Don’t Look Away II is a branching database narrative film, a dynamic prosthetic memory assemblage and an act of digital, global, mobile witnessing. It was conceived as a follow-up to Usher’s 2015 interactive music video experience Chains (feat. Nas and Bibi Bourelly), which both effectively and affectively chains its viewser to its interface by challenging her to look directly and unflinchingly into the eyes of victims of racial injustice for the duration of the song. Should she turn away for any reason, the linear engine stops and awaits the return of her actuating gaze. While Chains is highly interactive in the sense that it literally cannot function or advance without input from a face, in practice it actually enforces a necessary inactivity on the part of its viewser, a passivity that requires her head to be immobilized (à la the cinematographic apparatus of Jean-Louis Baudry) in order for the narrative to proceed. Such binding passivity has a clear purpose here: Chains aims to stop us (society) from looking away from the reality of racially motivated abuse (“Facing the facts is the first step toward change,” reads the final title card), and its strategy of using black-and-white close-up images of the faces of victims seeks to engender an empathic or compassionate response in its audience. My sequel, named after the hashtag that accompanies Chains, addresses the same subjects, namely police brutality and the state-sanctioned destruction of black bodies throughout the United States, but in lieu of the standardized photographs that isolate faces both from the bodies upon which violence was done and from the contexts of their lives and deaths, I compile an interactive constellation of found footage ripped from YouTube and various online news outlets, using short videos from diverse sources to construct a navigable, expandable database.
Instead of attempting to recreate the highly affective webcam-enabled face-tracking technology of Chains, which would have required a level of engineering I do not possess, Don’t Look Away II grants the viewser a significant measure of control, soliciting her to select a path, step by step, through its limited archive of footage captured by surveillant (dashcam, closed-circuit television) and sousveillant (smartphone) apparatuses. Building the environment involved three discrete stages—first, I used a free digital video recorder to acquire clips from the Internet based on a list of victims I developed whose deaths at the hands, guns, cars and dogs of police officers had been publicly documented and made available. I then used a nonlinear editing system to clean up and standardize these clips, cropping and resizing the images, altering their aspect ratios, removing any obstructive logos or watermarks, adding titles and subtitles for context or coherence, balancing audio tracks and exporting each short as a self-contained, high-quality 1080p24 .mov file. I made twenty-five films in all, one for each of twenty victims plus five others that offer alternate angles or reenactments of events already depicted. Finally, I uploaded my finished films to Interlude’s Treehouse composer, a cloud-based and mobile-friendly interactive digital video platform. Once my online media library was populated, I constructed Don’t Look Away II’s branching nonlinear architecture, dropping my shorts into nodes and connecting them to form a rhizomatic narrative web with over five thousand possible pathways.
When a viewser embarks on the potentially endless wandering that is Don’t Look Away II, she first encounters an introduction, a series of titles that vaguely outline the aims and objectives of the piece, after which she is cued to make her first choice, to take a first step into the interface. I offer her different organizing principles that appear at the end of each video: she may choose to proceed from one short to the next chronologically (from Oscar Grant in 2009 to Laronda Sweatt in 2016) or by the victim’s age (from Tamir Rice, 12, to Walter Scott, 50), or in specific cases she may elect to review to review the same incident from another angle or apparatus. Each film must play in full before the viewser is given the option to continue; there is no way to skip ahead, even if she has already seen a particular clip. Each perspective she adopts bears with it varied levels of critical or literal distance, assumed safety or complicity, alternately situating her within a cop car or in the position of an eyewitness, aligning her gaze with an officer or an onlooker as each event unfolds. These potentially troubling paradigms of identification are part of the experience of navigating Don’t Look Away II, and each viewser must come to terms with the kinds of spectatorship that the project solicits. Does placing her gaze behind cameras that capture murders inadvertently force her to align with panoptic positions of power? Does privileging the destruction of unintelligible bodies due to universally low-quality footage render them even less intelligible? Encouraging the viewser to encounter each event in full, possibly multiple times, prompting her to interact further by straining to read the minuscule font that conveys limited contextual information before and after each clip, the film compounds spectatorial frustration in the end by making the end difficult to locate. Of forty-seven nodes that comprise the database, only four offer an escape, a way out of the engine that leads to the conclusion, signifying the endlessness of the abuse and brutality with which our state apparatuses attend to the black body, from which our society looks away. Few viewsers will likely make it that far.
The intuitive and harrowing experience of interacting with Don’t Look Away II can I think stand on its own, but it is productive to consider it in light of some of the theoretical frameworks that inspired the work and informed my critical making. Marsha Kinder’s discussion of the database narrative and the illusion of interactivity as the viewser performs it are crucial; she suggests that curiosity, ideology and desire are intrinsically involved in the process of retrieval and claims that the architecture of the database carries with it a subversive potential, to “process the past and reconfigure the future,” that makes it “an extraordinarily powerful vehicle for change” (353). The discrete source videos that populate Don’t Look Away II can be situated within Anna Reading’s concept of the globital memory field, as acts of digital witnessing, captured by smartphones, that become transmediated memory assemblages and are then institutionally deterritorialized, mobilized or implicated in public memory. Finally, I think these clips, and the final product itself, can function as what Alison Landsberg terms prosthetic memories, those that make national racial trauma collective and experiential, publicly circulated and personally felt (though the narrative should in no way offer white spectators the sense that we get it or can relate). The goal of Don’t Look Away II is to displace the enforced passivity of Chains, reinstating corporal interactivity and coupling it with vision in order to prompt an active role (that might lead to an activist one) in facing the reality and history of brutal racial injustice in this country. Though the film is published, the database remains open, and I hope to continue adding to it as more instances of violence are witnessed and captured and entered into the public consciousness, until the violence stops. As Ta-Nehisi Coates put it at the book launch of Between the World and Me, the “national conversation going on right now about those who are paid to protect us, who sometimes end up inflicting lethal harm upon us … is quite old. It’s the cameras that are new. It’s not the violence that’s new.” And in contrast to Usher’s hashtag, the title of this piece constitutes a challenge, not a requirement.
Works cited
Coates, Ta-Nehisi. 2015. Between the World and Me. New York: Spiegel & Grau.
Kinder, Marsha. 2003. “Designing a Database Cinema.” In Future Cinema: The Cinematic Imaginary after Film, edited by Jeffrey Shaw and Peter Weibel, 346–53. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
Landsberg, Alison. 2004. Prosthetic Memory: The Transformation of American Remembrance in the Age of Mass Culture. New York: Columbia University Press.
Reading, Anna. 2011. “Memory and Digital Media: Six Dynamics of the Globital Memory Field.” In On Media Memory: Collective Memory in a New Media Age, edited by Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers and Eyel Zandberg, 241–52. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Jasper Lauderdale 