History From All Angles

“American Beauty,” one of my favorite movies, has the tagline, “Look Closer.” One of the many ways that is underscored is the two different perspectives of the movie: through Lester Burnham, the protagonist who tends to have fantasies, and Ricky Martin, a teenage boy with a small camcorder. The images filmed through Ricky’s lens are much more nitty gritty, but play the important role of capturing the unnoticed truths. I believe that “history from below” gives us this nitty gritty version of the truth, rather than the airbrushed versions that technology allows us to create. Though the nitty gritty look of videos may offer a sense of transparency, the use of framing threatens accuracy in examining the “res gestae” of events.

One of the most salient topics, police brutality, offers thousands of eyewitness videos that have gone viral. With the overwhelming existence of smartphones, the ability to capture the next news story has skyrocketed. In a couple of minutes after filming an event, the user could already upload it on YouTube with tags that lure all audiences. While evidence of police brutality is not often fabricated, news outlets use their ideologies to frame the message of the events. The event becomes a news story.

Recently, a video of a “school resource officer” violently removing an African American girl from her desk and the classroom went viral. The 15 second video is filmed by a student of Spring Valley High School, in the classroom, and shows the officer exerting extreme physical violence, including prying her off the desk and throwing her across the room. My reaction and analysis of this video is shared among hundreds of thousands across all platforms of social media, as I first saw this video on Twitter. Looking into the topic, I found a video a little over three minutes, in which CNN interviews the sheriff of the county. According to this video, Sheriff Leon Lott reveals the premises of another video of the event, filmed from a different angle. In this angle, it shows the girl resisting the arrest, even punching the officer. The sheriff explains however, that despite her behavior, the officer should not have taken his course of actions.

This second video, though is offered through knowingly conservative CNN, shows that there are often more than one angles. Even though it is still “history from below,” the perspective adds to the truth. Neither of the videos are airbrushed or fabricated, but because of the way the first video was framed, the entire event was not properly fed to the public. Often the media will use just one perspective in order to create speculation. Without these primary sources of "history from below," the media would not be able to create nearly as much credibility or allure.

1st video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e1gup1y6rHc