By Steven Cairns
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William E. Jones, Actual T.V. Picture (2013)
Steven Cairns: Your recent video Actual T.V. Picture (2013) features the transistor developed in the 1940s for electronics and communications, as well as missile guidance systems and television. Why did you choose the technology as a focus?
William E. Jones: I chose to combine the Vietnam bombing footage, which is chiefly green, and the television advertisement footage, which is chiefly red, because the alternation of complimentary colours creates an intense visual effect, but also because the subject matter of the two sequences is intrinsically linked. They both present images of technology. The Vietnam footage and the TV advert are also from around the same time, the late 1960s, when I was a child.
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Actual T.V. Picture (2013)
SC: How important are the biographical links?
WEJ: : A lot of my work – maybe all of it – comes from personal connections. As a child, I watched so much TV that my mother was concerned about me. What did I see? Anyone who turned on a TV set in the late ’60s would have seen the Vietnam War. It was possibly the last time when media coverage of a war was intensive and relatively uncensored. Images from Vietnam played an important role in turning the American electorate against the war. Actual T.V. Picture was completed on 28 January 2013, exactly 40 years after the signing of the Paris Peace Accords, which brought an end to official US involvement in the Vietnam War. The end of the war was a victory for the Left in the US, but it was also the beginning of the end of the Left’s unity, because there was no longer a single galvanizing issue to rally around.
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Bay of Pigs (2012)
SC: Why are there very few people present in Actual T.V. Picture and none in your other recent work Bay of Pigs (2012)? They both focus on the machinery of war rather than the victims of it.
WEJ: : It’s a common strategy in modern times for any country, and the US in particular, to remove suffering human bodies from the officially sanctioned representations of war. After the debacle of Vietnam, I think the ideal for the US became waging war with advanced technology and in places so removed from media attention that atrocities and other misdeeds could go on without the public knowing much about them. New technologies offer the promise of conducting war by remote control. The latest example is the drone, in fact a killer robot, which has recently been approved for use against domestic targets. Actual T.V. Picture shows a stage in the progress of this logic.
The visuals in Bay of Pigs come from a Cuban film about another American military debacle, the attempted US invasion of Cuba in 1961. The source is a ‘captured’ film in the CIA Film Library, now part of the National Archives. The audio comes from one of many shortwave radio broadcasts communicating with spies in the field via a ‘numbers station’, so named because its messages are sets of numbers. In 1995, the station heard in Bay of Pigs was the subject of a case in US federal court, the only time a numbers station has been publicly discussed in an official setting. Intelligence gathered by spies possibly using numbers stations brought the Americans’ plans to the attention of Cuba long before the day of the Bay of Pigs invasion.
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Bay of Pigs (2012)
SC: Why do you choose to work with archive material?
WEJ: : Historical distance from the content gives me licence to be freer with the material. And, with time, certain things become clearer. I’m often trying to investigate what I remember from childhood but didn’t understand at the time. For example, as a child I associated the name Bay of Pigs with the ’60s slang for policemen. I suppose I am a rather slow learner, because I usually feel unable to respond to contemporary events directly and in a timely way. Also, the US government has a lot of historical material available for free to whomever can find it in their vast archives. State archives are not simple; there are lots of contradictions and gaps in what might seem to be monolithic institutions at the very centre of power.
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Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012)
SC: Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012) is a state film of a different type reworked for a law enforcement instructional video.
WEJ: : I have a collection of law enforcement instructional films, a subgenre of filmmaking that interests me a lot, because these films expose the practices of law enforcement and consequently are not intended for the general public. In Shoot Don’t Shoot, the soundtrack implicates the viewer in a police officer’s decision whether or not to shoot someone. The training scene I appropriated repeats with a variation: in the first instance, the suspect – ‘a black man wearing a pinkish shirt and yellow pants’ – is unarmed; in the second, he is armed. In neither case is the officer supposed to shoot him.
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Shoot Don’t Shoot (2012)
It often happens that I have material for a very long time and don’t know what to do with it, then suddenly something occurs to me, and I can edit it. In the case of Shoot Don’t Shoot, I felt a sense of urgency after the death of Trayvon Martin last year. This was a typically American tragedy that called up questions about armed white people and their attitudes toward people of colour. I live in a city where there is no majority, where people from many different backgrounds, linguistic and ethnic, have to get along somehow in public spaces. I get the sense that the rest of America isn’t quite so far along in dealing with these questions, yet at the same time Los Angeles has a paramilitary police force governing what is still quite a segregated city. I hope the material I choose provides an opportunity to reflect on that.
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