Excerpt 

​

In one form or another, as film, television play, photo-book with text, article, or autobiographical novel, “the documentary” fascinates [James Agee].  He wants to catch with a camera or the written word the exact curve of an object (the wall of a rural post office in Alabama), people (black children playing out a summer afternoon at an open hydrant in Harlem), or an historical event (the death of Abraham Lincoln).  The opportunities thrill him; he can render what he calls “exactitudes of existence,” and reach supreme revelations of the “cruel radiance of what is.”  But he also feels a persistent anxiety that such work puts both the artist and his audience at an “incurable distance from participation,” a distance that can widen into an “astronomical abyss.”  In his own great documentary, Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, he says, “Above all else: in God’s name, don’t think of it as ‘Art’”.  Agee keeps asking the reader who do ‘you’ think you are?—why are you looking at Walker Evans’ photographs and reading my text?  What right do you have to contemplate the sharecroppers’ world, will it entertain or enlighten you, will you be morally outraged and full of stricken social conscience? He has spent several years of his young manhood writing of Southern tenant farmers in the middle of the Great Depression.  And ‘you,’ the reader, will make a ‘parlor game’ of it.  If you took the work at all seriously, “you would hardly bear to live.”  But, no, you will think it is just a book, and “if it were a safely dangerous one it would be ‘scientific’ or ‘political’ or ‘revolutionary.’”  In those quotation marks the work gets conveniently put somewhere on the shelf, emasculated in official acceptance.  Agee registers his dismay at the American way of turning living perception into cultural property, the Judas kiss of commercialism—and ‘you,’ the reader, want it that way.