Must see TV?

It seems likely that the Democrats bringing the case against Donald Trump will try to make the impeachment trial just that. We live in a time when, apparently, there's always a video clip. Mostly I hate video, but I'm sure I'll be curious enough to watch some of  it.

I'm slightly skeptical about this, but the historian Heather Cox Richardson thinks it will be a powerful visual story:

Democrats are operating from a position of strength. It seems likely they will use the impeachment trial to explain to the American people what happened on January 6. Using videos and the words of those who were in the Capitol when the mob stormed in, they will paint a picture of an attempted coup, incited by a former President of the United States.

At Just Security, Justin Hendrix took a look at the challenges of of turning social media and other visual evidence into a narrative. If House managers (impeachment speak for prosecutors) do a good job, he thinks they can use the visual evidence of January 6 to set the historical frame in which these events are remembered. This could be more significant than the Senate verdict.

Certainly, the video evidence will represent a curious portrait of the various forces motivating the base of the Republican party at this moment in history. The participants in the siege on the Capitol represented “a really fascinating cross section of America, and I hope some of the coverage in the future will focus on that. I mean, there was a pride flag being flown from the inaugural scaffoldings really early on, and a Trump flag flying next to these America First and quasi-fascistic flags. I think it’s just such a fascinating insight into a pretty significant section of America and a pretty significant section of the Republican party,” said Higgins.

“Oftentimes the value of these processes is less about the final decision that’s made, because those are often steered by politics, than it is about actually correcting historical narrative, and educating a broader public about what took place relative to a particular event. The impact of something like this should go far beyond the decision. The last time we had an impeachment trial, the House came in with the best evidentiary record, a record that you cannot question in any way, shape or form and given the votes, and given the politics they could not get a conviction. But you do this for the public, you do it for the country, you do it for democracy,” said Matheson.

Apparently this was how the prosecutors at the Nuremberg trials of high ranking Nazis in 1945-6 thought about film. On the one hand, they wanted the content of the proceedings widely distributed on newsreels and therefore set up the courtroom for filming. And additionally, they created movies that showed Nazi crimes vividly and evoked visceral horror even among the defendants. These were widely distributed in theaters, setting the narrative of that atrocity-filled era.

The British Imperial War Museum (an oddly pacifistic leaning institution whose viewpoint may suggest how history can be revised after imperial decline) offers a short film about the Nuremberg video evidence.