Study Guides: Boycott

Boycott (Clark Johnson, 2001) is a made-for-TV film that originally aired on HBO. As the film's IMDB entry notes, it is based on the book Daybreak of Freedom, by Stewart Burns.

Boycott offers a useful example of contemporary televisual language applied to the task of remembering the Civil Rights Movement. (The film memorializes the Black community's boycott of segregated busses in Montgomery, Alabama, which took place between 5 Dec. 1955 and 21 Dec. 1956.) Thus, for the purposes of this class, the film's formal aspects are of the most interest.

Form

Valerie Smith's article "Meditation on Memory" makes several relevant points about the film's form. As she writes,

Through the use of a range of techniques including fictionalized scenes, the handheld camera, talking heads, a mix of real and faux footage, and a prominent soundtrack, Boycott prompts viewers to think about the strategies by which history in general and the history of the civil rights movement in particular have been represented cinematically. In its use of anachronism and the interweaving of the technologies of documentary practice and fiction filmmaking, it encourages us to reflect not only on the nature and politics of leadership and resistance but also on the politics and function of remembering. (531)

Johnson's DVD commentary stresses that these choices were deliberate, and that they were part of the filmmakers' plans from the outset. Boycott intentionally broke the conventional rules for docudramas:

What we didn't want to make as a dry, historically accurate docudrama. You know, the kind that you used to watch in the seventh grade in your history class with those old projectors: When the peasant of Bulgaria gather wheat for the winter. You know, we didn't want to make one of those kind of movies....I wanted to appeal to my teenage daughters, for one thing.

Of course, Boycott is still a docudrama--a hybrid genre that makes claims about reality why simultaneously claiming license to alter and distort events for dramatic effect (Wikipedia). Like older docudramas, Boycott uses actors to play roles based on historical figures, and it includes fictional events as well as fictionalized versions of historical events.

Unlike older docudramas, however, Boycott deliberately calls attention to the artifice inherent in the docudrama form. Yet Boycott was in no sense an independent or "outsider" production. It was a high-budget project produced by a mainstream media company, HBO Films, which is owned by the media conglomerate Time Warner. As a result, Boycott's complex and variegated structure demonstrates that conventions for docudrama have changed markedly in recent years.

Study Questions

  1. What is the meaning and purpose of the composite images overlaid over the bus window just before Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat?
  2. What is the meaning and purpose of the actors' blocking on the bus just after Parks refuses to give up her seat?
  3. Why shoot the meetings with white officials in black and white?
  4. Why include faux 16mm footage of King family events?
  5. Why include direct address, such as when the homeless man states, "They asked us to watch over these here vehicles after some of the tires got slashed"?
  6. Why depend so heavily on handheld cameras?
  7. Do you agree with Smith that the film encourages viewers to focus on "the politics and function of remembering"? If so, how? If not, why not?
  8. Explain Bayard Rustin's line, "I'm a man of my times, but the times don't know it yet."
  9. Boycott can be usefully compared to the two documentaries that we have screen so far: Eyes on the Prize and Sit-in. Does the modern documentary, Eyes on the Prize, more closely resemble Boycott or Sit-in?
  10. Do you think that Clark is right, that Boycott appeals more to young people than, say, Eyes on the Prize? Why or why not?
  11. Most of Clark's acting and directing experience comes from television police dramas like Homicide and The Wire. Does Boycott draw from the conventions of this genre?