eyes on the prize

It's almost embarassing that I've never come across this series before in my education, or life in general. It's obviously an incredible project to achieve in general - in scope, scale, and execution. It turns out that a friend of mine had the series checked out from the Temple library, she was watching it for the sake of watching it, and had been making her way through the whole series. She handed it off to me and said, "Here, this is amazing and emotinally devistating - I've been crying my way through a dvd every night." Her reaction to the series definitely set my expectations on a particular slant, and I found I had to work very hard to look at the work in several ways. First, I had to watch simply as a human, and let the horrific history of our country methodically reveal itself, and just sit with it. I found within that I was watching the film as a white person, who obviously grew up in a de-segregated society that is technically post civil-rights, and while the history, subject matter, and some of the footage is certainly a part of my education, history, and "image bank" it's emotionally and intellectually compelling to watch so thorough and extensive a document and to put it in a context today of race relations in the US, in this city, in this part of the city, in this school, and at this time, is very powerful. It was inspiring to see a work that focused on the agency and effort of people involved in the civil rights movement that are not famous and who lived their lives, or moments of their lives, with such necessity and conviction. That said, I had a hard time focusing on the parts of me that are supposed to be in film class, and analyzing this as a part of a documentary fictions class. What are the fictions, are there any? Does this film breach the actual with the fiction? Are there moments when it approaches propaganda? Are there emotionally manipulative devices at work in the music, narration? Does it matter? It's almost too close to home to look objectively, and it's one of few instances in this class where I didn't have a negative association with any of the devices at work.