The Documentary Moment and the Revelation at Hand

The "fixing" is what so many hope to do, wrestling with the passage of time, resisting the erasure of what actually happened.2 We also know "the moment" to mean the time we live in, the urgency we feel to respond to the ever-changing waters we find ourselves floating in-political, emotional, environmental- and to do it in order to amplify what we see, hear, and believe, to share it with others in hopes of revealing our own awakening to a broader audience. Documentarians participate, intervene, and act in the communities, struggles, and stories that they record.3 THIS PAST AUGUST I was sitting with friends at the Wooden Nickel Pub in Hillsborough, North Carolina, on a late Sunday afternoon while we reflected on the power of an event we'd just come from, celebrating the best of our community. Off the street, someone came into the Nickel and said a group of kkk members were gathering on the Orange County Courthouse steps, just over a block away. "Surely some revelation is at hand," wrote Yeats - and perhaps the revelation in this era of Charleston and Charlottesville (and Ferguson and Isla Vista and Standing Rock . . .) is that we must "fix" these moments so that we truly see them.4 When the Washington Post published Hillsborough writer Steven Petrow's opinion piece about that day, they chose not to run an image from the Klan gathering in Hillsborough and ran instead an archival image from a cross burning near Yanceyville, North Carolina, from two years earlier.