During the summer of 2021, I designed a new course on “21^st Century Documentary Filmmaking” for upper-level undergraduates and master’s students at North Carolina State University. The first part of the course explored various styles, objectives, and conventions used to tell stories about people and politics (Steve Bannon, Mister Rogers, political activists in the Satanic Temple, and individuals grappling with loss or illness); the second half of the semester focused on race, justice, democracy, and freedom. I knew that I wanted the class to engage with the urgent subjects of racism, technology, incarceration, and police brutality. Not only were there excellent recent documentaries—such as Coded Bias (Shalini Kantayya, 2020), Time (Garrett Bradley, 2020), Strong Island (Yance Ford, 2017), and Whose Streets? (Damon Davis and Sabaah Folayan, 2017), all of which I included on the syllabus—but I was also thinking about the ten-minute-long cellphone video taken by seventeen-year-old Darnella Frazier of Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin pressing his knee on George Floyd’s neck, resulting in Floyd’s death, even though I had not yet watched it.

Frazier’s video of Floyd’s murder in May of 2020 had gone viral on social and then news media, reenergizing Black Lives Matter protests and enabling a refutation of the Minneapolis police department’s “short and sanitized” official statement about Floyd’s death. It directly resulted in the firing of the four officers involved, an FBI investigation, and the very rare instance of a murder conviction for police officer Derek Chauvin in June of 2021.[1] To be unequivocal about this: it was not the killing of George Floyd that led to these outcomes; it was Frazier’s video capturing his killing, making it an especially important example of cellphone moving image documentation. Prior to Chauvin’s trial, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz described Frazier’s video as “maybe the only reason that Derek Chauvin will go to prison.”[2] In June of 2021, Frazier was recognized with a special Pulitzer Prize “For courageously recording the murder of George Floyd, a video that spurred protests against police brutality around the world, highlighting the crucial role of citizens in journalists' quest for truth and justice.”[3]

When I watched Frazier’s video in July, I was awed by the mettle of the young woman who held that cellphone in her hand, training it where it needed to be to capture this brutal crime over the course of its excruciating duration as she questioned the police through her actions as well as her words. I thought about the camcorder video footage shot by George Holliday of Rodney King’s brutal beating by police officers in 1991, which did not lead to a single officer conviction. I also thought about the imperative of witnessing in the BLM movement—of saying names to honor black lives taken, and as a tool for demanding justice.

I have always taken seriously our obligation to teach difficult material. I have taught several classes—on war documentaries, in particular—that explored representations of violence, suffering, and death that have, at various moments in history, inspired social change. I am also aware of the debates in Black studies about the ethics of representing, witnessing, and re-traumatization in relation to violence against Black people. With these frameworks in mind, and some trepidation, I added Frazier’s cellphone video to my syllabus. I placed it at the mid-point of the class as a transition between the course’s two parts, allotting an entire one-hour-and-fifty-minute class to discuss the ten-minute video with the hope that it would inspire a serious conversation about media and democracy, individual agency and state power, internet-era distribution and social media, racism and policing, and the power of documentation and documentary.

But how do you teach something as disturbing and difficult-to-watch as this video? And why did I decide it was appropriate to do so?

As I finalized my syllabus, I wrote a reflection about my decision to include the video on my syllabus. I did so partly to document my discomfort, and partly to think through ideas central to my teaching and my research:

I included Frazier’s name on the syllabus as the director of the video to signal her agency, implicitly building a case for its status as more than just a document.

I suspected that some of my students would have already seen the video in its entirety; others would have seen excerpts or stills via broadcast news, print or online journalism; and some would have had no exposure at all. I planned to allow any student to opt out of the viewing, which I indicated on the syllabus. My students had already read most of Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary (3^rd edition) and were conversant with his discussions about ethics as well as the differences between documents and documentaries; they were also familiar with ethical issues raised by Brian Winston, Gail Vanston, and Wang Chi in The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century.[4] I assigned two journalistic readings—Salamishah Tillet’s New York Times article, “It’s My Job to Watch. With George Floyd’s Death, I Had to Look Away,” which makes a compelling case for not viewing the Floyd video; and Jenni Morello, “Addressing Trauma in The Documentary Practice,” which focuses on secondary trauma experienced by documentary filmmakers.[5]

I also assigned a response paper in which students would write about their decision to either view or not view the video in class: “If you opt out, you will have the opportunity to leave the classroom while we watch the video and then return for our discussion, during which I will not show any clips. Prompts: What, if any, of the video have you already seen? What makes you willing or unwilling to watch this video in its entirety? How is the thought of watching this similar to, or different, from other images of violence (fictional or real) that you’ve experienced (or avoided) as a viewer? Please also discuss your decision in relation to some of the issues of documentary representation that we have been studying.”

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Almost as soon as the semester started, I began to second guess my decision to show the video. As the semester progressed, I became increasingly aware of the stresses on my students that were caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, and began to consider how these might make an already difficult viewing experience even harder to process. Despite my strong belief in the importance of witnessing, I decided not to show the video in class but to teach it nonetheless, and to be transparent about my decision-making process.

I wrote my students an email prior to class, in which I set up a framework for our discussion. I told them that I had never removed something from a syllabus before, but that

“I am less certain that watching it in a class is the right thing to do”:

On this day that I did not end up showing Darnella Frazier’s video, I spent the first hour lecturing before I opened the floor to discussion. I shared my rationale and my past experiences teaching challenging documentary moving image material, and discussed other examples of media depicting suffering and death that have widely circulated in public forums and classrooms, often accompanied by some degree of controversy: concentration camp footage immediately following World War II, home movie footage showing John F. Kennedy’s assassination, videos of the 9/11 attacks in New York City, prisoners being tortured by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib, cellphone videos of mass shootings and of Heather Heyer being struck and killed by a car at the Charlottesville protests in 2017.

What makes Frazier’s video so powerful are precisely the things that make it unbearable: its duration and sustained gaze, the audible off-screen pleas from bystanders as a Black man is slowly killed by a white man in uniform. I told my students that the thought of showing it to them on a big screen in a classroom setting as an object of study ultimately felt unjustifiable, even unethical. Its evidentiary use had succeeded with a jury, and well beyond that given its role as a catalyst for the protests that led up to Chauvin’s trial. I asked aloud questions that I could not answer: Would I feel the same way if I were teaching this material in five, ten, or twenty, years, with the distance of time and perspective? Or if I were not a white professor teaching a largely white group of students? Or if the footage were used or re-enacted in a narrative film about George Floyd, or a documentary about his death that placed Frazier’s video in a wider context?

Many of my students shared thoughts, including some that questioned my decision to include Frazier’s video on my syllabus. One student found it “deeply disrespectful to the family and loved ones of George Floyd. [...] George Floyd did not choose to be a martyr; he did not want to die. Maybe he would have been grateful that his death would bring a broad awareness to the reality of police brutality and lead to months of protesting across the country. The reality is we will never know, and that ambiguity makes it so that I am deeply uncomfortable with the act of watching his murder.” Another wrote that, “I feel that Darnella Frazier did not record this video for me to watch—even if it may in some way lead to a deeper understanding of injustice. She recorded it to have (hopefully) irrefutable evidence of what happened to George Floyd.”

Of course, Frazier did share her video on Facebook, which was in turn shared by many thousands of others—the first steps in its much wider circulation. It was seen in broadcast and streaming media, usually excerpted for television news or on shows like The View. I knew that my students could easily access it if they wished to view it after our discussion. In fact, they have access to an endless parade of violent moving images. This, too, haunted me during my decision-making and after our discussion. Several students shared that they were utterly desensitized to violence on screens. They had been watching things like Isis beheading videos and playing violent, realist video games since junior high school, and had next to no reaction when witnessing violence and death, real or fictional. Some of these students were not at all worried about watching Frazier’s video in class, sitting on the opposite spectrum of those who could not imagine subjecting themselves to these images.

This single, complex episode in the life of a syllabus and a class amounted to a tremendously uncomfortable teaching moment, but a teaching moment nonetheless—hopefully both for my students as well as for me. If I teach this class again, it is highly unlikely that I would consider screening Frazier’s video. Would, however, showing a very brief excerpt—or even a carefully chosen still or two—be an appropriate way to convey its significance, or would that undermine precisely what makes it so important? I do not know the answer to this question. What I can imagine doing in the future is dedicating a day to discussing it precisely the way we did, reflecting on the power of documenting and of documentary images as they circulate online, in courtrooms, and in classrooms.

Marsha Gordon is Professor of Film Studies at North Carolina State University, a recent Fellow at the National Humanities Center, and an NEH Public Scholar. Her book Leftover Ladies: Ursula Parrott and the Reinvention of the Modern Woman is forthcoming with the trade division of University of California Press in 2023.

1. Derek Chauvin was convicted in April 2021 and sentenced in June 2021; as of this writing the three other officers involved are awaiting trial. For more on these events see Audra D.S. Burch and John Eligon, “Bystander Videos of George Floyd and Others are Policing the Police,” New York Times (May 26, 2020) (“short and sanitized” derives from this article); “Darnella Frazier, Teen Who Filmed Floyd’s Murder, Praised for Making Verdict Possible,” NPR (April 21, 2021); “What Happened at Derek Chauvin’s Sentencing for George Floyd’s Murder,” New York Times (June 25, 2021). ↑

2. “A teen with ‘a cell phone and sheer guts’ is credited for Derek Chauvin’s murder conviction,” CNN (April 21, 2021). ↑

3. The 2021 Pulitzer Prize Winner in Special citations and Awards. ↑

4. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (3^rd edition) (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2017). Brian Winston, Gail Vanston, and Wang Chi, The Act of Documenting: Documentary Film in the 21st Century (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017). ↑

5. Salamishah Tillet, “It’s My Job to Watch. With George Floyd’s Death, I Had to Look Away,” New York Times (May 20, 2021). Jenni Morello, “Addressing Trauma in The Documentary Practice,” [documentary] (February 11, 2021). ↑