Flag Day Parade, Appleton, Wisconsin

July 1, 2008

I've been working the past few nights on this new Wisconsin video featuring Appleton's Flag Day Parade. Having to work through raw footage and find ways to cut scenes so that they are manageable has gotten me thinking about the experience of a parade and ways to translate that experience into another medium.

We hardly realize it, but a parade is filled with vast empty stretches that involve craning our necks to see the next band or float slowly make its way toward us. There are all kinds of stoppages in the route. As spectators of a parade we accept all this empty space because that is part of what we value in a parade: the chance to just sit and relax. The experience of a parade is about sitting in lawn chairs, looking around, and talking with family. Our attention is only occasionally grabbed with any intensity.

When it comes to translating a parade into a video or written description there are obvious problems. We expect our viewing and reading experience to be attention grabbing. We don't bring to viewing or reading the expectation of dead time that accompanies watching a parade on a brisk sunny day in early summer. This is why if we watch a parade on television we demand commentary.. something we would probably find insufferable in real life. But for the active viewing experience we need all the gaps in interest plugged with lively talk. In making my short video of the parade I cut sequences of the parade into brief sections.. thus allowing for my own narrative to gain traction and not be bogged down by the actual speed of the parade.

Writing about a parade is also tough. The example that sticks in my mind is the Grand Procession of Ptolemy Philadelphus in 285 BC as recorded by Athenaeus. The choice is made to devote a paragraph to each successive richly designed float. The theme of the float and the adornment of the gods, along with the costumes and number of attendants, are carefully laid out. But this is a boring text! It attempts to describe verbatim a showy parade.. and that is a project that fails because of the higher demand for movement within a written text. Like it or not we do not experience a written text in the lazy fun way we experience a parade.

Here is another question: Why portray a parade at all.. either in writing or on film? In the case of the Ptolemies there was obviously a desire to publicize their splendid events.. and a similar motive lies behind rich written descriptions of medieval Islamic processions (Fatimids, Mamluks). Parades and processions were important to rulers because they communicated important messages to spectators near and far. They presented an argument about the legitimacy of power and reinforced the system of symbols upon which that power was built.

In other words, parades and processions are just as much rhetorical texts as books or films.. and they can be interpreted and read in similar ways. The only difference is that parades are texts experienced at a different pace than the "literary" texts that demand a constant high level of attention. This difference in the experience of a parade often leads us to give them a free pass.. and not to inquire critically into what they are communicating.