That was over a year ago, and boy have things changes. Let’s just say that Obama has not left his supporters from 11/04/08 feeling as fulfilled as they might have hoped. But that day was an enormously important one for the country, and though its memory is now framed by Obama’s actual presidency — small detail, that — the day itself and all it stood for remains an important historical cornerstone. Which makes this documentary a key historical document.

And an evolving one. Though the film is now completed and will debut at the SXSW Film Festival in March, the community surrounding the film is and will remain interactive, soliciting and collecting submitted images from that day. Said filmmaker Deutschman via email: “The goal is to start re-engaging people in the democratic process – not just by raising awareness of this film – but by encouraging them to upload their own footage to our website so they can partake in the writing of history.”

Here is the just-released trailer, hot off the presses:

And here is Deutchman’s account of the making of this film, and what motivated him to do it. Calling it “a Groundhog Day of my own creation,” Deutschman writes:

There are many compelling arguments that the Obama administration has missed opportunities in the last year, however much of the problem lies on the part of expectations. The concept of “making history,” hammered into the Obama camp’s minds by the repeated call for “change,” is tricky. Obama may be black and young and have a Muslim father – facts that cannot be overstated but provide the limit of the indisputable historical shifts – but he became President through pragmatism, compromise and incrementalism. Anyone expecting sudden drastic policy shifts wasn’t paying attention to the candidate.

And yet, for a filmmaker, these kinds of expectations provide an interesting opportunity. If we as a people – and I don’t completely exclude myself from being swept away in these ideas – expect a single day to represent significant historical change, how will we act? What kind of behavior, emotions, and associations will this bring out in us? What will “history” look like?

…In the months following 11/4/08, I received footage from over a dozen cities around the world – from Homer, Alaska to Austin, Texas to Chicago, Illinois to Berlin to Dubai. As I edited together a feature documentary from this footage, I watched these images over and over again, living in a Groundhog Day of my own creation as the world was moving on and becoming cynical.

Watching this trailer, it all comes back — the excitement, the emotion, and yes the hope of that day. It’s an interesting time for 11/4/08 to come on the scene, in the wake of Obama’s chequered first year — not to mention the day that Scott Brown officially becomes a Senator! — and looking ahead now to the 2010 midterm elections. The reminder of what that day felt like then may make some voters feel duped in retrospect — or may remind them of just what they were voting for that day, and why.

A Groundhog Day of My Own Creation [Mediaite]
11/04/08 Photo Page [Facebook]
SXSW Film Festival Lineup [NYT]
SXSW 2010 Film Program – Emerging Visions [SXSW]

There are many compelling arguments that the Obama administration has missed opportunities in the last year, however much of the problem lies on the part of expectations. The concept of “making history,” hammered into the Obama camp’s minds by the repeated call for “change,” is tricky. Obama may be black and young and have a Muslim father – facts that cannot be overstated but provide the limit of the indisputable historical shifts – but he became President through pragmatism, compromise and incrementalism. Anyone expecting sudden drastic policy shifts wasn’t paying attention to the candidate.

And yet, for a filmmaker, these kinds of expectations provide an interesting opportunity. If we as a people – and I don’t completely exclude myself from being swept away in these ideas – expect a single day to represent significant historical change, how will we act? What kind of behavior, emotions, and associations will this bring out in us? What will “history” look like?

It occurred to me that regardless of what Obama would or would not accomplish, this would be a day written about in history books. And in this era of digital technology and web interconnectivity, why should it be left to the written word and the singular historian?

In October 2008, I sent e-mails and Facebook messages to everyone I knew and asked my friends, family, acquaintances and perfect strangers all over the world to film their experiences of 11/4/08. On the day of the election, I myself filmed in Brooklyn and Manhattan – voting in Carroll Gardens, visiting my friends working in phone banks in Clinton Hill, Bushwick and the Financial District, talking to strangers on the streets of Lower Manhattan and Harlem, and celebrating within a spontaneous mob in Williamsburg.

In the months following 11/4/08, I received footage from over a dozen cities around the world – from Homer, Alaska to Austin, Texas to Chicago, Illinois to Berlin to Dubai. As I edited together a feature documentary from this footage, I watched these images over and over again, living in a Groundhog Day of my own creation as the world was moving on and becoming cynical.

Now that the film is completed and premiering at the SXSW Film Festival in March, I am embarking on the second phase of my project. I have launched www.11-4-08.com, a website that aims to continue collecting footage shot on 11/4/08 and to make all the raw footage available for users at home to download and edit their own versions of events.

The idea behind this is not to obsessively dwell on the past, as there is clearly an increasingly uncertain future that demands our attention. But history can be an important tool for understanding, especially when that history is democratized such that we are all its authors. The Obama administration has lost a great deal of the political engagement of the Obama campaign. My instinct is that by looking at footage of ourselves on that day and engaging in the writing of history, people might achieve some kind of fusion between the naïve enthusiasm of 11/4/08 and the hardened realism of now. Just because our expectations are now low doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be engaged. This is precisely when we should be engaged.

The goal of this project is to make raw historical footage available in a way that is open to interpretation and will no doubt be seen under different lights depending on the moment in which the viewer is situated. The student of history has the luxury of hindsight. However, by eliminating the distance between author and student, by allowing us all to become historians, I hope we can look into the mirror of our own recent past and reflect.

Trailer: 11/04/08

Related:
Remembering 11/4/08, Before The Cynicism [Mediaite]

Based in New York City, Jeff Deutchman is the curator/editor/producer and a contributing filmmaker on 11/4/08. For the last four years, he has worked in independent film distribution, marketing and acquisitions. He received a BS from Northwestern University where he studied film history and wrote about contemporary strands of cinema that challenge the Auteur Theory. 11/4/08 is his feature film debut.

We interviewed some of the major figures in the book more than half a dozen times. We had interviews that lasted up to 6 or 7 hours. It was not at all unusual for our interviews, over 300 interviews with over 200 people, to last several hours. That was the norm.

No one, of course, is doubting that these interviews took place. It’s more the nature of the interviews and under what rules they were conducted and how they were attributed that is causing the furor: there are a lot of anonymous quotes in this book and a lot of supposed in-the-room recountings, which no doubt are far easier to make when you don’t suffer under the fear of retribution or vetting. Per HuffPo’s Jason Linkins:

In their book, Halperin and Heilemann establish a set of rules governing how things are attributed and what quotation marks are meant to convey in their authors’ note: “Where dialogue is in quotation marks, it comes from the speaker, someone who was present and heard the remark, contemporaneous notes, or transcripts. Where dialogue is not in quotes, it is paraphrased, reflecting only a lack of certainty on the part of our sources about precise wording, not about the nature of the statements. Where specific thoughts, feelings, or states of mind are rendered in italics, they come from either the person identified or someone to whom she or he expressed those thoughts or feelings directly.”

So if these guidelines were followed, how then did Harry Reid’s “negro dialect” comment get reported but the identity of Bill Clinton’s supposed girlfriend did not? Reid says he was under the impression his remark, and discussion with the “two disarmingly charming book authors” was off-the-record. In Politico’s account of how the quote came about they say “Capitol Hill veterans said there was no way that such inflammatory words from a Senate majority leader would remain off the record, even if that had been the arrangement.” Which, as Linkins points out is utterly “absurd” and galling. Andrew Sullivan says he “cannot square this story with the principles of ethical journalism as laid out by the authors themselves.”

Of course, what all this anonymous sourcing also leaves itself open to is cries of stories being distorted, which Sarah Palin was happy to make last night on the O’Reilly Factor “These reporters weren’t there…I don’t think I have ever met these guys. They certainly didn’t interview me for the book.”

Is the lesson here that nothing should be considered off-the-record anymore? Fairly or not, the easy access of the blogosphere and Twitter has put a lot of things up for fair game that would have otherwise remained under wraps. Remember Obama’s “jackass” remark? That was also supposed to be off the record but made it on to Twitter courtesy of veteran journo Terry Moran. It would appear, that like it or not, Halperin has merely taken the new journalism ethos of Twitter (with some original The Note added in) and applied it to campaign book publishing.

Not to be outdone the NYT apparently shortly thereafter got their hands on a copy and whipped up an embargo breaking review that called it “a spicy smorgasbord of observations, revelations and allegations — some that are based on impressive legwork and access, some that simply crystallize rumors and whispers from the campaign trail.” It’s true! Thus far the headlines sound like D.C.’s version of the behind the high school gymnasium gossip mill. And who could resist that.

The juiciest, and thus far most damaging revelation has been Harry Reid’s private remark during the campaign about how he liked Barack Obama because he was a “light-skinned African-American with no negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.” Oy. And that may be just the beginning.

There is reportedly details about President Clinton’s (allegedly) more recent affairs and Hillary’s private war room that was set up to deal with them. And then there’s the Edwards, neither of whom come out looking good, to say the least. New York is running a train wreck of an excerpt the most surprising part of which may be hearing Elizabeth Edwards described by former staffers described as a”"abusive, intrusive, paranoid, condescending, crazywoman.” They make Sarah Palin look tame and one wonders if Elizabeth Edwards won’t suffer the most of anyone involved from the publication of this book. Meanwhile, if Heileman and Halperin have anything good to say about anyone at this point it has yet to surface. All in all, it’s a bit like the two got their hands on the private diaries of all the main players and published them. One half expects the chapters to be signed XOXO.

Michael Calderone calls the media blitz that has arisen of this weekend’s leaks and excerpts a “freak show.” Gossipy election history tomes, of course, are not new. The difference is that five years ago the audience for this sort of thing would have been limited to the beltway and a smallish group of political junkies. Not so now that we are a nation of politico’s! There is a national audience for this sort of thing and one wonders if Harry Reid is going to survive the tumult (probably he’s hoping for more shocking revelations regarding others to emerge today).

That said, some media folks are less thrilled than others with the results. Says Salon’s Glenn Greenwald “Generally, the people who most love royal court gossip are the courtiers, courtesans and hangers-on – like Mark Halperin.” Meanwhile, Newsweek’s Howard Fineman tells Politico that Halperin “more or less created the world that we now live in—the 24-7 always-on, hyper-linked, web-based, D.C. political media world we live in now with ‘The Note.’” Either way, assuming they book has nothing that damaging to say about the President (and if they did we probably would have heard it by now) one suspects Obama may relish a few days of having the press’ attention diverted away from realities of 2010.

This from CBS (video below):

Asked by Barack Obama if she would be his secretary of state, Hillary Clinton – after initially turning him down – was concerned that her husband’s penchant for causing controversy would interfere with her new role. Sarah Palin was so overwhelmed by the amount of information she needed to learn to debate Joe Biden that campaign staffers thought the debate might be a “debacle of historic and epic proportions”…Palin had a reflexive tendency to refer to Biden as “O’Biden,” says Schmidt, something that had to be fixed before the debate. He says others in the campaign came up with a solution. “It was multiple people – and I wasn’t one of them – who all said at the same time, ‘Just say, Can I call you Joe,’ which she did.”

Schmidt says he took over the prepping, simplified it, and says she “more than held her own” in the debate. But not without one “O’Biden” slip on national television.

It will likely be a must-read in media circles as well. Mark Halperin, currently a journalist for Time, and formerly for ABC News (he was the original The Note) was once dubbed by the New Yorker as “leading purveyor of inside dope.” Heilemann is the much-read political columnist for New York. The book, which initially sold to Harper for six figures has already been optioned by HBO.

Watch CBS News Videos Online

And this morning on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Joe Scarborough took on the persona of his colleague Keith Olbermann as he mocked the lofty rhetoric of 2008 Election Night. Update: maybe.

Newsbusters caught the moment, which they describe as “beautiful.”

While discussing the Virginia Gubernatorial race – one of the three big races ending tomorrow, along with the New Jersey governor race and the New York-23 congressional race – Scarborough recalled the declarations that were being made about the state as Pres. Obama won a decisive victory in ’08. If polls hold, the Republican candidate Bob McDonnell will defeat Democrat Creigh Deeds handily tomorrow, despite Pres. Obama’s campaigning for the Democratic candidate.

As co-host Mika Brzezinski uncomfortably tried to interrupt Scarborough, and others on set like Mike Barnicle laughed nervously, Scarborough took on the vocal inflections, mannerisms and tone of MSNBC’s 8pmET liberal host a liberal blowhard. “I heard that Virginia had been switched forever last year,” said Scarborough, before launching into his impression. “It’s a transformative night. Virginia, once solidly in the Republican’s column – it’s gone purple, my friends. This will change the landscape of America for the next generation! Or the next…eleven months, until Republicans kick their ass by twelve points.”

> Update: We listened again – could it be Ed Schultz? Maybe. Just a generic liberal blowhard? Could be. Here’s a clip of what seems to be Scarborough’s Olbermann impression. Is it the same? Maybe it’s a variation.

Here’s the clip:

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