Extras on the Historical Stage

Martin Luther King delivers his "I have a dream...." speech in August, 1963 in Washington, D. C. For me the historical moment is entwined with the insistent presence of an man who looms silently on the left side of this image (taken from a televised recording of the event). Absent in the audio recordings and print versions of the speech, this figure enters the picture and transforms it. Throughout the talk he seems to respond alternatively to the crowd in attendance, the event going on around him, and the words that penetrate his distracted state. He represents what MLK would do if he didn't have to talk on the stage. But he also represents the recipient of the speech. The way he responds prompts us to think about the effects of this moment, in the moment. His changing facial expressions are a kind of seismograph registering the impact of King's rhetoric. The trio of lines formed by his eyebrows and moustache provide an expressive mechanism that processes MLK's words. At one point his features suggest meditation or a passing mood of consternation:

At other moments he shakes his head in that precise way that denies truth to anything but the words he hears. When King speaks about having his dream, the man looks up into the sky as if he had begun to visualize it or search for it. We have all been told about the importance of Martin Luther King's speech. The face of the extra over King's right shoulder registers something more elusively human than importance: impact. Where the other figures standing behind King seem to stare untransfiguredly, as if in a blinking contest with the TV camera, the man to the left shows us how King's words go through his listeners. We see how the speech repeatedly has to pull him from his state of distraction. He demonstrates how difficult it must be to listen to King's speech while up on stage with him. He shifts back and forth between being mesmerized by his proximity to King to being addressed and moved by speech. Cleaning his ear out with his index finger one moment, he utters words under breath in response to King, the silent prayer of the extra, in the next.

The face of the extra helps us plumb the historical moment by allowing us to see what King's words do to his audience, and therefore to us. The power of King's speech owes itself in part to this extra who makes MLK's speech visible.

The television camera transforms the bystander into an extra: into someone indelibly present on the historical stage. The combined distance of the camera and effect of the zoom lens abridges the distance of Dr. King from the people behind him, generating the impression that MLK is standing among, rather than in front of or before, a crowd. A photograph of the event from a different angle indicates a much greater distance exists between MLK and the man over his right shoulder:

The photograph isolates MLK, makes him into a separate figure, bearer of the decisive gesture, and in some ways already a statue. By contrast, the televised image immerses him into his human environment and in the process elevates the adjacent and peripheral figure into celebrity. The man in the white hat stands at the same level as the civil rights leader. The televisual image fulfills the message of MLK's speech.

Here's a segment of the video: