Forty Years On, RFK Ad Maker Still Frames The Campaigns

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Forty Years On, RFK Ad Maker Still Frames The Campaigns
By Ann Hornaday
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, May 3, 2008; Page C01


Charles Guggenheim's political ads for Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 primary run were hugely influential in an evolving field. (Guggenheim Productions)

It's a historic year in American politics, and during a pivotal Democratic primary in Indiana, a television ad shows the candidate speaking casually but forcefully within a scrum of farmers. Other spots feature similar conversations -- spiked with talking points on crime, jobs and agricultural policy -- set in a roomful of schoolchildren, perhaps, or a group of homemakers sipping coffee.

It's not Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton visiting the stations of the campaign-media cross: It's Robert F. Kennedy in the first primary of his 1968 run for the presidency. Produced by Washington-based filmmaker Charles Guggenheim, the TV spots were made on the fly, just weeks after Kennedy announced his candidacy. Guggenheim created some of the ads from footage he had already shot for Kennedy's 1964 senatorial campaign, as well as stump speeches featuring the candidate's soaring oratorical skills.

But the most compelling pieces featured Kennedy -- always dressed in a suit and tie, with that famous unruly shock of hair and brooding eyes -- by turns challenging and charming the farmers, factory workers, women and even young children that Guggenheim and his team had hastily assembled for a series of what were meant to look like off-the-cuff encounters.

To watch Guggenheim's ads four decades later, it's possible to see the creation, almost in real time, of the grammar of political advertising -- the elements of style that are still evident today, at a time when emerging technologies and political passion are merging again to revolutionize political communications.

Filmed with the lightweight cameras and sound equipment that were reinventing documentary cinema in the 1960s, the Kennedy ads are a curious blend of the staged and the spontaneous, the crude and the sophisticated. With minimal narration and a mesmerizing public figure at their center, the ads beam from a crucial point in ancient political history, before the ascendancy of television, polls and focus groups, but poised on the very cusp of the media culture they would come to define....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/story/2008/05/02/ST2008050204173.html?hpid=topnews