"Beginning in 2020, in response to the cultural and political upheavals that were playing out in the United States, I started making a series of videos to help me understand and cope with what was going on around me. To date, five videos have been made under the heading, Imperfect Union Productions. They are Rage, 2020; Gaea’s Lament, For Love of Guns, Isn’t It a Pity—all 2022; and A Brief History of American Demagoguery, 2024. This blatant incursion into political messaging is unusual for me, but I found the current situation so abhorrent, and I felt so powerless that I needed to do something even if my outrage found no audience beyond myself. These five videos are the result.
When a group of people is denied a voice or is rendered invisible by a dominant culture, when its rights are repudiated, when it lives in constant fear of state brutality, when it is deprived of an education, when a significant percentage of its population is imprisoned, it seeks a means to be heard and seen in order to draw attention to its grievances. In the wake of the George Floyd murder, we witnessed multiple ways in which these grievances were expressed, including multi-racial demonstrations, peaceful and widely embraced. But there were also incidences of violence, vandalism, and looting.
As I witnessed all of this, I was reminded of the “Prologue” to Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, which I had recently re-read, where the narrator’s anger explodes into a savage attack on a white man who has insulted him. It made me realize that I have no concept of the fury that can accumulate in long-marginalized African American communities and elsewhere. On further reflection, I did come to terms with how this rage could easily mutate into physical violence. My modest video, Rage, using the words of Ralph Ellison with music composed and performed by Gannon Hall, attempts to make that exact point."
–Doug Hall
Text from the “Prologue” to Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Music performed and composed by Gannon Hall