Anna Devere Smith: Performing or Informing?

-The difference between acting and interviewing/documenting...


Despite Anna Deavere Smith’s clear talent as an actress and ability to perform multiple roles with great integrity, I found myself annoyed and agitated by her performance by the end of it all.

Her documentation approach is in the least, very unique, a kind of hybrid so to speak: not quite a documentary and not fully fiction. So, what does that make her, an actress or an interviewer? I personally think a little of both. I think that she is able to convey each account in a way that maintains close truth to what was actually said, but at the same time what is said is sometimes partially overlooked because the viewer is drawn towards her performance and eccentricities as an actress instead of focusing on the hard facts. Clearly, she is putting on a show with her exagerated stereotypical depictions of how different ethnicities speak and how they typically dress, but at the same time she transcribes the interview almost by verbatim. In this sense she is both acting while simultaneously documenting true accounts on what a wide variety of people had to say about the riots.

Arguably Smith’s style both adds and takes away from the complete truth on the matter. On the one hand she is able to encompass a variety of different perspectives and opinions on what happened, focusing on their raw emotions and delivering them with great intensity and truth. On the other hand, her overt stereotypical representation of these people are not all factual as we can see by Smith’s performance of Angela Davis where she exaggerates her large Afro, which was at one time her trademark/key identifier but hasn’t been for some time now. Here, it seems that she has a propensity to exaggerate cultural stereotypes for the sake of visual appeal and aesthetics.

Although Smith does a good job performing each role, maintaining close truth to what was actually said in the interview, she is in the end exactly that-a performer. Some may argue that Smith’s hybrid approach to documentation is just as effective, if not more so than typical styles, because it adds a new element of entertainment that may better hold the audiences attention. Despite this, I must maintain that the incorporation of role play slightly discredits Smith as an interviewer and documentarian. Her over-the-top performance continually reminds us, regardless of the element of truth, that this is simply a performance that is slightly exaggerated, edited and tampered with in order to get a certain desired point across. In this sense, Smiths' performance is not completely truth, but only a version of it.