TV REVIEW : ‘History of ‘88’ Tracks a Year of Living Ritually

Remember 1988? The year of Michael Dukakis, Ben Johnson, Flo-Jo and Jimmy Swaggart? Wouldn’t we rather forget it?

Not if videomaker Eames Demetrios has his way. His two-hour collage, “Common Knowledge: An Oral History of 1988” (at 10 tonight on KCET-TV Channel 28), tracks 28 Southern Californians for 12 months during a time marked out by some of the same rituals of 1992, such as the presidential election and the Olympics.

What Demetrios is playing on is both the banality of talking heads video and the infinite number of ways in which we regurgitate information absorbed from the media. At several points, he displays several inset frames of his subjects talking simultaneously about the same issue in virtually the same phraseology. Very subtly and gradually, even while we begin to like several of these people, we have to wonder if these are mere opinions we’re hearing or the stuff of introspective thought.

Because of this, we appreciate the eccentrics who emerge from the crowd: Jascha, an author, who suggests--then recants--that hijackers should be shot the minute they’re captured; Angelique, who speaks in utterly unfiltered, hopeless terms (“I think people who are dead have the best deal”); Yen Lu, who consistently strikes an energetic and emphatic stance on any topic.

“Common Knowledge” often slips into banality even as it comments on it; two hours of common knowledge, of flitting from one hot issue to another, is like leafing quickly through a book without really reading it. Still, Demetrios’ elegant use of frames-within-frames and his willingness to allow real life to intrude (the apparent murder of a homeless woman, clearly one of his favorite interviewees) lends his work layers of meaning that no linear documentary could handle.