Truth or Dare: Art & Documentary - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1841501751 ISBN 13: 9781841501758

Casa editrice: Intellect L & D E F A E, 2008

Riassunto

The new wave of documentaries that prominently feature their filmmakers, such as the works of Michael Moore and Morgan Spurlock, have attracted fresh, new audiences to the form—but they have also drawn criticism that documentaries now promote entertainment at the expense of truth. Truth or Dare examines the clash between the authenticity claimed by documentaries and their association with imagination and experimental contemporary art. An experienced group of practitioners, artists, and theorists here question this binary, and the idea of documentary itself, in a cross-disciplinary volume that will force us to reconsider how competing interests shape filmmaking. 

 

 

 

 

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Informazioni sull?autore

Gail Pearce teaches contemporary media art at Royal Holloway, University of London, United Kingdom.
Cahal McLaughlin is senior lecturer in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism at the University of Ulster, United Kingdom. A documentary filmmaker with twenty years of experience, he is director of the Prisons Memory Archive of recordings in Northern Ireland.

 

 

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Truth or Dare

Art & Documentary

By Gail Pearce, Cahal McLaughlin

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2007 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84150-175-8

Contents

Acknowledgements and Thanks, 
Introduction, 
Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice Michael Renov, 
Freedoms and Accountabilities Cahal McLaughlin (interlocutor), Sergei Dvortsevoy, Clarisse Hahn, Ann-Sofi Sidén in conversation, 
Documentary, History and Reality: Reflections on Jean Chamoun's Tal al-Zaatar Lina Khatib, 
Dancing to Different Tunes: Ethical Differences in Approaches to Factual Film-making John Ellis, 
Collaborations and Technologies Stella Bruzzi (interlocutor), Gideon Koppel, Jane and Louise Wilson in conversation, 
Is It Art? Gail Pearce, 
Viewing Spaces and Audiences Gareth Evans (interlocutor), Nina Pope, Claudia Spinelli in conversation, 
Vietnam/USA Trinh T. Minh-ha in an interview by Eva Hohenberger, 
Contributors, 
Bibliography, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice

Michael Renov

'I think of my films as documentaries. I never fantasize. I have never invented something just for the sake of making an interesting image. I am always struggling to get an equivalent on film to what I actually see'. Stan Brakhage.

The late Stan Brakhage is considered by many to be America's premiere avant-garde film-maker with a career spanning 50 years and more than 100 films. One of his first films, Wonder Ring (1955), was a short work commissioned by artist Joseph Cornell who wished to have a filmic memento made of New York's Third Avenue El before its destruction. It is a luminous work, silent, filled with shimmering images that play at the edges of abstraction. Some of these dancing images are reflections captured from the imperfect window glass of the moving car, rippling distortions attracting the eye of the film-maker, neither graphically produced nor optically printed on film. These images are the product of Brakhage's visual fascination, offered up to the viewer as the equivalent of what he sees. It is what we ourselves might have seen had we been there and had we been so attentive.

Critic P. Adams Sitney has called such works as Wonder Ring lyrical films': 'The lyrical film postulates the filmmaker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision.' The subject matter of such a film as Wonder Ring is the visible world – the stuff of documentary – enlivened by the eye and mind of the film-maker, a dialectical play of subject and object. Although the documentary tradition has tended to repress the emphasis on the subjectivity of the maker in favour of the world on the other side of the lens, the non-fiction film is always the result of an encounter between the two.

Much the same could be said of photography which demonstrated its capacity for the literal transcription of reality as early as 1839. A gesture, a face, an event could now be rescued from time's passage; the photograph delivered an incontestable existential warrant, bearing the physical traces of the light beams that once touched the object itself. The photograph, like its progeny the documentary film, bears witness. But witness to what? To history, no doubt, as long as we trust the image's indexicality, its physical connectedness to the referent, not so easy to do in this digital age. But Roland Barthes for one has argued otherwise. 'I would ... say that the photographer bears witness essentially to his own subjectivity, the way in which he establishes himself as a subject faced with an object.' For Barthes, every photograph is a fabulous relic of pastness but it is, even before that, a physical expression of a perceiving self. Subject trumps object.

As a paradigm for documentary film-maker and historical world, I prefer the notion of the encounter, a dialogue between seer and seen, the subjectivity of the maker facing the objecthood of the world. Most often in the documentary tradition, the world rather than the filtering sensibility has taken precedence. But there is nothing inherent to the documentary endeavour that requires that this be so. Perhaps this is the way to describe the simultaneous convergence and disparity between the work of the documentary practitioner and that of the contemporary artist faced with a world overflowing with human drama and contingency. The documentary film-maker has generally opted for emphasizing the social field, the call to arms or public enlightenment, over the lens that filters and focalizes that field. In a literary context, the late-sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne termed this dialectic between seer and seen 'the measure of sight' versus 'the measure of things.' According to this calculus, the visionary artist opts for interrogating vision itself while the documentarist sets his sights on the world around him and on the need to transform it through his interventions. But I would stress the point that these tendencies have always been emphases along a dynamic continuum rather than defining differences.

That is why I began with reference to the work of a self-proclaimed visionary such as Stan Brakhage or American avant-gardist Peter Hutton who has produced a series of New York Portraits which show us a city filled with sky, clouds and changing light conditions. It is a silent city seen through the eyes of a former painter and merchant seaman whose inclination is to look skyward. Hutton produces portraits attuned more to perceptual thresholds and tantalizing visual patterns than to teeming city streets. New York Portrait, Part III (1990) is a city symphony cut to the measure of Hutton's visual imagination, presented as a series of vignettes which document the city, the film-maker's sensibility and the capabilities of Kodak's Tri-X film stock which Hutton has used almost exclusively for a quarter of a century.

But why would I choose to begin a discussion of innovations in documentary film-making with references to the work of film-makers outside the documentary canon? In tracing some of the important new directions that have evolved within the realm of documentary film-making in the past two decades, it seems to me crucial to begin by establishing both a conceptual grounding for such innovation as well as a sense of its historical antecedents. I would argue that there has been an explosion of contemporary work in which film- and video makers have explored the historical world from diverse perspectives, employing a range of methods and approaches. These artists are drawn to the world 'out there' as documentarists have since the Lumières but shaped and informed by the world 'in here,' by their personal experience, cultural and sexual identities, their political and aesthetic engagements. There is a new balance being struck between subject and object and the result is a reinvention of documentary practice. In this regard, I will make reference to the uses of personal voice and performance in Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied (1989) and Sadie Benning's It Wasn't Love (1992), the combining of live action and animation in Jonathan Hodgson's Feeling My Way (1997), the reinscription of documentary temporality in Peter Forgacs' The Maelstrom (1997), the revision of the city symphony in Jem Cohen's Lost Book Found (1995) and the movement beyond traditional narrative forms in Jay Rosenblatt's Phantom Limb (2005). I hope it will become apparent that, while these works are in powerful dialogue with 80 years of documentary film practice, they are also reworking the syntax of documentary film-making and reconfiguring its boundaries. All of which are indications of a remarkable vitality within the realm of contemporary non-fiction media. Moreover these works are bringing the documentary world in ever-closer contact with the realm of contemporary art.

But before moving to the work of the recent past, I would like to return for a moment to earlier strands of formal innovation. Dziga Vertov, one of documentary's totemic ancestors, voiced certain modernist ambitions which constitute, for the documentary tradition, a road not taken. Vertov, pseudonym of Denis Kaufman – newsreel producer, manifesto writer and creator of the landmark film The Man with a Movie Camera in 1929 – celebrated the cinema's unparalleled possibilities. In Vertov's view, these possibilities had nothing to do with film-drama, deemed to be 'the opiate of the people'. 'The main and essential thing is,' wrote Vertov, 'the sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space.' The camera – freed from the physical limitations of human perception, capable of contracting or expanding time, of plunging and soaring through the heavens, of linking and combining disparate spaces and bodies – could do far more than merely copy the eye. 'Starting today,' wrote Vertov in 1923, 'we are liberating the camera and making it work in the opposite direction – away from copying.'

Here, very early on, a year after Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North, the first documentary blockbuster, Vertov stakes a claim for the entirety of the cinematic apparatus: its mission is to be an infinitely perfectible prosthesis to the human sensorium, a mission inherited by Virtual Reality and other current technologies. For Vertov, there need be no fabrications of drama for cinematic creation; the social world in all its dynamism and complexity provided drama enough. An experimenter with sound recording as early as 1916, Vertov believed that the filmic capture of sound and image and its reorganization through montage could re-present the world in ways that could literally alter the consciousness of its audience. The cineaste's raw material was everywhere around her but to achieve the goal of cinematic creation she could be no mere copyist of nature. She was to transform it through her engagement with it, through much thought, careful selection, framing, composition, sound design and editing. For Vertov, intellection and artistry were the necessary requirements for documentary film-making which was the purest of cinematic modes. One could say that, in the first decade of documentary's emergence, its claims to the status of art by virtue of its unprecedented power to defamiliarize and thus transform the world were aggressively posited.

In my own writing, I have argued for the existence of four fundamental documentary functions or modalities whose interplay constitutes a documentary poetics: the preservational, the persuasive, the analytic and the expressive functions. In my view, the expressive or aesthetic function has tended to be undervalued within the non-fiction domain, a circumstance that has begun to change in recent years. Quite often, the documentarist's task has been to mobilize mass opinion, to draw attention to an injustice or to offer to public view a previously unknown corner of the world. But it is important to note that expressivity is the support of the other discursive goals. The greater the expressive power of the piece, that is, the more vividly the film communicates, the more likely an audience is to feel persuasion, educative value or revelation. The camera that follows John F. Kennedy into that Milwaukee auditorium in Primary (1960), the film that, along with Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin's Chronique d'un Eté (1961), helped to launch the movement variously called cinema verité or direct cinema, allows us to gauge the man's charismatic power, to witness the laying on of hands as Kennedy winds his way to the stage, in a manner that no other camera placement could have done. The strength of the cinematic gesture heightens the film's power to persuade us of the candidate's extraordinary personal appeal.

The centrality of the expressive domain is a crucial point to make for documentary studies in light of a tradition of disparagement toward 'formalism,' meant to be an unyielding focus on the beautiful rather than the true. Vertov suffered from such an indictment even from comrade Sergei Eisenstein himself who chastised the monumental The Man with a Movie Camera as 'formalist jackstraws and unmotivated camera mischief.' In the 1930s, the Griersonian tradition sought to show the face of industrial Britain to the world, to valorize the state's best efforts and the common courage of its citizenry. During more than a decade of worldwide depression and war, aesthetics tended to be seen as a luxury ill-suited to the urgency of the times.

Perhaps Joris Ivens offers the clearest instance of an anti-aesthetic that emerged within the documentary tradition during the 1930s and 1940s. While filming his monumental Misery in the Borinage (1933), Ivens, whose earlier film Rain (1929) had celebrated the camera's power to evoke the subtleties of atmosphere and sensory memory, decided that beautiful images could sabotage his goal of alerting the world to the dire conditions faced by striking coalminers in the Borinage region of Belgium.

During the filming of Borinage we sometimes had to destroy a certain unwelcome superficial beauty that would occur when we did not want it. When the clear-cut shadow of the barracks window fell on the dirty rags and dishes of a table the pleasant effect of the shadow actually destroyed the effect of dirtiness we wanted, so we broke the edges of the shadow. Our aim was to prevent agreeable photographic effects distracting the audience from the unpleasant truths we were showing.

Far from moving away from copying as Vertov had wished, documentary makers of the period embraced the documentary cinema's mimetic capacities wholeheartedly as a way to move an audience to grim recognition and social mobilization.

I would nonetheless argue that it is the clickity-clack rhythm of W. H. Auden's narration in Wright and Watt's Night Mail (1936) or the flawless editing of people and machines toiling as one to defeat the Germans in Jennings and McAllister's Listen to Britain (1942) that burn these films into the world's memory. They do their work to persuade and promote all the better for their ability to engage our senses and induce our pleasures. In Claiming the Real, Brian Winston has argued that the Griersonians were more interested in 'prettifying aesthetics' and the search for the picturesque than in investigating the social ills which their films appeared to address. I don't deny the shortcomings of these films' social reformist politics but I must oppose the terms of the critique. The formal construction of a work is far from an add-on or surface feature that the 'prettifying' label would suggest (aesthetics as the icing on the cake). Rather the formal domain is about the work of construction, the play of the signifier, the vehicle of meaning for every instance of human communication. The formal regime is the very portal of sense-making; it determines the viewer's access to the expression of ideas, its power to move and transform an audience.

Thus far I have argued for the centrality of formal or expressive concerns for documentary filmmaking at both the conceptual and historical levels. I have also suggested that a sort of documentary anti-aesthetic emerged in the 1930s and early 1940s which has marked this cinematic mode ever since. I would argue that it was the dire necessity of that moment that has cut documentary off from its avant-garde roots. Here I'm thinking of the city symphonies of Walter Ruttmann, Jean Vigo and Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Bunuel's Las Hurdes (1932) or later works such as Georges Franju's Le Sang des Bêtes (1949) or Alain Resnais's Nuit ou Brouillard (1955).

Another institutional circumstance has intervened, cutting documentary culture off from its avant-garde roots. Beginning in the 1960s, television arose as hegemonic across Europe and the United States. The standards of broadcast journalism began to displace those of the documentary tradition in a manner discussed at the 'Truth or Dare: Documentary and Art' conference by John Ellis. What we think we know about documentary has been strenuously conditioned by televisual practices, a circumstance that is now being undone by documentary's new theatrical vitality, a lively festival circuit and the new museum as well as gallery options that are bringing documentary forms (often via multi-channel installations) to new audiences.

Documentary has long borne an asymptotic relationship to commercial culture, uneven and historically contingent. At certain moments – the first of them no doubt coinciding with the tremendous popularity of Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) – it has seemed that non-fiction forms could compete with their fictional counterparts in the marketplace. In the early 1960s, Robert Drew of Drew Associates believed that his brand of direct cinema could become an American broadcast TV staple. But his independence did not mesh well with network executives who wished to maintain control over their own documentary units. From mid-1961 to the end of 1963, Drew Associates made twelve one-hour films, only two of which were shown on ABC (American Broadcast Company). The remaining ten films were packaged as a series called the 'Living Camera' in the hopes of enticing a network buyer. This never materialized due in part to ABC's decision to produce its own non-fiction programming. A moment of near-convergence (of documentary and commercial culture) never quite materialized.

Until quite recently with such box office successes as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and The March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, 2005) and the massive emergence of reality television – a global phenomenon – in the mid-1990s, the presumption was that documentary could claim little more than its own modest 'market share,' an audience of the curious and the committed. My own sense is that the asymptotic relationship between documentary and commercial culture still obtains; we are simply experiencing a moment of near tangency that could be replaced by a new phase.

(Continues...)

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Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Intellect L & D E F A E
• Data di pubblicazione: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1841501751
• ISBN 13: 9781841501758
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 139
• Redattore: Pearce Gail, Mclaughlin Cahal
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile