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The Documentary Temptation:
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1.
Some directors flirt with
it at the beginning of their careers, and then quickly move on, never to return
– like Jean-Luc Godard, after his earliest extant attempt at filmmaking, Opération Béton (1954), or Jacques
Rozier after Blue Jeans (1958) and Paparazzi (1964). Some dwell there
secretly, making a spin-off of their better-known productions, like François
Truffaut putting together in the editing room a little poem about planes
launching and landing made from shots left over from The Soft Skin (1964). Some use it as research, or as an audiovisual archive-testament, some
manner of addendum to a particular fictional project: such as Benoît Jacquot making
his portrait Louis-René des Forêts (1988) in tandem with his adaptation of that author’s Les mendiants (1988).
Some make a leap at a
sudden, dramatic point in their lives, jumping from one train to another, once
and for all: Jean-Pierre Gorin, Terry Zwigoff or Alexander Kluge. Some never go
there at all, absolutely certain of their storytelling course: Pedro Almodóvar,
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Terrence Malick. Some begin there, take a long detour
though the land of fiction, and end up back there – like Michelangelo
Antonioni, in his circuitous path from Gente
del Po (1947) to his enigmatic, short portraits of various landscapes (Noto, Mandorli, Vulcano, Stromboli,
Carnevale [1993]). Some end up there, using humble technologies, in a final
gesture of do-it-yourself modesty and simplicity – like Hollywood legend King
Vidor, examining the affinities between himself and painter Andrew Wyeth in Metaphor (1980). Some make just a brief
visit or two unpredictably, during their long careers, largely for personal
reasons – such as Ingmar Bergman with Karin’s
Face (1984) and the various versions of The
Fårö Document (1969, 1979).
I am speaking of what I
will call the Documentary Temptation – as experienced by filmmakers who are,
more usually, associated with fiction cinema. By this heuristic label, I am not
meaning to refer every kind of film that can receive the label of documentary.
For the vast genre of non-fictional cinema can be basically split in two. At
one extreme pole, there is the essay-film, often made from the treatment of various
archival documents and found materials, as practiced (variously) by Edgardo
Cozarinsky (One Man’s War, 1982),
Chris Marker (Sunless, 1983), and
Godard in his Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-1998) period. At
the other extreme pole, we find the pure or raw documentary form, where
unstaged realities are encountered and recorded. It is mainly the latter end of
that spectrum to which this essay – which aims to offer a preliminary survey of
the topic – will refer.
A great deal happens in
the degrees and overlaps between the two extremes of documentary form that I
have just posited. Much contemporary television documentary, particularly in
the digital era, tends more towards archival sifting (even if the archive in
question is only the photos, clips and interviews pertaining to some movie or
music star) than direct reportage; and even the most elaborately constructed
film-essay may contain passages directly captured from reality, like the
interviews embedded within Marker’s Level
Five (1997).
However, the Documentary
Temptation, as I am coining this term, relates essentially to the encounter
with reality – whether finally rendered in minimalist, observational, cinéma-vérité, or quite conventional
reportage formats. For filmmakers mainly associated with the creation of
fiction – and hence of entire, complex, illusory worlds – this type of
documentary is such a sweet temptation because it comes, at least on some initial,
primary level, without artifice, without pretence, without contrivance, without
the vast industrial and aesthetic machinery (the building of sets, large crews,
maintenance over diverse spaces, times and conditions of a coherent and
cohesive fictional world) that comes with the terrain of fiction. Post Nouvelle
Vague director Luc Moullet – who has devoted documentaries to, among other
curious subjects, Des Moines (Le ventre
d’Amérique, 1996), murder and insanity in regional France (Land of Madness, 2009), and food (Genèse d’un repas, 1978) – puts the
difference, as he sees it, in characteristically amusing terms: while making a
fiction, you lose more weight than when making a documentary, because it is
harder work!
In the imagination of
most filmmakers around the world whose careers began after World War II, we
could say that this Documentary Temptation corresponds to a certain dream of
what cinematic neorealism was meant to be, but never actually was: real people
(non-professional actors), no sets (just the homes, settings and environments
of daily life), quotidian rituals, unforced spectacle. The Italian neo-realists
of the 1940s and ‘50s such as Vittorio De Sica and Roberto Rossellini created a
simulacrum of this ideal but, as is glaringly obvious to our 21st century eyes, much of this was essentially fiction, albeit borrowing the
clothing of reality (Rossellini filming in the European ruins for Paisà [1946] and Germany
Year Zero [1948]) and the burgeoning rhetoric of an artistic realism across
all the arts (the life of an ordinary, lonely, old guy and his dog in De Sica’s Umberto D [1952]). (1)
The Documentary
Temptation is all about the “return to zero” once associated (however mistakenly
or dreamily) with neorealism. Armed only with a camera and a sound recorder or,
at best, a small crew, the filmmaker drops his or her signature style, the
familiar mise en scène, and humbly
goes toward something they love or are fascinated by in the real world, perhaps
some piece of their own autobiographical formation: a person, a town, a
community, a heroic or influential figure, an art form, a philosophical or
religious tendency.
Some filmmakers go constantly
back and forth between documentary and fiction – Werner Herzog, Paul Cox, Agnès
Varda, Wim Wenders, Spike Lee – often enriching their fictional projects with
inputs from their non-fictional excursions. Herzog has gone so far as to
produce, when the opportunity arose, the fictional version (Rescue Dawn, 2006) of a prior
documentary portrait, Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997) – although he did not manage to improve on it in this subsequent
elaboration. Cox, an Australian director associated with Herzog (and also Guy
Maddin) in the 1980s, often used his short documentaries (We Are All Alone My Dear [1975], The Island [1975]) as matrices, generators or research centres for
his feature-length fictions. Varda has found herself more famous, by the 2000s,
for her non-fiction than for her fiction, because of the international public
success inaugurated by The Gleaners and I (2000) – although many of her works, whatever their genre or form, sit on a thin
line between documentary and fiction, like her fairly corny celebration of a
century of cinema, Les cent et une nuits
de Simon Cinéma (1995).
Spike Lee has frequently
made documentaries (such as Four Little
Girls, 1997), relatively little-known outside of the USA in terms of his
public auteur image, mixing television techniques (in the manner of Ken Burns)
with an African-American choral aesthetic, woven from a plurality of voices and
real-life stories, and richly treated at the post-production level of montage
and musical orchestration. His moving account of the Hurricane Katrina
catastrophe in the “requiem in four acts” When
the Levees Broke (2006) has (as with Varda) transformed Lee into an
acclaimed documentarian.
In Wenders’ case, it is
primarily his high-profile attachment to popular music, and his association
with key musicians (Ry Cooder, Bono, etc.) that has led to the creation of
works such as The Buena Vista Social Club (1999) and The Soul of a Man (2003, part of the
series The Blues) – but, equally, it is also fed by
his life-long infatuation with the audiovisual diary form, expressing itself in
films ranging from his haunted collaboration with Nicholas Ray, Lightning Over Water (1980), to Notebook on Cities and Clothes (1989)
about the fashion designer Yohji Yamamoto, and Tokyo Ga (1985) on his “affair with a city”. Even further back than
these artists who emerged in the 1960s and ‘70s, we have the rich example of
Orson Welles, often moving between documentary and fiction, whose unfinished Don Quixote project was ultimately to be
about his difficult and ever-changing relationship, over four decades, with
Spain itself.
For other directors,
documentary works occur within special parentheses, in the framework of
particular small-scale (or low-budget, or televisual) projects set-up between
large-scale fictions. This is the trajectory, for example, of Martin Scorsese,
especially since the mid 1990s – moonlighting, as it were, in his off-times
between epic feature narratives to deliver his pedagogical essays on cinema
history (A Personal Journey with Martin
Scorsese Through American Movies [1995] co-directed with Michael Henry
Wilson, My Voyage to Italy [1999]), his
dynamic recordings of musical concert events (The Rolling Stones in Shine a Light [2008] harking back to his
earlier The Last Waltz [1978] with
The Band), or his tributes to American monuments (as producer, writer and
mentor on film critic Kent Jones’ Lady by
the Sea: The Statue of Liberty, 2004). It is also an element of John
Boorman’s career, lured to television to make an autobiographical whimsy (I Dreamt I Woke Up, 1991) or an ode to a
friend, Lee Marvin: A Personal Portrait (1998), among other occasional assignments. For that is what such films by
Scorsese, Boorman or Julien Temple, are: occasional in the English language sense, tailored to fit a specific occasion or
commission.
2.
To truly understand the
Documentary Temptation as I am proposing it, we need to take a backward glance
at Scorsese’s earlier, fascinating portraits in the style of home movies: American Boy (1978), about his wired-up,
story-telling pal Steven Prince; and Italianamerican (1974) about his family, especially his parents (who are also familiar –
especially his mother, Catherine Scorsese – from their cameo appearances in his
fictions). Here the lineaments of the Great Temptation become perfectly
apparent: rough or no-nonsense camerawork, filming in 16 millimetre, direct
sound recording, a texture of daily incidents (guys hanging out, drinking and
sharing tales, or a mother making meals) and random, unplanned exclamations,
laughs, bodily movements. Scorsese reinvents his usual fictive style of “energy
realism” (as Raymond Durgnat described it in relation to Raging Bull [1980]), (2) bringing it closer to the John Cassavetes manner, and traces the
roots of his own socio-cultural upbringing.
Abbas Kiarostami – whose
work has frequently crossed documentary and fiction, in highly conceptual and
sometimes secretive ways – provides another pure example of the Temptation in
his ABC Africa (2001). It is a case
of straight-down-the-line observational filmmaking, without his frequent
reflexive games and explorations of the medium, letting himself (and his basic
filmmaking tools) do some looking and listening, wandering and watching,
noticing and noting, in a strange land – itself a kind of Ground Zero of civilisation,
close to an experience of the apocalypse in Kiarostami’s mind.
Here we find a
characteristic trope of the fiction filmmaker when he or she is making
documentary: the drifting through a
place or space or landscape, encountering people (children at play, the elderly
telling their stories, the sick in suffering, their professional helpers … ), following
the vagaries of a random journey – a form Varda, too, often uses, even when she
is documenting the Parisian street on which she lives, the Rue Daguerre in Daguerréotypes (1976). Yet Kiarostami
too, like Scorsese, inadvertently finds himself encountering a mirror image of
a scene from his own fiction: hence the spectacle of the lightning storm in the
dark of night in ABC Africa, so
reminiscent of the solemn, penultimate scene of Taste of Cherry (1997).
Generally, documentaries by fiction filmmakers are, as
the phrase goes, labours of love. Sydney Pollock pays homage to a beloved
architect in Sketches of Frank Gehry (2005); Clint Eastwood sums up his love for a particular mode of jazz music in Piano Blues (2003); Budd Boetticher
returns to his primal worship of bullfighting in bullfighters in Arruza (1972) and of horses in the
Super-8-shot My Kingdom For … (1985);
Abel Ferrara temporarily abandoned his career in fiction film and seized the
opportunities to pay homage to the cities of New York (Chelsea on the Rocks, 2008, and Mulberry
St., 2010) and Naples (Napoli,
Napoli, Napoli, 2009); Alain Resnais compiles the tribute Gershwin (1992, with a commentary
scripted by celebrated film critic-historian Claude Beylie); Bertrand Tavernier
(who appears in Gershwin) makes Mississippi Blues (1983) in
collaboration with Hollywood legend Robert Parrish, “the two directors meandering through rural
Mississippi in search of the spirit of local music and society” (according to
IMDb’s description).
All these are (with the
exception, occasionally, of Ferrara’s films) essentially gentle, easy-going,
sometimes melancholic works: very different to what happens when some of these
same directors tackle historical-political topics (such as Resnais with Night and Fog [1955] or Tavernier with Histories of Broken Lives [2001]). But the
Documentary Temptation can also grow a political dimension.
3.
When primarily
fiction-based filmmakers make documentaries, their work tends to be of a
particular character, a particular nature – of the type that I have described as
the Documentary Temptation. We do not really find these filmmakers wanting to
become Frederick Wiseman or Harun Farocki, making films that are somehow like
theirs: Olympian in their vision, cool, detached, sizing up an entire social
institution, sector or strata; films with a deliberate, dispassionate, analytic
style, working with building blocks of observational construction as Farocki
quite literally does in his film about bricks, By Comparison (2009).
However, we can trace a
number of fiction filmmakers whose involvement with theoretical ideas and
conceptual forms takes them into different and new documentary modes – modes
that go, beyond or complicate, the pure observationalism/homage of the
labour-of-love mode.
Of all the fiction
filmmakers who have made forays into the documentary realm, Jean Eustache has most
closely approached the kind of detached perspective we associate with Wiseman
or Farocki. He filmed, in collaboration with Jean-Michel Barjol, the ritual
slaughter of a pig in Le cochon (1970), and recorded the life-testimony of his grandmother in Numéro zéro (1971), the latter reworked and
shortened for television as Odette Robert (1980). He laid down procedures for these films that anticipate the moves of
contemporary minimalist World Cinema (as it gets called): static camera, long
takes, minimal interference from the director in the unfolding action.
Eustache went still
further. In his twin-set of documentaries made
in the town of his birth – as if to cheekily sow filmographical confusion, he
named them both La Rosière de Pessac (The Virgin of Pessac, 1968 and 1979)
– he played an intriguing game with documentary temporality.
Eleven years apart, Eustache filmed two performances
of a traditional ritual – the crowning of a chosen, local virgin girl – which
he already knew from his childhood, and which had been occurring long before
then. The ritual remains more or less the same each year; Eustache,
appropriately, more-or-less attempts to reproduce the codified mise en scène of his 1968 filming of it
again in 1979. But, against these unchanging or only slightly changing
elements, the films record the already enormous differences and alterations in
village life, the significance of customs, and the encroachments of the outside
world.
Here, in a method that anticipates Farocki, and with
an anthropological or ethnographic perspective similar to Wiseman, Eustache
seeks less to encounter a messy, immediate reality than to measure social and
historical difference within what French theory calls a dispositif, a way of filming according to certain pre-established
rules and concepts.
An intriguing mid-way case between the spontaneity of cinéma-vérité and the logic of the dispositif occurs in the work of
Jean-Louis Comolli [1941-2022], a celebrated critic and theorist who began in
the early 1960s at Cahiers du cinéma,
and later became known as a documentarian whose films chiefly address political
situations in and around Marseille (Marseille
de père en fils in two parts [1989], Rêves
de France à Marseille [2003]). Comolli’s first features in the 1970s were
fictional, such as the fascinating if overextended La Cecilia (1975) about an Italian-Brazilian commune of 1887. One
of his chief concerns, both aesthetically and theoretically, was the key
cinematic resource of mise en scène –
the staging of scenes for the camera.
Comolli had reached the position that, rather than
thinking of mise en scène as the
writing or painting, in images and sounds, of what is in the auteur’s freely
creative mind, we need to conceive of a coded, social dimension to whatever
happens before a camera, at the very moment when bodies arrange themselves into
shapes and patterns of interaction. (3) This was in itself a revolutionary
idea, arising from the ferments of the late ‘60s, and it remains a challenge to
the purely Romantic artistic ideal of auteur cinematic creation. Comolli was extending the intuition of Pier Paolo Pasolini
in his stirring “Manifesto for a New Theatre” from 1968.
The semiological
archetype of theatre is the spectacle that unfolds every day before our eyes
and ears, in the street, at home, in public places, etc.. In this sense, social
reality is a representation that is not unaware of being a performance, with
its resultant codes (good manners, appropriate behaviour, comportment, etc.).
In a word, social reality is not unaware of being a ritual. (4)
Compare this with the pronouncement of Comolli in the
late 1970s, when he was still involved primarily with fiction cinema.
It is naive to locate mise en scène solely on the side of the camera: it is just as much,
and even before the camera intervenes, everywhere where the social regulations
order the place, the behaviour and almost the “form” of subjects in the various
configurations in which they are caught (and which do not demand the same type
of performance: here authority, here submission; standing out or standing
aside; etc.). In other words, script, actors, mise en scène or not, all that is
filmable in the changing, historical, determined relationships of men and
things to the visible, are dispositifs of representation. (5)
What we see emerging here is a new concept of social mise en scène – something Comolli
never ceased pursuing in his critical writing and film work alike. With one key
difference: the switch from fiction to documentary. In the 1990s, deep into his
new career, Comolli asked: “Is there a documentary mise en scène?” – surely a paradoxical question, since the
pro-filmic events in documentary are (usually) unplanned and unstaged, while mise en scène is a matter of
choreography and artifice.
Comolli embraced this paradox, coming to formulate the
idea that there is not only the kind of social
mise en scène evoked above (the familiar patterns of and rituals of social
life visible in their reflex enactment), but also what he called an auto mise en scène, a performance or
staging of the self by individuals – particularly strong when there is a camera
around.
Each person
I film also comes to their encounter with the film with their own habitus, this tight fabric, this
framework of learnt gestures, acquired reflexes, assimilated postures […] The
filmed subject, the subject in the film’s view, prepares him or herself for the
film, consciously and unconsciously,
is penetrated by it, adjusts themselves to the cinematic operation, and thus
puts in place his/her own mise en scène,
the performance of the body in the space and time defined by the look of the
other (the “scene”). (6)
For Comolli, documentary filmmaking – particularly of
a radical or leftist political persuasion – thus involves two stages or levels.
Observational filmmaking – for much of what Comolli films is out of his strict
control, such as speeches delivered at political rallies – is a matter of bringing out or somehow underlining this
reflex, coded, theatrical or ritualistic aspect of spontaneous social events,
much as Eustache did in his twin-documentaries. In this sense, Comolli takes
the option of respecting – sometimes
with a sly sense of irony, or submerged critique – the auto mise en scène of those individuals who allow themselves to
appear before his camera and be included in his films.
This strategy has become, in fact, a crucial resource
of contemporary documentary practice, and even become a part of conventional
television reportage as well as advertising (especially in a humorous mode):
filming people as they want to be seen,
as thy inhabit (as it were) their own imaginary, their ideal self-image. The
Australian filmmaker David Caesar, who began with several popular, very stylised
documentaries (in the Errol Morris tradition) before departing for the Land of
Fiction (such as Prime Mover, 2009), made
this approach his signature: his frontally-framed portraits of ordinary,
suburban people standing next to their beloved TV sets, letterboxes, cars or
pets (in films such as Body Works [1988] and Car Crash [1995]) have been highly
influential on subsequent documentarians in several countries.
But Comolli goes one step further. For him, the film’s
own mise en scène – which, in
documentary, relates most particularly to camerawork (since so many other
variables, such as setting and lighting, are beyond his control) – must enter
into a dialectical relationship (sympathetic or critical, or both) with the auto mise en scène of those filmed, a
process which he calls a “two-step dance”.
Often, the
filmmaker’s gesture aims, consciously or not, at blocking, mixing up, erasing
or annulling the subject’s own mise en
scène … The wisest mise en scène cedes the step to the other, favours his or her development, gives them the
time and the frame to nuance themselves, deploy themselves. Filming thus
becomes a conjugation, a relation, a rapport. (7)
4.
We have heard and read much, over the past 25 years,
about the “line between documentary and fiction”, the hybrid works by many
(such as Kiarostami’s Close-Up, 1990)
that cleverly move between fictional and non-fictional material, nesting one
inside the other – sometimes in ways that are hard to immediately detect. With
the aid of recent developments in digital technology, Antonioni made what is in
fact among the strangest and most beguiling of these doco-fiction hybrids: The Gaze of Michelangelo (2004), which
shows the director walking around and admiring a famous sculpture of Moses by
the Master … nothing too odd, it seems, until we remember that Antonioni had
been long paralysed by a debilitating stroke (which also robbed him of the
power of speech), and was unable to walk except in this unreal, animated state!
Here, however, I am interested in pinning down a more
particular and restricted change: the return of a fictional element into
documentary projects by normally narrative filmmakers. The Documentary
Temptation thereby performs a torsion, does a twist, and by this route takes on
a paradoxical character. Of crucial importance here is the recourse to psychodrama – which, in its theatrical
origins, involves an overrunning of the theatrical illusion by a real element
unleashed by performance: real passions, real acts (whether erotic or violent),
real outcomes.
Psychodrama was central to the work of Cassavetes, at
least as a theme (Opening Night [1977]
is a veritable fictive essay on the topic), and also of Norman Mailer:
especially in Maidstone (1970) where
the improvised Happening between actors (including Rip Torn) momentarily spills
into dangerous, physically threatening territory. Robert Kramer, in his
movement from political newsreels in the ‘60s to highly charged political
fictions such as Ice (1970) and Milestones (1975) and on to the many
sophisticated essay-films he shot around the world (such as Starting Point, 1994), was unafraid to
wander onto psychodramatic soil. The little-known Australian underground
classic Yackety Yack (Dave Jones,
1974) offers an ingenious parody of this very ‘70s obsession; while another
Australian rarity, Dalmas (Bert
Deling, 1973), re-integrates itself as an on-set workshop/discussion lab once
its opening generic crime-cop fiction has disintegrated.
Psychodrama in documentary takes two principal forms. Either
the reportage contains an element of re-enactment;
or the situation unfolding before the camera develops – sometimes precisely as
a result of the film crew being there – in a distinctively dynamic, volatile
direction.
When things get really out of hand in the pro-filmic
event (i.e., whatever is going on in front of the camera), the documentary
develops a rushing, headlong speed, and the filmmaker has to manage a merely
precarious control over incidents that have their own complex, in-motion logic,
as in the prodigious work of anthropologist Jean Rouch (who made very few
strictly fictional pieces in his long career), or in the most paroxysmic
examples of cinéma-vérité. Curiously,
in the cases of Scorsese’s American Boy or Vitali Kanevski’s We, Children of the
20th Century (1994) – the latter a portrait of Russian street
kids, several of whom had already been teen actors in Kanevski’s fictions – it
is when the real chaos begins that documentary begins to mimic the mise en scène of disorder fully staged
in, respectively, Mean Streets (1973)
or Freeze, Die, Revive! (1989).
The fullest expression of this mirroring of an
auteur’s fictions in their documentaries occurs, in the American context, in the
work of James Toback.
In Tyson (2008), we once more see a
person – this time, a famous sports celebrity, Mike Tyson – who has already
appeared in Toback’s fictions, particularly the partly improvised Black and White (2000), where he explodes violently (to
Robert Downey, Jr.) in the midst of a scene that mimics incidents in his
biography. This is in itself constitutes a figure, a familiar constellation of
characters and events, in the Tobackian universe: his early book Jim (1972), written fully in the
Participant Observer mode of the New Journalism of the 1960s and ‘70s, is about
the black footballer Jim Brown, who then, as an actor, became a menacing
Phallic Superego in the nightmarish world of the director’s debut feature, Fingers (1978).
Moreover, Toback has frequently announced, over the
span of his career, the view of existence-as-psychodrama that he has frequently
tried to dramatise and capture on film: we are all actors, but unstable,
borderline-schizophrenic actors, living out wild scenes in the fantasy-scenario
which is our life. (8) Finally, at the end of this line, we reach Tyson: much of it is intimate interview
material filmed in digital close-up (interspersed with obligatory archival
material, as in Emir Kusturica’s somewhat similar and contemporaneous
film-portrait of Diego Maradona) but, instead of being simple, reassuring talking-head
footage typical of a television format, Toback offers these candid interview images
as the record of a psychic madness – a self that is never complete and instead
changes at each instant, poised between confession and denial, desire and
guilt, recall and erasure. Split (and multi) screen has rarely been so
abrasively eloquent!
Another key theme and structure in Toback’s cinema is
the encounter – whether of two
individuals, or many in a group. For his most colourful and radical excursion
into documentary, Toback decided to stage a party-like Happening in The Big Bang (1989): get a remarkable
group of disparate people together (actors, criminals, doctors, philosophers,
gamblers … ), and have discuss the fairly surreal question: “Did God create the
universe in a cosmic orgasm?” The film is proudly wayward, incoherent, purely
associative: everybody (once again) ceaselessly performs themselves, and what
they discuss (sex, money, power, violence) perfectly mirrors Toback’s imaginary
world as expressed in his movie fictions – as well as offering a glimpse into
his own social background and connections.
The Big Bang is a genial
psychodrama, but it evokes well the kind of sauvage reality which is at the heart of the Documentary Temptation – but this time
morphing into a fanciful fiction that anticipates the weirdest moments of
Reality Television in the 21st Century, such as on US programs like The Hills (2006-2010). Toback returned
to this realm in Seduced and Abandoned (2013), his Cannes-set document of himself and Alec Baldwin trying to raise
money for an unlikely film project titled Last
Tango in Tikrit – roping in Scorsese, Bernardo Bertolucci, Roman Polanski,
Francis Ford Coppola, Brett Ratner, and a crowd of actors along the way. (9)
What of re-enactment? It is, in a sense, something
already visibly in play on Mike Tyson’s face in Toback’s documentary. Over the
past decade or so, filmmakers and cultural commentators have become veritably obsessed
with the workings of trauma and its legacy within the scarred, distorted,
psychic memories of victims – whether that trauma is on a personal scale
(sexual abuse) or a collective one (wars, natural disasters, the Holocaust). A
documentary such as Capturing the
Friedmans (2003) is merely the most visible manifestation of this
international trend, while Rithy Panh’s S21:
The Khmer Rouge Death Machine (2003) rates among its most profound achievements.
The Australian filmmaker Peter Tammer, a major figure
in the independent cinema movement of the 1970s, has made a psychodramatic,
Toback-style exploration of the ambiguities of acting and performance in
situations of high anxiety (Fear of the
Dark, 1985), but his masterpiece is Journey
to the End of Night (1982), in which an ex-army man re-enacts – in a
ghostly, play-acting fashion, as if in a trance – his extreme experiences of violence
directed against Japanese soldiers. Thanks to a simple shooting technique, a
disquieting truth emerges that goes well beyond what would have been possible
in either a smooth dramatic recreation (of the kind contemporary TV documentary
loves) or a more typically lucid, reflective, close-up talking-head approach.
5.
Strictly avant-garde or experimental cinema deserves
its own study in terms of its own often novel uses of documentary and fiction.
The same goes for video art: for instance, the case of talented ex-Cahiers critic Jean-André Fieschi [1942-2009]
creating, with the lightweight paluche camera, the largely subjective fiction New
Mysteries of New York (1976-81, now thought to be lost), before transiting
– like his colleague, André S. Labarthe – to a long series of lyrical
documentaries for TV or DVD about artists and filmmakers (such as his portrait
of Éric Rohmer at work in La fabrique du Conte d’été [2005]). (10) But here I will mention here only two special cases
from the canon of American experimental cinema: James Benning and Stan
Brakhage.
Benning, in the first phase of his artistic career, was
preoccupied with the overlap between a hard-edge, pictorial formalism (as
pioneered within painting and still photography), and narrative systems or
forms – as were a number of his contemporaries in the USA avant-garde,
including Yvonne Rainer and Hollis Frampton. Into serial image-structures –
strings of pictures of houses or streets, for example, often following the
parameter of colour schemes in their ordering – Benning would cleverly introduce
elements of plot intrigue through marginal actions, and especially through
soundtrack overlays. A typical example is One
Way Boogie Woogie (1977), filmed in mundane locations (factories, shops,
streets) around Wisconsin.
27 Years Later (2005) is the
answer to, or “ruinous remake” (in Stephen Heath’s ‘70s phrase) of, Benning’s
earlier film (today he likes to screen the two together, to facilitate audience
comparison). Aware that the world he had filmed was on the verge of
disappearing altogether under the force of creeping industrialisation and
globalisation, he set out to place his camera in almost exactly the same spots
as he had in One Way Boogie Woogie.
Faced with the material difficulty of re-recording what in many cases is no
longer there, in a landscape frequently transformed beyond his recognition, the
entire project undergoes a massive material and conceptual displacement: same
film (in some material sense), but completely different concerns. The
pictorialism, the games with narrative, are largely gone; suddenly 27 Years Later is – in its active
memory-relation to the first film – a disturbing, minimalist, political
documentary on social change over the passage of time. It is a provocative
mixture we will often find in Benning’s œuvre as a whole.
What register as outright gags or purely formalist
experiments in One Way Boogie Woogie – twin sisters performing choreographed gestures, a woman leaving a factory (in
an evocation of early cinema newsreels), three-colour separation giving a
ghostly effect to passing cars, the shapes of belching factory chimneys –
become (especially when the same people perform roughly the same gestures)
markers of a bleak social critique in 27
Years Later. This sequelising displacement is helped by Benning’s ingenious
recourse to the same technique Marguerite Duras had used in her “re-take” of India Song (1975) in Son nom de Venise dans Calcutta désert (1976): he retains exactly the same soundtrack as I the original, now
completely surreal and disturbing in its relation to the new images.
The case of Brakhage is even more intriguing. Long
regarded as the master of abstraction, whether beginning from animation or
cinematography (his Text of Light [1974] spins a feature from views of light and smoke in an ashtray), Brakhage
turned in his famous 1971 “Pittsburgh Trilogy” to a city, and three of its
institutions, normally at once omnipresent and beyond notice, hyper-visible and
invisible: the police (Eyes), dead
bodies in the morgue (The Act of Seeing
with One’s Own Eyes), and a hospital (Deus
Ex). This would seem to be a perfect example of the Documentary Temptation,
with a vengeance! And there is no doubt that a strong dose of concrete, material
reality – as well as a possibly inadvertent echo of Hollywood movie and TV
genres of the ‘70s – alters and expands Brakhage’s usual repertoire, and that a
trace of explicit social critique here enters his œuvre.
But what really registers in the Pittsburgh Trilogy is
the tension, the incessant back-and-forth between physicality and abstraction,
reconquered anew by Brakhage: we are constantly on the point of forming a world
(or a fiction of it) and losing it in the play of pure forms.
6.
My final case is the curious career of Jean-Pierre
Gorin. It is, in truth, difficult to cleanly say that he began in either
documentary or fiction. Working with Jean-Luc Godard as the other half of the
Dziga Vertov Group in the late 1960s, his first films are truly essays, hybrid
constructions of original footage (shot in many countries), found footage, graphics
and heavy, voice-over soundtracks of theoretical explication: Wind from the East (1969), Struggles in Italy (1969), Vladimir and Rosa (1971), and so on. Yet
Gorin made clear, in all his statements of the time, that the movement into
fiction was imminent and necessary: Tout va bien (1972) marked the heroic but commercially doomed attempt to make a
political narrative – almost a comedy – for mass audience consumption, starring
Jane Fonda and Yves Montand.
From that point, after the Group’s dissolution, Gorin
made his way to USA, where he has lived (and, until his retirement, taught)
ever since. In that new context, he reworked his essayistic orientation, but
now, on each occasion, from a documentary basis: reportage of twins with their
own unique language in Poto and Cabengo (1980), immersion in a group of model-train enthusiasts in Routine Pleasures (1986), hanging out with a Samoan street gang in My Crasy Life (1991). Although Gorin has
often announced an imminent move back into fiction projects (he came close to
filming Philip K. Dick’s Ubik in the
mid ‘70s, and co-scripted Ilkka Järvi-laturi’s History is Made at Night [1999]), his politically-inflected
aesthetic has, in the event, materialised itself fully in his unique doco-essay
hybrids. (11)
In Gorin’s films, fiction – particularly through the
memory and citation of narrative movies, forms, genres and styles – is
everywhere. In fact, using a famous triad borrowed from modern psychoanalysis, we
could say that everything in Gorin’s films of the ‘80s and ‘90s happens
simultaneously on three levels: the Real, the Imaginary, and the Symbolic.
Real: an undeniable, palpable trace of real people,
traces and events, unrepeatable, irreducible, unique. Imaginary: the ideas,
fictions, associations, contexts, histories, mythologies and clichés that
inevitably accrue to or can be generated out of these realities. Symbolic: people,
events and institutions become symbolic when they are, in some way, typical or generalisable
(“allegorical” as Fredric Jameson would say); when a social analysis or
argument can be triggered or generated from their filmic representation.
How can we hold all those levels together
simultaneously in our minds? When it comes to documentary film, we are too used
(as viewers or critics) to separating them out, concentrating on what is either
Real or Symbolic – and mainly censoring the Imaginary, which is what Gorin,
like Comolli, always insists upon. But filmmakers are always ahead of critics
in their grasp of what is innovative and progressive in any kind of cinema. And
those filmmakers who come from fiction into documentary, whether they are
merely taking a holiday there, grasping the opportunity to pursue a personal
obsession, or elaborating a conceptual experiment, have a good chance of mixing
up all the levels – Real, Imaginary and Symbolic – and coming up with some
cinematic creature we have never seen the likes of before.
2. Raymond Durgnat, “Out of the Looking Glass, or a Phantasmagoric
Mirror for England”, Monthly Film
Bulletin (February 1984), p. 40.
3. These reflections on dispositif and social mise en
scène draw upon material developed at length in my book Mise en scène and Film Style (Palgrave, 2014).
4. Pier Paolo Pasolini (trans. Thomas Simpson), “Manifesto for a New
Theater”, PAJ: A Journal of Performance
and Art, Vol. 29 No. 1 (2007), pp. 135-136.
5. Jean-Louis Comolli, “The Frenzy of the Visible”, in
S. Heath & T. de Lauretis (eds), The
Cinematic Apparatus (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1980), p. 139.
6. Comolli, Voir et pouvoir (Paris: Verdier, 2004), p. 153 (my translation).
7. Ibid., p. 154.
8. See James Toback, “Notes
on Acting”, Film Comment (January-February 1978), pp. 35-36.
9. With this roll-call of
Toback-Ratner-Baldwin-Bertolucci-Polanski ( … and Jessica Chastain!), Seduced and Abandoned makes for
eye-opening and/or queasy viewing in the post-Me Too period of activism. Toback
himself has, since his intriguing dissociated-identity fiction The Private Life of a Modern Woman (aka An Imperfect Murder, 2017), seemingly
disappeared from public view.
10. For a retrospective
reflection on his paluche practice,
see Fieschi, “Notes sur Les Nouveaux
mystères de New York”, La Pensée,
no. 369 (January-March 2012).
11. See my “Sixteen Ways to Pronounce Potato, or: The Adventure of Materials (Fragment from 1987)”, Photogénie, no. 1 (November 2013). back
© Adrian Martin July 2010 / July 2014 |
