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RESÚMENES TEXTOS DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKING, 2021
“Why are ethical issues central to documentary filmmaking?” ÁNGEL
Every film is a documentary because every film speaks about the culture that created it. We could say that there are two kinds of film: documentaries of wish-fulfillment (fiction) and documentaries of social representation (documentaries). ● Documentaries of wish-fulfillment (what we would normally call fictions): Give tangible expression to our wishes and dreams, our nightmares and dreads. They give a sense of what we wish, or fear, reality itself might be or become. Such films convey truths if we decide they do. They are films whose truths, insights, and perspectives we may adopt as our own or reject. ● Documentaries of social representation (what we typically call nonfiction): Give tangible representation to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share. Give a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been, of what it is now, or of what it may become.These films also convey truths if we decide they do. Films of both types call on us to interpret them, and as “true stories,”. Belief receives a premium in documentaries since these films often are intended to have an impact on the historical world itself and to do so must persuade or convince. Fiction is content with “ suspension of disbelief ” while documentary asks for “ belief ”. We take not only pleasure from documentary but direction as well. Documentary represents our world in three ways:
- Documentaries offer a depiction of the world that bears a recognizable familiarity. This quality provides a basis for belief: we see what was there before the camera; it must be true. This is the power of the photographic image , even though it is subject to qualification because an image cannot tell everything we want and images can be altered.
- Documentaries stand for or represent the interests of others. Documentary filmmakers take on the role of public representatives. They speak for the interests of others, both for the individuals whom they represent in the film and for the institution that supports their filmmaking.
- Documentaries put the case for a particular view or interpretation of evidence. They do not simply stand for others, representing them in ways they could not do themselves, but actively make a case or argument: they assert what the nature of a matter is to win consent or influence opinion. REPRESENTING OTHERS Documentaries stand for or represent the views of individuals, groups, and institutions. Representation is central to documentary. Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? = What Do We Do with People When We Make a Documentary?
In fiction films : we ask them to do what we want, actors represent a character. (using non- professional actors complicates this blah blah blah) In non-fiction , or documentary: People are asked to live their lives as if the camera wasn't there. Their value is in themselves not in acting or a character, they are social actors. If the director wants a performance he will compromise the authenticity .“What responsibility do filmmakers have for the effect of their acts on the lives of those filmed?” Most of us think the invitation to act in a film is a desirable opportunity. But what if the invitation is not to act in a film but to be in a film, to be yourself in a film? There is a different burden of responsibility on filmmakers who set out to represent others rather than to portray characters. Filmmakers who set out to represent people whom they do not initially know run the risk of exploiting them while those who choose to observe others but not to intervene run the risk of altering behavior and having their own human responsiveness called into question. Informed consent is often used to bypass these ethical questions. But of what consequences or risks should filmmakers inform their subjects? To what extent can the filmmaker honestly reveal his or her intentions or foretell the actual effects of a film? Is it acceptable to feign interest in a company’s achievements to gain evidence of its unsafe labor practices? Is it appropriate to film illegal acts that may contribute to the prosecution of those filmed? Given that most filmmakers act as representatives of those they film or of the institution sponsoring them rather than as community members, tensions often arise between the filmmaker’s desire to make a compelling film and the individual’s desire to have their social rights and personal dignity respected. Ethical issues often arise in relation to the question of “In Documentary, How Should We Treat the People We Film?” because of the degree to which the filmmaker is set apart from those he or she films. Developing a sense of ethical regard becomes a vital part of the documentary filmmaker’s professionalism FILMMAKERS, PEOPLE, AUDIENCES Various ways in which filmmakers can choose to represent others, the most common summarized in:
- I speak about them to you - ● - I - The filmmaker takes on a persona, either directly or through a surrogate. Typically the Voice of God commentator, a voice over with authority. It is also possible for the filmmaker to speak himself off-camera or in front of it and become a character of his own film. ● - speak about - The filmmaker represents others. The sense of speaking about a topic or issue, a people or individual lends an air of civic importance to the effort. ● - them -. The third person implies a separation between speaker and subject.The “I” who speaks is not identical with those of whom it speaks. We as an audience receive a sense that the subjects in the film are placed there for our examination. ● - to you - Suggests a separation. One person speaks and another listens. A filmmaker speaks and an audience attends. Typically separated from both the act of representation and the subject of representation. We have a role and identity of our own as viewers and audience members
access to the artifacts of non-mainstream cinemas also accompanied by struggles for public recognition and remediation of oppression (racial, gender, sexual. The need to reinterpret American history enhanced by Vietnam and the assimilation of innovative European models. Recycling of past images frequently operates in tandem with present-tense interviews but under a conscious construction, not over assumptions of an unmediated presentation. Discontinuity as a bond between the past and the present makes images appear as disembodied. Images are capable of eliciting multiple responses (a key tenet of verité) and the field of meaning shifts, it cannot be universalized. The organizing voice in collage films is split between enunciative trace in the original footage and material residues of production + a source of knowledge given by the collage work (through editing, sound, new titles and so on). Collage is an antidote to verité’s individualist and performative encounter with social reality. Collage and Ideology Echoes of Soviets claims for the political efficacy of montage can be heard in the rhetoric of a current generation of film/video activists. Since then, basic agreement that newsreels and other forms of reportage are artless because lack of aesthetic (re)construction. As if the absent of beauty makes it more truthful. There is a debate on a no-historical narrative and that they make actuality seem fragmentary and superficial. Denotative; elements requiring a narrativized continuity to establish any logic. Nichols says that a perspective, a presentation of argument is what differentiates a text from a mere film or raw footage. Only the viewer’s perspective will stop these objective reports from falling in the category of value- free reproductions. Then, the recycled fragment resembles Eisenstein’s “montage cell”, a shot acquiring meaning only in juxtaposition with other shots. Y vamos, que es por eso por lo que puedes invest new meanings in appropiated images. El texto es loquísimo porque están todo el rato contradiciendose entre ellos y no conlcuye, es como ole ole ambiguo, es todo y es nada, es blanco pero es negro: primero que si raw footage is not overdetermined a priori but gains enunciative perspective only through recontextualization. But also, positions opuestas: that the possibility in appropriated images is mapped by and through ideological significations already present in the artifact – so here it wouldn’t be about combining pure fragments that construct meaning with alternative perspective but about the embedded ideology of the extant materials. Found footage collages is thus by definition a dialogical operation, pitting two (or more) enunciative agents against each other. Parmar: it is the politicized appropriations of dominant codes and signifying systems which give us powerful weapons in the struggle for empowerment. Mercer: found footage strategies can then expose the heterogeneity of social identity denied by dominant visual discourses and “defeat monologism”. But commercial films, TV shows and advertising are the most frequent sources of the avant-garde so how can you question the charge of overdetermination there. Both documentary and avant-garde try to contest received historical hierarchies while activating new ways of comprehending the process of social change. However, there are differences in how their films are produced (from funding to distribution and reception) that affect the use of said found materials. (Re)interpretative strageties: editing and sound/image juxtaposition. The recoding of historical narratives is founded on a perceived identity between visual depiction and verbal assertion (voiceover, text, speech).
Nichols dice que la credibilidad depende de la intervention, on formal restraint in handling recycled footage sin demasiada distorsión. Los avant-gardist say que recontextualization will undercut the integrity of original footage (porque la fidelidad es imposible y reconfigurar la imagen tiende a no borrar la especificidad histórica de un fragmento) Denotative and Expressive Collage Divergence of the conceptions of realism can be reduced to matters of realism. The avant-garde refuses realist codes with their constructivist approach to unmasking the materiality of the image. So, to what extend do mainstream collage documentaries violate the realist assumptions around them? Se pone a hablar a tope de ejempos de Emile de Antonio. The two basic modes of recontextualization (illustrative/analogical and metaphoric) are usually mixed. Sometimes they work as “stock shots” rather than literal representations. Many illustrative instances in documentary collage are understood not as literal but figurative representation. Las montage sequences que conectan verbal assertions in which the denotative and expressive valences de los planos que se suceden cambia entorno a lo que se describe. A veces, shots chosen for their visual tonality to convey an abstract idea. If he does not belong to the scene portrayed: (misleading) significance – non-denotative tasks. Ethically suspect or cognitive disruptive. Habría que ser muy cabrón para preguntar algo de este apartado, pero he ido dejando ideas generales, aunque sean un poco useless y estén como muy desperdigadas. Adopting a version of spectatorship endorsed by Bordwell that involves a sequential testing of narrative hypotheses. Long story short: los documentales que don’t do restaging do not hesitate in creating collages with metaphoric fabrications of reality. The guarantees of authenticity secured by archival footage are a myth. Al final se le va la pinza con de Antonio He used found footage as discursive tool y que tiene imitadores; todo lo demás (como las 2 últimas páginas) es un comentario superespecífico del señor ese, que debería servirle a los documentary scholars para pay more attention to the expressive, figurative dimensión of found footage.
“Direct cinema is anything but a fly on the wall” SAMIA
Albert Maysles, along with his brother David, was a pioneer in American observational documentary in the early 1960s. Maysles, producer Robert Drew and filmmakers Ricky Leacock and D.A Pennebaker
So I’d look at the exposure meter, get the reading, and transfer it right away to the f-stop – all of which without disturbing the camera or the subject. FV: How did you insert yourself in a situation that’s happening so you can give the viewer the experience of being there, while also limiting the effect that you’re having on that situation? AM: I’m not afraid to get very close. Sometimes it’s better, for whatever reason, to keep some distance, and I also have the opportunity to get very close with the zoom lens. I find that I’d rather be very close, rather than rely on the zoom. It’s one thing for the zoom lens to bring you close, but it’s something better for the camera to pick that up, right in the middle of it. Also, being close doesn’t mean being geographically close, if there is something interesting going on nearby that emphasizes what’s going on, then include that shot. Sometimes, I would rather see the work of an amateur than a professional because professionals rely on fashion instead of what’s happening. As to how not to make the camera interfere with what’s going on, it’s by not having a relationship with the subjects. What’s the expression, about the camera that’s not there? If the camera’s not there, you say that it’s – FV: A fly on the wall? AM: Fly on the wall. Direct cinema is anything but a fly on the wall. You have to get in there to get what’s really going on. The cameraperson has to have the confidence that their presence is not going to hurt whatever is going on; authenticity can be maintained by recognizing that you are there and for the subjects as well. You have to have a kindly, trustworthy relationship with the people you’re filming. From the very beginning up to the last moments. And you maintain that relationship where people are not put off by the camera by not filming when you know that it’s going to hurt that person. When they get into a hurtful area, that’s when they begin to get conscious of the camera, and you don’t want to get that anyway. But, at the same time, you might want to get stuff that’s a little borderline, but you have to be very discreet. It’s your discretion and your empathy that keeps it going right. FV: I want to ask about the gaze. My favorite scene in any of your films is the “Wild Horses” playback sequence in Gimme Shelter. I use it when I teach my film theory students narratology, as a way to talk about the subjective camera, and the way it tells a story of a particular moment by both concealing and revealing. I think it perfectly illustrates your painterly technique at work. But that arresting moment of Charlie Watts returning the gaze is so powerful, when he just turns the gaze back on to the viewer. AM: Speaking of my work filming them, I always refer to the fact that when I was a child, I think I got a whole course in classical music, just by looking at my father’s face as he put on one record after another. And, so... maybe that’s got me in that direction of looking at people’s faces for expressions. But then, there are all kinds of clues that come from other sources, as well. For example, in Primary, when I filmed Jackie [Kennedy]’s hands, all they wanted was her face – which told something, of course
- but not what the hands told. She loved that scene, by the way, and said that she wanted to keep the film. When she saw that, she was like, “I gotta keep this film for my grandchildren”. FV: That’s an excellent shot. AM: Again, it is an example of exposing somebody’s privacy in a very discreet way. FV: You have an interest in filming interior spaces when they’re marked by the physical presence of their inhabitants. How do these interactions that subjects have with the spaces they inhabit function as markers of identity? I’m thinking of films like Grey Gardens , Salesman ... AM: There’s lots of examples in those films, like the mess that is Big Edie’s bed, the radio they’re listening to, the cats hanging around, the raccoons, the hole in the wall...In Salesman it was amazing that there was a piano and the girl chose to play the music she came up with, it was so appropriate to the mental state of the salesmen.
I like to capture and transmit the experience of whomever it is that I’m filming, and to do it in such a way as to further reveal their humanity. (pequeño rant sobre el tv commercial, how it dehumanises us y como haría él uno) FV: What would you say is the ideology behind your filmmaking practice? AM: My philosophy is that audiovisual recordings give us a unique opportunity to capture reality. So many times, something has happened in our lives, and we say to people, “You should have been there”. Well, you don’t have to say that if a good direct cinema filmmaker was there. And, in fact, because such an effort – with the right tools, and the right frame of mind – such an effort is made to capture what’s going on very authentically, you’re probably even better off seeing the film than actually being there [chuckles]. Such an effort is made to get it right, and in such a form that it’s transmitted so that people pick up on all the subtleties. I think some people who practice direct cinema do it to prove a point of view, which is not what I do. You can understand direct cinema if you contrast it with what Michael Moore does, he’s out to get people. FV: I read that you find even FrederickWiseman’s early films problematic for that very reason. AM: Yeah. It’s just one side against the other, and defending one side. As a matter of fact – what was his first film? FV: Titicut Follies [1967]. AM: Yeah. At some point, I had learned that they were already making the reforms [in Massachusetts mental health institutions] while they were filming, and those reforms weren’t depicted in the film. FV: Was there ever any overlap or dialogue between you and Wiseman? It seems like you, Pennebaker and Leacock were off exploring one end, and Wiseman was doing something else. AM: We never really had much conversation, it was clear to all of us that we were doing something different. However, none of us detoured from our philosophical commitments. FV: Would you say your philosophical concerns are just as important to your filmmaking practice as your technique? AM: Yes, it’s all connected. FV: One of the things that I find fascinating about direct cinema is – because it was so very much of its time, and depicted contemporary experiences – the way it provides unique access to a very specific historical moment. What do you think your films reveal about the mid-twentieth century American experience? AM: Norman Mailer said that Salesman probably tells more about America than any other film. FV: As I've been doing a lot of research on your work and direct cinema, many academics criticized it for supposedly naive assumptions about the nature of reality, truth and filmmaking. Do you feel like your work and yourself have been misrepresented? AM: Yeah, in two ways. For one thing, because I’m a psychologist, I’m that much more conscious, I think, about being fair to the people that I’m filming and open-minded, and not working with some preconceived idea. In the case of Grey Gardens , many reviewers thought that this was an abuse to these two women, because they’re so crazy, which they’re not. Their openness is not a sign of craziness but of good health. They took advantage of the biography-making camera to do an autobiography. When they saw the film, they adored it. If you were to compare these two women with the wealthy people in their neighborhood, the divorcees and so on, you might even argue that they were better off. One of the reasons that they’re so admired by gay men is that they found a way of opening up, and by maintaining their own beliefs and maintaining their values. They’re nonconformist in the healthiest fashion. One of the reviewers of Grey Gardens ended the review by saying that there are just some people who shouldn’t be filmed. I would say just the opposite. When Mrs. Beale was dying, Edie turned to her and said, “Is there anything more you want to say?” and she said, “There’s nothing more to say. It’s all in the film”.
The structure Holt chose has the merit of identifying the problem and proposing a strategy: it addresses anxiety as much as possible, but at the same time puts the reassuring display of aesthetic totalization in the way. By providing a remote device (rhythm, structure) the viewer may be more intimately involved." Like Holt with his cameras, Wheeler turns speech into a "distance device." The dying one, Nicholas Ray, was not an unknown amount. He had a very successful career in 1955 Hollywood. He didn't like scripts, played with producers and began to "de-apportion" his reputation for his abuse of alcohol, drugs and gambling. When Wim Wenders met Nick Ray, the old filmmaker was trying in vain to gather support. Wenders was the first serious filmmaker to offer to direct Ray's last film. When the shooting of Lightning Over Water began, Ray still seemed strong and no one doubted that he would be in a position to direct it. Turns out he just snort cocaine. A week after filming, the situation changed dramatically. Ray became physically weak and had to cede the direction of the film to Wenders. Ray was not only sick; was in the latter stages of terminal cancer. This fact explains the strong reaction the audience had when the film was first screened in New York in 1980. Little did I know that the film would be removed from circulation and eventually destroyed, except for a copy deposited in the Wim Wenders Archives in Munich. Lightning Over Water was about dying, and dying wasn't something an American audience was ready to see at the time. Of all the people, Nick Ray was certainly able to provide access to death. Lightning Over Water allowed all participants to experience death instead of burying it, and this was unforgivable for the public. Removing all fictional elements from the film, however, had significant consequences. If Ray was playing his own role as a filmmaker in the film, the unwanted result was that his team became actors in his own right. A second 35 mm camera had to be brought in and the crew acted as a Greek choir, commenting on the tragedy unfolding. A third camera was also introduced, a cheap video camera entrusted to Ray's assistant, Tom Farrell, which contrasted with the luxurious 35mm camera used by Wenders. But Farrell's images ended up playing an important role in the film. An important scene from the film was a dream dialogue between Wenders and Ray, with Wenders lying on the bed at Ray and Ray's hospital sitting by his bedside. What followed was one of the most disturbing monologues in the history of cinema. Ray, pretending to drool over himself, accused Wenders of making him sick in the stomach. The dialogue between the two men never really happened. The two monologues were only assembled in a dialogue later in the editing room. The scene ended symbolically with the two directors daring each other to stop filming. Ray died three weeks later, on June 16. I wasn't on camera. The film didn't have a real closure. The film as a whole is a crime scene, but very special because we are never quite sure that a crime has been committed, or that it has been committed. Ray didn't die while shooting, so it's a crime scene without a crime. Or rather, crime keeps changing as the film progresses. Maybe the criminal is also the victim, and maybe everyone participates in the crime, not realizing his involvement. One thing's for sure: something happened during the film and you'll never rest in peace.
The worst thing that happened during filming was not that a crime had been committed, but that a single person had been assigned. Wenders' most important addition to the film was his storytelling, which definitely turned the documentary into a fiction and fiction into a truth.
“Faking what? Making a mockery of documentary” PABLO
Apart from mocking, fake documentaries can also copy, mimic, gimmick, play with, scorn, ridicule, invert, reverse, repeat, ironize, satirize, affirm, subvert, pervert, convert, translate, and exceed documentary style. Subversion is simply not inherent in the project of faking, as Lerner duly affirms in his introductory remarks. Fake doc needlessly concedes that documentary itself is “real” or at least authentic (the genuine article, i.e., not fake), while my hope is that mockumentary might more successfully attenuate, if not ultimately destabilize, the credibility of documentary by, if you will, mocking the very concept at its core. Who is parodying whom, I want to know. Mockumentary, by making the field of documentary studies sexy, is actually revitalizing and reorienting what might otherwise be a withering subject. Again, the question of who is propping whom emerges. Clearly, with doc/mock/umentary, it is difficult to know which urge comes first. Fake conundrum, original urge: the urge or instinct to gaze upon the Real. it is this promise or possibility of revealing the Real that drives both documentary and mockumentary practices. Is or is not reality (let alone the Real) ultimately representable? In brief, it seems that the reason to maintain documentary as a conceptual category has more to do with cultural capital than it does with any necessary intimacy, indexically or otherwise conceived, to reality. “intertextual relay” that creates “horizons of expectations” for the spectator. Cowie suggests that documentary is a prosthetic device, extending the spectator’s perceptual abilities (through the superior optics of the camera) while simultaneously admitting the deficiencies of the human power of sight and the scopophilic drive. The normative coding of reality. Verisimilitude To adapt and loosely paraphrase the insights of such thinkers as Judith Butler and Homi Bhabha, mockumentary mimesis inevitably reveals the impossible ideal of the purported real thing (i.e., the documentary “original”). Parallel with drag Who imitates whom, and further, who imitates whom, imitating what, we might ask. Documentary’s limit case: death. We see a person dying, not death. It refuses to become knowable to the direct gaze. … but the recourse to discourses of purity and superiority indicate a type of transcendentalism ascribed to the documentary mode that implies a higher aspiration than merely the faithful recording of actuality (were that even possible). Legendary documentarian George Stoney can claim that what keeps documentaries fresh and interesting is “the combination of real footage and reenactments.” Son frases copiadas del texto literal, en general habla de cómo es imposible representar la realidad aunque se esté grabando algo real, que el documental normalmente está percibido como una forma más alta culturalmente hablando por esta concepción que tenemos de que representa la realidad. La autora cuestiona esa superioridad por eso, porque por mucho que lo intenten la realidad no es representable, solo imágenes de lo real que no son suficientes. Se puede grabar pero no más, lo real va más allá. Por
autobiography offers are often those of the interior rather than the exterior ones, we could even call them psychological truths. In any case, it seems that autobiographical works can breed a kind of healthy skepticism regarding all documentary truth claims. Especially since a lot of documentary films have depended on interviews to advance their arguments and reinforce their historical armatures, which is paradoxical because these interviews come from the same place as autobiography: personal experience. Autobiographies are using this same resource but to reveal the truths of the inside and the particular, instead of in order to make statements about the world we all live in. Prívate truths, inner realities have come to be the business of documentary as much as public proclamations. It makes more sense to rewrite this first thesis: the idea of autobiography reinvents the very idea of documentary. We need to discuss also the fact that filmic autobiography is nothing new. People have been making self-portraits on film and video for some time, but this is often ignored when discussing autobiographical documentaries. That is because autobiography is a tried and true form in the realm of the avant-garde rather than the non-fiction film. Adams Sitney makes the argument that 'what makes autobiography one of the most vital developments in the cinema of the late Sixties and early Seventies is that the very making of an autobiography constitutes a reflection on the nature of cinema'. The distinctions once drawn among avant-garde filmmakers, video artists, and documentarians seem less and less meaningful today. This may be about the 'convergence' we hear about so much in the media arts and industries or it may just mean that filmic avant-gardism and video art have been so fully absorbed into commercial culture (or annexed by the art world) that little turf remains. Post-1990s documentary culture has, to some degree, inherited and been transformed by the other two traditions. Autobiography is typically depicted as life story-telling and, as such, might appear to be a predictably narrative form bound by the irreversibility of birth and aging toward death. But filmic autobiography comes in many forms: the essay film, the electronic essay, the diary film, the video confession, the epistolary mode, domestic ethnography, the personal Web page, and the blog. In each instance, varying possibilities for the expression of subjectivity and the telling of life stories arise. Those variances depend, in sorne measure, on the medium of choice as well as the discursive conditions that prevail and are what make it such a broad and exciting type of filmmaking. Finally, the autobiographical embraces and is inflected by the political. This doesn't mean that autobiography and politics are always or inevitably linked. But the claims that autobiography is, by definition, self-absorbed and solipsistic, outside of agency, incapable of encompassing or elucidating the social field are untrue generalizations. Self-construction is impossible outside of social relations; as the understanding of our mobile, multiple, and often conflicting identities, is through politics. THESIS AND FILM S (están subrayadas en el texto): (1) the very idea of autobiography reinvents the very idea of documentary: My Uníverse Inside Out (US, 1996) (2) filmic autobiography is nothing new: Nostalgia (US, 1971) (3) filmic autobiography comes in many forms: Tarnation (US, 2003), Sink or Swim (US, 1990), Roger and Me (US, 1989), Song of Ceylon (UK, 1935), Man with a Movie Camera (Soviet Union, 1929), Phantom Limb (US, 2005) ( 4) the autobiographical embraces and is inflected by the political: Bowling for Columbine (US,2002), Roger and Me (US, 1989) and Fahrenheit 9/ 11 (US, 2004) (son todas del mismo director), Afrique: fe te plumerai (1992).
“The Essay Film: Problems, Definitions, Textual Commitments” PABLO
Hybrid form that crosses boundaries and rests somewhere in between fiction and nonfiction cinema. Like ‘heresy’ in the Adornean literary essay, the essay film disrespects traditional boundaries, is transgressive both structurally and conceptually, it is self-reflective and self-reflexive (viene del ensayo escrito!!) “The essayistic quality becomes the only possibility to designate the cinema that resists against commercial productions.” reflectivity and subjectivity. form that thinks and thought that forms If we follow Huxley, this critical component may take or, in the best cases, may combine, three main poles: “Essays belong to a literary species whose extreme variability can be studied most effectively within a three-poled frame of reference. There is the pole of the personal and the autobiographical; there is the pole of the objective, the factual, the concrete particular; and there is the pole of the abstract- universal.” Most if not all accounts of the essayistic also place emphasis on its personal, almost autobiographical nature → Subjectivity In what ways does the subjectivity of the essay film differ from that of other subjective forms, be they fictional or documentary? A Certain Tendency: The Emergence of the Essay in Film Theory and Film Practice Hans Richter’s “Der Filmessay, Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms,” (first contribution explicitly devoted to essay films) “Naissance d’une nouvelle avant-garde: la caméra-stylo,” - Alexandre Astruc For Astruc, who looks at Renoir, Welles, and Bresson as good approximations of what he has in mind, the new cinema will be able to express thought in a supple, subtle, and efficient manner, in the same way as literature does Con el desarrollo de las tecnologías: más posibilidades de hacer cine distinto como libros. This is possible because cinema is “gradually becoming a language” Direction - writing → politique des auteurs, Nouvelle Vague... Bazin: a given image doesn’t refer to the one that preceded it or the one that will follow, but rather it refers laterally, in some way, to what is said. Menciona las Hurdes como docu personal/influencia del surrealismo poético Differ from the “oldstyle documentary” because they do not take a “passive subject” but an “active theme” Theorizing the Essay: Heresy, Form, and Textual Commitments Authorial voice, in-depth, personal, thought-provoking reflection Enunciator vs. extra-textual author. Structural(essay) individual/personal enunciator rather than casual(docu) collective/social the essay urges the spectator to engage individually with the film, and reflect on the same subject matter the author is musing about Structure: constant interpellation The Inscription of Subjectivity in the Essay Film: Voice-over, Interpellation and the Question of Authority Use of voice can be contrapuntal or ironic or polemical, as well as a means to convey information. prime location of the author’s subjectivity, privileged tool The Place of the Essay Film The essay is a field of experimentation and idiosyncrasy (essayer, intentar). to debate a problem by using all the means that the cinema affords, all the registers and all the expedients
had always remained (or almost always) off camera: the filmmaker and his reality. Tarnation was not the first film to show this extension, but it did have the virtue of doing it in everyone’s view. Also, with Varda, the old all-knowing voice of the descriptive documentary, belonging to no particular place, was replaced by a story in the first person that was stuck to the wrinkles and the folds of private life. Digitalism: the world is no longer what we see. The zeros and ones of the digital images circulate towards a thousand different screens and cameras, without physical media, forcing us to rethink our relationship with what is real and, perhaps, to assume it as a construction and a discourse, not as something objective and accessible through technology (as it happened with celluloid). In the field of the documentary, this is an explosion of new modes and getting back others of renewed validity: intimate cinema, the film diary or new readings of direct cinema and cinéma vérité. These go against documentary understood as a discourse of sobriety and the idea of an objective knowledge attached to scientific discourse. John Grierson, to whom the very name ‘documentary’ is attributed, always considered it an artistic but social undertaking at the service of a set of values. Bill Nichols always linked documentary discourse to others such as scientific, religious, political and educational, all of them instrumental powers to change the world. This could not be further from the intentions of the post-documentary regarding influencing reality: how can one have an influence on something that is hardly known and cannot be unravelled? In contrast with the traditional knowledge offered by an orthodox documentary, these documentary makers work on what has been called “incarnated knowledge”, that is, a voice with its roots in the world, one that always speaks to us from its own subjectivity. The 1960s paired documentary with objectivity, but now we find that if the ‘truth’ exists, it does not lie in the medium but in the filmmaker. In a performative documentary (Nichols) the director stands in front of the camera and guides the narration; this has gradually been destabilized while gaining reflexivity in the process. Some authors have called it the “aesthetic of failure”: far from representing a consolidated vision of reality, the post- documentary makers turn their inability to portray the world into the raw material of a representation – one cannot encapsulate everything and that the little that can be said should be done from the humility of someone who knows their limitations. I am my masks: reality is performance Filmmakers take refuge in intimate areas. Examples of Alain Cavalier. Recurrent images and sound: his portrait deformed, and sound produced by his hands on the camera. Imperfections and noise that underscore the narration instead of hiding it. También, se va a mazo ejemplos específicos – en el texto están todos en negrita si a alguien le interesan. Everything is archive: the explosion of found footage An audiovisual cannibalism, heir of found footage, has expanded exponentially while the universal archive of images grew, thanks to the internet and the increasingly large number of video pages, audiovisual portals that have opened the door to a cinema made without a camera.
This explosion of found footage rewrites the classical approchement of documentary cinema to archive material, because the new recyclers do not resort to archive images for their historical nature, nor to quote or document a particular moment in history; they do so to create discourses based on pure fascination with images or to explore the terrain of film essay. The proliferation of the audiovisual collage is yet another product of the fall of the documentary as a sober discourse, as we mentioned at the start. Spanish coda: decentralisations, degenerations and “heterodocsies” A “documentary boom” was promoted by the media in the early 2000s because of successes in theatres and the audiovisual sector. But also, there was a stagnation of production in subsidised formulas which, although they helped to stir up the Spanish filmmaking panorama, managed to contribute to hide other documentaries that were much more in line with what was happening internationally. This was particularly the case in Catalonia, which saw the documentary as a cheaper way to subsist and, in the process, legitimise itself intellectually. A scene of directors emerged. These directors not only saw digital as an opportunity for self-production, but as a set of new tools to construct new languages and new documentary practices between the impure, the mixed, and the hybrid. This Spanish scene has structured itself as a reality parallel to the audiovisual sector. These Spanish post-documentary makers are neither marginal nor underground; they operate as an autonomous and decentralised network, one that has clearly surpassed (mainly by ignoring them) the centres of power of Madrid and Barcelona. Small autonomous cells of audiovisual creation that are really independent voluntarily or compulsorily. Highlight two projects (EL SIGUIENTE TEXTO VA DE ESTO)
- The ‘D-Generació n’ programme, consisting of underground experiences in non-fictional Spanish film, directed by Josetxo Cerdá n and Antonio Weinrichter for the Festival of Las Palmas in 2007. It has its second edition in 2009, this time with help from the Instituto Cervantes.
- The Heterodocsias project, also set up in 2007 by Carlos Muguiro for the Punto de Vista Festival, of which he was artistic director at the time. In 2008 it took the form of a production project under the name of ‘La mano que mira’. Born almost at the same time, the first focused on the buoyant audiovisual scene and the second set out to trace a map of Spanish heterodoxy in the present, past and future. Both programmes agreed on the need to invent new terms in order to work on a reality that few people had explored before. A panorama is growing steadily, combining recognised filmmakers who also work on the other side of the camera with other, younger names, video artists or anonymous figures of the audiovisual world who have found a fruitful form of expression and work in this path of the post-documentary and the new do it yourself. From the assimilation of digital technologies as a creative tool to the liberty of working with a concept, the documentary has freed itself of its previous burdens and has become a field open to subjectivity, impurity, humour and experimentation.
“D-Generation. By way of introduction” DIEGO
Background
On the one hand, the accessibility of video has enabled those who were interested in making a start in the audiovisual field to express themselves without having to do a degree or forge a merit-based career; and on the other hand, it has allowed the television institution to be consolidated in a much more general and obvious way than the film of institution which lost some important points due to an excess of purism (technological, generic and formative). Video has developed “as an artistic form” in museums and as a popular medium given its television and “family” status, whereas cinema, has continued in its narrative and industrial mode, failing to appreciate new family members. The new revolution Digitalisation have encouraged the practice of formats that take advantage of the immediacy provided by the use of digital cameras, such as: the film-diary, the subjective report, the anthropological investigation into the surrounding environment, and even the essay-based format. The Modern “revolution” was driven by the access to portable equipment that image and sound to be recorded at the same time and the Post-modern “revolution” was driven, at least in part, by the portapack , created video art, then the new digital camera could represent a new leap. The updating process of this revolution passes through this interaction with space that allows the expansion of digital technology and with its quasi amateur poor image quality it still to be accepted by museums and cinema, without passing a filter prior to it becoming a “filmic” or artistic object. More recently, documentary has come to suggest something incomplete and uncertain, compilations and impressions, images of personal worlds and their subjective construction. This development from the general to the particular has made some experts suggest that this emphasis on the subjective could reduce the “referential” quality of the documentary as a source of objective knowledge about reality. It is in the rough waters of non-fiction where the found footage or false documentary practices acquire their very nature. One of the fundamental features of the fake is that it allows us to take another look at the mechanisms inherent in the documentary institution and, usually, at how other kinds of institutions operate.
