This concluding chapter has two main parts: in the first half, I will reflect on insights I have gleaned through my research questions—which focussed on the overall unfinalizability of subjects and filmmaker; the usefulness of reflexive and performative devices in
unfinalizing; the problems and solutions I encountered as an auto/biographical marginal author; and the effect of Renov’s domestic ethnography designation on my main film subject. As my first research question about unfinalizability is an overarching question, the other three will also reflect back on the first. In the second half of this chapter, I will discuss the second sub-question of the fourth research question, about the designation domestic ethnography, focussing in on why I feel validated in my rejection of it, and why other authors may also refuse to accept it. I will argue that this designation can categorise the desire of authors based on the domestic milieu, and that the result of this categorisation of desire can only be a less open interpretation the film’s ‘voice’ than what may be intended by authors (especially female authors). 64 Moreover, the term ethnography especially in a cross-national context can support stereotyping not only of filmed participants but also of authors. The second part of this chapter will also outline what I see as my contribution to knowledge.
Firstly, however, I would like to acknowledge that, as an author working through the necessary ethical, aesthetic and political choices of my film, and trying to make their difficulty and importance clear in the form of the film, I am following documentary
filmmakers who have also combined theory and practice by thinking reflexively about these dimensions of filmmaking. Contemporary filmmakers like Errol Morris and Ross
McElwee, whose work I have discussed here (mainly in Chapter Two), fit into this critically reflexive group, as did the anthropologist and filmmaker Jean Rouch, who contributed vital theory as well as films to the field over many decades, including the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. In addition to ciné trance he developed other concepts concerned with
intersubjectivity, like ‘shared anthropology’, which maximized the involvement of subjects in the filmmaking process (Losoda: 2010). Previously, Dziga Vertov had critically analysed the power of the filmic medium in Man With A Movie Camera (1929), in which he revealed
64 Here I am using ‘voice’ in the sense used by Nichols, described both as “a text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us” and as “intangible” (Nichols in Rosenthal and Corner: 2005: 18).
the apparatus of filmmaking to viewers, including the camera, editing and audience. Other filmmakers like Luis Buñuel, who was associated with the surrealists and who also made fiction films, helped lay the foundations of critical reflexivity in documentary, especially with Land Without Bread (1933), in which he emphasized problematic practices in documentary and ethnographic film by using an ‘unreliable’ narrator. Though I did not write about Vertov and Buñuel in the main body of my thesis, I was influenced by their approaches, and I will refer to their work briefly in the answers to my first two research questions, in the next section.
The critical reflexive tradition influenced Morris and McElwee in many ways. Rouch’s insistence on the provocative role of the camera’s very presence is echoed in the
sentiments of Errol Morris, who rejects the idea that an unobtrusive, observational camera can be a guarantor of ‘truth’ in non-fiction film (he also rejects the term ‘documentary’). Moreover, Morris’s naming of his interviewing machine (the ‘Interrotron’) conveys the idea that questions substantially influence answers. Morris also calls attention to the film
apparatus in his work, following the example of Vertov, by frequently reminding the audience of his machinations through “disturbances” (Ira Jaffe in Rothman: 2009: 21) that point back to him. Moreover, these authorial reminders sometimes question his authority as an author by their unsteady manner: indeed, Ira Jaffe writes of Mr. Death (1999), “often it appears that the film has gone out of control” (ibid).
Meanwhile, McElwee also points to his efforts to make a film, rather than nurturing illusions about seamless filmmaking: he shows himself with camera, comments about difficulties he is having with the progress of his film, and foregrounds storytelling through a well-written documentary script, including “fantastic” coincidences, thereby showing himself to be part of a Southern Gothic storytelling tradition (Diane Stevenson in Rothman: 2009: 63). Meanwhile, to my mind, his persona in his films is of a somewhat unreliable narrator, and his narration, with its tenor of insecurity and wavering uncertainty, undermines the
traditional, all-confident voice of God narration style. Diane Stevenson writes that McElwee’s documentaries “are stories about how stories are told” (in Rothman: 2009: 70).
Furthermore, McElwee has ethical considerations in mind as well, as he says in an
interview with The Harvard Advocate: “I try to render people’s lives with as much complexity and—when appropriate—affection as I can, which I hope prevents people from being reduced to mere images or symbols” (Interview with Lahav: 1994).
I agree with McElwee that our documentary subjects’ identities are complex and so are we as authors—and furthermore that encounters between filmmakers and subjects do shape films. By pointing to the provocation of the filmmaker, Jean Rouch insisted that we consider this additional complicating factor. Rouch conveyed this idea by proclaiming that one can only film “life as it is provoked” (Rothman: 2009: 159)—a comment that went completely against the new claims (at the time) for observational cinema. In my film I have tried to enhance complexity by interrupting the story and reminding viewers of human unreliability in authorship. The critical reflexive tradition in documentary can be seen as one of embracing complexity while rejecting pacifying illusions of simplicity and a single ‘truth’—a political rejection, as simple truths are easily converted to slogans and used for political gain.