Jon Prosser has noted that while the long hegemony of the positivist paradigm indirectly marginalized image-based research (the role visual technologies could play in anthropology, sociology, history, and so forth) reducing it at best to the role of cataloguing and documentation, orthodox qualitative researchers have ‘undervalued and under applied’ image-based research (Prosser 1998: 97). The anthropologist Kirsten Hastrup, for example, champions writing over the visual image. She bases much of her critique on a disappointing experience she had when she tried to DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 91
Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: 06-wayne F Sequential 10
JOBNAME: 5769−McGraw−AustenDe PAGE: 11 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 18 10:37:04 2008 SUM: 6579FDBE /production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/austendejong/06−wayne
photograph an Icelandic ram competition. But her critique suggests that successful image-based research requires a number of factors: technical competence with the medium, knowledge of its history of uses, imaginative capacity to mobilize that knowledge in given situations and preparation for the specific logistical difficulties of those situations. According to Hastrup, the visual image can: ‘record only visible things; while we can take a close-up of the ram’s private parts we cannot see its metaphorical expression of the owner’s sexual abilities’ (1992: 14). Hastrup’s argu-ment that photography cannot make connections, cannot capture the broader context, is too grounded in the particular and is devoid of the capacity to be suggestive, ambiguous or metaphorical suggests an absence of all the above precondi-tions for successful photography.
Creativity and imagination are certainly important elements in any kind of cultural production that aims to be rewarding for audiences. Many of the Critical Theorists, such as Marcuse, thought that imagination and fantasy were important resources for critical thinking, providing us with the ability to ‘create something new out of given material[s] of cognition’ (Marcuse 1989: 71). With the question of the pleasure and cognition to be derived from the creativity and competence in art and culture we pass over into the realm of aesthetics. Creativity may be an important element in critical thinking, but it is hardly the exclusive province of critical practice, as Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Triumph of the Will (1935) with its celebration of German fascism, taught us all those years ago. Aesthetics is indeed a terrain well booby-trapped with ideological mines. For one thing, within bourgeois ideology, aesthetics have often been conceived as a realm outside politics and ideology, transcendent art or ‘mere’ entertainment, but certainly not impacted by social interests. One particular way of figuring aesthetics as outside the realm of the social has been to interlace it with Nature itself. In this sense, a documentary like Touching the Void (Kevin Macdonald, 2003) uses the stunning environment of snow, mountains and sky to abstract what is a quite socially specific drama out of the realm of society altogether. Thus the contradictions of competition and co-operation that bind and separate the professional middle class in their struggle to ascend the career mountain is the real story that lies behind the phantasmagoric and pseudo-universalizing one told by the film, the audience for which were interestingly enough, overwhelmingly middle class (UK Film Council, 2004: 32). The film encourages the audience to ask of its central ethical dilemma: what would I do in such a situation? Would I cut the rope? But this is essentially an unrecognizable transposition of the question of solidarity that in rather less dramatic scenarios, actually confronts us here and now, where all too frequently, in our everyday practices, we are busy cutting the rope.
One way of engaging with the question of aesthetics while resisting its ideological lures and traps, is to re-ground it as a subset (albeit a ‘special’ one) of human labour generally. The aesthetic is not qualitatively different from other kinds of human labour (and so therefore does not transcend society). Despite all the creativity, play and experimentation that are routinely robbed of ordinary human labour, it still retains some residual subjectivity, that is human agency and conscious-ness that is potentially at least, in contradiction and conflict with capital. Capital demands, despite the new management discourses promoting the importance of 92 MIKE WAYNE
Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: 06-wayne F Sequential 11
JOBNAME: 5769−McGraw−AustenDe PAGE: 12 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 18 10:37:04 2008 SUM: 67166121 /production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/austendejong/06−wayne
‘worker knowledge’ and ‘human capital’, the subordination of labour to the impera-tives of profit accumulation. Because this demand is potentially limitless but human bodies are finite, there can never be the degree of integration of human labour (and cultural production) into capitalism that the Critical Theorists, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno famously envisaged in a period of particularly dark pessimism (Adorno and Horkheimer 1977). Furthermore, to a degree, aesthetic labour is different from ordinary labour. Cultural materials, despite the controlling conditions they are made under, remain more pliable and plural in their possible uses, relatively less prone to absolute standardization (each film is a prototype), more open to authorial
‘capture’ by cultural workers and often vibrantly alive to registering shifts, changes and contradictions in the wider body politic than other kinds of labour.
The potential within the aesthetic for play, creativity, acutely attuned sense perception, experimentation and participation (for both producers and audiences) and a place where, potentially, thinking and feeling can come together, makes the aesthetic register a kind of prefiguring of the sort of world a critical theory like Marxism hopes to make a contribution to bringing into existence. It is after all the fundamental axiom of Marxism’s critique of commodity fetishism that consciousness parts company with social being when the latter is constituted in ways that rob it of memory, agency, autonomy, creativity and our relatedness to others.
A nice example of how documentary labour sets into play a number of the above qualities of the aesthetic can be found in a short film by Sandra Ruesga on a Spanish/Catalan compilation DVD called Between the Dictator and Me (2005). The dictator in question of course is Francisco Franco who came to power in 1939 when the fascists won the three-year Spanish Civil War. Franco ruled Spain until his death in 1975, building his dictatorship on the grave of the experiments in socialism and anarchism which his forces had set out to crush. Between the Dictator and Me is made by young documentary filmmakers, recounting their earliest experiences of growing up in Franco’s Spain. Ruesga’s contribution works with, but also reworks and interrogates, the genre of the family video. The video camcorder has increasingly supplemented the use of photography as a means of providing a record of family history. What Richard Chalfen calls ‘the home mode’ of visual communication (1998:
215) has tended to reinforce the ideology of the private ‘happy family’. Ruesga’s home video footage is no different, with the occasion for documenting what the family is doing tending to revolve around birthdays, holidays, significant moments (such as christenings) and other activities of fun and leisure. This material constitutes the image-track of Ruesga’s documentary.
The audio-track is made up of two separate telephone conversations between Ruesga and her mother and father as she seeks to make sense of their silence, apathy and accommodation towards the Franco regime. The motivation for the documentary is evidently her re-assessment of the family videos and the choices her parents were making. Specifically she asks them why they went on holiday at the Valley of the Fallen, where Franco is buried, or why they visited a fascist monument at Cerro de San Cristobal. Her parents were not fascists, but neither did they do anything to think or act critically in relation to the dictatorship. So the filmmaker plays as a child in the shadow of fascist monuments and understandably feels a painful gap between that DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 93
Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: 06-wayne F Sequential 12
JOBNAME: 5769−McGraw−AustenDe PAGE: 13 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 18 10:37:04 2008 SUM: 4C6EC947 /production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/austendejong/06−wayne
time when she was kept in the dark and uninformed about the nature and history of the society she grew up in and her own emergent consciousness as a young adult about the dictatorship. These gaps between now and then are re-doubled in the gap between herself now and her parents’ breezy rationalizations of their indifference to the nature of their society, articulated by the fact that the interviews are conducted by phone, which symbolizes both communication and distance. Ruesga’s short nicely demonstrates the power of the aesthetic at work: the potential for critical evaluation (here of personal archives), for re-articulating the private and the personal with a political and public life it is often torn from, the potential to remake both cultural materials and re-evaluate the self and its social and historical conditions of existence.
And all this is achieved by a few relatively simple but effective choices and juxtapositions made in the realm of documentary cultural production.
Conclusion
I have argued that documentary, as a mode of generating knowledge, is strongly grounded in the paradigm of qualitative research practices. The case study, inductive analysis, inferred typicality from the particular, predominate. Nevertheless, documen-tary can draw on the statistical data of positivist research to identify macro trends and scales. At a philosophical level, the recording capacities of film share with positivism something of its confidence that the data it is generating provide evidence of a real world ‘out there’ that is not reducible to perception and point of view, no matter how much it may be mediated by it. Overcoming the divisions between the naïve realism of positivism and the tendency towards relativism characteristic of the qualitative paradigm generally and the methodologies of the ‘linguistic turn’ specifically, was one of the ambitions of Critical Theory. While the methodologies of the linguistic turn may be integrated into a critical theory, whether they constitute a ‘critical theory’ in and of themselves is very much open to doubt in my view. Further, I suggested that within the culture of documentary films, there is a strand, articulated to a critique of capital and state power, which has many points of contact with Critical Theory and represents critical research practices rather more robustly than much contemporary film and cultural studies within academia. Finally, documentary is not just a research practice, critical or otherwise, but an art form, a creative practice that intersects with debates on aesthetics, which, properly understood, can see cultural production as a special prefiguring of what emancipated cognition and feeling might look like in future.
94 MIKE WAYNE
Kerrypress Ltd – Typeset in XML A Division: 06-wayne F Sequential 13
JOBNAME: 5769−McGraw−AustenDe PAGE: 1 SESS: 15 OUTPUT: Tue Mar 11 13:25:45 2008 SUM: 4C84CCB7 /production/mcgraw−hill/booksxml/austendejong/07−basu