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Documentary Filmmaking: From the Photogenic to the Simulacrum

In document Film - The Key Concepts (Page 35-39)

The belief in the power of cinematographic reproduction and editing to reveal hidden aspects of reality was the cardinal rationale for modernist documentary filmmaking, both by filmmakers sharing this belief, and by those who manipulated it for ideological and even propagandistic purposes. Whatever the aims driving them, their cinematography and editing always involved a conscious and subjective manipulation given the necessity of selection and narrative deployment.

Vertov’s awareness of this led him to include within his films the process of the film’s production in its relation to the resulting images and their editing.

In his film Man with a Movie Camera (1929), Vertov constantly shows himself, the camera, his cameramen and editor as they work on the gathering and editing of shots, emphasizing the direct relation between the shooting and the shot, the editing and the edited. In

an emblematic sequence within the film, his editor and wife Svilova is shown working by the editing table as she tries to match a shot of a child smiling with that of an elderly woman, shifting back and forth from the matching process to the matched result. Each result is different rhythmically and thematically so that one match emphasizes the difference in age while another focuses on the similarity of the smile. This comes through not only because of the shifting interrelations but also from their relation to shots showing Svilova in the process of interrelating them, as when Svilova is shown at the editing table setting a freeze-frame of the girl in motion and exposing her bursting smile. In sharp contrast to Vertov’s self-reflexivity and awareness stands Robert Flaherty’s manipulative style as found in his poetic documentary Nanook of the North. In the film, Flaherty used the viewer’s belief in documentary

manipulate it by floating within it or by slowing, accelerating or elasticizing it. This relation between the digital revolution and Baudrillard’s concept of the simulacrum has often been noticed by researchers. Hence, Vivian Sobchack has suggested that the digital device of morphing instantiates Baudrillard’s simulacrum in that the morph has no origin whatsoever, since that from which it changes does not ‘cause’

or precede that to which it has changed. The morph implies seamless reversibility and one image is not more real, original or essentially different from the other. For instance, she recapitulates Baudrillard’s ideas in a comparison she makes between the pre-morph film transformations in a montage sequence from All that Jazz (1979), showing a mix of ethnic and gender differentiated dancers’ bodies constituting one single pirouette, to Michael Jackson’s morphing of similar bodies into one another in his Black or White videoclip (1991). She argues that whereas through cut transitions in All that Jazz, ‘we are still aware of their discretion and diference . . . in Black or White . . . these racially and ethnically “different” singing heads enjoy no discretion:

images to depict an anachronistic, embellished, exotic and faked image of Eskimo life. He did this by re-creating through the leading Eskimo character Nanook, the way Eskimos used to dress and hunt in the past, a task which Nanook had no knowledge of and had to learn and perform at great risk. The manipulation of documentary images was also exploited for purely propagandistic purposes in many state-subsidized films and reached extremely troublesome proportions as in the Nazi film The Eternal Jew (1940), where Jews are equated with dirty and disgustingly presented rats by the juxtaposition of unflattering documentary images of Jews with those of rats.

Aware of the problematic subjective import embedded in documentary shots and editing yet still believing in the medium’s power to reveal some truth, two main and contradictory strains of documentary

filmmaking developed during the 1960s. In the USA, Robert Drew and others initiated the Direct Cinema movement characterizing it as a ‘fly on the wall’ attitude towards the reality recorded. They used several hand-held cameras to cover an event, imparting a sense of liveliness and non-intervention as evident in their multi-camera coverage of the 1960 Democratic Convention (Primary, 1960). In contrast, the French anthropologist Jean Rouch initiated what he termed a cinéma verité movement (a term borrowed from Vertov’s newsreel series Kino-Pravda/Film Truth), in which the filmmaker made himself and his subjectivity present throughout the film, going beyond Vertov’s manifestation of the filmmaking process by the constant interrogation of the premises guiding the coverage of events. This can be seen in Rouch’s film Chronicle of a Summer (1961) where, towards the end, those interviewed in

Documentary Filmmaking: From the Photogenic to the

Simulacrum

each is never “itself” but rather a mutable permutation of a single self-similarity [as Jean Baudrillard writes] “Division has been replaced by mere propagation”’.50

The idea that morphing is based on the propagation of inter-referring simulations that deny meaningful categorical or hierarchical differentiations pervades many contemporary films. This can be found in the widespread device of digital replication and multiplication of the same character (e.g. Mr Smith the virus agent in The Matrix), but is also evident in the destabilization of real versus fictional characters or environments in films. Well-known cases include Ridley Scott’s director’s cut version

the film as well as the director conduct a discussion over the truth import and manipulations of the film just shown. This latter strain has developed into first-person documentaries as found in David Perlov’s six-part film Diary (1973–83), where the pretension to reveal objective truth is discarded to begin with in favour of a documentation of the director’s immediate surroundings as seen through his hand-held camera. Through his own voice-over commentary, his preferred music and paintings, the director portrays a highly subjective and poeticized view of his world.

The advent of the postmodern episteme and the dominant concept of the simulacrum blurred the distinction between fact and fiction. Postmodernists rejected the assumption maintained by both documentary realists and formalists that reality exists beyond human

perception and can be revealed (realists) or must be departed from (formalists). Postmodern filmmakers presumed from the outset that while documentary and fiction are cultural categories or kinds of discourse with different styling, their distinction does not stem from their approach to an elusive pre-recorded reality. Hence, postmodern films inadvertently and seamlessly mixed documentary and fiction. Deliberate documentary-style lies and fictional truisms abounded. For example, in Israeli filmmaker Avi Mugrabi’s film How I Learned to Overcome my Fear and Love Arik Sharon (1997) the director mixes a documentary following of Ariel Sharon’s election campaign with a deceitful documentation of both his slow transformation into one of Sharon’s devotees and the deterioration of his marital relations, ending with his wife’s decision to leave him because of his changed

Documentary Filmmaking: From the Photogenic to the

Simulacrum

of Blade Runner (1982) – where Deckard, a ‘blade runner’ in charge of tracking down and terminating replicants turns out to be a replicant himself – and David Cronenberg’s film eXistenZ (1999) – where a game designer creates a virtual-reality game that taps into the players’ body and mind but ultimately leaves them (and us) with the idea that the ‘reality’ from which the film started may have been just another option within the game. Other film researchers following Baudrillard’s notion of simulacrum have noticed that contemporary films are leaning towards stunning spectacles on account of narrative or character depth.

political affiliation. Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) offers a good illustration of the blurred postmodern distinction between fact and fiction. The film is articulated in various documentary styles such as the use of voice-over commentary voice-over jumpy edited segments of grainy or scratched ‘old-looking’ black and white archival film footage, inserted within modern-looking interviews in colour. Through this style the film tells the story of Zelig, a human chameleon who adapts his looks and personality to whatever period, place or circumstances he finds himself in. Moreover, Zelig is seamlessly inserted into famous documentary photographs and film clips, as when he is seen sitting among the Nazi leadership near Hitler. Instantiating postmodern approaches to film, Zelig, comically blurs in both style and content the categorical distinctions between documentary and

fiction, film and reality, different historical periods and different identities. Postmodernism has also led to what have been called mocumentaries, such as the Blair Witch Project (1999) which opens with a caption reading ‘In October of 1994, three student filmmakers disappeared in the woods of Burkittsville, Maryland, while shooting a documentary. A year later their footage was found.’ The film uses hand-held cameras offering an unnoticed mix of fact, fiction and deliberate documentary styled lies to fabricate its fictional mystery. The latest manipulation of reality can be seen in the widespread ‘Reality TV’ genre (e.g. Big Brother) where ordinary people are under surveillance by cameras recording their intimate life while competing for some prize.

Documentary Filmmaking: From the Photogenic to the

Simulacrum

In document Film - The Key Concepts (Page 35-39)