I
When I first taught filmmaking in the 1970s – before video had properly arrived – I was junior to an old hand, a former BBC man called Ron. We got on very well, but we had almost opposite approaches to shooting documentary, a difference which was symbolized by the question of the tripod. Ron taught that you should always keep the camera on the tripod except when there was an overriding reason for taking it off. I, on the other hand, was a newcomer who came to the medium at the end of the 1960s. I naturally had a penchant for what is loosely called cinéma vérité, which went with a camera style that the oldies among BBC cameramen called wobblyscope – they were all men, and I’d worked with some of them.1But I’d also had the good fortune of working with a couple of younger cameramen (freelancers, as we used to call them), who moved with great agility, always smooth and steady, and with this as my model, I taught that you should keep fit and shoot documentary hand-held, and only put the camera on the legs when there was good reason to do so.
We decided the sensible thing to do was debate the question in front of the students. Another thing Ron said on one of these occasions – another old BBC adage – was that you can’t shoot a black cat in a coalhole, a warning against trying to shoot documentary in dark places without lights. This was another growing predilection of the time, another possibility introduced by the new lightweight gear, which included better lenses and faster film, portable tape recorders and directional microphones, and allowed the camera team the more easily to cross the boundaries between public and private. As Brian Winston (1995: 230) neatly puts it, ‘Paradoxically, because the new equipment made filming so much less intrusive than it had been, the finished films were far more so.’ In short, the new documentary placed the old definition of privacy in crisis precisely because it created new ways of trespassing on privacy. In the process, the documentary camera began to enter the private places and even intimate spaces of everyday social life whose portrayal was previously the privileged province of fiction.
My own instinct was not to intrude but to try things out when the opportunity arose. I would say, if you can see it in the viewfinder, shoot it, and then ‘push’ the film stock, as it was called – the practice of processing the film in the laboratory as if it were faster than it was rated; this produced a more grainy image, but allowed the filmmaker to shoot spontaneously under available light. But Ron’s phrase stuck in my
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mind for another reason – for its metaphorical possibilities: to speak of things you can’t shoot because you can’t see them, things that are invisible in some way other than lack of light. For example, in the sense that Walter Benjamin (1979: 255) indicated, in his ‘A Small History of Photography’, when he cited Brecht’s (2000:
144–5) remark that the simple reproduction of reality says very little about what it shows, and a photograph of, say, the Krupp works or AEG tells us almost nothing about these enterprises, because it cannot reveal the reification of human relations which is produced within them.
I was thinking about this question all the time I was writing The Politics of Documentary (Chanan 2007), but a way of broaching the issue there escaped me, and so this is the subject I want to take up here, as a kind of supplement. What I propose is not at all a definition of the invisible, but some notes towards the deconstruction of the language game of invisibility.
II
Let me start with some examples. First, a literal instance. In 1981, I filmed with Peter Chappell in El Salvador, during the uprising of the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front.2 We had secured a commission from West German television to go behind the guerrilla lines and report on what life was like in the liberated zones. In other words, we weren’t shooting the military clashes and actions – but we couldn’t entirely avoid getting caught up in them. This happened once, during the daytime, when the encampment where we were billeted came under a pounding from across the valley – but the shells were landing much too short. (Anyway we knew that if it got dangerous, our friends would pull us back.) The problem was how to film the incident. Since the shells were few and far between, you could run the camera for minutes at a time without seeing anything, and when the next burst of fire came, you might be looking in the wrong direction. We didn’t have enough film stock for that, because we had to carry it all with us, so we fell back on a handful of shots of the scene, the fighters on the alert. Later, we incorporated these shots into a montage to accompany a song sung by the guerrillas at night under the stars, which we couldn’t film but did record. A day or two later, we were invited to accompany a small troop going out on a raid, but we had to decline: they were leaving at sundown, and that night there was no moon, so there wouldn’t have been any light to film by (I’ll confess we were relieved). But our shots of the fighters marching out of the village in the beautiful colour of the setting sun suggested the narrative shape of the film, and became the final sequence. The effect was to keep the film from closure, because this ending was the opposite of the heroic cowboy riding off into the sun after a happy ending. Here there was no happy ending, the struggle continued.
Second example, of a different type. Later the following year, again with Peter, our small film crew (this time there were four of us) arrived in Panama to shoot a sequence for a documentary we were making for Channel Four about Latin American Cinema, only to discover from the friends who met us at the airport that a coup had taken place just a few hours before we’d arrived.3Our immediate thought was, how do we film what’s going on? There’s nothing to film, said our friends. It was a palace 122 MICHAEL CHANAN
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coup – no disruption, not even any soldiers on the streets. Nor was there anyone who was willing to tell us anything, and certainly not to talk on camera, because they didn’t know which way the wind was blowing. (Just as well, since a few days later the new interim president sent in his hoodlums to smash the offices of the country’s leading newspaper.) So we dropped the idea and went back to our original schedule.
But my mind went back ten years, when I was on a trip to Bolivia and there was an attempted coup in La Paz, where I didn’t see anything either; but in La Paz you could hear things, because the city lies in a steep valley, and the sound of gunfire ricocheted back and forth.
To film events like these you have to be in the right place at the right time (or the wrong time). Like the Irish filmmakers Kim Bartley and Donnacha O’Briain, filming a profile of Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez in April 2002, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised, when there was a coup attempt against him. When the crisis broke, they were with Chávez in the presidential palace; when he was whisked away, they stayed there for the duration of the crisis, capturing an extraordinary record from the inside, until the moment when he returned two days later (whereupon, as he strides triumphantly into the palace, he greets the camera crew as old friends).
When you see this kind of footage, showing something we never normally see, the viewer’s astonishment takes over, and all the other stuff that still remains out of view, because it was dropped in the editing or didn’t get captured by the camera in the first place, falls out of the picture. Not for long, however, since the film met with a hostile reception among Chávez’s opponents, who quickly began tearing it apart for everything it doesn’t show, or which they claim it distorted by tendentious selectivity.
Many of these criticisms miss their mark because they misconstrue the power of documentary as testimony. This is a film with a strong point of view because, as Pasolini (1980: 5) once put it, ‘It is impossible to perceive reality as it happens if not from a single point of view, and this point of view is always that of a perceiving subject.’
But here we need to add a number of riders. First, the truth is that there are always other things which remain out of view, and this gives rise to a crucial characteristic of documentary: the documentary that you see is only one version of the film it might have been. Why? First, because the other versions are lying on the cutting room floor, as we used to say. Second, also because the documentary that was shot is only one version of what could have been shot, if the camera had been running at different moments or pointing the other way. This is one of the areas where documentary practice differs from fiction, which is constrained to follow a script. What the documentarist shoots isn’t arbitrary, because it is undertaken with some degree of preparation and a certain set of expectations, but the art of the thing is to improvise around the unforeseen; otherwise what you get is the formulaic and stereotyped conventional wisdom which makes up the bulk of television current affairs. The wager of so-called ‘creative’ or ‘authored’ documentary is that whatever you film is going to be at least characteristic and even symptomatic of the subject under investigation; the challenge is that you have to be very much on your toes, you have to think about how you’re interpreting the situation and why you choose to film this or that, what to follow as events unfold. But in all cases, there is always whatever was FILMING ‘THE INVISIBLE’ 123
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going on behind the camera at the moment of filming, whichever way you point the camera, and which you are therefore not filming.
The result is that watching a documentary corresponds rather ironically to something like the Donald Rumsfeld scheme of the world, in which there are ‘known knowns’ (‘the things we know that we know’), ‘known unknowns’ (‘things we know that we don’t know’), and then there are ‘unknown unknowns’ (‘things we don’t know that we don’t know’). In other words, the documentary is always built on structuring absences, which are normally suppressed in the process of editing, that is, of achieving narrative or discursive or poetic coherence. This indicates another kind of filmic invisibility altogether, the myth of invisible editing, which supposes that the best editing is the kind that the viewer doesn’t notice – except for cuts designed to draw attention to themselves. But even when they do, the labour of editing, the weeks of chipping away at the shots and moving them back and forth, remains beyond the ken of the viewer; hence the ironic title of Dai Vaughan’s study of Humphrey Jennings’ editor, Stuart MacAllister, whom he called ‘The Invisible Man’.
Invisible editing has its counterpart in the invisibility of the camera, and another myth – that the most ‘objective’ kind of filming is ‘fly on the wall’, where the camera observes but never intervenes, and the subject agrees to ignore it and sometimes indeed forgets its presence. This is a complex question about the self-presentation of the subject, with or without a camera present, or what Erving Goffman (1971) called ‘the presentation of self in everyday life’. There is evidence about this in the case of JFK, the principal subject in three classic films of direct cinema in the early 1960s produced by Robert Drew. Kennedy was a willing accomplice, at least to begin with, and Primary, the first of them, came about in part because Kennedy, whose father after all was an erstwhile movie tycoon, was well prepared to take on the rapidly evolving media as a condition of political success.
Although according to one account (Watson 1989), Kennedy was somewhat uncer-tain about what he was letting himself in for, Primary was a critical success, but when Drew went back to him in 1961 to persuade him to let himself be filmed in the White House going about his business, Kennedy wasn’t certain the experiment would work.
‘If I can actually lose consciousness of the camera’, he said, ‘and it doesn’t intrude, we might be able to do something. If the camera is bothersome then we can’t.’ The modest results were seen on ABC television under the awkward title Adventures in Reporting: Adventures on the New Frontier. Drew decided he wanted to try again. He had come to the conclusion that mere observation wasn’t enough, and reasoned that in order to avoid a string of uneventful scenes, your subjects needed to be caught up in testing circumstances which would allow them to forget the presence of the camera and at the same time provide the film with narrative drive – the dramaturgy of what came to be called the ‘crisis’ scenario, after the title of this third film with Kennedy (Crisis, 1963). But this time, after seeing it shortly before his assassination, it seems that Kennedy had changed his attitude, and Pierre Salinger recalled that he was quite upset about it: ‘He thought he’d gone too far … He said he had forgotten the cameras were there. He was not sure that the image he gave was the right image.’
Kennedy’s ambivalence finds its counterpart in the ambivalence of the viewer, who often cannot believe in films like this that the subject is not in some way acting 124 MICHAEL CHANAN
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themselves for the camera, that is, acting up, putting on a performance. When Don Pennebaker was criticized for this over his portrayal of Bob Dylan in Don’t Look Back, he replied, if I recall correctly, that of course Dylan was performing, ‘he was playing himself, and doing it very well’. But this is a film which also offers a paradigm of situations where the camera’s presence does not significantly affect what its going on, namely, musical performance. The musician making music is already performing a role which the camera can observe without affecting it, because making music already involves the whole person in an act of communication which the filmmaker can shape, but which is given by the performer as a gift. Like the scenes in Don’t Look Back where it can be said that Dylan isn’t acting for the camera because he’s focused on making music, performing in concert for the audience, or else privately for himself, or with his companions. These scenes, observing musicians sharing their music away from the audience, are among the most satisfying; this is where Dylan appears to be most completely himself, doubtless aware of the camera’s presence, not performing for it, however, but happy for it to do its job.
Many of the problems about representation in the documentary arise from peculiar (and invisible) tensions between the film we see and the unseen film it might have been. This is not to say that documentarists simply have to live with the problem in the hope that the viewer won’t notice (this is how the hacks behave).
Many filmmakers, going right back to Vertov in the 1920s, have developed tech-niques of self-reflexivity designed to remind the viewer that this is not reality as such but its double, selected and recombined, with everything this might imply. These include films I discuss in the book, like Michael Rubbo’s Waiting for Fidel (1974), and Raúl Ruiz’s Of Great Events and Ordinary People (De grands événements et de gens ordinaires, 1978), in which the same Rubbo appears as himself in his real-life role of Canadian filmmaker shooting abroad. Both films break open and render visible the conventional forms of construction of documentary discourse, exposing the codes which normally determine the reading of the representation. And then there’s a neglected film from an unlikely source, an Iranian documentary dating from 1967, Story of a Boy from Gorgan, or, The Night it Rained, by Kamran Shirdel. A playful satire on the condition of documentary, we are watching the expedition of a film crew despatched from Tehran to investigate an incident in the news, in which a teenage boy is said to have averted a catastrophic rail crash near the town of Gorgan, only to discover that the ‘heroic’ act may be in question. The first self-reflexive gesture comes at the outset, in the commentary: instead of addressing the audience in the cinema, this voice addresses the head of the studio back in Tehran for whom the film is being made, by way of explanation of the confusing material they’ve come up with. They have filmed interviews with everyone involved they could find, but can only present them in the order in which they found them (of which one result is that the boy himself comes late in the process). The result is summed up by Hamid Naficy (1981:
41–6):
The viewer is faced with a bewildering range of accounts of what was done by whom and when. A salient comment on reality and perception, this film was banned for years before winning the 1974 Tehran International Film Festival as best short film.
FILMING ‘THE INVISIBLE’ 125
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What’s going on here is that the film plays into an ideological quagmire in which one ambiguity compounds the next, and of course this is maddening to authority. A relentlessly teasing film, which makes you suspect that reality cannot be grasped, it’s too elusive, and not to be got at by such blunt instruments as the mass media, documentary included; the result is both a commentary on the intractability of reality, and a deconstruction of the representation of ‘truth’, that is to say, the official
What’s going on here is that the film plays into an ideological quagmire in which one ambiguity compounds the next, and of course this is maddening to authority. A relentlessly teasing film, which makes you suspect that reality cannot be grasped, it’s too elusive, and not to be got at by such blunt instruments as the mass media, documentary included; the result is both a commentary on the intractability of reality, and a deconstruction of the representation of ‘truth’, that is to say, the official