Contemporary Documentary

Daniel Marcus, Selmin Kara

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138849525
• eBook ISBN: 9781317534150
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary Documentary offers a rich survey of the rapidly expanding landscape of documentary film, television, video, and new media. The collection of original essays addresses the emerging forms, popular genres, and innovative approaches of the digital era.

The anthology highlights geographically and thematically diverse examples of documentaries that have expanded the scope and impact of non-fiction cinema and captured the attention of global audiences over the past three decades. It also explores the experience of documentary today, with its changing dynamics of production, collaboration, distribution, and exhibition, and its renewed political and cultural relevance.

The twelve chapters - featuring engaging case studies and written from a wide range of perspectives including film theory, social theory, ethics, new media, and experience design - invite students to think critically about documentary as a vibrant field, unrestricted in its imagination and quick in its response to new forms of filmmaking.

Offering a methodical exploration of the expansive reach of documentary as a creative force in the media and society of the twenty-first century, Contemporary Documentary is an ideal collection for students of film, media, and communication who are studying documentary film.

PART I Forms, Genres, Innovations

DOI: 10.4324/9781315725499-2

1 Lying to Be Real

The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Docufictions

Ohad Landesman

DOI: 10.4324/9781315725499-3

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

(Oscar Wilde)

Introduction

One of the most striking developments in recent documentary cinema is the emergence of films that blur or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead what Robert Koehler describes as “the zone of the cinema free of, or perhaps more precisely in between, hardened fact and invented fiction” (2009). In films from different geopolitical contexts, such as Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2002), Ford Transit (Hany Abu-Assad, 2002), The Roof (Kamal Aljafari, 2006), Our Beloved Month of August (Miguel Gomes, 2008), and Alamar (Pedro Gonzales Rubio, 2009), truth and fiction are systematically intermingled, compossible from the very beginning. Such a strategy of documentary and fiction hybridity, the result of which I will refer to here as “docufictions,”¹ produces a lingering bafflement about definition. Docufictions allow a viewer to simultaneously adopt different attitudes and embrace distinct modes of engagement toward them, without these necessarily conflicting with one another. By doing so, they tap into a viewer’s familiarity with contemporary paradigms of representation, and take advantage of this knowledge to expand and challenge any prescribed and rigid understanding of what constitutes a film as a documentary. Such a viewing mode of instability, an ongoing state of uncertainty about the possibility of placing a film within definitive and familiar categories, is not merely the result of a playful hoax, but the function of mixed intentions of the filmmakers that invite contradictory expectations from an audience. To paraphrase Noël Carroll, the ambiguity produced between fiction and nonfiction makes difficult a distinction “between the commitments of the texts,” and not just “between the surface structures of the texts” (1996: 287).

While only limited attention to the docufiction has been given in academic texts, such a strategy of commingling fact and fiction has been gaining a lot of buzz lately in critical circles. Dennis Lim speaks of films that “could be said to blur or thwart or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction, staking out instead a productive liminal zone in between” (2012). Analyzing recent docufictions such as Our Beloved Month of August, which fluctuates between “a musical, a travelogue,” and a “quasi-incestuous family melodrama,” or Alamar, where a real-life father and son embark on a fishing trip conceived and organized for the purposes of the film, he points to how “impure forms” are invented in order to match “impure content.” With a similar interest, and focusing on other works such as La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001) and Sweetgrass (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009), Koehler recognizes this phenomenon as a contemporary and important moment in film culture. “We have been living through an incredible period of the cinema of in-between-ness,” he observes (2009). Finally, in his book about cinema in the twenty-first century, J. Hoberman makes a reference to docufictions and characterizes works such as The Libertad and Paraguayan Hammock (Paz Encina, 2006) as “successors to the short-lived Dogme movement in the form of modestly produced motion pictures” (2012: 23). Neither pseudo- nor mock-documentaries, these films are categorized by Hoberman as “situation documentaries,” films that mark their (digital or analogue) media-specific realness “through the use of long takes, minimal editing, behavioral performances, and leisurely contemplation of their subjects or setting. Drama is subsumed in observation. Landscape trumps performance” (2012: 23).

My interest in this chapter is to broaden this discussion academically, and to outline the blurry contours of the docufiction, analyze its strategies, and contextualize it both historically and theoretically. The two case studies I will focus on are the penetrating study of poverty In Vanda’s Room (Pedro Costa, 2000) and the mnemonic journey to modern-day China 24 City (Jia Zhangke, 2008), hybrids of fictive and documentary storytelling made with digital technology. How does digitality, I will ask, play into their efforts to creatively mediate truth and craft performance? The spotlight put on new technologies is not meant to suggest any notion of deterministic evolution in documentary, or to reduce the formal tendency discussed to a cinematic trend made possible by technical means only. The role of the digital within the construction of docufiction aesthetics is inseparable from a complex web of other historical, economic, and political factors, among which the evolutionary trajectory of documentary is of major importance. Therefore, in the following sections, I will account for this important context, and further explore the notion of camcorder aesthetics and the effect of medium variations, address the important role a viewer may take in recognizing and defining a filmic text as a documentary, and question the notion of documentary performance.

Historical precedents and the mockumentary paradigm

Surely, there is nothing essentially groundbreaking here. Documentaries have a long history of putting together fiction and reality that the modest scope of this chapter could not sufficiently address. A few early examples include the recourse to fiction in order to iterate a daily activity in La Terra Trema (Luchino Visconti, 1948) and Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922), the performative agit-props of Michael Moore, and the meticulously stylized reenactments by Errol Morris. “Every documentary representation,” as Michael Renov clearly points out, “depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier” (1993: 7). Nonetheless, the degree to which fiction and documentary are having their way with each other nowadays is quite striking, inviting further discussion on this formal and thematic mix.

Instead of providing a comprehensive list of historical precedents, I wish to briefly point to how the docufiction has been often bordering and flirting with another format of formal hybridity, the mockumentary. Despite the difficulty in drawing clear lines between the two, an effort to highlight those blurry edges is relevant here. Mockumentaries (or mock-documentaries) are first and foremost fictional texts that mimic and exhaust documentary codes and conventions, requiring the viewer to momentarily disavow their fictional fakeness. Docufictions, on the other hand, invite a viewer to welcome and embrace their aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead, or mock, but to offer a different tactic that exists along a fact–fictional continuum. In other words, although mockumentaries emphasize the fabrications of truth, their documentary facet seems to be largely sacrificed to the fictional. Docufictions, on the other hand, displace that skepticism by foregrounding relationships with both fictional and factual discourses, and distill truth even from a constructed narrative.

Two early exemplars for such a blurred distinction between mockumentary and docufiction, made at roughly the same time during the tumultuous 1960s, are David Holzman’s Diary (Jim McBride, 1968) and Medium Cool (Haskell Wexler, 1969). While both exploit the aesthetics of cinéma vérité, the privileged cinematic idiom during the time of their making, it is the former that levels a satirical comment on its conventions to fabricate an illusion of authenticity, while the latter embraces the strategy of infusing reality into a fictional story. David Holzman’s Diary’s main character is a young man presenting himself to the viewer as David Holzman, an obsessive filmmaker documenting his life in New York City over the course of a week with a 16mm Eclair camera. Holzman is filming inside his apartment, introducing us to his girlfriend and friends, and intimately sharing with us every aspect of his unfolding life. A fictional character played out by Kit Carson, Holzman is acting on Jean-Luc Godard’s famous statement according to which “film is truth 24 times a second” (Le Petit Soldat, 1963) and pretending that the only thing giving meaning to his life is the act of recording it with his camera. David Holzman’s Diary is a satirical fiction posing as a documentary, one that deconstructs the aesthetics of cinéma vérité down to its individual components (sync-sound recording, grainy black-and-white shooting, and a handheld camera) in order to expose their artificiality. In Medium Cool, however, it is never clear where the partly scripted narrative begins and where the reality that unfolds in the background engulfs it. The relatively superficial plot focuses on a television news cameraman who grows fond of a single mother whose husband has left for uncertain reasons. What makes the film remarkable is how it places its fictional characters in real situations during a strong political upheaval of counterculture in the United States, infusing reality into a fictional story. Such hybridity becomes all the more dominant during the final sequence, when footage from the real-life events of the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago penetrates the fictional story of the cameraman’s love affair.

Another early example that similarly thwarts clear boundaries between fiction and nonfiction is Daughter Rite (Michelle Citron, 1979), a film that explores the position of women in a nuclear family by looking at the relationship between two women and their mother. Daughter Rite is essentially acted, but the characters’ roles and dialogues in it are drawn from research and real interviews. It encourages the viewer to question whether the home movie footage represents real images of the narrator’s relationship with her mother or not, and if the narrator’s voice is indeed the filmmaker’s. In fact, cinéma vérité segments sometimes relate to the footage or the voice, while other times they do not. As in Medium Cool, strategies of hybridity walk a thin line between producing a mockumentary effect of deception for the purpose of deconstruction and embracing a more advanced strategy of documentation.

Within the unwritten history of contemporary docufictions, nothing serves as a better illustration of how the aesthetics of ambiguity are manufactured through new modes of production than the first provocative films of the Danish Dogme 95 group. Armed with a teasing manifesto, advocating both earnestly and jokingly an alternative film practice aiming to counter escapist illusion with gritty realism, Dogme filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg scribbled (in less than 45 minutes) a taxonomy of aesthetic restrictions in hope of eliciting a new creative freedom in film. The document, publicly known as “The Vow of Chastity,” is in the tradition of the fierce attacks by French New Wave and Italian neo-realist filmmakers on stagnant mainstream cinema. The Idiots (Idioterne) (Lars von Trier, 1998), a compelling expression of those restrictions, is a film that cleverly exploits the look and feel of DV to produce a docufiction that borders on a mockumentary. It focuses on an anarchist group of avant-garde pranksters who are playfully faking mental disability, and tells their story in both a scripted and an improvised manner. While the group’s behavior targets the hypocrisy of bourgeois culture and seeks to shamelessly subvert its middle-class values, the style of the film defies not only traditional Hollywood filmmaking, but also the possibility of making any clear distinction between its fiction and documentary tenets. To put it differently, the act of “spassing/spazzing” in the film (the faking of disability) formally weds with the attempt to manufacture a documentary style.

Strategically, the film never really provides a definitive “recipe” or a template of formal cues (traditional credits, for example) for how to read it. It manufactures inconsistent and contradictory suggestions that are partly structured around our familiarity with filmic codes and conventions. Talking head interviews made post facto, shaky and sloppy handheld camerawork, loosely bordered shots that go in and out of focus, jump cuts that disrupt continuity, and degraded video quality that results from the DV-to-film transfer all connote a documentary mode of engagement and highlight photographic presence. Since The Idiots deals mainly with role-playing, its central indeterminacy lies within specific moments of performativity that make it particularly difficult to decide if what we are watching is real or not. The film’s playful employment of documentary conventions and strategic use of DV aesthetics would become highly influential in the years to come for other filmmakers engaging with the docufiction format.

FIGURE 1.1 The Idiots (Idioterne) (Lars von Trier, 1998): exploiting the look of DV for manufacturing a documentary style.

Both mockumentaries and docufictions help to expand our understanding of what constitutes a documentary, the former by means of parody or pure fakery, and the latter by forming a troubled relationship with the real. Such an understanding of both modes, which are not always easy to separate from each other, enables us to recognize in them a strong documentary dimension, or at least one that stems from a certain aspiration to document, without splitting hairs in making a clear distinction between the two.² In the docufictions I will discuss below, it is fiction that is diffused into reality without the risk of shattering the essence of the text as being partly a documentary, or the experience of it as such. The skepticism it infuses into the documentary structure, I argue, works to expand its epistemological value and not necessarily compromise it.

“Judgment comes easy in documentary”: In Vanda's Room and the need to play oneself

Ossos (1997), In Vanda’s Room (2000) and Colossal Youth (2006) are three films made by the Portuguese filmmaker Pedro Costa. Referred to by critics as “The Fontainhas Trilogy,” they focus on a neighborhood in Lisbon that does not exist anymo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword
• Introduction: Situating Contemporary Documentary
• Part I Forms, Genres, Innovations
• Part II Documentary in New Contexts
• Index