on the real and the visible in experimental documentary film
TRANSCRIPT
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CHAPTER SIX
ON THE REAL AND THE VISIBLE
IN EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY FILM
DANIEL JEWESBURY
Its been customary to understand documentary and fine art filmmaking as
very distinct practices. Documentary has its own traditions and history, its
terms of critique, its academic engagements (for instance with
anthropology and sociology) that are, at first glance, quite divergent from
the interests of experimental filmmakers. Of course, as long as there has
been documentary filmmaking, there have been those artists who wishedto subvert or interrogate its processes of meaning-making; Luis Buuels
Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933)1
is perhaps one ofthe earliest examples. The presumed objectivity, the transcendent subject
position of much early documentary film the claim to open a window on
the world jarred with modernist and structuralist artists, many of whom
concentrated on the qualities of the medium itself (the materiality of film,
colour, or light, for instance in the films of Stan Brakhage or Anthony
McCall; or the grammar and technics of film in the works of MichaelSnow or John Smith).
There has recently been a marked growth in interest in documentary
amongst fine art filmmakers, coupled with a critical engagement with the
limits and tensions of the form. Arguably there has always been a strand
within art film that has drawn on the real, even if it has not been
recognised as documentary per se. The structuralism mentioned above
was concerned primarily with the conditions and perhaps the
impossibility of making meaning through representation; and from the
1960s onward, with the invention of the video camera, many artists used
the static camera to record performances and other live art, producing adocument, if not a documentary.
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Contemporary fine art film explores documentary as a form with which it
is possible to experiment, and engages with it reflexively, often reminding
us of the constructedness of its meanings (not that they are necessarily anyless real for being constructs). This form of experimental documentary
is now widely distributed and established in the mainstream of art
discourse: Luke Fowlers All Divided Selves (2011)2, a mesmeric collage
on the life, work and thought of R. D. Laing, using both archive and
original material, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, while the
feature-length film portraits of Ben Rivers have received nationwide
distribution in UK independent cinemas.
Two of the most influential filmmakers within the world of fine art film in
the UK have been John Smith and Patrick Keiller. Smiths works from the
mid 1970s onward take the processes of making and watching film apart.
They have a performative quality, often featuring Smith in front of the
camera or in a voice-over, but they are also social documents that attempt
to use the complexity and richness of film to explore difficult concepts.
They are also, often, very funny. Smiths playful disruptions of the
viewers expectations in terms of shot order, editing and the relationship
between image and sound result in works that explode and unravel
outwards, formally, and produce a strange filmic world which belies the
modesty of the subject matter explored. Often, this material is that whichis on Smiths doorstep in north-east London.
Patrick Keillers series of pseudo-documentariesLondon (1994)3,Robinson
in Space (1997)4 and Robinson in Ruins (2010)
5 are concentrated
examinations of the social, political and economic conditions of Britain.
Keiller employs a static camera, very long takes, and unstaged footage; the
only actors employed are those speaking the voice-overs that he writes,
which recount the exploits of a fictional observer of the decline of British
culture and society, Robinson. These texts are reminiscent of the writingsof W. G. Sebald: dense meditations which combine the autobiographicaland the fictional, and employ a disguised first- or third-person voice, but
which weave together threads from history, geography and political
economics with musings on the absurdities of culture.
Inherent in both these artists works is a desire not simply to represent, but
to discover and reconstruct the real. This real is not something which it
is possible simply to perceive unproblematically and depict, it is not the
superficial appearance of things; rather, it is something which lies behindthat which is immediately available to the senses, that which is visible to
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the camera. It is the accumulation of social relations that structures the
choices and experiences of individuals, the social forces which move
through those individuals, the political and economic conditions ofexistence which are usually obscure, mystified, difficult to apprehend, letalone make perceptible. Keillers combination of mundane, fixed medium
shots of the quotidian life of London, or of England, with dense, often
ludicrous voice-over and apparently ambient sound turns his films into
multi-layered essays, sometimes polemical, sometimes humorous,
sometimes incomprehensible in a single viewing. The films reveal
themselves gradually and reward multiple readings.
The fact that many artists are now intent on exploring this dimension of
the political (that is, the political as a set of social-cultural-economic
discourses which shape us, and our environment, and which we attempt to
influence or interrupt) makes the form of the documentary particularlyappealing. But it is a form to which they bring critiques of authorship, and
an awareness of formal analysis that is necessary to understand how the
documentary film can never be a neutral or objective comment. Of course
these critiques, this reflexivity, have their own history within documentary
film practice; but overwhelmingly, the documentary is still a medium in
which certain technical and authorial tropes persist. The construction of
truth through conventions of editing and framing, the use of voice ofGod narration, and so on, are found in documentaries today just as they
were 70 years ago.
The fine art documentary, or what I prefer to call the experimental
documentary, offers different approaches to both the potential content and
the form of documentary film. In fine art, the fictional voice can be used to
approach an investigation of reality, just as factual material can be used
to unravel preconceived or unquestioned ideas of truth. The idea of what
material might constitute documentary is thus immediately broadened inthe hands of fine artists.
Fine art film also foregrounds aesthetic concerns which are different to those
of the documentary filmmaker: the aesthetic and the ethical, which is to say
considerations of formal qualities, on one hand, and the approach to theme
and subject matter, on the other, are in close dialogue with one another.
There is no pre-existing form for experimental documentary; each subject
brings with it its own requirements, its own demands, and the filmmaker has
to approach the production and especially the editing of the film with an idea
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of how the form that they are building can bring the viewer into the
complexities of the subject matter, as an active, critical reader.
NLR, 31", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2010
This triangular critical and ethical relationship between the artist, the film-
text and the viewer is crucially important in experimental documentary.
Over a prolonged period during the 1980s and 90s the real was a
category which could only be spoken of in art if one were to demonstrateones disbelief in it, ones awareness of its obsolescence or irrelevance.
The acknowledgement that such excesses resulted in throwing out the
baby with the bathwater, not only in art but in politics and critical theory
more generally, comes with a reassertion of the artist as an ethical agent,
responsible for the text that they bring into the world, and moreover of the
viewer as a partner in the reading of that text.
Representation and the real
The examples that Ive used to illustrate this short overview of
experimental documentary are by no means exhaustive but I believe that
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an account of them helps to understand the concepts I have been outlining.
In addition to discussing some of the problems and questions approached
in two pieces of of my own work, I offer a reading of the film Bernadette(2008), by artist Duncan Campbell.6
Campbells film is a portrait, constructed primarily through archive
footage, of the Irish politician and activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey;
but it is also an investigation of historical process and of documentary
form itself. The film is constructed both from archive footage and original
material, and is structured in three sections: a hesitant, faltering
introduction, in which we see black-and-white close-up shots of a
womans hands and feet; the archival material, spanning McAliskeys brief
public political life in the 1970s; and a final section in which a voice-over
departs from the story of McAliskeys life to explore the broader theme
of how a life can be told, narrativised, at all.
The film persistently questions the authority, the transparency and the
veracity of documentary, personal testimony and historical narrative; yet it
is not in itself opposed to the possibility of documentary, and nor is it
anti-historical. Much as it depends on withholding explanations, on
confusing and destabilising understanding, it does not suppose that the
pursuit of understanding or meaning is somehow pointless, or thatmeaning should be deferred and relativised endlessly and indefinitely.
Campbell seeks to recover history as a process; it is that process which is
his subject matter. By appropriating the texts through which history is
rehearsed, Campbell makes communicable, visible, their inherent
contradictions. This is not just about stating, in a more or less banal
fashion, that historical meaning is contested, but about finding a form
through which the contradictions within and between sources can be
performed.
There are other formal-rhetorical tensions that repeatedly come to the
surface in Bernadette: between, on one hand, the various competing,
mutually exclusive attempts to tell events, the accounts which Campbell
uses as his source, which, in their sum, exceed the events they seek to
describe and to own; and on the other hand, Campbells acknowledgement
of the incommensurability of these accounts, such that the events (these
moments of a life) clearly exceed any attempts to describe or contain
them. Alongside this tension between history and historiography, a further
tension is enacted, between those conceptions of history in whichimpersonal forces move with their own detached, transcendent motivation,
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and those in which individuals shape the conditions of their existence
through decisive actions, and through personal conflicts and relationships.What we see, then, is not the life story of an Irish political leader, but arepeated struggle to make out of all this not-adding-up a form in which,
ultimately, something can be communicated, not merely about the past, but
its heavy bearing on the present; and not merely about that present, but
about its great debt to the future.In the film, the desire for a story to be told comes tantalisingly close to
being satisfied on a number of occasions: Bernadette is interviewed
outside the Houses of Parliament after punching the Home Secretary, on
the floor of the Commons, the day after Bloody Sunday; asked whether
she will apologise she hisses that she is only sorry I didnt get him by the
throat. Bernadette is interviewed about her trip to meet the Black Panthersin New York. Bernadette gives a speech; Bernadette explains that she will
not be leaving Downing Street until she has seen the Prime Minister;
Bernadette is released from jail after her conviction for incitement to riot
in 1969. Even the occasional interruption of the narrative, with out-takes
from unused news footage, cannot interrupt its irresistible flow. The events
are charged with excitement and danger; the figure of McAliskey herself, a
strange combination of media image and controlled revolutionary rhetoric,is compelling, even endearing in her humorous, self-deprecating moments.
But at a certain point the film steps back from this urgent unfolding of
history, at no clear signal, and enters a reflective, introspective segment.
McAliskey talks to an off-camera interviewer at some point in the late
1970s, looking back even from this point many years ago, prompted to
identify the self that she thought had endured throughout this time. The
archive footage is complemented by still images, and a female voice, with
an accent not dissimilar to McAliskeys own, begins to read from the
autobiography that she published as a young, newly-elected MP. It beginsto seem that this will after all remain a story, told in the central
characters own confident words. But once again, the stream of certainty
and clarity, of credible story, breaks down, this time with an exclaimed,
Christ! When did you start saying I to myself to yourself all the
time? Immediately, the status of the voice as an internalised Bernadette,
recounting her thoughts and reflections unproblematically, according to
the conceits and conventions of film, becomes untenable. For a while the
voice still operates as some sort of voice of or to Bernadette, a questioning
from within, but quickly this too disintegrates as the voice detaches itselffurther, once again becomes disembodied, replaces I with you. The
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voice recalls traumas, losses, childhood hurts, but these seem not to be
specific to Bernadette, not to add anything to the understanding of the
story that we believed we were following, the details fictional, or relatingto some other life, with little or no reference to Bernadette herself. Thisestranged voice cuts across the story that had been expected, its final
inscrutable words, a voice, not your own, you dont know, emphasising
the unfinishability of this narrative, this story.Its worth mentioning a temptation, on the part of many who encounter
Bernadette, to talk expansively and unreflexively about the life and deeds
of its subject the real flesh-and-blood Bernadette Devlin in her own
words as if this were actually a film about her; thus the beginning and
end segments, which clearly upset this reading, are glossed over as if they
were merely a troublesome formal mannerism. But the tendency to
hagiography is the viewers, not the artists. However much Devlin hasbeen chosen as a figure in whom historical potential seems to coalesce at a
certain time, who briefly appears able to cancel out the contradictions of
class and sectarian attachment, to carry a genuine mandate for a politics of
popular revolution, she is ultimately, once the persistence of those
contradictions has been definitively asserted, just an individual, left alone,
with the same range of limited choices as any other individual.In my film NLR (2010)7, I have approached some similar contexts: the
film is a portrait of a street, in the north inner city of Belfast, in a
republican district called New Lodge. The film sets out to explore the
distinct unity of atmosphere of the New Lodge Road, and is structured as
a walk along the street, from north to south. Many similar link roads in
the inner city, running between the major arterial routes, were demolished
between the 1960s and the 1980s; on others, the peace walls either cut
straight across them or run down either side, turning them into lifeless
corridors. NLR presents a filmic impression of the activity that still thriveson a single street, through a concentration on colours, details, surfaces,
styles of houses and flats, movement, comings and goings. By prolonging
the gaze of the viewer on these individual elements, the time of the walk
about six minutes is expanded and unravelled into a half-hour
investigation of the particularities of this place.
New Lodge is heavily defined to outsiders by its political (self) image. As
with Bernadette, NLR is not about New Lodge in the straightforward
sense; it is not a film about its political identity or its particular history.Nor is it a film made for New Lodge, celebrating a community. But a
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central part, even of the superficial visual identity of the area, is its explicit
political self-representation. This is most obvious in the roads various
murals, which present a certain framing of the area's history and character.
NLR, 31", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2010
NLR, then, sets itself a specific problem: how to make a film in New
Lodge thats neither political propaganda (whether nave or knowing), nor
bad journalism, nor unreflexive documentary, nor reductive communityproject, but which instead can foreground the contradictions that shape the
area, and then use these as the setting for some other, further
considerations. How, in short, to make political representations in a place
where Politics-with-a-capital-P have been so narrowly defined, and
where representation became such an automatic, clichd affair.
In part, the answer adopted to this problem is to foreground the problem
itself: by concentrating in great detail on the exterior surfaces of the street
the walls, the pavements, the arrangements of colour and lines the filmunderlines its own outsider status, emphasising that these surfaces are
themselves the boundaries between private and public, inside and outside.
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In this highly-politicised area, in a rapidly-regenerating city, such
boundaries are by no means simple however, and the soundtrack questions
the degree to which any space is really private here; and by extension,whether any is truly public.
In the soundtrack, a male and a female voice dramatise, through an
indirect, alternating argument, some of these ideas, recalling fragmented
remembrances of their own past relationship. The voices also explore their
different ideas of belonging in this community, with the woman expressing
her exasperation at the litany of stories hoarded and repeated by the man:
I tried explaining to him that even the most complex, detailed surface, a
wall, or a skin, conceals something else that lies beneath. He took me tooliterally, he didnt understand, so he just discarded what Id said. He
thought that I must be a fool. He continued with his stories about what
happened, where, to whom. How Terence had been walking down towards
that corner when he heard the crack behind him and felt the hot whistle
through his hair, about Lenny picking up his sisters kids and taking them
to his mothers house when he knew there was something on, and how
everyone else knew then to bring their kids in too.
About the time the football broke the glass in the old gas lamp, and the
darts team leaving on the bus, and the day the pub was knocked down.
About the flats and the houses on the long streets, and the theatre, and the
club. Tommys band that he had with his brothers, they played in every
dance hall there was. And in the clubs. Hed tell me about Jamesy who
went to a different dance every night, and always with a different girl, but
never missed a days work, and about Gerard who threw the stew from the
stove at them when they came for him and then jumped the back wall....
Their sharply contrasting ideas of the nature of the political are, in fact, the
contradictions and uneasy settlements of the film itself, brought out intothe open and given form, rather than made to conform to a more
convenient narrative. This fictional material, then, tackles directly the
problems of making a film of this type in this very particular place.
Gilligan (2009)8 is a short silent film, again shot in Belfast, asking who
has the right to speak in the contemporary, perpetually-regenerating city. A
series of seemingly expressionistic marks, graffiti painted on a hoarding,
are explored insistently by the camera and an obscured message is
eventually pieced back together: BARRY GILLIGAN HAS ?S TOANSWER ABOUT THIS LAND. The words have been painted and erased,
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On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film 75
Gilligan, 4", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2009
repainted and again erased (even physically gouged out of the plywood
hoarding), and again repainted. The significance of this text is never
explained but it is, in essence, the same story that is told about similar
plots of land in every city: a story of dispossession, exclusion,
privatisation and clearance, revealed through an ongoing battle to speak or
to silence. The bright exterior shots, and the panning movement used in
them, are contrasted with a series of interiors, some in total darkness,filmed in an old industrial service elevator as it moves between floors. The
abstract, inscrutable marks of the obscured graffiti are thus punctuated
with black: a rectangle of light flashes by from top to bottom or vice versa,
as the small window in the lift passes by another floor, and black returns.
Every so often the lift stops, and the square of light remains stationary in
the frame. The formal texture of the film, for instance this montaging of
different shots from different environments, is less deliberate than one
might ordinarily expect from a documentary film, thats to say the
relationship between different shots, in space and in time, is never clearlyestablished, and no narrator gives an overall context, or explains why we
are looking at these particular shots. In this way the film attempts to allow
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for an amount of chance in the way in which individual viewers might
construct a world and a narrative from the film. There is a central thematic
that it is intended to communicate the peculiar way in which the graffiti,and its obscuring, reveal something that has been repressed about this plotof land, about the city, and about politics and economics in a regenerating,
post-conflict city; but there is also an attempt to create movement, unease,
tension and so on for their own sakes, as mechanics that are as important
to reading the film as the telling of any particular story. Similarly, NLR
sets out to combine and juxtapose the individual visual, musical and
narrative elements so as to produce something more than simply the sum
of these parts, a suggestive, subjective world in which various questions,
emotions and formal relations can come to the fore and be considered. The
films interrogate their own form, then, not through a self-conscious
foregrounding of the unreliability or unfixability of their meaning, in
which the film is ultimately staged as a (potentially rather dry) self-reflexive metafilm, but through an intentional, non-deliberative
playfulness: an openness to openness, one could say.
Conclusion
Experimental documentary is an attempt to dramatise the political, that is,
to give form to the tensions and conflicts of which the social is composed,the ineffable reality that structures all things around us, and all our
relationships with one another, but which we can have great difficulty
perceiving. It activates the space of narrative and of representation,
making us active participants in the construction and consideration of
meaning-making. Inasmuch as various individual film works can be said
to cohere into a genre, this is a genre which has responded to the
supposed crisis of meaning within documentary media and its related
academic disciplines, by reasserting the real as a category which is both
knowable and describable. Crucially, this is not a real which has been
rediscovered, uninflected by debates around authorship, meaning-making
or subjectivity; rather it is the real as a set of active processes,relationships between forces that are constantly in flux, exchanges of
power, and struggles to make and to assert meaning; the real as an
ongoing, dialectical exchange involving very many actors and groups
across society.
To this end, experimental documentary strives to make form and content
mutually supportive of one another, which is to say, mutually enquiring.Structural conventions of film form (edits, montage, camera movement,
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narrative development, relationships between sound and vision and so on)
are not simply foregrounded or deconstructed, for their own sake. Rather,
a genuinely experimental approach to these tools of filmmaking meansthat new structures and forms, new ways of combining moving images,
sounds, subject matter and meaning are continually innovated by artists
who are as concerned with the formal integrity of a piece of work as with
its communicative potential. This does not involve privileging one above
the other, since it is precisely through this formal innovation and integrity
that an awareness of the various levels of the real, in all its
interrelatedness, its complexity and its fluidity, are approached in film: thisis a genuinely complementary process.
The aim of the films Ive discussed and the approach that they typify is to
instate a genuinely critical realism in the fields of visual art and
documentary film, fields which continue to expand and diversify through
their ongoing engagement with one another.
Notes
1Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread), 1933, Luis Bunuel, Spain.2
All Divided Selves, 2011, Luke Fowler, UK.3London, 1994, Patrick Keiller, UK.4Robinson in Space, 1997, Patrick Keiller, UK.5Robinson in Ruins, 2010, Patrick Keiller, UK.6Bernadette, 2008, Duncan Campbell, UK.7NLR, 2010, Daniel Jewesbury, Ireland.8Gilligan, 2009, Daniel Jewesbury, Ireland.