Everybody´s doing it- or how digital finished off the documentary (thank you, sir)
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Transcript of Everybody´s doing it- or how digital finished off the documentary (thank you, sir)
Everybody´s doing it: or how digital finished off the
documentary (thank you, sir)
Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria
Short fictitious introduction
If, in his first film, Nanook of the North (1922),
Robert Flaherty had included the moment in which some
members of his team cut an igloo in half to let the light in
and so pretend he was filming the characters waking up
after a long sleep; or if he had shot his own hand showing
Nanook how to make the gramophone work – the Eskimo
thought it was really funny – perhaps the history of the
documentary would have been different. If there had been
an inscription of the hand of the director in the
documentary even before it received its name, maybe we
would not be writing this article today. However, that is
fiction-film, fiction-history, or a hypothesis on which to
base an article. Despite the fact that Flaherty’s film
contained a fairly long list of interventions by the director
on reality to adapt it as far as possible to the story he
wanted to tell, the evolution of documentary film-making
1
over the years tilted the balance towards (supposed) truth,
even to the extent of putting the documentary on a level
with a piece of reality dug out of the rocks that surround us,
with the help of a sophisticated apparatus called a camera.
So, according to the documentary theory that would end up
imposing itself through the North American direct cinema
of the 1960s (and its later TV perversions), films would be
nothing more or less than raw depictions of reality,
fragments of truth torn from the world and ‘canned’ –
previously in celluloid and now in digital formats – for later
consumption. No trace of the hand of Flaherty is to be seen.
Filming with the hand: rewriting the documentary
Actually, we had to wait several years before we saw
the hand of Flaherty on the screen. In fact, until 2000, when
the veteran director Agnès Varda presented her film Les
glaneurs et la glaneuse (The gleaners and I, 2000) in the
Cannes Film Festival. It is a documentary that wanders
about in search of characters who scrape around in the
garbage and the throw-offs of capitalist hyper-consumption,
looking for food to survive and discarded materials to turn
2
them into art. The hand of Flaherty was already there in the
film’s title, in the second part of the title in which Varda
openly included herself in the film, introducing the ‘I’ into
the story and, as a result, an inevitable subjectivity. In
reality, however, her hand appeared graphically and literally
in one of the most beautiful sequences of the film, which
could be taken as an epitome and the ‘officialisation’ of the
shake-up that documentary cinema has undergone in recent
years. Sitting in the passenger seat in a car, Agnès Varda
shoots trucks they overtake on the highway, framing them
with her wrinkled hand. Varda is not really filming the
trucks, but her own hand, which is trying to capture a
reality that fades away and is left behind, like the trucks
along the way; a fleeting reality that is impossible to get a
handle on. Her small digital camera is unable to film the
world, it just captures the gesture of a filmmaker who tries
to shoot the world without managing to do so. In this short
sequence Agnès Varda expressed several of the changes,
challenges and revolutions that documentary cinema has
undergone in recent years in a masterly manner:
digitalisation, the universalisation of production (linked to
3
the propagation of amateurism), a decline in objective
discourse and sobriety, and associated with that, the mise en
scène of subjectivity that has finished off the documentary
as we knew it. Luckily, we should say.
“Let’s do it: everyone’s a documentary maker
Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it
Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it
Ain’t that music touchin’ your heart?
Hear that trombone bustin’ apart?
Come, come, come, come, let us start
Ev’ry body’s doin’ it now”
Before Cole Porter and his sexual ode “Let’s do it”,
Irving Berlin released “Ev’rybody's doin’ it” in 1912, a
song (also deeply sexual) that could now be the official
hymn of digital filmmakers, of the new documentary that
has emerged from the heat of the technological revolution.
Everyone is doing it. “Come on, come on, let’s do it too.”
What many filmmakers had dreamed of for years – cinema
in the hand of the director like the fountain pen in the hand
4
of the writer – did not become a reality with 16 mm. or
super 8, nor with the first video technologies of the 1980s,
but only with the arrival on the scene of digital technologies
at the start of the 21st century. These made things cheaper
and easier, and popularised all the processes of making an
audiovisual work overnight, so filmmaking became
accessible to anyone: “Thanks to the increase and greater
accessibility of technological tools, thanks to the diversity
of artistic models, because of the spreading need for
images, production is exploding. First phenomenon: like a
painter or a writer, a director can find a studio in his own
room and create a magnificent oeuvre all alone and in
complete freedom.”.1 Cinema made from home, at home
and for home, not in Cinexín format but with the possibility
of controlling all the stages of production from shooting to
distribution (and almost exhibition, in video channels, also
digital, born in the Internet) and including editing and
sound. It is as if the famous telegram that Jean-Luc Godard
sent the National Film Theatre in London in 1968,
apologising for his absence in a conference in which he was
5
1 Nicole Brenez in Jonathan Rosenbaum & Adrian Martin (eds.) Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, London, BFI, 2003, p. 176.
due to speak, became a reality: “If am not there take anyone
in the street, the poorest if possible, give him my 100
pounds and talk with him of images and sound and you will
learn from him much more than from me because it is the
poor people who are really inventing the language stop your
anonymous Godard”.
Tarnation (2003), by Jonathan Caouette, was an early
mirage of something that would become a reality years
later: the possibility of making a film with domestic
software and, in this case, a large number of family images
taken over more than twenty years. The credits for the
producers (Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell) do not
correspond to the orthodox model; they had access to the
initial versions of the film and helped Caouette to focus, cut
and circulate the film in the right places. The first version
of Tarnation appeared in MIX NYC, the gay and lesbian
experimental film festival of New York, then in Sundance
and later in the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Festival,
with the force of a bombshell in a situation in which the
term ‘digitalisation’ still sounded like some kind of
mediaeval punishment or, in the best case scenario, an
6
uncertain and frightening future. Thanks to iMovie (Apple’s
domestic video editing software), Caouette created a kind
of cinematographic exorcism that was dizzy, hallucinatory
and kaleidoscopic, and applied it to a collection of home
videos that narrated the tortuous story of the director and
his mentally ill mother.
Both Tarnation and Varda’s film showed that
professional tools were not necessary to make a film, and
that the technology that was being installed in people’s
homes (low-cost video cameras and editing programmes
that could be used on any PC) was quite sufficient. They
marked out a path of independence in which they could
function as epitomes and which would end up, in just five
or six years, generating a lively quasi-industrial scene
dominated by self-production in which each author works
as if in a guerrilla cell, being self-sufficient, producing and
distributing the product autonomously.
We might wonder why digital technologies initially
produced an explosion of documentary films and a number
of perverse/perverted variants but not a multiplication of
fiction, and see this as one of the most interesting
7
phenomena in the contemporary audiovisual world. Instead
of launching into fiction, why did the new filmmakers,
armed with their small DV cameras, film things that were
closest to them? Why did they go for documentary and not
fiction? The historian and filmmaker Michael Chanan, as
well as examining the reduction in production costs and a
certain weariness on the part of spectators vis-à-vis
classical fictions or the pseudo-real spectacles on TV,
proposes a vision of the documentary as the last bastion of
debate and civil participation in society: “The documentary
camera stays rooted in the reality of society, and from there
it reminds us all that the filmmaker is a citizen of the world,
our world, and is free to manifest his/her vision of the
world (...) In contrast to the pseudo-public space of the
media, the documentary creates a civic space for debate”2.
According to Chanan, the documentary has enjoyed
renewed validity because it has set itself up “behind the
back of censorship”, as the final space for civil society
participation and political commitment (not necessarily
demagogic). However, the consequences are perhaps more
interesting than the factors that triggered this off: a
82 Michael Chanan, “El documental y el espacio público”, Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 57-58, October 2007-February 2008, p. 87.
complete restructuring of the concept of documentary. In
contrast to documentary models that restricted themselves
to using video technology as a cheap alternative to
traditional 35 mm. and replicated the classical modes of
film narrative – only in video – and tried to conceal their
use of ‘impure’ or ‘unworthy’ technologies, trying to pass
them off as shot in celluloid3, a whole new wave of
filmmakers quickly recognised the expressive, artistic,
political and aesthetic possibilities of the new digital tools,
beyond their simple economic advantages.
A new medium finally ends up imposing a new
language, as the Colombian director Luis Ospina explains:
“I never saw video as an enemy or an intruder. When all the
doors of filmmaking were closed to me in the mid-1980s, I
saw video as a kind of resurrection. The cinema is dead,
long live video. (...) With video, no longer seen as a bastard
brother of the cinema, I felt the emotion and the stimulus of
working in a new medium that was less coded and more
9
3 “If something characterises the work of Mercedes Álvarez and José Luis Guerín it is that they get involved in a classicism that is not only documentary (Flaherty would be their model, as well as that of El sol del membrillo) but also narrative. On one hand, in both filmmakers we find strategies from other forms of classic documentary such as the docudrama: the inclusion of social actors that play themselves, the imposition of micro-narratives and the orientation provided by a script that is perhaps not written but clearly guided by the director. (...) On the other, a pre-planning that often responds to a classic paradigm consisting of montage, continuity and the breakdown of scenes through the technique of the reverse shot”. Elena Oroz and Gonzalo de Pedro, “Centralisation y dispersión (Dos movimientos para cartografiar la 'especificidad' del documentary producido en Cataluña en la última década)”, in Casimiro Torreiro (ed.) Realidad y creación en el cine de no-fiction, Madrid, Cátedra, 2010, p. 69.
open to experimentation. I was able to solve a number of
expressive needs because I was not only subjected to
cinematographic language but also to the new possibilities
offered by video. Video allowed me to work in a kind of
permanent postmodern collage in which I could mix all the
formats, incorporate archive material from a large number
of sources, generate texts and create special effects that
would be too expensive otherwise”4. This postmodern
collage Ospina refers to, and which he put into practice in
his film Un tigre de papel (2007) – a powerful reflection
on the documentary form as an equally big lie as any other,
just as susceptible to manipulation as any other – is one of
the main characteristics of what John Corner called “post-
documentary”5, a label that perfectly describes the way the
rules of the documentary have been overwhelmed in recent
years, although it has undermined it as an autonomous and
coded entity (and therefore is easily recognised, parodied
and criticised) and has helped to bring about a healthy
10
4 Interview with Luis Ospina, partially unpublished, and partly published in "Una nostalgia crítica", Gonzalo de Pedro. Cahiers du Cinéma- España, no. 36. Special supplement, p. XXVII.
5 “The term “documentary” is always much safer when used as an adjective rather than as a noun, although its noun usage is, of course, a form of abbreviation, championed by the cinema pioneers and established through sheer familiarity. To ask “Is this a documentary project? is more useful than to ask “Is this film a documentary?” with its inflection toward firm definitional criteria and the sense of something being more object than practice”. John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions (with Afterword)”, in Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette (eds.) Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, New York University, 2009.
overwhelming of its forms and subjects. An almost baroque
excess, which Tarnation anticipated prophetically with its
maelstrom of images – recycled and revisited time and time
again – that announces the fruitful audiovisual nonsense
that Caouette would create ten years later in All Tomorrow
Parties (2009), an authentic film of the YouTube era. It is
dizzy, constructed on the basis of borrowed images, and is
given over to the devouring rhythm of images and icons.
Tarnation already showed some of the features that would
later be the main ones of the documentary genre in the
binary age: audiovisual voracity, audiovisual ‘cannibalism’
and ‘carnavalism’ and, above all, the highlighting of the
director’s subjectivity. In Caouette’s film the camera turned
definitively on its axis, and by extending the field of
filming, focused its lens on those who (traditionally) had
always remained (or almost always) off camera: the
filmmaker and his reality. Strictly speaking, Tarnation was
not the first film to show this extension of the documentary
field and highlight what had previously belonged to the
realm of the private, but it did have the virtue of doing it in
everyone’s view. A few years before, Varda’s film also used
11
this same turn of the camera, filming her wrinkled hands
and her old age as examples of the place where the filming
and talking took place. The old, all-knowing voice of the
descriptive documentary, belonging to no particular place
and containing uncontested truth, was replaced by a story in
the first person that was stuck to the wrinkles and the folds
of private life: this is me, this is how I am, and from here,
with these hands, I am speaking to you and filming you.
That is my truth, then.
Digitalism: the world is no longer what we see
If something has become unstable and shaky with the
arrival of digital technology it is the old confusion between
‘documentary’ and ‘truth’ that gave documentary cinema
(here we are talking of cinema, i.e. celluloid, images printed
on a physical medium) an almost mystical quality in
relation to reality, as if the mere printing of light on the
medium would give the filmed images the nature of an
immutable truth. The old “train of shadows” that Gorki
talked about has now become a hyper junction of highways
where the zeros and ones of the digital images circulate
12
towards a thousand different screens and cameras, without
physical media, without that trace that linked the world and
its audiovisual reflection, in a digital interface that is
reconfiguring the image of the world, forcing us to rethink
our relationship with what is real and, perhaps, to assume it
as a construction and a discourse, not as something
objective and accessible through technology. In a way,
digital filming has highlighted the impossibility of
documenting a world that cannot be grasped definitively, a
reality that not is ‘out there’ (as Mulder and Scully would
have liked) but one that is constructed from subjectivity.
Hence the optimism unleashed by the new digital recording
devices, initially seen as the tools dreamt of by the old
filmmakers of direct cinema that seemed to promise, with
their almost infinite recordings, the long-desired access to
what is hidden behind reality. This gave rise to the only
possible certainty: digital video would not be of use in
freezing the truth, although it would serve to renew the
definition of documentary: “When everything is digital, a
sum of bits, there are no longer any spectres to turn to, no
shadows to pay tribute to. That Bazinian ontological-ethic
13
is not only in crisis, it has been rejected by the new nature
of the media”6. Some have seen this change as a crisis, but
it has actually been an opportunity to popularise and extend
the documentary through its perversion-dissolution.
If this digital change produced fiction films that
imitated the codes of the industry (but at a lower cost),
especially in the early years, in the field of the documentary
there has been an explosion of new modes and of others
that had been left in some corner of the history of the
cinema and that now in the digital age enjoy a new and
renewed validity: intimate cinema, the film diary or new
readings of direct cinema and cinéma vérité. These
approaches have undermined two of the pillars of orthodox
documentary cinema: the documentary understood as a
discourse of sobriety, and the idea of an objective
knowledge attached to a sober and scientific discourse.
John Grierson, to whom the very name ‘documentary’ is
attributed, always considered it an artistic but social
undertaking at the service of a set of values, and Bill
Nichols, the author of the indispensible Representing
14
6 Josep María Català & Josetxo Cerdán, “Después de lo real. Pensar las formas del documental, hoy” (monograph), Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 57-58, October 2007-February 2008, p. 17.
Reality, always linked documentary discourse to others
such as scientific, religious, political and educational, all of
them instrumental powers that “can and should change the
world, do things and give rise to consequences”7. This
could not be further from the intentions of the post-
documentary regarding influencing reality: how can one
have an influence on something that is hardly known and
cannot be unravelled? Here is the second of the key
differences. In contrast with the traditional knowledge
offered by an orthodox documentary, a kind of seamless
discourse, a ‘His Master’s Voice’ that gives the spectator an
insight into reality, these documentary makers work on
what has been called “incarnated knowledge”, that is, a
voice with its roots in the world, one that always speaks to
us from its own subjectivity8. A confusion, which started in
the 1960s and has been amply disseminated by TV
documentary forms, has led to pair documentary with
objectivity; now this has given way to a much more fruitful
15
7 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991 Spanish edition: La representation de la realidad. Cuestiones y conceptos sobre el documental, Barcelona, Paidós, 1991, p. 32).
8 “Traditionally, the word ‘documentary’ suggested something full and complete, facts and knowledge, explanations of the social world and the mechanisms that drive it. More recently, however, ‘documentary’ suggests something incomplete and uncertain, compilation and impressions, images of personal worlds and of its subjective construction. A change of epistemological proportions has taken place. What counts as knowledge is no longer what it usually was”. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 1.
situation in which the ‘truth’, if it exists, does not lie in the
medium but in the filmmaker. As Josep María Català and
Josetxo Cerdán put it: “This is the risk that documentary
fundamentalism runs when it insists on conserving the
purity of the genre, because it does not seem to take into
account the fact that the medium does not guarantee truth;
that lies with the filmmaker. Therefore, it is better to think
that all documentaries are liable to lie than believing that all
are true because they are documentaries”9.
Performative documentary, as defined by Bill Nichols,
in which the director stands in front of the camera and
guides the narration, has gradually been destabilised while
gaining reflexivity in the process. Indeed, some authors
have called it the “aesthetic of failure”10 and it has ended up
in a fruitful – and far from paralysing –scepticism in which,
far from wanting to represent a solid and seamless world or
a consolidated vision of reality, the post-documentary
maker turns his/her inability to portray the world into the
raw material of a representation which, as Laia Quílez says,
16
9 Català & Cerdán, op. cit. p. 17.
10 Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)”, in Michael Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary, Nueva York, Routledge/AFI Film Reader, 1993, p. 126.
“is neither unambiguous nor complete”11. An awareness
that one cannot encapsulate everything, and that the little
that can be said should be done from the humility (in some
cases) of someone who knows his/her limitations, is
undoubtedly the great divide that separates contemporary
documentary from what orthodox documentary consecrated
as an immovable canon. Filmmakers such as Jim McBride,
with his prophetical David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a
fake that poked fun at the all-embracing intentions of the
as-yet-unborn diary-based documentary, highlighting that
the idea was impossible to carry out, Alan Berliner, with his
family portraits, or Ross McElwee and his travel journals,
opened up the way (still using film cameras) to others such
as Alain Cavalier or Avi Mograbi, both of them fully
installed in digital instability.
I am my masks: reality is performance
Any notion of truth having been destroyed by the
binary codes of zeros and ones, post-documentary
filmmakers seem to have taken refuge in increasingly
17
11 Laia Quílez Esteve, “Cuando el documentalista se ríe de sí mismo. La estética del fracaso y el documental performativo en Avi Mograbi, Ross McElwee y Alan Berliner”, in Elena Oroz & Gonzalo de Pedro (eds.) La risa oblicua: tangentes, paralelismos e intersecciones entre documental y humor, Madrid, Ocho y Medio, 2009, p. 133.
intimate and obscure areas, in corners of a world that is
impossible to capture. After a long (and more or less
successful) career in conventional films, the Frenchman
Alain Cavalier gave up the avenues of conventional fiction
(and production) and set off on a more intimate type of
filmmaking that started by portraying others in Portraits,
(1988), his long series of portraits of working women made
in 16 mm. This hinted at ways in which he would later
develop in digital filmmaking; where he has turned to the
constant and obsessive shooting of his life at home and
travelling. His film diary work has increased considerably,
with his amateur digital camera in his hand. Since his first
masterpiece of this stage of ugly digital work in progress –
Le filmeur (2007) – Cavalier has extended the limits of
what can be filmed beyond modesty, with an almost smelly
portrait of his illness and daily life, with all its misery and
shadows, in a line that he continued, with humour, in Lieux
Saints (2007), a collection of portraits of public and private
urinals and toilets. The latest result is Irène (2009), a
digital exorcism of a former lover who died in a traffic
accident. Confessional and shameless – and always ‘in
18
progress’ – recurrent images and sound can be found in all
his films: the image is his portrait, camera in hand, captured
in a mirror, a glass, a reflection, always half-hidden behind
the camera, always deformed. Then there is the sound,
produced by him with the movement of his hands on the
camera. Imperfections, split or blurred reflections, noises
from the hand that moves the camera, anomalies that
constantly underscore the narration instead of hiding it, and
which even question the experience of daily life as
something evident and illuminating. Traces, perhaps, of the
unheimlich of Freud whereby the daily becomes something
sinister. It is about constantly feeling strange vis-à-vis the
world, even in the most intimate domain. Avi Mograbi has
also worked in this area in films such as August: A
Moment Before the Eruption (2002). He digitally
fragments his own self-portrait in what is not only a
representation of the political schizophrenia that surrounds
him but also of his own identity – ungraspable and
unintelligible – seen as a jigsaw puzzle that it is impossible
to complete. The series of digital manipulations that
Mograbi deploys in his films – noises, masks on the faces
19
of the soldiers in Z-32 (2009), decomposed and fragmented
images – is no more than a reflection of a documentary that
is aware of the impossibility of offering a complete truth, an
authentic portrait of what is before the camera. The way in
which Z-32 introduces the doubts around its own making,
in a deeply postmodern reflective gesture, highlights the
self-referencing bias that contemporary documentary has
acquired. This path has also been trodden by many other
filmmakers that look to documentary to unravel its
processes and challenge the genre.
The work of Cameron Jamie – a filmmaker from the
world of contemporary art12 – also reflects, in a very
different way to Mograbi or Cavalier, on this unintelligible
reality (in this case, perverse and obscure). Instead of taking
refuge in the folds of daily life, Jamie takes his camera out
onto the street to find another world, one that offers no
explanations or answers. Kranky Klaus (2003) takes on
the appearance of an almost ethnographic portrait of a
deeply-rooted custom in villages in the mountains of
20
12 The fact that Jamie’s work, like that of Deimantas Narkevicius or quite a few others, can circulate in experimental and documentary festivals or museums and galleries shows that digital technology has created the strongly desired convergence between “the two shores”, museums and cinema. This convergence is not, however, exclusively technological, it is also conceptual: documentaries have entered museums when the old forms were surpassed, giving way to more reflexive and performative (and even more hesitant) hybrid forms, in a glorious and fertile lack of definition.
Austria: one day at Christmas, a group of men disguised as
monsters walk through the village whipping and frightening
children and passers-by, sowing panic without any apparent
limits. Jamie, in the best tradition of Catherine Russell’s
experimental ethnography, far from explaining what it is
going on, simply films it in a clearly lackadaisical way (the
film looks amateurish, with a strident soundtrack by the
grunge and sludge metal group The Melvins and home-
made sound), in a display of violence that is beyond belief,
but with no explanations given: “The strangeness of the
Other in representation is the awareness of his unknowable
nature, the realisation that seeing is not, after all, knowing.
(...) The failure of realism when presenting proof of what is
real is the radical possibility of experimental ethnography”,
states Catherine Russell13. Jamie is concerned with
capturing the moment in which the group of ‘monsters’
stops in a bar where, having removed their masks, they
knock back a few beers; this highlights the inevitable
construction of what we have been shown until that
moment. That Jamie’s films, for example Spook House
(2003) or Jo (2004), skirt more around Z horror movies
2113 Catherine Russell, “Otra mirada”, en Archivos de la Filmoteca op. cit. p. 152.
than classical fiction shows how contemporary
documentary increasingly seeks references that are not
exclusively academic and orthodox, in a growing impurity
that enriches it while taking it apart at the same time.
Jamie’s work, half way between contemporary art and
cinema, also serves as a kind of bridge to highlight two
aspects that contemporary documentary has put to the
forefront: on one hand, the staging of any act, the
performative nature of any action, the realisation that
identity (or, rather, identities) are not only constructions and
masks to act in society; and on the other, the interest in
dysfunctional realities that are outside what is correct and
visible.
This work on reality and identities as a mask has taken
on different forms in contemporary documentary. From the
actresses that Jia Zhang-ke introduces into the real
testimonies of 24 City (2008) to the much more elaborate
(and interesting) theatrical recreations that Rithy Panh uses
in S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) or in
The Burnt Theatre (2005) to evoke his country’s painful
past, as if we can only face up to the most human horror
22
through repeated and theatricalised gestures devoid of any
emotion14, contemporary documentary has gradually done
away with any naturalness, emphasising the strangeness of
reality, in an awareness that masks only hide other masks
and that we will never find the skin hidden under them. The
work of Raya Martin in his trilogy (still in progress) about
the successive colonial eras in the Philippines – A Short
F i lm About the Indio Nac ional (2007) and
Independencia (2009) – takes this idea of theatricality and
constant fake documentary to the extreme, recreating,
through a combination of fiction and documentary,
impossible and non-existent images from Philippine cinema
in a radical gesture of rewriting history that does not hide
the fake element. The hieratic portraits in Portrait (Portret,
2002) by Sergei Loznitsa, which only capture the time of
the portrait itself, the (already mentioned) digital masks on
the Israeli soldiers in Z-32, the brutal simplicity of
Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (He Fengming, Wang Bing,
2007), through a single shot of a woman who tells her
personal history to the camera while the ambient light fades
23
14 “When the inherent feature of traumatic experience is that it resists verbalisation and narrative structuring, one can only resort to the memory of gestures, of the mechanical portrayal of horror”, Elena Oroz, "Pequeños gestos, enormes consecuencias", Cahiers du Cinéma-España, no. 31, p. 49.
away and the director remains impassive or, going to the
extreme, animated documentaries such as Waltz with
Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman are other examples of how
digital documentary digital has found – at the limits of what
it never would have filmed – sufficient reason to continue
shooting while blowing the portrayal processes of orthodox
documentary to shreds.
The Portuguese director Pedro Costa not only found an
aesthetic route in digital filmmaking but also an ethical one
that has allowed him to hang around the ruins of post-
colonial Lisbon to film (over the years) a group of
unfortunates left on the fringes of their own country. In an
interview, he recalled a phrase that the main character in his
film Juventude em Marcha (2006) said to him while
shooting, a phrase that was very revealing about the
impossibility of digging below the wrinkles on people’s
faces: “Don’t worry, don’t think that you will get to know
me in depth because you have a camera in your hand”.
Costa added a reflection to this comment: “I am reassured
and protected by knowing, as he says, that I will not stop
doing it precisely because I am never going to achieve it”15.
2415 Sara Brito, “Un maestro portugués, novato en España”, Público, 13 June 2010.
In Costa the two tendencies of digital documentary referred
to earlier come together: the awareness of the mask (Ne
change rien (2009) – his portrait of the actress Jeanne
Balibar is exactly the portrait of the mask that hides behind
the supreme mask, the face of an actress) – and work with
the most invisible aspects of society.
This last aspect – the interest of contemporary
documentary in those aspects of the visible that are
precisely the most invisible or hidden – has something to do
with the defence that Chanan makes of the documentary as
a space that is open to civic intervention and political and
social protest, but also with how far what can be considered
filmable goes. It is not only subjectivity that has taken
documentary by storm, it is also the most invisible part of
that subjectivity: going back to Tarnation, it is not only the
story of a son and his sick mother, it is also the brutal
confession of a young gay who is looking for himself
through images of his life. Le plein pays (2009) by Antoine
Boutet looks at the daily life of a social outcast, a man who
lives withdrawn from the world, digging the ground and
recording songs from the radio to memorise them. Boutet
25
constructs a portrait that, yet again, does not explain or ask
anything, it simply accompanies. However, it not only
contains the mark of the director, who is present in what he
shoots, but a certain element of vindication of an apparently
‘absurd’ way of life but one which ends up subverting the
notion of work as a way of defining one’s place in society
and as a social currency. American Alley (2009), by Kim
Dong-ryung, does something similar with a group of
Eastern European prostitutes in South Korea: from the
proximity that her job as a social worker gave her, the
director pulls apart the trap of love as a form of domination
and constructs a first-order feminist vindication without
falling into demagogy. Or RIP in pieces America (2009),
by Dominique Gagnon, who re-filmed videos that YouTube
users classified as “inappropriate” over several months
before the webmasters could remove them. He not only
reflects on the channels through which images circulate,
and systems of censorship and self-censorship, but also
creates a fairly terrifying portrait of the political
underground in the US through his gallery of
“inappropriate” internet users and people out on the fringes
26
of politics. Finally, in a list that could be endless, Mirages
(2009), by Olivier Dury, is a film half-way between
plasticity and physicality that links in with the fascination
of contemporary films with bodies in movement. In this
case the director (the camera-man) traces the long journey
of a group of emigrants to Spain through the deserts of
Niger as far as Algeria. There are no words or interviews,
just the idea of capturing a movement and rescuing it –
perhaps without any great hopes – from a certain
invisibility. Some cameras, like Pedro Costa’s, stay close to
the bodies they film; they do not interrogate them but
basically ask questions of the film about its role in that
particular room, that particular truck, or that forgotten
corner of the world. “We said the documentary is political
because it invites society to observe its own individuals and
its own concerns”, says Chanan16.
Everything is archive: the explosion of found footage
We said earlier that Tarnation anticipated the almost
cannibal-like voracity that some forms of post-documentary
have adopted, an iconic and audiovisual cannibalism, the
2716 Chanan Ibid p. 94.
heir of found footage that has expanded exponentially while
the universal archive of images within anyone’s reach grew,
thanks to the internet and the increasingly large number of
video pages17, audiovisual portals that have opened the door
to a cinema made without a camera. The growing
fascination with found footage of varying quality is simply
yet another consequence of the ‘fall’ of images as exact
correlates of what is real. In the words of Chris Marker
(probably the first great VJ of contemporary cinema, the
first digital filmmaker before digital came along) images
“are shown as they are, images, and not the portable and
compact form of a reality that is no longer accessible”,
filmmakers can finally handle them at will without
worrying about perverting their relationship to the world.
This explosion of found footage rewrites the classical
rapprochement of documentary cinema to archive material,
because the new recyclers do not resort to archive images
for their historical nature, nor to quote or document a
particular moment in history; they do so to create
discourses based on pure fascination with images or to
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17 The first one to appear was YouTube.com, in February 2005 (five years ago, an eternity in digital terms). It has been followed by many others such as Vimeo, aimed at consolidating a community of audiovisual creators, Archive.org, an authentic digital ‘library of Alexandria’, or Ubu.com, dedicated to the archives of avant-garde artistic movements.
explore the terrain of film essay (for which all the images
and all the reality are an archive with which to create a
discourse). In the work of filmmakers such as Péter
Forgács, who uses archive footage in a classical manner,
and Gustav Deutsch, as a representative of the experimental
side. or in the most troublemaking examples of digital
appropriation (the mash-up, the remix, the culture of the
VJ), work with archives in contemporary documentary does
not seek to blur the edges of the images to integrate them
into the narrative discourse but prefers to highlight the
corners and the points of friction – as if they were the
marks of the hand that holds the scissors – avoiding the
transparency of the classical documentary and
foregrounding the manipulations, the defects, the de-
contextualisation and the losses or perversions of meaning.
Thus is how films appear such as Iraqi Short Films
(Mauro Andrizzi, 2008), an authentic product of the
YouTube era in which the images are consumed
fragmented. It compiles hundreds of videos on the Iraq war,
recorded by US and British soldiers and also by Islamist
militias, and subjects them to processes of digital
29
manipulation; some are evident, others not, in an operation
that simply aims to strip away the status of the image as an
authentic vehicle of information. Then there is the recent
Material (Thomas Heise, 2009), which shows us how
contemporary documentary approaches the archive (in this
case the director’s own, consisting of images that he had
rejected for other films) with a certain mistrust and
scepticism. In Material the accumulation of unpublished
images on the fall of the Berlin Wall from the side of the
German Democratic Republic does not so much set out to
illustrate an unknown aspect of history as to confront the
viewer with his/her own ignorance and to witness the
process of construction of a film as something that is in
constant formation, something that asks questions about
history instead of providing answers, challenges the validity
of images (the residue of historical processes) to recover
and reconstruct the past. The film also reflects on the
imperishable and changing value of images that are
destined to be forgotten.
In a way, we could consider that the proliferation of the
audiovisual collage is yet another product of the fall of the
30
documentary as a sober discourse, as we mentioned at the
start. This fall has given rise (among other things) to a
celebration of the image per se, now freed of the yoke of
simply being an image-footprint.
Spanish coda: decentralisations, degenerations and
“heterodocsies”
The “documentary boom” that the Spanish media
promoted so strongly in the early 2000s, in the light of the
(surprising) success of some documentaries in movie
theatres and a (more or less buoyant) audiovisual sector
could not, however, hide a certain stagnation of production
in subsidised formulas which, although they helped to stir
up the Spanish filmmaking panorama, also managed to
contribute to hide other documentaries that were much
more in line with what was happening internationally18.
This was particularly the case in Catalonia, which saw the
documentary as a cheaper way to subsist and, in the
process, legitimise itself intellectually. In contrast to the
initiatives of modernity that imposed a new documentary
31
18 A more detailed description of the documentary boom in Spain, and its links to cinematographic modernity, can be found in the abovementioned article by Elena Oroz and Gonzalo de Pedro titled “Centralización y dispersión…”
orthodoxy – in which digital technologies were little more
than a way to save money while shooting or, at most, a way
to go deeper into reality on the basis of the heritage from
Bazin – a whole new, lively and suggestive scene of
directors emerged. These directors not only saw digital as
an opportunity for self-production, but particularly as a set
of new tools to construct new languages and new
documentary practices between the impure, the mixed, and
the hybrid.
Apart from self-production and digitalization, perhaps
the most outstanding characteristic (in its ability to
regenerate itself) of this Spanish scene is the way in which
it has structured itself as an authentic reality parallel to the
audiovisual sector. These Spanish post-documentary
makers are neither marginal nor underground; they operate
as an autonomous and authentically decentralised network,
one that has clearly surpassed (mainly by ignoring them)
the centres of power of Madrid and Barcelona. There is no
‘dispersion of centres’ as such (nor the filmmaking models
they impose), rather a process of going beyond the old
systems of industrial power towards a decentralised
32
movement without hierarchies that works, perhaps, as a
digital network in which each author is simultaneously
producer-distributor and even exhibitor. These are small
autonomous cells of audiovisual creation that are really
independent, sometimes voluntarily and on other occasions
compulsorily. It is a new post-documentary culture that has
led to the emergence of small-scale support structures (e.g.
TV stations such as ‘Xarxa de Televisions Locals’ in
Catalonia, with its ‘Designation of Origin’ project, the
‘Gran Angular’ programme of TVE in Catalonia, websites
like Blogs & Docs, distributors of video art and
documentary such as Hamaca, festivals like Punto de Vista
or Las Palmas, or museums such as ARTIUM in Vitoria or
the CCCB in Barcelona). These have not only laid a solid
basis for a really strong and decentralised network (which is
increasingly necessary), they have also helped to give this
parallel reality a high profile and to sustain it.
Among these structures (some of them are actually
quite weak) we would highlight two projects, both of which
emerged from festivals. They are on the periphery in
geographical terms, but set out to give publicity to these
33
parallel digital practices. They also played a key role in
bringing together the disperse reality of authors who were
not always connected with each other. We should
emphasise the point that the two projects emerged from
film festivals, perhaps because these have been the only
vehicles in the classical audiovisual domain that have taken
the initiative of opening up and approaching a territory that
the sector regarded as unknown (even dangerous). The first
was the ‘D-Generación’ programme, consisting of
underground experiences in non-fictional Spanish film,
directed by Josetxo Cerdán and Antonio Weinrichter for the
Festival of Las Palmas in 2007. It has its second edition in
2009, this time with help from the Instituto Cervantes. Then
there is the Heterodocsias project, also set up in 2007 by
Carlos Muguiro for the Punto de Vista Festival, of which he
was artistic director at the time. In 2008 it took the form of
a production project under the name of ‘La mano que
mira’ (the hand that looks). Born almost at the same time,
the first focused on the buoyant audiovisual scene and the
second set out to trace a map of Spanish heterodoxy in the
present, past and future. Both programmes agreed on the
34
need to invent new terms in order to work on a reality that
few people had explored before. The Punto de Vista project
chose the term ‘Heterodocsias’, a blend of the union
between heterodoxy and documentary which was explained
as follows: “It was our destiny; heterodoxy in the cinema
and the heterodox documentary”19. The programmers in
Las Palmas played with the “D” of digital and
documentary, and linked to the term “generation”, came up
with the suggestive “D-generación”20, which well defines
the paths of rewriting and perversion that documentary has
taken in recent years.
The list of heterodox and degenerate authors proposed
by these two projects gives us a good idea of a panorama
that is growing steadily, combining recognised filmmakers
who also work on the other side of the camera with other,
younger names, video artists or anonymous figures of the
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19 “The difficulty of the project (…) arose from a dual lack of definition which meant that it was difficult to grasp and its content debatable: on the one hand, the term ‘documentary’ and what it has to do with heterodoxy. After all, what is documentary? And above all, what do we call ‘heterodoxy’? Far from being a problem, however, this resistance to definition made it clear that we were entering a cinematographic terrain that was completely free, uncontrollable, wild, neither colonised nor civilised, where names were insufficient and are permanently beyond meaning. That was our destiny: heterodoxy in the cinema and the heterodox documentary. To refer to this unnameable terrain we coined the term Heterodocsia”. Carlos Muguiro and Gonzalo de Pedro, “Presentation. Heterodoxos y heterodocsias”, in Heterodocsias. Pistas para una historia secreta del cine documental en España, Festival Punto de Vista, 2007, p. 2.
20 “It refers, in first place, to the fact that we are considered a new generation, although – and we are pleased at this contradiction – not all of them can be grouped in terms of generation (...) The letter ‘D’ refers to what was previously known as ‘documentary’: these films emerge from that formless terrain in which non-fiction film radicalises its principles and flirts with other experiences (...) the proposals are always distant from any scholasticism or tradition, anything that can mean tracking formal alignments. In this process of expansion, which, as we have said, is born from the documentary and almost goes against documentary (…), there is a certain idea of cross-breeding or degeneration (…). And finally, pushing the semantics a bit, these filmmakers are “d-generate” because what they do is outside genre”. Josetxo Cerdán and Antonio Weinrichter, “D-Generación: a modo de reflexión introductoria”, in D-Generación. Experiencias subterráneas de la no-fiction española, Festival de Las Palmas-Instituto Cervantes, 2009, p.13.
audiovisual world who have found a fruitful form of
expression and work in this path of the post-documentary
and the new do it yourself. This list is necessarily (and
fortunately) partial and incomplete, because the number of
authors who are working in this quasi-industrial reality is
growing and changing all the time. So, the catalogue of the
‘D-generación’ project can be extended, it is not a closed
edition, and ‘Heterodocsias’ has grown and consolidated
itself as a programme of production within the Punto de
Vista festival, indicating an awareness of working in a
territory in constant expansion, and also the need to create
support, production and distribution networks outside the
traditional circuits.
The features highlighted in the international part of this
article, those that define this digital post-documentary, can
also be applied to the Spanish panorama of cannibalistic,
impure and cross-bred cinema. From the assimilation of
digital technologies as a creative tool to the liberty of
working with a concept, the documentary has freed itself of
its previous burdens and has become a field open to
subjectivity, impurity, humour and experimentation. This
36
fall of the documentary as a discourse of sobriety that has
shaken up the international panorama has led, in Spain, to
something playful, carnivalesque-cannibalistic that portrays
subjectivities or invisible realities, and dialogue, not so
much with fiction, but with impure or forgotten forms of
audiovisual such as experimental film, video art, B-movies,
or even TV genres. The list of authors and titles is as long
as it is changing, and we could quote Lluís Escartín, who,
in Terra incógnita (2004) portrayed his countrymen of the
Penedés (a region near Barcelona) with the surprise of
someone who visits another planet; El sastre (2007), by
Óscar Pérez, a powerful re-reading of direct cinema that
makes a full-frontal attack on the idea of the “fly on the
wall” and illustrates the construction that is always hidden
behind images; or the terrifying cannibalistic mix by María
Cañas, an authentic destroyer of found footage in the
YouTube era, who attacks the purity of the image, its link to
reality and the very concept of “author’s rights” in films
such as La Cosa Nuestra (2006). However, if we had to
choose a work that could represent them all, it could be
Life Between Worlds, Not In Fixed Reality (2008), a film
37
by Andrés Duque made for the Heterodocsias project titled
‘The hand that looks’ of the Punto de Vista festival, in
which seven authors had to film a kind of daily diary with a
mobile phone. With the lesser definition than a telephone
provides, Duque made the film to highlight the impurity of
the image and the beauty of the pixels. It is a sequence shot
that starts in a conventional shoot, with the usual apparatus
and paraphernalia, and gradually moves away until it comes
across a black cleaning lady in another part of the house
who carries on with her work while she watches weddings
from her country of origin on TV. It is a journey, from the
industry to personal images, made with the plasticity of the
new media and the impurity of a non-professional piece of
equipment. It serves as a manifesto, compendium and
gateway into an audiovisual panorama that looks forward to
the future and also turns its back – as does Duque’s camera
– on what interests conventional cinema to focus on other
realities that are dysfunctional, invisible, and subjective. It
does this based on an awareness that it is perhaps
impossible to understand what the camera records (in the
same way that Andrés Duque does not understand what the
38
cleaning lady is showing him) but it still worthwhile
continuing to shoot.
39