On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film

7/27/2019 On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film

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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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On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film 67

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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Chapter Six68

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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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.

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On the Real and the Visible in Experimental Documentary Film