The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth 1498504523, 9781498504522

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword: At the Center of Our Age
Introduction
THE MEDIUM, MORALS, AND METAPHYSICS OF DOCUMENTARY FILM
What Photography Calls Thinking
Cinematic Representation and Spatial Realism
Documentary Traces
The Limits of Appropriation
Inscribing Ethical Space
STRATEGIES AND STYLES OF DOCUMENTING WITH FILM
Before Documentary
Ruminating on the Ideologies of Nature Film
Jean Rouch’s Ciné-trance and Modes of Experimental Ethnofiction Filmmaking
The Ecstasy of Time Travel in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Habitats of Documentary
DOCUMENTARY THEORIST-FILMMAKERS AT WORK
Promises and Contracts Found in the Archive Are Not About the Past
“See and Remember”
Intimacy, Modesty, Silence
Provoking the Truth
Reinvisioning Dziga Vertov
Whose Strife Is It Anyway?
Redefining Documentary Materialism
INTERVENTIONS AND RECONSTITUTIONS OF DOCUMENTARY MODES, METHODS, AND MEANINGS
Four and a Half Film Fallacies
The Dogma 95 Manifesto
Minnesota Declaration
Omission and Oversight in Close Reading—The Final Moments of Frederick Wiseman’s High School
Cinematic Consciousness
Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace
The Big Short
Letter to Errol Morris
AUTO/BIOGRAPHY AND THE COMPOSITION OF IDENTITY IN DOCUMENTARY FILM
“You are Never Alone”
On Patience (After Sebald)
Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films
Vérité Fiction, Dramatized Documentary
“Deceiving into the Truth”
A Reality Rescinded
Acknowledgments
Selected Bibliography
Index
Contributors

Citation preview

Praise for The Philosophy of Documentary Film This anthology is a gem! Bringing together documentary filmmakers, philosophers, and film theorists, this volume will be an important resource for all those who are interested in this important genre of filmmaking, be they students, professors, scholars, or just serious film viewers. Get it for yourself and see! —Thomas E. Wartenberg, Mount Holyoke College, author of Thinking on Screen: Film as Philosophy and coeditor (with Cynthia Freeland) of Philosophy and Film An impressive selection, including some of the most interesting voices in documentary thought. —Jonathan Kahana, University of California, Santa Cruz, author of Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary and editor of The Documentary Film Reader: History, Theory, Criticism This is the collection of essays on documentary film that I have been waiting for. It brings together many of the best classic pieces on documentary theory and practice, and a thrilling assortment of new essays by philosophers, film scholars devoted to aesthetic issues and close reading, and documentary filmmakers who teach. The writing throughout is of the highest order, and the promise of genuine (as opposed to tinkertoy) philosophical inquiry is amply kept. David LaRocca has done an exemplary job of editing, and his lengthy overview essay that serves as the volume’s introduction is incisive and indispensable. —George Toles, University of Manitoba, author of Paul Thomas Anderson and A House Made of Light: Essays on the Art of Film, and screenwriting collaborator of Guy Maddin Timely. Vital. Engaging. An essential companion to any thinking about documentary cinema. David LaRocca is especially attuned not just to the voices at the heart of

theoretical debates but, to my liking, also to those who push out into the practice and craft of documentary filmmaking. —Paul Cronin, School of the Visual Arts, editor of Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Perplexed, Be Sand, Not Oil: The Life and Work of Amos Vogel, and Lessons with Kiarostami With the pervasive and facile use of digital manipulation of images in public and private communications, few questions are more important than the question raised by this richly rewarding book—“What is real and what is fake?” In 1960 my executive producer at NBC warned us to be careful of what we put on the screen because he said “people will believe it.” David LaRocca, in his comprehensive and well-articulated introduction, reminds us that a critical mind has never been more essential to acquire “a fuller, truer, experience of reality.” As a successful documentarian for over sixty years, I know of no other book that is more useful in the pursuit of that goal. —Bill Jersey, director of A Time for Burning (1967) and Eames: The Architect and the Painter (2011); winner of two Peabodys, Emmys, and Oscar nominations As far as documentary film and philosophy are concerned, David LaRocca has summoned a cloud of reliable witnesses and all the usual suspects, or so it seems. Once readers enter the critical conversations that these estimable writers provoke and sustain, the criteria for reliability and suspicion themselves become productively volatile, and that volatility will lead readers to surprising insights and reflections. From considerations of Plato to Cavell and well beyond, these memorable essays fruitfully explore both truth and make-believe in documentary film, as well as the manifold challenges of discerning the elusive differences between them. —Lawrence Rhu, University of South Carolina, author of Stanley Cavell’s American Dream: Shakespeare, Philosophy, and Hollywood Movies At the center of many of these observations and discussions—now receiving new and expert engagements in The Philosophy of Documentary Film—has been the taunting power of cinematic reality, nowhere more concentrated than in the quintessential art of the real, the provocative revelator of truth, documentary cinema. These works in hand are contemporary perspectives on, for me, the most vibrant practice in contemporary cinema. They call us to think carefully and seriously not only about the truth

claims and strategies of specific documentary films but also about why documentaries are so central to our age. —Timothy Corrigan, University of Pennsylvania, author of The Film Experience (with Patricia White) and The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker

The Philosophy of Popular Culture Series Editor: Mark T. Conard, Marymount Manhattan College The Philosophy of Popular Culture series comprises volumes that explore the intersection of philosophy and popular culture. The works are devoted to a subject in popular culture, such as a particular genre, filmmaker, or television show. The essays investigate the philosophical underpinnings, or do a philosophical analysis, of the particular topic. The books will contain smart, jargon-free essays that illuminate texts (films and TV shows) in popular culture, and they will introduce nonspecialists to traditional philosophical ideas and issues. The governing ideas of the series are that texts in popular culture are worthy of philosophical analysis and that philosophical thinking and traditional philosophical concepts can enlighten us and enrich our everyday lives.

Titles in the Series The Who and Philosophy, edited by Rocco J. Gennaro and Casey Harison The Philosophy of Documentary Film: Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth, edited by David LaRocca

The Philosophy of Documentary Film Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth

Edited by

David LaRocca

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com Unit A, Whitacre Mews, 26-34 Stannary Street, London SE11 4AB Copyright © 2017 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Available ISBN 978-1-4985-0451-5 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 978-1-4985-0452-2 (electronic) ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Dedicated with affection and admiration to Stanley Cavell and to the memory of Chantal Akerman, Abbas Kiarostami, V. F. Perkins, Amos Vogel, and Haskell Wexler

Contents

Foreword: At the Center of Our Age: The Philosophy of Documentary Film Timothy Corrigan

xv

Introduction: Representative Qualities and Questions of Documentary Film David LaRocca

1

PART I: THE MEDIUM, MORALS, AND METAPHYSICS OF DOCUMENTARY FILM

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1 What Photography Calls Thinking: Theoretical Considerations on the Power of the Photographic Basis of Cinema Stanley Cavell

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2 Cinematic Representation and Spatial Realism: Reflections After/Upon André Bazin Noël Carroll

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3 Documentary Traces: Film and the Content of Photographs Gregory Currie

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4 The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Film Distinction Carl Plantinga

113

5 Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary Vivian Sobchack

125

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PART II: STRATEGIES AND STYLES OF DOCUMENTING WITH FILM 6 Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic Tom Gunning 7 Ruminating on the Ideologies of Nature Film Scott MacDonald

157 159 175

8 Jean Rouch’s Ciné-trance and Modes of Experimental Ethnofiction Filmmaking William Rothman

193

9 The Ecstasy of Time Travel in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams William Day

209

10 Habitats of Documentary: Landscapes, Color Fields, and Ecologies in the Avant-Docs of Vincent Grenier Claudia Pederson and Patricia R. Zimmermann

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PART III: DOCUMENTARY THEORIST-FILMMAKERS AT WORK 11 Promises and Contracts Found in the Archive Are Not About the Past: Renewing Civil Alliances—Palestine 1947–48 Ariella Azoulay 12 “See and Remember”: The Golden Days of Said Otruk Diana Allan 13 Intimacy, Modesty, Silence: Documentary Filmmaking in the Face of Trauma Mieke Bal

241 243 251

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14 Provoking the Truth: Applying the Method of Cinéma Vérité287 Bernadette Wegenstein 15 Reinvisioning Dziga Vertov: Ten Enduring Diktats for Documentary Cinema Dan Geva

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16 Whose Strife Is It Anyway? The Erosion of Agency in the Cinematic Production of Kitchen Sink Realism Elan Gamaker

325

Contents

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17 Redefining Documentary Materialism: From Actuality to Virtuality in Víctor Erice’s Dream of Light343 Selmin Kara PART IV: INTERVENTIONS AND RECONSTITUTIONS OF DOCUMENTARY MODES, METHODS, AND MEANINGS

361

18 Four and a Half Film Fallacies Rick Altman

363

19 The Dogma 95 Manifesto Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg

375

20 Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema Werner Herzog

379

21 Omission and Oversight in Close Reading—The Final Moments of Frederick Wiseman’s High School381 V. F. Perkins 22 Cinematic Consciousness: Animal Subjectivity, Activist Rhetoric, and the Problem of Other Minds in Blackfish395 Jennifer L. McMahon 23 Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace: Reflections After Carroll, Currie, and Plantinga Keith Dromm 24 The Big Short: Adam McKay’s Vehicle for Truth Claims K. L. Evans 25 Letter to Errol Morris: Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse Bill Nichols PART V: AUTO/BIOGRAPHY AND THE COMPOSITION OF IDENTITY IN DOCUMENTARY FILM

413 431

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26 “You are Never Alone”: On Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait461 Michael Fried 27 On Patience (After Sebald): Documentary as a True Portrait of Sensibility Garry L. Hagberg

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28 Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films Charles Warren 29 Vérité Fiction, Dramatized Documentary: On Michelle Citron’s Aesthetic Provocations Linda Williams

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30 “Deceiving into the Truth”: The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing517 Karen D. Hoffman 31 A Reality Rescinded: The Transformative Effects of Fraud in I’m Still Here537 David LaRocca Acknowledgments577 Selected Bibliography

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Index605 Contributors621

Foreword: At the Center of Our Age The Philosophy of Documentary Film Timothy Corrigan

In one sense, films have always been about knowledge and ways of thinking, and with their insistent investigation of the chimeras of nonfiction realities, documentary films have, arguably, embodied the most demanding and focused of film practices regarding how we look through and think about the world by means of sounds and images. Since at least the nineteenth century, philosophers have, not surprisingly, debated and puzzled over moving images, while filmmakers and scholars, in their turn, have leaned on philosophers—from Arnheim, Bazin, Cavell, Deleuze, and Eisenstein, all the way to Žižek—to describe and valorize the dense and complex implications of the cinema. At the center of many of these observations and discussions—now receiving new and expert engagements in The Philosophy of Documentary Film—has been the taunting power of cinematic reality, nowhere more concentrated than in the quintessential art of the real, the provocative revelator of truth, documentary cinema. Arguably more than any other film practice, documentaries have been driven by and dismissed by their association with claims to representing the truth of reality. Extending from the nineteenth century and its photographic origins, this web of representational truth is a perhaps (but not necessarily) a long way from cinematic entertainment and pleasure. From the early “actualities” of the 1890s and the Flaherty, Grierson, and Vertov experiments of the 1920s and 1930s through postwar cinéma vérité and reaching into contemporary essay films, mockumentaries, docufictions, and mumblecore, variations on documentary practices have presented a spectrum of truth claims. Addressing this range of potential meanings and valuations in documentaries, philosophical responses to these works have generated vexed arguments about metaphysics, ethics, aesthetics, ethnography, subjectivity, epistemology, ontology, and phenomenology—and how these modes of intellectual inquiry xv

xvi Foreword

can be represented through sounds and moving images. At the center of these vigorously realized works of criticism and passionately argued theories have remained questions of why and how documentaries matter. The Philosophy of Documentary Film emphatically demonstrates why and how. Just as philosophy involves many approaches to and angles on truth and reality, the essays in this collection circulate through film history, criticism, and theory—across a capacious number of film forms, and, most importantly, with a variety of big ideas (both carefully articulating the ideas and offering considered reflections on them). These works in hand are contemporary perspectives on, for me, the most vibrant practice in contemporary cinema. They call us to think carefully and seriously not only about the truth claims and strategies of specific documentary films but also about why documentaries are so central to our age.

Introduction Representative Qualities and Questions of Documentary Film David LaRocca

PROLOGUE: PHILOSOPHY AND THE PROFILMIC Is he or isn’t he? That is to say, is the cameraman on the cover of this book a documentary filmmaker or an actor playing a documentary filmmaker? Fans of Quentin Tarantino’s Jackie Brown (1997) might squint to see a young Max Cherry, and so we have a clue that the actor Robert Forster is behind the Eclaire 16mm camera. But is Forster being photographed while working as a cinematographer—perhaps as part of a parallel career path? Or is he acting as a cinematographer in a film? It will require familiarity with Haskell Wexler’s Medium Cool (1969) to assemble a reply to these questions—and sure enough Robert Forster is playing John Cassellis, a television news cameraman. That easily discovered orientation, however, is upset by the film itself, which blends de rigueur narrative feature filmmaking with (1) preexisting documentary footage (e.g., from U.S. military training camps in Illinois) and, more radically, (2) the intervention of scripted action into a live, non-scripted event, namely the riots that took place at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. (It’s as if Wexler took Jean-Luc Godard’s move in Breathless [À bout de soufflé]—to film fictional characters mingling with the crowds gathered along the Champs-Élysées to wave on Eisenhower and de Gaulle’s procession through Paris—and sustained the gesture beyond a glancing intersection of the fabricated and the everyday to achieve a full, featurelength hybrid. A poster-sized photo of Jean-Paul Belmondo—from the iconic 1960 film—in John Cassellis’ apartment suggests that Wexler is simultaneously aware of his debts to Godard’s strategy and clear about his ambition to employ and expand it.) Wexler’s stunt yields some stunning questions for us to consider about the medium of film: What happens to Wexler’s filmed footage at the point where (or when) two commonly distinguished forms of 1

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filmmaking—namely, narrative and documentary, fiction and nonfiction— occupy the same time and space within the frame? Depending on where one dips in, a discrete piece of celluloid from Medium Cool may contain a through-line of the fictional story we have been following and a bona fide documentation of live events as they play out, unrehearsed, in real time. With Forster/Cassellis in the crowd, we are back to our initial question, once again unresolved—and perhaps endlessly renewed and deferred. Is he or isn’t he? In an unmistakable and yet still mysterious way, the book’s cover image sets out the kinds of philosophical questions we are asking in this volume as we address the philosophical significance and pertinence of documentary cinema (and the broader range of such images that we find in mainstream media, broadcast television, industrial filmmaking, and media art as well as on our personal mobile screens, disseminated in social media sites and on apps, and among the range and quantity of digital video that expands rapidly and exponentially with each passing hour—including the emergence of 3D and virtualreality [VR] technologies as a means for professional and citizen journalism, and innovative, unprecedented narrative techniques). As Bill Nichols has observed: “Most films, as metaphorical statements about the world around them, also possess an inherent ambiguity. Because they say what they mean indirectly, by means of their perspective on and representation of a distinct cinematic world, room for different interpretations, stressing different aspects or qualities of a film, always exists.”1 Documentary films—perhaps in large measure because the claims of truth, verifiability, assertion, and authenticity continually press up against our acknowledgment of the distortions the film medium must include (because of film stock or digital rendering, lenses, mise-en-scène, editing, text, captioning, graphics, animation, sound, music, voice-over, and much else)—are almost uniquely charged with “inherent ambiguity.” Hence the need to investigate what we mean when we say—or refer to—“documentary film.” When we face a new image, that is, an image that is new to us, we are recurrently impelled to sort out its status according to familiar (and often strictly enforced if not clearly defined) binaries: it is real or it is fake; it is a shot from the moment of encounter (e.g., in “real time”) or it is doctored and manipulated (“photoshoped”). But are these and similar splits satisfying? Do these divisions seem accurate? And are they enough to describe the range of images we live with (and create)? What about hybrid forms (the fake that is staged to look real, or the real that is so uncannily caught that it seems fake)? What about inversions and deceptions and a general lack of orientation, information, and perspective—what do we do about our sense and definition of those images?2 What about the distortive effects of mediaas-such—for example, that any image, even if made in earnest, presented as a “witness” account, is still framed, still housed in an intermediary form

Introduction

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(a place between viewer and incident)? What, in short, is our relationship to the profilmic event, that is, the stuff we believe is taking place in front of a camera at the time of its capture on film or digital media?3 The following collection of essays and remarks—written by some of the most incisive, most compelling, and not surprisingly, most influential theorists and thinkers who ever gave thought to the nature of “the documentary” as such (and especially as it relates to what we have come to call “documentary film”)—is presented as a substantial, one might reasonably hope, enduring, set of deeper, more elaborately and elegantly wrought engagements on the brief, rapid-fire list of queries thus far adduced. FILM, AS IF MADE FOR PHILOSOPHY The philosophy of documentary film—as an area of study—seems very much the model of an ancient quandary made new again, namely, when Plato noted (even in his day, 2,500 years ago) that “there is from of old the quarrel between philosophy and poetry.”4 What else, we might say, has cinema become over the last century or so but a form of poetry—visual, sonic, elastic reports projected to the screen and broadcast globally? Today, whether the cinematic image appears on the device in one’s pocket, through a range of differently sized screens, or within the elaborate technologies of 3D IMAX and VR environments, the moving image remains a dominant form for artistic expression and thus a vital factor in cultural life; it also has contributed to, and radically transformed, our conceptions of story, narrative, and the possibilities for meaningful ideational content.5 Plato would say the seventh art is, doubtless, part of the regime of poetic expression and as such is dubious as a resource for truth, or the proper guidance of the (private) soul [psyche] and the (public) city [polis]. What of the quarrel remains then? Though two and a half millennia have elapsed since Plato estimated the “effect of poetic imitation”—that it “waters and fosters these feelings [viz., sex, anger, pains, and pleasures] when what we ought to do is dry them up, and it establishes them as our rulers when we they ought to be ruled”—we are, with streaming video and three-story movie screens, blazing sound and sumptuous visual effects, life-like renderings via computergenerated imagery (CGI) and aerial drone footage—still coming to terms with his assessment that such imitation is at odds with the better ordering of our psyche, and contradictory to its reasoning parts. Perhaps nowhere in the broad expanse of types of film is the old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” more evident—and also more vitally relevant—than in the genre or mode of film known as documentary. Put tersely, the nature of documentary for many theorists involves a debate about what is

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real (or authentic) on film and what is fake (or fabricated); the binary interestingly, if stubbornly, persists. Documentary films present footage that seems to be making an assertion about the kind of representation it is (e.g., as true or as corresponding with the world it purports to show), while fiction films are thought to deviate from this kind of assertion, instead creating, as it were, a world unto themselves; it may seem like our world—indeed, it is likely filmed there! on the very streets we walk upon!—yet it is not, we are told, our world.6 Plato would find this distinction unconvincing. Documentary film is just another form of poetic imitation, in its variety of instances and complexity of fabrication, it is just as much caught up with the limitations—and effects—of mimetic art, including fiction film. What can a philosophy of documentary film do, then, if it takes Plato’s critique and concern to heart? It can first, admit that documentary film is not easily or intuitively defined, and therefore stands in need of careful accounting. But, perhaps as important, it can remind us—as critics and readers—that if, as Stanley Cavell has said, “film was as if made for philosophy,” then one of the ways in which this match seems fortuitous is the degree to which the philosophers may be called in—by the poets and filmmakers—to address the nature of their creations.7 A philosophy of documentary film, then, principally undertakes to offer a commentary on what documentary film thinks it is doing—and achieving; and, more propitiously, given that we stand late in the progression of the creation of and reasoning about documentary film: to venture the articulation of correctives, when necessary, of that project. A philosophy of documentary film, then, is essentially—but also humbly and genuinely—committed to the quarrel between philosophy and poetry, yet not for the sake of “dismissing” poetry from the city, but rather for the constructive aim of helping filmmakers, movie-goers, theorists, and fellow cineastes appreciate what is going on with and in documentary film.8 What are its claims to truth? What kind of truth can it reveal, if any, and how does it go about such illumination? In what ways is “documentary” a smokescreen for understanding the genre’s similarities with fiction film? Is documentary film—or even just the assignation “documentary film”—potentially more manipulative than films that make no such claims to isomorphic representations of the world, our world? These are the kinds of questions the critical philosopher—concerned with film’s challenge to our capacity for reasoning—will want to ask and reply to. And so the quarrel continues, but in a new light, in a temperate mood, full of curiosity, and charged with the anticipation of getting clearer on the terms and conditions that define the contemporary experience of documentary film—and our inheritance of the medium as it evolves into ever more realms of our daily life, in ever more mesmerizing permutations. A philosophy of film (generally speaking) can mean undertaking a Platonic critique of art, principally including what was referred to in pagan antiquity

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as poetry. In this sense, the contemporary philosophers are here to say what film does and does not say (or show), what it achieves and fails to, where it enlightens and where it deceives (and perhaps darkens our claims to clarity). A philosophy of documentary film would then devote steady attention to the genre we familiarly call “documentary,” yet it would also endeavor to assess implications for broader film theoretical concerns; to conduct an inquiry into film as such in its variable epistemological and metaphysical capacities to document reality. Meanwhile, any philosophy of film, again speaking more widely, will therefore act as a clarifier and corrective to the art’s apparent claims for artistic expressiveness and conceptual rigor. Film—like painting and politics—is a medium, an in-between, an interloper, a milieu, a proxy, a visual synecdoche, and therefore it is susceptible to manipulation and distortion.9 The Platonic critique of art (especially in its power to deceive), if preserved for the time being, therefore, will help retain a philosopher’s skepticism about what art can achieve, and therefore will guard philosophy’s role as a mode of criticism in the service of challenging that achievement. But what are we criticizing? As with much philosophical reflection, we could say the familiar habits of how we talk and think about the ways we structure our sense of reality—in this case, the ways we use film, and how we think about what they do for us. Among many points of reference, we might cite the vernacular regard for documentary film as a form of truth-telling. Here, the myth of documentary cinema as objective has been naturalized to such an extent that it is no longer perceptible as a claim, or at least as a debatable and enigmatic proposition. On this naïve what-you-see-is-what-you-get model, a documentary is a window onto a world full of revelatory meaning. Yet are we granted such a “window” in, or by means of, documentary film, or is it a (perhaps perniciously) misleading metaphor? In Film as a Subversive Art, Amos Vogel wrote: “However ‘authentic’ the image, it remains a distortion of life. Not only does it lack depth or density, the space-time continuum, or the non-selectivity of reality, but it emphasizes certain aspects to the exclusion of others by isolating them within a fixed frame in a constantly evolving concatenation of blacks and whites, objects and ground.”10 Cognizant of Plato’s lasting critique of art, Vogel concludes: “It is thus no longer possible for an artist creating within this historical period to portray reality along mimetic lines (art as the imitation of reality) or to view it as a coherent, fully intelligible construct, capable of apprehension through his sense organs and in its documentary aspects, a valid representation of the universe.”11 Vogel’s observation that superannuated understandings of mimesis have given way to some new vision (part of what we are involved in articulating in this volume), was explained, in part, by Walter Benjamin when he said: “For clearly the observable world [Merkwelt] of modern man contains only minimal residues of the magical correspondences and analogies that were familiar to ancient

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peoples. The question is whether we are concerned with the decay of this faculty or with its transformation.”12 Well, which is it? Perhaps both; this binary, at least, may have collapsed upon itself. For though we have likely lost a copious range of “magical correspondences” that animated our antediluvian lives, we still sit in dark rooms watching the flickering light. If we are clued into the fabricated nature of cinema (not tricked by it as if by prestidigitation), then we might ask what kind of analogy with the real (or reality) we want to claim for documentary film. What do we, as viewers, as critics, as creators expect of the medium and its modes of representation? To reply to such a question, it seems we need both philosophy and poetry in tandem in order to capture our fuller, truer experience of human reality. If philosophy aims at truth, its reports, nevertheless, often mislead and thus can seem like lies (not intentionally, just accidentally). Meanwhile, poetry—and by this I mean art, including film—whose power is so inherently dependent on the lie (deception, deflection, decentering) also—and perhaps at times even more reliably than the sincere efforts of philosophy’s agents—yields penetrating, lasting, world-making truths. Plato would not be startled by such reversals, for our contemporary circumstance underwrites the many ways in which we are prone to question the “documentary” for its point of view, in short, its politics, while we are willing to let the vast seas of fiction film wash over us without nearly as much suspicion.13 As with advances in continuity editing that made film reality feel seamless—“erasing the cuts,” which to say, hiding them in plain sight—so fiction film itself has become an aggregation of undigested realities. As documentary films (as well as filmed journalism more broadly) have evolved in terms of technologies and techniques, into well-paced narratives, often full of high-end production values, one can feel a slippage where such nonfiction films are watched as if on par, or in partnership, with fiction features. “[M]anipulation in documentaries is a touchy subject—especially for viewers expecting unvarnished truth,” notes Ben Kenigsberg.14 Meanwhile, Abbas Kiarostami asks aloud about his own tactics as a filmmaker: “Is what I do . . . manipulative? Perhaps, but manipulation isn’t always a bad thing. It has always been a valid way to capture truth on film.”15 Errol Morris, a director made famous, in part, by The Thin Blue Line (1988)—a documentary that employed reenactment as a method, and to such effect that the film led to the exoneration of its incarcerated subject—asks us: “Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief?”16 And Morris concludes, as if paraphrasing Plato: “If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves—because, regardless of what it is—we are likely to uncritically believe it.”17 And yet, for Kiarostami, manipulation leads to truth, and for Morris, the fictions of his documentary (as “an essay on false history”) revealed highly consequential

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truths (viz., an innocent man was set free).18 If the articulation of these definitions and arguments feels ephemeral and mandarin, the stakes of the debate are anything but. More than once, lives are on the line. The scandal of poetry in Plato’s time is replicated and proliferated by film in our own. And the crisis about what a documentary image or film is—how to define it, how to articulate what it does—adds another valence of significance to Stanley Cavell’s claim that “film was as if made for philosophy.”19 “Documentary film,” so-called, makes more prominent and more problematical the attributes about film that so often draw the philosopher’s attention, and it would seem fittingly, her wonder. Among many categories that might be adduced we would surely find: reality, nonreality, and the surreal; fact versus fabrication; depiction as opposed to fiction; live events (filmed in real time) and/or staged events; acting and reenacting; what the medium itself contains (traces? records?) or what its products should be called (documents? works of art?), and so on. Still, Plato’s concern with the “lie” at the heart of poetry may be one of the most durable philosophical concerns about art through the ages. FILM AS LIE AS TRUTH There is no difference between film and documentary film. In short, all film is fiction film. Can we sign up for the validity of this twinned claim? Two prominent issues arise if we pursue this line of thinking: (i) the pejorative description of “manipulation” in documentary cinema becomes instead a euphemism for “creation” or creative expression—a productive intervention; and (ii) if all film is “created”—both in the sense that it is not found, and in the sense that it is not objective—then the truth of film is necessary coextensive with its fabrication. (1) Carl Plantinga’s work is a touchstone for recalibrating our notion of what a documentary film is—and along the way, for diminishing what might be considered our “magical” desire for what we want it to be. For one thing, Plantinga notes that “both fiction and nonfiction films are creative in their manipulation of their materials.”20 Given this shared feature, then, Plantinga suggests that our inherited practice of distinguishing the two kinds of films “stems from conflating the word ‘document’ with the word ‘documentary,’ or confusing a document with a nonfiction film.”21 Sustaining this point, Cavell has also observed that, for some, “the real distinction [to be made] is not between the fictional and the factual within the art of film but between film as art and film as document.”22 As we think of nonfiction film in opposition to a document, antagonisms appear, such as the French word for documentary— reportage—which also curiously alludes to a certain practice of accounting,

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and thus stokes an impression of intimacy between film image and document. But then, who and how is that accounting being conducted? Plantinga, like Noël Carroll, sees intention, assertion, and social context as informing the definition of what we mean by a documentary film—and helping to differentiate, on a clearer criteriological basis, fiction from nonfiction. In other words, how the film is intended to be received by an audience contributes to its status: given these proposed factors, we can identify the “assertive stance” of nonfiction as separable from the “fictive stance” of fiction film.23 “To see a film nonfictionally, then,” according to Plantinga, “is not to see it as a document, but is rather to see it as a communicative artifact which embodies a social contract by which the audience is cued to take its representations as occurring or having occurred in the historical world. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction resides not merely in the mind of the audience or in films, but in the realm of implicit social contracts and conventions.”24 The filmmaker along with her or his culture—not the individual viewer—decide whether a film is fiction or nonfiction. Being a “documentary” is, then, not an essential quality of a film (e.g., an ontological state or set of inherent characteristics) but instead a description of our regard for its standing (or “stance”) in relation to us. Plantinga shifts our focus away from identity to ascription: turning us away from what the film is, and toward what we take it as. One of the reasons that we viewers can experience such pleasure in watching how the aliens (i.e., the Thermians) in Galaxy Quest (1999) treat episodes of the eponymous television show as “historical documents” lies in the effect of their mistaken treatment of fiction films as if they were, in Carroll’s phrase, films of “presumptive assertion,” or in Plantinga’s lexicon, films with an “assertive stance.” The Thermians believed the television show was documenting real exploits, and thus making claims about the real world (their world)—much as we expect from nonfiction films as well as filmed journalism. In the case of Galaxy Quest, we viewers are in on the joke, and it is satisfying to have a laugh at the expense of the Thermians. Trouble is, sometimes the joke is on us. What happens when we watch one or another of Werner Herzog’s documentaries now—years, perhaps decades after their creation? Do we laugh with him about how much he fabricated? Or do we feel stupid for not seeing the tricks and shifts and lies on the first or second screening? Our relationship to Herzog’s documentaries is much the same as the Thermians’ relationship to episodes of Galaxy Quest: we have been treating (largely unbeknownst to us) fiction film as documentary. The errors being made in both contexts—by Thermians and by we humans—usefully clarify Plantinga’s insistence that we make a distinction between documents and documentary films. These are not equal or interchangeable terms. Herzog’s manipulated documentaries are not

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as earnestly presented as “truth” (what he would call the “accountant’s truth”) as say, Ken Burns’ large-scale, high-profile, predominantly public television productions.25 But both Herzog and Burns, regardless of differences—even diametrically opposed strategies—of intention, intervention, and result are not producing documents. And yet, as Plantinga points out, there are works of mixed pedigree—and for these Plantinga’s theory leaves us puzzling. How do we describe or categorize, for example, Dusan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1971) given its gleeful imbrication of varied sorts of filmed materials?26 “It is true,” Plantinga writes, “that some films are hybrids, and for those films we will not be clear about their status as fiction or nonfiction.”27 Ohad Landesman notes that “the emergence of films that blur or simply ignore the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction” confirm “[o]ne of the most striking developments in recent documentary cinema.”28 The lack of clarity native to mixed forms, or hybrids, of course, is alarming—especially after it seemed Plantinga, along with Carroll and others, had sorted the criteria for distinguishing one type of film from another. But an awareness of hybridity itself seems quite grave, since—in a hybrid work—how would we go about distinguishing one “kind” from another? Hybridity is a metaphor that suggests we might tease apart distinct strands, and yet this may not be something we can do; so it may be better—more honest, and more true—to use a trope of contamination, where no quarter is spared, and no such disambiguation of discrete parts is possible.29 Given Plantinga’s admission, then, despite our awareness of a filmmaker’s intention, despite our acknowledgment of the film’s “assertive stance,” despite our appreciation for the cultural context in which the film appears, the film’s hybridity (or contamination) may leave us, in the end, unable to distinguish a fiction film from a nonfiction one. We are back to where we started. As we do in Part III of this volume, let us turn to someone who makes films—and who thinks about how that making informs the meaning of what is produced. Abbas Kiarostami has said: Cinema is nothing but fakery. It never depicts the truth as it actually is. A documentary, as I understand the word, is a film made by someone who doesn’t intrude a single inch into what he is witness to. He merely records. A true documentary doesn’t exist because reality isn’t a sufficient foundation on which to construct an entire film. Filmmaking always involves some element of reinvention. Every story contains some level of fabrication because it bears the imprint of the person who made it. It reflects a point of view. Using a wide camera lens for a swooping twenty-second shot rather than a narrow lens for a static fivesecond shot reflects the filmmaker’s biases. Colour or monochrome? Sound or silent? These decisions require that the filmmaker interfere in the process of representation.30

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Kiarostami’s idea that a “true documentary doesn’t exist” is not meant as a contrast to a “fake documentary” (such as a mockumentary, a pseudodocumentary, or a metadocumentary), but as an expansive dismissal of what might be unconsciously taken to be the passivity of the lens; the neutrality of the film stock or means of digital recording, of editing, and other forms of authorial creation and artistic intervention. Even a fixed surveillance camera shoots from a specific point of view and is shaped by resolution, color, focus, light, and other factors. For Kiarostami, the sheer fact of intrusion or interference (what we think of as the work of the artist) dissolves any criteriological boundary between fiction and nonfiction film. (2) Kiarostami’s summative assessment invites a paradox, for as surely as he says that “Cinema is nothing but fakery” and “everything [in cinema] is lies, nothing is real,” he also is sure to emphasize that “it all suggests the truth.”31 The notion that documentary has (anything) to do with truth—perhaps even that its (primary) business is the conveyance of truth—is not new, and neither is the idea that lies might be the best, most effective way to tell the truth. Arguably the founding figure of documentary cinema, Robert Flaherty, said, “[s]ometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.”32 Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) is a familiar touchstone on this and related points, since the director staged the very people whose lives he aimed to “document”; among other interpositions, he encouraged them to reclaim practices and behaviors that were no longer a part of daily life.33 “One often has to distort a thing,” Flaherty notes, “to catch its true spirit.”34 After World War II, Jean Rouch transformed Flaherty’s practices and ideologies to pursue ethnographic filmmaking in Africa and also in his native France; in the latter case, for example, in Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961), Rouch and codirector, Edgar Morin, interview nonactors, then screen those filmed scenes for the nonactors, and subsequently film their reactions to what they have seen. Questions arise: Are these nonactors acting? Does such acting on the part of nonactors prove a “phony naturalness” or does it reveal genuine truths? Are the participants “hams” or “exhibitionists” or something else altogether? Can anyone articulate the relationship between the fake and the true? For Rouch, sustaining Flaherty’s sentiment, “Fiction is the only way to penetrate reality.”35 As a filmmaker liberated by new portable technologies—including synchronized sound—Rouch’s camera was not a fixed observer, but a participant. For Rouch, “The camera assumes an entirely new function: no longer simply a recording device, it becomes a provocateur, a stimulant, precipitating situations, conflicts, expeditions that would otherwise never have taken place.”36 Playfully, we could say Rouch is a kind of Heisenbergian theory of documentary film: the mere presence of the camera changes the way other “objects” behave. Given his preoccupation with “cine provocations,” it is not

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surprising that Rouch is credited with innovating the term—and the practice—of “cinéma vérité.”37 Yet “cinema truth” is not a quick or equivalent translation of Dziga Vertov’s “kino pravda,” but instead a declaration for the intervention of the camera with what it is used to film, and an invitation to interactivity with those subjects and scenes of encounter. Though the names may confuse, it is, in fact the school of “direct cinema” that is more fittingly defined as “observational” in nature, a cinema of distance from the object— of looking, of witnessing.38 There are many lines of similarity between the aesthetics and ethics of cinéma vérité and direct cinema—for example, as practiced by Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers, Albert and David—but Rouch, more than these contemporaries, advocated a stridently interventionist approach to filming his subjects. In fact, Rouch pushed past ethnography as it was known (with its entrenched aspiration to merely record what others were doing, as if on their own—and thus, uncontaminated by foreign or outside influence) and into something more justifiably, and thus satisfactorily, named ethnofiction. For Rouch, as with Kiarostami later on, the filmmaker’s interference (at the scene) was essential to the provocation of truth (on the screen). The tradition of displacing authorial (or directorial) intentions, and highlighting the social and interactive nature of documentary filmmaking, appears echoed—if also transformed—in the Dogma 95 movement instigated by Thomas Vinterberg and the endlessly provocative and controversial Lars von Trier.39 The ethics and politics of cinema come to light anew with team Dogma (Trier points out that “it is no accident that the phrase ‘avant-garde’ has military connotations”), since it has as its target “the individual film [which] will be decadent by definition! Dogma 95 counters the individual film. . . . To Dogma 95 cinema is not individual.”40 As revolutionary as the movement may sound, especially as it aims to displace the “personal taste” of the director (indeed, officially-sanctioned Dogma 95 films are not allowed to credit a director), the “supreme goal” of the mission “is to force the truth out of my characters and settings.”41 While it is laudable that Dogma 95 seeks to challenge the cult of the auteur—inviting us to reconsider any latent faith in the (individual) authorship of films—the pursuit of truth by other means (collective, technological, etc.) remains under-theorized. Since the talented founders and acolytes of Dogma 95 so thoroughly invest their mission with qualities and credentials familiar to (almost any) documentary filmmaker (e.g., shooting on location, using a handheld camera, and no ADR), we are prompted, once again, to reflect and reassess the truth or truths we want and can expect from film. Our motivation to think further through the issues raised above in (1) and (2) is continually stoked by the appearance of new works of nonfiction film, especially those that alter norms or adopt new techniques. Among many promising

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and provocative examples, we could note how Lucien Castaing-Taylor does not sign his film collaboration, Sweetgrass (2009), with the customary “director” or “directed by,” but instead “recorded by.” The decision makes a subtle comment on the way we understand and frame what it is documentarists do: Are they, after the French name for director, a kind of réalisateur, or rather an agent of a different sort? Agency and direction come in for reconsideration in Victoria (2015), since the film comprised a single 138-minute take captured by cinematographer Sturla Brandth Grøvlen. Moreover, since we know precisely where and when it was shot—in Berlin on April 17, 2014, between 4:30 am and 7:00 am—we cannot forestall the urge to see the film as a documentary. Knowing, however, that the events captured are not in fact of the sort that Grøvlen has happened upon (as if haunting a group of amateur bandits with a camera-in-wait), there is good reason to take up the film as something like a “documentary of fiction,” and find ourselves—with high-end digital video equipment in hand—returned to the practices of early cinema where live theater was caught by celluloid (albeit without sound). In Amy (2015), a documentary in which sound is paramount, director Asif Kapadia dispenses with the ubiquitous, seemingly ineluctable, use of “talking heads,” leaving us only with the voices of commentators. While the viewer is focused on the true subject of the film, Amy Winehouse, commentary is identified by on-screen lower-thirds and motion graphics (as are many of her song lyrics) but we never see who speaks. Kapadia’s innovation comes in the form of an absence or an evisceration of a norm that felt essential, especially to biographically oriented nonfiction films. He seems to import a tradition from nature documentaries where the likes of David Attenborough speak from a disembodied position, joining the company of the viewer as an understated expert and convivial accomplice—and in those roles offer orientation to the subject at hand. These contemporary examples of directorial ascription (or its lack), implications of the one-take movie on the fiction/nonfiction divide, and varied techniques of using sound, are pre-dated by issues such as the relationship between realism and propaganda. Indeed, many documentaries (and “newsreels”) made during the 1930s and 1940s give credence to the claim that one person’s realism is another person’s propaganda, for one’s commitment to the truth claims of Frank Capra’s Why We Fight (1942–45) or Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935) will likely depend on one’s political allegiances and opinions about nationalism, race, and religion. After World War II, the problem did not dissipate; instead, beginning in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the realism/propaganda tension seemed to become part of the very fabric of filmmaking. As Erik Barnouw observed, “Several trends emerged as the smoke of battle cleared. One was toward documentarylike fiction. The widespread ruins of war helped set this trend in motion:

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they served as invitation to reconstruct the war experience and at the same time to mythologize it.”42 One does not, then, have to look far for why many Italian films of the immediate postwar period are referred to as “neorealism.” “While they showed the influence of war documentaries,” Barnouw says— including the “rubble films” of Germany—“they were really a step back into the latitudes of fiction.”43 In the shifting definitions and relative prestige of “documentary” films across time, we find, for example, that the high accord given to such films during wartime was transferred to the fiction creations made after the war by directors such as Roberto Rossellini and Vittorio De Sica (Italy), René Clément (France), Wolfgang Staudte (Germany), and Fred Zinnemann (Switzerland). Shot mostly on location, and in many cases on the former sites of real battles, the sheen of the documentary film so familiar to wartime audiences was naturally grafted onto or into the fictional works. Indeed, theorist (and neorealist apologist), Cesare Zavattini, contended that “reality is hugely rich,” and that by means of a neorealist approach to it, viewers would have a view of “real things, exactly as they are.”44 Films shot in America, however immune the country was to the physical destruction of war (save Pearl Harbor), also capitalized on this impression (or contention) of realism. As Barnouw points out: “On the Waterfront (1954), directed by Elia Kazan and shot in New York locations by Boris Kaufman, was also referred to as a ‘documentary.’”45 One is tempted, at least at the present moment, to add an exclamation point to the previous sentence for the documentary credentials of the film—so far as we understand the term today—seem decidedly remote; perhaps we should consult the theorists of “ubiquitous nonfiction” to parse the claim (see below). De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948) is a standard bearer for “neorealism,” and yet it takes advantage of preexisting industrial models of fiction filmmaking, among them casting choices (even if among nonactors), melodramatic flourishes (not least the swooning music), and plot shifts and patterns that bespeak anything but “realism,” new or not. We might do better, then, to table the “realist” credentials of De Sica’s film, and instead focus on its artful and effective transformation of found spaces for the purposes of achieving highly affective (and effective) melodrama. In the case of Bicycle Thieves, the purported authenticity of locations allows De Sica to manipulate these documentary elements to serve the shape and feeling of his fiction film. Drawing truth claims from the authenticity of objects or places, as De Sica did, is one among several contested approaches to achieving realism—or resisting that realization. Along these latter lines, consider any number of films by Chantal Akerman—but especially Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which, to be sure, relies heavily on its location, but more than that presents a rethinking of the meaning of filming in real time. Unlike one-take wonders such as Russian Ark (2002) and

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Victoria, which use the “running film”—a useful double entendre for live capture and the traveling camera—as an implied, almost material strategy for conjuring a narrative frame, Akerman’s long takes antagonize that linearity.46 Perhaps even more evident in The Room (Le Chambre, 1972) and News from Home (1976), Akerman’s stationary camera, set on axis, turns her long takes into something more akin to a tableau—but with a twist: as if she were framing a still life, yet coaxing it out of stasis through the animated movements of people. We are given an invitation to the exceptional power of looking (not its banal everydayness)—and in that studied attention, we can feel ourselves as voyeurs, as judges, as present to the scene (yet in a mode of absence from it), and perhaps most importantly, as aware of temporality (on both sides of the screen). Moreover, Akerman’s work, across a range of instances—from documentary to narrative fiction—reconceives the suturing effects of classicalstyle continuity editing (with its familiar cutting, selection of shots, points of view, transitions, complementary use of music, etc.); if we are caught up with Akerman’s long takes in real time, it seems more a function of our reality (our capacity to attend to the film[ed] event), than to the tactics of filmmaking that would hand it over, or for that matter, hide it from us. For Akerman’s capacity to linger—to let the camera role, as it were—her work, in Jeanne Dielman and elsewhere, encodes undeniable documentary effects: a sense of directness or immediacy with what lay within the frame, even if, at the same time, the duration of such shots (the very attribute that registered their achievement as intimate), may prove alienating—as if such availability was not an admission of truth but another Brechtian trick to remind the viewer of the film’s artifice (and perhaps his or her own). In Jeanne Dielman, Akerman does not intend to create a documentary, but, in some sense, as those who argue for “ubiquitous nonfiction,” her directorial method invites this impression. And yet, Akerman—in her final appearance on film, in a documentary about her and her work—at once unsettles and clarifies the matter, when she tersely declares, “As soon as you frame, it is fiction.”47 Contemporaneous with De Sica and Italian neorealism, and decades before Akerman, we find Alfred Hitchcock in Rope (1948) using just a dozen or so long takes—some of them up to ten minutes in duration—to comprise the entire film; importantly, though, unlike De Sica, et al., Hitchcock’s film is decidedly bound to the stage set. Decades after Akerman’s indelible early work (though not neglecting the achievements populating her entire corpus), Sofia Coppola cited her Jeanne Dielman as an inspiration for shooting in real time when making Somewhere (2010), and Akerman’s The Meetings of Anna (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, 1978) was a touchstone for Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003).48 We may even pause to wonder what a feature director, such as Coppola, is appealing to in this notion of “real time”: Does she mean

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to imply that the minute-to-minute parallel between the live event and the filmed event somehow transfers reality to the screen? As if shooting in real time was, in fact, a way to circumvent the mediations of the medium? Replies will illuminate our own presumptions on this matter. Traveling through cinema history a bit—from De Sica to Hitchcock to Akerman to Coppola—it is perhaps easier to the glean the ways in which the production of fiction filmmaking can mobilize the techniques familiar to documentary filmmaking, and yet still, resolutely, remain defined by its status as a fabrication. In short, turning the camera on and letting it role is not enough to grant us truth. But then, if De Sica, et al. are operating the camera, we may prefer instead the truths afforded by fiction. These illustrations should then confirm the extent to which the practices and definitions of documentary film appear engagingly, but also endlessly contested—at once inherited and reworked—perhaps especially so when we see striking reversals. Postwar film documentarians, by and large, abandoned the use of “scripted scenes using actors,” and, as Barnouw observed, “foreswore such reconstructions, which were felt to belong to historical fiction.”49 At present, among representative examples of the opposite trend, we find two-time Academy Award-nominated director Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing (2012) and the quieter, but somehow more devastating, The Look of Silence (2014), in which perpetrators of genocide are invited to (figuratively, fictionally) act out and reenact past events recollected from personal memory.50 Oppenheimer’s methodology could be described as a twenty-first century version or revision of Rouch: metaethnofiction. If one of the hallmarks of such a concept is self-consciousness—on the part of the one holding the camera and the ones being filmed—then metaethnofiction may be a brush to a paint a wider swath of contemporary filmmaking. Indeed, filmmaking has become so seamless in everyday twentyfirst century life—from the streaming video via Skype or FaceTime to the movie production capacities nearly everyone carries in his or her pocket— that any person with a camera-enabled phone (or body-camera or GoPro) is potentially, or more likely inadvertently, a documentary filmmaker or citizen journalist. There’s even synchronized sound! In an age whose moving pictures are defined by the accessibility to and ubiquity of YouTube—and the myriad websites devoted to still images and moving ones, including Instagram, Vimeo, and Vine—we all, by mere virtue of acquiring a “smartphone” (or similar digital video capturing device) are positioned to create and meditate on the meaning of the moving images we create. Yet, the “smartness” of the phone does not protect against our own (in)capacities to read its created images: cognitive perception and cultural prejudice inform our interpretations—and can be wrong, sometimes grossly.51 Still, even with the caveat about the need for savvy interpretations, the proximity, immediacy,

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and relatively low cost of operation and “production” makes the video phone an uncanny tool for documentary ethics, action, and declaration. Where once Erik Barnouw saw fit to distinguish the documentarian by a signature trait that would define him or her as creator, but also signal a certain place in time and space, now a single person equipped with a single smartphone might make dibs on any one or more of these evocative titles: prophet, explorer, reporter, painter, advocate, bugler, prosecutor, poet, chronicler, promoter, observer, catalyst, and guerrilla.52 Increasingly, the possession of a movie camera in one’s pocket—again, remarkably, including sound—has proved decisive in shifting cultural and political discourse from the streets of Los Angeles in the mid-90s to Cairo during the Arab Spring to Staten Island, Ferguson, Baltimore, Orlando, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Istanbul, Bangladesh, and Syria in the twenty-teens. In a place such as Palmyra, the losses are not human, but humanity’s patrimony—the irreplaceable artifacts of antiquity that are video-captured as they are being blown to oblivion. Being a witness-by-way-of-impromptu video capture has become an increasingly prominent instigator of social upheaval and transformation (for good and ill); a video-enabled mobile phone has become a potential instrument not merely of documentation, but of social awareness and perhaps social justice.53 The resemblances between gun and camera have been noted before (especially in the context of war), but there is—in the technology of portable, personal live broadcast—something uncanny about the competition between the two types of “shooting,” especially the way the camera-phone is unmooring the familiar habits and authority of historical, broadcast journalistic mediation.54 While such pieces of video documentation may be used for evidence of systemic injustice, we see also occasions when videos are used to punctuate shocking moments of graphic violence—such as the Islamic State’s video telegrams of on-screen executions, which as a collection might comprise a (documentary) subgenre of their own (jihadist snuff films). Partly owing to the shocking content of the films, a shock sufficiently severe that it may encourage disbelief in the truth of its images, one hears from media outlets that the videos must be “authenticated.” Such vetting and validation— that such events did, in fact, occur—only heightens their affective power. And yet, the ubiquitous presence of the camera-phone-movie-studio need not always have such pronounced historical effects; they can as easily be proximate, personal, and private. When I film my young daughters with my iPhone and they immediately ask to see the footage—proving that the old rhythms of film development and screening dailies are compressed to the duration of the microsecond— I am forced to give them a good reason not to watch it. Are we recording this moment because it is interesting, or of some value? Or are we interested in

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this moment primarily because it was recorded (regardless of the interest or value of the content we captured)? Even at this very intimate and everyday level—to say nothing of the professional study of documentary film (of which this volume aims to contribute)—we are drawn into a difficult and demanding controversy that calls out for articulation and clarification. Still, while we labor to make these articulations and clarifications, we can take note of the abundant and varied effects these tools are having on consciousness, ideology, and both private memory and public memory (usually just called history). Today, with Werner Herzog’s hectoring skepticism at hand—he has famously declared “there is no truth in cinéma vérité”—we encounter a veritable figure of (and maxim for) postmodern thinking, including the erosion of any faith in realism and by extension, in the intuition that documentary film is, in a word, authentic (or, again, drawing from journalism’s regular pronouncement that such media can be “authenticated”).55 What are the epistemic presuppositions that make this kind of deliberation possible—and necessary? If the footage is authenticated, for example, does that aid our reflections on what we understand to be an authentic documentary film? Realism’s boast was its potential (or achievement?) of showing “life as it really is,” much as John Cage wanted to “allow sounds to speak for themselves.”56 For Vertov, as Vlada Petric notes, film was meant to offer “an outstanding cinematic transposition of ‘life-facts,’” and so each shot was thought to disclose “Life-As-It-Is [zhizn’ kakaia ona est’].”57 With realism, the medium was, it seems, meant to evaporate. Meanwhile, and in tandem, documentary’s objective, according to Susan Hayward, was centered around “two major axes: first, that of the truth, and second, that of who is the speaking subject, that is, who is the purveyor of this truth—the filmed subject, or the filmmaker, or both?”58 Viewers of Herzog’s films, in part because of his unvarnished willingness to interfere with the sober and sincere ethics of the documentary tradition (perhaps needing its pretensions and humorlessness challenged), have become very savvy about the constructed nature of the cinematic arts, even and especially the documentary—an art, we should say, that so often pushes beyond “mere representation” to advocacy and propaganda. When one adds Herzog’s regular use of fabrication and fabulation, or Errol Morris’s reenactments, or Michael Moore’s chronological reshuffling of scenes, a viewer quickly becomes enmeshed in the complicated—and complicating— powers of the form.59 Herzog’s counteroffer to truth (what he disparagingly calls the “accountant’s truth”) arrives with a Teutonic inflection summoning the misty mountaintops of the Bavarian Alps as “ecstatic truth.”60 Yet, for all of Herzog’s awareness of film’s subliming and poetizing potential—and for the just-made association of his approach with the so-called postmodern—the raw nerve

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of his point can be found very early on in documentary film practice, for example, when in 1935, at the height of the Great Depression, amid the prevalence of newsreels, The March of Time series was inaugurated, and set forth to proudly antagonize the status quo with its combination of “actuality sequences” and “freewheeling dramatizations.”61 The sponsor of these provocations was none other than Henry Luce, who declared, defensively, that the films were “fakery in allegiance to the truth.”62 Rouch and Kiarostami might have said the same—and in so many words, they have. Meanwhile, duplicity can be used for nefarious purposes, as when Nazi filmmaker Fritz Hippler was assigned by Joseph Goebbels—out of his oxymoronically named Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda—to create a documentary about the Jewish people “in their natural state”: the result, The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude, 1940), not only used footage from the heavily bombed Warsaw ghettoes as evidence for the delinquency and mendacity of the race (with narration fortified by condescension and bombast, and replete with lies and fallacies), but also deployed clips from fiction films to serve as illustrations and proof.63 Despite the use of fiction material, the mandate of the film was still to “produce an anti-Semitic ‘documentary.’”64 Still, though Hippler’s was an invidious use, the practice of using fiction footage as part of a documentary can be found in John Grierson’s Conquest (1930); and when Esfir Shub created the documentary Spain (Ispaniya, 1939), she included material from Lewis Milestone’s All Quiet on the Western Front (1930).65 If we flatter ourselves with being more attentive viewers now (perhaps at an advantage in our film literacy by virtue of the quantity and variety of works we have access to), and thus can more easily spot the interventions of fictional elements in the flow of documentary works, we should still dwell on the peculiar claims at issue in this practice of using fiction to substantiate our grasp of reality and truth. Not incidentally, the water flows in the other direction as well: it is, by now, a common (and for that reason, seemingly sanctioned) practice to use documentary images to lend credence to works of fiction—to subsidize fiction with fragments of facts.66 Because cameras were on battlefields as soon as the technology allowed, a massive quantity of bona fide footage from the front is regularly deployed in fiction films; the practice was especially widespread in the 1940s as the machines of war and of Hollywood churned in parallel, and at times overlapped. We also catch a variation on this theme in the way mock news footage has become increasingly prevalent since, at least Samuel Fuller’s The Big Red One (1980). The emerging, arguably established, convention of beginning war films or their correlates—postapocalyptic/dystopia films—with a “helter-skelter montage of dire news reports informing us that humanity has been nearly decimated” reveals the trick of turning authenticlooking footage against us as viewers (of course, “against us” because for our entertainment).67

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This counter-technique of presenting (1) genuine broadcast journalism footage; (2) ersatz documentary footage; or (3) a peculiar hybrid: genuine broadcast journalists acting in fake documentaries can be easily glimpsed in recent variations of war films, especially in the opening sequences of District 9 (2009), Red Dawn (2012), World War Z (2013), and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014).68 Narratively these documentary interventions achieve not only a thrilling jolt to the audience (by heightening the switch from everything-isokay to full-out panic and catastrophe), but they also cover a huge amount of backstory in a few minutes of rapid-fire, jump-cut editing. The technique is not reserved solely for big-budget rehearsals of destruction and loss, since we find an erstwhile “newsreel” at the front of William Wyler’s morsel of a midcentury fairy tale, Roman Holiday (1953); an instinct for “establishing shots” that tether a fictitious story to an empirical location—such as in the opening shots of John Huston’s Maltese Falcon (1941); and still earlier, glimpses of this approach emerging when William Wellman steps off the sound-stage in A Star is Born (1937)—that is, when his confection of Hollywood dreams finds some reality in the “metropolis of make-believe.”69 The use of authentic documentary footage can serve yet another purpose in dramatic fiction films. In Downfall (Der Untergang, 2004), a fully fabricated fictional film about Hitler’s final days is framed—bookended—by documentary footage of an interview with Traudl Junge, his former secretary; a real person, as it were, authorizes avant la lettre the fictitious narrative and its dramatic (re)presentation. After proceeding entirely as a staged photoplay, The Last King of Scotland (2006) concludes with documentary footage of Idi Amin. In The Iron Lady (2011), documentary footage of the historical Margaret Thatcher is intercut within the fictional narrative featuring Meryl Streep-as-Thatcher, as if introducing a bit of legerdemain to help us mistake the one figure for the other. It might not be lost on us that these three random examples involve political leaders of renown and/or ignominy. It would seem that the reality of their exploits, for good or ill, as depicted as acting performances on film is somehow bolstered by the use of “historical documents” (such as found footage). Taken together, the “fiction film in documentaries” approach and the “documentary footage in fiction films” approach signal that we still, despite slippery, often misleading definitions, retain a faith in the difference between fiction and nonfiction. Filmmakers, it seems, are prone to capitalize on this difference—and our steadfast allegiances to the meanings of the difference—whenever they trade back and forth. Yet, even with the suggestion that such faith abides, we recognize a general habit in which fiction courts its affiliation with the truth (e.g., “inspired by true events”), while nonfiction fights fraud; both forms, then—or even film as such—seem aggressively oriented to the truth as a bid for legitimation. Plato’s admonition about the dangers of mimesis—of poiesis—returns to our scene with refreshed significance.

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If the sober examples of documentary footage in films about world leaders (Downfall, et al.) suggest something about our trust in—and need for—historical materiality as a way of legitimating reality, memory, and, yes, history, we should not be distracted from the fact that the purported split between fiction and nonfiction creates a frisson that may simply be entertaining. In Zelig (1983), Woody Allen—in this case, writer, director, and star—imposes himself in the form of his character, Leonard Zelig, into the newsreels of the 1920s, in effect fictionalizing the historical record. Here (the real) Saul Bellow, Susan Sontag, and Irving Howe reflect on Zelig’s (fictitious) participation in (fabricated) events said to have occurred some half-century earlier; again, the use of actual personages—such as Bellow, Sontag, and Howe—marks a further summons to believe in the (reality of the) eponymous character’s exploits. A decade later, Forrest Gump (1994) has its title character doing much the same—interacting on screen, in the same frame, with John F. Kennedy and Elvis Presley and John Lennon. In yet another permutation, in The Trip (2010) and The Trip to Italy (2014), we find Steve Coogan playing “Steve Coogan” and Rob Brydon playing “Rob Brydon,” and much of our pleasure derives from the self-lampooning that comes from an awareness of both “sides” of these people. An even more ingrown example can be found in Adaptation (2002) for which screenwriter Charlie Kaufman “writes himself into” the film as the character “Charlie Kaufman,” who is a screenwriter.70 Kaufman’s film is offered up as a cinematic ouroboros. In still another version of such exercises, In a World . . . (2013) begins by weaving newly shot footage (of the film’s actors playing their characters) coupled with footage of nonactors being interviewed (in a mode of straight documentation familiar from broadcast journalism). The result? The television interviews with nonactors lend authenticity to the staged or faked “documentary” of the actors-as-characters. To end with a more cerebral and celebrated instance, consider how, in Sans Soleil (1983), Chris Marker transforms ethnographic filmmaking into an epistolary/essayistic sci-fi montage meditation on time and memory drawing from images made in Japan, Guinea Bissau, and Iceland as well as from Hitchcock’s Vertigo—and interspersing all of this material with digital effects and electronic music. In this sketch of variations on a theme, we may catch a glimpse of the ways filmmakers have capitalized, often to great artistic and intellectual effect, on the tension inherent in our perception of the documentary image—perhaps especially our lack of confidence in what we understand it to be, or do, or mean. Even when a fiction film dispenses with the imposition of documentary footage (the sort of material one is tempted to call, in this context, a kind of relic), we regularly find early intertitles that make beseeching declarations such as “inspired by true events” or “based on a true story.” When the film’s creator disseminates these insistent slivers of metacommentary how are viewers

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supposed to react? One conjecture: the statement is nothing short of the casting of a spell—if we tell you this, or something “a lot like this” happened, you can access new reserves of trust, and by extension, pathos. A declaration that truth and reality are nearer-than-not to the film representations to come could be said to activate otherwise unrealized melodramatic force. Remember, it is only very late—indeed, functioning like something of a bookend to the opening state of proximity to truth—that we lingerers-among-the-scrolling-credits read the fine print: “The story, all names, characters, and incidents portrayed in this production are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, buildings, and products is intended or should be inferred.” The origins of this boiler-plate “disclaimer” go back to 1932, when Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was sued for libel—and lost. Fiction filmmakers giveth the truth and then they taketh it away. Whether it is Rasputin and the Empress (1932), the film that got MGM into trouble, or more recent fair, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty (2012), fiction films variously state or insinuate that truth is in the film—that it is part of its composition. But then viewers, critics, journalists, and historians are left to suss out what of this composition is true or mostly true (and, more perspicuously, what is false). But then none of the questions about how much truth is “in” a film can be clearly made, and therefore none could be clearly answered. Verification would require something like a correspondence check between reality (do we yet know what we mean by this term?) and the movie. This appeal to truth may seem bankrupt, but it inadvertently reveals that there is another way to approach the claim “based on a true story”—namely, by emphasizing not truth but the idea of something being based on truth. With this emphasis in hand, the appeal is to fiction through and through, ever and always (and isn’t this precisely what that disclaimer is assuring us of?). At the other end of the film, namely, at its beginning, the point of “based on a true story” is not to say: you will see the truth in this film, but that we (the creators) have used found elements (facts, truths, empirical data, historical materials) in order to fabricate the conditions for fiction. In this light, “based on a true story” is a euphemism for “fiction that now and again may invoke referents from the scope of empirical history, while duly noting that none of those invocations are part of historical truth.” Broadly drawn, then, we can identify the mood of the skeptic (with regard to cinematic truth or veridical filmic assertion), and, in opposition, the stance of the realist (or objectivist).71 For the former, as Michael Renov has written, we find a willing admission that the documentary film, like other texts, is subject to “contingency, hybridity, knowledge as situated and particular, identity as ascribed and performed.”72 Renov reminds us—borrowing a line from Hayden White—that “all discourse constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically and to analyze objectively.”73 Here

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Noël Carroll parses White’s insight and its relevance to the created nature of documentary film: The narrative structure in the historical recounting is not true or false; it is fictional. It is imposed on events by the historian and . . . it is thought to distort, presumably necessarily. Thus no historical narrative can pretend to accuracy or objectivity because in virtue of its possession of a narrative structure, it is both fictive and distortive. It merely pretends to refer objectively to the eventstructures that plot structures appear to depict, because those event-structures are in fact the fabrications of narration. . . . That which plot-structures seem to portray has no independent historical existence outside of narrative discourse.74

To make this somewhat more concrete: where an actor in a feature fiction film may be described as a (true) pretender—someone we are meant to believe is playing a part, inhabiting a role—the subject in a documentary film might be called a (false) pretender: someone we are meant to believe is herself, when in fact, she is, at last, playing a part within the “fabrications of narration.” The documentary subject, like the Hollywood actor, may be described as a character. Documentary truth would then seem to be just another staged event (and participating in a “discourse”). Furthermore, such effects, of course, can easily go beyond the actor, her lines, and the film locations, and appear in editing, ordering/chronology/plotting (syuzhet), production design, titles, captions, scores and sound tracks, special effects, CGI, graphics, marketing, distribution, exhibition, and much else.75 Among those who defend the idea of objectivity in documentary film, we find Carroll, who claims that so long as a work embodies the creator’s commitment to “the practice of reasoning and evidence gathering,” and so long as the work “can be intersubjectively evaluated against standards or argument and evidence shared by practitioners,” then it may be deemed objective.76 Plantinga contends (and clarifies) that we may be better served by seeing how “Carroll’s understanding of objectivity pertains more to justification than to truth.”77 Consequently, Carroll’s defense of objectivity, according to Plantinga, “leaves the status of the objective documentary vis-à-vis reality undetermined.”78 Because philosophical theories, like so much else, so often appear at opposite extremes, in contentious binaries and dichotomies, we should also note Brian Winston’s rejection of documentary-as-objective. “Surely Winston is right,” notes Plantinga, “that if one defines an objective documentary as one that lacks any subjective or mediating element, then there are no objective documentaries.”79 Here the philosopher-theorist (Winston, Plantinga) and the theorist-filmmaker (Kiarostami) line up in agreement. While Winston has insisted on a classificatory bifurcation—dividing subjective from objective documentary, in fact, dismissing altogether the legitimacy of objective

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documentary—Plantinga, again in a role of mediator, has suggested that “while no documentary film reaches the objective ideal of absolute realism, we might nonetheless find one documentary more objective than another.”80 Plantinga, then, is suggesting a gradal approach, rather than a sortal one. Thus, while Winston “holds that the entire project of documentary films can be questioned,” Plantinga proposes, with more circumspection, that the qualities of documentary films—especially in relation to issues of truth and realism—may be better served by an emphasis on degree instead of kind. TOWARD A SCHEMA OF THE TERM “DOCUMENTARY FILM” (TYPES, TAXONOMIES, AND TELL-TALE SIGNS) Reference to a film genre—say, Western or musical, film noir or political thriller—does not usually, or naturally, invite consideration of the film medium; there are exceptions, to be sure: Singin’ in the Rain (1952) comes to mind as exemplary in this regard. But the generic diminution (dismissal or denial) of the medium is not the case with the genre we call “documentary film,” where its doubleness—as a genre and as a medium—are apparent, if not always promoted, in every frame. Unlike genre films that invite immersion into them, the documentary (even if it isn’t meant to be an agitation) is constitutionally suited to self-consciousness. As viewers, we are aware of the film—and its creators—as making certain kinds of (assertive) claims, and so though we may become caught up in the film-as-story (because it may successfully deploy the same kinds of immersive techniques familiar to film-asentertainment), its characteristics as a medium are endlessly on trial. Where we are familiar with other titles in the Philosophy of Popular Culture series, for example, in which a director’s work comes into focus (e.g., The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman), or an established, enduring, but also evolving genre (e.g., The Philosophy of War Films), here Documentary Film as a title or phrase, then, is not redundant but illuminative of two functions: (1) to provoke our thinking about the conventions and claims that define a genre (especially insofar as those traits are static and dynamic), and (2) to stimulate our consideration of the way the materiality and construction of film contributes to our capacity to represent our ideas (what is in/on the film) and to reflect on them (what is in us, as viewers, as inheritors of these works). These two functions seem to lie at the heart of any philosophy of documentary film. As a genre and a medium (two-in-one) its philosophical credentials appear at once to be assured and also to call out for critical attention. If this description of documentary film “as genre and medium” provides an initial context for distinguishing it from other kinds of genres and media, we find other approaches to typing and taxonomy in foundational work by

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Erik Barnouw, Patricia Aufderheide, and Bill Nichols. For example, Barnouw gives us names to describe the temperament and style of documentarians: explorer, reporter, advocate, observer, et al. (the full list noted just above).81 Aufderheide proposes six “subgenres”: public affairs, government propaganda, advocacy, historical, ethnographic, and nature.82 Nichols schematizes “Six Modes of Documentary Film”—(1) Expository (Why We Fight, Frank Capra and Anatole Litvak, 1943–45); (2) Poetic (Werner Herzog’s Wodaabe, 1989 and Lessons of Darkness, 1992); (3) Observational (“sometimes referred to as direct cinema,” and represented by the work of Frederick Wiseman, Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and Albert and David Maysles); (4) Participatory—“sometimes referred to as interactive documentary or cinéma vérité” and illustrated by the films of Jean Rouch (Chronicle of a Summer, 1961) and Claude Lanzmann (Shoah, 1985); (5) Reflexive (The Man with the Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929); and (6) Performative—emphasizing the “affective dimension [of] lived experience,” for example, Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1955); The Gleaners and I (Agnès Varda, 2000).83 Because of what has been said about the interaction between genre and medium, Nichols’ account of the defining traits of the Reflexive film, however, seems to be a fitting and useful general statement for all documentary film: “Like meta-communicative statements, it draws attention to the type of film a documentary is. It makes the viewer aware of the conventions, the expectations and assumptions that usually go unspoken. It stimulates reflection on the viewing process and how it differs from viewing a fiction film.”84 Notice how Nichols’ description of Reflexive filmmaking does not stimulate reflection on the other five modes of documentary filmmaking but, instead, on fiction film. Below I will take up consideration of documentary film’s reflexivity—across modes—to consider the further significance of this attribute. As my adjustment or expansion of Nichols’ schema makes clear, any attempts to categorize—to define and divide one work from another—invite a savvy viewer to push back. Is not Resnais’ Night and Fog also Expository and Poetic and Observational? Given Nichols’ criteria, the film seems to share in the work of these other modes as well as its prominent or dominant mode. We are prompted not just to see how the films we know fit into such modes and categories, but also how they might not. Are there other modes and categories to add, for example, do Mockumentary, Pseudodocumentary, Metadocumentary, and Metaethnofiction deserve their own columns, or are they best regarded as a subset of Reflexive cinema?85 And if there is not another independent category, then perhaps should we speak of subcategories or hybrids—for instance, Participatory-Reflexive as a way to discuss and categorize illusive cases such as Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), David Holzman’s Diary (1968), Daughter Rite (1979), Jane B. by Agnès V. (1988), and Medium Cool, the last of which began our proceedings?

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Categories and taxonomies, as Barnouw and Nichols illustrate in their efforts to create them, require differentiating one sort of thing from another; and just as the ink dries on such divisions, exceptions arise, questions are asked, and one reaches for an eraser, which is no good against the ink. Odd that the permanency of film—that we can watch Cary Grant as easily today as audiences did in the 1930s and 1940s—should result in the impermanency of our account of what it is or shows. For its own sake, documentary film socalled possesses a rich history of debate about how to characterize the form. Susan Hayward states that “narrative cinema’s function is storytelling, not description, which is, supposedly, a part [or] function of the documentary.” Her reticence—“supposedly”—is telling.86 Likewise, even the form’s most illustrious progenitors and benefactors, enthusiasts, and canonical figures emit competing (and sometimes contradictory or corrective) visions. We may be taken aback to learn that John Grierson, thought to have coined the term “documentary” in response to Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), held an impression distinctly at odds with our contemporary vernacular sense of the word; for Grierson, in a documentary “we pass from the plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural material, to arrangements, re-arrangements, and creative shapings of it.”87 Instead of purporting to be an objective or scientific (or even aspirationally scientific) genre, documentary film for Grierson was, as Plantinga puts it, “an art form rather than the mechanical documentation of some bit of reality.”88 If truth and reality are part of Grierson’s regard for documentary cinema, it is not insignificant that nearly a century ago, these would entail a truth and a reality derived from art and its attendant “creative shapings.” Grierson is also well known for a partner description in which the aesthetics of documentary cinema should be regarded as the “creative treatment of actuality.”89 A few years later, in 1935, Paul Rotha echoed Grierson’s phrasing, noting that among the “first demand[s] of the documentary method” is “the creative dramatisation of actuality.”90 Robert Gardner both alludes to and distills Grierson’s and Rotha’s definitions when he states a preference for “actuality” in place of documentary.91 Vertov, contemporaneous with Grierson, in the 1920s, held a more stridently literal sense of “actuality,” for his definition(s) of kino pravda (or cine pravda) meant to emphasize and elicit the way moving, cinematic images do, in fact, provide access to truth.92 By contrast, some decades later, Frederick Wiseman encouraged us to see his own documentaries (and perhaps those of others) as “reality fictions,” a phrase which upon hearing we may ask: Is this a playful oxymoron and/or a penetratingly honest invitation to understand what he is up to?93 Antedating these terminological debates and variations, it is useful to recall that Grierson reached for “documentary” in the first place (as a way to describe Flaherty’s Moana) because the word documentaire was already in service by

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the French, used specifically to describe travel films.94 In the fin de siècle, and early into the twentieth century, Auguste and Louis Lumière, Thomas Edison, and many other film entrepreneurs employed a range of terms to capture the qualities, associations, and possibilities of their nonfiction films, among them: “documentaires, actualitiés, topicals, interest films, educationals, expedition films, travel films—or, after 1907, travelogues.”95 Thus, Grierson, and those who followed him, did not invent new terms for nonfiction films ex nihilo but were already, in the 1920s, in debate with a robust set of descriptions for the sorts of things nonfictions films were understood to be. The debate about what to call or how to identify a documentary (bracketing the folk intuition that “I know one when I see it”), can be traced back to the earliest instincts that governed the use of the medium. Siegfried Kracauer describes such instincts as “tendencies,” and contends that the works and outlooks of Louis Lumière and Georges Méliès instructively illustrate two such options: the former was a “strict realist,” while the latter “gave free rein to his artistic imagination.”96 For Kracauer, the simultaneous emergence of these two tendencies is not “sheer accident,” but a function of experiments in the “potentialities of the medium [of film] as are in accordance with its substantive characteristics.”97 While Lumière “appealed to the sense of observation”—and in this term we can hear a nascent credo of documentary cinema take shape—Méliès “still remained the theater director he had been. He used photography in a pre-photographic spirit—for the reproduction of a papier-maché universe inspired by stage traditions.”98 Lumière’s “realistic tendency” and Méliès’ “formative tendency” are still palpable in our contemporary assessment of the “potentialities of the medium”—and we might add, its actualities as well. While Lumière and Méliès come to life as filmmakers, according to Kracauer, with opposing aspirations for the cinema, we may be as intrigued by the fact that they shared the same medium. Film was the common denominator. But if film is one thing (viz., one medium) how can it be so effectively claimed by two clashing temperaments—the realist and the fabulist? For a reply, consider William Rothman’s expert gloss of an insight made by Stanley Cavell in The World Viewed: “Cavell gave Bazin’s idea [that the emergence of film in the nineteenth century stemmed from a wish to see the world re-created in its own image] a crucial dialectical twist by reflecting on the fact that it is precisely because the medium’s material basis is the projection of reality that film is capable of rendering the fantastic as readily as the realistic. Reality plays an essential role in all films, . . . [b]ut in no film is the role reality plays simply that of being recorded or documented.”99 We have grown accustomed to thinking, indeed have been encouraged to think, that documentary footage is a kind of “autopsis”—literally, as in the translated title of the Latin in Stan Brakhage’s film, The Act of Seeing With One’s Own

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Eyes (1971). But the act of seeing with one’s own eyes does not confirm a privileged access to reality or truth; it is but a grounding for the beginning of interpretation or testimonial or criticism. In short, seeing when or that does not equal seeing why or how.100 Indeed, even Brakhage’s film—with its astonishing directness of address to its subject—does not convey a message or a lesson. Rather the film stirs the audience to thought and feeling. Watching the film, then, becomes the condition for the possibility of thinking—not an encounter with the thought itself. As Rothman continues: “Documentaries are not inherently more direct or truthful than other kinds of films. . . . What particular documentary films reveal about reality, how they achieve their revelations, are questions to be addressed by acts of criticism, not settled a priori by theoretical fiat. . . . How are we to acknowledge what separates what we call ‘documentaries’ from what we call ‘fiction films’ without denying what they have in common? (What they have in common, first and foremost, is the medium of film).”101 “Documentary film,” as noted, is often used as a synonym with “nonfiction film.”102 Most users (even some theorists and critics) trade back and forth with these terms as if they were interchangeable without loss or conflict. This familiar usage is confusing, and therefore is both interesting and problematic: interesting because it highlights a historical equivocation between documentation and truth (the latter term being a positive way of describing nonfiction), and problematic because documentation is—well—not strictly an act of conveying an isomorphic experience of time and space. In this latter case, documenting/documentation is thoroughly, necessarily mediated, which is to say transformative for reality and thus, for truth. So, an abiding issue in the current volume is not just, as Rothman describes above, a recognition of the shared material basis of cinema, but also—on metaphysical and epistemological terms—to what extent, if at all, a documentary film is a nonfiction film. Given what has been said thus far, and what is to come in this volume as a whole, we could dwell on the resiliency of the dyad fiction/nonfiction. If Grierson, Rotha, Rouch, Wiseman, and Gardner, among so many other practitioners of the form—including, more recently, Herzog, Kiarostami, and Lars von Trier—resolutely resist the truth-making or truth-giving power of nonfiction film, why does its aura of illuminative attributes, its sheen of authenticity persist? Plantinga has described this dyad as “ubiquitous fiction” (position 1) and “ubiquitous nonfiction” (position 2).103 These phrases mean what they say: position 1 = everything you see and hear in a documentary is fiction; position 2 = everything you see and hear in a documentary—or a feature film for that matter—is nonfiction. If positions 1 and 2 focus strictly on the medium, a third position draws attention to the audience: here, in position 3, the meaning of documentary film is a matter of reading and reception, and “assigning reference”—and not about text, context, or technology;

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position 3 is the film equivalent of “reception theory” in literary studies.104 Yet, Plantinga is quick to point out that position 3 makes a fatal error of ascription: “to confuse a document with a documentary film is a serious error of categorization.”105 Plantinga’s gloss on this criticism involves a reminder that it is not the audience’s reception of a film that defines what it is, but instead, social constructions. Still, Plantinga admits, author intentions may define or classify a work; we must, however, be attuned to cases when an author/auteur/director misleads us through his or her description of the film (either internally, or externally, to the film text). Another approach to the definition or characterization of nonfiction film can be distilled from Gregory Currie’s distinction between the image as a trace (which is independent of belief) and as a testimony (which is belief dependent).106 On Currie’s reading, we should understand that the way a camera records its subjects is not dependent on the beliefs of the camera operator; consequently, a film renders an objective “trace,” whereas, by contrast a painting is entirely subjective—dependent on the beliefs of the painter, and is therefore a testimony.107 The “ideal” documentary for Currie is “a filmically sustained narrative the constitutive film images of which represent only photographically: they represent only what they are of.”108 Thus, to offer a concrete example, a significant part of the scandal surrounding the making and release of Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here (2010) had to do with the director’s shift from claiming, out the outset, that his film is made up of traces to admitting, after the fact, that the depictions were, in fact, testimonies. Just as position 3 makes a category mistake (in likening documentary films to documents), so does Currie when he signs on for the same equivalency. Plantinga helpfully suggests that Currie’s faith in the documentary film-asdocument may derive from “a lingering influence of the direct cinema or cinéma vérité movements of the late 1950s and 1960s.”109 The “aesthetic of authenticity” surrounding the documentary image during this era is strikingly at odds with our more contemporary (skeptical? postmodern?) notion that a documentary film is a “structured rhetorical discourse.”110 Plantinga usefully reminds us that “the first sixty-five years of documentary” filmmaking—as originated and exemplified by Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, and Humphrey Jennings—were not preoccupied with authenticity; they were “not hesitant to employ stagings and recreations of events under the banner of documentary filmmaking.”111 What has seemed, perhaps, like innovation in documentary practice over the past few decades (viz., stagings, recreations, chronology shifting, etc.) is, in fact, a return to form: from Roger and Me (1989) and The Thin Blue Line (1988) to Man on Wire (2008) and The Act of Killing (2012), much contemporary documentary filmmaking has embraced film’s fabricated nature as a fact, and as something to be exposed, explored, and experimented with. According to this logic, in recent decades, inheritors of documentary

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film have suffered from a kind of cultural amnesia. As a result, the present is looking like the past, while the middle period seems like an aberration (albeit a long and influential span)—a time when forgetfulness gave way to fancy, generated peculiar hierarchies of value, and imposed a division in the definition of the medium that was never solicited. Substantiating Plantinga’s point about documentary film (by those who might use the term for their own work), as a “structured rhetorical discourse,” we can find further moments of illumination in experimental films. Among many trenchant examples, it is particularly rewarding to contemplate Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), where Martin Arnold transforms our capacity to attend to the effects of manipulating—not the image—but its rate and direction of playback, repetitions and reversals, and attendant distortions of sound. Or Removed (1999), where Naomi Uman changes found pornographic footage—not by editing it—but by making direct, chemical interventions on the celluloid itself. And as a last example, A Movie (1958), a film-as-collageand-composite of clips—none of them newly shot or defaced—but gathered and arranged by Bruce Conner in counterpoint with Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. All three artists draw from existing footage, but use it in distinctive ways. Each case renews and makes resonant the qualifications of film as a medium of potentiality, and acts a reminder that similar kinds of artistic inventions are part and parcel of the “structured rhetorical discourse” we familiarly call documentary cinema. In addition to trace accounts, and reflections in the wake of experimental film, another significant sphere of definition and characterization of nonfiction film can be found in what are called theories of communicative action.112 Here, in a bit of analogizing with linguistic forms, and dependent on the ordinary language philosophy of J. L. Austin, we find film theorists, such as Noël Carroll, describe documentary film as a kind of “speech act.”113 Or more specifically, in Austin’s lexicon, as an illocutionary act—that is, using “words, gestures, or some other expressive means to perform one of several kinds of actions, such as making an assertion, a request, or an apology.”114 In the realm of documentary filmmaking, this analogy draws a line of affiliation between the content of the film and the world it addresses; unlike a fiction film, which aims at creating a world unto itself, the documentary film is poised to generate assertions about the actual (i.e., extra-filmic) world, which, to make things more complicated, no doubt, also includes the history of film. Carroll refers to documentaries as films of “presumptive assertion,” which means that we, the audience, are meant to take the film (and its “propositional content”) as depicting the world we know and inhabit, and as making assertions about it.115 Trevor Ponech proposes a theory of communicative action concerning “cinematic assertions” where documentary film is understood as an “action of indication.”116 Consequently, Ponech’s approach leads to an intentionalist

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account of a documentary film’s identity—namely, where the intentions of the filmmaker prevail when determining what kind of thing it is.117 Carroll, for his part, has drawn his communicative action theory to what he calls an “intentionresponse” model “that presupposes that the artist or maker of a work indicates that the audience is meant to respond [to that work] in a certain way.”118 When considering cases in which images “sometimes show rather than say, and thus leave some of the propositional content of their moving images and sounds unspecified,” Plantinga argues that “we should take the documentary as an ‘asserted veridical representation’”: “In the case of its propositional content, a documentary is meant to be taken as truthful; in the case of its recorded images and sounds and their ordering, it is designed to be taken as a reliable guide to relevant elements of the profilmic scene, without necessarily being taken as a particular account of the scene’s propositional content.”119 Plantinga’s mediatory position provides a way in which we can appreciate a range of “documentary styles and techniques” and yet maintain an allegiance to the “illocutionary act characteristic of the typical documentary” (namely, as an act that aims to “provide veridical, . . . implicitly truthful, reliable, and/or accurate representation”).120 Still, we have a sufficient abundance of accomplished documentary films that have upset our ability to identify the world in the film as our own (from The War Game [1965] to Close-Up [1990] to Stories We Tell [2012]) that we are perhaps understandably cautious— skeptical?—about enlisting our full faith in documentary film’s consistent production of illocutionary acts. (Errol Morris might make a cameo here to remind us how evidence suggests the contrary that “we have an unfettered capacity for credulity.”)121 Even if a documentary turns out to be a ruse—a fake or fraud or otherwise a muddle of fact and fiction—it does not bar the film from making significant “assertions” about our (nonfictional) world. Such is our familiar habit in the case of fiction feature films—including science fiction fantasies and brutalizing war films, elaborate period melodramas, and violent Westerns—so why not also with documentaries? We readily supply our fixed and extended attention to fiction films, and then walk away from them deriving all sorts of profound truths about life, truth, and reality. The unstable status of any given documentary film (is it fact or fiction or a blend of both?), then, does not have to undermine or eviscerate the credibility of the film’s lessons for our world, just perhaps our naïve faith in the stability of the film’s veridical assertions of our world. TOPICS IN DOCUMENTARY FILM I: REAL, UNREAL, SURREAL Amos Vogel once declared that “it is appropriate that it was a surrealist [viz., André Breton] who so well expressed the curious combination of

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technology and metaphysics that is cinema.”122 It is sufficiently insightful for Vogel to have merely noted that cinema is a “curious combination of technology and metaphysics,” but it is a familiar sign of his perspicacity that he gleans the significance of a surrealist making the concatenation. For one thing, Breton might be saving us from a debate between the real and the non-real, and supplanting it with an attention to the surreal. Film, in effect, is too uncanny in its re-presentation of the world for us not to be hypnotized by its power, and thus to slip—again and again—into a faith in, or into love with, its particular, or better, peculiar reality. In common speech, when a person is overwhelmed by an event—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a Hollywood red carpet—we hear variations on “It feels just like a movie,” or “It’s surreal.” Indeed, even a hostage released by the so-called Islamic State says that his captors see themselves as being part of a movie; there is such a love of compelling film narratives about “heroes,” and of the resulting fame, that time and again we find many people, even terrorists, “playing a part . . . in their own movie.”123 These remarks are meaningful, if inadvertent, confessions of ordinary language, and we could do worse than to notice how they ratify resemblances between cinema and the surreal. Not surprisingly, Jean Mitry made a related observation years ago: “If research into the supernatural is an attempt to discover what a certain philosophy compares to the ‘essence’ of things or, at any rate, whatever transcends the power of our senses, one could say that in the cinema, reality and fantasy show themselves as different aspects of one and the same thing.”124 Mitry puts us on notice that “‘realism,’ interpreted initially as a category of art, degenerated fairly rapidly into a style.”125 In sum, what seemed like the metaphysical capacities of film (as articulated by André Bazin, e.g., in his vision of “total cinema”), devolve into aesthetics or politics, and more often than not both. Bicycle Thieves goes from being a window (onto a world) to being a socio-political prod to the viewers. Mitry tells us “[f]ilm is unable to capture the essence of concrete reality through an arbitrary representation,” and he concludes: “[film realism] is therefore a question of content before it is a question of form,” and as such, whatever apprehension we can claim to make of the world through cinematic capture, it will be found in “the truth of the signified far more than in a style of signification.”126 It is precisely at this moment when Mitry directs our attention to content—what he elsewhere calls “the importance of the subject matter”—that we are tempted to think we are talking about realism (or the realism of the filmed object), yet since all this is happening through film, and thus through a medium that transforms the metaphysics of things, we are, instead, in the realm of the surreal. No matter how many ways or times one approaches the issue of film realism—especially in a discussion of documentary film—it can come as something of a surprise. But then indicators keep lining up to make the same

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point. Jean Rouch credits his discovery of surrealism, when in his early twenties, for stimulating him to follow after the fusion of fiction and documentary that would come to define his ethnofiction.127 Paul Henley described Rouch’s methodology as aiming “to document the manifestation of the surreal in the forms of the real.”128 Rouch himself captured this idea with characteristic flair and gnomic provocation: each of his films are meant to be “a postcard at the service of the imaginary.” Eliot Weinberger descried the uncanny overlapping of traditions and techniques when he wrote that surrealism “introduced an aesthetic based on chance, improvisation, and the found object—an aesthetic which would seem tailored to the actual conditions of a Westerner making an ethnographic film. Yet the genre [of ethnographic film] has had only one surrealist: ironically, the founder of cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch.”129 But not so fast. When Robert Gardner, celebrated ethnographic filmmaker of Dead Birds (1963) and Forest of Bliss (1986), referred to the iconic surrealist, Luis Buñuel, Gardner said: “I always thought of him as my cinematic father.” Buñuel was, for Gardner, “my great illuminator.”130 The attributes of surrealism that Weinberger notes as especially complementary to ethnographic filmmaking—“chance, improvisation, and the found object”—are also evident in Gardner’s films, and therefore in the legacy of his contribution to the field.131 In Forest of Bliss, for example, there is no voice-over commentary, no lower-thirds, and no dialogue; the footage, though obviously edited together, is also remarkably undigested. The effect is a sort of immediacy of the moving image, and thereby, one might imagine, a certain potential for immersiveness on the part of the viewer. In 1957 Gardner founded the Film Study Center at Harvard, which was a production and research division at the Peabody Museum of Archeology and Ethnology. More recently, Harvard is home to the Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL). Directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor, SEL describes itself as “an experimental laboratory . . . that promotes innovative combinations of aesthetics and ethnography. It uses analog and digital media to explore the aesthetics and ontology of the natural and unnatural world. . . . It opposes the traditions . . . of documentary that are derived from broadcast journalism.”132 Several of the representative works emerging from SEL include Still Life (Diana Allan, 2007), Sweetgrass (Castaing-Taylor and Ilisa Barbash, 2009), Leviathan (Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, 2012), and The Iron Ministry (J. P. Sniadecki, 2014).133 By dispensing with formal characteristics “derived from broadcast journalism,” SEL-style documentary simultaneously inherits and innovates Gardner’s methodology. If Mitry, Rouch, Gardner, and the SEL crew are attuned to the surreal quality of cinematic metaphysics (especially as experienced through “chance, improvisation, and the found object”), we ought not to lose track of the degree to which Breton’s other element—technology—has transformed our

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relationship to the cinematic image. To begin in our contemporary frame and work backward, Castaing-Taylor and Paravel’s use of small digital video cameras (in their most commercially popular form, GoPro units) has enabled them to put a camera in places where a camera—much less a person—would seldom fit or survive. These self-contained, waterproof units, barely the size of a deck of cards, generate images of sufficient quality to project at any theatrical venue. When the cameras get so small, the vision for how to use them can become quite big. Looking back a century, though, we see a structurally similar innovation in the rise of the 16mm film camera—from its early standardization by George Eastman, et al. in 1923—which lent a first indication of the technical liberation of the medium from bulky, stationary, temperamental, and expensive machines.134 These small cameras—often used in conjunction with a separate sound capture device—provided the necessary conditions for everything from Vertov’s kino pravda to Rouch’s cinéma vérité. An image of a movie camera on one’s shoulder has become a veritable icon of/for documentary film: as on this book’s cover, technological portability is part of the art. The freedom and independence of the filmmaker has an analogue in the film works themselves. In his now-classic essay, “From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Product,” Rick Altman, traces the early twentieth-century shift from films as ancillary to a performer’s live presentation to stand-alone entities that could, as it were, speak for themselves in the absence of their creator or contextualizer.135 TOPICS IN DOCUMENTARY FILM II: THE DIGITAL AND THE DOCUMENTARY (AN ANIMATED COUPLING) As we see in Mieke Bal’s contribution to this volume, the category of “documentary film” must make room for documentary video—and also, arguably, should include documentary still imagery since, in the realm of the digital fabrication of an image, the sensor that creates the still also creates the video; they share a site of origin and a mode of becoming. Bal’s Nothing is Missing (2006–10) is not a documentary film per se, but, a “multiple-screen video installation.”136 Given the plentiful, varied, and increasingly (approaching exclusively) digital tools—for the creation of documentary film, video, and photographs, we may be better suited to refer to all of this media with the single, more inclusive coupling documentary imagery; thereafter, we may want (or not) to distinguish traits of the still versus the moving image. Bal’s observation reminds us that “film” is, if commonly forgotten, a medium—that is, a very specific kind of matter, traditionally celluloid. In recent decades, “film” has achieved its apotheosis and transubstantiated into

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a metaphor: now “film” often means any moving picture, including those generated by digital means. The feature nonfiction work Tangerine (2015) was shot using iPhones, yet it is still referred to as a film.137 If, in several forms or fashions, we have been asking thus far what a documentary film is/ does/means, we are now prompted to rethink the underlying presumption that it is, or has been, or has to be film. From Arnheim, Bazin, and Eisenstein to Perkins, Cavell, Rodowick, and Dudley Andrew, among many others, film theorists have been (justifiably) obsessed with the medium of film, especially what it means ontologically.138 What happens, then, when the medium for “film” is no longer film? As we approached the end of the twentieth century, Lev Manovich asked, “What is digital cinema?” and in his reply found an initial contrast worth dwelling on (especially for thinking about the documentary qualities of the image): he conjectured that the cinematic image involves “the art of the index; it is an attempt to make art out of a footprint,” whereas digital cinema, put bluntly, is not.139 Consequently, “computer media redefine the very identity of cinema,” and thus the ontological basis of our definitions of documentary cinema. For all of the cataloging and critiquing of the similarities and differences of fiction and nonfiction film, it may be easy to lose track of an obvious (and for that reason hard to make) observation: “Fictional films are live-action films,” writes Manovich, “that is, they took place in real, physical space.” The same can be said for nonfiction films. In watching a film-as-such, we are, as Cavell has described it, “not present to” what is on screen but “present at” it.140 “From the perspective of a future historian of visual culture”—and here we are a couple decades after Manovich wrote this, and therefore occupy this future—“the differences between classical Hollywood films, European art films, and avant-garde films (apart from abstract ones) may appear less significant than this common feature—their reliance on lens-based recordings of reality.”141 Taking us right back to the top, that things appear before a camera at a specific time and place—the so-called profilmic—is not just evidence for those who insist on the case for “ubiquitous nonfiction” but also marks a distinction between all celluloid-based film and all digital media production. In a little over a century, we have gone from the profilmic to what Garrett Stewart calls the “postcinematic.”142 Scanning through the many instances of digital cinema that now lay before us, one of their common features is their lack of being filmed as an event. Digital cinema—and here we must more overtly include animation—dispenses with the profilmic. “As cinema enters the digital age,” Manovich tells us, and again, we might say that we already inhabit this age, “. . . cinema can no longer be clearly distinguished from animation. [Cinema] is no longer an indexical media technology but, rather, a subgenre of painting.”143 For one thing, the ready-to-hand definitions of cinema, of the fiction/nonfiction

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divide, however contested they have been, come in for radical readjustment in the light of this uncanny recursion. Jean-Luc Godard, who jolted our thinking about film’s binary and blend of fiction and nonfiction in Breathless—more than half-a-century ago—is now restlessly contending with the painterly status of the digital image, for example, in Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2014). Clearly, the end of film need not mean the death of cinema.144 Where cinema, especially in its early history, like photography, stood in stern contrast with painting (and drawing), it is now—in the twenty-first century, in the midst of new non-celluloid technologies—thrown back into company with its estranged aesthetic combatant. Drawing from Currie’s lexicon, we could say that the digital is instantiating a shift from the trace (back) to testimony; painting and cinema are now, more than ever, evolving out of an agonistic rivalry and into a mutually beneficial, symbiotic relationship. Twenty-first-century “film studies” is, in fact, more akin to eighteenth-century studies of painting as we find them in Johann Winckelmann’s Reflections—or earlier, from a summoning made in Timothy Murray’s illustrious syntagm, a “digital baroque”; or earlier still, to Plato’s remarks on painterly mimesis in the Republic.145 Laura Mulvey has, like Manovich, begun to reckon with the “crisis of the photographic sign as index” caused by the emergence (and increasing dominance) of the digital. She recognizes that “the digital, as an abstract information system, made a break with analogue imagery, finally sweeping away the relation with reality, which had, by and large, dominated the photographic tradition.”146 The intimacy between film’s “material base and its poetics” meant that, in a very literal sense, (the) film had to be there at the moment of exposure to the profilmic event. The medium was a witness simultaneously with its status as an embalming agent.147 If the digital is not “present” to an event in the same way as film—because it is painting instead of indexing— we may skirt scandalously close to thinking that photographically based film offers “more reality” than the digital brush. In an odd coda to our struggle with the values and virtues of the photographic/film image, it is, in fact, the digital that is delivering new credibility to the once maligned seventh art. As D. N. Rodowick puts it: “The digital reasserts the aesthetic value of analog images as somehow more real than digital simulations, not only at the cinema but also in computer gaming and other new media.”148 Did we notice what Rodowick points out, namely, that “most of the key debates on the representational nature of photographic and filmic media—and indeed whether and how they could be defined as art—were deduced, rightly or wrongly, from the basic photographic/cinematographic process”?149 Taking stock of this question may be among the implied central tasks of the current generation of theorists.

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The metaphor (or analogy) of the brush—where paint displaces the photochemical—obscures the agency of digital cinema (who or what is “doing the painting”), which it would seem must involve our consideration of those who instantiate, order, and manipulate numbers; the “who,” of course, is already and may increasingly be a nonhuman agent. Again according to Rodowick: “The transformation of matter in the electronic and digital arts takes place on a different atomic register and in a different conceptual domain” than the “arts of intaglio,” which include photography and film.150 Referencing Timothy Binkley, Rodowick notes that “where analog media record traces of events, . . . digital media produce tokens of numbers.”151 We appear to end up with the suggestion that, in a playful sort of concatenation of words, digital media are, in effect, “paint by numbers.” We should forestall the customary association that any such “paint by numbers” is predetermined or lacks the full range of creativity (a few minutes with a lauded Pixar release will disabuse that inkling); rather the phrase is meant to emphasize that “digital media are,” as Rodowick adduces them “neither visual, nor textual, nor musical—they are simulations.”152 Tom Gunning had declared that it is “one of the great scandals of film theory” that is has so severely neglected animation (and often quite consciously).153 Karen Beckman has undertaken to correct this embarrassing lacuna, acknowledging along the way the pioneering labors of Alan Cholodenko and the contributions of Miriam Hansen and Vivian Sobchack.154 As Beckman points out, in one established and influential text that is meant to introduce students to film studies, Film Art, edited by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, “documentary film” shares a chapter with “experimental film” and “animation.” As Beckman reflects on this grouping: “Yet of these ‘outsiders,’ animation, often regarded as a childish film form and lacking either documentary’s political and historical credentials or experimental film’s association with high-brow categories like the avant-garde, has until recently received the least scholarly attention.”155 Beckman aims to discern “some of the intellectual and institutional conditions that have fostered this (often mutual) history of neglect of which scholars in both fields—cinema studies and animation studies—have become increasingly conscious.”156 But the headline that seems to have arrived, if not yet been made fully public (owing to a long history of habits, personal and industrial) is nothing less than “Digital Cinema is Animation.” Manovich’s fin de siècle prognostications have come to pass, and perhaps even more quickly and virulently than he, or we, could have predicted. If, by employing digital media, we have decidedly and definitively taken a step away from the “trace” image (away from the indexical referent and toward wholesale simulacra), then what else/more/different can we learn about the documentary image in this new (digital/painted/animated) context?

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Even as a film such as Boyhood (2015) reinvigorated an appreciation for the indexing capacities of film—the film itself was described as a kind of documentary of youth, with some critics citing Michael Apted’s Up series (1964–present) as a “precursor” to Richard Linklater’s twelve-years-inthe-making film—we have many innovative examples of documentaries (so-called) that are made using digital video, and perhaps most strikingly, animation.157 Consider among many cases of films that court the familiar practices and expectations of documentary (as genre and medium) but do so without recourse to indexical imagery: Persepolis (2007), Waltz with Bashir (2008), The Congress (2013), and another work by Richard Linklater, Waking Life (2001). Rithy Panh’s The Missing Picture (2013) and Charlie Kaufman’s Anomalisa (2015) stop-motion films prompt still other issues, since we recognize that empirical forms—clay, silicon, etc.—are being filmed (as profilmic entities), and yet the meanings of those materials only come to life by virtue of the impression of motion, and the effects of coupled sounds (voices, foley work, music). And finally, we should make a note of motion graphic-based documentaries, a prominent example—if in an unexpected place—can be found during the end-credit sequence of Adam McKay’s The Other Guys (2010); or in more expected venues such as Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job (2010), and Davis Guggenheim’s graphics-inflected works, An Inconvenient Truth (2006) and Waiting for “Superman” (2010), but also in myriad YouTube works, and the PowerPoint-type presentations familiar to the ever-expanding TED-talk industry. TOPICS IN DOCUMENTARY FILM III: METADOCUMENTARY AND ETHICS Having made a glancing survey of some hallmark questions of documentary filmmaking, especially in their metaphysical and epistemological dimensions, a turn to some moral implications is in order. Let us begin, simply, by asking whether all documentary film is always already metafilmmaking. Where the fiction film camera encourages the viewer to see through the frame to characters and their contexts, the documentary camera seems to endlessly invite consideration of the conditions of its creative application: this camera was there, at this time; these people said these things; this event happened, and so on. As viewers, we are not meant to get lost in documentary film but, instead, to find something. The form, then, seems inextricably tethered to its awareness (or better, the creator’s or the viewer’s awareness) of what is being represented—that it is being represented. A finished film is to filmmaking as human consciousness is to the brain; if the analogy holds, then it seems ineluctably the case that film—as literature, as philosophy—becomes at once

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a record of thoughts and the conditions for them. A film is thinking, even before we begin to think about it. The “thinking” qualities of film—and documentary film, in particular—go by many names, and are illustrated by myriad techniques, among them: selfreflexivity, self-reference, recursion, duplication (e.g., doubles, replication, reproducibility). Because documentary film often draws attention to itself as a created thing (to its use of a camera, to the intervention of documentary agents, to intertitles and voice-overs, etc.), and thus to the very means of making a film, it is, in many cases, constitutionally self-reflexive. Even the name “documentary” can be read as a euphemism for a gesture: “We are going to use a camera to record things in front of the camera, and so we (as creators, as viewers) should be aware of the fact that a camera is filming these things.” Since the act of recording (or “documentation”) as such calls attention to the means and modes of inscription, it is arguable that all documentary is inherently metadocumentary. Of course, antagonizing whatever special claim documentary might make to its powers of reflexivity, Hollywood has its own cycle of fiction films— back-lot-of-studio- and behind-the-camera-type—that make the making of films into the subject of dramatic narrative as well as comedy, including, among many representative examples of the durable subgenre: A Star is Born (1937, 1954, 1976), Sunset Boulevard (1950), Singin’ in the Rain (1952), 8 ½ (1963), Stardust Memories (1980), Barton Fink (1991), The Player (1992), Ed Wood (1994), Get Shorty (1995), Boogie Nights (1997), L. A. Confidential (1997), State and Main (2000), Mulholland Drive (2001), Adaptation (2002), The Aviator (2004), Tropic Thunder (2008), Somewhere (2010), The Artist (2011), Argo (2012), The Bling Ring (2013), Birdman (2014), and Hail, Caesar! (2016). Despite whatever tempting behind-the-scenes glimpse these films might suggest, they still aim to suture the viewer, and thus to disappear the apparatuses involved in the film’s creation: we are meant to be entertained by the characters’ contentious relationship to the medium, and making movies by means of it (not our own). Still, even documentaries get in on the action of dramatizing the making of movies, among impressive instances: Burden of Dreams (1982), My Best Fiend (1999), American Movie (1999), Lost in La Mancha (2002), and The Five Obstructions (2003). Carl Plantinga has argued that “claims of epistemic benefits for reflexivity are exaggerated, in part because such claims depend on debatable assumptions about the documentary film (as pretending to ‘transparency’) and the documentary spectator (as passive and gullible), and also because reflexivity guarantees neither a complexity of representation (what [Bill] Nichols calls ‘magnitudes’) nor accurate and sincere self-revelation on the part of the filmmaker.”158 Plantinga’s reasons for assessing this exaggeration are evident from his own research, but are also reflected in the contested field of issues at

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play in what has been said thus far: in short, the metaphysics of film creates problems for our epistemic claims about what film (and documentary film in particular) can tell us about truth. However, it stands to reason whether the ethical “benefits for reflexivity are exaggerated.”159 Above, when I sketched Aufderheide’s six subgenres of documentary film—namely, public affairs, government propaganda, advocacy, historical, ethnographic, and nature—the focus was terminological and categorical debates (e.g., as a reply to the question: What kind of film do we have before us?). Yet, if we reread those same six titles wondering about their ethical significance, the ground appears to shift beneath our feet, since in each case, whether or not such films (going by these names) were made in good faith makes a substantive difference to our capacity, as viewers, to hold them, much less herald them, as the kind of thing we think they are. If An Inconvenient Truth—which may lay claim to a piece of all six subgenres—turned out to be a hoax, what then? As Brian Winston astutely assesses the present situation, in which fake, hoax, and fabrication lie in wait: “Once the film-maker is liberated from implications of actuality and creativity, then ethical behaviour becomes even more crucial than it was previously.”160 This liberation has, arguably, not only been unleashed but has become the norm. Part of the reason why we have an indication that the ethical benefits of reflexivity are not exaggerated lies precisely with our reaction to instances of mockumentary (understood as a knowing satire of the form, e.g., many films directed by Christopher Guest) and fake or pseudodocumentary (understood not strictly as satire, but also as a sober bid to trick based on viewer trust and audience expectations, e.g., Casey Affleck’s I’m Still Here). Precisely because of the self-referential qualities of mockumentary and pseudodocumentary our habitual sense of the documentary’s status becomes antagonized. Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1975) is among the most enduring examples of this claim, in part, because it manages over the course of its running time to be a straight-forward documentary, a mockumentary, and a pseudodocumentary. Welles’ characteristic brilliance is embodied by the remarkable achievement of having internalized the ethical stakes of documentary representation. In this way, he has given us a way to assess our relationship, as individuals and as a group, to the moral import of the mise-en-abîme. Unlike the clever reduplication of images and subtexts, and the wily film-within-a-film playfulness that we find in so many Hollywood films that lampoon—and capitalize on— our disorientation, Welles does not leave us to our own devices: he becomes our Virgil in the circles of the cinematic comedia. Circling back to the earlier description of our stance toward documentary films being either “skeptical” or “objectivist” (the former a proxy for “postmodern” or deconstructive, the latter sometimes called “realist”), but now with ethics in mind, we can appreciate Plantinga’s haunting admonition

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“that the skeptical position on the documentary, in its rejection of standards of evidence, truth-telling, and rational discourse, would arguably leave us with no method to determine whether a documentary is biased or deceptive, or even to distinguish between degrees of relative bias and deception. Without the appeal to such standards, how would we differentiate between blatant propaganda and objectivity? If objectivity does not exist, do all documentaries become equally propagandistic?”161 Plantinga, for his part, leaves these questions in the air, and by not replying to them directly, invites us to regard them as rhetorical, which is to say, they may not be questions after all but statements. To make our situation more palatable, we might rewrite the questions: first, if documentary is inherently rhetorical (in the sense of presented to argue for a point of a view), then we need not speak of “blatant” propaganda, since we seem just as susceptible to, as it were, the ways documentary films are, insofar as they attempt to influence viewers and “come with a perspective,” propagandistic; second, in the absence—or at least in the bracketing—of objectivity, we need not rush to see all documentaries as “equally” propagandistic, and this inequality is borne out by everyday experiences with them as argumentative texts (some films are more effective at shaping personal and public opinion than others; and, as context changes, so may our readings of the meaning and significance of any given film).162 Metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical issues at stake in the making of documentary films are given a revitalized urgency when legal matters arise. It may be one thing to pull off a hoax as a challenge to our collective adoration of celebrity (e.g., in I’m Still Here), but what if the “ethical obligations of filmmakers to audience and to subjects” treads across legal barriers? Prominent in this regard is Joe Berlinger’s three-part Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996), which, as the director describes the project shifted from “journalism” in the first installment to “advocacy” in the second and third installments.163 As Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line was used to overturn a conviction, so Berlinger’s trilogy proved crucial in exonerating three imprisoned men. The effect can go the other way, too, as when Amy Berg’s Deliver Us from Evil (2006) “exposed and publicized the identity” of a known pedophile, Oliver O’Grady, and in that capacity, contributed to his reincarceration.164 More recently, Emily Nussbaum generated reflection on the nature of documentary ethics when she explored Andrew Jarecki’s production methods for The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst (2015), asking, in effect: to what degree are documentary filmmakers participating in the events they aim to depict?165 When speaking about the Jarecki film, Paradise Lost director, Berlinger, wonders about the two-year lapse between Jarecki learning about a potentially incriminating piece of evidence (a matched handwriting sample) and the airing of the series; in a bit of lucky promotion for the film, Durst was arrested the night before the finale aired on HBO.166 Berlinger reflects on the

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documentarian’s twin demands: to offer a truthful presentation of facts and to serve the needs of narrative storytelling, the latter of which may involve manipulating chronology, withholding material, or otherwise shaping facts to serve dramatic purposes.167 Finally, still another approach arrives from directors Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos, who spent a decade developing Making a Murderer (2015), and present their work matter-of-factly as selfconsciously avoiding advocacy: “We were there simply to document events as they were unfolding. We were not there to judge. We were there to listen and to witness.”168 Whether their studied, intentional neutrality is possible remains an open question for viewers. Such a thicket of interrelated, ingrown issues is not novel, and yet, Berlinger’s division of “truthful presentation of facts” from the “needs of narrative” returns us anew to the ways, in many documentary films, the two are at odds. Or, put another way, as in the case of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me, a utilitarian calculus may prevail “that Moore’s little deceptions are acceptable because his overall project leads to the greater good.”169 This violation of the Pauline principle may not rise to the level of reprobation, yet Moore’s deceit, such as it is, necessarily activates our judgment about the degree to which such manipulations are (morally) acceptable, even if aesthetically and politically palatable, perhaps especially when a life may be on the line. A documentary film—even a raw bit of surveillance footage—may present us with a direct representation and yet for its vantage (or the nature and quality of the sound, color, resolution, or some other factor) lead us to false conclusions about what we see.170 Why else would law courts, for example, enlist Conor McCourt, a retired Sergeant of the New York Police Department, as an expert of “video forensics” if it were not unsure about the nature of the media presented as evidence in court?171 A piece of footage, like a claimant’s remarks, is a kind of trace and a form of testimony, but just as we read for sincerity and authenticity in what people say, so we want to have a reliable sense of what films “say.” Moreover, is that “saying” proof of anything? Whether Sgt. McCourt, while testifying in court, claims the shadowy, blurry, pixelated figure is you—or not—can make a life-altering difference, from one moment to the next, and therein implies how we also, even beyond the bounds of the legal system, need to be savvy, skilled readers of the documentary film image. The presumption that filmmakers “owe a ‘duty of care’ to those who appear in their films” extends to the duty of care we have as interpreters of those films.172 NOTES ON THE AIM AND CONTENT OF THIS VOLUME There is, to be sure, a need to generate new scholarship on documentary film—on the full range and multiple registers of its works—yet, there is

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also a need to reflect upon (and appreciate) accomplished contributions to the field. This volume is meant to address and, to the extent it can, fulfill this double vision: (1) returning anew to the insights of established and influential works of scholarship (some of them famous and canonical, and for good reason, while others are hard to access or unjustly neglected); (2) and turning to the revelations of new instances of criticism (some of it, while pushing forward with fresh challenges to the field is also rightly dependent on the scholarship of essential literature on nonfiction film, some of which is included here). Yet, even with this “double vision,” there is a third axis to address, namely (3) the work of the theorist-filmmakers: those who live a double-life as makers of documentary films and critics of its forms and definitions. In sum, the collection presents (1) established, fundamental, formative works in the philosophy of documentary film; (2) new critical works (often involving new films, or reconsiderations of classic films, as well as novel encounters with the existing secondary literature); and (3) reports by theorist-filmmakers from the front lines of cinematic creation and innovation. Ideally this anthology will be of immediate interest and use to theorists and practitioners of nonfiction film; to undergraduates getting their bearings in the field (whether figured generally as “film studies,” more specifically as “documentary film studies,” in the broad, inclusive terms of “media studies” and “screen studies”—or perhaps more accurately, but employed with less regularity, “sight and sound studies”); to emerging and established scholars contributing to the secondary literature; and to a general readership who may be intrigued by the kinds of questions and claims that seem native to nonfiction film, and who may wish to explore some critical responses to them written in engaging language, and populated by sometimes inscrutable, but always absorbing examples of the kind of films that are worthy of our attention.173 The spirit that founded the volume and guided its development is radically inter- and transdisciplinary. Dispatches have arrived from anthropology, communications, English, film studies (including theory, history, criticism), literary studies (including theory, history, criticism), media and screen studies, cognitive cultural studies, narratology, philosophy, poetics, politics, and political theory; and as a special aspect of the volume, theorist-filmmakers make their thoughts known as well. Consequently, the critical reflections gathered here are decidedly pluralistic and heterogeneous, inviting—not bracketing or partitioning—the dynamism and diversity of the arts, humanities, social sciences, and even natural sciences (insofar as we are biological beings who are trying to track our cognitive and perceptual understanding of a nonbiological thing—namely, film, whether celluloid-based or in digital form); these disciplines, so habitually cordoned off from one another, are brought together into a shared conversation about a common object and domain of investigation.

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Individual contributors often speak from a discernable disciplinary training and set of preoccupations, yet, as those remarks are arranged and ordered for the present occasion, they are enhanced for their sequencing and juxtapositions—and sometimes contrast—with notes from adjacent, and even foreign, fields of research. As a result of this welcoming of diverse interests in film, and methodologies for speaking about it, a reader may identify different registers of relationship between philosophy and film; indeed, how we connect the one to the other—by means of words such as “in/as/of/and/ through”—will implicitly announce conceptual affiliations and claims. Here is an instance of seeing philosophy in a documentary film; there, in another reading (perhaps even of the same film), we are shown that it is a case of the film functioning as philosophy, and so on. Of course, the book’s very title—part of the series of which it belongs—ascribes one of these categories of relation; as such, with symphonic as well as cacophonous moments to follow, we are all, nevertheless, beneficiaries of these efforts to explore the philosophy of documentary film. Part I offers an initial set of what have become classical, canonical readings in the philosophy of documentary film. Some of the usual (and essential) names, problems, and subjects are represented. These contributions provide access and orientation to the sorts of questions that typically get asked when thinking about the philosophy of documentary film. Along the way, one may glean some of the concepts and problems that are at stake (and that, in due course, will be referred to and responded to in parts II through V). Part II aims to give some sense of the history of documentary film in its variety of expression (from early cinema to representative examples of such variety, including works by Grierson, Painlevé, Rouch, Herzog, and Grenier). The moral—and reminder—is simple: documentary film is not monolithic and homogeneous; it is not one thing. And like the genre it is often said to be, nonfiction film possesses both static and dynamic elements.174 Whether those elements are philosophically defensible—and thus, whether some static elements are, in fact, dynamic, and thus debatable—sets up the inquiries that follow in parts III through V. Part III is the result of welcoming theorist-filmmakers into conversation with film theorists. All of the writers in part III have made documentary films of their own and are active cinematic and visual media-based documentarists; all of them also work full time as professors on academic faculties. The idea here is to invite those who work on both sides of the theory/praxis divide (however permeable it may be, or not) to reflect on how their theories of film (including thoughts on the medium, capture and construction methodologies, and close

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readings of specific films) is informed/affected by their practice; repeatedly, in what follows, this relationship reveals itself to be interactive and mutually edifying. The very nature of these inherited binaries and boundaries—such as theory/praxis—are tested, contested, and, it would seem, illuminatively limned. Part IV is directed at unsettling—though not necessarily resolving what ensues from unsettling—some of the key ideas, claims, beliefs, and assumptions that are familiar to documentary film studies, and that may stand in need of some critique (from the treatment of sound to the nature of truth). The works here range from brief and bold manifesto to studied and erudite rethinking of the basic terms we use (or misuse). Part V attempts to focalize attention on the depiction of individual people who are filmed, or whose lives (even posthumously) become the subject of documentary film. Here we find questions about the construction of self-identity through film; whether the self-as-composed-in-film bears resemblance, if at all, to historical subjectivities; the relationship between film narrative and personal narrative (the stories we tell ourselves and others); the way people create documentary records (again, of themselves and others)—and thus link to, or stand in tension with our notions of history (as depersonalized, as nonindividuated, as objective); and how the nature of fabrication may conflict with—or, less intuitively, even constitute—what we regard as the truth of the documentary image. If we return to the kinds of distinctions Plato made between philosophy and poetry, then for the purposes of this book, we have before us a philosophy and a poetry (poiesis) of documentary film. And both, in their own ways, reflect also on a praxis of documentary film. Philosophy is evident in the theoretical implications of the field’s family of preoccupations (especially in metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics); poetry—and its relation to mimesis—in realms of art, politics, history, psychology, rhetoric, and the unconscious conditions by which we are moved and persuaded by film. Finally, how documentary films get made often stands in some kind of relation to philosophy and poetry, if also often unarticulated or under-theorized; in this collection, we have a space for filmmakers to reflect on their praxis, to think and theorize interactively with the making of documentary films. The book is meant to afford a prismatic perspective on documentary cinema, and thus does not presume to offer a consecutive or comprehensive account. The ambition is not coherence from essay to essay, but coherence within in each piece so that a survey of likenesses and differences across the range of content might be offered to the reader. The idea is, then, to get

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a sense for the diversity of forms and ideas, and to see how manifold approaches nevertheless share traits. A reader is encouraged to watch the films under discussion and thereafter to see how the essays transform a reading of those films (and invite comparison with still others, made and yet to come); in this way, examples and experiments with those examples should enrich our shared endeavor to speak meaningfully about documentary film now and into the future. As we turn to the fascinating and fecund offerings to come in this collection, there is reason to consider the line-up of terms in its subtitle—Image, Sound, Fiction, Truth. Are we to believe that these four hallmark traits of film are also hallmark traits of documentary film? Perhaps a reader will allow easy and quick assent to image and sound, but how so with (both?) fiction and truth? The cover image for this book, from Medium Cool, can serve as a synecdoche for a meditation on “image, sound, fiction, truth”—especially in the frame’s full form, reproduced in the front matter—for it reminds us how a documentary film, in many instances, engages all four attributes. We see it. We hear it. We are aware of the distortions inherent in the translation through media that deny it objectivity and render it, to varying degrees, a work of fiction (at last a mimetic work, a simulacrum of the world, that demands interpretation). And yet, from that same aggregation of image and sound that we call a documentary film, we also glean insight and respond emotionally, and suspect we have, on many occasions, perceived something true. Despite its controversial, unsettled status, documentary film restlessly conjures the disclosure of truth by encoding events, experiences, and expressions that we recognize as corresponding to the world (or worlds) we inhabit, both privately and publically. Through these instances of representation, documentary film simultaneously complicates our habituated sense of reality and contributes to the coherence of what we think about as the habitable world. NOTES 1. Bill Nichols, Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010), 25. See also, Bill Nichols, Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). 2. See David LaRocca, “Still, Standing: Anonymous Desire and Unarticulated Threat in Julian Hibbard’s The Noir A-Z,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 5 (March/April 2011), 2–4. 3. Carl Plantinga, “Documentary,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), 495. 4. Plato, Republic, Book X, 607b, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961), 832.

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5. See Andrew Marantz, “Studio 360,” in The New Yorker (April 25, 2016) for remarks on the “first virtual-reality narratives,” newyorker.com. 6. For more on films of assertion, see Noël Carroll, “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); page references are to the version reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006). 7. Stanley Cavell, Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996), epigraph and xii. See also “Reflections on a Life of Philosophy: Interview with Stanley Cavell,” Harvard Journal of Philosophy, Vol. VII (1999), 25. 8. Plato, Republic, Book X, 607b. 9. For more on metaphors of the medium (and media), and in particular, the act and art of translation “across” domains of inscription, see David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, “Thinking Through International Influence,” in A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture, ed. David LaRocca and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015), esp. 2–9, 12–14. See also, David LaRocca, “Rethinking the First Person: Autobiography, Authorship, and the Contested Self in Malcolm X,” in The Philosophy of Spike Lee, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 10. Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 11. 11. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 19. 12. Walter Benjamin, “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933), in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, tr. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 721. 13. See Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008); and Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). 14. Ben Kenigsberg, “Documentary Filmmakers Talk about Manipulation in Their Work,” The New York Times (June 26, 2015), nytimes.com. 15. Lessons with Kiarostami, ed. Paul Cronin (New York: Sticking Place Books, 2015), 96. 16. Errol Morris, “Play it Again, Sam (Re-enactments Part One),” The New York Times (April 3, 2008), nytimes.com. See also David LaRocca, “Errol Morris: Re-enactment and Reconception,” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 3, ed. John Berra (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016). 17. Morris, “Play it Again, Sam.” 18. Margot Livesey interview with Errol Morris, BOMB, Vol. 69 (Fall 1999), bombmagazine.org. 19. Cavell, Contesting Tears, xii. 20. Carl Plantinga, “The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Film Distinction,” originally published in Moving Images, Culture, and the Mind, ed. Ib Bondeebjerg (Luton: University of Luton Press, 2000), see in this volume, 114–15.

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21. Plantinga, “The Limits of Appropriation,” see in this volume, 117. 22. Stanley Cavell, “Words of Welcome,” in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), xii. 23. Plantinga, “Documentary,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009), 498. See also, Carl Plantinga, “Defining Documentary: Fiction, Nonfiction, and Projected Worlds,” Persistence of Vision, Vol. 5 (1987), 44–54. 24. Plantinga, “The Limits of Appropriation,” see in this volume, 121–22. 25. See in this volume, Werner Herzog, “The Minnesota Declaration,” 379–80 and also David LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014); and “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). 26. See also Simone Rapisarda Casanova’s The Creation of Meaning (2014), a documentary-fiction hybrid, and the films of Pedro Costa and Lisandro Alonso. 27. Plantinga, “The Limits of Appropriation,” see in this volume, 120. 28. Ohad Landesman, “Lying to be Real: The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Docufictions,” in Contemporary Documentary, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (London: Routledge, 2016), 9. 29. For more on tropes of purity and contamination, see David LaRocca, Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), esp. 159–62, Ch. 10 passim, and 267–68. 30. Cronin, Lessons with Kiarostami, 6. 31. Ibid., 8. 32. Anthropology—Reality—Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch, ed. Michael Eaton (London: British Film Institute, 1979), 8. See also Diane Scheinman, “The Dialogic Imagination of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Le maîtres fous,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2014). 33. See Patricia R. Zimmermann and Sean Zimmermann Auyash, Nanook of the North, Library of Congress, National Film Preservation Board, www.loc.gov/ programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/. 34. Richard M. Barsam, Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, Revised and Expanded, 1992), 52. See also Anthropology—Reality—Cinema, ed. Eaton. 35. “Jean Rouch” by Brian Winston, in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 529. 36. Anthropology—Reality—Cinema, ed. Eaton, 74; Scheinman, “The Dialogic Imagination of Jean Rouch,” 184. 37. Ibid. 38. See Nichols, Engaging Cinema, 117–18; See also, on witnessing and the creation of documentary images, David LaRocca, “War Films and the Ineffability of War,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), esp. 44–50.

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39. See David LaRocca, “The Limits of Instruction: Pedagogical Remarks on Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions,” Film and Philosophy, Vol. 13 (2009), 35–50. 40. Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, “Dogma 95,” see in this volume, 375–77. 41. Thomas Vinterberg and Lars von Trier, “Vow of Chastity,” see in this volume, 375–77. 42. Erik Barnouw, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (Oxford: Oxford University Press, second revised edition, 1993), 185. 43. Barnouw, Documentary, 185. 44. See Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Critical Visions in Film Theory, ed. Timothy Corrigan, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj (New York: Bedford/ St. Martin’s, 2011), 916. 45. Barnouw, Documentary, 185. 46. See Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close, ed. Dieter Roelstraete and Anders Kreuger (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012). 47. In I Don’t Belong Anywhere: The Cinema of Chantal Akerman (dir. Marianne Lambert, 2015), Akerman remarks: “In a fiction film there is documentary, and in a documentary there is fiction. Simply because of the framing. As soon as you frame, it is fiction.” See Warren in this volume, 507. 48. Rachel Donadio, “The Director’s Director: Chantal Akerman,” The New York Times (March 25, 2016), nytimes.com. See also David LaRocca, “Sofia Coppola: Fame and Self-Reference,” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 3, ed. John Berra (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016). 49. Barnouw, Documentary, 206. 50. See Karen Hoffman’s chapter in this volume, 517–36 51. See Timothy Williams, et al. “Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?” The New York Times (April 1, 2016), nytimes.com. 52. See table of contents in Barnouw, Documentary. 53. Consider the case of Diamond Reynolds, who live-streamed from her phone on Facebook’s video feed in the immediate aftermath of the shooting of Philando Castile—who lay bleeding to death beside her and soon after died on camera. See Julie Bosman, “After Poised Live-Streaming, Tears and Fury Find Diamond Reynolds,” The New York Times (July 7, 2016), nytimes.com. 54. See section “The Camera and the Gun,” in LaRocca, “War Films and the Ineffability of War,” in The Philosophy of War Films, 9–13. 55. See Herzog in this volume, 379–80. 56. Tony Gibbs, The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design (Lausanne: Ava Publishing, 2007), 33. See also, The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies, ed. Trevor Pinch and Karin Bijsterveld (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 57. Vlada Petric, “Vertov’s Cinematic Transposition of Reality,” in Beyond Document, 272. 58. Susan Hayward, “Realism” and “Documentary,” in Cinema Studies: Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, fourth edition, 2013), 111, 312. 59. See Lucia Ricciardelli, American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age: Depictions of War in Burns, Moore, and Morris (New York: Routledge, 2015).

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60. See LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’,” in The Philosophy of War Films, 437–82. 61. Barnouw, Documentary, 121. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid., 141–42. 64. Ibid., 141. 65. Ibid., 142. 66. See LaRocca, “War Films and the Ineffability of War,” in The Philosophy of War Films, 437–82. 67. Chris Nashawaty, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (review), Entertainment Weekly (July 18, 2014), 46. 68. For more on this topic, see Elisabeth Bronfen, “War and Its Fictional Recovery On-Screen: Narrative Management of Death in The Big Red One and The Thin Red Line,” in The Philosophy of War Films, esp. 422; and in the same volume, K. L. Evans, “The Work of Art in the Age of Embedded Journalism: Fiction versus Depiction in Zero Dark Thirty,” esp. 380–81n. 57. 69. See, for example, 00:09:30, after the prologue, at the homestead. 70. See K. L. Evans, “Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011); see also George M. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). 71. See Plantinga, “Documentary,” 499–500. 72. Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), 137. 73. See Hayden White, Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); Michael Renov, “Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction,” in Theorizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov (New York: Routledge, 1993), 7; and Noël Carroll, “Nonfiction Film and Postmodern Skepticism,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), 288. 74. Carroll, “Nonfiction Film and Postmodern Skepticism,” 288. 75. For more on syuzhet, see David Bordwell, Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), esp. 50–57, 64–73, 77–88. 76. Noël Carroll, “From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film,” in Philosophy Looks at Film, ed. Dale Jamieson (New York: Oxford University Pres, 1983), 30. See also Carroll, Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 231. 77. Carl Plantinga, “Documentary,” 501. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 500. 80. Ibid. 81. See table of contents in Barnouw, Documentary. 82. See table of contents in Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 83. Nichols, Engaging Cinema, 114–26. 84. Ibid., 123.

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85. See Del Jacobs, Revisioning Film Traditions: The Pseudo-documentary and the NeoWestern (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). 86. Hayward, “Narrative/Narration,” in Cinema Studies, 268. 87. John Grierson, “Documentary (1),” Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1 (1932), 67–72. 88. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 494. 89. Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 347. 90. Paul Rotha, “Some Principles of Documentary” (1935), in A Paul Rotha Reader, ed. Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999), 148. 91. Robert Gardner, “Muestra Retrospectiva” (video), https://youtu.be/nz KoeFX5Nbg?t=4m41s. 92. See Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (London: I. B. Taurus, 2007). 93. See Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman, ed. Thomas W. Benson and Carolyn Anderson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1989; second edition, 2002). See also Dave Saunders, Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London: Wallflower, 2007). 94. John Grierson, Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966), 13. 95. Barnouw, Documentary, 19. 96. Sigfried Kracauer, Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960), 30. 97. Kracauer, Theory of Film, 29. 98. Ibid., 33. 99. William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), xiii. 100. See David LaRocca, “Reading Cavell Reading,” in Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America, ed. Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly (London: Routledge, 2013); and “The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2013), 109–31. 101. Ibid., xiii–xiv. 102. See Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary is, After All,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring 2005), 105–117; Trevor Ponech, What is Non-Fiction Cinema: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999); and Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995). 103. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 495. 104. Ibid., 496. See also David LaRocca, “Performative Inferentialism: A Semiotic Ethics,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 2013). 105. Ibid. 106. Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Content of Photographs,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 3 (Summer 1999), 285–97. 107. Currie, “Visible Traces,” 286–87.

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108. Currie, “Visible Traces,” 291. 109. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 497. 110. Ibid. 111. Ibid. 112. Ibid., 498. 113. See Noël Carroll, “Language and Cinema: Preliminary Notes for a Theory of Verbal Images,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 187–211. See also J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). 114. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 498. See also Stanley Cavell, “Counter-Philosophy and the Pawn of Voice,” in A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 53–128; and Reading Cavell, ed. Alice Crary and Sanford Shieh (Routledge: New York, 2006), 49. 115. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 162–63. 116. Trevor Ponech, “What is Non-Fiction Cinema?” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 204. 117. Ponech, What is Non-Fiction Cinema? see esp. 8–39. 118. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 165. 119. Plantinga, “What a Documentary is, After All,” 111. 120. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 499. 121. Errol Morris, “Play it Again, Sam (Re-enactments Part One),” The New York Times (April 3, 2008), nytimes.com. 122. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 9. 123. Interview with Nicholas Hénin, “We Need a New Narrative,” On the Media (March 25, 2016), wync.org. See also Nicholas Hénin, Jihad Academy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016). 124. Jean Mitry, “Content and Form: The Importance of the Subject Matter,” in The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, tr. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 363. 125. Mitry, “Content and Form,” 365. 126. Ibid., 366. 127. For a related discussion of surrealism and ethnographic film, see Jeffrey Ruoff, “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread,” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998). 128. Paul Henley, The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009), xiv. 129. Eliot Weinberger, “The Camera People,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from the Visual Anthropology Review, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994), 21. 130. Robert Gardner, “Muestra Retrospectiva” (video), https://youtu.be/nz KoeFX5Nbg?t=4m41s. 131. See The Cinema of Robert Gardner, ed. Ilisa Barbash and Lucien CastaingTaylor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). 132. See www.sel.fas.harvard.edu.

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133. For more on SEL, see Scott MacDonald, American Ethnographical Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013), esp. ch. 9. 134. Barnouw, Documentary, 97n. 135. Rick Altman, “From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Prop: The Early History of Travel Films,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 136. See http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/installations/nothing-is-missing/. 137. See Noël Carroll, The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), where, in the first line, Carroll says he “prefers to say . . . the moving image.” 138. See Rudolph Arnheim, Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957); André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. I, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967/2005); Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, 1949); V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (New York: Penguin Books, 1972); Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971; enlarged edition, 1979); D. N. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007); and Dudley Andrew, What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). 139. Lev Manovich, “What is Digital Cinema?” (1995), in The Digital Dialectic: News Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfield (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999); retitled “Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image” and reprinted in Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Film Theory and Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), seventh edition, 794–96. 140. Cavell, The World Viewed, 27. 141. Manovich, “Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image,” 795. 142. Garrett Stewart, Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). 143. Manovich, “Digital Cinema and the History of a Moving Image,” 796. 144. See Paolo Cherchi Usai, The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001); Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006); Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film; Daniel Morgan, Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); André Gaudreault and Philippe Marion, The End of Cinema: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, tr. Timothy Barnard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). 145. Johann Just Winckelmann, Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1759); Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Art and Cinematic Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008); and Plato, Republic, Book X. 146. Laura Mulvey, Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006), 18. 147. See Bazin, on how photography “embalms time,” What is Cinema? 14. He also writes: “The film delivers baroque art from its convulsive catalepsy. Now, for the first time, the image of things is likewise the image of their duration, change

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mummified as it were.” “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Film Theory: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies, ed. Philip Simpson, Andrew Utterson, and K. J. Shepherdson (London: Routledge, 2004), 22. See also LaRocca, “War Films and the Ineffability of War,” in The Philosophy of War Films, 55; Philip Rosen, Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001); and Stewart, Framed Time, 128, 264. 148. See Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 5. 149. Ibid., 9. 150. Ibid. 151. Ibid. See also Timothy Binkley, “Refiguring Culture,” in Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, ed. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1993). 152. Rodowick, The Virtual Life of Film, 10. 153. Tom Gunning, “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” differences, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2007), 29–52; “‘Animated Pictures’: Tales of Cinema’s Forgotten Future, After 100 Years of Films,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). 154. See Animating Film Theory, ed. Karen Beckman (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014) and Alan Cholodenko, ed., The Illusion of Life I: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1993) and The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007), and his article “Animation: Film and Media Studies’ ‘Blindspot’.” See also Annabelle Honess Roe, Animated Documentary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 155. Karen Beckman, “What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory,” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 179. 156. Ibid. 157. Mary Jo Murphy, “Watching Youth Fly By, in Fiction and Fact,” The New York Times (February 6, 2015), nytimes.com. 158. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 501. See also Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 214–18. 159. See F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Learner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) and Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, ed. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). 160. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 258. 161. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 502. 162. Ibid. 163. “Is True Crime Jinxed?” On the Media (March 20, 2015), onthemedia.org. 164. As Carolyn Kormann, a fact checker at The New Yorker, replied to my query for clarification: “Amy Berg’s film did help put Oliver O’Grady back in prison by exposing and publicizing his identity in Europe as well as the United States. In 2010, O’Grady was living in Rotterdam under an alias, and volunteering at a church, when

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Berg’s 2006 documentary about him aired on Dutch television. Parishioners recognized O’Grady in the film and reported him to the local authorities. O’Grady, who had applied for Dutch citizenship, then fled back to Dublin, but left his laptop on the plane. Police found that it contained videos and stills of child pornography, and soon arrested him. He was sentenced to three more years in prison.” Carolyn Kormann/ David LaRocca personal correspondence (March 20, 2015). 165. Emily Nussbaum, “What about Bob,” The New Yorker (March 23, 2015), newyorker.com. 166. See again “Is True Crime Jinxed?” 167. Jonathan Mahler, “Two Maxims at Odds: Tell a Story, Tell the Truth,” The New York Times (March 22, 2015), nytimes.com. 168. See Alec Baldwin interview with Laura Ricciardi and Moira Demos excerpted in “Netflix’s Making a Murderer Makes a Star,” Here’s the Thing (June 7, 2016), heresthething.org. 169. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 502. 170. See note 51 above. 171. Conor McCourt. See mccourtvideo.com. 172. Plantinga, “Documentary,” 502. See Part Three, “Documentary Ethics,” in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner, Second Edition (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005; first edition [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988]). See also Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television, ed. Larry Gross, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988); Steve Lipkin, Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002); and Paul Ward, Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). 173. For recent collections of related ambition and scope, see A Companion to Documentary Film, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow (Oxford: WileyBlackwell, 2015); Contemporary Documentary, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (London: Routledge, 2016); and The Documentary Film Reader, ed. Jonathan Kahana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016). 174. See Rick Altman, Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999); Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2000); and Thomas Schatz, Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: McGrawHill, 1981).

Part I

THE MEDIUM, MORALS, AND METAPHYSICS OF DOCUMENTARY FILM

Chapter 1

What Photography Calls Thinking Theoretical Considerations on the Power of the Photographic Basis of Cinema Stanley Cavell

What I have so far published on the subject of photography (in The World Viewed, 1971, reprinted 1979; Pursuits of Happiness, 1981; and Themes Out of School, 1984) approaches it mostly through motion, through the photographic basis of cinema, and I will mostly continue that approach here.1 I begin with certain ideas I have recurrently explored concerning the relation of photography and reality. It is around something like a relation to reality— as of the mind to the world—that certain fashionable mottoes concerning the power of photography form themselves. Some notable and, I find, oddly empty examples are mottoes to the effect that “photographs always lie,” or that “photography has changed the way we see.” To say that photographs lie implies that they might tell the truth, but the beauty of their nature is exactly to say nothing, neither to lie nor not to. Then what purposes may be served, or disguised, in attempting to deny so obvious a fact, in attempting instead to mean that emptiness? If the purpose is to counter those, real or imagined, who bluntly claim that photographs never lie, then the counter only replaces the Village Idiot by the Village Explainer. There must be some more attractive purpose. I believe the motto serves to cover an impressive range of anxieties centered on, or symptomatized by, our sense of how little we know about what the photographic reveals: that we do not know what our relation to reality is, our complicity in it; that we do not know how or what to feel about those events; that we do not understand the specific transformative powers of the camera, what I have called its original violence; that we cannot anticipate what it will know of us—or show of us.2 These matters will be touched on as we proceed. People who say that photography has changed the way we see, typically, in my experience, find this a good thing, something for us moderns to get excited by, to speculate from. Susan Sontag’s On Photography stands out 57

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within this line of thought in finding the changes introduced by photography to be a bad thing, something to deplore, whatever praises may be due it. But to say that photography has changed the way we see strikes me as something like the reverse of the truth. The remark does not explain the power of photography but assumes it. Photography could not have impressed itself so immediately and pervasively on the European (including the American) mind unless that mind had at once recognized in photography a manifestation of something that had already happened to itself. What happened to this mind, as the events are registered in philosophy, is its fall into skepticism, together with its efforts to recover itself, events recorded variously in Descartes and Hume and Kant and Emerson and Nietzsche and Heidegger and Wittgenstein. The name skepticism speaks, as I use it, of some new, or new realization of, human distance from the world, or some withdrawal of the world, which philosophy interprets as a limitation in our capacity for knowing the world; it is what Romantics perceive as our deadness to the world, which they understand philosophy to help sustain, and hence to be in no position to help cure. Why skepticism broke upon the mind when and as it did, what succession of guises it assumes, what the roles may be of, for example, the New Science, of the displacement of kings, of the dying of God, are questions I suppose open to historical answer. I find the issues of skepticism fully at play in Shakespearean tragedy and romance. It is perhaps the principal theme of The World Viewed that the advent of photography expresses this distance as the modern fate to relate to the world by viewing it, taking views of it, as from behind the self. It is Heidegger who calls it distance; Thoreau rather thinks of it as the oblivion of what he calls our nextness to the world; Emerson preceded Thoreau and Heidegger in calling nextness to the world nearness to it; Kierkegaard and Wittgenstein say, in different contexts, that we are “away”; others speak of alienation. Since for me philosophy is still—as the names Heidegger and Wittgenstein are meant to suggest—finding its way in this question of skepticism, and since for me the question of photography is bound up with the question of skepticism, I am not likely to regard any proposal as illuminating the one that does not illuminate the other. Hence I take mottoes about photography’s lying, and its changing the way we see, as so many fragments of some pre-Cartesian or pre-Kantian or preHeideggerian moment of philosophical surprise or titillation at human vulnerability or, say, finitude. They may be valuable in pointing to the recesses of the question of photography, but in their empty seriousness, they seem to me efforts to evade the question of what a photograph is. I am likely to characterize this question as asking what a photograph is thinking about—as I have asked, concerning literary and cinematic texts, what the text knows of itself.3



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I am not unaware that these ways of speaking have been found offensive or provocative beyond consideration. Such matters are nowadays sometimes referred to as the text’s textuality, or its self-reference. I sometimes speak of the text’s self-acknowledgment, and sometimes of its knowledge of others, of me. I will not try to provide here any basis for choosing among these descriptions. It may help to say that by wording my intuition in the form “what the text knows of me” I do not first of all suppose this to denote anything personal. For example, the photograph tells me that I am subject, inherently but impersonally, to some version of hallucination. In writing in The World Viewed of the photographic basis of movies, I said that film proposes an artistically unheard of relation between the presence and absence of its objects. In a photograph we see things that are not, in actuality, before us. You may feel that I am missing the plain fact that what we are seeing is a photograph, which is before us. But I am not denying that. I am on the contrary asking that we ask what that means, what a photograph is, and I feel you are missing its strangeness, failing to recognize, for example, that the relation between photograph and subject does not fit our concept of representation, one thing standing for another, disconnected thing, or one forming a likeness of another. When I see that child there in the photograph of the group of school children posing outside the country schoolhouse, the one standing just in front of their teacher Wittgenstein, I know that the child is not here, where I am; yet there he stands, his right arm slightly bent, his collar somewhat disarranged. So, of course, you can point to a figure, perhaps that very child, in a painting, but I think everyone will sense that the words are said in a different spirit about a visual representation than they are about what can be called a visual transcription, a difference registering the fact that in the taking of the photograph the object has played a causal role altogether different from its role in the making of the painting. A representation emphasizes the identity of its subject, hence it may be called a likeness; a photograph emphasizes the existence of its subject, recording it; hence it is that it may be called a transcription. One may also think of it as a transfiguration. Here is one sense of the glory of photography, perhaps due to its power, perhaps to its impotence. It is because I see what is not before me, because our senses are satisfied with reality, while that reality does not exist, that in The World Viewed I call film “a moving image of skepticism.” This version of hallucination is not exactly mad, but it suggests, as skepticism does, my capacity for madness. (Roland Barthes acknowledges an intuition of derangement as a normal possibility of the experience of the photographic in the closing pages of Camera Lucida.) ****

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I said I would proceed to raise the question of the photographic primarily by way of the moving picture, not by way of the still (so it has come to be called) photograph. The principal movie I will interrogate as to its thoughtfulness about itself is Frank Capra’s Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936, with Gary Cooper and Jean Arthur). I choose this example for two general reasons. First, because it is just the sort of popular American film about which it seems most paradoxical to speak of artistic self-reflexiveness, and it may therefore serve to make us wonder whether we know what the concept of the popular means when applied to the art of film. Second, since Capra’s own writings about his films are as gullible, sentimental, and, let me say, unintellectual, as he perhaps wishes his audiences to be, this apparently gullible, sentimental, and unintellectual film may serve to emphasize that I am speaking not of the man Capra but of the power and glory of a medium, of what it knows of itself. (That this man Capra turns out to be a master in letting this medium show itself may eventually force us to revise our idea of who or what “the man Capra” is.) I will work toward the Capra film by first illustrating briefly, with two pairs of related films, the kinds of revelation of the medium I expect to find in any significant film—a significant film being one precisely on the basis of which such revelations of the medium are most significantly made. Of course this process of mutual revelation, between a work and the work’s medium, being hermeneutic, is circular, global. The first pair of films are the earliest and the latest of the seven films that, in Pursuits of Happiness, define the genre I call “the comedy of remarriage.” In the latest, Adam’s Rib (directed by George Cukor, 1949, with Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy), an early sequence consists of the depicted screening of a home movie. The enclosing, sophisticated film relates itself to the enclosed, primitive home movie (primitive but complete, like a Wittgensteinian language game) in such a way as to demonstrate the near but not full coincidence of the two films: their framing edges, on reframing, move closer to one another without quite coinciding, creating an effect as complex and illuminating as similar moments in Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), they share the same principal actors and characters and one minor actor and character; they end in the same setting and with the same conclusion (a house in Connecticut for which they have just finished paying off the mortgage). The differences between the enclosing and the enclosed movie—apart from that relation itself, which remains incompletely assessed, and apart from the fact that the enclosed is silent and the enclosing has sound, another incompletely assessed matter—seem to go little beyond a matter of style (which is not to suggest that style is itself a clear matter, but merely that it is not everything). The similarities and differences between the larger and the smaller movies generate a long philosophical story, but in the end I draw a short, multipart moral from that story: the event of film itself is the



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fundamental cinematic event, not what the filmmaker does to the event, not, for example, whether it was composed in continuity or in discontinuities, which once seemed the fundamental aesthetic question of film; the aesthetic significance of a given film is a function of the way in which and degree to which it reveals or acknowledges this fact of its origin in the medium of film; the full discovery of the significance of an artistic medium, in the revelations and acknowledgments of its significant works, would be accomplished only by the complete history of an art, I mean by an exhausted art, supposing there is such a thing. The earliest of the comedies of remarriage, It Happened One Night (directed by Capra, 1934, with Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert) specifies “the event of film itself” as an event of censoring. This is how I read the film’s most famous prop, the blanket hung across a rope strung between two beds in a motel room to divide the space between the man and the woman. The specification of this division of masculine from feminine space depends on two ideas: first, the idea of taking the blanket as an allegory of the working of a movie screen—it conceals the woman’s presence from the man while continuously registering her presence causally by her voice and by the dents and ripples her motions impart to the vertical rectangle of fabric; second, the specification depends on accepting the pertinence, in connection with the ensuing limitation and transgression of knowledge, of invoking Kant’s idea of the limitations and transgressions necessitated by human reason in establishing the presence and absence of the world. Again there is a long philosophical story generated by these claims, but the short double moral I draw from this story is that the effect of censoring (as elsewhere) is not to banish but to displace and magnify the sense of the erotic; and that the narrative of remarriage is an account, or rather recounting, of what in the English tradition of philosophy is called the problem of other minds, as studied, for example, in the final part of my The Claim of Reason. This double moral emphasizes the following points of method in the way I approach the study of film. What you may call the aesthetic importance of such a film as It Happened One Night—a certain cultural importance may be measured by its having received more Academy Awards than any previous film—is not secured by its position within the genre of the comedy of remarriage, nor by its containing an element that can be understood to allegorize the work of the movie screen, nor by its bearing up under a comparison with the project of the Critique of Pure Reason. The conditions of the aesthetic power of film, as with the exercise of any human power, cannot be known in advance of a certain criticism, or say critique, of that power, and a conviction in the architectonic of the critique—a satisfaction in the placement of concepts within the structure of importance—is not had apart from its application in individual cases. Sciences call such application experimentation;

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humanities call it criticism. If we say that what organizes or animates the results of experimentation is mathematical discourse, then we might say that what organizes or animates the results of criticism is philosophical discourse, and perhaps go on to consider the following: a physicist can allow himself or herself to rely on the soundness of a piece of mathematics once for all, and independently of his or her own ability to derive the mathematics; such is the nature of mathematical conviction, or proof. Whereas a critical reader cannot leave it to others to derive the philosophy he or she invokes, because that philosophy is either derived by such a critic in each act of criticism, new each day, or else it is intellectually unanimated, dead, at the disposal of fashion. (Here as elsewhere, one of the best uses of philosophical acumen is to spot and turn aside useless, invasive philosophy.) **** The second pair of films I mention in specifying a work’s revelation of the photographic medium begins with perhaps the central member of the genre of remarriage comedy, The Philadelphia Story (directed by George Cukor, 1940, with Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart). The surface narrative of the film has to do with a reporter and photographer who, through blackmail by the unscrupulous publisher of a sensationalist weekly magazine (one that makes news of gossip and gossip of news—it is modeled on Time magazine), are insinuated into an upperclass household to do a feature story about a wedding behind this household’s commonly impenetrable doors. The film ends with the wedding ceremony about to begin; as it happens, all three principals are standing before the minister. From nowhere the unscrupulous publisher appears at their side and interrupts the ceremony by himself taking the wedding photos. The film then comes to an end with the following events. At the click of the publisher’s camera the trio instinctively snap their heads toward it and their startled looks freeze. It is as if that is what the still camera captured, a gesture suggesting that no photograph can be candid, that any camera necessarily imposes on its subject its own conditions of capture, and that identifies the publisher’s camera and its motives with the camera of this film. Then that still photograph becomes a page which, when turned, reveals a second still photograph in which Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn appear alone, embracing, beyond the reach of James Stewart. In Pursuits of Happiness I read the significance of the turn to stillness in this way: however we understand the provenance of these wedding photos— whether as magazine pages, or perhaps as moments of a wedding album, even perhaps as production stills—the fact of their photographic stillness, after the context of motion pictures, is shocking. It feels as if “we are seeing something after the fact, whereas didn’t we just now take ourselves to be, as



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it were, present at the wedding? . . . What is the difference [between motion and stillness]?”4 The fundamental question of the relation between photographic motion and stillness was not one I was prepared to think about very deeply. I let it go once I had located its function in this film, namely that it makes us question the illusion of our presence at these events, and question the nature of dramatic illusion. I related this, in turn, as I relate other moments in my book, to a problematic in Shakespearean romance, in this instance to Shakespeare’s pervasive study of audience. To take the thought a step further, I want now to pair The Philadelphia Story with Dusan Makavejev’s 1974 film Sweet Movie. As good a way as any of summarizing this immensely complex work, which combines documentary and fictional materials and methods, is to say that it is a psychologicalpolitical-philosophical meditation on two themes: first, on a progressive mutual destruction of claims to truth and claims to fantasy which leaves us helpless to believe the one and to take guidance from the other—as if the confusion of news and gossip, depicted in The Philadelphia Story as a matter of distaste to a cultivated sensibility, had now become a global matter of intellectual and emotional poison; second, it is a meditation on the title of the song that underscores the film’s opening sequence, “Is there life after birth?” The film is punctuated by, or rather organized around, images and thoughts of birth, and of rebirth, as of exhumation from premature burials—it may be a suffocation in the beds of sugar or the vats of chocolate with which the American and the Russian halves of the globe cloak the failures of their revolutions; or it may be the digging up of the mass graves of the massacred Polish officers in the Katyn Forest; or it may be ceremonies of the radical Muehl commune from Vienna, providing a new and bouncing infancy for the bloated grown-up body of one of its group. It is as if the film is asking: Are there ways of thinking, is there a language, in which to speak of such things usefully, nonpoisonously? Is there a form of life, that is, in which such a language may be used? (I have in mind, of course, in this gloss, Wittgenstein’s formulation, “To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life”—implying that philosophy needs to take instruction here, that it tends to imagine language as dead, no longer spoken.) Makavejev ponders these questions by subjecting his film to them, getting it to ask of itself whether it creates life or death. This self-questioning is epitomized and confronted in the final sequence of Sweet Movie, as lucid and beautiful an acknowledgment as I have seen of the power and glory of film. The final sequence opens, tinted a monochrome blue, with five corpses wrapped in plastic shrouds and laid neatly on a river bank. They got there through astounding paths of circumstance which cannot now be retraced. The wrapped bodies begin to stir, and the human beings we knew to be inside, call them the actors, begin removing themselves from

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these cerements or cocoons, exhuming or metamorphosing themselves. The figure nearest us proves to be the boy who had been the main object of a dance of seduction by a woman who in Makavejev’s depiction allegorizes phases of the imagination of the Russian revolution. The boy turns his face toward us, looking past us, as at the invisible camera, whereupon the frame freezes and his looking is thus preserved. Gradually the blue tint gives way, and color returns to the frame, upon which the film ends. Formally this ending is a meditation on film’s properties of color or its absence, of motion or its absence, and of sound or its absence. The fruit of the meditation is produced through the interpretation of the plastic shrouds or cerements as visual figures for strips of film. Then, the boy’s looking out from the screen, half exhumed from his cocoon of film, becomes Makavejev allowing his own youth to confront the grown-up he has become—touched by the horror of the world he now works within and to that extent consents to—and to pose the question as to whether his film creates life or death. The return of color declares that he takes himself as on the side of life, but the stillness and silence of the frame threaten that answer. The pair of still and silent frames that end The Philadelphia Story are from a different world, and yet the hint of death is also present even there, in arcadia. Pursuits of Happiness does not insist on this but it does ask if there is not “some lingering suspicion that the picture of the trio was already a kind of wedding photo?”—that somehow, as Edmund madly says in the final moments of King Lear, “I was contracted to them both. Now all three marry in an instant.” What Edmund means by the three marrying is that he is in an instant going to join them in death. The violence and range of Shakespeare’s problematic of marriage, which continues throughout his tragedies and romances, the violence of its creation and its decreation, applies also to the comedy of remarriage, because marriage is there legitimized, authorized, not by state, church, sexuality, or children, but only through the pair’s unsponsored willingness to choose one another again, so that the plot will contain the fact or threat of divorce. The ground of this willingness for repetition turns out to be the woman’s feeling that she is still in need of creation (as in different ways Nora feels in Ibsen’s A Doll House and Hermione feels in Shakespeare’s A Winter’s Tale) and that for some reason she has chosen this man to provide the necessary midwifery of this new birth (unlike Nora’s case; like Hermione’s, but without the full mystery of her choice). “The creation of the woman” alludes in my book to a simultaneity of projects: to the institution of marriage by God in Genesis, creating the woman from the man; to the progress of the feminist movement; to the transfiguration given to or imposed upon particular women of flesh and blood by the camera’s power of photogenesis. The violence of the camera’s creation I understand to be declared in another Cukor film, A Woman’s Face (1941, with Joan Crawford, Melvyn



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Douglas, and Conrad Veidt), where the power of the photographic may be taken as allegorized by the power of plastic surgery. A related idea is taken up in the recent Gorky Park (1983), where the medical reconstruction of a head without a face is an emblem for the reconstructability of a murder, perhaps of history as such, and, at the same time, of the process by which the camera preserves the human figure. Horror films will necessarily hint at the camera’s transfigurative power, in their disfigurations, recreations, or decreations, of the human being. In my book this shows the genre of horror film to be adjacent to the genre of remarriage comedy. **** After one more introductory word I will propose an application of film’s participation in creation and annihilation to the frivolously obvious, I mean the apparently frivolous, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town. Photography’s participation in death—as if in preserving its subject a photograph removes it from life, mounts it, like a trophy—is an idea that kept surfacing in The World Viewed, where I would have been prompted to it by what I had read of André Bazin, with his recurrent sense of the photographic as a kind of life mask of the world, the twin of a death mask. It occurs centrally as I note that the photograph speaks of its human subjects as distracted from the future awaiting them, hence as blindly facing death, a condition displaced with particular lucidity in shots of candid happiness, where the metaphysical transience of such instants marks their subjects with mortal vulnerability; and I close that book with a vision of the world viewed—the world as photographed—as the world of my immortality, the world without me, reassuring in the promise that it will survive me, but unsettling in the suggestion that as I stand now the world is already for me a thing of the past, like a dead star. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth and Emerson and Thoreau mean to awaken us to our harboring of such a vision, and to free us from it. Yet our nostalgia deepens. Memory, which should preserve us, is devouring us. We must, as Thoreau put the matter, look another way. (I should like to cite, in this connection, Garrett Stewart’s “Thresholds of the Visible: The Death Scene of Film” in Mosaic XVI/1–2, which studies film’s presentation of death in connection with recent studies of the presentation of death in written narrative. The idea of the death of the world occurs as a frisson within the vulgar ironies of such settings as those of the Planet of the Apes movie series and the television serial Buck Rogers in the Twenty-Fifth Century.) Leaving the issues of stillness and motion so undeveloped, the moments I have described from The Philadelphia Story and from Sweet Movie suggest that stillness emphasizes the death in mortal existence while motion emphasizes the life of it. So long as these emphases do not deny that both speak

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of both, in their particular ways, no theoretical harm is done, if not much good. In turning to Mr. Deeds I focus on a feature of human mortality that the motion of motion picture photography cannot fail to capture. It may seem about the most trivial feature of human beings there could be, the fact that they are more or less nervous, that their behavior is fidgety. This fact of human life becomes the climactic evidence cited by Mr. Deeds (Gary Cooper) while defending himself in a law court against the charge of insanity. His successful interpretation of this evidence causes general social happiness and wins him the ecstatic embraces of his estranged beloved, whereupon the film concludes. That propositions of such ludicrousness can be seen to illustrate, even to explore, philosophical sublimities is surely part of my fascination with so-called popular movies. About the film’s plot, all I will say before looking at a few moments of that trial is that Deeds was arrested for trying to give away his sudden inheritance of $20,000,000, on the complaint of lawyers—who have their designs on the money—that his behavior shows him mentally incompetent. He has also just found out that the woman he has fallen in love with is a reporter who, using his feelings for her to extract a sensational series of newspaper features, has held his escapades up to ridicule, naming him “The Cinderella Man.” In a detention hospital room he has withdrawn into silence. The trial occupies the last twenty minutes or so of the film, and starts out with Gary Cooper maintaining his silence, refusing to plead further with a world that has erotically and politically ridiculed and jailed him for his Utopian fantasies. What causes him to speak again, which means, narratively, what prompts him to defend himself, is an obvious critical question. A less obvious question concerns the participation of Capra’s film in the genre of melodrama, in which muteness is a signal feature, and in which the breaking of silence is a climactic declaration of personal identity and the confrontation of villainy. It is an image of ecstasy or exaltation expressed in this instance as the power and the willingness to communicate one’s presence, to have one’s existence matter, one’s own terms taken seriously. (Emphasis on muteness and self-revelation is among the many discoveries in Peter Brooks’s valuable study The Melodramatic Imagination, 1976.) Less obvious still is what the camera’s evidence of fidgetiness has to do with these matters. Mr. Deeds appeals to fidgetiness as a universal human attribute, if not exactly a normal one, in defense of his playing the tuba at odd hours, a practice taken by the prosecution and its witnesses as a major piece of evidence of madness. Deeds’s defense is that his tuba playing is his version of something every human being does under certain universally recurrent conditions. The other versions he cites of such behavior are tics (a man’s compulsive nose twitching, a woman’s knuckle cracking) and doodling (drawing aimless designs, filling in Os). I say he “cites” these instances, but in fact his speech



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becomes a kind of voice-over narrative as the camera illustrates each of these involuntary movements in closeup, as if it is setting up exhibits of evidence for Mr. Deeds’s case. The evidence is, accordingly, not for the depicted judges and spectators, for whom the closeups are invisible, but for us. He does cite two such practices without photographic illustration—ear pulling and nail biting—as if to declare that the act of photographing is deliberate. This underscores Deeds’s alliance with the camera. It is his acknowledgment that to provide such illustration or evidence is a power and possible glory natural to the moving picture camera, that the most apparently insignificant repetitions, turnings, pauses, and yieldings of human beings are as interesting to it as is the beauty or the science of movement. Think of this interest or power as the camera’s knowledge of the metaphysical restlessness of the live body at rest, something internal to what Walter Benjamin calls cinema’s optics of the unconscious. Under examination by the camera, a human body becomes for its inhabitant a field of betrayal more than a ground of communication, and the camera’s further power is manifested as it documents the individual’s self-conscious efforts to control the body each time it is conscious of the camera’s attention to it. I might call these recordings somatograms (cf. cardiograms, electroencephalograms), to register the essential linking of the pattern of a body’s motions with the movements of the machine that records them. We seem to have no standing word for what somatograms record. “Mannerisms” is partial in its noting of characteristically recurrent behavior; “manners” is partial in its attention to social modification. Freud uses the word Fehlleistimg (usually translated as parapraxis) to gather together something like the stage of behavior I have in mind, but his examples are more selective than mine must be. The plain word “behavior” has the right generality, but in a time still unpredictably marked by the psychological and philosophical sensibility of behaviorism—in which behavior is reduced to something outer, from which something inner (call it mind) has been scooped out—the expressiveness of the range of the restless is more or less incomprehensible. Emerson’s essay entitled “Behavior,” from The Conduct of Life, is an effort to rehabilitate this concept of behavior, along with that of manners, to return the mind to the living body. Here is a sample: Nature tells every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time, by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face and parts of the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible carriage or action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we call manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the body, the speech and behavior? . . . The power of manners is incessant,—an element as unconcealable as fire.

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Emerson’s effort of conceptual rehabilitation constitutes this marvelous essay as a major contribution to the aesthetics of cinema (as well as to the aesthetics of acting, a coincidence hardly merely coincidental). Mr. Deeds has a particular name for the condition that causes universal fidgetiness. His name for it is thinking. “Everyone does silly things when they think,” he declares. He uses the word “think” or “thinking” repeatedly, and each time emphasizes that each individual does something idiosyncratic when he or she is in the condition of thinking. Why he includes playing the tuba as part of his particular somatogram—not, say, as an item in his profile as an aspiring American musician and artist—is, of course, a further question. I want to stay with the question at hand: How has Deeds been brought to break his silence in order to speak of the connection between thinking and silliness? Why is it now that he is willing to claim his identity and his contribution to the polity and his personal happiness against the villainous incomprehension of the world? My answer depends on taking his appeal to the concept of thinking with greater philosophical seriousness than others may be prepared, right off, to grant it. I have taken Deeds’s perception of fidgetiness as disclosing an essential feature of the human, not simply of the animal, body; it marks a creature in whom the body and its soul do not everywhere fit. (I wish to leave open the question whether this is true of the human creature as such, or whether it may be true only of the human creatures in our epoch, and especially true of those creatures in the period of capitalism that Deeds’s social program of redistribution defines, one in which a large number of evidently hardworking, unenvious, independent people are needlessly being deprived of what they need in order to make a living. “Need” is another recurrent term of Deeds’s discourse. His word for those who do not wish to work is “moochers”; he is shown to be indiscriminate in his application of this term.) And I have taken the idea that fidgetiness always accompanies thinking to mean that it proves thinking, or the desire to think, which, as Heidegger asserts, is essential to the possibility of thinking. It is the connection of thinking with the human desire of the possible, of realization, that prompts me to see in Deeds’s words, and the way he uses them, a recapturing in the everyday of Descartes’s perception of what thinking itself proves, namely the existence of the human. So that when Deeds begins to speak, defending his sanity, he is performing, as the climax to be expected in a melodramatic structure, a version of Descartes’s cogito, taking on the proof of his own existence, as if against its denial by the world. Some will be unwilling to grant this degree of seriousness to Mr. Deeds’s courtroom lecture on silliness and thinking, and they may wish to protect their sense of the serious by suggesting that Deeds’s words are at best a parody of philosophy, not the thing of philosophy itself. I am sympathetic to this. But I have shown cause elsewhere to suppose that at some stage serious



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philosophy may come to manifest itself as—one could say, to exist most immediately as—a parody of philosophy.5 I have based this idea on Emerson’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s apparently parodistic adoptions, or adaptations, of the cogito argument. Because Emerson’s adaptation will play a direct role in my conclusion about the movie Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, I pause here simply to state his observation that we are no longer able to announce the cogito for ourselves, no longer able, as he puts it, to say “I think” and “I am,” on our own, for ourselves. I take this to imply that we are without proof of our existence, that we are, accordingly, in a state of preexistence, as if metaphysically missing persons. Emerson’s famous word for lacking words of our own is “conformity.” It obviously has precursors in Romantic perceptions of the human as dead, or deadened, and it is a specific conceptual precursor of Nietzsche’s “last man,” hence of Heidegger’s Das Man. Before we dismiss Deeds as lacking the authority or the circumstances in which to assume the cogito (matters essential to Descartes’s broaching of the issue), we had better be sure that we know who this man is and what his circumstances are, know them as well as we must know, for example, who and where one of Poe’s narrators is in order to know the spirit in which to take his tales. We have to make up our minds whether we grant Deeds the authority to mean the line from Thoreau that he identifies when he says early in the film: “They built palaces but they forgot to build the people to live in them”; or whether, alternatively, we withhold this grant and thereby rebuke his pretension in voicing it. He says it in his first conversation with the woman, alone at night on a park bench, as part of establishing an initial intimacy with her; a few moments later he seizes an occasion to run from her and jump on a screaming fire engine. Is this what philosophical authority looks like? I note that the line preceding the one about building palaces is also from Thoreau, but not identified as such in Capra’s script: “People here seem to have the St. Vitus Dance.” (Capra’s limitation as a reader of Thoreau and Emerson may show in the circumstances of this line. Deeds says it about New York, with the implication that in small towns such as the one he comes from behavior is radically different. Even I would find it hard to believe that Capra invites this interpretation to show the limitation only of his character Deeds, implying that he has himself a yet more transcendental perspective.) St. Vitus’s Dance is the more familiar name for the disorder called chorea, found mostly in children and associated with temporary brain dysfunction. In Deeds’s phantasm (and for that matter in Thoreau’s) there is no radical distinction to be made between St. Vitus’s Dance and human behavior as such (as it has become), as if human behavior is now in general the result of brain damage. When the two comically dotty old maid sisters testify in the court room that not only Deeds but everyone except themselves is “pixilated” (controlled by pixies), they discredit their earlier testimony that Deeds is thus

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affected. Everyone thereupon agrees that this shows the sisters to be mentally incompetent. But the only difference between their expressed view of the world and Deeds’s view is that he does not clearly exempt himself, any more than Thoreau exempts himself, from the madness of the world. Perhaps this is what philosophical authority sounds like. To dismiss Deeds as too silly for philosophical thought is to deny him a voice in defining what is silly, one of his characteristic words. And if we deny him this voice, how are we different from the corrupt prosecution, who would exercise an analogous denial by having him declared insane? And how do we understand the muteness that prepares the condition, you may say the seriousness, of his cogito? The woman who loves him screams that he is being crucified. (Frank Capra, like other American artists, finds the figure of Christ near at hand for identifying the posture of his heroes. Some will find this an irredeemably coarse habit, perhaps in the way Nietzsche found Luther’s intellectual habits to be coarse.) Without going that far, the question remains how far we credit the grief, the sense of rejection, that this hero’s extended muteness bespeaks. Our answer to that question determines how seriously we take this man’s intellectual seriousness. If our philosophical sensibility fails us here it may be failing us at any and all times, so that it is we whose perceptions and powers of sympathy will prove to be coarsened and muted. Evidently, my questions concerning the seriousness with which we grant the intellectual seriousness of Mr. Deeds is some kind of allegory of a more extensive question about whether we will grant to Frank Capra the capacity to undertake a significant artistic response to Emerson and Thoreau. My anxiety about communicating such a thought with due seriousness has waxed and waned since the time, in preparing the chapter on Capra’s It Happened One Night for Pursuits of Happiness, I broached the idea of Capra’s filmmaking as incorporating a mode of vision inherited from American transcendentalism, even to the point of sharing American transcendentalism’s inheritance, in turn, of German culture (specifically, in Capra’s work, of German expressionist cinema). The anxiety tracks my knowledge that lovers of American movies have taken such remarks of mine to be needless and pretentious, together with my sense that professional students of film are often not prepared to credit such company for American movies, colored by my observation of American professional philosophers, for whom, with perhaps a growing number of exceptions, such speculation is fit, at best, for an intellectually frivolous hour. It has been urged upon me that such dismissals should not matter to me so much. But I think one can see in the work of Emerson and of Thoreau and of Capra that, in their various American ways, analogous dismissals have mattered as much to them. To provide a fair test of this question of Deeds’s intellectual seriousness, we would need to place Deeds in that courtroom, arrive at him, derive him,



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exactly as he comes to be derived from paths of narrative and cinematic development most of whose contours cannot possibly be accounted for here. I will accordingly end these remarks by returning specifically to the path of the power and glory of photography, asking after the role the camera plays in Deeds’s willingness to speak and to claim his happiness with the woman. I pick up from two ideas already discussed. First, that Deeds will show his awareness that the motion picture camera bears an affinity with metaphysical restlessness, that it has its own imperative to keep moving, and second, that this awareness is, in effect, an acceptance of Descartes’s perception that the human stands in need of proof in each case, by each case, together with Emerson’s perception that we are mostly incapable any longer of taking on our existence by ourselves. And I take it that Deeds’s insight is that a reverse field of proof is available by way of the motion picture camera, so that while thinking is no longer secured by the mind’s declaration of its presence to itself, it is now to be secured by the presence of the live human body to the camera, in particular by the presence of the body’s apparently least intelligent property, its fidgetiness, its metaphysical restlessness. In Descartes the proof of thinking was that it cannot doubt itself; after Emerson the proof of thinking is that it cannot be concealed. Am I saying that the camera is necessary to this knowledge? Descartes says that my existence is proved “each time I say ‘I think,’ or conceive it in my mind.” Must I commit myself to saying that my existence is proved (only) each time the camera rolls my way? I ask a little license here. My idea is that the invention of the motion picture camera reveals something that has already happened to us, hence something, when we fail to acknowledge it, that is knowledge of something fundamental about our existence which we resist. And the camera also reveals and records that resistance—recall that, in the course of Deeds’s lecture to the court, each time the camera follows his attention to a person’s body’s motion, that person’s reflex is shown to be to attempt to hide the motion. We can think of what the camera reveals as a new strain either in our obliviousness to our existence, or in a new mode of certainty of it. If the price of Descartes’s proof of his existence was a perpetual recession of the body (a kind of philosophical counter-Renaissance), the price of an Emersonian proof of my existence is a perpetual visibility of the self, a theatricality in my presence to others, hence to myself. The camera is an emblem of perpetual visibility. Descartes’s self-consciousness thus takes the form of embarrassment. Deeds is accordingly the name of one who sees the stakes in this altered condition and who submits himself to the camera’s judgment, permits its interrogation—its victimization—of him. It is an unlooked-for species of bravery. Psychologically, submission to a somatogram—to the synchronization between body and camera—demands passiveness, you may say demands

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the visibility of the feminine side of one’s character. Capra’s mastery of the medium of film, or his obedience to it, guides him to make certain that we are aware of the beauty of Gary Cooper’s face, and in one instance he photographs him posed as in a glamour shot of a female star, lying on his back across a bed (playing the tuba it happens, as if that mattered), capturing his full length from a vantage just above his head. Cinematically his submission declares what I have called the natural ascendancy on film of the actor over the character, so that the rightness of its being specifically Gary Cooper who plays Deeds comes here to the fore, as if Capra is interpreting the embarrassment (say the self-consciousness) of the Emersonian proof—that thinking cannot be concealed—in terms of Cooper’s world-historical capacity for shyness, and vice versa, giving a metaphysical interpretation of this American mode of shyness.6 Narratively the condition of Deeds’s happy ending is that his victimization be interpreted, or redeemed, as his willingness to reverse roles with the woman. We know of his boyish wish for romance, his wish “to rescue a damsel in distress.” Jean Arthur asserts once and for all her superiority over him in the realm of action, call it the male realm, by pretending to him to be such a damsel. She has ridiculed exactly that wish of his by naming him “The Cinderella Man”—he is more in need of being rescued than in a position to provide rescue. But this, in turn, is the expression of her own condition of romance: her wish to discover a man for whom she could make it all right that he has been badly frightened by desire and lost a slipper. At the end he shows her this loss, this desire. He has twice run from her, each time at a moment when his desire was importunate. Early, as mentioned, when he runs to the fire engine from the park; then later, elaborately, when, as she completes reading aloud to him the love poem he has composed for her, he races down the night streets, stumbling noisily over visible and invisible garbage cans, in a solo of awkwardness that cinematically registers the falling of an American male in love. In the courtroom his starting to speak is the sign that he has stopped running. He claims the woman’s love by acknowledging that the shoe fits, that he was, so to speak, at the ball, that he has desires and can ask her to rescue him from his fear of expression. Narratively the man’s willingness to speak, to express desire, comes in response to the woman’s courtroom declaration, under cross-examination, that she loves him (a familiar Hollywood topos). I think we are entitled here, further, to understand the man’s reading of this woman’s declaration of love as a signal of her own distress. Thus, after all, she grants him his wish to rescue, to be active, to take deeds upon himself, earning his name; as he grants her wish to her. So this film participates, with comedies of remarriage, in what I have called the comedy of equality and reciprocity.



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The words with which the man had broken his silence were: “I’d like to put in my two cents”—which is still useable American slang for expressing an opinion. Our next step should be to consider why this man, whose adventure recounts the inheriting and attempted bequeathing of one of the richest fortunes in the country, initiates his willingness to quit his silence and to claim the inheritance of his existence, his right to desire, by speaking of speaking as an issue of “two cents.” Of course, one can bring any number of ideological suspicions to bear here. I think the film deserves also the following line of consideration. The right to speak not only takes precedence over social power, it takes precedence over any particular form of accomplishment; no amount of contribution is more valuable to the formation and preservation of community than the willingness to contribute and the occasion to be heard. Furthermore, unlike $20,000,000, the contribution of two cents is one that can be responded to equally by others; it leaves your voice your own and allows your opinion to matter to others only because it matters to you. It is not a voice that will be heard by villains. This means that to discover our community a few will have to be punched out, made speechless—one interpretation of Deeds’s repeated violence, punching men on the jaw. It is a fantasy of a reasonably wellordered participatory democracy. It has its dangers; democracy has; speech has. If the motion picture camera contributes its uniqueness to help keep this Utopian idea alive, that is power and glory enough to justify its existence, a contribution somewhere between two cents and the largest fortune in the world. NOTES 1. This chapter was prepared initially at the invitation of the Graz (Austria) Photography Symposium, held in October 1984, and was delivered there in a somewhat different version. Participants in the symposium were asked to speak about their personal approaches to the medium of photography under the title and with the typography: THE POWER (and the glory) OF PHOTOGRAPHY. Hence the echoing of the words in that title in the course of my remarks. First published in Raritan, spring 1985; reprinted in Richard Poirier, ed., Raritan Reading (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1990). Portions of chapter 10 of Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Harvard, 2004) are adapted from this essay. 2. See Stanley Cavell, “The Courting of Marriage,” in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 218. 3. See Stanley Cavell, “The Politics of Interpretation (Politics as Opposed to What?),” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984), 53.

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4. See Stanley Cavell, “The Importance of Importance,” in Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). 5. See Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988), 54; and “Being Odd, Getting Even (Descartes, Emerson, Poe),” in Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 99–100. 6. See Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, Expanded Edition (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 25–29, 111.

Chapter 2

Cinematic Representation and Spatial Realism Reflections After/Upon André Bazin Noël Carroll No figure is as important in the history of film theory as André Bazin. His influences on contemporary theory, though diverse, are unmistakable. Some contemporary theorists like Stanley Cavell follow a Bazinian line outright— claiming, with Bazin, that cinema is essentially a realist art.1 Other theorists, such as V. F. Perkins, while diverging from Bazin on many crucial points, nevertheless attempt to incorporate central aspects of Bazin’s theory into their own work; in Perkins’s case, this can be seen in his elaboration of the concept of credibility.2 Thus, while rejecting Bazin’s theory as a whole, such authors seek to preserve some of its parts. Even contemporary film theorists who might be called ciné-Brechtians and who would consider themselves violent opponents of Bazin oddly enough buy into central parts of Bazin’s theory.3 Indeed, they often more or less accept Bazin’s characterization of the spectator’s response to the screen image as the accurate account. Bazin pictures the viewer of mimetic cinematography as accepting that he or she is witnessing a slice of reality—the film viewer is said to regard the image as the representation of some event or state of affairs from the past. Although ciné-Brechtians denounce this phenomenon as ideologically pernicious—a species of politically motivated, deceptive illusionism—they nevertheless hold as correct something very like the Bazinian story of how normal spectators regard mimetic images. They agree with Bazin on the putative facts of the case, but disagree on how these should be morally evaluated. What Bazin sees as the glory of cinema—its purported capacity to move viewers to accept that they are in the presence of the referent of the image— ciné-Brechtians bewail as film’s disgrace. Yet, they must accept the Bazinian spectator as the normal spectator before they can mount their attack upon the classical, mimetic, narrative cinema.4 75

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Bazin’s influence was also strongly felt by the generation, often called auteurists, that immediately preceded the present crop of film theorists. The authors I have in mind include Godard, Truffaut, Chabrol, Rivette, and others who, before they became filmmakers, were polemicists on the pages of the magazine called Cahiers du cinéma (which was cofounded by Bazin). In America, Andrew Sarris was and is the most distinguished auteur theorist. This theory—which attributes value to films insofar as they manifest or clearly evince the personal vision or stamp of their director (auteur/author)— was not propounded explicitly by Bazin (though in his criticism Bazin does lean toward the great-genius approach to art). What the auteurists learned from Bazin, however, was a sensitivity to mise-en-scène. And when one examines the pantheons erected by auteurist critics, one immediately sees the influence of Bazin, insofar as the directors most honored by these critics are often those, like John Ford, who excel as metteurs-en-scène, tending to favor long takes over pyrotechnical editing. Not only is Bazin important for his influence. He is also the major representative of the change in direction that cinema took after the sound film survived its first decade and a half. That direction is often summarized by the word “realism.” The film theory associated with the silent film was preoccupied with showing that film could be more than the mere recording of reality. Through editing, lighting, camera angulation, and the like, the filmmaker could reconstitute reality, offer interpretations of reality, and make statements about, rather than only copy, reality. Silent-film theorists—for example, Arnheim, Eisenstein, and Vertov—favored highly stylized films. Often these theorists seemed to believe that the more a film diverges or departs from the way the world normally appears, the better. Bazin led the counterattack against this tendency of silent-film theory that I have called creationist. While the creationists located the truly cinematic wherever the medium diverged from a perfect recording of reality, Bazin argued that the truly cinematic film stays as close to recording as possible, eschewing the interpretation, recreation, or reconstitution of reality. This debate between sound-film theorists and silent-film theorists was in large measure precipitated by the introduction of sound in film. Sound enhanced the recording capacity of the medium—the dimension that the silent-film theorists held in lowest esteem. As the sound film evolved from the late twenties to the early forties, a gap developed between the undeniable international accomplishments of the sound film and the established film theory. The theory no longer seemed adequate to the task of accounting for cinema’s newest achievements. A new type of theory was called for. Bazin offered such a theory, one sensitive to the masterpieces of sound film, and in the process he reversed the evaluative priorities of established film theory. Where Arnheim deprecated the recording aspect of film, Bazin chose



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this dimension of the medium as the major source of value in film. Where established film theory urged that the filmmaker be highly interventionist or creationist—that is, manipulating and rearranging images of reality almost like a poet manipulates words—Bazin advocated the adoption of formal strategies of composition, lighting, camera movement, framing, and narration such that meaning would not be imposed on reality but would rather seem to emerge from the interaction of the recorded event with a participant (rather than a passive) spectator. Where silent-film theorists often read as if they are embarrassed by the photographic, mechanical, recording components of the medium, Bazin, in the forefront of the realist movement in film theory, looks to exactly those elements of film to discover “the cinematic.” From the perspective of the history of film theory, Bazin is a watershed figure. His theory marks the most decisive moment in the transition from the silent-film paradigm to the sound-film paradigm. Moreover, since this is the most important shift in the history of film theory, Bazin’s central role in it guarantees him a privileged place in the study of film theory. Bazin was not an academic theoretician. He was a journalist and a polemicist. Although he wrote for newspapers, he also contributed lengthy articles to intellectual reviews and general interest journals. His literary output was vast and varied, including theoretical pieces, film history, and film criticism. Many of his critical pieces and his observations about individual films and filmmakers have stood the test of time. They are the first and last word on the subject. But Bazin is also important as a historian of film style. In many ways his accomplishment is comparable to that of the art historian H. Wolfflin.5 Bazin essayed a stylistic history of the medium that he was concerned with— his is the first major effort to encompass the stylistic development of both silent and sound film. In the course of tracing the logic and structure of the evolution of film history, Bazin mobilized a battery of dubious philosophical and metaphysical presuppositions. It is possible, however, to reread Bazin while ignoring these excessive theoretical commitments so that his observations about the evolution of film style can be de-mythologized leaving us with several insights about the progress of film history that have lasting value. Once Bazin is de-mythologized, he can be reread as claiming that the advent of sound caused artists to reevaluate the possibilities of their medium. One avenue of response to sound can be seen in the early sound films of René Clair—for example, À Nous la liberté. This is a kind of formalist response. Another response was to embrace the acquisition of sound as an addition to cinema’s capacity to record events. This attitude, in turn, changed the approach of artists to their medium as a whole. They sought techniques and strategies that would emphasize the recording aspects of film and thereby concord with the telos inherent in film’s newest recording element, synchronized sound. That is, sound, regarded as a realist element, fired the

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imaginations of artists in a way that sent them searching for other techniques to accentuate the recording dimension of the medium as a whole. As Soviet writings on film indicate, this “realistic” attitude was not the only attitude held toward sound in the thirties. But, in historical perspective, it was certainly the important attitude. As we have seen, silent film of the twenties, in theory and often in practice, betrayed a horror of the idea that cinema is simply the mechanical recording of events. In this, cinema responded to the prejudices of the world of fine art which, with the arrival of so-called nonobjective painting, began to discount the value of representation as an artistic property. In defense of their medium as an art form, film theorists like Arnheim and the Soviets denied that film was a simple, reflex, automatic reproduction of reality. And at the level of filmmaking, expressionism (e.g., of the German variety) and montage were highly assertive styles that emphasized that cinema was not merely a mechanical reproduction or recording of profilmic events. Both silent-film artists and theorists—committed to the notion that film is an art—were predisposed to foreground the constitutive and creative (as opposed to the reproductive) aspects of the medium. Some theorists, notably Arnheim, refused to endorse the shift in film aesthetics. Sound for them was a return to canned theater, a regression to the pre-Griffith era before film had weaned itself from the stage. Others, however, embraced the new device and attempted to incorporate it into the aesthetic system of the silent film. Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Alexandrov, in their famous 1928 statement on sound,6 and Roman Jakobson, in a rarely discussed 1933 article entitled “Is the Cinema in Decline?”7 proposed that sound be understood as a montage element: aural units should be juxtaposed against the visuals just as shots should be juxtaposed against shots. Jakobson, ironically, answers someone like Arnheim in the same manner that Arnheim might have answered the anti-cinematic charges of a Clive Bell or a Benedetto Croce. Jakobson tells the opponent of sound that his opposition to the sound film is not based on a thoughtful look at the possibilities of the new medium. Jakobson argues that the sound element in a scene can be asynchronous and contrapuntal, thereby diverging from mere reproduction. This possibility enriches cinema because added to all the conceivable visual juxtapositions of the silent film are inestimably large reservoirs of sound counterpoints. Coinciding with the theoretical endorsement of asynchronous sound, a number of films were produced that exploited this “montage mentality”: Lang’s M and Testament of Dr. Mabuse, Dreyer’s Vampyr, Vertov’s Enthusiasm and Three Songs of Lenin, parts of Pudovkin’s The Deserter, Buñuel’s L’Age d’or and Land without Bread, and Clair’s early sound films, especially À Nous la liberté. These films might be called “silent sound films.” This is not meant disparagingly. Each of these films represents a major achievement.



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Yet that achievement in each case derives from a penchant for asynchronous sound based on a paradigm of montage juxtapositions as a means to manipulate, to interpret, and to reconstitute profilmic events. The montage or “silent-film” response to sound was conservative in one sense. It was an attempt to extrapolate the basic concepts of a silent-film aesthetic to a new development, recommending montage as a basic model for dealing with sound. By the forties another kind of recommendation was evolved, by a group of artists isolated by Bazin. This alternative was diametrically opposed to the general silent-film propensity toward stylization and manipulation, toward what has been called creationism. In Bazin, the recording/reproductive aspect of film—that nemesis of silentfilm artists and theorists alike—became the center of a theory that made recommendations about the types of composition and camera movement that would best enable the filmmaker to re-present reality in opposition to the silent-film urge to reconstitute it. The formation of Bazin’s theory was closely related to the transition to sound, especially in terms of the gradual emergence of a certain realist tradition of sound films that defines itself against the aesthetics of the silent film—notably the tendencies toward montage and expressionism—and that for that reason may be said to comprise “sound sound films,” in contrast to “silent sound films.” In other words, in the thirties a filmmaker like Renoir responded to the introduction of sound as an augmentation of film’s recording capacities, and he evolved a realist style that roughly correlated with the notion of film as recording.8 Bazin described and sought foundations for Renoir’s practice, and in doing so charted the predominating ethos of the sound film until the sixties. That is, with the introduction of sound, the aesthetic pendulum gradually began to swing away from montage and expressionism and toward the affirmation of something said to be closer to a “recording” style. This is not to claim that much sense can be gleaned from phrases like “the mere recording of reality,” but only to acknowledge that “recording” is one parameter of film. What is compelling about Bazin’s writings is the way that he is able to pick out and explain the place of formal techniques, like long takes and deep-focus photography, in the process of the move from a conception of film art as assertive stylization to a reconception of the medium as more a matter of recording—rooted, Bazin would claim, in the photographic nature of film. For example, Bazin explicates the work of Renoir in terms of specific strategies, such as irregular panning and deep-focus composition, that can be understood as associated with the recording/reproductive capacities of film in the context of the international cinema of the thirties. We need not commit ourselves—in our demythologized account of Bazin—to his idea that recording is the essential characteristic of film. It is a possibility—just as the more stridently interventionist or creationist techniques of montage and

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expressionism are possibilities. But what has explanatory power in Bazin is the way that he points to the development of certain techniques, that, in the context of the thirties and forties, can and do come to emphasize the recording aspects of the film medium as a historical response to the aesthetic proclivities of silent film, where that response is predicated on the belief that sound should be exploited and integrated into film style as an additional increment of recording. This is not to say that sound is not still sound-recording in examples of assertive stylization, such as Clair’s, but only to say that Clair’s use of sound in audiovisual tropes emphasizes the constitutive creationist dimension of film over the recording dimension. When analyzing Renoir’s irregular panning, Bazin was at pains to show that by using slight lateral pans and zigzag pans, Renoir subverted the traditional manner of composing a scene. Previous standard operating procedure had often involved setting up all the action in a scene or shot so that it could be photographed without camera movement. The actors were blocked in such a way that they never stepped out of the camera’s perspective, that is, out of range of the viewfinder. Renoir, however, orchestrated scenes, notably in Rules of the Game, in such a way that the camera was often refraining laterally to keep the actors on camera. As well, rather than constructing sets and blocking actors so that the camera could move through the profilmic environment in highly direct, geometrically striking, and elegant lines and arcs, Renoir favored awkward, geometrically irregular, and unevenly paced camera movements. Bazin seized on both these techniques and argued that, insofar as they broke with traditional schemas, they functioned as indexes of spontaneity. The techniques downplayed certain evidences of preproduction artifice common in average films of the period.9 In this light, these techniques can be interpreted as emphasizing that possibility of film that is thought of as the “spontaneous recording of events.” For instance, a cameraman committed to laterally reframing action is a cameraman committed to following the actors and action. This is not to claim that Renoir’s shots are in fact spontaneous recordings of events. Rather, the claim is that in contrast to the corpus of ordinary films of the period, Renoir’s films subverted certain standard techniques in a way that could be interpreted as dismantling a kind of artifice that marked prior styles of filmmaking as both theatrical and painterly.10 Bazin’s analysis of deep-focus composition can be reread in a similar fashion. Depth-of-field photography historically defines itself against editing as a structurally divergent but in some ways functionally equivalent means of organizing scenes. In this respect, deep-focus composition offers itself as an alternative to traditional forms of representation. Deep-focus compositions have structure. Nevertheless, that structure, when compared to traditional editing, emphasized the recording dimension of film by articulating events



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in a spatially and temporally continuous manner. And it is this concern with the possibility of film as a recording that makes depth of field, along with the analogous phenomenon of “lateral depth of field” (the taste for lateral reframings and irregular pannings), a meaningful option for film realists in the period that Bazin describes. Thus, Bazin can be read as offering a reconstruction of the logic of an (aesthetic) situation—in the Popperian sense of that phrase—an account of the rational choices and alternative “moves” open to the ambitious filmmaker in the circumstances of the advent and evolution of the sound film. Moreover, Bazin was able to connect the emergence of this realist sound style with a heretofore overlooked tradition of silent film— including the works of Stroheim, Murnau, Keaton, Flaherty, and Chaplin—as well as with developments that were contemporary with the maturation of his own theory—the work of Welles, Wyler, and the Italian neorealists. In terms of offering an overview of the history of film style, Bazin’s attention to film realism represents a discovery of the first order. In the preceding paragraphs I have rewritten Bazin’s position in a way that I think captures what is useful in his work. One result of my rewriting is to make Bazin sound less the theorist and more the historian of film style. And this, of course, corresponds to my view of Bazin—his talent was not for theorizing, but for perceiving and articulating broad stylistic movements. Most of this chapter will be devoted to undermining Bazin’s theoretical speculations. I have taken this opportunity at the outset, however, both to explain my admiration for Bazin and to avoid leaving the reader with the mistaken conclusion that I think Bazin’s work is worthless. Also, before proceeding, another disclaimer is necessary. As I have already indicated, Bazin wrote a great many articles. The majority of these were not theoretical. Moreover, the relation between the straightforwardly theoretical articles and his critical reviews is sometimes especially complex and obscure. Often the reviews have little to do with his explicitly stated theory. And at times, Bazin says things that are quite at variance with what one would expect from a proponent of Bazin’s theory. In fact, sometimes Bazin’s critical “results” contradict his theory. Furthermore, often his critical conclusions have nothing to do with the theory. One way to deal with this problem would be to attempt an in-depth exegesis of Bazin’s corpus of writing aimed at rendering all criticism and theory consistent, perhaps by invoking deep principles that Bazin never develops in his text and by offering subtle reinterpretations of Bazin’s central tenets in ways that dispel apparent contradictions. This is not how I will approach Bazin’s theory. Rather, I will take the theoretical articles at face value, ignoring the contradictory criticism. I do not take my task to be that of reconciling all the different things Bazin wrote at different times. It is Bazin’s theory as it is explicitly stated rather than the theory that might be implicit in or presupposed by his criticism that is most important historically for film theory.

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Thus, I will set forth the outline of Bazin’s theory as it is usually conceived in film circles rather than attempting to discover a more compelling version that might be developed by working through all his writing with the purpose of making it consistent. It is often remarked by defenders of Bazin that he was willing to violate a theoretical precept in order to acknowledge cinematic achievements. If it came down to a choice between hardlining his theory or honoring a cinematic accomplishment, Bazin would opt for the film, not the theory. Some therefore claim that Bazin was not an absolutist but rather regarded his work as a conjecture.11 And from this observation it might be argued that detailed criticism of Bazin—of the sort that I intend—is really beside the point. The missing premise of this argument is probably something like—“since Bazin knew his theory wasn’t perfect, why bother to bring to light its imperfections?” I have three answers to this sort of objection. (1) A theory presented as a conjecture is no less deserving of criticism than a theory presented as incontrovertibly true—indeed, why submit a conjecture if not to see whether it should be abandoned or improved as a result of criticism? (2) Advocates of this line of thought seem to confuse criticism of Bazin the person with criticism of Bazin’s theory. (3) Even if Bazin and everyone else know that this highly influential theory is false, spelling out its precise imperfections still seems worthwhile, since this will give future film theorists a deeper appreciation of the logical pitfalls along certain avenues of speculation. **** Perhaps the best way to begin a sympathetic account of Bazin’s theory is to narrate the sequence of events leading to its formation. Bazin began writing on film in the early forties, as a student,12 and he continued working until his death in 1959 at the age of forty. One of the major films of the period when Bazin began to be concerned with cinema was Renoir’s Rules of the Game. (Much of Bazin’s theoretical work represents a sustained meditation of Renoir’s films, especially Rules of the Game.) What Bazin perceived there was a style of filmmaking distinct from the dominant international styles of filmmaking. Some of the features Bazin came to see as central to Renoir’s achievement were: (1) the use of medium-long shots—shots in which the whole bodies of actors were visible on screen, often with space between the top of their heads and the upper frame line; (2) the use of deep focus—every point in the image was in hard focus, as opposed to the soft-focus techniques of Hollywood thirties’ composition (the background of Renoir’s shots were legible, visible, and recognizable rather than blurred); (3) the use of multiplanar



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compositions—since Renoir’s images were in deep focus, he could situate dramatic details and contrasts on several pictorial planes, while more typical soft-focus films of the period situated action only in the foreground (at times Renoir would deploy as many as four planes of discrete dramatic action in Rules of the Game); (4) the use of the long take—rather than break down a scene into a series of shots, Renoir tackled it in one shot of long duration (a long take), working out the dramatic action on multiple planes of a deep-focus shot—the action was not analytically fragmented into a series of shots but developed in a long-take, medium-long shot, what is sometimes called a “sequence shot,” since the entire sequence is done in a single shot; (5) the use of camera movement rather than editing to follow the action; (6) a nontheatrical, nonpainterly use of the frame—because Renoir’s camera was often shifting to keep track of the actors, the frame lacked the kind of fixity or permanence found in ordinary films, where the frame was modeled on the proscenium arch of a stage or the frame of a painting.13 In reference to this last point, it should be added that the proscenium arch and the picture frame are said to mark the boundary between what they contain and what is geographically adjacent to them; likewise, the film framing that was modeled on them. Renoir’s cinematic frame, however, has a more fluid relation to what is offscreen. Constant reframing makes the relation between what is onscreen and immediately offscreen seem more continuous than the centripetal framing of ordinary films. Renoir’s frame, Bazin stressed, is not modeled on anything; it is merely homothetic to, that is, coextensive with, the viewfinder of the camera.14 Bazin did not claim that every shot of every Renoir film had all of these characteristics. But many of the most important images did, especially in such mature works of the late thirties as Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. One way to capture Renoir’s style is through the often obscure concept of continuity. The Renoir scene is continuous in the sense that the space and the action have not been broken up and elliptically resynthesized through editing.15 The action is continuous—we see the whole action, without gaps, so to speak. What might be called the integrity of the space is respected. At the same time, the space of the action has a quality of continuousness that is quite different. It arises from Renoir’s framing technique, which creates a continuity between onscreen and offscreen space that is constantly reaffirmed by the slight pannings and lateral reframings of the shot.16 By exploiting these various dimensions of continuousness the Renoir image approaches a realistic representation of space. It projects an image that is certainly more like our ordinary experience of space than the constructed, artificially bounded, elliptical space found in most other films of the period, which synthesized scenes by means of editing and soft focus.17 These “sequence shots” might be said to traffic in real space and real time rather than the constructed space and time

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of edited scenes (although “real space” and “real time” here ought not be taken too literally, but as terms of art signaling a stylistic contrast and thereby functioning like the term “depth” as it is applied to paintings). Bazin further argued that deep-focus, long-take sequence shots place spectators in a relationship to the image that is more like their relationship to an actual—rather than a representational—perceptual manifold than what is available in edited film. Viewers scan the scene from foreground to background, making connections for themselves rather than having every relationship in the drama spelled out for them by the editing. Thus, in Rules of the Game viewers “discover” ironic echoes as the same marital farce is played out by different sets of characters in the hallway and in the room behind the hallway. (In the average film of the thirties the same point would be hammered home by cutting from the hallway to the room.) Using the long-take, deep-focus shot, Renoir could present simultaneously occurring dramatic events simultaneously rather than sequentially, as is done via editing. Renoir’s commitment to work in a continuous dramatic space, Bazin thought, allows a certain freedom to the spectator that is more like our ordinary experience of actual events than is the highly directed manner in which we assimilate an event that is edited and shaped by classical montage. Rather than convey information through unambiguous close shots, for example, the director working with medium-long shots allows spectators to discover the dramatic point of a scene for themselves. Moreover, since Renoir’s camera follows the actors, Bazin felt this lent the image the feeling that the event filmed seems somewhat “independent” of the camera (i.e., rather than palpably staged for the camera).18 And this, of course, corresponds to our ordinary experience of perceptual manifolds. Thus, because of these qualities of independence, perceptual freedom, and “continuity” of the space in Renoir’s sequence shots, Bazin called Renoir’s style “realist.” In the aftermath of World War II, American films began to flood into Paris again. Bazin noted that some major stylistic shifts were evident in American filmmaking during the war. These shifts were most evident in the work of directors Orson Welles and William Wyler and cinematographer Greg Toland. The American cinema in general seemed to be inching toward an aesthetic based more and more on the sequence shot, and, in the work of Welles, Wyler, and Toland, these shots were often articulated by using deep-focus, multiplanar medium-long shots and moving the camera. Certain American films—including Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, The Little Foxes, The Best Years of Our Lives, The Bishop’s Wife, and others— seemed to be evolving along the lines crystallized in Renoir’s thirties films, particularly Grand Illusion and Rules of the Game. Owing to American technological innovations, pioneered in part by Toland, the depth of field in these American films was crisper and more defined than it was in Renoir’s films.



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And the camera movement, again partly due to the technological superiority of the Americans, was smoother then Renoir’s. The aesthetic commitment to use sequence shots of continuous space, however, marked an affinity between these American auteurs and the French realist. This new aesthetic preference in American cinema engendered a number of famous scenes: Susan’s attempted suicide in Citizen Kane19; the kitchen scene in The Magnificent Ambersons20; the marriage of Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright (in the foreground) while Frederic March and Myrna Loy echo their vows (in the background) in The Best Years of Our Lives; and the telling of the story of David and the angel in The Bishop’s Wife.21 Bazin recognized in these American films a correlation with Renoir’s experimental style in his late thirties’ films.22 Bazin believed that he was witnessing the emergence of a full-scale stylistic movement, one that he would not only christen but also champion. Along with the influx of American films, Paris after World War II saw the appearance of the first fruits of the post-Fascist Italian cinema. Most striking among these films were the works of a newly coalesced movement called neorealism. Rossellini, De Sica, Zavattini, Visconti, Fellini, Lattuada, and De Santis all were participants in this tendency of Italian film. Open City, Paisan, Bicycle Thief, and Umberto D are perhaps their best known films. In many ways the realism of these Italian films rested on factors different from the “spatial” realism of the American films.23 The realism of the American films was primarily a matter of cinematic style rather than content—costume films and fantasies were counted as realist insofar as they employed long takes. Neorealist films, on the other hand, generally contained what could be thought of as “classic” realist content—depictions of the contemporary problems of the working class. Bazin also saw these Italian films as realistic in virtue of (1) their mixing of nonprofessional and professional actors24; (2) their use of location shooting; (3) their often episodic and open-ended story construction25; and (4) their even lighting, which was reminiscent of documentary filming in contrast to the dominant form of the studio fiction film.26 These features, of course, have little in common with the style of realism that Bazin saw emerging in the Hollywood films of Welles and Wyler. Yet, there was one point of congruence. Like Renoir and the Americans, the Italians seemed to endorse a preference for elaborating scenes in continuous takes rather than through editing. And in the clearly lighted backgrounds of these Italian films shot on location, one could see the daily flow of Italian life amid the ruins of the war. Renoir and the Americans used the background of their long takes to develop dramatic detail, whereas the Italians amassed anthropological and archaeological detail there. The Italians favored medium-long shots that gave the spectator the freedom to peruse this wealth of detail and to see the contemporary problems of the Italian people played out in everyday locales, recorded in real—that is to say nonsynthetic,

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unedited—space and time. Bazin was quite aware that the films of Welles and Wyler and the neorealists were not exactly the same. Yet, he also thought that in a broad but important sense they were linked as representatives of a general tendency of filmmaking. “They [the Italians and Welles] are aiming at the same results. The means used by Rossellini and De Sica are less spectacular but they are no less determined to do away with montage and to transfer to the screen the continuum of reality.”27 Though what Bazin had to say, as a positive generalization, about the affinity between Renoir, Welles, Wyler, and the neorealists at times seems strained, vague, or obscure, Bazin’s negative reasons for grouping these filmmakers together are clear. The group coheres because it can be construed as standing against a style of filmmaking based on editing—whether Soviet montage or the “invisible editing” of the classic thirties’ Hollywood film28—and because of a tendency to favor long-take, medium-long shots over editing.29 Bazin’s arguments against montage of both the Hollywood and Soviet varieties (henceforth simply “montage”) and in favor of spatial realism were based on a range of considerations. One was the aura of authenticity spatial realism imparted to certain scenes. Perhaps I shall make myself clearer by giving an example. In an otherwise mediocre English film, Where No Vultures Fly, there is one unforgettable sequence. The film reconstructs the story of a young couple in South Africa during the war who founded and organized a game reserve. To this end, husband and wife, together with their child, lived in the heart of the bush. The sequence I have in mind starts out in the most conventional way. Unknown to the parents, the child has wandered away from the camp and has found a lion cub that has been temporarily abandoned by its mother. Unaware of the danger, it picks up the cub and takes it along. Meanwhile the lioness, alerted either by the noise or by the scent of the child, turns back towards its den and starts along the path taken by the unsuspecting child. She follows close behind him. The little group comes within sight of the camp at which point the distracted parents see the child and the lion which is undoubtedly about to spring at any moment on the imprudent kidnapper. Here let us interrupt the story for a moment. Up to this point everything has been shown in parallel montage and the somewhat naive attempt at suspense has seemed quite conventional. Then suddenly, to our horror, the director abandons his montage of separate shots that has kept the protagonists apart and gives us instead parents, child and lioness all in the same full shot. This single frame in which trickery is out of the question gives immediate and retroactive authenticity to the very banal montage that has preceded it. From then on, and always in the same full shot, we see the father order his son to stand still—lion has halted a few yards away—then to put the cub down on the ground and to start forward again without hurrying. Whereupon the lion comes quietly forward, picks up the cub and moves off into the bush while the overjoyed parents rush towards the child.



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It is obvious that, considered from the point of view of a recital, this sequence would have had the same simple meaning if it had been shot entirely in montage or by process work. But in neither event would the scene have unfolded before the camera in its physical and spatial reality. Hence, in spite of the concrete nature of each shot, it would have had the impact only of a story and not a real event. There would have been no difference between the scene as shot and the chapter in a novel which recounted the same imaginary episode. Hence the dramatic and moral values of the episode would be on a very mediocre level. On the other hand, the final framing which involved putting the characters in a real situation carries us at once to the heights of cinematographic emotion. Naturally the feat was made possible by the fact that the lioness was half tamed and had been living before the filming in close contact with the family. This is not the point. The question is not whether the child really ran the risk it seemed to run but that the episode was shot with due respect for its spatial unity. Realism, here, resides in the homogeneity of space. Thus we see that there are cases in which montage, far from being the essence of cinema, is indeed its negation. The same scene then can be poor literature or great cinema according to whether montage or a full shot is used.30 If slapstick comedy succeeded before the days of Griffith and montage, it is because most of the gags derived from a comedy of space, from a relation of man to things and to the surrounding world. In The Circus Chaplin is truly in the lion’s cage and both are enclosed within the framework of the screen.31

From these examples, it is clear that Bazin believes that these scenes acquire a quality of authenticity by making use of homogeneous, unedited space as opposed to the synthetic, constructed space of editing. “It is simply a question of respect for the spatial unity of an event at the moment when to split it up would change it from something real to something imaginary.”32 Moreover, Bazin does not see this as merely a reason why some scenes should be spatially unified, but rather believes that such scenes reveal the essence of cinema—“Essential cinema, seen for once in its pure state, on the contrary, is to be found in straightforward photographic respect for the unity of space.”33 Bazin also supports what I am calling spatial realism over editing for what could be thought of as moral reasons. Montage, according to Bazin, tells the spectator what to think about the action on the screen. But with a medium-shot, long-take composition, as I noted earlier, the spectator is free to discover the meaning of the action independently. Bazin’s thesis is that montage compels passive spectatorship while spatial realism induces active spectatorship. The spectator scans the image and derives the meaning of the action on his own. The spectator of films of spatial realism is a participant in the meaning structure of the film—he is free in opposition to the enforced passivity of totalitarian montage. Bazin says the deep-focus, medium-shot, long-take style implies, “consequently, both a more active mental attitude on the part of the spectator and a more positive contribution on his part to the

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action in progress. While analytical montage only calls for him to follow his guide, to let his attention follow along smoothly with that of the director who will choose what he should see, here he is called upon to exercise at least a minimum of personal choice. It is from his attention and his will that the meaning of the image in part derives.”34 Bazin calls this criticism of montage a psychological consideration, but, although psychological observation is involved in stating the case, Bazin’s emphasis on freedom of choice for the spectator makes the conclusion of the argument more a matter of moral evaluation than of applied psychology pure and simple. Bazin had another charge to level at montage, one that he calls metaphysical but is again, better thought of as moral. In analyzing reality, montage presupposes of its very nature the unity of meaning of the dramatic event. Some other form of analysis is undoubtedly possible, but then it would be another film. In short, montage by its very nature rules out ambiguity of expression. Kuleshov’s experiment proves this per absurdam in giving on each occasion a precise meaning to the expression on a face. . . . On the other hand, depth of focus reintroduces ambiguity into the structure of the image, if not of necessity—Wyler’s films are never ambiguous—at least as a possibility. Hence it is no exaggeration to say that Citizen Kane is unthinkable shot in any other way but in depth. The uncertainty in which we find ourselves as to the spiritual key or the interpretation we should put on the film is built into the very design of the image.35 In Roberto Rossellini’s Paisan and Allemania Anno Zero and Vittorio De Sica’s Ladri de Biciclette, Italian neorealism contrasts with previous forms of film realism in its stripping away of all expressionism and in the total absence of the effects of montage. As in the films of Welles and in spite of conflicts of style, neorealism tends to give back to the cinema a sense of the ambiguity of reality.36

Bazin appears to be arguing that (1) since reality is ultimately ambiguous— at least in terms of the judgments we make about people—and (2) since this sort of ambiguity is possible (but not necessary) in the long-take, mediumlong shot style, but not even possible in montage, then (3) the long-take style is superior to montage insofar as it can reflect reality more truly. This seems to be a species of moral argumentation, since the type of ambiguity in question revolves around a belief in the “ultimate mystery of the human heart.” Connected with this is the injunction that such mystery demands that we must refrain from judging and interpreting others. Editing, in turn, is seen as a form of immoral interpretation. At the same time that Bazin identified spatial realism he also looked backwards to the history of film to find forerunners of this tendency. These included not only Renoir, but also Stroheim, Murnau, and Flaherty.37 “In their



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films,” he wrote, “montage plays no part, unless it be the negative one of inevitable elimination where reality superabounds.”38 To see the type of thing that Bazin found important about these filmmakers, consider what he has to say about Stroheim. Stroheim’s films could not have the same meaning before or after Griffith. This language [that is, Griffith’s popularization of the conventions of editing] had to exist before its destruction could be called an improvement. But what is certain is that Stroheim’s work appeared to be a negation of all the cinematic values of his time. He will return the cinema to its main function; he will have to relearn how to show. He assassinated rhetoric and language so that evidence might triumph; on the ashes of the ellipse and symbol, he will create a cinema of hyperbole and reality. Against the sociological myth of the star—an abstract hero, the ectoplasm of collective dreams—he will affirm the most peculiar embodiment of the actor, the monstrosity of the individual. If I had to characterize Stroheim’s contribution in one phrase, I would call it “a revolution of the concrete.”39 If Stroheim’s narrative could not, for obvious technical reasons, escape the discontinuity of shots, at least it was not based upon this discontinuity. But, on the contrary, what he was obviously looking for was the presence of simultaneous events and their interdependence on one another—not a logical subordination as with montage, but a physical, sensual, or material event. Stroheim is the creator of a virtually continuous cinematic narrative, tending toward permanent integration with all of space.40

These quotations show—as did his analysis of sound film realists—that what Bazin found striking about silent-film realists was an explicit contrast with the montage style. These “opponents of montage” were dubbed realists because they could be seen as developers of a film style that was an alternative to montage and because that style could be seen as an affirmation of the continuity of “real” space through the use of long-take composition. The isolation of a lineage of spatial realists gave Bazin the wherewithal to reconceive the entire history of film style. He divided filmmakers into two broad camps: those who put their faith in the image—montagists and German expressionists (who resort to distorted imagery),41 and those who put their faith in reality—those committed to the realism of “continuous” space. He writes: I will distinguish, in the cinema between 1920 and 1940, between two broad and opposing trends: those directors who put their faith in the image and those who put their faith in reality. By “image” I here mean, very broadly speaking, everything that the representation adds to the object there represented. This is a complex inheritance but it can be reduced essentially to two categories: those related to the plastics of the image and those that relate to the resources of montage, which, after all, is simply the ordering of images in time.

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Under the heading “plastics” must be included the style of the set, of the make-up, and, up to a point, even of the performance, to which we naturally add the lighting and, finally, the framing of the shot which gives us its composition. As regards montage, derived initially as we know from masterpieces of Griffith, we have the statement of Malraux in his Psychologie du Cinema that it was montage that gave birth to film as an art, setting it apart from the mere animated photography, in short, creating a language. The use of montage can be “invisible” and this is generally the case of the prewar classics of the American screen. Scenes were broken down just for one purpose, namely to analyze an episode according to the material or dramatic logic of the scene. It is this logic which conceals the fact of the analysis, the mind of the spectator quite naturally accepting the viewpoints of the director which are justified by the geography of the action or the shifting emphasis of dramatic interest. But the neutral quality of this “invisible” editing fails to make use of the full potential of montage. On the other hand, these potentialities are clearly evident from the three processes generally known as parallel montage, accelerated montage, montage by attraction. . . . Whatever these may be, one can say that they share that trait in common which constitutes the very definition of montage, namely the creation of a sense or meaning not proper to the images themselves but derived exclusively from their juxtaposition.42 Through the contents of the image and the resources of the montage the cinema has at its disposal a whole arsenal of means whereby to impose its interpretation of an event on a spectator. By the end of the silent film we can consider this arsenal to have been full. On the one side the Soviet cinema carried to its ultimate consequences the theory and practice of montage, while the German school did every kind of violence to the plastics of the image by way of sets and lighting. Other cinemas count, too, besides the Russian and the German, but whether in France or Sweden or the United States, it does not appear that the language of cinema was at a loss for ways of saying what it wanted to say. If the art of cinema consists in everything that plastics and montage can add to a given reality, the silent film was an art on its own. Sound could only play at best a subordinate and supplementary role: a counterpoint to the visual image. But this possible enhancement—at best only a minor one—is likely not to weigh much in comparison with the additional bargain-rate reality introduced at the same time by sound. Thus far we have put forward the view that expressionism of montage and image constitute the essence of cinema. And it is precisely on this generally accepted notion that directors from the silent days, such as Erich von Stroheim, F. W. Murnau, and Robert Flaherty, have by implication cast a doubt.43

From these passages it is evident that Bazin is working up his observations about the development of a forties’ style spatial realism and his isolation of forerunners of this style into a grand evolutionary scheme of film history,



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one that is progressive in nature. That is, Bazin’s history sees the forties style of spatial realism as a goal that was inherent in the medium from the start. Stroheim, Murnau, Flaherty, et al. were glimmerings of film’s destiny in the days of German expressionism and Soviet montage. At times, Bazin seems ambivalent about how to judge these early “art” cinemas. Sometimes he appears willing to honor them—at least some of the montagists, though not the expressionists—as necessary and respectable (though infantile and now exhausted) stages in film’s development. In fact, occasionally it sounds as if he is willing to regard the Soviets as representatives of some early sort of realism, despite their employment of montage. More often than not, however, when Bazin speaks of realism he has his variant of spatial realism in mind. And, since he sees evidence of it as early as the teens (in Stroheim, for example), it naturally follows that this style, in Bazin’s view, is the most correct one throughout film history—even if at times Bazin has kind words for some of the montagists of the twenties, notably Eisenstein. In any case it is at least clear that by the forties, for Bazin, adherence to the constraints of spatial realism is a necessary condition for cinematic achievement. Indeed, in Bazin’s articles on his contemporary, Alfred Hitchcock (the montagist exemplary of the sound film), the firm but gentle resistance to Hitchcock—against the importunings of younger auteurist critics—is underwritten by Bazin’s belief that cinema’s destiny, determined by its essence, is against the increasing sophistication of montage.44 Bazin was not satisfied to chart the emergence of a distinctive style of filmmaking and to adumbrate its special qualities. Rather, he wished to establish that style as the most important and the only legitimate cinematic style. He recast film history in a particular evolutionary mold to suggest that spatial realism was the ultimate style of film—the destiny of the medium. In order to ground this extreme form of advocacy, he attempted to show that his beloved style best exemplified the essence of cinema. Bazin argued that spatial realism followed logically from an understanding of the unique representational nature of cinema. He also argued for spatial realism on the basis of claims about the objectivity of the photographic process, the moral inferiority of montage to spatial realism, and the psychological genesis of the urge for cinema. NOTES 1. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (New York: Viking, 1971). 2. V. F. Perkins, Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972). This point is discussed at length in chapter 2 of Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).

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3. Ciné-Brechtianism is discussed in my “Address to the Heathen,” October, No. 23 (Winter 1982), 103–09. 4. Bazin’s writings are also gaining contemporary importance in the newly developed debates concerning photography where he is taken—along with Sontag and Barthes—as one of the major proponents of the view that the camera image is a replica of some sort of reality. This position is addressed in my “Concerning Uniqueness Claims for Photographic and Cinematic Representation,” Dialectics and Humanism, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1987), 29–43. 5. H. Wolfflin, Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in later Art, tr. M. D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1932). 6. In Sergei Eisenstein, Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949), 257–60. 7. In Russian Formalist Film Theory, ed. Herbert Eagle (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981), 161–66. 8. In my “Lang, Pabst, and Sound,” in Ciné-tracts, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Fall 1978), 15–23, I discuss the film Kammeradshaft, which I take to be a forerunner of this tendency for handling sound that predates even Renoir’s experimentation in this direction. 9. André Bazin, Jean Renoir, ed. François Truffaut, tr. W. W. Halsey and William H. Simon (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1973), 89. 10. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 89. 11. Bazin himself refers to his view of the evolution of film history as a “working hypothesis.” See André Bazin, What Is Cinema? vol. 1, tr. H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 24. Henceforth I will abbreviate references to this book as WIC 1. 12. Many of Bazin’s early critical writings are anthologized in André Bazin, French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981). 13. Renoir himself acknowledged his awareness of the long take, medium-long shot, hard focus, multiplanar style when he said in a famous article: “The further I advance in my profession, the more I abandon confrontations between two characters neatly set up before the camera, as in a photographic studio. I prefer to place my characters more freely, at different distances from the camera and make them move. For that I need great depth of field” (quoted in Bazin, Jean Renoir, 90). 14. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 87. 15. Bazin, WIC 1, 48–52. 16. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 84–91. 17. Bazin discusses the interrelation of editing and soft focus in WIC 1, 33–34. 18. Bazin, Jean Renoir, 89. 19. Analyzed by Bazin in Orson Welles: A Critical View, tr. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper and Row, 1978), 77–78. 20. Bazin, Orson Welles, 80. 21. The last two examples are my own, not Bazin’s. 22. Bazin, WIC 1, 34. 23. Bazin, of course, was well aware of the difference between the American realists and the Italian neorealists. See, for example, WIC 1, 37. Also see André Bazin,



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What is Cinema? vol. 2, translated by H. Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 29–30, 33. Henceforth I will abbreviate references to the latter book as WIC 2. 24. Bazin, WIC 2, 22–25. 25. See Bazin, WIC 2, 30–32, 34, 38–40, 84. Related to the episodic structure is what Bazin sees as key to neorealism—a downplaying of plot, where plotting is seen as taking an a priori view toward reality. See WIC 2, 64–65. 26. Ibid., 33. Bazin also notes other similarities between neorealist camera style and documentary style. He says, “The Italian camera retains something of the human quality of the Bell and Howell newsreel camera, a projection of hand and eye, almost a living part of the operator, instantly in tune with his awareness.” Bazin also sees the use of locale in neorealist films as documentary in the sense that it does not resort to the expressionist’s mobilization of the pathetic fallacy (WIC 2, 88). The comparison of neorealism and the documentary can also be found on page 20. 27. Bazin, WIC 1, 37. 28. For an explanation of “invisible editing,” see the long quotation from Bazin beginning on page 117. 29. This claim, if it is to be empirically accurate, requires much more finesse than Bazin ever devotes to it. It is not the case that his preferred films lack montage altogether—for example, the hunt scene in Rules of the Game. One might say that these films eschew editing and adopt long takes in important or crucial scenes. But this is not an apt empirical generalization either—there is cutting, as well as deep-focus composition, in the wedding scene of The Best Years of Our Lives. To make the claim fit the facts, it would be best to say that Bazin’s favored films use both long takes and editing to develop crucial scenes, but that the deep-focus and/or long-take images have a special, distinctive effect—are of greater importance or are more moving than the edited imagery—because of the sorts of qualities Bazin noted—for example, the accommodation of spectator discoveries. Moreover, it could be added that these cinematic structures would have been less probable in an earlier period of film. 30. Bazin, WIC 1, 49–50. 31. Ibid., 52, italics added. 32. Ibid., 50. 33. Ibid., 46. 34. Ibid., 36. 35. Ibid. 36. Ibid., 37. 37. Ibid., 26. 38. Ibid., 26–27. I take the obscure phrase “where reality superabounds” to refer to the framing that amounts to something being “edited out” when the cinematographic images are strung together. 39. André Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (New York: Scaver Books, 1982), 7–8. 40. Bazin, The Cinema of Cruelty, 9–10. 41. Bazin’s twin enemies are the expressionists (notably the German variety) and the montagists. The expressionists commit the same general type of error that the montagists do. Bazin spends less time chastizing expressionists, however, than he

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does montagists. Perhaps the reason for this is historical; by the time Bazin was writing, expressionism was a defunct and generally disparaged tendency in filmmaking. 42. Bazin, WIC 1, 24–25. 43. Ibid., 26. 44. Bazin’s struggle with the problem of Hitchcock can be reviewed in his Cinema of Cruelty, 101–80.

Chapter 3

Documentary Traces Film and the Content of Photographs Gregory Currie

Theorists of film are generally skeptical of the idea of documentary.1 Bill Nichols says, “Documentary fails to identify any structure or purpose of its own entirely absent from fiction or narrative. The terms become a little like our everyday, but unrigorous, distinction between fruit and vegetables.”2 Pronouncements like this encourage the view, suggested by a quotation from filmmaker Michael Moore, that documentary is a merely rhetorical category you can slip out of at will, especially when faced with embarrassing revelations about your work.3 It is puzzling that Nichols contrasts documentary with narrative; documentaries are, after all, narratives. They are, I say, narratives of a special kind. They are narratives in which traces of real events play a distinctive role. Documentaries can be and often are misleading; they do not consist of the “unmediated reproduction” of reality. They include Lumière-style actualitiés, high-minded Griersonian products, and the peculiar efforts of Moore. All the things in this otherwise heterogeneous category differ from straightforward narrative retellings, histories, journalism, and such reconstructions as Culloden (Watkins, 1964). They differ from fictions, even from ones which are documentary in style, such as The War Game (Watkins, 1965) and Cathy Come Home (Loach, 1966). Style and subject may be indicators of documentary status, as clarity and potability are indicators of water, but they are not defining features. Just as there can be fool’s water, so there can be a fool’s documentary. Very few things, it will turn out, are ideal documentaries, just as very few things in this world are pure samples of water. That has no tendency to show that the concept of water is one we ought to get rid of. It’s just that we should allow that there is a loose (but legitimate) sense in which many things are water samples; this loose sense derives from a stricter sense in which not many things are. Many things, I shall argue, are partly 95

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documentaries, and their being so is a significant determinant of the interest we take in them. As we would expect, where things have some documentary elements within them, it will often be indeterminate whether they count as documentaries themselves. In accounting for documentary we are going to consider some fundamental issues about representation, and in particular about the nature of photographic representation. One thing I shall suggest that might be of interest even to those who reject my theory of documentary will be that the duality of content possessed by film images is a duality of kinds of content: conceptual and nonconceptual. I’ll begin by saying something about a notion I take to be central to that of filmic documentary itself, namely the method of cinematic (and more broadly photographic) recording, and why it is that such methods have results which belong to a kind I call traces. Traces carry information, but they do so in ways different from the ways that what I shall call testimony carries it. I’ll say something about the epistemic and other implications of this distinction. The first substantive point will then be that a documentary must involve traces of its subject, and not merely testimony of it. But since fiction films and dramatic reconstructions give us traces also, we need to say more in order to characterize documentary. At that point I shall appeal to a distinction between two ways that film images can represent: that will be the key to my first attempt at saying what a documentary is. TRACES AND TESTIMONIES To understand the contrast between trace and testimony, compare a painting and a photograph. The painter may make a likeness of her subject so vivid and detailed that one could take it for a photograph. But photography is not just a device to make paintings by cheaper and quicker means; a photograph is a trace of its subject, while a painting is testimony of it. Perhaps that is the thought which the French film theorist André Bazin was struggling to express when he likened photographs to footprints, to death masks, and, more problematically, to mummified remains.4 What is the similarity between the photograph, the footprint, and the death mask? All these things are traces left on the world by their subjects themselves. A painting, on the other hand, is not a trace, however much it tells us about the appearance of its subject and however reliable what it tells us is. Nor is an equally detailed and reliable written description of the subject a trace of it. Traces of all kinds are, as Kendall Walton has pointed out, in a certain sense independent of intention.5 They are independent of it in a way that paintings and descriptions are not. A camera records what is in front of



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it, and not what the photographer thinks is in front of it, if there is a difference between them. But the painter paints what he or she thinks is there. An hallucinating painter will paint the pink elephant he thinks he sees, and an hallucinating diarist will describe the same, but an hallucinating photographer will be surprised when his photograph reveals an empty room. When I say that photography is intention-independent, I mean that in this precise and restricted sense: the photographer or cinematographer who sets out to record the scene in front of him will record what is there; the painter with the same intent will paint what he thinks is there. I do not mean that how or whether a film image gets to be created is independent of intention; that is not usually the case. But significantly, an accidental photograph is possible: I trip, the shutter button is depressed, and a picture of my foot results. By contrast, an accident in a paint shop may result in something startlingly reminiscent of Chartres, but no portrait of that cathedral is produced by the spillage. There might even be photograph-producing plants or animals, whose surfaces hold an imprint of focused light (perhaps our brains are a bit like that). But there cannot be paintings which are the product of nature below the threshold of intentionality. As with photographs, so with footprints and death masks. These are traces left by things on the world. Anything about the person’s appearance that the footprint or death mask manages to record is intention-independent in the way that the photograph is: what is recorded depends on the morphology of the foot or face; not on what someone thinks the morphology of the foot or face is. In the same category fall the cross sections of trees, considered as records of the age of the tree, seismographs, time-slices of thermometers, and so on. Paintings and drawings fall into a different category of representations on account of their being in the first instance records of what someone thought the facts of the matter were. They belong with chronicle, history, journalism, and like activities which are similarly mediated by producer’s intention. Things in this category I say are testimonies, and their representational natures contrast with those of traces. Note that the pictorial/ linguistic distinction cuts right across this one; testimony can be verbal or pictorial, and a sophisticated thermometer that generates a written description of the temperature is still a trace. Traces need not employ analogue representations. Testimonies differ from traces also in what I shall call their primary representational range: we can draw and write about things that never happened or have not happened yet, but only real things can leave traces of themselves, and a trace can be only of something in the past and never of anything in the future (assuming the direction of causation and the direction of time are one). But as we shall see, we must not confuse this point with the false claim that photographs never mislead.

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Do traces and testimonies exhaust the field? There are hybrids, of course, like hand-painted photographs, where testimony and trace are literally superposed. But is there anything else? I think so. Between traces and testimonies lie simulations. The detective, lacking both a reliable testimony and a film of the murderer’s movements, may wonder how the murder was carried out. Suspecting that a shot was fired from the conservatory, she may go there and try firing a shot to the position where she knows the victim was struck down, then run to the library to see whether she can get there in the time she knows the murderer would have had. At every step of the process we have intention-driven activity on the part of the agent, but the result may be surprising information not contained in or implied by anything in the agent’s mental state: yes, the murderer could have got back in time, unlikely though it seems at first sight. And crucial to the reliability of the information is the assumption of causal isomorphism between the simulation and the process it simulated, an isomorphism that would not hold if it turned out, for instance, that the murderer walked with a limp. Thus simulations are at their most reliable when you can get the criminal to simulate his own behavior as happens, rather implausibly, in Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone.6 I’ll say more about these representational differences between traces and testimonies when I tell you what a documentary is, but now I shall say a little more about the significance of photographs and film images being traces of things. Without that, my attempt to show that documentaries involve traces leaves it unclear why documentary is a category of any interest. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF TRACES Photographs, partly because they are traces, can be a source of information in ways that paintings can’t. That is why Antonioni’s Blow Up (1966) is about a photographer and not about a painter; no painter could reasonably hope to find, by vastly enlarging small sections of his own painting, evidence for the existence or occurrence of something he or she did not know about at the time the painting was made. But a photograph may well give us a clue to something we, including the maker, did not suspect. A painter can, of course, make various mistakes. She can wrongly apply one name or description to it when she should have applied another name or description, and she can fail to see the significance of, or relations between, the things she has painted (perhaps this is the idea behind The Draughtsman’s Contract [Greenaway, 1982]). But a painter cannot represent an object she did not see and did not intend, under any description, to represent. What holds of photographs in this regard holds also of cinematic images made by photographic means (thus excluding, for instance, animated



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cartoons, about which more in a moment). The difference between the photograph and the cinematic image is merely that the film image is capable of revealing more things the photographer did not expect, for the film image records movement as well as the things a still photograph records. Someone might recall the movement of a horse, and commit it to posterity by producing an animated cartoon which reproduces the movement as remembered. But if the maker remembers wrongly, it is his mistaken impression which goes in the archives. By contrast, the cinematographer’s image records what the movement was really like. Analyzing frame by frame the filmed record of Kennedy’s assassination, we may hope to learn things about the origin and number of shots fired. We could not learn these things by similarly analyzing a dramatic recreation of the same event, which would have to presuppose answers to the very questions we were investigating. Photography and film create a new representational possibility: the fixation, in the public domain, of non-intentional contents, whereby events themselves are registered independently of the agent who otherwise might be the author of the process. Such processes are not wholly new with film or photography, and their continuity with footprints and death masks was noted by Bazin. But film allows us to fix the temporal aspect of events and thereby vastly to increase the quantity and subtlety of the information displayed. This was well understood by early filmmakers and by the great documentary makers of the 1920s and 1930s, who saw themselves as being in the business of conveying a narrative partly by means of representations which carry traces of the events represented; on this was based much of the faith—a lot of it unfounded—in the educative power, truthfulness, and objectivity of the documentary. With the erosion of some of that faith has gone a tendency also to abandon the notion of documentary itself. It may be that we are collectively losing our grip on or interest in the documentary proper, replacing it gradually and perhaps unknowingly with something like Noël Carroll’s idea of the film of presumptive assertion, which is defined without appeal to the idea of a trace.7 But even now we feel an intuitive pull in the direction of what I take to be the core and distinctive aspect of documentary. In 1999 Carlton Television was fined £2,000,000 for having engaged in what we might call documentary malpractice. They showed film of what purported to be men soliciting the services of male prostitutes; the “clients” turned out to be TV employees, and the transactions staged for purposes of the film. It might be argued that what was at issue here was deception, and not the mere presence of reenactment which, when it is clearly signaled, we tend to accept in a documentary. I agree that we do accept a certain amount of reenactment, and my definition can accommodate that. But the fact that there was, or was presumed to be, deception in this film and in others like it says a lot in favor of my own view. Deception is often possible in such cases because of the presumption we all

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have that, when the documentary is telling us something controversial, it will do so, unless there is indication to the contrary, with the aid of images the trace contents of which reflect the claims being made; that is apparently what did not happen in the Carlton film. Accounts of documentary that do not make the idea of a trace central to the concept cannot accommodate this important fact about documentary.8 Wanting factual knowledge is not the only reason for valuing traces. We expect the documentary to link us with focal events in its narrative via traces of those things for the same sorts of reasons that we prefer photographs of our friends to photographs of people who merely look like them. Photographs seem to have an affective capacity that handmade pictures lack. Other things being equal, we are likely to value a photograph of a loved one over a sketch, more likely to be offended or disturbed by an offensive or disturbing photograph than by a painting.9 Possessing a photograph, death mask, or footprint of someone seems to put me in a relation to that person that a handmade image never can. By now we have some insight into the significance we attach to documentaries—assuming, with me, that documentaries are, or involve, traces. By virtue of containing traces of things, they offer us special epistemic and emotional access to the things they are documentaries of. DEGREES OF COHERENCE I have said that to be a documentary the thing in question must consist partly of traces. But all films made by photographic and analogous means are so constituted: Casablanca is a trace left on the world by the activities of Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and a lot of other people as they went about the business of making the fiction film by that very name. And Casablanca is no documentary. So being a trace cannot be sufficient for something to be a documentary, though I say it is necessary. Casablanca fails to be a documentary because, while its images are traces of, and hence represent Bogart and Bergman, their trace content fails to cohere with the narrative the film presents to us. The narrative of Casablanca tells of the conflict between love and duty in war-torn North Africa. The images we see are of actors on Hollywood sets. The lack of coherence manifest here is no problem for the viewer; we recognize another level of content that these images have, a level of content that does cohere with the narrative. At this level of content, the images represent Rick, Ilsa, and the others; it represents them in war-torn North Africa. I call this narrative content. It is distinctive of nondocumentary films, be they fictions or dramatic recreations, to have a narrative content which is distinct from trace content. The film images in



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All the President’s Men (Pakula, 1976) are traces of, and hence represent Redford and Hoffman; they also, via the narrative of the story, represent the real but absent persons Woodward and Bernstein. In an ideal documentary the only content the images have is trace content. This should not be taken to mean that documentaries lack narratives. What is meant is simply that, in a documentary, the images we see do not acquire content from the narrative. They have their trace content, and it is presumed that this trace content coheres, to a high degree, with the narrative of the film. What is this relation of coherence, and what is a high degree of it? I do not propose to define these things, but the following examples indicate what I have in mind. If the documentary unfolds in such a way that, at this point, Nixon’s resignation is being recounted, the images we see should be traces of Nixon around the time of his resignation, or of closely Nixon-related events at that time. In Bringing Up Baby, on the other hand, the trace contents of the images we see are not expected to be related in this way to the narrative. The narrative concerns a society-girl, a paleontologist, a sheriff, and various others; the trace content of the images we see is of actors. And this would not be a documentary even if, unusually, the actors were, in their offscreen lives, a society-girl, a paleontologist, a sheriff. For the narrative tells us more than who they are; it tells us that the society girl is in love with the paleontologist, that the sheriff arrests both of them, that the paleontologist is worried about funding the museum. Shots of an actor/sheriff pretending to arrest the other two would not be enough to induce a significant degree of coherence; for that, the sheriff would have to actually arrest them. I don’t say that coherence can’t be found at some level of description for this film; Bringing Up Baby tells of people doing various things, and we see people doing various things on screen. I don’t suppose any one will want to argue that this is coherence enough for documentary status. A fiction film might have a substantially higher degree of coherence than that displayed by Bringing Up Baby. There might be a fiction film in which the fictional characters never appear; all we see is real locations and real people, understood to be just background to the events of the story, which is told in a voice-over.10 Coherence here is only partial of course; the trace contents of the images we see are traces of locations where the fictional characters never were. But it tells somewhat in favor of my view that cases of this kind shade off into a region where we have no clear intuitions about whether the film is documentary or not. If the story of the offscreen characters is what primarily holds our attention we are likely to judge this a fiction. My theory explains that in judging degree of coherence we are giving substantial weight to the thought that what is said or implied about these characters is in conflict with trace content. If the focus of our attention is the city and the lives of its real inhabitants, and the voice-over is simply a way of making vivid our sense of

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these real lives, we are more likely to judge this a documentary. I can explain that also: in judging degree of coherence we are giving more weight to the thought that what is implied about real people coheres with trace content. One can imagine cases so finely balanced that we simply do not know what to say. That is my account of an ideal documentary. I have said, and I will go on saying, that few documentaries are ideal. But notice that ideality as I define it does not mean being something that postmodern critics of documentary suppose a genuine documentary would have to be, namely an unselective slice of life from no perspective whatsoever. A high degree of coherence between trace content and narrative is compatible with the narrative in question being highly selective. It is coherence, not all-inclusiveness, that documentaries aspire to. Documentaries do not always achieve a very high degree of coherence; that is why many documentaries are not ideal. The narratives of some documentaries tell us (often by artful implication rather than directly) that things happened which did not happen, or did not happen in that way or for that reason: Roger and Me (Moore, 1989) comes to mind here. When they do, there is a lack of coherence within the film between the narrative and the content of the images we see. We see images of one thing, and we are told about some other thing, or we see images of something caused in one way and we are told that it was caused in another. Recall that what matters for being an ideal documentary is a high degree of coherence. Documentaries that fail to be ideal can be so in more or less spectacular ways, according to how low down the scale of coherence they fall. Take Night Mail (Wright, 1936) where, notoriously, shots purporting to record the sorting of mail in the train carriage were in fact studio recreations. Compare this with Roger and Me; perhaps things in Flint did not occur in quite the way the film suggests they did; still, what we see on screen is Flint, its workers, and its unemployed. Coherence is being maintained to a much higher level than in Night Mail, which juxtaposes a narrative of postal workers sorting mail on the night train with images of non-postal workers not sorting mail in a film studio. Coherence has so far been lost in this case that we have the use of fake material, something critics of Roger and Me have not, I think, suggested. What makes Night Mail and Roger and Me documentaries of any kind, given that they are not ideal ones? Both maintain, and are clearly intended by their makers to maintain, a reasonably high degree of coherence through large stretches of their narratives. Furthermore, deviations from coherence, when they occur, do not signal a move to fictional mode. Nothing is signaled in Roger and Me to indicate that, at certain points, the film has ceased to make assertions and that we are now in the realm of pretense and imagination. These factors combine to make it reasonable to think of these as documentaries,



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though not as ideal ones. Our use of “documentary” to apply to a whole film is therefore a rough and ready one, based on a judgment that the film is preponderantly documentary, backed by the judgment that the whole thing has an assertive force.11 Films sometimes go beyond the inclusion of mere fake detail; they can consist wholly of fake elements. No Lies (Block, 1973) purports to record a conversation between a female rape victim and her increasingly aggressive (male) interlocutor who tries to suggest her complicity in the assault; the credits at the end reveal the whole thing to have been staged with actors, scripts, and weeks of rehearsal. No Lies is no documentary. Why not? Because none of its images cohere to any significant degree, through their role as traces of things, with the narrative: the events recorded on film and the events asserted in the narrative (but without, note, any explicit commentary) are completely at odds. The images seem to cohere with the narrative only so long as we have false beliefs about them.12 Our belief that film images in a documentary should have the right kind of coherence with the narrative, at least in cases where the claim of the narrative is significant or controversial, has a complex structure. Many documentaries use “stock footage” which does not have any precise correspondence with the narrative. A war documentary might show us film of a Sherman tank, but not one in action at the precise time or place that the documentary is currently focused on. We can allow grades of narrative correspondence here; a given trace content can correspond to the narrative at one level of description and not at another. If the focus of the narrative is, say, the use of Sherman tanks in Normandy and what we get is an image of a Sherman tank in Germany then there is a correspondence at the level of the description “Sherman tank” but not at the level of description “Sherman tank in Normandy.” This latter description is the canonical one, given the narrative context, and so the correspondence is less than ideal. But correspondence at the level of the “coarser grained” description might be regarded as allowable given that nothing much hangs on the question which particular tank this was. We are much less tolerant of failures of correspondence at the canonical level of description if we are considering, say, a point in the narrative where the focus is on the sinking of HMS Hood but we are actually shown images of HMS Rodney. Recent revelations (July, 2003) of the use of stock footage during coverage of the war in Iraq and the subsequent resignation of a reporter confirm our sensitivity to the degree of correspondence. Judging the degree of coherence in a documentary is not always easy, even from a theoretical point of view. Take Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. In this film the narrative tells of the Nuremburg Rally of 1934. I take it that the trace contents of the images we see are of exactly that. But the film’s narrative suggests certain positive evaluations of these events which we are very

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likely to think are incorrect. Simplifying somewhat, we might say that the story-maker suggests that these are good events, whereas we see the traces of bad events. Does this detract from the film’s coherence, and make this a less than ideal documentary?13 My inclination is to think that we give little weight to evaluative aspects of the narrative in judging the ideality of a documentary. Why? The answer may have something to do with the puzzle of imaginative resistance, which I will briefly describe. Makers of narrative seem to have more autonomy in some areas than in others. If an author wishes to have her characters travel faster than light, or to be their own grandparents, she is free to construct a story in which these things are fictionally so. Readers and viewers accept violations of physical and even conceptual laws without much difficulty. On the other hand, an author cannot, it seems, merely stipulate the moral facts for the story-world; if she writes a story about slavery she may make clear that she approves of this system, but readers and viewers are unlikely to be able to accept that the world of the story is one in which slavery is good. There are various and competing theories of why this is so, but let us accept for the moment that a narrative-maker’s autonomy is limited in this way.14 In that case, it is easy to see why we do not count positive moral evaluations of Nazism as detracting from the ideality of Riefenstahl’s documentary. Riefenstahl was free to construct her narrative in various ways that would have failed to cohere with the trace content of the images we see on screen. She might, for example, have chosen to suggest the rally took place in Paris. On the other hand, she was not free to make it a part of her story that the events taking place in Munich were admirable, though she was able to make it clear that they were admirable in her estimation, and to try to persuade others of this as well. We judge the ideality of the documentary by looking at those aspects of the film where the maker exercises maximum control over content, and that means judging ideality against factual content. We can now see why various documentary-like productions are not, in fact, documentaries at all. In Culloden and in Cathy Come Home, for all their documentary look, the images we see have a trace content which is maximally at odds with the content of the narrative. In Culloden we see traces of mid twentieth-century people pretending to fight, and in Cathy Come Home we see traces of people pretending to be homeless. TRACE CONTENT AND NARRATIVE CONTENT Trace content and narrative content are quite different things. Objects possess them in virtue of quite different sorts of facts. Trace content is intrinsic to the image, whereas narrative content is, as we would expect, heavily dependent



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on the context that surrounds the image. Trace content is nonconceptual, while narrative content is conceptual. I take these issues in turn. The trace content of a cinematic image is independent of context; a photograph of Aunt Ethel represents Aunt Ethel no matter what other pictures you mix it with, no matter what you say about it. In fact causal origin determines both the trace content and the identity of the photograph. If photograph A in world ω1 is of Aunt Ethel, then no photograph in ω2 of anything distinct from Aunt Ethel is a candidate for being trans-world identical with, or a counterpart of, A. If A represents Aunt Ethel in ω1 by virtue of being a trace of her, then A represents her in every world in which it exists.15 It is different with the narrative content of cinematic images. Those cinematic images of Bergman and Bogart represent, through their association with the film’s narrative, the fictional characters Ilsa and Rick. But those very images—images of Bergman and Bogart—might have had different narrative content. A decision, after filming was complete, to abandon the Casablanca project in favour of a quite different story line might have led to those images being recruited to the representation of quite different characters. But they would still be the same images. Trace content and narrative content differ in another way. We can see this if we take seriously another distinction which has recently been influential in the philosophy of perception. Two kinds of representational states are perceptions and beliefs. Indeed, there used to be support for the proposition that perceptions really are beliefs.16 But this view has given way, and many philosophers draw a sharp distinction between the two on the grounds that, while beliefs must have conceptual content, perceptions need not. To credit someone with a belief is to credit him or her with the concepts necessary for a description of how that belief represents the world. But someone can have a perceptual experience which represents the world as a certain way, yet lack the concepts necessary to say what way the world is represented as being. We can say that the contents of beliefs are conceptual, while the contents of perceptions are nonconceptual. We can find something like this difference when we look at the case of, on the one hand, the purely photographic, or causally induced, representational content of a film image and, on the other, the distinct narrative content of the image, if it has one. A typical case of this is in the fiction film, where images of actors and sets also represent fictional characters and locations. I say that in such a case, the content the image has in virtue of its photographic origin is nonconceptual, while the content it has in virtue of representing things and events in the fiction is conceptual. We cannot straightforwardly take over definitions of conceptual and nonconceptual content from the case of mental representation, because beliefs

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and perceptions are states of a person, while pictures are not. But we can come up with a distinction very much in the spirit of the one appropriate for mental states: For any picture with representational content, S, S has conceptual content if a subject X’s having made S entails that X possesses the concepts that appear in a specification of what it is that S represents.17

It is easy to see that on this criterion photographs do not have conceptual content, because it is true of any photograph that it could have had the content it does have without the person who took the photograph being able to conceptualize that content in any way. This is because the content of the photograph is determined wholly by brute causation. But if we say that the photograph or film image has also a distinct narrative content, that must be because there is some association between the image and the narrative, and that association must be an intended one. Non-intentional causation cannot induce such a relationship, nor can it create any narrative. But then the content of the narrative is describable only in terms constrained by information about the concepts possessed by or at least available to the narrating agent. A long tradition of film-theorizing associates the film image with subjective experience. In all sorts of ways this view is wrong, but we have now discovered one similarity between perception and the image: both carry nonconceptual content. THINGS WHICH ARE BOTH TRACE AND TESTIMONY To be a trace and to be testimony are different things. But a thing that is a trace can also be testimony. If something is both, then its status as a trace does not immediately qualify it as a documentary element within a given documentary context. This is notably the case where we are dealing with auditory traces: recordings of people’s voices, for instance. The recording is a trace of the voice, and not testimony of that voice, for the tape recorder records the sounds which impact on its receiving equipment, and not the sounds the person recording believes are being made (thus De Palma’s Blow Out (1981), a transposition into auditory mode of the mystery described in Antonioni’s Blow Up). Documentaries typically contain auditory traces, but they, like other parts, are not always documentary parts of the documentary. A documentary about Hitler may present us with both visual and auditory traces of him, and the recording of his voice should count as a documentary part of the documentary. But if the commentary is spoken by Laurence Olivier, the trace of his voice is not a documentary part of the documentary—assuming that the focus of the narrative is Hitler and not Olivier. For the recording of



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Hitler’s voice cannot be a recording of words he did not utter (though the sound quality might be so distorted that we draw a wrong conclusion about what his words were). It cannot intrinsically misrepresent the documentary’s focus. But Olivier’s words can, and those words represent actual things and occurrences if the beliefs of the person who wrote them were true, and not otherwise. So things are complicated: the recording of Olivier is a trace of his speech, but it is testimony of Hitler and his activities. Because Hitler is the focus of the documentary, and because the Olivier-trace is testimony concerning Hitler, the Olivier-trace is not a documentary part of this documentary, however informative it may be. But that same trace of Olivier could be a documentary part of another documentary: if it were recycled and used as part of a documentary about the speaking powers of Olivier, for instance. So just as the question whether a shot is documentary needs resolution by context, so—sometimes—does the question whether the item we are considering falls exclusively into the trace category or, at the same time, into the testimony category as well. A trace of A can be testimony of B, and if the narrative focus of the documentary is B and not A, that trace functions, in that context, as testimony, as the trace of Olivier functions as testimony in the documentary about Hitler. Now this observation—that a trace of one thing can function as testimony of another—suggests a problem for my approach to documentary. Take a “documentary” about Napoleon. No filmic traces here of Napoleon—nor, let us assume, of things to which Napoleon was closely related, which would complicate the picture. Rather, there are traces of Napoleon experts, drawings of Napoleon, models of battlefields, etc. If, as it seems we should, we say that the film’s narrative is about Napoleon and closely Napoleon-related things and events, then this is no documentary, because the things of which the filmic parts are traces are not the things which are the focus of the narrative. We could identify a kind of subnarrative which the film presents, concerning Napoleon-experts, drawings of Napoleon, models of battlefields, etc., but the most that gets us is the conclusion that this is a documentary about those things, not about Napoleon. I choose to tough this one out. If this film is not a documentary about Napoleon, it is not surprising that we would casually label it as such. In medium, form, and technique it is very like things which are documentaries about, say current or recent Heads of State. In some sense it is also clearly about Napoleon; at least that is the focus of its narrative. Let us use the phrase “A is a documentary-about-B” to mean that A is a documentary which tells a narrative about B and does so to a significant extent through its use of traces of B and closely B-related things. But let us use “A is a B-relevant documentary” to mean that A is a documentary (and hence a documentary-about-something) from which you could learn, and perhaps are intended to learn, things about B. On my theory, the imagined documentary

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is a documentary-about-various-things (none of them Napoleon) and is a Napoleon-relevant documentary. One would not in that case be surprised to hear it called a “documentary about Napoleon.” Are there other problems here for me? The documentary I just imagined turned out to be about the things of which its constitutive filmic elements were traces, as all documentaries are. In the imagined case they were traces of Napoleon experts and other things. Imagine a new case which provides traces of just one eminent historian telling us about Napoleon. This sounds as if it ought to be described as a “TV lecture” and not as a documentary about anything. Am I forced to say that it is a documentary about the historian? No. The traces we see are traces, certainly, of the historian and not of Napoleon. But the narrative here concerns Napoleon, not the historian. There is not here the kind of match between narrative and trace that would make this a documentary about the historian. Note that there can be levels of narrative, and that documentary status is a matter of match between traces and narrative at the most prominent level. In a different sort of program, another narrative might come to dominate: a narrative about A. J. P. Taylor’s innovative approach to television lecturing, for example. In that context, the traces of Taylor lecturing on Napoleon come into harmony with the dominant narrative of the program, and we have, on my account, a documentary about Taylor. That seems the right result. What about game-shows? Are they documentaries about their participants? Are chat-show documentaries about the interviewer and interviewees, and sports programs documentaries about the activities of the athletes? Certainly, we tend not to class them in that way, and that may be because they display rather minimal narrative structuring.18 By contrast, we happily count Riefenstahl’s film of the Berlin games (Olympiad: Festival of the Nations, 1938) and Ichikawa’s Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which have richer and more evident narrative structure, as documentary. On my account talk-shows and sports programs count as having very minimal documentary status. THE DOCUDRAMA I began by saying that we could not say simply that the documentary is the nonfiction film, because this would not distinguish between the documentary and the docudrama: the recreation, by dramatic means, of certain actually occurring events. If there are any genuine docudramas, they are certainly not documentaries. There might be docudramas, and their possibility ensures the intensional nonequivalence of documentary and nonfiction film. But are there actually any docudramas? I want to suggest that there are few if any, and that the things



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we are most inclined to place in the docudrama category are in fact fictions, or at least things with substantially fictive content. It is true that All the President’s Men is based on fact. It contains many characters who are real people and depicts many events which (I assume) actually happened. But so are many other films we happily call fiction. All the President’s Men is really very different from historical testimony, say that in the eponymous book on which the film was based. In the film, a vast number of things are depicted which did not occur, which it is not intended that the audience will believe occurred, and which the audience will not in fact believe occurred. Woodward is depicted as having a certain appearance, namely that of Robert Redford. Redford, Hoffman, and the other actors speak certain words and speak them in certain ways with certain intonations. They move in certain ways in certain settings, all this plainly visible on screen. None of this is attributed or intended to be attributed to Woodward and Bernstein. These are fictional things; we are to imagine them happening, we are not intended to believe they happened. At times we are intended to assume that what the film depicts really did occur, but only in general outline. Each morsel of assertion is thickly coated with fictional detail. The reason lies in the nature of the medium. An historical text can tell us just so much as the author wants to tell us and no more, because its sentential structure is highly discriminating. But film is not discriminating. Without extraordinary and self-defeating artifice, it cannot be confined to that which is reliably believed by the maker, or to what the maker expects the audience to believe. The actor playing the character has to look, speak and move in a certain way. And we watchers know that none of this (or very little of it) is intended to be believed to be true of the character, and we consequently believe very little of it. Rather, we imagine the events which the screen portrays in all their specificity. So even the most faithful and restrained docudrama contains an overwhelming amount of fictional material: material, the appropriate response to which is imagination rather than belief. Moreover, in the docudrama, this fictional material is largely presented via the photographic process (or the comparable process of sound recording), and therefore makes a break with assertion at the very point where the documentary is at its most reliably assertive. One thing that a documentary detailing the activities of Woodward and Bernstein could be expected to do very well is to make reliable assertions about what Woodward, Bernstein, and the other protagonists look like. The docudrama’s divergence from the documentary is thus not merely a matter of the quantity of assertions it fails to make, but of the way in which the kind of assertion here lacking is central to the documentary project. A docudrama—unless it is a very unusual one—is best counted along with the fictions.19 Some will say I am taking the documentary/docudrama distinction much too seriously. After all, documentaries have always been substantially

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reenactive; in Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922), Nanook, we know, was not tugging his line against a fish, but against the combined efforts of offscreen assistants. But the long history of reenactment, and our response to it, supports my case. Such revelations about Nanook are sensational (or mildly so) because we have a conception of documentary according to which reenactment is contra-standard.

NOTES 1. This chapter is a very much revised version of a paper published as “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, vol. 57, no. 3 (1999), 285–97 and reprinted by kind permission of the editor. Some material that was published in reply to criticism of the original article (Carroll 2000; Choi 2001) has been incorporated. Thanks to Noël Carroll for discussion of these issues on a number of occasions, including a session organized by Richard Allen at the Tisch School of Art, New York University in May 1999. Thanks also to Hugh Clapin, Tim Crane, Richard Holton, Frank Jackson, Alan Lee, Chris Mortensen, and Ian Ravenscroft. Research was supported by the Australian Research Council and by the Institute of Advanced Study, Australian National University. 2. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 5–6. See Noël Carroll, “From Real to Reel: Entangled in Nonfiction Film,” in Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); for critical scrutiny of contemporary filmtheoretic approaches to documentary, see also his “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism,” in David Bordwell and Noël Carroll, eds., Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). 3. In an interview with Harlan Jackobsen, Michael Moore said of Roger and Me: “I think of it as . . . an entertaining movie like Sophie’s Choice [or] any Charlie Chaplin film that dealt with social commentary” (“Michael and Me,” Film Comment, vol. 25, no. 6, 16–26). Moore’s Roger and Me (1989)—a chronicle of the decline of Flint, Michigan as General Motors shut down plants, and of Moore’s efforts to confront GM’s Chairman. Roger Smith—telescopes the events of two decades into an industrial holocaust a fraction of that duration. The issue here is not “whether the order of the filming was the order of the film,” as Brian Winston supposes, adding in a rather lame footnote that “It is possible that [the] critics were not so absurdly naive as this suggests” (Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited [London: British Film Institute, 1995], 206, 274). The issue is whether the order of the film constitutes an implication that events had one kind of cause when in fact their actual time of occurrence made such causation impossible. 4. See André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” in Hugh Gray, tr., What is Cinema? Vol. 1 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971). For commentary see Kendall Walton, “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 11 (1984), 246–77.



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5. See Kendall Walton (1984) and “Looking Again Through Photographs: A Response to Edwin Martin,” Critical Inquiry, vol. 12 (1986), 801–08. Walton acknowledges a debt to the work of Paul Grice. 6. Sherlock Holmes simulates the criminal in “The Musgrave Ritual.” See also Pat O’Brien’s rerun train ride in Crack Up (Reis, 1946). 7. Noël Carroll, “Documentary and the Film of Presumptive Assertion,” in Richard Allen and Murray Smith, eds., Film and Philosophy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 8. The best such account is that due, again, to Noël Carroll (1997). 9. Kendall Walton (1984) cites this as support for the transparency thesis: we are more offended or disturbed by photographs and films because when we see them we are actually seeing the offensive or disturbing events themselves. But while photographs and films may affect us more than paintings do, they surely affect us less than witnessing the offensive or disturbing acts directly would. This suggests that photographs somehow lie midway between handmade image and the reality itself. That photographs are more able to affect us than handmade pictures are is therefore best explained in terms of the photograph’s being a trace (see my Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science [New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995], ch. 2). 10. Mike Walsh suggested Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil as an example of this. 11. Thus I agree with Noël Carroll that the idea of “presumptive assertion” is important in documentary. I disagree with him about the role of trace content. 12. Thanks here to Julia Erhart. 13. Remember that ideality is defined solely in terms of coherence. The film could be ideal while at the same time being deplorable in various ways. 14. On the puzzle, see for example Kendall Walton, “Morality in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, supp. vol. 68 (1994), 27–50; Tamar Gendler, “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy, vol. 97 (2000), 55–81; Gregory Currie, “Desire in Imagination,” in Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne, eds., Conceivability and Possibility (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 15. Where an image has no trace content, as with a painting, its primary representational character is also context-free. Again, this is because facts about origin determine both the painting’s identity and its representational features. What, in the case of a painting, are the relevant facts about origin? This is a little difficult to specify in a general way. Causal-intentional and brute-causal facts can combine to determine the answer. We have seen that a painter can be wrong about what he is painting; he intends to paint Everest, but, because he is mistaken about what he is looking at, he paints K2. But it is not just the fact that light from K2 is reflected into his eyes that makes this true; the painter intends to paint that mountain, which happens to be K2. Or it might be that the painter took K2 as a model, using this as a basis for his attempt to paint Everest, which he has seen and remembers rather well; here brute-causal facts concerning the act of portrayal don’t seem to matter much. There are other kinds of cases (Antonia Phillips, “The Limits of Portrayal,” in Andrew Harrison, ed., Philosophy and the Visual Arts [Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1987]). But in all cases, I believe, intention is an essential component in determining what is represented.

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16. See David Malet Armstrong, A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968); and George Pitcher, A Theory of Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). For criticism of these views see Frank Jackson, Perception: A Representative Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 17. This is modeled on the account in Adrian Cussins, “The Connectionist Construction of Concepts,” in Margaret Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). See also Tim Crane, “The Nonconceptual Content of Experience,” in Tim Crane, ed., The Contents of Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 18. It is important here to distinguish between the question of whether the programs themselves have substantial narrative structure and the question of whether the events recorded by the programs do. My denial of substantial narrative structuring is meant in the first, not the second sense. 19. It can be fictional of a docudrama that it is a documentary. In Culloden, the battle is recreated through the fictional presence of a film crew there to record the event, and we see what purports to be their record of it.

Chapter 4

The Limits of Appropriation Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Film Distinction Carl Plantinga

In film studies in the recent past, Lacanian/Althusserian film theory assumed that films carried significant psychological power over the spectator: power to bind the viewer into the film’s discourse through suturing, to determine the viewer’s unconscious psychic processes, and to control her or his subjectivity for the purpose of fostering the bourgeois and patriarchal subject. With the declining influence of subject positioning theories, the energies of the field have swung toward the study of the reception of film texts and also to a presumption on the part of many scholars that psychic power rests in the viewer rather than in the film. This move toward subjectivist theories is common to many film studies methodologies. Within cognitive film theory, for example, we have heard that rather than position anybody, films instead cue a series of mental activities. Using these cues, the spectator is said to construct the film. Cultural and historical reception studies also downplay the text’s power over the spectator. Those interested in film reception in relation to ethnic or international audiences, gays, and women have concentrated on the uses to which subcultures put a film, arguing that in the process of reception oppressive, patriarchal, or nationalist discourse can be appropriated and coopted for alternative purposes. Where Lacanian/Althusserian theories had granted little agency to the viewing subject, the tendency today is to presume that the viewer has power and freedom in relation to the text. For some theorists, the viewer actually defines and constructs the text within the process of viewing. In the theory of nonfiction film, such emphasis on the power of viewers to define or construct films has also gained sway. For many, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction films rests not in differences between kinds of texts, but in differences in kinds of reception and comprehension. It is almost as though the individual perceiver determines the ontological status 113

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of a fiction or nonfiction film in the process of viewing. Thus, while some documentary scholars hold fast to paradigms which grant the film power over the individual, others have turned to subjectivist theories which hold that the film is positioned, constructed, and/or freely used by the spectator for her or his own purposes. The study of film reception and audience response are clearly important for many reasons. There is much to learn about how audiences interact with and respond to films. I do not question the value of reception studies, or the legitimacy of alternative uses viewers may have for films. Neither will I argue for a return to the determinism of subject position theory. In this chapter, I do wish to suggest that the subjectivist turn in documentary film theory has gone too far in granting an idealistic freedom to the viewer and in claiming that reception alone can account for the distinction between fiction and nonfiction. Subjectivist theories of the nonfiction film, I will argue, do not stand up to scrutiny. I’m going to begin by offering a story, a fictional story with a moral or a point, as in one of Aesop’s fables. One might also think of it as a thought experiment of the kind that philosophers use to help us see the implications of our ideas. MICHAEL TAKES SUBJECTIVISM SERIOUSLY On a bright and colorful Fall morning, an intelligent but rather naïve university student named Michael walked to the library with the intention of researching a paper on the history of space travel. The professor of Michael’s history class, Professor Martin, was somewhat forward-thinking for an historian, and had told her students that they could use audiovisual materials and web sites, as well as the print media, to find information for their research papers. Like many university students, Michael believed that he had already done enough reading for the academic term, so as he entered the library, he immediately headed for the media center, where he was determined to do as much research as possible by viewing films and videos. Before continuing with the saga of Michael’s research, I should tell you that in addition to his history course, Michael was also enrolled in a course in film theory. The previous week the professor of his film theory class, Professor Lewis, had coincidentally been discussing the nature of documentary film and the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Michael had learned that both defining the documentary and distinguishing fiction films from nonfiction films posed difficult conceptual problems. Many of the traditional means of distinguishing fiction from nonfiction had been rejected. For example, we should not suppose that in the act of representation, nonfiction films imitate or copy while fictions fabricate or create. Both fiction and nonfiction films



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are creative in their manipulation of their materials, and furthermore, both imitate or copy some aspects of what we take to be reality, even if it is only the surface appearance of the world. The key to the fiction/nonfiction film distinction, Michael had learned, lay not in the inherent textual features of films, but in reception. The distinction fundamentally depends on how the viewer understands and uses the text in question. One theorist Michael had read claimed that the realist documentary suffers from a “crisis of legitimacy” because it falsely claims to “capture” the real. The only way to justify the documentary was to admit that the difference between fiction and nonfiction film was in “the mind of the audience.”1 Emphasizing reception, this theorist went on, would allow the viewer to make the truth claim for the film, rather than assume that the film makes truth claims for itself. “That’s interesting,” Michael thought. “Presumably, then, the nature of the film itself is irrelevant. I can make truth claims for it, and I need not worry about what it is said to represent or communicate. The film is merely a cipher into which I pour my interests and purposes.” Another documentary theorist wrote that we can comprehend fiction films nonfictionally, and that what distinguishes a nonfiction from a fiction is not the rhetoric of the film or the truth claims it is presumed to make, but the conventions by which we assign reference and causality to what we see on the screen.2 Michael wondered, “Does this imply that I can see any film as a nonfiction film, since I can comprehend any film nonfictionally? Or, is comprehending a film nonfictionally different than seeing a film as a nonfiction film?” Yet a third theorist took a more extreme view, claiming that the proper question to ask is not “What is a documentary?,” but “When is a documentary?” For this theorist, apparently, a film is fiction or nonfiction depending on who is viewing it and how they are viewing it.3 “Presumably, then,” Michael had thought, “If, while viewing a film, I alternate between seeing it as fiction and nonfiction, then the film itself alternates between being a fiction or nonfiction film, rather like a light switch that can be turned on and off. Now it is fiction; now it is nonfiction. And not only that,” he continued thinking, “if two people view a certain film simultaneously, one viewing it fictionally and the other nonfictionally, then the film is both a fiction film and a nonfiction film at the same time.” Initially this possibility bothered Michael. Was it possible that an object could simultaneously possess two contradictory properties, such as being both fictional and nonfictional? After some consideration, however, Michael concluded that it could very well be that a film could be fiction and nonfiction simultaneously. After all, he thought, we live in a world of multiple realities. For me it could be one thing and for someone else another thing altogether. As the song goes, “You say tomato, and I say tomato; You say potato, and I say potato.”

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Michael was a thoughtful young man. He even considered himself to be somewhat of an intellectual. And so, as he approached the media center of the library, he mulled over these ideas. If the distinction between fiction and nonfiction is merely in the mind of the beholder, he thought, this opens up a world of new possibilities. It would mean that I am free to use a film for whatever purposes I like, and that I can see any film fictionally or nonfictionally; that I am not beholden to the artificial categories that seem designed to limit my personal freedom and circumscribe my viewing experience. At this point, Michael had become a kind of “perverse” spectator. Upon entering the media center, Michael immediately saw that the socalled fiction videos had been placed on the left side of the room, and the nonfiction videos on the right. This was obviously a reflection of the discredited and somewhat naive idea that the fiction/nonfiction distinction inhered in the films themselves rather than in how they are viewed. So Michael determined that he would ignore this philistine bifurcation between fiction and nonfiction, and he proceeded to view and take notes on all of the videos about space travel he could find. Among the films he viewed were not only the so-called nonfiction films about NASA and the Russian space program, but also Star Wars, E.T., 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Tarkovski’s Solaris. Michael decided that since the fiction/nonfiction distinction was purely in the mind of the audience, and that since he was the audience (and furthermore it suited his purposes), he would comprehend these films nonfictionally, and regard them all as nonfiction films. And that he did. The research paper that Michael turned in to Professor Martin, his history professor, described not only the American and Russian space programs, but also discoursed on Darth Vader and his relationship with Luke Skywalker, discussed space voyages to the planets Jupiter and Solaris, and went on about a diminutive extraterrestrial which got left behind on Earth, and which needed to find its way home. When the paper was returned to Michael a week later, Michael eagerly paged to Professor Martin’s comments. There, to his horror, he read: “I assume that this paper is a practical joke. I did find it to be rather amusing and thus I will not fail you. You have one week to rewrite and resubmit. Needless to say, your revised paper should not use science fiction films as sources for historical information—unless, of course, you are writing about the history of science fiction films.” COMPREHENDING FICTION FILMS NONFICTIONALLY? The saga of Michael’s research paper is not yet finished, but here I pause to make a few points that this story illustrates. The first point is this. It may seem that the story of Michael is outrageous or just silly. It is obvious, you might



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think, that the naïve Michael has exaggerated and misinterpreted the idea that the fiction/nonfiction distinction is in the mind of the viewer. My argument, however, is that Michael’s behavior follows directly from subjectivist theories of documentary. This is how we should expect a viewer to behave were she or he to comprehend a fiction film nonfictionally, or if it were in fact the viewer’s reception which determined whether a film were fiction or nonfiction. What would it mean to comprehend a fiction film nonfictionally? The film theorist Edward Branigan, in Narrative Comprehension and Film, has offered a sophisticated theory of the narrative comprehension of both fiction and nonfiction films. There are many aspects of Branigan’s theory that I find fascinating and suggestive, and other points with which I disagree. Branigan argues that all films have a “nonfictional dimension,” described as the “historical situation that presupposes a social consensus about artifacts and biographical authors.” If I understand Branigan correctly, the nonfictional dimension of a text is the material and historical context out of which it emerges—the fact that it is “made with materials and labor, marketed, and [has] measurable social and psychological effects.”4 Branigan writes that a viewer “may interpret a text fictionally or nonfictionally, or in both ways.” The difference between interpreting a film fictionally or nonfictionally lies in “the method or procedure for making decisions about assigning reference,” which will be different in each case.5 If the viewer understands a film as a document of its own production history, then the viewer is comprehending the film nonfictionally, for example, when I look at particular shots of The Wizard of Oz as documents in my research on Judy Garland as an actress. Branigan thus implies that the fiction/nonfiction distinction lies in kinds of reception rather than in kinds of texts, since the viewer can interpret any film fictionally or nonfictionally or both ways. In my own book, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, I accepted Branigan’s idea that we can legitimately comprehend fiction films nonfictionally. I no longer believe that we can. The problem stems from conflating the word “document” with the word “documentary,” or confusing a document with a nonfiction film. Of course, every film is a document, in the sense that it can provide evidence about its profilmic events or about its own production processes. I would argue that comprehending a film nonfictionally, however, should involve taking the film as a nonfiction film, not simply as a document. A nonfiction film may make use of photographic documents, but as a structured rhetorical discourse, it is far more complex than a document. It not only uses photographs and sounds as iconic and indexical signs, but also weaves images, sounds, and linguistic assertions into a stylistic fabric through which it makes arguments, implications, and truth claims on many levels. In this

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matter I agree with John Corner, who writes that “the truth claims of documentary exposition reach well beyond this level of specific, rendered appearances to encompass abstract propositional/argumentational matters.”6 When Brian Winston writes that digital image processing “will have a profound and perhaps fatal impact on the documentary film,” it seems that he supposes that nonfiction films are merely, or at least, most basically, documents.7 Winston assumes that we lend belief to a documentary’s claims solely on the basis of the indexical evidence of the cinematography. Digital imaging, Winston thinks, threatens to destroy that indexical bond, and thus threatens the entire documentary project. On the contrary, I believe, what the advent of digital imaging will make abundantly clear is that our belief in a documentary depends not solely on our taking photographic images as evidence, but more fundamentally on our estimation of the reliability of the documentary filmmaker(s), the congruence of the claims the film makes with what we already presume to know, and the overall sense of reliability the text creates. Our estimation of a film’s veracity depends on complex factors, including our seeing it as a designed communicative discourse, not a mere indexical sign like a fossil or a fingerprint. Thus to see a film nonfictionally is not to see it as a document of its own making. That would be to ignore what the film is actually about and its intended function. To see a film nonfictionally is to recognize that it was intended to be a nonfiction film: that it gives an account of, records certain aspects of, and makes assertions and implications about its subject. To use a fiction film such as The Wizard of Oz as a document in research about acting or set design is legitimate of course. To take it as a nonfiction film, however, or to comprehend it nonfictionally is to misunderstand the text entirely. For that would be to perceive that the film presents Dorothy, the Tin Man, the Scarecrow, and the Cowardly Lion as characters in the actual world, rather than as fictional characters. The documentary filmmaker and theorist Dirk Eitzen goes further than Branigan in his subjectivist approach to nonfiction film. Eitzen argues that to posit the fiction/nonfiction distinction as textual and contextual, rather than as a matter of reception, ignores the extent to which viewers can frame a discourse in variable ways. Eitzen writes that one can see Spike Lee’s film School Days as a documentary “if one asks the kinds of questions that invite such a stance,” and conversely, the viewer can view Ken Burns’ historical film, The Civil War, as entirely “make-believe” if she or he wishes.8 Eitzen proposes that the proper question to ask is not “What is a documentary?,” but “When is a documentary?” A nonfiction film, Eitzen claims, is in the last analysis “not a kind of text but . . . a kind of ‘reading.’” And the nonfiction film is distinguished from the fiction film by a question, Eitzen writes, to which it is “susceptible,” namely, “Might it be lying?”9



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Eitzen writes that we are free to see Spike Lee’s School Daze as a documentary, and to see the documentary The Civil War as entirely make-believe if we so wish. But do we really have such freedom? Let me make an analogy with common household tools to argue my point. A culture often defines human artifacts according to their design and function. A screwdriver is designed to put in screws, while a hammer is designed to pound in and remove nails. If I so desire, I am free to use a screw driver as a hammer. I am not free, however, to redefine screwdrivers and hammers, because definitions are social rather than individual. Moreover, screwdrivers and hammers, like fiction and nonfiction films, are designed to function for certain purposes. If I attempt to use a hammer to put in a screw, I face the problem that the hammer was not designed for such a purpose. Similarly, when Michael uses a fiction film for research on the history of space travel, he discovers that it was not useful for such a purpose, in part because it was not designed to give information about actual space travel. To evaluate Eitzen’s claim that we are “free” “to see” a nonfiction film as fiction or vice versa, we must first determine what is meant by the words “free” and “to see.” I am free to see Star Wars as nonfiction in the sense that I can pretend that it is nonfiction. To actually see it as nonfiction, however, would be to misunderstand the intended function and social purpose of Star Wars, to misunderstand the place the film holds in our culture. It would constitute an error similar to mistaking a screwdriver for a hammer, or mistaking a last will and testament for a marriage license. Some scholars are turning to reception to distinguish fiction from nonfiction film because defining genres and types of texts has proven to be difficult. Branigan rightly points out that both fiction and nonfiction films employ narrative structure and rhetoric, and both make truth claims of a sort. Eitzen notes that the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction texts are often fuzzy at best, and for that reason it is impossible to distinguish between fiction and nonfiction on the basis of authorial intentions or textual features. Eitzen proposes that basing the distinction on kinds of reception solves these kinds of problems. Nonfiction and fiction films just are whatever people take them to be. The trouble with using kinds of reception to separate fiction from nonfiction is that kinds of reception are just as difficult to define as kinds of films. Of course some films occupy that fuzzy space between fiction and nonfiction, and are hybrids. But the same is true for kinds of reception. When I view Oliver Stone’s JFK, for example, or Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, I do not see them either fictionally or nonfictionally, but as hybrids. So if the fact that there are fuzzy boundaries between fiction and nonfiction films makes the fiction/nonfiction film distinction illegitimate, then the fuzzy boundaries between kinds of reception makes those distinctions illegitimate as well.

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Of course, the easy solution to this problem is that fuzzy boundaries between categories or distinctions do not make the categories or distinctions illicit. Prototype theory has clearly shown that certain categories have prototypes or exemplars with spreading waves of less central examples.10 The nonfiction film, I would argue, is one such category. A DISTINCTION IN THREE PARTS My argument is this: that the distinction between fiction and nonfiction films is not merely a matter of individual viewer reception, but depends on the intended function of the film within the cultural context in which the film is produced and viewed. Ultimately, when we describe the distinction between nonfiction and fiction film, we cannot limit our description to the intrinsic characteristics of the text, or to the reception processes of the spectator, or to cultural context. We must incorporate the role of all three into our description. An instrumentalist account of nonfiction film, the approach that I take to be most useful, considers films as human artifacts designed to perform certain functions, and used by spectators for various purposes.11 As I have argued elsewhere, film viewers usually view a film while knowing whether the film is either fiction or nonfiction. Noël Carroll has called this phenomenon indexing. It is true that some films are hybrids, and for those films we will not be clear about their status as fiction or nonfiction. For the moment I am speaking only of prototypical or clear examples of fiction or nonfiction film. When we view a film, we have often read or seen reviews, advertisements, or have heard through word of mouth how it is indexed. If we are viewing a television program, it will often be a part of a weekly series that indexes the program for us as either fiction or nonfiction. In the absence of any of these cues, the film or program itself typically provides textual cues such as a voice-over narrator, titles; the presence of stars, or stylistic markers that identify the film as fiction or nonfiction. Typically, we do not frame the film as fiction or nonfiction; the film is framed for us. When the spectator notes that a film is a nonfiction film, the spectator implicitly understands that the film is designed to embody a different stance toward the states of affairs it presents than does the fiction film. Both fiction and nonfiction films present states of affairs through their photographic images, sounds, and words. The nonfiction film, however, asserts that the state of affairs it presents occurs in the actual world, while the fiction film presents its state of affairs as imagined rather than actual. Let me say this in other words. The makers of a nonfiction film design the film such that it asserts that the states of affairs it represents, through visual



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or aural means, actually occur or occurred. This stance that the filmmakers take toward their film I call the assertive stance. Fiction filmmakers, on the other hand, take a fictive stance toward what they present, inviting the viewer to ponder the states of affairs, enjoy their presentation, consider their significance, and perhaps be persuaded to accept a moral or political message. The fictive stance does not, however, invite the viewer to take what is presented as having occurred in the actual world. When the viewer understands how a film is indexed, the viewer will typically employ processes of reception and comprehension appropriate to that indexing. Thus when I view Dreyer’s Vampyr, I do not presume that the film implies the existence of an actual David Grey. Similarly, when I view a nonfiction film about Tivoli, I do assume that Tivoli is an actual place and that the film makes claims about it. Even when one views a nonfiction film with which one disagrees, one should not typically question the status of the film as nonfiction. That is, one should not presume that the film does not make assertions. Rather, one should question the veracity of the assertions it does make. If you say it is nonfiction with which you disagree, that is one thing, but if you say it isn’t nonfiction at all, that shows a misunderstanding of the functions and purposes of the film. Given this way of thinking about the fiction/nonfiction distinction, why can we not base the distinction solely on reception processes? For this reason: the distinction between fiction and nonfiction does not reside in the mind of the audience, but in the objective social practices and viewing schemas of a culture. Filmmakers understand these schemas, and design texts with the knowledge that audiences understand these schemas as well. This common understanding, played out in the rhetorical and structural design of the film, allows films to communicate and to have all kinds of other effects as byproducts of that communication. Various shared schemas for representation and communication are the lines that connect texts with audiences, that allow filmmakers to communicate through their films. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction, then, resides in part in the realm of cultural convention and social practice. The distinction also resides in the fiction and nonfiction films themselves, because the films usually have conventional features that identify them as fiction and nonfiction, that are designed to carry out their purposes, and that cue the spectator to take them as either fiction or nonfiction. Finally, the distinction between fiction and nonfiction film lies in the mind of the audience, because these two fundamental types of discourse call for different viewing strategies. To see a film nonfictionally, then, is not to see it as a document, but is rather to see it as a communicative artifact which embodies a social contract by which the audience is cued to take its representations as occurring or having occurred in the historical world. The distinction between fiction and

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nonfiction resides not merely in the mind of the audience or in films, but in the realm of implicit social contracts and conventions. MICHAEL QUESTIONS SUBJECTIVISM, CONTINUED To continue with the saga of Michael’s research, Michael was quite upset about the reaction of his history professor, Professor Martin, to his paper. To Michael it seemed that he had been given bad advice by his film theory professor. If the distinction between fiction and nonfiction films resided solely in the mind of the audience, then one would expect audience members to realize this, especially audience members as highly educated as Professor Martin, his history teacher. So Michael decided to show his history paper to Professor Lewis, his film theory professor, to get his reaction. Professor Lewis agreed to read the paper and to meet with Michael. At that meeting, Michael was surprised at Professor Lewis’s condescending tone. “What you did, Michael, using fiction films as though they were nonfiction films and suitable for research purposes, shows that you completely misunderstood what I said. When I said that the fiction/nonfiction distinction lies in the mind of the audience, as a kind of audience response, I did not mean that you can simply treat films we call ‘fiction’ as ‘nonfiction’ and vice versa. These categorical distinctions may not make rational or logical sense. Nonetheless, we must act as though the distinction exists objectively, or we will be wholly out of synchronization with those around us.” “In other words,” the professor went on, “it’s all a matter of cultural politics.” Michael thanked Professor Lewis for the explanation and excused himself. He walked toward the library to rewrite his history paper. Now Michael was thoroughly confused. “At the very least,” Michael thought, “Professor Lewis ought to be clearer about what it means for a distinction to be solely in the mind of an audience. What good is it to say that a distinction is merely subjective when we must always act as though it were objective?” Michael resolved never again to see a fiction film nonfictionally, whatever his professors might say. THE MORAL OF THE STORY Like Aesop, I want to conclude with a moral to the fable I have just told. Cultural distinctions such as one between fiction and nonfiction lie in the conventional practices of a culture, in the systems of organization designed to foster such practices, and in the artifacts designed as tools to be used for those practices. Nonfiction films are artifacts designed for specific purposes.



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They are placed within systems of distribution and exhibition which regard them as a particular kind of film—a nonfiction film. And they function in a culture which regards nonfictions as sources of information about and investigations of aspects of the actual world. The distinction between fiction and nonfiction films is not merely in the mind of the audience, then, but also in the design of the films and, most importantly, in the social conventions that govern how fictions and nonfictions are used. That’s why I cannot see a nonfiction film fictionally or a fiction film nonfictionally with any more legitimacy than I can see a restaurant menu as a grocery list or a bill of sale as a wedding invitation. Or to put this in a different way, I am free to see these objects of discourse any way I wish, unless or until I enter into the realm of social practice and action. In the broader social realm, I must recognize them for what they are. Like grocery lists, restaurant menus, bills of sale, and wedding invitations, fiction and nonfiction films are kinds of discursive artifacts with distinct, if sometimes overlapping, social uses and functions. Subjectivist conceptions of the fiction/nonfiction distinction will not work because films are cultural artifacts with intended functions. The filmmaker and her or his culture—not the individual viewer—decide whether a film is fiction or nonfiction. Of course, I may have good reasons for using a film in unconventional ways. Various cooptations, interpretations against the grain, fan culture celebrations, and resistant appropriations have political power and legitimacy. As this chapter has shown, however, my freedom to appropriate texts for my own purposes is limited. We will have a better understanding of such cultural appropriation when we recognize and attempt to understand these limitations. NOTES 1. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995), 253. 2. Edward Braningan, Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992), 204. 3. Dirk Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?; Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal 35:1 (1995), 81–102. 4. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 88. 5. Branigan, Narrative Comprehension and Film, 193. 6. John Corner, The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996), 18. 7. Winston, Claiming the Real, 6. 8. Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?” 96. 9. Eitzen, “When is a Documentary?” 92.

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10. George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Human Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). 11. See Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) for a more detailed presentation.

Chapter 5

Inscribing Ethical Space Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary Vivian Sobchack

Always concerned with the subversive capacity of cinema to show us what we may not wish to see, critic Amos Vogel has frequently commented on the medium’s tendency to avert its eyes before the sight of actual death. He writes: “Now that sex is available to us in hard-core porno films, death remains the one last taboo in cinema. However ubiquitous death is—we all ultimately suffer from it—it calls into question the social order and its value systems; it attacks our mad scramble for power, our simplistic rationalism and our unacknowledged, child-like belief in immortality.”1 Death, Vogel suggests, possesses a “ferocious reality” that exceeds attempts to repress it or culturally contain it. Indeed, semiologically speaking, we can say that death presents a special problem in—and to—representation. What follows is best identified as a semiotic phenomenology of death as it is represented and made significant for us through the medium and tropes of nonfictional documentary film.2 Such a phenomenology of representation attempts to describe, thematize, and interpret death as it appears on the screen and is experienced by us as indexically real rather than iconically or symbolically fictive. Given that representation and our experience of it and the world are the object of its scrutiny (and, indeed, the means of its description), such a phenomenology is necessarily culturally and historically informed; it is not transcendentally removed from the cultural and historical situation in which it was carried out. What I observe here about our understanding of death, both in the culture and on the screen, is always subject to qualification by culture and history in their various transformations. Thus, my aim is less to arrive at “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Representation, and Documentary,” in Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture by Vivian Sobchack. © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California. Published by the University of California Press.

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universal, “essential,” and proscriptive categories than to address the “thickness” of one particular mode of visual representation as it richly and radically entails a crucial aspect of human existence and our present attitudes in the sight of it. To that end, after a general historical situation of death and its representation in the context of Western culture, I will pose ten propositions as a way to focus on and semiotically describe some of the problematic relations that exist between death and its cinematic representation in nonfiction film. Finally, thematizing and interpreting these relations will lead to an exploration of the highly charged ethical stances that existentially (but always also culturally and historically) ground certain codes of documentary vision in its specular engagement with death and dying—and, so visibly charged, also charge the film spectator with ethical responsibility for her or his own acts of viewing. HISTORICIZING DEATH AND REPRESENTATION Let us first consider the particular threat that death presents to representation in our culture. Initially a social and public event, what is today uncomfortably called “natural” death has over time become an antisocial and private experience—all the more shocking when we are confronted with the sight of it. At the same time, we are more familiar with the public sight of accidental or violent death, death thus seen less in the natural order of things than as an aberrant, if frequent and highly charged, dramatic event. The particularity of death’s current force and social meaning has been succinctly historicized in Philippe Ariès’s Western Attitudes toward Death, which takes us from the Middle Ages to the relative present, highlighting how the social significance of death and dying has radically changed over the centuries.3 Ariès thus charts a course from the public space of the medieval bedchamber and a natural, “domesticated,” and socially speakable event to the privatized space of the individual bedroom, where—from the sixteenth through the eighteenth century—the parallel paroxysms of sex and death condense to form a major iconography, one that stresses the “undomesticated” and “irrational” behavior of the body as culturally disruptive. He tells us: Like the sexual act, death was henceforth increasingly thought of as a transgression which tears man from his daily life, from rational society, . . . in order to make him undergo a paroxysm, plunging him into an irrational, violent, and beautiful world. Like the sexual act, death for the Marquis de Sade is a break, a rupture. The idea of rupture is something completely new. Until this point the stress had been on the familiarity with death and with the dead. This familiarity had not been affected, even for the rich and the mighty, by the upsurge of individualism beginning in the twelfth century. Death had become a more important event; more thought had to be given to it. But it had become neither frightening



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nor obsessive. It had remained familiar and tamed. But from now on it would be thought of as a break. This notion of a break was born and developed in the world of erotic phantasms. It then passed into the world of real and acted-out events. (57–58)

This rupture between death and daily social life, this connection of death to the irrational, the convulsive, the erotic, the sexual, the decadent, and the private is furthered by the sublimations and repressions of nineteenth-century Victorian culture that find their displaced expression in various forms of romanticism. Morbid, hysterical, and eroticized fascination with the idea of death emerges. Death becomes linked not only to the erotic but also to the exotic and decadent. It is marked as beautiful and thrilling by virtue of its opening onto a foreign and forbidden space that is not constrained by Victorian social restrictions. Indeed, the nineteenth century displaces Eros in Thanatos— not only in the iconography of romantic and gothic literature and visual art but also in excessive social representations of death. Ariès points to the period’s elaborate “funeral processions, mourning clothes, the spread of cemeteries and their surface areas, visits and pilgrimages to tombs, the cult of memory” (106). Nonetheless, despite this elaborate system of displacement, this eroticization of dying and this gothic approach to the dead, nineteenth-century Western culture was still familiar with and regularly exposed to the process and event of death as the gradual outcome of disease, old age, and bodily decay. Family members generally died at home, deathbed visits and vigils were still common, and the public’s knowledge of accidental and violent death (however increased by industrialization and urbanization) was balanced by its more common and intimate experience of death as an event it could call natural. Experiences and attitudes changed in the twentieth century. Encounters with natural death became less common. Natural death thus became less natural—on the one hand, less part of daily life and, on the other, more attributable to “foreign” causes that had exotic medical names. Increasingly medicalized, institutionalized, and technologized, natural death was displaced not in elaborate and erotic representation but in objective physical space. The common event of death through disease or old age was moved from its common site in the home and bedroom to a regulated hospital room and then the mortuary, where the dying and the dead could be overseen by professionals and overlooked by family and community. Removed from sight and common experience, from a site integral with cultural activity, natural death in our culture became, Ariès tells us, a “technical phenomenon”: one “dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped” (88–89). If impossible to prevent, natural death became possible to efface.

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Given the disappearance of natural death from the public sphere and an increasing public emphasis on sexuality, twentieth-century Western culture rejected what Ariès calls the nineteenth century’s “eloquent decor of death” (106). Breaking with the necrophilic excesses of romanticism and the sexual prudery of the Victorians, and opting for the social goal of a prosaic “collective happiness,” twentieth-century (and now twenty-first-century) culture found (and finds) excessively poetic or aristocratic expressions of “melancholy nostalgia” embarrassing, if not downright repugnant and undemocratic (93–94). Such excess is generally seen as self-indulgent rather than socially functional—unless it is tinged with irony, or it is ceremonial and performed en masse and in the service of the state or other major cultural institution. (A fairly recent and, to some, discomfiting instance of such excessive display was the response to the death of Princess Diana; here the displacement of Eros into Thanatos was played out publicly and ceremonially, not only in “melancholy nostalgia” for both a lost aristocrat and “the people’s princess” but also in a mass-mediated melodrama that, both erotic and maternal, found its resolution in violent death and the inaugural installation of, as Ariès put it, “the cult of memory.”) Although we may still observe ceremonial conventions surrounding the death of public figures, there seems no cultural need for excessive rituals surrounding natural death when its process and event in the private sphere are displaced from public sight. Thus, as Ariès concludes (paralleling Vogel’s observations), “Death has become a taboo . . . and . . . in the twentieth century it has replaced sex as the principal forbidden subject.” Citing social anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer’s influential 1955 article “The Pornography of Death,” Ariès writes: “The more society was liberated from the Victorian constraints concerning sex, the more it rejected things having to do with death. Along with the interdict appears the transgression: the mixture of eroticism and death so sought after from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century reappears in our sadistic literature and in violent death in our daily life” (93).4 The point to be emphasized here is that by removing the event of natural death from common—and public—sight so that it has become exotic and strange, and by diminishing, making shameful, and rejecting the excessive and explicit displacements of natural death found in the social representations of the nineteenth century, contemporary Western culture has effectively made natural death a taboo subject for public discourse and severely limited the conditions for its representation. Removing natural death from public space and discourse leaves only accidental and violent death in public sites and conversation. And, with the emphasis on accident and violence, thus emerges what Gorer has called the “pornography of death”—that is, representation obsessed with and limited to the sensational activity of a sensible bodyobject abstracted from the latter’s simultaneous existence as an intentional and sensate body subject. Pointing to the factors that led to this pornographic



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curiosity about death and an obsession with its bodily inscriptions, Gorer, writing in the 1950s, tells us: During the last half-century public health measures and improved preventive medicine have made natural death among the younger members of the population much more uncommon than it had been in earlier periods, so that a death in the family, save in the fullness of time, became a relatively uncommon incident in home life; and, simultaneously, violent death increased in a manner unparalleled in human history. Wars and revolutions, concentration camps, and gang feuds were the most publicized of the causes for these violent deaths; but the diffusion of the automobile, with its constant and unnoticed toll of fatal accidents, may well have been the most influential in bringing the possibility of violent death into the expectations of law-abiding people in time of peace. While natural death became more and more smothered in prudery, violent death has played an ever-growing part in the fantasies offered to mass audiences— detective stories, thrillers, Westerns, war stories, spy stories, science fiction, and eventually horror comics.5

It hardly needs saying that our exposure to violent death—and its detailed pornographic inscriptions made visible on the body and in representation— has increased since Gorer wrote his essay in 1955. Assassinations; snipings; mass, serial, and celebrity murders; civil unrest and violence; terrorism; around-the-clock televisual coverage of a variety of catastrophic accidents; and, by now, almost incidental murders and suicides—all have brought death increasingly into public sight and marked its significant representation as accidental and/or violent. In addition, an increased cultural faith in the infinite efficacy of new technologies as they are mobilized by medicine, the biological sciences, and fitness industries to preserve and extend the human body into perpetual health and perpetual youth has further marginalized “natural” death from disease or old age as “unnatural.” Indeed, both disease and bodily decay are now seen as an affront to nature (the latter naturalized through and through by the technological). Which is to say that death is more comprehensible in the current cultural moment when it occurs for a young or hard body—or as the sudden consequence of external forces rather than the gradual consequence of internal processes. Thus, as Lawrence Langer points out in The Age of Atrocity, death in our current culture is generally regarded not as a natural human end but, rather, as “a sudden and discontinuous experience,” as always “inappropriate,” as an “atrocity.”6 Furthermore, in a paradoxical way (given its apprehension as always shocking), accidental and violent death and its bodily paroxysms have also become increasingly naturalized. Indeed, in both our televisual and cinematic fictions, “sudden,” “discontinuous,” “violent,” “inappropriate,” and “atrocious” deaths have become the norm. Safely contained by narrative, often represented in hyperbolic forms and structures, they titillate and offer a mediated view that softens

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the chaotic randomness and ferocious threat they present in the real world in which we live. Furthermore, even in the fiction film, it is the rare death that is represented as traditionally natural. In our documentary films the representation (or, in phenomenological terms, what is perceived as the presentation) of death is even rarer. Indexical in code and function, documentaries tend to observe the social taboos surrounding real death and generally avoid explicit (i.e., visible) screen reference to it.7 THE SEMIOLOGY OF DEATH In our present culture, then, we create and have access to delimited and overdetermined representations of death. A taboo subject, it titillates us in our fictions as a “pornography” that objectifies and enacts violent mortifications of the human body while, in its quotidian process and event, it remains unnatural and unnamable in both our social relations and those indexical forms of representation that point to them. That is, even in those representations that do speak and “name” death, there is a tendency to avoid showing its presumed actual moment onscreen. As one commentator points out in relation to On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (Bill Moyers, 2000), a documentary television series that deals with terminally ill patients, their families, and their doctors explicitly struggling and coming to terms—personal, moral, and legal—with death: “Because of the intrusiveness inherent in the genre, it comes as almost a shock to realize we don’t see the actual moment of death. That reminds us that these are real people and not actors, actual rather than staged stories. It also testifies to the persistent taboo that we feel around death itself, even on a show dedicated to shattering the taboo.”8 If, indeed, as Vogel suggests, the “ferocious reality” of death (particularly “natural” death) in our present culture threatens our “social order and its value systems,” thus rendering it a taboo subject, then that “ferocious reality” also radically calls into question our culture’s semiological systems. That is, the event of death as it is perceived in our present culture points to and interrogates the very limits of representation in all its forms—including, of course, the cinematic and televisual. Certainly, death is not the only “ferocious reality” to make the camera avert its gaze or despair of representing the existential reality of both human and social being. Vogel points out in Film as a Subversive Art that “the periodic transformation of matter from one state into another continues to evoke all the superstitious alarms and taboos of pre-history.”9 These superstitions and taboos, many of them cross-cultural, all have to do with the ultimately uncontrollable and therefore mysterious and (often) frightening semiosis of the body. Difficult to contain in cultural vision, such acts of human bodily



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transformation include excretion, sexual union, and birth, as well as death. Furthermore, the visual taboos surrounding these bodily transformations that challenge both the unity and security of the subject often extend to particular bodily signs that indexically point to and foreground the essential mystery of bodily being and nonbeing. For example, always in some way treated as sacred—whether through the observance of ritual or ritual nonobservance— both the deformed live body and the inanimate human corpse serve as radical signs of the “matter” of human being as out of human control. The body thus serves as the primary indexical sign of what Langer calls “the universal dilemma of dealing with one’s ‘creatureliness’—of living critically and selfconsciously while so vulnerable to the physical cruelties of men, nature, and science” (63). Nonetheless, of all transformations of the lived body in our culture, the event of death seems to pose a particularly strong threat to representation. Indeed, it seems unrepresentable. Birth, by contrast, does not seem unrepresentable. Although it also involves a bodily transformation that interrogates conventional systems of representation with its radical originality, unlike death it affirmatively signifies the entrance into conventional culture, into social order and value systems, into a representable world and a world of representation. Birth, for us (and possibly for all cultures), is the sign to begin all signs. Death, however, is a sign that ends all signs. In a secular and scientized culture such as ours, it is perceived as the last, the ultimate, act of semiosis. It is always original, unconventional, and shocking, its event always simultaneously representing both the last gasp of sign production and the end of representation. Thus, although birth and death are each processes and representations of liminal moments of bodily transformation and both threaten the stability of cultural codes and conventions with their radical originality, in our present culture death is the more subversive transformation of the two. Hence, we come to my ten propositions about death and its current—and specifically—cinematic and televisual representation in the documentary mode. (Here I will not address the conundrum of digital—or digitized— death, which calls for an essay of its own.) Each proposition is certainly open to argument and thus is offered less as an essential insight than as a “proposal”—a focal point for thought about the significance and signification of death in our cinematic and televisual culture (as well as across cultural boundaries). Indeed, all the propositions are historically and culturally limited in their claims even though they are couched in assertive language. 1. The representation of the event of death is an indexical sign of that which is always in excess of representation and beyond the limits of coding and culture: Death confounds all codes. That is, we do not ever “see” death on the screen nor understand its visible stasis or contours. Instead, we see the

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activity and remains of the event of dying. Whereas being can be visibly represented in its inscription of intentional behavior (the “having of being” animated concretely in action that is articulated in a visible world), nonbeing is not visible. It lies over the threshold of visibility and representation. Thus, it can only be pointed toward, the terminus of its indexical sign forever offscreen, forever out of sight. Here Roland Barthes is apposite (echoing, as well, previous discussion here of death’s sublimation and pacification through fiction): Trauma is just what suspends language and blocks signification. Of course, certain normally traumatic situations can be apprehended in a photographic process of signification; but this is precisely because they are indicated through a rhetorical code which distances them, sublimates them, pacifies them. Strictly traumatic photographs are rare, the trauma is entirely dependent on the certainty that the scene has really occurred: the photographer had to be there (this is the mythical definition of denotation); but this granted (which, to tell the truth, is already a connotation), the traumatic photograph (fires, shipwrecks, catastrophes, violent deaths) is the one about which there is nothing to say: the shock photo is by structure non-signifying: no value, no knowledge, at the limit no verbal categorization can have any hold over the process instituting its signification.10

Death also exceeds cinematic representation and escapes comprehension for other semiotic and phenomenological reasons in our highly technologized culture. In the contemporary context death has come to be inscribed and understood as an objective “technical phenomenon” of the body rather than as a subjective lived-body experience. Even as our own bodies tend to flinch and feel the possibilities of the mortification of our own flesh in the presence of some cinematically represented and sudden assault on another’s body, what Ariès says of death in our current culture holds generally true nonetheless— and it finds its parallel in the indexical representation of death in the cinema. That is, the structure of what Ariès sees as the contemporary dissection of death into a series of “little steps” that “finally make it impossible to know which step was the real death” is paralleled by the initial recording of death by the film moving through camera and projector in twenty-four “little steps” per second and, finally, in always disappointing post hoc attempts to “find” and “see” the exact moment of death in nonfiction films through a close inspection of every frame recording the event. Such spatial and temporal dissection echoes several of Zeno’s paradoxes that, in dissecting space and movement into their component “objective” parts, undo the experience and achievements of both—and, in relation to the present discussion, this dissection “undoes” what was merely the illusion of the representation of death to leave us with the continuing mystery and unrepresentability of its actual fact.11



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An exemplary “proof” of this excess of death over its indexical cinematic representation, as well as of its contemporary and technological dissection, was the fascination (and disappointment) generated by the Abraham Zapruder film of John Kennedy’s assassination. Played again and again, slowed down, stopped frame by frame, the momentum of death escapes each static moment of its representation and frustrates our vision and thus our insight. Rituals of repetition and stop motion, of closer and closer scrutiny, yield only greater and greater mystification. What the images reveal is not the fact or truth of death but the fact or truth of representation—and its limits. Indeed, in Report (1967) experimental filmmaker Bruce Conner loops the Zapruder footage and, through repetition and slow and stop motion, comments ironically on (among other things) the impossibility of our ever being able to “really see” the “moment” of Kennedy’s death. This excess of death over visibility and representation is felt most acutely in our encounter with images that are primarily indexical and have known relations to our extracinematic personal and social lives. Usually represented by signs that, although verisimilarly indexical, function primarily on iconic and symbolic levels, death in fiction film does not generally move us to seek out a visibility that we feel—in seeing it—it lacks. Even without the slow motion inspections of death made paradigmatic by Sam Peckinpah in The Wild Bunch (1969), fictive death is experienced as visible within representation. That is, referring primarily and significantly only to their characters, representations of death in fiction film tend to satisfy us—indeed, in some instances, to sate us or overwhelm us so that we cover our eyes rather than, as with the Zapruder film, strain to see. Thus, whereas death is generally experienced in fiction films as representable and often excessively visible, in nonfiction or documentary films it is experienced as confounding representation and exceeding visibility. 2. It is the visible mortification of—or violence to—the intentional, responsive, and representable lived body that stands as the index of dying, and it is the visible cessation of that body’s intentional and responsive behavior that stands as the symbol of death. Dying and death, particularly in documentary film, cannot be represented and made visible on the screen with an exactitude experienced as “fullness.” The transformation of a being into nonbeing, its location at what T. S. Eliot in “Burnt Norton” describes as the “still point of the turning world” where being is “neither flesh nor fleshless” and eludes us, is only perceptible by way of contrast with what is representable.12 That is, death can only be represented in a visible and vigorous contrast between two states of the physical body: the body as lived body, intentional and animated—and the body as corpse, a thing of flesh unintended, inanimate, static.

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In this regard, although generally taken as an indexical sign of death (i.e., existentially connected to and symptomatic of the cessation of existential being), the corpse is also understood in its particularity as a symbolic sign of the “dead.” That is, conventionally the corpse signifies, first, the deterioration of materially embodied being into absolute “thing-ness” and then into absolute “no-thing-ness”—both experientially unknown (and unknowable) states of “being.” This is not to say that we do not respond physically, emotionally, and cognitively to the sight of what is believed to be a real corpse on the screen but rather that we respond to it always as other than we are and as an object. Indeed, the horror of the corpse is precisely that it is not perceived as a subject—even as its objectivity confronts us with and reminds us of the limits and end of human subjectivity. In an extremely moving essay, “The Sacral Power of Death in Contemporary Experience,” William May tells us: The flesh is more than instrumental to control and more than sensitive, it is also revelatory. A man reveals himself to his neighbor in and through the living flesh. He is one with his countenance, gestures, and the physical details of his speech. As some have put it, he not only has a body, he is his body. Part of the terror of death, then, is that it threatens him with a loss of his revelatory power. The dreadfulness of the corpse lies in its claim to be the body of the person, while it is wholly unrevealing of the person. What was once so expressive of the human soul has suddenly become a mask.13

The corpse, then, exists with paradoxical semiotic force. It is a significant bodily sign of the body that no longer has the iconic power to intentionally signify itself as lived. Instead, the corpse engages our sympathy as an indexical object existentially connected to a subject who was once an intentional and responsive “being,” and it generates our horror as a symbolic object bereft of subjectivity and responsiveness that stands for a condition we cannot existentially know and yet to which we must succumb. As an object, the corpse is alienated from human being. It may have once been a subject, but it is not now a subject. Thus, as John Fraser points out in Violence in the Arts, “the very thing that cries out for the deepest sympathy serves in some measure to inhibit that sympathy, namely the conversion of the sufferers into ‘monsters.’”14 Our sympathy for the subject who once was is undermined by our alienation from the object that is. We are not dead and cannot imagine what it would be like to “be” so (i.e., to “not be”). The corpse, then, becomes a horrific yet sacred taboo object. We are fascinated by it and fearful of looking at it, filled with what Vogel suggests is “the thrilling guilt of the voyeur/transgressor (to see what one has no right to see), coupled with the fear of punishment. How delicious when it does not come and the forbidden . . . image can continue to be viewed.”15 In nonfictional cinema the corpse visibly provides the material and physical premises for visual and metaphysical reflection on being and not-being,



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between the lived-body subject and the inanimate and implacable bodyobject. The corpse as a body-object is physically passive, semiotically impassive. It can be offered to a devouring scrutiny or embalmed with the richest symbolism. It can be used, offering no resistance to the willful viewer—either filmmaker or spectator. However, as Fraser tells us, “In general, passivity does not invite empathy. What does invite it . . . is anything that permits one to see the other as an agent. . . . Two of the most important factors making for empathy are a sense of the individual as engaged in work, and a sense of the physicality of the body.”16 Although the corpse is the most physical of bodies, it is so because it is just a physical body. It does not “work”; it is not lived. As a physical body, it can be inscribed by decay in an activity of transformation that signifies the passage between some “thing” and “no-thing.” But as just a physical body, the corpse cannot be inscribed by death in an activity of transformation that signifies the passage between being and not-being, between the responsive being of a body-subject and the passive existence of a materially embodied object. The inactive and unresponsive corpse, then, does not necessarily quicken us in our own lived bodies to an apprehension of dying and death so much as does the active inscription of the process of mortification on another lived body. This need to signify the active transformation that death visits on the responsive, physical, lived body in a representation that visibly contrasts two extreme states of existence leads to a third proposition. 3. The most effective cinematic signifier of death in our present culture is violent action inscribing signs of mortification on the visibly lived body. This proposition is perhaps the most controversial thus far. Although it is meant as descriptive rather than prescriptive, it still moves us to some sort of ethical response. That is, if we abhor violence and its rupture of both the social and fleshly fabric of culture and individual human lives, it is difficult to acknowledge that violence is currently the most effective signifier of death in visual representation. However, as discussed earlier, the primary relationship we have to death in our present culture is one marked by our lack of familiarity with the relatively gradual process of what used to be seen as natural death and increased familiarity with the abrupt and now natural unnaturalness of sudden and violent death. Given contemporary social relations to the event of death (the overwhelming visible presence and representation of death as externally and violently caused and the “structuring absence” and invisibility of natural death both in our lives and our representations), it should not be surprising that violent mortification of the lived body is the most effective sign-vehicle by which to signify the transformation of being to nonbeing.17 The sign-functions of violence are aptly described by Langer: In an age of private violence and public slaughter, which threatens to make atrocity socially respectable, inappropriate death has become an issue which we

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can no longer consider an aberration from the normal rhythms of experience. Sudden violent death is now a fact of our imaginative existence, crowding out the serene metaphors. . . . More recently the mushroom cloud has been displaced in our national consciousness by a personal act of aggression gradually approaching the status of metaphor—assassination (6).

Consider how, in our cinematic culture, violence gives death a perceptible form and signifies its ultimate violation of the lived body.18 The objectively visible, most often externally caused, and violent end to animate and intentional activity is particularly, personally, and viscerally shocking seen on the screen—for the film medium, in its inherently kinetic and unfolding presentation of moving representations, is life-giving, life-sustaining, and life-affirming. Thus, the violent cessation of movement and animation in a lived-body subject visibly and spatially emphasizes the temporal contrast between animate and inanimate being—between the living and the dead. It visually transforms the cinematic present into a visible past tense, and an embodied subject into a body-object. This contrast and transformation suggests a fourth proposition. 4. The most effective cinematic representation of death in our present culture is inscribed on the lived body in action that is abrupt. Ironically, although we have little to actually do with “natural death” in contemporary culture, the idea of natural death is comforting insofar as it is perceived as gradual and even possibly easeful. For example, the notion (and hope) of dying “in one’s sleep” significantly returns us to the bedchamber and a “domesticated” death, one not necessarily associated with pain or bodily humiliation. This idea of a domesticated and gradual death, however, is also nostalgic and subversive in relation to our culture’s myth of process as progress and has led to the spatial (and social) displacement of lived bodies undergoing the visibly “unprogressive” process of decay. As Ariès notes, by the late Middle Ages, decomposition of the body had become the sign of human failure and finitude; in our time, that failure (and mortal finitude) has become transformed into something personally shameful (39–46). Except in the case of the sudden and fatal heart attack or stroke (described in the vernacular as “dropping dead”), we do not customarily think of natural death in the binary terms that violence inscribes. Indeed, the perceptible qualities of natural death mark neither the sudden end to the body as lived nor a single dramatically significant moment of bodily transformation. Thus, the slow and almost imperceptible transformation of a lived body into a corpse, of the animate into the inanimate, does not signify our more usual contemporary experience and idea of death as a “break” or “rupture.” Instead, natural death sets up and fulfills its own expectations over a perceived durée (hence,



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the now unfamiliar notion of a “death watch” or “wait”). And, in regard to its visual representation, this durée could be said to exist in temporal equivalence to the present-tense process of the film medium, marking little or no contrast between movement and stillness, between presence as an embodied being and a merely present body. Visualized as a gradual rather than abrupt process, then, the transformation of animate body-subject into inanimate body-object does not so much represent death as it represents the living of the process of dying. Thus, referring to Michael Roemer’s Dying (a 1976 documentary that, over time, follows three people dying of various forms of cancer and conducts interviews with the widow of a fourth), a reviewer writes: “Theirs is a lesson about living,” or, “Shock it will, not because it is painful to watch but because it isn’t. . . . It is an unabashed plea for death as ritual.”19 These comments echo Ernest Becker, who, in The Denial of Death, points out that “disease and dying are still living processes in which one is engaged.”20 Abruptness does not allow for the temporal experiences of process and ritual, the analgesic of form and formalities. The abrupt transformation of the animated body into an inanimate corpse denies formal reason and connotes the “irrationality,” “arbitrariness,” and “unfairness” of death. Indeed, abruptness itself structures in part what we perceive as violence, and it may well be that, in our present culture, both abruptness and violence best articulate death so that its binary marking of existence and nonexistence can be felt viscerally and personally by those who view its signs. It might be said, then, that the cinematic representation and durée of dying as a gradual process effectively functions to signify a third-person death—whereas the abrupt and binary representation of death through a violently sudden bodily transformation signifies a first-person death that, because it always appears untimely, can be appreciated, at least to some extent, as potentially mine. In this regard Simone de Beauvoir, in A Very Easy Death, writes: “There is no such thing as a natural death. . . . All men must die: but for every man his death is an accident and, even if he knows it and consents to it, an unjustifiable violation.”21 Martin Heidegger, too, points to a disavowal of our own “Being-towards-death” that always displaces it onto “someone” or “sometime” else. He writes, “One knows about the certainty of death and yet ‘is’ not authentically certain of one’s own. . . . Death is deferred to ‘sometime later,’ and this is done by invoking the so-call[ed] ‘general opinion.’”22 Beauvoir’s and Heidegger’s existential assertions are couched in universal terms, yet, of course, they are also situated historically and socially in twentieth-century experience, one dominated by images of massive discontinuity and upheaval. More particularly, Robert Jay Lifton locates the contemporary emergence of general attitudes toward death as an accident and a violation in the social discontinuities and upheavals caused by the great wars we have experienced since the early part of the twentieth century. He tells us,

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“Without a cultural context in which life has continuity and boundaries, death seems premature whenever it comes. Whatever the age and circumstances, it is always ‘untimely.’”23 Thus, abruptness, particularly as it is correlated with violence, most effectively serves to signify the phenomenological sense of death in our time. As Langer puts it: “Atrocity, with its emphasis on the grotesqueness of abrupt and violent death, intensifies man’s latent apprehension that dying is an unmanageable event; it erodes culture’s carefully nurtured positions for withstanding this threat, and leaves man with the options of terror or awareness” (64). Linked as it is with atrocity, violence, and abruptness, it seems hardly surprising that, in today’s culture, death has replaced sex as a visual taboo. The subversive action death performs on and in culture and visual representation, its excess and its primary articulation as abrupt and mortifying violence on a lived-body subject, in part explains the particular ethical problems its event poses for nonfiction cinema. If death is kept from cultural sight except when it violently breaks into a public site, how is a visual medium to deal with its representation without breaking a cultural taboo? As Langer suggests: “Men are reluctant to speak about death because ‘words have a primitive equivalence with the underlying reality to which they allude.’ To speak about real death, therefore, as opposed to death in the abstract, ‘puts us in the role of someone who violates a taboo’” (14–15).24 In fictional cinema, the representation of death, however graphic, is experienced as abstract—that is, hypothetical or “irreal”; it is a character who dies and not the actor who plays him. The nonfictional representation of death in the documentary, however, is experienced as real—even when it is not as graphically displayed as it often is in fiction film.25 Expressed primarily in the limited tropes and obsessions that Gorer identifies as pornographic, the excessive visual attention lavished on violent death in the fiction film is thus culturally tolerated—if often socially criticized. Conversely, documentary film is marked by an excessive visual avoidance of death, and when death is represented in a nonfictional context, its representation seems to demand ethical justification (often generalized as the “public’s right to know”). In sum, when death is represented as fictive rather than real, when its signs are structured and stressed so as to function iconically and symbolically, the spectator understands that only the simulacrum of a visual taboo has been violated. When death is represented as real, however, when its signs are structured and inflected so as to function indexically, a visual taboo has been violated, and the representation must find various ways to justify the violation. Fiction film, then, only plays with—and as—visual taboo, not only containing death in a range of formal and ritual simulations but also often boldly viewing it with unethical and prurient interest, as if, thus simulated, it really “doesn’t count.” The fiction film audience generally responds in kind. That



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is, however “grossed out” by death’s excessive particulars, viewers tend to be less ethically squeamish about looking at fictional death and also less stringent in their judgment of the nature of the film’s curiosity about and gaze on the violence and mortification that transforms the lived body-subject into the objective matter of a corpse. Documentary, however, tends not to “play” in the fields of simulation.26 Rather, when it comes to the visually taboo event of death, in most instances the genre constitutes its dread and violent images of the dying and the dead within what visibly appears as the camera’s “accidental” vision or in the visible evidence of the personal risk taken to capture the images by the filmmakers. Visibly represented as caught nearly “unawares,” or facing his or her own mortality, the camera and filmmaker are less vulnerable to possible charges of prurience or unethical behavior by an audience who morally judges their represented gaze at death in terms of its moral responsiveness to a social world shared not only by the filmmaker and audience but also by the memorialized dead. Perhaps this reluctance to face such ethical judgment explains why, according to Vogel, “there are so few film records of individuals dying of natural causes; it is rather war deaths or executions that have been caught on film. Even these are rarely shown except on ceremonial occasions at which an audience gathers in guilt, remorse, or solemn, ineffectual vows never to forget.”27 As we have seen, what is here called “natural death” is the least natural and commonplace in the public sight of contemporary culture. Thus, we are less able to deal with it cinematically and televisually. Its very temporality is threatening and presents ethical problems. That is, gradual, natural death allows time and space for the ill-mannered stare to develop and objectify the dying. The filmmaker’s ethical relation to the event of death, the function of his or her look, is open to slow scrutiny by the spectator. Thus, as the filmmaker watches the dying, we watch the filmmaker watching and judge the nature and quality of his or her interest. Less potentially problematic, the abruptness of, for example, a war death or an assassination leaves no time or space for the stare, either the filmmaker’s or our own. Conversely, the incredibly painful anticipatory gaze that waits for and records a formal execution is, however horrific, always partially sanctioned by its political service, either for or against the executioners. These observations about the ethical nature and quality of the filmmaker’s gaze at dying and death inform not only all my remaining propositions but also the concluding section of this essay. 5. In the cinema the visible representation of vision inscribes sight not only in an image but also as moral insight. This is to say that vision visibly inscribes its own investments in the world in a concrete situation—or site. That investment and situation can be seen in the particularity of its produced images and in their implication in a social world that could be said to “incite” cinematic

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vision’s visual activity.28 In the indexical representations of documentary the very act of vision that makes the representation of death possible is itself subject to ethical scrutiny. As mentioned previously, that vision must visibly respond in some way to the fact that it has broken a visual taboo and looked at death. It must justify its cultural transgression as not only responsive but also responsible and must make the justification itself visible. Thus, although perhaps spontaneously responsive to contingent situations in which death occurs before its eyes, the visual behavior made visible in documented visions of death has come to inscribe itself in relatively conventional ways so as to justify itself. It has, to a certain extent, become codified—commuting, as codes do, an existential confrontation with an excessive event into a morally framed vision that marks and contains not only a visible death but also the visible physical situation and ethical stance of the filmmaker. Signs of the filmmaker’s situation and stance (quite literally, “attitude”) are, for example, inscribed in and visibly represented by the camera’s stability or movement in relation to the situation that it perceives, in the framing of the object of its vision, in the distance that separates it from the event, in the persistence or reluctance of its gaze in the face of a horrific, chaotic, unjust, or personally dangerous event. As we have already seen, death always forcefully exceeds and subverts its indexical representation—so much so that we can never actually see it. Rather, it is the act of visually dealing with death’s exorbitance by means of human and technological vision that documentary cinema most visibly documents, most effectively represents. Thus, those visual “sign vehicles” that function to make death seemingly visible on the screen most significantly signify the manner in which the immediate viewer—the filmmaker with camera—physically mediates his or her own confrontation with death: the way she or he ethically inhabits a social world, visually responds in and to it, and charges it with an ethical meaning visible to others. As well, such sign vehicles are the means by which the mediate viewer—the spectator of the film—immediately and ethically inhabits the theater and visually responds in it. (Do we shrink in our seats or lean forward toward the screen? Do we cover our eyes or peek through our fingers? Do we stare at the vision before us or watch from the corners of our eyes? Do we sit there deciding to act on what we’ve seen once we’re outside of the theater, or do we shrink a bit, knowing we will do nothing but watch what is presently before us?) 6. Before the nonfictional screen event of an unsimulated death, the very act of looking at the film is ethically charged, and this act is itself an object of ethical judgment. That is, the viewer is—and is held—ethically responsible for his or her visible visual response. The cinematic signs of the act of viewing death provide the visible grounds on which the spectator judges not only the filmmaker’s ethical behavior in response to death but also his or her own



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ethical response to the visible visual activity represented on the screen—both its content and its form. At minimum two viewers are ethically implicated in their relations with the viewed event, both the filmmaker viewing the event of death through the camera and the spectator viewing the film that makes that death visible. Thus, responsibility for the representation of death by means of the inscribed vision of cinema lies with both filmmaker and spectator—and in the ethical relationship constituted between the vision of each. In the presence of real death (and its representation) the codification of visual behavior, as that behavior acts to circumscribe the sight of death and bear (bare) its traces, allows both filmmaker and spectator to overcome, or at least to circumvent, the transgression of what in our present culture is a visual taboo. Such codification allows both filmmaker and spectator to view death’s “ferocious reality,” if not from a comfortable position then from a normatively ethical one. Such codification inscribes in the film text what Roger Poole, in relation to photography, has called an “ethical space”: the visible site that represents and signifies the viewer’s subjective, lived, and moral relationship with the viewed.29 Thus, even though documentary film most often represents death in visual activity initiated less by conscious moral concerns than by the technical necessity and specific existential contingencies of the profilmic event in which the death occurs, this activity has nonetheless become codified and used conventionally to visibly inscribe the text within the contours of what would normatively be considered an ethical vision of some kind. In its visibility this activity of representing death thus constitutes a moral conduct: the conventionally agreed-upon manner and means by which a visually taboo, excessive, and essentially unrepresentable event can be viewed, contained, pointed to, and opened to a scrutiny that is, to varying degree, culturally sanctioned. It seems important at this point to revisit the difference between documentary and fictional representations of death. I have already made some distinctions between the sign-functions of both genres; documentary is primarily indexical, fiction primarily iconic and symbolic. I have also suggested that the criteria for ethical vision in the face of death in fiction are not as stringent as they are for documentary. This is not to say that a fictional vision of death does not also have to meet at least a certain minimum set of ethical criteria to gain some level of cultural sanction. But there does appear to be more ethical “wiggle room” in the iconic and symbolic space of the “imagined” irreal than in the indexical space of the “referred to” real. Thus, physical mortification of the lived body, violence, and death are much the stuff of which fiction is visually made. Fictive death draws the camera to its representation. Fiction films inspect death in detail, with the casual observation of realism, with undisguised prurient interest, or with formal reverence (the latter ritualized in slow motion or stately camera and montage rhythms). Indeed, for cultural

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reasons previously discussed, death in our fiction films has become a commonplace—rather than taboo—visual event. However, the emotions we feel as viewers in the face of it, the values we put at risk in looking at it, the ethical significance we find in our encounter with it differ in kind as well as degree from the way we respond to death in the documentary. These differences are problematized by the film that generated this essay: Jean Renoir’s humanist, and realist—Rules of the Game (1939). There are two instances of death in the film, and although both are seemingly homogenized by their equivalent mode of cinematic representation and their mutual containment within the boundaries of a single narrative, one death differs radically from the other. The first to die in the film is a rabbit. The second is a human character. I have chosen my words carefully here so as to emphasize that the rabbit is not perceived by us solely as a character in the narrative. Rather, it is a real rabbit that we see die in the service of the narrative and for the fiction. The human character who dies, however, does so only in the fiction. Thus, insofar as we are talking about a classic film, even though they eventually survived the actor, both his character and the narrative were immediately survived by him. We cannot, however, say the same of the rabbit. What is important to note here is that the knowledge that informs our distinction between the fate—and fatality—of the rabbit and character is both extracinematic and intertextual. On the one hand, the cinema-specific codes of representation are the same for both the real rabbit and irreal character, and each of their deaths serves a similar and interrelated function in the narrative. Nonetheless, despite these cinema-specific codes (for Renoir, a rigorous realism), a distinction is made between them. Indeed, the textual moment of the rabbit’s death gains its particular force from an extracinematic and intertextual cultural knowledge that contextualizes and exceeds the representation’s sign-function in the narrative. This brings us to the next proposition. 7. The intertextuality provided by personal experience and cultural knowledge contextualizes and informs any textual representation of death. That is, a sign-function is only purposefully functional within a text insofar as it is not challenged or subverted or put into idiosyncratic service by extratextual knowledge. Watching Rules of the Game, we know that it is easier to kill a rabbit than to teach it to play dead. We also know it is easier to teach a man to play dead (i.e., to act) than to kill him. What is meant by easier in the ethical context of our culture and the economic context of cinema is “faster,” “cheaper,” and “less morally problematic.” Rabbits are slow learners, bad actors, and their lives generally thought of as expendable. A filmmaker will not be sent to jail for killing even the cutest rabbit, but he may very well lose his life for killing even the worst actor. However, in this context it is interesting to note how our extratextual knowledge has historically changed (at least



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to some degree) our relation to injury and mortification in the cinema. Now, in addition to a moral imperative that forbids killing actors, there is legislation guarding against injuring and/or killing animals merely for the sake of a fiction—and films graphically attest to compliance. Thus, today one’s ethical, if not bodily, response to watching an animal’s injury or death onscreen has been appreciably altered; we may still flinch as we watch a horse fall in midgallop, but we probably feel a good deal less guilty than we once did for watching it. Nonetheless, given general knowledge of Rules of the Game as an “old” (for those of us in film studies, a “classic”) film, cultural knowledge and ethical considerations contextualize both the rabbit’s and the character’s deaths and, in the case of the former, momentarily fracture the classical coherence of the film’s narrative representation, introducing the offscreen and unrepresented space in which the viewer lives, acts, and makes distinctions as an ethical social being. Thus, watching Rules of the Game, we know—above and beyond cinematic codes—that the murder of the young aviator André Jurieu is merely represented, whereas the rabbit’s death is not only represented but also presented. Dying only in the fiction, the senselessness and shock generated by the earnest young man’s death make narrative sense and satisfy, rather than surprise and subvert, narrative expectations. His death is not merely contained by the codes governing the narrative but is, in fact, constituted and determined by them. The rabbit’s death, however, exceeds the narrative codes that communicate it. It ruptures and interrogates the boundaries (and license) of fictional representation and has a “ferocious reality” that the character’s death does not. Indeed, it is taken as an indexical sign in an otherwise iconic/ symbolic representation. That is, it functions to point beyond its function as a narrative representation to an extratextual and animate referent, executed not only by but also for the representation. The rabbit’s death violently, abruptly, punctuates fictional space with documentary space. Nonfictional or documentary space is thus of a different order than fictional space that confines itself to the screen or, at most, extends offscreen into an unseen yet still imagined world. Its constitution is dependent on an extracinematic knowledge that contextualizes and may transform the sign-functions of the representation within a social world and an ethical framework. This, indeed, is a dependency made particularly problematic by the titillating ambiguity of the “snuff” film, in which human bodily mortification and death are purposefully staged for the camera but done so in the name of the real. The snuff film supposedly teases the viewer as to its undecidable ontological status. On the one hand, what is perceived is an indexical staging and representation of actual mutilation and murder. (Indeed, given the documentary realism, a narrative may have to be constructed by the viewer to explain why the victim—usually said to be a woman—is even at the scene: that is,

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how she must have been seduced into thinking she was just going to “act” in a fiction.) On the other hand, it is almost impossible to believe that the filmmakers would challenge—in seemingly plain and indexical sight—one of culture’s most powerful interdicts. Thus, the viewer is aware that the film is in all likelihood (but not definitively) a fiction, a probable (but not certain) cinematic “joke”—for, if the film is really nonfiction, then not only the filmmakers but also we, the viewers for whom the film was made, are complicit in an act of murder. Although I have not met anyone who has actually seen a snuff film involving the death of a human being (and would they admit to it if they had, given the ethical conundrum it presents?), the idea of the genre still circulates. And this is, I think, because—even as an idea—it foregrounds the shaky extracinematic grounds on which we usually and securely take up cinematic representation as the kind of representation it is. Thus, even in thought, what is almost more horrifying than the supposedly real death staged for us on the screen is the recognition that all we can really depend on to tell us whether that death is real or fictional is our glaringly limited (and certainly not definitive) extracinematic knowledge and experience. The apocryphal experience of the snuff film not only tests the ground between documentary and fictional space but also tests us, and watching it (even in thought), we probably squirm as much for ourselves as for its hapless victim. This brings us to the final three propositions. 8. Documentary space is indexically constituted as the perceived conjunction of the viewer’s lifeworld and the visible space represented in the text, and it is activated by the viewer’s gaze at the filmmaker’s gaze, both subjectively judged as ethical action. To whatever degree it may be conventionally constructed, given that the constitution of documentary space is finally dependent not merely on a film’s codes of textual representation but also on the viewer’s extratextual knowledge and judgment, the viewer (both as filmmaker and spectator) bears particular subjective responsibility for the action marked by—and in—his or her vision. Thus, even the vision that “transparently” or “neutrally” inscribes its action as “objective” is subjectively judged by the spectator on its ethical appropriateness in the context of the event at which it gazes. 9. Documentary space is constituted and inscribed as ethical space: it stands as the objectively visible evidence of subjective visual responsiveness and responsibility toward a world shared with other human subjects. The textual vision inscribed in and as documentary space is never seen as a space alternative or transcendental to the viewer’s lifeworld and its values. That is, this textual vision and its activity reflexively point to a lived body occupying concrete space and shaping it with others in concrete social relations that describe a moral structure.30 Such vision is both subjectively situated and



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objectively visible to the ethical scrutiny and judgment of other embodied and intentional viewing subjects who are, to use Alfred Schutz’s terms, historical “consociates,” “contemporaries,” “predecessors,” and “successors” of the film spectator.31 10. Although death itself confounds and exceeds its indexical representation in documentary space, the filmmaker’s and viewer’s ethical behavior does not. Whether by necessity, accident, or design, the documentary filmmaker represents—and thus encodes—his or her act of vision as a sign of an ethical stance toward the actual event of death she or he witnesses. Given its taboo status, how may the filmmaker visually confront this event and visibly represent it so that the representation is perceived as morally justifiable in its gaze at what is normatively regarded as forbidden? It seems that in almost all cases the solution to this ethical problem is an inscription of the filmmaker’s visual activity that visibly indicates that the filmmaker is in no way party to—and thus not responsible for—the death at which she or he gazes. (Again, in its lack of any such inscription, the ethical problem of the snuff film is relevant here.) Furthermore, the representation must visibly indicate that its visual activity in no way substitutes for a possible intervention in the event—that is, it must indicate that watching and recording the event of death is not more important than preventing it. Or, alternatively, it must indicate that the very fact of the representation of a particular death is somehow more socially important than the death of the individual who suffers it. DOCUMENTARY AND THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF THE ETHICAL GAZE To meet either of these two conditions that attest to the ethical behavior of the filmmaker who encounters and films the event of death, we can see five forms of visual activity emerge across a wide range of documentary films and raw nonfictional footage. Each is constituted as human behavior visibly encoded in the representation to signify the particular embodied situation of the filmmaker and thus his or her capacity to affect the events before the camera lens. In their cinematic engagement with and representation of the event of death, these five visual forms of ethical behavior can be thematized phenomenologically as what I will call the accidental gaze, the helpless gaze, the endangered gaze, the interventional gaze, and the humane gaze. In addition, there is a sixth visual form that is more ethically ambiguous and suspect than the others; presenting problems of ethical judgment to both filmmaker and spectator alike (particularly insofar as their situations and allegiances may waver or differ), this more ambiguous form of visual behavior can be called the professional gaze.32

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Inscribed as the least ethically suspect in its encounter with the event of death, the accidental gaze is cinematically coded in markers of technical and physical unpreparedness. The film gives us visual evidence that death was not the filmmaker’s initial object of scrutiny, that it happened in front of the camera suddenly, randomly, and unexpectedly, surprising the filmmaker’s vision and disallowing any possibility of the filmmaker’s intervention or complicity. Such lack of preparation for the encounter is signified by the camera’s unselective vision in relation to the death, by its conceptual and often literal “oversight” of the event. That is, the filmmaker and camera are not intending toward or focused on the fatal event occurring before them since their intentional interest is clearly located elsewhere. Examples of the accidental gaze include, at one extreme, the previously mentioned amateur Zapruder footage of the Dallas motorcade in which JFK was assassinated and, at the other extreme, a highly crafted documentary like Gimme Shelter (David Maysles, Albert Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin, 1970), which “unwittingly” filmed a murder at a Rolling Stones concert in Altamont, California. In the latter film, although the death is “seen” by the camera, at first the filmmakers—and later the spectator—literally have no insight into the event. That is, they don’t know where to look in the huge crowd for the fatal spot because they don’t know someone is being killed and are attending to the larger scene of the rock concert. Indeed, even informed in advance as to what we will see on the screen, as spectators watching the crowd we still don’t really “see” the event occurring before our—and the camera’s—eyes. Indeed, we don’t see the killing (although it’s literally there in the mise-en-scène) until the filmmakers inspect their own footage on the screen and after the fact to find the death for themselves, for the Rolling Stones, and for us. Whatever their differences, then, the breaking of visual taboo is cinematically inscribed as unintentional in both the Zapruder footage and Gimme Shelter. Indeed, the wonder and fascination generated by such films and their accidental gaze is that a death happens in plain sight yet is somehow not seen and that it was attended to by the camera (however diffuse its attention) although not intended by the filmmaker. Awareness of this disparity of attention and the gap that occurs between visual comprehension of the object of one’s interest and the rest of one’s visual field creates a compelling desire to stopframe the film so as to see the death more intentionally and attentively now that we are aware of it—as if, now that we know where in the visual field to look, such stop-framing would somehow make its representation clearer, its signification more precise. This, in fact, is what has been done both with the Zapruder footage and in Gimme Shelter. Nonetheless, although viewing and reviewing the film in both instances increases our focus and direction, it never finally overcomes the accidental oversight of the immediate visual encounter with mortality (and the excess of the death over its representation).



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The helpless gaze at the event of death is cinematically coded in markers of technical and physical distance from it. The distance may be great—in which case physical intervention on the part of the filmmaker is visibly perceived to have been impossible. In other instances, particularly when the death entails the ritual of a legal execution, the filmmaker may be technically and physically closer to the event but is legislatively distanced and prevented from intervening. Distance, and the helplessness it confers, is signified not only by the long shot but also by the frequent use of telephoto and zoom lenses. As the intentional object of the filmmaker, the event of death is brought closer in view and attention but not in physical proximity. Furthermore, although the helpless gaze is often stable (i.e., technically attached to a tripod so that the frame is not marked by physical agitation), it usually does not maintain the cool fixity of a mechanical stare but rather covers the figured space and/ or shifts its attention: panning as if to seek visual escape, zooming out as well as in toward the event, contextualizing the event of death in a space marked out to absolve the gazer from the responsibility of active intervention. (This visual movement and discomfort are to be distinguished from characteristics of both the humane gaze and the ethically ambiguous professional gaze, both of which will be described shortly.) The endangered gaze, as differentiated from the helpless gaze, is cinematically coded in terms not of distance but of proximity to events of violence and death. It is inscribed by signs that indexically and reflexively point to the mortal danger faced by the filmmaker in a particular and contingent situation, indicating a physical presence behind the camera and at the scene. The representation is marked by the relative instability of its framing—the camera shaken, for example, by nearby explosions or handheld while being carried over rough terrain (pointing, of course, to the body that holds it, to a vulnerable human operator). Endangered vision is frequently seen as obstructed, which marks its need for protection and inscribes a fragile yet concerned relation to the horrors of mortality that it visibly grasps. Parts of vehicles and buildings, foliage, rubble, and the like partially hide the mortal objects of vision but also indexically point to and reveal the filmmaker as the mortal subject of vision. Thus, looking at death with an endangered gaze visibly constitutes itself as an intersubjective and ethical trade-off: the filmmaker pays for the transgression of breaking a visual taboo by visibly risking his or her own life to represent the proximate death of another. In Theory of the Film Béla Balázs discusses what I am here calling the endangered gaze in relation to war documentaries and cameramen killed during their filming: This fate of the creative artist is . . . a new phenomenon in cultural history and is specific to film art. . . . This presentation of reality by means of motion pictures

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differs essentially from all other modes of presentation in that the reality being presented is not yet completed; it is itself still in the making while the presentation is being prepared. . . . The cameraman is himself in the dangerous situation we see in his shot and is by no means certain that he will survive the birth of his picture. Until the strip has been run to its end we cannot know whether it will be completed at all. It is this tangible being-present that gives the documentary the peculiar tension no other art can produce.33

So long as it is visibly encoded in the film, this risk of personal peril ethically absolves the filmmaker of purposefully seeking out and gazing at the death of others through the camera. The rarest, and usually the most poignant, ethical representation of a visual encounter with death is the interventional gaze. Moving beyond endangerment, it literally comes out of hiding; its vision is confrontational. It is more than visually active in its engagement with the event at which it looks. It is often marked by the urgent physical activity of the camera, and often the filmmaker’s voice—usually repressed or suppressed—adds spatial and physical dimension to the inscription of bodily presence and involvement. In its extreme instance, such as in a sequence in Patricio Guzman’s The Battle of Chile (1976), the interventional gaze ends up representing not only the death of another, but also its own. Balázs is most eloquent and insightful in his description of a similarly extreme instance of the interventional gaze as it appears in a sequence in a French war documentary: It darkens and the camera wobbles. It is like an eye glazing in death. The director did not cut out this “spoilt” bit—it shows where the camera was overturned and the cameraman killed, while the automatic mechanism ran on. . . . Yes, it is a new form of consciousness that was born out of the union of man and “camera.” For as long as these men do not lose consciousness, their eye looks through the lens and reports and renders conscious their situation. . . . The internal processes of presence of mind and observation are here projected outwards into the bodily action of operating the camera. . . . The psychological process is inverted—the cameraman does not shoot as long as he is conscious—he is conscious as long as he is shooting.34

Thus, although in this instance we do not ever see the camera operator’s body, we nonetheless see the waning of his attention and consciousness. Here the visible image is inscribed with the loss of the human intentional behavior that informs it, the very image of vision becoming random, diffuse, and unconscious in relation to the world and its objects. The interventional gaze is the endangered gaze at its reflexive extremity. The act of looking at and filming death may also be performed with a humane gaze. Marked by its extended duration, the humane gaze resembles



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a “stare”—a fixed look that tends to objectify that at which it gazes—except for the fact that it visibly and significantly encodes in the image its own subjective responsiveness to what it sees. Thus, dependent on the nature and context of the event of death at which it looks, the humane stare usually takes one or the other of two visual forms. In one form it may fix itself in shock and disbelief, its gaze hypnotized by the horror it observes. Atrocity usually generates this response as exemplified in the famous footage of a South Vietnamese officer executing a suspected North Vietnamese terrorist in the middle of a Saigon street. In a sense the frozen quality of the stare, the bodily paralysis and inertia it represents in relation to both the camera and the filmmaker, suggests the ethical recognition that there is no tolerable point of view from which to gaze at such a death yet that such horror must be witnessed and attested to. Under other circumstances a second form of the extended humane gaze emerges. Here the gaze may settle in rather than fix itself—engaging itself directly with the direct gaze of its dying human subject, who looks back, inscribing intimacy with as well as respect and sympathy for those who die in its vision. The relatively rare documenting of gradual death usually generates this response and is exemplified in such films as Dying and Silverlake Life where the filmmaker’s gaze is “invited.”35 Thus, there is visual and visible interaction between the dying subject and the filmmaker. Which is to say that there is, at the least, an agreed-upon complicity with and, at the most, love between the filmmaker and the dying subject who has allowed the former to watch and unblinkingly record the subject’s death. Dying in such an instance is stared at humanely, and the act of looking and filming is sanctioned as “a ritual organized by the dying person himself,” who presides over it and knows its “protocol” (Ariès, 11). In both instances of the humane gaze, however, the image is inscribed by the mark of a relatively steady camera, placed in a generally measured distance from its visual object, and by relatively smooth technical and physical activity. (Steadiness and smoothness depend on a technical expertise that breaks down to the degree that the filmmaker is an amateur or is in emotional extremity.) When zooms occur, they are controlled. Vision is purposefully framed and clearly focused. Insofar as they indicate planning and technical preparation, all of these are signs of permission to be there. However, what seems most of interest about the humane gaze is that its identification as such is extremely dependent on the nature of the death before it. That is, the spectator’s judgment about the gaze’s humanity is determined by the magnitude or quality of the event that prompts it. Shock, paralysis, and disbelief cannot be ascribed to the filmmaker’s every fixed gaze. It cannot, for example, be attributed to the television news cameraman’s stare that fixedly watched a young man ignite a match and set himself on fire to protest unemployment. Although the young man’s death was certainly horrific, it was humanly

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comprehensible, and, more significant, the filmmaker might have prevented it. To be inscribed and read as humane, the frozen and hypnotized gaze of the camera must be generated by events and acts that are incredibly inhumane and incomprehensible and that correspond to an ethical person’s disbelief at being confronted with and seeing the horror not only of what is existentially possible but also of what is actually happening. In this situation representation is transfixed and at a loss in the presence of such an excessive, impossible, but actual referent. In the ascription of humanity to the gaze that inspects a gradual death, however, the event must be seen as inviting and even welcoming human interest. In the inscription of such a gaze the possibility of planned exploitation of human beings, of ghoulishness, of cold voyeurism is belied by the dying subject’s openness to the probity of the gaze, by a collaboration with its interest, by a frequent address to the gazer that inscribes the offscreen presence and intimate acceptance of the filmmaker. In a positive regression from the social conditions of death in the twentieth century as glossed by Ariès and others, the bedchamber here becomes again a space for public ceremony, a space organized, in part, by the dying subject. Under the dying person’s direction the filmmaker’s gaze becomes ethically simplified (if also existentially difficult). Death occurs before—and in—the humane gaze “in a ceremonial manner, yes, but with no theatrics, with no great show of emotion” (Ariès, 12–13). These are the inscriptions of documentary vision signified as ethical in the face of death, an event that charges the act of looking at it with ethical significance. There is, however, yet another visual form that addresses death, one that problematically straddles the already relatively ambiguous border that separates ethical from unethical visual activity. This problematic form is what we understand to be the professional gaze. As suggested previously, it is always in the service of two masters, each with differing, but equally arguable, ethical claims on the filmmaker’s vision. An article in TV Guide popularizes the issue on its title page. Headed by the announcement “Reporters’ Dilemma,” bold letters ask, “SAVE A LIFE OR GET THE STORY?” A smaller insert sums up: “The camera’s whirring . . . someone’s in trouble . . . and TV journalists must decide where their duty lies.”36 Referring to the aforementioned self-immolation of a young man protesting unemployment who has, in fact, “invited” the press to watch his death, the article goes on to ask the crucial ethical question that is posed by—and in—the footage of such an event: “When the values of good journalism and humanitarianism collide, what should a journalist do?”37 The entire piece, somewhat sensationally but also appropriately, presents the voices of nonfiction filmmakers and their employers in ambiguous but revealing debate that can be thematized as one about ethical responsibility to the human moment and its subject or to the forging of historical



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consciousness for a greater number of people and in relation to a greater span of time. One filmmaker (indeed, the one whose abovementioned Vietnam footage contributed significantly to altering American perceptions about the nature of the war) discloses his “professional” philosophy: “I always disregarded the events that I was covering. I was there just to record events, not to think about them.” Another says: “You have to remove your feelings as a human being when you’re shooting something gruesome. You have to psych yourself up to cover the news and turn off your personal feelings.” Alternatively, an ABC official suggests, albeit with caution: “Journalists are observers, not participants. But where life is at stake, there may be an exception.” Another journalist is much stronger: “I have always maintained that the journalist owes his duty to humanity. When there’s a conflict between being a journalist and a human being, I’ll always hope I’ll be a human being. It’s a grave error for reporters to set themselves aside from humanity.”38 If it is visibly inscribed at all then (i.e., the camera not abandoned completely or turned to the service of the interventional gaze described earlier), the professional gaze is marked by ethical ambiguity, by technical and machinelike competence in the face of an event that seems to call for further and more humane response. “You don’t show your tripod when you’re a professional,” says news producer Fred Friendly. “By being a good Samaritan, we get in the way of our lenses. It makes it impossible for us to do our job well. We blur the image of the job we’re trying to do: explain complex issues.”39 The concern for getting a clear and unobstructed image, and the belief that it is possible to strip the representation of human bias, perspective, and ethical investment so that it is truly “objective,” indelibly mark the inscriptions of the professional gaze with their own problematic ethical perspective in the face of both human mortality and the visual taboos surrounding it. In sum, the existential and social event of death in our culture poses an ethical question to vision and challenges representation. In filming the event of death, what eventually gets on the screen and is judged by those of us who view it in the audience is the visible constitution and inscription of an “ethical space” that subtends both filmmaker and spectator alike. It is a space that takes on the contours of the actual events that occur within it and the actions that make it cinematically visible. It is both a space of immediate encounter and mediated action. Here I have focused primarily on the radical origins, embodied articulations, and cinematic inscriptions of this space. I have not, however, addressed its secondary articulations—namely, those entailed in the editorial practices of filmmaking that take the original representations of violence and death and further contain them in what may be called a secondary and “reflective” (rather than immediately reflexive) ethical vision. A few comments on this kind of representation would seem to be in order, at the very least to suggest the additional complexity and dimension of the issues in question.

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Certainly, the least shaped and structured films that make the event of death visible are experienced as the most immediate and shocking. That is, compared to more structured films, they appear as a more directly visceral, unprepared, and nonintellectual confrontation with the abrupt violence that currently signifies human mortality in our culture. These films are often not even considered films as such but are seen to exist in some “raw” and “realer” (i.e., more indexical) state as “raw footage” or as “documents” rather than documentaries. Examples are the Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s assassination and the news footage of the Vietnamese man being shot in the head. To quote W. H. Auden, “These are events which arouse such simple and obvious emotions, . . . poetic comment is impossible.”40 Although this may be an exaggeration or, more precisely, need more specific elaboration, we do tend to experience single-shot and raw, unedited footage as representing the event of death more immediately: as unshaped and uncooked (to use a pertinent metaphor from structuralism). The reflections of ritual art do not intervene. Once, however, that footage is incorporated into a shaped film, or even merely juxtaposed with other footage (as on a television news broadcast), although the intellectual impact of the death may be enhanced and its significance enlarged with rational or poetic meaning, such shaping will also be in some ways always also reductive. Thus, while the raw footage of the Vietnamese street execution in Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds (1974) gains an ironic dimension as it is juxtaposed with other images, it also loses some of its essential and violent unspeakability and partially submits to the containments of a form that forces it to speak something specific, something expressible and less momentous. The most shaped and structured films about death tend to be poetic elegies: they end up speaking less of the unspeakability of the specific deaths they contain than, in general, of death’s unspeakability and the limits of representation. They aestheticize the space in which the raw footage of death is enshrined, using pauses and fades to black and dissolves that constitute moments of commemorative “visual silence.” Moving us less viscerally and directly than the raw footage (which is not to say that we do not have visceral responses to them), these more formal films move us emotionally and ethically by removing us from a sense of contact with the deaths we see. Thus, death becomes the object of mediated contemplation in such powerful and poetic documentaries as Georges Franju’s The Blood of the Beasts (1949) and Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (1955). The contemplation of death in these films is ritually formalized as a moral consideration of the mortal conditions of the body, of the fragility of life, of the end of representation that death represents. The conjunction of death, representation, and documentary film foregrounds what is true of all vision as it engages a world and others. Certainly, this is because death in our culture is among the least expressible and least



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malleable of subjects available to a filmmaker. Any intentional camera angle or camera movement or editorial juxtaposition will comment on what is essentially a moment of unspeakable transformation and will inscribe it in an act of human vision that makes visible an ethical insight. As Roger Poole forcefully points out: “There can be no flaccid action, no action which is not immediately imbued with an ethical ballast, filled in from our point of view in the world of perspectives. . . . Acts in space are embodied intentions.”41 Thus, the event of death may finally exceed and confound all indexical representation and documentary codes, but it also generates the most visible and ethically charged acts of visual representation.

NOTES 1. Amos Vogel, “Grim Death,” Film Comment 16, no. 2 (March–April 1980), 78. 2. A semiotic phenomenology sees being and representation as coemergent, both differentiated and yet united in the reversibility (or “chiasmus”) of perception and expression in the making of meaning and communication. For further elaboration see Richard L. Lanigan, Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Theory of Existential Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1972); and Richard L. Lanigan, “Semiotic Phenomenology: A Theory of Human Communication Praxis,” Journal of Applied Communication Research 10 (1982), 62–73. See also my own The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 3. Philippe Ariès, Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, tr. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Subsequent references will be cited in the text. 4. An apposite example of such “sadistic literature”—purposefully so in its “mixture of eroticism and death”—is J. G. Ballard’s Crash, the subject of a previous chapter in Carnal Thoughts (Ch. 7). Movies in this vein are, of course, commonplace in the American context. 5. Geoffrey Gorer, “The Pornography of Death,” Death: Current Perspectives, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1976), 75. 6. Lawrence L. Langer, The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon, 1978), xii–xiii. Subsequent references will be cited in the text. 7. Since this essay was initially published in 1984, the social taboos on representing real death in documentary films have been purposefully transgressed in concert with increasing political activism (that has involved cinema) around the AIDS epidemic. Thus, although they are not widespread, there are more films than there used to be that document dying and death. A contemporary example of a feature documentary that found national theatrical distribution is Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Peter Friedman, 1993), in which filmmaker Tom Joslin and his lover Mark Massi, both diagnosed with AIDS, kept a video diary of the progression of Mark’s illness and his eventual death. In the present context it is worth noting also that the political

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activism surrounding AIDS (and the films dealing with it) have consistently attempted to demedicalize and de-technologize the illness, the process of dying, and death so that these cannot be quarantined as “institutional” problems. 8. John Lantos, “How to Live as We are Dying,” Chronicle of Higher Education (September 8, 2000), B18. 9. Amos Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974), 263. 10. Roland Barthes, “The Photographic Message,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985), 19. 11. Reference here is to Zeno of Elea (fifth century BC) and—as known to us primarily through Aristotle—his four paradoxes involving the objective nature of space and motion (which, of course, also entail both time and stasis). Two of these paradoxes are pertinent to the present discussion: the “racetrack paradox” and the “arrow paradox.” The former has to do with the logical impossibility of a runner ever reaching his or her destination since the runner must get to the midpoint, then the midpoint of the midpoint, ad infinitum—thus never achieving the end point. The latter has to do with the fact that at any moment in time, an airborne arrow occupies only a “point” in space and thus cannot be in motion since a point does not have what is necessary to motion: duration; thus the arrow does not move (and, indeed, nothing does). The implications for the present discussion are, in relation to the first paradox, that the representation of death proves that it never actually happens, and thus we can’t see it (all we see is dying); and, in relation to the second, that the representation of dying is impossible because every moment of the representation is itself motionless and without duration, and the temporality that makes the distinction between human life and human mortality meaningful does not exist. For a brief gloss on these and the other two paradoxes see The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, ed. Robert Audi (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 865–66. 12. T. S. Eliot, “Burnt Norton,” in Four Quartets (New York: Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace, 1943), 15. 13. William F. May, “The Sacral Power of Death,” in Death in American Experience, ed. Arien Mack (New York: Schocken, 1973), 116. Interior reference to not only “having” a body but also “being” a body is to Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962), 150. 14. John Fraser, Violence in the Arts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974), 59. 15. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 201. 16. Fraser, Violence in the Arts, 61. 17. Although the term sign-vehicle can be seen as equivalent to the term signifier, which would be more familiar to most scholars, it is companion to the term signfunction, which is not equivalent to either the familiar terms signified or sign and is used to clarify and highlight specific components that correlate to constitute signs by Umberto Eco, A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 48–57. The sign-vehicle is the expressive “stuff” that conveys significant meaning content into the world; furthermore, a single sign-vehicle usually “conveys many



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intertwined contents” and in itself constitutes a “text whose content is a multileveled discourse” (57). According to Eco, “Properly speaking there are not signs, but only sign-functions.” “A sign-function is realized when two functives (expression and content) enter into a mutual correlation”; but, as Eco points out, “The same functive can also enter into another correlation, thus becoming a different functive and therefore giving rise to a new sign-function. Thus signs are the provisional result of coding rules which establish transitory correlations of elements” (49). 18. One of the earliest essays I published (long before I knew what phenomenology is) was on the significant cinematic shift in the 1970s from a fairly reticent treatment of violence to its graphic inspection and the correspondence of this with changes in the American cultural experience and exposure to violence in daily life. See Vivian Sobchack, “The Violent Dance: A Personal Memoir of Death in the Movies,” Journal of Popular Film 3 (Winter 1974), 2–14; the essay—under the same title—has been reprinted and expanded to consider the cinematic treatment of violence in the present day in Screening Violence, ed. Stephen Prince (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 110–24. 19. David Dempsey, “The Dying Speak for Themselves on a TV Special,” New York Times (April 25, 1976), sec. 2, p. 29. The description also is apposite to the films Silverlake Life and On Our Own Terms mentioned above. 20. Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973), 104. 21. Simone de Beauvoir, A Very Easy Death, tr. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Warner, 1973), 123. 22. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962), 302. 23. Robert Jay Lifton and Eric Olson, Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974), 28. 24. Langer quotes here from Avery Weisman, On Dying and Denying: A Psychiatric Study of Terminality (New York: Behavioral Press, 1972), 16, 26. 25. There are, of course, some very fine distinctions to be made here in terms of what differentiates the documentary and fiction film experience, particularly insofar as spectators either posit or “bracket” the existential status of what they see represented on the screen based on their extracinematic personal and cultural knowledge and experience. Jean-Pierre Meunier, in Les structures de l’experience filmique: l’identification filmique (Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1969), presents a phenomenological model for thinking through such differentiation. In this regard I both explicate and elaborate Meunier’s model in “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Michael Renov and Jane Gaines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 241–54. 26. On “simulation” in documentaries (particularly in contemporary documentaries such as Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line [1988]) see Linda Williams, “Mirror without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” in Film Quarterly: Forty Years—A Selection, ed. Brian Henderson and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 308–28. 27. Vogel, Film as a Subversive Art, 266.

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28. This significant homonymic play was inspired by Larry Crawford, “Looking, Film, Painting: The Trickster’s In Site/In Sight/Insight/Incite,” Wide Angle 5, no. 3 (1983), 64–69. 29. Roger Poole, Towards Deep Subjectivity (London: Penguin, 1972). 30. I call this reflexively discovered viewing (but not necessarily viewed) body the “film’s body.” This is a way of emphasizing the material and situated premises, as well as the perceptive and expressive functions, of cinematic vision; the term is not meant to be taken as an anthropomorphization of the cinematic apparatus, although—in conjunction with the humans who use this apparatus to perceive and express their own vision but in a different and technologically enhanced mode—it could be taken as quasi-anthropomorphic much as the filmmaker (specifically as such) could be taken as quasi-mechanical. For full elaboration see my The Address of the Eye. 31. Alfred Schutz, The Phenomenology of the Social World, tr. George Walsk and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 163–214. “Consociates” are those others in the social world of whom we have direct experience, and “contemporaries” are those others who share our social world whom we do not know directly or specifically but who coexist with us, sharing our worldly space and time; our own actions emerge in relation to and always have a possible effect on both. “Predecessors” and “successors” are those others whose duration in no way overlaps with our own and whom we can only know indirectly as “past” or “future” but who have once partaken or will of our worldly space and who incalculably affect our present time. 32. Bill Nichols has taken up and used these variations of the documentary gaze to talk about documentary ethics in his Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 33. Béla Balázs, Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, tr. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970), 170–71. 34. Balázs, Theory of the Film, 171–72. 35. It should be noted, however, that the event of death in Silverlake Life ends up not being recorded—less by design than by accident. 36. Howard Polskin, “Save a Life or Get the Story?” TV Guide (July 23, 1983), 4. 37. Polskin, “Save a Life or Get the Story?” TV Guide, 5. 38. Ibid., 6. 39. Ibid., 8. 40. W. H. Auden quoted in William Stott, Documentary Expression in Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 13. 41. Poole, Towards Deep Subjectivity, 6.

Part II

STRATEGIES AND STYLES OF DOCUMENTING WITH FILM

Chapter 6

Before Documentary Early Nonfiction Films and the “View” Aesthetic Tom Gunning A DEFERRED DISCOVERY The recent reevaluation of early cinema springs from a determination to approach the films of cinema’s first decades on their own terms. While recognizing that a historiographic project which attempts to fully reproduce the past “as it really was” is doomed to a naïve historicism, nonetheless, a responsible historian must try to recreate the original horizon of expectation in which films were produced and received. The recent revision of early film history dates from the 1978 FIAF conference at Brighton, England, which inaugurated a new era in the study of early cinema by collecting together a larger number of films from 1900 to 1906 than had been gathered previously. This “Brighton project” arranged for scholars to view and discuss these films, rather than relying on canonical descriptions and accounts of cinema’s evolution contained in traditional histories. A series of presentations at Brighton and later a number of published essays reevaluated these films, making use of contemporary narrative theory and formal analysis. Since Brighton a broader project of placing early cinema in a social and economic context has begun. While many unanswered questions remain, the work undertaken by historians in many countries to establish the modes of production, the range of cinematic styles and genres, and the means of exhibition in early cinema continues to make strong headway, emerging from (and in some ways surpassing) the simple principle formulated at Brighton of a close and fresh examination of the texts themselves. But, as is always true, decisions in the initial gathering of material ended up shaping a corpus in ways which had unforeseen consequences. Two principles which governed the selection of the films shown at Brighton in 1978 contributed to a general neglect of nonfiction film in the reevaluation of early 159

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cinema.1 Both of these decisions, as I understand it, were of a practical rather than polemic bent, and neglect was simply a by-product rather than intent. The first was the decision to focus on a period beginning at 1900, some years after the most commonly agreed upon dates of cinema’s debut. The motive for this decision came from a desire to avoid the controversies over rival claims of invention which had so often dominated the study of early cinema, sidetracking it into often bitter quarrels between advocates of competing inventors, spurred on by personal or national loyalty. The second decision was to concentrate on fiction filmmaking, leaving nonfiction to the side. The motive for this decision seems to be less the avoiding of controversies than a reasonable reluctance to wade into a great unexplored territory, a space left blank on all charts. The mass of nonfiction films were difficult to date, trace or identify. Wisdom seemed to dictate restricting this initial foray in the revision of early film history to the more containable area of fiction films. The consequence of these eminently rational decisions was that nonfiction cinema had to wait for a reconsideration of its role in early cinema. This delay contained some irony, since it is during the period of early cinema that nonfiction film could claim its greatest hegemony. During the initial years of film history (and hence the effect of the decision to begin the reevaluation of early cinema at Brighton with 1900) nonfiction production greatly outnumbered the production of fiction films. Clearly the recent focus of the 1994 Domitor conference of these first five years of production (including extensive screenings), the workshop of nonfiction cinema from the 1910s at the Nederlands Filmmuseum at Amsterdam, and the large-scale screenings at the Cinema Ritrovato at Bologna and the Giornate del Cinema Muto in Pordenone2 indicate that the tide has turned. The place of nonfiction filmmaking in early cinema has at least been acknowledged and has begun to be theorized and investigated. DISCOVERIES OF DIFFERENCES: ACTUALITIES VERSUS DOCUMENTARIES What are the issues that face us in this task? I must stress that I feel we are at the beginning of this investigation. But, as at Brighton nearly two decades ago, it is important to make some preliminary observations, even if they can only serve as tentative hypotheses, early surveys and probes that provide starting points to further study, theses to be further demonstrated or perhaps discredited. A new conception of early nonfiction film must begin from a starting point similar to that of much of the work on early fiction film: an acknowledgment of a basic difference between early nonfiction film and later documentary filmmaking. This is not to deny any continuity between



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the two forms or the possibility of some continuous tradition. However, even if such continuity could be established and a tradition fashioned from it, I believe we must confront a gaping abyss that separates the earlier and later modes of nonfiction filmmaking. I propose that we use the already existing terms for these different periods in nonfiction filmmaking: “actuality” referring to this practice before World War I and “documentary” reserved for the practice that begins with the later period of the war. The dates for this periodization are certainly provisional, an area which calls for further discussion. However, I believe that World War I itself plays an important role in the transformation of nonfiction filmmaking. When John Grierson introduced the term “documentary,” primarily to describe the work of Robert Flaherty,3 he did not intend the term to cover all nonfiction filmmaking. In fact, Grierson wished to differentiate through this term a new approach to nonfiction films. He distinguished the documentary from other films made from “natural material,” such as newsreels or scientific or educational films. For Grierson the move from these earlier nonfiction forms to the documentary proper represented a transformation “from the plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural material, to arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings of it.”4 I will return to the concept of creative shaping and arrangement later, but for now I want to stress Grierson’s understanding of this earlier mode as “descriptive.” As Charles Wolfe points out, this differentiation continued to be discussed during the thirties, with a retrospective arranged by the highly influential Film Department at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1939, taking as its title “The nonfiction film: from uninterpreted fact to documentary.” As Wolfe states, this “drew what for many was a crucial distinction between the simply ‘descriptive’ function of earlier forms of nonfiction and the ‘interpretive’ ambitions of true documentary.”5 The term “documentary,” then, announced an historical fissure in film criticism and filmmaking, separating a new and valorized practice from an earlier approach which was now condemned to a sort of prehistory. With this act of polemic periodization Grierson and others set a pattern followed by most historians of nonfiction filmmaking. After ceremonial nods to the Lumière brothers, the enormously rich period of nonfiction filmmaking before Flaherty basically remains undiscussed, as if shrouded by a collective amnesia. However irresponsible it may be for contemporary historians to maintain this attitude, it does function as an important historic signpost. The documentary as conceived by Grierson did differ from earlier nonfiction filmmaking practice in significant ways. If the documentary in the Griersonian sense needs to be theorized and analyzed from the viewpoint of its “arrangements, rearrangements and creative shapings,” what defines the formal and pragmatic impulses of the actuality film and, therefore, structures its history? In fact, the history of the

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actuality film from the viewpoint of its formal development challenges the methods of historians of early film, as a characteristically observant point made by Ben Brewster at the 1994 Amsterdam Workshop demonstrates. Brewster observed that many nonfiction films from the 1910s, most especially travelogs, look surprisingly similar stylistically to nonfiction films from earlier periods. This apparently largely static evolution of nonfiction cinema from, say, 1903 to 1917 contrasts sharply with the dynamic evolution of fiction cinema in that period, not only in the development of editing, but in the clarification of narrative form and character delineation. No film historian would confuse a fiction film from 1906 with one from 1912. In the case of nonfiction, however, the stylistic traits show considerable less differentiation over the same period. As Brewster put it at the workshop, nonfiction films “don’t seem to exist in the regime of stylistic pressure that was clearly there for fiction filmmakers.”6 Of course, tracing stylistic developments entails learning where to look for transformations. Viewing a larger number of early actuality films does alert us to a number of formal/technical transformations during this period. The growth of multi-shot films certainly differentiates the actuality films of the early 1900s from those of the 1890s, which were restricted to single shots. The development of editing in actuality film, while not as programmatic as in the fiction film, nonetheless displays concerns for clarity and logic in the presentation of information, as in the “process film” in which one sees the successive stages of industrial or handicraft manufacturing (which I discuss later in this essay). Some editing practices change rather early. For instance, the earliest actuality films, from the Lumières on, made strong use of camera stoppages (moments when the camera has stopped filming, then resumes shooting from the same position but with an ellipsis of action); viewers today often don’t notice this important tool in early actuality filmmaking, or they attribute the visible jump in action to a splice in the film.7 Around 1905 (or possibly earlier) these stoppages became rare and “jumps” within shots were replaced by actual cuts to different shots. Likewise the increased use of intertitles in actuality films after 1905 or so reflects not only a change in presentational strategy (possibly as a result of a gradual abandonment of the lecturer), but also a desire to make actuality filmmaking more self-sufficient in its organizational strategies. However, a certain consistent series of strategies and thematics in early actualities remains, making such stylistic transformations seem more like technical refinements than the equivalent to the radical transformations in fiction films of the first two decades. Accounting for this apparent lack of radical transformations should not lead us to think of the nonfiction film as somehow stagnant or, worse yet, retarded in relation to fiction film. Models of necessary stylistic progress distort our sense of film history. The radical development



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of film style in the fiction film during the early 1910s derives from the need to develop characters and establish clear patterns of temporality as these films took on new, more complex models of storytelling and attempted to achieve an autonomous mode of comprehensibility. One could attribute the relative lack of development in the nonfiction film to the fact that the existent modes of film style remained entirely effective for the genres then practised. In other words, I feel that the aims and purposes for nonfiction filmmaking during the early 1910s (and therefore the formal models for nonfiction films) had changed very little since about 1906. Since the available and familiar forms served these purposes quite effectively, there was little motivation for transformation.8 THE “VIEW” AESTHETIC What, then, was the model for nonfiction filmmaking which I am claiming was relatively consistent from around 1906 or so until World War I and which the fairly straightforward descriptive style of filming served so well? While there are certainly many different sorts of nonfiction films during this period, I would maintain that a particular aesthetic subtends or could embrace most of this diversity. This Urform of early nonfiction film I propose to call the “view.” With this term, frequently used by contemporaries to describe early actuality films (as well as, before film, photographs of places or events of interest), I mean to highlight the way early actuality films were structured around presenting something visually, capturing and preserving a look or vantage point. In this respect the “view” clearly forms part of what I have called the “cinema of attractions,” the emphasis found in early cinema upon the act of display and the satisfying of visual curiosity.9 As an actuality a “view” makes a greater claim to recording an event of natural or social history, while attractions include artificially arranged scenes enacted precisely to arouse and sate the spectator’s curiosity. However, a differentiation between the arranged and the simply recorded is so difficult to maintain or demonstrate that I do not wish to draw this line too firmly. “Views” tend to carry the claim that the subject filmed either preexisted the act of filming (a landscape, a social custom, a method of work) or would have taken place even if the camera had not been there (a sporting event, a funeral, a coronation), thus claiming to capture a view of something that maintains a large degree of independence from the act of filming it. Clearly there are degrees of independence and borderline cases that blur such distinctions. But I feel that the “view” as opposed to the “act” or “scene” delineates a perceived distinction between actuality and staged films during the early era of film history. Needless to say, both “views” and “acts” could function as attractions.

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To my mind the most characteristic quality of a “view” lies in the way it mimes the act of looking and observing. In other words, we don’t just experience a “view” film as a presentation of a place, an event or a process, but also as the mimesis of the act of observing. The camera literally acts as a tourist, spectator or investigator, and the pleasure in the film lies in this surrogate of looking. The primary indication of this mode of observation lies in the clear acknowledgment of the camera’s presence. People filmed respond to the camera, either through looks or gestures directed toward it, or through the way they present their actions to it, demonstrating a work process or custom. Likewise the camera’s placement tends to take the best view possible of the action, and one senses its placement as being far from casual. In a “view” the world is presented to the camera, and therefore to the spectator. While my description of “views” may sound simple to the point of tautology—a film showing something—the films themselves are far from simplistic. As I hope to demonstrate by contrasting them with later documentaries, these films do take on a certain quality partly through the things they don’t do. In addition, the forms of showing and observing in these films are quite varied and their apparent simple styles are well adapted to a variety of tasks. Two large genres of “view” films are evident in a survey of early nonfiction films (although there are others). These genres allowed “views” to become more than single shots and organized a number of single views within a larger, multi-shot logic of exposition. First, there are the films which tour and present locations, an organization based on space and place presented as a series of views. Second, there are the films dedicated to activities and processes, views strung together with a temporal, rather than a spatial, organization and with a more determinate sequential logic of transformation. “VIEW” GENRES: PLACE AND PROCESS Unlike the single shot films typical of the turn of the century, the “place films” from at least 1906 on edit together a series of shots in order to provide a rich and varied sense of locale. These films include scenes of cities, rural areas or even a tour of a foreign country. While the imagery may capture natural landscapes, man-made structures, or a combination of both, the selection of shots serves to develop a variety of sights—much like a tourist album—and to articulate an aesthetic that would remain remarkably consistent in travelog films of future decades. The view of the tourist is recorded here, placing natural or cultural sites on display, but also miming the act of visual appropriation, the natural and cultural consumed as sights. Perhaps nowhere is the dramatizing of the act of visual appropriation more palpable than in the many “phantom ride” films of this era, films shot from moving



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vehicles (primarily trains, but also autos and boats) moving through a landscape or urban environment. These films, still visually powerful today, place on view the unfolding visual horizon, the sense of an eye moving through space, clearly featuring the act of seeing as much as the sight to be seen. In phantom rides, place and act of seeing become dynamically interrelated through the creation of a view in motion, foregrounding the unique appetites of the film medium for both the visual and the mobile. The longevity of the phantom ride genre stands as another indication of the basic coherence of the “view” aesthetic for nearly two decades of film history. At the same time, I sense some transformation in the genre, a transfer from an earlier form which emphasized both landscape and the novelty of the mobile gaze cutting through space, to a later form which primarily stressed the unfolding landscape and directed attention away from the technology of the movie camera and mode of transport. These later phantom rides seem more contemplative, less attuned to the thrills of fast locomotives, sudden curves and looming tunnels than to the natural panorama spread before the viewer. For instance, Burnham Beeches10 passes by the natural forms of a grove of trees, creating a leisurely pace conveyed by a smooth, jarless movement, a reflective rhythm of contemplation further guaranteed by the soft dissolves that link shots. One not only loses oneself in this natural imagery, but one has no sense of whether one is transported by train or car or other means. The mobile means, once the center of such phantom rides, is now only the vehicle for a communion with nature. This contrasts sharply with the modes of reception of early train films, with their emphasis on speed, danger and sensation.11 The modality of the “view” is open to a variety of approaches. The spatial unfolding and linking that forms the structure of these “place films” gives way to temporal strategies in the films which offer a view of a process, whether the production of a consumer good through a complex industrial process, the creation of an object through traditional craft, or the detailing of a local custom or festival. While such films also make use of a spatial logic, as the films present a variety of viewpoints on an action (especially in films of industrial processes, which partly function as factory tours), their dominant organization principle is temporal, detailing the stages of a process in a logical order. Clearly many films combine these two orders of logic, both spatial exploration and temporal explication, showing that the structure of viewing and construction of “view” actualities can indeed be complex. While both these forms rely primarily on structures of succession, devices such as cut-ins to closer views or to details allow a degree of editing sophistication, especially after 1906 or so. The increased temporality of the process films brings them closer to narrative form, though clearly lacking the consistent diegesis and creation of character that the fiction film of this period strove to achieve (and which produced

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the “regime of stylistic pressure” that Brewster speaks of). While rooted still in a descriptive approach, recurring narrative patterns are evident in many of these films. The most fully developed narrative pattern is the transformation of raw material into consumable goods. In many of these films, the narrative process moves from opening scenes of raw material through the various stages of production to culminate in a scene of delighted consumption. Films such as The Manufacture of Walking Sticks12 and Messrs. Barlow and Jones Ltd., Manchester and Bolton,13 both shown at the 1995 Pordenone film festival, begin with unloading of raw materials (sticks, cotton) at factories. Similarly such process films as Making Christmas Crackers,14 A Day in the Life of an English Coal Miner,15 or Culture et Récolte des Pommes à Washington,16 shown at the same festival, end with scenes of pleasurable consumption of the manufactured good within a comfortable or even glamorous bourgeois interior. This trajectory from raw material to consumable product enacts a basic narrative of industrial capitalism, already sketched by Prince Albert in his plan for the displays in the 1851 Crystal Palace relating raw material to finished products,17 and rehearsed in world fairs and school text books for decades. Work not only transforms, it mediates between nature and culture, for the benefit of the comfortable classes. The class basis (and bias) of this narrative is especially clear in A Day in the Life of an English Coal Miner, which opens with a miner leaving his cottage and family for work. The penultimate shot shows him returning home, but the final interior shot brings us, not into the miner’s home, but presents a comfortable middle-class family gathered around the hearth and warmed by the coal he mined. Perhaps the most dramatic tracing of this trajectory comes in D’ou Viennent les Faux Cheveux,18 which begins with a series of pans around a small Breton town square and market in which women have gathered to have their long hair cut off (a gathering of raw material detailed in medium close-up). The process of cutting, gathering, sorting, carding, and finally sewing this hair into wigs and hair pieces is detailed, leading to the last shot which shows a glamorous bourgeois woman in medium close-up taking off her hat, then removing false hair pieces, and smiling fetchingly at camera. UNCOVERING THE LOOK As Grierson indicated, the primary mode of these early films was descriptive. While clearly they cannot claim to present an untouched raw reality (however mythical such a concept might be), their “interference” with reality, the means by which they shape it, centre on the act of looking and describing. Actions and people may be arranged so that the camera can get a better look



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at them, but this arrangement is for the most part fully evident in the manner in which people acknowledge the camera or display their talents, costumes or physical characteristics to it. I believe that Grierson was right in declaring that this style of filmmaking was quite different from the creative shaping of the material which he felt defined the documentary film. As complex ideologically as these process and place films may be, rehearsing as well as shaped by narratives of colonialism and consumer culture, nonetheless they remain rooted in the “view” aesthetic. The ultimate act of consumption in these films is the audience’s act of viewing; and everything—people, places, and things—is offered to our view. Recurringly this is marked by the returned look of people within the film, the gaze directed out at camera and viewer which transfixes the act of looking as central to the descriptive mode, the act of display as the primary act of the filmmaker. These films often show a range of these returned looks (from the shy laughter of the women about to have their hair cut to the coquettish gaze of the woman removing her hair pieces in D’ou Viennent les Faux Cheveux), and even incorporate scenes where such looks are avoided (the staged sequences of the miner leaving and returning to his cottage in A Day in the Life of an English Coal Miner, in which he avoids looking at the camera, contrasting sharply with the shot in the same film, introduced with the intertitle “Belles of the Black Diamond Field,” in which women workers smile at a voyeuristic panning camera). However, in the construction of the films the primacy of the view affirms itself. If these images find their place within ideological narratives, this place is as much a sight as a site, and not a diegetic story incident or part of an articulated social or political argument. The social attitudes here are preexistent, rather than argued, and the images hardly serve as evidence. While many actuality films exemplify this aesthetic of the “view,” with travelogs and process films being perhaps the clearest examples, the desire evident in these films to provide a nearly endless and (ideally) exhaustive catalog of views of the world reached a climax in the films shot for Albert Kahn and his utopian project of “Les archives de la planète,” in the 1910s and 1920s. Although this fascinating phenomenon calls for more in-depth research than I have yet undertaken, the films that have been made available from this archive on video reveal a fascinating archaeology of the nonfiction films through a peerless demonstration and an encyclopedic collection of the “view” aesthetic. Kahn was a rich Parisian banker of the early twentieth century, who supplemented his other philanthropic cultural and social endowments with the project of collecting on film a series of motion picture images from around the world, seizing, as he put it, life where it exists. These films consist predominantly not of edited documentaries explicating social customs or political events, but rather simply of views of daily life around the world: modes of dress, city streets, national “types,” native festivals, religious customs,

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processes of agriculture and handicraft. Taken collectively the films construct an exotic panorama of the planet on display, the ultimate cinematic World Exposition. Perhaps the most extraordinary of these short films is a shot of an Indochinese woman, filmed (apparently for modesty’s sake) out of focus as she undresses for the camera, revealing both the layers of native clothing and her body.19 The sense of voyeurism as a source of the desire for knowledge (of the Other, of the body) is so boldly demonstrated by this film that it stands as a sort of confession of the drives behind the “view” aesthetic. As this film reveals, even these simple unedited films are hardly bereft of ideology (a whole vocabulary of colonial and sexist gazes is unfurled here), but it is an ideology contained within the fascinating subterfuges and revelations of the look. One is always aware—and I believe this is true of all the early actuality films I am describing here—of a drama staged between camera and subject, the observer and the observed, and ultimately, the “view” and the audience. These “views” represent a sort of primal exchange and encounter contained in the act of looking with all its possible scenarios of dominance, curiosity, seduction, objectification, and even identification. For Grierson the documentary went beyond this primary encounter. However, just as I have maintained that the aesthetic of attractions persists in a less obvious form within later fictional films, the staging of the look certainly subtends much of later documentary practice, including, even, much of Nanook the North. But the documentary moves beyond (and obscures or, perhaps, camouflages) this primal act of looking through its creative reshaping and dramatizing of “natural material.” Undoubtedly editing plays a key role in the restructuring of material that defines the advent of the documentary. I would claim that even though actuality films make often sophisticated use of editing, the “view” privileges the relation between camera and subject. Editing basically plays the role of providing a succession of views, whether spatially (as in the travelog) or temporally (as in the films of process). This editing can be quite elegant, including cut-ins to closer views or a truly creative sense of juxtaposing different points of view (such as certain phantom ride films which vary the angle from which the passing landscape is seen) with grace or sensational effects. But the editing does not possess the same drive toward dramatizing and rhythm that can be found in fiction films of this period, where articulation between different shots increasingly becomes an expressive mode of narration and ideological comment. WAR AND THE ARGUMENT OF IMAGES Although it is always a perilous task to try to demarcate historical periods in aesthetic practice and locate a transformation in style with precision, I believe



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from my viewing of the films from the 1910s shown at the 1994 Amsterdam Workshop that one can locate the transformation from the “view” to the documentary in a period somewhat earlier than Nanook the North. Let me restate in semiotic terms Grierson’s idea of the documentary as the reshaping of natural material. We could describe this transformation from “view” to documentary as a move from films conceived as a look to a film form which embedded its images in a larger argument and used those images as evidence to substantiate or intensify its discourse. Not surprisingly, this transformation becomes extremely visible in the films that are made during World War I as propaganda for one side or the other. Although there were undoubtedly a large number of such films made, some of the films at the Amsterdam Workshop stand out for their strongly discursive arrangement of image and text in order to present arguments about the course of the Great War. These films include Londen in Oorlogstijd,20 Vernietiging Britse Schepen,21 and Der Zeppelinangriff auf England.22 As Charles Musser pointed out, the first two of these titles are government films which tried to establish or deny claims of damage inflicted on the enemy, and thus foreground their “evidentiary function.”23 They employ film images in order to prove a thesis whose main claims are carried in an accompanying verbal discourse, usually embodied in the films’ intertitles. In Londen in Oorlogstijd this verbal discourse is even embodied in some of the shots themselves, such as those in which a man stands in a number of prominent sites in metropolitan London holding a placard which bears the date “Sept. 26 1917.”24 The date thus inscribed into this view makes an evidentiary claim in an argument about the extent of destruction caused in London by German bombing attacks before this date. As Nicholas Hiley demonstrated at this workshop, such images can even be arranged to make an argument which in fact is contradicted by the images themselves, provided a viewer has certain knowledge (for instance, in Der Zeppelinangriff auf England Hiley could identify the Zeppelin footage as showing prewar flights and the images of destruction in England as showing the result of naval raids rather than air attacks).25 Certainly it would be an oversimplification to claim that the earlier “view” films are entirely innocent of larger discourses. To pick and critique the terms of the Museum of Modern Art nonfiction retrospective from 1939, in cinema there is no such thing as the “uninterpreted fact.” No image is innocent of ideological assumptions and the syntax of the look exchanged between camera and subject or screen and spectator can be quite complex. Furthermore, as Charles Musser would be the first to point out, early nonfiction films were the genre of early productions most likely to be accompanied by a lecture which could place these views in a variety of discursive contexts. Finally, audiences would undoubtedly receive an image in terms of preconceived discursive contexts (such as the narratives of production and consumption embedded in

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the process films discussed earlier) and tend to fit them into already learned discourses. But the contrast that the Museum of Modern Art wished to draw remains significant in its differentiation, even if naive in its attitude toward representation. A difference in the degree, methods and purposes of interpretation and argument separate “view” films and documentaries. I believe that the birth of the documentary appears, as Grierson puts it, when the filmic material has been rearranged, has been placed into an explicit discursive context through editing and intertitles. Rather than a succession of views, the documentary fashions from its images an articulated argument, as in the wartime films discussed, or a dramatic structure based on the basic vocabulary of continuity editing and the creation of characters borrowed from fiction filmmaking, as in Nanook. Therefore, I contrast the view, a descriptive mode based on the act of looking and display, with the documentary, which is a more rhetorical and discursive form inserting images into a broader argument or dramatic form. The “view” relies more on individual shots, while the documentary creates a larger, closer structured context for these images. In the documentary individual shots lose much of their independence as separate “views” and become instances of evidence or illustration within an argument or story. Such structures depend on a closer weave of edited relations (including a greater use of the codes of continuity editing in the films which create characters or stories), and a greater reliance on intertitles to explain or interpret the images. Issues of accuracy and evidence become foregrounded in the documentary, largely because the authenticity of the image becomes part of the argument (and therefore issues of faking evidence, as the Zeppelin film). Specific claims of accuracy are much looser in the “view,” which permits manipulations of the image for their spectacular effects (such as the magical trick effect appearance of Santa Claus in the bourgeois parlor at the end of Making Christmas Crackers) and which therefore don’t undermine any truth claim. LOOKING BOTH WAYS: THE AMBIGUITY OF THE “VIEW” I want to emphasize again that this contrast does not absolve “view” films from any expression of ideology. However, I do feel that the enormous—and neglected—fascination of these early “view” films lies in their thorough and often complex exploration of the look in a manner outside of the creation of a fictional space, dramatic structure or character development. These films present for us a new conception of vision, which technological revolutions in photography and in transportation made possible, and whereby all the sights in the world and its people were made subject to a new roving form of vision and representation. Following in the footsteps of the stereoscope and magic



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lantern views, actuality filmmaking developed and exploited a new form of visual curiosity. The addition of motion photography not only added a temporal dimension to these earlier view forms, but allowed the drama of the look to develop a more dialogic relation to its filmed subjects, whose faces and gestures gained a further expressiveness and independence as they were filmed in time. Both the movement through the landscape available in phantom rides and the expressiveness of a darting glance or a mobile countenance show the new forms of experience and knowledge available through the motion picture view. A view which could be mobile and a form which could record the mobility of filmed subjects opened up a new realm of visualization, picturing new phenomena for the curious observer, as well as recording instances of resistance to the dominance of the touristic or colonial gaze.26 The aesthetic of the “view” in early actuality filmmaking has been neglected by a film history which has generally followed the contours of cinema’s main mode of economic development, the fiction film. But, more scandalously, it has also been radically repressed by the official history of documentary film (certainly no history of narrative film could consider passing over the decades from the 1890s to the 1920s with the same silence that the canonical histories of documentary display as they skip blithely from Lumière to Flaherty). It would seem that the documentary needs (or has needed) somehow to disavow this intensely rich earlier tradition (just as the “fly-on-the-wall” aesthetic of American cinéma vérité seemed to disavow the dynamic power of the camera’s gaze in cinema). The motivation for this repression must be carefully examined, and I don’t want to rush into conspiratorial scenarios. However, it seems to me that the most frequently given reason for this neglect, the belief that this early material remained too raw, too close to reality and bereft of artistic or conceptual shaping (compared to the more “cooked” documentary), doesn’t take us very far. I believe, rather, that “view” films made the fashioners of the documentary tradition uncomfortable, because they reveal the ambiguous power relations of the look so nakedly. The voyeurism implicit in the tourist, the colonialist, the filmmaker, and the spectator is laid bare in these films, without the naturalization of dramatic structure or political argument. These “views” stage for us the impulse toward “just looking” so important to our modern era; and we have learned in the work on visual culture over the last decades that “just looking” is never just about looking. The mass of actuality films from the first decades of film history in our archives around the world are ripe for rediscovery and reexamination. They constitute a neglected and, indeed, repressed aspect of film history. They present an incredibly rich reserve of information about the foundation of our modern culture, not only for the vast variety of things displayed as audiences and filmmakers sought to slake a seeming inexhaustible visual appetite, but also as demonstrations of this modern visual curiosity itself. From these films

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we gain access to a viewing practice which was one of the foundations of our modern world. And from them we can also rethink and reformulate the tradition of documentary, a tradition filled with both beauties and terrors, scenarios of power and resistance, turning on the act of looking and the creation of the view.

NOTES 1. This neglect has been relative, of course. In the recent rediscovery of early cinema, the study of actuality filmmaking has had a number of powerful advocates. The work of Roland Cosandey, Stephen Bottomore, Charles Musser and others has made a vital contribution to exploring and defining the issues of early nonfiction cinema. But even with these contributions, I believe these authors would agree that nonfiction filmmaking remains not only less thoroughly studied than early fiction filmmaking, but also less theorized. 2. The third Domitor conference, “Cinema turns 100,” held in New York in 1994, focused on cinema before 1900. The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop at the Nederlands Filmmuseum focused on nonfiction from the teens, which is also the title of the book published from its discussions. Both Bologna and Pordenone staged festivals in 1995 focusing on silent nonfiction films. 3. The locus classicus for the term “documentary” in relation to film is usually given as Grierson’s review of Flaherty’s Moana, which appeared in The New York Sun in February of 1926. This review is reprinted in Lewis Jacobs, The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971), 25–26, where Jacobs notes that “for the first time he gave currency to the term ‘documentary’ in English.” However, Charles Wolfe in “The Poetics and Politics of Nonfiction: Documentary Film,” a chapter in Tino Balio, Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939 (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), points out that this early use of the term by Grierson was “unexceptional” and only became a defined concept in his essays in the early thirties. 4. “First Principles on Documentary,” in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1947), 100. This section is culled from an article originally published in 1932 in Cinema Quarterly. 5. Charles Wolfe, op. cit., 353. 6. Brewster’s comment appears in Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk (eds.), Nonfiction from the Teens: The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994), 32. 7. See André Gaudreault, “De quelques figures de montage dans la production Lumière,” a paper delivered to the Congrès Lumière at the Université Lumière-Lyon 2 (June 7–10, 1995), for a description of this practice in Lumière films. 8. The recondite English scholar of early documentary films Stephen Bottomore made a similar point at the Amsterdam Workshop, pointing out early documentary’s strong inheritance of visual forms from the magic lantern lecture preceding film. See Hertogs and de Klerk, op. cit., 33.



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9. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” in Thomas Elsaesser (ed.), Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative (London: British Film Institute, 1990), 56–63. 10. Burnham Beeches, United Kingdom (Hepworth) 1909. NFTVA print, London. 11. See my “‘The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images Without Borders,” in Roland Cosandey and François Albera (eds.), Cinéma sans Frontières 1896–1918: Images without Borders. Aspects de l’internationalité dans le cinéma mondial: représentations, marché, influences et réception / Internationality in world cinema: Representations, markets, influences and reception (Lausanne: Payot / Quebec: Nuit Blanche, 1995), 21–36. 12. The Manufacture of Walking Sticks, United Kingdom (Heron) 1912. NFTVA print, London. 13. Messrs. Barlow and Jones Ltd., Manchester and Bolton, United Kingdom, 1919. NFTVA print, London. 14. Making Christmas Crackers, United Kingdom (Cricks and Martin) 1910. NFTVA print, London. 15. A Day in the Life of an English Coal Miner, United Kingdom (Kineto) 1910. NFTVA print, London. 16. Culture et Récolte des Pommes à Washington, United States (American Kin) 1915. Print from Lobster Film. 17. See Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990), 28. 18. D’ou Viennent les Faux Cheveux, France (Pathé) 1909. CNC print, Bois d’Arcy. 19. My knowledge of the films commissioned by Albert Kahn, which are preserved by the Musée Albert Kahn in Paris, comes from the videotape La Planete Albert Kahn, which includes the film I describe. I thank Jeanne Beausoleil, the director of the Musée, for making it available to me. 20. Londen in Oorlogstijd / Wartime London, United Kingdom, 1917. NFM print. 21. Vernietiging Britse Schepen / Destruction of British Ships, Germany, 1916. NFM print. 22. Der Zeppelinangriff auf England / Zeppelin Attack on England, Germany (E. Hubert) 1915. NFM print. 23. Mussers’s comments are contained in Hertogs and de Klerk, op. cit., 30. 24. A photogram of this image is reproduced in Hertogs and de Klerk, 32. 25. See Hiley’s comments in Hertogs and de Klerk, 42. 26. Miriam Hansen made a related point about resistance in her discussion of De Avonturen van Martin Johnson onder de Kannibalen op de Zuidzee-eilanden / Martin Johnson’s Adventures among the Cannibals of the South Sea Islands / Among the Cannibal Isles of the South Pacific, United States, 1918; NFM print at the Amsterdam Workshop. See Hertogs and de Klerk, 58. This essay is an expanded and revised version of the essay “Vor der Dokumentarfilm: früher nonfiction Filme und die Ästhetik der ‘Ansicht’,” published in Anfänge des Dokumentarischen Films (Basle: Stroemfeld / Frankfurt am Main: Roter Stern, 1995), 111–23; KINtop, 4. I wish to thank the bold and imaginative archivists of the Nederlands Filmmuseum in Amsterdam for their staging of the Workshop, which

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allowed me to see these films and develop my ideas, as well as the other members of the workshop whose insights helped shape mine. I also want to thank the organizers of the third Domitor conference at the Museum of Modern Art (especially, as always, Eileen Bowser), Roland Cosandey for his exhibitions of nonfiction films from the Joye collection, and Jeanne Beausoleil for alerting me to the Albert Kahn archive.

Chapter 7

Ruminating on the Ideologies of Nature Film Scott MacDonald

Probably no substantial dimension of film history that is so widely admired by public audiences has been so thoroughly ignored by film critics, historians, and theorists as the nature film (or, to use the currently more widely accepted term, “the wildlife film”): those films and videos that purport to reveal the lives of other species.1 Indeed, the publication of Gregg Mitman’s Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (1999) and Derek Bousé’s Wildlife Films (2000), currently the definitive explorations of American wildlife cinema; and the beautiful book on the French nature-film pioneer, Jean Painlevé, Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (2000), edited by Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg, were the first substantial indications that nature film was becoming of interest to scholars.2 More recently, the dawn of nature film is explored in Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney (2011), Ronald B. Tobias’s deeply informed reading of the early history of American nature cinema as implicitly/explicitly propaganda for American empire,3 and Oliver Gaycken’s carefully researched Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (2014).4 But my guess is that most academic film studies professionals still barely consider nature film a part of film history. Indeed, there are few better indications of the educationally counterproductive gap between the humanities and the sciences. One can hope that the five volumes mentioned above—along with the remarkable successes of the feature films Winged Migration (2001, Jacques Cluzaud, Jacques Perrin, and Michel Debats), Deep Blue (2003, Andy Byatt and Alastair Fothergill), March of the Penguins (2005, Luc Jacquet), and of the BBC television series The Blue Planet (2001) and Planet Earth (2006, both produced by Alastair Fothergill for the BBC)—will instigate further exploration of this neglected genre, and perhaps not only a revival of awareness of 175

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its history, but increased exhibition of its major contributions. Nevertheless, the general attitude of film historians and scholars currently makes such a revival less than certain. The obvious location for serious thinking about the nature film, at least within academic film studies, would seem to be within the history and theory of documentary cinema. In fact, in the popular mind few forms of filmmaking are more obvious instances of documentary film than the nature film. But historians of documentary have routinely ignored the nature film, for reasons articulated by Bill Nichols.5 For Nichols the capacity of the photographic image to generate indexical representations of the world makes it valuable for scientific imaging, but cinema’s very usefulness to science “depends heavily on minimizing the degree to which the image, be it a fingerprint or x-ray, exhibits any sense of perspective or point of view distinctive to its individual maker. A strict code of objectivity, or institutional perspective, applies. The voice of science demands silence, or near silence, from documentarian or photographer”6 Since documentary requires a “voice of its own,” according to Nichols—“voice of its own” meaning a clear or at least identifiable ideological position—nature film is by definition not part of documentary history.7 There are several problems with this position, and they grow increasingly evident the more fully modern society comes to terms with the many dimensions of the evolving environmental crisis. Of course, it is true, as Nichols suggests, that nature films (science films in general) have historically pretended to objectivity. There are a variety of reasons for this. Since science is our cultural attempt to find out what aspects of the physical world can be known through observation and experimentation, that is, those aspects of the physical world that are verifiable regardless of ideology or belief, it is hardly surprising that scientific films have an aura of objectivity that is confirmed by the cinema’s ability to make indexical, seemingly objective, records of sensory phenomena. But the moment a nature filmmaker begins to construct a particular film, there is no escaping point of view: filmmakers must choose what to show us and why and determine a filmic structure that exhibits a particular set of conclusions, whether they are those of an individual scientist, a group of scientists, or science-interested laypeople. The presumption of objectivity in science film is simply a particular instance of the aura of objectivity that documentary nearly always carries with it, and which, as Nichols has so often made clear in other contexts, must be qualified by the point of view that is explicit/implicit within any specific documentary. A second reason for the widely held position that nature films are not really documentaries, and therefore not worth serious investigation within a film studies context, is historical, in at least two senses. First, until Mitman and Bousé, no American scholar had described a history of nature film or made an attempt to identify its pivotal moments and landmark contributions—and



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even the valuable chronology of the wildlife film Bousé includes in Wildlife Films is limited in significant ways.8 It is hard to take a genre seriously if one has no sense of it as a genre—and especially since nature films are rarely exhibited as instances of an evolving history. Second, since research into natural phenomena, and other species in particular, is ongoing, and since new research tends to make previous research outdated, nature films that may have seemed state of the art at one point can seem old-fashioned in a few years. This tendency is exacerbated by the fact that a good many nature films, especially those designed for use in primary and secondary schools, use strategies that may seem educational to one generation, but hopelessly corny to the next: Bruce Conner’s recycling of material from outdated educational films into surreal montages (in Mongoloid [1978], for instance) has the impact it does because these older educational films now seem more revealing of the absurdities of their era than of scientific information. In fact, the nature film has a long prehistory and history that arguably begins with the dawn of the photographic motion picture: Eadweard Muybridge’s breakthrough animal locomotion photographs and Zoopraxiscope demonstrations, and Étienne-Jules Marey’s chronophotographs used a variety of animal species as their primary subject matter. During the first decades of film history there was a minor tradition of “animal fight films” that included A Fight between Spider and Scorpion (1900, Biograph) and A Fight between Wild Animals (1912, Kalem)9; and films about wildlife, especially hunting films, were important early contributions to the development of the cinema audience: Roosevelt in Africa (1910), shot by Cherry Kearton during Theodore Roosevelt’s African expedition in 1909, and the more melodramatic and popular fictionalized version of Roosevelt’s hunting adventures, Hunting Big Game in Africa (1909) by Colonel Selig, instigated a genre of “bring ‘em back alive” films that included Paul Rainey’s African Hunt (1912), William Douglas Burden’s footage of the Komodo dragon, and Martin and Osa Johnson’s Trailing African Wild Animals (1923) and Simba (1927).10 And, of course, exotic animals play pivotal roles in such early proto- or pseudo-ethnographic documentaries as Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1921) and Moana (1926), and Ernest B. Schoedsack and Merian C. Cooper’s Grass (1925) and Chang (1927). The mythic version of these early films is, of course, King Kong (1933), produced by Cooper and Schoedsack and based on their own and others’ adventures filming in the wild.11 While the early films about hunting exotic wild animals and about the symbiotic relationships between nonindustrialized peoples and animals provoked, and continue to provoke, widespread debate about what is science and what is showmanship, there were also, at least from the 1910s on, attempts to use cinema to focus on the life cycles of other species, apart from their interaction with human society. Two particularly significant contributions

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to this history are the series of short films made by Jean Painlevé beginning with The Octopus (La Pieuvre) in 1928 and concluding with Acera or The Witches’ Dance (Acéra ou la bal des sorcières) in 1972; and the Walt Disney Studio’s True-Life Adventures (in particular, those directed by James Algar), beginning with Seal Island (1948), Beaver Valley (1950), and Nature’s Half Acre (1951) and culminating in a series of features, including the commercial breakthroughs, The Living Desert (1953) and The Vanishing Prairie (1954). The Painlevé films and the Disney films could hardly be more different, especially in their exemplification of two very different attitudes with regard to the representation of other species in cinema. DISNEY VERSUS PAINLEVÉ While Painlevé’s pioneering efforts to demonstrate the potential of cinema in scientific experiment and to establish the nature film as a form that combines good science with entertainment and aesthetic awareness precede Disney’s True-Life Adventure films by two decades, in the United States there is almost no awareness of Painlevé’s contributions, while the Disney films are not only well known, but were formative for several generations of American children, and important for a good many adults as well. Independent filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, for example, counts the early True-Life Adventures, as one of the primary influences on his work: “I had started to make films with an 8mm camera when I was around ten or eleven. I was very influenced by the Disney True-Life Adventures, films like Beaver Valley and Nature’s Half Acre. They were the first time I saw, for instance, flowers growing in timelapse—very photographic films, held together with music and narration. Both films went through the four seasons, and for some reason, I was very taken with that.”12 I do not remember precisely when or where I first saw the early True-Life Adventures, but such characteristic elements as Winston Hibler’s narrating voice, the use of an animated paint brush to introduce films, and their overall tenor remain deeply familiar artifacts of childhood. Disney began production of wildlife films as a way of dealing with the financial problems created by the high cost of animation. While the series of animated features the Disney Studio released during the 1940s were immensely popular—Pinocchio (1940), Fantasia (1940), Bambi (1942), Song of the South (1946), and Cinderella (1949) were the five of the most popular films of that decade—the considerable cost of producing each of these features made them, at first, economically tenuous at best. During this financially stressed moment, the comparable cost of a nature film, even a feature nature film, allowed this new Disney product to be a financial success. While Bambi cost two million dollars, and lost a million dollars during its first



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run, a feature True-Life Adventure cost around $350,000 and could gross as much as four million dollars, as both The Living Desert and The Vanishing Prairie did.13 Furthermore, the True-Life Adventure films were, like the animations, durable: neither the animations nor the nature films aged as quickly as most live-action films tend to. Over the decades, the Disney-animated features have done quite well and continue to be successful in rerelease, and while the nature films fell prey to changing science and an evolving social awareness (the opening narration of The Vanishing Prairie, e.g., is patronizing to Native America in ways that have come to seem quite problematic), they too were able to last through their original theatrical runs to become popular television entertainment during the years when Disney was a major force in television programming. And the True-Life Adventures were inevitable parts of school libraries across the country during the decades when school districts routinely bought 16mm prints of educational films. Several of the feature True-Life Adventures remained available through the video store era, and the entire series is available now at amazon.com. The popularity of the Disney films was a function of their combination of first-rate nature photography and forms of narrative entertainment developed by the Disney Studio during the decades that preceded the release of Seal Island. While the Disney nature photographers were sent into the field without a script to capture the most interesting imagery they could find, and ideally, according to James Algar, “those unexpected and unpredictable happenings that cannot possibly be written into a story ahead of time,”14 Disney made sure that the films that developed out of this cinematic research were as carefully constructed and as entertainment-driven as any film produced by a Hollywood studio. And while the Disney nature films may have seemed to their first audiences as far from politics or ideology as the early Silly Symphony cartoons, these films were powerful in supporting not only particular attitudes toward family life and gender, but a deep complacency about the history of Manifest Destiny and modern middle-class life. Indeed, for all their charm and beauty, the True-Life Adventures can often seem to a contemporary viewer as ideologically motivated as Animal Farm. In The Vanishing Prairie, as in so many Disney films, the focus is on the nuclear family, especially on the bond between mothers and children, and in particular on moments within the lives of animals that seem to mirror middleclass American mores (and in one way or another confirm the gender politics of the time). The film begins with birds migrating—beautiful shots that seem premonitions of Fly Away Home (1996, directed by Carroll Ballard), Winged Migration (2002, directed by Jacques Perrin), and many epic shots in the Planet Earth series—then focuses on various avian courtship rituals and an amusing moment in the domestic life of a pair of grebes: a piebilled grebe

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father looks after grebe eggs while the mother grebe is searching for food for several chicks, and does not see that one of the eggs has gotten caught in his feathers and is moved out of the nest when he steps out. The narrator comments, “Like most males he’s rather careless about domestic chores!” and then mouths the thoughts of the mother grebe when she returns: “Well that’s typical! Perhaps if he had to lay these eggs, he’d be more careful. I declare, these husbands—always leaving things for someone else to pick up!” The fact that the male grebe is tending to the children and the female grebe is out looking for food runs counter to white middle-class gender roles in the 1950s, but the possible impact of this moment is quickly suppressed in favor of humorous banter that locates the grebes within conventional family patterns.15 A sequence of amusing mating rituals among grouse leads to a passage on buffalo, highlighted by the birth of a buffalo calf, the mother’s care of the calf, and the calf’s first attempts to nurse; then to a passage on prong-horned antelope and big-horned sheep, then to a long passage of a mother mountain lion caring for and training her cubs, then to a complex passage focusing primarily on a community of prairie dogs and their amusing attempts to deal with interlopers (including a mother coyote searching for food for her pups and a male badger who meets a female and falls in love). The climax of The Vanishing Prairie is a sequence that begins with buffalos in mating season (no actual mating is shown), followed by a lightning storm that starts a prairie fire, which is put out by heavy rain and a flood, after which things move back toward normal. The well-known and much imitated finale takes us to mountains in winter, where male big-horned sheep battle to the music of “The Anvil Chorus,” and the film concludes with the narrator’s assurance that “Nature preserves her own and teaches them how to cope with time and the unaccountable ways of man. Mankind in turn, beginning to understand Nature’s pattern, is helping her to replenish and rebuild so that the vanishing pageant of the past may become the enduring pageant of the future.” It is, of course, a pageant that Disney provides in The Vanishing Prairie, The Living Desert, and in the other True-Life Adventure films. In the completed films we are sutured into the Disney vision by the ever-presence of the narrator; by the music, which is carefully and continuously mickey-moused with the action so as to create particular, interpretive cinematic moods; and by the film’s visual and textual framing of the “adventures” of the animals. Not only do these films create animal characters that are meant to lure children, mothers, and fathers into emotional identification in much the same way as Disney’s animated features do, but individual sequences are often fabricated to suggest that the animals, like the spectators in the theater, are interested observers of what is occurring on-screen. In The Living Desert an owl “watches” a burrowing snake, a courtship ritual of tarantulas, and a courting dance of scorpions; and when ground squirrel “Skinny,” the “kid from across the way,”



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confronts a Gila monster and chases it away by kicking sand in its eyes, the heroic exploits of the little guy are watched and admired by the neighborhood ground squirrels who realize they have underestimated Skinny (at the end of the sequence Skinny rides off into the sunset on the back of a desert tortoise). In other words, in these films as in any other Hollywood melodrama, we are meant to enjoy the pleasure of gazing at the private lives of characters we can identify with and we share the characters’ gazes at each other. Originally, the True-Life Adventures provided a new, exotic form of entertainment, combining the conventional pleasures of entertainment film with the sense that the audience was learning something (after half a century, at least judging from my recent use of some of these films in my history of documentary film classes, the entertainment value of The Living Desert is still considerable for film students). Of course, the True-Life Adventures do create an expanded sense of the animals that inhabit particular regions—to my knowledge there had been nothing like these films within the annals of American commercial entertainment—combined with an emotional residue of pleasant nostalgia for the innocent past and an implicit acceptance of the inevitable progress of civilization. The True-Life Adventures may have created in their first audiences a greater awareness of the natural environment, but it was an awareness qualified by a deep complacency. The natural world is valuable and admirable, the Disney films suggest, precisely to the degree it can be understood to reflect and confirm the ideology of contemporary American middle-class family life. When one comes to the Painlevé films having first experienced the Disney nature films as a formative childhood influence, it is difficult not to feel that they are transformative, at least in terms of what we assume a nature film can be. While the True-Life Adventures were instigated by financial concerns, Painlevé’s nature films were an attempt to demonstrate the value of cinema for science (a highly controversial idea for French scientists of the 1920s),16 and to produce both good science and good cinema. The pageantry of the Disney films reflects their origins in the studio system: many of the True-Life Adventures were elaborate feature-length extravaganzas, produced within a hierarchical studio system involving many people. The Painlevé films are generally eight to fifteen minutes long, and were relatively humble productions, often collaborations with Painlevé’s wife Geneviève Hamon, in which Painlevé, working with technology he himself invented for filming underwater, did his own cinematography or worked with a single cameraperson (most frequently, André Ramond early on, and later, Eli Lotar). Like the Disney films, Painlevé’s nature films were made in 35mm and were shown in public theaters; in fact, The Seahorse (L’Hippocampe, 1934) was successful enough to support a spin-off: a line of seahorse jewelry designed by Hamon and displayed “in chic boutiques alongside aquariums filled with live seahorses.”17

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But The Seahorse was the only Painlevé nature film to break even (and even the profits from the seahorse jewelry were stolen). Painlevé was, throughout his life, more a scientist and educator than a capitalist, and his energies were generally directed toward the promotion of science films as an educational tool. Not surprisingly, given their vastly different production processes and purposes, the Painlevé nature films are very different from the Disney films, both in their scope and in the ideology that seems to underlie Painlevé’s choices of subjects: the second of his “Ten Commandments” for filmmakers is, “You will refuse to direct a film if your convictions are not expressed.”18 Each Painlevé film tends to focus on a single organism, and because of Painlevé’s fascination with and commitment to underwater organisms, usually on a single sea creature. Each film presents, clearly and concisely, the crucial moments in the life cycle of the chosen organism, often beginning by recognizing that this particular organism might not at first seem worthy of being the focus of a film. In general, Painlevé’s commitment is to reveal the wonder and the beauty even in organisms that some would consider beneath our notice: the sea urchin, for instance, or the acera, a tiny mollusk. And he is drawn to organisms, or aspects of organisms, that some would find disgusting: the South American vampire bat in The Vampire (Le Vampire, 1945), for example, and the love life of the “cephalopod, horrifying animal” in The Love Life of the Octopus (Les Amours de la pieuvre, 1965). Though each film provides an in-close examination of an organism, Painlevé often makes clear how the organism he has chosen to focus on relates to human society—in a simple practical sense. The Vampire, for example, introduces its examination of the vampire bat with a brief reminder of the pervasiveness of vampires in our imaginations and in the arts—a shot from Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is included; and Shrimp Stories (Histoires des crevettes, 1964) begins with imagery of men and women fishing for shrimp in ocean shallows. While the True-Life Adventures tend to reconfirm, in live action, attitudes and ideas evident in Disney’s earlier animated features and cartoons, the Painlevé films can be seen, at least in part, as related to Painlevé’s earlier interest in art, and in particular, surrealist art. Painlevé (the son of distinguished mathematician and one-time French prime minister, Paul Painlevé) studied mathematics, then medicine, then biology and zoology. In 1923, at the age of twenty-one, he coauthored a scientific paper with one of his professors and presented it to the Académie des sciences, and in 1924 graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in physics, chemistry, and biology. By the time he graduated, he had become fascinated with the then-thriving French avant-garde art scene in Paris and soon was friendly with a number of the surrealists; he was one of the publishers of, and a contributor to, the single



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issue of the journal Surréalisme (1924).19 Painlevé also became involved with the ciné-club movement, which was sweeping through France and the rest of Europe, making available to public audiences a wide variety of forms of cinema not regularly screened in commercial theaters. Through ciné-club activity he became close friends with Jean Vigo, and in 1927 finished his own short surrealist film, Methuselah (1927), which is reminiscent of René Clair’s Entr’acte (1924).20 Painlevé’s engagement with surrealism would continue; for example, he supplied the remarkable text for the narration of Georges Franju’s The Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes, 1949). The defiance of social convention implicit in Painlevé’s early movement between the worlds of science and surrealist art is frequently evident in his nature films, especially in his (usually implicit, but clearly evident) reasons for focusing on particular organisms. While the Disney nature films focus on animals whose activities can be seen as analogous to or sentimentally reminiscent of the activities of the largely middle-class families who were their primary audience, Painlevé’s choices often seem, at least in part, a function of the ways in which particular organisms offer a challenge to conventional societal assumptions and values. For example, in an unpublished conversation with Brigitte Berg, Painlevé makes clear that one of the reasons for his early choice of the seahorse as subject was the way the male and female seahorses collaborate on child-raising: the abdomen of the male seahorse has a pouch into which the female lays her eggs; once the eggs are fertilized, the male nourishes the eggs and, in time, gives birth to the baby seahorses in a manner reminiscent of female human labor. As Painlevé explained to Berg, “The seahorse was for me a splendid way of promoting the kindness and virtue of the father while at the same time underlining the necessity of the mother. In other words, I wanted to reestablish the balance between male and female.”21 Rather than using the seahorses to reconfirm conventional middle-class American family patterns, Painlevé uses his investigation of seahorses and his cinematic report on them to do what he sees as progressive gender politics; he wants us to learn not only about, but from this strange fish. Painlevé’s interest in the acera mollusks in Acera or the Witches’ Dance seems to have two motivations: one of them obvious and the other more subtle. Of obvious interest is the acera’s way of finding a mate; as suggested in the film’s title, the acera do a kind of ballet, during which the cloaks that encircle their bodies fly open, evoking tutus. A substantial portion of the film is devoted to shots of this dance, which is fascinating and lovely—and reminiscent of moments from Oskar Fischinger films and from Disney’s Fantasia. But once the acera have found mates, we learn that their means of sexual reproduction could not be further from anything even implied in a

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Disney film: each acera is bisexual and can function sexually as either male or female, or, as is demonstrated in Acera, or the Witches’ Dance, simultaneously as male and female: we see in one instance a chain of five acera in which each of the three middle partners in the sexual act is fertilizing the eggs in one acera and, at the same time, having its own eggs fertilized by another acera. For Painlevé the beauty of the acera does not depend on its mimicking conventional Western assumptions about sexual morality. One can only imagine the repercussions if this lovely film were shown in high school biology classes in the United States, even today. The Vampire, the best-known Painlevé film, at least in this country, makes its politics more specific and more overt. During the German occupation of France, Painlevé was a persona non grata for a variety of reasons, including his activities in helping immigrants on the run from fascism to obtain work visas and French citizenship. Painlevé spent the Occupation years in hiding, escaping to Spain under water, using scuba diving gear he had invented. Just before the war, Painlevé had seen, for the first time, the Brazilian vampire bat (Desmodus rotundus), and had begun work on what would become The Vampire. His interest in the creature and the film seems to have been closely related to his hatred of Nazism: the bat, which could be a scourge to its animal and human neighbors, was, like the Nazis, a “brown pest.” Near the end of The Vampire, soon after we’ve seen how the bats can transmit disease, Painlevé reveals “the salute of the vampire”: “When I was finishing the film, I noticed how the vampire bat extends its wing before going to sleep. I thought it looked like the Nazi ‘Heil-Hitler’ salute.”22 In this instance, the bat is used overtly as a political metaphor in a way that is not particularly characteristic of Painlevé’s work—though, as usual, the film is good science. Throughout his career, Painlevé’s primary commitment was to support the creation of first-rate science films and the development of public audiences for these and other forms of cinema that might function to energize and inform the public. Soon after the war, Painlevé became president of the French Federation of Ciné-Clubs, and he continued to promote the use of cinema as a way of popularizing science, through his work with the Institute of Scientific Cinema, which he had founded in 1930, and by helping to found the International Association of Science Films, which held many conferences where science films from around the world were screened. He was also among the first science filmmakers to work with television and in time would experiment with new video techniques. While for Disney the nature film was one small part in the construction of a financial empire, for Painlevé filmmaking always remained a means of democratizing scientific research and of using cinema to work across theoretical and cultural distinctions to share information about our remarkably complex, sometimes terrifying, but always wondrous world.



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PLANET EARTH, MICROCOSMOS, AND FURTHER CONJECTURES Bringing nature film, and science film in general, into the mainstream of film-historical thinking and teaching has a variety of potential benefits. Most obviously, of course, it can help us become more aware of the full range of cinematic accomplishment. Certainly the best nature films—of course, we will need to develop definitions of what “best” means in this genre—should be recognized alongside the best dramatic narratives, the best animations, the best films of any kind. What makes an aesthetics of nature film particularly difficult is that, more than perhaps any other genre of cinema, the talent, the ingenuity, and the hard work involved in recording the astonishing imagery in the best nature films are often obscured by the compromises that producers seem to feel are essential to the marketing of the films: overdetermined narration and music most obviously. That is, despite the fact that their imagery is what makes the films interesting and powerful, the men and women who patiently collect this imagery (sometimes braving considerable danger) have no final say in how it is received; in many cases, the packaging of the imagery can seem a form of anti-creativity! In any case, an expanded sense of nature cinema as a genre cannot fail to be illuminating. As cineastes and scholars, we need to learn from, and enjoy, the genre’s ongoing evolution: what this evolution has to teach us about cinema, about those who are drawn to make these films, about the audiences that are drawn to the various experiences nature film has provided, and of course, about the worlds depicted in the films. Just as the modern histories of the horror film and film noir can help us think about the developing power of women to deal with their societal marginalization, the evolution of nature cinema can help us think about our relationship to other species and to the environment we all share. Of recent contributions to nature cinema, the Planet Earth series is the grandest and most technologically adept—indeed the “Diaries” sections that conclude the individual episodes focus on the remarkable technology, along with the human ingenuity, patience, and bravery, that made Planet Earth’s remarkable imagery of wildlife in far-flung locations possible. Planet Earth tends to focus on predation, often spectacular moments of predation; and, somewhat ironically, this is consistently reflected in the tendency of the series to depict the spectacular capturing of imagery of animal life as a form of cine-predation. As sophisticated and engaging as the series is, Planet Earth is essentially a modern version of the “bring ‘em back alive” tradition, and one that tends to sublimate the implications of the population explosion and the developing environmental crisis for the places and species it depicts.23 One might argue that nature filmmakers assume we recognize the imminence of

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environmental devastation, but in most cases, popular nature cinema—especially when experienced through the filter of commercial television—reconfirms complacency and the inevitability of damaging exploitation. In my view, the most innovative and thoughtful instance of modern nature cinema is still the Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou feature, Microcosmos, Le peuple de l’herbe (“The People of the Grass”), which was released in 1996 and was, at that time, important in demonstrating that nature film was still a viable theatrical experience. Microcosmos is distinct within the genre of nature film in several significant ways. First, Microcosmos is not about animals, but about insects—mostly quite common insects. Whereas the makers of Planet Earth were focused on capturing the grandiose, the natural sublime, Nuridsany/Pérennou were interested in revealing the sublimity that surrounds us. Like the filmmakers who recorded the imagery in Planet Earth, Nuridsany/Pérennou did need to develop complex means for recording the imagery presented in Microcosmos, but their focus is not on their own accomplishments as cinematographers, but on the mystery, beauty, and ingenuity of the insects filmed. They have explained that in order to film beings usually “beneath our notice”; they wanted to use “the same tools as are used to film actors and actresses in fiction films: traveling shots, cranes, et cetera, so as to give the insects the stature of real characters.”24 Furthermore, though no human beings are seen within Microcosmos, Nuridsany/Pérennou do not pretend that they have found a natural wilderness unaffected by human beings, an approach that has been typical since the True-Life Adventures. The pastoral landscape Nuridsany/Pérennou apparently explore is clearly an environment that has been transformed by human beings, and yet, as the concluding narration (one of two brief narrative comments in the film) explains, the insects that live, “almost beneath our notice” in this familiar environment, are “beyond anything we could imagine.” In Microcosmos Nuridsany/Pérennou are interested not so much in exotic species living in places we will probably never be able to visit, but in the mysteries of an environment we think we know. The insects depicted in Microcosmos are presented as distinctive “characters,” remarkable beings worthy of dedicated filmmaking, for at least two reasons, one relating to our cultural past, the other to our probable future. It is evident within the particular sequences that comprise Microcosmos that the filmmakers see insects as beings not only as evocative of mythological stories (a dung beetle struggling to keep its ball of dung moving suggests Sisyphus; the startlingly lovely emersion of what we finally realize is a common mosquito suggests the birth of Venus), but also, implicitly, as a major source of mythology itself—after all, the mysterious transformations of insects were clearly a source for Ovid’s Metamorphosis. On the other hand, as modern people faced with deeply challenging changes to our planet’s environment, the overlooked and usually underappreciated



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beings depicted with such dignity by Nuridsany/Pérennou can be understood as creatures with whom we can empathize, and even as pioneers. In one of the most memorable sequences in Microcosmos, two snails are apparently having sex. They are filmed in scintillant visuals and accompanied by operatic music—the resulting humor is roughly reminiscent of certain moments in the True-Life Adventures, but this sequence is more serious and more deeply engaging than anything in the True-Life Adventures: we recognize the apparent passion of these snails. And the remarkable transformations of many of the insects in Microcosmos, filmed so that the epic dimensions of these transformations are obvious, remind us that insects have endured myriad environmental changes on the planet we share. Leonardo da Vinci, Étienne-Jules Marey, and others studied the flight of birds in order to develop the technologies that made human flight possible—ultimately transforming human culture and society. Coming generations of scientists and engineers may look to our tiny neighbors for ideas about how we might transform ourselves and our surroundings to meet the immense challenges that we are just beginning to face.25 One final conjecture. In her video, The Head of a Pin (2003), Su Friedrich intercuts between long and medium shots documenting a vacation near the Delaware River in northern New Jersey (Friedrich and several others live in a small cabin and walk to the river to enjoy swimming and picnicking) and in-close shots of a spider subduing and wrapping a wasp or some kind of fly that has gotten caught in its web.26 During the shots of the spider and its prey, the vacationers discuss the strange, grisly spectacle, and at one point admit to each other that “what we know about Nature” would fit “on the head of a pin.” Near the end of the video, the final in-close shot of the spider and the now wrapped and stored prey concludes when the camera pulls back and up, and we realize that this tiny saga of predation has been occurring underneath the kitchen table in the cabin—we see that what can seem to be two different worlds are simply two aspects of the same space. Friedrich’s concluding gesture suggests the relationship between what is going on below the table and what normally occurs on top of it: both spiders and humans live by means of periodic exploitation of other life forms, and intelligence lies in recognizing the intricate relationships between what may at first seem separate worlds. In the present context, The Head of a Pin can serve as a metaphor for the gap that has formed between the humanities and the sciences in the current American academic environment. While educators generally recognize that anything like a sensible liberal arts education requires experiences with both the sciences and the humanities, the tendency for many faculty and students is to see one of these areas as primary and the other as secondary, and for all practical purposes, a strange, hidden world. This gap has produced one of the more remarkable paradoxes of modern intellectual life: the seemingly

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contradictory nature of crucial, recent conclusions/discoveries in the humanities and in the sciences. The major conclusion of many scholars working across the humanities during recent decades has been that the categories that earlier generations assumed were biological givens—gender, race, sexual preference, even individual identity itself—are in fact social constructions, that our ways of understanding the world around us and of coming to terms with each other are not biologically intrinsic to us, not essential dimensions of us, but the social fabrications of postmodern capitalism. On the other hand, among the most remarkable conclusions of many scholars working across the sciences during recent decades is that our physical being is mapped, from the moment of conception, by our DNA and that this DNA mapping is so distinct for each of us that anyone with the tools to read it can distinguish each human individual from every other, and various classes of humans from each other, on the basis of even the tiniest molecule of the human body, living or dead. In other words, however much our socialization constructs predictable, conventional, often-problematic patterns of action and thought, there is an essential identity within each of us. Of course, I recognize that I am oversimplifying very complex issues, but I cannot help but wonder whether the tendency on the part of the first generations of academic film teachers and scholars to ignore the history of cinema devoted to scientific exploration and explanation might be, at least in part, a reflection of a repressed fear of confronting those dimensions of the physical world around us that might frustrate our desire for an unambiguous, stable political consciousness and for definitive theoretical solutions to complex social questions. Obviously, the humanities and the sciences need each other, more than they sometimes realize, and the wide world of cinema, including the long history of films devoted to depictions of the natural world, remains one of those dimensions of culture that may yet help us come to terms with this need.

NOTES 1. In this particular context, I prefer “nature film” because “wildlife film” has come to refer primarily to films about animals, whereas “nature film” more comfortably includes the lives of insects, as well as other forms of cinematic engagement with the environment—Larry Gottheim’s Horizons (1973), for example, or James Benning’s 13 Lakes (2004) or BNSF (2013). I often use “nature cinema” to make clear that in recent decades the works discussed have been made with celluloid film and digital video, or, like Sharon Lockhart’s Double Tide (2009), with a combination of both. 2. Gregg Mitman, Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Derek Bousé, Wildlife Films



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(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000); Andy Masaki Bellows and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg, Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Derek Bousé carefully reviews the scholarship on wildlife film in Wildlife Films. The British in particular have amassed a considerable body of writing in the field. 3. Ronald B. Tobias, Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011). 4. Oliver Gaycken, Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). Devices of Curiosity includes Gaycken’s groundbreaking early essay “‘A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the Death’: Some Remarks on the Flourishing of a Cinema of Scientific Vernacularization in France, 1909–1914,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, vol. 2, no. 3 (August 2002), 353–74. Gaycken’s discussion of early French scientific films produced by the Éclair, Pathé, and Gaumont studios, especially the Éclair series called “Scientia,” is particularly useful. Gaycken discusses the distinction between films made in the service of scientific experimentation and films of “scientific vernacularization”: that is, films that attempted to make scientific investigations and ideas available to a more general audience; and he examines a number of films involving insects and animals doing battle with one another in ways that are early instances of some of the films discussed in this essay. 5. Lewis Jacobs’ seminal anthology, The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971) does include Arthur Knight’s brief discussion of Arne Sucksdorff, “Sweden’s Arne Sucksdorff,” which mentions Struggle for Survival (1944), Sucksdorff’s study of bird life on a Baltic Island; and Bosley Crowther’s review, “Cousteau’s The Silent World (1956).” Erik Barnouw’s Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993) devotes a single paragraph to the nature film (210–12) in which the early Disney True-Life Adventures and Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s film work are mentioned. But none of the recent anthologies focusing on documentary so much as mentions this dimension of documentary history. Derek Bousé’s first chapter includes an extensive consideration of the ways in which wildlife films correspond and fail to correspond to conventional understandings of documentary. In general, Bousé sees the wildlife film as a genre separate from what we usually call documentary. I do consider the films I discuss here documentaries; for me Jean Painlevé’s definition has been particularly useful: a documentary is “Any film that documents real phenomena or their honest and justified reconstruction in order to consciously increase human knowledge through rational or emotional means and to expose problems and offer solutions from an economic, social, or cultural point of view.” Painlevé, in “Castration du documentarire,” Les Cahiers du cinéma (March 1951); reprinted in Science Is Fiction, 39. 6. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001), 85. 7. I am sure Nichols would agree that the films I discuss in this essay are more fully documentary than the more strictly scientific use of cinema to collect data, which is his focus in the lines I have quoted. Nevertheless, the position he enunciates does, I think, confirm the broad tendency not to take the nature film seriously as cinema. If I have stretched Nichols’ position beyond what is fair, I apologize to him.

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8. Both Mitman and Bousé focus primarily on American wildlife films, and both tend to exclude films that focus on insects and sea organisms. 9. Gaycken, “‘A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the Death’,” 368. 10. Gregg Mittman provides a useful overview of the evolution of the “bring ‘em back alive” film in Reel Nature, chs. 2 and 3. 11. The nature film was also an early staple of the ciné-club movement that swept Europe and the United Kingdom in the 1920s and 1930s. For example, at its third public presentation, December 20th, 1925, the London Film Society began the “Film Society Bionomica Series” focusing on animal and insect life; and throughout the Film Society’s fourteen-year run, a nature film was regularly included within diverse programs that also included films about film, revived classics, instructional films, animations, documentaries of all sorts, and narrative entertainments from around the world. See the London Film Society’s The Film Society Programs, 1925–1939 (New York: Arno Press, 1972). 12. Dorsky, in Scott MacDonald, A Critical Cinema 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 81. Dorsky’s Hours for Jerome (shot in the late 1960s and edited in 1982) seems particularly indebted to the True-Life Adventures. Dorsky’s film takes the viewer through a year in New York City and at a lakeside retreat in northern New Jersey, not particularly focusing on wildlife, but creating a sense of the seasonal cycle, as represented by weather, plant life, and human activity. 13. Mitman, Reel Nature, 111–14. 14. Algar, in an interview with Gregg Mitman, in Mitman, Reel Nature, 119. 15. Bousé suggests that wildlife films may “entail an even greater potential [than Hollywood features] for naturalizing ideological values—for example, by ‘finding’ in nature the predominance of the nuclear family, or the values of hard work, industry, and deferred gratification. Indeed, because wildlife films are about nature, there may be an even greater commitment than in Hollywood films to making things appear natural,” Wildlife Films, 18. 16. Brigitte Berg explains that when Painlevé’s early research film, The Stickleback’s Egg: From Fertilization to Hatching (L’Oeuf d’épinoche: De la fecundation à l’éclosion) (1927), was screened for scientists at the Académie des sciences in 1928, it was met with skepticism and outrage: “One scientist, infuriated, stormed out, declaring: ‘Cinema is not to be taken seriously!’” Berg, Science Is Fiction, 17. 17. Berg, “Contradictory Forces: Jean Painlevé, 1902–1989,” Science Is Fiction, 25. 18. Painlevé’s ten commandments were written in 1948 for a program called “Poets of the Documentary” and are reprinted in Science Is Fiction, 159. Commandment four, “You will seek reality without aestheticism or ideological apparatus” suggests that what Painlevé means by “convictions” in his second commandment is not political convictions in the contemporary sense, but convictions that develop from an exploration of natural reality from an unbiased position. 19. Painlevé’s contribution to Surréalisme was a bit of prose that may well be coherent biology, but reads like surrealist fantasy. A translation of the piece begins, “The plasmodium of the Myxomycetes is so sweet; the eyeless Prorhynchus has the dull color of the born-blind, and its proboscis stuffed with zoochlorellae solicits the



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oxygen of the Frontoniella antypyretica; he carries his pharynx in a rosette, a locomotive requirement, horned, stupid, and not at all calcareous.” The entire piece is included in Science Is Fiction, 117. 20. A considerable number and range of Painlevé’s films are available on the Criterion DVD, Science Is Fiction: 23 Films by Jean Painlevé. 21. Berg, Science Is Fiction, 23. 22. Berg, Science Is Fiction, 33. 23. In a number of instances David Attenborough does mention that one or another of the environments depicted in Planet Earth is endangered by pollution created by humans or by exploitation of animal and mineral resources, but this danger is never depicted within the basic episodes of the series. The DVD version of Planet Earth includes four disks with the eleven episodes of the series, plus a fifth disk, entitled “The Future,” which includes three one-hour shows: “Saving Species,” “Into the Wilderness,” and “Living Together.” This triad of extras recycles excerpts from the series within a new context. Simon Poland narrates and provides segues among a variety of experts from various positions within the debates about environmental protection and sustainable development, who discuss these issues. The Future is not, strictly speaking, part of the original series—the final credits for the series complete the eleventh episode. The Future is, quite literally, an afterthought. The three shows frame the debates in slightly different ways, but all three have in common an interest in surveying all the standard viewpoints; and while this is not entirely unappreciated, the overall impact is to create a knot of idea and argument that seems almost as unlikely as the series itself to lead to specific action in any one direction. 24. Nuridsany/Pérennou in Scott MacDonald, interview with Nuridsany/Pérennou, in Adventures of Perception: Cinema As Exploration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 190. 25. In their most recent film, La Clé des champs (The Field of Enchantment, 2011), Pérennou and Nuridsany combine nature film with an implicitly autobiographical fiction about a young boy discovering the fascinations of life in a nearby pond, including a young girl who shares his fascinations—suggesting, in mythic form, the personal evolution of these two filmmakers from dedicated biology students to filmmaker and partners devoted to combining good biology with engaging and visionary cinema. La Clé des champs is an exquisite, if strangely underappreciated feature. 26. I have not been able to determine whether the insect is a wasp (Bracónidae or Ichneumónidae) or a stem sawfly (Cèphidae). Thanks to Dr. William H. Gotwald, Jr., Emeritus Professor of Biology at Utica College, for his assistance in narrowing the possibilities for me.

Chapter 8

Jean Rouch’s Ciné-trance and Modes of Experimental Ethnofiction Filmmaking William Rothman

Within the field of film studies, it is widely recognized that Jean Rouch occupies an important place in the history of cinema. Yet most film scholars and students have seen few, if any, of his films. Rouch’s significance is generally taken to reside not in the artistic value of his films generally, but rather in the influence of a single film: Chronicle of a Summer (1961). Generations of documentary filmmakers have been attuned to the film’s special contributions to the nature of documentary, and have especially appreciated Rouch’s role as a missing link between the postwar Italian neorealists and the directors of the French New Wave, for whom his “ethno-fictions” were an inspiration and a major influence; in 1964, for instance, Jean-Luc Godard ranked The Human Pyramid (Pyramide humane, 1961) the second best French film since the Liberation.1 It was in the mid- to late-1950s and early 1960s that Rouch had his greatest influence on the course of world cinema, and it is his films from that period—especially Chronicle of a Summer but also, the earlier The Mad Masters (Les maîtres fous, 1955)—that have received the most appreciative attention within film studies. Yet even these two relatively well-known films have rarely been accorded serious criticism. Indeed, most of the serious writing about Rouch’s work has been composed by anthropologists, not by film critics or theorists. And the anthropologists treat their films primarily as visual ethnography, not as cinema—as another form of scientific record, not as an art or as the expression of an artist. For the likes of François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer, Claude Chabrol, Jacques Rivette, and Jean-Luc Godard, it is not hyperbole to say that the art of cinema was a religion. They aspired to become cinéastes, a priestly role in which they could aim to follow the work of exemplary practitioners of cinema like Hitchcock, Renoir, Mizoguchi, or Rossellini. Film was the holy scripture; the cinéastes provided the midrash. Rouch was not a member of the temple. 193

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Except for the films of Flaherty, Vertov, and the other documentary filmmakers he considered his “cinematic ancestors,” Rouch rarely if ever talked about films or filmmakers. His ambitions seemed incommensurate with those of the nouvelle vague directors he inspired and influenced. And yet, I believe, for all his reluctance to claim to be an auteur, Rouch was no less a cinéaste than they were—yet he achieved that position on his own terms. For one thing, he was not preoccupied with writing film criticism, but instead with making films—works of art—that would be of permanent value in and of themselves. For a half-century, Rouch developed his cinematic practice primarily by filming the Songhay of Niger, whose possession ceremonies were the subject of Rouch’s own ethnographic publications; and the Dogon of Mali—the people studied by Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, his mentors in anthropology—whose rituals are spectacular triumphs of mise-en-scène. Rouch’s work among the Dogon culminated in a series of short films about the epic Sigui ritual (staged every sixty years to commemorate the origin of death among human beings), and two feature-length films, arguably his cinematic masterpieces, Funeral at Bongo: The Old Anaï, 1848–1971 (1972) and Ambara Dama (To Enchant Death, 1974); the latter of these closes a circle of influence and engagement: Rouch films the mask dance first captured by Griaule in the 1930s, and in the voice-over narration Rouch speaks his teacher’s words. In his excellent book The Cinematic Griot, anthropologist Paul Stoller suggests that Rouch understood his films to be of value insofar as they furthered the practice he called “shared anthropology.” Inspired by Robert Flaherty’s example, Rouch regularly screened his footage for the Songhay and Dogon people he filmed, asked them questions about events he had captured with his camera, received answers that helped him film in ways that enabled him to ask new questions and receive new answers. Thereby filming furthered Rouch’s pursuit of ethnographic knowledge. And from this knowledge sprang new films and, in turn, new knowledge. In screening his films for the people he filmed, Rouch’s goal was also to share with them the knowledge the films engendered, to help these “ethnographic others”—the traditional objects of ethnographic study—to become subjects who shared in the pursuit of ethnographic knowledge. And in screening his films to Western audiences, Stoller suggests, Rouch’s primary goal was to win converts to his practice of “shared anthropology.” In Documentary Film Classics, I argued, however, that when Rouch screened his films for the Songhay and Dogon, there was an apparent but unarticulated asymmetry in their relationship. From the filmmaker’s point of view, the “other” remained other: Rouch pursued knowledge about the way “others” thought and lived, while those “others” pursued knowledge about their own way of thinking and living. The pursuit of knowledge about



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“others” that for Rouch was at the heart of anthropological practice—for example, to learn about the way “others” think and live—was not part of the Songhay and Dogon’s anthropological interest; instead, they sought self-knowledge, something more akin to philosophy. Rouch made a point of teaching his practice of filming to Africans. However, insofar as they went on to film their own “others,” they became observers, no longer “others.” And insofar as these Africans filmed people who thought and lived as they did, who were not “others” to them, it was not anthropology they were practicing. In my book, I suggested that one could put a positive face on this asymmetry and say that Rouch’s practice effected a marriage between anthropology and philosophy. But I chose, at that time, to dwell on the less positive idea that his work entailed an avoidance of pursuing knowledge about his own way of thinking and living—an avoidance of self-knowledge, and thus, an avoidance of philosophy. And when Rouch screened his films to Western audiences, I argued, there was still an asymmetry, only it was reversed: it was his way of thinking and living, not theirs, that was being studied. Insofar as members of these audiences were moved—as many were—to pursue this claim by asking him questions about his way of filming (and responding to his answers with further questions), their questions provoked Rouch to reflect on his own practice. Again dwelling on the negative, however, I argued in Documentary Film Classics that the fact that Rouch had to be provoked to engage in self-reflection underscored that his practice ordinarily resisted a philosophical perspective. Over the years since these initial remarks, however, I have gained a deeper appreciation of the subtlety, as well as the profundity, of Rouch’s art. The films themselves, as they have provoked me to continue reflecting on them, have taught me to understand that their art is in pursuit of self-knowledge no less than anthropological knowledge. Rouch’s films are philosophical, and they are personal or poetic, as surely as they are ethnographic. Indeed, it is the main thrust of the readings I offer in what follows that within these films—and, by extension, within Rouch’s films more generally—anthropology, philosophy, and poetry are intimately intertwined. Insofar as Rouch made films to beget films, that is, to inspire (and teach) others to make his kind of films—as Vertov also envisioned himself doing, we might note—his goal was to usher in a radically new practice of anthropology in which it makes all the difference that film, not writing, is primary. But can anthropology become film and still be anthropology? If we simply assume, on the basis of the fact that Rouch called his practice “shared anthropology,” that his films give priority to science over art, to anthropology over cinema, and do so without consulting the films themselves on this matter, we would be making a serious mistake, I believe. For we would simply be assuming that we already know what the difference is that film makes, and

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what film is that it makes such a difference. For Rouch, I have come increasingly to recognize, these were not questions settled to his satisfaction somewhere other than in his films. Within Rouch’s films, therefore, it is an abiding question what becomes of anthropology when film enables its transformation into cinema. And it is no less an urgent question what becomes of cinema when, as we might put it, film possesses, or is possessed by, anthropology. If Rouch’s films quest for knowledge (both of oneself and others; of philosophical as well as anthropological knowledge), they also aspire to transform our understanding of what knowledge is by demonstrating what becomes of science, and what becomes of art, when both realms acknowledge that there is no real division between them. Rouch’s films transform anthropology (with its claims or pretensions to know others with scientific objectivity) into an artistic practice no less rigorous for acknowledging the unknowable, the unsayable, and the value of abandonment. The aspiration of Rouch’s art is to dismantle the barriers—there are no such lines of demarcation, he believed, in the African societies he filmed for almost half a century—separating what we know from the way we live. Rouch’s style of filming, which he sincerely wished others would emulate, was also a way of thinking and living, one which embraced the magical, the strange, the fantastic, and the fabulous while promising freedom from the alienation and the joylessness to which Western society otherwise consigns us. As I put it in Documentary Film Classics, “No less than Buñuel, Rouch believed that our way of life in the West has to change, that our lives cannot change unless we change, and that we cannot change unless we change our way of thinking. We have to awaken to, awaken from, the horror to which we have condemned ourselves and our world. We have to tear down the fences we have built, the fences we continue to build, to deny that nature exists within us as we exist within nature.”2 The new world Rouch heralded is, it turns out, an ancient world—a world older than Western civilization. As Rouch has presented them, the Dogon and Songhay villagers he filmed were dwellers in that aged but still vital world. For we “others” to find our way into that world, we, too, would have to achieve a form of life in which our every action, however ordinary, expressed what we know (and acknowledged what cannot be known) about being human. At one level, Rouch filmed Dogon rituals in order to vindicate Griaule’s claim—made in Griaule’s dissertation and in his popular book Conversations with Ogotemmeli—that sparked controversy during his lifetime (and continues to do so long after Griaule’s death) within the French anthropological establishment, namely, that the Dogon had developed and sustained a society based on complicated but orderly conceptions (including institutional and ritual practices) that constitute a philosophical system comparable in



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completeness and sophistication to that of the classical Greeks. As Griaule put it: “These people live by a cosmogony, a metaphysic, and a religion which put them on a par with the peoples of antiquity and which Christian theology might indeed study with profit.”3 Believing Griaule’s claim to be true, Rouch conjectured that filming Dogon rituals could further the quest for anthropological knowledge, including the defense of Griaule’s hypothesis. By tapping into the Dogon’s knowledge, Rouch also believed, he could harness more emphatically the powers of film—hence further his own art, and his own quest for self-knowledge. If Rouch has a legitimate claim to be included among the masters of cinema art, as I believe he does, that claim in my judgment does not rest primarily on his celebrated films of the 1950s and 1960s—even for all their remarkable qualities and their powerful impact on other filmmakers. Ultimately, his legacy rests on a number of films made in the 1970s. Labeling these works “ethnographic,” or even thinking of them as exemplary of “shared anthropology,” fails to acknowledge their ambitiousness as films—for example, as they bring to fruition, and at the same time transcend, what Stoller calls the “one take/one sequence” method.4 The series of almost feature-length films Rouch made about the spectacular Sigui ritual the Dogon perform every sixty years, for example, and the feature-length Funeral at Bongo: The Old Anaï, 1848–1971 and Ambara Dama, among others, are crucial to the genre of documentary film, but are also—one is compelled to say—great films, exemplary instances of the art of cinema generally. And even the ten-minute The Drums of Yore: Tourou and Bitti (Les tambours d’avant: Tourou et Bitti, 1971), a jewel-like miniature composed of just two shots about a Songhay possession ritual, is also, despite its brevity, a great film in its own right. What qualities give these works such lauded credentials? At a minimum, such films must bear up under criticism of the sort that is invited and expected by serious works within the classical arts. Each film must be a work in which, as Stanley Cavell puts it, “an audience’s passionate interest, or disinterest, is rewarded with an articulation of the conditions of the interest that illuminates it and expands self-awareness.”5 Part of my thrust, in the readings that follow, is how singularly challenging it is to put into words what makes The Drums of Yore a great film—namely, to find terms of criticism, words capable of carrying conviction, that illuminate our interest in such a work. It is partly for lack of such critical terms that, in writing about Rouch’s work in Documentary Film Classics, I focused on Chronicle of a Summer, even though, in that earlier writing, I suggested that Anaï and Ambara Dama were his artistic masterpieces. Moreover, the sequences of Chronicle that I analyzed in detail were ones that were shot and edited in ways that emulated classical movies (and thus connected more readily with my habits of viewership and my critical film vocabulary), rather than those memorable

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passages—such as Marceline walking through the Place de la Concorde, for one—that anticipate the “one take/one sequence” method of his later films, where Rouch’s camera is always restlessly moving and, within each sequence, he forgoes cutting from shot to shot. In the sequences I analyzed in Documentary Film Classics, it made sense, as it does with Hitchcock sequences, say, to interpret every cut and every camera movement, to articulate its meanings and the authorial intentions that motivate them. In The Drums of Yore, as in Anaï and Ambara Dama, the camera moves incessantly, but those movements generally have no particular significance apart from binding the camera to Rouch’s bodily presence. Insofar as he follows the “one take/one sequence” method, Rouch’s camera’s movements do not cohere into self-contained gestures that call for—or even allow—interpretation. (There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.) Consequently, his method makes his films not only “documents” of the events he filmed, but also of his acts of filming as well. Despite these initial sketches, it seems that most of the time we film critics do not have words to describe the way Rouch’s camera is moving. Nor do we have words—other than those he provides in his narration—to describe what we are viewing, to describe who is doing what, and in what way, within the world on film. Then what role is left for criticism? What can be said about a film like The Drums of Yore, about the conditions of our interest in it, that illuminates that interest, expands our self-awareness, in short, makes Rouch’s films of philosophical significance for viewers? **** The Drums of Yore: Tourou and Bitti begins with a brief shot that establishes the village setting, followed by a solid black title card that announces in white letters that this is “un film de JEAN ROUCH,” and we hear Rouch describe the work as an “ethnographic film in the first person.”6 The entire remainder of the film consists of a single long take—an unbroken sequence shot. What we view, then, is everything the camera filmed, and what we hear—apart from Rouch’s voice-over—is everything the microphone recorded. Rouch does not manipulate the footage; the world projected on the movie screen is “reality” captured by the camera with nothing added, subtracted or altered. And yet, true to Rouch’s theory and practice of cinéma-vérité, it is not reality as it is, but reality as it is provoked by the act of filming—a reality that would not exist apart from the presence of the camera. The reality that The Drums of Yore “documents” reveals a new truth—a cinematic truth. Indeed, The Drums of Yore serves as a textbook illustration of Rouch’s oftstated view that the camera is a catalyst that prompts people to reveal fictional or mythical parts of themselves which are, he never tired of asserting, (also, and ironically) the most real parts of themselves. We see this self-disclosure,



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for example, in the way the camera encourages the Songhay musicians to throw themselves into their performances with ever more flamboyant gestures; compels schoolchildren to stare; and apparently also invites invisible gods or spirits to possess the human dancers we see. The Drums of Yore also serves as a classic example of the view, which I presented in Documentary Film Classics, that it is the very presence of the camera—when it is doing its mysterious work—that provokes people into revealing themselves.7 The fact that a filmmaker need do nothing to “shake up” his subjects other than simply film them, I went on to argue, renders moot the distinction between cinéma-vérité, as Rouch practiced it, and so-called direct cinema as practiced in the United States by the likes of Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles brothers. In The Drums of Yore, Rouch does not manipulate his footage in the editing room. Yet he does give shape to the film. He gives it a beginning, middle, and end by his simple act of walking into the village center with his camera on his shoulder; shooting what takes place there, and then retracing his steps so that when his ten-minute magazine runs out he is back where he started. Viewing the film, it seems no mere coincidence that he closes this circle at the precise moment his film magazine runs out; or, rather, it seems the kind of coincidence Rouch was aiming for. After all, as he tells us in his voice-over, it was his intimation that he was soon going to run out of film that made him stop filming the conversation between villagers and gods, which was taking place in the public square, and to start walking backward away from the square. The perfect simultaneity of his completing this circular route and his camera’s running out of film crowns Rouch’s achievement in pulling off the virtuoso filmmaking performance that at one level comprises the entirety of the film. This remarkable coincidence of event and film reel, coming on the heels of the equally remarkable coincidence—if it is a coincidence—that two dancers become possessed at the moment the camera attends to them, seems uncanny, as if Rouch’s act of filming, as well as the events he is filming, are under the sway of supernatural forces, forces whose reality the film documents. (When Rouch screened and discussed The Drums of Yore for audiences, he liked to underscore this suggestion by telling the story of his aborted attempt to repeat the experiment of filming a possession ritual in a single tenminute take. On that other occasion, the possession happened immediately after he ran out of film. The lesson he drew from this failure, Rouch especially reveled in telling Western audiences, was that it was unwise, even dangerous, to trifle with such powerful forces. And, so his story goes, he never tried the experiment again.8) In any case, and perhaps because it was a special take among many others, The Drums of Yore has an air of mystery or magic about it. This atmosphere is enhanced by the way, in his voice-over narration, Rouch refers to the dancers—after they are possessed—not as mortal human

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selves, but as gods or spirits, as if he personally believed in the reality of the Songhay deities. So much for anthropological distance, and doubly so, for not only does the act of filming affect his camera’s subjects, but their way of thinking about the camera affects his understanding of what cinema is. In any case, as this mood of mystery reminds us, if The Drums of Yore is shaped by Rouch’s act of filming, it is also given shape by his narration. Essentially improvised, Rouch’s narration, in words and tone, presents itself rhetorically as his spontaneous response to the film, spoken to us as if he were in our presence, viewing what we are viewing as we are viewing it (with him). But the narration, which is written in the past tense, also invokes an “original” scene in which Rouch, in the past, viewed through his camera’s viewfinder the fabulous spectacle presently being projected by the magic of cinema on the screen before us. The man who silently filmed these events unfold before his camera is the bearer of the voice now speaking to us; this is the mysterious reality Rouch’s narration declares—both by his words and by the hushed, poetic quality of his voice, both of which bespeak the sublimity of the ritual we are viewing, including the ritual of our viewing (film) and the ritual of his own act of filming. As is usually the case in his films, Rouch’s narration for The Drums of Yore performs a variety of functions. He explains enough about this Songhay possession ritual for us to understand the practice up to a point—but not so much that we may explain it away, or deny its mystery. When people in the film speak—or when these gods pronounce themselves—Rouch does not simply tell us what they are saying or merely translate their words; rather, he speaks for them in their words—translated of course—yet still in his own voice. In effect, he acts out their speeches, expressing their thoughts and feelings as if they were his own. And as if he shared their belief in the occult powers of invisible gods and spirits. Though it is uncommon to documentary film practice, Rouch explicitly casts his narration for The Drums of Yore in the first person. His words declare that he was present behind the camera when these events took place, that he was a participant, if a silent one, in the ritual he was filming. This is evident, for example, in the way his narration begins: On March 11, 1971, after three years of famine, the people of Simiri, in the Zermaganda of Niger, staged a possession dance to ask the forest spirits to guard future crops against locusts. On March 16, Daoudo Sorko, son of the Zima, or priest, Daoudo Zido, asked us to watch the fourth day of ritual, when they played the antique drums, Tourou and Bitti. By late afternoon, no dancer was yet possessed, but my sound man, Moussa Hemidou, and I, on the camera, nevertheless opted for a 10-minute sequence to obtain a real-time film document on these ancient drums that would soon be silent forever. So we made this experimental ethnographic film.



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Rouch’s words here not only refer to his presence behind the camera, they also explicitly declare his purpose in being there, namely, to make an experimental ethnographic film, that is, the film we are viewing (a “real-time film document on these ancient drums that would soon be silent forever” consisting of a single ten-minute sequence shot). Immediately after these introductory remarks, a title reads “un film de Jean Rouch,” and Rouch, again in voiceover, describes the work as an “ethnographic film in the first person.” The body of the film—what we come to learn is a single long take that comprises the rest of the film—begins with Rouch’s self-reflexive commentary: “Entering into a film means diving into reality, being both present and invisible, as that afternoon at 4 o’clock when I followed Zima Daouda Zido, who met us at the edge of his village.” As will emerge in the course of the short film, Rouch’s characterization of his status when he is filming—“both present and invisible”—pointedly links him with the gods or spirits who are about to shed their invisibility by entering the bodies of dancers wishing to abandon themselves, their human forms. Rouch “dives into reality,” as he puts it, when he begins to walk with his camera into the Songhay village in which a possession ritual is already underway. The narration continues: “We passed the corral of ritual sheep and goats to be sacrificed to the spirits robed in black, white or red. We passed the shack where the spirits’ horses are kept. In the square, before the orchestra, old Sambu Atabeido of Simiri was dancing.” At this point in the sequence, the camera lingers on the dancer. As if he has fallen under the spell of the “drums of yore,” Rouch’s voice falls silent, as will happen again several other times in the film, enabling the spectacle animated by the drums to cast its spell over us. Such extended spans of time during which Rouch allows the projected world film to express itself directly, unmediated by montage or by Rouch’s words and voice, are essential to the beauty, the emotional impact, and the meaning of the film as a whole. These spellbinding passages are instrumental to the remarkable double achievement of The Drums of Yore in not only documenting this particular traditional Songhay possession ritual, but in documenting at the same time the mysterious powers of cinema—the ability of incorporeal shadows projected on a screen to weave spells over us, for example—which Rouch understands to be no less mysterious than the powers of the invisible gods or spirits the Songhay believe capable of taking possession of flesh-and-blood human beings. In the second of these narration-less stretches, Rouch moves away from the dancer (who has been trying ineffectually for four hours to become possessed) and toward the band of drummers. Rouch’s camera hovers over the musicians who respond to the camera’s attention by playing with increasingly

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flamboyant gestures; then Rouch begins moving back in the direction of the dancer. “Suddenly the orchestra stopped,” Rouch says just as suddenly. When he adds, “I should have stopped filming,” he makes clear that he took this silence as a sign that the musicians were giving up hope that anyone would be possessed that day. But then, as Rouch tells us with mounting excitement in his voice, he sensed that something was, in fact, about to happen; our excitement, too, rises to a fever pitch. “I drew closer to the Bitti player, and I heard a cry: ‘The meat! Kuré the hyena, here is the meat!’ He was no longer Sambu Albeidu the Simiri farmer, he was Kuré, Kuré the hyena, spirit god of the Haousas.” Every time I view The Drums of Yore I have the impression that it is no mere coincidence—and thus not a cameraman’s dumb luck—that the possession happens at the very moment the camera, by drawing close to the Bitti player, moves close to the dancer. I have—one is tempted to say, and in this context it seems fitting—a premonition that this is going to happen. Loading the deck, perhaps, Rouch provokes viewers to have this premonition by informing us, in effect, that he moved so close to the dancer because he himself had such a premonition. In any case, it appears as if it is the very proximity of the camera that provokes the dancer to become entranced, to abandon himself so as to free the invisible spirit of Kuré to enter his body. Of course, we would not find ourselves ready to sense that the possession was about to take place if we were not already under the spell cast by the “drums of yore” (as the dancer was; as Rouch, filming, presumably was; as— Rouch would have it—Kuré was). For Rouch, immersed in the act of filming, the spell cast by the pulsing drums was inseparable from the spell cast by the world framed in his camera’s viewfinder. For The Drums of Yore’s viewers— including Rouch himself, when he later recorded his narration—the spell cast by the drums cannot be separated from the spell cast by the world—visible yet absent—projected on the movie screen. In the world on film, the camera, itself invisible, has the power to provoke the invisible to reveal itself. Despite the camera’s proximity to the dancer, at the instant the possession happens, his face is outside the frame, above its upper border; the camera’s focus is on the drums. Whenever I view the film, this, too, appears to be no mere coincidence. If The Drums of Yore were a fiction film, such a framing, which renders the dancer’s face invisible the moment the possession takes place, would clearly be intentional—likely a visual trick introduced by the film editor. But we know—do we not?—that this is a nonfiction film we are viewing. There is no omniscient author, or god, behind the camera—just a man with a movie camera. It nonetheless appears to be no mere accident that the camera misses the moment the invisible spirit of Kuré enters the dancer’s body. Is this, then, Kuré’s doing—a declaration of the god’s more than human powers—his ability to move us and to hide himself, and thus to preserve his mystery and his



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power? In any case, this framing has the effect of deferring Kuré’s entrance, and enhancing the dramatic impact when—thanks to the dancer’s own movement and the camera’s—the dancer’s figure reappears in the frame and we see for ourselves the astonishing change in his countenance and demeanor. Once again Rouch’s voice falls silent, allowing the spectacle to cast its own spell on viewers. Kuré, now walking with a distinctive loping gait (I must confess that the way he swings his arms and crouches as he walks makes me think of Groucho Marx, not a hyena) strides over to the drummers and goads the musicians to play with even greater intensity. As the camera, approaching close, circles Kuré, we are at the same time accorded our first clear view of some of the children who have gathered to watch the dancing (and, no doubt, the filming). For the children, the appearance and behavior of this Frenchman who walks around with his face hidden behind a strange object made of metal and glass must be an intriguing spectacle, indeed. After showing his film to the people featured in it, Rouch became convinced that it was his act of filming that precipitated the possession trance of the dancer. He was moved to write “On the Vicissitudes of the Self: The Possessed Dancer, the Magician, The Sorcerer, the Filmmaker and the Ethnographer,” an essay that attempted to explain how it was possible for the camera’s presence to have this effect—not only on the dancer, but also on the invisible spirit Kuré. When the spell of the film wears off (does it, though?), we may well believe that this spirit is imaginary, not real, or even that the dancer was not really entranced at all but only acting. But then we still require an explanation of how a camera can be so much as imagined to be capable of provoking a god into manifesting himself in human form. What does this dancer believe Rouch’s camera to be that he understands its presence as capable of provoking him to fall into a trance, to abandon himself, and thereby enable, as he believes, an invisible spirit to possess his body? When filming The Drums of Yore, Rouch argues in “On the Vicissitudes of the Self,” he too fell into a trance—a “ciné-trance” comparable to the catalepsy that enabled the dancer to be possessed. “While shooting a ritual,” Rouch wrote some years later, the filmmaker “discovers a complex and spontaneous set-up.”9 To capture it, he only has to “record reality,” improvising his frames and movements. If, by chance, while shooting a . . . trance dance, I happen to accomplish such a performance, I can still remember the acute challenge of not wobbling, not missing focus nor exposure, in which case the whole sequence would have to be resumed, therefore be lost altogether. And when, tired out by such a tension, the soundman drops his microphone and I abandon my camera, we feel as if a tense crowd, musicians and even vulnerable gods who got hold of trembling dancers were all aware and stimulated by our venture.10

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Rouch’s growing commitment to the “one take/one sequence” method of filming, which reaches its apogee in The Drums of Yore, confirms that his artistic roots, like those of Griaule, are in surrealism. Shooting in a trance, and not revising or correcting the improvised footage in postproduction, makes Rouch’s filming a kind of surrealist automatic writing that frees the resulting work from what surrealism understands to be the repressive mechanisms of the filmmaker’s conscious mind, which would otherwise have been absorbed in having to tend to merely technical details. And Rouch’s narration, too, as we have noted is essentially improvised—a spontaneous response to his experience of viewing the film, as we are, even as it calls upon us to recognize that, unlike us, he is also reliving his experience of having been there at the time, filming everything we are viewing. As Rouch describes it, while filming The Drums of Yore he became so absorbed in pulling off his performance—namely, succeeding in getting the ritual on film—that he fell into his self-described “ciné-trance.” Walking into the village with the camera on his shoulder, he “dove into reality,” as he puts it in the film’s narration. At once “present and invisible,” he became other than the person he ordinarily was. He became the being that Paul Stoller, in his eloquent account of the film, calls “Rouch-the-camera.” Filming The Drums of Yore, Rouch-the-camera walked among the villagers gathered for the ceremony, and also among invisible spirits who recognized him as belonging to their realm (as well as to the realm of the visible). When the musicians, discouraged by the failure of the divinities to appear, Rouch-the-camera nonetheless drew closer to one of the dancers, and that dancer must have taken this gesture as a sign that Kuré—invisible to ordinary human beings, the dancer believed, but not to Rouch-the-camera—was at last approaching. According to Rouch’s essay, the Songhay believe that when a dancer is possessed he or she is approached by an invisible spirit carrying the skin of a freshly slaughtered animal. The spirit wraps the skin around the dancer’s head, and at the same time captures and protects the “self” of the dancer, who is now in a deep trance, thereby freeing the spirit to enter into the dancer’s body—to take possession of it. When the time comes to leave, the spirit lifts off the animal skin, liberating the displaced “self” of the dancer, who has no memory of being displaced by the spirit. In his essay, Rouch suggests that a “ciné-trance” is comparable to such a possession trance, but he does not flesh out this picture. In Documentary Film Classics, however, I sketched a way of doing so. The world viewed through the viewfinder of a movie camera, like the world projected on a movie screen, is a world of surfaces—the skin of the world. Thus when Rouch falls into a “ciné-trance,” his “self” can be captured, and protected, by quite literally by being wrapped in the skin of the world. In this state of ciné-trance, it is possible for the filmmaker’s “self” to become displaced, his body to be



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possessed—and for him to remember nothing of his displacement after he stops filming. Perhaps when shooting The Drums of Yore, Rouch did see the invisible spirit of Kuré in the viewfinder. If so, when he awakened from his trance, he had no memory of the encounter. When the dancer goes into his trance, he abandons his self, freeing his body to be possessed by Kuré’s alien consciousness or spirit. So what consciousness or spirit can we say possesses Rouch when he becomes Rouchthe-camera? A camera is, to be sure, only a machine; it has no consciousness or spirit. Then who or what possessed Rouch when, for example, he moved from the drummers to the dancer? He tells us, in his narration, that he sensed that something was about to happen. But who or what made him sense this? Who or what made him respond to this premonition by moving the camera the way he did? Then again, who or what is Rouch-the-camera? Perhaps a key to this query—and the questions it invites but does not answer—can be found in Stanley Cavell’s profound observation in The World Viewed that when we speak of the person (or object) that a photograph is of we do say in reference to the subject of that photograph; this attribution suggests both that (1) the subject is what the photograph is about, what the image studies, and—this is a further point he makes, in effect, in “What Becomes of Things on Film?”— that (2) the object of this study—the world as it appears in the viewfinder, the world as it appears on film—also participates actively in this study.11 In sum, the photograph’s “object” is also its subject. Thus when Rouch’s “self” becomes “wrapped in the skin of the world” and he enters into a ciné-trance, the visible world—the objective world of people and things, the world in which gods like Kuré are invisible—reveals itself to be a subject, reveals itself as a subject; in the visible, the invisible is revealed, reveals itself. The camera’s viewfinder becomes a kind of crystal ball in which the entranced filmmaker sees what to everyone else is invisible: the world as it is fated to appear on the movie screen. When Rouch enters a ciné-trance, then, he becomes possessed by the world framed by the viewfinder, a world in which the invisible reveals itself in the visible. In that world, Rouch himself is invisible. Thus for him to enter into a ciné-trance, his invisible self must be revealed, must reveal itself, in the visible; this means that, in the world framed by the viewfinder, hence in the world projected on the movie screen, Rouch’s self must be revealed, must reveal itself, in the visible. (Rouch reveals himself in the world on film the way dreamers reveal themselves in their dreams.) As The Drums of Yore nears its end, Daoudo Sorko, hoping to persuade Kuré to help the village with its crops, is busy haggling with the god, to whom he offers fresh meat. While this negotiation is going on, a second possession of a person takes place, this time in full view of the camera. “She is no

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longer a Samiri woman,” Rouch says. “She is Hadio, the captive Peule.” He adds, “School children have come to see how their parents and grandparents dance,” acknowledging the staring children who have become conspicuous in the background of this frame—no doubt, these children are staring in fascination at the camera’s movements as well as at the dancer-turned-god—and, as an audience to this coupling of performances, perhaps anticipating the scene’s conclusion. As Daouda Sorko is sprinkling “Haousa perfumes on the gods and the band,” Rouch, walking backwards, begins pulling away from the village square, retracing his steps to where the film began. “I should have gone on filming,” he says, “but I wanted to make a movie, to return to the start of my story, and I pulled back slowly to see what the schoolchildren saw: A small village square in the setting sun where, in a secret ceremony, men and gods spoke of coming harvests.” By the time Rouch finishes saying these words, the camera is back where it started. As it tilts up from the earth to the sky, the ten-minute film magazine runs out. The Drums of Yore ends by completing a circle, and thus symbolically bridges disparate the realms: earth and sky, bodies and spirits, mortals and gods, the visible and the invisible. Even as his camera looks up toward the heavens, Rouch’s closing words (“a small village square in the setting sun”) bring the entire scene down to earth and, at the same time, remind us of the mysteriousness of what we have witnessed (a “secret ceremony” in which “men and gods spoke of coming harvests”). He is being ironic, I take it. Can we really believe that he ultimately regretted performing this cinematic experiment? His purpose in making this film was not, or not primarily, to advance scientific knowledge; rather, he made this film as an artist—an artist committed to creating a work of cinematic poetry, a film with an aesthetically satisfying, and meaningful, shape or form. Rouch gives the resulting film the title The Drums of Yore: Tourou and Bitti and, as we have seen, speaks of it as a “document” of the ancient drums. But if the drums are the film’s subjects, what the film is about, what is it about the drums that it documents? As we have seen, the power of these “drums of yore” cannot be separated from the power of film itself, which The Drums of Yore also documents. If the film is about the drums, it is also about itself, about film, about the entrancing power of the world on film. What makes the film an experiment is not simply its unconventional form as a single tenminute sequence shot; it is an experiment also because it tests film’s power to bridge the worlds of the visible and the invisible, and its power to keep alive the voices of these ancient drums that, as Rouch’s narration hauntingly puts it, “are soon to be silenced forever.” I cannot help but believe, now that Jean Rouch is no more, that The Drums of Yore also tests the power of film to keep alive its author’s voice, to keep Rouch’s voice, too, from being silenced forever.



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The film’s ending invokes the point of view of children fascinated by the spectacle of a “secret ceremony” whose meaning escapes them. If one among them is driven to ask questions, there his initiation will begin. For in traditional African societies, “Knowledge is only transmitted to those who ask for it,” as Rouch puts it in his narration for Ambara Dama. By placing viewers in the position of these young children, Rouch is providing us with an opportunity to ask questions, too. Thanks to Rouch’s narration, we know things the children do not know about the way their grandparents dance. But what of the dance of Rouch-the-camera’s the “secret ceremony” that made it possible for The Drums of Yore to be created? Only by asking questions of the film, and attending to the film’s answers, can we be sure that its meaning does not escape us. NOTES 1. Peter Wollen, Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (New York: Verso, 2002), 100. 2. William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 101. 3. Marcel Griaule, Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1971), 8. 4. Paul Stoller, The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 100–104. 5. Stanley Cavell, “The Good of Film,” in William Rothman, ed., Cavell on Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 335. 6. All my quotes from The Drums of Yore make use of the English subtitles incorporated in the VHS copy provided to me by Mme. Françoise Foucault, Rouch’s longtime associate, of the Comité du Film Ethnographique. 7. Rothman, Documentary Film Classics, 96. 8. For the opportunity to participate in three of Rouch’s incomparable summer seminars on his work, I am profoundly indebted to Kitty Morgan, who organized the seminars three successive years at Tufts, Hampshire College, and Harvard. On the subject of Rouch and his films, I have learned most of what I know from conversations with Kitty. 9. Jean Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 8. 10. Rouch, Ciné-Ethnography, 8. 11. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge and London: Harvard University Press, 1979), 28; “What Becomes of Things on Film?” in Cavell on Film, 1–10.

Chapter 9

The Ecstasy of Time Travel in Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams William Day

In Stanley Cavell’s extensive oeuvre on films and film theory, very little is said about the documentary. Cavell’s writings address mostly classical Hollywood cinema of the 1930s and 1940s, though there are also remarks ranging from single sentences to full-fledged readings of films stretching across the cinematic canon from the beginning to the end of the last century. But the absence of explicit writings by Cavell on nonfiction film (with one or two exceptions) turns out not to matter much for the present discussion on the documentary as considered through Cavell’s writings. This is because, on his view, to weigh the meaning of “documentary film” is perhaps already to be weighing one word too many: “every movie has a documentary basis,” as he says in remarking on the use of documentary footage in Dušan Makavejev’s Sweet Movie (1974).1 Cavell underscores this documentary basis by reminding us of “the camera’s ineluctable interrogation of the natural endowment of the actors.” But one can add more generally that film, whose material basis Cavell identifies as “a succession of automatic world projections,”2 carries out its magic by reproducing the world automatically, and so invariably documents (some part of) the world and its inhabitants. I speak here only of films that are made in this way, and will not be considering alternative means of creating moving images—neither those means that date from early in movie history (such as animation) nor more recent alternative techniques (such as CGI). Thus I begin with the thought that one can characterize, if not define, documentary film as that genre of filmmaking that lays bare the fact of all film. Cavell names this fact by saying that film presents “a world I know, and see, but to which I am nevertheless not present,” that is, “a world past.”3 While Cavell’s claim is not meant to be taken at face value, as we will see shortly, 209

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the idea that the world we find in the movie theater is inevitably past already suggests why it is that the documentary, and film generally, seems to revel in the fragility of the momentary, in the intimation of a secret contained in the unrehearsed, the spontaneous, the aleatory. Watching a film with interest often means joining in the camera’s delight in the chance happening, the “blink and you miss it” passing event. It is as if we take the measure of our lives from such transitory moments; they reveal our fate. But what is it to “know, and see, . . . a world past”? What is our fascination with the cinematic world, whose “only difference from reality” is that it “does not exist (now)”?4 Why be interested in reality only insofar as it is past? We might try to answer these questions by saying that our real interest in film lies in preserving a world past. That is no doubt part of the motivation behind certain archival uses of moving pictures—the ethnographic study, for example, or the home movie or iPhone video. If we say that film “preserves” a world past, we tie our interest in film—or, perhaps better: our interest in film’s metaphysical basis—to our interest in artifacts like fossil records, mummies, death masks, relics, perhaps even DNA coding. André Bazin famously draws on such analogies to specify the nature of film’s realism, which he describes as “the preservation of life by a representation of life.”5 If one were to take one’s cue from this collection of analogies, then the interest of film, and a fortiori of the documentary, would be that it preserves aspects of the world for future contemplation or understanding, so as not to lose those aspects of the world to the ravages of time. But while film may carry artifactual interest, the interest of artifacts is not everywhere preservationist. Consider Robert Gardner’s documentary Forest of Bliss (1986) and its presentation of a ritual cremation in India. When Cavell, writing about this film, proposes cremation as one of this film’s many allegories of the camera’s life, he sees in it not a ritual of preservation but, in his words, “a ritual figured as transfiguration itself.” The lesson Cavell draws from this implication of Gardner’s Forest of Bliss is that “film is the medium of transfiguration . . . blessed or cursed with the fate, in the same gestures, to destroy and recreate everything it touches.”6 In “More of The World Viewed,” Cavell is at pains to explain the nature of this transfigurative power of film; his struggle there is to avoid the misunderstanding that the significance of the filmed world is its mere pastness. The experience of watching a movie on a screen in an otherwise dark room is for Cavell not an experience of the world preserved so much as that of the world raised or transfigured (and not by being raised into the realm of fiction): My intuition is that fictionality does not describe the narrative or dramatic mode of film. . . . I think the mode is more closely bound to the mythological than it is to the fictional. . . .



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When I say that the audience in a movie house is present at something that has happened, I do not wish to imply that the events on the screen have taken place, as it were, in real life, nor that they are inevitably set in the past . . .: How can one be present at something that has happened, that is over? . . . To speak of being present at something that is over is not to state a falsehood but, at best, to utter a paradox. . . . My repeated emphasis on such notions as the projected world’s not existing . . . are meant to correct, or explain (of course, mythologically to correct or explain), what is wrong and what is right in the idea of the pastness of the projected world. I relate that idea most immediately to my passiveness before the exhibition of the world, to the fascination, the uncanniness, in this chance to view the manifestation of the world as a whole.7

My aim in this chapter is to follow this collection of thoughts evoking the “paradox” in the experience of film generally—the paradox, namely, that it is an experience of being present at something that has happened, something that is over. But I will not be taking the path forged by Cavell’s idea that “film is a moving image of skepticism.”8 I have no doubt of the importance of that claim for identifying a motivation behind our fascination with reality projected and screened. By saying that I will offer a different path, I do not mean that the sense of otherworldliness and uncanniness that skepticism trades in will be left very far behind. But I note that Cavell’s words—his description of a paradox inherent in the experience of film—play on the sound of a paradox that, in the most straightforward sense, is a paradox not of skepticism but of time. It is true that when we speak of being present at something that is over—when we speak of being in the grip of a movie—the paradox this expresses is not captured by the traditional philosophical paradoxes of time dating back to Zeno and unraveled by Aristotle, Augustine, and others. The cinematic paradox arises not so much in our ways of talking about time as in our experience of it. And it is as experience that the cinematic paradox leads me to ask whether we would be better off, as film theorists, if we drew the comparison between film and artifacts the other way around. Instead of understanding film’s peculiar transfigurations by analogy to practices of preserving the past—cremation, mummification, and so on—what might we learn if we tried to understand our interest in fossils records or mummies or DNA coding by analogy to our interest in film, or to our fascination with being present to “a world past” given to us in film? In the next section I examine three pre-cinematic descriptions of relations to time—in Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil—that anticipate the paradox of time inherent in film. What we learn from that examination will be put to use in the subsequent and final section, where the achievement of Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams, ostensibly a film about prehistoric cave paintings, will be seen to lie not in its documentation of a time past but in its liberation of the present, locked-in-place moment.

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THE ECSTASY OF TIME TRAVEL The textual passages we will be considering in this section are not explicitly about the peculiar paradox of time that arises in our experience of film. But they nonetheless describe similar experiences of time, or attitudes one might take toward time, that parallel our experience of cinematic time. They thereby cast light on the cinematic experience of a world past, revealing it as the experience of a particular kind of wonder—what I will want to call philosophic wonder. The first textual passage is taken from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “History,” the opening essay in his 1840 collection Essays: First Series. As in virtually every essay written by Emerson, in this one he attempts to alter or reroute our unexamined relation to our own experience. Emerson’s topic in “History” is the experience we have in considering and reflecting on the past, specifically on the historical and prehistorical past—the past as we come to it preserved in books, in artifacts, in bones, in rocks. We are prone to think that in such physical forms the past is preserved simply, without cinematic or other paradoxes of time, since we and the record we examine are simply present to one another. I hold the book, I examine the geological outcrop, and my effort appears to be to understand, not something about the present that I and the record occupy, but something about the past. My wish is to go there: the distance between present and past is the barrier to the past; that distance must be overcome. Yet it is precisely this understanding of “the past” that Emerson calls “wild, savage, and preposterous.” To correct it, he draws our attention to the character of the time we experience when we are reflecting on the past (a time he designates “the Here and the Now”). He begins his recalibration of the meaning of the past by considering the archaeologist at work in the field: [Giovanni] Belzoni digs and measures in the mummy-pits and pyramids of Thebes, until he can see the end of the difference between the monstrous work and himself. When he has satisfied himself, in general and in detail, that it was made by such a person as he, so armed and so motived, and to ends to which he himself should also have worked, the problem is solved; his thought lives along the whole line of temples and sphinxes and catacombs, passes through them all with satisfaction, and they live again to the mind, or are now.9

Studying the past—contemplating the people who lived then—is not an experience of time travel as ordinarily imagined (e.g., my leaving “the Here and the Now” to go back to “There and Then”), but rather an experience of doubleness, of two registers of time. Our imagining of the past has significance not as a singularity but as a comparative: it involves experiencing this



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moment transfigured in the wake of that (the past). The people who populate the past, as marked by their books or bones, are present to us in our way of conceiving their ways of being in the world. We do not travel back to them; they travel ahead to us. Our experience of this moment of identification and insight—“they live again in the mind, or are now”—is what gives “preserving the past” whatever sense it has if it is not to mean a shelving of the past, a way of putting the past in its place as “what was.” In “The American Scholar,” Emerson provides us with a related account of the transformation that happens as we consider and reflect on our own, personal past. Here is Emerson’s description of the process whereby our past actions become our present thought: The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent actions,—with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. . . . The new deed is yet a part of life,—remains for a time immersed in our unconscious life. In some contemplative hour it detaches itself from the life like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised, transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood.10

Where the Empiricists describe the work of memory as a mere copying of original and more vivid sensory experiences, Emerson reverses their claim. To bring the past into the present by remembering it is not a diminishment of the original experience, a second-best. Rather, for Emerson, contemplating the past is a way of taking it in, or on, that the original experience in its liveliness could not (logically or grammatically) provide. Something like this transfigurative power of ruminative thought is known by many names across the mottled history of philosophy: as Plato’s doctrine of recollection or anamnesis; for Hegel, as the achievement of Weltgeist in coming to know itself; for Freud, as the basis and presumption of the psychoanalytic method. But we should not allow the interjection of influential names and theories to distract us from Emerson’s singular image, that what we are now doing will “put on incorruption” in becoming thought. His idea is not that thoughts are incorruptible; the nature of a thought is that it passes (“a passing thought”). His idea is that contemplating the past—say, thinking back to the moment we first read Emerson’s very words, “the business” we then had literally “in hand”—is an experience that is neither in the time of the past deed nor locked in the present moment of the recollection, but sits bestride the two. On this account, to reflect on one’s own past is to be lifted out of time altogether, into the realm of the incorruptible.

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What a moment ago I characterized as an experience of doubleness—the human ability to infuse the present moment with the vitality of another moment so that they marry in an instant, somewhere beyond our ordinary, one-dimensional sense of time—is not far from the mood of a paragraph in Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, in the middle of his chapter titled “Solitude.” It reads: With thinking we may be beside ourselves in a sane sense. By a conscious effort of the mind we can stand aloof from actions and their consequences. . . . I only know myself as a human entity; the scene, so to speak, of thoughts and affections; and am sensible of a certain doubleness by which I can stand as remote from myself as from another. However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you.11

If we take our cue from Cavell and read this remark as answering to a threat of skepticism—specifically, to the skeptic’s doubting the possibility of human action per se—then what this double or spectator shows us is, according to Cavell, “a mode of what [Thoreau] calls ‘being interested in.’”12 Beyond your self, caught in the midst of your experience, Thoreau reminds you of the possibility of a spectator-self “beside” you, “taking note of” the experience like a spectator at a play. What you achieve by this conscious act of doubling yourself is a kind of unselfconscious self-awareness—your right, in Cavell’s phrase, “to take an interest in your own experience.”13 Cavell asserts that Walden sometimes calls this spectatorial double “the imagination,” thereby casting this spectator in the role of specter.14 But that may be a too hasty reading on Cavell’s part, given the ambiguity in Thoreau’s further description of this mindful achievement. In Walden, Thoreau continues: “When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”15 Thoreau seems to be saying that it is my life that is imagined from the point of view of this dispassionate spectator-self. Then who is doing the imagining, and who is being imagined? Perhaps the sense is: when through a conscious effort you consider yourself from a remote standpoint, what you are considering is a shadow play of yourself: something that, like a shadow, is objective and perceivable but also insubstantial and ephemeral. That is one reading. But I understand Thoreau to be saying something else, and something not distant from Emerson’s earlier thought. When one is simply in time, taking experience as it comes, animal-like, one is as yet unrealized, and so “a kind of fiction.” In the competition for my attention—that is, between my absorption or subsumption in the scenes of my life and my finding interest in those scenes as spectator—the more necessary, the more



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helpful and neighborly, standpoint is the reflective one, in which I stand next to time but not in it. Such a description fits the predominant mood of Thoreau’s “Solitude,” in which society is not to be found in “the depot, the post-office, the barroom, the meeting-house”—in the “outlying and transient circumstances” of a life as it is lived.16 To see these as “essential to a serene and healthy life” is to suffer what Thoreau calls “a slight insanity.”17 The reflective or doubling standpoint, contrariwise, where one is beside oneself sanely, will find its society in what Thoreau calls “the perennial source of our life”; and the prospect of awakening to life, he says, “makes indifferent all times and places.”18 It follows that to consider one’s existence from the standpoint that Thoreau characterized as being next to oneself, “where the grandest laws are continually being executed,” is to neighbor time as well.19 Thoreau is, one could say, giving the phenomenological evidence for a noumenal perspective on our intuition of time, and on our lives, suggesting that our timebound perspective is unexamined, perhaps imagined, and certainly partial. A third and final description of the doubling of time is sketched in Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace, particularly in the brief and remarkable chapter “Renunciation of Time.” Despite the title of the chapter (which is not hers), Weil asks not that one renounce all of time but something just short of all. One is urged to renounce past and future: to abandon, more specifically, the self-deception of imagining time as a place and a possibility different from what the present can promise. The past and future of the imagination are shades or blinds to one’s sensing reality: “The imagination, filler up of the void,” she writes, “is essentially a liar.”20 For Weil, there is a ready cure for the habitual imagining of a better time past or to come, and that is to suffer with an intensity that can wipe out all thoughts of past or future compensation. Such intense suffering also, against all expectation, allows one to straddle the door that opens onto eternity: The past and the future hinder the wholesome effect of affliction by providing an unlimited field for imaginary elevation. That is why the renunciation of past and future is the first of all renunciations. The present does not attain finality. Nor does the future, for it is only what will be present. We do not know this, however. If we apply to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality, it pierces right through to the eternal. When pain and weariness reach the point of causing a sense of perpetuity to be born in the soul, through contemplating this perpetuity with acceptance and love, we are snatched away into eternity.21

Weil describes an experience of time—clearly not an experience sought by all—in contrast to which, again, the thought of traveling out of the present moment’s pain and into some future eternity, a compensating immortality, is

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revealed as delusional. The sense of the eternal is not to be experienced in the future, or ever, if it is not discoverable through the dawning of an aspect of the present. The aim of Weil’s devotional life is not to suffer for the sake of suffering. Rather, intense suffering allows the present moment to reveal to one’s experience what the reality of the eternal waits upon: achieving the perspective of eternity requires simply that I renounce the thought that there is some (other) time when I will gain it. Weil’s “renunciation of time” can seem at odds with the attitude towards time that makes renunciation so much as possible—I mean the aspiration to abandon one’s past and to change, the commitment to one’s better or higher self, what Emerson at one place names one’s “unattained but attainable self.”22 Being inspired by a vision of a different future self is at least half of the motivation in Cavell’s narrative of moral perfectionism.23 That vision of another self for one’s self serves to balance the other, initiating half of that mood—the otherwise overwhelming sense of disappointment or disgust in one’s present self. In Cities of Words, Cavell highlights the aspirational half of the movement to a next self when he says, “what [moral] perfectionism proposes [is] that no state of the self achieves its full expression, that the fate of finitude is to want, that human desire projects an idea of an unending beyond.”24 But that is, again, but half of the realization that can set the soul in motion. Elsewhere Cavell joins Weil by bringing into view the clarity of thought that the present instant presents: “Each state of the self is, so to speak, final: each state constitutes a world (a circle, Emerson says) and it is one each one also desires. . . . On such a picture of the self one could say both that significance is always deferred and equally that it is never deferred (there is no later circle until it is drawn).”25 Taken together, these two passages from Cavell suggest that an ideal, or at least a helpful, conception of the Hereand-Now is that one is receptive both to one’s attained self (its expression of one’s self) and to one’s unattained self (or how one’s present self always falls short of expressing itself). The moral is that if you claim the right “to take an interest in your own experience,” then when you are absorbed in your present experience (whether it afflicts you, as in Weil, or disgusts you, as in Nietzsche,26 or enraptures you, as can happen in the cinema), you are to give up the idea that the redemption of your present (self) lies elsewhere, at some other time. In each of the foregoing texts by Emerson, Thoreau, and Weil, we are given cause to distrust our ordinary understanding of the past. Emerson, for example, undermines our sense that the past harbors knowledge of itself that is both ideal and metaphysically inaccessible to us. We are given cause as well to distrust our sense of the present as fixed deterministically between past and future; Thoreau, for instance, undermines our sense that we are creatures inevitably or chronically situated in the unstoppable, silent slippage



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of time. And we are given cause to distrust our reverence for the past and the future; Weil, for example, undermines our sense of fear over the present, as if it waits to ensnare us, so that we think the better alternative would be to escape it by means of the imagination. Taken together, these texts remind us of our cognitive possibility to consider ourselves, or transport ourselves, outside of time. They thereby illuminate how the popular fantasy of time travel (our wish to “travel through” time) not only misses in what way traveling through time is our ordinary mode of life (what we otherwise call “living”) but amounts to a wish to kill time, or to abort the present. It is one of countless fantasies that humans devise to avoid the pregnancy of time itself—fantasies that allow us to overlook the possibilities, beyond science fiction, of occupying two times at once. Each of these writers (and the tradition they exemplify, stretching back to Plato) reconceives the human desire to step out of time. They accomplish this by revealing and nurturing through language an interest in experiencing facets of the present moment that differ from the ordinary, immersed, unreflective sense of time. HERZOG’S CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS If, as I claim above, these descriptions of experiencing facets of the present moment are literary precursors or equivalents to the experience of “a world past” in film, then a part of our fascination with that world involves its power to place us outside our ordinary, immersed, unreflective relation to time. (I think of this claim, arising from the “paradox” in the experience of film, not as competing with but as standing alongside Cavell’s discovery that film is “a moving image of skepticism,” by which he means that film satisfies our interest to view the world in private and unseen, mechanically displaced from it.27) I do not mean to say that the experience of film automatically displaces us from our ordinary relation to time. It is a metaphysical fact that, when we watch a movie, we are present at something that has happened; but a given filmmaker may choose to bring out (draw on or exploit) this fact, or not. In the light of the previous section’s discoveries about literary antecedents to the way cinema displaces time, we might conclude that an escapist movie—if there is such a kind of movie—is not exploiting this metaphysical fact at the heart of film. What the texts examined above promise is not, as with escapist movies, a way to escape the present—to live in the imagination in another time, whether past or future—but a way to escape time, or say a certain fatalist view of the present, by inviting us to give ourselves over to other possibilities inherent in the present. We can think of these other possibilities collectively as mythological relations to time; and we will find, in considering Werner Herzog’s 2010 documentary feature Cave of Forgotten

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Dreams, that creating the conditions for placing or displacing the viewer in a mythological relation to time is a natural possibility for the medium of film. It is because the medium of film presents this possibility that the documentary nature of film can be understood not as a means of preservation but as a medium of transfiguration. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, perhaps best known for its use of 3D technology to film prehistoric cave paintings found in 1994 in Chauvet Cave, in the Gorges de l’Ardèche region of southern France, seems to pose the question: What are we to do with a vision of our collective ancestors that is somehow both indubitable and unfathomable, evidence of the kind of fact that makes time itself spin? The cave paintings, as revealed by radiocarbon dating, were created as far back as 32,000 years ago. Painted on undulating cave walls, they register with us immediately for their striking verisimilitude, their depictions of mostly large (and for us, often extinct) animal species. But these paintings insist as well that we take up not only their beauty of depiction but the humanly or creaturely life that surrounded them and brought them to life. How might we do that? One answer—let us label it the scientific answer—is represented in the film by the charming circus-performer-turnedarchaeologist, Julien Monney, who, prompted off-camera by Herzog, says: “Definitely, we will never know [their thoughts and dreams], because [the] past is definitely lost. We will never reconstruct the past. We can only create a representation of what exists now, today.”28 Herzog’s film seems attracted at first to this humble assessment of the archaeologist’s project of building a bridge to the past; shortly after Monney’s remarks, Herzog as narrator asks, “Will we ever be able to understand the vision of the artists across such an abyss of time?”29 But roughly an hour into the film, about the time we meet the mildly eccentric professional perfumer, Maurice Marin, the narrative changes. We see Marin, in the cave, conclude a lengthy speech by saying (and it may be, as in any Herzog documentary, that the author of these words is not the speaker but Herzog): “The presence of their lives, meaning burnt wood, resins, the odors of everything from the natural world that surrounds this cave—we can go back with our imagination.” Herzog in voice-over then endorses and supplements the thought these words express: “With his sense of wonder, the cave transforms into an enchanted world of the imaginary where time and space lose their meaning.”30 This thought becomes the film’s touchstone in its response to the fact of the Chauvet Cave paintings. The scientific perspective is embraced throughout the film not despite but because of its conclusions, which are inconclusive31; the perspective from wonder—it matters little whether we label it philosophic or cinematic wonder—is at once the film’s perspective and its goal. We see the inside of Chauvet Cave intermittently during the first twentythree minutes of Herzog’s film. One memorable stretch of footage, lasting



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almost four minutes, is inaugurated when Jean Clottes, the former director of research at Chauvet Cave, asks for silence from the scientists and crew so that they might listen to the cave interior. While they (and we) are taking in the silence that is broken only by the sound of water dripping, the sound track gives way to a human heartbeat.32 As is not uncommon for the healthy human heart, it beats in sync with each passing second one by one, one for one; it measures the steady passage of time that we share with the living human figures on the screen before us, despite our metaphysical distance from them. We see their attentive looking and listening as we listen and look ourselves. The heartbeat also stands in for exactly how much, or how little, we have in common with those who stood and listened in that same cave some 32,000 years earlier. The human faces we see are posing a question to the walls of the cave; the film is offering us the experience of a mystery. But the heartbeat can feel foisted on us. Perhaps it is simply too early in the film for the sense of the uncanny, for the enchanted world of the imaginary, to take hold. If the heartbeat—as an emblem of both the passing seconds and the distant millennia—comes too soon, then what about its reappearance near the end of Cave of Forgotten Dreams? In the intervening time, we have seen and heard multiple interviews, learned about the biomass in Paleolithic Europe, been shown figurine specimens and ancient flutes, witnessed a demonstration of Paleolithic hunting techniques, and been guided through multiple tours of the cave. But now there follows a singular stretch of time—lasting over seven minutes—when Herzog halts his narration and parade of experts, and we hear only the film’s ethereal musical score and, at one point when the music fades out, the return of the human heartbeat. What we see on screen is a sequence of handheld shots, either still or slowly panning shots, of the interior of Chauvet Cave. These shots return us to the same static, and now familiar, prehistoric cave images that were introduced at earlier intervals in the film. Almost invariably, each shot opens with an in situ fade-in, beginning in darkness as the handheld LED light-panels are turned slowly toward the cave wall being filmed, as if each painted surface is granted its own dawning, or allowed to pose its own riddle. The movement of the light panels provides the only animation, other than the camera’s occasional panning and (as it seems) its patient absorption.33 Given the quickening pace and increased optical change in popular films of recent decades,34 Herzog’s film is burdened at once with recognizing and fending off the threat that audiences will laugh, or yawn, at the luxurious time devoted to these all-but-still shots of cave paintings. But laughter and its originating anxiety are familiar responses to the ruminations of philosophy as well. How is it so much as possible that such images hold our interest? And why, speaking for myself at least, do these mostly static images satisfy

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a longing that Cave of Forgotten Dreams itself creates in us—an effect not unrelated to the thumping, throbbing climax of an action movie? My sense is that Herzog constructs this concluding segment of Cave of Forgotten Dreams to be experienced (if not as what he would call an “ecstatic truth,” then) as an interval of ecstatic contemplation.35 There is something about the contemplation of the expansiveness of time and of our place in it, occasioned by roughly every other shot in Herzog’s film, that can strike the viewer as revealing the incongruousness and absurdity of human existence itself. A moment’s consideration of the hard facts—for instance, that my father’s life, just short of ninety-seven years, would be scarcely visible at the end of a three-meter timeline representing the years from Chauvet Cave to his death, an interval of time itself dwarfed by the billions of years that modern cosmology places on either side of that interval —and we see why a filmgoer’s nervous response to this mismatch of scale might be to laugh the absurdity away. And yet Herzog’s film, over the course of its preceding seventy-five minutes, has provided all the materials we need to experience a response other than nervous laughter. Like Freemasons prepared for initiation, we arrive at the end of the film wellequipped to meditate on mysteries. If the specific narrative aim of Cave of Forgotten Dreams is to place us outside our ordinary, immersed, unreflective relation to time—to set up the conditions for imagining ourselves straddling time so as to contemplate other possibilities of our relation to it or placement in it—it is also the concern of the film to acknowledge this aspiration for the medium of film generally. One way to begin measuring the truth of this claim is to observe Herzog’s fascination with the cinematic possibilities of the cave paintings and the form of life that once surrounded them. He asks us to “note” that one of the cave artists painted a bison with eight legs, “suggesting movement—almost a form of proto-cinema”; and a rhino nearby “seems also to have the illusion of movement, like frames in an animated film.”36 Herzog appears most delighted with speculation about what the evidence of a row of fires in Chauvet Cave tells us about the aboriginal experience of the cave and its paintings. As he explains in an interview: And when you look at the cave, and there are certain panels, there’s evidence of some fires on the ground. They were not for cooking. They were—because there’s no evidence of any habitation in there—they were used for illumination. You have to step in front of these fires to look at the images. And, of course, when you move you must see your own shadow.37

When these speculations are introduced in Herzog’s film they immediately give way to the most extraordinary and delightfully incongruous sequence in the documentary: we are shown the image of Fred Astaire dancing with three



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of his shadows, a scene from the 1936 musical comedy Swing Time. This dance sequence, Astaire’s tribute to the African-American dancer known as Bojangles (Bill Robinson) and performed by Astaire in muted black face, is often remembered by film critics (e.g., in Roger Ebert’s 1998 review article)38 for the way it ends. The three shadow dancers eventually become exhausted and break out of sync with Astaire, unable to keep up with him, and Astaire dances a kind of victory lap by himself before he walks off coolly and triumphantly; we are not shown that conclusion in Herzog’s excerpt of the sequence. The conclusion of this dance sequence in Swing Time, however, is so memorable that critics typically misremember who breaks out of sync with whom first, thinking that the shadows are the first to stop, to exhaust the impulse to dance. But Herzog’s film gives us exactly that portion of the sequence where things first break down, which he describes with both precision and admiration in the interview quoted earlier: “It is actually, arguably or for me, certainly the greatest single sequence in all of film history: Fred Astaire dancing with his own shadows, and all of a sudden he stops and the shadows become independent and dance without him and he has to catch up with them. I mean it’s just so quintessential movie. It can’t be, it can’t get more beautiful.”39 Describing this Fred Astaire sequence as “certainly the greatest single sequence in all of film history” is, arguably or for me, something more than mere Herzogian hyperbole. Cavell, in “Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise,” reminds us that “the origin of dancing” is “in ecstasy.”40 And in “Something Out of the Ordinary” he characterizes film as “the art which replaces living human beings by photographic shadows of themselves.”41 A shadow is not typically a shadow of something past—unlike a mummy, a death mask, or a shroud, metaphors with which, as noted at the outset, André Bazin described film’s lineage in realism. The dancing shadows sequence from Swing Time as recounted and as borrowed by Herzog earns his high praise in part by serving as an emblem of what becomes of things on film. To put it minimally, things on film have an existence not just independent of but extending in time beyond the time of the things filmed. Fred Astaire stops, but his shadows dance on, and rapturously: they know that the dance now belongs to them. And it matters that when Astaire stops, he is turned toward us (i.e., toward our screen and away from his), and so is unaware that the shadows continue on without him.42 The sequence is thus no less an emblem of what becomes of things filmed: Fred Astaire is dead, long live his shadows. So would it be simpler, as you might think, to read Herzog’s inclusion of the sequence from Swing Time, and the significance of Cave of Forgotten Dreams generally, as a straightforward meditation on human or creaturely mortality and the (or Herzog’s) wish to defeat it? Why do I describe Herzog’s

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film as offering viewers the possibility of escaping a fatalist view not of the future but of the present? I conclude with two sorts of answer: (1)  Everyone, as I imagine, and as I imagine Herzog imagines, can feel the incongruity in the film’s juxtaposition of a discussion of Paleolithic humans casting their shadows on the images of Chauvet Cave with the image of shadows dancing in sync with Fred Astaire. One might suppose, however, that the incongruity lies in the incongruity of the times juxtaposed—time periods that, as it were, lie in opposite regions of one’s consciousness. It helps in that case to be reminded that the two times or epochs that are juxtaposed in Herzog’s sequence are not 32,000 years ago and the year 1936. This is because (a) there is not some event of 32,000 years ago that the comparison to the sequence from Swing Time is asking us to acknowledge, and because (b) Fred Astaire’s dancing with his shadows is not an event of the year 1936. Rather, each is a film event—that is, an episode whose relation to us is captured by nothing more nor less than its tense, an event indeterminately or mythically in the past. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, notwithstanding The History Channel’s role in its production, is not an attempt to document a time or a people of the determinate past. The film offers, rather, one set of conditions for the possibility of an experience, what I have been calling (following Emerson and Thoreau) an experience of doubleness and (following Cavell) a mythological relation to time. (2)  A final explanation for why one should read Cave of Forgotten Dreams as inviting, not an escape from the present, but an escape from our ordinary or fatalist view of it, can be gleaned from Herzog’s title. We are not told over the course of the film who is dreaming in the cave or, consequently, whose dreams have been forgotten. But we can ask the director of Fitzcarraldo. At the end of Herzog’s turn-of-the-millennium commentary to the DVD rerelease of Fitzcarraldo (1982), a film possibly best remembered for the demands of the film shoot (which included the pulling of an actual ship over a mountain—neither a model ship nor one created by animation or CGI), Herzog is asked whether he regrets the time and pain that the film exacted. While his answer is unsurprising—it is, in a word, No—Herzog recounts his telling others at the time, “If I abandon this I would be a man without dreams. And I just do not want to live as someone who has dropped and disconnected from his own dreams.”43 As the human heartbeat fades from the sound track in Cave of Forgotten Dreams, we hear the narrator intone, “These images are memories of long-forgotten dreams. Is this their heartbeat, or ours?”44 We are invited to consider that the dreams that have been forgotten are not those that were dreamt in the Paleolithic past; and we are welcome to conclude that the dark but illuminated cave that contains forgotten dreams is not somewhere in southern France but surrounds us like a movie theater—is, in fact, a movie theater—that awaits, in Weil’s lovely phrase, our applying to the present the point of that desire within us which corresponds to finality.



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NOTES 1. Stanley Cavell, “On Makavejev on Bergman,” in Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 116; emphasis added. 2. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enl. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 72. 3. Cavell, The World Viewed, 23. 4. Ibid., 24. 5. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly 13, no. 4 (Summer 1960), 5. 6. Stanley Cavell, “Words of Welcome,” Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005), 219. 7. Cavell, The World Viewed, 210–12. 8. Ibid., 188. 9. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “History,” in Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983), 241. 10. Emerson, “The American Scholar,” in Essays and Lectures, 60–61. 11. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, collected in The Portable Thoreau, revised edition, ed. Carl Bode (New York: Penguin, 1977), 385–86. 12. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981), 102. 13. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 12. 14. Cavell, The Senses of Walden, 103. 15. Thoreau, Walden, in The Portable Thoreau, 386. 16. Ibid., 384–85. 17. Ibid., 382–83. 18. Ibid., 384–85. 19. Ibid., 385. 20. Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 16. 21. Weil, Gravity and Grace, 19–21. 22. Emerson, “History,” in Essays and Lectures, 239. 23. See “Introduction: Staying the Course,” in Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 1–32. 24. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 311. 25. Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome, 3. 26. Friedrich Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator,” Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 125–94; see especially 157–58. 27. Cavell, The World Viewed, 40–41, 188, 213. 28. Cave of Forgotten Dreams (New York: Creative Differences Productions, 2010), 00:17:00.

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29. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 00:22:26. 30. Ibid., 00:58:43. 31. Jean Clottes proposes or admits near the end of the film: “Homo sapiens—the man who knows. I don’t think it’s a good definition at all. We don’t know; we don’t know much. I would think Homo spiritulis.” Ibid., 01:09:19. 32. Is this the same human heartbeat that opens Herzog’s 1979 remake of Nosferatu? There the heartbeat accompanies shots of mummified bodies, initially children’s faces. Next to the rock walls, the mummies have the look of a bas-relief, or a 3D cave painting. 33. Peter Zeitlinger, Herzog’s longtime cinematographer, is perhaps more properly credited for the patience. 34. See James E. Cutting, et al., “Quicker, Faster, Darker: Changes in Hollywood Film over 75 Years,” i-Perception 2, no. 6 (2011), 569–76, (nih.gov). 35. See Werner Herzog, “The Minnesota Declaration,” reprinted in Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary according to Werner Herzog, Visible Evidence 27 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), ix–x, and in the present volume, 379–80. See also David LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014), 437–82. 36. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 00:14:04. 37. Fresh Air interview with Werner Herzog, April 20, 2011, 24:41 (npr.org). 38. Ebert, review of Swing Time, February 15, 1998 (rogerebert.com). 39. Fresh Air interview with Werner Herzog, April 20, 2011, 24:11; emphasis added. 40. Stanley Cavell, “Fred Astaire Asserts the Right to Praise,” in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005), 78; emphasis added. 41. Cavell, “Something Out of the Ordinary,” in Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow, 15. 42. You may feel it is prejudicial for me to say that Astaire (and not his shadows) breaks out of sync: does not such a description depend on what the choreography prescribed, and who, or which, forgot it? But I assume we know that all of them—Astaire and his shadows—dance exactly what the choreography prescribes. That is why the moment is funny rather than tragic, and why we are shown Astaire suddenly realizing that he must catch up: the dance is going on without him. 43. Werner Herzog, commentary to the DVD Fitzcarraldo (Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay, 2002), 02:35:25. 44. Cave of Forgotten Dreams, 00:22:14.

Chapter 10

Habitats of Documentary Landscapes, Color Fields, and Ecologies in the Avant-Docs of Vincent Grenier Claudia Pederson and Patricia R. Zimmermann HABITATS OF PARADOX Documentary proposes an engagement with what Bill Nichols calls “the historical world,” a term that avoids the more popular culture conflation of documentary practice with some objective, empiricist notion of “the real.” For Nichols, documentary constitutes a rhetorical form, where the structures of argument function more saliently than structures of narrative.1 Another strain of documentary theory, for example, in the work of scholars such as Brian Winston, David MacDougall, Michael Renov, and Alexandra Juhasz, concentrates on the representation and participation of subjects, asking questions about advocacy, ethics, encounters, victims, agency, impact.2 An undeveloped area of documentary theorization resides in the question of representation of habitats and landscapes, the background in which these subjects speak and act, the nonhuman environment of spaces and places, landscapes, color fields, ecologies. As Nichols has noted, the documentary triangle features the subject of the film, the filmmaker, and the spectator. Documentary filmmakers work through different vectors on this triangle, privileging each of these nodes differently depending on context.3 This triangle of relationships provides a useful grid in which to think through how experimental works engaging documentary content subvert these structures. These shifts elicit a metacommunicative meditation on the image as a habitat for intellectual contemplation and slow immersion outside logocentric domains. They also reject the idealizations of the poetic sublime, a trope of landscape painting, and the romanticisms of personal filmmaking, where vision emanates from the self. Scott MacDonald has identified a salient form of practice that he has termed the “avant-doc,” a confluence that merges documentary’s interest in “real phenomena” with the avant-garde’s preoccupation 225

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with exploring new topics and new forms of representation interested in texture, form, and abstraction. MacDonald argues that historical intersections between documentary and avant-garde form the originary moment of cinema in the works of Eadweard Muybridge, Étienne-Jules Marey, Louis Lumière. MacDonald advances that the crossings between documentary and the avantgarde have been underrepresented and undertheorized by both programmers and scholars.4 The scholarship on the aesthetic and political conjunction of documentary and avant-garde suggests that these liminal zones between modes and genres open up ways to consider the documentary triangle a bit differently. These works operating in the fissures between modes can perhaps be considered more as a constantly adapting octagon along vectors of habitats, the environment, color, light, composition, surface/depth, technology, simulation. In new media theory, these same questions about how to unpack the provocative folding and unfolding between forms, discourses, practices, and politics have emerged in the writings and lectures of Timothy Murray. He has explored the Heideggardian notion of poiesis—the bringing forth, the bursting open, the unknown—in relationship to ecotechnical states of emergency where the natural and unnatural posit locations within the anthropocene. For Murray, habitats contain contradictions between the inhabited and the uninhabited: their unlocking as well as their inherent disjunction releases disturbances, surprises, and unpredictability that can produce transformative change.5 When the subject is removed, rendered incidental and contingent, what are the philosophical and art historical contours of background, habitats, landscape, ecologies, unpredictability in the documentary project? In his discussion of early documentary travelogs, a cinema marked by its focus on landscape, Michael Chanan notes how tableau shots, spectacle, colonialist imaginaries, and the grandeur of the landscape as excess inscribe a conservative politics emphasizing peoples from elsewhere and land as timeless and unchanging.6 How can we understand spatiality, composition, light, color fields, technology, and simulation as integers of the philosophy of documentary, beyond the humanist-centered subject, colonialist imaginaries, and landscape as excess? If single-vision linear perspective has defined the documentary project and its ethical and political conundrums, how can we understand documentary when flat space replaces spatial depth, when composition functions as organization of surface, when simulation replaces representation? The short experimental works of Vincent Grenier present a series of interrogations into these questions of the avant-doc as it meets the contradictions of the poieses between the inhabited and uninhabited. These works stage a political and philosophical intervention into the history of documentary: through their careful consideration of movement and framing, they reject the figuring of landscape as timeless, unchanging, excess. Grenier’s



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short experimental videos map how habitats, spaces, environment, sound, color fields, and technology engage the landscapes of the everyday. The works of Grenier operate as dialectics and contradictions, visual Zen koans juxtaposing the natural with the human-made, the everyday with technology, stasis with movement. They function as simulations of the real, defined as a constantly transforming nexus between landscape, sound, movement, stasis. The paradoxes in the videos of Vincent Grenier map terrains between documentary and the avant-garde, between the analog and the digital, between cinema and painting, between single view and scanning, between surface and depth, and between the horizontal and vertical planes. This chapter analyzes the more recent digital video works of Grenier photographed in one specific location—Ithaca, New York, a small college town in the Finger Lakes region of upstate New York—in order to unpack how abstraction and the everyday engage place through a cartography of abstract visuality. An increasingly dominant genre of popular culture television figures nature as epic, overpowering, and sometimes destructive spectacle (Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown, Deadliest Catch, Alaska Off Road Warriors). Feature length documentaries about the natural world also reflect these visual tropes of nature as spectacle larger than and outside, beyond the human, in films like Oceans (2009), March of the Penquins (2005), Winged Migration (2001) and Samsara (2011) as they emphasize long shots and aerial views. Ken Burns’ documentary television series National Parks: America’s Best Idea (2009) entails a visual structure of large vistas, spectacles so enormous they produce awe. These works toggle between aerial or drone shots above the landscape and go-pro style moving camera work that marks the body as embattled and pummeled by the weather and land. Grenier’s videos present a radical recalibration of the nexus of the cinematic and the natural which intervenes against these popular culture representations: his works shift focus to the quotidian and to small places contemplated through long takes and slow editing. Vincent Grenier is an internationally recognized Quebecois experimental filmmaker who has produced a large body of visually and conceptually rigorous short experimental works since the 1970s. The abstraction which marks his aesthetic, where framing slyly disturbs any easy reading of the referent, generates invitations to the spectator to enter into the visual field and complete the composition. Tony Pipolo, in a 2014 article in Artforum, has observed: “It’s clear that Grenier is as interested in what is unseen or barely seen as he is about what is directly before us. But this play with presence and absence, or virtual presence and absence, seems less about the importance of offscreen space than it is about enlisting the viewer’s tendency to ‘complete’ the picture that the film offers only obliquely.”7 Grenier’s work has been featured regularly in the New York Film Festival’s high profile and extremely influential “Views from the Avant-Garde,” as

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well major international festivals in the United States, Europe, and Canada. He was intimately involved in the important Montreal art scene of the 1970s and 1980s, although he was living in the United States at the time, suggesting that the area comprising New York State and lower Canada in the Northeast constitutes an artistically fertile region that crosses national borders. His large body of work includes two dozen films and over a dozen digital videos. Although his style and approach in avant-doc has shifted across four decades, a visual and structural interest in minimalist strategies functions as a unifying conceptual problematic. Grenier is currently based in upstate New York, a region with a rich and variegated tradition of experiments in technology, experimental visualities, and media.8 He teaches cinema at Binghamton University in a program with a long historical legacy of intellectually and aesthetically rigorous experimental filmmaking. For example, Ernie Gehr and Ken Jacobs, two filmmakers recognized for their structuralist interrogation into cinematic form, taught there in the 1970s. More recently, Martin Arnold, Michael Robinson, and Tomonari Nishikawa have taught there, elaborating on this merger of structuralist and process-focused experimental practice. Across four decades, Grenier’s experimental work operates as a philosophical exploration of the complex nexus of composition, spatiality, color fields, slowed temporalities, landscape, and simulation. As he explains in his artist statement, “My works directly confront the ideas of spatiality and temporality as a continuum and unsettle the notion of a universal human experience. Instead, my work moves towards fracturing space and time in order to release how the everyday and the specific hold within them ineffable, untranslatable visual mappings.”9 Michael Sicinski contends, for example, that if Grenier’s work provides pleasures both anticipated (the formal beauty and exacting eye of a great media artist) and unanticipated (the many contradictions, misprisions, and perceptual paradoxes the works induce), his films and videos also seem to want to tell us, in very direct ways, that those pleasures are only partly of the artist’s making. They are also accidental and given to chance; they are also freely available.10

Grenier’s conjurings on the transformative forces of nature, the contingent— a leaf, a bird, a shadow, a digital manipulation of color or form—reveals possibilities for considering the ontology of the cinematic image not as one of representation, but one of simulation. As he has explained, “An important tendency in my work is to privilege the intricate process of discovery that comes from filming something.”11 In this chapter, we analyze works where these contingencies present discordances and ruptures in habitats. These works refuse linear perspective so endemic in commercial narrative cinema



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and in long form, more logocentric documentary by emphasizing the image as a two-dimensional, rather than three-dimensional, screen. With perspective removed, the image adopts the flat fields of painting, producing landscapes of light and texture that reject the singularity of vision proposed by classical continuity editing. The flat field generates a conundrum between cinema as a two-dimensional screen and color fields as painting. LANDSCAPE AND THE BUILT ENVIRONMENT Grenier’s videos are in conversation with the history of landscape painting and photography, presenting both continuities with and interventions into this art historical trope that traverses the sublime and the picturesque. While landscape as a subject matter in painting has a long trajectory in Western and non-Western arts, its appearance as a distinct aesthetic in the United States is fairly recent. Its beginnings in the early to mid-nineteenth-century in the work of the English émigré Thomas Cole and his followers in the Hudson River School are linked to the search for representations of a distinct “American” national identity at a time when the recently independent nation sought to set itself apart from Britain. The American sublime, a short-hand term for the highly romanticized representations of North American landscapes produced by this first generation artists, is associated with the hallmarks of a national identity spiritually defined as Christian transcendentalist and reflective of Thomas Jefferson’s agrarian dream.12 Mimetic (life-like) in nature and thoughtfully edited, the edenic, empty landscapes of the American sublime, while heavily steeped in European traditions of Romanticism as found in the paintings of J. M. W. Turner, imply a celebration of the beauty of the new nation.13 Yet, they simultaneously suggest the abundance of resources at hand—what the landscape could become. To the individualist yeoman farmer the American sublime holds the promise of opportunity; to native peoples, whom are literally erased in such depictions, it spells out imperialism. Experimental film invokes and challenges these histories of landscape painting and photography. In his The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place, Scott MacDonald charts how this fascination with landscape in American cultural history which probes notions of wilderness, nature, the pastoral, and cityscapes emerges as a major set of visual and ecological concerns and interventions in post-mid twentieth century American experimental film. He notes that “upstate New York had continued to produce visual artists fascinated with landscape and the human presence in it, a considerable number of film artists whose work betrayed the same resistance to commercial development.”14 MacDonald explores how the films of Larry Gottheim (Fog Line, 1970), Kenneth Anger (Eaux d’artifice,

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1953), James Benning’s (North on Evers, 1991), Marie Menken (Glimpse of the Garden, 1957), Ernie Gehr (Eureka, 1979), Peter Hutton (Landscape [for Manon], 1987) Stan Brakhage (The Garden of Earthly Delights, 1981) mark the folds between landscape and humans. He asserts filmmakers have used “cinema as a means of revivifying our sense of place in all its complexity . . . while at the same time recognizing the problematic moral, environmental, and political implications of five centuries of European involvement in the Western Hemisphere.”15 In this sense, experimental cinema extends beyond form to place, with landscape as a key fulcrum and analytical node. The questions of industrialization and the built environment are imbedded in landscape painting. Minor painters in this tradition such as George Innes depicted the role of industrialization in the development of the United States. Some of his paintings show trains crisscrossing the United States by the 1810s. However, the hallmarks of romantic landscape painting to eschew signs of mechanization carried through to the twentieth century. Alongside the social realism of the New Deal sponsored artists, the American sublime reappears in the widely reproduced photographs of Ansel Adams, of which the Yosemite National Park series is emblematic. Conceived in the romantic traditions of landscape painting—like the first generation landscape painters, Adams was a follower of the transcendental ideas of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau—Adam’s photographs are similarly heavily edited, mimetic in representation, and designed “to reveal beauty.”16 In the context of the national identity crisis connected to the failure of capitalism in the Great Depression, Adams’ oeuvre speaks to the profound ecological catastrophe of the Dust Bowl, linked to the intensive use of Midwestern prairie land for agricultural purposes. Embedded in a conservationist ethos, his landscape photography emerges from his life-long activism as a member of the Sierra Club, one of the world’s first large-scale environmental organizations, which gained prominence during the New Deal years and lead to the creation of national parks—the first, Yellowstone (1872) followed by Yosemite Valley (1890)—under the administration of President Theodore Roosevelt.17 While positioned against pictorialist photography which deployed color and softfocus effects in imitation of impressionist painting, Adam’s conservationist ethos was reflected in his black and white photographs of natural habitats devoid of technology. The mimetic quality of his work ultimately erased the suggestion of mediation, instead encouraging an understanding of the image as a copy of reality, a verissimilitude. Grenier’s Color Study: Slaterville New York (2000) offers an example of this interrogation into the art historical legacies of landscape painting. This video figures the flat field of the two-dimensional screen as a site of mediation between technology and nature. Grenier experiments with the interface between the natural and the digital, between surface and depth, between the



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art historical legacies of landscape and its digital rendering. This 4 minute and 30 second video invokes early cinema’s landscape shots through its use of the tableau shot with a stationary camera: the video is comprised of one long take of trees on an upstate New York hill in autumn, their leaves green, orange, red, and gold. The perspective that this is actually a hill is flattened, as the shot is composed only with the textures of the trees and the leaves without any markers of depth until the very end, when a field of dried out corn stalks fills the bottom fifth of the frame. Color Study’s reference to early cinema’s tableau shots also functions as a wry pun on two levels. First, the sounds of cars on a highway composes the soundscape for the film, implying a contemporary temporality where roads and engines layer into the pastoral, interrupting its isolated contemplation with machine noise and wind. This soundscape unsettles ideas of natural beauty as beyond modernity, as a sublime or picturesque restorative to industrialization. The soundscape marshalls rupture into the tranquil and suggests another space beyond the hill, a layering of spatialities. Second, digital technologies invade this tableau shot, changing the colors into neon hues not found in the natural world, questioning what is nature and what is digital, and what is the nature of the digital. In Color Study, this flattened tableau shot of autumnal trees becomes an easel for digital manipulation of color that is technological rather than natural. The image changes into a series of color markings migrating from green, red, purple, red, neon green, blue, green, purple, abstracting the surface of the leaves and trees into texture. While the trees and leaves do not move, the digital effects to color the image provide a movement through colors applied to nature rather than emanating from it, inferring the digital as handmade, deliberate, and reflexive, rather than invisible and imbedded. ABSTRACTION AND COLOR FIELDS Grenier’s videos mine the liminal zones between the natural and the unnatural through abstraction and color fields. These formal elements, however, open up a poieses, a bursting forth, between the inhabited and the uninhabited, a more political concern related to the question industrialization and development as it alters the landscape. His video work can be contexualized within the histories of abstraction of landscapes and color field in painting, as the works play on intertextual invocations and sly references to visualities beyond cinema in the realms of painting, doubling the conceit of stripping cinema of its three-dimensional illusions. Grenier’s video work stages a dialogue with the history of landscape, abstraction, and color field in art. Abstract representation of the American landscape developed in the late 1940s and 1950s in response to the teachings and practices of European

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war refugees and Latin American artists working and teaching in the United States. The formal experiments of Mexican muralists, among them David Alfaro Siqueiros, who taught Jackson Pollock and was known for his innovative use of acrylics, resins, asbestos, and airbrush, influenced this movement toward abstraction in American art.18 The theories of the German exile Hans Hoffman emphasized abstraction, spiritual conceptions of nature, color relationships, pictorial structure, and spatial illusion. They were particularly significant for the development of abstract tendencies in American art, including landscape painting.19 Hoffman, who had taught at the Bauhaus in Germany and went on to teach at various art institutions in the United States, had a profound impact on artists associated with strands of abstract expressionism, especially artists connected to color field painting, such as Helen Frankenthaler. For instance, Frankenthaler opted for staining and blotting white canvases, her large abstract compositions derived from environmental forms. Color field artists were distinct from abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock. While similarly concerned with the flattening of the pictorial plane and the elimination of figurative elements—concerns conjured repeatedly in Grenier’s works—these artists also veer away from emotionally charged, mythic, and religious themes. Combined with the notion of the gestural and painterly mark of the artist, these strategies of flattening and eliminating the figurative constitute the hallmarks of abstract expressionism.20 In contrast, color field artists favored formalist experimentations with color, a choice rooted in advances in industrial paints where the availability of acrylic paint allowed for fluid application yet fast and permanent drying, and the desire to avoid any identification with the artist’s mark or psyche.21 In Grenier’s works, digital tools, rather than acrylic paint or paintbrushes, stand as the next step of industrial advances that offer new ways of rendering the image. Unified in their experimental use of color, the conceptualization of color field painting, a term coined by the influential art critic Clement Greenberg, is varied, as artists connected with this tendency held different understandings of the content of their work. The divergence of these visions makes it clear that color field painting ultimately had to do less with the landscape than with the study of the qualities of color. For example, contrary to later artists like Frankenthaler, early color field artists such as Mark Rothko associated his work with spirituality, transcendence, and myth. Barnett Newman, another prominent early color field painter, wrote about this aesthetic as antithetic to the European traditions of “the beautiful” as “the sublime,” more appropriate to convey the post-Hiroshima, spiritual-void world. This strategy of layering paradoxes to generate an opening for more abstract, philosophical inquiries into the relationships between technology, nature, and the built environment continue in Watercolor: Fall Creek (2013).



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The title of the video suggests a geography of its visual structure and concerns, a pun connecting nature, art, place: Watercolor: Fall Creek. The title invokes histories of amateur landscape painters who use watercolor paints, where water instead of oil dissolves pigments in light, often pastel hues, a more forgiving medium than oil or acrylic. This tradition of amateurs engaging the quotidian of landscape to render the beautiful and the sublime dates from the late eighteenth century. The title also identifies the exact place where the video was shot, Fall Creek, a creek that runs through the town of Ithaca, New York, a reference to scientific geological surveys. In Watercolor, the paradoxes of the literalization and physical embodiments of term artistic process called watercolor functions as a description not of a medium but of a process of contingencies, abstractions, and color fields. This video layers together a series of philosophical incongruities: depth versus surface, the quotidian versus abstraction, stasis versus movement, the digital versus the natural. At a running time of 12 minutes 37 seconds, the video consists of a stationary camera in tableau shot of water underneath a bridge. Eschewing any construct of scenes with narrative arcs, the video is composed in 14 movements within the tableau framing, each featuring a different visual planes, color fields, and changing compositional elements of lines and rectangles. At a screening of the film at the 2014 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, animator Jason Harrington referred to the video as an “invocation of Rothko’s paintings if they could move.”22 In Watercolor, the juxtaposition of the stationary tableau shot with compositional elements within the frame constantly realigning with light, wind, reflections, light and darks, and water movement suggest that nature exceeds and disrupts the cinematic frame, a dialectic between the control of the cinematic frame as a flattened, abstract space and the out of control, unpredictable movement of the natural. Color fields shift and change within these static long takes. In the first movement, the shot is composed of a brown field with a strip of blue. At the top of the frame, two blurred upside down reflections move slowly, phantasms of the human within the nonhuman. Each movement offers a different composition of rectangles and colors, formed through light, water, texture, movement. In one movement, strips of brown, green, and brown, in layers in the frame, shift slowly into a shot where the top portion of the frame is clay, and bottom blue. Wind creates ripples on the water, forming another layer of the image. In another movement, the frame is divided into three color fields: green at the top, brown in the middle, and black at the bottom. Reflections layer more texture. Gradually, rocks at the bottom of the creek are exposed. The video seems to suggest that a habitat is a microterritory, a small point where the body, vision, space, nature, built environment converge. Through its visual construction, it implies the refined vision of compositional structure into planes and rectangular spaces is continually

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in a state of impermanence and transformation as light changes, water moves, and effluvia and run-off debris float by. The cinematography transforms this habitat into a series of shifting color fields, while referencing the history of abstract paintings such as Rothko that are fixed, stable, large scale, demanding slow attention and immersion. As a video projected on a screen, Watercolor conducts a wry joke into abstract expressionism, refiguring the cinematic screen as the invocation of large scale but also the injection of movement and chance into painting. In Watercolor, the camera is fixed in a medium long shot while the water it photographs transforms in a state of continual change and movement. The compositional structure in Watercolor organizes the shifting color fields in horizontal planes across the frame, offering the spectator to read the images both horizontally and vertically, rather than in depth or chiaroscuro. The compositional strategy flattens the water as a two-dimensional surface. Ponds, rivers, lakes, and oceans constitute a dominant representational component in the history of European, American, and Chinese landscape painting.23 Watercolor offers a philosophical pun on the history of landscape painting through this flattening out of visuality: How are we to consider landscape when the land is removed, absent, unnecessary, when the interchange between land and water dissolves into liquid? In Watercolor, the shore as a place of refuge and stability appears only in the last shot at the top of the frame, a river bank dominated by a cement wall crammed with graffiti. Watercolor refutes the ideas that water represents a natural element we gaze down on, below our line of vision, or that we look at from afar, removed from its specificities. Instead, Watercolor flips water up on the large screen, changing the angle of vision for engagement with it. Water is no longer surrounded by landscape but now anchored in cinematic theatrical space, moved 90 degrees from below our gaze to direct address to and with our gaze. Watercolor submits a conundrum where the fixity of a small geographic place—Fall Creek—plays against the continual movement of the water and the play of light, texture, form. The last three movements move from the abstractions of continually changing water and shapes of light and color towards a consideration of the built environment which encases this place and water space. In movement 12, the shot shows the underside of the bridge over the water, with diagonal girders and cement walls, with white reflections on the bottom of the frame. Green, speckled light, almost neon and iridescent, ripples across the girders, moving in small increments. In the next shot, the majority of the frame is a black rectangle, with a small strip of light on the tip. The last shot shocks and exhilarates as it differs from any other shot in the video: the grey water of the creek rushes through the frame with complex textures from waves, the top half of the frame occupied by a concrete wall covered with color graffiti suggesting adolescence, rebellion, and subversive



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amateur art making. The video’s complex visualities mobilize a slow paced, visual immersion into consideration of paradoxes between abstraction and representation, between process and place. ECOLOGICAL ART AND SIMULATION Vincent Grenier’s work is also in an energetic dialogue with another art history vector: the movement of ecological arts and simulation. His work stages a philosophical paradox between the ecological as material and the simulation as immaterial. The rich visual and conceptual complexity of his work needs to be contextualized within the ecological art movement in order to fully map its layers of dialogues with political traditions located in place. As the American environmental movement emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, ecological perspectives also emerged in art. As the art historian James Nisbet recently discussed, ecological-themed art from this period reflects a broader shift from a conservationist view of ecology where nature and culture were understood as separated realms, toward a view that encouraged a sense of the interconnectedness of all things.24 Artists created in a range of media. They drew from a multiplicity of sources: scientific concepts such as cybernetics, systems theory, and thermodynamics filtered through the writings of Gregory Bateson, Niklas Luhman, R. Buckminster Fuller, and the Mesoamerican art historian George Kubler; writings about the impacts of industrialization such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring; and theories about an increasingly communication-saturated world in the works of Marshall McLuhan and Raymond Williams.25 Artists began probing ecology as a field from which to explore biological and technological connectedness. This connection between the biological world and the technological apparatus of the camera emerges across the works of Grenier. This expanded notion of ecology as not only a system but as a concept was reflected in the varied forms of works of art connected with ecological themes. Ecological art practice spanned formats, mediums, and space: Allan Kaprow’s Yard (1961), a gallery environment filled with tires); psychedelic happenings (USCO, 1966–67); Peter Hutchinson’s bread scatter on the edge of Paracutin, a volcano in Mexico (1970); 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968); Robert Barry’s radio wave installations and telepathic pieces (1969); and the decade-long gestation of Walter De Maria’s 400 stainless steel poles in the landscape of Western New Mexico (1970s). In experimental film, Michael Snow’s sculptural installations incorporating film also brushed on ecological themes as filtered through the technological imaginary. Snow’s landmark film Wavelength (1967) was a major influence on Grenier. As the Museum of Modern Art curator, William C. Sietz, put it in his contribution to the

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catalog of the Ninth São Paulo Biennial in 1967, environmental art included the “inorganic, biological, ‘physicosocial,’ social, and ‘psychosocial.’”26 But environmental art also launched broader critiques of outmoded models of institutionalized art, modernist theories of art, and the museum gallery system. Much of this environmental art work was unwieldy or large, located in remote places, or intrinsically connected with particular sites and thus difficult to sell. It also refused to conform to the linearity of Art Historical lineage, instead taking on the characteristic complexities (hybridity) of communication technologies, thus forming ecologies of information.27 These works intertwine the mediated nature of both art and ecological systems. From this perspective, art and environments are understood as kindred processes that are both constitutive of and constitute social production. Environmental art of the 1960s and 1970s trace to sculptural practices. They reject the object in favor of process which questions our relationship to the landscape. Subsequent work elaborates and enlarges this vein through engagements with cultural, social, and political systems, as artists working with environmental themes collaborated with governmental institutions, corporate entitities, and civic organizations.28 This model of questioning relationships to landscape continues to be key to the conceptualization of contemporary ecological art practices in artists working in the United States such as Natalie Jeremijenko, Beverly Nadus, Andrea Polli, among others.29 Contemporary ecological art often plays on the notion of simulation. Simulation can be defined within Jean Baudrillard’s notion of nature/images as social relations fashioned in the image of the commodity. The real/the original/originality have no meaning because nature and images only have meaning and are only valued in relation to exchange value.30 Les Chaises (2008) and Armoire (2007) suggest Grenier’s formal training in painting as well as a trajectory of environmental art where relationship to landscape and place motors conceptual concerns. These works engage the spectator in first instance through the interplay between line and color. This formalistic conceit, however, overlays the topic of ecological art practice addressed in both videos: simulation, where the real and the original are refracted, abstracted, distracted. Grenier invokes this idea of simulation stylistically: a rejection of linear time combined with subject matter derived from signs of natural or simulated environments. These works can be read as a critique of the linear narrative machine of mainstream commercial cinema and documentary, and their insistent representations of conventional notions of nature as edited, idealized, or dystopian. Both videos are set in simulated natural settings—a backyard and an aviary. Les Chaises is photographed in a domestic setting using props such as weathered-down backyard red chairs. The video consists of a series of shots framed as brief studies of color tonality, with reds and greens appearing differently



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depending on the lighting, set against repeating shapes in the forms of ovals, squares, and rectangles, including the video frame. A mixture of birdsong, wind, human voices, and traffic, the sound track further suggests the interplay of natural and built elements in the environment, emphasized visually through Grenier’s use of line and color. The sound track itself functions as a simulation of aural space. Armoire, filmed from within an aviary, is similarly composed of repeated rectangles. The suggestion of simulation is clarified in this work, which opens with a shot of a pigeon. At first, the bird seems trapped in a rectangle, but as the video progresses, it is shown to be reacting to its image in a mirror, commonly used in aviaries because pigeons can recognize their reflection. The remaining scenes of the video give the impression that it is shot through the vision of the bird, a rejection of the anthropomorphic point of view of most cinema, a simulation in the most direct sense of a bird’s eye view, another visual pun. The camera captures the view from the window of the aviary, showing the manicured garden environment surrounding it. A silhouette of a bird glued on the window is at one point set in “flight” through the effects of editing, which create repeated, juxtaposed images that give the impression of the movement of birdflight, another instance of simulation. The play of condensation and frost on the panes of the building suggest nature invading the built environment. Similar to Les Chaises, the sound track of Armoire interweaves the sounds of nature and industry, with a train rumbling in the distance. Ultimately, both works address simulation as a fundamental feature of cultural representations and cinema. These videos investigate how simulated environments emerge from interactions between a multiplicity of elements, natural and artificial. In Les Chaises, the visual effects of sunlight, leaves, trees, a house, chairs, a car question how the cinematic apparatus inscribes simulation. In Armoire, the conflation of surfaces between the mirror, the windows, and the vision of the captive bird construct a simulated environment where the divides between the technological and the natural dissolve. The sound tracks of both works suggest urbanity and machines, further underscoring the simulated nature of the environments represented. Both works also implicate the camera through their strong focus on spatial arrangements in the use of rectangles and their structures which reject the linear and the logocentric as organizing principles. LANDSCAPES, COLOR FIELDS, AND ECOLOGIES These avant-docs of Vincent Grenier probe the relationships between nature and the built environment. They mobilize a series of philosophical paradoxes

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that fold and unfold into each other: cinema and painting, surface and depth, light and dark, the screen and the frame, the material and the immaterial, the represented and the simulation, nature and technology, horizontal and vertical planes, three-dimensional lived reality and two-dimensional screens, landscapes and technologies, large philosophical inquiries and small places, tableau shots and subject movement, analog and digital. These works also offer analytical dialogues that examine how cinema engages and layers art historical trajectories in landscape, color fields, and environmental art. Grenier’s videos introduce a critical practice toward landscape, a strategy of alienation to provoke reflection about our relationship with mediation and the natural world. These videos stage a distancing effect to call attention to cultural fascinations with simulations of nature. The Grenier videos discussed invoke the older traditions of art as imitating nature, a consistent visual trope across all the works discussed in this essay. They then launch elaborately choreographed rejections of this tradition, by making it clear that what one is looking at is a simulation—an image many times displaced—of “natural environments.” This move resonates with postmodernist art focused on exposing process. These works ask what happens when documentary moves beyond the subject and the documentary triangle into the avant-doc octagon, composed of vectors of light, place, color, movement, framing, landscape, technology, and simulation. NOTES 1. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 4–68. 2. Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995); David MacDougall, Transcultural Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998); Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004); Alexandra Juhasz, AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). 3. Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 33–87. 4. Scott MacDonald, Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 3–18. 5. Timothy Murray, “Habitats for Medial Humanities, ‘Lecture at the 18th Annual Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival’,” Ithaca College (Ithaca, New York, April 7, 2015). See also Timothy Murray, Digital Baroque: New Media Arts and Digital Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008). 6. Michael Chanan, The Politics of Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2007), 60–74. 7. Tony Pipolo, “It’s the Small Things,” Artforum, November 4, 2014, http:// artforum.com/film/id=48902.



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8. For a useful timeline and archive of the electronic arts, film, and new media community in upstate New York, see Experimental Television Center, Video History Project, http://www.experimentaltvcenter.org/video-history-project. 9. See Vincent Grenier website, www.vincentgrenier.com. 10. Michael Sicinski, “This, That, and the Other: The Digital Video Works of Vincent Grenier,” October 22, 2010, http://www.movingimagesource.us/articles/ this-that-and-the-other-20101022 11. Vincent Grenier private email correspondence with the authors, May 23, 2015. 12. Transcendentalism is a spiritual philosophy emerging in New England in the nineteenth century. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau are among the best-known disciples. At its core was the belief in the possibility of access to the divine through nature, without any mediation from church, prophets, or the Bible. Nature itself was seen as a perfect spiritual state. 13. Malcolm Andrews, Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 135. 14. Scott MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California, 2001), 30. 15. MacDonald, The Garden in the Machine, 91. 16. Ansel Adams, Ansel Adams, an Autobiography (Boston: Little Brown, 1985), 25. 17. See the Sierra Club’s website: http://vault.sierraclub.org/history/anseladams. 18. Laurance P. Hurlburt, The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1989), 220. 19. Joan Marter, ed., Abstract Expresssionism, The International Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007), 2. 20. Marter, Abstract Expresssionism, 14. 21. Emile De Antonio, Painters Painting: A Candid History of the Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984), 81. 22. Jason Harrington, experimental animator, comment at the 2014 Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival, April 6, 2014. 23. Simon Schama, Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996). 24. James Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2014). 25. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, 1–12. 26. William C. Seitz, “Environment U. S. A.: 1957–1967,” São Paulo (9th Biennial). Exhibition catalogue, Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1967. 27. Nisbet, Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s, 1–3. 28. Among other works, the AIR studio project founded by the artist Jo Hanson in the 1980s in Marin county, San Francisco, is a case in point. Hanson collaborated with the NORCAL Sanitary waste recycling and disposal company to create the project, which today continues to run as a residency for artists working to raise awareness

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about environmental issues as well as a site for public educational programs about the environment. 29. Beatriz da Costa and Kavita Philip, Tactical Biopolitics, Art, Activism, and Technoscience (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2008). 30. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations and Simulacra, tr. Sheila Glaser (Ann Harbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1994).

Part III

DOCUMENTARY THEORISTFILMMAKERS AT WORK

Chapter 11

Promises and Contracts Found in the Archive Are Not About the Past Renewing Civil Alliances—Palestine 1947–48 Ariella Azoulay Between November 1947 (The United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine) and May 1948 (The creation of the State of Israel), many Jewish and Arab communities who cared for their country intensified the negotiations between themselves and initiated urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned meticulously to the last detail, during which the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, and made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to prevent the rising violence in the area from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and to salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over onehundred documented encounters—and probably many more whose records have yet to be found—they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives. In 2012, I directed a film based on archival documents depicting these events entitled Civil Alliances—Palestine 1947–48.1 In this chapter I reflect upon the importance of this archival material for a potential history of Palestine, as well as on my cinematic decisions to film the movie around a map of Mandatory Palestine (from 1947) with the participation of twenty-five Arabs and Jews of varying ages speaking in Arabic and in Hebrew. In Yael Bartana’s Mary Koszmary (Nightmares, 2007)—a Polish intellectual addresses the Jews, calling to them: “Come. Let us live together, let us be different but not harm each other.” In his speech, Slawomir Sierakowski emphasized the nightmares that haunt Poles ever since their land was ethnically cleansed of Jews. The possible return of Jews to Poland is not merely the renewed possibility of Jewish life in Poland but rather the renewed possibility of life-together revived out of the ruins of ethnic cleansing, negating 243

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ethnic cleansing as a basis for new partnership. Although this work focuses on the Jewish/Polish context, its scope is wider by far. Ever since I heard it, this speech has haunted me relentlessly with its repercussions on other political contexts and most particularly the local context of Palestine. It kept resounding in my head until, one day, it emerged in my language, in civil language, as an address to Palestinians: “Only with you, Palestinian women and men—by force of our common demand to be governed equally can the state embody its proper, favorable dimensions: a neutral framework upheld by the governed and for their sake. Neither negotiations nor conditions, neither ‘peace’ treaties nor transition phases but a basic demand—by the governed and by those who have been expelled from the sphere of governance—to be counted and be a part, to become citizens, to participate in ruling their country, shaping the regime, reinstating political partnership.” “Palestinian women and men,” I repeated in my imagination until a certain day it was no longer a matter of imagining a future but of reconstructing it from the past that had to be imagined anew. This happened when to my big surprise, while trying to locate in the archive a single civil contract between Jews and Palestinians mentioned once in one line in a book published in 1989, I found hundreds of documents recording such contracts, signed in Palestine in the years 1947–48.2 I realized that intense civil activity had taken place throughout the country at that time, and subsequently had been completely ignored by historians.3 Its removal from historical narratives enabled the retroactive depiction of the 1948 war as the culmination of a long-lasting national conflict. This civil activity whose amplitude I had just begun to reconstruct, included urgent encounters, some short and spontaneous, others planned in advance and carefully designed in detail—whose Palestinian and Jewish participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, asked for forgiveness, made efforts to reconcile and compensate— and did everything possible not to let violence take over their lives. They did their utmost to halt the violence that national and military forces were intent on igniting and negotiated with each other in order to create mutual civil alliances. This tremendous civil effort continued during the constituent violence that was practiced in Palestine and until the State of Israel was declared, making obsolete the efforts of citizens to imagine their future outside the dictates of the nation state. In the global order that began to be consolidated and implemented in the final months of World War II, such civil activity was doomed, outcast and replaced by a nation state, and member of the United Nations. The pairing up of citizenship and national self-determination with forced migration and the creation of noncitizens and impaired citizens was presented as a necessary means to reduce the prospects of new national conflicts



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and was part of the new international order that emerged from World War II. Unsurprisingly, as such “solutions” were conceived and achieved by international organizations, resolutions, and state powers4 (and not by the relevant body politic of the governed population) in almost any geographical territory where such “solutions” were implemented in the mid twentieth century— India/Pakistan, South Africa, Germany—the conflict that it was supposed to pacify was either generated by such implementation or enhanced and exacerbated.5 For most Israeli citizens, especially those born after 1948, Palestinians are exactly this: stateless persons, while they themselves are full citizens. The persistent status of Palestinians as refugees for over six decades has never appeared as an injustice that should lead Israelis to question their own citizenship.6 The only link most Israeli Jews can see between their citizenship and Palestinians’ statelessness—when they see such a link at all—is that of threat to their sovereignty. Jewish sovereignty is conceived as a stable entity that precedes any alteration of the body politic and as such should be kept untouched by it.7 However, the constitution of this sovereignty and hundreds of thousands of “stateless persons” was not achieved without violence and resistance.8 The omission of this constitutive violence is part of intentional falsification of history by political regimes based on a differential body politic.9 For most Israeli citizens, especially those born after the State was declared in 1948, this is what Palestinians are—stateless persons, refugees, or intruders who threaten to undermine Jewish sovereignty.10 Thus Palestinians, targeted directly by this violence, became the main bearers of this denied memory.11 The memory of the violence exercised in order to force minority rule by expelling the majority of the population who threatened its constitution was sublimated into a founding myth of independence, selfdetermination, and equality. The maintenance of this myth as history among the majority of Israeli Jews required a constant and intentional work of erasing the past and distorting history. Citizenship was the tool used by the State to make the new citizens consider as historical facts what otherwise would appear as state propaganda. Paradoxically, Palestinians, deprived of citizenship and thus free of this founding myth, became not only the main bearers of the past, but also those who for years kept exercising what seems as the most important skill of citizens: keeping the past incomplete and refusing to acknowledge violence as law. The pile of documents I found in the Haganah archive, relating to the period between November 1947 (the Partition Plan by the United Nations) and May 48 (The creation of the State of Israel), emerged slowly not only as a missing chapter of the local history, but as its missing geography. I started to cover the map of Mandatory Palestine (issued in 1947) with points wherever Jews and Arabs got together, in urgent encounters or in others, planned in detail and in

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advance. Though until 1948, Jews and Palestinians shared Palestine and knew to find their ways between their mutual localities, such a map could not be found, so I decided to reconstruct for the film the propinquity of their localities from scattered information found here and there.12 I invited twenty-five Arabs and Jews of varying age groups, each of them speaking in Arabic or Hebrew, to gather around the reconstructed map and recite these encounters, agreements, and promises made by our ancestors in hundreds of localities in Palestine during this period. Each event is narrated shortly either in Hebrew or in Arabic while all the speakers speak both languages alternatively. During those numerous encounters and negotiations between them that took place between 1947 and 1948 the participants raised demands, sought compromises, set rules, formulated agreements, made promises, sought forgiveness, made efforts to compensate and reconcile. Their shared purpose was to keep violence from taking over their lives. They sought to protect the common world of their life in Palestine and salvage it from those who wished to destroy it. In over one hundred documented encounters—and probably many more whose records have yet to be found—they promised themselves and each other the continuation of their shared lives. The archival materials that the film foregrounds have been kept dormant in State archives. The film frames these documents as an important chapter in local history and geography that has been erased from history books to enable the hegemonic historical narrative of an enduring Jewish-Arab conflict. Gathered together, these stories are presented for the first time in Civil Alliances as significant common civil efforts of Jews and Palestinians. Two cameramen mingle with the speakers and photograph them. Their presence, captured by a third camera fixed in the ceiling above the table, embodies the fact that these were exciting developments, and persisting day-after-day for half-a-year— and their outcome was not foreknown. After each narrated episode, the participants place white dots on the map near the name of the locality to which they refer. The film ends when the map is covered by hundreds of white dots embodying the extent of the agreements spread over all of Palestine. Today, when the prospect of a one-state solution seems like the only viable one, the film reconstructs the historical moment where Palestinians and Jews sought together, as equal partners, after ways to maintain and protect their shared life in the same territory and when local conflicts eventually emerged they found ways to resolve them. The film reconstructs this historical past as a valuable potential for the future. To Edward Said’s formulation of imperialism as theory and colonialism as practice,13 “sovereign citizenship” should be added as historiography and as a vantage point. Much has been written about the theory and the practice, about colonialism being a lever for acquisition of more and more land, money, and manpower. Too little, however, has been written about differential citizenship



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that dictated colonial historiography and to a large measure also shaped the horizon of the anti colonialist position. This historiography is based on the national-sovereign delineation that dictated the boundaries of narrated history as national history, often demarcated from the geo-political context in which it unfolded. Thus, for example, the French and American revolutions were studied for about two hundred years as national events, isolated from the Atlantic context in which they took place, while the history of the State of Israel was written as detached from Palestinian history, as though the Nakba—the Palestinian catastrophe—happened by itself and is an internal Palestinian affair, and as though the declaration of the State of Israel, the violence that became law indeed created a distinct time-space unit whose Jewish Israeli rulers can also rule the history that will be told of and about it. Out of such historiography, peoples—and their supporters—wishing to be liberated of the bonds of colonialism could not imagine liberation that does not entail national self-determination and the reproduction of the sovereign citizenship model. Sovereign citizenship was nothing but a tool serving the world order of sovereignty that continues to maintain colonialism as practice and imperialism as theory, and sanctifies the distinction between citizens and all the rest crowding at the borders, drowning at sea, shot or roasted upon electric fences. It is sovereign citizenship that has shaped the vantage point from which citizens look upon the disaster of others. It is this citizenship that turns them into perpetrators without having to raise their hands in violence, perpetrator-citizens who merely by being governed alongside noncitizens are in effect exerting violence. Those vehement joint efforts of Jews and Arabs that we find before May 1948 to preserve their shared life find peaceful solutions to conflicts and disputes, reach compromises, be mutually attentive to needs, make agreements and promises—all these did not cease once violence erupted, and these efforts lasted even while some of the agreements were not observed. In most cases promises were broken not by the inhabitants themselves but rather by members of national militias who tried to impose a new political reality upon the land. In May 1948, the founding of the State of Israel put an end to this mutual recognition of Jews and Arabs of their responsibility for their shared life. The new sovereign rule replaced the old civil rules of the game with new—national—ones. Under the new rule, this civil chapter of history was erased. The little that was known of efforts to promote civil treaties was presented in a negative light, in the ruling perspective through which civil partnership appears as “collaboration,” namely an act of national treason. A civil reading of documents recording the mutual efforts of Arabs and Jews, collected in the Haganah archive, yields a complex, vital picture full of hope and faith in the power of shared life. This picture cannot be reduced to the national sovereign

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narrative that began to be constructed from May 1948 and thereafter projected hopeless polarity and hostility onto the past. I was not the first one to read these documents in the archive, but I was the first to understand that what is recorded in them is not a footnote within the existing narratives of this period, but the tip of the iceberg of a completely different narrative that cannot be grasped within the partitioning of history into Zionism/Nakba. This other narrative—the expansive civil activity—was not given and its recovery was conditioned by the suspension of the automatic and wholesale identification of the participants with the respective national groups. Thus for example, a work of foregrounding was required in order to make clear that the civil agreement between the inhabitants of Deir Yassin and Giv’at Shaul was violated not by local Jewish residents who were party to the civil contract achieved with their neighbours, but rather by Jewish militiamen. On April 9, 1948 Jewish warriors from the Jewish militias—the Irgun Zevai Leumi and Lochamei Herut Israel—entered Deir Yassin and massacred the local population. A wooden box was looted from one of the houses in Deir Yassin and kept in the home of one of the Jewish assailants. For years its provenance was an open secret in the house where it was kept. It is now in my possession. I regard it as a priceless deposit placed in my keeping until the story of this place can be rewritten, until life as it was known here until the curse of partition took hold of it would be retold, and conditions would transpire for founding a shared museum—to tell how the national war machine ground to dust civil hopes for shared life. In this box borrowed time is stored. On January 20, 1948, the residents of Deir Yassin and Givat Shaul reached an agreement of good neighborliness: “Dayr Yassin villagers will inform of the presence of gang members in the area (in case they will not manage to force them away) with the following signals: in daytime people of Dayr Yassin will hang up laundry at an agreed-upon spot (two white articles and a black one in-between). The neighborhood’s reply—a red piece of laundry. At night—people of Dayr Yassin will use a flashlight to signal three dots; Givat Shaul neighborhood will reply with a dash; Dayr Yassin will conclude with three dots. After exchanging the above signals a meeting should take place at a set spot, the password to which will be changed every 3 days.” NOTES 1. The film Civil Alliances—Palestine 1947–48 (2012) is available at: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=lqi4X_ptwWw. The transcript of over one hundred civil alliances is included in Settler Colonial Studies, Special Issue: Collaborative Struggles in Australia and Israel-Palestine, Vol. 4, No. 4 (2014).



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2. In Benny Morris’s book on the Refugee Problem, first published in 1989, he mentioned the existence of a civil agreement between the habitants of the Palestinian village Deyr Yassin and the nearby Jewish village Givat Shaul. This line haunted me for years as Deyr Yassin was the place where an atrocious massacre took place. Not surprisingly, no historian wrote about this or any other agreements achieved between the Jews and Palestinians. See Benny Morris, The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited in Cambridge Mideast Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, second edition, 2004). 3. Hillel Cohen, in his books relates to these material but from the perspective of the collaborators that I avoid. On the problematic figure of the “collaborator” see my The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). I thank Hillel Cohen for helping me to locate some of this material and for accepting to participate in the film I made out of them. 4. Edward Said wrote: “Thus all appeals on behalf of Zionism were international appeals perforce. The site of Zionist struggle was only partially in Palestine; most of the time until 1948—and even after—and Weizman’s own work is the best case in point—the struggle had to be waged, and fueled, and supplied, in the great capitals of the West.” Edward Said, The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979/1992), 23. 5. On the creation of the Palestinian-Jewish conflict by the constituent violence exercised following the partition plan see my From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–50 (London: Pluto Press, 2011). 6. The nongovernmental organization Zochrot stands for an exception. 7. Israel’s persistent refusal to allow Palestinians refugees to return to their homes illustrates this perfectly. 8. See Azoulay, From Palestine to Israel. 9. In The Question of Palestine, Edward Said quotes Moshe Dayan saying in 1969: “We came to this country which was already populated by Arabs, and we are establishing a Hebrew, that is a Jewish state here. In considerable areas of the country we bought lands from Arabs. Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you, because these geography books no longer exist; not only the books do not exist, the Arab villages are not there either,” 14. 10. Except those Palestinians who were not expelled in 1948 and became Israeli citizens, they are conceived as conditional citizens who are always somehow under scrutiny and periodically expected to prove their loyalty to the state. 11. In 1967, when the West Bank and Gaza were conquered, Israeli rule deprived Palestinians who were expelled to these territories in 1948 of their citizenship for the second time. They were kept out of a public space that had been reserved solely for one ethnic group, the Jewish one, and Israeli Jews were taught to believe that this exclusion was a fact of nature, both given and justified. 12. I am grateful to Umar Al-Ghubari from Zochrot who assisted me generously in this task that seemed quiet impossible at the beginning. A year later the NGO Zochrot published such a map of this erased geography.

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13. Said refers to one aspect of this historiography when he writes “the dispersion of the Palestinians was not the fact of nature but a result of specific force and strategies. The concealment by Zionism of its own history has by now therefore become institutionalized, and not only in Israel.” Said, The Question of Palestine, 58.

Chapter 12

“See and Remember” The Golden Days of Said Otruk Diana Allan

Said Otruk reclines on his fishing boat in a photograph taken in the Palestinian port city of Acre, in the northern Galilee. Balancing, somewhat awkwardly, he looks directly at the camera. The immediacy and intensity of the gaze is disarming, momentarily reversing the relations of viewer and viewed, as if it is we who are being watched. We see a young man whose pose appears assured, almost jaunty. We imagine the pride he takes in his boat and his work and are moved by it. Said’s expression, the firmness of his brow, his tailored jacket, all convey ease and contentment. The date, and caption, inscribed on the border of the photograph—“Said in Acre in the year 1948, the golden days”—add another set of associations. The photo’s narrative range deepens with our recognition of the catastrophe about to befall him, and our sense of the image as a “stranded object” from a former life now gone.1 The impending loss, which Said cannot see, is apparent to us as viewers. Taken shortly before the fall of Acre in 1948, during the events that led to the creation of the State of Israel, the image appears illuminated by the radiance of another historical reality, proof that Palestinians, to borrow Susan Sontag’s phrase, were “irrefutably there.”2 In this chapter, I reflect on the tension between the evidentiary and expressive at play in the use of photographs in documentary, on the intersection of cinema and ethnographic practice, and on the material and affective dynamics this particular image set in motion as it moved from Said’s world into mine—becoming, as it did, the entry point for Still Life, a video portrait I made with Said in 2007.3 I first saw this photo of Said in his boat in 2005, stuck on the window of his small electrical shop in the old city of Sidon, South Lebanon. The photograph faced out into the street. It was one of five he had brought with him when he had fled to Lebanon in 1948 in his boat. Worn and annotated, the images bore the traces of years of careful handling. Two others he carried folded up in his 251

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wallet. When I later asked why the photo faced out, not in, Said replied it was so that the people of Sidon would “see and remember.” “They often tell me, ‘By God you’re right in what you say,’” he continued, alluding to the phrase “The golden days,” in the bottom right-hand corner. His window display seemed to be a way of extending his community of memory beyond family to neighbors and passersby; a way of reframing intimate memories and making them collective or, conversely, a way of personalizing a remote national past. It was an invitation of some sort.4 What were people invited to see and remember? An image of a handsome young man, liberated from the corruptions of time? Acre, as a Palestinian city that exists only in photographs? The pathos and power of the photographic lies in its ability to arrest time, and keep present the past. Writing about the uncanny ontology of the photograph, and its ability to make present people and places that have ceased to exist, André Bazin observes that they are like “disturbing presences of lives halted at a set moment in their duration, freed from their destiny.”5 When I interviewed Said for Still Life, this photo became the pivot for our conversation and the entry point for recollection. As a trace of pre-48 Palestine, it functioned as a porthole through which Said viewed his former self, and through which that past self peered confidently and unknowingly back into the present. I produced Still Life at Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), an interdisciplinary program for making anthropologically inflected works of media that combine ethnography and aesthetics.6 Unlike more propositional and expository traditions in ethnographic filmmaking, work produced at SEL is characterized by granular attention to the material, sensorial and affective.7 This portrait of Said was a counterpoint to an earlier project on Palestinian memory in exile. Since 2002, I have worked on the Nakba Archive, which has recorded filmed testimonies about the 1948 expulsion with first generation refugees in the camps in Lebanon.8 While the archive aims to document eyewitness accounts of dispossession and displacement, Still Life attempts to explore the phenomenological presence of the past: the retrieval of data is secondary to a rendering of the experience of remembering. Its subject is the aggregation of sensory and embodied experience on the edge of consciousness; it explores the gap between consensus representations of the past and subjective memory. It thus foregrounds the role objects and emotion play in structuring recollection (and forgetting), along with the physical contexts in which memories are formed. If the naïve premise of the archive was that filmed interviews would capture the transmission of memory, Still Life and the other the experimental ethnographic documentaries I have worked on since, examine the ways memories are always mediated.9 My interest in embodied experience and refracted memory crystallized through my work on the Nakba Archive. Recording several hundred testimonies with camp elders forced me to reflect on implicit mnemonic hierarchies,



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on what kinds of memories count as authentic and relevant for national archives. More densely textured, less starkly political accounts of everyday life tended to be elided in favor of linear, programmatic nationalist narratives and causal explanations.10 With their historical and political imperatives, the formal interviews recorded for the archive often seemed too directed to capture the suffused nature of affective experience and the embodied dimensions of mnemonic practice. I also became more aware of how outsiders—not only ethnographers and documentary filmmakers like myself, but solidarity networks and NGOs engaged in representing refugee experience—have played a key role in articulating and sustaining nationalist meta-narratives, at the expense of more dynamic and diverse forms of remembering. Making Still Life was one attempt to represent embodied memories, and use visual media to explore other kinds of histories and experiences. The portrait is structured around ellipses in Said’s memory, using personal photographs to examine the conflation of image and reality, as well as the effects of aging. Said repeatedly misremembers the number of his fishing boat, for example, and his age when he left Palestine. His hands sift restlessly through the images in his lap, turning them over, much as his mind does; the tremulous cadence of his voice reveals the intensity of emotion undergirding memory. The motion of his hands is too swift to take in particular details, the repetitive sifting seems redundant, registering an agitated search, much as the mind, awakening from sleep, strives to gather details of a disappearing dream. Over the course of the film the photos are broken down into fragments, highlighting certain details and rendering others illegible; in this, I tried to mimic the oscillations of memory and lived experience, between moments of clarity and engagement and moments of distracted detachment. I chose to highlight certain details—Said’s hand, the crease in his jacket, the shadow on his eyes, light on the surface of the water, creases in the photographs, the text—while rendering other elements illegible, often through extreme close-up. Returning to this photograph of Said almost a decade later I realize I’d misremembered, or rather, misapprehended it. The backdrop is not the weatherstained harbor wall I’d remembered, but a building, partly in shadow, partly illuminated by brilliant sunshine. The apparent depth of focus is deceptive. The darker forms framed within the shadow are shuttered windows, not indistinct holes in a sea wall. As I follow the line of the building from light into shadow I notice it is several rooms deep and the wall behind is, in fact, some distance from the subject. The image of Said on his boat, once a secure symbol of some former state of prosperity in my mind, suddenly floats untethered: the boat now resembles a prop in a photo studio, set against a false backdrop. The misapprehended details are in themselves trivial, or should be, by any logic. And yet in the process of mentally correcting them, editing them as it were, I realize that the image had acquired a canonical status in my mind,

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with a radius of truth larger than its diegetic details, a truth now tampered with; what was radiant is now in shadow. Belated discoveries in a familiar image feel like revelations. Ironic revelations in this case: my misremembering of this image mirrors his. Just as Said’s repurposing of the photograph on his shop window extended its meaning beyond what is visible in the image itself, my own relationship to it is mediated by its restaging in Still Life. My sense of intimate familiarity with it—it is enmeshed in my film work, writing and thinking—carries a kind of hallucinatory, fictive logic of its own. Just as Said shuffles through photographs to recover knowledge not available to the eye, my mind has passed over particular details to arrive at what feels proximate to another kind of truth. This tension between what we see and what we feel we see in an image at any particular moment—between evidentiary and affective meaning—suggests the indeterminacy of both, as well as revealing their narrative depth and peculiar temporality. **** Our relationship to an image evolves over time. We see different things at different moments, depending on shifts in our subjectivity as viewers and makers. It is a reminder that any act of looking is always motivated. “Appearances in themselves are oracular,” writes John Berger; “they insinuate further than the discrete phenomena they present. . . . The precise meaning of an oracular statement depends upon the quest, or need of the one who listens to it.”11 When I made Still Life, Said’s photographs allowed me to explore embodied recollection and the dislocations of memory: they marked the irreducible distance that separated Said from his younger self. In the course of the interview it became clear that these images were important to Said not simply as imprints of Acre, but as material traces of youth. When referring to Acre’s waterfront as the “golden age,” he seemed to be gesturing as much at the splendid figure of his own youth as at the halcyon days of pre-1948 Palestine: the loss of Acre is lyrically convergent with the felt loss of vitality. While constructing the film, I also found myself returning repeatedly to the detail of Said’s hand holding the side of the boat, both as the point of continuity between the photograph and the video footage of him handling the image, and as the element of the photograph that betrayed unease and discomfort. The contortion of his wrist seemed to bear synecdochic relation to the larger context engulfing the image. Within the sequential logic of the film, the closeup fragment of his hand became an expressive refrain, connecting past and present, and prefiguring his painful account of loss. This reordering of experience through image manipulation, repetition and nonlinear forms of editing enabled an oblique approach. Pushing against



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conventional filmic grammars for representing Palestinian historical experience became a way of exploring other aesthetic possibilities for political engagement.12 These formal decisions were also an invitation to viewers to consider other forms of editorial control at work—the reordering of narrative elements, the place of politics—to reflect on the ability of photographs to function as documentary evidence, and to consider more generally the nature of historical data. On the tenuous boundary separating fiction from nonfiction in thought and composition, poet Eileen Myles suggests that “what’s fictional is arrangement—what follows what. If somebody is lying to you, part of what they’re doing is . . . changing the order of things.”13 As ethnographic filmmakers, viewers and readers, we have become adept at bracketing this problem of referential authenticity, because the composite nature of images— and their material and affective force—register, with such vivid intensity, complex relations between people, places and things that can lose immediacy and synchronic connection in writing. It was initially this capacity of photography to register presence and absence—indeed the passage of time itself, which made it a compelling medium for exploring Said’s experience of radical historical rupture, aging and exile.14 However, this search for meaning produces its own omissions. “The meaning we find in what we see that allows us to categorize objects,” writes ethnographic filmmaker, David MacDougall, “can blind, causing us to see only what we expect to see, or distracting us from seeing very much at all.”15 In a similar vein John Dewey, in his lectures on art as experience, differentiates between perception that is “fresh and alive,” and what he calls “recognition,” which is perception that has been “arrested at the point where it will serve some other purpose.”16 While the former rests on apprehension that is intimate and intuitive, the latter involves learning how to read the cues of cultural convention: “We recognize a man on the street in order to greet or to avoid him,” writes Dewey, “not so as to see him for the sake of seeing what is there.” When seeing is subordinated to some other order of knowledge or political purpose, recognition is facilitated at the expense of perception. The image’s resolution, so to speak, is reduced; signification and interpretation are foreclosed. To echo Jacques Rancière’s recent theorization of the image, this way of seeing neglects the way “things themselves speak and are silent.”17 As filmmakers and anthropologists working with photographs, how are we to resist the urge to speak for them? How can we be sensitive to the way they communicate nonlinguistically, while incorporating them into a structure that is ultimately and inescapably one of language? Photographs cannot express meaning in and of themselves; they demand interpretation. In any act of looking there is arguably, moreover, a presumption of narrative meaning. “When we find a photograph meaningful,” observes Berger, “we are lending it a past

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and future”—in other words, creating a narrative trajectory and securing it in language.18 By illuminating different constellations of meaning in the imagination of the viewer, photographs—and the stories we tell about them—create space for affective and sensory engagement, interiority, retrospective and prospective thought (while looking at an image, you instinctively anticipate the memories that will follow). As readers you cannot verify my description of the photograph of Said, but you have nevertheless been conscripted into some kind of ethical encounter with it, and are perhaps able to imagine the particular temporality and set of associations it conjures both for Said, and now for me. The critical phenomenologist Robert Desjarlais, reflecting on a photograph he took of a beggar on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur Basilica some years ago, described the encounter as an ambiguous exchange of glances, his motivated by the preoccupations of an anthropologist-tourist, the beggar by the possibility of money.19 His account of being possessed by the shrouded figure in the photograph suggests a force neither fully conscious, nor volitional— a power emanating from the image itself, which seems to resist language and interpretation. He speculates who the beggar is, why he is there, and confabulates. Desjarlais’s succumbing to this affective force seemed to register neither interpretive struggle nor methodological uncertainty, but rather something like poetic inspiration. Disconnected from the discrete phenomena they represent (a figure in front of a basilica; or, for that matter, a Palestinian fisherman on his boat), and unburdened of their indexical, documentary function, images in such moments can become vehicles for other kinds of “seeing.” Describing the relation between sight and vision in poetic creation, Joyce Carol Oates writes, “If we consider . . . what the poet has made out of the sighted object that is, but is not, contained within the subject, we catch a glimpse of the imagination akin to a flammable substance, into which a match is dropped.”20 Refracted by desire, the indexical is ignited. Such forms of seeing—where the meaning of the image is no longer tethered to social and historical coordinates—raise troubling questions for the documentarian and ethnographer. Do they distort and romanticize? Do they say more about the seer than what is being seen? In contexts like the one in which I work, where history must be insisted upon and “proven,” archival photographs—as the “fingerprint” that unsettles distinctions between object and representation through contact—perform almost by necessity, an evidentiary function and are thus politically charged.21 There is an expectation that as scholars working on Palestine we should accept our role as advocates, and use images to tap this “ideology of indexicality” and produce politically mobilizing work.22 By contrast, to dwell on the formal qualities of an image, the associations it produces, or the power it radiates as a “sensible object”— in other words, to aestheticize it—arouses political and ethical suspicion.23



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Social accountability appears to be the measure of value, and to entail a certain asceticism.24 Much of the writing about how images function in ethnographic work has been characterized by this moralized opposition of the political and aesthetic, often mapped onto an underlying opposition of the evidentiary and symbolic. On the one hand, scholars make claims for the unmediated, immediacy of images (they are vivid, concrete, documentary, expressive); on the other hand, they insist on their irredeemable ambiguity, for example, arguing that they are “semantically richer the more speechless they are.”25 It is not uncommon to encounter both the urge to mystify and demystify images in the same text. The frequent reference to Roland Barthes’ punctum in writing about photographs—where a particular detail can pierce the viewer (a “sting, peck, cut, little hole”), defying the “studium” (the more general, codified meanings likely to be attributed), is symptomatic of this ongoing belief in the primitive power of images, a preconceptual relation to seeing, an ability to bypass language.26 So how might we balance the evidentiary and expressive when drawing on images in ethnographic practice? Searching for alternative ways to bring image and text together brings me the novels of W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s use of images defies easy classification, and the interplay of text and photograph both “invites and thwarts [the reader’s] attempts to separate fact from fiction.”27 Photographs appear as interruptions: they break the flow of speech (sometimes in the middle of a hyphenated word), or illuminate an aspect of text, but obliquely, at some remove, off to one side. The relation of image and text is carefully disjointed and out of synch. Rather than functioning as document or illustration, Sebald’s evocative images create space for intimate indeterminacy; they communicate opacity. Photographs in ethnographic film can similarly introduce ambiguity and create space for intersubjective engagement between film-subject, filmmaker, and viewer. We see, remember, imagine, interpret, subvert, reformulate, and so on. As Bazin noted early on, a unique indexicality is laid bare in film, a “concrete reality in itself multiple and full of ambiguity.”28 How might this vexed ideology of indexicality in turn shape ethnographic writing? What possibilities does it offer anthropologists? Echoing Bazin, Stanley Cavell describes film’s capacity to register the incommunicability of experience—those aspects of life that do not neatly fit into a verbal matrix. He writes: There is a further reality that film pursues . . . in which the words we need are not synchronized with the occasions of their need. . . . I have in mind the pulsing air of incommunicability which may nudge the edge of any experience and placement: the curve of fingers that day, a mouth, the sudden rise of the body’s frame as it is caught by the color and scent of flowers, laughing all afternoon mostly about nothing, the friend gone but somewhere now which starts from

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here—spools of history that have unwound only to me now, occasions which will not reach words for me now, and if not now, never.29

If Cavell’s description underscores the inescapability of the linguistic lens, even as he strives against it, it offers a striking example of how the experience of seeing and the rhythm of perception can also shape our language and the way we write. Our work in images, static and moving, can essay to achieve something similar, a style that acknowledges the limits of a medium even as it tries to transcend them. NOTES 1. Eric Santner, Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). 2. Susan Sontag, On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977), 70. 3. Diana Allan, dir., Still Life (Beirut and Cambridge, MA: Digital video, color, 27 mins). 4. As I have become more interested in the trade networks that tied Sidon, Acre, and other coastal communities before 1948, when Palestinians, Lebanese, and Syrians moved fluidly between the port cities and markets of greater Syria, I also wonder if these more inclusive forms of belonging, beyond the national frame were being invoked. 5. André Bazin, “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” What Is Cinema? Vol. 1, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 14. 6. The Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University was established by the anthropologist and filmmaker, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, who continues to direct it. For more on SEL’s approach see Scott MacDonald, American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013) and J. P. Sniadecki, “Chaiqian/Demolition: Reflections on Media Practice,” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2014), 23–37. See also http://sel.fas.harvard.edu. 7. Bill Nichols coined the term “expository documentary” for films that function as illustration to textual argument. Where observational filmmaking is associated with showing, expository modes are linked to telling, often through the inclusion of voice-over and the insertion of text. See ch. II, Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). 8. See http://nakba-archive.org. 9. The other films in series include Fire Under Ash (2008) and Terrace of the Sea (2010). 10. Diana Allan, “From Archive to Art Film: A Palestinian Aesthetics of Memory Reviewed,” Cairo Papers in Social Science, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (2012), 149–66. 11. John Berger, About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 118. 12. For an interesting discussion of representations of the Nakba in Palestinian cinema, and the emergence of what has been dubbed “Pallywood”—a cinema focusing on the suffering Palestinian subject in order to expose the traumatic truth about



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Israel’s political and military policies, see T. J. Demos, The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 144–69. 13. Eileen Myles, “The Art of Poetry, No. 99,” Interview by Ben Lerner, The Paris Review, No. 215 (Fall 2015), parisreview.org. 14. This ideology of photographs as evidence derives both from their indexical relation to the event captured and the presumed objectivity of the camera’s mechanical eye. As Karen Strassler argues, the “unconscious optics” of photographs, “explode the givenness of perceptual reality by opening up a whole realm of truths unavailable to the naked eye.” Karen Strassler, Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 231. 15. David MacDougall, The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 1. 16. John Dewey, Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 1934). 17. Jacques Rancière, The Future of the Image (London: Verson, 2007), 13. Cited in Mary Griffin Wilson, “Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Contemporary Literature (Spring 2013), 56. 18. Berger, About Looking, 89. 19. Robert Desjarlais, “Blank White.” Unpublished conference paper, presented at the American Anthropological Association Annual Meeting (2015). 20. Joyce Carol Oates, “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” New York Review of Books (August 13, 2015). 21. Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 1, 15–16. 22. See Strassler, Refracted Visions. 23. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Godsen, and Ruth Philips, Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Ariella Azoulay, “Getting Rid of the Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 7–8 (2010), 239–62. 24. While it is broadly recognized that ethnographic writing employs narrative and literary techniques to arouse emotion and engage the imagination of its audience, or arrive at a more proximate representation of reality, the same expressive latitude is not extended to images, where the aesthetic, artistic, and analytic are often seen to be at odds. See James Clifford, “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 25. Clive Scott quoted in Susanne Lenne Jones’ The Multiplicities of Memories in Contemporary German Literature: How Photographs are Used to Reconstruct Narratives of History (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013), 24. See also Clive Scott, The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). 26. Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). 27. Wilson, “Sheets of Past,” 55. 28. André Bazin, What is Cinema? Vol. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971/2005), 37. Cited in Sniadecki, “Chaiqian/Demolition,” 28. 29. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971/1979), 147–48.

Chapter 13

Intimacy, Modesty, Silence Documentary Filmmaking in the Face of Trauma Mieke Bal

Some fifteen years ago, I began, quite suddenly, to make documentaries. The occasion was rather prosaic: something bad happened to my neighbor, and I was upset that this was done in the name of the state, hence, as some extension of my name, too. I felt compelled to stand at his side, and make sure to document what happened, or least, what I was privy to and could capture with my camera. The issue was the unfair, unnecessary, and unwarranted persecution of an undocumented migrant in Paris. Instead of making a film the first goal of which would be to produce and distribute knowledge, I wanted, quite simply and frankly: naively, to bear witness. Knowledge did come into the equation: I wanted people to know what kind of cruelties were committed in our collective name—as a state. But this was not because we didn’t know this as individuals. We do; we know these things happen, and happen all the time. The request to write for this volume made me think back to that moment in 2002 when I decided to make the film, titled Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days, 2004). And to think why, from then on, I continued to make documentaries, and later fiction films, but these always with a strong bond to reality too, in some form or other. Retrospectively I understood that for me, documentary is not only for the transmission of knowledge, but also, or even primarily, for demonstrating attitudes toward the knowledge desired and (partly, by means of the film) proposed. From my vantage point, this double effect is clear from nearly all the documentaries I see. They are, first of all, passionate: informed by passion. The passion that brings directors to the subject and makes them feel obliged to carry the project through is much more complex than the desire to bring knowledge to spectators. René Descartes—a much but wrongly maligned philosopher on whom I have just completed a fiction-film project titled Reasonable Doubt (2015)—wrote his last treatise, “The Passions of the 261

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Soul” in a spirit close to what I mean here by passionate. You do something because you want to do it, and your “soul” (whatever that concept means to us today) pushes you, so that action (of your body) occurs. Passion is the animating force of the body, the inward agitation to action. Despite the vulgate that claims Descartes guilty of separating mind from body—the dilemma or dichotomy as we have inherited it—the inquietude that his writings convey is precisely coming from the opposite direction: he argued so strongly for the independent existence of the soul (a term that perhaps finds its only equal today in the word mind) because he did not think such a separation was easy, or even possible. Descartes’ soul/mind included, or at the very least, touched the imagination, the senses (hence, the body), memory, and yes, the intellect. The soul’s passions, for him, is the connection between mind and body. I can live with such a concept of “soul” even if I do not believe any of the religious paraphernalia attached to it. In fact, all restrictions to cognition (to use, again, a contemporary word) or intellect would be incompatible with Descartes’ vision. Therefore, I cannot imagine that a documentary has ever been made without passion as its motivating force. In my practice of documentary making my passion goes to two aspects most important of all, but they are in tension with each other because they each serve a different constituency. Let me abbreviate them with the words “modesty” and “intimacy.” On the one hand, a tremendous degree of modesty is necessary in order to preserve the privacy of the people concerned, especially if they express a wish for such discretion, but even regardless of such expression. This demand may go against the director’s impulse to document as much as possible, especially things that are difficult to talk about on camera. When people fall silent, they have their reasons for it. It is not the role of the filmmaker to dig and probe and force those whom she is filming. Documentation should not be coercive. People who agree to be “subjects” of documentary must have the trust of the director, who, in turn, expects them to tell the truth insofar as they are able; but even more importantly, the subjects must be able to trust the director—a trust that the director must earn and deserve. Informed consent only goes so far, since not all such subjects can be totally aware of what may happen to the film footage in which they appear. The director therefore owes it to the people whose stories she documents to make sure no personal or private limits are transgressed. On the other hand, the filmmaker has to anticipate the presence of her audience. The best chances for the film to engage viewers will derive from the intimacy established between the filmmaker and the people in the film. Sometimes long stretches of togetherness are necessary to achieve this intimacy; it may be achieved easily, almost “naturally.” But the danger I find is that it may also be the result of manipulation. The tension inherent in this is that the intimacy is pursued, not for the development of a genuine friendship—even



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if this may result—but in the interest of the filmmaker’s access to an audience; hence, for the viewers’ sake, rather than of the people being filmed. In my process of making films I noticed quickly how important these two concepts—modesty and intimacy—turned out to be. In this chapter I will develop these two concepts, and the tension between them, on the basis of some of my documentary work. I will limit myself to two productions, with seemingly opposed cinematographic strategies. The first is the first film I made, Mille et un jours. Creating this work, together with others, became an experiment in discovering what matters in documentary filmmaking. Let us call it the ethics of the artwork as distinct from the technology, skills, and creativity of the artistic practice. Mille et un jours is a film full of people, and thus representative of many voices. Here, the pluralization of voices became a strategy for creating intimacy and preserving modesty. The second production is the installation Nothing is Missing (2006–12), a long-term project that was occasioned by a subject from Mille et un jours. The mother of the main figure of the first film was as unfairly treated as her son, when she was denied a visa to attend his wedding, so I decided to reverse the perspective and visit mothers who (literally) sit in their homes waiting for news from the child who is now out of reach—out of the country. Here, the monologue (and sometimes the dialogue) became the strategy to achieve intimacy and preserve modesty. Both films have a relationship to trauma, although without being a representation of trauma as such, and both have been received as works of art. They were not made in pursuit of beauty or aesthetic experience. Indeed, for reasons of intimacy and discretion, they were both purposively made with very low-tech equipment, and have low production values. The very mode of production—the tools of filming, the manner of approaching people in their homes—brings up the ethics of documentary making, and eventually, documentary watching. Proposing to the viewer to reflect on the ethical issue at hand is just as important as, or perhaps more so, than making the hidden truth known by means of the film itself. The low production value thus becomes semiotically relevant.1 The first film, Mille et un jours, is narrative, the second, Nothing is Missing, is less clearly so. The second project, an installation of five to seventeen films, is based on attempts to empower disempowered persons who suffered great loss. In both cases, however, it is not possible ethically or epistemologically to affirm the actual presence of trauma. Still, both films suggest we are uncomfortably in the presence of a person or persons who have suffered potentially traumatogenic events. The possibility of trauma has an impact on the narrativity of the film because traumatic events resist the integration that makes memory possible. Since they cannot become narrative memories, traumatic events are mechanically reenacted as drama rather than synthetically

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narrated. The memorizing agent cannot “master” them because they remain outside the subject, assaulting her without her participation.2 For cinema, the potential presence of trauma imposes not only the modesty mentioned but also the creation of a form that does justice to the desire of audiences to know while not infringing on that modesty. To characterize both films under discussion here I use the phrase “migratory aesthetics.” For aesthetics I return to the eighteenth-century philosopher, Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten who developed the notion of binding through the senses in a preKantian book of 1750.3 Because such binding happens in public space such an aesthetics is also political. Since this conception of the aesthetic presumes neither formal beauty nor a separate artistic sphere, it seems a useful starting point to develop an understanding of Baumgarten’s theory that straddles the distinction between academic and artistic exploration. With “migratory” I do not aim to define the culture or aesthetics of migrants but the public-sensorial space we all share. For the political, I rely on the distinctions between politics and the political currently advanced by, among others, Chantal Mouffe. In this distinction, politics is the organizational strategy that settles conflict, even if the political is also where conflict “happens.” Needless to say it is only on account of the political that social life is possible. To be sure, though, politics constantly attempts to dampen the political. Thus migratory aesthetics, as it finds purchase in documentary filmmaking, will act as means for the political to express itself—staving off as best as it can, the stultifying effects of politics. LOUD SILENCE: INTIMACY AND THE DISPERSAL OF VOICE The first film, Mille et un jours, is a narrative; it concerns a series of events. But the narrativity is put under pressure by the potential of trauma—a possibility gleaned from bits and pieces of conversations and facial expressions (such as faces that appear to fall or shut down). Modesty precludes finding out, let alone revealing further details. Even before modesty became an issue, from the filmmakers’ perspective, Mille et un jours was so closely situated in inseparably overlapping cultures that it seemed impossible to let it be spoken in a single voice—to attribute, implicitly or explicitly, the narrative to a single speaker. Instead, the story asked to be multivoiced. The background of this realization is the commonplace assumption that every narrative is “uttered” by a voice belonging to an explicit or implicit narrator. Having been a proponent of this one-narrative, one-speaker thesis myself, and having been involved in the making of Mille et un jours, I considered this a relevant and challenging contradiction. Making this documentary while respecting the two ethical imperatives thus posed a narratological problem.4



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In narrative theory, it seems obvious that every speech act, including visual or mixed media speech acts, originates from a “speaker” who utters it. Moreover, the question of voice raises a reasonable worry about narrative responsibility. My argument here is not meant to deny the linguistic, semiotic or, indeed, ethical aspects of that belief. Nor do I wish to make a case for the possibility of “sentences without speaker” on the basis of strictly philosophical arguments.5 Instead, I seek to question the implications of the assumption that all narratives originate in a speaking subject—one that, on principle, would be singular—and I propose a provisional suspension of this assumption. Even though film is predominantly a narrative genre, the voice—especially the singular voice—assumption does not readily apply to it. Yet, if the common assumption holds, then film, even if it does not necessarily contains a narratorial voice, can also be assumed to have a narrative subject. Therefore, I look at the very familiar concept of voice in order to denaturalize it.6 Mille et un jours is a film on the subject of migration. Hence, thematically as well as structurally, it is situated in a space not reducible to one specific culture. Consequently, the film resists unquestioned concepts from the Western tradition such as voice. I knew intuitively that this tension was a productive one, but only if we were able to work out how the concept of voice can be revised so as to live up to its encounter with cinematic narrativity. Such a revision of the concept required a revision of that narrativity as such. There could be, and was, a main character, but this did not make him the main speaker. In line with the possibility of trauma, the structure of the documentary became dramatic and nonlinear. In Mille et un jours we celebrate the outcome of a long and intricate journey, and the anguish, struggle, loneliness, and financial constraints of Tarek, a young sans-papiers in Paris. The joyful three-day celebration of his wedding establishes the here-and-now of this documentary, which is organized through an Aristotelian unity of time, space, and event. But within that same event, pockets of history weigh in with darker times and tougher spaces—where trauma might have occurred. Bound to the present of the festive moment in which the film is set, the people in the film descend into memories of fear and uncertainty, only to bounce back again and rejoice in the outcome. This temporal structure already precludes any singularity of voice. It also alerts us to the possibility of trauma, and the absolute need to respect the two ethical guidelines of modesty and intimacy: being with the people, yet without probing them.7 As in so many films, the story—the sequence of events, from illegal to legal status—is never really told. This lack of a traceable act of storytelling is also a simple thematic issue. Tarek’s is a complex story that cannot be offered as a coherent or full narrative in the film; he cannot “master” it. Nor does a unifying, identifiable subject or “voice” mediate the content. Instead,

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the film tells a story through the voices of the people involved—who, by definition, are diegetically embedded; at the same time, they are also providing closure through visual celebration. Through a genuine intimacy with the men and women in front of the camera, the film invites the viewer to become acquainted with the ins-and-outs of their situation—in effect, to be a guest at the wedding. This intimacy further hampers assigning an overall voice to the film. Even its viewers cannot easily step out of the diegesis. The intimacy of the film, however, clashes with politics. The multiplication of voices extends across time as well as across different worlds. With the wedding celebrations in full swing, we witness how four generations of Tunisian immigrants give shape, each in their own way, to their predicament of migration and the different opportunities and hardships they have encountered. The politics of immigration never cease to haunt the proceedings. However, not all generations talk about this constantly present and pressing theme. Consequently, merely adding up the voices does not provide a sense of completeness either; there is no unified or collective narrative voice that tells this story. Instead, the film’s voice is dispersed through a multitude of voices and images, none of which can be considered unifying.8 The unifying voice that is usually expected in film, perhaps especially in a documentary film with a narrative shape, is actively foreclosed. For example, against the backdrop of political machinations, the film offers a consideration of what is easily dismissed as an “arranged marriage.” This issue is presented through the voices of the bride and her parents, the groom and his future brother-in-law, and in a mixture of denial, endorsement and doubt. Importantly, the issue of arranged marriages, while frequently presented, is never named, never “voiced,” never even put in so many words. If anywhere, the topic suggests itself in the many concerns for the bride’s future life. Western viewers, considering arranged marriages a token of cultural foreignness, and thus a theme, might have expected an explicit discussion—and perhaps would have demanded political clarity, a distinct position for or against. But it is the very “naturalized” status of arranged marriages in the culture from which the parents migrated that precludes a clear voice that directly addresses this issue. Hence, using a narratorial voice would violate what is most “natural” to the couple and their guests. In addition to the politics of immigration and arranged marriages, a third theme that is highly present but not “voiced” is time. Cast against the shadow of his father’s failure, as an earlier immigrant, to cope with capitalist time, Tarek seems obsessed with time’s frightening speed. Meanwhile—and this makes matters worse—other elements of the film do appear to solicit more straightforward identificatory viewings. For example, an insight into the social fabric of immigrant life is given as well as a tender portrait of a young woman and her friends reflecting on the transformation of one of them from



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schoolgirl into adult woman. The profound grief of loving parents about to see their eldest child leave home and move to the city—a change they barely seem able to face—alternates with the joyful anticipation of and preparations for a wedding that gives expression to their love for and pride in their daughter. Short of calling these expressions of emotions, or the emotions themselves, “universal,” I assume they speak to Western viewers as much as to the community of Arabic immigrants. These parts of the film could be assumed to have a voice—except that that “voicedness” itself stands in tension to the necessarily “devoiced,” or, rather, multivoiced—parts described above. Yet another attack on narrative voice stems from the voices of a misguided official and a faux journalist. Their contrary views open up—rather than shut down in consensus and prejudice—the question of how the administration ought to deal with situations where rules and people appear to be no easy match; where politics clashes with the political. Here, the contradictory views cannot, indeed must not, be resolved in a higher truth. Instead, the contradictory nature of many of the film’s speeches constitutes the film’s performativity. Taken together, these cases, while undermining the self-evident nature of voice, also serve a constructive purpose. For these problematizations of voice reflect a thematic concern that is essential, yet not at all explicit. Rife with bureaucratic violence but also with the characters’ vitality, determination, honesty, and intelligence in outsmarting the system, the film’s content and aesthetics together constitute a plea for a world without borders. Time, it seems, constitutes a border. None of the people in the film are aware of this, and no connection is therefore made—through a voice—between, for example, time and borders. Yet, the unliveable nature of Western time comes to the fore with the insistence borne by repetition. Thus, migratory aesthetics partly emerges from the failure of “voice,” while voice, in turn, foregrounds aspects of migratory aesthetics that might otherwise remain invisible. Therefore, voice is here a concept under siege that, nevertheless, fiercely defends itself.9 Affect and voice are strongly connected, whereas narration as such is dispersed. On the one hand, this association reincarnates the voice. On the other hand, narrative theory cannot deal with the fact that, in the very attempt to incarnate voice, to give it body—by marking its gender, age, and other social positions, for example—the voice is de-individualized by the analyst who uses the term “voice.” Instead, the relation between the narratorial, non-diegetic voice and the body contains a regulation through rhythm that includes this term’s narratological sense—what Amittai Aviram calls the “telling rhythm.”10 This aspect of narrative keeps us aware of the rhythmic bond between voice and the movement of the body. This relationship affects more than

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decipherable language. Importing body, music, and space as frames of affective-perceptual experience into the text, such a notion of voice indicates that narrative cannot be severed from the other domains of culture. Furthermore, this aspect of narrative also comprises “accents,” those little signs that denaturalize the disembodied neutral voice of classical narrative and its theory. In Mille et un jours, rhythm is a strongly narrativising element, along with the fast-paced rhythm in which bodies move. But the concept of voice cannot be applied to this rhythmic narration. The immediate reason for this is that the film is anchored in what I have called a “migratory aesthetics.” This term concerns the utterly small yet significant aspects of everyday culture as well as academic thought, which are foreign in origin, but not in their present incarnation. In a sense these aspects are beyond identity but carry visible and audible traces of foreignness that are sometimes called “accents.” This makes any concept that unifies and grants authority impossible to use in a straightforward way. What appears as the narratological “messiness” of Mille et un jours is precisely where the classical Western tradition of narrative intersects and interacts with the profound hybridity of the migratory aesthetics through which migrants’ home and host cultures mutually enrich each other.11 A key example of the ongoing relevance of “voice” in spite of its untenability resides in the fact that most people in the film speak in a second language, constantly reflecting their efforts of translation. This negotiation intensifies their body language while slowing down their speech and its comprehension, both physically and through the deployment of metaphors that are unusual in French. The film editing attempted to capture that peculiar rhythm in order to preserve and convey the mixed temporality of the resulting narrativity. But such narrativity can be assigned neither to the characters, who gave no indication of awareness about the mixed rhythm of their storytelling, nor to the filmmakers who could only be as faithful as possible—“documentarywise”—to their interpretation of these story-tellings. It is precisely to the extent that we preserved these elements as much as possible that the film is documentary. “Voice” reinforces our habit of perceiving reality through linear narratives. Yet since reality is neither linear nor singular, reality in films cannot possibly be straightforwardly linear or singular as well. Rather, the disorderly reality in which we live, including when we are watching a film, constantly bleeds into our field of vision. What would happen if, instead of streamlining events retrospectively into a story, we position the moment of storytelling in the unpredictable present and allow the past to creep in, like an apparition of what is both insignificant and decisive? This strategy became the structure of the film, and thereby a reply to this question.



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With this approach, the possibility of trauma intervened and dictated our ethical commitments. Thus, while making Mille et un jours, three difficulties became the guidelines for our work: 1. We aimed to make a documentary based on the culmination of a story full of trauma and shock, the memories of which impinged on the joyful outcome—the wedding celebration. But how do you document the innertruths of memory when memory is foreclosed? 2. In line with traumatic recall in the present, how do you represent past and present at the same time? 3. On the level of emotion and the medium’s work with affect (affect as a medium), how do you render joy and grief, relief and anxiety, trust and mistrust, within a threshold situation between private and public, as well as, and again, within the same moment? These three challenges constitute precisely the ambiguity of documentary as a genre—that is, its mission of trying to reduce the heterogeneity between the language of film and the world it signifies, symbolizes, and necessarily betrays. In the cracks between these two aspects, the issues of modesty and intimacy play themselves out. Voice-over is, therefore, the primary tool of documentary film that we had to cast out. For, as Shoshana Felman cautions in a different context, if truth can lie, it is on this affective level that it does so most readily. It is easy, all too easy, to flatten or diffuse emotions or, by contrast, to arouse them unwarrantedly through sentimentality. Hence, it is in the preferred use of a narrative voice-over that the deceit inherent in documentary film lays.12 Linear narrative and its explanatory voice-over seemed an unsuitable form for our story, composed as it had to be of bits and pieces, the fragmentary strands that constitute memories and the inaccessible memories of trauma. Reportage alternated with testimony, while the witnesses, all too aware of the public nature of that which they report, are emotionally restrained. As a result, the grief and anxiety, the impact of the small violence as well as the more positive emotions of relief, love, and happiness barely surface. Through this avoidance of sentimentality on the part of the interviewees, the small tips of icebergs are, we find, more affectively powerful. One such moment can be glimpsed when Tarek, instead of complaining, simply mentions the prohibitive phone call he received that called off the wedding at 4:00 pm the day before it was to occur, and immediately compelled him to go in hiding. When asked if she was afraid, Ilhem first says that she was surprised. While putting on lipstick, her mother says Ilhem became more decided when the prohibition came. Thus, instead of a story of collective emotion—as a voice-over would have had to tell it—these tiny, very intimate

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moments dispersed through the sequence and interrupted by other events, form an emotional “rhizome.”13 A second sense in which the traditional model of the documentary film with voice-over seemed less straightforwardly suitable for this film is the absence of a clear political position. Mille et un jours is not a one-issue film, nor is there a single answer to any of the questions that come up. First of all, narratologically speaking, there is no one-issue through which, and no oneposition from which, the story is being told. For example, there is no loudand-clear indictment of the French police. This is not because we wish to make an a-political film. On the contrary: in a situation where ambiguity and tension are more “normal” than a clear-cut right-and-wrong, and where such shifting values are contingent upon the power of those who do the speaking, a de-fetishization of right-and-wrong decisions seemed called for. The issues of ambiguity and tension came up in the context of the police intervention lying at the heart of the story. The police intervention was at once both extremely modest, in that no physical violence was used, and also extremely hurtful, in that it violated the safety of the domestic sphere; it set up trusting people against one another; it nearly ruined both the marriage and the groom’s ticket to legal residency; and it scared the daylights out of a young boy, who was home alone when the police came to search the apartment. At the same time, no one was beaten up and no one was put in jail. In fact, the police’s powerlessness to act, due to their lack of insight into the culture they were assaulting, is pathetic, and even, at times, comical. For these combined reasons, we refrained from interviewing the police. This decision was our own act of silence. If a film modeled according to migratory aesthetics is to avoid an exteriorised, even eroticised othering, a constant negotiation between outside and inside perspectives is needed. This negotiation can be seen as an exchange between the two perspectives, rather like the exchange so prominent in the gift culture we are looking at and involved with. In terms of narration, the exchange between the perspectives of the filmmakers and that of the people in front of their cameras embodies such a gift culture as it has insinuated itself in the host culture. Cinematic form, thus, espouses the hybrid situation aesthetically. One aspect that the concept of migratory aesthetics clarifies is the unusual intimacy of the film, which encompasses the filmmakers themselves, addressed and evoked discretely but persistently as part of the party. There is indeed a consistent situating of the filming inside the ambiance of the group of people concerned.14 The intimacy in the mode of filming and editing might wrongly suggest that our lack of narratorial intervention entails total endorsement of the political positions represented. But, in fact, the way the film has locked itself inside the group serves another purpose. It is from the inside that it becomes



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possible to bear witness to what I call, for lack of a better term, the “hybriditywithin” that characterizes migrant situations. The outside world comes inside the home, the family life, and installs itself there.15 A central and clear manifestation of this principle of inner-hybridity runs through the film. This is the presence-absence of the police, already evoked, memories of which continue to shape the relationships between the groom and his future in-laws, and of the bride’s family with their neighbors. Rather than to highlight the outward, public manifestation of the intervention, we wanted to show the impact of this police intervention inside the home, in the private sphere, where the small violence, as the phrase has it, “hits home.” More important than having police officers say they had a job to do, it seemed to us important to show the bride’s father’s doubt about the groom, which was the direct consequence of the police intervention. Shifting from the bride’s father to the groom, visible grief over the absence of his beloved mother and uncle overruled the anxiety over his status. But this overruling occurred and could hence only be perceived against the backdrop of that anxiety. But Mille et un jours is not an attempt to do justice to the perspective of the “insiders,” namely, the people concerned in the film; to a serious extent, they make the film and decide what to say and do. Nor are they passive victims. For, conversely, it is through interviews with two wedding guests, each of whom attempted to play a part in getting the marriage approved, that we can see how the outside world of politics is being manipulated from inside the party. First of all—perhaps to the shock of those with binary expectations—a Magrebhine woman defends the state with arguments appealing to French republican, democratic values, and to sentimental talk of “love”—spoken, suddenly, in the administrative plural “we.” And it is a Frenchman who speaks up against the state, sensitive as he is to the real albeit nonphysical violence committed in the name of the law. This reversal of expected, prejudged positions alone makes for a kind of political “messiness” that, we believe, is best suited to generate fresh discussions. One of the tools to keep that messiness in view is the suspension of the unifying voice.16 If “voice” is a term invented to eliminate authorship as the prime preoccupation of literary studies, then to let it in again through the back door, the speakers in the film cannot be discarded as its (collective) “voice” without assessing the position of those who wielded the camera, the editing programme and, most importantly, the position of “second person” to whom the interviewees speak, along with the intimacy of the hosts and guests at the wedding. The word “voice,” a near-catachresis, is naturalised to account for the fact that a story does not come out of the blue and that someone is responsible for its making. That “someone” may be a collective, as is routine in cinema and theater, but the struggle to acknowledge filmmakers collectively, beyond the director alone, shows the difficulty of accepting shared responsibility,

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for good or ill. It is even more unusual to come across the acknowledgement of subjects—fictional characters or the people in documentaries—as “coauthors” whose voices co-structure the text. Given the importance of responsibility, it seems indispensable to circumscribe the subject of the text. But when we use words like “responsible,” we enter the domain of the ethical. And this domain becomes active when the “object” of narration is the audience’s cultural “other”—a term that is as problematic as “hybridity” but also a term that is as hard to avoid. Here, Descartes and Spinoza, I imagine, would have something to discuss. The use of not only multiple cameras but also of borrowed home videos and historical footage underscores the active contribution of the protagonists’ culture in constituting the film, and through a variety of ways. Early in Mille et un jours, where footage from home videos of the children’s early years shows a good degree of assimilation, the parents express a longing for their homeland and cultural traditions as well as regret that Tunisia is just a holiday destination for their French-born children. At the end of the film, this view is turned upside-down when it turns out that the daughter had insisted on a traditional wedding, whereas her mother, while happy to comply, does not know the meaning of some of the traditions involved. The film ends with the mother’s expression of limited knowledge—finding her at once clearly pleased that the traditional after-wedding meal is being served, while also unable to explain its meaning.17 Meanwhile, what, for the parents, is a lived past to which they cling and towards which they gently push their children—the children mark as a possible future, potentially filling an emptiness or gap in their own genealogy. For this new generation, there is a hybrid belonging to a culture that was never theirs to begin with, yet one that is always present in their lives through their parents’ nostalgia—“remembered” in what is somewhat problematically called post-memory.18 The Arabic tradition as embodied in A Thousand and One Nights is called upon to establish genre. It helps, that is, to insert into the film the discourse of the fairy tale and the structure of the patchwork, the string narrative and the loosely connected collections of stories in which so much of ancient world literature is captured. This discourse is literally an inter-discourse, as a discursive interlocutor. It is present as an antecedent, but also, and at the same time, as the discourse of post-commentary, à la Bakhtin’s heteroglossia.19 Nevertheless, the question of voice, far from being futile, is absolutely central in the Arabic classic. The diegetic thread that keeps the stories together, such as there is, consists of the fabulous gift of story-telling Scheherazade possesses, which saves her life. The point is not, then, to eliminate voice from our inquiry but to examine the point of its occurrences. In contradistinction— but systematically—the life-saving quality of voice in the universe of Mille et



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un jours resides, precisely, in voice’s multiplicity. As Tarek himself asserts, without his friends who have the key (to his mailbox, but also, by extension, to his life, under construction as it is) he could not have managed it all. For Mille et un jours, the impossibility to determine who speaks translates into a dispersal of “voices,” which facilitates a reception equally diverse: each viewer can both recognize his or her own cultural “voice” and encounter voices less familiar to him or her. On the other hand, there is the question of the social relevance of the film, that is, “What does it do to the public domain in which it functions?” In our case, the facilitation of what I call “intercultural encounter” helps enrich such encounters for both groups since it gives shape to the European public domain—say, “Western” and “Arabic.” These two questions—who speaks, and what is the social relevance—I hasten to add, must be asked in the positive and also in the negative form. What meanings and critical possibilities are repressed when we use a concept of the “who?”kind, such as narrative voice? I think these questions matter as a backlight for the analysis underway in the film and in the present essay. SILENCES SPEAK VOLUMES As we have seen, documentary film can stage the modesty the genre’s ethics require, as well as the intimacy that helps keep the dignity of the participants intact. No matter how much talk there is in the film, the tension between intimacy and modesty primarily concerns silence. What does a filmmaker do when people stop talking or clearly refrain from opening up in ways that seem optimal to the expression of their inner lives? In Mille et un jours, people’s reticence in front of the camera created the need for a multiplicity of voices. In Nothing is Missing, where each screen presents a single voice (for the most part), addressed to an intimate other, silence becomes more conspicuous. The reluctance to speak deserves acceptance and respect from the director; but it also tends to entice a filmmaker to try to get through the silence, in short, to get people to speak. For frequently the question is what silences hide. And a serious documentary filmmaker will not stop at the person’s (de)fence; she will seek to find out what is hidden, even why it is hidden, so that it can be revealed. And thereby the small acts of (directorial) cheating often begin. One such act, seeming innocent, would be for the filmmaker to start talking about things that show identification. Something along the line of “I understand why you don’t want to talk. But you can trust me; I have been through something similar.” Even if this is not true; or if it is irrelevant. Worse than outright lying is a form of blackmail that, appealing to the other’s vanity or to the desperate attempt of people to get attention for their plight, suggests— subtly or not-so-subtly—that the film might fail if the subjects are not more

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forthcoming. If successful (or not?) for engendering speech and commentary, these strategies of deceit and manipulation remain violent acts. They assault the will or will power of the subject. They, in effect, force people to say something they—for whatever reason, by definition legitimate—prefer to keep silent about. Why, one may wonder, is silence so sacred? It is not the silence that is sacred but the autonomy of the person who elects it as a mode of speaking. Therefore, while probing and prodding by the filmmaker is ethically problematic, representing the silence itself is not. Keeping silent in the face of an expressed desire for openness is a form of speaking, for behind such silence may be shame, shyness, or the possibility of past trauma. Shame is, of course, a frequent and legitimate emotion. Entire cultures are considered cultures of shame, in opposition or not to “honor.” Saying things hitherto hidden may trigger strong, even unbearable shame. As such, shame is a social emotion; it influences how people, from then on, live with others in their shared environments. Shyness—a psychic variation of shame—is, like all psychic phenomena, hard to control. If behind the silence lays trauma, the issues of shame and shyness become stronger. I have said that in Mille et un jours there were hints that made me think there might be traumatogenic events that had to remain unspoken. Yet I could not go further than such speculations. Spelling out a trauma goes against what trauma is as well as against modesty. It is even impossible to determine the presence of trauma, and it is immodest to try. Instead, in the second example I will propose some instances of silence that speak “around” the possibility of trauma; or, if not trauma, then a deeply felt grief, affliction, or troubling experience. The mission of documentary film is, then, to both convey the possibility of such suffering, and to refrain from reveling in it. Nothing is Missing puts the audience in the position of facing, in all meanings of that verb mentioned below, whether it likes it or not. I focus on Elena, mother of Simion, who left the hills in North-Eastern Romania to emigrate to Canada. This film is one element of a video installation of between five and eighteen pieces. All the pieces are about mothers whose children have left in migration, frequently ending up in the dire situation of undocumented immigrants, chased by the police and immigration officers, despised by the settled population, and unable to advance in their lives. The mothers stay behind; they do not know what happens to their children. I do not know if this separation is traumatizing (for some?, for all?) But if we assume that the mother-child bond is as close to a universal value as we can come, then it is likely to be a deep and abiding trauma. One of the most severe challenges to the idea, or hope, of any universal values and rights of this or any kind is the division produced all over the world between people whose everyday life and its intimacy are safely assured and those who lead an existence of “infra-humanity.” Migration causes the



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coexistence in one social environment of people who can afford to live permanently in a place and those who cannot—namely, those who are driven to displacement. In Mille et un jour as well as in Nothing is Missing (Elena), this division is the central concern.20 The combination of motherhood and migration is a good place to reflect on the possibility of making art—and thereby experience—that can “touch” trauma. Imagine a gallery looking like a generic living room, where visiting the space feels like a social call. The images are portraits of a woman speaking to another person. The installation itself enacts the tension between global and intimate since the domestic ambiance is created within a space that is public. The question that the video-work-as-laboratory raises is, how to make intimate contact across the many divisions that separate people in different cultural, that is, linguistic, economic, and familial situations, and why does it matter to do so. My primary goal in what follows is to explore the possibility of an “aesthetic understanding” that, by means of its own intimacy across the gaps of globalization, can engage the political. In Mille et un jour the tool for achieving some sort of political effect is speaking and listening—in effect, producing an acoustic mirror. In Elena, by contrast, the tool is facing. Facing constitutes three acts at once. Literally, facing is the act of looking someone else in the face. Second, it involves coming to terms with something that is difficult to live down by looking it in the face rather than denying or repressing it. Third, facing is a form of making contact, placing the emphasis on the second (or other) person, and acknowledging the necessity of that contact simply in order to sustain life. For this reason, facing is my proposal for a performance of contact across divisions, one that avoids the traps of universalist exclusion and relativist condescendence, and that potentially can relieve trauma. Here I present one bit of Elena’s conversation with her son, Simion. She tells him a story from her adolescence. Line breaks correspond with the subtitles; line space indicates a new frame. I liked playing theatre and dancing he [Elena’s father] didn’t allow me to lead my life – where did you want to go with the theatre? where? they took me to act that’s what the theatre was in those times long ago, we were kids I was a girl, you know, a little girl

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there was a theatre in Dorna ... they were all saying “come with us” because I play well, I was playing well

This episode is stunningly at odds with the evocation of poverty, war, and child labor that precedes it. Even though the installation is not narrative, each film in it contains narrative elements. The passage quoted here is a proper narrative: after a situation description, something happens that breaks up the monotony of the situation. This girl, Elena, who spent her best years slaving away in order to make a future—and an illusory escape into marriage—possible, had a life of culture, pleasure, and talent. In the villages that populated the hills, ambulant theater groups passed by, scouted for talent, and noticed Elena. Many a young girls’ dream happened for her. The troupe leaders said, “Come with us”! They offered instant escape, a new life of camaraderie and glamor—even if glamor, in this case, might not have been what she thought it was. And this chosen woman, Elena, knows she owed this brilliant opportunity to herself. Her pride in that talent touches me deeply. The story continues: I could memorize I acted very well also the dancing and everything else and she didn’t let me do it mother said “if you go you should not call me mother again” because I am soft-hearted . . . once I started to go but when I reached the bridge I returned home I cried for a while there and I returned home I regret it a lot today that I didn’t do it but what did I know in those times?

Even much older and wasted by the hardship of her life, Elena is beautiful. It is, therefore, easy to imagine her as a beautiful young girl, wanted and courted because she was also able, cheerful, and willing.



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But motherhood is a sharp-cutting knife. If Elena leaves, she will lose her mother. This threat will resonate throughout the conversation the audience hears. When, later in the story, her own child wants to leave Elena, she does not stop him. A short episode further refines the narrative. Something specific happens. Elena was going to go, we hold our breath—she gives up. The bridge of no return, to be burned behind her, yet she cannot muster the courage to cross. But braver, perhaps, is that Elena tells her son that she regrets it. She regrets the life of which her son—who sits in front of her—is the fruit. Verging on cynicism, but not quite achieving it, Elena braves the convention that prescribes self-sacrifice to mothers. if I can’t say mother again . . . it’s over! what can I do? there is no one to come here and do the work say something if you can! so I didn’t say anything then I continued to work with the bulls every day I don’t want to say anything else

Elena went back home because she needed a mother—her mother. The mother alleges the need to get work done, but that does not sound right. It does not compensate for the loss of one’s mother, a threat by which the daughter was bullied into returning home. The discrepancy between options strikes young Elena dumb (are they truly options?), and so she says nothing. And as the life of routine, of misery and hardship resumes, moves on, the memory of the window of opportunity and the glamor that shone through it, slowly fades away. Elena is Madame Bovary after the party at the Château de la Vaubyessard. From Flaubert’s story we learn that a miserable life after a glimmering of hope becomes worse than it was before; it would be better to never believe a better life were possible. To Simion, in the present, Elena says that she does not want to say more. We are barely a few minutes into the film. She does eventually resume her talking, but after a few moments of considered silence. That silence, I contend, hides what it meant, how deep the wound went—but whether this is a trauma is not for me to decide.21 My mode of filming is in accordance with this principle of modesty. I staged the women, asked their interlocutors to take their places behind the

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camera, set the shot, turned the camera on, and left the scene. In its extreme staging of the principle of modesty, this method is hyperbolically documentary. Its goal was to maximize the empowerment of the mothers. To underline this aspect of their priority, I did not edit the single-shot, long-take films. The relentlessly permanent image of the mothers’ faces is meant to force viewers to look these women in the face and listen to what they have to say, in a discourse to which we can relate affectively. The mothers become the holders of the inter-face. The face as inter-face is an occasion for an exchange that, affect-based, is fundamental in opening up the discourse of the face to the world. The “perceivedness” that the predominance of the close-up in my installation foregrounds is not necessarily as negative as has been alleged (Bakhtin). Instead, it leads to an empowering performativity. The close-up, then, is my reply to Berkeley’s pessimistic view of vision as violence, expressed in his famous dictum esse est percipi. If you can only exist in the eye of the other (when you are being seen), being overlooked equals psychic death. This is why, when Chamkha, in Mille et un jours, expresses her astonishment at the police intervention in severely understated terms, we presented her in extreme close-up. Where the memory is unspeakable, the affect the close-up solicits fills in the gaps. Berkeley’s dictum esse est percipi must be reversed lest invisibility can install itself with social death as the result. As for Descartes and his even more famous cogito [ergo] sum, according to French thinker Jean-Joseph Goux, the stake of the cogito is neither the link between thinking and being, nor the exclusive emphasis on reason and the excision of the body, but the tautological grammatical use of the first person: I think, [therefore] I am.22 Here we find an attempt to describe human existence outside of the need to use the second person. Descartes, then, enacts a kind of trauma—namely, of being alone—disguised as an ideal. Preparing for the film on Descartes I learned that as a young child he was abandoned, and this, three times. His mother died when he was still a baby (fourteen months), then his father up and left to pursue a career elsewhere, leaving the children with their grandmother. A year and a bit later, the father remarried, whereupon he retrieved the older children but left young René behind—yet again. Such triple abandonment is likely to have left ineluctable psychic scars, and true enough, his correspondence and biographical accounts point in the direction of a personality disorder called abandonment complex. Whether he was a PTSD patient or not we cannot know, nor should we try. But the philosopher who is known as the father of rationality was primarily always in doubt—a doubt in some measure traceable to his lost relationship to his own father. It would appear that Descartes’ paternally derived trauma may bear more than anecdotal significance for the history of modern philosophy, an undertaking in



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which some degree of the care and comfort one might—or should derive from a father—is replaced by the search for abstract grounds for philosophical certainty.23 Given his personal history, then, Descartes may have had excellent reasons to pursue his autonomy. Nevertheless, our dependency on others is so obvious and absolute that it may well have been its very inevitability that informed his desire to overcome it. From the baby’s mother to social caretakers to linguistic second persons, this dependency has been articulated in psychoanalysis, sociology, and linguistics, respectively. Being a second person seems more “natural” a definition of being human than any other. In this sense of or sensitivity to the second person lays the philosophical need for the intimacy with “subjects” of documentary film that is also a primary ethical imperative of the medium and its methodologies. In Nothing is Missing, the intimacy is as hyperbolically staged as is the modesty that frames the filming and, later, the social display of personal stories. Consequently, the interlocutors who speak with the mothers become intimates. Intimacy does not guarantee modesty; on the contrary, intimacy makes it easier to break the requirement of modesty. Later, when Elena talks about her miserable childhood, her silence, it turns out, is broken by force. every time someone would come to ask for my hand father would start arguing saying whatever came to his mind he would say “keep your mouth shut, you stupid girl, stay out of it” that’s how it was for me after I came here it was the same with your father I still had a hard life – can you talk a bit about me?

So we learn that candidates for Elena’s hand did show up, despite the pittance she had to offer for a dowry. Looking at her now—in her beauty, warmth, and radiating humanity—I am not surprised they were undeterred by the lack of funds. The stingy father, to be sure, is irrational and a bully. We may wish to tell him to stay out of Elena’s future, her life, for it is a widely known difficulty of transgenerational trauma that victims become perpetrators. This man, who probably felt himself to be nearly a slave, makes his daughter one. Yet, is not parenthood principally about trying to give one’s children a better life than

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one had? I personally feel revolted by the father’s behavior and by Elena’s troubling scenario. Of the man she ends up with, Simion’s father, we hear nothing. And we are left to wonder whether the marriage is traumatic for Elena, and whether saying nothing about that trauma is perhaps a sophisticated narrative strategy on her part. Before the camera, the event of Elena’s marriage is skipped, elided. This lacuna speaks volumes about how eager she was (not) to marry this man; about how her silence is a kind of redaction or wish to replace a trauma with a more tolerable surrogate, if only in the form of denied acknowledgment. And here, another silence of sorts intervenes: an interruption by another person. This vocal interference may seem the opposite of silence, but it is, in fact, an act of silencing. The moment becomes uneasy, tense. Before Elena gets a chance to complain about her husband, Simion asks the next question. And we see again, and anew, that interviewing is not just about making people talk, but also shutting them up. That is what Simion does to Elena—no doubt afraid of what he might hear from her mouth. DOCUMENTARY: BETWEEN DESCARTES AND SPINOZA We cannot exist without others—in the eye of the other as in the eye of the storm (Berkeley) as much as in sustenance of others—the ethical imperative to which Descartes, according to the vulgarized cogito, refused to owe his existence. An increasing number of scholars are studying the relevance of Descartes’s younger contemporary Baruch Spinoza for an alternative stream of thought in rationalism.24 They make an excellent case for a collective and historical responsibility to the past—a responsibility that we have to face today. Studying Descartes a bit more than I was compelled to do in my student days, I can now see how close he and Spinoza were in their thoughts, and what could have emerged had they met and befriended one another. While Descartes struggled with the interdependency of mind (“soul”) and body, memory, and the imagination—yet, as, I speculate, as “abandonnien” felt compelled to preserve the autonomy of the subject, Spinoza dared to go further and to see the subject as fundamentally social in constitution and character. Spinoza’s attention to the social aspect of personal identity explains the current justified interest in the thought of this second-generation refugee whose parents had left Spain out of fear of the Inquisition—thus, Spinoza was a migratory subject in his own right. And yet, so was Descartes, in a different way, always on the move; Descartes whose current bad press as a dualist is not justified, even if his itinerant lifestyle was not driven by external persecution but by internal paranoia. The keyword for Descartes-cum-Spinoza, in my view, is the preposition inter-. I deduce three uses of the preposition “inter-” from contemporary



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Spinozism. Inter-cultural relationality, in its inscribed mobility of subjectivity, posits the face as an interlocutor whose discourse is not predictably similar to that of the viewer. Secondly, inter-temporal thinking comes with the “preposterous” foregrounding of the present-as-starting-point. The women who make up Nothing is Missing state their acceptance of the separation— from homeland, from family—as a fact of the present day. Moreover, the practice of video installation positions the co-presence of the mothers with the viewers visiting the gallery. Inter-temporality, therefore, also plays out in the belatedness of the viewer’s engagement with the people on screen. To understand the need for this engagement in its inevitable belatedness, we must make the move from individual to social, and from past to present. At the same time, the social nature of intersubjectivity holds out a performative promise, namely, that the quality of social bonds may improve from the viewers’ imaginary enactment of identification with the others seen on film. The documentary film images themselves fulfill a function in this intertemporality; they do this through the exclusive deployment of the close-up as affection-image. Close-ups subvert linear time; they endure in a kind of atemporal freeze-frame, and thus inscribe the present into the image (perhaps, in this respect, acting more like photographs than film). Consequently, close-ups produce heterochrony. Between narrative images and close-ups, then, a particular kind of inter-temporality emerges: one that stages a struggle between fast narrative and stillness. With Deleuze’s philosophy of film in mind, one could say that between a perception that is in certain ways troubling, and an action still hesitant, affection emerges. The affection-image binds a perception that has already taken place but leaves a trace to the future of possible action. This is why the affection-image remains closest to the present while providing it with the temporal density needed to make the inter-face possible. Affect (and especially the affect produced by the close-up) remains an event in the present—an event of becoming; this is not an event in the punctual sense, but a slice of process during which time external events slow down or even remain out of sight. Becoming concerns the presence of the past. Nowhere is this clearer than in the case of trauma—that wound that cannot move with time, remains lodged in the unconscious, and directs the subject from that position. If we take the presence of (private) trauma to the realm of the social, we can no longer deny responsibility for the injustices of the past, even if we cannot be blamed for them. Becoming also defines our activities as scholars in the humanities. Hence, finally, inter-disciplinary thought is needed. This allows us to make the connection, in the present and across the cultural divide, between a number of discourses and activities routinely either treated separately or unwarrantedly merged. I find film and philosophy, as well as psychoanalysis and linguistics, enticing interdisciplinary realms, as challenging as they are stimulating.

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Such stimulation is also found in Nothing is Missing, where we encounter an installation of voices (intermingling and alone), women facing other women (all of them new faces). The installation aims to shift a viewer’s perception from an essentialist concept of a static culture to a performative, confrontational notion of what could be called “the cultural.” In this adoption of Johannes Fabian’s concept of culture as a process of contestation—and in analogy with Mouffe’s distinction between politics and the political—I see a possibility for articulating an intimate cultural dynamic in the globalized world: the intercultural, indeed.25 The face faces—ever looking us in the face—which makes the viewer the interlocutor. The interlocutor, then, faces something that is hard to live down— here, the severance of the primary bond that humanism construes as defining for humanity: that between mother and child. In these videos of acting faces, that event is qualified as larger than the individual, indeed, any individual. All the women speak in understated tones of the causes of a child’s departure, and they do so in terms for which Western cultures can assume historical responsibility. Making contact, the third and most important act implied in facing, facilitates becoming—becoming world citizens, building our existence on mobility without having to move. Making contact—here, by way of an installation of documentary films—is an effect of the insistent facing in Nothing is Missing. Thinking through Mille et un jours, we first encountered collective speaking and its counterform, silence; then, in Nothing is Missing, we discussed the experience and the concept of facing. It is up to you—as reader, as viewer, as global citizen subject to these migratory aesthetics—to consider how these two films, together, may be in touch with trauma—help us hear it, help us face it.

NOTES 1. The same holds for a documentary, Becoming Vera (2008), about a three-yearold girl, made with Michelle Williams Gamaker. As trauma is not an issue, while intimacy is crucial in this film, I will not discuss it here. For an analysis of that film see Mieke Bal, “Becoming of the World versus Identity Politics,” Nordlit: Tidsskrift i litteratur og kultur, Vol. 24 (2009), 9–30. 2. See Bessel van der Kolk and Onno van der Hart, “The Intrusive Past: The Flexibility of Memory and the Engraving of Trauma,” in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, edited and with an introduction by Cathy Caruth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 158–83; Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 10–24; and the essays by Brison, Hirsch and van Alphen in Bal, Crewe and Spitzer (eds.) 1999; Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, ed., Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999).



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3. Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, Aesthetica, 1750 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961). 4. In alphabetic order, Cinema Suitcase consisted at the time of Mieke Bal, Zen Marie, Thomas Sykora, Gary Ward, and Michelle Williams. 5. Ann Banfield, Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). 6. This assumption is still common, with the early exception of Ann Banfield (1982; philosophically elaborated in The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]). Banfield’s argument is theoretically convincing, yet, since it leads to stylistic analyses, it does not really undermine the commonsensical assumption concerning responsibility. For a more thorough discussion, see Mieke Bal, “Phantom Sentences,” in Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield, ed. Robert S. Kawashima, Gilles Philippe, and Thelma Sowley (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008), 17–42. 7. Time is a key element in (post)colonial sensibility. For a useful overview of different conceptions of time, see Nancy D. Munn, “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay,” Annual Review of Anthropology, No. 21 (1992), 93–123. Of the many philosophical analyses of time, I found Casarino’s Deleuzian-Marxist one very helpful; see Cesare Casarino, “Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben and the Corporeal,” Strategies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 2003), 185–206. 8. Migration is an issue where (institutional) politics and the (everyday, lived) political clash, as the film shows several times. For the distinction between politics and the political, see Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). 9. The concept of “voice,” here, is subject to the kind of analysis I have proposed in my book on travelling concepts; see Mieke Bal, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). 10. Amittai F. Aviram, Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). A fundamental article on affect is Ernst van Alphen, “Affective Operations in Art and Literature,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (Spring/Autumn 2008), 20–30. A strong moment of the bond between affect and voice occurs when the bride’s mother, Chamkha, expresses her total shock at the police intervention, simply saying “Nous, on ne connait pas ça du tout.” At that moment her face, in extreme close-up, embodies the Deleuzian affection image. The most succinct formulation of these three types of “movement-images” is in Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 66–70. 11. The term “migratory aesthetics” is the title of an exhibition and a research project we have conducted at ASCA, University of Amsterdam. For more on the concept, see the two volumes the project has yielded (Sam Durrant and Catherine Lord, ed., Essays in Migratory Aesthetics [Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007] and Murat Aydemir and Alex Rotas, ed., Migratory Settings [Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008], and the exhibition catalog, Mieke Bal and Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro, 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration [Murcia, Spain: Cendeac, 2008]).

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12. Shoshana Felman, The Juridical Unconscious: Trials and Traumas in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 13. Gilles Deleuze, Rhizome: Introduction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976). 14. For intimacy, see Ann Laura Stoler, Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). She employs the concept to call attention to the intricate connections between imperial politics and domestic spaces. Not unlike Mille et un jours, she shows how regimes of race, sex, and citizenship are shaped in knots where “private” spaces are incessantly imbricated with—and invaded by—the concerns of colonial administrators. See also Lauren Berlant, Intimacy, Special issue, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter 2000), especially Svetlana Boym’s essay on diasporic intimacy. Neither publication defines the concept explicitly. 15. This term “hybridity-within” is meant to evoke Barbara Johnson’s term “difference within”; see Barbara Johnson, The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980); and A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). Johnson’s deconstructive analyses of literary texts continue to be an inspiration for what might perhaps qualify as deconstructive representation: an attempt to displace opposition from the tensions between groups to hybridity within groups. Hybridity remains a problematic term that I use here for lack of a better one. See Young (1991) for an incisive critique. 16. On the intricate connections between violence, law, and lawfulness, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” tr. M. Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 11, No. 919 (1990), 921–1045; and Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber, ed., Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997), 80–105. 17. See Victor Turner’s discussion of the impossibility for practitioners to explicitly know the meaning of their rituals in The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967). 18. On the concept of post-memory, see Marianne Hirsch, Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). For a convincing critique, see Ernst van Alphen, “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory,” Poetics Today, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006), 473–88. But then, Hirsch’s later response to criticism is convincing, too—see “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008), 103–28. 19. On the use of this term in cultural criticism, see Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd, ed., Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989). For a confrontation between Bakhtin and popular culture, see Esther Peeren, Identities and Intersubjectivities in Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). 20. The word “infra-humanity” was coined by Colombian artist Doris Salcedo a propos of her work Shibboleth (2007–08) at the Tate Modern. See my book on her work, that combines high artistic values with strong ethical and political commitments and effects: Mieke Bal, Of What Cannot Speak: Doris Salceo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).



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21. The reference to Madame Bovary is meant to bring in our project Madame B (2013), on which all information can be found at http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/ films/madame-b/. 22. Jean-Joseph Goux, Oedipe philosophe (Paris: Aubier, 1990). 23. On the “complexe d’abandon” see Han Verhoeff, “‘Adolphe’ et Constant: Une étude psychocritique” (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976). For biographical information about Descartes I mainly rely on Desmond Clarke, Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), for Descartes, see http://www.miekebal.org/artworks/ films/reasonable-doubt/. 24. Moira Gatens and Genevieve Lloyd, Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 1999). 25. Johannes Fabian, Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

Chapter 14

Provoking the Truth Applying the Method of Cinéma Vérité Bernadette Wegenstein

This essay is intended as a provocative self-examination of the status quo of the “vérité” or “truth” in the context of my vérité documentary, The Good Breast (2016).1 In this film, I showcase the extent that the notion of truth is tied to the presence of myself as filmmaker and, thus, reflects my opinions, curiosity, in short, my viewpoint, through my interactions with the characters in this film. But why “provoking the truth” and not simply “producing the truth”? And whose truth is it anyway? These are the first questions to be asked. MY FIRST VÉRITÉ LOVE AFFAIR WITH LEO BRETHOLZ I have made three documentaries thus far that developed a similar but increasingly provocative approach to working with subjects—the people in my films—although the first film marked only a baby step in the direction in which I wanted my work to go.2 In the second film, See You Soon Again,3 a film about a Viennese Holocaust survivor who tells his story of survival to Baltimore’s youth, I already developed the encounter with the main character Leo Bretholz as “pro-vocation,” a “calling forth,” in the literal sense of its etymology, for something to be challenged, pressed, exposed specifically for the camera. For Leo this was about his unresolved feeling of hope that every time he would recite his memoir—the story of his incredible survival of the Holocaust itself and, with it, the loss of his mother and sisters whom he saw for the last time at a tram station in Vienna in the hopes of seeing them again after the war but who were murdered in the Izbica concentration camp—the trauma would disappear. But of course it did not and that was exactly what moved me. The emotion I wanted the film to carry was the fact that a man 287

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would give 2,500 talks in his lifetime, talks that retraumatized him and the student audiences over and over again. But the survivor’s compulsion to tell his story did not make the story go away. It was this tragedy of the trauma of memory itself that I tried to capture with Leo and not the tragedy of the story that he was recounting. It was a difficult task and I have to admit that the film only barely became what I wanted it to be and would have benefitted from a longer and more precise editing phase. But it was my first true vérité experiment and for that I will always have my own wonderful memory of it. Leo was my first “vérité love affair.” Already in See You Soon Again I realized that through the act of vérité filmmaking an emotion or an action is “called forth,” an emotion or action that did not happen before and will not happen afterward but that is expressed through the very presence of the camera and its extensions via the camera crew, the director, the real-life set, and then of course the reencounter of the action and the emotions with the editor in the editing room. The editing stage is equally important in the production of vérité because it follows a similar path, this time for the editor, who calls forth the truth and the depth of an emotion captured during production. The editing stage is in many ways the real “moment of truth” for the vérité film because vérité editing is completely unforgiving. It attempts to follow the flow of a real situation, bringing forth the situation’s dialogue, emotions, and aesthetics. Already during See You Soon Again I thought of editing as “open-heart surgery”; it interacts and interferes directly with my reality, as I imagined and intended the film, and is therefore very precarious and delicate because with one wrong move or cut, the heart (of the film) may stop. The difficulty and challenge of provoking the “truth of the moment,” whether in production or postproduction, is simply that, as any filmmaker of documentaries knows, what translates best into vérité is a necessity that preexisted the camera encounter but explodes or, to put it into linguistic terms, becomes performative in the event of the human encounter. Leo’s necessity, for instance, was to make his mother and sisters come back to life, for Vienna to be apologetic for its anti-Semitism, and for his Austrian schoolmate who spat on him for being a Jew to be punished; and this was the impossible necessity that made up the truth of Leo’s trauma. Let me briefly extrapolate this question of where the roots of a cinematic necessity lie, both historically and theoretically. NEVER FORGET ITALIAN NEOREALISM! A new cinematic realism arose in the mid 1940s around the legendary and for me most essential style of a precursor to vérité filmmaking called



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New Realism, predominantly practiced in postwar Italy. As film historian Francesco Casetti points out, prior examples of a demand for cinema to deal directly with reality did of course occur, but it was “however only in the immediate postwar years that this still marginal request became a strong hypothesis, because it was no longer based, as it had been previously, on matters of style or effectiveness, but on an intrinsic necessity.”4 This new style, often called “European,” moved away from the plot-driven American (predominantly Hollywood) way of filmmaking, instead portraying real people in everyday life situations rather than using beautiful actors and fancy studio sets; examining socially relevant themes of mostly marginalized and lower class people shown in real-life struggles with native dialects and unpolished language, rather than glorifying stories of winners and leaders, princesses and kings; emphasizing the reality of life’s stories and finding a small happy ending that often included a sense of nostalgic sadness, rather than a forcing onto the viewer a false happiness through a fairy-tale-like never-ending kiss of a frog-turning-prince. In other words, neorealism did not promote the manipulation of events imposed by the cinematic apparatus by strictly following a film script with actors representing and playing characters, but instead focused on the organic development of situations and showing the real flow of events.5 The acclaimed French film critic of the 1940s André Bazin was described by French philosopher and film theoretician Gilles Deleuze as articulating the aesthetic criteria of Italian neorealism, and in this suggesting nothing less than a new form of realism: it was “dispersive, elliptical, errant or wavering, working in blocs, with deliberately weak connections and floating events”—just as we experience real-life events.6 Most famously Bazin pointed out that with neorealism the real was no longer re-presented but aimed at. I will come back to this shift later when drawing from my own experience producing and editing The Good Breast. Deleuze, whose history of cinema in the twentieth century relies heavily on Bazin’s theory of realism, went as far as putting neorealism at the very onset of what he called the epoch of the “time image.” According to Deleuze this is the epoch that was truly able to do justice to cinema as we know it today because of its newly achieved capacity to present a world in its own “timezone,” that is, the “time” of the screen. Deleuze points to a sense of time that aims at giving back the lived experience of the screen characters and in that way instilling them with a sense of reality. Deleuze, here also borrowing from the early twentieth-century French phenomenologist Henri Bergson, admired in this second phase of cinematic history its ability to attune viewers to the duration of experience. In short, as a cinematic methodology, neorealism was able for the first time to actually create an alternate reality rather than re-presenting or copying situations from real life. In Deleuze’s own words what comes to fruition in the “time-image” of the era of neorealism is

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thought itself. This “cinematic thought” is achieved with the observational dwelling-style of the camera that observes and perceives its subjects and thus embeds us in the experience and perspective of a character; this approach is contrasted with the era of the preceding “movement image,” which in its visual assessment was more focused on the actions of a character. As Deleuze explains: “What defines neo-realism is this build up of purely optical situations (and sound ones, although there was no synchronized sound at the start of neo-realism), which are fundamentally distinct from the sensory-motor situations of the action-image in the old realism. It is perhaps as important as the conquering of a purely optical space in painting, with impressionism.”7 The comparison with impressionism helps to understand why Deleuze called neorealism a “cinema of the seer” rather than of the “agent.” This new realism is an invitation to see and experience an alternate reality of the screen with the character. With the action of seeing, a significant change is underway: the viewer is forced not to judge but rather to experience a world, to think with the character. WHOSE THOUGHT IS IT ANYWAY? To this day in cinema, the tension between control and spontaneity is deeply woven into the fabric of the “cinema of the seer,” however it is practiced, whether as narrative or documentary film or as Reality TV. In my mind vérité documentary is a format that is very close to New Realism insofar as its “hunger for reality”8 mimics the spontaneity of a lived moment, trying, as it does, to bring to the screen not a preestablished plot that was written to impose a reality or manipulate one that was already there but something that was discovered “in the air” during the time of a film shoot, something that was aimed at rather than recited by a character. In other words, life itself. But whose thought is it? In my experience of directing three cinéma vérité films, I found that the thought expressed in a recorded moment on a vérité set is the interaction between the characters and the director or camera crew. It is the result of a participation, a conversation. In a vérité setting the director will prompt a character to expose himself or herself, to explain or question something he or she perhaps had not considered before, and share reflections for the first time with and for the camera. Like a “blind date” (not that I have been on one), the outcome is a risk: one does not know what will happen ahead of time; only the camera “knows” and will reveal it and ultimately only the editor in the editing room9 will be able to confirm that thought, or instead find a different one (which at times can be a good happenstance and at other times very disappointing). Francis Ford Coppola famously said about directing: “The director is the ringmaster of a circus that is inventing



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itself.”10 It is in Coppola’s sense that vérité as a format is so close to real life. The characters, locations, and actions are discovered by a film crew, and in this process of finding—a relationship is built that is not far off from real-life relationships. My own relationship with the characters—or with the topic of the film such as the Holocaust or breast cancer—become living thoughts of what we see on the screen. I will return to this claim later, when I discuss how such “cinematic thoughts” coalesce into a film during the editing stage of production. Before I venture into my own experience from The Good Breast, let me point to some very famous examples of “vérité thoughts” uniquely captured and edited onto film that have always been in the back of my mind while I produced my own vérité footage. I was inspired by Agnès Varda’s cinécriture, a combination of self-analysis with the presentation and exposure of strange and unique individuals, while never pointing to their “oddity” but rather promoting a sense of normalcy in exposing their very peculiar quests, for instance, the passion and obsession of collecting things that we find in The Gleaners and I (2000); or in the mature work of poetic self-discovery from Varda’s own past—replying to very the question of who she is—in The Beaches of Agnès (2010). I was inspired also by Claude Lanzmann’s uncovering of the awful truth in Shoah’s (1985) notorious “barber scene,” where the filmmaker forces Abraham Bomba to remember his deep guilt and trauma by recounting the fact that he had to cut and shave his own people’s hair in preparation for their mass murder in the gas chambers. After the character, Abe, breaks down during the interview, confessing his very intimate “grey zone” of having helped in the murder of others in order to survive himself, he urges Lanzmann to turn off the camera, but Lanzmann refuses. Instead, the dialogue used in the edited scene reveals the filmmaker’s force to continue the interview on film against the subject’s wishes. Despite the obvious violation of the character’s desire, I always felt that this scene was beautifully real because it did not hide the cruelty of the filmmaker, whose belief in the importance of the scene overshxadowed the character’s protection of his own privacy and intimacy. Such violation created a form of controversial realism that fit the thought of the scene: anger, guilt, unresolvedness, and desperation. Lanzmann could not resolve Abe’s inner turmoil—nobody could, which is what the scene powerfully expressed, whether we like it or not. I was also inspired by the comedic approach in Ross McElwee’s first-person nonfiction films such as Time Indefinite (1993), where vérité is used to take humorous revenge on one’s own past. In a domestic ethnography, using a lot of archival family footage, the filmmaker openly works through his past, reinventing his own most intimate relationships. Earlier than these other examples, the master of the art of vérité, Allan King, immersed himself into the world of A Married Couple (1969) bringing forth the very ups and downs of a young family’s intimacy as

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lived in their own home. In the film, King witnesses and shows situations of abuse—without intervening—which made it hard for the film to be released. I was impressed with the fact that King gave preference to the ethics of the “alternate reality” he was creating over the reality he was living, that is, not intervening and stopping a man physically abusing his wife but rather continuing to film it. I love how honest and uncompromising all these examples are in each of their extremist vérité styles, each revealing the often conflicting presence of a filmmaker in the background, whether the partially visible and cruel investigator Lanzmann, the also partially present Varda, who we can hear making fun of her extravagant characters, the funny voice-over narrator Ross McElwee, or the invisible King. Of course, all of these vérité practices must be interpreted as self-discoveries in that they reveal the filmmakers’ as much as they reveal the films’ reality. These filmmakers—and their practices— suggest the extent to which a vérité film is always also an extension of the filmmaker. Werner Herzog notably coined the phrase “I am my films,” which is also the title of an eponymous documentary about him. It is well known that other maestri before Herzog, Godard, and Fellini, blurred the lines between their lives and their films. Fellini probably put it most directly and candidly—though edging close to a pathological statement from the depths of his own unconscious—when he said, “I see no dividing line between imagination and reality.”11 FINDING VÉRITÉ IN THE GOOD BREAST In the following I want to focus on how I chose and worked with the characters rather than recounting the background of why I made the film, which would be the topic of an entirely different essay. My first goal was to find the right patient-characters to showcase the individuality and complexity of breast cancer and the importance of the breast in America. I was open to any kind of complexity and interesting story. I did not want to force my own agenda onto the illness but rather let the illness speak to me. I knew I wanted to make a film with several women, not one, to demonstrate the subjective differences of how breast cancer, like any very severe illness, can be experienced. But rather than looking for contrasts, I was looking for an authentic uniqueness in a character that was hard to resist and that drew me in. I was not shy about finding conflicted or hyperbolic characters, ones that were capable of revealing extreme ways of experiencing the breast and femininity. The reason for that was simply that I love melodrama and hyperbole. I find in it the necessary expressiveness of our emotions. I have never been interested in “normalcy” but rather in seeing the normality in the contradiction, the



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excess, the unusual. As Derek Schilling points out, in the traditional auteurist creation of the screen character, the voice chosen by a male director is often that of a younger alter ego. In The Good Breast, on the contrary, I chose several female alter egos, interestingly, all about ten years older than me, to become the voices of my own virtual experience of breast cancer via the film. I chose a multiplicity rather than a singularity because of my resistance to “oneness”—or homogeneity or conformity—which I generally experience as a patriarchal mode of storytelling that does not leave me enough room to breathe. However, I also chose one female character on the side of the doctors treating breast cancer with whom I identified perhaps more traditionally, as a “male director” would. It was the figure of Dr. Lauren Schnaper, who during production adopted the voice not of my alter ego but of my “mother,” the one who ordered me around through the film-creation process and along the way taught me about the science of breast cancer. At any rate, equal to any man, cyborg or other being, as a director I was not interested in “showing events objectively but in telling them from a personal standpoint freighted with authenticity.”12 Except that my “authentic standpoint” was split into two camps, the camp of the lived experience of the illness via the patients, and the camp of the breast surgeon and her fate in performing mastectomies, in a certain sense, against her own wishes, as she believes that fear and ignorance are fueling an alarming rate of medically unnecessary mastectomies in America. Did she remind me of grumpy Leo Bretholz, the Holocaust survivor telling his story compulsively over and over again? Yes, no doubt she did. I always fall for people’s extreme drives and irresolvable passions. I met the no-nonsense veteran breast cancer surgeon Dr. Lauren Schnaper at the Comprehensive Breast Clinic in Baltimore, Maryland, where I myself was also a patient. I experienced her at first as overbearing and very authoritative and she certainly did not hold back from lecturing me and making me aware of how little I knew about breast cancer. I was immediately taken back by the clash of worlds between the medical community treating breast cancer and the patients battling with the illness—and found this clash to be profoundly interconnected with the reality of the illness. It seemed as if the two worlds hardly ever touched each other, except, that is, when the women appeared in the doctors’ offices; outside they lived a life far away from science and medicine. I decided to show the discrepancy between the world of knowledge embedded in the practice of medicine and science and the world of uncertainty and not knowing as it was actually experienced as lived illness. During the development phase, which took about six months, I filmed many different women at various stages of breast cancer, women whom Dr. Schnaper made me aware of by going through her chart of patients every morning, and suggesting who I might be most intrigued by based on their patient history. Already with this step, Dr. Schnaper took an active part in the

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casting of the patient-characters. After meeting them and filming their first encounters with the doctor, I asked myself who I wanted to see again, who touched and affected me, and with whom I would want to create a relationship, not just for the film, but beyond it. After the developmental phase it was clear that I had too many patient-characters. I was very sad to stop working with some of the women—those who did not open up enough. For the lack of communication, we drifted apart, not unlike the way many acquaintances do—after a brief coup de foudre, there is nothing left that sustains a connection. This had also happened with two other characters, who had both been rediagnosed with the disease throughout their lives, and who had a certain familiarized, down-to-earth savoir-faire with it. But the problem with their screen presence was that their medical treatment overshadowed their personalities. They would have made great cases to show how breast cancer is medically treated but, when I looked at the dailies in the editing room, working with one of my assistant editors, we never felt we really managed to edit them so that an audience would care about them. And then there were the opposite cases, those who wanted me to care too much, who reached out aggressively and invited documentation by my crew as much as possible. Sadly, it might have been for that very reason that their screen presence appeared also disappointing and flat. All they wanted was for the camera to absolve and celebrate their survivorship but they did not let me get close to them, to a place that offered questions, dialogue, a place for me to respond and truly participate. For the four women I ended up working with intensively, on the other hand, the camera and I became true participants in their lives. I became a friend, someone they trusted. We were looking for each other on equal terms, to “catch up,” to talk about important and unimportant things, to be there for each other as one is with good friends; with these women I was able to reach a level of intimacy that is comparable to a real friendship that has nothing to do with the film but with the vérité of mutual attraction. This is a feeling that can be compared to the state of being at ease with someone when the doors are closed and you are alone with that person. There was no embarrassment, no false expectation, just a genuine openness for anything to happen, including controversy. In other words, the four women really affected me personally, they spoke to me as much as I spoke to them. I would think about them in the morning when I woke up, would write notes about them, ask questions that remained unanswered. Still, it was important to me that they remain a mystery in certain ways and that I never stopped reflecting about them. I lived with the women’s treatments, knew about personal things in their lives, and I was able to be with them and the camera crew, which at times consisted just of me and my own camcorder, when important things happened to them, both medically and personally. But I tried hard to never



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overstep my welcome; instead leaving them their own space and waiting for them to invite me into their lives. It was like any good relationship, where one builds a basis of trust, respect, and in the best of all cases even love, step by step. All of the women, including Lauren Schnaper, had a bigger story to tell than the one of their breast cancer, or better, their illness was also expressed on another level, one that touched the roots of their identities as women, and that was what the film became about. What has been described as intimate directness carried out in the vérité of The Good Breast was in truth a relationship that each woman had built one with me as much as I and the film had built with them. The feeling was mutual, as we say, and the love and fascination was and still is real. These women were Doris, Carol, Debra, and Shelia, and, as noted, their doctor, Lauren. In the following I will describe my relationship with each of these characters, starting with my “mother-alter-ego” Dr. Lauren Schnaper: how I changed along with each throughout the making of the film, and how this work provoked a “hidden truth” revealing a bigger story than breast cancer itself; how I was at times equally directed by them, especially by Lauren, as I directed them, and how the film, in the editing phase, created its own “alternate reality” that I had never anticipated. LAUREN, THE UNSYMPATHETIC CHARACTER Not long after production commenced, Lauren began showing a large amount of resistance to the crew occupying the Breast Center day in and day out. She claimed that I “snakecharmed” myself into her center and forced her to be on camera, which perhaps was true. My real “in” was through the mothering soul of the center, the breast cancer nurse and survivor of breast cancer herself, Barb Raksin, with whom Lauren had an interesting conflicted motherdaughter relationship (one that is not depicted in the final film). I made my way in, however, not because I wanted to fool Lauren but because I knew I needed the doctors and staff of the center on my side in order to “get to the illness itself” via the patients and thereby to document their medical procedures and what was happening to their bodies through the course of breast cancer treatment. And, besides, Lauren was the self-declared emperor of the Breast Center “kingdom.” Early on, I decided to portray the mastectomies and other medical breast cancer treatments with an intimate vérité. I wanted to include the mastectomies and the very complicated breast reconstructions in the film because of the “elephant in the room” that breast cancer represents: in addition to being a cancer, it also bears the loss of the breast along with the uncertain outcome of its reconstruction. If it had been a different cancer—one that cannot be removed surgically because it is located

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internally in the body—it would have affected my cinematic approach. But I wanted to show what really is at stake when a woman loses a breast, a part of her outward body. As my relationship with Lauren grew, so did her trust and candidness, however slowly. During sit-down interviews (that were embedded in some vérité action), she would interrupt me, pointing out that she did not want to answer my “artsy-fartsy questions.” I tried to get closer to her, but she resisted me for a very long time. Lauren’s gift to the production was that after months of appearing as the “bad cop” she suddenly let me experience her emotionality in two ways. The first was in a sub-story that she herself coproduced with me. One day, she took me by surprise to see her mother, who lived in a retirement home and was suffering from dementia. To see the tough surgeon suddenly as a caring daughter changed the way I and the film saw her. A few weeks after the first encounter with her mother she called me into her office and said, “You and Allen [my cameraman] have five minutes to record this and it has to be now.” Once we turned the camera on the doctor surprisingly started to cry, telling me that her mom had suffered a stroke and that she would not be back to normal ever again. In this moment, the unsympathetic character Lauren “broke” and revealed that she wanted me to document her personal feelings of weakness; but at the same time she also told us when to stop and turn the camera off. And we almost did: when she saw the way Victor Livingston had edited the scene, she was (at first) a bit critical but then eventually acquiesced to our experiencing her emotionality in this scene. By the end of production, Lauren and I had become accomplices, friends, and at times our relationship had turned itself into a classic mother-daughter relationship. The high point of this relationship was the fact that she and the plastic surgeon Dr. Sheri Slezak, Dr. Schnaper’s “side-kick,” had decided to accompany the crew to Catania, Sicily to attend the festivities honoring the patron saint of breast cancer, Agatha.13 It was entirely “true” (as it is presented in the film) that the doctors made this decision on their own, buying their plane tickets, etc. The trip was an enriching dramaturgical investment in the film, the necessary ritualistic ecstasy to address its underlying question, “Why is the breast of such importance?” In terms of character development, it loosened the doctor up and made her open for questions that went beyond medicine and science. Why have the people of Catania celebrated “a breast saint” for two thousand years? Why is the breast so important that its loss can mean something over generations and generations? While Lauren never stopped making funny comments about Catholicism during the trip, not least because as a Jew she had few affinities for the elaborate iconography of Saint Agatha’s martyrdom, she however did show a deep emotion for the celebration while watching it from the Archbishop’s balcony. As a person or character in the film, the trip to Catania did not change Lauren in an unreasonable or outsized way. But it did change her. She could



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not stop talking about it in the operating room, when she recounted her experience to another team of doctors. In the film her interest in Agatha’s story prepared us for a surprisingly compassionate end-monologue that was partly scripted by me on the basis of what she had told me during several other interviews. We recorded her end-monologue in a special ADR recording session so we could use the voice-over with the Catania images during the final montage; it was this session that provoked Lauren’s truth, which was, for me, the hidden drama in the circumstances doctors treating breast cancer find themselves with: they are the ones who are closest to the unknown territories of cancer and yet they are seldom given a space in which to ponder their proximity to this foreignness—this unknownness—“in the body.” This is a dilemma for any oncologist who wants to save and protect people from breast cancer, people who all want to live: “I personally believe,” Lauren said in the final voiceover narration, “that finding the cure to cancer is sort of unlocking the secret to life. You know, why does a cell give birth to a bad cell, a malignant cell? It’s just too complicated. The real issue is: do we really need to know the answer? And I think, no. We don’t need to know the secret to life. We just need to know how to figure out how to treat cancer. . . . Imagine how many lives will change when we do cure cancer.” DORIS, THE VICTIM When I met Doris she had had a botched lumpectomy by another surgeon that left her disfigured. When she visited Dr. Schnaper for the first time, Doris revealed that she wanted a double mastectomy despite the fact that this was not a “survival benefit” (as Lauren pointed out to her). Doris said the reason for her decision was that “It’s a mix.” She wanted the peace of mind to not have to worry about mammograms in the future but is also a self-declared “girly girl,” who says she wanted new breasts in order to feel more feminine because the “real ones tried to kill her.” Doris revealed that the premium she places on looking attractive comes from her Italian mother, who taught her that a woman has a duty to look good for her man. Doris has been with Randy, her boyfriend, for two years. She sees her breast reconstruction as another way to please him—even going so far as to say her reconstructed nipples will “obviously” not be for her pleasure, but for his. The daughter of a Korean War veteran and an Italian mother, Doris grew up in a strict family. Her father was physically abusive and tyrannical about her chores, white-gloving picture frames to make sure they were clean. During an intimate interview while she cooked a surprise meal for Randy, she revealed to me and the camera crew that her grandfather sexually abused her from age six until she got her first period at age eleven. While we decided

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not to include the explicit story of her sexual abuse in the film (to protect her privacy), with the way Doris’s story plays in the film she clearly comes across as a victim, self-imposed or not, of patriarchy’s expectations that women please men. It was a hard task for the editor, Victor Livingston, to omit the actual abuse story while still portraying Doris as a believable victim and not just a breast-obsessed and vain woman. But Doris’s desire for the largest breasts possible will be not only unfulfillable but also one that almost cost her her own life. Because of the damage due to radiation, her skin strained to hold the large implant that Doris demanded; the implant became infected twice and she had to have it removed. With just one breast Doris feels lost—she says she would accept a 30-percent chance of dying just to have her breasts back. She visited the plastic surgeon, Dr. Gedge Rosson, who specializes in the DIEP Flap, which she sees as her last best hope to have big breasts. Just before her DIEP Flap, Randy leaves Doris, taking some of her money that he says she owed him for having taken care of her during her treatment and reconstruction. Dr. Rosson performs the DIEP flap and Doris wakes up after the 12-hour surgery in despair and confusion. Her first worry was, “Does my left breast now look like a football?” (because her scar was so prominent). After two days at home, Doris’s breast transplant over her radiated skin becomes severely infected and she loses it in an emergency procedure with a different doctor. This is most likely where she contracts MRSA—a life-threatening bacterial infection. She blames Dr. Rosson’s nurse practitioner, Laura Gavin, believing that Laura didn’t admit her fast enough and that her infections could have been avoided. In the film, Doris’s uncertainty about the outcome of her new breasts after her cancer turns itself into a fight to achieve a state of beauty that would stabilize and, to some extent, restore her. And indeed her wish did come true, and she did find another surgeon: Dr. Stephen Bonawitz, who constructed her breast using tissue from her back, a so-called latissimus dorsi breast reconstruction. In her final scene Doris looks at herself in the mirror smiling. She got what she wanted and the film celebrates her achievement with her, without any judgment of whether it was “worth” it or what it really meant. CAROL, THE WARRIOR Carol was a wild young woman who had her first child at age sixteen. She lost her mother to breast cancer and remains angry that her mother never gave her the chance to properly say goodbye. Through her own experience with breast cancer, she realizes it was impossible her mother didn’t know she was going to die—but her own illness has brought her closer to understanding her mother’s illness.



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Just like Doris we meet Carol during her first visit to Dr. Schnaper’s office, where she and her ten-year-younger husband, Eric, reveal glimpses of their unusual backgrounds: they met as “leaders” in the video game Halo, calling themselves AmaZaan and Alpha Shadow. Carol tells the breast cancer nurse Barb that she wrote a book about the Amazon warrior theory and about how anger may be a positive emotion that helps one get through life. Carol has six children, among whom are her twin daughters Octavia and Echo, who have been the most involved in her treatment. They are like the yin and yang of their mother’s cancer story—Octavia, who is studying to be a marine biologist specializing in sharks, has her mother’s Amazon warrior grit. Echo, who is a Montessori school teacher, has her mom’s down-toearthness and sensitivity. During a family meeting, Carol reveals her cancer to her children, who have strong and angry reactions. Echo warns that “doctors don’t know shit,” and says she mistrusts the false positivity around her mom’s diagnosis. When Carol found a large lump in her breast, which had developed rapidly after her last mammogram, Dr. Schnaper put Carol on a neo-adjuvant chemotherapy treatment (chemo before surgery). Throughout her chemo treatment, which Carol described as “torturous,” her tumor shrunk noticeably—although not enough to keep her from undergoing a double mastectomy and radiation. Throughout her grueling treatment, Carol’s attitude remained positive— although not in a way that diminishes the seriousness of her situation. She was strong in the face of mortality and, although her prognosis is unknown, she remains protective of Eric and of her family, guiding them through their insecurities around her illness’s progression. A week before going in for her final implant exchange, Eric and Carol decided that she will have a tummy tuck. She discloses this information only after the fact (sharing the decision only with her daughter, Octavia). The tummy-tuck and her breast implants (which are bigger than they were before surgery) turn Carol into a woman who appears even stronger and more physically formidable—as if to reemphasize or claim anew her “Amazon” status. Her transformation has also highlighted that now that she can control the size and symmetry of her breasts she wants to get them “just right,” something she admits would never have occurred to her before the reconstruction process began. Carol’s story allegorically showcases how her uncertainty over the fate of her body turned her into a stronger person and fighter. Her hidden truth surfaces at the end when she validates that her mother’s cancer helped her in opting for the emphatic wish to live. Although she never says that she can now forgive her mother for not telling her that she was dying, the film leaves us with a feeling of Carol’s contentedness. This insight is enhanced by the playful husband Eric’s sexual end-comments, confessing that while he misses Carol’s nipples, which he can now no longer stimulate, this does not take away from his love for her.

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DEBRA, THE INGÉNUE Debra is a white, middle-class nurse in her early fifties who hoped that breast cancer treatment and her mastectomy after her diagnosis with DCIS would give her a new opportunity to show more cleavage but ultimately her fragility and her fractured self never gave her the chance to celebrate her transformation. Every time I interviewed Debra, she cried and mourned her breast and her life. Despite the insistence of her plastic surgeon, Dr. Slezak, that her breast reconstruction was “one of the best [she’s] ever done,” Debra decided to correct it further with a nipple-sharing procedure, because one nipple rubbed against her T-shirt when she jogged. Dr. Slezak had the slightly larger nipple from her healthy breast “recycled” into the nipple on the new breast. In the process of trying to find healing, Debra turned to fashion—saying that she feels like more of a woman when she looks “put together.” After a young designer asked her to be in a fashion show for breast cancer survivors, the experience helped her—she said she felt “adored,” just like a modern-day saint. She saw fashion as a way of controlling her life. When I filmed her with Nancy Brinker, founder of the Susan G. Komen Foundation, at a luncheon in Palm Beach, Brinker was excited and inspired by her story. She also won, with a breast cancer essay, a competition to be the honorary batgirl for the Baltimore Orioles’ breast cancer awareness game, where she threw out the first pitch. In one of her last interviews with me, however, Debra admitted, while folding laundry, that her faith in the pink ribbon movement has faded, and that she sees it now as more of a commercial marketing effort than a real community that could ever replace the support system of doctors and other patients who truly care for her. When Debra learns of recent research that suggested that DCIS is not cancer (studies Dr. Schnaper concurs with), her identity as cancer survivor comes into question, and she begins to wonder if her suffering had been in vain. She also questioned the fundamental and philosophically irresolvable question: “What if I had never had a mammogram? Or what if the recommendations to not have regular mammograms had come out five years ago, instead of today?” During her self-imposed checkups with her oncologist, Dr. Donegan, she revealed that the loss of her breast triggered the idea of losses elsewhere in her life—her unhappy marriage, the loss of her fertility, and that she never was able to have a daughter. Debra was a “hard nut to crack.” We ended up only showing a glimpse of her suffering and her story—omitting her participation in the fashion show, the story of her being batgirl, and her pink ribbon critique. I left these aspects out in order to avoid judging her; in the editing room, we needed to stay positive in the



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material we did include. Such positivity would be impossible if we included all of her complaints and self-doubts, over and over again. The fact that Debra had not resolved the loss of her breast turned her narrative arc into an incomplete one in the film as well. We started her story late, at around a third into the film already, and left her early. For this reason, the essential Debra—and her uncertainties and persisting dilemmas—remained real; just as she did not find a true answer in real life so too did she—and we—fail to find a true answer in the film. SHELIA, THE SAINT Shelia comes from a middle-class, African-American Baltimore family. Her family is religious and hard-working and among them she seems to be the black sheep—with stains on her past, including alcohol abuse, drug addiction, and homelessness. Shelia, fifty-three, is effusively warm and through her illness her religious faith had grown stronger. But her cancer was very advanced. Though she had a double mastectomy and underwent aggressive chemotherapy, her cancer had already metastasized when I first met her. Her plastic surgeon, Dr. Rosson, who also treated Doris, could not finish his work because Shelia’s cancer had entered her bones and liver. Additionally, her aggressive radiation treatment created a hole in her chest wall—a complication that caused her to be admitted to the hospital’s intermediate care unit. Still, Shelia wants to better herself through her illness. With renewed faith and stubborn optimism, Shelia refused to give up on herself—and her suffering only made her appreciate her life more. She enthusiastically joined a Baptist church in Baltimore—the Empowerment Temple. Shelia was a religious person before her diagnosis but she faced her mortality with a renewed and strengthened faith in the midst of her caring family. Breast cancer runs in Shelia’s family; her mom died of it, along with several aunts. The night before her mastectomy, the family gathered to talk about the past and the future. The younger family members were understandably scared. A pastor utters a special prayer for Shelia’s upcoming mastectomy but clarifies that only the Lord decides if Shelia will survive or not. The family members refer to Shelia as a saint. But she counters with modesty: “A saint is someone who walks with Jesus. I am no Saint. I wish I was.” Shelia’s sisters and family are always by her side—during her mastectomy, the waiting room is filled with her family members who tell the story of their own mother and grandmother dying of breast cancer. Despite what one of her doctors called her “insane optimism,” Shelia died seven months into treatment. During a family reunion her loving siblings remember her selflessness and saintliness and speak of her as always giving to others. In some ways Shelia’s story is the most iconic in the film, directly bringing us back to the

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underlying theme of Saint Agatha’s martyrdom14 through the loss of her breasts, which had been introduced to us by the surgeons’ visit to Catania. As Dr. Slezak says at one point, through their suffering and loss, all breast cancer survivors become a little like saints. In this way, Shelia, who says that she cares more about others the more she suffers—and the closer she comes to her own death—embodies the hidden truth of the film, that we cannot help but experience the loss of the breast through a cultural history that teaches us that suffering and loss can have a greater moral meaning and that perhaps by defeating a disease like cancer, or even falling to, we can become better people. THE EXISTENTIAL REALISM OF THE GOOD BREAST The Good Breast is a film exhibiting what Siegfrid Kracauer would call an existential realism that is due to the cinema’s unique capacity to participate in the life of the world.15 But if the participation in the experience of breast cancer in The Good Breast scares us, makes us sad and angry, as many viewers of the film related their impressions, the film itself never tries to give the viewer a reason to judge the people going through the illness. This nondidacticism was the most important premise for all of my character developments, that is, not to directly comment on or judge their actions and emotions, their belief in miracles, or their need for the perfectly reconstructed good breast. As Cesare Zavattini, the neorealist screenwriter and film critic said so elegantly: “We are neither good nor bad, neither saints nor devils. We are.”16 The characters that live in The Good Breast are thus not only real or true in their authenticity as people but they function equally well as fictional characters in that they become the “truths of who we (as an audience) are.”17 It is in this regard that The Good Breast functions almost (and at times uncomfortably) like a snuff vérité film, because the women’s suffering is so real that it affects us all— women who either have faced or may one day face breast cancer. I wanted us to feel connected to all of my allegorical women characters and their strength, their desperation, their triumphs, and most of all their bravery to face the unknown of the illness. Returning to Zavattini, Bazin, and Deleuze, I can say that the reality I aimed to capture in The Good Breast was precisely a glimpse of the unknown, of cancer’s unforgiving and unsettling uncertainties. The only response that I thought the film could give to such a pressing disquiet was the metaphor of Agatha’s martyrdom, expressing as it does the hope or fantasy that something good comes from the loss of the breast. But I did not entirely make up this connection. My research brought me to the story of Agatha and the doctor accompanied me out of her own free will because she wanted to know



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something from me as much as I wanted to know something from her. It is in this regard that I agree with Werner Herzog, who reminds us that “being” your film is not about your own authorship but rather “disappearing into the work of the film” and ultimately “being dwarfed by the larger weights and energies it testifies to.”18 I came to feel the weight and energy of the patientcharacters’ stories through my journey with them and these are effects that will most likely never leave me but, more importantly, they will never leave the film. Whatever truths the filmmaking may have provoked from them will also be present in it, and in me. NOTES 1. The Good Breast, distributed by Icarusfilms, had its world premier at the Bentonville Film Festival in May 2016. 2. Made Over in America, Icarusfilms, 2007. 3. See You Soon Again, The Cinemaguild, 2012. 4. Francesco Casetti, Theories of Cinema: 1945–1995, tr. Francesca Chiostri and Elizabeth Gard Bartolini-Salimbeni (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1999), 21–22. 5. Bert Cardullo, André Bazin and Italian Neorealism (New York: Continuum, 2011), 22–23. 6. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema II: The Time Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013; first published, 1985), 1. 7. Deleuze, Cinema II, 2. 8. Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema” (1953), in Film: A Montage of Theories, ed. Richard Dyer McCann (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), 216–28. 9. I was lucky to be working with an acclaimed documentary editor who specializes in Vérité editing, Victor Livingston, on The Good Breast, and also on Devoti Tutti, its “sister documentary.” 10. http://www.azquotes.com/quote/862266. 11. Fellini on Fellini, tr. Isabel Quigley (New York: Delacorte Press/S. Lawrence, 1976), 53. 12. Derek Schilling, “On the Class Character of Desire: Romantic Heroics in the Conets moraux,” in The Films of Eric Rohmer, ed. Leah Anders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 136. 13. I am currently in postproduction with the editing of Devoti tutti, the second documentary that resulted from filming parts of the material for The Good Breast in Catania, Sicily. 14. I am currently in postproduction with Devoti Tutti, a separate documentary about the cult of Saint Agatha of Catania, to be released in 2017. 15. Casetti, Theories of Cinema, 35. 16. Cesare Zavattini, Neorealismo (Milano: Bompiani, 1979), 56. 17. William Egginton, manuscript of The Man Who Invented Fiction, 241. 18. Eric Ames, Ferocious Reality: Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 221.

Chapter 15

Reinvisioning Dziga Vertov Ten Enduring Diktats for Documentary Cinema Dan Geva PROLOGUE: “THE GREATEST DOCUMENTARY FILM OF ALL TIME” In 1918, a man who worked at No. 7 Gnezdnikovsky Lane, Moscow, leaped across rooftops and asked his brother to film the jump in slow motion. He later projected the footage and carefully viewed it. With that quadruple act— leaping over an urban abyss, filming the act using a nonconventional camera speed, projecting, and then reflecting on that event’s screen image—a new form of cinema was born. A few days earlier, this same man adopted the pseudonym Dziga Vertov—a name for a man in motion, an onomatopoetic signifier that had the whir of the cinema machine in it.1 What did Vertov see and recognize in the intersection of leaping, filming, projecting, and contemplating one’s image in slow motion? What made this aggregation of intuitive forces so compelling that, fourteen years later, when Vertov’s revolutionary documentary doctrine (Kino-Eye) reached its historic and artistic peak Joseph Stalin outlawed its practice?2 In 2007, Jeremy Hicks began his detailed account of Dziga Vertov by noting that “as yet there exists no work in English covering his whole career.”3 Hicks further pointed out that only recently had Vertov’s real genius been acknowledged by the wider circle of the Anglophone audience and that a thoughtful understanding of Vertov can “emerge only from a study of the whole body of his films and writings.”4 Despite Hicks’ emphasis on the entire range of his work, five years later, in 2012, Vertov’s 1929 magnum opus, The Man with the Movie Camera,5 became the only documentary film included in the list of “all-time greatest films” poll, placing eighth. (Hitchcock’s Vertigo was voted “The Greatest.”) Two years later, in 2014, The Man with the Movie Camera won the coveted title “the greatest documentary film of all time” in a 305

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parallel documentary poll wherein 340 leading film scholars, critics, as well as the world’s most renowned documentary practitioners, awarded Vertov a clear victory over any other documentarian in film history.6 Ironically, the results of these polls (surely non-essentialist accounts, by definition) affirm Vertov’s hubristic exclamation from 1945: “We are the founders of documentary cinematography, and we must not cede our first place to anyone.”7 Indeed, for a brief moment, it seemed that Vertov’s self-celebratory prophecy had come full circle. Or had it? Vlada Petric reports that most of Vertov’s contemporary critics in the Soviet Union attacked the film for being “formalistic” and “inaccessible,” while American critics of the 1930s found it confusing and superficial, “a hodge-podge” that was “increasingly mechanical and trick-filled.”8 In 1972, Annette Michelson, a key figure in aiding Vertov’s introduction to the West, lamented: “We are dealing certainly with a very special case, a film with a forty-year history of the most generally distrustful and hostile reception and of systematic critical neglect.”9 In order to appreciate the scope of the problem at hand—namely, the nature and significance of The Man with the Movie Camera—we need to revisit the emotions that important documentary films generate in our minds and hearts; the seductive characters they present; the knowledge they propagate; the pain, laughter, tears, empathy, and anger they induce; and their passionate calls for action. But most of all, we must consider the crucial events they have evoked in a century filled with explosive documentary cinema. A casual, or even a studied, look at Vertov’s The Man with the Movie Camera reveals that it has no storyline (at least not in the sense that film schools or script manuals teach); its plot is essentially fractured; and it has no punctual dramaturgic trajectory. Furthermore, the film offers no emotional catharsis, and thus does not discharge any viewers’ repressed desires. However, from the time that film historian Jay Leyda was mystified by Vertov’s film in 1930, cinema-goers and cinema-makers around the world have never gotten over its bewildering effect. More recently, Graham Roberts declared that “The Man with the Movie Camera is an example of all that cinema can achieve.”10 What quality, then, does The Man with the Movie Camera possess such that it is able to maintain this mythical status—prevailing over all rivals, despite a contentious history of reception? Whatever answer we provide, we can readily note that many influential twentieth-century realistic film movements have been heavily stamped with Vertov’s signature. This influence has been evident from the time of John Grierson, founder of the British documentary movement, who nevertheless condemned Vertov’s methods and goals, holding that “Vertov has pushed the argument to the point at which it became ridiculous,”11 to Sergei Eisenstein, the renowned shaman of Soviet fiction culture who reviled Vertov, scorning him and his followers as “Talmudists of ‘film truth’-documentary,”12 onward to Stalin’s



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social realism, Italian neorealism, the American school of direct cinema, the French cinéma vérité, Jean-Luc Godard’s “Dziga Vertov’s group,” and all the way to contemporary Americans such as Alan Berliner. All of these figures and movements and styles and philosophies owe something of their legacy, methodology, and aesthetics to Vertov in general and to The Man with the Movie Camera in particular.13 Against this broad historical backdrop of documentary film’s development, Vertov therefore plays a constituting role in the history of cinema—and, I contend in the analysis to come, it is worthy of our consideration at present and into the future of documentary filmmaking. Far from being an historical milestone, The Man with the Movie Camera presents itself as an au courant masterwork evincing—from frame to frame, sequence to sequence—revelations for our contemporary practice of being, each in our own ways, people equipped with movie cameras, often blithely and inadvertently undertaking the greatest mass cataloging of filmed images in the history of the medium. As my title suggests, I propose to “reenvision” Vertov’s art of cinema by distilling ten essential “diktats” (dictates) that might serve as guides, points of inspiration, and poignant provocations for further thought and experimentation to filmmakers and theorists alike. Needless to say, critical questions await scrutiny. What is the core element in Vertov’s philosophy of documentary making that allowed him to so confidently predict the timeless status his documentary idea would attain? What is the governing logic of Vertov’s documentary thinking? What is the nature of his documentary making? And how do responses to these questions shed light on our own time, and our own efforts to make use of cinema for documentary purposes? It is important to state at the outset that the scholarly work treating Vertov in the past half century has offered a formidable and enduring reply to the questions I pose. My humble contribution, therefore, aims to invite our focus on an idea that has been insufficiently emphasized and explored, namely, that Vertov’s timeless artistic and philosophical resilience stems from an indivisible combination of thought, action, and committed mode of living as a total documentarian. This triple, indissoluble commitment is not a matter of formality or of subjective interpretation by film critics and historians. It is, instead, I argue, a logical structure that is embedded in Vertov’s thinking, writing, polemicizing, filming, and editing. My careful reading of this architectonic structure shows that Vertov’s philosophy of documentary affirms life itself through his embedded configuration of linguistic abstraction, his distinct mode of filmmaking, and his way of living the enterprise with total commitment. Adopting one of Western philosophy’s foundational concepts, I term Vertov’s higher unity of documentary fundamentals “praxis.”14 In my reading, Vertov’s praxis, in its simplest understanding, signifies creating new

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means for comprehending the world beyond its naive form of visual or verbal given-ness. As has become familiar to readers of his own discursive remarks on documentary film, Vertov’s notion of “Kino-Eye”—a system and a film method—provides a means of transforming the self and the world.15 Borrowing from Vertov’s idiosyncratic wording, I term his documentary praxis “cine-seeing the invisible.”16 Hopefully, critics and viewers alike will find this twofold compilation of Vertovian language games (“cine-seeing” + “seeing the invisible”) representative of Vertov’s own habit of inventing hyphenated descriptions of his practice and his outlook. Put as tersely as possible, Vertov’s term “cine-seeing” is an active verb he used to complement “kino-eye” (also translated as “cine-eye”)—the eye as equipped with the transformative powers of the camera/lens/film. And beyond that, according to the principle of “cine-seeing,” viewers are able to see the world they cannot otherwise see: namely the manifestation of the essentially “invisible” realms of life. Vertov must be understood as a first-of-his-kind, visionary documentary philosopher in action: a true man of cinematic praxis. Still, the question remains: What is Vertov’s praxis, and how can a subtle reading of it shed new light on the riddle of his near-century-long relevance? Last, but certainly not least, is the question of what we, as relentlessly visual twenty-first century people, can learn from Vertov’s praxis as we stand on the brink of—or already into—the most visually documented era in human history. Finally, at the end of this discussion, I will attempt to address the question of what the task of documentary is, per Vertov’s praxis. PREPARATORY NOTES TO VERTOV’S PRAXIS OF THE INVISIBLE When I mentioned Vertov’s experimental leap across rooftops and its being filmed in slow motion, I asked: What was Vertov’s key realization that came out of that experiment? And how can we fathom its significance, given the extent to which Vertov testified that the experiment stimulated him to push ahead with his documentary revolution, and subsequently to develop his praxis as “cine-seeing the invisible”? The answer, in fact, and perhaps unsurprisingly, is right in front of our eyes. In his 1934 manifesto Kinopravda, he recounts the facts of the experiment as well as the insights he drew from it: “Cranking the camera at maximum speed made it possible to see my thoughts during my leap on the screen. Thus Kino-Eye, from the very moment of its conception was not a matter of trick effects, or, of kino-eye for its own sake. Slow motion filming, like other cinematic language games he later developed and incorporated (e.g., reverse shots, superimpositions, fast motion, splitscreens, etc.) was understood as the means to make the invisible visible, the



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unclear clear, the hidden manifest, the disguised overt, the acted non-acted, untruth truth-kinopravda (i.e., truth obtained by cinematic means . . .).”17 Given Vertov’s clear sense of his mission and his accomplishments, how are we to interpret Vertov’s claim to “see my thoughts . . . on the screen”? Vertov’s statement from Kinopravda seems to encapsulate his most primordial cinematic definition, that which he was seeking to create and enact throughout his life. It could be said that Vertov was, in effect, looking to establish an integrative mode of living through documentary in order to create a visual philosophy of life. So much of life (phenomenologically speaking) is imponderable, and so it seems—at least to many esteemed philosophers—to require a philosophical system or critical framework. The need for such a system or framework has become an imperative for most groundbreaking philosophers in the history of thought—with prominent examples including Plato’s “Theory of Forms”; Aristotle’s division of human activities into theory, poeisis, and praxis; Descartes’s “cogito”; Kant’s Ding an Sich; Leibniz’s monad; Schopenhauer’s Welt als Wille und Vorstellung; Nietzsche’s “Will to Power”; and Freud’s “unconscious.” In the same vein, I suggest we ask whether Vertov is attempting to establish—or whether we can establish for him—an all-encompassing philosophical framework as well. Is not the neologism “Life-As-It-Is” a foundational concept of Vertov’s philosophical outlook?18 Is not the core of his praxis what he deems “cine-seeing the invisible”? I suggest both are the case. Consider how Vertov speaks of his work and those who would follow it: “The kinoks have resolved: to replace verbal debate, as a literary phenomenon, with film debate, that is, with the making of film objects.”19 In the following paragraphs, I contextualize Vertov’s “Life-As-It-Is” insofar as it is an a priori function of “cine-seeing the invisible.” However, at this stage of the inquiry, we are clearly safer in assuming that Vertov’s epigraph “seeing my thoughts on the screen” is nothing other than a sign of his transcendental transposition of philosophy’s locus classicus—namely, the ability to transform abstract thinking into the regime of the visual. Thus, by reading Vertov, we are able to sustain the observation that his praxis consistently strives toward retaining a “writing in film,” proceeding with the essence of the invisible quality of thinking. In that vein, Vertov writes of the teleology of this process: “The movement of thought, the movement of ideas, travels along many wires but in a single direction, to a single goal. Thoughts fly out from the screen entering without verbal translation into the viewer’s consciousness.”20 In the analysis below, I comment on the distinguishable components of Vertov’s praxis, and then suggest a comprehensive assessment of the integration of what I have already termed “cine-seeing the invisible.” Note how, for Vertov, this philosophical standpoint will emerge from the recognition that the deep truth of real-life appearances is, a priori, false: “From the viewpoint of the ordinary eye, you see untruth. From the viewpoint of the cinematic

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eye (aided by special cinematic means . . .) you see the truth.”21 Thus, in Vertov’s world-picture, truth is always concealed: we are unaware of it, fail to see it, owing to the limited capacity of our natural, untrained eyesight.22 In the face of such a predicament, it behooves us to ask: What does Vertov mean, then, by reorienting documentary toward a philosophy of “cine-seeing the invisible”? Specifically, what of Vertov’s praxis rejects the perception of visible truth by the unaided eye? One preliminary explanation can be found in Vertov’s own words: “The main and essential thing is the sensory exploration of the world through film. We therefore take as the point of departure the use of the camera as a kino-eye, more perfect than the human eye, for the exploration of the chaos of visual phenomena that fills space.”23 CINE-SEEING THE INVISIBLE: A PHILOSOPHY OF DEPTHS Plato, Kant, Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Heidegger promote and prefer— each in his own terms—the deep and the hidden over the surface value of appearance. This mode of philosophizing negates the conspicuousness of visible phenomena and in the same breath rejects the possibility of a finite signification attributed to this appearance per se. In the same vein, Vertov’s doctrine negates final truths in the realm of visual (as well as auditory) perception.24 Vertov, however, firmly believes in Kino-Eye’s revolutionary capacity to transform life’s hidden truths—that is, to reveal them by means of film—and to have them transcend to a higher order of logic—Kino-Eye (or Cine-Eye). He writes: “Not Kino-eye for its own sake, but truth through the means and possibilities of film-eye.”25 The main premise of his paradigm is the creation of a new cinematic alphabet, which would then give rise to a new cinematic language and grammar, designated, in his view, “to record and organize the individual characteristics of life’s phenomena into a whole, an essence, a conclusion.”26 In a note he wrote later in life, Vertov shed light on the dimension with which I initiated this inquiry (namely, language): “For fifteen years, I studied writing in film. To be able to write with a camera not with a pen. Hindered by the lack of a film alphabet I attempted to create the alphabet.”27 In the mode of so many influential philosophers, Vertov set out to create a new vocabulary to serve his conceptual work. In the wake of his effort to “create the alphabet” for documentary cinema, we might call it “a Vertov cine-philosophical dictionary,” a collection that would yield (in Saussure’s sense) not only parole (manner of personal speech) but also langue (underlying structure, invisible to the common user).28 From another angle, we can see how this view of Vertov’s philosophical commitment emerges in tandem with the development of his actual cinematic practice and filmmaking technique. Each verbal concept is implemented in a film through a specific set of visual



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configurations carried out by a corresponding technical adequacy. Vertov’s consistent application of theory to practice (or praxis) guarantees the transformation of “cine-seeing the invisible” into the desired mode of cinematic reception and perception.29 As far as the tension between the task of creating the images and the unique process of their reception is concerned, it is reasonable to argue that, for Vertov, his attention is oriented toward confronting epistemological breaches and defying ontological fallacies: “It [Kino-Eye] forces the audience to confront itself with one-hundred percent film, and to accept the clash between ‘Life-As-It-Is’ viewed from the point of the eye armed with the camera (‘Film-Eye’), and ‘Life-As-It-Is’ viewed from the point of the imperfect human eye.”30 What, then, does “one-hundred percent film” mean to Vertov? TEN DIKTATS: WRITING IN FILM THROUGH CINE-SEEING THE INVISIBLE In the analysis below, I list ten perspectives of Vertov’s praxis writing in film through cine-seeing the invisible.31 Each element stands for an abstract dimension—a principle, a substance—of Vertov’s praxis. Each is a diktat insofar as each is a categorical assertion from the point of view of the overall constituting logic of Kino-Eye, or cine-seeing. From a wider vantage, all ten diktats derive from Vertov’s original philosophical vision, including the belief that such neologisms should not remain isolated within the constrained realm of verbal and/or written language, but rather, should pass on, or transcend, to the infinitely multilayered reality of cine seeing the invisible, which I describe as a “Thought-Shot System.” In his article “Without Words,” Vertov quotes H. G. Wells’ response to Vertov’s first sound film, Enthusiasm (1932):32 “had not a single word been translated for me I should have understood the entire film . . . the thoughts and nuances of the film all reach me and enact upon me without the help of words.”33 When Vertov speaks of “cinema” we must not take his words at face value. Instead, the praxis of cine-seeing the invisible calls for the intertwined treatment of four perspectives: (a) the pre-camera reality; (b) the interlinked relations of the kinok’s consciousness and technical virtuosity; (c) the complex filming-camera reality; and (d) the screened reality. From this point on, I deem Vertov’s ten epistemological constituents to be the “first principles of writing in film through cine-seeing the invisible.” His ten praxis principles are as follows: 1. Unplayed Cinema Yelizaveta Svilova, the first Kino-Editor (and Vertov’s wife), is famous for posing a rhetorical question to fellow Soviet fiction film directors: “If one

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photographs a real worker and an actor playing a worker, which is better? The impersonating actor or the real man? Unquestionably the latter!”34 The KinoEye film method (KinoGlaz) is responsible, per Vertov, for training people how to act as themselves, naturally, in front of the camera. In this manner, the nonactor becomes the essential premise or precondition of Vertov’s documentary method.35 Inasmuch as the common worker is the new Vertovian hero, this fact—of him acting-as-himself—remained invisible from the perspective of the contemporaneous narrative-based fiction film industry. As a result of Vertov’s philosophical attention to the crowd—namely, its grounding as a logical component of the visual field of life, invisible people became, for the first time in history, visible evidence.36 One may justifiably ask: “evidence of what?” Evidence of their truth as real and meaningful subjects, which is equivalent to saying that Vertov reclaims their existence as creative subjects otherwise embedded (and unseen) in the flux of life and world. Setting the conditions for transforming invisible people into visible subjectivities, who have learned to play themselves on the screen authentically, Vertov thus presents the true logic of the invisible man. This new subject—in and of the everyday—is presented without her natural masks: instead, in and through Kino-Eye she is revealed.37 Vertov insists that this “new person,” to the extent that she is a true performer of herself, is the sole valid actor for documentary film (indeed, for any kind of film). Furthermore, any filmmaking must take pains that people become accustomed to the camera presence prior to the beginning of the filming. By no means should the act of filming interfere with the natural course of real-life events. The beauty parlor, laundry, shaving, sewing, and cigarettepacking sequences in The Man with the Movie Camera, serve as an example of these real-life scenes.38 Here the native qualities of people’s ordinary conduct is caught by the camera and presented to the screen. What remains essential here is that, far from the Lumière-like “cartoonish” presentation of bourgeois society, with Vertov the invisibility of life’s hardships and the authenticity of human labor is brought to light and presented as an absolutely truthful portrayal of the invisible processes of life. People are presented on the screen “without masks.”39 The invisible becomes visible. 2. Unstaged Cinema Unstaged cinema consists of two perspectives. The first is the absolute denial of the stage heritage passed on from nineteenth-century theater traditions to early fiction film productions (e.g., the many works of George Méliès and W.D. Griffith’s grandiose eposes). Vertov forcefully scorns the staging of preconceived stories—what amount to Kino-Eye’s worst enemy. As early as his first manifesto, “WE: Variant of a Manifesto” (1922), and continuing



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through to his later diary notes, Vertov loathes the artificiality, rigidity, and lack of cinematic essence and true creativity embedded in the theatrical-style staging for cinema.40 The second perspective that is critical to unstaged cinema refers to the function of the written script, which in Stalin’s era and afterward became the de facto state license for producing film. Vertov resisted that demand on both philosophical and creative grounds.41 He said: “He [the kinok] is told [to] give us a scenario [to] give us the result of your future observation in advance, in the form of a literary and directorial description of each future shot: the result is an impossibility.”42 For Vertov, unstaged cinema is the filming of what Yuri Tzivian calls “bigger-than-life events”; funerals, mourning, birth, accidents, marriage, and divorce are moments in which people are immersed in themselves and their actions, and therefore at these crucial times, they are unable to pay attention to the camera.43 Thus, the bigger-than-life events become, per Vertov, our best chance to seeing life-as-it-is. Vertov argues that a concealed truth about human nature is revealed in these moments of intense feeling—whether of struggle or joy, torment or elation—insofar as they expose to the unnoticed camera a concealed/unconscious human truth. Unstaged cinema shows that when people are preoccupied with the gravity of their moment-to-moment existence, they cannot pretend to be something they are not and cannot fake their inner attitude toward the event of which they are an elemental part. 3. Life-Caught-Unawares In Vertov’s words, life caught unawares is intended not “for the sake of [the] ‘unaware’ but in order to show people without masks. Without makeup, to catch them through the eyes of the camera in a moment they are not acting, to read their thoughts laid bare by the camera.”44 Life-Caught-Unawares manifests the invisible truth through various techniques—for example, through diversion; a smaller camera can be used as a distraction that functions to clear the way for the now-unnoticed main camera’s capturing of the event. The candid camera is another fundamental means by which invisible human truth can be unconcealed. Life-Caught-Unawares avoids inert or self-conscious or otherwise acted human expression, all of them common responses to a camera’s known presence. In Vertov’s diary note titled “General instructions for all techniques,” this premise for generating authentic action becomes more understandable. He crafts an eight-section filming program for what escapes the eye: 1. Filming unawares—an old military rule: gauging, speed, attack. 2. Filming from an open observation point set up by Kinok-observers. Selfcontrol, calm, and—at the right moment—lightning attack.

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3. Filming from a hidden observation point. Patience and complete attention. 4. Filming when the attention of the subjects is diverted naturally. 5. Filming when the attention of the subjects is artificially diverted. 6. Filming at a distance. 7. Filming in motion. 8. Filming from above.45 The most compelling demonstration of the power of this principle is found in the “accident in the street” scene.46 It has an authentic “life-fact” quality, yet it creates what Petric calls “a transposition.” To these descriptions, I would add our new awareness of both the invisible essence of its content and the factual reality it is based upon. Vertov’s eight shooting techniques guarantee a decoding of the invisible world through an extraction of a deeper layer of meaning. It actuates what he calls, in his formative manifesto “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” “the negative of time.” A close reading reveals that this dialectical expression of temporality stands as the last among another set of eight logical conditions Vertov sets for “Kino-Eye.”47 In this context “the negative of time” means time does not advance forward linearly as intuition or memory seems to suggest. Time moves, instead, in all directions simultaneously: the pastness and futurity of events can be expressed by means of Kino-Eye. One prime example is the pair of reverse shots showing doves flying backwards onto the rooftop; these deliberately confusing shots follow the Charlie Chaplin-like disappearance of the kinok (documentarian) into the horizon, as he sets forward to begin his mission to see the world afresh. The contradiction between the forward motion of the kinok with the negative of the doves’s natural temporality sets in motion the opening scene of The Man with the Movie Camera.48 The “negative of time,” then, entails a dialectical spatio-temporal friction zone—part and parcel of Vertov’s grander optical project of “conquering space and time,” with and through Kino-Eye.49 4. From “Film Fact” to “Film Thing” We, as viewers or filmmakers, often begin an interaction with film equipped with the assumption that we can rely on our natural view of what Bill Nichols calls “the historical world.”50 According to this belief in a non-mediated vision, the world as we come to know it, through our natural sight, is a fixed state of affairs, and it correlates with the true nature of the visual field. The historical record should be visible. Furthermore, such a record exists independently of our minds and is affirmed prior to, and regardless of, the arrival of the camera on the scene.51 History plays out whether the camera is there to capture it or not. This scenario increases the challenge of Kino-Eye’s daring credo to achieve an absolute cinematic truth that, for one thing, ontologically



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connects to that assumed state of affairs, while at the same time maintains its independent cinematic ontology. For these reasons, it is essential here to make a distinction between “film fact” (singular evidence of life’s factual representation on film) and the possibility of attaining a higher truth through its emergence as a “film thing”—namely, the finalized cinematic reality, which is conceived through the implementation of a divergent but complementary cinematic process. Cinematic truth of the “film thing” cannot be faithful to a primordial and naive state of affairs, which is then later attached to the “film fact.” Vertov designates the reality of the “film fact” as lacking perspective of its unarmed sensorial reception—in other words, human sight. As Elizabeth Papazian argues, there is an unbridgeable gap between these two ontologies, and therefore she calls it “Vertov’s paradox.”52 However, in response to, or resolution of the paradox, it could be said that Vertov’s praxis called cineseeing the invisible offers us an understanding of this process without opposing binaries. Rather, the documentary process is, per Vertov, a continuum of progressive truth processes, something far removed from being subsumed by the logic of paradoxes. In this vein, one of the early phases of the “film thing” reveals itself as a “film fact.” In that phase, the film itself exhibits a strong bonding with the factual plain of empirical, historical occurrences. Thus, Vertov does not divorce his documentary vision from outer (nonfilmic) reality; however, this new level of filmed reality is only an embryonic fraction of a greater ontological shift that comes about through the shifting temporality of the kino-eye film editing process.53 Hence, “film thing” is not a “new thing” with respect to “film fact”; rather it is, a priori, an original manifestation of its hidden truth. Vertov’s dialectical force does not leave us with Papazian’s paradox but instead with a Hegelian synthesis: the documentary film has harmonized “film fact” and “film thing” by means of the camera/lens/film/ editing/screening process that uncovers truth. In other words, for Vertov, the true significance of Life-As-It-Is, insofar as we know it independently of the camera reality, is revealed only through the interdependency of the dialectical transformation from “film fact” to “film thing”—a dialectical tension that, in the same breath, negates and affirms its realistic origins. 5. Higher Mathematics Vertov writes that a documentary film is “not merely the sum of facts” but a “higher mathematics” of the recorded, deconstructed, and reconstructed events.54 Roberts adds that “The Man with the Movie Camera is constructed with a mathematical precision.”55 In this regard, Vertov insists that “kinoeye makes use of every possible kind of shooting technique: acceleration, microscopy, reverse action, animation, camera movement, the use of the most unexpected foreshortenings—all these we consider to be not trick effects but

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normal methods to be fully used.”56 Higher mathematics, then, diverts the goal of cine-seeing the invisible back to the editing table, calling it “higher mathematics of montage.”57 For Vertov this means that a documentary film is not just the sum of its facts, but a “higher mathematics of facts.”58 On that basis, Eisenstein scorns Vertov’s alleged “lack of purposeful intension in commenting about the film event.”59 6. Interval Theory of Editing; or, Disruptive Associative Montage Interval editing recognizes the physiological, subconscious effect of images on human consciousness. Vertov submits the principle of “sub-liminal editing” as part of his “theory of intervals,” a theory constructed from the notion of disruptive associative montage. Vertov’s theory of editing, therefore, boldly defies the logic of Eisenstein’s montage. Petric explains that “unlike Eisenstein’s concept of dialectical conflict that produces emotional/intellectual overtones due to the optical pulsation of images projected on the screen, Vertov’s cinematic dialectics results from unexpected insertion of shots whose thematic connotation contradicts the already established meaning of the entire sequence.”60 Vertov’s idea of “the interval” is essential to an understanding of his revolutionary thoughts concerning the role of his praxis in reshaping viewers’ perceptions. For him the interval is about the viewers’ active participation in the exploration of the external world—not in terms of superficial appearance (on screen) but rather in terms of penetrating the internal (“sub-liminal,” subconscious levels) and thus making the invisible structures of life at once visible and of significance. Intervals help us see collisions of scale, duration, content, direction, lighting, and graphic schemes. The interval summons and then orchestrates the invisible through film’s naturally disruptive nature—for example, in terms of reconfiguring space and time. The interval gives sense to film’s inner breaches, as well as its sutures, through a higher form of organization that emphasizes the idea of “difference” over that of “sameness.” For these reasons, among others, interval theory therein accounts for cinematic movement as it translates from the world to the screen.61 7. Life-As-It-Is Annette Michelson stresses Vertov’s “disdain of the mimetic.”62 Life-As-It-Is includes what Vertov describes as “the ‘life’ of the film itself—the process of cinematic creation from the various stages of shooting, all the way to the final product, namely the film being projected for the audience.”63 Vertov writes that Life-As-It-Is must be decoded in order to be revealed, and thus truly viewed— or viewed for its truth. Life-As-It-Is neither exposes nor decodes itself in the



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sense that we tend to believe in it qua appearance, or as Petric puts it “Life-AsIt-Is-Appears.”64 In that alone, invisibility is declared to be the natural and primordial position of reality, which thus requires Kino-Eye as a resolving logic, or a means for revelation of truth. For Vertov, Life-As-It-Is decodes relations in the world, or, in his own words, shows the “influence of facts upon workers’ consciousness . . . carefully selected, recorded, and organized facts from the lives of the workers themselves as well as from those of their class enemies.”65 Petric affirms the special relationship that Life-As-It-Is has with the invisible, namely, as a force for “ penetrating beneath the surface of external reality.”66 8. Film Truth Principle The principle of film truth respects the total authenticity of each separate shot; as such, it is an organizing logic for the invisible world; its function is to decipher invisibility via Kino-Eye. As Petric explains, in more detail: Although each shot in Film-Eye [method] (or Kinoglatz) was filmed on location with real people undisturbed in their daily activities, the montage structure of many of its sequences was often in “conflict” with the logical course of the events that had occurred in reality. For example, in several sequences Vertov juxtaposed shots based on the concept of “Life-As-It-Is” (Zhizn’ kak ona est’)— that is to say shots based on the ontological authenticity of the film image—with those shots which comprised a highly abstracted montage dynamism, or which were executed in slow, accelerated, or reverse motion.67

The problem Petric isolates for us—namely, that there is an unbridgeable tension between the authentic nature of pre-camera reality and the distinct cinematic ontology of shots once placed in the context of the “Film-thing”— warrants special attention. Let us take, for example, the opening shot of The Man with the Movie Camera.68 In it, Vertov creates an “ontological vertigo”:—specifically, we see how the diegetic camera fills the frame when the man with the movie camera emerges out of a nonsensical position in virtual space, somehow from (the invisible) backstage of the camera’s front façade. Suddenly we realize that the man with the movie camera has a completely different scale than the camera he mounts. He is a miniature in comparison to the camera’s gigantic dimensions. Then he mounts this downscaled self, and his proportionally downscaled camera, onto the gigantic diegetic camera, thus creating complete confusion and mistrust with regard to the very basic questions of orientation and identification—who? what? and where69 Hence, The Man with the Movie Camera’s opening shot challenges our intuitive notions or definitions for what it is to be a man with a movie camera. Vertov thus encodes the entire film with the problematics of this existential and phenomenological plain—an invented space time beyond the logic of gravity

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and scale. To an important extent, his entire documentary project is based on that provocative reformation of law and scale, here distilled into a single shot. If Vertov causes problems, set up mysteries and apparent paradoxes, he also provides answers—even if they remain invisible to the untrained eye. For example, the entirety of The Man with the Movie Camera reveals that the three aspects he associates with being a kinok (or documentarian) are (1) being a world, (2) being in the world, and (3) being no more than one of an infinite number of ways of seeing the world.70 This threefold association designates the kinok as being omnipotent and impotent at the same time. In this regard, in this answercoupled-with-a-new-paradox, we are liable to assume that Vertov’s view of truth is closer to Heidegger’s concept of truth as aletheia—truth as a partial clearing—than to traditional Western epistemology with its correspondence theories of truth, which favor the matching of the mind and its object.71 9. Kinesthesia Kinesthesia means “a geometrical extraction of movement.”72 So we could say that Kinesthesis (Kinesthesia) is a motion-enhanced approach to documentary filming and editing. It prepares the viewer for a novel visual experience based solely on the unique sensation of cinematic movement—achieved as still image, moving image, and via editing techniques such as interval placement. Stemming from Vertov’s adoration of the moving/movie machine in particular, or motion more generally, Kinesthesia is at the very foundation of Kino-Eye; for instance, Kinesthesia points directly to the kinetics of the kinok’s body—as he films, as he moves, as he positions himself with camera in hand. In one of his manifestos Vertov says: We fall, we rise . . . together with the rhythm of movements—slowed and accelerated, running from us, past us, towards us, in a circle, or straight line, or ellipse, to the right and left, with plus and minus signs; movements bend, straighten, divide, break apart, multiply, shooting noiselessly through space. Cinema is, as well, the art of inventing movements of things in space . . . the theory of relativity on the screen.73

One of the best examples of Kinesthesia is what Vertov terms “phieffect.”74 It generates a stroboscopic pulsation in order to shock the viewer perceptually and to warn him sensorially of the approaching danger in the scene to come. Petric explains the “phi-effect” in this way: “If two objects or graphic forms are projected alternately on the same screen, the viewer will have the illusion that one form is transformed into the other. The viewer thus experiences double exposure.” Petric goes on to explain: “The impression of the previous image merges with the perception of the succeeding image.”75 The kinesthetic impact of phi-effect is performed most vigorously in the “street and eye” scene of The Man with the Movie Camera.76



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10. Self-Referentiality With The Man with the Movie Camera, the film title’s syntax and semantics become the clearest and most overt enunciation of self-referentiality an author like Vertov can muster. More broadly, the film is the first in documentary history to devote itself to the subject who manufactures the film object, not only in the technical sense (as filmmaker) but also as part of an existential mission (as revealed in the film’s effects). “Self-referentiality” does not stop, therefore, at the kinok’s film title—as if it were a claim he could not fulfil. In Vertov’s praxis cine-seeing the invisible, “the filmed-other” becomes, from the beginning, a shadow-ghost of the filming-self, at the same time as the filming-self becomes a shadow-ghost of “the filmed-other.” Vertov is “there” in every frame as the camera holder, but as the camera holder he is also not there. The two subject positions are interdependent, and they reflect themselves through sophisticated optics: slow motion, reverse shots, accelerated speeds, superimpositions, telescopic lenses, reflections, and so on. The reflexivity of the filming-self to the filmed-other, and the attentiveness/indifference axis that connects the filmed-other to the filmingself, means we are encouraged to apply the notion of reciprocity by means of optics. Vertov argues that if the kinok and the real-life individual are inclined to look at the lens, then let them look. Their gaze becomes truth itself. Their inquisitiveness about the camera—seeing into it—becomes our inquisitiveness about seeing what the camera filmed. This indispensable reciprocity (between the filming subject and the filmed person and film-viewer) purifies filmic consciousness—at the level of the act of image creation, medium and reception—and creates a higher level of what Sergei Drobashenko calls “ontological authenticity.”77 For Vertov, the reflexivity of the kinok is a logical imperative: it is a precondition for the coming-to-life of writing in film through cine-seeing the invisible; it is, therefore, also documentary’s ethical condition insofar as it guarantees the authenticity of filming “LifeAs-It-Is.”78 Reflexivity, per Vertov, never operates at a singular level, or with independent status: it is always dialectical. While revealing a certain truth aspect, it conceals another; the epistemological strength of reflexivity resides in the camera/cameraman’s capacity to reflect the concealment of truth— and therefore, by the very means of this dielectic, also reflect the means for revelation (aletheia). The man with the movie camera, to the extent that he is a living ego in the historic world, and not a film subject or a film title, is a reflexive man of praxis. He is reflexive at any given moment with respect to at least three viewpoints: (1) to himself, (2) to the act of filming, and (3) to the camera. However, it is the fourth viewpoint that completes the existential dimension of Vertov’s innate reflexivity, namely, how the kinok is a priori reflexive with respect to the film spectator, and also with regard to the fact that he knows that his filming act of Life-Caught-Unawares is

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destined to be resurrected in another space and time—a time behind him, a time beyond the time of the recording. **** In order to grasp the philosophical strength of Vertov’s cine-seeing the invisible, as well as the obligations it enacts, and transformations it suggests, we must ask again: How do these ten diktats come to life? Vertov’s prophecy that cinema would show us the invisible rests on the notion that any man or woman with a movie camera—and now we can add video or digital camera—must seek purposeful seeing at any given moment of his or her praxis. Showing on film the invisible of Life-As-It-Is requires a multiplication of the infinite sensory abundance suggested by the ten diktats; such an appreciation of potential must be multiplied by the infinite number of opportunities for cine-seeing Life-As-It-Is. In other words, Vertov suggests a formulation for an infinite series of film-based revelations. (No wonder Stalin could not afford him!) The infinite potentiality of life is, per Vertov, a synonym for life—and thus a provocation to cine-life. In the opening lines of this chapter I noted that, for Vertov, praxis means creating a new way to understand the world beyond our otherwise naive form of (largely visual) givenness. For Vertov, the film documentarian assumes—as a sort of ultimate life mission—the practice of revealing hidden depths behind the obvious appearances of things and states of affairs. Viewed from that ambitious perspective, Vertov’s net of concepts—including “higher mathematics,” “Kinesthesia,” “life-caught-unawares,” and “ontological authenticity”—become powerful metaphors for the infinitude of the human potential with respect to the medium of film. In more than one sense, it is now safer to assume that Vertov’s praxis of cine-seeing the invisible is a synecdoche for the seemingly indefinite power of the imagery we create. Vertov warns us against our blindness to this imagery, claiming that it is not a God-given attribute of consciousness, nor is its meaning self-evident. The reciprocity of image creation and image consumption shows that images of the world change us as we are changed by their creation (by us). We are now all kinoks; this status gives rise to Vertov’s radical view of cinematic humanity. Still, the problem of how to find the true (or truer) combination of images among an infinite number of invisible possibilities is the daunting task of meaning-creation and meaning-deciphering imposed on us by the praxis of cine-seeing the invisible. Vertov becquethed this provocation and, it would seem, this commitment by means of his film philosophy of the Kino-Eye. Yet, more than six decades after his death, the promise of his praxis is still largely encrypted, and therefore, unrealized. Vertov left us to make our choices, but not before admonishing us: “Three-fourths of the human race is stupefied by



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the opium of bourgeois film-dramas. The battle against the blinding of the masses, the battle for vision can and must begin.”79

NOTES 1. Roberts recounts that “in a futurist gesture he began to call himself ‘Dziga Vertov.’ It is typical of Vertov that he should choose a name (a) because he liked the sound he made (possibly, because it reminded him of a film passing through a projector) and, (b) because it contained a host of linguistic references and connections; ‘Dziga’ was the name of a spinning top as well as the Ukrainian term for a gypsy. ‘Vertov’ is derived from the Russian verb ‘to spin.’” Graham Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, ed. Richard Taylor, The Russian Cinema Series (London: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2000), 15. Vertov’s birth name was David Kaufman. 2. See Roberts’s account of that historic moment in: Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 5–42. 3. Jeremy Hicks, Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007), 1. 4. Hicks refers to two Vertov retrospectives taking place in Cambridge and Pordenone film festivals, 2007. Ibid. 5. Vertov, The Man with the Movie Camera (USSR, 1929). 6. Paul McManus, Nick Bradshaw, and Isabel Stevens, “The Greatest Documentaries of All Time—All the Votes,” Sight and Sound 24 (September 2014). 7. Dziga Vertov, “From Notebooks, Diaries,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1945 [1984]), 268. 8. Vlada Petric, Constructivism in Film. The Man with the Movie Camera. A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 129. 9. Annette Michelson, “Man with a Movie Camera; from Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum 10, no. 7 (1972), 98. 10. Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 104. 11. John Grierson and Forsyth Hardy, Grierson on the Movies (London and Boston: Faber and Faber, 1981), 68. Quoted in Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 99. 12. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 56–57. 13. Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 98–103. 14. Plato was the first to touch upon the concept of praxis, but it was Aristotle who made the first attempt at giving it a more precise meaning, suggesting it should be regarded as one of the three basic human activities, the other two being theoria and poeisis. Theoria’s goal is the knowledge of truth; the goal of poeisis is the production of something; and the goal of praxis (practical knowledge) is action itself. In Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Terence Irwin, 2nd ed. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999), 1140b. See also Gajo Petrović, “Praxis,” in A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore (Oxford: Blackwell Reference, 1983), 435.

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A modern take on that distinction is: “Activity that has its goal within itself; conduct; distinguished from poeisis, or production, which aims at bringing into existence something distinct from the activity.” In Dagobert D. Runes, “Praxis,” in The Dictionary of Philosophy (New York: Philosophical Library, 1942). Bambach describes the perspective in different words: “Praxis for Aristotle designates the realm of human ‘action,’ whereas poeisis can be defined as the realm of ‘productive activity.’ As Aristotle sees it, production realizes itself as activity only when it achieves some result or product.” C. Bambach, “Arendt and Heidegger: The Fate of the Political,” Negations 3 (1998), http://www.datawranglers.com/negations/ issues/98w/bambach_01.html. 15. “Kino Eye (kinoglaz) is the name Vertov gave to the movement and group of which he is a founder and leader. The term was also used to designate their method of work.” In Dziga Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 5. 16. “My Latest Experiment,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 132. For the neologism: “‘I see’ = ‘I cine see,’” look in “From Kino-Eye to Radio Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 35, 87 and passim. Hereafter, I will be at pains to explore this concept. Vertov’s altered semantics for “writing in film” and his original conception of “cine-seeing” overlaps throughout his entire written oeuvre. In this chapter I will use both “writing in film the invisible” and “cine-seeing the invisible” intermittently. 17. “Kinopravda,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 131. 18. “The Man with the Movie Camera,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 84–85. 19. “On the Significance of Nonacted Cinema,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 32. 20. “Without Words,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 118. 21. “Three Songs to Lenin and Kino-Eye,” 124. 22. “On the Film Known as Kino Glatz,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 35. 23. “The Council of Three,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 14–15. 24. Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio Eye.” 25. “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 41. 26. Dziga Vertov, “Artistic Drama and Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 147. 27. “My Latest Experiment,” in Michelson (1935 [1984]), 132. Later in his life, Vertov termed his idea for documentary “documentary poetry.” In “On Mayakovsky,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 186. 28. Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw-Hill, 1915 [1996]). 29. “We will have to sharpen their senses before the shining screen of cinema.” Vertov, “The Fifth Issue of Kinopravda,” 11. 30. Vertov, “The Man with the Movie Camera,” 84–85. 31. For reasons of space limitation, this list does not attempt to cover the entire scope, depth, and breadth of Vertov’s cine-philosophical language. Other fundamental conceptions such as Classification, Organization, Higher mathematics, and



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ontological authenticity deserve more attention that, regrettably, far exceeds the scope of this discussion. 32. Dziga Vertov, “Enthusiazm (Simfonija Donbassa)” (USSR: Filmmuseum, 1930). 33. “Without Words,” 117. 34. “The Council of Three.” Cited in Petric, Constructivism in Film, 3. 35. Dziga Vertov, “Kinoglatz,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 38–40. 36. Vertov assets: “The field of vision is life.” In “On the Significance of Nonacted Cinema,” 37. 37. Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 41. 38. In The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:32:50–00:35:59. 39. Ibid., 41. 40. Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto.” 41. “From Notebooks, Diaries,” in Michelson (1939 [1984]), 213, 227. 42. Ibid., 222. 43. For Tzivian’s commentary see Dziga Vertov, “The Man with the Movie Camera: Annotation by Yuri Tzivian,” in BFI Films, ed. Yuri Tzivian (UK: BFI 1929). For the “Bigger than life event” scene see The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:25:24–00:28:33. 44. Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 41. 45. “From the Kinoks’ Field Manual,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, 162–63. 46. In The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:30:23–00:32:25. 47. Vertov, “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” 41. 48. See The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:08:30–00:08:43. 49. In “From Kin-Eye to Radio-Eye” he writes: “kino-eye means the conquest of time.” Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio Eye,” 88. 50. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality; Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 77. 51. Often termed “naïve realism.” In Ian Aitken, “Realism, Philosophy, and the Documentary Film,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 1096–1103. 52. Elizabeth Astrid Papazian, Manufacturing Truth; the Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009), 72. 53. See opening quotation. 54. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 199. 55. Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 102. 56. Vertov, “From Kino-Eye to Radio Eye,” 88. 57. Roberts, The Man with the Movie Camera, 84 58. Ibid. 59. Quoted in Petric, Constructivism in Film. 60. Ibid., 96. 61. See The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:29:51–00:30:23. In his analysis of the formal structure of the “Street-Eye” scene, Petric furhter offers a concise structure of the disruptive associative principle. In, Constructivism in Film, 140–43. 62. Annette Michelson, “Introduction,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, xxv.

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63. “On the Significance of Nonacted Cinema,” 35–38. 64. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 119. 65. Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 66. 66. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 4. 67. Petric, “Dziga Vertov as Theorist,” 31. 68. See The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:01:14–00:01:25. 69. Peter Preuss, “Ontological Vertigo,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 11, no. 2 (1980). 70. The entire “Kino-Eye” manifesto is devoted to the presentation of this philosophy. See Vertov, “Kino-Eye,” 60–79. 71. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 1977). 72. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 27. 73. Vertov, “We: Variant of a Manifesto,” 9. 74. Petric, Constructivism in Film, 139–40. 75. Ibid. 76. Ibid., 139. See The Man with the Movie Camera, 00:29:51–00:30:23. 77. Quoted in Petric, 51. 78. See Garnet C. Butchart, “Camera as Sign: On the Ethics of Unconcealment in Documentary Film and Video,” Social Semiotics 23, no. 5 (2012). 79. Vertov, “Kinoglatz,” 39.

Chapter 16

Whose Strife Is It Anyway? The Erosion of Agency in the Cinematic Production of Kitchen Sink Realism Elan Gamaker

In 1966, the BBC commissioned local filmmaker Ken Loach to adapt the Jeremy Sandford-penned play Cathy Come Home for national broadcast in England. Cathy Come Home tells the story of Cathy and Reg Ward (Carol White and Ray Brooks), a young working-class couple who, after a brief courting, marry and begin a life together. They have high hopes, but these are quickly dashed when Reg loses his job, and they must move into council housing. But there is a paucity of decent accommodation, so when the couple—with three kids in tow—are evicted, they move to a caravan. The caravan burns down, forcing the couple to split as Cathy moves to a women-only dormitory. The enforced separation ruins their marriage, and Cathy is left alone. Penniless, her children are taken into state care and she becomes homeless. The work was an episode of The Wednesday Play, a regular slot featuring television adaptations of current theatrical pieces. A quarter of the country’s viewing public tuned in, and the show had an immediate and far-reaching effect on programming, the effects of viewership, and especially social action. City councils were spurred into action and new housing charities such as Shelter were formed, as “the issues of homelessness and of various measures adopted by local authorities to deal with it became more prominent in public and political discussion.”1 The film was even credited with being the most prominent to highlight the growing postwar housing crisis and “had its effects on the Labour Government of 1966.”2 But, interestingly, Cathy Come Home has since become praised more for its visual style than for its social, economic, or political influence. Using a combination of dramatized narrative based on the source material, along with location footage of London’s decrepit housing precincts, the film merges raw document with actor-driven dramaturgy to create a depiction of working life that is part record, part restaging. So, even though Cathy Come Home was 325

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commissioned to show the housing shortage in 1960s Britain, it was this creative, hybrid approach—as opposed to the film’s real-world impact—that has made the work come to be regarded as a groundbreaking documentary. Moreover, and more proximately, its use of dramatization provided the springboard for Ken Loach’s career as a narrative filmmaker and was “an inspiration for his future work and his development into making feature length films.”3 By his own admission Loach did not set out merely to create a document of record. He decided to shoot the film in what I call here documentary style “to increase its believability.”4 By documentary style I refer to a generic stylization of a visual document: planned and restaged, rehearsed, written and acted scenes shot in a verité manner to imitate the straightforward recording of real events. For Loach, film—and by inference filmmakers themselves—had the “social responsibility to effect change.”5 But while we might argue that this ethos evokes a key problematic proposed by Allan Sekula, namely that artistic interpretations are “refractions of a larger cultural and ideological crisis [and] are rooted in the materially dictated inequalities of advanced capitalism,” there are, in particular with Loach and his use of documentary style, unavoidable contradictions, as I later discuss.6 For Loach, the most important aspect of a film designed to highlight serious social problems was not so much an idealistic verité documentary approach but something that would bring an important message across to the widest possible audience.7 In the case of Cathy Come Home, it would emerge in the form of the production—a dramatized, “directed” narrative based on a play, itself based on “real events” whose style was its key to accessibility, and whose entertainment value would lead to concomitant levels of distribution and exhibition (in this case a national broadcast). Likewise, as I also discuss in what follows, for Loach’s contemporary Ken Russell—also cutting his teeth on documentaries—excessive personal style enhanced the impact of productions and offered ambiguity of interpretation, both of which were understood to be favorable attributes. Loach’s and Russell’s approaches have meant that their films have come to be received differently than they intended, their contemporaneous reception notwithstanding. Using films from the early careers of these two filmmakers—noting that both Loach and Russell were working in the British cinematic social realist tradition—and through an analysis of the methodology of and response to their films, I will investigate the problem of agency in the documentary form and how it influences, or reinforces, the subjectivity of truth.8 Specifically I will discuss how both the power structure of (broadly construed) film industry stylization—directorial choices, narrative, set piece, montage and target audience—and viewer interpretation can conspire to strip



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agency from the subject at hand. That is, they remove agency from the subject who makes the film; the subject who is featured in the film; and the subject watching the film. Ultimately, I propose that the three-tier structure of industry, filmed subject, and spectator has the potential, with time, to return some of this agency to the various subjects. Cathy Come Home has at least five formal approaches worth noting: narrative fiction with dramatic interplay, narrative fiction with documentary footage, dramatic voice-over, testimony voice-over, and interaction with “real” subjects. The film came out of a tradition of British filmmaking characterized by both prewar social realist document and wartime propaganda.9 Indeed, many argue that British television was founded on the notion of public broadcast and therefore public service. The film journalist Ian Aitken argues that if “one of the central paradigms of British national film culture is realism, then the documentary film movement is one of the principal sources of that tradition.”10 But this is only half of the reason why an organization such as the BBC would use the documentary as a means of effecting social change. As a public broadcaster with a social realist broadcast tradition, the BBC had by the 1960s become as propagandistic as it was revolutionary, a creative position emanating from of the stylized work of documentary filmmaker John Grierson. Originally trained as a film critic, Grierson is often credited with the growth of the documentary medium in pre- and postwar Britain, and in particular with promoting the idea of film being a medium ideally suited to filming “ordinary people.”11 Once the British government saw the power of the Griersonian model—for example, that documentary benefitted the people it purported to represent— support for its use grew. This approach is part of a tradition in British cinema that came to form its national identity. As Sarah Street notes when considering the impact of the war effort on British film (and how the war had, perhaps unsurprisingly, affected every form of storytelling): Critics believed that at last a national cinema was born, encouraged by the need to stress unity and in recognition of the importance of film as propaganda. Although this national cinema was identified and praised in rather narrow terms, privileging realism and documentary as the dominant form and aesthetic, the range and diversity of wartime British films extended far beyond those terms and was rooted very much in 1930s genre production.12

This evocation of genre production may in some ways suggest the stylization of the real was a by-product of the social environment of the British New Wave period of which Loach and Russell were a part, but it does suggest that stylization and propagandistic representation never enjoyed mutual exclusivity. Just as Grierson and his acolytes such as Alberto Cavalcanti, Basil

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Wright, and Hilary Harris were making documentary films such as Drifters (1929) and Coal Face (1935), the cinematic environment was also being dominated by Russian formalist montage. Thus, while Alfred Hitchcock, in a short film made for Scottish Television in 1965, views Grierson as a documentarian, the distinction seems not only incorrect but also even tautological.13 Drifters, a documentary about deep-sea fishermen that uses portraiture, crosscutting, montage, and characterization, was merely a product of its time: it is every bit as formalist as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925). More significant is how the formal and political began to merge, particularly, as Aitken points out, that in spite of pretensions or even (honorable) ambitions to use the form to promote and highlight social awareness, “Grierson was strongly influenced by forms of neo-Hegelian philosophy which placed considerable importance on the value of the state and corporate institutions.”14 It is important to mention corporate and state institutions (such as the BBC) because they represent not just how such films came to be financed, but also how they influenced film style. Films such Housing Problems (Elton and Anstey, 1935), a social-issue project covering subjects similar to those in Cathy Come Home, bear out this distinction. Rather than being commissioned by a national broadcaster, Housing Problems was solicited by the erstwhile British Commercial Gas Association to highlight the dire housing of London’s Stepney Green neighborhood. Unlike Cathy Come Home, the film depicts only residents and their testimonies without any reenactment or restaging. While we must still wonder at which elements of film have been omitted or included, and would have to acknowledge that taking its depiction on face value would be somewhat naïve, its key differences—the lack of dramaturgy, commission and distribution—are nevertheless worth highlighting. Cathy Come Home, which begins as a continuation of Sekula’s call for documentary work to take place from “within particular struggles,”15 soon gives way stylistically to its director’s Griersonian inheritance. Just as Grierson placed “great emphasis on notions of duty and service,”16 Loach saw his films in the light of a “duty to show the nation as it really was.”17 But Grierson also believed “institutions of state possessed intrinsic merit because they were the culmination of long-drawn-out historical attempts to achieve social integration and harmony” and that “ideologies which promoted social integration were ‘good propaganda.’”18 And it appears Loach was equally not immune from such contradictions. Thus, the outlook that takes film as a means to a social end can in many ways be regarded as the thin end of a conservative wedge, where the might of the institution decides the “good propaganda” and not vice versa. Such a concern is in line with another major critique of the social realist documentary, namely that it can be used “by a conservative media establishment to reinforce consensualist ideas.”19 Broadcast journalist Stuart Hood similarly argues



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that the Grierson philosophy of adhering to top-down doctrine for the sake of a dominant “greater good” led to “the establishment of a politically toothless current affairs media, unable to carry out critical, investigate work.”20 In many ways the production of Cathy Come Home represented a clash of two principles: on the one hand, the general sanction of the institutional ethos, and on the other hand, the documentary formalism developed by Grierson and expanded by Loach and other adherents of the approach. If a film’s commission came out of the “social integration” function of the documentary tradition, its result often represented what this tradition had become, the corollary of Grierson: a stylized and simultaneous traditionalism and revisionism of the British social realist form. The problem here is not the internal paradox of form and intention as it pertains to film-as-a-medium, but that those who are lost in all this debating are the British underclass for whom the film was putatively made. It is here, at the point where doctrinal commission meets artistic license, where the top-down erosion of agency begins. I use the term “erosion” for the purpose of expressing a layered degradation of power within this process of filmmaking, and also to emphasize that this process begins on the ground level of production. Here the financial and political power structure in place determines cultural programming and dissemination, and it is where we begin to witness the effects of its command and control on content—or, rather, its alienation of the subjects it would otherwise seem dedicated to depicting and subsequently aiding. For if there is a chain of command in video and film production, questions of selectivity, content, and receptivity depend greatly on the different levels of agency at differing levels of production. One must ask if this agency can ever be fully preserved, transferred, afforded or gained in visual documentation, and indeed if its erosion is inevitable. This question arises initially out of the fact that the tools of this selfexpression were not available to these subjects, particularly in 1966, many decades before the self-publishing world of interlinked digital media and online platforms. Indeed, the subjects of the Loach film and, as I discuss later, those of Russell’s were both thematically and etymologically bound to their subordinate position. The first stage of erosion thus takes place from funder to filmmaker. In line with the reservations of Hood (and, by extension, of Sekula), the financial and distributional structure of filmmaking represents the first major hurdle for the accuracy of representation that true agency demands. Here, the agency loss is one of both content (conditional upon political meaning of outcome) and dissemination (conditional upon the limitations of broadcasting reach). In the case of Cathy Come Home, the BBC commission came out of a clear knowledge of both source material and the filmmaker, which meant the commissioners knew the outcome would, more than anything, be an entertainment.

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That Loach was commissioned by television is also an inescapable aspect of this first layer of erosion because of the political dimension of a top-down structure of information distribution such as (early) television, particularly in the case of a public broadcaster with direct links to government. As Sekula argues: “Television has never been a realist medium, nor has it been capable of narrative in the sense of a logical, coherent account of cause and effect.”21 Similarly, former BBC producer Irene Shubik notes the formal limitations of the medium by arguing that “the bulk of television writing is inevitably dramatized journalism.”22 So, while Loach took on the project because it matched the fundamental politic of his oeuvre, he did not attempt to change or challenge either the expected outcome or its exhibition platform. The film’s huge viewership bears this out. But while reactions were mixed and included negative responses, such as “if the things which ‘happened’ in the play really happened at all, then they did not happen to one couple as depicted; if ‘license’ was taken with plot construction, license may be presumed to have been taken elsewhere,”23 in this squabble between lawmakers and law-changers the neoVictorian “houseless poor”24 had little say in the matter. It might even be argued, perhaps cynically, that Loach’s use of footage of social housing enhances this mendaciousness. By placing a veneer of “reality” over drama, he constructs a stylistic merging of the two aspects and in so doing conceals the dramatic elements within a mock-vérité structure, even if John Corner argues for the truth-enhancing aspects of such a method: Stylistically, the program has a number of scenes which are shot in the documentary mode of action-led camera, with events appearing to develop spontaneously and to be “caught” by the filming. The resultant effect is one of high immediacy values, providing the viewer with a strong sense of “witness.”25

Either way, Loach was able to manipulate his content because his audience was carefully monitored and controlled. Speaking to Melvyn Bragg on BBC2’s Class and Culture in March 2012, Loach says he saw the film’s mass receptivity as an opportunity to use drama to “illuminate the facts in a way that representation cannot hope to achieve.” This use of drama leads to the next stage of erosion: directorial style. For if the propagandistic requirements of his paymasters represent the loss of agency for Loach as filmmaker, it is his artistic decisions that represent the loss of agency for his subjects. The subjects (interviewees, witnesses, and so on) in the film had little or no control of how they were depicted, and indeed how they would “fit” into the film’s final assembly, much less any awareness that their “real” stories might be stylized in the service of entertainment. For Loach would be right to argue that he confers agency in the filmmaking by



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letting people tell their stories, but this ends when the camera stops rolling and is almost erased when editing begins. One may be tempted to suggest that this power dynamic (of underwriting over filmmaker over subject) is a result of a middle-class filmmaker producing films about the working poor. But the power of such style—held by whomever makes creative decisions—transcends the agency one might expect a subject more empowered by their own social status to have. In other words, what of films made about the middle class? An example is London Moods, a BBC commission in 1961, ostensibly a documentary about middle-class life in the nation’s capital. It was directed by Ken Russell, who in critical circles is considered a distinctive filmmaker known for an oeuvre of indulgence and excess.26 London Moods has the hallmarks of the director’s later work, while echoing Grierson in its use of shapes, editing, montage and composition. These combine to give it a look and feel wherein the craft with which it was made is evident. The action is not narrated, and the film is edited to match the pace and beats of its sound track. London Moods is thus not merely a documentary short film without the use of narration; it is also a musical piece, even a variant of what were once called “city symphonies.” But, failing to record or use the audio of its subjects, it means their voices go unheard. The first half of the film employs jazz, a musical style symbolic of the burgeoning counter culture in the United Kingdom at the onset of the new decade. In the early 1960s, jazz came to symbolize the young response to the old order, and the film’s images of youthful habits coupled with a jazzy score suggested rebellion—and how music might provide a means for such expression. Yet no sooner is this audiovisual combination established then it gives way to a classical score by composer Adrian Boult, a representative of “older” music (in two senses), yet set against similar footage. The counterpoint is striking. This shift from young to old, from rebellious to status quo, not only foreshadows Russell’s later films such as Mahler (1974) and Lisztomania (1975), his film biographies of the titular composers, but also provides an ironic provocation to what we have just witnessed in London Moods. The grittiness and liveliness of 1960s London set to jazz feels fresh and revolutionary; the same grit accompanied by a tranquil harmony makes the city feel rough-hewn, shopworn, and desolate. Which meaning is Russell attempting to evoke? By using both scores is he suggesting he feels both emotions about the place, or that we should? Hard to say. But in one sense, he is deliberately ambiguous about not just his London moods, but what ours could be too. More to the point, by extracting (at least) two potential meanings from similar footage, he strips agency away from those being shown. So the diminishment of agency is not necessarily the result of the socioeconomic power of the filmmaker—or

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his funders—operating in a bourgeois industry. London Moods proves that even middle-class subjects can lose agency. Russell also strips agency from his subjects when presenting images of adult clubs and sleazy bars intercut with more commonplace images of London such as Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, that side of the city tourists—and indeed BBC viewers—might expect to see. The film also creates a tension among the triad of masculinity, machismo, and homoeroticism, especially in its depiction of “rockers” in leather gear (all of the shots made through clearly prearranged camera set-ups).27 These vignettes are juxtaposed with shots of real London life, including people ordering food from vending machines, followed by entirely unflattering low-angle shots of them eating it. Then, a series of shots depicts faceless women in gyms strapped into crude vibrating slimming machines. All this imagery is found in a film commissioned to give an impression of everyday life in the city, and thus, in many senses meant to be nothing more than a social document of a certain people at a certain time. But the result, through ambiguity and stylization, is neither straight allegory nor satire. It is a film whose incipient documentary meaning cedes to personal expression, and thus whose subjects cannot possibly be dominant or give voice to intended personal expression. Furthermore, Russell’s London Moods is not particularly vitriolic in its take on what appears to be the flowering of the consumer age. Nor is the film a glorification of the freedom of urban existence, despite alluding to the city’s liberating anonymity and permissiveness. While the work remains a social document (of sorts), a record of everyday London life in the early sixties told straight and edited to music, one cannot fail to sense an underlying political motive, especially as gleaned from the montage and the music. Even if my analysis of London Moods comes with the benefit of hindsight, the unbecoming shots of people eating fast food can scarcely be meant by Russell as a glorification of this new method of consumption. So while their inclusion reflects the director’s general distaste for the phenomenon, the film itself does not make explicit statements to that effect. And, in the omission of the voice of the subjects, such statements are also absent from those that remain at the heart of the “moods” on show. Likewise, while slimming machine close-ups may carry a sexual charge (or, for others, a certain valence of corporal punishment), their depiction without context—and indeed without faces to go with the bodies on show—is a remark on the nature of the action rather than on its meaning. Their users have lost the agency of identification and we have therefore only the filmmaker’s word on what such behaviour is intended to achieve. Weight loss? Submission to an emerging cult of the body in late capitalist culture? Russell feels and expresses the sexual dimension of the action being shown but also depicts the ramifications of it for women: in many ways the close-ups



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of the subjects could be considered prurient and even exploitative, but the shots—with the women strapped in and seemingly unable to free themselves from the devices—also suggest how the machines that will supposedly empower them in the sexual world have the potential to trap them within it. The film may offer us this ambiguous, contradictory reading, yet offers its subjects no voice with which to support or take distance from such ideas. In many ways, such ambiguity of meaning eradicates any last sense of agency: not only is the meaning not derived from the subject, it is lost in an oscillation of meaning determined by the filmmaker. Russell’s approach is like a Moebius strip, forcing us to accept (at least) two parallel meanings, but we can never know the intended meaning of the subjects regardless of which of the director’s suggestions we choose. Furthermore, a choice cannot be made when considering how the film and indeed the origins of the filmmaker’s work are subsequently to be interpreted. This scenario leads to the final stage of this three-phase degradation: the erosion of the viewer’s agency. Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), another BBC-commissioned Russell short film, is a 15-minute documentary and mood piece, this time about the working-class community of Salford, near Manchester. It is narrated by Delaney, the Salford-born playwright whose signature work A Taste of Honey would be adapted into a highly successful feature film by Tony Richardson for Woodfall the following year. The film again employs a Griersonian approach, beginning as straight narrative drama as Delaney “acts,” returning home for her evening tea. Then the style shifts, as Delaney begins to speak straight to camera in order to describe the environment of Salford in the midst of major social change, including the emptying of city centres, the razing of historic buildings, and mass rehousing to council estates. Delaney is highly critical of the changes being wrought upon her community, and her political rhetoric is accompanied by apposite images of densely packed Industrial-era alleyways and markets bustling with local life giving way to neat, soulless, concrete high-rise buildings. Thus, through the parallel telling of two versions of the same narrative, there are signs of something beyond the combination of academic work and straight reportage: the meta-narrative of documentary style. Yet the Salford we see is, as the film’s title implies, under the ownership of authors interpreting its meaning. As Delaney speaks, the same social realist imagery that accompanied her straightforward descriptions of Salford life now accompany her revelation—even admission—that the place she comes from doubles as a source of literary material: Delaney (v/o): For a writer, a place like Salford is worth its weight in gold. It’s got everything a writer could want. People who live here have a terrific vitality. You’ve only got to go down to the market to realise that. The whole place is

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alive, there are people teeming into it all the time. The language is alive, it’s virile. It lives and breathes and you know exactly where it’s coming from: right out of the earth.

Such a description of Salford shows how the film works on two levels. One the one hand it is a profile of a playwright, a literary study showing how Delaney uses her local environment as a rich source of material. On the other hand, it acts as a social document, an expression of a political view of social change, a way of life slipping away, and the emergence of a newly established post-Industrial order. This depiction of surroundings of Salford is very much in the tradition of 1950s British cinema, where the “use of landscape as a dangerous site of ambiguity and opposition runs like a thread [in] films that do not otherwise have rural rebellion as their central motif.”28 In this spirit, Delaney goes on to describe how local youth feel “tethered” to their surroundings and are simply waiting for someone to “cut the tether.” The tether of which she speaks is a recurring theme in the British postwar film, its tautness sustained by the tension between generations, social change, and seismic socioeconomic shifts. That Delaney would go on to produce a key work of the Kitchen Sink canon suggests a motive (if not a knowledge) on her part of not merely depicting Salfordians but also of mythologizing them. Shelagh Delaney’s Salford thus presents a visual account of political expression and a political account of visual expression: the text is wilfully ambiguous, merging literary biography and political tract. But where it does allow Delaney to describe her hometown in a matter-of-fact way, it accompanies her description with visual references, and offers its own comment on her position even as her voice remains absent. Initially dramatizing her existence, the film highlights the fact that Delaney, as both resident of Salford and observer of its residents (here in the figure of what anthropologists call the “informant”), works unavoidably within the construct of social realism regardless of whether or not she is qualified—as a Salfordian herself—to depict it. The film therefore posits three equally practicable Salfords: one laid bare in front of the lens, and one each at the behest of Delaney and Russell—the latter two being creatives using tropes of British social realism to express ideas around people who have not spoken for themselves. And even the agency of a young writer growing in celebrity, the subject/protagonist of a documentary, has been eroded by directorial style. This loss develops, ultimately, because the persona of the documentarian becomes inseparable from the work itself. As Linda Williams notes: It has become an axiom of the new documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths—the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events.29



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In this way, the filmmaker is merely a product of the collective: a paymaster public determining the political output of its broadcaster, which in turn determines the political output of its practitioners, Loach and Russell in the cases above. This apparent inversion of the power relationship of broadcaster to filmmaker to audience to subject links in with Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s thoughts on how the documentary could be “seen to converge within a dense matrix of bourgeois social anxieties and the need to assuage them.”30 Thus begins the agency found in the effect of viewer subjectivity, and the effect of time on that viewership. In 1966, Cathy Come Home was shocking to many audiences. Few were aware of the dire social housing problems in London at the time, and fewer still had seen—or had expected to see—such troubling social issues depicted on ordinary weekday television. While the film was hugely popular, it was also very controversial given not only its subject matter but its filmic treatment: “No doubt there will be a fuss worked up about this play or documentary or whatever we decide to call it.”31 If Loach took agency from his subject through selectivity and restriction of content, the selectivity of viewer taste takes agency from him. And as the film ages, this agency is removed altogether as the film is praised and afforded a place in the film-historical canon. Its stylization has meant its form has superseded its meaning and its director’s intention. Here, “interpretation is ideologically constrained,” if only because our “readings of past culture are subject to the covert demands of the historical present.”32 Ironically the ultimate destiny of the films mentioned here—light years socially from both their original purpose and certainly from the lives of their subjects—represents a completion of the top-down funding dynamic, and means the erosion of agency is comprehensive: the activated viewer that dreamt up the broadcaster and inspired the filmmaker now sits idly by as an admirer of form without meaning. Inherent truth of form thus becomes a smokescreen, a precursor to the current 24-hour news cycle “that tend(s) to situate the viewer in the role of passive recipient of ostensibly factual information.”33 It is in this space of ostensible truth borne out of eroded agency that documentary interpretation now uneasily rests. So, if agency by its very nature cannot be conferred, and its erosion is an unavoidable by-product of the documentary form, its ontology becomes oxymoronic as opposed to tautological. Implicit or explicit truths depend on subject and context both within the film itself (provenance) and when considering its distribution (destination). We see here that a subject/document becomes inextricably linked and thus subservient to both filmmaker and industry, or as Solomon-Godeau puts it: “A photograph’s context is a powerful determinant of its meaning.”34 The solution to this erosion seems to reside elsewhere. On the strength of Cathy Come Home and his feature film Kes (1969), Loach was commissioned by British charity Save the Children to produce

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a film on the organization’s work with children in postcolonial Kenya. The film, rather than being a pat on the back, highlighted its often-cruel practices as being, in Loach’s words, “neo-colonial.”35 The result was a legal battle and an exhibition ban that meant the film was only shown to the public forty-two years after it was made, and even then at an invitee-only BFI screening. The Save the Children film, which was never officially titled, rated or distributed, and remains extremely difficult to access, presents an interesting paradox. Loach won the commission given his track record, emerging as he did out of both the documentarist and televisual tradition of 1960s social realist British cinema. But even if Loach may have been honorable in decrying the “neo-colonial” practices of his benefactors, did he not act, albeit one level lower, as a neo-colonial himself, momentarily deferring his agency if not entirely surrendering it? Again, a clue lies in the documentary form. Loach is quoted as saying: “Politics informs your aesthetic of filmmaking because it determines how you photograph people,”36 a comment that appears to be in stark contrast to the early remit of the social documentarian but that turns out, after Grierson, merely to support it. Loach’s sentiment instead ends up contradicting Sekula who argued for “[a] political economy, a sociology, and a nonformalist semiotics of media.”37 Loach and Russell’s style, from Cathy Come Home to London Moods and beyond, has defined their acceptance in the academy. But, particularly in the case of Loach, this acceptance represents a key problematic of both their bodies of work. While John Tulloch has criticized Loach for his “controlling naturalism”38—drawing on British writer and film producer Colin MacCabe’s argument that Loach’s form opposed his Leftist views by imposing an “imaginary unity”39 on the viewer—both writers are nonetheless supportive of Loach’s attempts to promote a social-transformative agenda within the context of an industry that subjugates his content for his reputation. Having to tow the line between the desire to construct realistic representation and the requirement to produce commercial entertainment is the double-bind for the documentary filmmaker, one Rona Munro, writer of the 1994 Loach film Ladybird, Ladybird, describes as the “media’s control (over) potential audiences, over the actual subjects of films (and) over [herself] as writer.”40 Ultimately, Munro and Tulloch agree that with Ken Loach, “cultural control” is “out there” and not in the narrative of his films.41 Loach may not be a filmmaker who maintained the Grierson model in his own work, and in the 1990s came to “understand that if his films were not to be censored he should have to leave the BBC,”42 but even he cannot escape the fact that his subject matter and style are haunted by the ghost of Grierson, who argued that a documentary should aim at “the creative interpretation of actuality.”43



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Returning to Russell and the opening of Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, where the writer “plays herself,” entering her own home in a reconstruction of an unspectacular day in her life, he sets up the expectation in a documentary that serves as literary analysis and the depiction of a place rather than a person, as the title implies. Yet Russell is aware that it is Delaney’s Salford and not his (or even ours). To this end, he sets up the work’s focalization by using a framing device that establishes his protagonist. Without this dramatized scene—the only one in the film—we might have been forgiven for believing we were watching his take on Shelagh Delaney’s Salford, just as we might watch Arthur Seaton’s Nottingham in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning or Frank Machin’s Wakefield in This Sporting Life, other staples of Kitchen Sink cinema. The film thus creates the expectation of a biopic by employing a key trope of the genre: the establishment of the protagonist as the focus of the biographical record. It then abandons it, all the while creating a stylised text open to interpretation. In doing so, the film gains relevance—and resonance—beyond the pragmatic requirements of the television documentary and liberates the viewer from didacticism. So, refreshingly, while we as viewers contribute to the final level of erosion, it is also we who have the potential to halt the slide. For if we accept Loach’s restrictions while working for a public broadcaster with specific programming requirements and limitations, as well as the predilections of a large television audience and its associated mores, we must also accept that the work is the product of a broad consensus that relates to the locus of distribution and exhibition, and thus how “the subjective aspect of liberal aesthetics is compassion rather than collective struggle. Pity, mediated by an appreciation of ‘great art,’ supplants political understanding.”44 As critical viewers we must, therefore, ask what Loach and Russell did not film, and what was left on the cutting-room floor. We have a right to ask this because if the film purports to being about “us,” a social document made for the greater national good a la Grierson, we have a personal investment in what amounts to self-depiction. We confer agency to the filmmaker only when—within the rigors of respectability, the frame of censorship and the wand of the permissive—content is deemed acceptable. If, then, the erosion of agency unavoidably marks the work of the documentary maker in the context of restrictions of power structure, style, and viewership, to what degree can this be avoided? Is a deferral, or transference, enough? For are not Loach and Russell, as filmmakers, part of the superstructure their subject matter purports to challenge? In the case of Loach, clues can be found in his later works, which included narrative documentary and, later, the socially driven dramas such as Bread and Roses (2000) and The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006) for which he is best known. For Russell’s part,

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his career as an “excessive stylist” casts doubts on the degree to which his motives were about documentarist representation. If the style of social documentarism is handed down, like clothes given from an elder to a younger sibling and then on to a thrift store, Cathy Come Home is one such example because the “charity” afforded by Loach to his needy subjects extended only as far as the giving hands of his distributors would allow. But this gifted agency is to some degree returned to both him and his subjects by the vagaries of an audience and its contemporaneous disposition. The truth of documentary remains subjective because of the political nature of any work, the selectivity of montage or the stylization of the form, and also in relation to the problem of agency. And the problem of agency has ramifications not merely for individual projects but for any telling of “lower” content in a medium that is primarily made by and for the middle class or, as film theorist Paul Swann describes it: “The problem with Grierson and his followers [was] that theirs were films by an élite for an élite.”45 To draw on a historical context, it seems the erosion of agency is not time-dependent, even when the nature of distribution changes and, in theory at least, the ability to “self-publish” on websites such as YouTube would seem to offer greater agency in the form of self-representation and control of viewership. But even this new distribution scenario seems similarly skewed, largely because neo-colonial practices—the result of a continuing imbalance in technological status and education—persist. While shooting and editing documentaries on one’s smartphone might provide some measure of correction to this enduring predicament, in the world of film and television production and broadcast, the sheer cost of the items involved means the (eroded) agency defines the form of the product itself, and how we view it. Charitable truth, as one might call it, can thus be seen in the same light as the propagandistic films that gave British social realism its raison d’être: a link in the vertical chain of command built and driven by the creative license of hegemony. Style is the means by which this erosion of agency can be ameliorated, or slowed down, if never entirely obviated. Through style, filmmakers can create distinction, resonance, and double meaning. In so doing, they offer the suggestion that even if agency cannot be fully restored, it can—through a viewer empowered by permissiveness, reflection, and ambiguity—nevertheless be conferred. And this restoration can happen, if only sporadically, through the vagaries of chronology, interpretation, and representation. After all, a documentary is a document not just of people but also of times, lost worlds presented for immediate reception but ultimately for reflection. It is with the effect of shifting social context and increasing psychological distance that later audiences can reclassify the Kitchen Sink documentary as



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something else altogether. Here, the tension between voice and positioning has the potential for resolution: a place where the supposedly contradictory formal conceptions of documentary style and relinquished representation of quotidian life can be momentarily reconciled. NOTES 1. John Corner, “Cathy Come Home: British Docudrama,” in The Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago: Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2009), museum.tv. Accessed March 23rd, 2013. See also Julian Petley, “Why Cathy Will Never Come Home Again,” in New Statesman & Society, vol. 6, no. 246 (London: New Statesman, 1993), 23. 2. Derek Paget, “Cathy Come Home and ‘Accuracy’ in British Television Drama” (tonygarnett.com), 2000. Accessed August 11th, 2013. 3. Shona Fairweather, “Ken Loach: 40 years of Social and Political Filmmaking,” in Aesthetica (August/September 2007), 48–49. 4. Corner, “Cathy Come Home: British Docudrama.” 5. Ebru Karafutek and Anand Asher, “Loach: Politically Driven or Social Realist?” (youtube.com). Accessed December 1st, 2014. This clip is a reedited excerpt from Carry on Ken (dir., Toby Reisz, Sixteen Films, 2007). For the director’s own take on this question see Ken Loach and Graham Fuller, eds., Loach on Loach (London: Faber, 1999). 6. Allan Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 860, in The Massachusetts Review, vol. 19, no. 4 (December 1978), 859–883. 7. John Hill, Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (London: BFI, 2011), 36. 8. My use of the term agency is aligned with the Marxist philosophical conception of the term: the relative ability of individuals to make independent personal choices based on free will. This ability is part of a dialectic that includes structure in opposition to agency, where structure refers to the socioeconomic and other factors that limit or counter agency. 9. A note on the use of the term social realism; here it refers to social realism in the sense of the artistic movement, and specifically in the context of film theory. This usage is distinct from Socialist Realism, an institutionalized form of realistic art in the Soviet Union, or indeed from the political concept of Real socialism. This usage is also distinct from social-realism, a sociopolitical and anthropological term with applications beyond the cinematic realm. Following on from a documentarian tradition in photography and early documentary, social realism in cinema refers broadly to films (across eras and in different countries of output) which deal ostensibly with issues such as housing problems, health and labor concerns, poverty, the working classes, and so on. For further reading on the use of this definition—and its related aesthetic—in the films of Ken Loach, see Anthony Hayward, Which Side Are You On? Ken Loach and His Films (London: Bloomsbury, 2005).

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10. Ian Aitken, “The British Documentary Film Movement,” 177, in The British Cinema Book, 3rd Edition, ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 2009), 177–84. 11. Aitken, “The British Documentary Film Movement,” 180. 12. Sarah Street, British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997), 50. 13. Alfred Hitchcock was a great admirer of John Grierson, seeing him as an opposite and equal filmmaker capable of capturing everyday life with beauty and accuracy while he (Hitchcock) did the same for drama. See Hitchcock on Grierson (1965), 45 min. 14. Aitken, “The British Documentary Film Movement,” 178. 15. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 877. 16. Aitken, “The British Documentary Film Movement,” 179. 17. Karafutek and Asher, “Loach: Politically Driven or Social Realist?” 18. Aitken, “The British Documentary Film Movement,” 179. 19. Ibid., 181. 20. Stuart Hood, ed., Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the Nineties (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994), 34. 21. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 866. 22. Paget, “Cathy Come Home and ‘Accuracy’ in British Television Drama.” 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Corner, “Cathy Come Home: British Docudrama.” 26. In his obituary for Ken Russell, film critic Derek Malcolm of The Guardian describes him as “the apostle of excess.” See Derek Malcolm, “Ken Russell Obituary,” in The Guardian, November 28, 2011 (guardian.co.uk). Accessed February 5th, 2013. 27. The term “rockers” refers to the self-styled youth counterculture movement in early 1960s Britain. Drawing on influences from 1950s American pop culture, rockers were characterized by motorcycle gangs, leather biking gear, and their opposition to the other predominant youth culture movement of the period, the “mods,” who based their look and ethos on continental European styles. In spite of internecine clashes between the two, both the mods and the rockers came to symbolize youth disenchantment with the establishment, as well as the growing consumer class in post-austerity Britain among financially independent and rebellious teenagers. 28. Christine Geraghty, British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (London: Routledge, 2000), 53. 29. Linda Williams, “Truth, History and the New Documentary,” in Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3 (Spring 1993), 9–21, 13. 30. Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 175. 31. Gerard Fay, “Television Review: Cathy Come Home,” in The Guardian, February 14, 2006 (guardian.co.uk). Accessed March 11th, 2014. 32. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 859.



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33. T. J. Demos, “Moving Images of Globalization,” 23, in Grey Room, vol. 37 (Fall 2009), 6–29. 34. Solomon-Godeau, “Who Is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” 179. 35. British Film Institute, “Save the Children Film + Discussion: BFI Live,” BFI (bfi.org.uk), 2011. Accessed March 12th, 2013. 36. Karafutek and Asher, “Loach: Politically Driven or Social Realist?” 37. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 862. 38. John Tulloch and Rosa Munro, “Whose Stories You Tell: Writing Ken Loach,” in Writing and Cinema, ed. Jonathan Bignell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1999), 13. See also Jacob Leigh, The Cinema of Ken Loach: Art in the Service of the People (London: Wallflower Press, 2002). 39. Tulloch and Munro, “Whose Stories You Tell: Writing Ken Loach,” 13. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 26. 42. José Díaz-Cuesta, “Kenneth Loach’s Riff-Raff, between the British Documentary Tradition and the Working Class Cinema,” in Odisea, vol. 1 (2001), 151. 43. Díaz-Cuesta, “Kenneth Loach’s Riff-Raff, between the British Documentary Tradition and the Working Class Cinema,” 150. 44. Sekula, “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” 875. 45. Paul Swann, The British Documentary Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press: 1989), 178.

Chapter 17

Redefining Documentary Materialism From Actuality to Virtuality in Víctor Erice’s Dream of Light Selmin Kara

Víctor Erice’s documentary The Quince Tree Sun (El Sol del Membrillo, 1992)—later released under the title Dream of Light—is an award-winning contemplation of the relationship between painting and cinema through the artistic practice of the Spanish realist painter Antonio López García, who obsessively attempts to portray a single quince tree over the course of twoand-a-half months. The film’s simple premise of capturing “a painter painting” is somewhat deceptive; as the film progresses, both Erice and López find themselves strained by the demands of representing elusive subject matters.1 For the painter, the subject in question is the sensuality and vitality of the quince trees from his childhood (reminiscent of times lost), which he tries to reinvoke through painting a tree he planted in his backyard. Since the shifting levels of the branches under the weight of maturing fruits, and the wavering light of the autumn sun, deny him the luxury of an unchanging image or impression of “still life,” he repeatedly starts over, and each subsequent painting is eventually left unfinished. Similarly, for Erice, filming López’s experiential and ultimately nonconclusive practice, which is processual and light/time dependent, poses a challenge in that it requires reflecting on the ontology of cinema as an art that is predicated upon the same arduous pursuit of “the perfect capturing of light” during the unfolding of time and changing conditions.2 In the press kit for the film, Erice talks about how cinema, like painting—or better, the filmmaker and the painter—possess an “ingrained need to conquer time through the perpetuity of forms” and a “desire to replace the external world with its double.” Although such a formulation seems to establish the similarity between the medium of painting and cinema—in their approach to light as an instrument for achieving formal mastery over time and matter—Erice’s film itself points toward a nonrepresentational aesthetic, 343

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locating in the two art forms’ preoccupation with light an insistence on its intractable materiality and agency.3 I pit materiality against mastery here to go against the popular tendency in documentary film studies to associate all forms, practices, and aesthetics that come under the banner of documentary with representationalism, perhaps inspired by the titular framework of Bill Nichols’s seminal study Representing Reality (1991). By moving away from prescriptive frameworks and shifting his attention to issues like embodiment and affect in audiovisual documentation, Nichols himself has since that earlier, and tremendously influential work, responded to the call of various contemporary thinkers to resist representational thinking—a kind of thinking that offers, according to scholars such as Nigel Thrift and Karen Barad, a reductive view of the external world or matter as cultural inscription.4 In their view, representationalism is a mode of thinking common in the fields of arts, humanities, and philosophy (inherited, in part, from the traditional Cartesian subject/object divide), which makes a problematic distinction between on the one hand representing subjects and on the other hand passive matter awaiting representation.5 A similar attachment to the subject/object divide—and to using the term “representation” to describe the activities related to documentary filmmaking—persists in both nonfiction theory and practice, despite the fact that often the materiality of the world that documentary filmmakers (and their works) strive to “replace with its double” asserts its own agency and resists the reductive tendencies of the cinematic apparatus. Such a moment of resistance to (traditional, Cartesian) representation is most strongly felt in Dream of Light during the documentary’s final “painter’s dream” sequence. As a conclusion to the preceding two hours of footage, in which a highly exacting López continually fails in his attempts to create a definitive representation of the single quince tree, a sequence suddenly takes the viewer into the dream world of the painter: a dream conveyed through an associative juxtaposition of images, sounds, and music, all of them presented with surrealist undertones. What follows this sequence is the cinematic interpretation of an actual dream, first recounted by López to Erice in the summer of 1990 while they were spending some time together, prior to the making of the film.6 It was, in fact, this dream that Erice credits for having given him the inspiration for the film project. In a preparatory scene that sets the stage for the final (dream) sequence, Erice shows López’s wife María Moreno (who is also an artist) working on a life-size portrait of the painter, lying in a death-like pose in bed. This seemingly spontaneous set-up bears a recursive or mise-en-abîme quality, making the audience aware of the multiple frames present in the image. More specifically, Erice’s camera registers Moreno framing López in a pose that makes a reference to an earlier oil painting by him titled “Death Mask of César Vallejo.” Linda Channah Ehrlich relays



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that the painting portrays the South American poet “lying prone on a bed, accompanied by the following words . . .: ‘I shall die in Paris on a day of heavy rain, of which I already have the memory.’”7 Reportedly, an actual death mask was created after the death of the poet by the request of his wife and López’s painting can be viewed as a commentary on the ontology of painting as a form of death mask itself.8 The “mixing of an image of death with the final blessing of rain foreshadows the dream sequence” in the film.9 In the manner of art-imitating-art-imitating-life, López takes on the role of the subject of his painting, posing for his own “death mask” (requested by his wife, as in the case of Vallejo) to be cast simultaneously by two media: painting and film. Notably, an earlier scene in the film shows López chatting with a fellow painter and friend about The Last Judgement, the painting Michelangelo completed in his 60s, and the soon-to-be sexagenerian López’s commentary on it hints at the possibility that the painter increasingly views his own work as a reflection on mortality, hence giving the death-mask idea a further significance. Here, one only needs to think of Susan Sontag’s association of the photographic trace with the idea of a death mask to imagine how the film camera framing both Moreno and López serves the same perpetuating function (Andre Bazin’s ideas about cinema as mummification cannot be far behind such an observation); the material association with the history of “casting”—from sculpture to death masks—makes the word seem especially fitting for the work of painting and film. In the process of these multiple framings and sealings-for-eternity, López seemingly falls asleep (its own uncanny rehearsal of death), leading Moreno to turn off the light and leave him alone in the room with the camera rolling. Moreno’s gesture to the sleeping-as-dead (with the rest/death being embalmed on film) also works as a narrative switch since the film abandons its observational documentary style for Erice’s trademark essay-film aesthetic from this point on. PARABLES OF TIMES LOST In Dream of Light, the dream is depicted as follows. A quick series of shots show the city and flickering television sets in neighborhood apartments suddenly go dark; the distinctive sound of an analog camera fills the lightless void; and we hear the voice-over of López recounting a dream, a narrative that involves an “indescribable” light giving his childhood memories a certain clarity and embodied intensity: I’m in Tomelloso, in front of the house where I was born. On the other side of the square there are some trees that had never been there before. In the distance, I recognize the dark leaves and golden fruits of the quince trees. My parents and

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I are beneath the trees, along with some people I can’t seem to place. I can hear our voices. We chat peacefully. Our feet sink in the muddy ground. All around us, on the branches, the ever softer, wrinkled fruit hangs. In the still air, I feel their flesh rotting. From where I stand, I can’t tell if the others can see it too. Nobody seems to notice that the quinces are rotting beneath a light that I can’t really describe: bright, and at the same time somber, which turns everything into metal and dust. It isn’t the light of night. Nor is it of twilight. Nor of dawn.

The evocation of the flesh; the vivid description of the colors, texture, and feel of matter that populates the imaginary topology of the dream; and the emphasis on the enchanted powers of light (beyond linguistic description or accountability) in transforming objects are significant here, as they give López’s memories what Jane Bennett would call a vital materiality or an “out-side.”10 In Vibrant Matter, Bennett draws upon nature philosophers like Baruch Spinoza and Henry David Thoreau to talk about the intractable power and uncanny vital agency of things—such as organic and inorganic matter as well as technological artifacts—that “rise up to meet us” in everyday life and argues that there is an out-side, a complexity or strangeness to them that is not reducible to the contexts and meanings that humans can give (e.g., through reasoned discourse, or even in poetic description). In López’s own account of his dream, tranquil light and the rotting flesh of the fruits, slowly turning metal and dust from within, establish a similar out-side for the painter’s memories. As he recollects, the quince trees do not belong to an authentic setting of his childhood neighborhood; yet they “meet” him in the dream and help exteriorize the experience of remembering the intimacy of his past, making memory’s effects bodily felt by carrying it to the surface of the body (in this case, to consciousness and narrativized/fictionalized recollection of bodily perception). The light that shines on the trees is also a combination of the material and the imaginary; it fuses the disparate aspects of López’s variegated recollections in the same way that the “parables of sun light”— described by the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas in his “Poem in October,” and taken up by the film critic Rudolf Arnheim as the title of his book—conjures up a sensuous, composite reality. In his 1944 poem, Thomas notably presents a López-like account of his encounters during a leisurely walk he took on his thirtieth birthday, a day on which the poet’s imagination, memories, and the sensual reality of the present moment collided, reminding him of “Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother [as a child] / Through the parables / Of sun light.”11 It is perhaps a similarly strange, parabolic as well as bodilyfelt, quality of light that resists being captured in López’s failed attempts at representing the quince tree in his backyard. López’s affective narration—heard in voice-over—is laid under an equally distinctive montage of intercut imagery and sounds, featuring alternating shots of an analog camera mounted on a tripod (pointing at the fallen fruits in the



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backyard and, in one specific shot, the viewer) and the camera’s shadow on the wall; a single spotlight; time-lapse style imagery of quinces rotting; the shrouded façade of the full moon behind clouds; surveying pans and close-up shots of the artist’s various works in the studio (including one cast that looks like a death mask); and the sleeping face of the painter.12 As López’s lines become more and more evocative of the sights and sounds of his childhood recollections, the images slowly transition to a vivid nocturnal object study: beautifully shot, the tightly framed quinces decomposing on muddy soil and glistening grass take on a tactile quality. This stylistically non-realist, essayistic return to the oneiric vision behind the film (shot in an observational style for the most part to match its subject’s famous realist painterly aesthetic) points to a contradictory tension in Erice’s own work.13 One the one hand, the film resorts to formal abstraction—especially in its self-reflexive inclusion of the camera and light source in the sequence—in order to ascribe an overarching meaning to López’s practice and painting: the projection of the underlying desire to master time and matter through light and medium, which is understood here to be paint and canvas but also can be readily mapped onto celluloid and the digital equivalent. Viewed with this attention to mastery and fixity (both of them artistic fixations? Or perhaps simply human ones?), the sequence suggests that Dream of Light is as much a film about Erice’s own vision regarding cinema (as a form of what cinematographer John Alton would call “painting with light”) as López’s approach to painting. One could even argue that Erice hints at cinema’s superiority over painting in mastering light and the passage (and fixing) of time here, as there is no indication of a frustration with the inadequacy of the filmic apparatus or López-like interruptions in the work to start all over again in the sequence’s aesthetic. On the other hand, the recourse to the conceptual origins of the film in the conclusion montage can be interpreted as underscoring a circular or process-based thinking in Erice’s work. The film’s final image—the backyard quince tree growing new fruits in the following spring—also enhances this possibility through its allusion to the “cyclical processes of renewal.”14 By refusing to complete the narrative arc of the painter’s journey in a clear end point (more specifically, with a finished painting) and including traces of his own process of making the film in an elliptical fashion, Erice implants in the mind of the viewer an ambiguity about whether the story comes full circle in the end by giving painting and cinema a deeper, cultural meaning, or encircles the fact that it is impossible to represent process, affect, and experience based practices conclusively. RECALCITRANT MATTER AND THE MEDIATION OF LIGHT It is at this point that Dream of Light becomes significant in terms of offering alternatives to representationalism in documentary film. I would like to argue

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that a sense of alien, intractable “out-side”—or materiality—is invoked at the level of Erice’s audiovisual aesthetic, perhaps one that spills beyond the frame of his own intentions. Whether intentionally or accidentally, a “recalcitrant” materiality finds an expression through the filmmaker’s assemblage of images and sounds as well as clever arrangement of technological and natural matter.15 In his attempt to find a suitable audiovisual language for reflecting the material intensities and virtualities so vividly portrayed in López’s narration of his dream, Erice steps out of his own representational framework. Here I borrow the words intensity and virtuality from Manuel De Landa’s 2002 study on Deleuze’s realist ontology.16 De Landa’s work participates in a common theme of new materialist philosophy, namely, to go against Platonic idealism and Aristotelian essentialism by insisting on the autonomy of matter from the human mind, a view that has found, in recent decades, a robust and ever-widening interest in varied disciplines across the arts and humanities.17 In Intensive Science & Virtual Philosophy, for example, De Landa establishes these two terms—intensity and virtuality—as integral to our contemporary understanding of reality. According to his natural scientific contextualization of Deleuzian thinking, all reality or matter exists on an actual-virtual continuum—with actuality referring to the extended properties of matter (such as length and volume) and virtuality to its not-yet actualized or observable tendencies and capacities.18 Shifting attention from actuality to virtuality in examining reality effectively—and auspiciously—replaces essentialism (in other words the view, which posits that matter is passive and unchanging without human intervention, as it is traditionally understood). De Lanza’s definitions also bring us closer to the findings of contemporary natural sciences related to the physical world, for example, a world in which nonhuman matter such as plants and minerals are understood as independent “agents” capable of impacting one another as well as humans. In this physical sciences sense, a study of the virtual is a study of the intensity or capacity of matter to produce affect and be affected in turn. Such a materialist sensitivity toward the virtual can be found in Erice’s dream sequence at the audiovisual level—and in spite of the director’s descriptions of the film, comments that are infused with the kind of idealist notions I mentioned at the beginning of this chapter. Erice’s peculiar juxtaposition of images and sounds suggest that the sequence is about the mediation— rather than the mastery—of light through distinct technological, organic, and inorganic bodies. The absence of a filming subject behind the operator-less camera and around the light source (which Erice seems to have placed in front of a second camera precisely as a means of self-inscription and of making absence speak for presence) gives these devices the appearance of technological artifacts imbued with special agentic powers that are independent of the director’s intentionality. The devices are also presented as intra-acting



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(to use Barad’s term, referring to an understanding of causality between human and nonhuman matter in which there is no hierarchy between the forces) instead of interacting, with the profilmic reality in the painter’s backyard. The iconic image of the camera mounted on a tripod and “acting” on its own has, of course, a long history in the documentary film tradition, dating most memorably back to the famous stop-motion camera sequence in Dziga Vertov’s Soviet futurist film Man with a Movie Camera (1929). One can also think about the interesting ontological issues arising from more recent uses of operator-less cameras in documentation, such as the implications of the digital time-lapse sequences in films such as Abbas Kiarostami’s Five (2003), James Benning’s Ruhr (2009), and also of GoPro cameras in films such as Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s Leviathan (2012).19 However, in Erice’s version of the operator-less camera (with two legs placed precisely against the marker nails—which López uses to mark his vantage point while painting the tree)—he seems to imply that the camera is capable of occupying the painter’s perspectival position, by using cinematic devices that are as exacting as López’s painterly tools of precision. Perhaps Erice wants to say that it is his turn to take the place of his subject—and pose like him—once again going back to the idea behind López’s performative reenactment of the death mask of Vallejo, yet without any bodies in sight. The composition of Erice’s film, however, evokes a much more complex field of material relations. The young tree and the fallen quinces are placed close to the center of the frame together with the flicker dimmer gadget, while the camera and the freestanding spotlight stand equidistant from the center on two sides. A series of close-up shots—that of the dimmer, the spotlight, the quinces, marker nails, and the first camera’s lens pointing at the viewer (in other words, the second, invisible camera filming the free standing first camera)—follows respectively. This editorial sequencing evokes a sense of serialization, a marking of the distinct nodes on a field of relations. The foregrounding of the flicker dimmer gadget is perhaps the most unusual choice here, especially with regard to the fact that it is not an easily identifiable device for the common viewer. (Scholars such as William Johnson describe it as a microphone and I considered the possibility of it being an intervalometer for a while myself, until it seemed more likely that the gadget was a kind of flicker dimmer-style light controller). The device’s significance only gains clarity later when Erice manipulates the artificial light on the rotting quinces and uses it to create shadows of the free-standing camera on the wall of López’s house, evoking a sense of the passage of time (if not Platonic representational notions of how the camera perpetuates forms through shadows). What looks like time-lapse imagery, capturing in a few seconds the creative and destructive force of time/nature that the film painstakingly portrays as having eluded López for two-and-a-half months, turns out to be a type of

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trick or illusion made possible by the technological affordances of the lighting equipment. While these and similar portions of Dream of Light purport to demonstrate the capacity of cinema to achieve mastery over time and reality much more easily than painting as a medium, the film also points to the fact that any such mastery is deceptive, provisional, incomplete, and all the while a carefully constructed output of a technological medium, which employs special effects and is itself a sort of special effect. In this sequence from Dream of Light intensities and material processes come to the foreground due to the erasure of the human gaze or subjectivity (except for that of López, which still asserts itself through his voice-over and the cutaway images of him sleeping). Yet, even when including the narrative voice of López, the sequence hints at a processual mode of subjectivation replacing an apparently well-formed subjectivity reflected in the painter’s carefully choreographed performance of lucid dreaming. López’s memories are depicted as topological images and folded into the surface of quince fruits decomposing, evoking an association with his slowly aging body, and anticipating—in his death-like prostration—the eventual fact of his life’s cessation (and here we humans are humbled to realize that even after we die, the body continues to decompose: we have achieved stasis while the body keeps on moving into a new arrangement). López no longer appears as a subject that can be easily identified. Like the rotting quinces, his aging body is portrayed as if it is on a perpetual course of becoming—part of an endless process of slow, molecular change. Instead of his subjectivity acting as a unifying force for the sequence, then, various matters are placed in a nonhierarchical field of relations in which bodies—human and nonhuman—are all entangled in mediations of light. The camera, the dimmer, the marker nails, the moon, the ominous nightly clouds, and the rotting quinces all reflect and modulate light to varying degrees, in turn impacting one another. This type of mediation (through light) is close to what Richard Grusin calls “radical mediation,” understood itself as a process or event that is not reducible to the reality mediated or the work of representation. In developing the idea of radical mediation, Grusin draws from William James’s radical empiricism, which rejects both the “realism that starts with objects or the real in itself and the rationalism of an idealism that sees the real as an imperfect manifestation of a universal logos or spirit.”20 Replacing James’s starting point “relations” (which itself replaces objects in a traditional phenomenology) with the term “mediations,” Grusin argues that all experiences (not only relations but also transformations, disruptions, modulations, translations, and intra-actions) are mediations that technically, bodily, and materially generate affects and effects among assemblages of humans and nonhuman agents. Erice’s Platonic references, conveyed through multiple cuts back to the camera’s dramatic shadow on the white wall, do little to suppress the



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intensive mediations of light among the nonhuman matter and technological artifacts in the backyard. In other words, the light is not merely projected or captured in the sequence; rather, it is established as a connection that generates effects and affects among the diverse matter dispersed within the frame. The modulations of light, generated by the dimmer and traveling across the surface of the rotting fruits, create a surplus affect that cannot be easily contained by a conceptualization of cinema that is simply understood as the perfect capturing or representation of light as a fixed object or trace of reality.21 In Dream of Light, instead of finding a passive object “captured” (by film or paint), light is felt as a relation, or experienced as an all-implicating event. At the end of the film, the viewer is left pondering over light’s capacity to transform, disrupt, and regenerate matter—its power to reconfigure the process or experience of painting and cinema. Perhaps this transformational effect of light on documentary can be viewed as a form of lucid dreaming too. To be more specific, the phrase “dream of light”—that becomes the title of the film—can be interpreted subversively, as suggesting an imagining or evocation of light in its sensual materiality or more specifically, not only in its actuality but also virtuality. If a dream can distill from memories an ineffable light, we may also wonder if our waking-life perception of light itself is not just a fragmented dream. THE CREATIVE TREATMENT OF ACTUALITY AND VIRTUALITY At this point, I want to move from challenging the representational readings of film toward offering a broader new materialist framework for theorizing documentary by focusing on what an “actuality and virtuality” coupling might imply for our understanding of nonfiction practices (of creating film) and criticism (about film). An attention to the virtual (in the context of a return to event- and process-based materialist philosophies) can be found in the writings of Brian Massumi (2002) and Johanna Drucker (2009), in addition to De Landa. In Parables for the Virtual, for example, Massumi argues that virtuality is not an antonym for reality or materiality; instead virtuality stands for “the mode of reality implicated in the emergence of new potentials.”22 He arrives at this formulation following Deleuze and Guattari’s reading of Bergson and suggests that the potential of a situation exceeds its actuality, making the actual and the virtual two sides of reality’s same coin. While the actual is easily accessible through immediate sensory experience, the virtual requires imagination and an anticipating subject—his or her stretching of perception in the direction of the only-thought.23 Notably, actuality in Deleuzian terminology is associated with the meaning of the word

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in French, l’actualité, denoting current events. This etymological trace also captures the sense in which iconic filmmaker John Grierson uses the word in his famous definition of documentary: “the creative treatment of actuality.”24 Contrary to the short-lived life span of most other historical definitions in the field, the Griersonian formulation can be argued to have withstood the test of time for the most part and maintained its popularity, but perhaps it might be possible to offer here a meaningful update—and addendum—to it as “the creative treatment of actuality and virtuality” in light of the new or neo-materialist turn that dominates much thinking in the early twenty-first century. In fact, the whole history of documentary film could be reimagined in terms of a double movement between these two terms. Looking at the all-inclusive history of documentary cinema, we could say the first movement covers a historical and technological trajectory, what some historians like to call its “pre-documentary origins” in analog actuality films and continues all the way to its contemporary status in the age of real-time based electronic media, broadly characterized as a form of virtualreality. As a documentary specific term, actualities denote the first motion pictures: the short, unedited footage of vernacular events, spaces, and things, born as the love child of the realist impulse and the technological spectacle of cinema; early Lumière brothers films offer a quintessential model of this kind of filmmaking. In my obviously abbreviated account, actuality and virtuality are posed as art historical terms, or two markers bracketing the entire history of cinema and post-cinematic media, from within the logic of documentary. What such a redescription—and all-inclusive encompassing—enables is the chance to reclaim documentary as a domain in which we can formulate cinema as one of the constituents of a broader history of technological or new media, instead of subordinating documentary to the narrower framework of film theory. The temporal progression implied here, however, does not necessarily suggest a linear or teleological history; we are not talking about an advance from a primitive (theatrical screen-bound) analog cinema of facts towards an advanced multimedia environment of high-definition reality and multi-sensory affects (such as immersive, photorealistic 3D animation). Nor are we talking about a regrettable retreat from a material-based documentality (in which indexicality was the guarantee of cinema’s arresting of light as the chemical trace of matter) to algorithmic forms of immateriality, brought about by the digital revolution. As Johanna Drucker argues, the force of materiality supports the algorithmic as well as the mechanistic; there is a probabilistic materiality to the way our contemporary technologies mediate reality, which is performative like our cognitive processes.25 Therefore, digital texts, images, sounds, and experiences are all events, rather than immaterial objects. Levi Bryant’s onto-cartographic (speculative) philosophy also supports this broadened conception of materiality.26 In calling for a renewal



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of materialism in philosophical thinking, Bryant proposes onto-cartography as an alternative model of ontology, which maps the relations among discrete, emergent entities (without resuscitating old questions like what matter-initself might be), and he argues that even ideas and concepts have their materiality, since they can only be transmitted through “physical media” such as fiber optic cables (a technology that uses light as the means for digital transfer and translation). Viewed from Bryant’s perspective, the dream sequence at the end of Erice’s film can be interpreted as being closer to actuality on the historical actual-virtual continuum. The careful staging of the analog camera, the flicker-dimmer gadget, the distinctive noise of the cinematic apparatus, and the projection of shadows on the white garden wall all within the same sequence evokes ideas related to the ontology and the flicker aesthetic of early cinema. There are no references to the digital or the virtual revolution, which reinforces Erice’s status as one of the most persistent figures of analog art-house filmmaking in the digital era. However, one can find a subtle engagement with virtuality (in the historical sense) at the level of affect in Erice’s cinephilic nostalgia. His films after the 80s have increasingly taken the form of self-reflexive displays of his love for cinema, which is a sentiment that can be associated with post-cinematic affect: a structure of feeling that is related to the anxieties attached to the foreseeable death of cinema in the digital age.27 In his reading of Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up (1990), French philosopher Bernard Stiegler describes the film in a way that is relevant to our reflections on Dream of Light. According to Stiegler, “Close Up [which is also a cinephilic docufiction film] stages the love of cinema by putting it on trial: the trial is its staging, and this staging is its trial.”28 He elaborates on the idea of trial as follows: Close Up is a trial of cinema that describes cinema’s process: it puts cinema on trial by turning it into a work-in-process, and as this very work. This happens through the creation of a persistent doubt whose object is undecidable: the narration is construed in such a way that it confuses what one assumes to be archival and documentary forms—that is to say, recordings of “true histories”—with reconstructions, that is to say, with the cinema of fiction.

It can be argued that Erice’s cinema is one of trials as well. His digital era films—albeit made on celluloid, thus confirming nostalgia and contributing to the present from an increasingly outmoded medium—start as meditations on distinct subjects that slowly shift focus to the process of filmmaking, or more dramatically, to a staging and summoning of the cinematic process in order to put its constantly evolving nature on trial. In the case of Dream of Light, what is staged is analog cinema’s love affair with light—at a moment when their chemical connection is on the verge of becoming obsolete—whereas

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his later short Lifeline (2002) turns back to analog cinema’s long-lasting preoccupation with time and duration. The heightened sensitivity in Erice’s work toward resisting a teleological narrative for cinema, and through his constantly restaging of its analog process as a work-in-process (as work that is never finished, exhausted, or rendered obsolete) points to a paradoxical post-cinematic logic. The second movement between actuality and virtuality in the documentary context is phenomenological, which I have already partially discussed through the new materialist frameworks of scholars like De Landa, Massumi, and Drucker. Actuality and virtuality, in this second context applied to film, couples the actual, perceivable audiovisual content with the unperceivable potential of media and profilmic matter, making them equally integral to documentary reality. The potential of media can be understood in technological, historical, aesthetic, or material terms (and sometimes as all of them), in the sense of the ability of a new medium or technological apparatus to introduce new relations or change our experiences (e.g., of what is possible in representation and communication). Social media enable intensified connectivity, mobile media bring ubiquity and embodied mediality, and locative media suggest the possibility of a more immersive engagement with place and community, for example. Once again, what I am talking about is a complex yet close, materialist relationship between the two terms, instead of a linear movement or dichotomy. In the case of the film Dream of Light, virtuality in this second sense would manifest itself in the potential of Erice’s specific technological configuration (the foregrounding of the dimmer, for example) in subverting his predominantly representational vision, placing the emphasis on mediation as a form of connection or encounter among filmic and profilmic matter rather than mastery. Another form of subversion might take place through the nighttime backyard scene’s evocation of a peculiar “ecology.” DOCUMENTARY’S FOOTPRINT In her ecological study of cinema, Nadia Bozak argues that there has always been an inextricable relationship between moving images and natural resources (a close relationship between oil and cinema is established as early as Robert Flaherty’s iconic docufiction films like Nanook of the North (1922) and Louisiana Story (1948)) in that cinema is always environmentally determined as well as determining. Providing plenty of examples from documentary history, Bozak contends that “embedded in every moving image is a complex set of environmental relations” that can be understood as a kind of carbon footprint.29 While initiatives like carbon-neutral cinema overtly focus on ecological matters such as sustainability and try to reverse cinema’s



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exploitative effects on the environment, more experimental documentary works like Benning’s Ruhr or Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness (1992) make the ecological connection felt in more subtle ways, for instance, by projecting intertwined visions of filmic technology and profilmic matter. In Ruhr, Benning takes up landscape as both an aesthetic category and physical reality, reflecting on the affective impact of the radically industrialized landscape of the Ruhr Valley in Germany (famous for its culture of steel production and epitomizing the industrial sublime), and depicting cinematic visions of digital cinema’s potential for creating synthetic realities that reconfigure the medium’s sensuous materiality. Lessons of Darkness, contrariwise, is about the environmental sublime; Herzog uses the hallucinatory landscapes of burning oil fields ignited by the retreating Iraqi armies during the Persian Gulf War as the backdrop for a cinematic—one wants to say, intergalactic—contemplation that pushes both the ecological imagination and the cinematic apparatus to its limits and then beyond them. The film’s most memorable sequence features footage from a camera mounted on a helicopter surveying the vast oil fields in tedious, but immersive, long takes and plunging into clouds of all-consuming black smoke. The helicopter and camera (operator-less; or rather, it would seem the pilot is operating the helicopter-as-a-camera) advance wearily as if in a celestial funeral march, caught up in the magnetic pull of the fires’ infernal heat (reportedly even slightly melting the camera in the process) and in undulating movements of dizzying elevations and depths. Once again, there is no clear hierarchy among the technological, human, and natural agents in the oil catastrophe’s harrowing ecology, perhaps especially in terms of determining film’s relation to reality. The camera is only there to surrender itself to the materiality of the nightmarish encounter with actualities that surpass human imagination. In both Ruhr and Lessons of Darkness—films that have clear ecological undertones—there is also an evocation of the human-cinematic apparatusnature assemblage as a peculiar ecology. In this respect they are especially relevant to the discussion of the dream sequence in Erice’s film. In a sense, Lessons of Darkness presents the reverse or negative image (a “carbon” copy?) of Dream of Light in terms of its cinematic vision. If Dream of Light is about cinema as lucid dreaming and the mediation of light, Lessons of Darkness is about cinema as a form of hallucination about reality and darkness. What emerges in their juxtaposition is a subversive reading of both works: they become films that have ecological implications, yet not because of environmental concerns on the part of the directors, or even their subjects. The ecologies of these films are distinctive in that the human and non-human actors that populate them take active parts in radical mediation. In conclusion, we might propose as a starting point a new materialist ontology as a framework for documentary, especially in terms of the movement

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between actuality and virtuality (and back again), which I outlined above. In speaking of a new materialist framework in the singular, however, I do not aim to homogenize, or provide a reductive account of, the diverse strands of theory that have come out of the desire to turn towards materialist lines of thinking since the late nineties. The frequently uttered Democritus-EpicurusLucretius-Spinoza-Diderot-Deleuze lineage only provides a vague entry point for scholars and philosophers pushing for a new metaphysics from within diverse theoretical currents like speculative materialism, neo-vitalism, the non-human turn, object-oriented ontology, agential realism, media archaeology, eco or materialist feminism, non-philosophy, posthumanism, and most recently, scholarship related to the anthropocene.30 Rather, my invocation of a singular new materialist framework is only an invitation to think about documentary’s relation to matter in nonrepresentational ways, while simultaneously drawing from the rich offerings of these currents without necessarily privileging any specific line of inquiry. What we need to do, then, is lay the groundwork for alternative documentary materialisms (note the plural) to emerge and pay attention to the ways in which filmic and profilmic materialities like bodies, technologies, human-nonhuman assemblages, processes, intensities, and affect complicate, reconfigure, or subvert our assumptions about reality. For that purpose, it might be helpful to suggest, if briefly, a few guiding principles. First, what a new materialist documentary ontology can do differently from a representational framework is approach reality as a spectrum that ranges from actuality to virtuality—a spectrum that includes taking into consideration the intensities and not-yet-actualized capacities of images and sounds. Second, such an ontology would not seek to draw a distinction between human and nonhuman matter or assemblages in terms of their agency and capacity to affect/be affected by one another (which should not be understood as a dismissal of the discursive and social dimensions of reality or representationalism related to those altogether; there is undoubtedly a need for representational frameworks in documentary practices and theory when it comes to covering certain issues, such as sociopolitical conflicts, wars, social justice movements, and inequalities/disasters caused primarily by human factors (to name only a few). My call here is only to broaden the scope of the field by offering other compelling alternatives.). Third, a new materialist ontology can acknowledge that audiovisual documentation is always about mediation, understood as generating new, all-implicating encounters between the world and us. As such, it is process-oriented, experiential, attentive to distinct materialities of technological media (both image and sound), and nontotalizing. Finally, a new materialist ontology can be speculative; it can perceive the entanglements between matter and meaning as dynamic, open to change with time and the latest explorations of science, philosophy, and documentary



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(including its practice, its technologies, and the culture of its reception). Developing these tersely sketched guidelines—and beyond them—there is, to be sure, much room for exploration and plenty of opportunity for research. NOTES 1. Juan F. Egea, “Poetry and Film: El Sol Del Membrillo and Los Amantes Del Círculo Polar,” Hispanic Review 75, no. 2 (2007), 160. 2. Marsha Kinder, “Documenting the National and Its Subversion in a Democratic Spain,” in Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation, ed. Marsha Kinder (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1997), 89. 3. The film’s original title The Quince Tree Sun is symbolic in this regard; it is taken from a proverb in Spanish—“El sol septembrino, madura el membrillo,” which can be translated as “the September sun makes the quince grow” (I thank Alejandro Melero Salvador and Dean Allbritton for helping me identify the proverb). Refering to the quality of light in September, or the “sunny period in the fall that coincides with the ripening of quinces,” the title is evocative of the documentary’s real subject. William Johnson, “Review: Dream of Light,” Film Quarterly 46, no. 3 (1993), 41. 4. Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2007), 57. 5. Karen Barad, “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs 28, no. 3 (2003), 803. 6. Linda C. Ehrlich, “Objects Suspended in Light,” in The Cinema of Víctor Erice: An Open Window, ed. Linda C. Ehrlich (Lanham, MA: Scarecrow Press, 2007), 18. 7. Ehrlich, “Objects Suspended,” 22. 8. Stephen M. Hart, César Vallejo: A Literary Biography (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books, 2013), 266. 9. Ehrlich, “Objects Suspended,” 22. Heavy rain appears as a significant element in Erice’s film too, constantly interrupting López’s work and causing him to abandon it in the end, by blocking exterior light. 10. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 3. 11. Rudolf Arnheim, Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1990), ix. As in the works of Vallejo, López, and Erice, Thomas’s encounters are filtered and blessed by the autumn rain in the said poem, strengthening the connection among these artists in terms of their meditations on light and rain as affective milieus. 12. Víctor Erice is famous for his use of transitions that makes imagery look like time-lapse. Adrian Danks, “Come Towards the Light: The Films of Víctor Erice,” Senses of Cinema (March 2003) accessed March 15, 2015, http://sensesofcinema. com/2003/great-directors/erice/. The time-lapse feel of the rotting fruit imagery might have easily been achieved through changes in lighting, so I am only mentioning the technique here to refer to the produced effect of these shots. The small device placed

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between the camera and the free-standing spotlight looks like a dimmer flicker-type Magic Gadget so it is more likely that the time-lapse effect is created through dimming and controlling the spotlight, consistent with Erice’s obsession with cinema as mastering light. 13. One could argue that there is a heightened realism in the filming of the rotting quinces, yet I find the mystification of the image through the level of detail and chiaroscuro-like lighting effects reminiscent of the object-lesson films of the surrealist documentarians like Jean Painlevé and Jean Comandon, and the look of their timelapse microcinematography. 14. Danks, “Come Towards the Light.” 15. Bennett, Vibrant Matter, 3. 16. Manuel De Landa, Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002). 17. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt, eds., Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” through the Arts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013); Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, eds., New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010); Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman, eds., Material Feminisms (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007). 18. Bringing natural sciences and philosophy closer has notably been one of the broader goals of scholars and philosophers pushing for a new materialist turn in recent years, as exemplified in French philosopher François Laruelle’s concept and theory of “Non-Philosophy.” François Laruelle, Principles of Non-Philosophy, tr. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). 19. In my own analysis of Five, I have argued: “Kiarostami downplays the agency of the filmmaker . . . by pointing to the no longer required presence of the filmmaker during filming in digital technology (he sets the camera up and leaves the scene, while the sound is recorded separately) and the relativity of human consciousness–based time. The time-lapse technology used in acquiring the long-take shots interrupts the duration of the image, giving it a relative continuity that is based on machinic rhythms rather than human-based ones. Consequently, the effect of slowness achieved through the process points to a temporal rhythm that is interminable: slowness becomes an affectively charged, virtual mode of reality established by an assemblage of lapsed and superimposed temporalities rather than an effect of uninterrupted linear flow of time. The question in the editing process, then, turns into one of understanding the interrelations among the distinct materialities of image, sound, and profilmic reality: the patterns and rhythms that emerge in their interaction, facilitated yet not fully determined by the filmmaker.” Selmin Kara, “The Sonic Summons: Meditations on Nature and Anempathetic Sound in Digital Documentaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 590. See also Selmin Kara and Alanna Thain, “Sonic Ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary,” in Music and Sound in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers (New York: Routledge, 2014), 180–93. 20. Richard Grusin, “The Radical Mediation of Life in the Anthropocene,” Thinking C21: Center for 21st Century Studies (October 23, 2013), accessed March



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25, 2015, http://www.c21uwm.com/2013/10/23/the-radical-mediation-of-life-in-theanthropocene. 21. Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (1999), 285–97. 22. Brian Massumi, “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,” Architectural Design 68 (1998), 16–25. 23. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 92. 24. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). 25. Johanna Drucker, “Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,” Parallax 4, no. 15 (2009), 7–17. 26. Levi R. Bryant, Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Speculative Realism) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). 27. Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010). 28. Bernard Stiegler, “On Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up,” Parrhesia 20 (2014), 40–48. 29. Nadia Bozak, The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 6. 30. Iris van der Tuin and Rick Dolphijn, New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012), 14.

Part IV

INTERVENTIONS AND RECONSTITUTIONS OF DOCUMENTARY MODES, METHODS, AND MEANINGS

Chapter 18

Four and a Half Film Fallacies Rick Altman

Logically, every theory of cinema should address the problem of film sound. Practically speaking, such has hardly been the case. On the contrary, a surprising number of theoreticians blithely draw conclusions about the nature of cinema simply by extrapolating from the apparent properties of the moving image. If this were just a question of oversight, the problem would be rapidly corrected. In fact, the theoreticians who overlook sound usually do so quite self-consciously, proposing what they consider strong arguments in favor of an image-based notion of cinema. Indeed, some of these arguments have reached the level of truisms, uninterrogated assumptions on which the entire field is based. In the pages that follow, I propose to reopen the cases of these arguments, cross-examining the very assumptions that have guided cinema theory over the years. THE HISTORICAL FALLACY The late twenties’ worldwide conversion to synchronized sound was received by many filmmakers as an affront (Clair, Eisenstein, and Pudovkin, among others). Intent on exacting satisfaction, they found a clever method of disenfranchising the offending sound track. Cinema was cinema before the sound track was added, they said, so sound cannot be a fundamental component of the cinematic experience. Historically, sound is an add-on, an afterthought, and thus of secondary importance. Ironically, it is precisely because of insufficient historical knowledge and reflection that these avengers err. As a purely historical argument, the notion “Four and a Half Film Fallacies,” by Rick Altman © 1992, courtesy of the American Film Institute.

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of sound-as-afterthought cannot stand careful scrutiny. Apparently convinced that “silent” film had always conformed to the mid-twenties model of standardized organ or orchestral accompaniment, sound’s critics set up an all-ornothing opposition that has been perpetuated by generations of critics. On one side an ethereal cinema of silence, punctuated only by carefully chosen music; on the other side, the talkies, with their incessant, antipoetic dialogue. Too heavily dependent on the practice of the twenties, this is an unacceptable assessment of the first thirty years of cinema history. Here, for example, is a pop quiz that is not likely to be passed by sound’s detractors. In what year did the following editorial appear? “In our opinion the singing and talking moving picture is bound sooner or later to become a permanent feature of the moving picture theater.” 1926? 1927? 1928? Wrong by a wide margin. This 1910 Moving Picture World editorial came at the height of sound film’s expansion. Cameraphone, Chronophone, Cinephone and dozens of other competing systems were not only invented in this period; during the end of the century’s first decade they were installed in hundreds of theaters across Europe and from coast to coast in the United States. Their competition came, by the way, not from silent films, with or without musical accompaniment, but from road shows with extremely sophisticated and carefully synchronized effects (a technique originated by Lyman Howe), and from the many “wheels” (vaudeville-like circuits) of human-voice-behind-the-screen companies, with colorful names like Humanovo, Actologue, Humanophone, Humanoscope, Natural Voice Talking Pictures, Ta-Mo-Pic, and Dram-o-tone. In short, the world did not wait until Don Juan and The Jazz Singer to discover the entertainment (and financial) value of synchronized sound. From a purely historical point of view, the notion that sound is a Johnny-come-lately add-on to a thirty-year-old silent medium simply will not stand. Even if the historical information had been correct, however, the claims of sound’s early critics would still have been fallacious. Though their appeal is apparently to history, these unconditional lovers of “silent” cinema actually close themselves off from history, refusing to recognize that the identity and form of the media are in no sense fixed. Why do we identify the human appendix as vestigial? Because we recognize that it is possible for evolution to redefine the structure and even the nature of the human body. How can we tell when one system has given way to another? This we can do only by analyzing the functioning of the system. The fact that one element appeared before or after another carries no weight in this evaluation. At stake here is the very ability to take into account historical change in theoretical arguments. It is regularly assumed that a single term (like cinema) covers a single object. If our theories are to become sufficiently sensitive to historical concerns, we must abandon that assumption, recognizing instead that historical development regularly occurs within an apparently single object, thus often hiding under a single name two or more historically distinct objects. In other



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words, even if silent film were the object that sound’s detractors claim, the sound-as-afterthought argument would still not hold up. Cinema changes, and the action of sound is one of the prime reasons for that change. THE ONTOLOGICAL FALLACY Though they continue to influence cinema studies, historical fallacy arguments were especially popular among the filmmakers of the late twenties and early thirties. Later in the thirties, a new argument appeared in the writings of such influential critics as Rudolf Arnheim and Béla Balázs. Eschewing historical arguments, they make the formal case that the image without sound still constitutes cinema, while sound without an image is no longer cinema. Clearly assuming that cinema is a firm, unchanging category, immune to history, these critics present their arguments as logical and permanent. Indeed, so strong is the apparent appeal of this ontological claim that it regularly reappears in the writings of current theoreticians. Two primary considerations undermine the ontological argument. The first is a practical concern relating to the way in which ontological critics use their claims. Like the historical case, the ontological argument seeks to disenfranchise sound, to prove that sound has (or should have) little effect on overall film structure. Even if we were to accept the notion that film is a fundamentally image-oriented medium, this conclusion begs the larger question of the relationship between ontology and structure. May we affirm with confidence that an object’s structure can be predicted from its nature? The answer to this question depends on the way in which we construe the term “nature.” If nature is defined through structure, that is, if all claims about the nature of a class of objects are derived from analysis of the structures characteristic of the objects, then we can treat nature as predictive of structure. But this is precisely what sound’s ontological critics do not do. On the contrary, they base their claims about cinema on a single surface aspect rather than on a careful inspection of the structure of actual films and the system that produces them. Indeed, the acerbic vocabulary and prescriptive exhortations of these critics suggests that they are more interested in influencing the structure of future films than they are in analyzing the structure of existing ones. What about the truth value of ontological critics’ claims? The problem with these apparently rock solid claims, I would suggest, is that they are actually built on sand. Presented as absolute and unchanging, appeals to the nature of cinema appear to be independent of history. In spite of appearances, however, the evidence actually offered is all historically specific. To say that a particular configuration would not be recognized as cinema, while another would, is to affirm that in the present conditions these conclusions would be

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reached. Present conditions, though, have to do with the way in which a given configuration has been used, and not with some transhistoric category. The ontological argument, it turns out, is only falsely ontological. Even in the absence of a properly ontological argument, however, the historical claim would remain: cinema has indeed been exploited as a visual medium, to the point where audiences identify the medium with the image rather than the sound. To the extent that it represents a carefully documented historical argument, this position has a certain amount of merit (however unontological it may be). Even when the ontological argument is reduced to its historical evidence, however, hesitations must still remain. For the historical circumstances assumed by ontological critics have not always obtained. During the many periods when cinema was heavily marked by its relation to the music industry, for example, music accompanied by a blank screen has regularly been recognized as cinema: the long overtures to the early Vitaphone sound-on-disk features, the introduction of a film’s theme song before the images or its continuation after the post-credits (as in Nashville), and the use of a totally black screen in recent music videos. These examples hardly prove that cinema is regularly taken as a sound-based medium, but they do suggest the historical possibilities of cinema as an audiovisual medium, in which sound-oriented proclivities regularly confront image-based tendencies, thus producing a varied history belying claims of a solely image-oriented ontology. Since first pointing out the ontological fallacy in Cinema/Sound, I have become aware of an even more problematic appeal to ontology in the study of sound, Surprisingly, this dependency on ontological arguments comes not from the enemies of sound, but from its greatest defenders. In their celebrated book on Composing for the Films, Theodor Adorno and Hanns Eisler attribute to hearing a privileged relation to pre-individualistic collective times; music thus has a pre-capitalistic nature, being more direct and more closely connected to the unconscious. While their other arguments are by and large well attuned to historical differences, this approach to hearing and sound edges dangerously close to an ontological claim, apparently capable of predicting sound’s nature in any given situation, but actually able only to locate sound’s action in certain past situations. A similar danger lurks in the work of Mary Ann Doane, Kaja Silverman, Michel Chion, Claudia Gorbman, and other critics who have leaned heavily on the psychoanalytic theories of Guy Rosolato and Didier Anzieu, who characterize the voice as archaic, based on the notion that we hear the soothing voice of the mother from the womb long before we are able to see. It is not surprising that such a transhistoric proposal, apparently predictive of sound’s role in any situation whatsoever, should lead to such conclusions as Doane’s claim that “the aural illusion of position constructed by the very



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approximation of sound perspective and by techniques which spatialize the voice and endow it with ‘presence’ guarantees the singularity and stability of a point of audition, thus holding at bay the potential trauma of dispersal, dismemberment, difference.”1 Yet we know from actual listening that very few films construct an approximation of sound perspective. Can it then be said that “the subordination of the voice to the screen as the site of the spectacle’s unfolding makes vision and hearing work together in manufacturing the ‘hallucination’ of a fully sensory world”?2 The problem here is that an apparently ontological claim about the role of sound has been allowed to take precedence over actual analysis of sound’s functioning. (In my article “Sound Space,” I suggest a different approach to the same question, based not on an assumption of unity and concordance, but on a perceived conflict between sound scale and image scale.)3 While it would be unreasonable to cut short speculation on the sources of sound’s attraction, it is essential that such speculation not be taken as a prescription, as a binding assumption about the way sound must work in all cases. If we are fully to restore a sense of sound’s role in creating our sense of the body, we must depend on historically grounded claims and on close analyses of particular films rather than on ontological speculations that presume to cover all possible practices. THE REPRODUCTIVE FALLACY In spite of the fact that, as a storage medium, sound recording lags behind the image by tens of thousands of years, recorded sound has from its very beginnings held a great fascination for critics. Whereas the image, however carefully rendered, clearly reduces a three-dimensional original to two dimensions, sound appears to reproduce the original faithfully, in its full three-dimensionality. By no means limited to early admirers of the newfangled technology, this position was until recently held by a majority of sound critics (many of whose pronouncements are quoted at the beginning of Jim Lastra’s article “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound”4). By and large, critics remain convinced that sound is literally reproduced by a high quality recording and playback system, in spite of Alan Williams’ demonstration of the contrary in his Cinema/Sound article (“Is Sound Recording Like a Language?”). Sound, it is worth recalling, cannot be construed independently of the volume of air (or other medium) in which it is heard. Typically, we notate sound (through writing or musical notation) as if sounds were ideal entities. But volume, frequency, and timbre cannot exist independently of several material factors which preclude reproduction as such. To be sure, in some sense a G# is a G#, whether it is played at home or on stage, but

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that does not make the two sounds identical. By restricting our description of sounds to familiar musical terminology, we have bamboozled ourselves into believing that sound itself is restricted to those characteristics. Does the G# have a slow attack? a long decay? an echo? reverberation? Does it bounce around like a superball in a hollow cavity? Or does it rapidly lose its force, like a beanbag hitting a pillow? If all we want to know about a sound is that it was a G#, then all G#s are the same, but if we care about the material differences between two sounds, and the spatial configurations that cause them, then we must recognize that no recording can possibly reproduce an original sound. Recordings do not reproduce sound, they represent sound. According to the choice of recording location, microphone type, recording system, postproduction manipulation, storage medium, playback arrangement, and playback locations, each recording proposes an interpretation of the original sound. To be sure, one of the common strategies involved in this process is an attempt to convince the audience that they are listening not to a representation but to a reproduction. We must not, however, be taken in by advertisements for “high fidelity” sound. The notion of “fidelity” is not a measure of success in reproduction, but a way of assessing a recording’s adherence to a set of evolving conventions, like the parallel standards established for such culturally important qualities as “realism,” “morality,” or “beauty.” The concept of fidelity is thus a strange hybrid of engineers’ aspirations and ideology, serving to mask recording’s representational nature. Considered as a reproduction, recording seems to fall under the aegis of technology and engineering. Construed as a representation, however, sound inherits the double mantle of art. Simultaneously capable of misrepresentation and of artistically using all the possibilities of representation, sound thus recovers some of the fascination lost to its reputation as handmaiden of the image. Indeed, it is recording’s very ability to manipulate sound that makes it so amply worthy of our interest. THE NOMINALIST FALLACY In order to show that recording cannot possibly reproduce the original sound, critics (Williams, Levin, Altman) have regularly made the following points: (1) sound exists as pressure within a volume; (2) it is impossible to collect all the sound of a particular performance, since it disperses differently into the various parts of the theater or other surrounding space; (3) even at a live performance, different spectators hear different sounds, depending on where they are seated and which way they and the performers are turned; (4) sound systems always enforce a particular set of values in selecting microphone



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type and location, frequency response, volume levels, and many other recording and playback characteristics; (5) playback involves the same set of differences and choices involved in recording. Within this apparently coherent argument lurks a potential danger. Stressing the material nature of sound in order to counter fundamentally idealist assumptions, this approach fragments sound to the point where the emission of a single sound apparently gives rise to the perception of a multiplicity of different sounds. By concentrating on the differences between the sound as heard in the orchestra and the “same” sound as heard from the balcony, this argument has rendered the important service of sensitizing critics to the materiality, complexity, and context-based nature of sound. At the same time, however, these defenses against the reproductive fallacy have failed to address the problem of the communicative language used by auditors having heard the “same” sound to overcome the fact that they actually perceived physically different sounds. This is an old problem, closely identified with the weaning of philosophy from theology in the latter part of the Middle Ages. When I pick up two different rocks and call them “rocks,” what is the status of the name that I attribute to them? Is the name itself real? Or is the name just a convenient label? To put it another way, is the shared category to be understood as actually existing, or are the objects themselves the only things that exist? Is there such a thing as the category “rock,” or are there only objects, on which for the sake of convenience we confer names (such as “rock”) which have no existence independent of the objects they represent? The traditional position, usually identified with Plato and Augustine, is termed “realism,” because it takes the general category as real; the radical position, championed by William of Ockham and generally thought to have been instrumental in paving the way for Renaissance individualism, is known as “nominalism,” because it considers that the general category is just a convenient name. Especially concerned to recognize individual difference (and thus the value of the created world), the nominalists accused the realists of subordinating the entirety of creation to a set of preexisting universals. This is precisely where we stand today with regard to sound. As Jim Lastra demonstrates so well in his article “Reading, Writing, and Representing Sound,” the critics of the reproductive fallacy have edged dangerously close to an ultra-nominalism in which differing auditor perceptions make a single original sound appear like so many different rocks with no common identity save their common name.5 The very names used to identify sounds are suspect, disrespectful of sound’s material heterogeneity. Yet we do discuss the film as we file out of the theater. In spite of the fact that we have literally, really heard different sounds, we still manage to find a common ground on which to base our conversation.

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At this point in time, the study of sound shares the position of reception studies. I once witnessed an interchange that says a great deal about the project of reception studies. After demonstrating that neither the author nor the text can possibly determine readings, that each reader may read the text in differing ways, Tony Bennett opened the floor to questions. Said Paul Hernadi: “This is all well and good, but if what you say is true, how did I understand what you just said?” Taking an ultra-nominalist stance (which, by the way, he has toned down since), Bennett laid such heavy emphasis on our freedom of interpretation from textual constraints that he jeopardized the very notion of understanding. Even today, reception studies need to concentrate more fully on the bridges, the terms, the categories, the reading formations that permit a Paul Hernadi to understand a Tony Bennett. A similar situation holds in sound studies. While not abandoning for a moment the notion that every auditor of the “same” performance actually hears different sounds, we need actively to interrogate the cultural phenomena that permit us to compose sentences, frame ideas, and ultimately communicate about the sounds which are heard. A decade or two ago, it would no doubt have been politically essential to defend at all costs the free play of the signifier; today it seems far more important to remember with Saussure that signification can occur only through the repression of the signifier and to call for increased sensitivity to the many strategies adopted by various cultures to assure the repression of sound’s differences in favor of language’s communicative value. INDEXICALITY: HALF A FALLACY WORKING ON THE OTHER HALF Inherited from photography, one of the most deeply ingrained notions about cinema is that it depends primarily on recording. Unlike painting or writing, it is commonly supposed, cinema uses motion picture photography and sound recording to fix and retain in memory a physical image of the profilmic scene. Whereas representational painting is based largely on iconic resemblances, and writing is built around symbolic relationships (according to the terminology of Charles Sanders Peirce), cinema is thought to depend especially strongly on indexical connections, that is, those revealing a particularly close existential relationship between the represented item and its representation (such as that which exists when light rays bouncing off an object expose motion picture film, or when sound waves either drive the stylus of a disk recorder or, once transformed into light, expose the sound track portion of the film). This close connection of course creates an iconic relationship between the pro-filmic object or sound and its filmic



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representation (i.e., the object and its representation have the same shape), but critics and theoreticians have consistently stressed the indexical ties over the iconic resemblance. In particular, André Bazin’s realist criticism has been especially influential in popularizing an indexical approach to cinema. For Bazin, cinema is like a mold that takes each scene’s impression; cinema thus works like a death mask or the Shroud of Turin, recording as it were by sacred contact. During the early history of photography, photographs could be produced only through indexical relationships. As photography matured, however, photographers discovered various methods of “correcting” nature, typically adding painted-in iconic details to the photograph’s indexical base. From the very start, however, such techniques were roundly condemned. Offering ontological arguments about photography’s nature, critics insisted that certain types of retouching constituted a highly undesirable form of “cheating.” The moralistic tone of this argument carried over intact to motion picture. In spite of early cinema’s non-indexical display of color, “silent” cinema’s iconic and symbolic approach to sound, or the late twenties’ creation of the falsely indexical playback system, critics and theorists continued to stress the ability of the motion picture camera, like that of its still picture cousin, to take snapshots of reality. As cinema developed, to be sure, the scenes recorded by the camera began to depend on an increasing amount of manipulation (through set design, costuming, makeup, and so forth), and the final film image was increasingly constructed from a combination of separate images (through mattes, background projections, and other processes). For all this prestidigitation, however, the basic assumption was never jeopardized: cinema is primarily an indexical medium, directly dependent on the photographic recording of each pro-filmic scene (or scene fragment). Throughout the history of cinema, the image has by and large corresponded to this indexical, recording-oriented definition (with the exception of special cases like scratch-animation, computer graphics, or electronically generated images). Cinema sound, on the other hand, has rarely been the result of straightforward indexical recording. Long before the cinema industry converted to sound, the market for telephonic communication, phonograph records, public address systems, and radio entertainment had led engineers to investigate the possibilities of “enhancing” sound in order to achieve greater volume, presence, or intelligibility, while reducing unwanted characteristics. At first, engineers concentrated on the recording process itself, laboring to increase the indexical fidelity of the sound recording apparatus. Soon, however, sound’s capacity for post-recording transformation became apparent. Why record the reverberation associated with sounds produced in a large hard-walled room if you can simply process the reverb in later? Throughout the thirties, parallel developments in electronics and film sound led to the

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creation of myriad devices designed to produce final-release sound differing radically from the sound originally recorded on the set. Little by little, the indexical nature of film sound became compromised by the ability of acoustic networks and electronic circuits to alter or simulate sound. Once the sole province of high-end sound production facilities (such as those found in New York, Hollywood, and a few other important centers around the world), the electronic revolution has now made it possible to produce all the music and effects for a film sound track without recording a single cricket or musical instrument. For a decade, film sound has been heavily influenced by digital systems like MIDI and the Synclavier. Even the most inexpensive films feature sound tracks that are no longer primarily recorded. In cinema, television, and disk production, sound has definitely surpassed the era of indexicality. Today, the customary electronic manipulation and construction of sound has begun to serve as a model for the image. Though the film image currently depends primarily on a chemical (and thus indexical) technology, the electronic nature of the television image provides a different model, whose influence is increasingly felt in the cinema world. In order to create Mickey Mouse, Walt Disney had to do more than just make thousands of drawings; he had to record them with the same (indexical) motion picture process used for live actors. Today’s animators work in an entirely different fashion. While most still depend in part an drawing, they make heavy use of electronics and its ability to produce iconic relationships without depending on the indexicality of recording. A similar shift has taken place in color technology. Whether two- or three-strip, whether additive or subtractive, traditional color processes systematically depended on indexical relationships: the color was fixed by the existential contact of the object with the film. Today, films are colorized by an electronic process that owes nothing to recording. It is only a matter of time before the plunging prices of all electronic processes turn colorization from a postproduction technique into a production device. In short, the recording medium that cinema once was has now been massively transformed and risks ultimate obsolescence. However accurate it may once have been to understand cinema as recording its object by sacred contact, we must recognize that three-quarters of a century of electronics has radically desacralized cinema, substituting circuitry for direct contact, constructed iconicity for recorded indexicality, and the infinite imagined possibilities of the keyboard for the restricted immediacy of recording reality. Not so very long ago, treating cinema as écriture was a radical move; the technology itself is now turning this metaphor into a reality. Once, cinema was recorded with a camera; now, it is increasingly written with a keyboard. So far, it is only half a fallacy to treat cinema as a recording medium. By the end of the century, however, cinema will be well on its way toward full



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digitalization. The end of the indexical era looms large. Perhaps it is time to revise our theories and our vocabulary to take this transformation into account. More experienced in this domain than the image, sound must lead the way. NOTES 1. Mary Ann Doane, “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies, 60 (1980), 45; my emphasis. 2. Doane, “The Voice in Cinema,” 45–46. 3. See Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Rick Altman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 46–64. 4. See Sound Theory/Sound Practice, ed. Altman, 65–86. 5. Ibid.

Chapter 19

The Dogma 95 Manifesto Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg

DOGMA 95 is a collection of film directors founded in Copenhagen in spring 1995. DOGMA 95 has the expressed goal of countering “certain tendencies” in the cinema today. DOGMA 95 is a rescue action! In 1960 enough was enough! The movie was dead and called for resurrection. The goal was correct but the means were not! The new wave proved to be a ripple that washed ashore and turned to muck. Slogans of individualism and freedom created works for a while, but no changes. The wave was up for grabs, like the directors themselves. The wave was never stronger than the men behind it. The anti-bourgeois cinema itself became bourgeois, because the foundations upon which its theories were based was the bourgeois perception of art. The auteur concept was bourgeois romanticism from the very start and thereby . . . false! To DOGMA 95 cinema is not individual! Today a technological storm is raging, the result of which will be the ultimate democratization of the cinema. For the first time, anyone can make movies. But the more accessible the medium becomes, the more important the avant-garde. It is no accident that the phrase “avant-garde” has military connotations. Discipline is the answer . . . we must put our films into uniform, because the individual film will be decadent by definition! DOGMA 95 counters the individual film by the principle of presenting an indisputable set of rules known as The Vow of Chastity. 375

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In 1960 enough was enough! The movie had been cosmeticized to death, they said; yet since then the use of cosmetics has exploded. The “supreme” task of the decadent filmmakers is to fool the audience. Is that what we are so proud of? Is that what the “100 years” have brought us? Illusions via which emotions can be communicated? . . . By the individual artist’s free choice of trickery? Predictability (dramaturgy) has become the golden calf around which we dance. Having the characters’ inner lives justify the plot is too complicated, and not “high art.” As never before, the superficial action and the superficial movie are receiving all the praise. The result is barren. An illusion of pathos and an illusion of love. To DOGMA 95 the movie is not illusion! Today a technological storm is raging of which the result is the elevation of cosmetics to God. By using new technology anyone at any time can wash the last grains of truth away in the deadly embrace of sensation. The illusions are everything the movie can hide behind. DOGMA 95 counters the film of illusion by the presentation of an indisputable set of rules known as THE VOW OF CHASTITY. THE VOW OF CHASTITY I swear to submit to the following set of rules drawn up and confirmed by DOGMA 95: 1. Shooting must be done on location. Props and sets must not be brought in (if a particular prop is necessary for the story, a location must be chosen where this prop is to be found). 2. The sound must never be produced apart from the images or vice versa. (Music must not be used unless it occurs where the scene is being shot.) 3. The camera must be handheld. Any movement or immobility attainable in the hand is permitted. 4. The film must be in color. Special lighting is not acceptable. (If there is too little light for exposure the scene must be cut or a single lamp be attached to the camera.) 5. Optical work and filters are forbidden. 6. The film must not contain superficial action. (Murders, weapons, etc. must not occur.)



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7. Temporal and geographical alienation are forbidden. (That is to say that the film takes place here and now.) 8. Genre movies are not acceptable. 9. The film format must be Academy 35 mm. 10. The director must not be credited. Furthermore, I swear as a director to refrain from personal taste! I am no longer an artist. I swear to refrain from creating a “work,” as I regard the instant as more important than the whole. My supreme goal is to force the truth out of my characters and settings. I swear to do so by all the means available and at the cost of any good taste and any aesthetic considerations. Thus I make my VOW OF CHASTITY. Copenhagen, Monday 13 March 1995 On behalf of DOGMA 95 Lars von Trier

Thomas Vinterberg

Chapter 20

Minnesota Declaration Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema Werner Herzog

LESSONS OF DARKNESS 1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinéma Vérité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants. 2. One well-known representative of Cinéma Vérité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law; the bad guys should go to jail.” 3. Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time. 4. Cinéma Vérité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable. 5. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination. 6. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization. 7. Filmmakers of Cinéma Vérité resemble tourists who take pictures of ancient ruins of facts. 8. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue. 9. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler

Werner Herzog, “The Minnesota Declaration: Truth and Fact in Documentary Cinema.” © Werner Herzog Film.

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and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.” 10. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down. 11. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life. 12. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile. 13. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of hell that during evolution some species—including man—crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. Werner Herzog Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, April 30, 1999

Chapter 21

Omission and Oversight in Close Reading—The Final Moments of Frederick Wiseman’s High School V. F. Perkins

In the early days of Film Studies, Frederick Wiseman’s 1968 documentary High School was choice teaching material. It was much studied and discussed for two particular reasons over and above its own achievement: first, because it would reliably connect with students’ recent experience, and then because it gave ready access to key issues of realism and viewpoint. It was the second film that Wiseman completed, developing a strongly individual approach to the opportunities presented by developments in technology: lightweight gear had become available that needed only two operators to record synchronised sound and image under available light conditions. By reducing the scale of the filmmakers’ presence, the equipment encouraged observational—fly-on-the-wall—movie-making. Wiseman’s approach to these opportunities was strikingly fresh because it excluded voice-over narration and made no use of on-camera interviews. There was no attempt to construct a narrative by following a person, a group or a process. Instead the camera observed events in the routines of an institution—in this case, Northeast High School in Philadelphia. Around forty hours of film was shot over a period of weeks and the resulting material was pruned and shaped in the editing room to yield a seventy-five minute movie. Wiseman refused the usual labels—Documentary, Cinéma-Vérité, or Direct Cinema. He described his film as “Reality Fiction.” With this tag he emphasized the freedom with which he assembled sound and image, for instance, the freedom to disregard the actual chronology of the filmed material. The sequence of events and images in the film was constructed independently in pursuit of formal and expressive aims. In an interview in Sight and Sound he gave a useful summary of his editing approach. “The structure of the film,” he said “is a theory about the events that are in the film.”1 He more 381

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than once illustrated that approach to structure by citing the final shot of High School. In it we see and hear the principal, Dr. Haller, speaking to a faculty meeting. She reads through a letter she has received from a recent graduate. The letter comes from Vietnam. The sender is about to be flown on a dangerous mission, and he recognizes the possibility that he may be killed. He expresses commitment to the American cause, has pledged his GI insurance money to support a scholarship fund at the school, and thanks his teachers for all that they did for him. As she ends the reading, the principal offers the letter as proof of the school’s success. Although this sequence was in fact filmed on the final day of shooting, that is not the reason why it comes last in the movie. Wiseman put it this way: “The placement of the letter at the end of High School makes it a different film than if the letter hadn’t been used or if the letter started the film. When you hear the letter at the end of the film I hope you read the film into the letter. It connects the major themes I think I’ve been dealing with and hopefully enlarges the context of the film.”2 Wiseman’s design achieved its purpose. So much is evident from the large body of critical and scholarly comment on the film. Pauline Kael set the trend in an influential column in The New Yorker. She greeted Wiseman as “probably the most sophisticated intelligence to enter the documentary field in recent years” and she climaxed her review by transcribing very nearly the whole text of the final sequence.3 Like most of those to follow, Kael related the principal’s verdict of success to one particular phrase in the letter—the writer’s self-description in his role as a soldier: “I am only a body doing a job.” In academic studies of High School a consensus developed that saw the institution as a machine for producing subservience and conformity. That interpretation was supported by taking the end sequence as the completion of a pattern, and relating it back to an image in the opening scene where the camera’s approach to the school has it looking much like a factory. Part of the ground for this reading, clearly, is a dissident response to US involvement in Vietnam. An audience on the other side of the political divide would most likely revere the soldier’s self-sacrificial commitment to the victory of the “free world.” The success claimed by the principal could then be endorsed without irony. This is not a position taken up in any of the scholarly literature. Here is the text of the final sequence, complete. Only Dr. Haller is heard. I have marked with square brackets her interjections in the reading: Now let me read you this one, if I’m able to get through it. This is written from, and I might say that the letter that I’m about to read is from Bob Walters.



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Bob Walters, as Fran could tell you—she could write his biography—was a boy without parents who might have been a nobody. He certainly was not a high academic student. He was most average or sub-average in many ways. But a few teachers who cared made a great difference in this boy’s life. His letter comes on, uuh . . . stationery marked USS Okinawa. I hope I can get through it. If I don’t, Hy will have to go on. “Dear Dr. Haller, I have only a few hours before I go. Today I will take a plane trip from this ship. I pray that I’ll make it back, but it is all in God’s hands now. You see, I am going with three other men. We are going to be dropped behind the DMZ (the demiliarize [demilitarized] zone). The reason for telling you this is that all my insurance money will be given for that scholarship I once started but never finished, if I don’t make it back. I am only insured for ten thousand dollars. Maybe it could help someone. I have been trying to become a Big Brother in Vietnam but it is very hard to do. I have to write back and forth to San Diego, California and that takes time. I only hope that I am good enough to become one. God only knows. I really pray that the young men in your cooking classes will use this change of learning very well. Thank you Dr. Haller for helping these men become good, very fine cooks. [He should have said ‘Thank you, Mrs. C.’] My personal family usually doesn’t understand me. They don’t see, they don’t understand why I have to do what I do do. They say that I’m a real nut to do such work, but . . . thus they say: ‘Don’t you value life? Are you crazy?’ My answer is ‘Yes, but I value all the lives of South Vietnam and the free world, so that they and all of us can live in peace.’ Am I wrong Dr. Haller? If I do my best all the time and believe in what I do, believe that what I do is right, that is all I can do. Dr. Haller, if anything happens to me, James C. Heckwicker [I think it is] will send you a telegram and in time he will send you the money. Please don’t say anything to Mrs. C. [but I did] she would only worry over me. I am not worth it. I am only a bo . . . a body doing a job. In closing I thank everyone for what they all have done for me. Yours truly, Bob Walters. Thank you all again very much. Please forgive my handwriting, I am a little jumpy. Please understand.” Now when you get a letter like this, to me it means that we are very successful at Northeast High School. I think you will agree with me.

The full text gives a sense of the scene’s duration, I hope, because its length and its concentration are important for its effect. The scene lasts around four minutes. Once the reading has begun, the camera remains fixed on the reader, Dr. Haller. Her head is framed tightly but insecurely in a low-angle telephoto shot that magnifies the smallest shifts of face and eyeline. Scrutiny only a little less probing, a slight retreat easily achieved, would have given space for the movements of Dr. Haller’s head within a steady frame. We do not need to think these matters through to feel the insistence of the camera’s gaze. It imposes close attention to both the words of the writer and the performance of the reader.

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It is notable that most of the High School criticism follows Kael in relating the principal’s assertion of success directly to the letter’s words about “a body doing a job” and, in this juxtaposition of selected spoken matter, few writers mention other aspects or indeed other words. One point that escapes notice is the proficiency of the recital; its inflections convey at the same time understanding of the writer’s emotions and the reader’s feelings in response. It is forgotten too, that Dr. Haller introduces the letter as an instance of the achievement of “teachers who cared”; she prepares a context within which we, as well as her real-life audience, attend to the text: the whole reading will be a celebration. Another context is given by the last words of introduction where she repeats the warning that emotion may make her unable to complete the reading. By its end we understand that she is moved, but it is clear that her feelings of pride and pleasure outweigh distress that the young man may have been about to kill or be killed. “I hope I can get through it” alerts us to the stresses of performance, and the difficulty of balancing the professional values of control and empathy. The threat of breakdown could make us sensitive to the reader’s stumble when she comes to the words “just a body.” If the words carry weight (and I agree that they do) the stumble must also speak. After all, the word “body” does not present the hazards to enunciation offered by “demilitarized.” Finally, much could be said about Dr. Haller’s declaring, with an evident sense of her colleagues’ approval, her entitlement to disregard the writer’s most emphatic request: that she keep the letter to herself so as to save a fondly remembered teacher from distress. Critics worth reading support their understandings and their evaluations with material verifiably present in the sights and sounds of movies. But no criticism, detailed as it may reckon to be, will ever encompass all that might be observed about a passage of film, or even a moment. Needing to select, I could choose to ignore the stumble on “body,” for instance, as I do not claim for it the weight of relevance carried by Dr. Haller’s pride in the achievement of the institution that she heads and speaks for. When some salient detail escapes comment, the omission may as soon result from a writer’s decision and priorities as from a failure of observation. Inevitably though, we do fall victim to failures of observation. I am going to present two cases that I believe qualify as oversights, rather than strategic omissions, since they concern features that, once observed, could hardly be left unremarked. The first is a lapse not over fact but over significance. All accounts concur that the film has time and again highlighted gender issues, yet none applies this insight to the movie’s climactic episode. Nobody seems to ask how it matters for the effect of the sequence that it fixes at length on the figure and actions of a woman, a mature woman of polished appearance who judged it suitable to her role and the occasion that her silver hair be neatly styled. Nobody fails, or can fail, to see that the principal is female. Everyone acknowledges the fact



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simply through use of the personal pronoun. But Kael comes nearest to recognising how much that matters in her parenthetical description of Dr. Haller as “a fine-looking woman.”4 Discussion elsewhere treats Dr. Haller as no more than a relay of the letter’s words and the institution’s judgment. Yet her appearance, voice and manner are prominent features of the scene, not dissociable from her gender, that vitally inform our response to the finale. (For a start, they enable us to recognize her status as principal.) The sequence falls into a pattern that suggests a gendered division of labor: it’s a woman who carries the work of memory and emotion. Aware that it may be his last farewell, a young man has chosen to write home not to the “personal family [that] usually doesn’t understand” but to the institution whose moral authority he respects and whose approval he seeks. It is specifically the women there that he remembers and addresses. (In Dr. Haller’s preamble, Wiseman responds to “teachers who cared” with cutaways that single out only women among the listeners.) It feels appropriate, then that Bob Walters’ words are spoken with acknowledged emotion by this female reader. As a result we sense the more strongly one of the prime sources of the writer’s attachment and thankfulness to the school: he found there—it seems, uniquely—a motherly concern whose memory stays with him and is cherished. It is important that we feel this, little as we may examine the feeling, because the strength of the sentiment usefully confuses the factory image of the school. If the letter’s text might tip us toward a hostile verdict on an educational machine, wider possibilities are brought into play by a presence and a bearing that evoke the maternal. To observe only the mechanical and oppressive, then, would do poor justice to Wiseman’s subtlety and the breadth of his vision. Perhaps the principal’s sex is too obvious to be taken note of. But I suspect there’s a further reason why its significance escapes comment: it was a factor outside the filmmaker’s control. Wiseman chose to include the letter in the film, and to place it as the finale. He did not choose the sex or manner of the letter’s reader. In documentary, criticism is rightly alert for the editorial decisions that give shape to the material, embodying the director’s attitude and intention. But this concentration can mislead when it isolates what the artist constructs from what the camera discloses. Film Aesthetics has wanted to celebrate the malleability of the moving image, to erect a filmmaker who enjoys freedom of artistic choice of the kind that is attributed to the composer or the painter. Pursuing that desire, it has exaggerated the selectivity of the cinema apparatus. The film frame selects by exclusion. Within the frame, few means exist to distinguish the vital information from the incidentals that come with it. In standard film technique the issue is addressed largely by constructing a line of continuity to carry us from key point to key point. But Wiseman’s editing between episodes most

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often foregoes this means of distinguishing the essential from the secondary. An action cannot be captured minus the features of the actor, nor can microphones detach the spoken word from the character of a voice or the rhythm of an utterance. Wiseman’s camera could not ignore Dr. Haller’s discreetly showy earrings or evade the look of her dark, oval spectacle frames. While observing the authority of the speaker’s position the lens had also to observe the little tics and hesitations that may suggest anxieties imperfectly controlled. But criticism, mine included, has chosen to neglect these incidentals even though they must be relevant to our impression of the principal, and must inform the context in which we hear her address. In speaking of the film Wiseman shares the critics’ emphasis, dwelling on the content of the letter, taking less account of what belongs to the reading. No doubt that reflects his priorities. But in a film prepared for presentation to an audience “unintended consequences” cannot be simply unintended. Collateral effects are effects nonetheless. Wiseman made his choice knowing that the letter brought with it this reader with these attributes. He would have had to look for a different way of ending the movie if he had judged that the lady’s presence and her performance were ruinous, confusing, or even unhelpful for his design. When choice is equated with invention, nostalgia for unconstrained freedom may deceive us. It may obscure the relationship between intention and contingency, distract us from the role that the incidental plays in the expressive. Since the apparatus seizes all it is allowed to see and hear, skilled film artists know abundance of detail for a resource rather than a limitation. In the movie—a fiction rehearsed and refined—the detail can be highly controlled. Witness Max Ophüls: “Details, details, details! The most insignificant, the least observed of them are often the most evocative, characteristic and even decisive.”5 Or witness Vincente Minnelli: “A picture that stays with you is made up of more than a hundred hidden things.”6 These “hidden things” are most often, like the principal’s features, hidden in plain sight. We take them in without taking them up. That remains true even in a “reality fiction” which foregoes the metteur-en-scène’s freedom to invent and control. However, I now turn to consider a different case, where what escapes notice is an editorial intervention that was clearly a matter of choice. At the very end of High School, Wiseman closes the movie with a device of great rhetorical weight, and it is remarkable that it goes unmentioned even in those studies that offer themselves as close reading, or transcripts, or analysis. In a book-length study of Wiseman’s cinema, Barry Keith Grant is one of those who draw attention to the last words we hear: “I think you will agree with me.” He comments that in its place the remark “functions like a rhetorical question, addressed as much to the viewer as to the assembled



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teachers. . . . The fact that the film ends abruptly as she concludes her reading leaves the viewer to contemplate the extent to which one agrees with her.”7 It is not part of my purpose to challenge the consensus reading of High School, which gains support from more than one of Wiseman’s published remarks about his design. Indeed it is because the film leaves me too at a distance from the principal’s assessment that I see particular relevance in one aspect to which none of the scholarly literature attends: how the abrupt ending noted by Grant splits image from sound. A rapid fade-out on the sound track occurs moments before the image fades to black and we lose sight of Dr. Haller. The silent image is very brief, but long enough for us to take in the speaker’s gestures as she looks down to her right then jerks her head up and across to the left and begins to smile. We have time to feel that the smile asserts a mood close to triumph. The silence behind it is palpable because our ears have been used to listening through a background of hall noise and incidental sound, like the rustling of the sheets of paper between the reader’s fingers. The effect is the effect of a change, a loss, not just of an absence. Dropping the sound out is, I believe, a key element in Wiseman’s strategy. So it is remarkable that it escapes notice in studies whose main concern is with the means through which the artist shapes his film to carry a personal viewpoint on events which he recorded but did not control. In early editions of the textbook, Film Art: An Introduction by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, High School is discussed at some length in a chapter headed “Film Criticism: Sample Analyses.” The account is alert and helpful in tracing patterns built into the movie’s form; it witnesses “the film’s development from educational discipline to military regimentation.”8 Like others, it ends by juxtaposing “a body doing a job” with “we are very successful” but also without mentioning Wiseman’s intervention on the sound track. The oversight is the more surprising in view of the context: the discussion is introduced as one of several “models of short critical analyses,”9 the declared purpose in this case being to illustrate “how the filmmaker’s formal and stylistic choices can create a coherent impression, strong spectator effects, and a particular range of explicit and implicit meanings.”10 We should note that the sample analysis is of the whole film, not just of its end sequence. Inevitably then the treatment is highly selective. Nevertheless, Wiseman’s formal and stylistic choice to end by divorcing sound from image is a strong spectator effect, and we might expect it to gain acknowledgment. The problem is, I think, that the device escapes accommodation to the interpretive process favored by Film Art. The book offers itself as a guide to the skills of film appreciation. However, those skills turn out to consist of the ability to determine, for any given film, the ways in which it can be accommodated to some prescribed categories. In the present instance that entails requiring interpretation to work with meanings conceived as “formal

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entities”11 and divided into four types. Of these the two most forcefully applied are, as above, the explicit and the implicit. I have argued elsewhere against this conception,12 and George Wilson has set out convincing reasons to distrust the application to cinema of the implicit/explicit divide.13 It’s enough here to note the confusions that follow when the analysis of High School is subjected to the given categories. We were promised a range of explicit meanings but we are offered only one: “We are very successful. . . .” That single specimen, undoubtedly explicit, is not a meaning of the film. As a view expressed within the movie, and placed at the end in relation to everything we have seen and heard, the principal’s claim is her own, and it stands to be weighed against, for instance, an equally clear assertion by one student: “morally, socially, this school is a garbage can.” There are damaging consequences when a unique but specious instance of explicit meaning forms the basis for a contrast with whatever may be identified as implicit. Perceptions of irony and ambiguity are coarsened when made dependent on that clash. Under this regime, ambiguity loses all richness and complexity; it emerges as a flat contradiction between mutually exclusive readings—the film celebrates (explicit) or the film condemns (implicit). The scheme has no place for the ambiguity that holds conflicting or mutually qualifying possibilities in suspension. Likewise with irony, a literary definition is invoked with no recognition of the muddles that arise when it is applied to a motion picture. The film is more generous, and its ironies are deeper, than can be recognized within a scheme that pitches the principal’s assertion of success against a view of the institution as “an oppressive bureaucracy.”14 If the institution succeeds in operating an oppressive bureaucracy and in hiding the recognition from itself, that is in part because it sees no reason to doubt its own good intentions. The ironies accumulated by the film do not depend on our being led to deny the school’s success. (The two sequences preceding Dr. Haller’s address, though carrying a taint of the grotesque, are essentially celebratory.) We are likely to have witnessed the successes, but often with alarm. Wiseman’s approach leaves open to scrutiny the terms in which success is defined and pursued. At the editing stage a great deal of thought must have been given to the precise timing of the final moments. It was a significant decision to go on beyond the principal’s boast and to offer “I think you will agree with me” as the last words to be heard. With this extension, as Grant suggests, the issue of agreement lingers and becomes shaded as a question for the movie audience. The case for this reading is strengthened when we take into account Wiseman’s play with the sound level. The effect of the cut-off is to withhold any reaction from the hall that the microphone had picked up. The context is such that even an audible lack of response from the faculty would weigh as heavily as any other reactions. The plea for agreement would then be



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answered from within the film. The challenge to the audience in the cinema would be muffled. Still, if nothing more were at issue, it would have been possible to preserve synchronization and fade the picture out along with the sound. In making his editing choice, Wiseman must have thought that there was a particular value in the half second of muted image. My sense of it is that it impresses on us the last thing that we see and that persists into the fade-out: the smile. Without the context that the sound would have supplied, no new information is given to us that would define the source of Dr. Haller’s satisfaction. As a result we are encouraged to refer the expression of pleasure back to the context of the letter, the celebration of success, and the asserted confidence in the quest for validation. Joy lights the principal’s face, and triumph powers the swing of her head. But joy and triumph are not the inevitably appropriate responses to the news that the letter has conveyed, or to the doubt that it leaves about the fate of the soldier. The enthusiasm of the soundless image is tinged—but only tinged—with frenzy. Wiseman’s device reminds me of the vernacular use of “No comment” when the words withhold an invited gesture of assent. When I try to articulate the significance of this ending I have to resort to verbal imagery. The principal is left high and dry, I say, or “stranded” or “out on a limb.” Or I say that the image is “hollowed out.” These attempts to evoke feeling by reliance on metaphors seem to serve the case better than any words that would decipher a meaning in Wiseman’s device. In a case like this, and very often, I think we are wise to avoid the word “meaning”: it prompts us always to search for a proposition, or a set of them, that the film can be said to advance; it pulls us away from complexity and nuance in a way that “significance,” for instance, does not. The drop-out of sound works against the sustained big close-up of the principal. The final shot lasts a deal longer than any other in the film where the camera holds on a single talking head. (In the whole film there’s only one shot of longer duration.) Its uninterrupted continuity contributes to the sense that the film has reached its culmination. In a place where, for the first time, the institution offers its verdict on itself, the camera hangs on the subject’s every word. These are factors that contribute to the ability of the sound-loss to affect us while escaping notice—in other words, to inflect our response subtly, with a rhetoric that is all the more effective for not being blatant. Maybe this becomes more apparent if we imagine other possibilities. What if the silent close-up on the principal were held for another three seconds before the fade-out? In that case, the absence of sound could not fail to strike us, and would have us wondering about its purpose. Or reverse the procedure: fade the image out before the sound and have “I think you will agree with me” echoing under a blank screen. Either of these alternatives would keep many,

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not all, of the film’s effects, and enable many of the familiar readings, but with a much blunter, more overt, rhetoric. By contrast it is surely the case that Wiseman’s device not only—as the record shows—escapes notice, but is calculated to do so. We can hardly doubt that the film would have failed in its purpose if the viewer’s first reaction to the final moments became “Wow, they dropped the sound out!” Working stealthily, Wiseman is able to color our response to the principal and her claims within an overall viewpoint that can encompass complexity. The film can identify and at moments satirize a trend in the school’s operation without demonizing its staff and while allowing us to observe, as Kael’s review remarked, “genuine benevolence behind the cant.”15 Why have I chosen to bring to light a device in a nearly fifty-year-old movie? The first reason is that I have not come across a clearer instance where a much studied and intelligently analyzed sequence has so successfully guarded one of its secrets. An interest in the “possibilities of the medium” entails an interest in the discoveries that filmmakers have made in opening up routes to eloquence. Two discoveries are of special interest here. The first lies in the possibilities in the separation between image and sound track. We should keep it in mind that the talking picture addresses the distinct perceptual activities of the eye and ear, which are served by the outputs of two completely separate technologies—those of the projector and those of the loudspeaker. (Lens and microphone are equally separate, which is why Wiseman’s work required a two-man crew.) Moreover, what we hear is more amenable to covert manipulation than what we see. I have highlighted a climactic instance where Wiseman’s editing makes the formal separation of sound and image serve the purposes of expression. The film’s viewpoint is embedded in an effect of technique. The second discovery lies precisely in the grading of a formal intervention such that it escapes notice. The possibilities of depth and nuance in the movies depend largely on the filmmakers’ ability to scale sights and sounds so that they can register with us at every level of force and prominence. “Every level” has to include passing unobserved. This medium—by which I mean the medium of the movie—depends on our ability to absorb the significance of objects, gestures, images, and sounds without paying attention to them, or pausing to articulate their significance. Films play on the differences between seeing-and-hearing, on the one hand, and noticing on the other. There is no room for doubt that all of us hear what happens on the sound track in High School. We could say, though, that the film does not prompt us, or give us time, to register it in consciousness. Only a medium with the resources to grade its effects can allow both clarity and subtlety, and encourage what is plainly shown to submit to qualification by what is delicately suggested. That is why I see harm in a system of categories



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that will draw away from the recognition of degree and variousness. A stark opposition between the explicit and the implicit obscures the ranges of emphasis where some implications are blatant, others plain but unemphatic, and a host of them gently atmospheric and undertonal. Filmmakers face a constant challenge to arrive at stresses that enrich our understanding, and achieve a weight of expression appropriate to the weight of significance that a moment can bear. The flows of response, of feeling, thought and observation can gain or suffer, be blocked or enhanced, by judgments of balance between force and tact. Wiseman faces issues of the appropriate at every moment, and in our appreciation of his work we face them too. Earlier in my discussion I referred to Wiseman’s “stealth” in the construction of an unnoticed effect. I wrote this way in order to slide in the sense that the “possibilities of the medium” include possibilities of dishonesty, falsification, bad faith—all the potential for duplicity extended by any form of communication. That is one basis for the role of close reading in criticism. Whether in the fiction film or the documentary, the movie medium presents a standing opportunity and a standing problem in the relationship between recording and viewpoint. When Wiseman says that “the structure of the film is a theory about the events that are in the film,” he is reflecting on the tension between the demands of reportage, and his concern to mould the recorded material according to his own sense of form and truth. Examining moments of eloquence in film, however minute, can be a way of illuminating structure by relating part and whole. The practice can be motivated by simple curiosity, sometimes by hostility, but its larger justification lies in the way that it relates the achievements of a movie and its maker to a discovery of the medium and its possibilities. Missing the significance of Dr. Haller’s gender is like and unlike missing the fact of the sound-cut. The oversights might in both cases be described as gaps in realization or articulation. It does not follow that there are corresponding gaps in the experience of High School. But both oversights are relevant to the relationship between close reading and appreciation or criticism. In both respects, too, these final remarks should begin with an acknowledgment. My own awareness did not come punctually and was not prompted by seeing the film under ordinary viewing conditions. The sound effect is observed in notes that I took in preparation for a lecture-seminar in the late 1980s, more than a decade after first seeing the film. I was working with a 16mm print, evidently on an analyzing projector or an editing table. The technology enabled me to stop and start, pause and rewind so that reflection and note-taking could proceed at a pace no longer governed by the film’s own continuity. The rewind lever freed the work from dependence on the hazards of memory, allowing me to check data and at least to try to trace in the detail of scenes the sources of impressions I had formed. Then, it was only recently

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that the impact of the principal’s personality came to consciousness. I had already given the conference paper from which this chapter derives. That presentation made no mention of gender. It was only in the course of writing this, running and rerunning the final sequence on DVD in order to check details of the camera’s response to Dr. Haller’s gestures, that I came to see what was hidden in plain sight. The technologies that enable these kinds of work can be seen to have something in common with those employed by filmmakers at the editing stage. What is more certain is that they involve a radical interference with the film and the way in which it was intended to play. In the pre-digital era movies were made to be seen under what we may call cinema conditions. That is, crucially, with no possibility of audience impact on the process of exhibition. As a result the use of time, pace, continuity, was the work of the movie alone. Extracurricular enjoyments apart, the spectator surrendered to the run of the film and, particularly, had no sense that it could be slowed to the pace of thought or the requirements of analysis. Films were not seen in isolated fragments; nobody mistook a trailer for a movie. In the case of High School the viewer would arrive at Dr. Haller’s scene, and then discover it to be Wiseman’s finale, having ceded control over the duration and the succession of sights, sounds, and events. It makes for an experience distinct from that of any ordinary viewing when one acquires the ability to pause, start, freeze, skip forward, or back. We should ask what safeguards should be put on our close readings when the control of time has been stolen from the artist in the interests of study. The temptations are many, and not the least of them is the temptation of cleverness. Distortion threatens when an aspect is isolated from its context to take on perhaps disproportionate weight or implausible significance. When analysis serves a critical purpose—one that goes beyond cataloging to touch on the significance of a work or the achievement of its makers—it must be held answerable to a true experience of the movie. The analyst must ask what case can be advanced with sincerity and conviction. Readiness for conversation and correction is a vital discipline. Still we cannot say that the reference point must always be past viewings, or the memory of them, as that would contradict a large part of the motivation for close work (either by scholars or by enthusiasts). It would rule out new discoveries and fresh realizations. When accurate analysis opens our eyes to new possibilities, or to new data that challenges our understanding, it is a future, better informed encounter with the movie that we have in prospect. Quite often a further viewing will be both possible and enriching. We may then see an offered reading as convincing, revelatory, merely credible or not even that. The question will need to be addressed through lively interrogation of our renewed experience.



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In this process of introspection we shall, at our best, be alert for what we can truthfully say and mean. Sincerity and introspection have not been terms privileged in the philosophy of film, but close reading cannot prosper without them. NOTES 1. Allan T. Sutherland, “Wiseman on Polemic,” an interview with Frederick Wiseman, Sight and Sound, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1978), 82. 2. Liz Ellsworth, Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979), 3. 3. Pauline Kael, The New Yorker (October 18, 1969) in Thomas R. Atkins, Frederick Wiseman (New York: Monarch Press, 1976), 101. 4. Kael in Atkins, Frederick Wiseman, 100. 5. Ophüls in Claude Beylie, Max Ophüls (Paris, France: Editions Sehgers, 1963), 120. 6. Minnelli in Mark Griffin, A Hundred and One Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge, USA: Da Capo Press, 2010), xiv. 7. Barry Keith Grant, Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 58. 8. David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art, 2nd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986), 320. 9. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 2nd edition, 286. 10. Ibid., 287. 11. Ibid., 31. 12. V. F. Perkins, “Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation,” in MOVIE, No. 34/35 (Winter 1990), 1–6. 13. George Wilson, “On Film Narrative and Narrative Meaning,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 221–26. 14. Bordwell and Thompson, Film Art, 2nd edition, 320. 15. Kael in Atkins, Frederick Wiseman, 100. Again it is notable that Kael’s review, with no pretensions to offer analysis, responds to aspects of the movie unremarked in the scholarly literature.

Chapter 22

Cinematic Consciousness Animal Subjectivity, Activist Rhetoric, and the Problem of Other Minds in Blackfish Jennifer L. McMahon

Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s documentary, Blackfish (2013), opens with a red herring. It begins with audio from a 911 call made from SeaWorld. As the audience listens to the emergency plea, the screen vacillates between underwater footage of killer whales and credits appearing on a black background. Toward the end of the initial sequence, an Orange County Fire and Rescue operator asks the second caller for confirmation of his report that a whale had eaten a trainer: “A whale ate one of the trainers?” The caller responds: “That is correct.” The audio ends. Silence follows. A blue-tinted image of an orca swimming alongside a figure in a pool floods the screen. Ominous music and scene framing call to mind the infamous swimmer sequences from Jaws and invoke a sense of claustrophobic doom. Tension builds as the footage switches to a whale violently pushing a person in a wetsuit up from the bottom of a pool. The individual is miniscule compared to the whale. Stomachs tighten and heart rates increase. Viewers anticipate seeing the whale enact the violence reported in the 911 call. Suddenly, the surface of the water is breached. Horror turns to delight. Instead of seeing the orca kill and eat the trainer, the trainer emerges from the depths poised on the nose of the whale. The whale launches him skyward in a breath-taking arch, an orchestrated component of a SeaWorld performance. Threat has become theater. Viewers are stymied by the emotional inversion catalyzed by the opening sequence. It cultivates then confounds their initial assumptions. In the eighty minutes that follow, this trend continues. With her ingenious integration and juxtaposition of different source materials, Cowperthwaite plays—and preys—on certain mental associations and undercuts others in a bid to encourage her audience to oppose keeping orcas in captivity. In an effort to move viewers to the position that orca captivity is morally unacceptable, Cowperthwaite introduces them to the complex nature of orca 395

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consciousness. She uses the documentary, in part, as a cinematic instrument to help viewers appreciate what it might be like to be an orca in captivity. However, as renowned philosopher of mind, Thomas Nagel, discusses in “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” this task is extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, due to what is commonly referred to as the problem of other minds. The problem is not that there are other minds, but that we are not in a position to obtain reliable knowledge regarding the content of other consciousnesses due to the fundamental interiority of subjective experience. Or, put more simply, the fact I cannot get into someone else’s head. As Nagel points out, if one accepts the premise that one of the characteristic features of consciousness is that “basically . . . there is something it is like to be that [particular] organism,”1 then one grants the unique nature of individual awareness. This premise implies that one cannot legitimately know what it is like to be another mind—and thus know it—because one cannot divest oneself of one’s own consciousness and adopt that of the other. Instead, though we normally take it for granted that we can imagine what it is like to be “in the shoes,” or minds, of other conscious entities, Nagel explains that what actually happens when we try to empathize with others is that we imagine “what it would be like for me”2 to be them. Nagel reveals the troubling fact that what many of us take to be a genuine moment of empathic connection is instead one of narcissistic projection. As Nagel’s example of bat consciousness illustrates, projection does not produce genuine understanding of the “alien”3 consciousness in question. Instead, it yields a sort of psychic colonialism wherein we project ourselves into what we imagine to be the circumstances of the other, whether human or non-human. He states, “I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task.”4 As Nagel forces readers to recognize, understanding the subjectivity of bats is “permanently denied to us”5 because “our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination.”6 Not only is the subjective character of bat experience “beyond our capacity to perceive,”7 Nagel warns that the problem of other minds is “not confined to exotic cases [like bats] . . . it exists between one person and another.”8 Subjectively speaking then, other minds are off-limits whether they are human or not. Though cautionary in nature, Nagel’s article is by no means pessimistic. Instead, by demonstrating that “the imagination”9 is not a viable means of developing an appreciation of what it might be like to be or know another form of consciousness, Nagel’s article is positive insofar as it discloses our latent potential to misunderstand other minds and therefore be unintentionally insensitive to other consciousnesses. By disclosing this tendency, he gives us the requisite knowledge to intentionally resist subjective projection.



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Moreover, he calls for the development of “a new method”10—what he refers to as “objective phenomenology”11—that is designed to help us more accurately apprehend the subjective character of other minds, including the minds of animals, an achievement that could help ensure more adequate understanding of those minds and therefore more morally responsive relations to them. While Nagel asserts that this method would not, indeed could not, reproduce the subjective experience of the other, “its goal would be to describe, at least in part, the subjective character of experiences in a form comprehensible to beings incapable of having those experiences.”12 Most importantly, it would help us guard against the pretense that we know the minds of others, and instead encourage constant efforts to rely on objective indicators rather than mental projection to help us appreciate what it might be like to be another form of consciousness. As Nagel notes, consciousness is a “widespread phenomenon”13 that occurs at “many levels of animal life.”14 He states “there is no more doubt that . . . mice or pigeons or whales have [this] experience,”15 and the “moral”16 lesson that can be drawn from his “reflections”17 on bat consciousness is that it is impossible to understand “the experience of another species without [attempting] [to take] up its point of view.”18 As Nagel asserts, however, to take up the point of view of another species such as orcas, we have to “go as far away as [we] can from a strictly human viewpoint,”19 “reducing our dependence on . . . [our] species-specific poin[t] of view”20 in an effort to obtain—as paradoxically as it may sound—as objective a subjective perception as we can manage. In what follows, I shall demonstrate that Blackfish is an example of the objective phenomenology that Nagel recommends. The film helps viewers appreciate the unique subjective features of orca consciousness through the representation of objective aspects of their awareness rather than by compelling viewers to engage primarily in imaginative projection. This insight into orca consciousness is a critical means through which Cowperthwaite’s documentary helps audiences understand that keeping orcas in captivity is morally unacceptable because it is corrosive not only to the physical, but also the mental health of orcas. **** Blackfish utilizes interviews with experts in orca biology, neuroanatomy, and cetacean behavior to help viewers appreciate some of the objective characteristics of orca consciousness. This helps viewers apprehend how captivity, at least in the manner it has historically been practiced by SeaWorld and similar sea-life parks, is an adverse situation for orcas. In particular, whale experts, Dave Duffus, Ken Balcomb, Howard Garrett, and Lori Marino (Senior Lecturer in Neuroscience and Behavioral Biology at Emory University and

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Director of Science for the Nonhuman Rights Project), discuss the inferences they have drawn from decades of research, including observation of captive orcas, study of wild orcas, analysis of whale vocalizations, MRI of live orcas, and postmortem dissection of orca brains. Admitting that we knew very little if anything about orcas—both behaviorally and in terms of consciousness—until relatively recently, they report that the data now overwhelmingly suggests that orcas are highly intelligent marine mammals who are fundamentally social and have the potential for rich cognitive and emotional lives. Garrett reports that wild orcas live the whole of their lives in communities, commonly referred to as pods, which are based on matrilineal relations and commonly range thousands of miles. In nature, he asserts, “adult offspring never leave their mother’s side” and because of the continuity within and exclusivity of individual pods, each pod has a unique culture and language. Marino asserts that her analyses of the orca brain suggest particularly high intelligence. Moreover, the discovery that they possess neural anatomy adjacent to the limbic system (anatomy that humans lack) suggests that they also have “highly elaborated emotional lives” that contribute to the formation of social bonds that may be deeper and “more complex than other mammals, including humans.” Collectively, the testimony provided by these researchers helps illuminate objective facts about the nature of orca consciousness, life practices, and social behavior that suggest that the current practice of keeping orcas either in isolation or in nonfamilial groups, as well as in restrictive physical enclosures where they lack the opportunity to engage in normal behavior such as hunting and swimming long distances and at depth, creates an unnatural situation wherein the animals might predictably become frustrated and vulnerable to problematic mental states including “hyperaggression” and even “psychosis.” What is interesting about the internal structure of Cowperthwaite’s film is that the volume of time allocated to the discussion of the objective character of whale consciousness is relatively small when compared to other elements in the narrative. This means that only a portion of the film qualifies as Nagel’s objective phenomenology. Cowperthwaite has incorporated other narrative elements because the problematic minds that she needs to convince regarding the ethics of orca captivity are humans, not whales. Perhaps owing to our tendency toward what Donna Haraway calls “primary narcissism,”21 and the difficulty we have sympathizing with entities that differ decidedly from us in size, appearance, and/or behavior,22 it is not sufficient for us to know of the existence of orca consciousness in order to act responsibly toward orcas and oppose their captivity. Acting responsibly is confounded further, in this case as it is in so many others, because it requires modifying our present practices, modifications that would require a number of human parties to forgo benefits such as entertainment and income. Ultimately, in order for Cowperthwaite to



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create sufficient interest in surmounting these counterincentives and opposing captivity, she needs to do more than give audiences a glimpse of what is objectively unique about the minds of whales. Though Nagel is right that it may not actually produce an accurate perception of orca consciousness, Cowperthwaite nonetheless needs to encourage viewers to imaginatively simulate orca consciousness in order to generate a feeling of empathy for whales. And cognizant of our predisposition toward self-interest, she also reinforces her case by demonstrating that keeping orcas is detrimental to humans. From a structural or rhetorical standpoint, Cowperthwaite’s documentary film project involves four major elements that interplay with one another to bolster her position that we should not keep orcas in captivity. First, she creates a formal interest in orcas as a species worthy of our sympathy. Second, she undermines audience confidence in the dominant narrative regarding orca captivity, a narrative historically conveyed by oceanaria such as SeaWorld. In addition to garnering audience interest and discrediting the dominant narrative provided by popular oceanaria, she also provides a convincing body of evidence substantiating her claim that orcas should not be kept in captivity. Finally, because humans are influenced as much by emotion as reason, Cowperthwaite includes emotional appeals in order to cement audience distaste for keeping orcas in captivity and heighten their attraction to fostering their preservation in the wild. Clearly, crafting a full-length documentary addressing the plight of captive orcas marks a significant step in raising audience awareness. However, for a documentary to modify public opinion, the public has to be moved by it. Cowperthwaite employs familiar elements such as the dramatic opening sequence to cement audience engagement. Likewise, she incorporates traditional literary elements (familiar to film and fiction alike) such as tragic action and the figure of a sympathetic, but flawed protagonist to catalyze audience interest. For example, though Blackfish’s objective is to influence audience opinion regarding captive orcas generally, it does so by focusing audience attention primarily on the situation of a single whale, Tilikum, the most well-known orca in the SeaWorld collection, as well as his 2010 victim, former SeaWorld head trainer, Dawn Brancheau. Though other whales and other fatalities are discussed in the film, consistent with viewers’ established narrative expectations for heroes and villains, the film focuses on these two figures in order to clearly identify main characters as focal points for audience attention and response. In addition, the narrative employs familiar techniques to first create suspicion, then motivate audience sympathy, for the blackfish, Tilikum. Tilikum is, without question, the central character in the film; he is the blackfish referred to in the title; and the title itself is a critical feature of the complex rhetorical enterprise that is Blackfish. Specifically it activates

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viewers’ cultural associations with the color black (ominous and threatening) and fish (cold-blooded and less intelligent than mammals) to depersonalize and vilify orcas generally, and Tilikum in particular. To the extent this set up runs counter to the popular anthropomorphized narrative of orcas promoted by institutions like SeaWorld and films like Free Willy, the title challenges audiences; it is at odds with the expectations they have been conditioned to have as consumers of SeaWorld’s marketing. Tilikum is not even named until fourteen and a half minutes into the film. This delayed naming reinforces the effect of the title—he is a generic fish. It that facilitates his depersonalization and helps establish him initially as the antagonist. Our perception of this blackfish is bolstered by the ominous opening sequence and the scenes that follow it which introduce Dawn Brancheau first, and in a highly sympathetic fashion, one that conjures negative associations with the cause of her death: the yet unnamed whale. Footage is provided that shows Dawn smiling and interacting playfully with both the camera and the whales. She is an image of vitality and enthusiasm. Audience sympathy is evoked by this sequence and it is and amplified by the knowledge that the whale she rides will kill her. Sympathy is increased even further as viewers are supplied with footage that shows Dawn’s friends and coworkers watching the tape on a laptop that is set on a table; their eyes well with tears. Strategically, Cowperthwaite frames the shot so that it reproduces what the figures at the table would see thereby putting viewers vicariously in their company, and encouraged to simulate their emotion. Whereas the laptop scene conjures audience sympathy for Dawn and antipathy for her attacker, subsequent sequences redirect audience attention to Tilikum and his personal narrative, a “whale story” that deliberately changes audience perception of the orca from a cold-blooded killer to an object of sympathy. By modifying audience awareness the documentary reconditions audience response to Tilikum and blackfish generally. One mechanism designed to enhance audience sympathy for orcas occurs when viewers are told that—contrary to their subconscious associations—the term “blackfish” is not derogatory, but is, instead, a word used by Native Americans to refer to these beings, whom they argue, “should not be meddled with” due to their extraordinary spiritual power. The name that initially conjured negative perception is recast to elevate, indeed spiritualize, its referent. Ironically, and not incidentally, the scene’s success in achieving this effect is reinforced by the tendency that mainstream Americans have to romanticize Native American culture even though the actual treatment of Native Americans remains less than ideal. Here, the narrative turns almost exclusively to Tilikum, giving evidence to support the belief that his experience in captivity is what contributed to his aggressive behavior, not any inherent tendency toward violence. Captured at two, Tilikum was forcibly removed from his mother and placed at the now defunct



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facility, Sealand. Former Sealand trainers testify they never saw Tily as a threat, but were witness to his bullying and serious injury by other captive orcas. They also report that Tily and the other whales were subject to “food deprivation,” undue confinement, and sensory deprivation in metal storage tanks. Tilikum’s move to SeaWorld occurred as a result of the closing of Sealand subsequent to the 1990 death of one of its trainers, Keltie Berne. Berne fell into the pool with Tilikum and the two female orcas and was pulled under and drowned. Though the disclosure of this attack disturbs audiences by revealing the potential for a long-standing pattern of violence, it also “humanizes” Tilikum by integrating him into the now familiar and sympathetic narrative regarding the way in which long-term abuse can create a disposition for violence. The narrative further reinforces the viewer’s positive impression of Tily’s nature by incorporating multiple images of him interacting “playfully” with trainers and with shots of him looking directly at the camera (in effect the viewer) and “coyly” sticking out his tongue. It also documents that Tilikum’s move to SeaWorld did not result in his transition to an improved environment. Instead, former trainer, Jeffrey Ventre, indicates that he was “attacked repeatedly by [SeaWorld’s] female orcas.” Because Tilikum had “nowhere to run” Ventre reports that Tily was kept in isolation most of the time unless he was being used for breeding. These elements quickly transform the seemingly black and white story about the black and white whale. Structural elements in the documentary bring viewers to the point where they see Tily, though clearly dangerous, as no longer the villain, but another victim. With viewer interest in orcas and sympathy for Tilikum established, Cowperthwaite moves to create cognitive dissonance with the dominant narrative that orca captivity is acceptable. Clearly, Cowperthwaite realizes that if mainstream viewers even think about orcas, it is likely that their thinking has been influenced by the narrative provided by institutions like SeaWorld whose profit motive may conflict with their ethical responsibility to the animals in their care. This is confirmed by the film’s interviews with former SeaWorld trainers, the majority of whom report that their decision to apply for jobs as trainers was heavily influenced by visiting SeaWorld and/or watching media that served to glamorize animal training—and, of course, the animals themselves. For the most part, institutions such as SeaWorld strategically resist the language of captivity and instead emphasize in their promotional materials that their fundamental mission is to serve the purpose of wildlife education and conservation, not profit or entertainment; they insist that their institutions house animals responsibly in enriched environments that reproduce aspects of their natural one and are therefore sufficient to meet the animals’ physical and psychological needs. To successfully critique institutions that keep orcas in confinement and to generate interest in changing the existing state of affairs for captive orcas,

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Cowperthwaite has to generate cognitive dissonance in viewers, namely, disbelief in the prevailing narrative regarding orca captivity. To do this she has to help her viewers see that it is a narrative (as opposed to a simple and incontrovertible fact) and then supply sufficient information to show it is an unreliable one. One mechanism that she uses to achieve this end is the prominent integration of actual advertising from the institution best known for its captive orcas: SeaWorld. Though a number of SeaWorld ads are referenced in the course of the film, two are of particular interest here: the “Do You Believe?” ad and the “Making of Believe” ad. When they originally aired on network television, these carefully crafted advertisements inspired audience delight in the extraordinary and relatively new phenomenon of orca exhibition and performance. They capitalized on the thrill of seeing gigantic apex predators dance with human trainers. They present a magical fairy-tale narrative of cooperative coexistence, and more subliminally, of human mastery of animals, that many people want to believe. However, in the context of Cowperthwaite’s documentary these ads subvert their original function, reminding viewers that the story that they have been told about orcas is one they were made to believe through slick ads and sophistry. Their presence reminds audiences that they could answer, “No,” to the question, “Do you believe?” Through the juxtaposition of these ads with her counter-narrative, Cowperthwaite reminds the spectator that if she has not already overthrown her belief in this story, it is time to do so. Disbelief is encouraged by other components in the narrative structure including first-person interviews. As John Jett, one of the former SeaWorld trainers interviewed for the film asserts, SeaWorld, and institutions like it, have a vested economic interest in promoting a particular “storyline” regarding orcas, a storyline whose success is a function of appearing as truth, but not necessarily corresponding with it. The popular narrative is that orcas are “gentle giants” who are safe for their trainers to work with and who enjoy exhibition and the interactions that they have with their human caretakers. However, as another former SeaWorld trainer, Carol Ray, reports, while she “like[d] to think” that she had a personal relationship with the orcas she worked with and that the success she had getting them to perform was based on “something more than the fact [she] [gave] them fish,” that might be “naïve,” and it “may not be the truth.” She says, “I was blind. I was a kid. I didn’t . . . know anything about these animals.” Instead, she and other trainers interviewed said they were given “misinformation” by their supervisors at SeaWorld and “bought into [the story] they told us.” Another significant means that Cowperthwaite uses to discredit the popular narrative legitimizing orca captivity is by actively juxtaposing the popular storyline with a powerful counter-narrative, most notably in the form of testimony from respected researchers. The popular narrative paints the keeping



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of orcas as a form of enlightened stewardship that promotes the greater good of the species (and marine mammals generally) by increasing people’s commitment to conservation. It also tends to promote the view that containment is not an adverse situation for animals, either from a physical or mental health standpoint, and that it may even be superior to life in the wild. Cowperthwaite documents the existence of this narrative through multiple examples of visitor footage of SeaWorld personnel conveying this narrative to guests. Their comments include reports that orca longevity is roughly thirty, dorsal fin collapse is normal, the social groupings established are analogous to the social arrangements found in nature, and that the situation contained whales is indeed “better” than in it is for those the wild because they live longer and are healthier. Cowperthwaite discredits these accounts with testimony from researchers, such as Howard Garrett, who report that whale lifespan in the wild is analogous to that in humans (double what was reported by SeaWorld staff), that dorsal fin collapse—observable in virtually all captive male orcas—occurs in less than 1% of the wild population, and finally, that the social groupings established in captivity are not only unnatural, but potentially lethal, neither reflective, nor supportive of the natural familial organization evident in the wild. Indeed, two highly emotional cases are presented to reinforce the latter claim, particularly the removal of immature calves from their mothers, removal that resulted in unusual vocalizations and behavior that seemed clearly indicative of “grief.” John Hargrove, former trainer witness to the removal of Takara from her mother, Kasatka, states, “How can anyone look at that and think that [it] is morally acceptable?” Testimony from Ray regarding the removal of a second calf, Kalina, from her mother, Katina, serves as further indictment of SeaWorld, as the basis for Kalina’s removal was the fact she was becoming disruptive at performances. The implication: blood may be thicker than water, but money trumps both. These examples also mark a structural point of transition to another means of discrediting the popular narrative, and its most well known proponent, SeaWorld, by illustrating multiple instances that suggest that the institution “was lying” and making decisions based on economic interests, not those of conservation. For example, cetacean expert, Marino, discusses the “hyper-aggression” which occurs regularly when whales from different social groups are placed together in restrictive contexts. Tension in such situations is normal, but in captivity, unlike in the wild, escape is impossible. As Marino notes, frustration, hyper-defensivity, and atypical aggression follow. She contends this problem is not specific to individual animals, but all captive orcas. “It’s not just Tilikum,” she says. Instead, she maintains that all captive whales, even those bred in captivity, are “traumatized” by confinement and states provocatively that they are “ticking time bombs.”

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On Marino’s testimony, the narrative transitions to discussion of specific cases of captive whale aggression, including aggression against humans. They include the 1987 John Sillick case, the 2006 Ken Peters incident, and the fatal attack in 2009 on Alexis Martinez at Loro Parque. Samantha Berg, former SeaWorld trainer, comments that despite over thirty reports of serious whale aggression toward humans prior to her hire at SeaWorld, none were disclosed to her by supervisors, a fact that suggests she was not adequately informed of the risk of working as a trainer. With regards to Tilikum, our focal point, Berg reports that in retrospect she believes that SeaWorld knew there “was reason to exercise caution” with him and “knew more than they were telling.” This assertion is supported by the testimony of Ventre, who reports that he was ordered by his supervisors to destroy videotape of a performance where Tilikum lunged at another trainer. Ventre states that Tilikum’s official SeaWorld profile even noted a tendency to lunge—a report the film provides—and which suggests SeaWorld knew he was a danger. Collectively, this testimony not only undercuts the positive narrative promoted by SeaWorld, it discredits the organization itself. A final technique that Cowperthwaite uses to cement the cognitive dissonance generated by the aforementioned structures is the discussion of the Occupational Health and Safety Association (OSHA) case against SeaWorld, particularly the integration of animations of court testimony offered by then SeaWorld director, Kelly Clark. Clark’s commentary (and visual appearance) contrasts sharply with that of whale expert, and OSHA witness, Duffus, the former trainers who worked with him, and other experts such as Marino. In her sworn testimony Clark denies Tilikum’s tendency toward aggression. She also denies that SeaWorld has any affiliation with the whales or staff at Loro Parque, site of the 2009 attack on Martinez, which resulted in his death. However, Cowperthwaite juxtaposes Clark’s testimony with sources that document that Martinez trained at SeaWorld within one year of his death and that all of the orcas at Loro Parque were obtained from SeaWorld. Duffus asserts that Clark was either painfully “ignorant” of things she should have known about or telling a “bald-faced lie.” The fact that Clark is represented in animated form and intentionally left faceless reinforces the negative impression generated by the inconsistency between her testimony and that of multiple other experts and employees at SeaWorld. SeaWorld’s credibility is further undercut when it is revealed that contrary to widely accepted professional standards that would discourage the continued breeding of an animal with a documented history of aggression, it is noted that at least up to the point of the film’s release, Tilikum remained a major source of revenue for SeaWorld as a breeding bull and 54% of the orcas in the SeaWorld collection traced their lineage directly to him. To inspire audiences to oppose orca captivity, Cowperthwaite has to build a rational case against it, not just inspire audiences to realize that the popular



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storyline they’ve bit onto hook, line, and sinker, isn’t necessarily true. And Cowperthwaite combines a variety of elements to succeed in this regard. Arguably, the very form she adopts, documentary, is part of her appeal. Generally speaking, owing to the narrative expectations that are established in and through our exposure to various media, we take documentaries to be true. We regard the genre as more credible than others. Thus, by using this platform, Cowperthwaite starts with a form that audiences are inclined to accept and is therefore more persuasive. Cowperthwaite builds on this foundation by employing other elements in the narrative that audiences associate with truth telling and verifiability: scientific testimony and journalism. As noted, the narrative relies heavily on remarks provided by experts in whale biology and behavior and commentary anchored in documented empirical research. To the extent the findings of the experts interviewed counter the claim that orcas can flourish in captivity and are safe to work with in that context, they not only discredit the claim that keeping orcas is acceptable and healthy for the animals, they also help establish it as “inhumane” to the orcas and dangerous for human handlers. The presence of consistent testimony from multiple credentialed researchers reinforces the strength of Cowperthwaite’s position by illustrating the opposition to orca captivity and concerns about hyper-aggression are not the eccentric opinion of a single academic outlier, but the findings of a respected, highly credentialed body of scientists. The veracity of the scientific testimony is further reinforced by the integration of official documents and reports corroborating the aforementioned empirical claims. In particular, the integration of news reports reinforces audience’s perception of narrative’s credibility because audiences associate news reports with truth. For example, the film juxtaposes reports where journalists interviewed SeaWorld employees subsequent to attacks on trainers. These staff characterized the incidents as “accidents” resulting from “trainer error.” However, the integration of these news reports coupled with testimony from other trainers and footage of the incidents themselves discredit the claims that the trainers were responsible. Cowperthwaite’s position is reinforced further by the testimony offered by individuals who worked firsthand with specific whales discussed in the documentary. They include Samanatha Berg, Dean Gomersall, John Hargrove, John Jett, Jeffrey Ventre, and Carol Ray. A significant portion of the narrative is constructed from the testimony of these former trainers, several of whom worked directly with Tilikum, the narrative’s focal point. Throughout the narrative, the testimony given by the trainers reinforces the film’s position that the keeping of orcas is “inhumane” and the testimony is consistent across the group. This reinforces the audience’s impression of the veracity of the position. Moreover, the interweaving of speakers in the narrative through

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repeated quick cuts from one speaker to another bolsters this impression. This technique, which is not evident in other interviews in the film, creates the sense of a single line of testimony spoken through their combined accounts. Another standard element in a rational argument is the recognition and refutation of a dissenting voice. In Blackfish the dissenter to Cowperthwaite’s position comes in the form of Mark Simmons. Former senior trainer of SeaWorld Orlando, Simmons acknowledges that Tilikum was a “hazard,” but vehemently denies that other orcas are a threat. However, the film’s discussion of serious and fatal attacks on trainer by other whales, including an extended sequence detailing the attack against Simmons’ coworker, Ken Peters, discredit his claim. The film further undercuts Simmons’ authority by presenting him as someone who still “believes” SeaWorld’s established storyline. When his is quoted saying passionately, “What if there were no SeaWorlds?” the narrative structure sets him up to look like a naïve believer of the narrative that cetacean conservation could not exist without it. In additional to rational means Blackfish uses a variety of emotional appeals to persuade its audience to oppose orca captivity. Some of these have been alluded to already. Additional ones include extended and uninterrupted treatment of interviews describing fatal attacks, inclusion of sustained footage that is either illustrative of emotion or likely to elicit it, and the juxtaposition of dated SeaWorld advertisements with more recent and highly evocative footage. For instance, the interviews of witnesses to Keltie Berne’s death are an excellent example of the way in which Cowperthwaite uses extended footage of personal testimony to command audience emotion. Here, subsequent to the presentation of tape of Berne smiling and talking about her life goals, Corinne Cowell and Nadine Kallen describe the attack on Berne in excruciating detail. Their interview concludes with them offering not only condolences to Keltie’s family but teary apologies that they couldn’t save her. Their testimony not only supports the rational case that captivity compromises the mental health of orcas and makes them dangerous, it appeals decisively to viewers’ emotions, ensuring the audience fully appreciates the tragedy of Berne’s death. This technique is used again to arouse sympathy for Tilikum when Jett reports, his emotion visibly evident, that he stayed on at SeaWorld because he was concerned about Tily. But it isn’t only interviews that serve to arouse emotions. As mentioned previously, compelling footage of the whales also does. In particular, the footage of Kasutka subsequent to the removal of her calf is heart wrenching. Coupled with the voice-over that reports that her vocalizations were longrange efforts to locate her missing calf, her cries arouse viewer sympathy and invite them to imagine the emotions they would experience if robbed of their progeny. Arguably motivated to build on that effect, Cowperthwaite offers equally evocative footage of the Ken Peter’s incident, where Kasutka



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becomes the attacker and Peters her victim as she grabs his feet and repeatedly takes him to the bottom up the pool, sometimes for over a minute at a time. Not disclosing in advance whether Peters will die, Cowperthwaite gives viewers extended footage of the event, giving them ample opportunity to simulate the anxiety experienced by Peters. However, due to influence the prior sequence, viewers also have the benefit of an equally evocative narrative that could explain Kasutka’s behavior. This time, rather than encouraging unequivocal sympathy for the plight of the captive whales, the sequence also elicits anxiety about them in an effort to heighten concern over the danger they represent to humans when kept in confinement. Blackfish also plays on emotion when it juxtaposes another SeaWorld ad with moving personal testimony. The dated advertisement features a family that has just returned from SeaWorld. They comment cheerily upon the great time they had at SeaWorld. The ad concludes with the son, a boy reminiscent of Beaver Cleaver, reporting how fun it was when the whales splashed the crowd. “Whammo, you’re a goner!,” he laughs. Immediately the narrative cuts to a series of sequences documenting fatal orca attacks including the “suspicious” death of visitor, Daniel Dukes, in Tilikum’s pool, and the fatal attack on Alexis Martinez. The treatment of the Martinez case is extensive. Martinez’s mother and fiancé are interviewed at length. Like the interview with Cowell and Kallen, their interviews are emotion laden and extremely moving. The pain immediately evident in their faces contrasts sharply with the contrived character and dated appearance of the ad. Not only do audiences imaginatively simulate the grief evident, but they are motivated to feel outrage as Martinez’s fiancé reports he was overworked and that neither the facility nor its staff “were ready” for the orcas. In the film’s final series of scenes, attention is returned to Tilikum, our tragic figure, who, while depersonalized earlier in the narrative, is now personalized emphatically—even humanized. As Jett explains, today, in the wake of Brancheau’s death, concerns about safety and public relations, and the OSHA ruling prohibiting trainers from being in the water without a barrier, Tilikum now spends most of his time in isolation, alone for hours each day “floating lifeless[ly]” in his tank. Jett testifies that he hopes in the future we will look back at the practice of keeping whales as “barbaric.” He says he does not want his daughter to see whales kept this way and asserts it not the way we “should treat our kin.” The film closes with Jett’s sentiment echoed and the alternative to captivity illustrated: the former trainers who have figured prominently in the narrative go whale-watching and have the good fortune to bear witness to a group of orcas in their natural habitat. Ventre’s testimony ends the film: he says that he “was so honored” to see the wild orcas and confesses he was glad he had sunglasses on because the experience brought him to tears. Even reporting

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the event in retrospect, he wipes his eyes. Viewers of the film are no doubt cued to emulate him; having started the film with suspicion regarding a captive whale, they are now, at the end, encouraged to experience awe observing orcas in the wild. Having analyzed the persuasive structure of Cowperthwaite’s documentary, one can appreciate its design while still asking: Is it telling the truth? As we have discussed, the film is a carefully constructed rhetorical enterprise—a work of (now celebrated) documentary advocacy, similar to the Oscar-winning film about dolphins, The Cove (2009). In a remarkable coda to its power as a persuasive work of documentary filmmaking, SeaWorld announced in 2016 that it will “cease breeding killer whales” and would “phase out” its killer whale performance, thereby confirming that this will be the last generation of orcas the company holds in captivity.23 To study how the film achieved this impact, we may look at the ways Cowperthwaite’s Blackfish combines a judicious combination of empirical research, news clips, and witness testimonials concurrent with powerful emotional appeals in order to persuade its audience that orcas should not be kept in captivity. However, just like the SeaWorld ads it works to discredit, Blackfish is structured to sell. The question is whether it is truth that is being marketed. As New York Times film commentator, Michael Norman, states, “The problem is that film may be the worst medium to talk about truth because every film is a lie, even a documentary. The lie begins as soon as the first cut is made and time and reality are altered. The lie continues when drama is added, a neat beginning, middle and end . . . film romanticizes whatever it portrays.”24 Blackfish is not exempt from the concerns raised in Norman’s commentary. It is strategically designed to move viewers from a state of relative ignorance of (and likely indifference to) the plight of captive orcas to a point where they assent that keeping orcas in captivity is morally wrong. From Norman’s perspective the interest that Cowperthwaite has in convincing viewers of this position may result in her offering an account that is slanted in the same way SeaWorld’s “storyline” was skewed to bolster its agenda. Clearly, there are structural elements present in Blackfish that are designed to persuade audiences to adopt a particular perspective. One of Blackfish’s objectives, it seems, is to inspire viewers to blacklist SeaWorld and other oceanaria. Though the film raises legitimate concerns about the SeaWorld organization, its prior practices and current protocols, it also paints an unequivocally negative portrait of the institution. The SeaWorld described in Blackfish is an unfeeling corporate monolith, one concerned almost exclusively with profit and not genuinely interested in the welfare of its animals or employees. While it is rhetorically strategic to portray SeaWorld in this fashion, the portrait is almost certainly reductive. It simplifies and misrepresents a complex organization that may continue to have serious problems, but also



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has contributed in significant ways to marine mammal education, research and conservation. That said, the argument presented in Blackfish is not just smoke and mirrors. While Cowperthwaite uses a variety of rhetorical techniques to enhance the persuasiveness of her position, such techniques does not falsify it. Indeed, the evidence at the core of the narrative is compelling and ratified by scientific study. It suggests that captivity is corrosive to the physical and mental health of orcas given their physical needs and their sophisticated consciousness. It also suggests that interacting with captive whales poses an increased risk to handlers due to the predictable increase in frustration in captivity. In addition, to the extent the film reveals the existence of powerful incentives—primarily economic—behind orca captivity, it discloses the increased potential for dissemination of information (and misinformation) by parties that profit from continuance of the practice. While it is possible that Cowperthwaite and her allies are subject to the same charge, it is not as clear what these incentives would be; documentary filmmaking is something of a metonym for not making money. It would be an unexpected discovery to find Cowperthwaite profiting fiscally from her expose of SeaWorld and her call, now heeded by that organization, to cease keeping orcas captive. To be sure, critical attention should be applied to Blackfish and similar examples of exposé journalism. This ensures that works that purport to truth don’t take liberties with it in an effort to push an agenda. However, we should not assume that the fact that a work has an agenda means it is perpetrating a lie. An analogy presented by contemporary philosopher, Peggy Zeglin Brand is illustrative here. In her article, “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” Brand discusses the way in which political art differs from other types, particularly in the way in which it is both expressive of a particular interest and interested in promoting that perspective. Blackfish is clearly an example of political art. As philosophers have noted for centuries, though art can be used to deceive, it can also help us arrive at truth. Brand reminds readers that truth is an elusive thing, one that is often hard to see because of the limited nature of our subjective perception. She introduces the analogy of lenses, arguing that works that present different perspectives help us move toward the goal of truth, a goal that Nagel himself says we may only be able to approximate.25 According to Brand, by looking at things from a variety of different perspectives we get the “fullest and fairest”26 view of things we can. Though Blackfish contains its own elements of bias, it succeeds in offering audiences a new perspective on the plight of captive orcas. The film itself becomes one of Brand’s lenses, one that helps move viewers to a fuller appreciation of orcas by providing objective information about orca consciousness, but also by inciting imaginative identification and emotional engagement. As contemporary research in cognitive science suggests,27 though imaginative

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identification may not produce genuine understanding of other minds, the practice does enhance our emotional allegiance with them, and this is not unimportant. As Iris Murdoch suggests in the Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts, the way in which the presence a kestrel in her case, or a whale, engages our imagination produces a sort of “unselfing,”28 that is epistemically and morally productive. Rather than export us into the mind of the other, it pushes us to expand the horizons of our own, and move perhaps toward the “moral inclusivity”29 that Marino recommends and the “new and inclusive ethic”30 that well-known animal advocate, Marc Bekoff supports. To be sure, it is not easy to determine all that this ethic and its inclusivity implies; it is complicated, especially in light of the fact that our lives are intertwined with those of many other species. When it comes to orcas, it seems reasonably clear that the basic imperatives that we “do no harm”31 and treat others with “respect and dignity”32 are not achievable so long as we persist in the practice of keeping orcas in captivity. And it is not because organizations like SeaWorld are the villain, as Blackfish seems eager to confirm. Instead, it is because when one attends to the objective character and needs of the species and the objective features of confinement, it is apparent that even the most conscientious care-taking situation is not conducive to the long-term physical and mental health of the animals. Through Cowperthwaite’s documentary Blackfish audiences learn enough about orca consciousness to know that with the exception of temporally limited confinement needed to facilitate rescue or rehabilitation, for the present time, the general practice of breeding and exhibiting captive orcas is morally problematic and should be disallowed. NOTES 1. Thomas Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 4 (October 1974), 435–450; content accessed at http://organizations.utep.edu/portals/1475/nagel_bat.pdf (April 2, 2016), 1–9, 2. 2. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 3. 3. Ibid., 2. 4. Ibid., 3. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., 2. 7. Ibid., 3. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 7. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid.



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13. Ibid., 1. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 2. 16. Ibid., 5. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 4. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid., 5. 21. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 11. 22. Lori Marino, “Humans, Dolphins, and Moral Inclusivity,” in The Politics of Species, ed. Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 104. 23. Sewell Chan, “Sea World Says It Will End Breeding of Killer Whales,” The New York Times (March 17, 2016), nytimes.com. 24. Michael Norman, “Carnage and Glory, Legends and Lies,” The New York Times (July 7, 1996), nytimes.com. 25. Nagel, “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” 4. 26. Peggy Zeglin Brand, “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998), 155. 27. David Comer Kidd and Emanuele Castano, “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Theory of Mind,” Sciencexpress (October 3, 2013), sciencemag.org. 28. Iris Murdoch, “The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts,” in Aesthetics, ed. Korsmeyer, 198. 29. Marino, “Humans, Dolphins, and Moral Inclusivity,” 104. 30. Marc Bekoff, “Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why?” in The Politics of Species, ed. Corbey and Lanjouw, 26. 31. Ibid., 25. 32. Ibid.

Chapter 23

Understanding (and) the Legacy of the Trace Reflections After Carroll, Currie, and Plantinga Keith Dromm Night and Fog (Nuit et brouillard, 1955), a documentary film about the Holocaust by director Alain Resnais, begins with a color shot of an empty farm field that extends to the horizon. The camera holds on this shot for a few seconds and then moves down until it is behind a barbed-wire fence that partially obscures the scene in the distance. There is then a cut to a series of shots in which the camera moves across a landscape of more barbed-wired fences, now clearly electrified, which are shot at oblique and perpendicular angles to the camera’s frame. The narration identifies the landscape as a former concentration camp. The shots conclude with a cut to black-and-white stockfootage of uniformed Nazis, beginning with an image of soldiers marching in formation. This opening sequence is affecting, elegantly edited, and rich with significance, but its function is difficult to explain according to an influential, perhaps the dominant, way of defining the genre of documentary film. It is a widely held view (one I will cite and address in what follows) that the distinguishing characteristic of documentary films is that they make assertions; whereas fiction films only present us with imagined events loosely modeled on reality, documentary films make claims about reality. The primary purpose of documentary films, according to this interpretation, is to tell us truths about our world, and so most everything that takes place within them is in the service of that purpose. Yet, the assertions made by the opening shots of Night and Fog—if there are any, including within its narration—comprise only a small part of what is happening in them. To take the film’s primary purpose to be the making of assertions about the Holocaust explains very little of what is going on in this opening sequence, as well as the rest of the film, which is dominated by graphic archival images of the Holocaust’s victims. I will call the view that holds that the making of assertions is the essential feature of documentary films the assertoric view. I will argue that this view 413

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fails to explain common features of documentary films. In fact, it accounts for, at most, only a part of what takes place in documentary films. Films in general are not even a good medium for making assertions. The most efficient vehicle for making an assertion is the linguistic sentence. There is typically much more taking place in documentary films than the sentences that are uttered by its actors and narrators, might appear on its screens, or are implied by its images. While film can certainly be used to make assertions, the aural and visual resources of films are wasted on them. I propose that there is another more central goal of most documentary films. Rather than just making assertions about their subject matter, documentary films aim to promote understanding of it. I will be drawing on the recent work of some prominent philosophers who have been advocating for greater attention by philosophers to understanding. Much of modern philosophy has been more concerned with another cognitive value, knowledge. Analogously, philosophical writings on documentary films have focused on their ability to contribute to our knowledge by communicating truths. Both domains would be enhanced by expanded concentration on understanding. In the first part of this chapter, I summarize some examples of the assertoric view of documentary film. As we will see, there is some variety to the theories that I am labeling as assertoric. I begin by discussing two of the most well-known examples of this view: the definitions of documentary film offered by Noël Carroll and Gregory Currie. I will also discuss the important ideas of Carl Plantinga. While Plantinga’s theory of documentary film avoids some of the problems with the definitions offered by Carroll and Currie, it is still representative of the assertoric view. In the second part, I summarize some recent research in philosophy on understanding. I will also draw upon Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussions of how understanding is taught. I will employ all of this in the third part to show that understanding can explain the purpose of creative elements in documentary films, like those employed in the opening shots of Night and Fog, a purpose left unaccounted for by the assertoric view. In the fourth part I examine a common element of documentary films that seems to be in direct contradiction to their truth telling goals, namely, reenactments. I summarize my conclusions in the fifth part. **** Noël Carroll and Gregory Currie do not intend their definitions to fit exactly our ordinary use of “documentary film.” Yet, they are still supposed to bear some relation to that use, as well as illuminate it in some way. So, I will evaluate how well their definitions cover the range of films ordinarily called documentary. I am especially interested in how much of the genre they are able to explain, that is, with how complete their definitions are.



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Currie’s definition is intended for an “ideal documentary,”1 or what he also calls a “pure documentary.”2 Such a film would consist mostly of photographic images, and those images would, as Currie puts it, be about what they are of. Every image is about something, that is, it is a representation. Photographic images are also—what Currie calls—“traces” of something. A trace is casually induced by its subject. Besides photographs, Currie cites as examples footprints and death masks. These are like photographs in that they visually resemble their subjects, although that is not necessary for something being a trace.3 What is essential to a trace, and what distinguishes it from what Currie calls “testimony,” is that it is created independently of beliefs through a purely mechanical process. A trace can still be about something other than what it is a trace of. While an image of Werner Herzog in his documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) is both about and of Werner Herzog, in Jack Reacher (2012), where Herzog plays a sadistic crime boss named “The Zec,” the images are traces of Herzog, but they are about The Zec. According to Currie, for a film to be a documentary, it must “consist substantially”4 of photographic images that only represent what they are traces of (we will call these “historical traces”). The narrative of a film determines what its images are about. In a fiction film, the narrative can make the images be about almost anything. In an “ideal documentary,” the narrative maintains conformity between what the images are traces of and what they represent. Currie makes it a further condition that ideal documentaries have only “narratives that are asserted.”5 This is meant to exclude from the category of documentary a possible film that contains no images of actors or sets, but only photographs of actual locations with a voice-over narration that describes fictional events occurring in those places.6 In such a film, those images would still be about what they are of, yet they would function merely as the backdrop to a fictional story. In a documentary film, both the narrative and the images must be about reality. The condition of an asserted narrative clearly puts Currie’s definition within the assertoric views of documentary film. But the central condition that its images be historical traces also aligns it with such views. According to Currie, documentary films are “bringers of knowledge,”7 and they make a unique contribution to our knowledge by offering us historical traces of the events they are about. If a film does not aim to expand our knowledge in this way, then, according to Currie, it is not a documentary film. Throughout this chapter I will challenge the identification of assertion as the distinguishing characteristic of documentary films, but I will briefly mention here some other problems with Currie’s definition. First of all, there are problems with its extension. The definition is too inclusive, but in ways that (oddly) Currie endorses. For example, Currie says that game shows, interview shows, and sports programs, such as the broadcast of a football

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game, would be documentaries according to his definition.8 This stretches the extension of documentary in uncustomary ways. The claim is also overly exclusive by disowning films that comprised mostly reenactments or other images that are not historical traces. This includes a large number of films that have commonly been considered documentaries, including almost all films about events or persons that preceded the advent of photography.9 There is another sort problem with Currie’s definition.10 According to his definition, we could not know whether a film was a documentary without knowing the causal pedigree of its images. This entails that even a filmmaker could be mistaken about the genre of her film, for example, if she has made a compilation film, but unknown to her the stock footage she used does not actually consist of traces of the events her film is about, but of ones visually indistinguishable from them.11 Noël Carroll’s definition of documentary film escapes this problem by making the generic status of films dependent on the filmmakers’ intentions. As long as the filmmaker has the appropriate intention, then what he makes will be a documentary. Carroll also does not require that the film be composed exclusively of historical traces, so his definition is more inclusive by allowing for documentary films that consist of reenactments or other nontrace representations. His definition of what he calls “films of presumptive assertion”12 is based on “an intention-response model of communication.”13 This approach to defining documentary film, derived from Paul Grice’s intention-based semantics,14 focuses on film’s status as a type of communication and the role intention plays in producing effective communication. According to Carroll, a filmmaker intends the audience to respond in a certain way to her film. For this to be an act of communication (and not, for example, an instance of manipulation), she must also intend that the audience recognize her intention and respond in a particular way on the basis of that recognition. Consequently, audience response is not emotional or otherwise noncognitive; rather, it is directed towards the meaningful signs that comprise the film or, in other words, its propositional content. In the case of a documentary film, the filmmaker’s intention is for the audience to see the propositional content of the film as asserted. Carroll calls this the “assertoric stance,” and the intention that elicits it the “assertoric intention,”15 and he devotes a lot of space to explaining the difference between the stance we take toward this intention and the one that generates fictional films. In both cases, the audience entertains the content being presented. In the case of fiction film, the audience is meant to entertain the content as “unasserted thought”; for the documentary film, on the other hand, they are meant to entertain the content as “asserted thought.” It is difficult to see the difference between these two modes of entertaining a thought, for they seem qualitatively the same. To help clarify the difference, then, we might add to the conditions of the assertoric stance



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the recognition by the audience that the filmmaker wants them to consider, at least, believing in the thought. In order to know that a film is a documentary, according to Carroll, requires only grasping the filmmaker’s assertoric intention. Investigations into the history of its photographic images are not required (i.e., whether they are actually traces of what they are about). According to Carroll, these intentions can be signaled internally or externally to the film. For example, a documentary could begin with text that announces that it is a documentary or the publicity material used to promote the film could make the filmmakers’ intentions clear. It is by means of the signaling of what Carroll calls the “categorical intentions” of the filmmakers that we determine a film’s genre.16 Despite the greater inclusiveness of Carroll’s definition, Carl Plantinga has identified something important missing from Carroll’s definition of documentary films, as well as Currie’s. He explains what this gap is by distinguishing between two ways a documentary film can communicate. The film can make assertions that have “specific propositional content.”17 This is what Plantinga calls the saying aspect of documentary films. But films can do more than just say; they can also show. The photographic and aural images need not be used to assert anything specific. As Plantinga explains, they can be used as “phenomenological approximations”18 of events, which instead of asserting specific propositions about the events, can “provide a sense of the look, sound, or overall perceptual experience” of them.19 These approximations can be provided by historical traces of the events, but they can also, and sometimes even more effectively, be provided by reenactments or digital simulations. The definitions proffered by Carroll and Currie do not account for showing as a significant feature of documentary film, even though showing is a distinguishing aspect of films in general. Carroll’s definition, in particular, treats documentary film as just another medium for asserting propositions and ignores the unique features of the medium; his definition would seem to recognize any film in which assertions are made as documentary film, even a video capture of a classroom lecture. Meanwhile, Currie’s emphasis on photographs as traces does acknowledge a unique capacity of film, but it has been exploited less by documentary films and more by home movies and surveillance camera footage. Yet, even though Plantinga’s theory entails an extension for the concept of documentary that conforms better to our ordinary usage, he also tends to overemphasize the role assertion plays in documentary films. He describes the documentary film as an “asserted veridical representation.”20 Plantinga departs from Carroll and Currie in recognizing that the assertions documentary images convey need not be specific, other than the sheer assertion that they are, in fact, veridical images. As Plantinga put its, the propositions that a viewer might glean from a film are “underdetermined” by the intentions of

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the filmmakers. He also acknowledges that a filmmaker’s purpose in showing an image may have nothing to do with assertions; the filmmakers may only intend to approximate the experience of the portrayed events. However, home movies, pornography, and YouTube cat videos provide “phenomological approximations.” Plantinga does not assign any more general purpose to documentary films that would distinguish them from these examples. Carroll and Currie explicitly attempt to distance themselves from the succinct and classic definition of documentary that has been widely attributed to one of the leading pioneers of the genre, John Grierson, who supposedly— besides coining the term “documentary”—described documentary films as “the creative treatment of actuality [or reality].”21 While underdeveloped as a definition, it succeeds in drawing attention to common features of documentary films. The assertions they make are heavily adorned, and the films typically do more than merely show us reality. By taking understanding to be a goal of documentary films, we can better account for these creative techniques and other features of documentary films. **** Modern philosophers have paid far less attention to understanding than to knowledge, despite the obvious affinities between the two concepts.22 However, over the last decade or so, several prominent philosophers have encouraged their peers to devote more attention to understanding. Some of them have even recommended that understanding replace knowledge as the primary focus of epistemology. In their defense for this shift, they have cited historical precedent, arguing that episteme, the root word for “epistemology,” carried a sense in the writings of ancient philosophers that is closer to our contemporary use of “understanding,” rather than “knowledge.”23 These same philosophers make a different and stronger case for this change of focus when they argue that understanding is the ultimate goal of all our cognitive endeavors, rather than just the accumulation of discrete items of knowledge. Among these philosophers, Linda Zagzebski has observed that “the word ‘understanding’ is used loosely, with a wide variety of meanings, and usually without any notice of ambiguity.”24 The sense of understanding that concerns these philosophers, and which I think is a central goal of most documentary films, is understanding as a cognitive achievement. Sometimes “understanding” is used to indicate something less than knowledge, such as a false but warranted belief, for example, as when someone remarks to another who has arrived late for an appointment, “I understood that you were going to be here earlier.” Here understanding indicates a putatively well-founded belief that has turned out to be false. However, understanding in the sense of “cognitive success,”25 as Catherine Elgin describes it, is something more



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than knowledge, and different from knowledge in several other ways that we will review. A good illustration of understanding as cognitive success, as well as how it differs from knowledge, is provided by cases of linguistic comprehension. Consider a situation in which a reader does not understand a sentence because it is written in a language in which she is not fluent, yet one that she has studied. Let us say she knows all of the relevant vocabulary and grammatical rules that would be required for understanding the sentence. Despite this knowledge, after an initial reading of the sentence, she does not understand it. If a translation of the sentence into her own language were provided to her, she would then know the meaning of the sentence. However, this knowledge would not automatically result in her understanding the sentence. She might use the translation, along with her knowledge of grammar and vocabulary, to arrive at an understanding of the sentence. Alternatively, an understanding of it might just occur suddenly with no such effort (although it would still reflect her grasp of the relevant grammar and vocabulary). In both cases, her understanding would entail her knowing the sentence’s meaning. Yet, the two concepts are still distinct, because, as we have seen, she can arrive at that knowledge independently of understanding. This example of linguistic comprehension can help illustrate at least three important aspects of understanding. First of all, while knowledge can describe a relation between a knower and a single proposition, understanding, as Elgin explains, is “a cognitive relation to a fairly comprehensive, coherent body of information.”26 Even though our example above concerns a reader’s attempt to grasp the meaning of a single sentence, her eventual understanding of the sentence draws upon, and reflects her understanding of, the entire array of grammatical rules and vocabulary that are employed in interpreting the sentence. What she really reveals by understanding that sentence is an understanding, at least partial, of the language in which it is written. One can know the meaning of a sentence without knowing any other part of the language or understanding any of it; the person could simply be told the translation of the sentence. To understand that sentence, or anything else, requires relating to many more pieces of information. Second, as Elgin also points out, understanding does not consist of merely believing in the conjunction of the discrete items that make up that body of information27; it also requires seeing how those items fit together. Zagzebski describes understanding as “seeing the relation of parts to other parts and perhaps even the relation of parts to a whole.”28 Jonathan Kvanvig expresses a similar view of understanding when he writes that it involves “an internal grasping or appreciation of how the various elements in a body of information are related to each other in terms of explanatory, logical, probabilistic, and other kinds of relations.”29 According to this holistic view of understanding,

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someone can know a body of information in its entirety without understanding it.30 Understanding does not consist in merely possessing that body of information in the form of beliefs, in the same way that understanding a language involves much more than the memorization of vocabulary and grammatical rules. Understanding consists of relating those items of information to each other in complex and highly nuanced ways. In this respect, at least, understanding is more than knowledge; as Zagzebski puts it: “Understanding deepens our cognitive grasp of that which is already known.”31 Third, the criteria for understanding are more complex than those for knowledge. All that we typically need in order to attribute knowledge to a person is that person articulating a true proposition and signaling his or her belief in it. But the criteria for the possession of understanding are similar to those for the possession of a skill. In fact, Zagzebski says that “understanding is a state gained by learning an art or skill, a techne.”32 To demonstrate the possession of a skill involves its sustained application over a variety of cases. Whether our reader’s demonstrated understanding of that sentence would be enough for us to attribute understanding of the language to her would depend on the sentence’s complexity and novelty, but typically we would require her to demonstrate understanding of a large number and variety of other sentences. So, what is demonstrated by understanding is the ability to use the knowledge or information over which the understanding extends. As Elgin puts it: “In addition to grasping connections, an understander needs an ability to use the information at her disposal.”33 Daniel Wilkenfeld says that understanding is exhibited by the ability to “utilize” or “manipulate” what is understood.34 For example, I may know many geological facts; to understand the field of geology, however, I have to know much more than those facts. I need to be able to associate each thing I know with every other. The latter is demonstrated by my ability to make inferences from what I know, incorporate new items of information into what I already know, and so on. Merely my ability to cite many geological facts does not demonstrate an understanding of geology; I would have to show that I was able to do something with that knowledge. Given the complexity of our criteria for understanding, as well as the diversity of its objects, the teaching of understanding is not nearly as straightforward as the teaching of knowledge. In fact, it might even be incorrect to speak of the teaching of understanding. Whereas we can teach knowledge simply by communicating facts and, if necessary, demonstrating their truth, efforts to inculcate understanding are less direct. Such lessons sometime involve the teacher demonstrating the skills that are criteria of understanding until the student catches on and displays those skills himself.35 Discussions of this sort of instruction in understanding are prominent in the early parts



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of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. Understanding is achieved in this way through “examples and practice.”36 Wittgenstein makes it clear that there is no more direct way, so to speak, to inculcate understanding. As he puts it, from the perspective of the teacher: “And when I do this I do not communicate less to him than I know myself.”37 All that she does, and all that she can do, is show her understanding in the most perspicuous way she can imagine. Besides this technique of, what I will call, novice training in understanding, understanding can be inculcated by a clear presentation of what is to be understood, in particular, all of the relations whose grasp is a condition of understanding. This is effective when some bias or other obfuscation prevents seeing those relations. Such a method is employed by Wittgenstein to clear away the philosophical confusions that inhibit understanding. It achieves, what he calls in a couple of places, a “perspicuous representation” (which is capable of producing, as he puts it, “just that understanding which consists in ‘seeing connexions’”).38 I will discuss in detail later some examples of this method. I contend that documentary films are similarly capable of contributing to our understanding of their subject matter by showing it in either of these two ways. Neither way of showing is of the same sort that Plantinga finds in documentary films; at least, their purpose extends beyond merely approximating a visual experience. It can consist of invoking understanding through its exhibition; this is what I am calling novice training in understanding, and I will discuss examples of it in the next section. The other method, perspicuous representation, will be discussed in the fourth section of this chapter. **** By taking a primary goal of documentary film to be producing understanding in the audience, we can account for many more of the common features of documentary films than the assertoric view, including the creative techniques and styles that align documentary films with other types of art. Zagzebski writes on the way works of art produce understanding. Although her remarks on this topic are brief, they encourage us to see that these creative techniques and styles are not mere aesthetic adornments; they have cognitive value and cannot be separated from the factual content without loss: “The technai of art, music, and literature can produce a state that has epistemic value. The arts enable us to penetrate reality more deeply than we could without them.”39 In this section, I will show, for a few films, how some common creative techniques evince a particular understanding of their subject, thereby modeling how the same might be discerned in other documentary films. I will start by returning to the opening sequence of Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog. The visual elements of the sequence include the first shot, which

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begins with the frame above the—initially hidden—fence and looking onto an expansive field. The frame then moves down behind the barbed-wire fence while still remaining directed toward the field, until it is obscured by the fence wire. There is then a series of shots in which the camera moves across a landscape of barbed-wire fences. These shots end with a cut to stock-footage of Nazis, the first image of which is of marching soldiers. There is a graphic match between the vertical shapes of the fences and the marching soldiers. There is a narration that accompanies these shots. It is an impressionistic description of the setting of the opening shots, the ruins of a concentration camp. “Even a peaceful landscape,” the narrator intones, “even a meadow in harvest . . . even a resort village with a steeple and country fair can lead to a concentration camp.” He then lists the names of concentration camps, including Auschwitz and Ravensbrück, and then he says of the contemporary scene: “No current runs through the wires. No footstep is heard but our own.” He next announces a date, 1933, and remarks, “The machine goes into action.” At that moment the images switch to the stock-footage. There is also a musical score, which also abruptly shifts at this point, from a melody that suits the “peaceful landscape . . . with crows circling overhead,” shot during spring or summer, to a martial theme as soon as the Nazis appear on screen. The voice-over narration contains only a few explicit assertions. Some implicit assertions might be discerned in the images. The first shot might imply some proposition about how fences restrict our freedom. The graphic match between the fences and the marching soldiers might imply something about the causal link between Nazis (or perhaps more generally, militarism) and the concentration camps. But all of these candidates for assertions seem forced, as well as simplistic and trite. There are also clearly more efficient ways to express such propositions, and ways that would remove much of their ambiguity. However, not every moment in a documentary film needs to be occupied with assertion-making. Maybe this opening sequence is merely an aesthetically satisfying prologue to the rest of the film, whose images and narration—it might be presumed—more clearly make assertions. Its purpose then would be to engage the attention, making viewers more attentive to the assertions that come later and distinguish this film as a documentary. However, if we take understanding to be one of the central goals of the film, we can assign a more substantive role to this sequence. The elements of this opening sequence—the images, score, and narration—are aptly juxtaposed, insofar, that is, that they coherently exhibit a particular understanding of the Holocaust. This understanding cannot be paraphrased. As a skill, understanding is demonstrated; it is shown, as I put it in the previous section, and its inculcation in a receptive audience can be achieved solely through its exhibition. Nevertheless, one way to recognize it is to imagine alternative combinations of images, score, and narration. Even



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a slight variation can evince a different understanding of the subject matter, for example, martial music accompanying the shots of the concentration camp, and a nostalgic theme for the footage of Nazis; instead of the barbedwire fences shot from a distance and angle that emulates the perspective of an inmate, a wide shot tracking backward to suggest distance and protection from a threat; instead of a graphic match between concentration camp fences and marching soldiers, one between the soldiers and crops growing in a field; and, of course, the voice-over narration can enhance or duplicate the different understandings of the Holocaust proposed by these alterations. All of these variations involve different ways of relating, manipulating, and utilizing the elements of the subject matter. They reflect something more, and even deeper, than what is conveyed by the presentation of the individual elements alone, whether they are assertions, historical traces, symbols, or other sorts of visual and aural images. The juxtaposition of these elements convey one way of seeing, as Kvanvig says of understanding in general, “how the various elements in a body of information are related to each other in terms of explanatory, logical, probabilistic, and other kinds of relations,”40 which, as Zagzebski puts it, “deepens our cognitive grasp” of them.41 So, they go beyond what merely assertions can do, which is only to expand our knowledge, but not necessarily our understanding. The style of Night and Fog’s opening sequence is carried throughout the film. It is not an aesthetic prologue to parts of the film that less ambiguously assume an assertoric stance, to borrow Carroll’s terminology. Yet, Night and Fog does seem to satisfy Carroll’s definition and the two others we reviewed. Some assertions can be discerned in at least the voice-over narration, despite their typical indirectness and lack of novelty (the film presents us with no new facts about the Holocaust). It consists of historical traces, in conformity with Currie’s definition, which also satisfy Plantinga’s expectation for documentary films that they contain asserted veridical representations. But those definitions fail to illuminate everything that takes place in this film. Their focus is too narrow to do that. Grierson’s definition of documentary film as the creative treatment of reality does at least a better job of acknowledging that an important role is played by its use of creative techniques like musical score, shot composition, and editing. We can expand on Grierson’s definition, however, by assigning a role to these techniques. They convey an understanding of the subject matter, so they play a cognitive role just as much as any assertions that are made by the film. Even seemingly more traditional documentary films, like those of Ken Burns, can profitably be regarded as not merely asserting facts, but creatively treating those facts so as to increase our understanding of them. Burns’s films, such as The Civil War (1990) and Prohibition (2011), might seem to be models of Currie’s “ideal documentary” in their reliance on historical traces. Their

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ubiquitous voice-over narrations convey many informative facts, so the films also satisfy Carroll’s definition. Yet, the narrations do not merely convey a series of unrelated facts, but as with most narratives, connections, interrelations, logical and causal dependencies, etc., between those facts are drawn. And Burns’s films consist of much more than these narrations. The traces they contain are edited together, the narrations are dramatic (Burns tends to prefer original source material, such as letters, over the reports of historians), and these are accompanied by musical scores, sound effects, and camera movement (in particular, the so-called Ken Burns effect). The various and ubiquitous creative techniques in his films typically imply no additional facts, and they function as more than adornments to the assertions made by the documentary. They are capable of exhibiting an understanding of the subject matter. Consider how a somber melody played over images of fallen soldiers from both sides of the Civil War would present one understanding of those events; a different understanding would be conveyed if a victory march were played over the images of those fallen from only one side. A dramatic narration similarly reflects choices of interpretation, which can convey an understanding. And the choice of historical traces, how they are juxtaposed with the narration and other traces, as well as how the camera movement focuses on certain aspects of them, also reflect choices that exhibit an understanding. There are some filmmakers who take the “creative treatment of reality” to an extreme, and others who attempt to eschew it entirely. Among the former, Errol Morris is a prime example. In The Thin Blue Line (1988), Morris employs elements of the film noir style to tell the story of Randall Adams and his conviction for the murder of a police officer. Morris’s filmic style includes not only visual elements, such as low-key lighting for the reenactment scenes, but also a score by Philip Glass, which Morris explains “gives the film an underlying feeling of inexorability, of inevitability, which is part of the film noir aspect of the story.”42 His creative treatment of the facts of Adams’s case reflect an understanding of them as comprising a tale, as Morris puts it, of “doom and desperation.”43 A different style, say, slapstick instead of noir, would reflect a very different understanding of the facts of his case. His choice of style also probably played no small part in the persuasiveness of the film, which was instrumental in the conviction against Adams being overturned in court. Practitioners of the direct cinema style of documentary filmmaking ostensibly set aside these creative techniques. They employ techniques like handheld cameras, natural lighting, and the use of exclusively diegetic sound to minimize the influence of the filmmakers on the events being recorded. As Betsy McLane explains, these techniques “seemed to offer the possibility of an objective observer.”44 However, despite the explicit ambitions of their creators, these films do not lack creative treatment of their subjects. Morris



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observes of the films of a direct cinema pioneer, Frederick Wiseman, that “they embody something of his own vision or ideas: they’re very personal and idiosyncratic.”45 In films made over a very long period, from Titicut Follies (1967) to the more recent National Gallery (2014), Wiseman does not let his images speak entirely for themselves (as Plantinga might put it); his own understanding of those images is embodied in his films, although more subtly perhaps than in Morris’s, but similarly conveyed through photography and editing. One place in which these techniques are seen in Wiseman’s films is in what substitutes for the kind of voice-over narration we find in films by Burns and many others, as well as the interviews that are also common in documentary films: the voices of the subjects of his films captured while they perform their regular activities. What voices he chooses to present, which only sometimes make assertions directly about the subject matter, are capable of reflecting, like the other sorts of choices we have reviewed, an understanding of the subject matter. It is not always the case that the use of creative techniques will coherently reflect an understanding of the film’s subject matter, but whether we can make sense of a film’s use of these techniques is a primary measure of its quality. When they are used effectively, they play a more substantive role than providing aesthetic adornment to its assertions. They exhibit an understanding of the subject that can be received by audiences in the form of novice training in understanding, discussed in the previous section. I discuss in the next section the other method for inculcating understanding and its employment by documentary films. **** In addition to the creative treatment of facts, documentary films often contain invention, such as in the use of reenactments. Currie excludes films that make extensive use of reenactments from his category of “ideal documentary.” For other versions of the assertoric view, they can present problems insofar as they imply assertions that are false. Yet, while they might be in tension with truth, reenactments serve very well the purpose of understanding. This can be seen through comparison with the use of models, theories, and laws in science, which, as Elgin explains, are not representations of facts, but tools for inculcating understanding.46 As simplified presentations of phenomena, they are idealizations. Elgin even goes so far as to call them “fictions,” albeit fictions that can contribute to our understanding of reality.47 She says that these devices are “purposely contrived to bring to the fore facts that are ordinarily imperspicuous”48; they do this “by exemplifying features they share with the facts.”49 The theories do not exemplify all the features of the phenomenon, and some of their features are not found in the phenomenon.

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A physical or graphic model of the solar system, for example, will typically exemplify the relative positions of the planets with respect to the sun, but it would not exemplify their distances from each other and it will only approximate their relative sizes. I would add that beyond making more perspicuous certain facts, idealizations also allow us to discern more easily connections among facts, and thereby, to make inferences from them that would otherwise be too complicated, too obscure, or otherwise prevent us from making accurate predictions based on them. A mechanical model of the solar system, for instance, could represent the orbits of the planets that would enable inferences about their relative positions. Reenactments in documentary films function like idealizations in science: they are not—at least not always, or not entirely—substitutes for missing historical traces; they have a cognitive value that sometimes historical traces cannot achieve; they also have a long history of use in documentary film. It is now well known that the pioneering films of Robert Flaherty consisted mostly of reenactments, or the staging of events. The title character of Nanook of the North (1922) did actually hunt a walrus, but this was a practice that his people had abandoned. Even Nanook’s regular activities were prompted or staged for the camera. However, it is also widely accepted that the purpose of Nanook was, as William Rothman puts it, “not to contribute to a body of scientific knowledge of human cultures; it is far from an ethnographic film in the current sense.”50 Indeed, none of Flaherty’s films were ethnographic in this sense: they had other purposes. McLane suggests that Flaherty “was attempting to show how other cultures are like our own; how understandable rather than how different and strange.”51 While her assessment might be overly generous, it does describe a purpose that can be served by the staging of even moribund practices. If only the general understanding of other people is a goal of Flaherty’s films, then their verisimilitude to genuine practices is not important, only their exemplification of features that reflect our affinities. The highly stylized, yet minimalist, reenactments in Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, like the animations in his A Brief History of Time (1991), highlight only the relevant features of the events being recounted, such as a milkshake flying through the air, the appearances of cars from the rear, the relative positions of persons involved in a traffic stop and the witnesses to it, and so on. Filmed reenactments like these can present the relevant facts more clearly than historical traces of the same events, and in doing so facilitate our understanding of them. Consider the sequence of images in The Thin Blue Line of the rear ends of two cars (a Mercury Comet and Chevrolet Vega) that helps the viewer understand how easily witnesses can misidentify the makes of cars, a fact relevant to the investigation of the crime of which Adams was accused.



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Reenactments employ the method of exemplification that Elgin identifies in models, theories, and laws in science. To exemplify is to present clearly the relevant features of the subject in order to facilitate understanding of it. As such, they are a form of perspicuous representation, the second method of training in understanding that we discussed earlier. Commenting on the use of models in science, Elgin writes that science’s “reliance on such devices shows that veritism is inadequate to the epistemology of science.”52 Similarly, despite its access to historical traces, documentary films will often—even must, on occasion—forgo veritism for the sake of understanding. **** Through the techniques of novice training and perspicuous representation (exemplification) documentary films can inculcate understanding in viewers. Accepting this as a central goal of documentary films allows us to explain many more of their features than the assertoric view. Also, since documentary films sometimes employ fiction and fabrication in the service of understanding, the assertoric view is inapplicable to many documentary films, or at least to prominent elements of some of them. In claiming that understanding is a goal of many documentary films, I am not identifying a necessary property of such films. Thus, I am not offering a definition that can replace Carroll and Currie’s definitions. Plantinga does not represent his theory as a definition at all, but rather as a “characterization of the documentary that can account for the visual and aural nature of the medium.”53 I do not believe that I have offered any more than that. Even when understanding is an explicit goal of a documentary film (and it need not be, while still conveying an understanding), it might not be its ultimate goal. When asked what he wanted his audiences to take away from The Thin Blue Line, Morris replied: “outrage,”54 but even such more primary goals are most effectively achieved by inculcating—and so they presuppose—an understanding of the subject matter. Yet, a film whose primary goal was the assertion of facts, and not the audience’s understanding of those facts, would not only be rare (at least among the films discussed in this book), but one that did not take full advantage of the medium’s resources.

NOTES 1. Gregory Currie, “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (2009), 291. 2. Gregory Currie, “Response to Jinhee Choi,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001), 319.

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3. Consider Currie’s example of a hypothetical trace that is a “sophisticated thermometer that generates a written description of the weather” (Currie, “Visible Traces,” 287). 4. Currie, “Visible Traces,” 293. 5. Ibid. 6. As Currie points out, an example might be Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983). 7. Currie, “Response to Jinhee Choi,” 319. 8. Currie, “Visible Traces,” 294. 9. He would admit a film comprised mostly of interviews with historians about such events into his category of ideal documentary, but he says that this film would actually be about the historians and not the historical events they are reporting on (Currie, “Visible Traces,” 294). 10. My thanks go to students in my fall 2013 Philosophy of Film class for pointing out the following problem to me. 11. Currie responds to a case like this proposed by Carroll; see Gregory Currie, “Preserving the Traces: An Answer to Noël Carroll,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000), 306–308. 12. Noël Carroll, “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, eds. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 154. 13. Carroll, “Presumptive Assertion,” 159. 14. See Paul Grice, Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). 15. Carroll, “Presumptive Assertion,” 162. 16. Ibid., 166. 17. Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is, After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 63 (2005), 111. 18. Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is,” 115. 19. Ibid., 113. 20. Ibid., 111. 21. Paul Rotha, with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith, Documentary Film (New York: Communication Arts Books, 1952), 70. 22. The exception is among philosophers of science; see, for example, Henk W. De Regt and Dennis Dieks, “A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding,” Synthese 144 (2005), 137–70. 23. See, for example, Linda Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” in Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, ed. Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 235–51. 24. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 240 25. Catherine Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts,” Philosophical Studies, 132 (2007), 34. 26. Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts.” 27. Ibid., 36. 28. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 241. 29. Jonathan Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 192–93.



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30. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 244; Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge, 192. 31. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 244. 32. Ibid., 241. 33. Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts,” 35. 34. Daniel A. Wilkenfeld, “Understanding as Representation Manipulability,” Synthese 190 (2013), 1002–1003. I do not agree with Wilkenfeld that understanding is always a matter of manipulating “some mental correlate” (1003) of what is understood, which is at the core of his account of understanding. I even think that describing understanding as a “mental phenomenon” (997) can be misleading. 35. Understanding does not require endorsement. Someone can understand astrology without believing in it; even a Holocaust denier could understand Resnais’s film. 36. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 2001), §208, italics in original. 37. Wittgenstein, Investigations, §208. 38. Ibid., §122. 39. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 243. 40. Kvanvig, The Value of Knowledge, 192–93. 41. Zagzebski, “Recovering Understanding,” 244. 42. Peter Bates, “Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris,” Cineaste 17 (1989), 17. 43. Ibid. 44. Betsy McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (London: Continuum, 2012), 229. 45. Bates, “Truth not Guaranteed,” 17. 46. Catherine Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” in Epistemology Futures, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), 200. 47. Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” 210; although she revises this in “Understanding and the Facts” (2007), where she calls them instead “felicitous falsehoods” (41). 48. Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” 211. 49. Elgin, “Understanding and the Facts,” 39; emphasis added. 50. William Rothman, “The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North,” in Documenting the Documentary, eds. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 24. 51. McLane, A New History, 35; emphasis added. 52. Elgin, “From Knowledge to Understanding,” 214. 53. Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is,” 106. 54. Bates, “Truth not Guaranteed,” 17.

Chapter 24

The Big Short Adam McKay’s Vehicle for Truth Claims K. L. Evans

Adapted from Michael Lewis’ nonfiction bestseller The Big Short (2010), a completely engrossing portrayal of a handful of folks who saw the subprime crash coming and profited hugely from it (despite what Lewis identifies as their uniting attribute—moral shock about what they saw happening), McKay’s 2015 inspired feature film of the same name “wants not only to explain the financial crisis of 2008,” as A. O. Scott reports, “but also to make the dry, complex abstractions of high finance exciting and fun.”1 In this chapter I suggest that McKay wants something even more commendable: to remind ordinary viewers that we are, in fact, smart enough to understand the “true story” on which this film is based, everything going on behind the housing bubble, and that we can achieve such understanding by the usual means: by looking and by listening. Thinking about the meanings of the words we use. Drawing analogies, employing concrete examples. On top of its other merits, McKay’s film is a paean to reading the signs, what used to be called “reading” before reading came to be associated with an interpretive act foisted upon objects, like books and movies, in a manner that advances critics’ personal or political agendas but ultimately diminishes the object’s value for general culture. The shrewd individuals going against the tide in The Big Short are distinguished by their facility for reading, that is to say, and in this film reading still suggests the painstaking process of examining something with patience and care, taking into account its seemingly unaccountable details with the intention of discovering its inner law, that which marks it as unique or special. In McKay’s film, reading—the kind of attention to objects it is never too late to start practicing—is proposed as a kind of antidote to the habits and presumptions that underwrote the financial crisis of 2008 and are presently, no doubt, gathering force. 431

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One outcome of this film’s evident commitment to reading (or to the view that what counts as an explanation can’t be derived without close observation, that there’s no explanatory apparatus that replaces looking and listening) is its unusual representational mode. For despite its indexing as fiction,2 the way in which The Big Short is produced and experienced makes it feel more like the 2010 Academy–award winning nonfiction feature with which it shares a subject, Charles Ferguson’s superb Inside Job, than any other film nominated, as McKay’s was, for the 2015 “best picture” category. To put it another way, the stance taken toward the world projected by The Big Short is assertive as often as it is fictive. Generally speaking, fiction does not assert that the state of affairs it represents actually occurred. However, a useful way to characterize nonfiction or documentary films is to say that they do make this assertion; as film theorist Carl Plantinga reasons, the distinguishing convention of documentary filmmaking is the expectation that audiences take the relevant film scenes as reliable representations of how something is or was in the actual world.3 Now, The Big Short is not a documentary. And yet its erstwhile assertive stance is worth considering, since it is by adopting the posture of a documentary that this film cues its audience to receive it as a reliable representation of the recent past—to see it as an instrument or contraption from which we may glean accurate appraisals of real-world events. In what follows, then, I make a fairly straightforward claim about the discernable ambition of The Big Short, what I see as the film’s aim or desired result. And I try to show how, in realizing this aim, the film throws light on a thorny question: Can fiction, which is necessarily not assertive, that is, not intent on asserting that the state of affairs it portrays actually went on, critically examine a real-world event? Can a work of fiction invite audiences to not only reflect on some state of affairs but also acquire practical, empirical knowledge about it? Evidently, in McKay’s narrative feature film (in which actual events are not simply transcribed in the text but presented or projected through it)4 the generalizations about reality we justly expect from fiction are in some instances accompanied by an expository apparatus—attempts to explain or describe something as it is or was in the actual world, to deliver a factual record or report—more usually associated with nonfiction. Does that make McKay’s “bold and upsetting tragicomedy about the American economy” also an “asserted veridical representation,” as Plantinga characterizes documentary?5 That is, does this character-driven drama also function as the kind of film wherein filmmakers openly signal their expectation that audiences believe the propositional content of the film, or trust that what they are being told explicitly is accurate? Does The Big Short present itself as a reliable source for forming beliefs about its subject, the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis?



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My purpose in asking these questions isn’t to argue unproductively about what kind of film The Big Short is: fiction, nonfiction, or some strange amalgam of these two very different representational modes. Instead I want to set out from Plantinga’s orienting distinction between fiction and nonfiction or documentary films (that in a fiction film the stance taken toward the world projected by the film is fictive; in a documentary, it is assertive) in order to make better sense of The Big Short’s claims. In particular, I want to see if occasionally adopting an assertive stance is what enables McKay’s tragicomedy about the subprime crisis to command a response from viewers more practicable—of more heuristic use—than mere outrage. MICHAEL LEWIS AT THE MOVIES Adam McKay’s The Big Short has a peculiar identity. It achieves poignancy by linking its protagonists, these people who saw the housing market collapse coming before anyone else, with the vital information on the collapse (so that, as McKay says in filmmaker talk, “their emotional arcs are tied to this information”) and by this simple device makes the very technical subject of the film—how subprime mortgages had been packaged into bonds, how the bonds had been sliced into tranches, how the formulas being used to price and rate the tranches got the variable expressing correlation wrong, etc.— emotionally engaging.6 What is more, these distinctive, eccentric individuals, people who not only predicted the catastrophe but had the nerve to bet on it, are in the film turned into characters, creatures of pure textuality, whose living presence doesn’t originate in the material world but is conjured (in the projected world of the film) by actors, writers, directors, cinematographers, lighting and sound technicians, and many other hardworking artists. The Big Short is thus readily classifiable as narrative fiction. But the film also attempts to offer its audience reliable information about some crucial aspects of the subprime mortgage catastrophe. Viewers of The Big Short correctly suppose that the situation represented in the film—how what amounted to a threedecade boom in the bond market created a financial system so fragile that an uptick in delinquent subprime mortgages could effectively crash the global economy—is in accordance with reality. In addition, McKay’s film wants to assert in some of its particulars that what it shows is true, for example, when this story’s unlikeable narrator, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) turns directly toward the camera in order to tell the film’s audience that something didn’t—or really did!—happen in the way it is being shown. Intriguingly, the freshness and appeal of The Big Short seems to hinge on its power to refer to and make true statements about the actual world. The implication is that some of the events represented have literally occurred. And that likelihood

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troubles this film’s classification as fiction. Fiction, as Aristotle first pointed out, dispenses with both reference and assertion because its business is not with fact but with meaning. The “reality” to which fiction introduces readers or viewers is not that of the actual or natural world. What fiction offers, rather, is the reality of lived experience—ways of making sense of the kinds of things that happen to us, often by learning to reject the adequacy of those conceptual schemes that we have, mistakenly, come to regard as exclusive and exhaustive.7 Plainly, sharing the beliefs of the fabulist and the documentarian hasn’t hurt The Big Short at the box office or in the critical press. A. O. Scott represents most of the film’s viewership when he calls it “a terrifically enjoyable movie that leaves you in a state of rage, nausea, and despair.” All the same, The Big Short’s curious representational mode is too easily explained—is explained away—either by calling the film “postmodern,” that ready catchall for any text that challenges conventional categorization,8 or by citing the film’s faithfulness to its originating material, Lewis’ tense and enlightening The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine. After all, Lewis’ masterpiece of financial journalism has inspired an analogous kind of confused admiration. Meaning to suggest that his facts are imaginatively recounted, Lewis’ reviewers come close to describing his book as if it were a work of the imagination. According to the blurb provided by the New York Times Book Review, Lewis “managed to find quirky investors who minted fortunes by making unpopular, calculated bets on a financial meltdown”—like Dr. Michael Burry, a one-eyed Stanfordeducated neurologist turned hedge-fund manager—and he “constructs a story that is funny, incisive, profanity-laced and illuminating.” (Here the sudden shift from past to present tense is telling. Encounters with real people must be described in the past tense because they happened at a particular time, and times change. But stories are always described in the present tense because the persons we encounter in them are abiding, immutable. That is, and in contrast with the Mike Burry Lewis the journalist “managed to find,” the Mike Burry who figures in Lewis’ writing will never alter or die. The people we meet in books are simply not subject to the same laws and indignities that afflict living people.) The blurb from the San Francisco Chronicle proclaims that with The Big Short, “Michael Lewis adds to his impressive collection of beautifully written books of nonfiction with a fascinating tale.” Is Lewis’ determination to understand—and to have his readers understand—the risk inherent in the housing bubble, a risk compounded by the creation of arcane, artificial securities loosely based on piles of doubtful mortgages, really a “story”? Is Lewis’ account of the subprime mortgage crisis a “tale”? No wonder so many of the bad guys got away. Confusion about what kinds of books Lewis writes contributes to misperceptions



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regarding what readers are supposed to do with these books. As the author notes, he wrote his first exposé of the deceptions and inventions of bond salesmen, Liar’s Poker (1989), with the “hope that college students trying to decide what to do with their lives might read it and decide that it’s silly to phony it up, and abandon their passions or even their interests, to become financiers.” He hoped that “some bright kid at Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Goldman Sachs, and set out to sea.” But as Lewis reports, “somehow that message was mainly lost. Six months after Liar’s Poker was published, I was knee-deep in letters from students at Ohio State University who wanted to know if I had any other secrets to share about Wall Street. They’d read my book as a how-to manual.”9 Intrinsic to Lewis’ literary achievement, as well as his representational mode (call it nonfiction writing with a fiction writer’s eye for recurring themes and intriguing aberrations, a fiction writer’s ear for language, for how people talk past one another or give themselves away without meaning to) is his instinctive feel for the considerable difference between, on the one hand, the actual people a journalist meets over the course of his investigations, and on the other, a story-teller’s ordering and interpreting efforts, his ability to put before the eyes of his readers something (or someone) that must be imagined, that can’t simply be discovered through the senses. For Lewis, and even though the effectiveness of his writing requires that he unite his powers of observation and of imagination, the distinction between what can be seen or heard and what must be intuited or understood is as appreciable as the distinction that separates “lying” from “storytelling,” “fraud” (which is designed to be deceptive) from “fiction” (designed to illuminate). In contrast, many otherwise astute commentators on McKay’s film have helped to blur this important distinction. Critics have not adequately addressed what can feel like a confusing jumble of existing and figurative people in The Big Short. Nor have they tackled McKay’s apparent willingness to tear up the implicit contract between producers and viewers, the agreement (“this is a work of fiction,” or “this is a work of nonfiction”) that usually governs how a feature film is viewed. This is perhaps because The Big Short’s winking, insidery feel can make that effort seem outmoded. Variety’s Andrew Barker, for instance, seems disposed, in a fashion typical in current practice, to chalk up the film’s mixture of fiction and factual record to the exigencies of postmodern pastiche: Taking style cues from hip-hop videos, Funny or Die clips and The Office, Adam McKay’s film hits its share of sour notes; some important plot points are nearly impossible for laypeople to decipher even with cheeky, fourth-wall-obliterating tutorials, and the combination of eye-crossing subject matter and nontraditional

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structure makes it a risky bet at the box office. But there’s an unmistakable, scathing sense of outrage behind the whole endeavor, and it’s impossible not to admire McKay’s reckless willingness to do everything short of jumping though flaming hoops on a motorcycle while reading aloud from Keynes if that’s what it takes to get people to finally pay attention.

For Barker, The Big Short’s fusion of sober documentary (reminiscent of Inside Job) and operatic boiler-room drama (Margin Call, Too Big to Fail), crudely perforated with academic discourse or disquisition, is held together by little more than the director’s “scathing sense of outrage.” Apparently that’s enough in postmodern filmmaking. For Barker, using sentiment to stitch together a work of art does the trick; what doesn’t work aesthetically can be shrugged off (“McKay’s film hits its share of sour notes”) because the larger project—brewing moral indignation—has such cogency. Still, I think carefully trying to determine when and how this otherwise fictional film offers a reliable account of something in the actual world—when and how it employs the chief convention of documentary filmmaking, or packages itself as a vehicle for truth claims—is worth trying to decide, especially because sorting between what has real world existence and what does not is this film’s intellectual preoccupation. The Big Short’s representational mode might be hard to figure out, but its overarching theme is from the first unmistakable: the marked contrast between the lives of actual human beings and the various abstract ways we have of representing those lives, whether it be in the service of seeing them more clearly, which is what fiction is supposed to allow, or less clearly, which is what the mathematical legerdemain of bond market banking ensures.

THE PRESENCE OF CHARACTERS Before tackling The Big Short’s curiously assertive stance, though, we should see how the film declares or officially announces its fictive stance. The simplest way to do that is to talk about characters. What is a character? Or, what might Michael Lewis mean when he announces, “I am not an essayist. I need characters. If I don’t have a character, I can’t find my way into a story”?10 Lewis is an anomalous kind of journalist or nonfiction writer because in order to write compellingly he has learned to pay attention, the way a fiction writer would, to character—that is, to how someone’s “unity” (as the ancient critics called any individual’s unique combination of physical and spiritual qualities) justifies or produces the things that happen to them. Characters (Achilles and Odysseus, Helen and Penelope) are what Homer invents in his epic poems when she shows how an act revealing a man’s nature “unfolded



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naturally and inevitably into the sum and sequence of that man’s kindred acts,” as Erich Auerbach writes, “into a life that would take a certain direction,” be caught up in the complicated arrangement of events which add up to the man’s condition in life.11 The Heraclitean maxim that “a man’s character is his fate” was enormously valuable to Homer and so to imaginative storytelling because what can be represented in poetic terms “is not that good things happen to a good man and brave things to a brave man, but that the fate of Achilles is Achillean.”12 Characters as we have come to understand them are thus not living men and women but living images—readily perceivable persons preserved in the place of their ultimate fate. And though they may bear a resemblance to autonomous individuals down to the most extreme particularities of their sensuous beings, these imagined beings in fact have their ground and limit in what Auerbach calls “the very definite event that is being related.”13 In Don Quixote, for example, Cervantes’ knight is a man who stands there complete, in all his sensual fullness, only because he is fully encompassed by the “event” that is being related—the confusion of a man whose class has lost its function, “whose life is running meaninglessly out,” or “whose life is hardly better than a peasant’s but who is educated and who is neither able nor permitted to labor as a peasant does.”14 By these means Cervantes’ knight is preserved in his physical as well as his spiritual being. This is important to understand, because it is how to make an imagined person convincing—how a writer makes a person in a story seem real and evident. To repeat, a character is not an actual or living person but the result of a creative act. A character is an invention or creature of pure spirit through which earthly, tangible, temporal life is robustly preserved. Accordingly, and even though in ordinary conversation we call real life individuals who offer an amusing array of quirks “characters,” characters in the literary (fictional, filmic) sense of the word cannot be found in real life. Characters you must make. They live only on the page or screen. Hence Michael Lewis might need characters, but characters have their own prerequisite: authors. By his own admission, Michael Lewis is drawn to eccentrics and non-conformists, oddballs and cranks—especially those who demonstrate both genius and self-awareness, or who recognize themselves as individuals somehow separated from their environments and from other individuals. The real people who interest Lewis often have further shared traits: among them a facility for teaching others, for describing what is happening in the world in a way that is both irreverent and to the point. Lewis is drawn to truth-tellers, that is to say, and (as he well understands) a truth-teller is a lonely thing to be. But what Lewis is able to give back to these people is a way of involving their individual narratives with the skein of events that all together mark out the defining mood of a particular period of history. As an author, Lewis gives

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a kind of imaginative life to real people his readers will never know but can come to vividly perceive because what Lewis’ characters or living images reveal is the concordance of personality with event, the integration of someone’s crucial traits and the providential course of the world. To make this point about characters more concrete, and to see how the presence of characters enables what we have called the “fictional stance” of a feature fiction film (as opposed to the “assertive stance” of a documentary film) we might look at Bennet Miller’s Moneyball (2011), written for the screen by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian, and by many accounts a highly successful (meaning, true to the spirit of) adaptation of Michael Lewis’ nonfiction bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game (2003). Central to the story of Moneyball—how a small group of undervalued professional baseball players and executives, many of whom had been rejected as unfit for the big leagues, turn themselves into one of the most successful teams in Major League Baseball—is Billy Beane (Brad Pitt), General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Now, as readers of Lewis’ book have discovered, there does exist a baseball executive named Billy Beane, and he was the General Manager of the Oakland A’s. Nevertheless, filmgoers know that the Billy Beane of the film Moneyball is a character; we know this because Brad Pitt is “playing” him. But more essentially, we know this because in the film we are presented not only with Beane’s distinctive personality (the contingent, particular side of his person, for example, how he eats, or talks, or throws things around) but also with his spiritual being, the event that is being related in this story, namely, what it looks like when a man who is not otherwise prone to introspection is able and determined to teach others what is happening to them. As Henry James reasons, “A work of art should be lighted with a ray of idealism”— an artist must extend his or her vision to include immutable patterns of which individual persons and things are imperfect copies—and such patterns are exactly what Miller’s Moneyball brings to life on the screen.15 Viewers of the film are able to see (as it were, realistically) something that does not have existence in real life, and that is how we can be sure we are watching fiction. Naturally, film being a palimpsistic medium, the envisaged or imagined Billy Beane of Miller’s Moneyball, this indivisible unit of body and spirit, is created by any number of people—for example, Aaron Sorkin and Brad Pitt, not to mention cinematographer Wally Pfister or editor Christopher Tellefsen. But interestingly the lineaments of this imagined Beane, this living image, were already in place in Lewis’ book. Despite its clear status as a work of narrative journalism, Lewis’ nonfiction book Moneyball proved an excellent resource for filmmakers because his kind of investigative reporting (which rests on the journalist’s assertion that the events he assembles for our consideration did actually occur, that the people he describes do actually exist) is,



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in effect, character-driven. As Lewis intimates, the force or effectiveness of his writing is determined by his facility for finding people he can make into believable, relatable, compelling characters. And so not just characters per se, but characters with distinct, indelible, and curiosity-drawing traits. This talent perhaps helps to explain why, however life-like Billy Beane appears in Miller’s fine adaptation Moneyball, however much this living image resembles an actual person one might find in the world, viewers of the film intrigued by this character and hoping to find him in actual life will not be able to find him there. As Carl Plantinga helps us to remember, if a viewer of the film Moneyball left the theater and headed to the Oakland A’s front office in hopes of discovering an extant version of the film’s protagonist, we would say that the viewer had profoundly misunderstood the function and intent of the film as fiction.16 Of course, if the viewer of Moneyball left the theater with a radically altered view of how one of the poorest teams in baseball was able to come near to beating one of its richest, we would not say that he had misunderstood the ontological nature of what he was watching. Fiction does indeed have implications for reality—it does suggest truths about the actual world by means of its projected fictional world—but as Plantinga reports, the fictional text “does not assert its particulars as true.”17 Because of its fictional stance, we are not meant to take the specific events depicted in the film Moneyball as having actually occurred, just as we are not meant to think of the characters that populate this story as exact likenesses of living people. That is what the philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff means to point out when he insists that the characteristic stance of fiction is not assertive. As Wolterstorff writes, “to take up the fictive stance toward some state of affairs is not to assert that the state of affairs is true, is not to ask whether it is true, is not to request that it be made true, is not to wish that it be true. It is simply to invite us to consider that state of affairs.”18 Fiction’s achievement, as Auerbach had also reasoned, springs from its capacity to picture earthly life—not simply to mirror or record what has actually happened but to gather the human world in all its breadth and depth into the structure of an immutable, unassailable order from which the confusion of earthly affairs (“not concealed or attenuated or immaterialized, but preserved in full evidence”) might be scrutinized and considered.19 So. What are viewers being presented with in Adam McKay’s The Big Short—living people, or characters? Do the larger-than-life men and women that populate the film exist in the actual world? Put this baldly, the question is not hard to answer: only living images appear in the film, not living people. But it leads to another, more difficult line of inquiry: how can a characterdriven drama (a fictional narrative full of characters) educate its audience about real-world events? How can it get us to think more carefully about

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actual people, for example, Dr. Michael Burry, that existing, suffering, perspicacious being whose revealing nature, manifested in the sum and sequence of his actions, inspired an arresting persona, the Dr. Michael Burry played with flawless precision by Christian Bale? Even more to the point, how can a work of narrative fiction like The Big Short help viewers take note of the millions of actual people Burry, because of his peculiar way of looking at numbers, is able to discern? A PREPONDERANCE OF PEOPLE Merely casting Brad Pitt—our Billy Beane! Our Achilles!—cues spectators of The Big Short to the certainty that we are watching fiction. Perhaps then the more pressing speculative task in the present context is to explain why or for what reason a film designed to offer for viewers’ consideration certain states of affairs (a film geared toward helping audiences reflect on, ponder over, and explore the implications of the remarkable events that led up to the 2008 financial crisis) seems so bent on drawing attention to existing people and the proceedings they lived through. The preponderance of captions, cameos, intertitles, backstories, and actors directly addressing the audience in McKay’s film raises the question: Does The Big Short ultimately short (bet against) the fictive stance? In other words, is the world presented or projected by the film broken up by periodic attempts to see or hear from actual, existing people (Margot Robbie or Anthony Bourdain, for example, or perhaps even Ted Jiang, Jared Vennett’s Chinese “quant” who turns directly to the camera to remark, dispassionately, and in American-inflected English, on Vennett’s deceiving description of himself), and do these testimonies in the end make the film’s fictive stance subordinate to its assertive stance? As I have suggested, the simple answer to this complicated question is “no.” The first tipoff that the stance taken up by The Big Short remains fictive throughout is that even the real people in this film are—unmistakably—playing themselves. Of course Ted Jiang, caricatured by his blinkered, egomaniacal boss as “Chinese quant,” is only a role or part, played by actor Stanley Wong. But “Margot Robbie in a bubble bath” is also more part than person, even though the person in the bath is, for once, probably in on what is in the end this scene’s deconstruction of a chauvinist idea, namely, that a beautiful woman is diverting, and thus an excellent vehicle for delivering information to audiences more devoted to diversion than analysis.20 However, the bigger clue that this film knows its representative mode— fictive—and sticks to it is the comforting, discomfiting presence of a narrator. McKay cements his allegiance to fiction when he turns one of the real people Michael Lewis writes about, a smug and obsessively self-interested



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head subprime mortgage trader at Deutsche Bank, Greg Lippman, into his film’s narrator, Jared Vennett (Ryan Gosling) a smug and obsessively selfinterested head subprime mortgage trader at Deutsche Bank. The conceit is easy to pull off because Lippman was himself a kind of caricature, a person whose inability to hide his own ungovernable impulses made him that rare thing in the world of high finance: reliably readable. As Lewis notes, “At some point between 1986 and 2006 a memo had gone out on Wall Street, saying that if you wanted to keep on getting rich shuffling bits of paper around to no obvious social purpose, you had better camouflage your true nature. Gregg Lippman was incapable of disguising himself or his motives.” That is, Lippman was transparently self-interested and self-promotional, and in a world in which bond salesmen could say and do anything without worrying that they’d be reported to some authority—in which bond departments were increasingly the source of Wall Street profits because people in the bond market made huge sums of money from the fear and the ignorance of their customers—that made Lippman serviceable. As Lewis makes clear, there was a reason that Lippman, who was “a walking embodiment of the bond market, which is to say he was put on earth to screw the customer,” could peddle an idea (not his own) to wiser, more informed, and deeply suspicious bond market analysts: “The story rang true even as the narrator seemed entirely unreliable.”21 More exactly, as The Big Short’s screenwriters Charles Randolph and Adam McKay intuit, Lippman (and subsequently Vennett) is an unreliable person who proves to be a surprisingly reliable narrator.22 The point, of course, is that it is possible to glean a true story from someone whose credibility has been seriously compromised, so long as the narrator’s omissions and prejudices are on display, or so long as what is left out or misrepresented is part of the story. However much he addresses audiences directly, then, Vennett’s presence only strengthens and confirms the film’s fictive stance. For rather than “break the fourth wall” (a misleading phrase, since it invites the notion that an actor’s direct address to the audience is somehow not acting, or can’t be subsumed under the umbrella term “performance”), Vennett alerts the film’s audiences to the conventions of storytelling. It is Vennett who points to the practice of compressing any number of actual events into one telling action, or the tradition of using characters to give visible form to concepts, feelings, or other intangible states of affairs. It is Vennett who invites viewers to think about how the story they are watching is put together. And this guidance, traditionally, is associated with the role of the narrator in a work of fiction: the narrator draws attention away from the tale in order to accentuate the way it is told. Thus, where viewers would otherwise be pulled into identification with a character, which is what happens in almost every scene in which Mike Burry (Christian Bale) figures, Vennett’s narration helps to keep the film’s

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audience at a distance from the action of the story. Vennett is a walking “alienation device,” as Bertolt Brecht identifies anything that interrupts or comments upon the action of a story. Alienation devices (cameos by famous stars, characters talking directly to the audience) goad viewers into heightened awareness of the conceptual barrier that separates art from everyday life. Such awareness is crucial when what is wanted from a dramatic narrative is education as well as entertainment—when, as in the case of The Big Short, a work of fiction prompts spectators to reflect on the underlying social causes of real-world events and to wonder how things might be different if these causes were better understood. Now, finally, we are circling in on The Big Short’s assertive stance. For there is no doubt that McKay’s film accomplishes something in addition to encouraging its audience to consider or form an opinion about the 2008 financial crisis. Audiences are compelled to form an opinion that is informed by certain facts. Such facts—truths known by actual experience and observation—are not, however, what certain actual people said or did or felt on certain actual occasions. McKay does not make his film pertinent to real world events by stuffing real people into his fictional narrative. (For even where the relevant film scenes may be construed as reliable representations of identifiable persons or occasions, offering reliable representations of things that have literally occurred is markedly not the aim of fiction.) The kinds of facts The Big Short wishes to report are more comprehensive and wide-ranging than the details of who said what when. And yet The Big Short’s facts are distinctly different from the general truths fiction usually trades in. It is, for example, not a general truth that no real analysis underpinned the subprime mortgage machine (simply a bet that home prices would never fall); that appalling certainty is better described as a piece of information, a statement about how something is in the actual world. Similarly, it is not a general truth that people were allowed to manage CDOs (collateralized debt obligations, Wall Street’s device for turning lead into gold) without having any personal exposure to the CDOs, as the storyline with Mr. Chau (Byron Mann) reveals. Moreover, when Mark Baum (Steve Carrell) has dinner with Mr. Chau, or comes faceto-face with the actual person on the other side of his credit default swaps and as a result finally understands the true madness of the subprime mortgage machine (that they needed bets like his, bets against the housing market, to keep the machine running, or to “synthesize” more CDOs; that there weren’t enough unqualified borrowers buying houses they couldn’t afford to satisfy investors’ appetite and so investors were creating subprime loans out of whole cloth, increasing the risk a hundred times over), we can’t call Baum’s stunning discovery a general truth. Again, it is a true piece of information, a hard-to-digest fact. In The Big Short these bits of information do not drive the narrative but are embedded in it; like shards of plastic in a plate of food



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they’re not easily processed—and that’s the point. We’re not meant to swallow them down but feel them between our teeth. The abundance of these indigestible facts turns The Big Short into something other than a vehicle for reflection. Like Inside Job, the film has a very specific objective, and in the end I don’t think it is “to make the dry, complex abstractions of high finance exciting and fun.” For this achievement would involve conceding, from the start, what ordinary Americans (those who lost their homes, savings, and pensions) have traditionally been forced to concede: that the complexity of the private financial sector far exceeded the capacity of its participants, experts, and watchdogs to understand it; that these individuals knew things we did not, and if they couldn’t understand what was going on, it wasn’t because they were lavishly rewarded for shuffling bits of paper around to no obvious purpose, but because the modern financial system is so complicated that no one can understand it. What both Ferguson’s Inside Job and McKay’s The Big Short teach viewers is that this particular bromide is a bunch of boloney. What is more, both films realize this goal not by telling audiences that the people we trusted to understand their jobs didn’t (for why would we believe them? We know people who get paid more than us are smarter than us) but by showing us how oblivious—and worse, how invested in being oblivious—these people were. In Ferguson’s film, this “showing” work is accomplished when the documentarian captures on record not simply the propositions or statements of certain insiders (as per the film’s thesis, those experts—politicians, academics, regulators—charged with monitoring the risks and hazards in our financial system but at the same time financially rewarded for turning a blind eye to them) but the insiders’ mode of existence. That is, it would be one thing to see Frederick Mishkin (a named Professor at Columbia’s Graduate School of Business who sat on the Federal Reserve Board when the crisis mounted and broke) or Glen Hubbard (Dean of Columbia’s Graduate School of Business and one time chief economic advisor to George W. Bush) making declarations; viewers might say, “those statements are true,” or, “those statements are false.” But as a substitute to mere talking heads, Ferguson’s lingering camera, coupled with information he has provided viewers regarding what these men wrote in high-profile reports, what they said in high-profile meetings, capture as it were the context in which the men’s statements are made. The result is illuminating. For despite their very senior positions at one of the country’s Ivy League institutions, Mishkin’s and Hubbard’s attempts to explain what are obvious conflicts of interest between their public obligations and their personal gains (often financially driven inducements) sound like gibberish. In Ferguson’s film, the talking heads are thus given the threedimensionality of literary figures, or as we might also say, the film’s audience is driven to wonder, not “are the statements these men make true or false,”

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but, “given these statements, what is the mode of existence of the people who make them.”23 As a result of this shift in attention, what viewers learn is of more practical value than the truth about these wretched individuals, what these particular men said and did; we learn that the very authorities charged with understanding the system and regulating it do not, and will not, so long as there remain these glaring conflicts of interest. In Ferguson’s film it isn’t simply two academics put to the sword—it is the bizarre reciprocity between Ivy League academics and the financial sector, a reciprocity that as the film makes clear has corrupted the study of economics itself.24 Of course the tone of McKay’s film is decidedly less sober than Ferguson’s, but its corrective impulse is just as strong. Rather than targeting unrepentant high-ranking sector insiders, though, the film takes aggressive action against an idea many of us are committed to: that some remarkable prescience was required to deconstruct the complex, nefarious operations of the private financial sector. Like Lewis’s book, McKay’s film works to disabuse us of the hope that the government will intercede to prevent rich corporations from doing bad things to poor people, or the expectation that inside the free market there is some authority—like the rating agencies—capable of checking its excess.25 But McKay works even harder than Lewis to make a mockery of the view (pushed hard by any number of well-paid experts) that comprehending this mess is not possible for stupid amateurs. A GUY ALONE IN HIS OFFICE My fairly straightforward claim about The Big Short is that in addition to its fictional clout (its power to cast light on concepts and notions that have universal or widespread currency, for example, the idea that stupidity characterizes the world of high finance, and not only greed and fraud), this film contains an aggressive repudiation of a crucial piece of accepted wisdom, namely, that the machinations behind the subprime mortgage crisis are nearly impossible for laypeople to decipher. What separates this film from other films that share its subject and sense of outrage is a vigorous opposition to the view that the complexity of our financial system makes it devilishly hard to understand what is going on. The conflict that gives The Big Short a racing pulse isn’t between the handful of people who guessed right about the looming financial crisis and the many people who guessed wrong (for as is made evident, guessing right means betting against ordinary hard-working Americans, and is therefore untenable).26 Rather, the conflict is between people like Michael Burry who despite or because of various obstacles have learned to draw conclusions based on research and careful argument—who read the “markers,” as Burry calls those signs whose presence indicates the presence of something else—and people who draw their conclusions from



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the ether, or whose logic is impoverished because it is ruled by blinding selfinterest. In the film, this latter camp is represented by the grinning Goldman Sachs representatives who take Burry’s short bets as if he’s the mark; or two douche-bag mortgage brokers, crowing about their sham practices and thus unwittingly self-revealing; or Charlie’s brother’s bed-hopping ex-girlfriend, who sees no problem in getting hired by Goldman Sachs after working for the ratings agencies meant to oversee such banks; or Mr. Chau, unctuous and self-pleased, coolly explaining to Mark Baum how there weren’t enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors’ appetite for the end-product—how Wall Street wanted to synthesize more subprime loans, and how short bets by the likes of Mike Burry or Mark Baum were actually making it possible for them to go on doing this. Uniting these people is a kind of deafness to the reasoning the film’s attentive handful try to supply them with; the most levelheaded queries are met with shrugs, smiles, and the variety of logic that asks, “If I know so little, why is my car so big?” The Big Short gives viewers a number of visual clues to distinguish between these adversarial parties, call them the readers and the nonreaders. Next to slick, tanned, smooth-shaven, extravagantly dressed Jared Vennett, who spends his time on the phone, at the gym, or with his “friends in fashion,” Mark Baum and Mike Burry appear unusually unkempt and disheveled. Ben Rickert (Brad Pitt), sage to hedge-fund upstarts Jamie and Charlie, looks distinctly bearded and wearied. But this scruffiness is Hollywood shorthand for what is also made obvious—that these men are busy doing their homework. Baum and his team shrewdly come up with the right questions (Is there a housing bubble? And if there is, how exposed are the banks?) then doggedly pursue the empirical research that supplies the answers. Mike Burry’s office, like Ben Rickert’s, is full of well-used books, including books of literature (e.g., by Adam Smith and Henry James), and it is clear that Burry spends his time immersed in data; he has the look of a man who reads and calculates and thinks for a living, rather than someone who has hunches and follows hot trends. Though Burry appears devoted to his wife and son, he is living largely out of his office, and some of the film’s most telling scenes are between Burry, surrounded by stacks of open binders and files, hermetically sealed off from the front room junior employees he kindly hires but doesn’t know what to do with, and his ungrateful clients, for example, Lawrence Fields (Tracy Letts), an early and heavy investor in Burry’s hedge fund and a kind of father figure to Burry, the first person Burry calls when he makes what he sees as the single shrewdest discovery of his career. In the first conversation between Burry and Fields—on the phone, each man at his desk—we see these individuals in their own settings, and the dissimilar workplaces signal the men’s own differences. Fields’ immaculate, richly furnished corner office has panoramic views of the New York City skyline;

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assistants come and go past the uncracked spines of his strategically placed leather-bound volumes. Fields himself is commanding and formidable, sure of his authority and the authority of other powerful men, like Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson. Burry, on the other hand, is compelling precisely because his authority or confidence is based on hard work and hard evidence, and is therefore a confidence not easily deflated. Burry has studied the numbers— he’s seen how mortgage-backed securities were filled with extremely risky subprime adjustable rate loans, and that when the rates rocket up in 2007 the loans will begin to fail, and when they fail above a certain percent the whole bond is worthless—and his faith in the authorities has crumbled. Thus the two key exchanges between Mike Burry and Lawrence Fields play out in miniature the dispute that drives the movie, the clash between the people who notice things, who are alive to detail (who are quick on the uptake, often because they’ve been hurt or exposed, and had to learn how to avoid getting fucked) and the people who have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo, like the invincible, impervious people at the top of the financial system or inside the big Wall Street firms (who don’t suffer from crises of conscience or who don’t ever say “This is wrong”). Note Fields’ reaction when, over the phone, Burry shares his decision to short the housing market: “Haha! Really? But the housing market is rock solid. Greenspan just said bubbles are regional, defaults are rare.” “Greenspan’s wrong.” “I don’t think you mean to do it but sometimes you sound very dismissive and superior, Michael. Alan Greenspan is the greatest Fed Chairman in history.” “It’s a fact. Greenspan’s wrong. He’s too focused on being right to realize he’s wrong. I don’t know how else you want me to say it.”

Another revealing scene comes later, when an exasperated Fields and his business partner travel across the country to insult Burry and pressure him— this time in person—to abandon his bet. “Hey, Lawrence.” “We have no confidence in your ability to identify macroeconomic trends.” “You flew here to tell me that? Why? Anyone can see that there is a real estate bubble.” “Actually, no one can see a bubble. That’s what makes it a bubble.” “That’s dumb, Lawrence. There’s always markers—mortgage fraud, quintupled since 2000, an average take-home pay. It’s flat, but home prices are soaring. That means the homes are debts not assets.”

Audiences of the film rightly love the next exchange, because it succinctly expresses the essential features of the David versus Goliath battle going on



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between the oddball outsiders who saw the financial crisis coming and the powerful insiders who failed to. Fields’ infuriated partner lashes out in a taunt: “So, Mike Burry, a guy who gets his hair cut at Supercuts and doesn’t wear shoes, knows more than Alan Greenspan and Hank Paulson?” “Yeah, Dr. Mike Burry. Yes, he does.”

But even more to the point is Burry’s reply to Fields’ conviction that there was nothing to see, nothing for Burry to base his objection on. Burry’s “That’s dumb, Lawrence,” for the reason that “there’s always markers” echoes the film’s opening thesis: that a few people saw the giant lie at the heart of the economy not by doing anything unusual. As the film’s narrator argues (making clear that he was not one of these “outsiders and weirdos,” that he himself was “pretty cool”), the people who saw the crash coming “saw it by doing something the rest of the suckers never thought to do: they looked.” **** In The Big Short, actually looking—staying alive to details, learning to read the signs—is what distinguishes the characters we cheer for from all those folks willing to take advantage of other people for their own gain. What is more, the film’s campaign in support of attentiveness is waged by showing and by telling. That is, audiences are able to evaluate what any person in this film says on the basis of what is discoverable about his or her nature or disposition. We know how to think about the things Burry says (or the things Vennett says) because we have a good sense of what this person is like—we are able to identify what literary theorists call his “mode of existence,” his nature as it plays out through the myriad things he says and does during the course of the story, or the way other people look at him, or the settings in which we find him, and it is this world of information which tells us what to do with Burry’s statements or declarations, how to understand them. Enabling audiences to know what to do with the things characters say because we understand those characters’ mode of existence is what we mean when we say that fiction—good fiction—“shows rather than tells.” It is also part of what we mean when we say that fiction isn’t assertive. The things characters say in a work of fiction should not be understood as assertions because these statements are not meant to contain propositional content about the actual world; rather, the things characters say, in the context of those characters’ mode of existence, are opportunities for audiences to evaluate what is going on in the story, and subsequently to come to an understanding about what we might call the motivations or concerns of the text (which is always something different from, and greater than, the characters’ motivations or

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their concerns). So, in McKay’s The Big Short, what gives Burry’s statements force or staying power isn’t the fact that the real Mike Burry said these things in real life. When Burry says that the way Fields thinks about the housing bubble is stupid, or when he offers his investors ethical instruction instead of financial advice (“People want an authority to tell them how to value things” Burry tells his investors in a final email. “But they chose this authority not based on facts or results. They chose it because it seems authoritative and familiar”), viewers of the film know what to do with these statements or propositions—we know how to use them as social commentary—because we have learned how to assess these propositions in light of everything else we have learned about Burry’s life and the lives of the people he interacts with. In other words to properly grasp these statements we must rightly view the scene—all the relevant scenes—in which we encounter them. And yet it is also the case that The Big Short supplies viewers with statements about the world that are meant to be understood merely in terms of their explanatory force. When Margot Robbie tells the film’s audience that “risky mortgages are called ‘subprime’” and as a result, “Anytime you hear subprime, think shit,” we are not cued or expected to know how to evaluate this statement on the basis of what we know about the person making this statement. (In fact, part of the humor of this interruptive scene is that audiences know next to nothing about Margot Robbie, except what she looks like in a bath, and perhaps that she was featured in a movie that may or may not have thrown light on the debauchery of Wall Street.)27 The certainty that “subprime” means “shit” is simply something we are supposed to accept as true. It is a fact, a piece of information about the actual world, not a concept we come to understand through narrative fiction’s usual means—by showing something otherwise hard to see from multiple conflicting perspectives, thus prompting viewers to develop an opinion about it. Margot Robbie’s scene is indexed as nonfiction, which is to say that in this scene the film’s audience is cued to receive the things we hear as truth claims, or as a reliable account of things as they stand in the world. Curiously, and perhaps because these disruptive scenes of instruction have an alchemical effect on the film as a whole, something similar happens in some scenes indexed as fiction. When Vennett, who as a human being is not to be trusted, presents to Baum’s team his (pilfered) analysis of CDOs and consequently of the precarious state of the housing market, this presentation, outrageously, is indexed as nonfiction. How? Perhaps because the film’s audience has already intuited that a guy you wouldn’t buy a used car from can still be spot-on in his analysis of some state of affairs—or that an unreliable person can be a reliable narrator. (And if we haven’t intuited this truth, Baum will remind us of it when he bundles it as a lecture to his team. The reason this lecture doesn’t feel like poorly constructed fiction, like “telling”



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where what is wanted is “showing,” is because Baum is a lecturing kind of guy—a certain pedantic quality is part of what we know and like about Baum. To take this point further, audiences are cued to appreciate this otherwise exasperating aspect of Baum’s character because his team appreciates it, and we’ve come to trust his team—because of what these men say and do in the context of their modes of existence—in a way that we do not trust certain members of Baum’s therapy group or even Baum’s wife.) Or perhaps Vennett’s presentation is indexed as nonfiction because in some cases the “markers,” as Burry calls them, are indisputable. The conclusion Burry reaches when he actually looks at the numbers, the conclusion Vennett hawks to anyone willing to listen, is that the people buying and selling bonds had genuinely failed to understand the nature of the subprime CDO. The correlation between the highest, AAA-rated and lowest B-rated tiers of mortgages bundled together was wrong; when one collapsed they all collapsed, because in the end they were all driven by the same broader economic forces. Or, as Burry tells his investors, when the subprime mortgage teaser rates end in 2007 the housing market will founder. In this chapter I have argued that The Big Short is unreservedly a work of fiction, and thus that viewers would be wrong to suppose that the events portrayed in this film have literally occurred or that the characters developed throughout the story accurately represent existing people. Nevertheless, this film encourages viewers to train our attention away from representative, emblematic people and schemes (people serving as a symbol of a particular quality or concept, like the icons who take up the film’s opening scenes and who occupied all our attention in the 80s and 90s, or schemes like the banking system itself, which as Ben Rickert says “turns people into numbers”) and toward living people and the real things that happen to them, for example, the very particular, displaced people appearing in snapshots throughout in the film. Tellingly, this achievement, The Big Short’s capacity for helping audiences think about living people and the underlying social causes of real-life events, isn’t brought about by renouncing fiction—by turning to real people when the insights gleaned from the projected world of the film don’t feel strong enough. All the “real” people in this film are incorporated into its fictional narrative. However, by encumbering its fictional narrative with propositional (assertive) content—by weighing down its story with particularized, unassailable information about how things are in the actual world—The Big Short proves better able than other fictionalized accounts to show what has thus far been hardest to see: that the subprime mortgage crisis did not exceed the capacity of its experts and watchdogs; that it was not too complicated for anyone to understand. Like Burry’s own handicap (what he refers to as his missing eye but is recognizably his Asperger’s) this hampering device turns out to be a blessing.

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NOTES 1. A. O. Scott, “In The Big Short: Economic Collapse for Fun and Profit,” The New York Times, December 10, 2015. 2. “Indexing” refers to the way that producers, writers, actors, directors, distributors, and exhibitors catalog a film, and as Noël Carroll maintains, “We don’t characteristically go to films about which we must guess whether they are fiction or nonfiction. They are generally indexed one way or another.” “From Real to Reel: Entangled in the Nonfiction Film,” Philosophic Exchange, Vol. 14 (1983), 24. 3. Thus, as Plantinga argues, an assertive stance is the characteristic convention of documentary or nonfiction filmmaking. For him, the notion of an assertive stance “captures something central about our sense of the functions and purposes of the documentary.” “Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Projected Worlds,” Persistence of Vision, Vol. 5 (Spring 1987), 44–54. See also “What a Documentary is, After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63 (2005), 114–15. 4. In fiction, that is to say, the meaning of an expression becomes clear only in the context in which it is uttered, written or otherwise presented. See Plantinga, “Defining Documentary,” 47. I develop this point throughout the essay. 5. This discerning summary of The Big Short is from Michael Sragow, Film Comment, December 9, 2015; Plantinga explains his notion of an asserted veridical representation in “What a Documentary is, After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 114–15. 6. For McKay’s analysis, see Fresh Air, “Funny or Die Creator Adam McKay Takes on the 2008 Economics Crash in The Big Short,” December 23, 2015. In “What Inside Job Got Wrong,” Ezra Klein offers a useful digest of the crisis (The Washington Post, June 22, 2011). 7. This is Bernard Harrison’s argument in What is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), xvii. What fiction offers is thus not cognitive knowledge, but what Harrison calls dangerous knowledge: “Knowledge of the sort that one comes to possess, for instance, in finally coming to grasp the part played by some trait of one’s own character in the failure of a project or a marriage.” Such knowledge is dangerous, Harrison proposes in an earlier book, Inconvenient Fictions, “because it possesses the power to change its possessor by destabilizing his view both of the world he inhabits and of his own place in it.” (xii). Bernard Harrison, Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), 45. 8. In his online review for Variety magazine, Andrew Barker calls The Big Short “a hyper-caffeinated postmodern farce, a spinach smoothie skillfully disguised as junk food.” November 13, 2015. 9. Prologue to The Big Short, xv. 10. “Michael Lewis: The Scourge of Wall Street,” by Tim Adams, staff writer for The Observer. Sunday, January 17, 2016. 11. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World, tr. Ralph Manheim, with an Introduction by Michael Dirda (New York: New York Review Books, 2007), 1–2. 12. Auerbach, Dante, 1–2



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13. Auerbach, Dante, 150–53. 14. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask, with an Introduction by Edward Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 137. Mimesis was first published in German in 1946; English version 1953. 15. Henry James, Literary Criticism, Volume II: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984), 185. 16. Plantinga, “Defining Documentary,” 48. Naturally, Plantinga is not explicitly addressing Moneyball. 17. Plantinga, “Defining Documentary,” 49. 18. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980), 134. Quoted in Plantinga, “Defining Documentary,” 48. 19. Auerbach, Dante, 133. 20. In keeping with the rest of his unmistakably feminist films, for example, Anchorman or The Other Guys, McKay demonstrates his genuine egalitarianism not by creating “strong roles for women” but by unmasking the most embarrassing predispositions endemic to society. 21. Michael Lewis, The Big Short, 63–64, 92. 22. Of the many readings of The Big Short I encountered, only Michael Sragow’s fine review (Film Comment, December 9, 2015) usefully emphasizes Vennett’s unreliability as a person and his reliability as a narrator. 23. Or as Deleuze teaches us to ask: “Given a proposition, what is the mode of existence of s/he who pronounces it, what mode of existence must one have in order to be capable of pronouncing it?” quoted and translated by Anthony Larson in “First Lessons: Gilles Deleuze and the Concept of Literature,” Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates, ed. David Rudrum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). 24. See Charles Ferguson’s documentary Inside Job (2010). See also Stephen McCloskey, “Inside Job,” in Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 13 (Autumn 2011) 106–09. 25. Lewis, The Big Short, 155. 26. There is no easy division between good guys and bad guys in the movie, for as Mark Baum discovers in his dinner with Mr. Chow, those who bet short were in a way aiding and abetting those who bet long. Thus, as Steve Eisman puts it (Eisman is the person on whom the character Mark Baum is based): “Being short in 2007 and making money from it was fun, because we were shorting the bad guys. In 2008 it was the entire financial system that was at risk. We were still short. But you don’t want the system to crash. It’s sort of like the flood’s about to happen and you’re Noah. You’re on the ark. Yeah, you’re okay. But you’re not happy looking out at the flood. That’s not a happy moment for Noah” (227). 27. See Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street (2013).

Chapter 25

Letter to Errol Morris Feelings of Revulsion and the Limits of Academic Discourse Bill Nichols

March 20, 2010 Dear Errol, I am writing you because I don’t know what else to do. Normally I’d write an article or give a paper but those forms feel inadequate. I have loved almost all your films and I try hard to avoid writing about films I hate. It is too easy to demonize the author or the film. I want to engage you directly because I experienced powerful feelings of revulsion when I saw Standard Operation Procedure. But why a letter? My body speaks the language of feelings and emotion; it is the language of unconscious desire as well, and is very distinct from the signifiers of written language. I need to give expression to my bodily experience and yet fear that I will betray it in doing so, especially with the detachment granted to the author of academic discourse. Images are always particular and concrete and they can pack a punch. The particularity of an image gains clarity by contextualization, and yet as soon as it is contextualized, it loses some of its distinction. Translating the affect of images into the web of signification woven by words can feel like a betrayal as well. Trauma, like images, retains its particularity by resisting contextualization; it remains incomparable. I think my revulsion has something to do with the way you give form to traumatic events in an abstract, almost ethereal way that produced something like a traumatic effect for me. These disturbing feelings are what trouble me here. I felt confronted with atrocities—torture—in ways that throw me into the same state as seeing evidence of genocide would. Atrocities test the limits of representation. We address the unspeakable to give it form. The raw experience of encountering 453

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atrocities poses the challenge of contextualizing and determining responsibility, including perhaps our own. This challenge is what I felt your film failed to address successfully. Instead, you took the sting from terrible images that had shocked the world by decontextualizing, and even fetishizing them. This tactic felt at odds with their gruesome contents and it, in turn, became a new form of revulsion, one peculiar to the form you gave to torture at Abu Ghraib. I felt as if your film were saying to me, “When you think about it, Bill, it’s not as bad as you imagine. I can reframe and explain it to you.” And yet, what I could not help but say to myself was, “When you think about it, it’s not what you think it is, Errol. The explanation you give disturbs more than it reveals.” You mention in your DVD commentary that we all know the photographs were a distraction, masking the responsibility of others beyond the obvious “bad apples” but then say you want to hear from the people literally behind and in the photographs to learn about their state of mind and the pressures they faced. This, to me, is a fatal error. Bertolt Brecht wrote long ago that a photograph of a Krupp’s munitions factory fails to reveal the socioeconomic reality of power and hegemony that function behind this reified façade. Brecht was not concerned, certainly not exclusively concerned, with the state of mind and pressures on the photographer of such an image. I wish you hadn’t been, either. As I watched your film in San Francisco at a 7:00 pm show in an auditorium with only eight or nine others strong feelings snap through my body using faster, more primitive neural networks than those deployed by cerebral thought. I feel a fight or flight response at work. As your film begins and the MPs’ stories unfold, my sense of discomfort increases. The speakers seemed stunned, almost expressionless, not all there, without any solid ground to stand on. Their faces possess a particularity that can vex all understanding but it’s a particularity isolated from its usual density: no background, no location, not even the remainder of their bodies. I feel as if I am watching animated portraiture. The effect is quite remote from the catch-as-catch-can aesthetic of so many documentaries. The shooting style reminded me of paintings of religious icons with their golden halos although you have replaced those halos with the abstract, empty “no place/anyplace” of a dematerialized studio backdrop. You omit any return to “les lieux de memoirs” so vital in many other documentaries. And it is not a spiritual realm you celebrate but a zone populated with rationalization and denial. An almost fetishistic quality haunts the portraits. It seems to enact a refusal to see the bigger picture on your part that parallels the blind spots of your characters. I could say you are letting the audience judge and decide, as I have done in response to your earlier films, but the MP’s excuses pile up so high that I sense an attempt to convince me to accept these



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self-deceptions, or to sidestep them by contemplating the photographs as free-floating, near-linguistic signifiers, shorn of their grim particularity and geographic/historical referentiality. I feel less an invitation to decide for myself than a desire to have me accept the rationalizations and your tolerance of them as a truth in need of acknowledgment. Fight or flight is definitely taking hold of me. My normal sense of narrative anticipation converts to a growing feeling of frustration and discomfort. The lurid photographs, no matter how many special effects surround them, remain appalling but, like Sabrina Harmon, your response is a strangely clinical and dissociated curiosity. Where is the moral center to their testimony? To your film? To your perspective? These lacunae leave me waiting your moral voice to arrive. The MPs’ stories roll on with surprising monotony. My body can’t find a comfortable position; I wiggle and squirm in my seat. My legs want to lift me up and carry me out of the theater but I resolve to stay. I feel I owe it to your film; surely it will shift to a different plane before it’s over. I can clearly see that the MPs have undergone something so painful they remain traumatized by it. I wish I were a Frantz Fanon. He was capable of hearing and treating the suffering experienced by the French soldiers who tortured their Algerian prisoners, but I feel ill-equipped for the task and wonder if such a challenge is what you intended for me. What is Errol doing I wonder; why are you subjecting me to such tortured testimony, so full of evasions and denials? You’ve taken me to the border zone where human action betrays inhumanity, barbarity, and the total objectification of others. Am I to follow, letting anger turn me against you just as these MPs turned against those who often angered them, sometimes for reasons that had nothing to do with terrorism and their role in “softening up” terrorist detainees? My sense of a social order depends on accountability and responsibility of the one to the many and of the many to the one. As I watch, that web of mutual responsibility ruptures in front of me. I don’t know what to do with my discomfort and anger; I need to understand it, to plunge deeper into it rather than sidestep it and see if I can discover exactly what provokes it. Rather than shifting over to a detached mode of analysis, I focused on my feelings of revulsion and eventually came up with three reasons for these feelings. I hope I can share these reasons with you, Errol, and I hope you’ll tell me if you think I am missing something vital. The first is the painfully limited perspective of the guards. They see their past conduct through a glass darkly, but are asked, and paid, to speak, and elevated to the larger than life proportions of the movie screen. Their images emanate from the screen like giant personages of mythic proportion and yet they display little, if any, emotion, especially remorse. “I found myself,” “I just had to . . . ,” “I was told to . . .” and other dissembling locutions deny

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their own agency. They “just” softened up detainees. Is the MPs’ testimony meant to “just” soften us up to their unfortunate plight as scapegoats? The MPs had nowhere to turn, they say, and found themselves doing unimaginable things. Besides, they were under fire from mortar shells, had no contact with the Iraqi population, and experienced severe stress their entire tour. They arrived at Abu Ghraib in a near hypnotic state of fear and distrust and remained so, perhaps up to the moment when you filmed them. No sense of individual responsibility emerges. Sociopaths typically lack remorse, possess no empathy, and hold the law in disregard. I hesitate to label the MPs sociopathic if that confers a mark of incorrigibility and yet you seem to take no interest in how a specific institutional framework and a set of inhumane policies can construct sociopathic behavior. You seem to think that, as victims, they deserve a chance to offer their rationalizations to us. But as perpetrators, they were found guilty, and sentenced to jail. Believe me, Errol, I understand how they were used as scapegoats by the administration but sometimes scapegoats are also guilty. Strangely, you also don’t show any particular interest in the ways in which their background and experience prior to arriving at Abu Ghraib—their family life, their educational level, their political views and social habits—contributed to their criminal conduct. In fact, I felt that, although you knew the outcome and their clear guilt, you chose to ignore it. Your curiosity about their state of mind bore a resemblance for me to that of the press as they listened to the rationalizations and denials by public figures charged with sexual misconduct—the Mark Foleys, Elliot Spitzers, John Edwardses and Tiger Woodses of recent infamy—even though we later learned that they had, indeed, committed the acts with which they were charged. Is denial, deception and outright lying all that fascinating, especially when we know that is what it was? These MPs appear to be locked in that same intermediate state of denial that Tiger Woods alone has confronted and overcome with humility and dignity. Why you would choose to be locked into such a state with them is what I do not understand. The second reason for my revulsion involves your reenactments of military torture. I felt the strongest visceral urge to flee the theater when you gave us tracking shots down corridors populated by ghosts as you reenacted actual interrogations and legalized torture. I felt pinned to a morally impossible space. It was like the grotesque tracking shot in Schindler’s List when Spielberg has the camera slowly approach the door to the apparent gas chamber housing Schindler’s Jews. We slip past the Nazi guards clustered around the door’s peep hole to see the panic and fear inside that chamber. It’s a grotesque point of view shot because it is literally the point of view of the death camp guards. The stakes are far higher than when I shared Norman Bates’s point of view as he spied on Marion Crane, but you offer no moral lesson



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to counterbalance the pain of occupying the point of view of perpetrators of torture. The reneactments were agonizing to watch. At Abu Ghraib, we move from individual pathology to national policy, from individual deviance to institutionalized torture, but this has no apparent bearing on your style of reenactment: you exhibit a strange form of curiosity: it’s detached more than idle, and verges on morbid. Your response is as if you were examining a strange, unfamiliar form of life that you’ve place inside your interrotron as if under a bell jar. I have always sensed a fascination and identification on your part, Errol, with people who live outside the bounds of “normal” human encounter, who become swept up in self-, or, here, small group-fashioned worlds of beliefs and behavior. This was part of the charm and strangeness of Gates of Heaven, Vernon, FL, Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, and to a lesser extent A Brief History of Time. Your fascination achieved a perfect equilibrium between respecting outsiderness and seeking a common truth in The Thin Blue Line where what began as idiosyncrasy took on murderous proportions. Your commitment to untangling the Rashomon-like tales of your many witnesses to arrive at a clear and simple truth gave the film a moral center, a center that feels inexplicably missing from SOP. With Mr. Death and Fog of War you shifted from idiosyncractic behavior (peculiar but largely innocuous behavior for the society at large—to ideological behavior—individual actions that serve the needs of a given ideology. Your curiosity in these two films continues to suggest both an identification with and strong curiosity about those whose views carry them to the margins of the social order. You show a remarkable willingness to let your subjects describe and defend themselves in whatever way they wish, without prodding or challenge. This works well with idiosyncratic and not so well with ideological behavior. The clearly self-serving testimony of Robert MacNamara and the delusional claims of Fred Leuchter left me uncomfortable to the extent that I wondered if you would once again locate and occupy a moral center in these films. You didn’t. That form of dialogue belonging to the I and Thou relation of mutual encounter, and honesty, remained at the horizon as you settled for relying on an expert to refute Mr. Leuchter’s most outrageous claims and on your own special effects to point to the magnitude of Mr. MacNamara’s war crimes, a strategy you repeat in SOP. I felt that you had retreated behind your interrotron and forfeited the moral ground to your subjects. The third reason for my feelings of revulsion involves the complete absence of the voices of the Iraqi detainees. They are the living referents of these horrific photographs. What happened to them? Why did you exclude them but recycle these degrading images of them? Surely some of them, including those who were never suspected of terrorism and for whom no

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“softening up” or vigilante punishment could ever be justified, are readily recognizable by friends and family. Did a “higher truth” legitimize displaying these images? Did you think your film would never get to Iraq or Iraqis never see it in the U.S.? Could you imagine making a film about American POWs held captive in Vietnam during that war that dealt exclusively with the rationalizations of Vietnamese guards for their acts of brutality and torture in violation of the Geneva convention, and to simultaneously deny those American POWs any voice whatsoever, while recycling images of their degradation and torture? I think of Rithy Panh’s powerful film, S-21, and the moral center of that film when former prisoners who survived S-21 and the killing fields confront their Khmer Rouge guards. They confront one another in what is clearly a dignified and respectful encounter fostered by Mr. Panh. The encounter has enormous power as the former prisoners cut through the rationalizations offered by ex-guards and express their bewilderment at their countrymen’s loss of moral compass. You are not Rithy Panh but were you not moved to hear those absent voices, to hear how they would address these guards who lost their moral compass and who might yet regain their bearings if they could be brought to understand the full depths of what they did? Of course you are not Ari Folman or Alain Resnais or Claude Lanzmann or Alex Gibney or Rory Kennedy either, and I am sure I will lose you if I start to discuss what these other filmmakers managed to do that your film doesn’t. You are a distinct voice, one that has shone brightly when you have captured the idiosyncrasy of others non-judgmentally. But in reflecting further on the revulsion I felt at your approach to the political complexity of torture at Abu Ghraib and the horrific images describing it, I sense that you have drifted away from your strength, despite, and, indeed, because of a continuing curiosity with the idiosyncratic outsider and social misfit. I continue to admire the bulk of your work and hope that these comments might be of some benefit as you go on to other projects. I realize that I chose to write a letter because of what felt like the limits of academic discourse but like others who have felt overly confined by specific forms and modalities of discourse in the past, I now wonder if I have truly escaped the arena of academic discourse or in some small way, perhaps, modified it. My wish, in any case, is that it be of genuine use to you. Sincerely, Bill Nichols

Part V

AUTO/BIOGRAPHY AND THE COMPOSITION OF IDENTITY IN DOCUMENTARY FILM

Chapter 26

“You are Never Alone” On Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait Michael Fried

Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno’s film, Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait (2006), was made as follows: during the entirety of a ninetyminute soccer match between Real Madrid and Villareal in the Estadio Santiago Bernabéu in Madrid on the evening of April 23, 2005, seventeen synchronized movie cameras, using different types of film and in various positions around the stadium, were trained on one player, the superb and legendary Real halfback, Zinédine Zidane. (Zidane, born 1972 in Marseille to an Algerian family, played spectacularly for France in the 2006 World Cup before being red-carded—expelled—from the final shortly before the end for head-butting an Italian defender. It was a stupefying act and brought his glorious international career to a more memorable end than anything he could have done except scoring the winning goal. Nevertheless, thousands of international journalists voted him the best player in the tournament, awarding him the “Golden Ball.”) Gordon and Parreno sat in a trailer outside the stadium looking at real-time images from the seventeen cameras fed to TV monitors in front of them; this allowed them to request individual camera operators to move in for a close-up, to pull back, to focus on Zidane’s torso or head or feet or raised arm and hand, and so on. Later the artists, together with noted editor Hervé Schneid, edited the raw takes, montaging sequences from each of the cameras, as well as bits from the TV broadcast, to make a single temporally continuous, albeit visually extremely heterogeneous—at times almost disorienting—ninety-minute movie; the sound track, also heterogeneous, combines the Spanish commentator’s televised account of the game (which runs intermittently through the film, giving it a narrative spine), crowd noise, sounds of contact from the field, hard breathing, music by the Scottish Michael Fried, Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before, © 2008, Yale University Press.

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band Mogwai, and silence. At several points, statements by Zidane appear in subtitles. The viewer follows not the match per se but number 5, Zidane, from beginning to (almost the) end, though at a few crucial junctures—once when he is knocked down and later, after Zidane defiantly dribbles past defenders and sends a fabulous left-footed cross that is then headed for a goal by his Brazilian teammate Ronaldo—the action is shown three times and from different points of view, to make sure that the viewer grasps what has just taken place. (Also given are two views of a crucial penalty that leads to a goal—not actually shown—against Real, and two of a goal by Michel Salgado that puts Real ahead to stay.) Zidane opened at the Cannes film festival in 2006, was projected in a stadium at the Basel Art Fair, and shortly after that went into general release in Paris, where I caught it twice the first day it was in the theaters. I did not do so by chance. I had learned about the project some time before and had been looking forward to seeing the film for two reasons. First, I had become interested in Gordon’s work ever since happening upon his video projection Play Dead; Real Time (2003), featuring an elephant that repeatedly lay down on the floor and rose with difficulty to its feet (presumably in response to instructions from a handler offscreen), at the Gagosian Gallery in New York in 2003, followed by his retrospective exhibition at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, DC, the following year. Second, the project intrigued me. In particular I was curious to discover whether or not the designation of the film as a “portrait” could be taken seriously— whether it meant simply that the film was a biopic or whether it had some deeper resonance. I hoped the latter was the case, and when I saw the film my hopes were fulfilled. In a short joint statement about their project, Gordon and Parreno refer to portraits by Velázquez and Goya in the Prado, but identify Andy Warhol’s real-time film portraits of friends and other visitors to the Factory as the “direct source for the portrait that we hope to paint.”1 This is doubtless true, but grasping the significance of Zidane also requires viewing it against the background of the issues I have been tracing in the present chapter and, more broadly, in Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008). First and most obviously, Zidane himself is depicted as wholly absorbed throughout almost the entire film. What absorbs him, naturally, is the match, which requires the keenest imaginable attention from start to finish and in addition calls forth the most intense and concentrated physical effort on his part, not continuously—he conserves his energy whenever possible—but in explosive bursts and sallies that are nearly impossible to follow as they unfold. Indeed, Zidane’s dazzling and unerring footwork, his astonishing control of the ball, and his instantaneous decision-making all exemplify his seemingly unremitting focus on the game even as they combine to keep the viewer perceptually on edge, as does the sheer violence of his high-speed



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physical encounters with rival players as they try to strip him of the ball or the other way round (the miking of the sound of those encounters adds greatly to their vividness). Another factor in all this is Zidane’s physiognomy, not just its leanness and toughness, emblematized by his balding, graying, closely cropped skull, but its basic impassiveness (his expression barely changes after his brilliant cross results in a goal), which adds to the impression of an inner ferocity that, it turns out, could scarcely be more photogenic. (To say that the seventeen cameras “love” Zidane is an understatement.) Through almost all the match that impassiveness gives way only once, late on, when he shares a joke with Roberto Carlos: the effect is marvelous, a sudden lightening, but according to Gordon (in conversation) that was the one moment that Zidane did not appreciate when he was shown the film. He seemed to himself to have lost concentration and that annoyed him. In short, I see Zidane as belonging, first, to the absorptive current or tradition that I have tried to show, in Absorption and Theatricality (1980) and subsequent books, has played a central a role in the evolution of modern art, and second, to the revisionary adaptation of absorptive strategies on the part of Struth, Dijkstra, Faigenbaum, Delahaye, and Fischer (among others I have not considered) in the interest of coming to grips with the ongoing problem of portraiture (see Struth’s remarks to Ann Goldstein cited in Why Photography Matters). Crucially, however, Zidane’s absorption in the match with Villareal is not depicted as involving the complementary unawareness of everything other than the focus of his absorption—which until recently has meant an unawareness of being beheld—that has been the hallmark of absorptive depiction from Chardin and Greuze down almost to the present. On the contrary, a major part of the conceptual brilliance of Zidane consists in the fact that its protagonist’s sustained feat of absorption is depicted as taking place before an immediate audience of eighty thousand spectators, with millions more watching via TV. Thus throughout the film there is the unmistakable implication that Zidane himself, as we see him, could not be other than acutely aware that literally untold numbers of viewers have their eyes on him. (He knows too that seventeen movie cameras are following his every move. At the same time, we also feel that he has no way of knowing that we in particular are looking on. In any case, this is the realm of “to-beseenness” with a vengeance.) Yet the viewer’s conviction of the great athlete’s total engagement in the match is not thereby undermined. Instead, the film lays bare a hitherto unthematized relationship between absorption and beholding—more precisely, between the persuasive representation of absorption and the apparent consciousness of being beheld—in the context of art, a relationship which is no longer simply one of opposition or antithesis, as it was throughout the absorptive tradition until recently, but instead allows a gliding and indeed an overlap between the two. (In Struth’s family portraits and Dijkstra’s photographs of adolescents on beaches, absorption in being

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photographed gives rise to palpable effects of oubli de soi, which is to say that in their work the traditional antithesis is displaced but not undone.) Furthermore, not only does Zidane lay bare that new relationship, it goes on to explore it, in the first place, by the repeated foregrounding of the filmic and TV apparatus (mainly by shots of the game as mediated by television monitors, including at least one black-and-white monitor in the trailer outside the stadium) as well as by one brief “climb” to the upper reaches of the stadium, whence the camera plunges down to the field; in the second, by sequences involving Zidane himself, as when the camera apparently follows his gaze up to the stadium lights or to the scoreboard (0–1 against Real) before returning to the match, or when it draws us close to his face, then blurs his features as it brings the previously indistinct crowd beyond him into sharp focus before zeroing in on him once more (the effect is to suggest Zidane’s shifting consciousness of the “theatrical” aspects of his situation)2; and in the third, even more explicitly, by means of some of the handful of remarks by Zidane that are reported in the form of subtitles. “When you step onto the field,” Zidane is quoted as saying at one point, “you hear the crowd, you feel its presence. There is sound, the sound of noise.” Then: “When you are immersed in the match, you don’t really hear the crowd. At the same time you can almost choose what you want to hear. You are never alone.” Then: “I can hear someone shift around in his seat. I can hear someone cough. I can hear someone speak to the person next to him. I can imagine that I hear the ticking of a watch.” And then: “When things go badly, one is perhaps more attentive to the reactions of the public. When they don’t go well, one feels less concentrated and more inclined to hear the insults, the whistles. One begins to have negative thoughts, sometimes one wants to forget.” All these remarks— which we read avidly, grateful for a glimpse of Zidane’s inner life—are set off by the sound track, in particular by haunting stretches of music that at these moments consist mainly of a repetitive, harmonic plucking, sometimes with crowd noise in the background. Above the titles or during the “silences” between statements we follow Zidane, sometimes in action, sometimes walking or standing still, at moments in extreme close-up, hooded gaze focused offscreen, sweat dripping as he waits for the play to surge back in his direction. From time to time he spits. He wipes his face with his arm or sleeve. He scratches his head behind his left ear. Now and then he barks “Hey” or “Aie” or raises one arm asking for the ball. We are also given repeated shots of his legs and feet, including close-ups that reveal him scuffing the toes of his cleats against the turf as he walks along—why does he do that? His gait becomes intimately familiar to us by the end of the film. (Somewhere in the neighborhood is Robert Bresson’s magnificent Au hasard Balthasar [1966].) The overall effect of subtitles, sound track, and images is intensely “subjective” and underscores the already powerful impression of Zidane’s



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capacity for stillness—one might say the impression of his psychic apartness, his faithfulness to his own Achilles-like singularity—at the heart of the general combat. (There are some things more important than the Trojan War, as a friend put it apropos the famous head-butt.3) As for the subtitles themselves, I am of course greatly struck by the fact that Gordon and Parreno make a point of Zidane’s consciousness of the crowd, which suggests that they recognize, explicitly or otherwise, that this is the crucial issue, artistically and ontologically, raised by their “portrait.” Beyond that there is the (to me burning) question of how exactly to understand Zidane’s account of his own double consciousness, if that is what it is: on the one hand, immersed in the game he does not really hear the crowd; on the other, at the same time, he can “almost choose” what he wants to hear and indeed can go so far as to imagine—extraordinary thought—the ticking of a watch. What is clear is that the second term in his double consciousness is not exactly distraction, absorption’s traditional other—albeit distraction itself, in the mode of reverie, can be a kind of absorption. (A potential source of distraction in the form of running illuminated advertisements for various firms and products just beyond the sidelines of the field is intermittently in view throughout the film.) Rather, it almost seems another form, another channel, of absorption, a psychic countermovement, reaching phantasmatic lengths (the ticking of that watch!), to his sense of exposure to the crowd’s unpredictable, divided, at times hostile attentions. Not that such a countermovement is always available: when things go badly, Zidane’s concentration flags, he hears insults and whistles, sometimes he wants to “forget.” (Another extraordinary thought: Does he mean to forget what he is there to do? But “forgetting” is also a traditional way of describing an absorbed person’s unawareness of his or her surroundings. Can he mean both? “You don’t necessarily remember a match as an experience in ‘real time,’” he is quoted as saying. “My memories of matches are fragmented.” Like the film itself? Gordon and Parreno probably think so; they give us the last two quotations twice. And what is the relation of imagining the ticking of a watch to that fragmenting of time?) In fact a flagging of concentration becomes visible toward the end of the match: one cannot help noticing what appear like signs of exasperation, culminating in a seemingly gratuitous and, as at the World Cup, a wholly unexpected act of violence that calls forth another red card. “On n’est jamais seul” (“You are never alone”)—whatever else Zidane may be, it is a compelling portrayal of that condition, which in this instance comes across as a state of mindedness that is almost unremittingly intense and at the same time seems somehow bare or minimal, as if lacking in depth. (Here too “Achilles-like” seems the right epithet.) What is not made explicit by the film—how could it have been?—is just how representative of our epoch the makers of the film imagine that condition to be.4 In closing, it occurs to me

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that Zidane’s remarks about the crowd are in the register of hearing—as if even in the worst circumstances his visual attention remains on the game. For Gordon and Parreno, Zidane represents an attempt to make a film that would belong at once to the world of popular entertainment—sports on TV, notably—and to that of galleries, museums, art.5 In my view they have succeeded, and what is characteristic of Gordon’s work to date (I do not know Parreno’s well enough to speak of it) is that artistic success turns out to have gone hand in hand with deep theoretical and philosophical interest. **** There is more to the philosophical interest of Zidane than I have suggested. Two lines of thought present themselves. First, with respect to the issue of worldhood, there is the implication that Zidane’s absorbed consciousness, for all its “bareness” and narrowness of focus, nevertheless opens upon (Heidegger would say “discloses”) a shared world—in other words, that the film is not in any sense a study in solipsism (in the usual understanding of the term). This, I take it, is one meaning of the sequence of fourteen extremely brief, extremely diverse news clips from different parts of the world during the short halftime break: such as a puppet show featuring a Bob Marleyfigure on a beach in Brazil, the destruction of homes by flooding in SerbiaMontenegro, Elian Gonzalez speaking on Cuban TV, the sale via eBay of a life-size X-wing fighter from the movie Star Wars, the space ship “Voyager” recording plasma wave sounds at the solar wind termination boundary, a reading marathon marking the four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of Don Quixote, the issuing of a new series of video games, the explosion of a car bomb in Najaf, Iraq (a bystander is wearing a black jersey bearing the number 5 and the name “Zidane” in white), the death of the British actor Sir John Mills, the first sighting in twenty years of an ivory-billed woodpecker, the close of the Asian-African summit in Jakarta—followed by the same mysterious and hard-to-translate statement (in subtitles) that ushers in the film: “Qui aurait pu imaginer que dans le futur on puisse se souvenir de ce jour extraordinaire comme d’une promenade dans un pare” (roughly: “Who would have been able to imagine that in the future one could remember this extraordinary day as if it were a walk in a park”). Toward the end among the news clips are also two unassigned “statements”: “My son had a fever this morning” and “I had something to do today.” It is not entirely clear what to make of all this—the “statements” in particular are hard to interpret—but the unexpected opening up of the film to a global perspective, or rather to the simultaneity of multiple perspectives, feels inspired. The second source of philosophical interest worth noting concerns the question as to whether human perception is inherently “conceptual” in its



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content. This has been a topic of contention between John McDowell, who is convinced that it is, and Hubert L. Dreyfus, who argues on phenomenological grounds that it is not. A representative paragraph from McDowell’s Mind and World (1994) reads: I have been urging that we must conceive experiences as states or occurrences in which capacities that belong to spontaneity are in play in actualizations of receptivity. Experiences have their content by virtue of the fact that conceptual capacities are operative in them, and that means capacities that genuinely belong to the understanding: it is essential to their being the capacities they are that they can be exploited in active and potentially self-critical thinking. But when these capacities come into play in experience, the experiencing subject is passive, acted on by independent reality. When experience makes conceptual content available to one, that is itself one’s sensibility in operation, not understanding putting a construction on some pre-conceptual deliverances of sensibility. At least with “outer experience,” conceptual content is already borne by impressions that independent reality makes on one’s senses.6

With respect to what Dreyfus calls “absorbed coping”—as in physical sports, a key example for him—conceptuality for him involves stepping back from such coping and thereby disrupting it. So that whereas (in Dreyfus’s words) “McDowell holds that our coping must be implicitly conceptual and permeated by mindedness [emphasis in original],” Dreyfus contends that “if [an] expert coper is to remain in flow, he must respond directly to the solicitation without attending to the object doing the soliciting [Dreyfus’s example is a doorknob on a door that we reach for without consciously perceiving it as we leave a room]. There is no place in the phenomenology of skillful action for conceptual mindedness.” I do not know about the doorknob; the example comes from Merleau-Ponty, and Dreyfus claims that recent research backs it up. But consider Zinédine Zidane, an “expert coper” and a master of remaining “in flow” if there ever was one: on the strength of Gordon and Parreno’s film, would one really wish to say that the great athlete’s participation in the match appears to confirm Dreyfus’s strictures? That Zidane’s restless scanning of the action on the field, his calling for the ball and rapid distribution of it when it arrives, his conservation of his forces at every valid opportunity, his sudden recognition that something can be made of a rapidly unfolding situation—as when he brilliantly dribbles to the left of the Villareal goal before delivering the cross that Ronaldo heads in—and in general, his unflagging yet also variegated responsiveness to the ebb and flow of the game, all unequivocally bespeak an involvement with the match that absolutely precludes conceptual content of any sort? For that matter, can Dreyfus’s all-ornothing vision of “absorbed coping” be squared with Zidane’s account in the subtleties of his shifting and complex awareness of the crowd? Finally, is it

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plausible that throughout the film his relation to the ball should be understood according to the model of Dreyfus’s “expert coper” leaving a room in relation to an unfocalized doorknob? For me the answer to these questions is no. Rather, I take Zidane to be a singularly perspicuous example of what it might look like to an ideally situated observer (one “constructed” by the film) for experience, perception, and “coping” of the most instantaneous and resourceful kind to be “permeated by mindedness” in McDowell’s sense of the phrase. (The remarks by Dreyfus come from “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” part of an exchange with McDowell that begins with Dreyfus’s APA Pacific Division Presidential Address, “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, no. 79 (November 2005), 47–65. McDowell replies in “What Myth?”; Dreyfus responds in turn with “The Return of the Myth of the Mental”; and McDowell comes back briefly in “Response to Dreyfus.” The last three texts appear together in Inquiry (50:4, 2007). I should add that McDowell’s views on conceptual capacities in perception have been contested by others besides Dreyfus; my comments here are not an attempt to assess McDowell’s arguments comprehensively, but Gordon and Parreno’s Zidane does seem to me to bear on the above exchange.) NOTES 1. Douglas Gordon and Philippe Parreno, “Some Notes about the Project,” Zidane: A XXist Century Portrait, promotional brochure, n.p. 2. A similar effect comes about each time the crowd noise returns at a high volume. My thanks go to Molly Warnock for her thoughts on this matter. 3. The friend is Robert Pippin. We receive an especially vivid impression of this apartness after Zidane is expected from the game (see below) and is at once surrounded by teammates as he walks off the field. They do their best to support him, to console him; one of them invites the crowd to applaud the exiting hero, but all of the while Zidane seems indifferent to their efforts, indeed to their presence. 4. The full English title, Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait, seems to imply a certain representativeness; of course, the French title, a translation from the English— Zidane: Un Portrait du 21 siècle—goes well beyond that, but I take the English title to be definitive here. On the relation of Zidane to twenty-first-century mass communications, see Tim Griffin, “The Job Changes You,” Artforum, vol. 45 (September 2006), 336–38. 5. Accordingly, 17 individual (i.e., unique) works have been made available for acquisition; each consists of two side-by-side “versions” of the match: the one at the left is the film I have just described, and the other is the entire 90-minute feed from one of the 17 cameras. 6. John McDowell, Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994), 66–67.

Chapter 27

On Patience (After Sebald) Documentary as a True Portrait of Sensibility Garry L. Hagberg

We can think of documentaries of persons as having criteria of verisimilitude much like how we might at least initially think of parallel criteria for portraiture: there is such a thing as a good likeness, a bad one, and everything in between. The good likeness captures the truth of the matter, the bad one not. A documentary of a person would thus, over the duration of the film, capture what the person is, what is essential to that person; its truth-content would be a matter of correct representation. But the complexity of the matter is far greater, and a far more engrossing subject, than this simple picture would suggest: there is, in the case of a person’s life, no one “look” to be captured, no one static truth against which to measure its representation. (Despite initial intuitions, we do not have in the portraiture case any such single or static criterion either, but that is a separate matter.1) If a human being were the sort of entity that has a fixed and determinate set of uniform descriptions that, taken together, would fully capture that person, then the truest documentary would be the one that most fully articulates that determinate set (a twenty-four surveillance feed, perhaps?). But a human being, properly understood in a non-reductive way, will fit no such mold. In Grant Gee’s remarkable documentary from 2012, Patience (After Sebald), addressing the person, life, and work of the writer Winfried Georg “Max” Sebald (1944–2001), we encounter a study that shows the rich weave of Sebald’s writing (especially his The Rings of Saturn2), and the relevance of that writing to Sebald’s autobiographical sense, the intricate relations between place, a scene-as-described, memory, photographs, personal documents, political history, language in all its complexities, and the subtle ways in which the descriptions of others, of Sebald, and of his work interweave with all of these.3 (The film incorporates observations on Sebald’s life and 469

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work by Tacita Dean, Robert Macfarlane, Sir Andrew Motion, Rick Moody, Iain Sinclair, Marina Warner, and others.) Thus, Patience (After Sebald), critically praised as “unique,” “otherworldly,” “exhilaratingly original,” “a brilliant documentary and a very fine piece of filmmaking . . . something extraordinary,” shows within its eightythree minutes that the understanding of a person is a mosaic of many interrelated parts—and that even those parts do not come individually separated or in bounded ways (hence the “mosaic” metaphor is, after Wittgenstein, a ladder we climb and then kick away). But this documentary does more than merely offer a provisional “mosaic” portrait, and insightfully so: this film, taken as a whole, itself becomes a portrait of the content of human understanding, of the process we undergo in understanding, in truly fathoming, another person’s sensibility. And in doing this, this documentary presents, over the initial presuppositions we bring to Sebald and his written work, a new, far more complex, far more intricate and non-reductive criterion for a good likeness, for depictive verisimilitude. In speaking of Sebald, it speaks both to the problems of documentary truth and to the question of what it is to understand a human being by entering his or her perceptual-imaginative world. (I) So to state the simple picture bluntly: if the quality of a representation is measured by the degree of correspondence between the representation and the thing represented, (a) the thing represented must possess and display a fixity over time, an ontological stability, which allows the comparison between representation and represented to take place. And on this model of representational truth—in essence a correspondence theory applied to the depiction of a person, (b) the representation will itself also be thought of as fundamentally static. A moment’s reflection will show not only that neither of these is true, but more interestingly, neither could be true. What then is the case about persons and their filmic depictions that make both components of the simple picture necessarily untrue? Ludwig Wittgenstein’s profound remarks on aspect-perception4 and “seeing-as” uncover the subtlety, the delicacy, of what is involved in seeing a thing for what it is, seeing that thing for what it is to you, seeing that thing in the light of another thing, and seeing that thing as another thing. These are all of course different, and importantly distinguishable, imaginative-perceptual phenomena, and they capture much of what it is to live in our human perceptual world. But they capture more than that—and here we begin to see the connection to the distinctive philosophical service Patience provides. In his thinking on perception, John Locke’s most fundamental distinction was that between sensation and reflection; as every introductory student of philosophy knows, sensations are what is given in—well, sensory experience, and reflection by contrast is the mind thinking back on, recalling—well,

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reflecting upon, that earlier sensory content. Here the simple picture is plainly discernible, if in classical empiricist guise: on these grounds it is thought that we have true knowledge of the world if and (as some philosophers love to say) only if the reflective content matches, corresponds to, the sensory content—indeed if the accumulated body of reflections accurately represent the accumulated body of sensations. Following his empirical forerunner, David Hume brought the picture into even clearer focus, by most fundamentally distinguishing between impressions and ideas: impressions are those present imprints upon the mind made by immediately-perceived sensory experience; ideas are then representations or mental reduplications of impressions, never (as Locke said) extending “one jot” beyond the originating content of sensory experience. This allowed Hume to proclaim that sensation, in and of itself, is always right, because it refers to nothing beyond itself; but wrongness can apply to ideas, as ideas can be mental memory contents that do not correspond—interestingly, do not depict—the way the world actually is as given on the level of impressions. (It was here that Hume introduced his famous criterion for the distinction between impressions and ideas—the former exhibiting a force and vivacity that the latter cannot possess; he needed such a criterion for the reason that we would never be in a position to see the world prior to, or separate from, sensory impressions, and so never be in a position to judge a given impression as coming directly from the world. I will return to this below in connection with the film.) What these twin variants of the basic picture suggest (and powerfully so—great philosophers have fallen into and remained in its grip5) is that true memory is essentially a matter of reduplication in the mind of the prior individual fragments or moments of experience that are in a sense nonmental. Of course, the initial sensory experiences, on this picture, are in one sense mental—they are perceived by sentient, cognizant human beings. But those initial sensory experiences are not mental in the sense that they depend for their existence upon reflective activity. One can see a centipede, interrupt that present moment’s perception with a thought back to the centipede very like this one that we first saw as a child (viz., in the past, now “in” one’s memory), and then look back acutely to the centipede before us, but the seeing of the present one is not mind-dependent in the same way that the remembered one is. What this picture—in fact, a drastically oversimplified conception of human perception, as Wittgenstein, and as we will see here Sebald and Grant Gee’s documentary film about Sebald show—does is offer a false foundation for any subsequent thought about how it is we perceptually live in the world, how it is we perceive and, as sentient, cognizant human beings, experience it. The picture, rooted in empiricist thought, suggests that (1) brute or atomistic perception (if there actually is such a thing) is basic, that (2) memory, if true, is dependent upon and directly representative of those atomistic perceptions,

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that (3) real perception, epistemologically respectable perception, is nonmental in the above sense, and thus that (4) the imagination and the extensive developments of our reflective capacities will not be involved in rightly or truly experiencing the world as it is, so that (5) the extent to which imagination inflects perception is the extent to which it distorts it. All five of these are interestingly incorrect, and all five, taken together, would leave us with an impoverished conception of what it is for a human being to have experience in and of this world and in and of the world of each other.6 But one does not announce that the empirical picture is drastically oversimplified and thus misleading; one shows it. That is the lesson of the philosophical-literary work of Sebald, and—in a doubled sense that we will unfold below—it is the work of Patience, that, with mimetically requisite complexity, represents him and the character of his work. (II) W. G. Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn (Die Ringe des Saturn: Eine englische Wallfahrt, 1995, English translation, 1998) is, in its most minimal description, a novel that is written as a travelog of a walking tour of the coast of East Anglia—hence the subtitle, “An English Pilgrimage.” But because the book incorporates actual episodes of Sebald’s real-life tour, it intrinsically challenges the categorization “novel”: it is drawn from experience in a way that, from the outset, repudiates the simple picture separating determinate factual experience from imagination; we will consider this point much more fully in what follows. But one step less minimally: the “novel”—the non-categorical creative hybrid7—has a narrator, but that narrator is of fluctuating identity (viz., seemingly the author Sebald and/or the fictitious narrator of the book by Sebald). As some reviewers of the book have succinctly expressed it, the narrator is and is not Sebald, and when it is not, it is not a single imaginary or fictional narrator either. This hybrid identity has been described as Sebald merging into another German writer who immigrated to England, his friend Michael Hamburger (whom the narrator encounters en route). But more intricate still, Hamburger blends into, or descriptively morphs into, Friedrich Holderlin.8 And then we have another layer still: we see Hamburger’s recollections of experience described by the narrator who for those recollections is not Hamburger, and only possibly Sebald. Or one wants to say: the narrator is at those points in part Sebald, and in part not—as with the book itself, part novel and part not, part memoir and part not, part travel writing and part not, part fiction and part not. And—this point is central to my entire discussion of this documentary—these categorical demarcations are not neat, not separable, not definitively decidable on a page-by-page or sentence-by-sentence basis. The character of the experience depicted here is not of that kind. (That character is, as I will come to below, more actually true to human life than any such neat-category model could

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capture, and thus it is representationally-autobiographically true in being an indissoluble and irreducible mix, and it provides a mimetic representation of the kind of hybrid and layered things we need to know of a person to understand a person—including ourselves.) The Rings of Saturn interweaves recounted and referred-to episodes of political history; literary history and allusions thereto; selected writings and passages of Sir Thomas Browne9; Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson, its telling details, and the associations it awakens (where our awareness of those associations reveals to us a great deal in short order about the sensibility of the narrator, leading us as readers to see into the sensibility of Sebald); landscape and seascape (with distant solitary boats and deserted beaches) photographs, drawings of historic architectural sites, photographs of street scenes, commercial buildings, and row-houses; photographs of massive seaside herring harvests; a newspaper clipping about a wealthy eccentric who willed to his housekeeper (to her utter surprise) his entire massive estate, the housekeeper having dined with him every evening but on condition of absolute silence; descriptions of hideously inhumane war killings and photographs of multiple war hangings; reproductions of handwritten diary entries; photographs of oceanside ruins; an image of a maze seen from above; reproductions of maps; a photograph of himself (where here that means the historical Sebald) from a decade earlier (c. mid-1980s) leaning against a great tree, next to the passage that reads “I feel a bond unites me with these trees; I write sonnets, elegies, and odes to them; they are like children, I know them all by name, and my only desire is that I should end my days amongst them”10; a photograph of the ravages of Dutch elm disease followed by a hurricane of unprecedented force that destroyed over fourteen million mature trees; illustrations of butterflies; images and descriptions of the silk industry and its variegated human impact; and his final reflections closing the book (in these passages he calls his book “these notes”)11 concerning the intertwined facts (but where, as so often in The Rings of Saturn, the intertwining is left to the reader as a way of thinking one’s way into the mind of the author) that, (a) for ladies of the upper classes, the only acceptable expression of profound grief was to wear high-quality black silk (worn, for example, by the Duchess of Teck at Queen Victoria’s funeral, described as “breathtaking” in the fashion magazines); (b) this very gown had been made of silk produced by weavers in Norwich who had, just before closing down for good and to show their unsurpassed skill, created a final roll of silk sixty paces long; and (c) Thomas Browne, who was the son of a silk merchant, wrote that in the Holland of his time, “it was customary, in a home where there had been a death, to drape black mourning ribbons over all the mirrors and all canvases depicting landscapes or people or the fruits of the field, so that the soul, as it left the body, would not be distracted on its final journey, either by a reflection of itself or by a last glimpse of the land now being lost for ever.”12

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The important thing about this list of elements in The Rings of Saturn is not merely that they are elements; rather, it is that we already know—and, importantly, can guess more—about the sensibility in question by the very selection of these elements, and (still more importantly), we can begin to sense the connections that the author is making between them, where these cohere, where they fit together into kinds of connections. These connections, Sebald’s book shows, are not supplemental to experience; they are constitutive of it.13 The reason for this is often obscured (showing the power and deep-rootedness of the oversimplified empiricist picture), but once it is in view—once we clear away what is blocking its view—it is straightforward enough: there is no “simple” or direct or uninflected or experientially isolable content to which such connections are added after the initial perceptual fact (ironically, this is the simple fact). That would be merely to graft what we intuitively know about the interconnected, continually intertwining character of experience over the top of the empirical picture, leaving it fundamentally intact. The philosophical task (here performed within literature, and then, as we will see, not only represented but reenacted within film) is to show that such simple perception is never the case—it is, to borrow a fashionable phrase, always already too late to isolate any such sensory datum as it would present itself to the senses independently of and prior to any relations within which that experience is grasped. Sebald’s book repeatedly, and with a growing power that itself makes this central point, returns to the themes of memory,14 identity, the gradual growth and loss of understanding, the inexorable erosion, gradual erasure, and ultimate loss of human sensitivities, of cultural practices, and of a civilization itself, as these are discernible on both grand and minute scales. He shows cultural erosion in the ruins of old buildings; he intimates the erasure of traditions in shifting landscapes going from cultivated to wild; he suggests the inexorability of decline on a macrocosmic or cultural scale by focusing on the decay of the particular object. He sees both individual and cultural memory in the same terms, where these also inflect each other. And recollection, reminiscence, and the shifting of significance, of meaning, are for him always in motion, never settled in a bounded manner with a permanent interpretive fixity. His, the narrator’s, unstopping motion in this book itself suggests the ceaseless flux of the layered relations within which he experiences the world he is investigating, the towns, landscapes, beaches, coastlines through which he is walking. Indeed, what he actually walks through, as represented in the book, is a continually shifting, continually changing constellation of possible connections and significance-determining and meaning-enhancing interrelations. Given Sebald’s atmosphere of perceptual possibility (I will return to this as presented in Gee’s film below), of ever-more acute and thoughtful and richly imaginative interaction with one’s environment (and I will return to this in

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connection with Wittgenstein on aspect-perception in a moment), it is particularly fitting that a central influence on Sebald was the work of Jorge Luis Borges, especially two of his stories, where the two short works, taken together, reveal a good deal about the conceptual content of Sebald’s work. The first is “The Garden of Forking Paths” (1941),15 in which a Chinese Professor of English, working in the United Kingdom, is in fact a German spy who, on learning that he has been discovered and is about to be caught by a pursuing MI5 agent, carries out a desperate plan to convey to the Germans (after his impending arrest) the location of a secret British artillery stockpile. This account by Borges creates a world within a world; and reminds us that in a sense everything in a spy’s world has a double meaning, where the world of appearance is layered over the real one beneath it. The entire life of a spy is Wittgenstein’s duck-rabbit—the spy intends for all his actions to be seen one way and to conceal the other in plain sight; the spy-hunter, by contrast, constantly looks for another way of seeing, another way of perceptually organizing, all the words and deeds of suspected individuals: to see what lies in plain sight yet cannot be (easily) seen. This scenario from “The Garden” and the nature of spying would be enough to bring to light a connection between what Sebald achieves in his writing (and also Borges), but what must have most deeply stayed with Sebald from this story—indeed, what in Borges’ story so effectively brings out a central aspect of Sebald’s work: namely, the character Doctor Albert, a renowned scholar of Chinese literature, who has as his major breakthrough solved a long-standing mystery concerning the stated aims of a long-dead great author who claimed that his life’s work was twofold: (1) to write a great novel so intricate and complex that settled interpretation was impossible—interpretation would never end and so the work would forever be alive, and (2) to create a labyrinth—a maze—of exactly parallel complexity in which all who entered would lose their way. The novel was regarded for years as an utter, incomplete mess; all that remained at the author’s desk was “a contradictory jumble of irresolute drafts” that defied any attempt to construct them into a finished whole. Albert’s breakthrough was that the two were one and the same: the book was the labyrinth, and what the book did was to describe a world where, in opposition to our world and our literary expectations stemming from it, all possible causal chains stemming from any single event occur immediately following the event (rather than one occurring that thus forecloses all others), so that the world depicted is one of massively expanded possibility—one, in effect, where all the possible worlds opened by events are realized (where each subsequent event then opens further realized causal chains, further “forking paths”). This dizzyingly complex network thus makes a surrounding atmosphere for the characters within The Rings of Saturn one in which possible connections, possible relations and stemming causal chains are all made real; this is in a sense very unlike our

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world. But in another sense, it is not so unlike the world Sebald has created in terms of a mind in constant motion moving through a Heraclitean flux of connective possibility. The second Borges story that stayed so deeply with Sebald was “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” (1940),16 which is, in one sense, a commentary on the Berkeleyan idealism that followed from Berkeley’s collapsing of Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Locke posited that the experience of a primary quality—for example, figure, motion, or rest—is one that resembles the object perceived as it is unto itself; secondary qualities—for example, heat, color—although we perceive them as if they belonged to the object perceived, are actually dependent for their existence on our sensory faculties and thus do not “report” the truth about the object as it is unto itself. Berkeley argued that we could never be in a position to perceive a primary quality; all sensory data is filtered through our faculties, so the distinction is only a myth that would falsely preserve the illusion of the material world as it exists independently of our cognition. In truth, Berkeley insists, we only know, and only can know, ideas, mental contents, to exist—hence “idealism”—and so our claims of knowledge of the world must stop at that epistemological limit. In his story “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” Borges describes a world created in the minds of intellectuals that is gradually discovered by a fictional version of Borges himself (again, like Sebald after him, Borges is and is not the narrator . . .), and so “he” assembles facts into a pattern as they become relevant to what he is gradually uncovering as he traces a thread through vast bibliographical resources (including the discovery of a large volume entitled A General History of Labyrinths)—through a maze of possibly-activated information lying in epistemic wait. He, “Borges,” discovers that the denizens of this mind-dependent world are themselves Berkeleyan idealists, rejecting as crude myth any belief in a material world and—of considerable significance for our understanding of a central aspect of Gee’s documentary on Sebald—that their language corresponds to this antimaterialist view: linguistics recapitulates metaphysics. Nouns (names of things) are either absent or displaced from a centrally significant position in speech, with phenomenological descriptions of experience taking their place; these idealist denizens do not refer to the moon, they rather describe the perceptual content of seeing the moon, with phrases like “round airy-light on dark” in one atmospheric condition, and with “pale-orange-of-the-sky” in another. This last difference of description is instructive, because they speak of present experience as it strikes the speaker’s sensibility; they do not speak (or think) of what we see in the preceding two phrases, that is two differing descriptions of the same thing. Indeed, the very idea of the same thing is unavailable. (At the end, “Borges” discovers that this mind-dependent world is a creation over centuries, thought into being and written into a vast ongoing encyclopedia by a

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secret society that included none other than Berkeley himself, who also, in turn, engages the work of Sir Thomas Browne.) These denizens do not, cannot, relate, connect, or categorize things; they relate, and continually interconnect, experiences within an ongoing phenomenological flow. Although Sebald, walking as he does in The Rings of Saturn, certainly has things to observe, it is never the thing itself (whatever that is—if it is) that is the focus; it is rather the experience of the thing as contextualized, interrelated, and interwoven across and within other experience—other experience and knowledge that lies in wait until activated. The thing’s significance remains open, where, in establishing a new line of thought, of interpretation, a dormant potential causal chain is actualized. And like the world Borges has imagined, Sebald’s walk is one in which, in his distinctive philosophico-literary sense, the world around him is made by the language used to describe and interrelate his phenomenal experience—that is, experience enriched by and given voice within his sensibility. Such reflections on “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” lead to two final aspectlighting points of contact between Borges and Sebald’s intellectual projects: Borges, in this story (and in others), interweaves factual persons, places, and books with the imaginative content in a way that makes them nearly indistinguishable—the point to bear in mind here is that, consistent with the preceding discussion of “The Garden of Forking Paths,” factual references take on significance within the story that, while preserving their factual status, gives them new life, new interconnections and new lines of causal linkages. And the other final point is this: Borges includes the project of reconstructing a full, extensive multi-volume encyclopedia of the mind-dependent world from a single volume of it that has been discovered. This observation quietly, yet forcefully, incorporates the theme of implication in connection with the determination of meaning: to understand a given sentence, or paragraph, or chapter, or book, or volume of an encyclopedia, one needs to see not only its explicit content but also the ranges of implications stemming from it. And so we find a model of how serious reflection on places, on persons, on things, on events, on one’s own past, and on a culture’s past, function for Sebald—the articulation, in language, of those lines of implication just are the content of all of those reflected-upon things—and yet that content depends upon the mind and language of the perceiver for its existence. On the first page of Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn he refers to the “traces of destruction, reaching far back into the past” that he repeatedly detected on his walk, where these traces, taken together and interweaving themselves into one force exerted upon the mind, overlaid a sense of “paralyzing horror” atop his initial “unaccustomed sense of freedom.” The implications of those traces, worked out in his imagination and in his language, grew to possess a meaning sufficient to achieve, as psychic cause, this cognitive-emotional effect.

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All of these Borgesian themes are ones, as we will see shortly, that Patience (After Sebald) captures in a special way that makes the film deeply truthful to its subject, and thereby illustrative of the philosophical import of Sebald’s literary achievement. (III) Ludwig Wittgenstein saw, perhaps with an unprecedented combination of clarity and depth, the role that implication plays in the determination of meaning. Let one passage stand for many: in Philosophical Investigations17 he writes “the sentence ‘The Earth has existed for millions of years’ makes clearer sense than ‘The Earth has existed for the last five minutes.’ For I’d ask anyone who asserted the latter: ‘What observations does this sentence refer to; and what observations would count against it?’—whereas I know to what context of ideas and what observations the former sentence belongs.” What Sebald continually does throughout The Rings of Saturn is articulate interrelating contexts, interrelating language games, especially as they explore the meaning of what he is seeing, imagining, recalling, reflecting upon, and discussing. He knows that all well-formed sentences are not for that reason (all) equally meaningful, equal conveyers of sense. Sentences, phrases, the articulations of our experience, themselves (as Sebald understands and as Patience shows) overlay; they do what phenomenal experience itself does.18 And this overlaying is often a matter of seeing one sentence, one phrase, one verbal line of implication-carrying articulation in the light of, or under or within the aspect of, another. Earlier in that fragment, Wittgenstein writes: “The familiar face of a word, the feeling that it has assimilated its meaning into itself, that it is a likeness of its meaning—there could be human beings to whom all this was alien. (They would not have an attachment to their words.)—And how are these feelings manifested among us?—By the way we choose and value words.” By relation, Sebald’s hybrid original genre is a form, a creative blend of language-games19 in Wittgenstein’s sense, a form that demands a kind of multiplied choosing and valuing: in the course of continuous writing (i.e., not divided by segment according to category, where there is not one single criterion for descriptive accuracy in play at any one time), Sebald chooses words by judging their value in terms of accuracy to present visual appearance, relation to his phenomenology and sensibility, aptness to the causal or implicative line he is developing, rightness in terms of connections to the precedents in play, “tonal” correctness in terms of awakening evocative memory and honestly capturing his own shifting and evolving memory contents, compliance with or answerability to established historical fact, and fittingness to the sensed connections that he is exploring as he proceeds. Such work by Sebald is exemplary as a representation—and indeed as an exquisite enactment—of what Wittgenstein was referring to as our “attachment” to our words.20 But then what more can be said of

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equal importance to all of the above in terms of grasping the content of Gee’s documentary—his representation of Sebald, in the world, in his book(s)—or more accurately, in language, in the world? Wittgenstein, in the course of examining what it is to see one thing as another, writes, “If I heard someone talking about the duck-rabbit picture, and now he spoke in a certain way about the special expression of the rabbit’s face, I’d say, now he’s seeing the picture as a rabbit.”21 Speaking in a certain way on the part of the perceiver, attending to his words, understanding the point and function of those words as expressions of what he sees—these are all of central significance for Wittgenstein in terms of simultaneously understanding what someone means and what someone sees—precisely what Sebald is showing us in The Rings of Saturn. Wittgenstein adds next: “But the expression in one’s voice and gestures is the same as if the object had altered and had ended by becoming this or that.”22 The expression in one’s voice, the intonation and nuance of it, along with the gestures one makes while—or really as part of—speaking, enact, record, and transmit the fact that the thing described by the speaker has changed, has been transformed in perception. And it is in such tones of voice that we indicate that, as he says, we express the fact that what he calls “the lighting up of an aspect”23 has occurred. Sebald’s world is one in which, as his language progresses, aspects illuminating what he sees are “lighting up” from sentence to sentence, gradually, cumulatively. And what the narrator remembers, connections between memory content and present perception, awaken associations and cast aspectlight continually as well. In seeing a drawing of a triangle, and then seeing it as a pointer or arrow, and then seeing it as a triangle that has fallen over on its side, Wittgenstein writes, “The aspects of the triangle: it is as if an idea came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression.”24 This account captures a way of neatly construing—of, language familiar to this example, “picturing”—the imagination-assisted perceptual phenomena we are discussing here, phenomena equally central to Sebald’s entire literary enterprise and to Gee’s documentary. But this way of describing the phenomena in question is also too simple—indeed, it reinsinuates the empirical picture that we began with (and debunked), where the notion of brute perception is still in place, but just augmented by imaginative redecoration, and, if to a lesser extent, my phrase “imagination-assisted” just above. The simple picture would suggest that we always see the basic object first, and that we then, voluntarily and only if and when we choose, overlay the imaginative element, the aspect light, as a way of enhancing that basic perception that always remains in place. This simple picture, as Wittgenstein and Sebald show, is too simple and too generic a formulation to capture the phenomena. Wittgenstein asks of the case of someone being blind to the expression of a face if we can conclude that his eyesight is therefore defective.25 We want to

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say, no, it is not that kind of thing (or problem or incapacity). And he asks, “What does someone who senses the solemnity of a melody perceive?” He answers, “Nothing that could be conveyed by repetition of what was heard.”26 What then is the nature of the part-imaginative, part-perceptual experience (with the appropriate doubt concerning what this formulation of the question misleadingly insinuates) that the turn back to Wittgenstein has brought out in higher relief? Film, as Gee particularly understands, is a medium especially well suited to offer an answer—and if the question is focused on the perceptual sensibility of an individual, documentary film all the more so. (IV) Patience (After Sebald) was itself on release rightly described as “Sebaldian,” where the adjective in this case meant “resistant to classification,” and “a landscape film, an essay film, a celebrity biography . . . and also a hauntingly original piece of literary criticism.”27 In the same review, by A. O. Scott, it was also correctly described as possessing “the combination of obsessiveness and calm—a very Sebaldian alloy of moods—that Mr. Gee brings to a project whose straightforwardness conceals a vast ambition.” All of the preceding discussion of philosophical matters (by way of Locke, Hume, Berkeley, and Wittgenstein) will serve to disclose the vastness of this documentary’s ambition—I think a distinctly, and for Sebald most appropriately, philosophical ambition; but first, a few more of the critical descriptions of this film will prove helpful. We see here mention of not only—I would say not merely, perceptually speaking—the places he walked, but also “the places he imagined, thought about or mentioned at each spot.” It was Berkeley who said that the theist and the atheist can stand next to each other on a hillside, gaze out upon the same landscape, and see utterly different things. This film’s task, its larger ambition, is to capture not only biographical details about Sebald, but to convey, and to evoke, and then—even—to instill in the viewer, what Wittgenstein called a way of seeing. What Sebald imagined in intertwined connection with what he saw, what he thought about in intertwined connection with the content of his perception (“as if an idea came into contact, and for a time remained in contact, with the visual impression”), what he mentioned—what words he chose and valued to both articulate and shape experience: these are all of the person and of his way of seeing.28 A. O. Scott captures a point perfectly in saying, “If he is a self-revealing writer, it is not in the usual, confessional sense, but rather because he seems so strongly present in his books, with a personality that is both the source and aftereffect of the prose.” Both source and aftereffect: Sebald expresses himself and is present within the words he chooses—but he also further creates, or composes, himself in those words. What Sebald documents in his hybrid book, and surprisingly, what Gee also captures in his documentary, is that this was not only a voyage of self-discovery—it was also an undertaking of

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word-borne self-composition (no doubt especially rare for film of any sort). But this latter project—consistent with both the nature of human selfhood and the nature of Sebald’s personal self-understanding—is not a drive toward completion, toward resolution. Another critical discussion of the film by Xan Brooks captures this element: “In keeping with the spirit of Sebald’s writing, Gee’s film is teasing, elegant and perhaps inevitably unresolved: an invitation as opposed to a destination.”29 The invitation is, I am suggesting, an invitation to see the world—taking the East Anglia coastline as a microcosm of the world—in a way where we come to understand a very particular human sensibility by peering into it and looking out from it, and through this experience come to understand more deeply and richly what a sensibility—a perceptual style—is, what a perceiving self is, and indeed what must be included in a capacious and comprehensive grasp of human experience (that, of course, is the vast ambition of the larger philosophical project in Sebald, and by extension in Gee’s film). Brooks describes Patience as retracing Sebald’s initial retracing of his walk, and while this is right, this is not to be understood in terms of the simple correspondence picture discussed above. Rather, the challenge as presented by Sebald—as person and as author, and as Gee clearly understands—is to construct the film as the only thing it can be given the nature of the self and the nature of perception as Sebald is living and showing it; that is, as a palimpsest that complexly layers and composes itself in precisely the way Sebald does within the world of his aspect-dawning perception and his valued words. In another review by the late Philip French,30 attention is rightly drawn to the underlying sense of decay and destruction in Sebald’s book, and the way that selected images and the grainy gray-and-white filming seem to evoke this aspect: the reason, I want to suggest, that Gee’s filming technique is so apt and so powerfully evocative of Sebald’s sensibility is that the theme of decay and destruction applies with equal force not only to political history (the obvious element here, with images of the ruins of bombed-out buildings from World War II), but also to that outward decay and destruction as the symbol of the decay and erosion of memory within a person, to the loss of acuity in our view of the experience that has made us who we are; within Sebald’s sensibility, personal and well as cultural memory (where this is selfdefining in both cases) needs to be kept alive.31 Moreover, Gee’s perceptual acumen also reminds us that decay and destruction threatens the medium of film as well—as the literal decay of celluloid or the “memory loss” involved in digital formats (e.g., through accidental erasure or technological obsolescence, among other threats). It is for Sebald—as for all of us—thought, and thought’s most-employed vehicle, that is words, that achieve this vitality. And finally, of the philosophically significant reviews, David Newnham says of this “art documentary in the very best sense” that it seemed to “evoke

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perfectly the melancholia of Sebald’s book while hinting at the horror which lies at the heart of its labyrinth.”32 With Borges in the undercurrents, one wants to say: labyrinth indeed. In an interview with Evan Harris,33 the director underscored the “dreamlike state” induced by Sebald’s The Rings of Saturn, and the fact that “everyone who reads the book seems to have this very strange experience of finding coincidences and connections to their own lives, travels, and family histories.” Wittgenstein described at one point his book Philosophical Investigations as “a machine to think with,” and there is a parallel here: as reader, we move into a world in which networks of connections, of possible inter-linkages, of Borgesian (part of the content of “Sebaldian”) multiplicities—like Wittgenstein’s metaphor of avenues and roads crisscrossing in every direction in our language—are continually shifting all around us. Gee says, “There are repetitions and unflagged, buried correspondences that, when you encounter them are experienced as a kind of déjà vu,” and that he “made some very basic efforts at that in the film” (this is admirably humble; what he actually achieved was very far from basic). So within Patience, as in The Rings of Saturn, we sometimes come upon and directly see and articulate connections and correspondences; on other occasions, we sense the presence of such connections in an implicit way—as though (as also in Borges’ world) they are waiting to rise into language. That itself is a form of mimetic fidelity; that itself is an instance of documentary truth. But beyond this, Gee also states that “the book starts to go way beyond its boundaries: you start trying to find the traces of it in the world.” This, precisely, is where the way of seeing lifts its gaze out of the book and into the world (consider again the adjective “Sebaldian”)—we can come to see the world through its lens, and that is what it means to understand the sensibility of Sebald. Gee says, describing another dimension of the film’s truth to its subject: “That’s what I was doing in the film.” Gee describes his experience of rereading Sebald’s book, newly realizing how much of it concerned the Netherlands, and then when standing on the Suffolk coast looking out, realizing that what is across the water is the Netherlands and so suddenly coming to see Suffolk as the Netherlands, “with the land in the middle scraped out by sea.” The set, the network, of associations awakened within this landscape is thus immediately transformed, and with this aspect shift comes a correspondingly transformed way of seeing what he thought he was seeing in a familiar, static, and permanently settled way. Experiences of this kind are readily present, whether we focus on Sebald himself as author, on the book, or on the film. These are three interrelated foci in which the phenomenal experience, the complex phenomenology, is what matters. Gee mentions (but does not on the occasion of the cited interview elaborate upon) the fact that his film is not narratively driven (I will return to this in a

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moment): precisely so, I think, because it is the “ambient cinematography” that provides the visual environment—what one might call the visually opened conceptual space and its atmosphere of possible thought—for what in the interview is discussed as psychogeography, the “sense of movement through the city as a kind of spatial psychotherapy where all kinds of hallucinatory histories come bubbling up.” I am not sure “hallucinatory” is the best word for what Gee is after here (perhaps “imagined,” or perhaps better, “fancifully organized but in a way that gives voice to buried or heretofore unseen connections within a human self”), but he does mention the underlying debt to surrealism, a style which often performs a psychologicallyengaging function for the viewer of this kind. Still, the fundamental point here is that in seeing ourselves making such connections (between book and film) and following out such Borgesian lines of memory-causality, we gain self-knowledge; hence the changed way of seeing can be of ourselves and not only of the world. And so here again: we have this experience within the atmosphere, the visual reflective space, of Gee’s film just as we do in Sebald’s book, and that is thus another significant part of the mimetic content that makes this documentary true as a representative of Sebald’s literary sensibility. Sebald, and Gee after him, have shown that the simple picture of directly correspondent truth cannot accommodate our range of truth-making experiences, much less how we go about representing them in word, still image, moving image, and sound. Speaking of his influences, Gee speaks of filmmakers who were “showing a way to try and make films that felt as intimate and natural as writing.” A feature that is distinctive (and I think stylistically definitional) about Sebald is that when we are reading his work, there is an intimacy we experience that reduplicates his own intimacy with his words; one could express this feature in various ways, but one would be to say that, if we read Sebald closely, we live in the illusion of writing with him—as though we too are choosing and valuing the words (his words, our words?), as though we too are experiencing the subtle resonances of possible connections, as though we too are experiencing the dawning of aspects and the seeing of things in a new light (not after him, but with him). Any intensely engaged viewing of the film (which the film seems to naturally solicit) engenders precisely the same special sense of intimacy. It is thus the felt sense here that corresponds, a sense of strangely deep connection with, and even creative collaboration inside, the world of the work of art. In a remarkable part of the interview, given all that has preceded here concerning the Borgesian themes and their philosophical significance, Gee mentions the encyclopedic aspect of some films that seem to intimate content far beyond what they explicitly state (recall the project of extrapolating a full set of an encyclopedia from one discovered volume); the experience of “coming

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across a portal out of the work and into the world” (following a portal out of one possible world into another parallel possible world that is present alternatively but simultaneously); coming to “feel like you’ve not read it before, because things have shifted”; and the idea of “a book that rewrites itself, when you close the covers, it shifts itself around.” Borges describes all this; Sebald and Gee, in their respective idioms, create atmospheres—one wants to call them, in tandem, “literary-filmic”—in which we, as readers and viewers, can experience it. And in a Berkeleyan-phenomenological world, that is what matters. The opening lines of The Rings of Saturn are read at the opening of Patience; it begins, “In August 1992, when the dog days were drawing to an end, I set off to walk the county of Suffolk, in the hope of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” Dispelling an emptiness within is to press it out; thus, in the first line of the book, and of the film, we encounter the theme of externalizing the subjective, transmuting it into the objective, thereby sending inner content outward. But (as Wittgenstein also showed34) this dichotomy is too simple, and it cannot capture the nature of the connection between this philosophical-literary sensibility and its environment: it is, rather more like what the American pragmatists35 discussed, a matter of a complex, layered, two-way interaction in which the self and the environment serve as constitutive elements of each other.36 In his “Notes Towards a Film,”37 the director said, speaking of the natural affinity between his aesthetic concerns and Sebald’s, “The dialogue between personality and place is thus central to my own artistic investigations.” Both the book and the film go on to show that the relation suggested in this opening line at once correctly establishes the nature of the investigation and yet calls immediately for enhancement, for sophistication, for climbing beyond and kicking away the ladder of this simple dichotomy—it calls for nothing less than Wittgensteinian subtlety on the matter. In his notes, Gee adds (having just written of the importance of place in culture, thought, and a non-alienated sense of belonging), “Sebald’s body of work is profoundly aware of this and offers the richest statement I have come across about the importance of attention to place and the histories it holds and has made.” “The histories it holds” can refer to political history, war and its aftereffects, and the geographically rooted place of a culture, but also to private, personal, self-constitutive experience that is atmospherically contained within an imaginative, reflective, memory-supported sense of place. “And has made” does something else: it underscores what this film captures so deeply and that makes it true under yet another aspect—it states the power that place (as richly, not simply-empirically understood) itself holds to shape experience, to promote thought that makes connections, and to do all the things that persons and works can do, for example, inspire, provoke, challenge, quietly

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insist, encourage, open and expand the sense of possibility, lead us to see one thing as another, deepen our sense of the importance of what we encounter, and enrich our comprehension of what lies before us. Gee refers to the “essay film”—his idiom here—as the genre most suited to capture what Sebald has in focus and is investigating about human experience, human perception, and this genre’s special allowance of “multiple tones and textures” that are as he says “essential when considering Sebald and place.” Thus the very possibility of a right tone, and the fact that textures can be chosen and valued like words, also constitute part of the meaning of the word “true,” or of the phrase “true of,” when used in description of this documentary. In still another interview Gee mentions Rick Moody’s term, “textual compulsion,” for the sense Sebald can instill in a reader of The Rings of Saturn that one has to rather urgently read everything else Sebald has written. Gee mentions that he “still can’t quite work out what it is, how it operates on some people the way it does” (I think he has worked this out within his film very well, and I would add that the fact that he cannot describe this “operation” succinctly in a few words is itself a measure of his grasp of the issue). Given the ground covered in this essay, I want to suggest that a desire to remain within Sebald’s sensibility, as discussed above, is a way of staying inside a world of connection-making of a kind that, while showing us a world through Sebald’s lens, shows us at the same time ourselves and the complexity of our perceptual world, that is: (a) our capacity to make meaningful connections and to sense the possibility of still others, (b) to connect imagination and perception, (c) to take us out of ourselves and into ourselves at the same time, (d) to investigate (indeed in a Wittgensteinian sense) the nature and variations of human perception, (e) to cultivate a more deeply rooted sense of the two-way interrelations between self and place, and more broadly (f) to gain self-knowledge as we gain other-knowledge. But now, with all the foregoing behind us, we should turn to unpack the significance of the documentary’s title. Patience comes from an episode in Sebald’s Austerlitz (2001). Of this work, published just before the author’s death in 2001, aged 57, Gee said, “There’s a key scene in which the Sebaldian narrator comes across the Austerlitz character, sees him from behind in a room, and he has a stack of black-and-white photographs. The narrator says he can see Austerlitz dealing them out in a sequence like he’s playing a game of Patience, which is like Solitaire in the States. The idea was that this guy is putting down family photos or location photos and hoping that a certain sequence of images will unlock the secret of his trauma. Obviously, thinking about montage and filmmaking, the idea of putting a certain sequence together that can unlock everything is very important.” Gee rejected the initial idea of using hands that deal images and photos as a foundational structural device of the film, and given all we have now considered, this

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directorial instinct (or perhaps explicit thought) was exactly right—it would have been too obvious, too clever, too much a matter of, indeed, direct depictive correspondence, too much a matter of illustration-as-representation. But what remained—the idea of setting out images before oneself as a means of unlocking hidden or obscured relations between things, experiences, persons, places, events, memories, authors, and texts, all of which, once woven together or “seen as” related, make sense, was exactly right. Delivered to the viewer as a static image, as a depiction of a hand dealing images as the cards of a life, would have been just that—a depiction. Rather, to create an atmosphere, a “mental state,” in which a viewer, like Sebald’s reader, who replicates within the reader’s inner world the interpretive work of Sebald’s shifting and non-unitary narrator, is not merely depiction, not merely truth by simple one-to-one correspondence; rather, and far more powerfully, it is an enactment of the perceptual-imaginative process that is the true, and not-easily replicable, content of the book (and here, by extension, the film about the book, about its author). The viewer does not only see Sebald’s biographically and autobiographically enlivening, connection-finding game of Patience; he is also put in a position where he has to play it. This special work on the part of both the viewer and reader is emphasized by Rick Moody in the documentary, in suggesting that the reason some people do not like The Rings of Saturn is that it is not organized and propelled by a narrative line and so the reader is not guided, as it were, through the book. Precisely so: the reader finds and makes her way through it—as in amid a landscape, not unlike life itself, an often haltingly foreign topography. Moody says (adding a layer to the meaning of the word “patience” here), “I think that’s a sign of impatience, that you’re not being led through the book.” But before concluding here, there is one more element, a final guiding directorial image, to consider in connection with the foregoing assessment. Gee says, I think of Sebald more as a photographer. There’s a quote I read somewhere where he says he wasn’t very interested in school and he spent most of his time in the darkroom of the school’s photography lab. And there is something—I’m not sure if I’ve made this up or imagined it—about the way images work in his book: it feels to me like a black-and-white print developed under a red light, like it comes up out of whiteness, and if you leave it there it will black out in the tray. It’s this kind of rising and sinking of the image; it’s a very strange feeling in Sebald. The film I made is barely cinematic at all. It contains very basic, postcard compositions, more like photographs.

This darkroom model of a dawning image (a figure so fitting to Wittgenstein’s sense of how aspects work), with delicate images emerging out of whiteness, perfectly captures the sense of how memories, associations, connections, aspects, ways of seeing fade in and out of the picture within the

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world of Sebald’s sensibility, and it also ably captures the actively imaginative experience of the reader moving within that world—a world in which it is instructively impossible to separate everything into Hume’s impressions or ideas. So Sebald’s writing (with photographs at hand), and Patience as a film “more like photographs,” is a visual representation not of photographs being developed—that would be a literal representation of a darkroom, but rather of a powerful intimation of the cognitive-imaginative-perceptual experience of actively finding meaning and making sense among images, within them. There are, as we have seen photographs incorporated within Sebald’s text, also photographs (and scenes that could be seen as still shots, but are, in fact long takes), in Gee’s film. But the latter images (in Gee’s film) are not mere reduplications of the former images (in Sebald’s book); more complexly, and more true to human experience and to the experience of reading Sebald, the filmic images—like the character Austerlitz as overseen by Sebald’s narrator—present material for active constructive engagement. Here again, now in the film: it is this kind of presentation that makes this documentary a good representation of the Sebaldian sensibility. This achievement of fidelity is reflected as well in the sound track, which also conveys this sensibility (and is itself worthy of close analysis in the terms discussed here). With figures from Schubert’s Winterreise emerging, receding, appearing under different aspects, in different connections, in sound-processed forms which tug at recognition in differing ways and which intertwine with their own previous instantiations and with layered vocal lines, tones, and textures, they—with a sense of appropriate strangeness—call on us to weave them into sense. This is a sound-design that is itself reminiscent of Borges’ multi-present world. But then affinities with Borges, with “Forking Paths” and “Tlon” in particular, are never far way from the film: Gee said, of some footage he made with a portable handheld camera, of the walk he took in Sebald’s footsteps in preparation for the film, “The imagery is all slightly archaic and I thought this kind of hugely compressed, very low-quality, digital stuff—absolutely vintage 2010 equipment—would somehow be a little hole through the middle of the film imagery to let you see the twenty-first century.” (V) All the major elements of the discussion here—the empiricist picture of perception; Sebald’s hybrid genre; Wittgenstein on imaginative seeing; Borges’ influence on Sebald (and Gee); Gee’s Sebaldian filmic vision—one could describe as pieces of a mosaic that fit together, and in that fit, capture what Sebald looks like, sounds like, thinks like, and then use that assembled composite to measure the representational fidelity of the film itself. But that image (as I mentioned of the “mosaic” model at the outset) is itself an oversimplification: these variegated elements intertwine and inflect each other in, as I also mentioned above, non-isolable ways. We see the empirical picture

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in the light of Sebald’s investigation of perception; we see the encouragement of imaginative perception in the film in the light of Wittgenstein’s remarks on aspects; we understand Gee’s relation to Sebald against the background of Borges. But then these strands (or, keeping to the mosaic metaphor, tiles or fragments) only identify the interrelated categories of elements that may be in play in connection with an understanding of the mimetic verisimilitude of Gee’s documentary of Sebald’s project. Of that intimate relationship between literary and filmic works, herewith a summary of the ground covered in this discussion, and its constitutive elements: (a) the picture of a person as captured in a set of straightforward descriptions, as opposed to the layered complexity of what we can see in a person; (b) the possibility of entering into another sensibility; (c) the fact that the accurate depiction of a person could never be static (as opposed to what may fleetingly be their appearance); (d) in Hume’s terminology, we are given in Patience impressions that themselves serve to awaken ideas— through which we then see the impressions; (e) seeing and remembering are not two distinct categories of experience, as strongly suggested by the empiricist picture (one can remember the (prior) centipede in seeing the present one); (f) each of the five misconceptions concerning perception and memory (as listed above); (g) the idea of a hybrid book, a correspondingly hybrid narrator, and Sebald, within the book, imagining himself as another or seeing through another sensibility—where this tells us still more about his imaginative capacity, his identity; (h) connective relations that are constitutive of experience, not added to it after the perceptually atomistic fact, so that no experientially isolable content is available as basic perceptual fact (“basic” is itself a variable, context-sensitive term); (i) we see within Sebald’s mode of perception a person seeing the grand in the minute, the largest universal intimated by the smallest particular; (j) Borges functions as a foundational connection, a telling relation, that brings to light a central aspect of both book and film; (k) the idea of a Heraclitean flux of connective possibility; (l) the experience of moving through a maze within a Berkeleyan mind-dependent world, where Sebald himself becomes a word-borne, and in an extended sense of the term mind-dependent, entity; (m) understanding the implication-range of a sentence is often the content of understanding (e.g., as above, “The Earth is five minutes old”); (n) the idea of choosing and valuing words, where these are both expressive of and creative of a sensibility; (o) tone and texture are meaning-contributing dimensions of both linguistic and visual experience; (p) self-expression and self-composition take place along parallel, or simultaneous, tracks within language; (q) the fact that there is such a thing as a perceptual style; (r) our sense of presence within a work as something of a creative collaborator, where this creative engagement feels as natural as writing; (s) transformations, sudden or gradual, of our

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(Wittgensteinian) ways of seeing; (t) the idea of a book, like life, changing itself constantly through the perennial flux of shifting relations; and (u) the powerful image of figures emerging out of, and then slowly fading to black, on darkroom paper. Drawing these varied strands together, we might conclude how we see all these elements in creatively and interpretively open ways (and how the interpretation of a person and the interpretation of a work of art stand parallel to each other—a fuller discussion of which is for another time, but is no doubt evident in the present remarks). That is, these elements of interpretation, meaning-determination, and sense-making function in the ways (against the empiricist picture) shown by Sebald, and complexly represented by Gee. This presentation of the possibility of interrelating all of these is, as we have seen, what makes this documentary true—that is to say: a convincing, absorbing representation that carries and inculcates the conviction that, as in Sebald’s book, we see a person—as a maze seen from above—in a multi-layered, irreducibly complex evolving network of relations; thus, not only from which we see a human sensibility emerging (as if in a darkroom tray with its developing photographs), but within which we see a human sensibility perceiving, reflecting, and acting—where those actions are the recognizable and meaningful enactments of a human soul. This kind of truth, as Sebald profoundly understood, is miles removed from the overly simple empiricist picture of perception as discussed above, but also from the corresponding empiricist picture of both self-hood and what it is to understand another person), and Gee’s subtle, philosophically significant, conceptually astute film shows this Sebaldian truth all over again. So one could colloquially say of Gee’s film: “He got it right.” But to understand that minimal sentence, one would have to understand all or at least many of the preceding elements, and probably with such a complexity and shifting expanse of content that one would not be able to recall all of those elements at the moment of uttering this minimal epistemic-aesthetic evaluation (and praise). Yet, and importantly, one in a sense remembers all these things (intuitively), and one remembers by intimation, or senses, their lines of implication and the language games that support them. So while no single criterion for the verification of this claim concerning documentary truth is available, many collaborating things, many aspects, many observations specific to their moments, many elements that conjoin the perceptual and the imaginative, all woven together, make it true (in the sense I am arguing for here), just as is the case within Sebald’s intimate, written world. Or perhaps we can put it this way: these elements, reviewed and considered as a network of interpretive tools, serve to display the richness—against the simple picture of “matching” truth or direct-correspondence truth as described at the outset of this chapter—of the concept of truth when used in connection with

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a documentary. Literature and film, working in concert—in these exemplary cases, through Sebald’s original mode of writing together with Gee’s contribution to the special idiom of the essay-film—make possible the wondrous experience of truth’s revelation within the realm of art.

NOTES 1. For helpful discussions of the conceptual issues that reside within portraiture, see Jodi Cranston, The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), where the dialogical relation between viewer and portrait is emphasized, and John J. Ciofalo, The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), where the expansion of meaningcontent within a self-portrait is helpfully articulated. 2. W. G. Sebald, The Rings of Saturn, tr. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998). 3. I am very grateful to Brian Clack for recommending Patience (After Sebald) to me in connection with biographical and autobiographical issues. 4. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Revised 4th ed., ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009), Philosophy of Psychology— A Fragment, sec. xi. 5. And the influence of this simple dichotomy-picture is discernible not only in the work of philosophers of perception. The fundamental distinction upon which New Criticism was built—internal versus external content—can I think plausibly be seen as a manifestation within literary-critical theory of this picture. 6. There is much more on this point in the following, but consider at this stage a profound remark of Jorge Luis Borges: “Because I think of reading a book as no less an experience than traveling or falling in love. I think that reading Berkeley or Shaw or Emerson, those are quite as real experiences to me as seeing London, for example. Of course, I saw London through Dickens and through Chesterton and through Stevenson, no? Many people are apt to think of real life on the one side, that means toothache, headache, traveling and so on, and then you have on the other side, you have imaginary life and fancy and that means the arts. But I don’t think that that distinction holds water. I think that everything is part of life,” in Richard Burgin, Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Avon, 1968), 35 (in a section entitled “The Living Labyrinth of Literature”). 7. I borrow this accurate term from Roberta Silman, “In the Company of Ghosts,” New York Times, July 26, 1998. 8. Here I follow the discussion of Patrick Lennon, “In the Weaver’s Web,” in W.G. Sebald: History-Memory-Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006), 91–104. 9. Sir Thomas Browne (1605–1682), a Norwich resident (with a statue of him standing in the center of Sebald’s city) wrote works of a hybrid or genre-crossing

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character that counterintuitively interwove the new science and rationality, mysticism and religiosity, and a (believing) interest in angels and ghosts. His works often possess an autobiographical tone or aspect, and one of his works is an encyclopedia of false beliefs (as shown to be false by new work in empirical medicine). Borges called him the finest writer in the English language; Virginia Woolf praised his work very highly; E. M. Forster quoted his work with great admiration; Samuel Johnson referred in a way to the distinctiveness of his sensibility as expressed in and through his writing; many other tributaries of influence extend from his work. 10. The Rings of Saturn, 263. 11. Ibid., 294. 12. Ibid., 296. 13. I offer a discussion of this matter in “Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove,” New Literary History 38:1 (Winter 2007), 163–81. 14. I should underscore the importance of both the literary investigation of memory undertaken within Sebald’s writing, and the inquiry into memory and its role in human understanding as occasioned in the reader by his writing. In an interview, Sebald said, “The moral backbone of literature is about that whole question of memory. To my mind it seems clear that those who have no memory have the much greater chance to lead happy lives. But it is something you cannot possibly escape: your psychological make-up is such that you are inclined to look back over your shoulder. Memory, even if you repress it, will come back at you and it will shape your life. Without memories there wouldn’t be any writing: the specific weight an image or phrase needs to get across to the reader can only come from things remembered—not from yesterday but from a long time ago.” In “W. G. Sebald: The Last Interview” (with Maya Jaggi in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, September 24, 2001), published in The Guardian, December 21, 2001. In that interview, and of the kind of sustained questioning concerning memory into which Sebald’s work positions the reader, Maya Jaggi said, “Your books have a documentary feel, using captionless black-and-white photographs, but their status is unclear, or whether portraits correspond to people in the text. What’s your interest in photography, and why do you strive for uncertainty in the reader about what’s true?” (I will return to photography in Sebald, in connection with Gee’s remarks on Sebald’s textual atmosphere, below.) 15. Jorge Luis Borges, “The Garden of Forking Paths,” in Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 119–28. 16. Jorge Luis Borges, “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius,” in Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998), 68–81. 17. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy of Psychology— a Fragment, sec. 313. 18. It is in this respect that we see Sebald’s personal stylistic idiom in the light, or against the background, of Borges; Borges sees London through the lens of Dickens. If one were to ask: Do we then no longer see Sebald directly; did Borges not see London directly? Or: Are we made to see Sebald less purely by such layering of perception? Or (as I want to suggest) as Sebald and Gee are showing in their work, more richly, more connectedly, and—here is the important epistemological point— more fully? If we walk the East Anglia coast in Sebald’s footsteps (as Gee did), do

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we for that reason see it less directly? In seeing it through the lens of literature, or in part through another’s sensibility (I’ll return to this below), we may indeed see it differently—but that experience then becomes part of what we have done, and so, importantly, it becomes unavoidably ours. Another way to put the point of this kind of work as it stands against or shows the poverty of the traditional picture of perception could be in Austinian terms: what is meant by “directly” here, and what is meant by “pure”? It is only the simplified picture that leads us to ask such a question and to attempt to generically use the term “direct” and “pure”—where in truth there are only specific contextualized usages of these terms, contexts in which we will see the site-specific criteria for their sense and for the relevant measurement of directness and purity as functioning there. There are no general answers on this score because there are no real general questions. 19. I offer discussions of Wittgenstein’s conception of a language-game in “Wittgenstein, Verbal Creativity, and the Expansion of Artistic Style,” in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. Sebastian S. Grève and Jakub Mácha (London: Palgrave, 2015), and in G. L. Hagberg, “Language-Games and Artistic Styles,” in Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 9–44. 20. On this point see Stanley Cavell, “The Touch of Words,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, ed. William Day and Victor J. Krebs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 81–98. Further on the issue of one’s attachment to words, and the consideration of who is speaking in weighing them, evaluating them, and understanding them, I should mention that Thomas Bernhard was another strong and acknowledged influence on Sebald. In this connection one noteworthy feature of Bernhard’s work is that he often presents the lengthy expressions of the views of a character in a recounting by another character of what that first character said. The question of interpretation— where this involves considerations of who is speaking, for what purpose, with what background, with what relationship to the character being reported upon, with what motive, with what hidden agenda, and so forth—is amplified in Bernhard’s work; the distinctive way in which this increases engagement, and particularly reflection on meaning, is not lost on Sebald. Gee’s film puts us in this position with a similar amplification of it. 21. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Philosophy of Psychology— a Fragment, sec. 208. 22. Ibid., sec. 209. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid., sec. 211. 25. Ibid., sec. 232. 26. Ibid., sec. 233. 27. A. O. Scott, “A Writer Who Defied Categorization: Patience (After Sebald), a Documentary,” The New York Times, May 8, 2012. 28. The entire book can be read as a study of how such changes, transformations, in ways of seeing are effected, that is, through an indissoluble combination of perception, imagination, historical awareness, reflection, activated memory, language, interrelation with prior experience, and the intertwining of all of these. But for now,

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one passage may stand for many: “An excavator dug large holes in which stumps and roots, some of them the size of a small house, were buried. Now, in the truest sense of the word, everything was turned upside down. The forest floor, which in the spring of last year had still been carpeted with snowdrops, violets and wood anemones, ferns and cushions of moss, was now covered by a layer of barren clay. All that grew in the hard-baked earth were tufts of swamp grass, the seeds of which had lain in the depths for goodness knows how long. The rays of sun, with nothing left to impede them, destroyed all the shade-loving plants so that it seemed as if we were living on the edge of an infertile plain. Where a short while ago the dawn chorus had at times reached such a pitch that we had to close the bedroom windows, where larks had risen on the morning air above the fields and where, in the evenings, we occasionally even heard a nightingale in the thicket, its pure and penetrating song punctuated by theatrical silences, there was now not a living sound.” The Rings of Saturn, 268. To perceive what is in front of him, Sebald here sees this barren landscape against the imagined backdrop of what was there and now is not, so to see rightly what it is, is to (within the same vision) see what it is not, and the accurate or truthful verbal articulation of this perception requires that what is not there, what has been (literally) buried, be described as fully, or more fully, than what is there as inverted remainder. In this passage we get a way of seeing that is changed—transfigured into both a scene of environmental loss and a metaphor of inward ruin or desolation—from what we might have seen without seeing it through Sebald’s words. And beyond this: in reference back to the concept of language games and the content that is generated within them, one can see here how very much would be lost (indeed, everything of human interest, everything evocative of a person’s way of seeing, everything subtle and metaphorically enriched) if one were to claim that we know, generally and invariantly across cases and usages, the meaning of the phrase “turned upside down,” so what he is saying here is that everything was turned upside down. 29. Xan Brooks, Patience (After Sebald), The Guardian, January 27, 2012. 30. Philip French, Patience (After Sebald), The Guardian, January 28, 2012. 31. Articulating the necessity of actively working with memory, the narrator says, “But the fact is that writing is the only way in which I am able to cope with the memories which overwhelm me so frequently and unexpectedly. If they remained locked away, they would become heavier and heavier as time went on, so that in the end I would succumb under their mounting weight. Memories lie slumbering within us for months and years, quietly proliferating, until they are woken by some trifle and in some strange way blind us to life. How often this has caused me to feel that my memories, and the labours expended in writing them down are all part of the same humiliating and, at bottom, contemptible business! And yet, what would we be without memory? We would not be capable of ordering even the simplest thoughts, the most sensitive heart would lose the ability to show affection, our existence would be a mere never-ending chain of meaningless moments, and there would not be the faintest trace of a past.” The Rings of Saturn, 255. 32. David Newnham, “W.G. Sebald Film Takes Journey to Cliff’s Edge,” The Guardian, February 8, 2012. 33. Evan Harris, “Interview with Grant Gee,” The White Review, April 2012.

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34. I discuss Wittgenstein’s lengthy and intricately layered investigation into this issue in Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 35. It was John Dewey who developed this interactive and relational conception of experience in connection with aesthetic experience; see his Art as Experience (New York: Minton Balch, 1934). I discuss the contemporary significance of his view in “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics: The Contours of Experience,” in the Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 272–99. 36. Because this theme is fundamental to the philosophical dimension of Sebald’s entire project one finds powerful examples of it every few pages. But again, one passage may stand for many: “It was as if I were passing through an undiscovered country, and I still remember that I felt, at the same time, both utterly liberated and deeply despondent. I had not a single thought in my head. With each step that I took, the emptiness within and the emptiness without grew ever greater and the silence more profound. Perhaps that was why I was frightened almost to death when a hare that had been hiding in the tufts of grass by the wayside started up, right at my feet, and shot off down the rough track before darting sideways, this way, then that, into the field. It must have been cowering there as I approached, heart pounding as it waited, until it was almost too late to get away with its life. In that very fraction of a second when its paralysed state turned into panic and flight, its fear cut right through me. I still see what occurred in that one tremulous instant with an undiminished clarity. I see the edge of the grey tarmac and every individual blade of grass, I see the hare leaping out of its hiding place, with its ears laid back and a curiously human expression on its face that was rigid with terror and strangely divided; and its eyes, turning to look back as it fled and almost popping out of its head with fright, I see myself, become one with it. Not till half-an-hour later, when I reached the broad dyke that separates the grass expanse from the pebble bank that slopes to the shoreline, did the blood cease its clamour in my veins.” The Rings of Saturn, 234–35. 37. Grant Gee, “Notes Towards a Film” (New York: Cinema Guild, 2012).

Chapter 28

Fiction and Nonfiction in Chantal Akerman’s Films Charles Warren

I came to know Chantal Akerman some years ago when we coincided as visitors teaching in Harvard University’s film program. I ran into her one day, early in our acquaintance, as she was rummaging in the projection booth of the main screening room there. She said she was looking to see if a print had come in that she wanted to show to her filmmaking class—Robert Bresson’s Pickpocket (1959). “They see so much bullshit,” she commented. We had no need to say more. Akerman did talk to me a number of times subsequently about her admiration for Bresson and about his being an inspiration for her, and of course she has talked about this publicly. Many things come into play: an aspiration for serious, independent, challenging, indeed radically experimental film art that yet works through the medium of the theatrical feature film; a disposition to pare down, to find a lot in a little, or release a lot from a little; a certain view of life, unblinking—even grim—about people and their motives and what people are up against in this world, yet a view where ecstasy, transcendence, even humor, can come alive. Bresson’s Four Nights of a Dreamer (1972) is a film full of humor, even “good humor,” as is much Akerman from at least Toute une nuit (1982) and Window Shopping (1986) on. Perhaps Bresson and Akerman are humorous when they want to be utopian, to imagine what people and life can be, might be, recognizing that people and life already are this to an extent, as Stanley Cavell argues about classical Hollywood in its characteristic mode of romantic comedy, something he takes very seriously— and Akerman’s A Couch in New York (1996) bears close relation to classical Hollywood romantic comedy. Akerman remarked to me once how struck she was by Bresson’s final film, L’Argent (Money, 1983), where a sympathetic young man, an outcast, ultimately goes berserk and kills people. She remarked on how amazingly tense 495

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she found the film, each image filled with a tension ready to explode into the next, which goes on moment by moment all the way through the film. Such tension does not sound like Akerman, and yet she has her tension, as does all valid film, as does all poetry, all that is made—a tension compounded of extension and intension, an attunement to the physical world as it is, in its extension, and an imbuing of the world with meaning, or a discovery of meaning, intension—so Allen Tate explained long ago in a famous essay, “Tension in Poetry.”1 Akerman’s tension is to be discovered if not immediately felt. On each viewing of an Akerman film, in my experience, its peculiar tension becomes more and more clear and palpable. Disclosure of the everyday is much of what she is about, and the emergence of a peculiar tension is at the heart of this disclosure.2 Tension, in the sense of restlessness, or energy moving more than one way, or the physical held in balance with overtones of meaning, is in the everyday, something to be revealed that we might ordinarily overlook, something for documentation with an intelligent and probing eye. And tension is in the presentation, the abstraction from reality, the very creativity of approach and structure in the film, holding the world up for view in a certain extended form. Here documentation and fiction—a making or fashioning—come together or blur. Go back to Pickpocket for a moment, the film Akerman wanted to show to her class as an instruction, and inspiration, a medicine for the sensibility. This film is possessed of a remarkable doubleness. It can look virtually like a documentary, doing its best to give the sense of observing ordinary people going about their lives, traversing the Paris streets, riding the Metro, talking in bars, descending into petty crime. But looked at another way the film is pure choreography, abstraction, all its composition and movement seeming highly controlled, the sound effects of course carefully manipulated, everything coming off as a beautiful, highly artificial shadow play. A crowd swarms placing bets at a racetrack—yet the people flow in a steady rhythm here and there across the screen like ghosts in Dante. A young man stands behind a woman and fingers open her purse and extracts money, as the horses race by offscreen—yet the crescendo and decrescendo of thundering hooves gives us the man’s panic and then his excitement over success, like a wave of sexual ecstasy. The messiness of everyday life is as if imbued with direction from the outside, eventually moving, in this particular film, toward transforming change, this man and his world being subject to the access of grace—coming from the outside, or coming from the inside in a way that is not usually acknowledged—not until this film points to it and asserts it. All film is possessed of a doubleness as between passively observing, registering the world, letting it come forth, and on the other hand actively transfiguring the world, making something out of it. The question is always, does a film show intelligence—or intelligence of the feelings—about its powers of



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doubleness, does the film really do something with this power? Bresson, for one, seems about as far as possible from cliché, from any half-alive formula for making fantasy seem real. And if a film does show intelligence, what are the specifics of its way with the real and the created? There are many ways in film of involving the real with the creative, letting the real show itself fully or become itself fully through involvement with the creative, the fictive, the structuring power—while, conversely, letting the special insight or worth of the creative enforce itself through seeming to be newly infused with reality, more possessed of reality than anything yet seen. The French New Wave, with its spontaneity of scripting, performance, shooting, editing, found a way. Pier Paolo Pasolini found a way with his barbs of sexuality and subproletarian behavior woven into a film’s larger tapestry of mythic import. And Akerman has found her own way, her own balances and imbalances. Or, as with Bresson or Godard or Varda or Pasolini, each film of hers finds a way. Some time after I first got to know Akerman, I wrote an entry on her for Ian Aitken’s Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film.3 Akerman was in Cambridge again visiting a friend, and I thought I had better show the piece to her before sending it in. She kindly said that she liked it, saw no problem or gaffe, and especially liked places where I pointed to a strong documentary element in the fiction films. She conceded that it seemed right to have an entry on her in an encyclopedia of documentary, but said, “You know, I don’t think, at least with my own work, that there are two kinds of film, fiction and documentary. To me they are all just films. I make them out of my feelings, one after another.” We mostly think of there being a difference between nonfiction and fiction, however hard it may be to spell out. We have heard plenty from film theorists about how documentary inevitably changes reality merely by looking at it, and all the more in the full structured account it gives, with editing and explanations. And we have heard, going way back—Samuel Johnson, Aristotle—about how fiction can be realistic. Cesare Zavattini wrote a famous manifesto for realistic fiction film.4 We hold to there being a distinction between fiction and nonfiction, though we see how much qualification has to be made in using these terms. Perhaps the two terms are necessary to begin thinking about a film, and can be taken away like scaffolding once the work of consideration is done, letting us remain just with the film as it is. We seem to need to think of fate and free will as opposites, but can come to admit the paradox that both are always true of life, that they coincide, that they are terms that can lead us to a third thing, beyond them. Je tu il elle (I You He She, 1974), Akerman’s first feature, ends with a long scene where two young women, one of them Akerman, make love passionately on a bed. The scene is filmed in three long takes, each made with a fixed camera. The sound of breathing and of skin moving against bedsheets

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seems natural and synchronous with what we see. Are these two women acting? Can they be? What is “acting” as opposed to real action? Where is the line to be drawn? Can deliberate acting be pushed into the realm of erotic abandon, so that it simply becomes that, turns into it? This episode stirs such questions in us. And what is the scene’s relation to the rest of the film, the fiction that comes before, where, first, the Chantal-figure is isolated in her apartment, brooding on existence, moving about, writing, as passages of voice-over give a somewhat inaccurate account of things that we see; and then, in the film’s second part, the Chantal-figure travels with a male truck driver, ultimately reaching the place where her old girlfriend lives? A number of things might be implied: that the flux of human identity and of a woman’s interaction with a man comes to rest in lesbian sexual experience, as the airiness of fiction gives way to fact, the unreal, in a sense, giving way to the real. Or, that the fact of intense physical bonding and, surely, bonding in feeling, is indeed a relative thing, depending, for what it is, on its being a contrast to the life that leads up to it and, presumably, goes on after it—a life experienced as if a bit, at least, unreal. How different the love scene in Je tu il elle would seem if we did not have to wait for it; if a protracted narrative did not, as it does, explode into this surprising and overwhelming material. And then there is the funny thing that these three long takes of the women in bed—involved in a carnality that appears genuinely felt—can begin to look abstract, a study in shades of white—skin, bedsheets, wall—or a study of the motion of long dark hair, swishing about like the black hair of Kinuyo Tanaka in the wind in Sansho the Bailiff (1954), or the hair of Godard’s Mary in Hail Mary (1984) as she thrashes about nude in bed, making love to God perhaps (and I think that Je tu il elle got under Godard’s skin and influenced the imagery of Hail Mary—Akerman told me that Godard wanted to use some of her “nude scene” in Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), but that she did not like the idea). In short, the women in bed become film, specifically black-and-white film. They are transfigured. They become something made by an artist—fiction. Even the paucity of cutting seems artistic, it is so deliberate, so out of the ordinary. Reality, it would seem, cannot escape being a representation, even though there is still reality there. Such are some of the peculiar tensions set up in or found by Je tu il elle. With Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975) Akerman made one of the crucial films in film history. The film is long, at three hours and twenty minutes, and grand—it has grandeur about it—though it focuses on just forty-eight hours spread over three calendar days in the life of an obscure widow keeping house for herself and her teenaged son, with much routine and repetition, little conversation in their life, and deliberate avoidance of thought, speculation, or any access of new feeling—the compulsion to avoid certainly having something to do with the fact that Jeanne,



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for all her lower-middle-class respectability, accepts a sexual client each afternoon. The film is crucial just because of its derivation of grandeur from this mundane material, a disclosure of the everyday unlike anything we have seen, and all this before, about halfway through the film, something starts to bubble up in Jeanne, feelings come forth and brooding occurs, things start to go wrong, leading to a violent outburst on Jeanne’s part, an act of violence, at the end. A quality in this film of documentation of the mundane, fused with Greek tragedy. As with the sex in Je tu il elle, we want to ask about certain things in Jeanne Dielman, are they not pure documentary?—observing a woman in real time mixing up and molding a meat loaf, peeling enough potatoes for dinner, scrubbing the bathtub, and so on. The sense we get is that we need this raw fact and real-time observation to understand where Jeanne’s life centers, where she is constrained, and also to understand the pure physicality and repetition that allow, not simply compel, her avoidance of reflection. One notable thing is that this unprecedented documentation of the mundane involves a performance. Delphine Seyrig brings to the molding of a meatloaf or shopping for a button all the dignity and fascination of her walking the hallways in Last Year at Marienbad (Alain Resnais, 1961). In Jeanne are we dealing, after all, with an extraordinary woman constrained by ordinary life? Is every woman who is constrained by ordinary life, perhaps extraordinary? Do we simply see in Delphine Seyrig what we might see if we looked harder elsewhere? Perhaps to see the dignity and fascination of the everyday, it is necessary that it become film—which is, of course, to be filmed in a certain way and screened, but also perhaps to be incarnated in a film being, even a star. Certainly someone who is not an actor can become a compelling film being, or star. Witness the man Flaherty calls Nanook, or Bresson’s pickpocket, or mouchette, or even the donkey in Au hasard Balthazar (1966).5 And Seyrig molding a meatloaf or washing the dishes is not exactly acting, is she—acting as opposed to doing? What happens with the raw facts of Jeanne Dielman is, as with Je tu il elle, a documentation and transfiguration at once, with the suggestion that documentation needs transfiguration, that what is to be documented comes to us only as transfigured, in ordinary experience—so western philosophy since Kant acknowledges (and eastern philosophy much earlier)—as well as in film that means to be true to, to be revelatory of, ordinary experience. Part of the dignity of Jeanne Dielman comes from a formal decision, to shoot most everything transpiring in the apartment with a fixed camera at a slightly low angle, cutting only with the end of a whole activity and movement to a new room. Akerman has suggested that the point of view is like that of a fascinated child watching its mother, and has said that her observation of Jeanne she meant to be adoring, patient, sometimes puzzled. The formal

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pattern gives the film something of the quality of stanzaic verse, or the meter of Sophoclean dialogue. The film turns things into song of a sort, or discovers that things are song. The point of view like that of a child makes explicit and taps into a power of film that Stanley Cavell says operates in all cases, all films: the interest of a child watching its mother.6 Jeanne Dielman is in part a crucial film because it renders the world into something that is essentially and in very specific ways film, and suggests that such rendering is necessary, that to become itself, the world needs to become film. Jeanne Dielman has something important to say about what film is, and part of this is a take on the child’s fascination with the mother, a way of making that explicit. Janet Bergstrom has made the interesting suggestion that the child (as it were) in Jeanne Dielman wishes not only to observe, but also to control, the mother, framing her.7 Film would see and create—I would put it—all at the same time. The camera in Jeanne Dielman, the child, does not go into Jeanne’s bedroom when she takes a client there, until the third such episode, near the end of the film, when we suddenly get two extraordinary shots: an overhead view down onto Jeanne’s face as she lies on her back in bed underneath her client and begins to feel something, pain, pleasure, it is not clear what, but something surprising and unsettling; and then, after the sex, a view into the mirror on Jeanne’s dresser, where we see, in reflection, Jeanne get up from buttoning her blouse and go over to the bed and stab the client in the neck with a pair of scissors. Is this melodrama reality? Does it really happen? Is the film wanting to say that such melodrama is as real as the humdrum that has gone before, like a Bressonian access of grace at the end of one of his films? Is the breach into the room and the sex scene the projection of the child, who is a manifestation of the power of film, which cannot see everything and inevitably brings imagination into play? Is the murder that is presented as an image, a reflection in the mirror, the projection of Jeanne, perhaps herself projected by the child? Perhaps all this action is a try at accounting for, an indirect and metaphorical way of characterizing, the next, and last, thing we see in the film: the eightminute shot of Jeanne brooding at her dining table in the dark, obscure in her feelings, intense. She looks as if she has just exploded and brought her life down in ruins about herself. Perhaps it is wrong to try to deny, or avoid, Jeanne’s sexual awakening and her violence. It is there, but approachable only as if a projection from the realm of kneading meatloaf and scrubbing the tub. But then that realm came after all as a transfiguration. Circles. Tensions. The third film in succession after Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman is News from Home (1976), a documentary, isn’t it? All we see in the film is shots of New York City with seemingly synchronous sound—lonely alleys amid tall buildings, diners at night observed through plate-glass windows, busy streets, the subway, the grid of cross streets viewed from a car moving up



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one of the avenues, finally lower Manhattan viewed from a departing boat. One becomes absorbed in the look and mood of all the locales, the silence, the loud sound. Yet Akerman’s voice comes and goes, reading what appear to be letters from her mother in Brussels, worrying about and missing Chantal, relaying downbeat family news. Akerman spoke to me of making films from her feelings, not considering whether the films are fiction or nonfiction. And one might take the motive or guiding feeling of News from Home to be that the filmmaker/adventurer abroad has to be placed against the tug of family back home, unpleasant, touching, something to which she knows she belongs. Perhaps the contrast here, set in this time and place, mirrors the whole of Akerman’s position as a connected, dutiful daughter who yet feels drawn away from where she began and into her own life and her work, her art. Perhaps the film mirrors the human condition for many people. Furthermore, the melancholy and emptiness of some of this film’s New York material can seem not a contrast to, but an image for, the mood of the letters—then the film seems to plunge into the noisy subway and busy streets to get away from this mood. The New York material and the letters, all fact we might say, serve in various ways to spell out who Akerman is, what she feels. This spelling out of herself is similar in the later documentary (isn’t it one?) D’Est (From the East, 1993), where Akerman travels through eastern Europe and spends time in and around Moscow, obsessively filming people waiting for transport, standing in groups outdoors at bus stops or filling train stations at night, waiting in their coats and with their possessions in bundles. One feels the force of obsession in the filming and does not really need to be told what Akerman has said, that she had these images already inside of her, part of the history of the Holocaust she had inherited through her family. And yet the images render what is there, outside her. News from Home and D’Est are more than the sum of their parts—their parts are used for something, as raw reality is used for something in Je tu il elle and Jeanne Dielman. And yet the parts are what they are, still the parts. **** In “The Paradoxes of Political Art” Jacques Rancière singles out Akerman’s documentary From the Other Side (De l’autre côté, 2002)—along with Pedro Costa’s In Vanda’s Room (2000)—as representative of “a new idea of what ‘critical’ art could mean today”—art that does not offer political analysis or a direct call to political action, but accepts the gap that exists between art and the rest of life, and focuses itself on the materiality of a situation, or the materiality it can itself achieve, stirring its audience in a general way and leaving interpretation open. From the Other Side is shot along the border fence or wall between Mexico and Arizona, where many from Central America risk great danger, and

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frequently lose their lives, trying to cross surreptitiously into the United States. We hear that people are misled by their guides and die of exposure and thirst, and that many are arrested trying to cross and then returned to Mexico. The film, says Rancière, “turns an economic and geopolitical issue into an aesthetic matter”—this is its power, stirring up conflicting considerations around a focus on “the raw materiality of the fence.” —Similarly, In Vanda’s Room foregoes “economic and social ‘explanations’” and offers purely its location, the slum dwelling space of its languid drug users and petty entrepreneurs, and the sheer “power and impotence” of the body in this situation. We are left to think on our own.8 Earlier in his essay Rancière had invoked the Belvedere Torso as written about by Johann Winckelmann, and the Juno Ludovisi (a head) as written about by Friedrich Schiller, both works being praised by these critics for their “indifference”—provocative, challenging to our sense of things, but open as to how they might be interpreted, what place they might take in a story we could imagine, how the torso might have us reconceive our sense of our own bodies and their freedom, or the head and face might comment on our lives.9 One thinks of Rilke’s poem “Archaic Torso of Apollo,” where the beautifully realized object, lacking in meaning in so many ways, is yet bursting with life and challenge: “here there is no place/that does not see you. You must change your life” (“den da ist keine Stelle,/die dich nicht sieht. Du musst dien Leben ändern”—note the intimate form of “you”—du, dich, dein).10 From the Other Side is not a sculpture, but a succession of images with sounds and words, a flow structured over a certain amount of time. In his collection on various films and filmmakers, Film Fables, Rancière talks about the nature of film to open itself to the world, to register and relay what is observed, and film’s nature at the same time to form “fables,” to develop a linear path under a certain guiding idea or impulse.11 Midway through “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” Rancière speaks of “the labor of fiction” and of “fiction” as “a word that we need to re-conceive”: “Fiction,” as re-framed by the aesthetic regime of art, means far more than the constructing of an imaginary world, and even far more than its Aristotelian sense as “arrangement of actions.” It is not a term that designates the imaginary as opposed to the real; it involves the re-framing of the “real.” . . . Fiction is a way of changing existing modes of sensory presentations and forms of enunciation; of varying frames, scales and rhythms; and of building new relationships between reality and appearance.12

For film, either “fictional” or documentary, the labor of fiction consists in a certain framing and presentation of things at any given moment, and in an unfolding through time. From the Other Side has its guiding impulse, its way of treading the line between the world’s extension before it and its intension of significance—has



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its particular take on how what is there before it relates to creative means for taking that in, taking in and giving out, breathing, thinking, ātman, the self (art-self, film-self) that is the world. This film’s guiding impulse is to acknowledge the blank border wall with “its inhuman strangeness” (Rancière) as a screen for projection. From the Other Side opens with some presentation credits—this is meant to be a theatrical film—and then a shot of a young man standing beside a door that opens into a house. He is near the camera, seen from the waist up, so that we feel an intimacy with him as he gives his name, Francisco Santillán Garcia, and tells, in a friendly but serious manner, the story of his brother who nearly died trying to cross over into the United States. To the right of this young man, the blank white outer wall of the house extends to the edge of the frame. To the left of the open house door the white wall extends the other way. The interior of the house is quite dark, but in the background we see a rectangular window looking out into blank, bright, white sky, or terrain. The image before us is very formal—man, wall, window within—and we hear a subdued duo for cellos (identified in the end credits as Monteverdi), giving the episode a ritual quality. There is a suggestion of this young man being placed against a blank screen, of his being seen as a projection, even as his own state of mind and that of those like him is caught up in projections of a future. The window in back of the dark house, a frame within the frame of the door, which is a frame within the frame of the film, suggests an opening out, suggests hope—and along with the cello duo we hear children’s voices offscreen, suggesting hope and energy. But the man has his back to a wall. What we see and hear compounds projection, hope, and frustration—even the blank frustration of death. The formality and metaphoric power of the image is countered by the warmth of this man genuinely telling his story, with Akerman’s voice (recognizable from her other films) intervening occasionally, in Spanish, with a question. The interview between Akerman and the man is succeeded by the film’s title, De l’autre côté—white letters against black—indicating all the more, by positioning, that what we have just seen is meant as a kernel for the film, as, in a sense, containing the whole film within it, like musical material near the start of a symphony. There will be many such interviews over the course of the film, eventually giving the side of Americans to the north of the wall, who feel overrun and violated by the nightly stream of immigrants and drug couriers. And there will be much play (Rancière cites Schiller’s “free play” of art) with frames within frames and blank expanses. There ensue three such blank expanses. First there is a shot of a wide, unpaved, dusty street or crossing or town square, the blank earth extending from the camera out and around through much of the frame, low buildings settled about, occasional walkers or cars slowly moving through the space.

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We hear the soft appropriate sounds of a poor border town—low motors, tires on earth, a barking dog, a song likely from a café or bar. The shot is held for a long time—there is a feeling of immersion in reality, of living here for a time. And yet the late afternoon light, softly yellow, beautiful as it penetrates the dust in the air, makes a contemplatable artistic object of all this, like a painting come to life. Akerman says that it was very hard for her to tell how long to let this and similar long-take views go on, that she could judge and edit only in the projection room, taking in the large screened image and its sounds as an experience, not just an idea or marker—comprehending the ongoing image, we might say, as a musical passage. (Bresson always edited in the projection room.) The open space, picking up on, opening out from, the blank walls and frames of the beginning interview with the young man, suggests the empty canvas, the nullity, from which human hopes proceed, a ground for creating life as if creating art. The next shot gives us another long-held view of a broad earthen street, mostly in shadow as evening progresses, low modest houses spread across the back, now with three children throwing and batting a ball and running to bases, playing a sort of reduced baseball game. The children seem as if projected on the screen of this earthen space, full of their own energy and hopes, and the hope of their families and community. The third shot of this series presents a road on the left, broad and empty, in shadow, and on the right our first view of the border fence, bright white as it catches the late sun, incongruous and surreal in its intrusion into the setting—though there are reasons for it—looking like the screen of a drive-in cinema, facing south as we view it, whence many would cross it, breaching the screen and pushing into the world of the film beyond, which may be a delusion. The series of three shots, opening from screen to screen, comes back to another interview, more extended than the first, with an elderly woman with a rich history, who has lost a son trying to cross over. She sits facing us, her back to a wall, on her right a table of support encased in plastic, presenting a blank rectangular surface to our view, and resting on the support, next to the woman’s head, a television set, facing us with a turned-off screen which yet reflects the filmmakers moving about—behind us, so to speak—with behind them a bright rectangle, presumably a window looking out. Eventually this claustrophobic situation, with its constricted frames within frames, will expand, or explode, into more views outdoors of expanses and broad roads. It is hard to keep in mind the exact sequence of images and episodes in From the Other Side—so that in a way it does become something like a sculpture, as if everything happens at once, coruscating about that repeated view of the fence, or view of it in different lights and from different perspectives. The pattern continues of moving from interviews with frames within frames, to views of broad expanses. The frames show variety—a barber shop’s broad mirror at the back of the room, a sheriff’s office window with an outdoor



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view that looks oddly two dimensional and may be a landscape poster—projections vary in their feel and in what drives them. The broad expanses show variety, too. In America, famous for its projections and wanting to make dreams come true, the expanses look possessed and settled—a field of wheat, a fenced-in pasture with cattle grazing. Before getting to America, and in a different way once we are there, there is a feeling of the same but different as images and episodes succeed each other. There is an energy at play, as human beings and the film itself try one thing after another, meet frustration, seem to go in a circle. The Americans, too, are frustrated. About a quarter of the way into the film, the camera begins to move, and there are a couple of protracted sequences—with no cuts—where the camera moves slowly along the fence apparently in a motor vehicle, contemplates the fence’s blank screen, and turns back toward the Mexican border town and moves on along, looking at houses and shops and the whole human settlement. This moving camera has partly the feel of wanting to participate in the general drive to move on, to break through, to find a hole in the fence or to breach it, and go north into another world. Turning back into the town feels like defeat, the defeat so often suffered by people here. But we know that Akerman and her crew can go where they please, so the whole process of moving and turning seems more purely observational, a push to try something new in coming to terms with this world. The moving-camera views of the fence and the town, especially in evening light, have the feel of being on another planet, a feel of fascinating but disturbing strangeness, of the surreal. It is all reminiscent of the extended episode in Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (Meetings with Anna, 1978), where Akerman’s protagonist, a young Jewish female filmmaker from Brussels—a self-projection of Akerman—travels across Europe at night by train, looks out the window, and observes the strange world of towns, stations, subdued human activity, and night lights and colors that passes by. How can this be here? How can this be?—both films seem to wonder. The films’ question cuts deep, like Heidegger’s about Being, drawing on the pre-Socratics. How is it that we are here? How is it that we are? Stanley Cavell writes about Robert Gardner’s sense of the “bizarre” and “surreal” in Forest of Bliss (1986), his observational film about Benares, India, with no spoken or written commentary. Cavell links the sensibility here to Wittgenstein’s alertness to the bizarre and surreal and his notion that the beginning of philosophy is “not to accept what we say or do as familiar but as strange, acknowledging our strangeness to ourselves.”13 The camera of From the Other Side comes to move in various ways—with a border guard walking with his flashlight through the brush at night; with a jeep or truck noisily moving down a dirt road at night; with a night vision machine with sighting lines as for a weapon, scanning around from a high

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point (possibly a tower, possibly a helicopter, though we don’t hear the sound of one)—where masses of immigrants hiking along in dark clothes appear white, like ghosts, as they are apparently herded into a prison compound. Akerman, overall so sympathetic to the immigrants, gives her film over at moments to the hunters. The camera hunts with them—but in order to observe them, acknowledge them, let them be—to hunt them in a sense. In the film’s surprising final sequence, we travel fast in a car on what appears to be—from the expensive construction, signs, and lights—an American interstate- or expressway-style highway, as a woman’s voice-over in French, recognizable as Akerman, gives us the story of an immigrant woman who worked as a house cleaner in southern California, moved about, and seems now to have disappeared. Akerman starts speaking about the woman in the third person, but switches to the first person, singular and plural, for statements from her family and a woman who employed her. These switches are like the giving over of the camera to different points of view throughout the film. We have not seen anything like this in the film so far— rushing through what seems an endless dark void—the extension of the wall becoming that of the long road we speed over, the film’s intension becoming bottomless and mysterious in a new way. The desire to move on, or to probe and understand, is pushed into hyper-speed—yet it feels like being caught in unstoppable fate, or falling through space. We have heard many testimonies in the film, but nothing like this warm voice in French, the speaker unseen. In this strong personal intervention, is Akerman making the story up—a fiction? No reason to think so, really. But the facts have been transformed into this episode of arresting new visual experience and a storyteller’s rehearsal, identifying herself with her characters—nonfiction fiction. The immigrant woman, disappeared, is finally called a mirage—in French hallucination—the last word of the film. Film figures are mirages, however mysteriously connected to the real—a “human something” Cavell calls them in The World Viewed.14 The French voice-over of the unseen woman is a mirage in a special sense. She/it is the film itself, pressing more than ever to come close to her subject—acknowledging that film is identified, if not a perfect fit, with human beings in their reality, film figures with their projections and uncertain status, legal and indeed ontological—mirages. Will we allow them, this film, this place with its many places, as Rilke would have it, to see us? **** Since the shock of Akerman’s death at age sixty-five in the fall of 2015, her final film, No Home Movie (2015), has circulated widely and been much discussed. In this same period Marianne Lambert’s I Don’t Belong Anywhere (2016)



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has appeared, a film about Akerman and her work that is in large measure a self-presentation on Akerman’s part. She talks to the camera in various interesting settings—no dry talking-head material—and cues Lambert’s inclusion of clips from the films. Moving freely between documentary and fiction films, Akerman and I Don’t Belong Anywhere make the point all the more emphatically that the two kinds are blurred, or are essentially the same, in this filmmaker’s work. At one point Akerman says that if with the camera you frame something there in the world, already you make a fiction—which is not to say that fiction does not testify to the truth, to reality. Akerman in Lambert’s film is energetic, positive, and eager to talk about her work, but she says that all her work has derived from her mother, and that now that her mother is gone— at the time, a recent loss—she wonders if she will have any more to say. Also, towards the end of the film Akerman dwells on the Holocaust and its destructiveness for European culture—it makes it impossible to show certain things, as if, she implies, that would be needless or tactless—thus frustrating a filmmaker’s principal desire, despite all Akerman’s great productivity, her many attempts to show and to suggest through showing. Perhaps she felt at this point that she was running out of life. With No Home Movie, completed shortly before Lambert’s film, Akerman makes an intimate portrait of her mother, or rather of their relationship, their intimacy. The last time I saw Akerman, several years ago in Miami, she stated in a public appearance that she had broken with her mother, and sounded quite angry toward her. So No Home Movie offers to heal a breach, perhaps detectable in subtle ways in the film, perhaps one of those things one cannot show. Perhaps the portrait is made in order to recover or recontact what Akerman now recognizes as the source of her creativity, a source she feels slipping away. Also in Miami, Akerman told me privately that she expected her next project would be something “pornographic” à la Courbet’s painting L’Origine du monde. No Home Movie, with its presence of the body, its confrontation of the mother, perhaps fulfills this impulse in its way. Staying mostly within the older woman’s conventionally well-furnished, light, airy Brussels apartment, Akerman records her mother walking about, making inarticulate sounds—sound has always been so important for Akerman—eating and conversing with her daughter, and finally declining in health. At the end, looking at the apartment empty of people, we understand that the mother has died. Harking back to News from Home, with its bold images and sounds of New York placed against Akerman’s mother’s letters read in voice-over, No Home Movie creates a like tension, taking Akerman away at times from home—if home is what it was for this displaced Polish Jew and Auschwitz survivor and her nomadic daughter. While away, Akerman communicates with her mother via Skype, finding it hard after a conversation to say goodbye to the ghostly image there. (And I Don’t Belong Anywhere shows us, with

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Akerman’s cooperation of course, that she films the Skype screen at one point in the nude, listening to her mother say, “When I see you like that I want to embrace you.” In No Home Movie we see only the screen and the mother’s image.) And as No Home Movie goes on, Akerman gives us, at an increasing rate, protracted shots of desert places, often with a fierce wind blowing—images of separation more extreme than those of Manhattan; images of purification, from history and from life as it is; images of a beyond-life that is the destiny of the mother, and now of Chantal Akerman herself. NOTES 1. Allen Tate, “Tension in Poetry” (1938), in Tate, Essays of Four Decades (New York: William Morrow, 1970), 56–71. 2. Andrew Klevan draws the title of his book Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge, Wilts: Flicks Books, 2000) from the discourses of ordinary-language philosophers, especially Stanley Cavell in his connection of this tradition back to Emerson, who found such depth in “the meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the street . . . the glance of the eye; the form and gait of the body.” See Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 14–15. 3. Charles Warren, “Chantal Akerman,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 20–23. 4. Cesare Zavattini, “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Film: A Montage of Theories, ed. Richard Dyer McCann (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966), 216–28; originally published in Sight and Sound, October 1953, edited from a recorded interview, and translated by Pier Luigi Lanza. 5. Robert Flaherty, Nanook of the North (1922). Robert Bresson, Pickpocket (1959), Mouchette (1967); Au hasard Balthazar (1966). 6. Stanley Cavell develops this notion in his essays on Stella Dallas, 1937 in both Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996) and Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004). 7. Janet Bergstrom, “Invented Memories,” in Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003), 108, in a wider discussion of the child’s point of view in the film. 8. Jacques Rancière, “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and tr. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010), 149–51. In The Intervals of Cinema (London and New York: Verso, 2014, tr. John Howe), Rancière elaborates on Costa’s films and their uses of pure surface and materiality to challenge thought, devoting a full chapter to them, “Pedro Costa’s Politics,” 127–42. 9. Rancière, “Paradoxes,” 137–38. 10. Rainer Maria Rilke, “Archaic Torso of Apollo” (“Archaïcher Torso Apollos”), in The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and tr. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989), 60–61.



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11. Rancière, Film Fables, tr. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Throughout The Intervals of Cinema, Rancière dwells on film’s tendency to do two things at once, or pull in two directions. 12. Rancière, “Paradoxes,” 141. The author elaborates a more specifically political significance to the labor of fiction. “Re-framing of the ‘real’” is “the framing of a dissensus,” a political refusal of the usual frame. And for Rancière “the aesthetic regime of art,” which disrupts and leaves us free to think, is contrasted to other regimes of art with political valences, where either we are told what to think, or it is assumed that we know what to think and therefore need not be told. 13. Stanley Cavell, introduction to Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film: A Conversation Between Robert Gardner + Ákos Östör (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Film Archive, 2001), 12. 14. Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, enlarged edition (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 26.

Chapter 29

Vérité Fiction, Dramatized Documentary On Michelle Citron’s Aesthetic Provocations Linda Williams A firefighter releases a powerful gush of water from a hydrant, a welder climbs a girder, a tense pilot scans the sky. With these images of tough, satisfying, useful work, Michelle Citron begins her new film What You Take for Granted. The images may be clichés, the stuff of TV beer commercials, but the idea of hard work and Miller Time camaraderie and relaxation after a job well done is a compelling one in our culture. Citron’s images are different, though. Unlike the macho men of the beer commercials, the firefighter, welder, and pilot are all women. And for them, the work, the camaraderie, and the relaxation are much more difficult matters. Citron examines the contradictions of these opening images in a multilayered work that situates itself in the gray areas dividing fiction and documentary. Weaving together these two different forms, What You Take for Granted offers a novel look at women who work in jobs that have traditionally been dominated by men. Except for biographies and dramas of the rich and famous or an occasional union drama or fantasy (Coalminer’s Daughter, Norma Rae, Nine to Five, Silkwood), it is remarkable how few Hollywood films have taken women and their work seriously. This is in contrast to the many films that take the importance of men’s work, as the film’s title says, “for granted.” By concentrating on the vanguard of women who have broken into the kinds of jobs our culture values, the film gives the clichés of male-dominated work a new vitality. But except for the brief opening and closing sequences that actually show women working, the bulk of the film is concerned not with the image of women at work but with what the work really means to them. We see women workers of all sorts reflecting on their jobs and confiding Linda Williams, originally published as “Women’s Work,” © 1983.

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their mixed exhilaration and frustration at entering the demanding arena of male competition. Anyone who has seen Citron’s previous film, Daughter Rite, will recognize a similar approach, one that is distinctly Citron’s own. Women talk, even complain, directly to the camera about the difficulties of a relationship to an absent figure. In Daughter Rite, that figure was an offscreen mother, and the women talking were her daughters: in an apparent documentary interview, two sisters talk about their mother to us and with one another; elsewhere, in voice-over narration, another daughter speaks of another mother over images of edited home movies of a woman and her two daughters. The effect of the film is to build, not an individual story about the daughters, but a composite picture of daughters trying to sort out their relationship to their mothers. The real subject of the film is absent. “Mom” herself has no voice except through the alternately idealizing and vilifying voice of the daughters—though it becomes clear in the course of the film that in talking about a figure so close to them they are also talking about themselves. In a sense, Citron’s new film is the flip side to Daughter Rite. In talking about their relationship to the male world of work—the bosses and male coworkers whose approval they seek—the women in the film are also talking about their relationship to their fathers. Like the Mom of Daughter Rite, this composite image of the father structures the film in his absence. And like her, he too is alternately idealized, vilified, and—to a lesser degree—internalized by the “daughters” who obsessively talk about him. But where the dramatic conflicts in Daughter Rite revolve around the daughter’s symbiosis with a mother she was too much like, here the dramatic conflicts revolve around the frustrations of fitting into a mold of behavior demanded by the much more distant figure of paternal authority. What You Take for Granted begins with a collage of interviews in which women of various races and classes talk about their work. Their jobs range from truck driving, carpentry, and cable splicing to sculpture, teaching philosophy, and practicing medicine. What they share is the common desire to escape the poor pay and powerlessness of traditional women’s work, whether for purely practical reasons (a carpenter explains that for her the choice was between “shit woman’s work for shit pay or shit man’s work for more pay”), as a means to self-expression (a feisty iron sculptor speaks of her joy working with materials that are “obstinate and obdurate”), or out of a desire to do good (a doctor speaks of her identification with the kindly doctor-father figure of a TV doctor series). All of these women have “made it” in the man’s world of work; all are proud of their accomplishments and know that it will be easier for the women who come after them. But as highly visible minorities, as the token women who are there partly to prove the democracy of a system that is not democratic enough to accept them as women, each has had to accommodate her identity



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to a foreign system of values. Some, like the doctor, who has learned not to smile, have simply repressed their gentle side to compete effectively with men. Others, like the aggressive truck driver, have learned to take whatever male coworkers dish out without compromising their values. Still others, like the ever practical carpenter, choose to play the role of the “nice girl” who is shocked by foul language in order to avoid the greater abuses that come with being “one of the guys.” Thus, Citron’s film investigates the price women have to pay to be admitted into the male world of work. The investigation is carried out on one level by apparent documentary interviews in which the women simply tell us, in engaging anecdotes, the personal stories that typify the experiences of so many women in their situation. Documentaries, except those that focus on the remarkable person or situation, have always claimed to represent the most truthful and typical aspects of human experience. But there is often a very fine line between the camera capturing the typical event, or account of an event, and the fictionalized staging of that event. Once the camera is present, the event becomes a performance, staged either by the subject or by the director—and if by the director, the camera can easily intrude on the more revealing acts and gestures of unsuspecting subjects. Much recent feminist documentary has chosen to avoid directorial staging as too intrusive and controlling, preferring to collaborate with the subjects in sympathetic interviews that give interviewees as much control over the image and its content as possible. Citron has taken this tactic a step further. Acknowledging that all documentaries are fictions of a sort, Citron has used actors to impersonate the subjects interviewed in her film. The result is a uniquely engaging blend of fact and fiction. Is what these subjects tell us any less true because of Citron’s technique? In a way it is more true, because more typical, based as it is on interviews with many more women workers than could possibly be included in the film, as the credits reveal. But more important, the strategy allows the kind of condensation of issues and themes that can only be achieved in a scripted fiction, while retaining, through improvisational acting, the documentary style of real people groping to express their experiences. This intentional blurring of the already blurred area between documentary and fiction has another advantage: it allows Citron to develop a fictional elaboration out of the “facts” of the documentary. The elaboration begins in a highly contrived meeting between two of the subjects of the documentary. The truck driver has cut her hand; the doctor, in a most unlikely house call, tends to it and stays to cook dinner. As they make their first tentative efforts to get to know one another the doctor asks, “So, what’s it like to drive a truck?” In answer the film cuts to another “interview” with the truck driver, who talks of her excitement at her job and the “good

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feelings” she gets from customers, then to the sculptor, who talks of winning a prize, and then to the philosophy professor, who talks of being judged by men who are not her peers. Thus the film weaves social document with private drama, expanding on the unique experience of the individual drama with a collage of related interview experience that gives a rich texture to the entire work. While the women in the interviews tell, in rational, public voices, of their difficulties dealing with a system of male authority whose rules are foreign and oppressive, two of these same women show, in the private dynamics of their developing friendship, the more subtle ways in which male authority affects their relationship to one another. Anna is a gregarious and volatile working-class truck driver who has brashly pioneered work for women truckers at her company. Dianna is a comparatively repressed and ladylike middle-class doctor who has played the game more conservatively in her efforts to gain acceptance in the doctor club. To this extent they are typical of their jobs and class. But in another sense they are not. Anna fits the stereotype of a leather-jacketed, butch trucker, but it is the more ladylike doctor who turns out to be gay. Just what Dianna’s gayness means to her is not explored in the film, not because the film represses it but because Dianna, in her role as competent and confident doctor, does not appear to be prepared to deal with her sexuality at all—at least not in her relationship with Anna. As Anna and Dianna’s friendship develops, in narrative scenes that punctuate the interviews, it becomes apparent that Dianna has arrived at her position of relative power and authority by living up to the expectations of her own father. So much of her life has aimed at making herself acceptable to paternal authority that she has closed off some of the more vulnerable aspects of her personality, including, the film implies, her gay identity. A particularly revealing scene shows her pain as she listens to the voice of her father on the phone, presumably telling her to accept a position that will not interfere with marriage. Unlike Anna, who suffers in her job for being too aggressive and is thus passed over in a promotion, Dianna has accepted male authority and suffers in the repression of her private life. Happily for the film, Dianna’s career “success” and Anna’s career “failure” are not there to draw moral lessons about the price of success, the integrity of failure. As the interviews show, many other women have made many other kinds of accommodations to male authority, ranging from angry threats of violence to playing the good little girl. The fiction is just one instance of how women’s relationship to paternal authority reverberates in their private lives. Nevertheless, there remains a touch of the overschematic in Citron’s manipulation of the material. One problem is that the fictional narrative



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sections illustrating Dianna’s cautious repression and Anna’s volatile acting out do not offer enough of the dynamic of their relationship; another is that this relationship does not contrast enough, thematically or emotionally, with the pseudodocumentary material. The result is a film with many fascinating insights into work and work’s effect on women’s relationships across class boundaries, but none of the instant electricity and recognition of Daughter Rite’s approach to the mother through the anger and love of her daughters. Perhaps significantly, What You Take for Granted has no formal equivalent to the intimate voice-over of the home-movie sections or the high melodramatic notes of some of the sister scenes. It is as if the subject of this new film—women’s relation to work and hence to the implied authority figure of the father—put a damper on Citron’s own emotional resources. Where Daughter Rite is alternately angry and loving, liberated and locked into deadly patterns of repetition, and the absent mother is always felt as a powerfully determining presence, the absent boss-father who structures this film is simply too distant, too abstract, to be felt as a powerful force in these women’s lives. Undeniably he is such a force, as the pseudodocumentary interviews wonderfully attest, but he is not felt emotionally. Citron’s new film, then, is somehow not as urgent an expression of long-repressed aspects of women’s lives as was her earlier film. What You Take for Granted remains, however, an enormously important work of feminist documentation and feminist fiction precisely for the ways these two forms give resonance to one another. As the fictional story grows out of the documentary interviews, and as two of the subjects of these interviews become actors in the fiction, it becomes clear that neither form is exactly what it seems. The fiction is acted and shot in an improvisational cinéma vérité style that connotes documentary. The supposed documentary sections are in turn more polished and rehearsed than interviews usually are. Audiences first accept, then question the documentary “truth” of the interviews. Although the straightforward feminist documentary, representing real women and real concerns, has been an important way for women audiences to recognize aspects of their lives not otherwise given cinematic representation, the documentary forms privileged in this type of representation have tended either to heroicize their women subjects or to shape the events of their lives into overly neat narrative resolutions (e.g., Antonia: Portrait of a Woman, Union Maids, Janie’s Janie). Both tendencies are highly fictionalized shapings of real events. Citron’s film does not set out to confuse its audience as to the fictional or documentary nature of its materials. Rather, it plays on the audience’s recognition of the many shades of difference between, on the one hand, real lives shaped by documentary techniques into partial fiction and, on the other, fictional representations based to varying degrees on reality. Neither a total

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fiction that the audience can unproblematically enter into and identify with, nor a true document that speaks an unquestioned unitary truth, What You Take for Granted interrogates the filmic process of representation while also allowing the presentation of a wider range of personal and political issues than either documentary or fiction alone could offer.

Chapter 30

“Deceiving into the Truth” The Indirect Cinema of Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing Karen D. Hoffman

The documentaries Stories We Tell (2012) and The Act of Killing (2012) feature interviews and reenactments aimed at exploring some of the ways in which people use storytelling and narrative to understand, justify, and reinterpret the past.1 Eschewing the voice-over narration of an impartial, objective perspective on the chronicled events, both films instead depict the conflicting (and sometimes contradictory) perspectives of multiple participants; both also tell stories about the past that involve imaginative filmic reconstructions. In the former film, director Sarah Polley employs the stories and reflections of her mother’s family and friends—as well as film clips made to look like homemade family movies—in an attempt to uncover secrets (and truths) about her mother’s life and Polley’s own paternity. In the latter film, director Joshua Oppenheimer records “gangsters” who participated in mass killings in Indonesia in the 1960s, allowing them to tell their stories by reenacting their brutality toward others through a series of dramatic performances. Although very different in content and tone, Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing both confront their subject matter less directly than documentaries that otherwise assume (or presume) they offer “asserted veridical representation.”2 Instead, Polley and Opperheimer take an indirect approach. And neither film hides this methodological fact. Both films prominently show participants discussing how to best tell their stories, engaged in preparations for filming, taking direction for various scenes, and worrying aloud about how those stories will be received by others. Many of the individuals on screen are aware of themselves as playing a dual role: first, as actors in the documentary film and, second, as participants in the historical events they reference. Additionally, the participants in both films have public personae: in Stories We Tell many of them work on stage and screen as actors, directors, and 517

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producers; in The Act of Killing many of them are the infamous killers who were supported by a government that has never apologized for the atrocities it committed and condoned—and that is still in power. Both films push the boundaries of documentary film as a genre since they use verbal and visual storytelling to prompt reflections about particular historical events and to consider the contemporary consequences of the stories that we tell about them. Perhaps that mode of address is part of the reason Polley refers to her film as “an interrogation process” and notes that, from the beginning, she thought the film “would be a hybrid: something between a documentary and an experimental film.”3 David Thomson notes, with reference to Polley’s film, that “our confusion over history and movie fabrication has never been more complex.”4 Meanwhile, Oppenheimer’s use of an indirect approach might also help explain why he considers his film to be a “documentary of the imagination, as opposed to a documentary of everyday life,” as well as why doesn’t really consider himself to be “a documentarian,” since “cinema should be truth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean documentary.”5 In what follows here, I explore some of the characteristics of indirect communication present in both films, including use of reenactments and imaginative reconstructions that veer into fantasy and blur the line between fact and fiction, as well as narratives told from multiple (sometimes conflicting) perspectives. Drawing from Søren Kierkegaard’s account of an indirect approach that can involve “deceiving” others into the truth, I explore some of the reasons for thinking that Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing attempt to do just that, namely, offer filmic deceptions aimed at expressing truths indirectly.6 KIERKEGAARD ON INDIRECT COMMUNICATION In his Concluding Unscientific Postscript Kierkegaard discusses what he means by indirect communication, how it differs from direct communication, and why he decided to use an indirect approach in his authorship.7 Taking Socrates (and his maieutic method of raising questions for his interlocutors) as an example of indirect approach, Kierkegaard explains that this type of communication focuses on helping participants come to their own positions about the subject matter. Rather than directly telling people what to think, the Socratic teacher assists others in thinking through the material so that they can develop their own sense of what is true and determine what significance that truth has for their lives. The authority of the teacher is removed; the student bears responsibility for what is learned. In addition to posing provocative questions, indirect communication can proceed by presenting multiple, sometimes conflicting, interpretations or



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ways of being in the world. Kierkegaard accomplishes this, in part, through the use of authorial pseudonyms. Even his Postscript is authored under the name Johannes Climacus; Kierkegaard is listed as the editor. Representing various aesthetic and ethical ways of being in the world, Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous authors depict their worldviews rather than his. Recognizing that some of his readers lead lives that are characteristic of an aesthete, for example, Kierkegaard uses aphorisms, stories, letters, and journal entries supposedly written by such a person in order to reveal the limitations of an aesthetic existence. Explaining that “indirect communication makes communicating an art . . . in supposing that the communicator has to present the communication to a knower, so that he can judge it, or to a nonknower, so that he can acquire something to know,” Kierkegaard’s Climacus emphasizes that the “receiver is an existing person.”8 He gives an example of trying to communicate with someone while walking beside her. Like the speaker, the person with whom one is communicating is in motion. She is traveling down a particular path and is interpreting what she hears in the context of that journey. Moreover, she will walk past a speaker who stands at a fixed point and is not likely to pay attention to what he has to say. She will only hear the person who walks with her. So, someone who wants to communicate with her would do well to pretend that he is heading in the same direction, even if that is not his intended path. An author communicating indirectly, therefore, might engage in some deception about where she is really headed and might pretend to take a particular path or point of view seriously, even though she believes it to be deeply flawed. And this seems to be the sense in which Kierkegaard talks about indirect communication as “deceiving into the truth.” The deception may be necessary in order to reach people where they are and get them to pay attention to what is truly at stake. Such an approach may also be necessary because people mistakenly think that they already know what they are going to be told. In such a case, a direct “telling” might need to be replaced by a more indirect “showing.” A widely accepted interpretation, for example, might only be called into question if the communicator pretends that it is true, lets those who accept that perspective speak on its behalf, and thereby exposes its inherent flaws. As Kierkegaard explains in Point of View, when we think of Socrates we are reminded that “one can deceive a person into what is true. Yes, in only this way can a deluded person actually be brought into what is true—by deceiving him.”9 If someone is operating under a delusion, one must first remove the error. “Direct communication presupposes that the recipient’s ability to receive is entirely in order.”10 If that is not the case, the obstacle must be removed. And the best way to remove it is to begin “by taking the other’s delusion at face value” rather than directly communicating what one wishes to say.11

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The two documentaries at hand appear to illustrate these Kierkegaardian observations and methodologies. In The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer lays aside the custom of voice-over narration that presumes to tell readers how to interpret the events that they are witnessing, and instead encourages the killers to describe, reenact, and imaginatively extend the scope of their stories; the film thereby indulges their delusions and opts for showing over telling as a way of exposing their crimes. The delusions in Stories We Tell are less morally problematic, but they are still present: many viewers of the documentary who are familiar with Polley’s family and career, will follow her family and friends in thinking that Michael Polley—himself an actor on stage and screen—is the director’s father. Her film indulges that error while moving towards the revelation that he is not responsible for her paternity. While Polley’s film employs voice-over narration, it does so as a reflection of one particular perspective not as a direct communication to viewers about who the director’s mother was or why she made the choices she did. Both documentaries use elements of fiction and storytelling, including imaginative reconstructions and reenactments. Both approach their subjects using the indirect approach of asking questions and receiving answers from multiple, sometimes contradictory and even ethically suspect, participants. In ostensibly neglecting to privilege any one of the interpretations over another, and by declining to proffer a conclusive interpretation of the (historical) events under discussion, both documentaries adopt an indirect approach and encourage viewers to think for themselves in sorting through the layers of meaning and multiplicity of perspectives. Whether we are in a position to say that viewers may better apprehend truth because of these modes of indirection becomes a concern. FICTION IN THE SERVICE OF A NONFICTIONAL FORM: REENACTMENTS AND IMAGINATIVE RECONSTRUCTIONS As part of their indirect approaches that emphasize showing over telling, both films use elements of fiction in the service of a nonfictional form. That showing extends to the use of reenactments, imaginative extensions of scenes from the past and, in the case of The Act of Killing, even metaphorical representations of the spirits and desires of the deceased victims, who haunt the killers and seek revenge. Stories We Tell opens with a series of shots depicting a woman who initially appears to be Diane Polley, director Sarah Polley’s mother, but who is later revealed to be an actress, Rebecca Jenkins, hired to play the part of Diane in footage that is made to resemble Super 8 home movies taken in the ’60s and ’70s. As if to suggest from the outset some of the difficulties



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involved in trying to separate fact from fiction in uncovering Diane’s identity, the first minute of the film seems to mix archival footage of her mother with fictionalized sequences of the actress depicting her, perhaps suggesting that the vision of Diane captured in the documentary will be a blend of the actual, historical person and artificial reconstructions. Recreated scenes depict Diane interacting with her friends and family, laughing and dancing. Showing her often in motion, the camera presents her as a dynamic, energetic individual. It’s not clear, however, how much of that footage is meant to reflect or illustrate actual memories people have of her and how much of that footage is fantasy (detached from any association with the past), since the reenactments are not generally presented as illustrations of testimony being given by someone who claims to have witnessed a particular event. The Super 8 footage is instead presented as extrapolations from and imaginative extensions of multiple accounts. The narration from Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace that accompanies the opening sequence in Stories We Tell highlights the tension between living a life and telling a story about it and suggests that how the past appears to us in the present might not match the way it appeared at the time it was being experienced: When you’re in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion, a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood, like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard are powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all, when you’re telling it to yourself or to someone else.

Even with respect to our own past, we cannot always separate fact from fiction, event from memory. Our usual issues with the reliability (or unreliability) of an account are further complicated by our awareness that Polley’s family consists mainly of actors and filmmakers—yet another layer to consider as we interpret the film’s narrative and the various interlocking stories it presents; does a family of actors further blur the lines between fact and fiction, or does it suggest we might learn more truth from fiction?12 In telling his story, for example, Michael speculates that Diane actually fell in love not with him but with the vibrant character he was portraying in The Caretakers. Michael and Diane began their relationship with one another as actors on stage in The Condemned of Altona. She saw him in the roles he brought to life. As a result of the characters that she saw him play, she thought (mistakenly?) that he was like her in being a person who lived life to the fullest. In reality, Michael says, he loves “to play it as an act” but finds that he “can’t live it as a human being.” Later in the film, when Michael talks about Diane’s death and his final goodbye to her, he wipes away tears and proclaims, “There was no acting in any of that. No acting at all.” When the director interrupts Michael’s narration to have him repeat a line, he introduces a bit of levity as he protests,

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“I was being so real. I completely convinced myself.” Only someone who is used to playing a part or to being seen as such a player is likely to make such a self-conscious claim. And so we as viewers, may find ourselves—like Diane before us—moved by Michael’s reaction and unable to differentiate his performance from his expression of true emotion. Joshua Oppenheimer is interested in the ways that people blend fact and fiction in telling stories about their pasts, particularly when they have committed terrible crimes for which they have never been held accountable, publically or legally. To experiment with this claim and this scenario, Oppenheimer places his camera in the hands of the perpetrators of genocide—allowing them to direct and star in their own reenactments of historical events and imaginative reconstructions of what they seem to consider their glory days. He also includes footage of the killers’ metaphorical representations of their alternately vengeful and conciliatory victims. As Homay King rightly notes, many of the film’s staged scenes “are more properly fantasies than re-enactments. The subjects being documented are not the events that occurred during the 1965–1966 Indonesian exterminations, but rather the perpetrator’s fantasies, nightmares, and rewritten memories about these events as they become visualized in stage scenes of their own making.”13 The highly stylized reenactments are fashioned after various Hollywood genres, including musicals and Westerns, as well as those that depict gangsters of various sorts. It’s clear that their acts of killing, too, were inspired by Hollywood films. Anwar explains that he would “watch gangster films—violent films— [and] . . . see such cool ways of killing” that he decided to copy them, “especially how gangsters kill with wire.” Oppenheimer notes that “acting was always part of the act of killing” for the perpetrators.14 Instead of fiction films distorting the line between fact and fiction, we find that historical events are already being affected by men who are attempting to recreate what they saw in fiction films; they are trying to make real what was fake. The negotiation between fact and fiction is further complicated by their reenactments, in which they seem to be at least as interested in the cinematic quality of their stories—including the use of special effects and costumes—as in the historical accuracy of their depictions. It’s not clear if these men are clear about their own relationships to history and representation, for example, whether the killers understand themselves to be participating in a documentary by reprising their roles or creating a work of fiction based on a historical past—a past, we learn, in which the men acted out (real) gruesome scenes that were inspired by (fake) Hollywood scenes. Moreover, The Act of Killing makes little effort to differentiate fact from fiction; in fact, the inverse may be the case. Many of the fictional scenes— including images of dancing women emerging from the mouth of a building shaped like a fish, to images of Anwar in the jungle being fed his own



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entrails—court a viewer to regard them as fantasy (or nightmare). But some others, like the scene in which the men are interviewed on a TV show that celebrates them as heroes, are not immediately identifiable as veridical or imagined.15 As Bill Nichols notes in his review of The Act of Killing, “the entire film presents a reality that is too thoroughly unbelievable to be true. And yet it is.”16 As a consequence, viewers are put in the position of continually evaluating the material presented in the hopes of discerning fact from fiction and truth from lies. The film communicates its subject matter indirectly, however, and thereby asks viewers to draw their own conclusions about what is real or not; it also implicitly encourages viewers to consider the possibility that something they considered as fact might hide fictions, just as fictional representations and imaginative extensions may provide truthful insights. STORIES WE TELL: AN INTERROGATION PROCESS WITH MULTIPLE, COMPETING PERSPECTIVES Kierkegaard’s indirect communication uses multiple (occasionally contradictory) perspectives without seeming to privilege any one of them. In film, while the author or director might have a particular perspective that he or she hopes will be adopted by an audience, that perspective may not be immediately apparent and may only emerge after multiple viewings. When director Sarah Polley attempts to tell the story of her mother, Diane, who died when the filmmaker was still a young girl, she does so by talking with many of the friends and family who knew her mother best, including her children Suzy and John Buchan (from her first marriage), Mark and Joanna Polley (from her second), her second husband Michael and many of her mother’s friends and fellow actors. Although Michael’s story of his relationship with Diane is central to the film, inasmuch as his account provides the voice-over narration, it becomes clear that his understanding of his wife is simply one among many and that there are important aspects of her life and loves that were unknown to him. As a result the film suggests that, first, although he is telling a good portion of the story, the story is not entirely his to tell; and second, that what he is telling may not be entirely true. Moreover, his gaps and blanks remind us that there is much—perhaps most—that he does not know. As Polley conducts her “interrogation process,” it becomes clear that there is widespread disagreement about Diane’s personality: some say that she was completely transparent; others claim that she had secrets.17 Some believe that she knew she was going to die; others claim that her sudden decline was a surprise to her. The audience isn’t given good reasons to privilege one of these interpretations over the others. And we are left to wonder: Are these

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competing truths (as we might find in a standard documentary) or competing falsehoods (as we are used to seeing in fiction films)? Or, as Polley may be alluding to in her description of the project a hybrid of documentary and experiment, a blend of both? At the least we can take note of how Polley’s “process” undermines any confidence in a singular, unified, or uniform truth (about personal history, for example) and instead offers a case for a fractured and fragmented portrait in which truths are multiple, overlapping, conflicting, and perhaps—for all these reasons—irreconcilable. Yet that lack of clarity and conclusiveness may still, as Kierkegaard repeatedly emphasizes, provide a glimpse of a deeper truth about ourselves and others. Polley’s choice to include footage of the preparation for the interviews— showing the microphones in position, people discussing their nervousness about being filmed, and the camera itself—introduces the suggestion that the film, too, merely presents another possible interpretation of her mother’s life. In an interesting doubling, viewers see the camera seeing its subjects and proffering a particular perspective on the events and people in the film.18 Once the documentary expands from its initial aim of getting to know the director’s mother to the task of figuring out which of several possible candidates is her biological father, the film begins to explore issues not just of how to tell the story of Diane but of whose story it is to tell. Or, whose story it is. What begins as a search for a fuller portrait of the director’s mother becomes a search for Sarah’s father. When Canadian director Harry Gulkin is revealed to be responsible for Polley’s paternity, he verifies, at last, the story of his relationship with Diane. Even so, Gulkin appears to desire a larger role in the narrative than the one he is given. Being a filmmaker himself, he questions Polley’s decision to include the “chaos” of multiple voices to tell the story. He maintains that, to approximate the truth of what happened, “you have to limit it to those who are directly involved.” Otherwise, “it’s woolly.” Arguing that many of the people Polley interviews are “nonplayers,” Gulkin claims that “one does not get the truth simply by hearing what their reactions are. People tend to declare themselves in terms of what they saw, in terms of what they felt, in terms of what they remembered, and in terms of their loyalties. . . . [But] the crucial function of art is to tell the truth, to find the truth in a situation.” Moreover, since Diane isn’t available, he claims that the story of their time together is “only [his] to tell.” His objection to the inclusion of multiple perspectives is one that strikes at the heart of the film because it suggests that Polley’s interrogation process might be too indirect to accomplish her task. We are increasingly unclear what that task is or might be. Perhaps it is Gulkin’s concern, then, that leads Polley to wonder (through voice-over readings of her emails) if she has “lost her mind” for “trying to reconstruct the past from other people’s words” and to worry that her mother may be “slipping away from us, over



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and over again, just as we begin to see her face.” Moreover, even the image of seeing her face is complicated by the fact that we keep catching glimpses of her, only to realize that Diane was being played by an actress, and so we too—indirectly placed in the director’s position—have lost sight of Diane. Ultimately, the film seems to follow Joanna Polley’s suggestion that the family has to accept the impossibility of accurately discerning “what actually happened in the past” and to instead accept “lots of perspectives,” including those generated by the act of capturing the stories on film. In doing so, the documentary shifts more fully into being a reflection on storytelling itself— especially in its cinematic form. Thus, when her half brother John reverses the roles of interviewer and interviewee and asks the director what her film is really about, Polley replies, “Memory and the way we tell the stories of our lives. I think in many ways it’s like trying to bring someone to life through people’s stories of them.” Later, in a voice-over reading of one of her emails to Gulkin, she elaborates on this point, explaining that she is interested in the discrepancies in the stories and how “the fact that the truth about the past is often ephemeral and difficult to pin down and many of our stories, when we don’t take proper time to do research about our pasts, which is almost always the case, end up with shifts and fictions in them, mostly unintended.” The suggestion seems to be that we must tell (and retell) the stories about our past and to consider the evidence provided by those who proffer contrary narratives in order to remove the problematic fictions from our conception of the past—of course, admitting that we are in no such position to fully “remove” them. We need to tell stories in order to try to discern, as much as we can, how the stories we tell may not be true (in terms of historical accuracy), but they are our stories nevertheless. We end up with “lots of perspectives” and no uniform or official record. Thus truth, in this context, is not primarily a matter of getting clear about the factual, objective content of the past so much as it is about how we remember the past and come to terms with the subjective significance it has for us today; this is the case for Polley, but it is also the case for us, the film’s viewers. By prompting reflections about storytelling itself and by inviting viewers to reflect on the ways that stories function in their lives, Stories We Tell serves as a kind of Socratic maieutic that is characteristic of indirect communication. By declining to resolve the contradictions (of fact and truth) that the emerge in the portraits of her mother, and by explicitly calling into question the value and accuracy of the film’s interrogation process, the documentary requires viewers to be actively engaged in interpreting what is seen, thereby generating a novel relationship to the film, its subjects, and its claims. For a film to resonate with viewers, particularly in terms of questions of meaning and value, direct communication may not be as powerful as an indirect approach. Polley seems to have something like that in mind when

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she explains that “if you know what you’re trying to say and someone receives it as such, it automatically loses its power.”19 Polley’s documentary, instead, aims to depict a process of discovering the truth about her parents without an appeal to definitive answers. The viewer, like Socrates’ pupil, or Kierkegaard’s reader, is not instructed but encouraged to reflect on the material presented and to draw her own conclusions. Presumably to highlight the incompleteness of the information her documentary provides and to suggest that interpretations of the past are always open to further revision (and addition), Polley does not end her film where viewers might expect. After the voice-over narration concludes and the screen goes dark, the audience once again sees Geoff Bowes, the actor that some of Diane’s friends suspected of being the director’s biological father. Despite his assurances earlier in the film that his relationship with Diane was chaste—purely one of friendship—and that he could not have any responsibility for Polley’s birth, he now admits that he and Diane did “sleep together once.” As a coda, his admission serves as a tacit reminder of the inherent open-endedness of any story. There is always some information that, once added or amended or omitted, could prompt a reconsideration of the past and an alteration of the stories we tell about it. THE ACT OF KILLING: AN INTERROGATION PROCESS WITH MORALLY PROBLEMATIC STORYTELLERS Joshua Oppenheimer began his film project by interviewing victims of the Indonesian genocide of the 1960s. However, the military followed the filmmakers, confiscated their equipment and recordings and terrified the participating survivors. So Oppenheimer decided to focus on the stories of the perpetrators, who were never prosecuted, with the aim of exposing (he says for Indonesians themselves) the true nature of the regime in which they live.20 Through his work with Anwar Congo, a man who reportedly killed hundreds—perhaps even a thousand—people while working as a “gangster” for the right-wing military regime, Oppenheimer explains that he came to see that discovering Anwar’s “brokenness” would be “the most effective exposé . . . of the rottenness of the whole regime.” Though Congo is the forty-first perpetrator that Oppenheimer interviewed in preparation for the film, he becomes the central figure in the documentary. Calling many of the other perpetrators “hollow men,” Oppenheimer focuses on Anwar as someone whom he believes is at least somewhat troubled by what he has done. As a celebrated figure considered by many to be a hero, Congo should be able to tell his stories with pride and with the levity with which he begins his interview. But, as the film reveals, the more he revisits his



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past by reenacting scenes from his life, the more he seems to become aware of some of troubling fictions embedded in those stories. As Oppenheimer observes in his commentary on the film, humans justify killing “through the stories we tell”; as a result, people might rethink those justifications if the narratives are revisited. Although the perpetrators who tell their stories offer no such justification—and beyond that, no apologies or attempts to atone for what they have done—Oppenheimer does not let them off the hook so easily. Yet rather than showing the names or faces of Congo’s victims or using voice-over narration to explain the atrocities they suffered, the director keeps to his indirect strategy of seemingly taking the perpetrators at their word and letting them speak for and, ultimately, indict themselves. The participants seem to be aware of the possibility of self-exposure (as killers) and, thus, of the risk to their well-defended self-representations (as heroes). Adi Zulkadry, who worked with Congo and was responsible for many deaths in the 1960s, warns the group that the film they are making “will disprove all the propaganda about the communists being cruel and show that we were cruel.” Although he seems to believe that the statute of limitations protects them from criminal charges, he notes his concern “about image.” He explains: “It’s not a problem for us. It’s a problem for history. The whole story will be reversed.” In response to the question, “Why should we always hide our history if that’s the truth?,” Zulkadry replies that “not everything true should be made public” before adding that “not everything true is good.”21 More than the others, he seems to be aware of the ironic likelihood that the footage that supposedly honors the men by perpetuating their legacy as cultural and political idols will end up exposing them as reprehensible killers. Oppenheimer’s indirect strategy of pretending that Congo and Zulkadry are heroes ultimately reveals their monstrosity. Moreover, by using this indirect approach, Oppenheimer can reach a wider audience, including one composed of viewers who believe that the killers have performed a valuable service for their government. Those individuals, who would probably not watch any films in which their celebrated/celebrity “gangsters” were directly maligned by documentarians, might watch a film in which the killers inadvertently condemn themselves. As Oppenheimer explains, prior to the film, the survivors’ stories didn’t have much impact, primarily because the storytellers were considered to be “scheming communists” whose “testimony [was] not seen as credible. . . . But if the leaders of society, wealthy and honorable members of the community who should be enjoying the fruits of their victory, expose themselves as broken, empty, and corrupt because of crimes they have committed, that is harder to deny.”22 As it is, Congo’s growing acknowledgment of the horrible nature of his killings and his growing awareness of his culpability in those deaths forms

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the larger narrative arc of the entire film. He enters the film as a gangster in white pants and a lime green shirt, which, by his own admission, makes him look like someone going to a picnic. The Act of Killing leaves him as someone who has witnessed the shocking violence involved in massacring a village of people, as well as a reenactment that has figuratively put him in the role of the victim by playing the part of a man whom he helped torture and kill. Returning at the end of the film (and at the end of his years of being interviewed) to the rooftop where Oppenheimer first questioned him, Congo finds it difficult to speak about his crimes. His physical reaction to his seemingly awakened conscience leads him to wretch in disgust about his role in the deaths of so many people. In interviews (though, notably, not in the film itself), Oppenheimer tells readers what he thinks the film shows: Congo “will never be able to bridge the gap, the abyss, between his fictional renditions and the unspeakable horror he inflicted on others. . . . In the end he realizes that [bridging the gap] is impossible, and he chokes on the rising terror that comes with the realization that he will never escape the horror of what he has done. He will never be able to tame it with storytelling, with fiction, or with fantasy.”23 Where Congo initially danced the cha-cha-cha, he now—at the end, coming to consciousness about the truth of his acts—finds it difficult to stand. The brightness of the earlier scene with Anwar in his white pants is replaced by the dark of night.24 Oppenheimer’s camera lingers on him—literally looking down on him—as he stops at the foot of the stairs seemingly finding it hard to follow the path through which he once carried so many corpses. While the theatrical release of The Act of Killing shows Congo eventually exiting the building into the blackness of the night, the director’s cut provides him no such escape. It chooses instead to leave him framed by the stairway—literally boxed in by the building in which he murdered so many people—seemingly overwhelmed and unable to move forward, incapable of fully escaping the past that haunts him. Like Polley, Oppenheimer is less interested in documenting the objective facts of the events of several decades ago and more concerned with what those events—or the stories about those events—mean to the people who live with them. As he notes in an interview in Filmmaker, his film is not about “what happened in 1965, although that’s important. That would be an interesting historical documentary or book.” Instead, he wanted to explore “the nature of [the perpetrator’s] impunity today.”25 Oppenheimer adds that “once you put a character’s imagination through a prism, once you create the conditions, as I tried to, for an observational documentary of the imagination, as opposed to an observational documentary of a kind of simulated reality . . . you are able to see all these second-hand, third-rate generic images that go into one’s self-conception and self-staging.”26 Although some reviewers have criticized The Act of Killing for not providing more historical, social and political context, and for focusing too much



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on the stories of the killers without devoting enough attention to documenting the facts surrounding the genocide, other critics, like Stuart Klawans, have defended the film against such charges.27 Arguing that the film doesn’t need to do the work of a forensic documentary because no one denies that the killing occurred or disputes how it was conducted, Klawans identifies Oppenheimer’s film as belonging to “a new category, a documentary of the genocidal imaginary” for its “attempt to record not the crimes of the past but the inner world of the criminals.”28 Arguably, and as testified to by, among other attributes of the film, Congo’s conversion from self-deluded to self-aware suggests that such inner worlds are best captured by film—and revealed to audiences—indirectly. As Michael Meyer explains, “Journalistic efforts to get around a façade often end up trapped within the same parameters of debate established by the artifice. A film about the massacre that presented long-suffering victims and unrepentant killers would have played into the same simplistic logic that had already made most Indonesians uninterested in examining the situation.” Therefore, the “real exposé . . . is in showing us things we already know.” Making an argument that sounds very Kierkegaardian, Meyer notes that change requires “a journalism of the imagination that interrupts and reinterprets the stories already playing on an endless loop in our heads.”29 Where Kierkegaard worried about how to encourage his readers to live a Christian (or religious) existence in a world in which they mistakenly believed themselves to be doing just that, Oppenheimer worries about how to encourage his audience, particularly viewers in Indonesia, to recognize the problematic nature of a genocidal regime that they continue to support. The obstacle is not that people are ignorant about the killings, which could be remedied easily enough by the direct approach of disseminating information; it is, rather, and more troublingly, that people know about the genocide and yet continue to accept it—and the regime that perpetrated it—without protest. Unmasking that error might be best accomplished by the kind of indirect approach that Oppenheimer employs. If Anwar Congo can come to terms with his own fraught participation in the killings—stripping away the layers of lies and fabrications—then so too might others who have celebrated him and his collaborators. Moreover, viewers around the world who are not accustomed to think of themselves as collaborators in death and destruction might be led to consider whether their own innocence is so complete or assured. THE DIRECTION OF INDIRECT COMMUNICATION: DIRECTORS AND THE CRAFT OF FILM DOCUMENTATION Late in Stories We Tell, Michael calls attention to the fact that Polley will have about six hours of footage from just one interview with him. He knows

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that she will edit the footage and worries that that selection is “an enormously different thing from simply doing an interview straight and . . . letting it run as it is.” Insisting that refraining from editing the footage would have made the film “at least as close to truth as you can get,” he worries that her editorial decisions “will turn this into something completely different.” Stories We Tell also calls attention to the role of the filmmaker in deciding what to shoot in the first place. When Michael talks about his use of the camera on his honeymoon with Diane, he points out his tendency to shift from filming images of people (the starting point of his camera’s gaze) to filming images of landscapes. His revelation takes on a new significance as viewers learn that it is part of a narrative in which he suggests that he did not pay enough attention to his wife. His failure to keep her as the central focus of his camera on their honeymoon becomes indicative of his failure to keep her as the central focus of his life. Yet even though the director of Stories We Tell has an essential role in shaping the film, she is presented as being without authority for establishing the film’s truth. She too is a seeker; her interpretation is part of series of interpretations; her film is but one of the many possible films that could have resulted from the footage. Her verbal contributions come most overtly from the emails and letters she reads, which reflect her thoughts at the time they were written but at the same time do not provide anything like a totalizing perspective. She is but one of the many participants in a story. Moreover, Polley is forthright about her role as the director—and thus fabricator—of this film. In case viewers were misled into thinking that the recreated home movies of her mother were historically accurate depictions of Diane, Polley shows herself on screen giving direction to the actress who plays her mother and lists the names of the actors and actresses (identified as such) in the closing credits. As she notes in an interview about her film, she “wanted to be open about the fact that the film is a construction; the idea was to provide audiences with that experience and make them wonder what is real (and what they can hang on to) and what is manufactured and manipulated. The idea was to construct something from the past while also calling that entire process of construction into question.”30 Oppenheimer also calls attention to his role in crafting his documentary. He, too, shapes his film through the questions he asks and the way that he edits the footage shot over several years. Moreover, as executive producer Werner Herzog notes as part of the commentary track, viewers see “real crafting of a movie” in Oppenheimer’s film. By the time recreated footage of the massacre at Kampung Kolam appears, Herzog maintains that the film’s increasingly stylized cinematic depictions shift The Act of Killing into what he characterizes as a “fever dream.” Viewers witness the massacre not just as a historical reenactment (much less as a historical event) but as an event



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that highlights both the artificiality of the scene and the reality of the terror to which it alludes. Oppenheimer notes that, in order to achieve this desired effect, he altered the sound of the screaming victims by removing the highest frequency. As the sound of the screams fades, the director notes, “It’s not just getting quieter, it’s also getting duller.” He explains that the sound resembles what one would hear if the victims were being smothered by pillows and that his purposeful alteration aims at making viewers conscious of the fact that they are viewing images—images that may in some respect resemble what actually happened but that nevertheless remain constructions or reconstructions. Noting that he felt a “moral responsibility to create an icon for a genocide for which there are no icons,” while acknowledging that “a genocide should never have an icon,” Oppenheimer simultaneously “created these images and . . . pulled down the sound to make you aware of the images, to think about what we are doing by consuming these images.” Additionally, he calls attention to the role of the filmmaker by allowing the audience to hear the set directions: “Cut, cut, cut.” The high-pitched frequency that rings in the background against the muffled screams of the massacre also serves to connect the scene to others in the film. In the theatrical release the ringing establishes a connection to an earlier scene of bats in flight against a dimly lit sky. In the director’s cut, the connection between the two scenes is further solidified by the fact that both scenes are immediately preceded by shots of Congo in his bed, making them scenes that seem to originate from as well as contribute to his nightmares. The director’s cut also incorporates that same ringing into a later scene set in the aftermath of Anwar’s nightmarish beheading by Herman Koto, a younger gangster and paramilitary leader who plays the part of a goddess of revenge. Anwar’s severed head sits atop a large rock in the jungle as monkeys feast on his bloody entrails. Since the camera is situated directly behind a large torch, flames fill the screen in the footage from the jungle in this scene just as they did in the footage of the massacre. Moreover, the footage of the bats (which contains the same sound) is itself a lead-in to footage of Congo in the jungle reenacting the tortured death of a man that he beheaded and whose death Anwar identifies as the source of his nightmares: Congo claims he is “always gazed at by those eyes” that he didn’t close. Oppenheimer’s handiwork in creating the connections between these scenes is apparent. There are numerous other ways in which it is evident that Oppenheimer is involved in crafting The Act of Killing. His camera, like his film, lingers on the faces of the perpetrators as they reenact their crimes rather than on, say, the faces of their victims.31 After showing Congo footage in which the perpetrator plays the part of a victim and hearing him remark that he knows how his victims felt now that he has been in their position, Oppenheimer interjects that the people Anwar tortured felt far worse because “you know it’s only a

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film. They knew they were being killed.” That comment seems to resonate with Congo, who tears up and wonders if he has sinned because he “did this to so many people.” The director’s cut of the film allows the camera to linger on Congo’s face in this scene as he struggles with his growing awareness of the monstrosity of his crimes. For nearly thirty seconds he sits through a silence that persists through a brief cutaway to a flashback of him playing the victim. The film then cuts to Zulkadry, who silently stares at himself in the mirror as he sits beside his daughter, who is having her face massaged—presumably at the shopping mall where the family has been shown spending time.32 The juxtaposition of the silent meditations of the two killers highlights their differences: where Congo’s silence seems to be one of despair and remorse, Zulkadry’s silence is one of defiance.33 While Anwar seems wracked with guilt, Adi remains unapologetic. Oppenheimer ends this telling minute of silence with a cut to Herman Koto (appearing as himself) screaming and playing the drums. Since Herman is a gangster and paramilitary leader who inherited the culture that Congo and Zulkadry helped to create, and since he plays the goddess of revenge in many of the fantasy sequences, one wonders if Oppenheimer intends him to represent the collective scream of the victims and anger of their descendants. The director’s cut of The Act of Killing includes many such sequences that are missing from the theatrical release. While the theatrical version has much of the same footage, the editing is importantly different. The “crafting” of a story is most apparent in the former. A number of narrative threads that emerge in the director’s cut are lost in the theatrical release. Some of the small scenes begin to take on a larger, metaphorical significance when repeated and juxtaposed with other scenes in the director’s cut of the film: Congo fishing, first during the day—perhaps in the very river that he has just mentioned is believed to be haunted because of all the dead bodies the men placed in it—and later fishing at night against the backdrop of stormy weather and lightening (when he talks about karma); Congo feeding the ducks (on two separate occasions) and talking with his grandson about the need to apologize for hurting the helpless creature, which, in the director’s cut, comes after a conversation with Zulkadry (that occurs while the men are fishing) in which the men discuss the propriety of apologizing for their actions. In the end, The Act of Killing arguably goes beyond merely using fictional elements and reenactments to document a historical past; it uses them to explore the lingering consequences of that past for the individuals involved and for the larger political and paramilitary forces still in power in Indonesia. As a result, the film remains open to questions about whether it is really a documentary. Even Oppenheimer admits that the film “almost stops being a documentary altogether” once “it becomes a kind of hallucinatory



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aria, a kind of fever dream.” Indeed, the director adds, at that point “the film ‘transcends documentary.’”34 Herzog agrees that “the borderline between documentary and fiction is sometimes blurred” in the film because of “the amount of stylization, the amount of surrealism, the amount of the force of a very, very strong hand of a movie director,” but he suggests that documentary film itself needs to “move away from the pure, fact-based movies because facts per se do not constitute truths.” He elaborates by explaining that the Manhattan phone directory is full of facts, but those facts are not connected in any meaningful way with people’s lives. Fictional elements might be needed even when the purpose of the film is to inform rather than to entertain. Errol Morris, another executive producer of the project, adds that “whatever documentary is, it’s not adult education. Presumably, it’s an art form where we are trying to communicate something about the real world.”35 Implicit in this presumption is the claim that the real world can be—perhaps, after Herzog, should be—known to us, in part, through fiction.36 I suggest that the borderline between documentary and fiction in films such as Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing is blurred not just by the things Herzog identifies but also by the fact that these films take an indirect approach to their subject matter and involve differing levels of deception. Both films use elements of fiction, including reenactments, imaginative reconstructions, and even fantasy, and both incorporate multiple (sometimes conflicting) perspectives. But it is significant that they use these techniques as part of an attempt to communicate truth indirectly with their audiences. Both films blend fact and fiction in the interest of encouraging viewers to reflect on the nature of the relationship between the two—and not just as a cinematic exercise but for the revelation of something profound. In Stories We Tell, we are encouraged to think about the nature of personal identity and family history; in The Act of Killing, we are prompted to think about the creation and maintenance of national identity and national history, especially when those stories are filled with horrors we are prone to forget, or perhaps as troublingly, remember and celebrate. Eschewing codification of their subject matter into a single veridical interpretation of events that can be directly communicated to an audience with unimpeachable authority, both films present themselves as being without the traditional authority assigned to (or expected from) documentary cinema. Instead both Polley and Oppenheimer present to viewers a series of overlapping narratives coupled with filmic depictions that may undermine themselves (namely, as documents that would otherwise purport to assert truths) and yet, by such indirection, these unstable images may yield deeper, more profound, and even lasting truths. Kierkegaard would certainly agree with Herzog that there are some truths, particularly the “essential” truths of our moral and religious lives, that must

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be subjectively appropriated by individuals; they cannot just be objectively examined and therefore disseminated (like leaflets announcing the end of a war). It follows that, if directors are interested in creating meaningful connections with their audiences and crafting films that reveal entire ways of life to be true (or full of terrible deceit), an indirect approach might be beneficial to the genre. Indeed, if Herzog is right, it might even be preferable. The promise of such alternatives—what we may call indirect cinema—seem especially pertinent when viewers are operating under a delusion that must be removed. By taking an indirect approach, documentaries like Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing might be more effective than documentaries of the so-called direct cinema tradition in helping individuals understand ethical and existential truths about the choices we make and the stories we tell to justify them. NOTES 1. I am grateful to the Hood College Board of Associates for a summer 2014 McCardell Grant that helped support the completion of this essay and to David LaRocca for his numerous helpful comments and suggestions on earlier drafts. 2. See Carl Plantinga, “What a Documentary Is, After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63, No. 2 (Spring 2005), 105–117, 105. In his helpful discussion of different types of documentary films and the features that they share, Plantiga notes that “typical documentaries are first and foremost meant to be taken, in both their particularity and their broad thematic outlines, as reliable accounts of records of, and/or arguments about the actual world. Fictions may also muse about the actual world, but do so indirectly through fictional characters and events” (114). He then adds that “various hybrid films stand at the fuzzy boundaries of fiction and non-fiction.” Stories We Tell and The Act of Killing seem to be to examples of such hybrid films in their indirect approach. 3. Richard Porton, “Family Viewing: An Interview with Sarah Polley,” Cineaste (Summer 2013), 36–40, 36. Polley goes on to explain that she wanted the audience to be “constantly wondering what was real and what was not, what was nostalgia, what was fact. . . . I don’t think that could have been done in a straightforward documentary.” 4. David Thomson, “When Did You Last Film Your Father?” The New Republic (April 29, 2013), 60–62, 62. 5. Melis Behlil, “The Act of Killing: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” Cineaste, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Summer 2013), 26–31, 28. 6. Søren Kierkegaard, Point of View, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 53. 7. Søren Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). 8. Kierkegaard, Concluding Unscientific Postscript, 277. 9. Kierkegaard, Point of View, 53.



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10. Ibid., 54. 11. Ibid. 12. Polley notes that she was able to learn more about her father, whose film Lies My Father Told Me won a Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film, by watching the documentary Harry Gulkin: Red Dawn on Main Street. 13. Homay King, “Born Free? Repetition and Fantasy in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Winter 2013), 30–36, 32. 14. See the Democracy Now interview with Oppenheimer included in the two-disk DVD edition of The Act of Killing. 15. Bill Nichols discusses this in “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Winter 2013), 25–29. 16. Ibid., 29. 17. Much later in the film, Polley reflects on her “desire to document” her experience through film. In her words: “As I begin this process, I don’t know what form my project will take. . . . I wouldn’t even pretend at this point to know how to tell it, beyond beginning to explore it through interviews with everyone involved, so that everyone’s point of view, no matter how contradictory, is included.” 18. Late in the film the camera appears again on screen as Polley shows herself to be the person behind it. To her right hangs a mirror in which viewers can see a reflection of the other side of the room behind the stationary camera—an image that can only be captured by the additional perspective that the mirror and second camera introduces. 19. José Teodoro, “Knowing You, Knowing Me,” Film Comment, Vol. 49, No. 3 (May–June 2013), 52–55, 55. 20. In his subsequent documentary The Look of Silence, which had a world release in 2014 and arrived in theaters in the US in July 2015 (too late to be addressed in this essay), Oppenheimer focuses greater attention on the survivors of genocide, particularly on an optometrist who confronts his brother’s killers during the process of testing their eyesight. 21. Reflection about the possible ways in which the film might damage the image of the killers occurs in several other places, notably when the topic is the massacre at Kampung Kolam. During the shoot Minister of Youth and Sport Sakhyan Asmara expresses concern about the fervor expressed by the paramilitary Pancasila Youth in preparation for the reenactment: “We shouldn’t look brutal, like we want to drink people’s blood.” He worries that their expression of bloodthirsty rage might be dangerous for their image. But he allows Oppenheimer to use the footage to “show just how ferocious we can be.” 22. Behlil, “The Act of Killing,” 28. 23. Ibid. 24. The shorter theatrical version of the film ends with Congo stepping through the open door into the dark of night. 25. Ray Pride, “Caught on Film,” Filmmaker (Spring 2013), 37–41, 86–87, 38. 26. Ibid., 41. 27. See for example Jill Godmilow’s “Killing the Documentary: An OscarNominated Filmmaker Takes Issue with ‘The Act of Killing’,” which is available online at www.indiewire.com.

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28. Stuart Klawans, “The Executioner’s Song,” Film Comment, Vol. 49, No. 4 (July–August 2013), 30–33, 32. 29. Michael Meyer, “False Fronts,” Columbia Journalism Review (September/ October 2013), 46–50, 50. 30. Porton, “Family Viewing,” 39. 31. For example, in a scene in which Zulkadry reenacts the execution of Suryono, Congo’s neighbor who was cast in the role of the victim and whose stepfather was killed during the genocide, the camera lingers on Zulkadry’s face. Similarly, when Congo reenacts his part as the killer by garroting a man who lies on a table above him, the camera lingers on Anwar’s face as he struggles to tighten the wire that will end his victim’s life. Interestingly, it is when Congo himself plays the victim very late in the film that the camera focuses on the victim’s face. 32. Interestingly, the multiple mirrors that surround Zukaldry frame him with mere fragments of himself. 33. The director’s cut of The Act of Killing is importantly different from the theatrical release in part because of its longer silences. For example, when Congo plays the gangster (in the last thirty minutes of the director’s cut), the camera lingers on his face for nearly ninety seconds as he struggles to end the life of the man on the table above him. The lengthy silence is punctuated only by the sound of his exertions. It is followed by quiet footage of a commercial plane taking off with a sudden cut to the silent wreckage of a downed plane. Thus, by the time the sequence comes to an end, nearly two minutes of silence has elapsed. And the plane, which is not included in the theatrical release, becomes yet another image that seems to take on a metaphorical significance because of way it is incorporated into the director’s cut. 34. Larry Rohter, “A Movie’s Killers Are All Too Real: ‘The Act of Killing’ and Indonesian Death Squads,” The New York Times (July 12, 2013), nytimes.com. 35. Herzog’s and Morris’s comments are included in the two-disk 2013 DVD release of The Act of Killing. 36. For more on Werner Herzog’s relationship to truth and fiction, see David LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014).

Chapter 31

A Reality Rescinded The Transformative Effects of Fraud in I’m Still Here David LaRocca

As part of the audio commentary for I’m Still Here (2010), director Casey Affleck lends the following explanation to a clip of broadcast television in which the actor Joaquin Phoenix, the protagonist of the film, appears on The Late Show with David Letterman: The reason that we were so tight-lipped, the reason I was so, so insistent and so diligent with the crew and everyone about keeping a lid on all of this was that it was going to help make the movie—the way we wanted to make the movie— believable to have people be treating him like he’s a normal person, to get great performances. . . . It wasn’t to fool people; that was never the intention: that’s what I think of as a hoax. And so . . . it’s not a hoax. It’s something. It’s a performance, that’s for sure. It’s just like any other movie; it’s just made in a slightly different way. The intention was just to tell a story about a person and that’s it. I never said anything to the press or sort of lied about anything. I just never addressed it. The only thing I ever said was “This is definitely not a hoax,” because that’s what a hoax meant to me. But because I never came out and said “Yes, Joaquin is performing” or “No, Joaquin is not performing” or “Yes, there’re scripted parts to this movie” and “The movie was planned,” “The movie was staged,” people just kept on speculating, guessing. I think that, in the end, what it’s done is—so far, anyway, unfortunately—is it’s made people a little bit annoyed. The reviews have read like somebody rolling their eyes and sucking their teeth. And they seem pretty irritated by it all. . . . The feeling I get is that they think that someone was trying to fool them and they don’t want to be fooled. But that really was not the intention. And it’s completely sort of irrelevant to it all, actually.1

Given Affleck’s sense of eye-rolling, teeth-sucking, annoyance, and irritation in the reception of his first feature film as a director, it seems that a critical 537

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consideration of the status of the film as a hoax—is it or is it not?—makes that debate not just relevant to any account of I’m Still Here, but essential to its interpretation in relation to the history, future, and philosophy of documentary film. At several prominent intervals in the film, characters or commentators address rumors (from reliable but unnamed sources) that the film I’m Still Here—in which Joaquin Phoenix’s brother-in-law, Casey Affleck, documents Phoenix’s “retirement” from acting along with his drug-laced, ill-tempered, and disastrous attempt to begin a hip-hop singing career—is a hoax. In audio commentary that leads off the film—that is, when Affleck is describing how the home movie-style footage of a young Phoenix with his father at a waterfall, is, in fact, staged—the director says “he wanted the performances to seem real”; wanted people Phoenix engaged to “act real,” that is, to have genuine responses to the now-former actor; and to explore “how the public would react to the film thinking this was real.”2 If I’m Still Here is not a hoax, what is it? And if it is a hoax—despite Affleck’s protestation to the contrary—what kind of documentary film does it become? It seems Affleck objects to the label “hoax” because the spirit of such an act—willful, knowing deceit—does not align with his intentions. He says: “The idea of a hoax never entered my consciousness. . . . When I think of a hoax, I think of Punk’d and Candid Camera. It’s a practical joke. That was never the intention.”3 To sort intentions from effects, we can call to mind such iconic hoaxes as Orson Welles’ radio program War of the Worlds (1939), a more recent deceit such as The Blair Witch Project (1999), and playful appropriations of cultural myths such as Incident at Loch Ness (2004). Unlike the perpetrators of these illustrious exemplars, remember, Affleck says he was not “trying to fool” people. But then, of course, we cannot help but notice, he was trying to do just that: to deliberately create conditions in which outsiders (other actors, the media, even friends, and of course, all of us) believed Joaquin Phoenix was in freefall—committing career suicide—so that they, we, would react as if it were true. As a documentary filmmaker, Affleck seems to be caught up in what Joseph Mitchell was doing as a journalist at The New Yorker in the 1930s—in his case, creating composite characters and inventing quotations—as a way to tell a more compelling story. As Charles McGrath, who personally knew Mitchell said of his colleague, “He wrote what he did out of affection and empathy for his subjects, not a wish to deceive.”4 Though McGrath points out that “composites and invented figures were an old, if not honorable, journalistic tradition,” he also acknowledges that the instinct behind the fabrications may have been a belief (shared by Affleck) that it “allows for a higher truthfulness, a faithfulness that goes beyond mere factual accuracy.”5 Even though Affleck may, in retrospect, report something akin to Mitchell’s



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“affection and empathy for his subject,” his experiment depends on fooling the people who are not in on the stunt (e.g., who become part of the film we know as I’m Still Here)—and by extension, the audience he aims to entertain with his trick. If we, the outsiders, were not duped, Affleck’s sought-after reality principle would not be achieved. As McGrath said of Mitchell, so we can say of Affleck’s I’m Still Here: “If we read it as fiction, which it is, in part, some of the air goes out.”6 Affleck’s approach to making this documentary would appear to place I’m Still Here squarely in the domain of hoax filmmaking. I’m Still Here is neither a sincere documentary film in which we are invited to believe its content is true (what Noël Carroll calls a film of “presumptive assertion,” or what Carl Plantinga defines as a film with “an assertive stance”) nor a mockumentary (which should be apparent as a put-on even as it takes up the form, or uses the grammar, of documentary film—all the while “mocking” its apparent solemnity and sincerity).7 I’m Still Here is, thus, a tertium quid—some third thing that contains elements of both the documentary of presumptive assertion (with an assertive stance) and the mockumentary, but is neither. As Affleck said “it’s something.” What that something is—a hoax? a fake-in-the-serviceof-real?—and what that assigned description means for our understanding of the documentary (as a medium, as a method, and as a part of a genre or subgenre) becomes the central focus of the present investigation. Not all fakes are hoaxes, but all hoaxes are fakes. Hoax is thus not so much a sibling to fake as a cousin. Peter Watkins’ The War Game (1965) is a fake or pseudodocumentary, as if from the future: adopting the traits of an emergency broadcast news report, it depicts the aftermath of nuclear war in Great Britain; but, of course, since viewers are safely watching the film in Great Britain, no viewers would believe nuclear war had descended upon them, and so the audience would not feel itself subject to a hoax. We might say there are two kinds of lies in filmmaking: those aimed to defraud, to cheat, to deliberately trick—in short, hoaxes; and those other kind, a much broader kind, which we are much more familiar with, indeed, arguably obsessed with, namely, films that invite us to enter an alternate reality, to willingly suspend disbelief, to allow fabulism to entertain (not offend)—in short, fictions. Mockumentary, pseudodocumentary, and docufiction all reside in this (latter) category of fiction. Affleck says he wants his viewers to “surrender” in order to “believe” what he shows us—a sentiment that hues closely to the familiar invitations of the fiction storyteller.8 Documentary film, by and large, is meant to occupy neither of these realms of “lies” (viz., hoaxes or fictions); it is, in its traditionally and conventionally understood sense, not aimed at lying to audiences, but just the opposite: showing the truth of the images it collects (albeit often for purposes of commentary, persuasion, education, and advocacy—and thus not shown neutrally).

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In Noah Baumbach’s While We’re Young (2014), Josh (played by Ben Stiller, an actor who also makes a cameo in I’m Still Here) is a documentary filmmaker who becomes outraged at the willful deceit of a younger documentarist, Fletcher (Adam Driver). At the pinnacle of his resentment-fueled rage and indignation over Fletcher’s blasé disregard for cinematic tradition (Fletcher manipulates and fabricates portions of his documentary), Josh insists: “It’s fraud. People go to jail for this.”9 But, of course, they do not! And even the old guard, represented by the figure of Leslie Breitbart (Charles Grodin), who came of age in the heyday of direct cinema and cinéma vérité, thinks Josh has misunderstood the tradition. Fabrication, alteration, manipulation: these are old, old controversies because these are old, old practices. Even in the early years of documentary’s emergence as a genre of filmmaking—as early as the 1920s—viewers and critics worried about fictionalization, and the interference (creative or otherwise) of the filmmaker, his camera, and the editor. When documentary actively courts fiction, though, it general falls into categories such as docufiction, mockumentary, or pseudodocumentary, but not hoax. These distinctions may seem innocuous, as well as contingent and naïve, but they point up the habit of celebrating artists who use artifice to reveal truths (fiction film), and we appreciate those others who use film as a means for recording events, arranging footage in meaningful ways, and letting those images and arrangements speak (nonfiction film), but we have a low regard for willful deceit—for hoax filmmaking. I wish to explore the kind of truths, if any, a hoax documentary may reveal; for example, truths about the kinds of expectations we have of the documentary image—its relationship to the evidence we think we have and the commitments we have to it, as well as the arguments and postulations we can make because of those committments. The controversy surrounding Affleck’s hoax, however, may not be the result of any special methods of deceit (remember, by his own admission, he believed he was not orchestrating a hoax) but owing, instead, to his and Phoenix’s degree of fame. Werner Herzog, for example, has been shaping and fabricating his documentaries for decades, attempting to reveal, as he puts it, not the “accountant’s truth” but rather “ecstatic truth.”10 In the documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Dieter Dengler, a former prisoner of war, opens and closes the door of his home repeatedly as a sign of his liberation, a literal exercise of freedom. Later we learn that Herzog recommended Dengler make this action; this intervention, we are told by Herzog (in the director’s audio commentary) pushes us away from the accountant’s truth and toward the ecstatic truth. We are, then, back in the company of Charles McGrath’s “higher truthfulness” by means of fiction. Still, Herzog is perhaps most famous for an act of literalism in the midst of a fiction film: where most fiction filmmakers would resort to models or special effects to depict a ship



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being pulled over a mountain deep in the Amazon, Herzog undertook—in Fitzcarraldo (1982)—to pull an actual ship over an actual mountain; thus, the crux of this fictitious narrative lay in the faithful cinematic capture of an empirical event; here truth, by way of documentary filming, aids the operatic fantasia of Fitzcarraldo’s dream. The fact that Herzog does not seem to get in trouble for his pursuit of ecstatic truth in his documentaries, however, may be a function of his reputation, or his kind of fame, than the nature of his filmic deceptions. The comparison of Affleck with Herzog summons us to an apparent difference between the effects their hoaxes engender. If Dengler agrees to alter or embellish his story for Herzog (or even from his own desire), what are we to say? But if Affleck or Phoenix—both of them actors whose work as pretenders is well established—say emphatically “this is true,” “this is really happening,” (or, as Affleck said, do not deny it is untrue), we may lean closer to see what is true, what is happening, and to explore why. Why we care may be more a comment on us than them, another permutation of an evolving and expanding fan culture obsessed with the cult of (the) celebrity.11 Yet, if we are credulous, it may be for good reason. There is much precedent for documentary films, despite their inventions, to have real effects. Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Amy Berg’s Delivery Us From Evil (2006) helped us see old evidence in a new light, and those documentary revelations had effects beyond our own private contemplation: Morris’ film led to the exoneration of an imprisoned man, while Berg’s film contributed to a man’s imprisonment.12 We are familiar with the genre of “true crime,” yet documentaries that help exonerate—like Morris’ film and Joe Berlinger’s Paradise Lost, also from 1996—suggest an inverted scenario, and perhaps a new subgenre: the “false crime” film. While Morris does not, like Herzog, seem to actively interfere with the truth-content of the material in his films, he does prominently dramatize historical accounts and employ reenactments—techniques that have caused controversy and drawn concern.13 Though Affleck demurs when his film is called a hoax, we have ample reason to treat it as one, and at that, an exemplary one. His experiment in making a film “in a slightly different way”—a phrase stated without euphemism—may have gotten Affleck and Phoenix in trouble. But they have since ably recovered, seemingly escaping the controversy without scar or deficit. We, however, as viewers, as consumers and critics of culture, have not gotten off so easily. I’m Still Here is a hoax that is still being played on us, for its protean nature and provocative methods disturb settled categories of documentary film, and stir us—as Affleck and Phoenix hoped it might—to reflect on our affection for celebrity, and what that adoration does to our capacity to perceive truth and respond to it responsibly.

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REAL ACTING In Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003)—a nearly three-hour long montage of film imagery of Los Angeles, draw principally from major motion pictures featuring the city—the narrator (voiced by Encke King) tells us: “Los Angeles is where the relation between reality and representation gets muddled.”14 While seemingly a straightforward, if vexing, observation, this statement contains a hidden premise, for “Los Angeles” in this context is a metonym for the film industry, or more precisely, the medium of film itself. And so we may expose the masked allusion, and simply say: in film the relationship between reality and representation gets muddled. For his directorial debut, Casey Affleck, and his accomplice and muse, Joaquin Phoenix, seemed motivated to contribute to the muddle, perhaps even to make it more clouded and ineluctably opaque. As the narrator says in Los Angeles Plays Itself, “if we can appreciate documentaries for their dramatic qualities, perhaps we can appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.”15 Once the audience knows I’m Still Here is a put-on—and the film is not documentary in the way we expected, or were encouraged to expect—then it becomes a study in a perpetual doubleness: namely, where we find two registers of representation, and are forced to alternate back and forth between both states or positions. On the one hand, we have been informed (from among other illustrious sources, an interview with David Letterman) that the film was staged—in Letterman’s words, as “a work of art” and “a theatrical ruse.”16 On the other hand, while the film was being made—roughly from August 2008 to June 2009, the public, including a lot of mainstream journalists, did not know it was a ruse; for the movie-going public as well as for all those who were not part of the upper echelons of Hollywood power (the agents, the studio executives, the fellow A-list actors, et al.), what was playing out before Affleck’s camera—and anyone else who pointed their camera toward Joaquin Phoenix—was unfolding in real life, and in real time. For those on the outside, the production of, and later the presentation of the finished film, I’m Still Here was a bona fide documentary. Such doubleness, or dual status (i.e., of fiction and depiction, of narrative drama and unscripted documentary) is present in all films, all the time. In this respect, I’m Still Here is not at all anomalous. The medium of film always encodes its fictions, and fictions always present us with documentary evidence: we see Brad Pitt in every frame of his movies—from Legends of the Fall to The Tree of Life and Troy, from The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford to Moneyball and Inglourious Basterds—but his characters remain squarely within each of these films. Tristan Ludlow is a fiction though all the while Brad Pitt remains Brad Pitt. Hence film’s peculiar gift of documenting physical material in time and space (in this case, an



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actor) and capturing his dramatic performance (namely, an actor playing a character). What is rarer, though, about I’m Still Here is the way in which the conditions for making the film are created in order to suppress one side of this dyad—specifically, to deny the film a status as a record of dramatic performances. When in ignorance of the true status of I’m Still Here, we are prone to regard it as a straightforward documentary (and thus as a sad record of a suffering soul raging against the world); but later, after Affleck and Phoenix confirm that it was a “performance,” the doubleness of fiction film is restored: we see Phoenix playing the character JP.17 CHARACTER, REFERENCE The impression that Joaquin Phoenix gives up his life as a celebrated actor— at that point already twice nominated for Academy Awards (for Gladiator and Walk the Line)—to become JP was cultivated not just by the cinematic grammar of documentary films that Affleck drew up (available light, handheld cameras, long takes, use of materials from broadcast journalism, etc.) but also, of course, the aura of secrecy and mystery surrounding Phoenix’s decline. Throughout production, and even early into the film’s theatrical release, there was—at least in the public—a sense of genuine faith (and often genuine worry, though perhaps, in some cases, disregard and even contempt) for what seemed another falling star. The fatigue shows at various points in the film itself, for example, when we hear a journalist ask “Is this whole thing a hoax? . . . Do we care?”18 When I saw the film during its theatrical run in the Fall of 2010, the matter was not settled, and so, for whatever it is worth, I was positioned—as an outsider—to believe the film was a straightforward, if not straight-laced, documentary. In retrospect, my ignorance proved useful for thinking about the different effects film can have (perhaps especially documentary film) depending on audience knowledge.19 Sure, I, like many others, was made a dupe. But my gullibility—what we normally just call a willing suspension of disbelief (so that we might be entertained)—troubled, or as earlier, “muddled,” my sense of boundaries and traits having to do with the kind of claims documentary film can make, or wants to. One special attribute of the hoax film—as differentiated from other works of fiction and nonfiction—may lie in its capacity to court a different kind of viewing: namely a willing intensification of belief—“This is real! This must be real!”—often followed, in due course, by the shattering of that belief; not insignificantly, such an intensification seems an emotional and perceptual register familiar also to conspiracy theory. Hegel’s remarks on the status of individuality seem a pertinent commentary on this shift from “suspension” to “intensification”: “The absolute reality which it knows itself to be

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[viz., an intrinsically real individuality] is, therefore, as it will become aware, an abstract, universal reality lacking filling and content, merely the empty thought of this category.”20 Thus, as viewers, we move from a willing suspension of disbelief (regarding fiction) to a tacit, and often intensified, belief in the veridical nature of the image (for works of nonfiction). Does this amount to an unconscious (or culturally trained) habit of treating documentary images as trustworthy, or do we also need to apply a certain amount of will to achieve that trust? To the latter point, it can seem that we want to believe the thing presented as true is true, even if, in time, it is announced that we had but seen an “abstract, universal reality lacking filling and content,” an image that proved to be “merely the empty thought of this category.” Therefore, it might be said that with images presented to us as documentary we want to trust them as being authentic; and to achieve this faith, we do not merely suppress skepticism (as with fiction film) but go further to engage or activate a substantive faith. When I’m Still Here is treated as an authentic documentary artifact, we see Joaquin Phoenix become JP—gaining weight, growing dreadlocks, calling prostitutes, using cocaine, alienating famous friends, and embarrassing himself on stage and on national television. But, later, even while the film was in theaters, the jig was up—both Affleck and Phoenix confirmed the stunt—and JP was no more. He became “JP,” a character in a major dramatic feature distributed by Magnolia Pictures and “written and produced by Casey Affleck and Joaquin Phoenix.” There was no danger that Phoenix would become Commodus (son of Marcus Aurelius) or Johnny Cash—and use those identities in everyday life—but he could become, as it were, another version of himself. The possibility of using Phoenix’s person—his persona, his celebrity—was viable, and as Affleck reports, it became part of an attempt “to get real reactions.”21 Or as Phoenix said: “We wanted something that would feel really authentic . . . to make a film in a different way . . . to develop our own system.”22 Both Affleck and Phoenix reference “reality TV”—as well as “gossip journalism”—as sources for their interest in trying something “different.” For one thing, Phoenix reflects on having watched a lot of reality television and how he was “amazed that people believed them, that they called them, like, reality.”23 His amazement, no doubt, derives from the fact that much reality TV is in fact scripted—with story arcs for individual shows as well as for seasons. (The enduring popularity and vitality of professional wrestling is another kindred manifestation of what might be called “scripted reality” programming.24) Phoenix noticed something peculiar about so-called reality TV: “Just use your name and people think that it’s real.”25 If celebrity is, at a very fundamental level, a kind of reputation, then the celebrity’s name is the currency he or she uses to leverage a career, and perhaps also for enduring fame thereafter. When a celebrity’s or public figure’s



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name is tarnished by stunt or scandal, and even crime—from a woman shaving her head to another tearing a photograph of the Pope on live television, from hiring prostitutes and abusing drugs to perjuring oneself in the Oval Office—the mark tends toward permanency, even as the infamy (and not necessarily the stunt or crime) was made principally on one’s name. From one moment to the next, it seems a celebrity may inadvertently shift from famous to infamous. (My ability to call to mind myriad frames of reference—you can fill in your specific cases—attests to the magnetic relationship between stunt or scandal and surnames). When Phoenix reports on “using his name” for the purposes of this film project, he must have been aware of these overt hazards, and willing to invite them. David Letterman asked him: “Were you worried that you might alienate people—that your career might be in jeopardy?” to which Phoenix responded: “I certainly knew there was that risk. I’m not sure I have much of a career . . . now. We knew that and were willing to take that risk.” Letterman: “Was it worth the risk?” Phoenix: “Yeah, 100 percent.”26 While Affleck and Phoenix believed that using Phoenix’s brand name was necessary for the purposes of achieving a link to reality, was it really “100 percent” worth chancing what may become a perpetual stain on one’s reputation—and thus one’s work-life and posterity?—The cause of art for art’s sake? Seeking truth? Unsettling ingrained habits of spectatorship? Perhaps all three. But there are alternatives. Consider the way I’m Still Here can be read as the obverse of Nick Cave’s 20,000 Days on Earth (2014). Where Cave’s film “playfully disguises itself as fiction while more than fulfilling the requirements of a biographical documentary,” the film about Phoenix cuts the other way: it claims itself as fact, and—since it is an act—fulfills none of the requirements of a biographical documentary.27 Once we learn that I’m Still Here is staged and scripted, whatever we thought we learned about Phoenix from watching the film is rescinded. Hence the confusion, criticism, and sometimes outrage registered by critics and audiences, not to mention concern, even from the director’s famous brother, Ben, who thought the film had “real cinematic merit,” and yet was “released into a black hole of enmity.”28 Of his younger brother’s film, Ben Affleck said: “I think the director in him was poorly served by the promoter in him, who stubbornly didn’t want to give in to people who thought this was all fake.” The elder Affleck said of his brother what also could be said of Phoenix, and was insinuated by David Letterman and others: “I thought it was a really smart, creative thing that nobody else had thought of. But he did it at the expense of his acting career.” Ben Affleck, along with longtime friend Matt Damon, “pushed Casey and Phoenix hard to tell the public what was going on with that film.” As Damon put it: The release was too clever by half—you have to tell them [the public] that it’s a joke because they will not forgive you if they’re not in on the joke. If they

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don’t know whether it’s a joke, they will not forgive you, and they will savage your movie. But he’s like, “I’m going to keep saying it’s not a joke, and then I’m going to tell them.” But you don’t get two chances to put a movie out; you get one chance.29

In Cave’s film, in contrast with Affleck’s adoption of a largely handheld documentary aesthetic, 20,000 Days on Earth’s robust and radical stylization through high-resolution film, steadicam, and color—from its very first frames onward—immediately suggests a high-end fiction feature production. If there is auto/biography in the film, it will arrive within this scheme of articulated and knowing artifice. Even so, and from the beginning, Cave seems to be talking about things the audience knows are personal details of his life and perhaps also more broadly historically accurate. The names of girlfriends are genuine, the hometown is his hometown, the archive of photographs and notebooks are not Photoshop creations, and the songs are sung by him, and performed with longtime collaborator, Warren Ellis, and Cave’s band, the Bad Seeds. By pushing the authentically biographical into the realm of fiction—by stylizing content in ways familiar to fiction film, by offering as he says, a “mythologized, edited version” of himself and his history—Cave smartly illustrates the points he makes throughout the film about the nature of creativity, of celebrity, and of constituting the self (both in its public and private aspects).30 By telling and retelling stories, Cave contends, we achieve a construction we think of as our own selves. By contrast, in I’m Still Here, Phoenix is presented unvarnished—without editing, without mythologizing, warts-andall—and we are meant to wonder about his sanity and his safety. Phoenix seems to be crashing his career before our eyes, and perhaps, more direly, rushing to an early grave (like his beloved brother, River, who died, in his arms, of a drug overdose in 1993). Phoenix’s behavior—or breakdown— would then seem to be the living out of a familiar, family pattern. Until, that is, we see him returning to the red carpet, or catching up with David Letterman, or acknowledging his third Oscar nod (one came for The Master, his first feature after I’m Still Here). And the life-at-odds-with-JP’s trajectory continues with The Immigrant (2012), Her (2013, a collaboration with Spike Jonze), another critically acclaimed P. T. Anderson movie, Inherent Vice (2014), and Woody Allen’s Irrational Man (2015), in which he plays a philosophy professor. With this abundant counterfactual evidence before us, JP seems ever-more and increasingly “JP”—just a character, one among many, that Phoenix has played since he was known as “Leaf.”31 Affleck conjectured that when the film is seen in thirty years, it will be appreciated differently because viewers will not be caught up with what really happened to Phoenix.32 Affleck’s prediction will likely be true for I’m Still Here: what remains less likely, however, is that a similar stunt pulled thirty years from now would fail to cause



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alarm. While we know—for certain—that I’m Still Here was a fake, that “JP” was a character, and that Phoenix is alright (and his celebrity is arguably stronger than before), what we are less sure of is the legacy this film creates or contributes to for our thinking about the nature of documentary film. PRESUMPTIVE ASSERTION AND THE FAITH OF/IN FILMED REALITY One of the issues that Noël Carroll’s essay “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion,” makes evident—and also reminds us of— is the way viewers commonly approach a documentary film with a belief that we are, as it were, getting a view of what we see. In short, that in seeing a documentary film we encounter a representation of “presumptive assertion.”33 Even if we admit, full well, that the documentary image is a mediation (e.g., a Bazinian “mummification” of time and space), we take for granted that it shows us something that is in and of this world.34 As Patricia Aufderheide writes in a similar vein: “Audience expectations [of documentary films] are also built on prior experience; viewers expect not to be tricked and lied to. We expect to be told things about the real world, things that are true.”35 When that belief or trust is broken—when the documentary is revealed to be a hoax; when we feel our faith was exploited; when the documentary image is exposed for its postproduction manipulation or alteration, or its context is revealed to be put-upon, an act—a viewer can feel both cheated and confused. As a case study in the nature of trust in the claims of documentary cinema, consider something that is not the case, but, if it were, would shake our sense of a hallmark trait of documentary film reception: suppose Michael Apted— acclaimed director of the Up series, begun in 1964 with Seven Up! and continuing in seven-year intervals to 56 Up (2012), a documentary meant to follow the lives of a small group of Britons as they age—issued a press release in which he stated: I have been inspired by, and a little jealous of, the widespread praise of Richard Linklater’s Boyhood, and since, it seems to me, we’ve been doing the same thing for nearly a half-century, I think it’s time to confess that every minute of the Up series is acted. Like Linklater, we hired these fourteen children in 1964 and, as with Elar Coltrane, made a plan to reconvene for a few weeks of scripted performance every seven years. I had seven years to come up with a screenplay, and then would submit material for the participants to practice ahead of shooting.36

My fake press release, of course, is meant to stir our commitment to a faith in the genuineness of Apted’s remarkable decades-in-the-making cinematic achievement. To be sure, Apted’s work has received pointed criticism from ethnographers, but the queries are addressed to what he shoots, how he edits it together, and the way he narrates the material—not to the work as

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intentionally fabricated, or as a consequence of professional actors presenting prerehearsed material.37 In this alternate universe, where Apted’s Up series is revealed to be a fiction—and we are all faced with a fraud, we may ask for orientation: “What sort of film is this? Is it still a documentary?” The nervous, perhaps even harried and aggrieved, tone of the questions seeking definitional clarity, of course, underscores a profound metaphysical concern with the nature of documentary as such—“If this film is a fraud, then what makes the other films we take to be documentaries truthful, forthright, bona fide?”—and by extension, “Does the hoax film, to some degree, undermine our epistemic assurance in the realm of documentary film depiction altogether?” After watching a (real) hoax documentary, such as I’m Still Here, every line, every cut, every cameo, every bit of added music, every juxtaposition of content that we watch in “more conventional” documentaries (such as the Up series, for example) comes to consciousness as potentially (or actually!) full of fabrication, fiction, and fantasy. In this revelation of I’m Still Here’s true character (as a fake), one shifts out of a will to believe (that it was real); but something similar might begin to happen with (non-hoax) films that assume an “assertive stance” toward the audience and the world.38 We simply stop believing (in) them. While I’m Still Here destroyed its credentials as the sort of documentary film that makes veridical assertions when it confessed its status as a hoax, we must ask if it did not also shake our faith in the “presumptive assertion” of documentary images and films more generally. In the wake of Affleck’s film, has the documentary film suddenly, if surreptitiously, become a suspect category of the movie-going experience? Do the egregious cases of documentary hoaxes, if relatively few, nevertheless, summon us to defend the “legitimate” documentary credentials of all the rest? What would such legitimation entail? How would we go about proving or defending such credentials? Such questions return us to the fundamental criteria for defining what we mean when we say “documentary”—and whether there are, for example, any stable criteria to be found. Though a criteriological crisis is surely a problem— both practically and conceptually—perhaps that very foment might assure a positive legacy for I’m Still Here, namely, that the film has unsettled complacency, especially among a general audience, about a passive reception of material labeled “documentary.” The trauma of Affleck and Phoenix’s stunt, as covered by The New York Times and as played out with David Letterman, suggests that an extracurricular, extra-academic public reckoning with the status of the documentary image was (and still is) in order. In fact, the issues at hand take us back to the very expectations that prompted the use of the term “documentary” in the first place. In “First Principles of Documentary” (1932–34), John Grierson admitted “documentary is



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a clumsy description, but let it stand.”39 For even Grierson, who is said to have coined the term to describe a film—when writing about Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926)—was aware that such a film would necessarily be, in Aufderheide’s paraphrase, an “artistic representation of actuality.”40 Perhaps as cinematic fantasies became more realistic—in the long history of development from George Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) to Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014)—the documentary was treated as a more sober, more restrained, form of depiction, and therein was increasingly assumed to be a closer or nearer reflection of an actual human encounter with the world. (Indeed, in a bit of playful punning upon Phoenix’s apparent descent into drunkenness, we can call to mind Bill Nichols’ description of documentary as participating in “discourses of sobriety.”41) If this distinction between fiction and nonfiction holds, then the advances of film technology and narrative techniques (including CGI, 3D, and VR), may be said to have trained us to see documentary films differently, for example, as even more intensely authentic: to believe, or to assume, they are more straightforward, direct, accurate, truthful, and therefore less manipulative, deceptive, distorted, and artfully conceived. If the history of cinema has inadvertently created this bifurcation of value and meaning, we seem to stand in need of addressing our inherited and ingrained habits of documentary viewership. The way Affleck and Phoenix went about creating their film involved wilfully hiding what Noël Carroll calls “fictive intention”—the authorial claim upon the kind of work he or she has created.42 Philip Roth is a prominent case of a literary author who muddles fictive intention, for example, by naming characters in his novels “Philip Roth.” Similarly, in film, Charlie Kaufman wrote himself into his screenplay—or, rather, wrote a character named “Charlie Kaufman” into the film Adaptation (2002).43 Related translations happen in Ari Folman’s The Congress (2013), where the actress Robin Wright plays an actress named “Robin Wright” who is propositioned (and paid-off) to retire from acting so that her computer-generated avatar (named “Robin Wright”) can become a character. Wright’s actual working life as an actress, and her personal life—from acting in The Princess Bride (1987) to her marriage with Sean Penn—are mentioned or alluded to. There are facts in this film that we share outside of it, and yet we are meant to read the use of such facts as the condition for fiction, in this case, satire (including a generous dose of an actress’ self-satire, and a writer/director’s critique of Hollywood conventions), but not as the basis for practical jokes.44 Yet Carroll is careful to point out that fictive intention is “normative not predictive,” and thus while the author may want us to take up his or her work as fiction, for instance, we may do otherwise: attribute things said by the character “Philip Roth” to the writer Philip Roth. Among other contributing elements, the fact that Affleck and Phoenix used the actor’s real name—and

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then did not resist the public’s (reasonably inferred) identification of an isomorphic relationship between character and actor, the fraud took shape.45 Remember Phoenix: “Just use your name and people think that it’s real.”46 If you have a reality TV show, or perform in professional wrestling, the audience finds dramatic tension in the moments when the line between fact and fiction blurs, or when artifice slips into our (shared) reality.47 Bruce Jenner really did have a car accident; his neighbor died in the crash; whether and how these events become part of the scripted Kardashian teleplay is a separate, secondary matter. Carroll says that “the assertoric intention of the maker of a film of presumptive assertion is a categorical intention”—the latter phrase meaning, “intentions about the category to which the relevant work belongs.”48 Affleck and Phoenix decided to create one kind of film (a fiction feature) but asserted that it was nonfiction; and their assertoric intention about the production of the film (that these things were really happening to Phoenix) was the modus operandi for generating the content of the film itself (what it was aiming to stoke and capture, namely, “real reactions”49). One pauses to wonder what the interest is in creating the conditions for real reactions to fake events; in this case, the creators were aiming to critique certain norms of fascination with reality TV, and yet they seem to get things backward: the Kardashian shows and professional wrestling do not insist on their reality, rather they unfold with reliance upon a script or story arc, with character development part of their mandate, and then let the audience make its own judgments (what may be the very source of the audience’s pleasure). Affleck and Phoenix, contrariwise, stubbornly insist that what might otherwise take on the tone of a mockumentary—a film, in this case, that would scorn Hollywood and our confusions about the real and the fake in Hollywood—is itself, in fact, real. If I’m Still Here were not defined as a mockumentary, it could have been presented as pseudodocumentary—namely, a fake that does not aim for parody or satire so much as to capitalize on the norms, conventions, and viewers expectations of documentary.50 Affleck and Phoenix adopted neither approach: instead their active involvement in the categorical denial of the film’s fakeness upsets or obscures what would have been, in the case of a mockumentary or pseudodocumentary, their “fictive intention” (viz., that the film was, in fact, staged), and their “assertoric intention” (that the film should be treated as a fiction). Carroll’s focus on creator intentionality is crucial for what he calls “indexing” film—in effect, calling it what it is.51 And given our habits of indexing, we have “a generally reliable way of sorting films of presumptive assertion from other types of film.”52 But when a director or actor hides from us, or intentionally deceives us, about the type of film he or she is making, we are caught up not only in a metaphysical puzzle, but also in an epistemological



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one. As Patricia Aufderheide puts it, with her emphases: “Reality is not what is out there but what we know, understand, and share with each other of what is out there.”53 In this sense, the creator’s description of the type of work he or she has created (viz., his or her assertoric intention) will go a long way in giving a viewer credence for attributing characteristics to film content. If the filmmaker says “this really happened,” then a viewer’s empathy or outrage, her admiration or revulsion will be affected accordingly. As Aufderheide continues: “Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication, because of its claims to truth.”54 I’m Still Here troubles our categories of ascription, and sense of genre specificity, because it relies on a documentary’s claims to truth while at the same time knowingly undermining them. As a result, the film couples our anxiety about the proper description of the truthstatus of a documentary image (as it is shown in or through a medium) with our attention to the production of such images (as revealed in documentary methodology), and in our reading of both images and methodology (as evidenced in film theory, history, and criticism). Moreover, I’m Still Here not only consolidates questions about the metaphysical and epistemological status of filmed representations, but by extension or relation also engages ethical conundrums about the contract that seems in place, or implied, between filmmaker and audience: again, “reality,” as Aufderheide sees it, “is not what is out there but what we know, understand, and share with each other of what is out there.”55 According to these criteria for “truthfulness, accuracy, and trustworthiness,” has Affleck borne false witness?56 (I will bracket the issue of Affleck’s moral obligations to his brother-in-law, especially troubling before the hoax was confirmed.) To what extent have Affleck and Phoenix violated what may be described as an implied contract with their audience? Since they are artists, perhaps the audience should be on watch for being caught up in its own righteousness (e.g., about being able to tell the difference between fiction and nonfiction), or for that matter, for being distracted by a lack of humor and perspective. Instead of feeling upbraided and offended by their stunt, we could, alternatively, take it up as a challenge to our inherited notions of what we think documentary film is for, and what we understand to be real within any given film. In this mood, Carroll’s appeal to presumptiveness in the assertions made by artists and the media they create also reflects back on the audience, and the sorts of presumptions it makes. I’m Still Here, in its production methodology, in its final form as a work of art, and in the cultural postscript to its completion (including promotion, distribution, and critical reception) undermines our confidence in, or “generally reliable” way of, presuming what it is we see. Looking back on I’m Still Here, before the hoax was confirmed, remember how (for some of us) we presumed faith in the assertoric nature of the movie (including the use of home movie footage), and then only later realized—after

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the fraud was exposed—that we were duped (and that even some of the home movies were staged!). By contrast, Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell (2012) slowly reveals its true—that is, fabricated—nature by degrees in the narrative of the film, namely, that it is a blend of nonfiction and reenactment, biography and scripted narrative fiction, present-day material and home movie-like footage. Unlike I’m Still Here, Stories We Tell internalizes its debate with the fact/fiction dyad and labors to show us ways of sorting it from within the running time of the movie; by the end of the film, we appear to have been given enough orientation to the different kinds of filmed material that we have a “generally reliable” sense of what did and did not happen: Polley did have a mother who died of cancer, but we did not see her on screen (in the home movies), as we thought we had; the dad’s narration was written by himself, not by Polley; and so on. (Compare both Affleck and Polley’s use of fake home movies with the role authentic home movies play in films such as Capturing the Friedmans [2003], Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son about His Father [2008], and The Wolfpack [2015].57) By the end of Stories We Tell, Polley’s fictive intention about the work is palpable, and we might add, its provocations are safely contained within the film. In the light of this contrast between Affleck and Polley’s films, we may appreciate, perhaps for the first time, that while I’m Still Here is presented as a documentary, its grammar of production—for example, the way it spills off the frame and onto the television gossip show, the late night talk show—is deeply informed by the swirling, churning mélange of reality TV. Where Polley presented reenactments as genuine home movies only to later renege on the truth of their testaments, Affleck and Phoenix called their acts real and held fast to those claims during production, and into the film’s theatrical release, thereby causing a lot of trouble for themselves—and for us—off screen. DOCUMENTARY METHOD AND METHOD ACTING If there are two principal forms of documentary method—observation (and the direct cinema approach) and provocation (with variations from Jean Rouch to Michael Moore)—we may take a closer look at I’m Still Here for its use of a trick to agitate our orientation to both. One cannot say in advance how the spectrum from observation to provocation will play out: every observation is potentially provocative, and every provocation can potentially draw from or become an observation. Yet, there is something about the ontological gimmick at the heart of I’m Still Here that insists we contend with the status of the footage from shot to shot, seemingly in endless negotiation with the footage (Is this really happening to the actor Joaquin Phoenix?), and that therefore demands our confrontation with the film’s status as observation



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(e.g., as made by Casey Affleck and his crew of camera operators) and as provocation (but to what end? to show that stars have meltdowns? that stars self-destruct? that reality is a fiction? that we are harmed for believing fake things to be real facts?) Part of what informs a viewer’s reception of the plausible reality of Joaquin Phoenix’s genuine dissent into the life of JP—but which is never so much as glanced in the entire film—is a backstory including his famous older brother, River. That is, knowing what we know about the world in which River Phoenix died in his brother’s arms at the Viper Room in October 1993, where he was with Johnny Depp, that is, knowing the world we take to be real and full of these kinds of facts, Joaquin’s fall may make more sense. Like a conspiracy theorist drawing from available clues (in the absence of all possible facts), we conjecture about the kind of life Joaquin might have (his struggles, his insecurities, his ambitions, his vanities, his resentments, his losses, etc.) and then create—or better, project—that narrative frame onto what we see on gossip shows that discuss Joaquin’s “retirement.” JP is, then, not an easy mark for Phoenix’s next moment of method acting but a cipher for our sense of who (we think) he is. Adding to the plausibility thesis, the film—as well as the extra-filmic moments of cultural significance, such as Phoenix’s disastrous appearance on David Letterman’s Late Show—embodies the very genuine sense in which Phoenix did undergo this process. He did gain weight. He did grow a beard. He did become estranged from his profession—withdrawn from the limelight, and conspicuously out of work. In this respect, then, I’m Still Here is vérité! The would-be vérité credentials are further intensified by the fact that the director is Joaquin’s brother-in-law; Casey Affleck was, at the time of production, married to Summer Phoenix. Hindsight may tease us for not smelling collusion between the family members, but then what a bad idea it was! “Let’s pretend Joaquin is a drug addict who wants to give up acting at the height of his career to become a rapper . . . and I’ll film the whole thing.” The haunting immediacy and charged realism of Affleck’s film lies precisely in our reversed presumption—namely, that Affleck has an unmatched bond and unparalleled access to the star, and is uniquely privileged to film him (no matter how painful it would be for Affleck to bear witness to this sad turn in his famous brother-in-law, and not less for his sister, the distressed star’s spouse). The only documentation of River’s death is an audio recording of Joaquin’s panicked 911 call. Now that Joaquin seemed in similar desperate straits, it was Affleck’s turn to document what we have come to expect as the costs of fame, the danger of narcotics, and the haunting effects of family demons. We may think how brave Affleck must be to patiently attend to his brother-in-law, putting his own burgeoning career on the A-list on hold; for reference, in the years leading up to I’m Still Here, Affleck starred in

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The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007), Gone Baby Gone (2007), and The Killer Inside Me (2010). Given this shortlist, a viewer might reasonable guess that while Affleck might want to make another critically acclaimed film with his brother, Ben, it is the more proximate and urgent need of his brother-in-law that detains him. Relatedly, and perhaps in line with a narrative generated by an able conspiracy theorist, it seems just as implausible that Joaquin Phoenix—after a tremendous rise to the A-list of Hollywood actors as well as extensive critical acclaim—would choose to undertake a deep method-acting approach to a pseudodocumentary (involving the portrayal of drug abuse, prostitution, and career suicide) with the ambition of offering a critique of celebrity culture and gossip journalism (e.g., as found on TMZ, Entertainment Tonight, and E! News), and the ambiguous status of reality TV throughout its many incarnations. As an idea, as a pitch, for a dramatic role, I’m Still Here seems a terrible idea (and to some, perhaps, an insult to River’s memory)—a confounding, damaging professional decision. For these reasons alone, there seems no justification for a viewer to suspect I’m Still Here is not a genuine portrait of a Hollywood A-lister’s tragic decline. An onlooker to the action might ask: Which is more likely, that Joaquin Phoenix would intentionally ruin his successful acting career for the sake of making a home-movie-style documentary with his brother-in-law, or that Phoenix—for whatever reason (stress, boredom, anxiety, depression, fatigue, etc.)—lost control of himself, took too many drugs, and ended up walking into the deep end of a river? When it was a documentary, Affleck’s film was not didactic (it did not plead “Just say ‘no’ to drugs”), rather it purported to show us Phoenix’s journey— right up to the end and the river (of no return?). Still, lessons could be found, readings could be made—and all of them reinforce a link between the world of I’m Still Here and the world we live in (in our theater seats and when we leave the movie house). In other words, I’m Still Here seemed a part of our cultural thinking about fame, drugs, and creativity; if it was not didactic, it could be taken, without much effort, as a cautionary tale—even a broad allegory of how the famous relate to the non-famous, as in Asif Kapadia’s Amy (2015).58 And then, suddenly, the link between the two worlds was cut. The hoax was publicized—even while the film was in the midst of its theatrical run— and all of that intimacy between the world of I’m Still Here and our own was lost. I’m Still Here was just another movie. The content of the film became a fiction sealed off from the realm in which we experienced meaningful introspection and heart-rending empathy. The Joaquin Phoenix (or “JP”) of I’m Still Here became, once and for all, a character in a film. Meanwhile in Los Angeles, our actor was safe and healthy and beginning a run of work with illustrious directors. In short, his career was not in shambles. All of the urgency the documentary had conveyed to us—about this life-in-peril, presumably Phoenix’s life—had now evaporated. The metaphysical, epistemic,



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and ethical claims made by I’m Still Here were no longer the kind we thought we had-in-hand, no longer carried the kind of referents and reference we thought the film possessed. The film was (somehow) something altogether different from one point in time to another. And yet, I’m Still Here was— frame for frame—the same film across time. So what happened? And what does it mean for our understanding of the documentary image or documentary film that context and authorial intention and audience inclusion are so essential to the meaning of the medium and its varied methods? REAL (UNSTAGED) AND FAKE (STAGED): THE LETTERMAN MIDRASH Even after the film was revealed to be staged—with Affleck doggedly trying to distance his work from being labeled a “hoax”—viewers were turned from the broader question of “Is Phoenix’s demise real or not?” to a more studied relation to the film itself and the question “What in the film is staged and what is unstaged?” This question, in turn, prompts our interest in “who knew what and when did they know it?” In short, who are the insiders and who are the outsiders; who are the accomplices and collaborators and who are the fools? If there are insiders and outsiders in I’m Still Here, it would seem the film contains at least two kinds of representation: (1) if one is an insider, then we are watching a dramatic scene where actors pretend to be in a documentary (much as we would expect in a mockumentary or pseudodocumentary); and (2) if one is an outsider, then we face a documentary scene where an insider encounters and manipulates an unsuspecting outsider (for instance, in the manner of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan [2006]).59 If I’m Still Here contains these two types of scenes, does it then contain two genres of film that are interwoven and intermixed?60 The fact that the audience is not an insider— that it is being lied to by the filmmaker and his star about the status of the filmed images—suggests that the hoax problematizes our ability to define the film. When watching Borat, for example, the viewer is invited in—with Cohen playing the character Borat—to see how people respond to him. In this respect, Borat is part of a hidden-camera subgenre of comedy: fake scenarios, real reactions.61 Affleck takes his desire to see “real reactions” well beyond those unsuspecting outsiders interacting with Phoenix on film by trying to create the same kind of condition in the movie theater, among the audience. David Letterman’s relationship to the film—both inside it and outside it—is instructive for replies to these and related questions, replies that reflect on all of us, especially, on what we expect of film, and what film expects of us. On February 11th, 2009, while I’m Still Here was still in production, Joaquin Phoenix made an appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman.

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He was there ostensibly to promote his new film, his final film, Two Lovers (2008), costarring Gwyneth Paltrow, but he ended up—heavier-than-usual, bearded with matted hair, wearing glasses, chewing gum, distracted (maybe high?)—making an absolute fool of himself. Letterman played along, turning what might have been a repeat of his 1997 interview with Farrah Fawcett, into a comedy gem. He skewered Phoenix, and every punch line was bigger than the last. The audience was game. Paul Schaeffer turned up the heat. And Letterman was unrelenting. “I’m sorry you couldn’t be here tonight,” he noted dryly, fielding uproariously applause from the audience. About half of the nine-minute interview was cut into I’m Still Here, making it a crucial document for studying the relationship between live television interviews (which, we are meant to presume, have some degree of reality to them, if only trusting that Meryl Streep, for example, speaks as Meryl Streep, and not as one of her characters, or as an alter ego) and documentary editing of such source material (which, if using such footage as the basis for a montage would sustain some measure of referential truth: this is Meryl Streep speaking; these are her words and not those of a character, an alter ego, or even a scriptwriter). Phoenix’s (or is it JP’s?) disastrous interview with Letterman, while risking Phoenix’s reputation, was a remarkable means of ratifying Affleck’s experiment in making a film “in a slightly different way.” Though Letterman was unstinting with his barbs, delivered with his characteristic dead-pan followed by wide smile, there was no sense that Phoenix was acting. Rather, as Letterman pounced, Phoenix lay prostrate, increasingly bloodied—and, it turns out, that attack is just what Affleck wanted Letterman to do. To us it seemed Phoenix was the prey, but it was Letterman instead. On September 22nd, 2010, Joaquin Phoenix—trimmer, clean-shaven, short-haired, without glasses or chewing gun, and noticeably intent to connect with Letterman—returned to the Late Show. The elephant in the room, of course, was his last visit, and seeing Phoenix in his new form, Letterman observed of their previous encounter: “It’s like you slipped and hit your head on the tub.” Phoenix laughed in tandem and seemed to take the joke as a compliment, then added how odd—preposterous even—it should seem to the public that a thirty-five-year-old actor would announce his retirement. Letterman aided the observation by hyping the implausibility of the declaration (“nominated for two Academy Awards”), and then reflected broadly: “I was surprised anyone believed it.” Phoenix flatters his host, while, it would seem, insulting the entire audience: “I assumed you would know the difference between a character and a real person.” And then explains his motivations as the character JP visiting Letterman in 2009: “I was looking for a beat down.” Letterman picked up on the implication: “I played right into your hands. You came out looking for a beat down and you got one.” Worried, perhaps, about his own vanity, and laced with a bit of hurt, Letterman channels



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what might be the sentiment of the critics and the general audience: “The movie comes out, and I somehow got the sense I’d been made a fool of.” When Phoenix returned to the show again, on December 8th, 2014, the two men revisited the scene of the crime—or the scene of the confusion. Letterman attempts to describe the first visit (from JP in 2009), as if still needing clarification on what went down. Letterman seems to simultaneously offer a description and to ask a question: “Turns out it was a performance art kind of thing.” Phoenix replies nervously, with a modesty that might erode his and Affleck’s achievement: “I don’t know if it was art. We just thought it was a movie.” But then Phoenix goes further—letting the audience, who itself might remain confused and offended—and lets us catch a glimpse of the behind the scenes: he told his agent, and the agent told the studio executives, “it wasn’t real.” “People in the industry knew. But the public thought it was real.” Was Letterman part of the “industry” that knew it was fake, or was he— with us—part of the public that thought it was real? His sense of having been “made a fool” suggests he was not in on the prank. Looking back to the 2010 visit, Letterman seems to make a point of assuring his viewers that he did not know, that he was not, in effect, colluding (“Did I know?” he asks aloud). The 2010 audience had a chance, then, to reinforce its impression of the 2009 visit—namely, that Letterman was a victim of the prank as much as we were, and he made comedy art out of it. A few days before the 2010 visit—the repair-and-restoration visit, we might call it—Bill Scheft, one of Letterman’s writers, said, “Dave knew about it [in 2009] and Dave loved it because he could play along.”62 Of the apparently disastrous interview, Scheft said affirmatively “It was great television.” Are we prepared to say that Letterman lied, or should we instead say he made a performance of his deceit, created a hoax of his own, like his guest? As we are now beginning to consider whether Letterman lied in the 2010 interview with Phoenix—perhaps protesting his ignorance too much?—we also see why he might have colluded: such trainwreck appearances are entertaining. Isn’t this just what Affleck and Phoenix’s allusion to the pleasures of reality TV was meant to show us? We marvel when the rich and famous unravel before our eyes. Bill Scheft even points out something he wrote during the 2009 interview: “I will take credit for the line, ‘I think I owe Farrah Fawcett an apology.’ That line was mine. I gave that to him during the break.” Scheft did try to expose Phoenix’s gag: “I’ve told people that (everyone was in on the joke), and not only don’t people believe me, they tell me that I’m wrong and that [Phoenix] is a schizophrenic and he needs help and he’s going to end up like his brother [River, who died of a drug overdose in 1993]. I said no. I saw the segment notes. It’s an act. I saw Ben Affleck’s brother taping the whole thing from offstage.”63 In September 2010, Casey Affleck told The New York Times of

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Phoenix’s work in the film: “It’s a terrific performance, it’s the performance of his career.”64 In the light of Scheft’s whistleblowing—made prior to Phoenix’s return to the couch in 2010, and thus prior to the moment Letterman insists he did not know it was an act—we enter another phase of ambiguity, not unlike our relationship to I’m Still Here; namely, that we must go back and rewatch the Phoenix-Letterman interview from 2009 (the JP interview) as a collusion between the two men (as insiders) and the audience at a distance (as outsiders). The JP interview is not the kind of reality TV we thought it was: namely, a real actor falling apart on live television with a host who took up the otherwise awkward occasion to make jokes at the expense of his guest. Instead, the JP interview with Letterman was real reality TV, namely, the participants were all insiders. REALISM AND RECEPTION What viewers who went to the theater to see I’m Still Here could not have known is that Phoenix would go on to star in the critically acclaimed P. T. Anderson film, The Master, Bruno Weiss’ The Immigrant (2013), the widely praised Spike Jonze film, Her, another Anderson film, Inherent Vice, and a Woody Allen film, Irrational Man. Likewise for Affleck, who found his way into prominent roles in Ain’t Them Bodies Saints (2013), Out of the Furnace (2013), and Interstellar (2014), a return to prominence lay in relief. And, in their first creative reengagement since I’m Still Here, with Affleck again serving as director and Phoenix returning to the set as actor, the duo are collaborating on the feature Far Bright Star. (Though, even as Affleck and Phoenix are reuniting, it is reported that Affleck and Phoenix’s sister, Summer, are divorcing.) Watching these post-I’m Still Here films, Phoenix more than confirms the extent to which I’m Still Here was a hoax. He is back in top form, but then, of course, he never wasn’t. Strangely, then, Joaquin’s return (or rather, “return”) to the marquee after I’m Still Here makes his work in that film seem a virtuosic performance. When we took it straight (i.e., as documentary), it was not virtuosic at all—but rather a cringe-inducing nightmare of debauchery, addiction, and tragically lost potential. After the hoax was revealed, however, and after The Master and Her and Inherent Vice, Joaquin’s performance in I’m Still Here seems like some kind of hypertrophic form of method acting. He went, with the aid of his brother-in-law, way too far, but the result just might be, as the director declares, “the performance of his career.” As Noël Carroll suggested, there are often strategies for determining whether or not a film is a documentary, whether it is a work of presumptive



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assertion.65 In most cases, we can do research, and usually even a superficial investigation will confirm the status of the film. In the case of I’m Still Here, we had to wait a while before the film was outed as fiction, and so we had to go beyond the frame in order to recognize its true status. If we take I’m Still Here on its own terms, however—quarantine it from the extra-filmic revelations of staging, set-up, and fabulism—and treat it strictly and sincerely as it presents itself to us, then it remains, or seems capable of remaining, a documentary about the tragic decline and demise of a fine actor. Of course, once we learn of the staging, I’m Still Here seems to change its form—its very metaphysical, epistemic, and ethical nature transforms—right before our eyes (another trick!) as it ceases to be a documentary and becomes, suddenly, a fiction feature! We stand corrected: “It’s not vérité! He’s acting!” We may say “thank goodness,” but before we finish the thought we may also feel angry. The joke was on us. In some respects, too, the joke was on Affleck. What appeared to him as a creative project exploring the relationship between celebrity and reality ended up confounding critics and offending the public. “The worst thing about I’m Still Here,” wrote film critic Dana Stevens in Slate, “is the fact that it exists.” And while significant attention was paid to Phoenix’s actual status—is he or isn’t he?—the real artist in distress was Affleck. In an interview with Kevin Lincoln of The New York Times, he confided that he “wasn’t good” at “that sort of performing-as-yourself aspect” of show business.66 It was Affleck, not Phoenix, about whom we should have worried—for his crisis was genuine. The reception of the film—not just the negativity of the reception but the way critics and the general public spoke about the work—showed that something peculiar was happening with the definitions we give to documentary film, and the expectations we (often implicitly) hold dear about the genre. As Affleck describes the development and motivation of the project: “We had only committed to doing I’m Still Here as if it were real because it was the only way to get a certain verisimilitude in the film—the only way to actually have it appear like a real documentary was to do it realistically. I didn’t want to do it in a campy way.”67 The “campy way,” it seems, is Affleck’s way of alluding to mockumentaries. Camp is very comfortable calling attention to its artifice, and much of the pleasure of mockumentaries is their capacity for satire and selfsatire (which regularly amounts to an exploration of the form’s reflexiveness). But Affleck wanted to create a fake film that appeared “like a real documentary,” and moreover, to have his fictional work, in Herman Melville’s phrase, “received for a verity”—and the only way to do that is to lie.68 As noted earlier, one of the many instructive, even revelatory, results of I’m Still Here—especially in its engagement with the public during production and after its release—is the way it reinforces generic expectations for the documentary image (e.g., as something that we can, in the light of

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Carroll’s diagnosis, presume is making an assertion about the world, our world). If Affleck chose to make that assertion as a form of satire, then the mockumentary would have been his most reliable option, but his pursuit of realism—or the “realistic”—where there was, as it were, nothing real (no JP, no breakdown, no retirement, etc.) meant he had to fake everything and just call it real: in effect, make a documentary film by, scoring Carroll in a new key, asserting it is one. In this respect, Affleck may be in line with Jacques Rancière’s suggestion that “the real must be fictionalized in order to be thought.”69 Affleck intervened to shore up the “presumptive” sides of the film’s assertions. Viewers were (and still are) not used to this approach, and so they became upset. Kevin Lincoln suggested that Affleck’s “miscalculation came in thinking that people wouldn’t believe Phoenix was breaking down, and would accept the project for what it was intended to be: a farce about celebrity.”70 But Affleck wanted people to believe Phoenix was breaking down, remember, “like a real documentary.” And treating the film like a “farce” seems to be something we can discuss only well after it was revealed to be a fraud. AFFLECK AFFECT: CINÉMA VÉRITÉ AND HOAX VÉRITÉ What we seem to like on film is an actor in his fiction. We do not mind Leonardo DiCaprio as Howard Hughes in The Aviator (2004), but we resent Clifford Irving claiming to have written Hughes’ autobiography once we discover the book is a hoax.71 Thus, we love the pretender but we begrudge—and are confused by—the false pretender, the one who claims he is not pretending but is instead being himself, telling truths.72 Hence our trouble—perhaps a blend of irritation and fascination?—with I’m Still Here. By contrast, we may more easily forgive Orson Welles his seventeen minutes of flat-out deceit in F for Fake (1975) since he announces the trick, or transgression, before the film’s end—after having promised (and delivered) an hour of truth. In the light of F for Fake and Stories We Tell—both of them frauds that contain their confessions of deceit—I’m Still Here presents itself as what we might want to term hoax-vérité. In such films, a film presents itself as truth, and never comes clean. By contrast with hoax-vérité, we could look to Ohad Landesman’s description of docufiction, which underscores the creative uses and affects of ambiguity: as he says, docufictions “tap into a viewer’s familiarity with contemporary paradigms of representation, and take advantage of this knowledge to expand and challenge any prescribed and rigid understanding of what constitutes a film as a documentary.”73 Importantly, though, Landesman adds: “[s]uch a viewing mode of instability, an ongoing state of uncertainty about the possibility of placing a film within definitive and familiar categories, is



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not merely the result of a playful hoax, but the function of mixed intentions of the filmmakers that invite contradictory expectations from an audience.”74 My italics are meant to help underscore the way that docufictions might be separable from hoax-vérité, a division that may be especially important on moral grounds, for example, when we ask: by what means, and to what ends, are we being lied to? As a practitioner of hoax-vérité Casey Affleck, then, would share company with Clifford Irving: a false pretender who insists on his truth, a guilty dissimulator who professes his innocence. Welles and Polley do not need to apologize because their lies were in the service of illumination and entertainment; they turned the medium, and the genre of documentary, on itself. But Affleck? Given that Affleck and Phoenix have so quickly and ably returned to the good graces of Hollywood, we can only conjecture that their lack of apology is a function of their film being a work of (performance) art. But as Welles’ film made clear, forgers may not just be financially liable for their deceits, but morally as well. The most conspicuous parallel to Affleck’s experiment is Andy Kaufman’s behavior in the late 1970s and early 1980s, which has been referred to as “performance art” and as a hoax.75 (Although Mark Frechette’s stilted, monosyllabic interview with Dick Cavett about Zabriskie Point [1970], is a kindred disaster to Phoenix’s “performance” on the Late Show, Frechette’s behavior was apparently, genuine—that is, not a performance at all.) Decades before Phoenix imploded on David Letterman’s show, Andy Kaufman was there, bedraggled, defeated, and the object of alarm. As the audience laughed at him, Kaufman said soberly, on the verge of tears “I’m not trying to be funny. This is true.” At the time, Kaufman was a star of the television show Taxi and was a regular on Saturday Night Live, but he began to cultivate a life, in of all places, professional wrestling. Then again, perhaps the performative quality of that domain was a perfect match for Kaufman’s sensibility.76 Still, the alignment with wrestling proved disastrous for his acting career and his reputation in Hollywood. On Late Night, as it was then called, Kaufman wondered aloud: “Maybe I went too far. That’s what most people are telling me.” Kaufman performed his detour into professional wrestling with such commitment, and so convincingly that, for many onlookers, there was genuine slippage from acting to actual behavior. Kaufman may have seen that shift as a confirmation of his success. And the confusion about where Kaufman-as-actor and Kaufman-as-person begin and end, did not cease even with his untimely death at age thirty-four in 1984. Many believe that Kaufman staged his death as a hoax and will emerge, alive and well, at some point in the future. Kaufman’s vérité partook of the televised weekend wrestling smackdown, but he was working in the audiovisual idiom familiar to the form; the medium

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was crucial to his message. Before Affleck revealed his hoax, I’m Still Here seemed to embody the conceits and techniques of traditional cinéma vérité: handheld camera work; no voice-over narration; sprawling long takes; use of natural light, etc. As such, the film gathered credibility as a documentary merely from its technical attributes, indeed, as noted, some of those attributes would also be familiar to the vernacular form we call the home movie. Needless to say, we seemed to be watching a documentary in a formal sense, and the people in the film were behaving as if they were in a documentary. No one appeared to give the lie. Films by Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg, and others in the Dogma 95 movement took it as a point of honor—and truth—to inject cinéma vérité elements into their craft of feature fiction filming. A manifesto to that effect appeared as the “Vow of Chastity.” Trier, et al., never made a presumption—as Affleck and Phoenix did—that they were making documentaries, nor did they reinforce the presumption, if it was made by viewers and critics. However, their films—among them, Trier’s Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), Melancholia (2011), and Vinterberg’s The Celebration (Festen, 1998), etc.—draw from the stylistic repertoire that gives so-called cinéma vérité films their blush and burnish. As viewers of work by followers of Dogma 95, we know we are not watching a documentary—and yet, something of the emotional exposure, wretched vulnerability, and unplanned revelation that we are used to in documentary film comes through. When we see what appears to be unsimulated sex in The Idiots, we are meant to think that it is at once real and part of the act. When Bess (Emily Watson) dies in Breaking the Waves, it feels like she has died. Before Dogma 95, we could look to the counter-method-acting approach of John Cassavetes, especially Shadows (1959), which is nearly synonymous with a kind of unscripted, unrehearsed improvisational style of filming. Yet, as we have learned, the actors (and many nonprofessional actors) in the film, rehearsed the material extensively, and eventually were given a script. Still, Cassavetes explicitly welcomed improvisation in the actors’ execution of their lines, and so we may appreciate the uniqueness of any given shot for its documentary attributes: it is a “take” that is unique unto itself. An heir to Cassavetes’ experiments with narrative form, Dogma 95’s technological countermanding of tradition, and we should add Eric Rohmer’s attunement to human conversation, is mumblecore. Many of its films are defined by dialogue-driven naturalism, improvisation, minimal (or no) music, on-location shooting, and often, digital capture.77 Though distinguishable, works by Cassavetes and Rohmer, along with Dogma 95 and mumblecore directors, share an implied antagonism to whatever line might be drawn between fiction and nonfiction.



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For another intriguing descendant of Cassavetes, et al.—and the questions their films present to and for epistemologies of documentary cinema—we can look to the emerging body of work by Robert Greene, including Fake It So Real (2011), Actress (2014), and Kate Plays Christine (2016). Greene’s shooting style, mise-en-scène, and editing—not to mention savvy dialogue and prompts for actors—puts pressure on inherited real/fake, documentary/fiction binaries. More specifically, we may note how Greene’s use of dramatic structure (e.g., by way of Douglas Sirk) draws from classical styles of narrative pacing and melodrama and yet, and at the same time, these films evince a palpable expression of methodologies familiar in work of the Maylses brothers, Frederick Wiseman, and Greene’s perhaps most salient forbear, John Cassavetes. In another vein, we find Neill Blomkamp’s artful science fiction film District 9 (2009), where the director introduces a parody of talking-head news and interview-style documentary footage as a way of framing the narrative. The film is told in flashback, using these interviews as prompts to return to the time and space of their reflections. Again, there is no point when we believe we have somehow left the fictional reality of District 9 and are watching (actual) news footage of an (actual) alien landing in Johannesburg, South Africa. And yet, there it is—the stylistic device works very naturally (and increasingly so, to a point where it becomes almost imperceptible as fabrication) thereby creating a feeling of directness with the action and events as they unfold in parallel to the narration of the experts and interviewees. Indeed, the filmmaker who first coined the term cinéma vérité, Jean Rouch, along with other filmmakers, later shifted to the phrase “direct cinema.”78 There is doubtless a felt connection between immediacy and truth, and such terminological tussling reflects it. Meanwhile, welcoming a bit of distance, Christopher Guest’s celebrated mockumentaries (This is Spinal Tap [1984] and Waiting for Guffman [1996], among other works) cleverly allow viewers to recognize conventions of documentary cinema—and then to enjoy parodying them. Viewers are in on the joke the whole time, and the more we know about documentary film—and the subject Guest has chosen (rock bands, dog shows, folk music)—the more we can delight in the playful skewering. Guest’s mockumentaries, made in the company of his talented repertoire of improvisational actors, often reveal an implicit compassion for their subjects even as they are lampooned. Earnestness, in Guest’s hands, is ripe for ridicule along with a whisper of admiration. While Guest’s films are hard to miss as mockumentary, Chris Smith’s American Movie (1999) is less forthcoming, and can leave viewers wondering what category best matches its characteristics. The pathos and plot arc of Smith’s film are so effectively articulated that it is hard to believe that events have not be orchestrated for dramatic purposes.

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With veterans of Saturday Night Live and Portlandia starring, Lorne Michaels has produced the series Documentary Now! (2015)—even the title calling to mind Santiago Alvarez’s Now! (1965). Hosted by Helen Mirren (the real Mirren, not an actress playing her), the illustrious series is said to be celebrating “fifty years of excellence and integrity in documentary films.” The first season highlights parodies of Grey Gardens (with Sandy Passage), Nanook of the North (with Kunuk Uncovered and Kunuk the Hunter), Vice News (with Dronez: The Hunt for El Chingon), and The Thin Blue Line (with The Eye Doesn’t Lie), among other films and documentary film practices. The origins of Documentary Now! emerged out of a SNL parody-of-a-parody—satirizing Guest’s This is Spinal Tap with Ian Rubbish and the Bizzaros: History of Punk; a candidate for the sub-sub-genre meta-mockumentary. Still, where Guest’s films take on a parody of a subject matter and its characters (dog shows, etc.), Documentary Now! doubles as a satirical commentary on specific documentary films and—perhaps even more enjoyably and insightfully— documentary film methodologies and, we must admit, pretensions. In Kunuk Uncovered (1985), the cinematographer looks back on the film shoot in 1922 and says: “I could tell: [the director] had a vision. He would use words like ‘realism’ and ‘truth’ and at that time those words meant a great deal to me.” At the other end of the spectrum from Christopher Guest- and SNL-style parody is Man Bites Dog (C’est arrive pres de chez vous/It Happened in Your Neighborhood, 1992), created by Rémy Belvaux, André Bonzel, and Benoît Poelvoorde, in which a documentary film crew follows a serial killer while he commits savage exploits on innocent people.79 While first observing the killer, Ben, as he narrates at length about his “craft,” the documentary film crew eventually begins to assist him—holding people down, participating in violent acts—and, by the end of the film, is executed individually by an anonymous, off-camera shooter. The camera still rolling, it falls to the ground where it captures the death of the last crew member. Man Bites Dog can be read as an allegory of many things: a filmmaker’s desire to document getting in the way of his ethical obligations—Craig Hight says the film “endures as a devastating critique of the ethics of documentary filmmaking”80; a social willingness—or desire—to revel in what appear to be true images of violence and death; and, most pertinently, the unsettling ways in which documentarystyle (in this case, again, a robust vérité aesthetic) is associated with truth. And yet, gratefully, mercifully, Man Bites Dog is not a record of real events. Much can be said about Woody Allen’s contribution to the mockumentary genre. Beginning with Take the Money and Run (1969), Robert Sickels claims that Allen “established himself as not only the most prolific mockumentarian but the most diverse as well.”81 Zelig (1983), for example, is a feature-length film that uses historical film footage as the material basis for fictional interventions by the character, Zelig, played by Allen—as David Denby glossed



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the film’s subject: “a documentary of a man who never was”82; a similar stylistic trick is perhaps more famously employed in Robert Zemeckis’ Forrest Gump (1994), in which a montage of archival footage and photographs is interrupted by the presence of the film’s eponymous character. While Allen’s main contributions are to what Sickels calls “anecdotal reenactment mockumentaries” (such as Sweet and Lowdown [1999]), Zelig is part of another sub-variant, the “archival mockumentary.”83 So what is Affleck doing? And how does it affect our understanding of his film, and the relationship between nonfiction and fiction? Affleck draws from the toolbox of cinéma vérité (like the founders and acolytes of Dogma 95, and as with mumblecore directors), but he never lets on that his is (entirely) a fiction film. Instead, Affleck features archival footage (such as selections from The Late Show with David Letterman), and then uses this material as validation for the “reality” of the (apparently) new footage—that is, not as a chance to contrast his film with documentary but to reinforce the authenticity of the proceedings on and off camera. This is why Letterman’s “beat down” was so crucial to conjuring or confirming the reality of the rest of the film. Moreover, Affleck never suggests that his film is in any way a parody or send-up, even when depicting Phoenix’s improbable retirement and painfully sought ambitions to inaugurate a hip-hop career (a memorably awkward meeting with Sean Combs/P. Diddy, in which Phoenix hopes to get advice on his rap demo tape, is among such indelible scenes). Affleck, therefore, tried to create something like an alternate reality for his documentary film—a space in which he could generate realistic reactions to false pretenses. There are reasons, we might note, why the word “hoax” is often preceded by the word “elaborate,” for Affleck had to build a “real” world within the real world in order to make the film. Now, years later, we know that the “real” world—the alternate reality in which Phoenix retires, etc.—no longer exists. Somehow the familiar phrase “alternate reality” seems both appropriate and helpful in this case, for it appears Affleck created a reality within reality, and only much later, after final cut, found himself in a position to defeat that reality—what I am calling a “reality rescinded.” But what does Affleck’s creative act—his art, his stunt, Phoenix’s “performance”—do to the reality that remains in I’m Still Here, or in its relation to the real world (of Hollywood, of celebrity, of reality TV, of mass culture)? If we live in the reality that knows Joaquin Phoenix as a thrice Oscar-nominated actor and not as a dissolute, hirsute ex-actor/rap-upstart, are we said to live in two worlds and not one? Was Phoenix’s story true from October 2008—when he announced his retirement—until September 2010 when the film was outed? Or was it always untrue? Or was it untrue only after Affleck’s admission? That we can generate these questions about the film—as a text and a context—suggests the heuristic value of I’m Still Here.

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METAFICTION AND METAPHYSICS Before I’m Still Here was revealed to be a hoax, it was not a didactic documentary—it did not aim to teach us, nor was it an admonition. Yet, after it was avowed to be a hoax, the film becomes strangely effective as a device for discussing the metaphysics, epistemology, and morals of documentary film (as art and as artifact). That is, at precisely the moment that I’m Still Here ceased to be the thing its directors claimed for it—a documentary (in the straight or conventional sense)—it became a clinic on our conceptual habits, inherited notions, and ossified expectations of what a documentary film is or can be. It is a strange and salient moment when the film transmogrifies before one’s eyes—becoming something other than it was. But what effectuates this change? A shift in epistemic relation? A change in belief, even faith in the presented documentary image? We are back to Carroll’s notion of “presumption assertion,” since I’m Still Here found us presuming—believing in—its assertions, only to interrupt our commitment to the veracity of its images; so after vociferously defending the film’s credibility, the creators of the film effectively disallowed its assertions. Though we may feel duped—fools of faith in documentary film—we may also feel relieved that it is only our pride that was injured and not Phoenix. He and Affleck played a joke on us, but at least, we might think, Phoenix is not a drug addict. At least he will stop trying to rap! Maybe he will even make another great movie (and he has). But those are extra-filmic effects—sentimental, selfish, and secondary to the attempt to get clear about what happened to the metaphysical and material status of damn documentary. And so we come to the question of whether I’m Still Here has any worth after the hoax. (Contrast this ending with what some argue is Andy Kaufman’s sustained, hovering hoax that still haunts our judgment of the “reality” of his performances.) Was the purpose of I’m Still Here—even its art—completely tied up with that moment of bursting illusions? If so, then the film’s achievements are more like time-dependent conceptual or performance art: meant to be momentary, ephemeral, and of interest subsequently for its capacity to stimulate thought.84 We do not need to go on seeing the film—as, say a permanent work, such as a painting or a sculpture or an architectural edifice—but can instead just go on thinking about it. Yet, this instance of performance art may be too tied up in its time to be appreciated after the fact; coming to the work late—which is to say now and into the future—may trouble the film’s conceptual conceit: if a viewer did not see the film until after the hoax was revealed, would there ever be a chance to convey the cognitive effect of the transformation from documentary to fiction, from film-of-presumptive-assertion to fabulist stunt? If so, then this essay should have begun with a spoiler alert. From the point when Phoenix announced his retirement (October 2008) to the point when the hoax was confirmed (September 2010), I’m Still Here



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looked and sounded like a conventional documentary, a work that was imbued with (or by) the truthfulness of the assertions it was making. In this period, it would seem to have become a bona fide member of the sub-genre variants that include behind-the-scenes, celebrity exposé, and autobiography—perhaps most in keeping with the tradition of music documentaries that includes Don’t Look Back (1967, D.A. Pennebaker), Sympathy for the Devil (1968, Jean-Luc Godard), and Woodstock (1970, Michael Wadleigh), Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970), and more recently, I am Trying to Break Your Heart (2002, Sam Jones) and It Might Get Loud (2008, Davis Guggenheim). But after the hoax is in hand, I’m Still Here summarily dissolves its candidacy in this tradition. What we have in I’m Still Here, subsequently, is not a music documentary but a conspicuous example of a simulacrum: it is a documentary film made of images without an original referent. We no longer see Joaquin Phoenix-asactor become JP-as-rapper, but instead—and much more conventionally—see Phoenix-as-celebrity (at award shows, on talk shows) and Phoenix-as-JP. I’m Still Here, therefore, documents everything that happened that was not happening. And in this paradox of creation—and likely to Affleck’s delight—the film does not become less real, but more real. I’m Still Here joins the ranks of a different club, one that Jean Baudrillard described as the hyperreal.85 Early in his audio commentary reflections, Affleck points out his interest in “celebrity, myth, gossip journalism,” and references the “snake that eats its own tale.”86 This creature is, of course, the ouroboros that figures so prominently in Charlie Kaufman’s Adaptation—another deep meditation on the fiction/nonfiction divide and the nature of authorship; the film has since become one of our signature explorations of mise-en-abîme (as was Being John Malkovich [1999] before it and Synecdoche, New York [2008] after it).87 Yet it is Affleck’s admiration for Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil (1983), an experimental ethnographic essay-film, that really stands out for our consideration. Affleck says Marker’s film was a “touchstone” for his thinking about method, and that he admired how Marker’s work was a mixture of “realism and metaphorical imagery.”88 In Sans Soleil, Marker blends stock footage, clips from films made by others, and documentary footage he shot mainly in Japan and Guinea-Bissau (with glimpses from Iceland, France, and California); many shots were modified using a Spectron video synthesizer. With no synchronous sound, the film ties all of these disparate visual elements together with an epistolary rumination on memory spoken in voice-over by a woman who claims to have received a letter from a (fictitious) cinematographer named Sandor Krasna (whose name we are invited to believe is a pseudonym for Marker—the true author of the images and the words the narrator reads). It seems especially productive to think of I’m Still Here in relation to Sans Soleil, but not because they share a ranking of esteem: I’m Still Here has been little seen (Phoenix: “Can we talk about it privately?” Letterman: “Sure, we’ll

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go to one of your screenings”89); and given the viewership tracking on YouTube, one might assume that many hundreds of thousands—even millions more—have seen Phoenix’s visits to David Letterman’s show than have seen the film at the center of their conversations. Meanwhile, when three hundred filmmakers and critics were asked to rank the best documentary films of all time, Marker’s Sans Soleil came in third place (behind Shoah [1985, Claude Lanzmann], and Man with a Movie Camera [1929, Dziga Vertov]).90 So, the pairing is not one of shared cultural regard, but, instead, is meant to suggest that they exhibit common methodological as well as metaphysical attributes. One appraiser of Sans Soleil’s achievements said that Marker’s film “gets so far away from Flaherty that it actually laps him: depending on one’s perspective, Sans Soleil is either an homage to the observational ethos of Nanook of the North or an ardent repudiation.”91 Returning to Nanook of the North (1922), in the wake of I’m Still Here, may reveal more similarities than differences, principally, that Flaherty—like Herzog later on—gave shape to scenes instead of merely filming what lay before his lens.92 Moreover, Flaherty—again, like Herzog—presented his work as documentary, not docufiction. With I’m Still Here, Affleck takes his directorial intervention much, much further than Flaherty and Herzog ever have by creating a world to support its “truth”—presumably the same world in which Herzog pulled Phoenix from his wrecked, overturned car that was leaking gas, and told him: “Man, relax.”93 Hence, the meaningful way in which Affleck’s film does not court the surrealism of Luis Buñuel, Dadaists, devotees of Pierre Restany’s Nouveau réalisme, or John Cage and the Fluxus movement, but instead hyperrealism (now more familiar to our thinking about alternate, virtual, immersive, other-worldly realities). Affleck and Phoenix leveraged nothing short of their names, their reputations, and their careers to facilitate the reception of their filmed fictions as true, as referring to and part of a world we all share, with a history of events we recognize as our own—no doubt, in part, from the filmed evidence we have gathered (e.g., celebrity talk shows, news magazines, reality TV, professional wrestling, and the like). Knowing what we know now, I’m Still Here as a film—and, even more prominently, as a piece of conceptual performance art—stands out for its achievement as a simulation of our world, as attempt to create a bona fide alternative or parallel reality in which these things did, in fact, happen. For, in a genuine sense, they did happen. Until they did not. CODA: A LITERARY ANALOGUE TO DOCUFICTION Earlier I mentioned novelists and screenwriters who, in their work, actively engage metafiction and the troubled nature of authorship. These representative



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examples of metafiction may help orient us to the quandaries created, and the clarifications afforded, by I’m Still Here as an instance of docufiction (albeit of the type I am calling hoax vérité). The novelist Philip Roth is now famous among novelists for writing himself into his fiction. But what do we mean by “himself,” since, after all, this is a fictional Philip Roth; and even if the characters may be (as they say in the movies) “based on” his own experiences, we are meant to treat them as characters (not persons). For example, Roth’s trials with prescription medication—halcion—are a structural element in Operation Shylock: A Confession (1993). Roth’s conceit is similar to what we find in work by screenwriter Charlie Kaufman, who named a character “Charlie Kaufman” (played by Nicolas Cage) in Adaptation. The effect in both the literary and the filmic cases is a distancing from the actual author.94 We get used to the reality of the characters known as “Roth” and “Kaufman,” and thereafter cease to seek a connection to the empirical world—to Roth and Kaufman’s present life and their histories, that is, to them as persons off-the-page and off-the-screen. Yet, when approaching Roth’s The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (1988), and discovering that Roth is writing as himself, it is hard to believe that this is, well, Roth. And for Roth, much the same could be said of Chuck Barris and his “unauthorized autobiography”—Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (1982)—a book written about Chuck Barris by Chuck Barris that has us asking after author-as-person and author-as-character: who is who? Roth’s subtitle, “a novelist’s autobiography” may be the clue we need—right there on the cover—that the dissimulation has begun and this is not Roth on Roth, but Roth on “Roth.” We have grown so used to Roth’s literary doppelgängers, the ersatz equivalents, the fabricated features of his eponymous characters, that it is hard to believe—to trust—that in The Facts we are not reading a metafictional autobiography. (The book begins with an epigraph from one of Roth’s books—a quotation from Nathan Zuckerman in The Counterlife [1986]). Admittedly, of course, Roth only began to use his own name in fiction after The Facts appeared—first in Deception (1990), and then as the narrator of Patrimony: A True Story (1991), Operation Shylock, and The Plot Against America (2004). But familiarity with even one of these instances of a fictitious Roth may retrospectively affect one’s reading of the earlier nonfiction work, The Facts. A reader’s skepticism about the proper status of The Facts—are these facts, in fact? Or, in fact, fictions?—can occur avant la lettre. But then, what if The Facts was Roth’s first eponymous fiction? If the doubt did not emerge with its appearance in 1988, perhaps it would afterward—after we find his artfully elegant imposition of “Philip Roth” in subsequent work. Was The Facts what gave him the idea to fictionalize himself, or was The Facts a pre-emptive act of self-fictionalizing—that is, before he had intentionally,

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openly, made fictitious use of his name, his experience, his capacity for subterfuge that agitates and enlightens? The tension in Roth’s case of metafiction—a tension that arises between a reader’s desire or will to believe in what she reads, and the suspicion that the writing is also just another invention—is instructive. And as Roth himself notes at the outset of The Facts—a book purportedly about his own memories, his record of personal events in his own life: “Memories of the past are not memories of facts but memories of your imaginings of the facts.”95 And he continues, as if anticipating our response given our ingrained habits and expectations for the duplicity at work in fiction: “There is something naive about a novelist like myself talking about presenting himself ‘undisguised’ and depicting a ‘life without the fiction.’” So here, Roth gives the lie (or as he says, begs the question) that there is anything such a writer—perhaps any writer—could do but fictionalize. And Roth, it seems reasonably, worries that an attempt at rendering an unvarnished life—instead of one transformed through fiction—will not be good. Are not writers’ lives by necessity uneventful? As Ralph Waldo Emerson replied to Mary Botham Howitt, asking if he would cooperate in having her write his memoir: “I am concerned to say I have no history, no anecdotes, no connexions, no fortunes that would make the smallest figure in a narrative. My course of life has been so routinary, that the keenest eye for point or picture would be at fault before such remediless commonplace.”96 Still, as Roth illustrates in his nonfiction work, one can write artfully—with vigor and insight—about the commonplace. The consideration of Roth’s proposal and his predicament in coming to write an autobiography—or nonfiction generally—is meant to reflect on the conditions that we find ourselves in with Affleck and Phoenix from 2008 to 2010, and to be sure, in thinking back upon this time from our vantage in the future, which is to say, the present. Here we have two talented actors—and a bevy of other renowned actors making cameos—with the power, resources, and wits to make a feature fiction. Yet, by adopting some conventions of documentary filmmaking and methodology, and further, by creating a public space in which to validate the nature of their subject (e.g., and most prominently, the spaced-out visit with David Letterman), Phoenix and Affleck effectively capitalized on audience expectation, audience faith, and audience sympathy. They have made a hyperreal context in which to experience the truth of their film. But where Roth-as-person can conceal himself under the aegis of metafiction (saying something like “It’s not me, it’s just a character named ‘Philip Roth.’”), Affleck and Phoenix used deception to engineer a passable reality (saying something like “It’s not a character, it’s really me.”). Affleck and Phoenix, doubtless, trouble us more because they lied—and were caught in a lie—and so even as we assess our wounded vanity in having fallen



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for the trick, we are left to assess the artistic or aesthetic merit of what appears to be a moral transgression. With I’m Still Here, we are invited—forced rather—to adjudicate a dilemma: do we learn more—or differently—from fact posing as fiction (Roth) or from fiction posing as fact (Affleck)? If the rewards of Affleck and Phoenix’s “performance art” or “conceptual art” oblige us to think anew about how we address the camera (as a means of making autobiographical documents—from home movies to selfies); respond to documentary footage made by others; engage celebrity culture; consume gossip journalism; find interest in reality TV; and in all of the above, lose our bearings with respect to the realism of filmed creations—whether they be glossy dramatic thrillers or gritty nonfiction exposés, then perhaps we are, despite instinct and judgment, compelled to say . . . yes, this lie—this hoax—has created conditions for the possibility of discerning deeper truths about the nature of documentary film. For one thing, we are provoked to admit that documentary film is not what we think it is, and it never was. And though we have been victims of fraud, we have, in the case of I’m Still Here also been funded by its assault. The film itself is not didactic, yet the hoax it represents teaches real lessons. If we are more savvy and less credulous about the categories through which we watch documentary film, this high-stakes, high-profile hoax may have been worth the artists’ effort—and our embarrassment.

NOTES 1. I’m Still Here (dir., Casey Affleck, 2010), 01:10:10. 2. I’m Still Here, opening minutes of director’s audio commentary. 3. I’m Still Here, 01:09:00. For remarks on the legacy of Candid Camera, see “Smile, My Ass,” Radiolab (October 6, 2015), http://www.radiolab.org/story/smilemy-ass. 4. Charles McGrath, “The People You Meet,” The New Yorker (April 27, 2015), 81. 5. Ibid., 80–81. For more on Mitchell and the nature of representation in film and journalism, see, A. O. Scott, “True Story, The Jinx, and Serving Up Truth with the Imagination,” The New York Times (April 22, 2015), nytimes.com. 6. Ibid., 81. 7. Noël Carroll, “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); page references are to the version reprinted in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); Carl Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 17. 8. I’m Still Here, opening minutes of director’s audio commentary.

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9. While We’re Young (dir., Noah Baumbach, 2014), 01:16:00. 10. See David LaRocca, “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). See also, Emily Nussbaum, “What about Bob?” The New Yorker (March 23, 2015), newyorker.com; and Jonathan Miller, “Irresistible TV, but Durst Film Tests Ethics, Too,” The New York Times (March 16, 2015), nytimes.com. See in this volume, Herzog’s “Minnesota Declaration,” 379–80. 11. See Jake Halpern, Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007). 12. See in the Introduction, in this volume, 40–41. 13. See David LaRocca, “Errol Morris: Re-enactment and Reconception,” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent, 3rd edition, ed. John Berra (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016); and Bill Nichols’ chapter in this volume in which he addresses, in reference to Morris’ Standard Operating Procedure (2008), what may be at stake in dramatic recreations of the past in the midst of documentary films, 453–58. 14. Los Angeles Plays Itself (dir., Thom Andersen, 2003), 00:05:12. 15. Los Angeles Plays Itself, 00:03:34. 16. The Late Show with David Letterman (September 22, 2010). 17. I’m Still Here, audio commentary, 01:10:00. The perspectival pivoting here may remind some readers of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of “aspect-seeing,” an association that seems profitable to explore. I address a related case of aspect-seeing in a visual medium—namely, a photograph by Cindy Sherman—in “The False Pretender: Deleuze, Sherman, and the Status of Simulacra,” in The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer 2011). See also Burke Hilsabeck, “Seeing Soldiers, Seeing Persons: Wittgenstein, Film Theory, and Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms,” in The Philosophy of War Films (2014). 18. I’m Still Here, 01:07:00. 19. For documentary “as a mode of reception” see Carl Plantinga, “Documentary,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009), 496–97. 20. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), §397, 237. 21. I’m Still Here, director’s audio commentary, 01:10:00. 22. The Late Show with David Letterman (September 22, 2010). 23. Ibid. 24. For more on the real/fake tension in professional wrestling see “The Montreal Screwjob,” Radiolab (s13: e5), http://www.radiolab.org/story/montreal-screwjob; and I’m From Hollywood (dir., Lynne Margulies and Joe Orr, 1989). 25. The Late Show with David Letterman (September 22, 2010). 26. Ibid. 27. Rob Nelson, “Review: 20,000 Days on Earth,” Variety (January 27, 2014), variety.com. 28. Kevin Lincoln, “Casey Affleck Should Be More Famous,” The New York Times (November 21, 2013), nytimes.com.



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29. Ibid. 30. 20,000 Days on Earth (dir., Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, 2014), 01:12:00. 31. In Parenthood (1989), for example, Joaquin Phoenix is credited as Leaf Phoenix, as he was in his acting work throughout the 1980s. His birth name is Joaquin Rafael Bottom. 32. I’m Still Here, director’s audio commentary, 01:10:00. 33. See Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion.” 34. See the Introduction, in this volume, note 147. 35. Patricia Aufderheide, Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 2–3. 36. Such a hypothetical can be turned the other way, of course, where documentary footage believed to be fiction is revealed to be real; a work presumed to be science fiction might be shown to be observational, perhaps surveillance footage of an actual event, or more terrestrially, a segment of war footage that was claimed to be staged— actors being shot with fake bullets—may be the result, instead, of a cinematographer in the field of battle capturing genuine carnage, real death; see The Philosophy of War Films (2014). Noël Carroll adds another scenario for our consideration: a “film historian who discovers film footage in an archive and wonders what kind of film it is” (“The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 167). A similar phenomenon may greet the channel-surfer who clicks onto a program while remaining unsure what to call it: fiction? nonfiction? mockumentary? pseudodocumentary? hoax? 37. See Mitchell Dunier, “Michael Apted’s Up series: Public Sociology or Folk Psychology Through Film?” Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2009), 341–45, and in the same issue, “Michael Apted Responds,” 359–67. 38. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, 17. 39. John Grierson, “First Principles of Documentary” (1932–34), in Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, ed. Richard M. Barsam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, Revised and Expanded, 1992), 19. 40. Aufderheide, Documentary Film, 3. Grierson parsed documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality.” See Jack C. Ellis, John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 347. See also Brian Winston, Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995). 41. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3–5, 9, 20–21, 29, 35, 50, 73–74, 89, 100, 108, 166, 201, 275, 293. For an analysis of the legacy of “discourses of sobriety,” see Craig Hight, “Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions,” in The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 42. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 159–60. 43. See K. L. Evans, “Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 44. A literary analogue to Folman’s The Congress may be found in Chuck Barris’s Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, where we could say there are facts in this book

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that we share outside of it, and yet we are meant to read the use of such facts as the condition for fiction. For more on the epistemic status of Barris’ literary enterprise and its philosophical significance, see David LaRocca, “Unauthorized Autobiography: Truth and Fact in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (New Brunswick, NJ: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). 45. See Stanley Cavell, “Audience, Actor, Star,” in The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971; enlarged edition, 1979). 46. The Late Show with David Letterman (September 22, 2010). 47. See note 24 above. 48. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 166. 49. I’m Still Here, opening minutes of director’s audio commentary. 50. Whether mockumentaries are defined, or constrained, by their role as parodies and satires is a debated issue. See Craig Hight, “The Mockumentary,” in Contemporary Documentary Film, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (New York: Routledge, 2016), 26. Hight suggests that it may be “useful to consider mockumentary as a discourse.” 51. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 166–67. 52. Ibid., 167; italics in original. 53. Aufderheide, Documentary Film, 5. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 4. 57. See Patricia R. Zimmermann, Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995); Michelle Citron, Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998); James M. Moran, There’s No Place Like Home Video (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002); Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008); and Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web, ed. Laura Rascaroli, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). 58. See note 11. 59. See Leshu Torchin, “Cultural Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Slonioswki (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, expanded edition 2014); and Hannah Pangrcic, “Borat: Controversial Ethics for Make Better the Future of Documentary Filmmaking,” WR: Journal of the CAS Writing Program at Boston University, No. 6 (2013–14). 60. For additional examples when the “fake is interwoven with the real,” see Aufderheide, Documentary Film, 23–24; F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Learner (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); and Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality, ed. Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001).



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61. See note 3 above. 62. “Letterman Knew Joaquin Phoenix was Faking: Writer,” Reuters (September 17, 2010), reuters.com. 63. Ibid. 64. Michael Cieply, “Documentary? Better Call it Performance Art,” The New York Times (September 16, 2010), nytimes.com. 65. Carroll, “The Film of Presumptive Assertion,” 166–67. 66. Kevin Lincoln, “Casey Affleck Should Be More Famous,” The New York Times (November 21, 2013), nytimes.com. 67. Ibid. 68. Herman Melville, Preface to Mardi: A Voyage Thither, January 1849 in Melville: Typee, Omoo, Mardi (New York: The Library of America, 1982), 661. 69. Jacques Rancière, “Is History a Form of Fiction?” in The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and tr. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004), 34. 70. Lincoln, “Casey Affleck Should Be More Famous.” 71. In addition to Clifford Irving’s book, The Hoax (1981), see Lasse Hallström’s The Hoax (2006), based on Irving’s first-person account of the fake Hughes autobiography. 72. See LaRocca, “The False Pretender,” and note 17 above. 73. Ohad Landesman, “Lying to be Real: The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Docufictions,” in Contemporary Documentary, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (London: Routledge, 2016), 9. 74. Ibid.; italics added. 75. See I’m From Hollywood (dir., Lynne Margulies and Joe Orr, 1989). See also, Jim Windolf, “Andy Kaufman, Joaquin Phoenix, and the two Lettermans,” Vanity Fair (February 13, 2009), vanityfair.com. 76. See note 24 above. 77. See Sophia Nguyen, “Mumblecore’s Maestro,” Harvard Magazine (September–October, 2015), 40–45. 78. Aufderheide, Documentary Film, 52. 79. Jane Roscoe, “Man Bites Dog: Deconstructing the Documentary Look,” in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006), 205–15. 80. Hight, “Beyond Sobriety,” 203. 81. Robert Sickels, “‘It Ain’t the Movies! It’s Real Life!’ Cinematic Alchemy in Woody Allen’s ‘Woody Allen’ D(M)oc(k)umentary Oeuvre,” Docufictions, 181. 82. David Denby, “The Past Revisited,” New York (July 18, 1983), nymag.com. 83. Sickels, “‘It Ain’t the Movies! It’s Real Life!’,” 183. 84. See Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology, ed. Alexander Alberro and Blake Stimson (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). 85. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994). See also, David LaRocca, “The False Pretender”; “Affect without Illusion: The Films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. after Ed Wood,” in The Philosophy of Tim Burton, ed. Jennifer L. McMahon (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014); and “Equivalent Simulation: An Interview

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with John Opera,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 6 (2015). 86. I’m Still Here, opening minutes of director’s audio commentary. 87. See The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, 284, 289. 88. I’m Still Here, opening minutes of director’s audio commentary. 89. The Late Show with David Letterman (September 22, 2010). 90. “Silent Film Tops Documentary Poll” (August 1, 2014), bbc.com. See also, “Critics’ 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time,” Nick James, et al., (March 11, 2015), bfi.org.uk. 91. Adam Nayman, Sans Soleil, “Critics’ 50 Greatest Documentaries of All Time,” Nick James, et al. (March 11, 2015), bfi.org.uk. 92. See Patricia R. Zimmermann and Sean Zimmermann Auyash, Nanook of the North, Library of Congress, National Film Preservation Board, www.loc.gov/ programs/national-film-preservation-board/film-registry/. 93. See the short animated film When Herzog Rescued Phoenix, https://youtu.be/ nDcnLfLaFiY, 94. See Evans, “Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter.” 95. Philip Roth, The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998), 8. 96. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters, Vol. III, ed., Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 417–18.

Acknowledgments

I take it as a testament to the contributors’ generosity that they have entrusted me with the care of their remarkable interventions into the now century-old debate addressing the meaning, vitality, and persistent intrigue of documentary film. To each and every contributor, I offer my sincerest thanks; it has been a tremendous honor and immensely rewarding to have this occasion to work with you. At Lexington Books of Rowman & Littlefield, I have the pleasure of thanking my editor Jana Hodges-Kluck, who—from proposal to proof to book-inhand—has been a steady guide and a thoughtful collaborator. Her editorial assistants—Natalie Mandziuk, Kari Waters, and Rachel Weydert—provided exceptional logistical orientation. And to series editor, Mark T. Conard, I remain enormously grateful for his continued support of my efforts in his series and in other ventures; our conversations over the years have been a touchstone for thinking through the relationship between philosophy and film. I wish to thank the many rights holders who made their work, or the work of their authors, available for this collection. For special mention, allow me to single out Donna Anstey (Yale University Press), Anders Kjærhauge (Zentropa), John Libbey (John Libbey Publishing), Greta Lindquist (University of California Press), Mike Pepin (American Film Institute), Lucki Stipetic (Werner Herzog Film GmbH), and Stephanie Volmer (Raritan), without whose cooperation this volume would have been regrettably impoverished. Conversations with colleagues at Cornell University, Ithaca College, and the College at Cortland have proved indispensable for informing the shape and content of the volume. I wish to specify those, among many others, including so many students, whose thoughtful input—on the issues most essentials to this collection—I cherish. 577

578 Acknowledgments

During my term as Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, Roger Stephen Gilbert has been a steadfast supporter, as has, more recently, Andrew Galloway. Victoria Leccese Brevetti provided essential coordination for my time in the department. Conversations with Kevin Attell, Tarleton Gillespie, Neil Hertz, Lindsay Lavine, Karen Levy, Jamie Lloyd, Mark Morris, Masha Raskolnikov, J. P. Sniadecki, and Aoise Stratford have been a highlight, mixing productive discussion with warm collegiality; and at the Society for the Humanities, Timothy Murray, for the same. Discussions with participants at the School of Criticism and Theory in recent years have stirred me to think and rethink the nature and scope of this volume, with special thanks to Branka Arsić, Simon Critchley, W. J. T. Mitchell, Hent de Vries, and David Wills. I am pleased to acknowledge the fiscal support of the Cornell Council for the Arts (CCA), who awarded a competitive grant to me and Mark Morris for mounting an exhibit and installation entitled “Homo Ludens: The Architecture of Play.” Library staff at Olin, Uris, Fine Arts, and other Cornell libraries have been especially helpful in enabling my research. While serving as Lecturer in the Department of Media Arts, Sciences, and Studies at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College, teaching in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts, I have had the pleasure of engaging with Virginia Mansfield-Richardson, Ben Rifkin, Bryan Roberts, Jill Loop, Elizabeth Nonas, and Steven Skopik. Teaching at Park, especially in the enduring and iconic team-taught “Film Aesthetics and Analysis,” has been especially gratifying and enlightening; for good reason, my experience was enriched by Patricia R. Zimmermann, Matthew Holtmeier, Chelsea Wessels, and Jane Glaubman. Co-teaching “Fiction Film Theory” with Andrew Utterson proved, for me, to be a seamless and delightful symbiosis, and for Utterson’s artful articulation of ideas, the course—despite being about fiction film—was especially fecund for thinking about nonfiction film. For liaising, and making everything run smoothly, Barbara Terrell was indispensable. At Ithaca College, beyond the Park School, I have had the luck of getting to know Michael Richardson, Interim Dean of the School of Humanities and Sciences. I benefitted from many conversations with Tayna Saunders. And I have felt welcomed, time again, by Wade Pickren and Judith Ross-Bernstein at the Center for Faculty Excellence; their collegiality, along with their skill for facilitating meaningful conversations about pedagogy and the contours of undergraduate education, remains a conspicuous sign of the college’s commitment to fostering a community of inquirers. During my time as Lecturer, and then as Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland, Andrew Fitz-Gibbon, Chair, has provided a most agreeable climate for discerning conversation. His standard is matched by Robert Earle, Nikolay Karkov, Mechthild Nagel, Elizabeth Purcell, and L. Sebastian Purcell, who together amplify the department as a collective dedicated to

Acknowledgments

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genuine philosophical investigations. Joanna Tobias has from first to last shown herself to be an admirable blend of cheerful and competent. Beyond the department, but still in Old Main, I have been enlivened by conversations with Mary Schlarb, Director of International Programs. This volume is the sixth I have written or edited as a Writer-in-Residence in the Frederick Lewis Allen Room at the New York Public Library. An appointment to the Maurice Wertheim Study also proved fruitful. Though he retired during the completion of this volume, I will not hesitate to acknowledge how Jay Barksdale thoughtfully presided over the room, and made certain the conditions were ideal for research. More recently, his heirs, Carolyn Broomhead and Melanie Locay have ably taken up stewardship. Participation in the Manhattan Research Libraries Initiative permitted access to the resources of the Butler Library at Columbia University and the Bobst Library at New York University. Research on this volume was immeasurably enriched by indelible and invigorating engagements with professional documentary filmmakers. Participation in Werner Herzog’s Rogue Film School comes most readily to mind, especially in terms of working out the sometimes tense relationship between theory and practice, not to mention fiction and fact. On the way to RFS, though, there were pivotal encounters with Catherine DeSantis, Maureen Gosling, and Michael Wadleigh, along with the fortunate coincidence of living next door to Errol Morris’ studio, editing with Tom Christopher at Saul Zaentz’s Fantasy Studios, and working relationships with Robert Elfstrom, William Jersey, and J. Mitchell Johnson that have invigorated my sense of the possibilities—and actualities—of documentary filmmaking. I am grateful to Joshua Oppenheimer for orienting remarks on his films, and early access to the “uncut”—original, unabridged—version of The Act of Killing. And I gleaned much from a brief but intense screening session and workshop with Abbas Kiarostami. Conversations with Paul Cronin, during the gestation of this book and the last one, The Philosophy of War Films, have pushed me to think harder and more clearly about the stakes of theorizing documentary film. His willingness to generously share his rich and expansive experience in the making, teaching, and scholarly pursuit of documentary cinema is ever complemented by the benefits of his quick wit and understated brilliance. My tenure as Fellow at the Moving Picture Institute of New York has not only provided the support necessary to create a documentary of my own devising (Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes), it has also, connected me to a network of active documentarists, who are at once clever and committed to one another. I have Rob Pfaltzgraff, Erin O’Connor, and Maurice Black to thank for gathering and liaising this community. Memorable conversations with Francisco Bello, Michael Galinsky, Suki Hawley, Toby Fell-Holden, Rob Montz, and Cyrus Saidi abide. Participating in an MPI Screenwriting Workshop, during the summer of 2014, provided a special

580 Acknowledgments

occasion to discuss with other practicing filmmakers the meaning and relevance of screenwriting for the production of documentaries. Working with Tom Small and Angela Small of Joule Q, James Fitzgerald, Jr. of ColdWater Media, and, most recently, Rita Mullaney has given me a chance to translate theory and thinking into the art and practice of making documentary films. I am grateful for their creativity and their generosity. Conversations about documentary film as production, as a mode of advocacy, and as an art form took a leap in the company of Bernadette Wegenstein, Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies at The Johns Hopkins University, especially when she invited me to participate in an event addressing the films of Robert Greenwald in the spring of 2014. I remain grateful for her intellectual hospitality as well as that of William Egginton, Vice Dean for Graduate Education. I wish to thank Marcia Ely and Katelyn Williams for an invitation to help curate and moderate a film series at the Brooklyn Historical Society in the summer of 2015. With the contributions of Ed Walsh and Phoebe Gavin, the serial event proved illuminating, especially as we made the contested attributes of feature fictions and documentary films a prominent part of the discussions. The Signet Society of Harvard College has provided, and continues to offer, a perennial venue for the sharing and testing of current projects in a climate of charged, shimmering intelligence. Members and associates, all beholden to Mark Hruby, as am I, gather to consider the shared endeavor underwritten by the credo mousiken poiei kai ergazou. During the production of this volume, I benefitted from the input of a range of film scholars, filmmakers, anonymous readers for the press, and other academics and practitioners. Whether in terms of critical commentary on drafts, liaising, or other forms of useful and thoughtful collegiality, I am sincerely grateful to Natalia Almada, Rick Altman, Ariella Azoulay, Dudley Andrew, Mieke Bal, Shai Biderman, Brett Bossard, Giuliana Bruno, Noël Carroll, Stanley Cavell, Tom Conley, Timothy Corrigan, Richard Deming, Cynthia Freeland, Michael Fried, Robert Greenwald, Vincent Grenier, Tom Gunning, Werner Herzog, Maria Kristensen, Scott MacDonald, Charles Musser, Bill Nichols, Constance Penley, V. F. Perkins, Peggy Phelan, Robert Pippin, Carl Plantinga, Murray Pomerance, Eric Rentschler, Lawrence Rhu, D. N. Rodowick, William Rothman, Jeffrey Ruoff, Jason Sperb, Vivian Sobchack, Garrett Stewart, Katherine Thomson-Jones, George Toles, Hent de Vries, Charles Warren, Thomas Wartenberg, Guy Westwell, Linda Williams, George M. Wilson, and Patricia R. Zimmermann. I wish to thank those with whom I have shared meaningful reflections, and who have lent their generous support, during the composition of this book: Diana Allan, Roberto Berardi, Jason and Catherine Blumenkamp,

Acknowledgments

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Curtis Brown, Rebecca Brown, Samuel A. Chambers, Ben Cosgrove, Brunello Cucinelli, Jigme and Haven S. R. Daniels, William and Kate Day, Douglas Drake, Lisa Ellin, Nayia Frangouli, Jill Freedman, Tarleton and Jenna Lahmann Gillespie, Adelaide Gomer, Julian Hibbard, Haym Hirsh, Kathy Lacson, Giorgiana Magnolfi, Victoria Malkin, Conor McCourt, David Mikics, Haaris Naqvi, John Opera, Sandra de Ovando, Joni Papp, Mario von der Ruhr, Peter Schwartz, Elvina Scott, Geoff and Kelly Stern, Kristen Steslow, Craig Street, Alessandro Subrizi, Elizabeth Sussman, Jennifer Tennant, Francesco Tomassini, Lupe Tomic, Andrew and Sarah Walston, and Mark and Alicia Wittink. My love to Ruby and Star—whose lives I feel very grateful to document, and whose wonder about those representations is, for me, a perpetual thrill. And, finally, as a measure of her priority to me, I heartily acknowledge Dr. K. L. E. LaRocca, the most stimulating intellectual interlocutor I have known—an ardent and abiding accomplice, who gives form and meaning to daily life, and whose visionary capacities propel me forward, beyond it. I am indebted to her, on this occasion, for reflections on philosophical realism, and how it relates to cinema, and in particular, documentary film. Ti amo.

Selected Bibliography

Adams, Ansel. Ansel Adams: An Autobiography with Mary Street Alinder (Boston: Little Brown, 1985). Aitken, Ian. “The British Documentary Film Movement,” in The British Cinema Book, 3rd edition, ed. Robert Murphy (London: BFI, 2009). ———. “Realism, Philosophy, and the Documentary Film,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). Alaimo, Stacy and Susan Hekman, ed. Material Feminisms (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007). Alberro, Alexander and Blake Stimson, ed. Conceptual Art: A Critical Anthology (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Allan, Diana. “From Archive to Art Film: A Palestinian Aesthetics of Memory Reviewed,” Cairo Papers in Social Science, Vol. 31, No. 3/4 (2012). Alphen, Ernst van. “Affective Operations in Art and Literature,” RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 53/54 (Spring/Autumn 2008). ———. “Second-Generation Testimony, Transmission of Trauma, and Postmemory,” Poetics Today, Vol. 27, No. 2 (2006). Altman, Rick. “From Lecturer’s Prop to Industrial Prop: The Early History of Travel Films,” in Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). ———. Film/Genre (London: British Film Institute, 1999). ———, ed. Sound Theory/Sound Practice (New York: Routledge, 1992). Ames, Eric. Ferocious Reality. Documentary According to Werner Herzog (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2012). Andrew, Dudley. What Cinema Is! (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010). Andrews, Malcolm. Landscape and Western Art (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). Antonio, Emile De. Painters Painting: A Candid History of The Modern Art Scene, 1940–1970 (New York: Abbeville Press, 1984).

583

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Selected Bibliography

Ariès, Philippe. Western Attitudes toward Death: From the Middle Ages to the Present, tr. Patricia M. Ranum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1974). Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics, 2nd Edition, ed. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1999). Armstrong, David Malet. A Materialist Theory of the Mind (London: Routledge, 1968). Arnheim, Rudolf. Parables of Sun Light: Observations on Psychology, the Arts, and the Rest (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). ———. Film as Art (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957). Atkins, Thomas R. Frederick Wiseman (New York: Monarch Press, 1976). Audi, Robert, ed. The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Auerbach, Erich. Dante, Poet of the Secular World, tr. Ralph Manheim, with an Introduction by Michael Dirda (New York: New York Review Books, 2007). ———. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, tr. Willard R. Trask, with an Introduction by Edward Said (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003); first published in German in 1946; English version 1953. Aufderheide, Patricia. Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Austin, J. L. How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962). Aviram, Amittai F. Telling Rhythm: Body and Meaning in Poetry (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). Aydemir, Murat and Alex Rotas, ed. Migratory Settings (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2008). Azoulay, Ariella. From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947–50 (London: Pluto Press, 2011). ———. “Getting Rid of the Distinction between the Aesthetic and the Political,” Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 27, No. 7–8 (2010). ———. The Civil Contract of Photography (New York: Zone Books, 2008). Bal, Mieke. Of What Cannot Speak: Doris Salceo’s Political Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010). ——— and Miguel Á. Hernández Navarro. 2MOVE: Video, Art, Migration (Murcia, Spain: Cendeac, 2008). ———. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002). ———, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer, ed. Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1999). Balázs, Béla. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art, tr. Edith Bone (New York: Dover, 1970). Banfield, Ann. The Phantom Table: Woolf, Fry, Russell and the Epistemology of Modernism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ———. Unspeakable Sentences: Narration and Representation in the Language of Fiction (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982). Barad, Karen. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter,” Signs, Vol. 28, No. 3 (2003).



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Barbash, Ilisa and Lucien Castaing-Taylor. The Cinema of Robert Gardner (New York: Bloomsbury, 2008). Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Barrett, Estelle and Barbara Bolt, ed. Carnal Knowledge: Towards a “New Materialism” Through the Arts (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013). Barsam, Richard M. Nonfiction Film: A Critical History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973, Revised and Expanded, 1992). Barthes, Roland. “The Photographic Message,” in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1985). ———. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981). Bates, Peter. “Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris,” Cineaste, Vol. 17 (1989). Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulation, tr. Sheila Faria Glaser (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1994). Baumgarten, Alexander Gottlieb. Aesthetica, 1750 (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1961). Bazin, André. The Cinema of Cruelty: From Buñuel to Hitchcock (New York: Scaver Books, 1982). ———. French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance, tr. Stanley Hochman (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1981). ———. Orson Welles: A Critical View, tr. Jonathan Rosenbaum (New York: Harper and Row, 1978). ———. Jean Renoir, ed. François Truffaut, tr. W. W. Halsey and William H. Simon (New York: Simon and Shuster, 1973). ———. What Is Cinema? Vols. 1 and 2, tr. Hugh Gray (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967/1971). ———. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer 1960). Beauvoir, Simone de. A Very Easy Death, tr. Patrick O’Brien (New York: Warner, 1973). Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death (New York: Free Press, 1973). Karen Beckman, ed. Animating Film Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). ———. “What Cinema Wasn’t: Animating Film Theory,” in Theory Aside, ed. Jason Potts and Daniel Stout (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). Behlil, Melis. “The Act of Killing: An Interview with Joshua Oppenheimer,” Cineaste, Vol. 38, No. 3 (Summer 2013). Bekoff, Marc. “Who Lives, Who Dies, and Why?” in The Politics of Species, ed. Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Bellows, Andy Masaki and Marina McDougall, with Brigitte Berg. Science Is Fiction: The Films of Jean Painlevé (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000). Benjamin, Walter. “On the Mimetic Faculty” (1933) in Selected Writings, Vol. 2, Part 2, 1931–1934, tr. Rodney Livingstone, ed. Michael W. Jennings, Howard Eiland, and Gary Smith (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999).

586

Selected Bibliography

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Benson, Thomas W. and Carolyn Anderson, ed. Reality Fictions: The Films of Frederick Wiseman (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University, 1989/2002, 2nd edition). Berger, John. About Looking (New York: Pantheon, 1980). Bergstrom, Janet. “Invented Memories,” in Identity and Memory: The Films of Chantal Akerman, ed. Gwendolyn Audrey Foster (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2003). Berlant, Lauren. Intimacy, Special issue, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 24, No. 2 (Winter 2000). Beylie, Claude. Max Ophüls (Paris: Editions Sehgers, 1963). Binkley, Timothy. “Refiguring Culture,” in Future Visions: New Technologies of the Screen, ed. Philip Hayward and Tana Wollen (London: British Film Institute, 1993). Bordwell, David and Kristin Thompson. Film Art, 2nd edition (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986). ———. Narration in the Fiction Film (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1985). Borges, Jorge Luis. Collected Fictions, tr. Andrew Hurley (New York: Viking Penguin, 1998). Bousé, Derek. Wildlife Films (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000). Bozak, Nadia. The Cinematic Footprint: Lights, Camera, Natural Resources (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011). Brand, Peggy Zeglin. “Disinterestedness and Political Art,” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998). Braningan, Edward. Narrative Comprehension and Film (New York: Routledge, 1992). Bronfen, Elisabeth. “War and Its Fictional Recovery On-Screen: Narrative Management of Death in The Big Red One and The Thin Red Line,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Brooks, Peter. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976). Bryant, Levi R. Onto-Cartography: An Ontology of Machines and Media (Speculative Realism) (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014). Burgin, Richard. Conversations with Jorge Luis Borges (New York: Avon, 1968). Butchart, Garnet C. “Camera as Sign: On the Ethics of Unconcealment in Documentary Film and Video,” Social Semiotics, Vol. 23, No. 5 (2012). Cardullo, Bert. André Bazin and Italian Neorealism (New York: Continuum, 2011). Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008). ———. “Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis,” in Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, ed. Noël Carroll and Jinhee Choi (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006); also in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).



Selected Bibliography

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———. “Documentary and the Film of Presumptive Assertion,” in Film and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). ———. “Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism,” in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1996). ———. Theorizing the Moving Image (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). ———. Philosophical Problems of Classical Film Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). ———. “Concerning Uniqueness Claims for Photographic and Cinematic Representation,” Dialectics and Humanism, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1987), 29–43. ———. “From Real to Reel: Entangled in the Nonfiction Film,” Philosophic Exchange, Vol. 14 (1983). ———. “Address to the Heathen,” October, No. 23 (Winter 1982). ———. “Lang, Pabst, and Sound,” Ciné-tracts, Vol. 2, No. 5 (Fall 1978). Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). ———, ed. Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). Casarino, Cesare. “Time Matters: Marx, Negri, Agamben and the Corporeal,” Strategies, Vol. 16, No. 2 (Fall 2003). Casetti, Francesco. Theories of Cinema: 1945–1995 (Austin: The University of Texas Press, 1999). Cavell, Stanley. “The Touch of Words,” in Seeing Wittgenstein Anew, ed. William Day and Victor J. Krebs (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). ———. Cavell on Film, ed. William Rothman (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). ———. Philosophy the Day after Tomorrow (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005). ———. Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge: Harvard, 2004). ———. Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes, ed. David Justin Hodge (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003). ———. Introduction to Making Forest of Bliss: Intention, Circumstance, and Chance in Nonfiction Film: A Conversation Between Robert Gardner and Ákos Östör (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Film Archive, 2001). ———. “Reflections on a Life of Philosophy: Interview with Stanley Cavell,” Harvard Journal of Philosophy, Vol. VII (1999). ———. “Words of Welcome,” in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). ———. A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). ———. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

588

Selected Bibliography

———. In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1988). ———. Themes Out of School: Effects and Causes (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984). ———. Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981). ———. The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981). ———. The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971/1979). Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2007). Cholodenko, Alan. The Illusion of Life II: More Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Publications, 2007). ———. The Illusion of Life I: Essays on Animation (Sydney: Power Institute of Fine Arts, 1993). Cieply, Michael. “Documentary? Better Call it Performance Art,” The New York Times (September 16, 2010). Ciofalo, John J. The Self-Portraits of Francisco Goya (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Citron, Michelle. Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998). Clarke, Desmond. Descartes: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths,” in Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). Coole, Diana and Samantha Frost, ed. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Corner, John. “Cathy Come Home: British Docudrama,” in The Museum of Broadcast Communications (Chicago: Museum of Broadcast Communications, 2009). ——— and Alan Rosenthal, ed. New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, 2nd edition; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 1st edition). ———. The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996). Corrigan, Timothy, Patricia White, and Meta Mazaj, ed. Critical Visions in Film Theory (New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2011). Costa, Beatriz da and Kavita Philip. Tactical Biopolitics, Art, Activism, and Technoscience (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2008). Crane, Tim. “The Nonconceptual Content of Experience,” in The Contents of Experience, ed. Tim Crane (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Cranston, Jodi. The Poetics of Portraiture in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Crary, Alice and Sanford Shieh, ed. Reading Cavell (Routledge: New York, 2006). Crawford, Larry. “Looking, Film, Painting: The Trickster’s In Site/In Sight/Insight/ Incite,” Wide Angle, Vol. 5, No. 3 (1983).



Selected Bibliography

589

Cronin, Paul, ed. Lessons with Kiarostami (New York: Sticking Place Books, 2015). Currie, Gregory. “Desire in Imagination,” in Conceivability and Possibility, ed. Tamar Gendler and John Hawthorne (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). ———. “Response to Jinhee Choi,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 59 (2001). ———. “Preserving the Traces: An Answer to Noël Carroll,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 58 (2000). ———. “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 57, No. 3 (1999). ———. Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Cussins, Adrian. “The Connectionist Construction of Concepts,” in The Philosophy of Artificial Life, ed. Margaret Boden (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990). Cutting, James E., et al. “Quicker, Faster, Darker: Changes in Hollywood Film over 75 Years,” i-Perception, Vol. 2, No. 6 (2011). Danks, Adrian. “Come Towards the Light: The Films of Víctor Erice,” Senses of Cinema (March 2003). Deleuze, Gilles. Rhizome: Introduction (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1976). ———. Cinema II: The Time Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013; first published 1985). ———. Cinema I: The Movement-Image, tr. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986; first published 1983). Demos, T. J. The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). ———. “Moving Images of Globalization,” in Grey Room, Vol. 37 (Fall 2009). Dempsey, David. “The Dying Speak for Themselves on a TV Special,” The New York Times (April 25, 1976). Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority’,” tr. M. Quaintance. Cardozo Law Review, Vol. 11 (1990), 919. Dewey, John. Art as Experience (New York: Penguin Group, Inc., 1934). Díaz-Cuesta, José. “Kenneth Loach’s Riff-Raff, Between the British Documentary Tradition and the Working Class Cinema,” Odisea, Vol. 1 (2001). Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in Cinema: The Articulation of Body and Space,” Yale French Studies, No. 60 (1980). Donadio, Rachel. “The Director’s Director: Chantal Akerman,” The New York Times (March 25, 2016). Dreyfus, Hubert L. “Overcoming the Myth of the Mental: How Philosophers Can Profit from the Phenomenology of Everyday Expertise,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, Vol. 79 (November 2005). Drucker, Johanna. “Entity to Event: From Literal, Mechanistic Materiality to Probabilistic Materiality,” Parallax, Vol. 4, No. 15 (2009). Dunier, Mitchell. “Michael Apted’s Up series: Public Sociology or Folk Psychology Through Film?” Ethnography, Vol. 10, No. 3 (2009). Durrant, Sam and Catherine Lord, ed. Essays in Migratory Aesthetics (Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2007).

590

Selected Bibliography

Eagle, Herbert, ed. Russian Formalist Film Theory (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1981). Eaton, Michael, ed. Anthropology—Reality—Cinema: The Films of Jean Rouch (London: British Film Institute, 1979). Eco, Umberto. A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976). Edwards, Elizabeth, Chris Godsen, and Ruth Philips. Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture (Oxford: Berg, 2006). Egea, Juan F. “Poetry and Film: El Sol Del Membrillo and Los Amantes Del Círculo Polar,” Hispanic Review, Vol. 75, No. 2 (2007). Ellis, Jack C. John Grierson: Life, Contributions, Influence (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000). Eisenstein, Sergei. Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, ed. and tr. Jay Leyda (New York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1949). Elgin, Catherine. “Understanding and the Facts,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 132 (2007). ———. “From Knowledge to Understanding,” in Epistemology Futures, ed. Stephen Hetherington (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Essays and Lectures (New York: Library of America, 1983). ———. Letters, Vol. III, ed. Ralph L. Rusk (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939). Ehrlich, Linda C. “Objects Suspended in Light,” in The Cinema of Víctor Erice: An Open Window, ed. Linda C. Ehrlich (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2007). Eitzen, Dirk. “When is a Documentary?; Documentary as a Mode of Reception,” Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (1995). Eliot, T. S. Four Quartets (New York: Harvest Books/Harcourt Brace, 1943). Ellsworth, Liz. Frederick Wiseman: A Guide to References and Resources (Boston: G.K. Hall & Co., 1979). Evans, K. L. “The Work of Art in the Age of Embedded Journalism: Fiction versus Depiction in Zero Dark Thirty,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). ———. “Charlie Kaufman, Screenwriter,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). Fabian, Johannes. Anthropology with an Attitude: Critical Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Fairweather, Shona. “Ken Loach: 40 years of Social and Political Filmmaking,” in Aesthetica (August/September 2007). Fellini, Federico. Fellini on Fellini, tr. Isabel Quigley (New York: Delacorte Press/ S. Lawrence, 1976). Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008). ———. Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980). Fraser, John. Violence in the Arts (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Gatens, Moira and Genevieve Lloyd. Collective Imaginings: Spinoza, Past and Present (New York: Routledge, 1999).



Selected Bibliography

591

Gaudreault, André and Philippe Marion. The End of Cinema: A Medium in Crisis in the Digital Age, tr. Timothy Barnard (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015). Gaycken, Oliver. Devices of Curiosity: Early Cinema and Popular Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). ———. “‘A Drama Unites Them in a Fight to the Death’: Some Remarks on the Flourishing of a Cinema of Scientific Vernacularization in France, 1909–1914,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Vol. 2, No. 3 (August 2002). Gee, Grant. “Notes Towards a Film” (New York: Cinema Guild, 2012). Gendler, Tamar. “The Puzzle of Imaginative Resistance,” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 97 (2000). Geraghty, Christine. British Cinema in the Fifties: Gender, Genre and the “New Look” (London: Routledge, 2000). Gibbs, Tony. The Fundamentals of Sonic Art and Sound Design (Lausanne: Ava Publishing, 2007). Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death,” in Death: Current Perspectives, ed. Edwin S. Shneidman (Palo Alto, CA: Mayfield, 1976). Goux, Jean-Joseph. Oedipe philosophe (Paris: Aubier, 1990). Grant, Barry Keith. Voyages of Discovery: The Cinema of Frederick Wiseman (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992). Griaule, Marcel. Conversations with Ogotemmêli: An Introduction to Dogon Religious Ideas (New York and London: Oxford University Press, 1971). Grice, Paul. Studies in the Way of Words (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary” (1932–34), in Nonfiction Film: A Critical History, ed. Richard M. Barsam (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1973; Revised and Expanded, 1992). ———. Grierson on Documentary, ed. Forsyth Hardy (New York: Praeger, 1966). ———. “Documentary (1),” Cinema Quarterly, Vol. 1 (1932). Griffin, Mark. A Hundred and One Hidden Things: The Life and Films of Vincente Minnelli (Cambridge, USA: Da Capo Press, 2010). Gross, Larry, John Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby, ed. Image Ethics: The Moral Rights of Subjects in Photographs, Film, and Television, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988). Grusin, Richard. “The Radical Mediation of Life in the Anthropocene,” Thinking C21: Center for 21st Century Studies (October 23, 2013). Gunning, Tom. “Moving Away from the Index: Cinema and the Impression of Reality,” differences, Vol. 18, No. 1 (Spring 2007). ———. “‘Animated Pictures’: Tales of Cinema’s Forgotten Future, After 100 Years of Films,” in Reinventing Film Studies, ed. Christine Gledhill and Linda Williams (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000). ———. “‘The Whole World Within Reach’: Travel Images without Borders,” in Cinéma sans Frontières 1896–1918: Images without Borders. Aspects de l’internationalité dans le cinéma mondial: représentations, marché, influences et réception / Internationality in world cinema: representations, markets, influences

592

Selected Bibliography

and reception, ed. Roland Cosandey and François Albera (Lausanne: Payot / Quebec: Nuit Blanche, 1995). ———. “The Cinema of Attractions: Early film, Its Spectator and the Avant-garde,” in Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser (London: British Film Institute, 1990). Hagberg, Garry L. “Wittgenstein, Verbal Creativity, and the Expansion of Artistic Style,” in Wittgenstein and the Creativity of Language, ed. Sebastian S. Grève and Jakub Mácha (London: Palgrave, 2015). ———. “Dewey’s Pragmatic Aesthetics: The Contours of Experience,” in Cambridge Companion to Pragmatism, ed. Alan Malachowski (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). ———. Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). ———. “Imagined Identities: Autobiography at One Remove,” New Literary History, Vol. 38, No. 1 (Winter 2007). ———. Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James, and Literary Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Halpern, Jake. Fame Junkies: The Hidden Truths Behind America’s Favorite Addiction (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2007). Haraway, Donna. When Species Meet (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008). Harrison, Bernard. What is Fiction For? Literary Humanism Restored (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2015). ———. Inconvenient Fictions: Literature and the Limits of Theory (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991). Hart, Stephen M. César Vallejo: A Literary Biography (Woodbridge: Tamesis Books, 2013). Hayward, Anthony. Which Side are You On? Ken Loach and His Films (London: Bloomsbury, 2005). Hayward, Susan. Cinema Studies: Key Concepts (New York: Routledge, 2013, 4th edition). Hegel, G. W. F. Phenomenology of Spirit, tr. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977). Heidegger, Martin. “The Question Concerning Technology,” in Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell (London: Harper Perennial, 1977). ———. Being and Time, tr. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (San Francisco: Harper, 1962). Henley, Paul. The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2009). Hertogs, Daan and Nico de Klerk, ed. Nonfiction from the Teens: The 1994 Amsterdam Workshop (Amsterdam: Nederlands Filmmuseum, 1994). Hicks, Jeremy. Dziga Vertov: Defining Documentary Film (New York: I.B.Tauris, 2007). Hight, Craig. “The Mockumentary,” in Contemporary Documentary Film, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (New York: Routledge, 2016).



Selected Bibliography

593

———. “Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions,” in The Documentary Film Book, ed. Brian Winston (London: British Film Institute/Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). ——— and Jane Roscoe, ed. Faking It: Mock-Documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001). Hill, John. Ken Loach: The Politics of Film and Television (London: BFI, 2011). Hilsabeck, Burke. “Seeing Soldiers, Seeing Persons: Wittgenstein, Film Theory, and Charlie Chaplin’s Shoulder Arms,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory,” Poetics Today, Vol. 29, No. 1 (2008). ———. Family Frames: Photography, Narrative, and Postmemory (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). Hirschkop, Ken and David Shepherd, ed. Bakhtin and Cultural Theory (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1989). Hood, Stuart, ed. Behind the Screens: The Structure of British Broadcasting in the Nineties (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1994). Hurlburt, Laurance P. The Mexican Muralists in the United States (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico, 1989). Jackobsen, Harlan. “Michael and Me,” Film Comment, Vol. 25, No. 6 (1989). Jackson, Frank. Perception: A Representative Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Jacobs, Del. Revisioning Film Traditions: The Pseudo-documentary and the NeoWestern (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2000). Jacobs, Lewis. The Documentary Tradition: From Nanook to Woodstock (New York: Hopkinson and Blake, 1971). James, Henry. Literary Criticism, Volume II: French Writers; Other European Writers; The Prefaces to the New York Edition (New York: Library of America, 1984). Johnson, Barbara. A World of Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987). ———. The Critical Difference: Essays in the Contemporary Rhetoric of Reading (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). Johnson, William. “Review: Dream of Light,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (1993). Jones, Susanne Lenne. The Multiplicities of Memories in Contemporary German Literature: How Photographs are Used to Reconstruct Narratives of History (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2013). Juhasz, Alexandra and Alisa Lebow, ed. A Companion to Documentary Film (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2015). ———, and Jesse Learner, ed. F is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth’s Undoing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006). ———. AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video (Durham: Duke University Press, 1995). Kahana, Jonathan, ed. The Documentary Film Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

594

Selected Bibliography

———. Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, tr. Norman Kemp Smith (London: MacMillan and Company, 1929). Kara, Selmin and Daniel Marcus, ed. Contemporary Documentary (London: Routledge, 2016). ———. “Sonic Ethnographies: Leviathan and New Materialisms in Documentary,” with Alanna Thain, in Music and Sound in Documentary Film, ed. Holly Rogers (New York: Routledge, 2014). ———. “The Sonic Summons: Meditations on Nature and Anempathetic Sound in Digital Documentaries,” in The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, ed. Carol Vernallis, Amy Herzog, and John Richardson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Kawashima, Robert S., Gilles Philippe, and Thelma Sowley, ed. Phantom Sentences: Essays in Linguistics and Literature Presented to Ann Banfield (Bern: Peter Lang, 2008). Kenigsberg, Ben. “Documentary Filmmakers Talk about Manipulation in Their Work,” The New York Times (June 26, 2015). Kierkegaard, Søren. Point of View, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). ———. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments, ed. and tr. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992). Kinder, Marsha. “Documenting the National and Its Subversion in a Democratic Spain,” in Refiguring Spain: Cinema, Media, Representation, ed. Marsha Kinder (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997). King, Homay. “Born Free? Repetition and Fantasy in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 2 (Winter 2013). Klawans, Stuart. “The Executioner’s Song,” Film Comment, Vol. 49, No. 4 (July– August 2013). Klevan, Andrew. Disclosure of the Everyday: Undramatic Achievement in Narrative Film (Trowbridge: Flicks Books, 2000). Kracauer, Sigfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960). Kvanvig, Jonathan. The Value of Knowledge and the Pursuit of Understanding (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). Lakoff, George. Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Human Mind (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987). Landa, Manuel De. Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy (New York: Continuum, 2002). Landesman, Ohad. “Lying to be Real: The Aesthetics of Ambiguity in Docufictions,” in Contemporary Documentary, ed. Daniel Marcus and Selmin Kara (London: Routledge, 2016). Langer, Lawrence L. The Age of Atrocity: Death in Modern Literature (Boston: Beacon, 1978).



Selected Bibliography

595

Lanigan, Richard L. “Semiotic Phenomenology: A Theory of Human Communication Praxis,” Journal of Applied Communication Research, Vol. 10 (1982). ———. Speaking and Semiology: Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenological Theory of Existential Communication (The Hague: Mouton, 1972). Lantos, John. “How to Live as We are Dying,” Chronicle of Higher Education (September 8, 2000). LaRocca, David. “Errol Morris: Re-enactment and Reconception,” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 3, ed. John Berra (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016). ———. “Hunger in the Heart of Nature: Werner Herzog’s Anti-Sentimental Dispatches from the American Wilderness (Reflections on Grizzly Man),” in Dark Nature: Anti-Pastoral Essays in American Literature and Culture, ed. Richard J. Schneider (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016). ———. “Sofia Coppola: Fame and Self-Reference,” in Directory of World Cinema: American Independent 3, ed. John Berra (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2016). ———. “Equivalent Simulation: An Interview with John Opera,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 42, No. 6 (2015). ——— and Ricardo Miguel-Alfonso, ed. A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2015). ———. “‘Profoundly Unreconciled to Nature’: Ecstatic Truth and the Humanistic Sublime in Werner Herzog’s War Films,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). ———. “War Films and the Ineffability of War,” in The Philosophy of War Films, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). ———. “Affect without Illusion: The Films of Edward D. Wood, Jr. after Ed Wood,” in The Philosophy of Tim Burton, ed. Jennifer L. McMahon (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2014). ———. “The Education of Grown-ups: An Aesthetics of Reading Cavell,” in The Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer 2013). ———. Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013). ———. “Performative Inferentialism: A Semiotic Ethics,” Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies, Vol. 9, No. 1 (February 2013). ———. “Reading Cavell Reading,” in Stanley Cavell, Literature, and Film: The Idea of America, ed. Andrew Taylor and Áine Kelly (London: Routledge, 2013). ———. “The False Pretender: Deleuze, Sherman, and the Status of Simulacra,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 69, No. 3 (Summer 2011). ———. “Rethinking the First Person: Autobiography, Authorship, and the Contested Self in Malcolm X,” in The Philosophy of Spike Lee, ed. Mark T. Conard (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). ———. “Still, Standing: Anonymous Desire and Unarticulated Threat in Julian Hibbard’s The Noir A-Z,” Afterimage: The Journal of Media Arts and Cultural Criticism, Vol. 38, No. 5 (March/April 2011), 2–4.

596

Selected Bibliography

———. “Unauthorized Autobiography: Truth and Fact in Confessions of a Dangerous Mind,” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman, ed. David LaRocca (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 2011). ———. “The Limits of Instruction: Pedagogical Remarks on Lars von Trier’s The Five Obstructions,” Film and Philosophy, Vol. 13 (2009). Larson, Anthony. “First Lessons: Gilles Deleuze and the Concept of Literature,” in Literature and Philosophy: A Guide to Contemporary Debates, ed. David Rudrum (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Laruelle, François. Principles of Non-Philosophy, tr. Nicola Rubczak and Anthony Paul Smith (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013). Lennon, Patrick. “In the Weaver’s Web,” in W.G. Sebald: History-Memory-Trauma, ed. Scott Denham and Mark McCulloh (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2006). Lewis, Michael. The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2010). Lifton, Robert Jay and Eric Olson. Living and Dying (New York: Praeger, 1974). Lincoln, Kevin. “Casey Affleck Should Be More Famous,” The New York Times (November 21, 2013). Lipkin, Steve. Real Emotional Logic: Film and Television Docudrama as Persuasive Practice (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002). Livesey, Margot. Interview with Errol Morris, BOMB, Vol. 69 (Fall 1999). Loach, Ken. Loach on Loach, ed. Graham Fuller (London: Faber, 1999). MacDougall, David. Transcultural Cinema (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998). MacDonald, Scott. Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). ———. American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). ———. Adventures of Perception: Cinema as Exploration (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). ———. A Critical Cinema 5 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006). ———. “An Interview with Amos Vogel,” Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002). ———. The Garden in the Machine: A Field Guide to Independent Films about Place (Berkeley: University of California, 2001). MacDougall, David. The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006). Mahler, Jonathan. “Two Maxims at Odds: Tell a Story, Tell the Truth,” The New York Times (March 22, 2015). Manovich, Lev. “What is Digital Cinema?” in The Digital Dialectic: News Essays on New Media, ed. Peter Lunenfield (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999). Marcus, Daniel and Selmin Kara, ed. Contemporary Documentary (London: Routledge, 2016). Marino, Lori. “Humans, Dolphins, and Moral Inclusivity,” in The Politics of Species, ed. Raymond Corbey and Annette Lanjouw (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).



Selected Bibliography

597

Marter, Joan, ed. Abstract Expresssionism, The International Context (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002). ———. “Sensing the Virtual, Building the Insensible,” Architectural Design, Vol. 68 (1998). May, William F. “The Sacral Power of Death,” in Death in American Experience, ed. Arien Mack (New York: Schocken, 1973). McCloskey, Stephen. “Inside Job,” in Policy & Practice: A Development Education Review, Vol. 13 (Autumn 2011). McDowell, John. Mind and World (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). ———. “The Return of the Myth of the Mental,” with Hubert L. Dreyfus’s “What Myth?” Inquiry, Vol. 50, No. 4 (2007). McGrath, Charles. “The People You Meet,” The New Yorker (April 27, 2015). McLane, Betsy. A New History of Documentary Film (London: Continuum, 2012). Melville, Herman. Typee, Omoo, Mardi (New York: The Library of America, 1982). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. Phenomenology of Perception, tr. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962). Meunier, Jean-Pierre. Les structures de l’experience filmique: l’identification filmique (Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1969). Meyer, Michael. “False Fronts,” Columbia Journalism Review (September/October 2013). Michelson, Annette. “Man with a Movie Camera; from Magician to Epistemologist,” Artforum, Vol. 10, No. 7 (1972). Miller, Jonathan. “Irresistible TV, but Durst Film Tests Ethics, Too,” The New York Times (March 16, 2015). Mitman, Gregg. Reel Nature: America’s Romance with Wildlife on Film (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Mitry, Jean. “Content and Form: The Importance of the Subject Matter,” in The Aesthetics and Psychology of Cinema, tr. Christopher King (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000). Morgan, Daniel. Late Godard and the Possibilities of Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013). Morris, Benny. The Birth of the Palestinian Refugee Problem Revisited in Cambridge Mideast Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, 2nd edition). Morris, Errol. “Play it Again, Sam (Re-enactments Part One),” The New York Times (April 3, 2008). Mouffe, Chantal. On the Political (New York and London: Routledge, 2005). Mulvey, Laura. Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books, 2006). Munn, Nancy D. “The Cultural Anthropology of Time: A Critical Essay,” Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 21 (1992). Murdoch, Iris. “The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts,” in Aesthetics: The Big Questions, ed. Carolyn Korsmeyer (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1998).

598

Selected Bibliography

Murphy, Mary Jo. “Watching Youth Fly By, in Fiction and Fact,” The New York Times (February 6, 2015). Murray, Timothy. Digital Baroque: New Media Arts and Digital Folds (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008). Myles, Eileen. “The Art of Poetry, No. 99,” Interview by Ben Lerner, The Paris Review, No. 215 (Fall 2015). Nagel, Thomas. “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” The Philosophical Review, Vol. LXXXIII, No. 4 (October 1974). Neale, Steve. Genre and Hollywood (New York: Routledge, 2000). Nichols, Bill. Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016). ———. “Irony, Cruelty, Evil (and a Wink) in The Act of Killing,” Film Quarterly, Vol. 67, No. 2 (Winter 2013). ———. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010). ———. Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010). ———. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991). Nietzsche, Friedrich. “Schopenhauer as Educator,” in Untimely Meditations, tr. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). Nisbet, James. Ecologies, Environments, and Energy Systems in Art of the 1960s and 1970s (Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2014). Norman, Michael. “Carnage and Glory, Legends and Lies,” The New York Times (July 7, 1996). Nguyen, Sophia. “Mumblecore’s Maestro,” Harvard Magazine (September–October 2015). Nussbaum, Emily. “What about Bob?” The New Yorker (March 23, 2015). Oates, Joyce Carol. “Inspiration and Obsession in Life and Literature,” New York Review of Books (August 13, 2015). Painlevé, Jean. “Castration du Documentarire,” Les Cahiers du cinéma (March 1951). Pangrcic, Hannah. “Borat: Controversial Ethics for Make Better the Future of Documentary Filmmaking,” WR: Journal of the CAS Writing Program at Boston University, No. 6 (2013–2014). Papazian, Elizabeth Astrid. Manufacturing Truth; the Documentary Moment in Early Soviet Culture (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009). Peeren, Esther. Identities and Intersubjectivities in Popular Culture: Bakhtin and Beyond (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007). Perkins, V. F. “Must We Say What They Mean? Film Criticism and Interpretation,” MOVIE, No. 34/35 (Winter 1990). ———. Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (Baltimore: Penguin, 1972). Petley, Julian. “Why Cathy Will Never Come Home Again,” in New Statesman & Society, Vol. 6, No. 246 (London: New Statesman, 1993).



Selected Bibliography

599

Petric, Vlada. “Vertov’s Cinematic Transposition of Reality,” in Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film, ed. Charles Warren (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). ———. Constructivism in Film. The Man with the Movie Camera. A Cinematic Analysis (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Phillips, Antonia. “The Limits of Portrayal,” in Philosophy and the Visual Arts, ed. Andrew Harrison (Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1987). Pinch, Trevor and Karin Bijsterveld, ed. The Oxford Handbook of Sound Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). Pitcher, George. A Theory of Perception (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). Plantinga, Carl. “Documentary,” in The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, ed. Paisley Livingston and Carl Plantinga (London: Routledge, 2009). ———. “What a Documentary Is, After All,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 63 (2005). ———. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). ———. “Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Projected Worlds,” Persistence of Vision, Vol. 5 (Spring 1987). Plato. Republic in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961). Poole, Roger. Towards Deep Subjectivity (London: Penguin, 1972). Ponech, Trevor. What is Non-Fiction Cinema: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999). ———. “What is Non-Fiction Cinema?” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Porton, Richard. “Family Viewing: An Interview with Sarah Polley,” Cineaste (Summer 2013). Preuss, Peter. “Ontological Vertigo,” International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Vol. 11, No. 2 (1980). Pride, Ray. “Caught on Film,” Filmmaker (Spring 2013). Prince, Stephen, ed. Screening Violence (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000). Rancière, Jacques. The Intervals of Cinema, tr. John Howe (London and New York: Verso, 2014). ———. “The Paradoxes of Political Art,” in Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and tr. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010). ———. The Future of the Image (London: Verson, 2007). ———. Film Fables, tr. Emiliano Battista (Oxford: Berg, 2006). ———. “Is History a Form of Fiction?” in The Politics of Aesthetics, ed. and tr. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Bloomsbury, 2004). Rascaroli, Laura, Gwenda Young, and Barry Monahan, ed. Amateur Filmmaking: The Home Movie, the Archive, the Web (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014). Richards, Thomas. The Commodity Culture of Victorian Britain: Advertising and Spectacle 1851–1914 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990).

600

Selected Bibliography

Rilke, Rainer Maria. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and tr. Stephen Mitchell (New York: Vintage, 1989). Regt, Henk W. de and Dennis Dieks. “A Contextual Approach to Scientific Understanding,” Synthese, Vol. 144 (2005). Renov, Michael. The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2004). ——— and Jane Gaines, ed. Collecting Visible Evidence (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). ———, ed. Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993). Ricciardelli, Lucia. American Documentary Filmmaking in the Digital Age: Depictions of War in Burns, Moore, and Morris (New York: Routledge, 2015). Roberts, Graham. The Man with the Movie Camera, The Russian Cinema Series, ed. Richard Taylor (London: I.B.Tauris Publishers, 2000). Rodowick, D. N. The Virtual Life of Film (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007). Roe, Annabelle Honess. Animated Documentary (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). Roelstraete, Dieter and Anders Kreuger, ed. Chantal Akerman: Too Far, Too Close (Antwerp: Ludion, 2012). Rohter, Larry. “A Movie’s Killers are All Too Real: The Act of Killing and Indonesian Death Squads,” The New York Times (July 12, 2013). Roscoe, Jane. “Man Bites Dog: Deconstructing the Documentary Look,” in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006). Rosen, Philip. Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001). Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner, ed. New Challenges for Documentary (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005, 2nd edition; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988, 1st edition). Roth, Philip. The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography (New York: Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, 1998). Rotha, Paul. A Paul Rotha Reader, ed. Duncan Petrie and Robert Kruger (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 1999). ——— with Sinclair Road and Richard Griffith. Documentary Film (New York: Communication Arts Books, 1952). Rothman, William, ed. Cavell on Film (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2005). ———. “The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North,” in Documenting the Documentary, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998). ———. Documentary Film Classics (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Rouch, Jean. Ciné-Ethnography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003). Ruoff, Jeffrey. Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel, ed. Jeffrey Ruoff (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006).



Selected Bibliography

601

———. “An Ethnographic Surrealist Film: Luis Buñuel’s Land without Bread,” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Spring/Summer 1998). Said, Edward. The Question of Palestine (New York: Vintage Books, 1979/1992). Santner, Eric. Stranded Objects: Mourning, Memory, and Film in Postwar Germany (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties (London: Wallflower Press, 2007). Saussure, Ferdinand de. Course in General Linguistics, tr. Wade Baskin (New York, Toronto, and London: McGraw-Hill, 1996; originally published 1915). Schama, Simon. Landscape and Memory (New York: Vintage, 1996). Schatz, Thomas. Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981). Scheinman, Diane. “The Dialogic Imagination of Jean Rouch: Covert Conversations in Le maîtres fous,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (Detroit: Wayne State University, 2014). Schilling, Derek. “On the Class Character of Desire: Romantic Heroics in the Conets moraux,” in The Films of Eric Rohmer, ed. Leah Anders (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). Schutz, Alfred. The Phenomenology of the Social World, tr. George Walsk and Frederick Lehnert (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1967). Scott, A. O. “In The Big Short: Economic Collapse for Fun and Profit,” The New York Times (December 10, 2015). ———. “True Story, The Jinx, and Serving Up Truth with the Imagination,” The New York Times (April 22, 2015). ———. “A Writer Who Defied Categorization: Patience (After Sebald), a Documentary,” The New York Times (May 8, 2012). Scott, Clive. The Spoken Image: Photography and Language (London: Reaktion Books, 1999). Sebald, W. G. The Rings of Saturn, tr. Michael Hulse (New York: New Directions, 1998). Sekula, Allan. “Dismantling Modernism, Reinventing Documentary (Notes on the Politics of Representation),” in The Massachusetts Review, Vol. 19, No. 4 (December 1978). Shaviro, Steven. Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010). Sickels, Robert. “‘It Ain’t the Movies! It’s Real Life!’ Cinematic Alchemy in Woody Allen’s ‘Woody Allen’ D(M)oc(k)umentary Oeuvre,” in Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking, ed. Gary D. Rhodes and John Parris Springer (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006). Sniadecki, J. P. “Chaiqian/Demolition: Reflections on Media Practice,” Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 30, No. 1 (2014). Sobchack, Vivian. “Toward a Phenomenology of Nonfictional Film Experience,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Michael Renov and Jane Gaines (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). ———. The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992).

602

Selected Bibliography

———. “The Violent Dance: A Personal Memoir of Death in the Movies,” Journal of Popular Film, Vol. 3 (Winter 1974). Solomon-Godeau, Abigail. “Who is Speaking Thus? Some Questions about Documentary Photography,” in Photography at the Dock (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991). Sontag, Susan. On Photography (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1977). Stewart, Garrett. Framed Time: Toward a Postfilmic Cinema (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007). ———. “Thresholds of the Visible: The Death Scene of Film,” Mosaic, Vol. XVI, No. 1–2 (1983). Stiegler, Bernard. “On Abbas Kiarostami’s Close-Up,” Parrhesia, Vol. 20 (2014). Stoler, Ann Laura. Carnal Knowledge and Imperial Power: Race and the Intimate in Colonial Rule (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Stoller, Paul. The Cinematic Griot: The Ethnography of Jean Rouch (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). Stott, William. Documentary Expression in Thirties America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). Strassler, Karen. Refracted Visions: Popular Photography and National Modernity in Java (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010). Street, Sarah. British National Cinema (London: Routledge, 1997). Sutherland, Allan T. “Wiseman on Polemic,” an interview with Frederick Wiseman, Sight and Sound, Vol. 47, No. 2 (1978), 82. Swann, Paul. The British Documentary Movement, 1926–1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Tate, Allen. Essays of Four Decades (New York: William Morrow, 1970). Teodoro, José. “Knowing You, Knowing Me,” Film Comment, Vol. 49, No. 3 (May– June 2013). Thomson, David. “When Did You Last Film Your Father?” The New Republic (April 29, 2013). Thoreau, Henry David. Walden (New York: The Library of America, 1985). Thrift, Nigel. Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (New York: Routledge, 2007). Tobias, Ronald B. Film and the American Moral Vision of Nature: Theodore Roosevelt to Walt Disney (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2011). Torchin, Leshu. “Cultural Learnings of Borat for Make Benefit Glorious Study of Documentary,” in Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Slonioswki (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, expanded edition 2014). Tuin, Iris van der and Rick Dolphijn. New Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies (Ann Arbor: Open Humanities Press, 2012). Tulloch, John and Rosa Munro. “Whose Stories You Tell: Writing Ken Loach,” in Writing and Cinema, ed. Jonathan Bignell (New York: Taylor and Francis, 1999). Turner, Victor. The Forest of Symbols: Aspects of Ndembu Ritual (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1967).



Selected Bibliography

603

Usai, Paolo Cherchi. The Death of Cinema: History, Cultural Memory, and the Digital Dark Age (London: British Film Institute, 2001). Verhoeff, Han. “‘Adolphe’ et Constant: Une étude psychocritique” (Paris: Klincksieck, 1976). Vertov, Dziga. “The Birth of Kino-Eye,” in Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, ed. Annette Michelson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; originally published 1924). Vogel, Amos. Film as a Subversive Art (New York: Random House, 1974). ———. “Grim Death,” Film Comment, Vol. 16, No. 2 (March–April 1980). Vries, Hent de and Samuel Weber, ed. Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). Walton, Kendall. “Morality in Fiction and Fictional Morality,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supp. Vol. 68 (1994). ———. “Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism,” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 11 (1984). Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality (London: Wallflower Press, 2005). Warren, Charles. “Chantal Akerman,” in Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, ed. Ian Aitken (New York and London: Routledge, 2006). ———, ed. Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 1996). Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace, tr. Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr (London and New York: Routledge, 2002). Weinberger, Eliot. “The Camera People,” in Visualizing Theory: Selected Essays from the Visual Anthropology Review, ed. Lucien Taylor (New York: Routledge, 1994). Weisman, Avery. On Dying and Denying: A Psychiatric Study of Terminality (New York: Behavioral Press, 1972). White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978). Wilkenfeld, Daniel A. “Understanding as Representation Manipulability,” Synthese, Vol. 190 (2013). Williams, Linda. “Mirror without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” in Film Quarterly: Forty Years—A Selection, ed. Brian Henderson and Ann Martin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). ———. “Truth, History and the New Documentary,” in Film Quarterly, Vol. 46, No. 3 (Spring 1993). Williams, Timothy, et al. “Police Body Cameras: What Do You See?” The New York Times (April 1, 2016). Wilson, George. Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011). ———. “On Film Narrative and Narrative Meaning,” in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). Wilson, Mary Griffin. “Sheets of Past: Reading the Image in W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz,” Contemporary Literature, Vol. 54 (Spring 2013).

604

Selected Bibliography

Windolf, Jim. “Andy Kaufman, Joaquin Phoenix, and the two Lettermans,” Vanity Fair (February 13, 2009). Winckelmann, Johann Just. Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1759). Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary, Grierson, and Beyond (London: British Film Institute, 2009). ———. “Jean Rouch,” in The Oxford History of World Cinema, ed. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996). ———. Claiming the Real: The Documentary Film Revisited (London: British Film Institute, 1995). See also Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995). Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations, revised 4th edition, ed. P. M. S. Hacker and Joachim Schulte, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and Joachim Schulte (Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009). Wolfe, Charles. “The Poetics and Politics of Nonfiction: Documentary Film,” Grand Design: Hollywood as a Modern Business Enterprise, 1930–1939, ed. Tino Balio (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993). Wolfflin, Heinrich. Principles of Art History: The Problem of the Development of Style in later Art, tr. M. D. Hottinger (London: G. Bell & sons, ltd., 1932). Wollen, Peter. Paris Hollywood: Writings on Film (New York: Verso, 2002). Wolterstorff, Nicholas. Art in Action (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1980). Zagzebski, Linda. “Recovering Understanding,” in Knowledge, Truth, and Duty, ed. Matthias Steup (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). Zavattini, Cesare. Neorealismo (Milano: Bompiani, 1979). ———. “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in Film: A Montage of Theories, ed. Richard Dyer McCann (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1966); originally published in Sight and Sound (October 1953). Zimmermann, Patricia R. Mining the Home Movie: Excavations in Histories and Memories, ed. Karen L. Ishizuka and Patricia R. Zimmermann (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). ———. Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

Index

1960s Britain, 326, 340n27 20,000 Days on Earth (2014), 545–46 3D, 2–3, 209–24, 352, 549 abandonment complex, 278 absorption, 463–65 abstraction, 227, 231–35; formal, 347; from reality, 496 Abu Ghraib, 453–58 accents, 268 accountant’s truth, 9, 17, 540 Acera or the Witches’ Dance (1972), 178, 183–84 Achilles, 436–37, 440, 465 The Act of Killing (2012), 15, 28, 517–36 The Act of Seeing With One’s Own Eyes (1971), 26–27 actuality (film), 161–63, 167–68, 170–71, 172n1, 352 Adam’s Rib (1949), 60 Adaptation (2002), 20, 38, 549, 567, 569 Adorno, Theodor, 366 Aesop, 114, 122 aesthetics, 264; of cinema, 68, 78–79, 344; ethnography and, 252. See also migratory aesthetics affect, affective, 267–69, 280 Affleck, Ben, 545, 554 Affleck, Casey, 28, 39, 537–76

Agatha, Saint, 296–97, 302 Aitken, Ian, 323n51, 327–28, 340n10, 340n11, 340n14, 497 Akerman, Chantal, 13–15, 48n47, 495–510 aletheia, 318–19 Algar, James, 178–79 Allen, Woody, 20, 546, 558, 564–65 All the President’s Men (1976), 101, 109 All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), 18 Alone. Life Wastes Andy Hardy (1998), 29 alter ego (as figure), 293, 295, 556 Altman, Rick, 33, 54n174, 363–74 Amazon warrior, 299 American Movie (1999), 38, 563 Amy (2015), 12, 554 Andrew, Dudley, 34 animation, 33–37, 53n154, 53n155, 99, 178–84, 209, 220, 222, 233, 352, 371–72, 426 Anomalisa (2015), 37 À Nous la liberté (1931), 77–78 anthropocene, 226, 356, 358 Antonioni, Michelangelo, 98, 106 Apted, Michael, 37, 547–48 archive, use of (in documentary film), 243–50

605

606 Index

L’Argent (1983), 495 Ariès, Philippe, 126–28, 132, 136, 149–50 Aristotle, 154n11, 211, 309, 321n14, 434, 497 Armoire (2007), 236–37 Arnheim, Rudolph, xv, 34, 76–78, 346, 365 Arnold, Martin, 29, 228 arranged marriage, 266 Arthur, Jean, 60, 72 aspect-perception/aspect-seeing, 470, 474–75, 481, 484, 572n17 assemblage, 348, 350, 355–56, 358n19 assertive stance (vs. fictive stance), 8–9, 121, 432–33, 436, 438, 440, 442, 450n3, 539, 548 Astaire, Fred, 220–22, 224n42 Attenborough, David, 12, 191n23 Auden, W. H., 152 audience response. See reception studies/theory Auerbach, Erich, 437, 439 Aufderheide, Patricia, 24, 39, 547, 549, 551 Augustine of Hippo, 11, 369 Au hasard Balthasar (1966), 464, 499 Austin, J. L., 29, 491n18 auteur, cult of, 11, 28, 76, 85, 91, 194, 293, 375–77 authorship, 11, 271–72, 303, 518, 567–69 avant-doc, 225–40 avant-garde, 11, 34, 36, 173n9, 182–83, 225–27, 375 Aviram, Amittai, 267 Azoulay, Ariella, 259n23 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 272, 278, 284n19 Bal, Mieke, 33 Balázs, Béla, 147–48, 365 Bale, Christian, 434, 440–49 Ballard, J. G., 153n4 Barnouw, Erik, 12–13, 15–16, 24–25, 189n5 Barris, Chuck, 569, 573n44

Barthes, Roland, 59, 92n4, 132, 257, 259 “based on a true story,” 20–21 The Battle of Chile (1976), 148 Battleship Potemkin (1925), 328 Baudrillard, Jean, 236, 567, 575n85 Baumbach, Noah, 540 Baumgarten, Alexander, 264 Bazin, André, xv, 26, 31, 34, 52n147, 65, 75–94, 210, 221, 252, 257–259, 289, 302, 345, 371, 547 Beauvoir, Simone de, 137 Beaver Valley (1950), 178 Becker, Ernest, 137 Beckman, Karen, 36 Being John Malkovich (1999), 567 Bekoff, Marc, 410 Bell, Clive, 78 Belmondo, Jean-Paul, 1 Benjamin, Walter, 5, 67 Bennett, Tony, 370 Benning, James, 188n1, 230, 349, 355 Berg, Amy, 40, 53n164, 541 Berger, John, 254–55, 258–59 Bergson, Henri, 289, 351 Bergstrom, Janet, 500 Berkeley, George, 278, 476–77, 480, 484, 488, 490n6 Berlinger, Joe, 40–41, 541 The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), 84–85, 93n29 Bicycle Thieves (Ladri di biciclette, 1948), 13, 31, 85 Bigelow, Kathryn, 21 The Big Red One (1980), 18, 49n68 The Big Short (2015), 431–52 The Blair Witch Project (1999), 538 Blomkamp, Neill, 19, 563 The Blood of the Beasts (Le Sang des bêtes, 1949), 152, 183 Blow Out (1981), 106 Blow Up (1966), 98, 106 The Blue Planet (2001), 175 Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), 555, 574n59

Index

Bordwell, David, 36, 387 Bousé, Derek, 175–77, 188n2, 189n5, 190n8, 190n15 Boyhood (2015), 37 Brakhage, Stan, 26–27, 230 Brand, Peggy Zeglin, 409 Branigan, Edward, 117–19 Bread and Roses (2000), 337 breast, female, 292, 295–300, 302; cancer of: 291–93, 295–301 Breathless (À bout de soufflé, 1960), 1, 35 Brecht, Bertold, 14, 442, 454. See also ciné-Brechtians Bresson, Robert, 464, 495–97, 499, 500, 504 Breton, André, 30–33 Brewster, Ben, 162, 165–66 Brighton project, 159–60 Bringing Up Baby (1938), 101 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 325, 327–33, 336 Brooks, Peter, 66 Bryant, Levi, 352–53 Buñuel, Luis, 32, 51n127, 78, 196, 568 Burns, Ken, 9, 118–19, 227, 423–25 Cage, John, 17, 568 Cahiers du cinéma, 76, 189n5 Camera Lucida, 59 Candid Camera (1948–92), 538, 571n3 Capra, Frank, It Happened One Night (1934), 61, 70; Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), 57–74; Why We Fight (1942–45), 12, 24 Capturing the Friedmans (2003), 552 Carroll, Noël, 8, 9, 22, 29–30, 46n6, 99, 120, 414, 416–18, 423–24, 427, 450n2, 539, 547, 549–51, 558–60, 566, 573n36 Casablanca (1942), 100, 105 Casetti, Francesco, 289 Cassavetes, John, 562–63 Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, 12, 32–33, 349 Catania, 296–97, 302

607

Cathy Come Home (1966), 95, 104, 325–29, 335–36, 338, 339n1, 339n2, 339n4, 340n22, 340n25, 340n31 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 327 Cave, Nick, 545–46 Cavell, Stanley, xv, 4, 7, 34, 57–75, 197, 209–11, 214, 216–17, 221–22, 257–58, 492n20, 495, 500, 505–6, 508n2; The Claim of Reason, 61; Pursuits of Happiness, 57–73; The World Viewed, 26, 57–75, 205, 210, 506, 550–51 celebrity, 40, 541–42, 544–47, 554, 559–60, 565–68, 571 Cervantes, Miguel de, 437, 466 Les Chaises (2008), 236–237 Chang (1927), 177 Chaplin, Charlie, 81, 87, 110n3, 314, 572n17 characterization, nature of, 433, 436–41 Cholodenko, Alan, 36, 53n154 Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été, 1961), 10, 24, 193, 197 ciné-Brechtians, 75, 92n3 cinema: as audiovisual medium, 366; democratization of, 375; digitalization of, 372–73; as écriture, 372; indirect, 517–36; as lucid dreaming, 355; as mastering light, 357n12; as mummification, 345; as realist art, 75–94; as recording medium, 372–73; unplayed, 312–13; unstaged, 312–13; as visual medium, 363 cinéma vérité, xv, 11, 17, 24, 28, 32–33, 171, 198–99, 287–92, 294–96, 302, 307, 326, 379, 381, 515, 540, 560–65, 565; aesthetics of, 11; confounds fact and truth, 379; ethics of, 11; hoax-, 40, 537–71, 573n36; mock, 330; Werner Herzog on, 379–80. See also representation, asserted veridical ciné-seeing, 308–11, 316, 319, 320, 322 Civil Alliances—Palestine 1947–48 (2012), 243–50

608 Index

Citizen Kane (1941), 84–85, 88 Citron, Michel, 511–16, 574n57 city symphonies, 331 Clair, René, 77–78, 80, 183, 363 Clément, René, 13 Clifford, James, 259n24 close-up, 272, 278, 280–81, 332–33, 347, 389, 461, 464 Close-Up (1990), 30, 353 Coal Face (1935), 328 cognitive film theory, 113 Cohen, Hillel, 249n3 Cohen, Sacha Baron, 555 Coleridge, S. T., 65 colonialism, 167, 171, 226, 246–47; psychic, 396 color fields, 225–26, 231–36 Color Study: Slaterville New York (2000), 230–31 Combs, Sean (P. Diddy), 565 computer generated imagery (CGI), 3, 22, 209, 222, 549 Confessions of a Dangerous Mind, 569, 573n44 Conner, Bruce, 29, 133, 177 Cooper, Gary, 60, 66, 72 Cooper, Merian C., 177 Coppola, Francis Ford, 290–91 Coppola, Sophia, 14–15 Corner, John, 118, 330 A Couch in New York (1996), 495 The Counterlife, 569–71 Courbet, Gustave, 507 Croce, Benedetto, 78 Crystal Palace (1851), 166 Culloden (1964), 95, 104, 112n19 Currie, Gregory, 28, 35, 414–18, 423, 425, 427, 428n3, 428n9 Cutting, James E., 224n34 Damon, Matt, 545–46 Daughter Rite (1979), 511–16 Dayan, Moshe, 249n9 Dead Birds (1963), 32 Dear Zachary (2008), 552

death, cinematic representation of, 125–56; as ferocious reality, 125 Deep Blue (2003), 175 De Landa, Manuel, 348, 351, 354 Deleuze, Gilles, xv, 270, 281, 283n10, 289–90, 302, 348, 351, 356, 451n23, 572n17 Deliver Us from Evil (2006), 541 Demos, Moira, 41 Demos, T. J., 258n12 De Palma, Brian, 106 Depp, Johnny, 553 Descartes, René, 57–74, 261–62, 272, 278–82, 309 description, vs. interpretation (cinematic), 161, 180, 256, 431 De Sica, Vittorio, 13–15, 85–86, 88 Desjarlais, Robert, 256–57 D’Est (1993), 501 Dewey, John, 255, 494n35 DiCaprio, Leonardo, 560 didacticism, 566, 571; non-, 302, 337, 554, 571 digital baroque, 35 digital cinema, 34–36, 355. See also animation and painting Dijkstra, Rineke, 463–64 direct cinema, 11, 24, 28, 199, 307, 381, 424–25, 534, 540, 552, 563. See also observational (cinema) disclosure: of the everyday, 496, 499, 508n2; self-, 198–99; of truth, 45 Disney, Walt, 178–84, 372 distraction, 465 District 9 (2009), 19, 563 Doane, Mary Ann, 366–67 docudrama, 108–10, 112n19 docufiction, xv, 47n28, 353–54, 539–40, 560–61, 568–71 documentary (film): anthropological use of, 193; coherence (in assessing criteria of), 100–106; contested definition of, 1–4; contrasted with document, 7–8, 10, 28, 117–18; feminist, 511–16; formalism, 329;

Index

greatest of all time, 305–6, 321; ideal, 28, 101–4, 415, 423–25, 428n9; materialism, 343–60; about music, 567; (contrast between) narrative and, 95–112; as objective, 5; what is a, 115, 118; when is a, 115, 118. See also actuality (films) and home movies Documentary Now! (2015– ), 564 documentary video, 33, 225–40, 274 Dogma 95 (movement), 11, 375–77, 562, 565; counters the film of illusion, 376; understanding of sound, 376 A Doll House, 64 Don Quixote, 437, 466 Dorsky, Nathaniel, 178, 190n12 The Draughtsman’s Contract (1982), 98 dreams, 19, 89, 205, 218, 222–23, 344–48, 350–51, 353, 482, 530, 541 Dreyer, Carl, 78, 121 Dreyfus, Herbert, 467–68 Drifters (1929), 328 duration (in film), 14, 16, 52n147, 83, 148–49, 154n11, 289, 316, 354, 358n19, 383, 389, 392. See also real time durée, 136–37 Dying (1976), 137 Eastman, George, 33 Ebert, Roger, 221 Eco, Umberto, 154n17 ecological art, 235–39 ecology, 354–55, 357 ecstatic truth, 17–18, 47n25, 220, 379, 540–41 Edison, Thomas, 26 Eisenstein, Sergei, xv, 34, 76, 78, 91, 306, 316, 328, 363 Eisler, Hanns, 366 Eitzen, Dirk, 118–19 Elgin, Catherine, 418–20, 425, 427, 429n47 Eliot, T. S., 133

609

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 57–74, 211–16, 230, 239n12, 490n6, 508n2, 570 empathy, 135, 306, 384, 399, 456, 538–39, 551, 554 eros, and thanatos, 127–28 The Eternal Jew (Der Ewige Jude, 1940), 18 the ethical, 263, 269, 280–82 ethical space (in cinema), 125–56 ethics, documentary, 11, 16–17, 37–41, 225, 273, 292, 564 ethnic cleansing, 243–44. See also genocide ethnofiction, 11, 15, 24, 32, 193–208. See also metaethnofiction ethnographic film, xv, 10–11, 20, 24, 32, 39, 193–208, 210, 251–59; pseudo-, 177 event-based philosophies, 350–52, 359. See also profilmic (events and materialities) expository documentary film, 24, 252, 258n7 expressionism, 79–80, 93n41; abstract, 232–34; as essence of cinema, 90; German, 78, 91; Italian neorealism vs., 88 Fabian, Johannes, 282 fabrications (cinematic), 1, 4, 6–9, 15, 17, 19–22, 28, 33, 39, 44, 379, 427, 518, 529, 538, 540, 548, 552, 563, 569 fabulism, 26, 434, 539, 559, 566 facing, 274–75 The Facts: A Novelist’s Autobiography, 569–71 fallacies (cinematic): historical, 363–65; of indexicality, 370–73; nominalist, 368–70; ontological, 365–67; reproductive, 367–68 Fanon, Frantz, 455 Fellini, Federico, 85, 292 feminism (and film), 64, 356, 358n17, 451n20, 511–16

610 Index

femininity, 287–304 Ferguson, Charles, 37, 432, 436, 443, 450n6, 451n24 F for Fake (1975), 39, 560 fiction film: criteriological boundary between nonfiction film and, 10, 19, 113–24, 511–16 fiction within nonfiction, 497, 502, 506–7, 573n36 film: close reading of, 381–94; diktats, 305, 307, 311, 320; fact, 314–15; editing, 288, 290, 295; ontology of, 8, 34, 113–14, 143, 311, 314–15, 317, 319–20, 349, 365–67, 371, 439, 465, 470, 506, 552; photography and, 57–74, 95–112; tension in, 495–96; thing, 314–15, 317; truth, 306; truth principle, 317 Film as a Subversive Art, 5, 130 Flaherty, Robert, xv, 10, 25, 28, 81, 88, 90, 110, 161, 171, 172n3, 177, 194, 354, 426, 499, 549, 568 Folman, Ari, 37, 458, 549, 573n44 Forest of Bliss (1986), 32, 210, 505, 509n13 formalism (cinematic), 77, 232, 236, 306, 328–29 Forrest Gump (1994), 20, 565 Forster, Robert, 1–2 Four Nights of a Dreamer (Quatre nuits d’un rêveur, 1972), 495 Franju, Georges, 152, 183 Fraser, John, 134–35 fraud. See cinéma vérité, hoax French New Wave (La Nouvelle Vague), 193, 375, 497 French, Philip, 481 Freud, Sigmund, 67, 213, 309–10 Friedrich, Su, 187–88 Friendly, Fred, 151 From the Other Side (De l’autre côté, 2002), 501–6 Fuller, Samuel, 18 Galaxy Quest (1999), 8 Gardner, Robert, 25, 27, 32, 210, 505

Gaycken, Oliver, 175, 189n4 gaze, 167–68, 171; documentary, 156n32; types of, 145–53 genocide, 15, 453, 522, 526–32, 535n20, 536n31 Gibney, Alex, 458 Gimme Shelter (1970), 146, 567 Godard, Jean-Luc, 1, 35, 76, 193, 292, 307, 497–98, 567 Goebbels, Joseph, 18 The Good Breast (2016), 287, 292–302 Goodbye to Language (Adieu au langage, 2014), 35 Gordon, Douglas, 461–68; Play Dead; Real Time, 462 Gorer, Geoffrey, 128–29, 138 Gorky Park (1983), 65 Grand Illusion (La Grande illusion, 1937), 83–84. See also Jean Renoir Grant, Barry Keith, 386–88 Grant, Cary, 25, 62 Grass (1925), 177 Greenaway, Peter, 98 Greene, Robert, 563 Grenier, Vincent, 225–38 Grey Gardens (1975), 564 Grice, Paul, 111n5, 416 Grierson, John, xv, 18, 25–28, 43, 95, 161, 166–70, 172n3, 306, 327–29, 331, 333, 336–38, 340n13, 352, 418, 423, 548–49 Griffith, D. W., 78, 87, 89–90, 312 Guest, Christopher, 39, 563–64 Gunning, Tom, 36 Haganah archive, 245, 247 Hail Mary (Je vous salue, Marie, 1984), 498 Hansen, Miriam, 36, 173n26 Haraway, Donna, 398 Harris, Hilary, 328 Harvard University: Film Study Center at, 32; Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at, 32, 51n132, 52n133, 252, 258n6 Hayward, Susan, 17, 25

Index

The Head of a Pin (2003), 187–88 Hearts and Minds (1974), 152 Hegel, G. W. F., 213, 315, 328, 543–44 Heidegger, Martin, 57–74, 137, 310, 321n14, 466, 505 Hernadi, Paul, 370 Herzog, Werner, 8–9, 17, 24, 27, 47n25, 209, 217–24, 292, 303, 355, 379–80, 415, 430, 433–34, 536n36, 540–41, 568; accountant’s truth, 9, 17, 379, 540; Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010), 209–24; ecstatic truth, 17, 47n25, 220, 379, 540–41; Fitzcarraldo (1982), 222, 541; Lessons of Darkness (1992), 24, 355, 379–80; Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), 540; Nosferatu (1979), 182, 224n32; voice-over, 218 heteroglossia, 272 High School (1968), 381–94 Hight, Craig, 564, 573n41, 574n50, 574n60 Hiley, Nicholas, 169 Hippler, Fritz, 18 Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988–98), 498 Hitchcock, Alfred, 14–15, 91, 94n44, 193, 198, 328, 340n13; Psycho (1960), 456; Rope (1948), 14; Vertigo (1958), 20, 305 Hitler, Adolph, 19, 106–7, 184 Hollywood films, 18–19, 34, 38, 57–74, 289, 522, 542, 549–50, 554, 561, 565 The Holocaust, 287–88, 291, 293, 413, 422–23, 501, 507 home movies, 417–18, 506–8, 512, 515, 520, 530, 538, 551–52, 554, 562, 571, 574n57 Homer, 436–37 Housing Problems (1935), 328 Hughes, Howard, 560, 575n71 hybridity-within, 271, 285n15 hyperreal, 567–68, 570 Ibsen, Henrik, 64 idealism (philosophical), 348, 350, 476

611

identification (viewer), 21, 149, 168, 180, 213, 232, 248, 273, 281, 317, 332, 409–10, 415, 441, 457, 512, 550 I Don’t Belong Anywhere (2016), 48n47, 506–8 IMAX, 3 immigration, politics of, 266, 274 imperialism, 229, 246–47 impressionism (in painting), 290 I’m Still Here (2010), 28, 39, 537–76 In a World . . . (2013), 20 Incident at Loch Ness (2004), 538 index (indexical, indexicality), 34–37, 53n153, 117–18, 130–34, 140–45, 152–53, 176, 256–57, 259n14, 352, 370–73, 432, 448–49, 450n2, 550 Inside Job (2010), 37, 432, 436, 443, 450n6, 451n24 “inspired by true events,” 20–21 Interstellar (2014), 549 interval theory, 316 intimacy, 261–62, 266, 270, 273, 275, 279 In Vanda’s Room (2000), 501–2 the invisible, 308–20 iPhone, 16–17, 34, 210 The Iron Ministry (2014), 32 Israel, 243–50, 251, 259 Italian neorealism. See neorealism (Italian) It Happened One Night (1934), 61, 70 Jackie Brown (1997), 1 Jakobson, Roman, 78 James, Henry, 438, 445 Jarecki, Andrew, 40 The Jazz Singer (1927), 364 Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), 13–14, 498–500 Jennings, Humphrey, 28 Je tu il elle (1974), 497–501 Jewish-Arab conflict, 243–50, 251–60 JFK (1991), 119 Johnson, Martin and Osa, 177 journalism, 6, 8, 40, 150–51, 434; broadcast, 19–20, 32, 543; citizen,

612 Index

2, 16; dramatized, 330; embedded, 49n68; exposé, 409; gossip, 62, 544, 552–54, 567, 571; of the imagination, 539; narrative, 438; nature of representation in film and, 571n5; testimony and, 405 Kael, Pauline, 382, 384–85, 390, 393n15 Kahn, Albert, 167, 173n19 Kant, Immanuel, 57–74, 264, 309–10, 499 Kapadia, Asif, 12, 554 Kardashian shows, 550 Kaufman, Andy, 561–62, 566 Kaufman, Charlie, 20, 23, 37, 49n70, 549, 567, 569, 573n44 Kazan, Elia, 13 Keaton, Buster, 81 Kearton, Cherry, 177 Kennedy, John F., assassination of, 99, 133, 152 Kes (1969), 335. See also Ken Loach Kiarostami, Abbas, 6–7, 9–11, 18, 22, 27, 349, 353, 358–59 Kierkegaard, Søren 518–20, 523–26, 529, 533–34 kinesthesia, 318, 320 King, Allan, 291–92 King Kong (1933), 177 King Lear, 64 kino pravda, 11, 25, 33, 305–24 Kitchen Sink realism (filmmaking style of), 325–42 Klevan, Andrew, 508n2 knowledge (as philosophical concept), 261, 414–15, 418–20, 423, 426 Kracauer, Siegfried, 26, 302 Kuleshov, Lev, 88 Kvanvig, Jonathan, 419–20, 423 Lacanian/Althusserian film theory, 113 Ladybird, Ladybird (1994), 336 Landesman, Ohad, 9, 560–61 Langer, Lawrence, 129–31, 135–36, 138, 155n24

Lanzmann, Claude, 24, 291–92, 458, 568 LaRocca, David, 45n2, 46n9, 46n16, 47n25, 47n29, 47n38, 48n39, 48n48, 49n70, 50n100, 50n104, 224n35, 536n36, 572n10, 572n13, 573n44, 575n85 Lastra, Jim, 367, 369 Last Year at Marienbad (L’Année dernière à Marienbad, 1961), 499 The Late Show with David Letterman, 537–76 Leacock, Richard, 11, 24, 199 Lee, Spike, 46n9, 118–19 Leviathan (2012), 32, 349, 358n19 Lewis, Michael, 431–52 life-as-it-is, 17, 309, 311, 313, 315–17, 319–20 life caught-unawares, 313, 319–20 Lifton, Robert Jay, 137 Linklater, Richard, 37, 547 The Living Desert (1953), 178–81 Loach, Ken, 325–30, 335–38, 339n5, 339n7, 339n9, 340n17, 341n36 London (UK), 325, 328, 331–32, 335 London Moods (1961), 331–32, 336 long take. See duration and real time The Look of Silence (2014), 15, 535n20 Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003), 542 Lost in Translation (2003), 14–15 The Love Life of the Octopus (1965), 182 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 26, 95, 161–62, 171, 172n7, 226, 312, 352 MacDonald, Scott, 52n133, 225–26, 229–30, 258n6 MacDougall, David, 225, 225, 259 MacNamara, Robert, 457 Makavejev, Dušan, 9, 63–64, 209 Malraux, André, 90 Man on Wire (2008), 28 Manovich, Lev, 34–36 The Man with the Movie Camera/Man with a Movie Camera (1929), 24, 305–24

Index

March of the Penguins (2005), 175 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 177, 187, 226 Marino, Lori, 397–98 Marker, Chris, 20, 111n10, 119, 428n6, 567–68 Marx, Groucho, 203 Marx, Karl, 283n7, 310, 339n8 Massumi, Brian, 351, 354 materialism, anti-, 476; documentary, 343–60; new, 348, 351–52, 354–56, 358n18; speculative, 352–53, 356 May, William, 134 Maysles, Albert and David, 11, 24, 146, 199, 567 McDowell, John, 467–68 McElwee, Ross, 291–92 McGrath, Charles, 538–40 McLane, Betsy, 424, 426 media archaeology, 356 mediation, radical, 350, 355, 358 medium (of film), 1–2, 23, 27, 34, 61, 72, 80, 136–37, 165, 218, 220, 320, 481, 542; as embalming agent, 35, 52n147, 345 Medium Cool (1969), 1–2, 24, 45 The Meetings of Anna (Les rendez-vous d’Anna, 1978), 14 Méliès, Georges, 26, 312, 549 Melville, Herman, 559 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 153n2, 154n13, 467 metadocumentary, 10, 24, 37–41 metaethnofiction, 15, 24 method acting, 552–55, 558; counter-, 562 metteurs-en-scène, 76, 386 Meunier, Jean-Pierre, 155n25 Microcosmos (1996), 186–87 migrant, undocumented (sans papiers), 261, 274 migratory aesthetics, 264–68, 270, 282, 283n11 Milestone, Lewis, 18 Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days, 2004), 261, 264–73, 278, 280, 282, 284n14

613

Miller, Bennett, 438–39 mimesis, 4–5, 45, 46n12, 75, 229–30, 472–73, 482–83, 488; Vertov’s disdain for, 316 Ministry of Public Enlightenment and Propaganda, 18 Minnelli, Vicente, 386 mise-en-abîme, 39, 344, 567 mise-en-scène, 2, 76, 146, 194, 563 Mitchell, Joseph, 538–39, 571n5 Mitman, Gregg, 175–76, 190n8 Mitry, Jean, 31–33 Mizoguchi, Kenji, 193, 498 Moana (1926), 25–26, 172n3, 177, 549 mock (fake) news, 18–19 mockumentary, xv, 10, 24, 39, 539–40, 550, 555, 559–60, 563–65, 573n36, 574n50 modesty, 261–62, 277, 279 Mogwai, 462 Mongoloid (1978), 177 Moneyball (2011), 438–39 montage, 20, 78–79, 84–91, 93n29, 201, 346–47, 542; Bruce Conner and, 177; disruptive associative, 316–17, 324n61; formalist, 328; higher mathematics of, 316; news, 18; rhythms of, 141 Monteverdi, Claudio, 503 Moore, Michael, 17, 41, 95, 102, 110n3, 552 Morris, Benny, 249n2 Morris, Errol, 6, 17, 30, 40, 46n16, 155n26, 424–27, 453–58, 533, 536n35, 541, 572n13; A Brief History of Time (1991), 426, 457; Standard Operating Procedure (2008), 453–58; The Thin Blue Line (1988), 6, 28, 40, 155n26, 424, 426–27, 457, 541, 564; use of reenactment, 6, 17, 46n16, 424, 426–27, 456–57, 541. See also reenactment motherhood, 275–77 Mouffe, Chantal, 264, 282, 283n8

614 Index

A Movie (1958), 29 Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936), 60–73 Mulvey, Laura, 35 Munro, Rona, 336, 341n38 Murdoch, Iris, 410 Murnau, F. W., 81, 88, 90–91, 182 Murray, Timothy, 35, 226, 238n5 Museum of Modern Art nonfiction retrospective (1939), 161, 169–70 Musser, Charles, 169, 172n1, 173n23 Muybridge, Eadweard, 177, 226 Myles, Eileen, 255 Nagel, Thomas, 395–412 Nakba Archive, 247–48, 252–53, 258n12 Nanook of the North (1922), 10, 47n33, 109–10, 168–69, 170, 172n3, 177, 189n5, 354, 426, 429n50, 499, 564, 568; and Kunuk the Hunter, Kunuk Uncovered (Documentary Now!), 564. See also reenactment Napoleon, 107–8 narration, voice-over, 2, 32, 38, 67, 101–2, 120, 198–99, 218, 258n7, 263, 269–70, 292, 327, 346, 381, 422–25, 517, 520, 562 narrative, 263, 269, 276; historical, 22, 244, 246; structure, 22, 108, 112n18, 119, 402, 406; voice, 264–73 narrative theory. See narratology narratology, narratological, 42, 264–70 Nashville (1975), 366 nature film, 175–91; “nature film” versus “wildlife film,” 175 neo-colonialism, 336, 338 neorealism (Italian), 13–14, 85, 88, 93n25, 93n26, 288–90, 306–7 Newman, Barnett, 232 new materialist ontology, 355–56 new materialist philosophy, 348, 351, 354–56, 358n18 News from Home (1976), 14, 500–501, 507 newsreel, 12, 18–20, 93n26, 161

New Wave, 375; British, 327; French (La Nouvelle Vague), 193, 375, 497 Nichols, Bill, 2, 24, 38, 95, 156n32, 176, 225, 258n7, 314, 344, 453–58, 523, 535n15, 549, 572n13, 573n41; six modes of documentary film, 24 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 58, 69–70, 216, 309–10 Night and Fog (1955), 24, 152, 413–14, 421–23 Night Mail (1936), 102 Nightmares (Mary Koszmary, 2007), 243 No Home Movie (2015), 506–8 Nolan, Christopher, 549 No Lies (1973), 103 nonfiction film, early, 159–74 Norman, Michael, 408 Nothing is Missing (2006–12), 33, 263, 273–82 Nuridsany, Claude, 186–87, 191n25 Oates, Joyce Carol, 256 objective phenomenology, 397–98 object-oriented ontology, 356 observational (cinema), 11, 24, 258n7, 289–90, 345, 347, 381, 505, 528, 568, 573n36. See also witnessing Olivier, Lawrence, 106–7 On Our Own Terms: Moyers on Dying (2000), 130 On the Waterfront (1954), 13 Operation Shylock: A Confession, 569–71 Ophüls, Max, 386 Oppenheimer, Joshua, 15, 517–18, 520, 522, 526–34 othering, other 270, 272 oubli de soi [self-abnegation], 463–64 Painlevé, Jean, 43, 175, 178, 181–84, 189n5, 190n16, 190n18, 190n19, 191n20, 358n13; definition of documentary, 189n5; science and surrealism, 182–83

Index

painting (and cinema), 5, 28, 33–37, 59, 78, 84, 96–100, 111n9, 111n15, 156n28, 343–60, 370, 566; cave, 209–24; landscape, 225–240. See also animation Palestine, 243–50, 251–60 Panh, Rithy, 37, 458 Paradise Lost (1996), 40, 541 parapraxis, 67 Paravel, Véréna, 32–33, 349 Parreno, Philippe, 461–68 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 497 passion, 261–62 Peckinpah, Sam, 133 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 370 Pennebaker, D. A., 11, 24, 199, 567 Pérennou, Marie, 186–87 performativity, performative, 267 Perkins, V. F., 34, 75, 381–94; concept of credibility, 75, 91n2 Petric, Vlada, 17, 306, 314, 316–18, 324n61 phenomenology of death (in cinema), 125–56; semiotic, 153n2. See also semiology The Philadelphia Story (1940), 62–66 Phoenix, Joaquin, 537–76 Phoenix, River, 546, 553–54 photographs, 57–74; as evidence, 251, 255–57, 259; as interruption, 257 photographic basis of cinema, 57–74 On Photography, 57–58 Pickpocket (1959), 495–96, 499 Pitt, Brad, 438, 440, 445, 542 Pixar, 36 Planet Earth (2006), 175, 179, 185–86, 191n23 Plantinga, Carl, 7–9, 22–23, 25–30, 38–40, 113–24, 413–430, 432–33, 439, 450n3, 450n4, 450n5, 534n2, 539 Plato, 3–7, 19, 35, 44, 213, 217, 309–10, 321n14, 348–51; idealism and, 348; realism and, 369 Poe, Edgar Allan, 69

615

poeisis, 309, 321n14 police, 16, 41, 270 the political, 12, 16, 36, 171, 245, 334 politics: cultural, 122; gender, 179, 183; and the political, 264–66, 282, 283n8 Polley, Sarah, 517–18, 520–21, 523–26, 529–30, 533, 534n3, 535n17, 535n18, 552, 561 Ponech, Trevor, 29–30 Poole, Roger, 141, 153 Portlandia (2011– ), 564 post-cinematic, 34, 352–54 posthumanism, 356 praxis, 43–44, 307–11, 315–16, 319–21, 321n14 presumptive assertion, film of, 8, 29, 99, 111n11, 416, 539, 547–50, 566, 573n36 Princess Diana, death of, 128 privacy, 262, 291, 298 problem of other minds, the, 395–412 profilmic (events and materialities), 1–3, 30, 34–37, 78–80, 96–97, 117, 141, 349, 354–55, 358n19, 370 propaganda, 40; in documentary production, 327–28 pseudodocumentary, 9–10, 24, 39, 177, 515, 519, 539–40, 550, 554–55, 567, 573n36 Pudovkin, Vsevolod, 78, 363 Punk’d (2003–15), 538 Rancière, Jacques, 255, 259, 501–3, 508n8, 509n11, 509n12, 560 Rasputin and the Empress (1932), 21 realism: social (British cinematic tradition of), 334, 338, 339n9; spatial, 75–94; viewpoint and, 381–94 reality fiction, 25, 381, 386 real time/real-time, 2, 7, 13–15, 83–84, 200–201, 352, 462, 465, 499, 542. See also duration Reasonable Doubt (2015), 261–62 reception studies/theory, 27–28, 112–24, 370

616 Index

reenactment, 99, 110, 328, 349, 414, 416–17, 425–27, 517–33, 535n21, 552, 565. See also Errol Morris, use of reenactment; and Nanook of the North referentiality, 255, 455, 556 reflexivity, 24, 38–39, 60, 144, 147–48, 151, 156n30, 201, 231, 319–20, 347, 353, 559 Removed (1999), 29 Les Rendez-vous d’Anna (1978), 505 Renoir, Jean, 79–89, 92n8, 92n13, 142, 193 Renov, Michael, 21, 225 Report (1967), 133 Reporters’ Dilemma, 150 representationalism, 344, 347–48, 356 representation, asserted veridical, 30, 417, 423, 432, 450n5, 517 Resnais, Alain, 24, 152, 413, 421, 429n35, 458, 499. See also Night and Fog Respighi, Ottorino, 29 rhizome, 270 rhythm, of early fiction films, 168; montage, 141; narrative and, 267–68; Rancière on fiction and, 502; time-lapse and, 358n19; Vertov and film, 318 Ricciardi, Laura, 41 Richardson, Tony, 333 Riefenstahl, Leni, 12, 103–4, 108 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 502, 506 Rodowick, D. N., 34–36 Roemer, Michael, 137 Roger and Me (1989), 28, 41, 102–3, 110n3 Rohmer, Eric, 193, 562 Rolling Stones, 146 The Room (Le Chambre, 1972), 14 Rosselleni, Roberto, 13, 85–86, 88, 193. See also neorealism (Italian) Roth, Philip, 549, 569–71 Rotha, Paul, 25, 27

Rothko, Mark, 232–34 Rothman, William, 26–27, 193–208, 426 Rouch, Jean, 193–208, 552, 563 Rules of the Game (La règle du je, 1939), 80, 82–85, 93n29, 142–43. See also Jean Renoir Russell, Ken, 326–29, 331–38, 340n26 Russian Ark (2002), 13–14 Russian formalism, 90, 328. See also Soviet filmmaking Said, Edward, 246, 249n4, 249n9, 250n13, 451n14 sainthood, 296–97, 300–302 Sansho the Bailiff (1954), 498 Sans Soleil (1983), 20, 111n10, 119, 428n6, 567–68 Santner, Eric, 251 Sarris, Andrew, 76 Saturday Night Live (SNL), 561, 564 Saturday Night and Sunday Morning (1960), 337 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 310, 370 Schindler’s List (1993), 456 Schiller, Friedrich, 502–3 Schilling, Derek, 293 Schoedsack, Ernest B., 177 School Daze (1988), 118–19 Scott, A. O., 431, 434, 480, 571n5 Scott, Clive, 257, 259n25 The Seahorse (1934), 181–83 Seal Island (1948), 178 Sebald, W. G., 257, 469–94 Sekula, Allan, 326–30, 336 self-questioning, 63 self-referentiality, 39, 319–20 semiology, of death, 130–45 Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL), 32, 252, 258n6 sensory experience, 213, 351, 470–71 Seyrig, Delphine, 499 Shelagh Delaney’s Salford (1960), 333–34, 337 Sherman, Cindy, 572n17 Shoah (1985), 24, 291, 568

Index

Shrimp Stories (Histoires des crevettes, 1964), 182 Shub, Esfir, 18 sign-function, 135–36, 141–43, 154n17 sign-vehicle, 135, 154n17 silence, 261, 270, 273–74, 279–80 silent (film), 75–94, 363–74. See also sound Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993), 149, 153n7, 155n19, 156n35 Silverman, Kaja, 366 simulacra, 36–37, 45, 138, 567, 572n13 simulation, 35–36, 98, 138–40, 155n26, 226–28, 235–38, 417, 528, 568, 575n85 Sirk, Douglas, 563 skepticism (philosophical concept of), 5, 57–74, 211, 214, 217, 544 Sniadecki, J. P., 32, 258n6 snuff (film), 16, 143–45, 302 Sobchack, Vivian, 36, 125–56 solipsism, 466 somatogram, 67–68, 71 Somewhere (2010), 14, 38 Sontag, Susan, 20, 57–58, 92n4, 251, 345 Sorkin, Aaron, 438–39 sound (film), 75–94, 311, 363–74; as afterthought, 363–64; Dogma 95 understanding of, 376; separating image from, 387, 390; studies, 42, 370; synchronized, 10, 15, 77–78, 290, 363–64, 381 sovereign citizenship, 246–47 Soviet filmmaking, 78, 86, 90–91, 306–7, 311–12, 339n9, 349. See also Russian formalism Spain (Ispaniya, 1939), 18 speech act, 29, 265 Spinoza, Baruch, 272, 280–82, 346, 356 This Sporting Life (1963), 337 stare (human), 139–40, 147, 149. See also gaze Star Wars (1977), 116, 119, 466 stateless persons, 245 Staudte, Wolfgang, 13

617

Stewart, Garrett, 35, 65 Still Life (2007), 32, 251–54 Stone, Oliver, 119 Stories We Tell (2012), 30, 520–26, 529–30, 551–52, 560 Strassler, Karen, 259n14 Stroheim, Erich von, 81, 88–91 Struth, Thomas, 463–64 style, filmmaking, 325–28, 330–39 subjectivism (in film theory), 113–124 surrealism, 32, 51n127, 182–83, 190n19, 204, 483, 533, 568 surveillance, 10, 41, 417, 469, 573n36 Sweetgrass (2009), 11–12, 32 Sweet Movie (1974), 9, 63, 65, 209 Swing Time (1936), 220–22 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1968), 24 synecdoche, 254, 320, 391; visual, 5, 45 Synecdoche, New York (2008), 567 syuzhet, 22, 49n75 tabloid media, 550, 554. See also journalism, gossip taboos (in cinematic representation), 125–56 Tangerine (2015), 34 Tarantino, Quentin, 1 A Taste of Honey (1961), 333 Tate, Allen, 496 thanatos, and eros, 127–28 The Thin Blue Line (1988), 6, 28, 40, 155n26, 424, 426–27, 457, 541, 564 Thompson, Kristin, 36, 387 Thoreau, Henry David, 58, 65, 69–70, 211, 214–17, 222, 230, 239n12, 346; Walden, 214–15 time: capitalist, 266; escape from, 217, 222; mixed temporality and, 266–68; mythological relation to, 210–11, 217–18, 222; paradox of, 211–12, 217; travel, 212, 217 Tobias, Ronald B., 175 Toland, Greg, 84 Toute une nuit (1982), 495

618 Index

trace: testimony vs., 28, 95–112; narrative and, 104–6 trauma, 132, 261–65, 269, 275–80, 288, 291, 404, 453, 455, 485 Trier, Lars von, 11, 27, 48n39, 375–77, 562 The Trip (2010), 20 The Trip to Italy (2014), 20 A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902), 549 Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens, 1935), 12, 103 True-Life Adventures (Disney series), 178–84, 187 Truffaut, François, 76, 193 truth, xv–xvi, 1–31, 287–304, 379–80, 431–52, 517–36 ubiquitous nonfiction (and fiction), 13–14, 27, 34 Uman, Naomi, 29 understanding, 414, 418–27, 429n35 Up series (1964– ), 37, 547–48 The Vampire (Le Vampire, 1945), 182, 184 Vampyr (1932), 78, 121 The Vanishing Prairie (1954), 179–181 Varda, Agnès, 24, 291–92, 497 Verhoeff, Han, 278–79 vérité. See cinéma vérité Vertov, Dziga, xv, 11, 17, 24–25, 33, 60, 76, 78, 194–95, 305–21, 349, 568 Victoria (2015), 12–14 video forensics, 41 Vietnam, 149–52, 382–83, 458 the “view” aesthetic, 159–74; documentary vs., 170; genres of, 164–66 viewpoint: realism and, 381–94; recording and, 391 Vinterberg, Thomas, 11, 375–77, 562 virtual-reality (VR) technologies, 2–3, 549 Vogel, Amos, 5, 30–31, 125, 128, 130, 134, 139

voice, narrative, 264–73 The Vow of Chastity, 375–77 Walton, Kendall, 97, 110n4, 111n9, 111n14 Waltz with Bashir (2008), 37 war: documentaries, 13, 103, 147–48, 169–70; films, 18–19, 30 The War Game (1965), 30, 95, 539 Warhol, Andy, 462 War of the Worlds (1939), 538 Watercolor: Fall Creek (2013), 232–35 Weil, Simone, 211, 215–17, 222 Welles, Orson, 39, 81, 84–86, 88, 538, 560–61 Wexler, Haskell, 1–2 What You Take for Granted (1983), 511–16 Where No Vultures Fly (1951), 86–87 While We’re Young (2014), 540 White, Hayden, 21–22 The Wild Bunch (1969), 133 Wilkenfeld, Daniel A., 420, 429n34 Williams, Alan, 367–68 Williams, Linda, 155n26, 334, 511–16 Wilson, George, 388 Winckelmann, Johann, 35, 502 Window Shopping (1986), 495 The Wind That Shakes the Barley (2006), 337. See also Ken Loach Winged Migration (2001), 175, 179, 227 Winston, Brian, 351, 354 A Winter’s Tale, 64 Wiseman, Frederick, 24–25, 27, 381–94, 425, 563 witnessing (and cinema), 2–3, 9, 11, 16, 35, 41, 47n38, 75, 149, 252, 261, 270–71, 520–21, 553; false, 551. See also observational (cinema) Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 58–60, 63, 414, 420–21, 470–72, 475, 478–89, 492n19, 492n20, 505, 572n17 The Wizard of Oz (1939), 117–18 The Wolfpack (2015), 552 Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 439

Index

A Woman’s Face (1941), 64–65 Wordsworth, William, 65 wrestling, professional, 544, 550, 561–62, 568, 572n24 Wright, Basil, 102, 327–28 Wright, Robin, 549 writing in film, 309–11, 319–322 Wyler, William, 19, 81, 84–86, 88 Zagzebski, Linda, 418–21, 423 Zapruder, Abraham, film by, 99, 133, 146, 152

Zavattini, Cesare, 13, 85, 302, 497 Zeitlinger, Peter, 224n33 Zelig (1983), 20, 564–65 Zeno of Elea, 132, 154n11, 211 Zero Dark Thirty (2012), 21, 49n68 Zidane: A Twenty-First Century Portrait (2006), 461–68 Zidane, Zinédine, 461–68 Zinnemann, Fred, 13 Zionism, 248, 249n4, 250n13 Žižek, Slavoj, xv

619

Contributors

Diana Allan is Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at McGill University (Montreal), where she holds a joint appointment with the Institute for the Study of International Development. She was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows (2008–2012), a Guggenheim Fellow (2013), and a Fellow at the Society for the Humanities at Cornell University (2014). A graduate of Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab, she is the director of Still Life (2007), and Terrace of the Sea (2009), and the author of Refugees of the Revolution: Experiences in Palestinian Exile (2013). Rick Altman is Professor Emeritus in the Department of Cinema and Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He is the editor of Sound Theory/Sound Practice (1992) and author of Film/Genre (1999), Silent Film Sound (2004), and A Theory of Narrative (2008). Ariella Azoulay is Professor of Comparative Literature and Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. She is the author of Death’s Showcase (2001), The Regime Which is Not One (2008), The Civil Contract of Photography (2008), and Civil Imagination: A Political Ontology of Photography (2012). Her documentary films include The Angel of History (2000), The Food Chain (2002), and Civil Alliance (2012). Mieke Bal is a cultural theorist, former Academy Professor of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and Founding Director of the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She is the author of Narratology (1985), A Mieke Bal Reader (2006), and Thinking in Film: The Politics of Video Installation According to Eija-Liisa Ahtila (2013). Her films include Three Films on Louise Bourgeois (2004), State 621

622 Contributors

of Suspension (2008), A Long History of Madness (2011), and Madame B (2013). Noël Carroll is Distinguished Professor Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at The Graduate Center, City University of New York. He is the author of Theorizing the Moving Image (1996), Beyond Aesthetics (2001), and The Philosophy of Motion Pictures (2008). Stanley Cavell is the Walter M. Cabot Professor of Aesthetics and the General Theory of Value, Emeritus, at Harvard University. He is the author of The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film (1971/1979), Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (1981), and Contesting Tears: The Hollywood Melodrama of the Unknown Woman (1997). Timothy Corrigan is Professor of English, Cinema Studies, and the History of Art at University of Pennsylvania. He is author of The Essay Film: From Montaigne, After Marker (2011) and The Film Experience (2014, 4th ed., with Patricia White), and editor of The Films of Werner Herzog: Between Mirage and History (1987). Gregory Currie is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of York (UK). He is the author of An Ontology of Art (1989), The Nature of Fiction (1990), Image and Mind: Film, Philosophy, and Cognitive Science (1995), Recreative Minds: Imagination in Philosophy and Psychology (2002), Arts and Minds (2004), Narratives and Narrators (2010), and is an editor of the journal Mind and Language. William Day is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Le Moyne College (Syracuse, New York). He is co-editor of Seeing Wittgenstein Anew (2010, with Victor J. Krebs). Other publications include “Moonstruck, or How to Ruin Everything” in Ordinary Language Criticism (2003) and “I Don’t Know, Just Wait: Remembering Remarriage in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” in The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (2011). Keith Dromm is Associate Professor of Philosophy in the Louisiana Scholars’ College at Northwestern State University. He is the author of Wittgenstein on Rules and Nature (2008) and Sexual Harassment: An Introduction to the Conceptual and Ethical Issues (2012), and co-editor of The Catcher in the Rye and Philosophy (2012, with Heather Salter). K. L. Evans is Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University, formerly Associate Professor of Philosophy and Literature at Yeshiva

Contributors

623

University’s Stern College for Women in New York City, and Assistant Professor of English at the University of Redlands. She is the author of Whale! (2003), One Foot in the Finite: Melville’s Realism Reclaimed (2017), and coeditor of Melville’s Philosophies (2017, with Branka Arsić). Michael Fried is Professor and J. R. Herbert Boone Chair in the Humanities and in the Department of the History of Art at The Johns Hopkins University. He is the author of Absorption and Theatricality (1980), Realism, Writing, Disfiguration (1987), Art and Objecthood (1998), Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before (2008), The Moment of Cararvaggio (2010), and Another Light (2015). Elan Gamaker is an award-winning filmmaker and editor of Itch magazine. His feature films, as writer and director, include Visa/Vie (2010), Ijspaard (Icehorse, 2013), and Saturn (2014). From 2003 to 2009, he was Lecturer at The South Africa School of Motion Picture Medium and Performance, and Cape Peninsula University of Technology. Dan Geva is Senior Lecturer in Documentary Studies and teaches documentary philosophy, history, and practice at Bet-Berl College (Israel), Witzo College of Arts, and Sam Spiegel Film Institute. He has created over twenty-five full-length documentary films. In 2010, as a Schusterman grant laureate, he served as Visiting Scholar at The Johns Hopkins University and Maryland Institute College of Art. Tom Gunning is Edwin A. and Betty L. Bergman Distinguished Service Professor, Department of Art History, Department of Cinema and Media Studies, and the College at The University of Chicago. He is the author of D. W. Griffith and the Origins of American Narrative Film: The Early Years at Biograph (1993), The Films of Fritz Lang: Allegories of Vision and Modernity (2000), and Fantasia of Color in Early Cinema (2015). Garry L. Hagberg is James H. Ottaway Professor of Aesthetics and Philosophy in the Department of Philosophy at Bard College. He held an endowed Chair in the Department of Philosophy at University of East Anglia, Norwich, England from 2006–2009. He is the author of Meaning and Interpretation: Wittgenstein, Henry James and Literary Knowledge (1994), Art as Language: Wittgenstein, Meaning, and Aesthetic Theory (1995), and Describing Ourselves: Wittgenstein and Autobiographical Consciousness (2008); editor of Art and Ethical Criticism (2008), Fictional Characters, Real Problems: The Search for Ethical Content in Literature (2016); and co-editor of A Companion to the Philosophy of Literature (2009, with Walter Jost). Hagberg is editor

624 Contributors

of the journal Philosophy and Literature, and is on the editorial board of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. Werner Herzog is a filmmaker, part of New German Cinema, whose documentary films include Fata Morgana (1972), Lessons of Darkness (1992), Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997), Grizzly Man (2005), and Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010); feature films include Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Fitzcarraldo (1982), and Rescue Dawn (2007). He has won the Silver Bear (Berlin), Best Director and Prix du Jury (Cannes), was nominated for an Academy Award, and convened the Rogue Film School. Karen D. Hoffman is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Hood College (Frederick, Maryland). She has contributed essays to The Philosophy of Stanley Kubrick (2007), The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese (2007), The Philosophy of Spike Lee (2011), The Philosophy of the Coen Brothers (updated edition, 2012), The Philosophy of Clint Eastwood (2014), and The Philosophy of Christopher Nolan (2017). Selmin Kara is Assistant Professor of Documentary and New Media at OCAD University (Toronto). She is the coeditor of Contemporary Documentary (2015, with Daniel Marcus). Her work has appeared in Studies in Documentary Film, the Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media, Poiesis, Sequence, and Music and Sound in Nonfiction Film: Real Listening. She coedited a special theme issue on “Unruly Documentary Artivism” for Studies in Documentary Film (2015, with Camilla Møhring Reestorff). David LaRocca is Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the State University of New York College at Cortland; Visiting Scholar in the Department of English at Cornell University; and Lecturer in Screen Studies in the Department of Cinema, Photography, and Media Arts at the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. He is the author, most recently, of Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor (2013), and editor of The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman (2011) and The Philosophy of War Films (2014); his articles have appeared in Afterimage, Epoché, Liminalities, Film and Philosophy, Journalism, Media and Cultural Studies, The Journal of Religion and Business Ethics, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, and The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. His latest documentary film, Brunello Cucinelli: A New Philosophy of Clothes (2013) premiered at the New York City International Film Festival. [email protected] www.davidlarocca.org. Scott MacDonald is Visiting Professor of Art History at Hamilton College (Clinton, New York). He is the author of The Garden in the Machine: A Field

Contributors

625

Guide to Independent Films about Place (2001), Cinema 16: Documents Toward a History of the Film Society (2002), American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge (2012), Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema (2015), and Binghamton Babylon: Voices from the Cinema Department, 1967–77 (2015). Jennifer L. McMahon is Professor of Philosophy, English, and Humanities at East Central University (Ada, Oklahoma). She edited The Philosophy of Tim Burton (2014) and coedited The Philosophy of the Western (2010, with Steve Csaki). She has contributed essays to Seinfeld and Philosophy (2000), The Matrix and Philosophy (2002), The Lord of the Rings and Philosophy (2003), The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese (2007), The Philosophy of Science Fiction Film (2007), and Death in Classic and Contemporary Film (2013). Bill Nichols is Professor in the School of Cinema at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Newsreel: Documentary Filmmaking on the American Left (1980), Ideology and the Image: Social Representation as a Semiotic Process (1981), Representing Reality: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture (1994), Introduction to Documentary (2001, 2010), Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies (2010), editor of Maya Deren and the American Avant-Garde (2001), and coeditor of Cinema’s Alchemist: The Films of Péter Forgács (2011, with Michael Renov). Claudia Pederson is Assistant Professor of Art History, New Media, and Technology in the School of Art, Design, and Creative Industries at Wichita State University; previously she was Assistant Professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College. She has published on games, digital photography, and technological art in the journals Afterimage, Intelligent Agent, and Eludamos, and in the proceedings of the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA), Design Automation Conference (DAC), and Human Computer Interaction (CHI). V. F. Perkins is Honorary Professor in Film Studies, and was Senior Lecturer (1978–2004), in the Department of Film and Television Studies at the University of Warwick (UK), where he cofounded the film department in 1978. He is the author of Film as Film: Understanding and Judging Movies (1972), The Magnificent Ambersons (1999), and The Rules of the Game (La règle du je, 2012). Carl Plantinga is Professor in the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences at Calvin College (Michigan). He is the author of Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997, 2010), Moving Viewers: American Film

626 Contributors

and the Spectator’s Experience (2009), and editor of Passionate Views: Film, Cognition, and Emotion (1999, with Greg M. Smith), and The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film (2009, with Paisley Livingston). William Rothman is Professor of Cinema and Interactive Media in the School of Communication at the University of Miami. He is the author of Hitchcock: The Murderous Gaze (1982, 2nd edition 2012), Documentary Film Classics (1997), The “I” of the Camera: Essays in Film Criticism, History, and Aesthetics (2003), and Must We Kill the Thing We Love? Emersonian Perfectionism and the Films of Alfred Hitchcock (2014). He is editor of the highly regarded Studies in Film series published by Cambridge University Press. Vivian Sobchack is Professor Emerita in the Department of Film, Television, and Digital Media at UCLA. She is the author of The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience (1991), Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1997), and Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture (2004), and edited The Persistence of History: Cinema, Television, and the Modern Event (1995) and Meta-Morphing: Visual Transformation and the Culture of Quick Change (1999). She was the first woman elected President of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, and is on the Board of Directors of the American Film Institute. Lars von Trier is a Danish film director, who with Thomas Vinterberg, cofounded the Dogma 95 movement. He directed Breaking the Waves (1996), The Idiots (1998), The Five Obstructions (2003), Dogville (2003), Manderlay (2005), Antichrist (2009), Melancholia (2011), and Nymphomaniac (2013). Europa (1991) won the Prix du Jury, and Dancer in the Dark (2000) won the Palme d’Or, at the Cannes Film Festival. Thomas Vinterberg is a Danish film director who, with Lars von Trier, cofounded the Dogma 95 movement. He directed It’s All About Love (2003), Dear Wendy (2005), Far from the Madding Crowd (2015), and The Commune (2016). The Hunt (Jagten, 2012) was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Celebration (Festen, 1998) won the Prix du Jury at the Cannes Film Festival. Charles Warren is Lecturer on Film at Boston University, and formerly at Harvard University. He is the author of T.S. Eliot on Shakespeare (1986), the editor of Beyond Document: Essays on Nonfiction Film (1996), and coeditor of Jean-Luc Godard’s Hail Mary: Women and the Sacred in Film (1993, with Maryel Locke). He worked with filmmaker Robert Gardner to produce

Contributors

627

the volumes Making  Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film (2008) and Human Documents: Eight Photographers (2009), and a collection of Gardner’s essays,  Just Representations (2010). He has contributed to The WileyBlackwell History of American Film and to books on Jean Rouch, Alfred Hitchcock, and Michael Haneke. Bernadette Wegenstein is Research Professor of Media Studies and Founding Director of the Center for Advanced Media Studies at The Johns Hopkins University; she is also a documentary filmmaker. She is the author of Getting Under the Skin: Body and Media Theory (2006) and The Cosmetic Gaze: Body Modification and the Construction of Beauty (2012), and editor of Reality Made Over: The Culture of Reality Television Makeover Shows (2008). Her documentary films include Made Over in America (2007), See You Soon Again (2011), The Good Breast (2015), and Devoti Tutti (2016). Linda Williams is Professor in the Departments of Film & Media and Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Figures of Desire: A Theory and Analysis of Surrealist Film (1981, 1991), Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the Frenzy of the Visible (1989, 1999), Viewing Positions: Ways of Seeing Film (1994), Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Town to O. J. Simpson (2001); editor of Porn Studies (2004); and co-editor of Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (1984, with Mary Ann Doane) and Re-inventing Film Studies (2000, with Christine Gledhill). Patricia R. Zimmermann is Professor of Screen Studies in the Roy H. Park School of Communications at Ithaca College and Codirector of the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. She is the author of Reel Families: A Social History of Amateur Film (1995), States of Emergency: Documentaries, Wars, Democracies (2000), Thinking Through the Digital: Transnational Environments and Locative Places (2015, with Dale Hudson), and Openings, Closings, and Thresholds of Independent Public Media (2016), and editor of The Flaherty: Four Decades in the Cause of Independent Cinema (1996, with Erik Barnouw).

AUTHORED, EDITED, AND COEDITED BOOKS BY DAVID LaROCCA On Emerson Emerson’s Transcendental Etudes by Stanley Cavell The Philosophy of Charlie Kaufman Estimating Emerson: An Anthology of Criticism from Carlyle to Cavell Emerson’s English Traits and the Natural History of Metaphor The Philosophy of War Films A Power to Translate the World: New Essays on Emerson and International Culture The Bloomsbury Anthology of Transcendental Thought: From Antiquity to the Anthropocene