A Brief History of Documentary: Movements and Modes

7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 27

CHAPTER 2 A Brief History of Documentary: Movements and Modes

Although fictional media dominate much of popular culture today, the history of motion pictures began not with fictional scenarios but with the documentation of daily life. The early years of motion picture development saw a number of individuals around the globe inventing competing systems of photography and exhibition, including Emil and Max Skladanowsky’s Bioskop, Thomas Edison’s Kinetograph, and Louis and Auguste Lumière’s Cinématographe. The Lumière brothers are generally credited with the first public exhibition of motion picture images; in 1895, in Paris, they exhibited a program of brief shots of film including Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory/La sortie des usines Lumière (1895). Subsequent screenings included works such as Arrival of a Train at the Station/L’arrivée d’un train en gare (1896), which folklore proclaims made audiences jump from their seats as the train approached on screen. The Lumière brothers quickly trained operators and sent them around the globe to bring back works such as The Pyramids/Les pyramides (vue générale) (1897) for public screening. These short programs of actualités toured major cities, amazing audiences and cementing a collective fascination with moving images that has only grown and normalized itself into our visual culture. The history of documentary is not a linear one specific to a single nation. Rather, it is one of concurrent developments in multiple cultural contexts, all intersecting one another. This chapter does not seek to provide a comprehensive history of documentary, but rather it introduces specific technological shifts and cultural movements that have precipitated particular documentary forms, each offering potential structures and formal approaches to your projects today.

Figure 2.1 Frames from three early Lumière ﬁlms. From left to right: Workers Leaving the Lumière Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Factory, Arrival of a Train at the Station, and The Pyramids all transcribed real moments of the lived and natural world.

Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [11 March 2019]. Created from rmit on 2019-03-11 00:32:13. 7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 28

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Scholar Bill Nichols termed these forms modes, and critical writing in the early 1990s by Nichols and by Michael Renov further expanded and reﬁned the modes collectively recognized today. For our purposes, we will build upon the six prevailing modes—reﬂexive, poetic, expository, observational, participatory, and performative—and use the work of Michael Renov to add two additional modes deserving discrete status of their own: the autobiographical and the essayistic. Additionally, I’ll propose a ninth, interactive, mode becoming worthy of standalone distinction in our digital moment. Each mode, as we will see, comes with

• its own practical and ideological approaches to representing reality; • a speciﬁc historical context for its creation; and • distinct power dynamics between documentary practitioner, subject, and audience.

This chapter will not only deﬁne documentary modes through these lines of investigation; it will also highlight crucial technological shifts and social movements that produced them. A ﬂuid understanding of both documentary history and modes of production is vital for you to fully analyze the documentaries you watch and to develop your own projects in a rich and responsible fashion.

Robert Flaherty: Character and Story Development

There is always the danger of tracing a cultural history on documentary back to a single “father figure.” Depending on where one starts, that parent could easily be one of several men: the aforementioned Lumières, John Grierson, or Robert Flaherty. An introduction to Flaherty serves as a useful point of departure, however, while also laying groundwork for our discussion of modes. His 1921 film Nanook of the North received international attention and influenced the work of several early movements that we will soon explore. The global actualités of the Lumières gave way to even longer travelogues—films recounting the particulars of a distant destination. With Nanook, the travelogue film was in turn updated. Flaherty took a page from fictional writing, creating audience identification with a specific protagonist, his family, and their arctic world. Flaherty, an American explorer/prospector turned filmmaker, was sent on mapping expeditions by the Canadian Railroad and encountered the indigenous Inuit population of the Hudson Bay region. He began filming the land and its people in an increasingly obsessive fashion, until filmmaking superseded prospecting as his primary mission. A self-critic, he was continually dissatisfied with his short filmstrips, despite public acclaim for them at home. After losing years of footage and work in a fire, he set about with a clean slate, fueled by his past frustrations, to make a compelling and coherent film about the Inuit: “But I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while” (Sherwood 4). The finished product, Nanook of the North, was named after a single Inuit hunter, who, along with his family, became the protagonist of Flaherty’s film. This in itself was already an Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright innovation for film—creating a central character for audiences to identify with. Flaherty then adopted a year-in-the-life structure to hold various sequences together into a cohesive

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Figure 2.2 Frames from Nanook of the North. From left to right: Nanook in closeup, on the hunt, and spearing a walrus; Nanook’s sled dogs sit outside the igloo for the night. Flaherty’s film evidences the value of character identification and storytelling to documentary practice, but its formal transparency and narrative flow mask the degree to which the portrayal of Inuit life on screen is a construct.

narrative, never before achieved in the nonfiction realm. This narrative coherence, character identification, and unique window onto an existence unseen by most Westerners made the film an immediate international success. But the film’s unity and flow effectively masked a range of practices by Flaherty that led to early forms of ethnographic documentary that have since been criticized and dissembled by critics and practitioners alike. Erik Barnouw’s research and writing on Flaherty and Nanook portray a strong collaboration between the men and a vested interest by Nanook in the cause of the film. But Flaherty had decided he wanted to chronicle not the Inuit existence of the 1920s but rather the “authentic” Inuit life style pre-contact with Westerners. He therefore instructed his subjects to live and perform in front of the lens in the manner of their ancestral traditions. One might argue this affords Nanook a preservational function, but it also put Flaherty’s subjects in unnecessary danger at times. Barnouw recounts a passage from Flaherty’s diary in which the filmmaker describes wanting to film a walrus hunt as it was done before contact with explorers introduced firearms. Nanook and his fellows agreed to hunt with harpoons for the sake of the camera and were dragged and thrown about by a harpooned walrus. Flaherty wrote, “I filmed and filmed and filmed—The men—calling me to end the struggle by rifle—so fearful were they about being pulled into the sea.” Flaherty admitted to having kept on filming, pretending he had not understood their pleas (Barnouw 37). The success of Nanook catalyzed a character-based, narrative approach to documenting reality, but it also spawned a genre of films about native cultures and their ways that evolved into a problematic tradition of ethnographic film (analyzed in Chapter 1), with distorted power dynamics between investigators and their subjects.

Foregrounding Form: The Reflexive Mode

In the reﬂexive mode, the act of making a documentary is explicitly acknowledged or referenced within the work. The producers call attention to the constructed nature of documentary media rather than trying to conceal the technical processes and their hand in shaping representations of reality. Our historicizing and analysis of this mode will reveal, however, that reﬂexivity can be introduced through a wide variety of formal and narrative Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright approaches, each with distinctly different representational aims.

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Soviet Montage

In the 1920s, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, became international voices, proclaiming a fervent sense of cinema’s social utility and proposing distinctive formal approaches to the cinematic treatment of reality. With his notion of montage theory, Eisenstein argued for a reflexive cinema that called attention to the formal processes of filmmaking rather than trying to create a formally transparent illusion of reality on screen for the sake of escapist narratives and passive spectatorship. He argued that editing should not create continuity, but rather conflict— conflict of light, mood, rhythm, graphical properties, and ideas. Meaning in cinema did not come from the individual shots, but rather through ideas spawned by their collision. Each edit should clash formal properties and cultural ideas against one another, provoking audiences to make new associations about society and its structures. An example of intellectual montage can be found in Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) after the Potemkin has fired upon the general’s headquarters in retaliation for the Odessa Steps massacre of civilians. Eisenstein films three separate lion statues in different states of repose and montages the shots together, making it appear that one stone lion has come alive and risen up on its haunches. This impossibility metaphorically underscores the momentous nature of the populist uprising and the maritime mutiny against tsarist control that Eisenstein’s film memorializes. Eisenstein’s approach to reality involved a penchant for casting nonactors but was unabashed in its use of historical reenactment and performance. Filmmaker Dziga Vertov challenged Eisenstein, disavowing such dramatized approaches to cultural representation and seeking reality-based claims to the world around him. But Vertov’s notions of formally representing reality were hardly the stuff of mimetic traditions, where artists seek to create a one-to-one correlation between what they see and how they render it. Writing in “From Kino- Eye to Radio-Eye” in 1929, Vertov heralds the apparatus of the film camera as the mechanical eye that can surpass the limitations of human sight. He calls for a reflexive cinema, openly showing the role of the camera as a translator of reality rather than downplaying its mechanical intervention:

Kino-eye means the conquest of space, the visual linkage of people throughout the entire world based on the continuous exchange of visible fact, of film-documents as opposed to the exchange of cinematic or theatrical presentations. . . . Kino-eye plunges into the seeming chaos of life to find in life itself the response to an assigned theme. . . . To edit; to wrest, through the camera, whatever is most typical, most useful, from life; to organize the film pieces wrested from life into a meaningful rhythmic visual order, a meaningful visual phrase, an essence of “I see.”

(xxvi) Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Figure 2.3 Three successive shots from Battleship Potemkin. Through montage, a reclining stone lion seems to wake and rise to his haunches in response to cannon ﬁre.

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In reflexive documentaries, the formal processes of media production, combined with the audience’s awareness they are watching a mechanical representation of reality, are not minimized but rather celebrated. Vertov heralded the ways that the camera’s kino-eye could stop time, slow it down, speed it up, and reverse it. Editing could make associations that were intellectual or emotional rather than ones governed by the realities and limitations of our physical world and our own vision. Vertov’s experiments and writings eventually led to the release of Man with a Movie Camera in 1929. In this reflexive documentary, Soviet society, in all its beautiful, ugly, leisured, and labored forms, is united with the machines of industry, transport, and photography via a day-in-the-life structuring. Vertov introduces the film with a manifesto of sorts, laying out his aims to audiences in a series of on-screen text cards:

The film Man with a Movie Camera represents an experiment in the cinematic transmission of visual phenomena without the use of intertitles (a film without intertitles) without the help of a script (a film without script) without the help of a theatre (a film without actors, without sets, etc.). This new experimentation work by kino-eye is directed towards the creation of an authentically international absolute language of cinema—absolute kinography—on the basis of its complete separation from the language of theatre and literature.

An astonishing feat of choreographed image and sound (the film was silent, but Vertov left detailed notes for a live musical accompaniment), Man with a Movie Camera satisfies all five of Eisenstein’s components of montage (meter, rhythm, tone, association, and intellect) to artfully construct its claims. Along with the film’s formal reflexivity, Vertov also incorporated reflexive components into his narrative. As the title suggests, this day in the life of the Soviet Union is framed through the eyes of a filmmaker character, the “man” with the movie camera, played by Vertov’s older brother, cinematographer Mikhail Kaufman. We see Kaufman filming in the city streets (shot by a second camera) and then cut to the actual footage, his camera has shot in that moment, getting two very different formal renderings of the same reality. Additional levels of reflexive filmmaking are added by Vertov’s wife, editor Elizaveta Svilova, who uses the principles of montage to create contrapuntal and intellectual tensions between otherwise unrelated shots from different spaces and times. In a sample passage, shots of women receiving beauty treatments in a salon are intercut with women at work in a factory, a coal yard, and at the film-editing table. A woman loading coal into a train car, her face blackened with soot, is cut against a woman at the salon, face blackened with dye as she gets her eyebrows colored and plucked. The collision of these two disparate contexts is jarring, surely registering with audience members as a momentary questioning of class disparity. Vertov then shows Svilova at the editing table, cutting together the film we are watching, creating an analogy between the labor of filmmaking and the labor of the proletariat. Svilova chooses similar actions—a woman pushing fabric under a sewing machine head in a factory and Svilova’s own hands pulling a strip of film off a reel at her editing table—and uses continuity of motion between each action to pull us across the edit, linking these two different spaces and processes in a shared sense of social enterprise. Moments later, a manicurist paints a fingernail; Svilova brushes splicing cement on two pieces of film to join them. Vertov, Kaufman, and Svilova use reflexive strategies of editing, framing, and narrative Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright structure to forge relationships and conversations between seemingly unrelated aspects of Soviet culture. Individuals from all walks of Soviet society are narratively integrated in a

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Figure 2.4 Frames from Man with a Movie Camera. A woman getting her eyebrows dyed is cut against the image of a female laborer whose face is blackened with coal dust, thus contrasting the social disparity of these two visages; a worker pushes a strip of fabric through a sewing machine, and editor Svilova cuts to her own hands pulling a strip of ﬁlm across a viewing box, building an analogy between labors of industry and ﬁlmmaking.

“meanwhile, elsewhere . . . “ structuring, while at the same time, reflexive strategies continually highlight the constructed nature of the film and the ideas its filmmakers seek to express. The works of Vertov and other Soviet montage filmmakers underscore that cinema can be used as a powerful social and ideological tool, with formal properties such as editing used to forge a desired truth from the chaos of existence.

Found Footage, Remix, and Culture Jamming

Principles of montage and reflexivity are at the heart of a range of subsequent movements, first termed found footage or collage filmmaking and now in our digital moment, remix, in which rather than shooting their own images, makers appropriate existing media and recontextualize it through editing to make new truth claims. Such works are inherently reflexive for the ways they call attention to their footage sources, foreground the grammar of editing, and prompt us to question the tropes of mainstream media and the contingency of meaning. In A MOVIE (1958) American artist Bruce Conner cuts together a dizzying array of materials from old industrial films, newsreels, pornography, and b-movies. The alternating collisions and linkages he makes between disparate source materials are both funny and troubling. In one signature passage:

• A seaman on a submarine peers through a periscope • A pinup girl poses on a bed, returning the gaze of the camera (and it seems, the seaman) • The seaman, now agitated, pulls away from the periscope • A ﬁnger pushes a detonator button • An underwater shot shows a torpedo ﬁring and cutting through the ocean • A series of water-level and aerial shots reveal mushroom clouds from various atomic blasts detonating and billowing up over horizon, into the stratosphere • Ocean surfers and rowers culled from a range of sources wipe out and capsize in the wake of massive, turbulent ocean waves.

Conner’s sequencing of images suggests a sort of absurdist sexual and nihilistic causality between the shots, underscoring the power of editing to produce associative meanings. An Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright artist who worked across a range of mediums, Conner would likely not have self-identiﬁed as a documentary ﬁlmmaker, but his acts of appropriation and recontextualization do prompt

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Figure 2.5 Bruce Conner produces seemingly causal relationships between shots appropriated from a range of different original sources in A MOVIE. Frames are in sequential order, left to right, top to bottom.

reflexive contemplations about truth claims and time-based media. Throughout the film, he repeatedly flashes a title card reading “A MOVIE,” reminding us of the medium under scrutiny and challenging us to question both its formal mechanics and our deep-rooted inclination to make connections between and ascribe narrative meaning to any sequencing of shots. The capacity to appropriate existing media and recontextualize it through editing has now become a digital commonplace. Remixing has become a mode of artistic and cultural production across forms of music and video. Quite often these acts rest at the level of pastiche, a term that theorist Frederic Jameson uses to criticize a tendency of postmodern culture to simply recombine existing works without a desire for reflexivity or criticality (17). We can see pastiche in a range of YouTube remixes in which fans do not seek to alter or question the original material but rather to enhance its original meaning (imagine the dance remix of a particular song or a compilation video of baby animals falling asleep). But specific to the subject of documentary, there is the possibility to engage in remix practices that go beyond pastiche to what cultural critic Mark Dery would term culture jamming, works whose reflexive practices are intended to disrupt the mainstream channels of information and commerce that have become normalized in our daily routines. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright For each work in his series of short videos collectively titled States of the Union, Aaron Valdez uses a single television broadcast of a State of the Union address by a standing

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president as his appropriated source material. In Bill Clinton (1998), Valdez extracts all the instances when Clinton cites a numerical statistic in his speech and strings these moments together into a barrage of numbers that lasts a startling forty seconds, ending with, “first, second, two million, two, five, sixty, fifty-five, sixty-five, three thousand, thousand, ten million, three, eighty, thousand, twenty, six, simply . . . zero.” The assembled congressional attendees rise to their feet in resounding applause and Clinton nods humbly, accepting the acknowledgment. The video is playful in its affect, but it “culture jams” this annual presidential performance, prompting us to reflexively question the rhetorical weight we place upon empirical data and statistics as a culture. With these precedents for reflexive montage in mind, refer to the Project 1: Camera-Less Documentary prompt in Appendix A, and make a remix documentary of your own.

Reﬂexive Moments

Montage practices are certainly not the only way to engage the reflexive mode in documentary. Including a shot where the microphone enters the frame, having a filmmaker’s voice off camera asking questions of a subject, or even adjusting focus or framing during a shot all engage varying degrees of reflexivity, reminding audiences of the filmmaker’s presence and the constructed nature of every documentary endeavor. John Ealer and Laura Bialis’s View from the Bridge: Stories from Kosovo (2007) is a documentary exploring tensions among Serbs, Albanians, and Roma gypsies in the divided Kosovo town of Mitrovica. The filmmakers chose not to make themselves a visible part of this documentary. Outsiders to the conflict, they wanted to get out of the way and show the world the divided and tumultuous existence the people of Kosovo still endure since the United States, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the United Nations (UN) suppressed Serbian forces in 1999 and declared an end to conflict in the region. The documentary does contain several reflexive moments, however. While filming Serbian refugees—displaced to a hotel in southern Mitrovica and unable to leave the grounds for fear of reprisals by the surrounding Albanian population—the camera passes an old woman in the hotel stairwell who breaks the film’s transparency, shouting at the crew to leave. “There’s no money. You take our picture but you don’t give us any money. I wait and wait, but nothing happens.” The filmmakers could easily have left this moment out, but they choose to include it, jarring us to another level of consciousness. We are reminded that global media coverage will not necessarily produce action; a region that must still be patrolled by United Nations and European Union (EU) peacekeeping troops eight years after “peace” was declared is still not at peace, despite international rhetoric. By choosing to leave in this momentary indictment, Ealer and Bialis permit a rupture and reflexively acknowledge their own positioning as outsiders. Several of the other modes we will subsequently outline are inherently reflexive—an autobiographical documentary for example necessarily acknowledges the production process and the fact that the central protagonist is also the filmmaker. Whether the reflexive mode is a central organizing principle or a more peripheral, momentary strategy in your project, remember that acknowledging position from which your project is being produced can go far in countering the myths of transparency, objectivity, and singular truth, or the representational gap between maker and subject critiqued in Chapter 1, providing audiences with greater ability to make their own informed assessments of the truth claims being Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright proffered.

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Ways of Seeing: Avant-Gardes and the Poetic Mode

While Dziga Vertov was taking to the streets of Odessa, Minsk, and Kiev with his kino-eye, Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens set out in Amsterdam to produce Rain/Regen (1929), a twelve- minute film that chronicles the arrival and passage of a rainstorm on an Amsterdam afternoon. Deceptively fluid, the film actually entailed two years of shooting multiple rainstorms and vantage points onto the city. At first silent, a later collaboration with Lou Lichtveld in 1932 added music and sound effects to the mix. Composer Hanns Eisler was later inspired by the film to compose his piece “Fourteen Ways to Describe Rain” in 1941. Rain’s subject matter may seem trivial at first for such a long investment of time and energy, but Ivens’s film remains a classic text offering several insights into the possibilities of a poetic mode in documentary, where makers seek out inventive or alternative approaches to representing reality. Ivens finds ways to denature the commonplace occurrence of a rainstorm and allows us to look at it again with fresh eyes, arguably the goal of every documentary maker. He also shows us that in searching for a project’s structure, perhaps one need not look further than the elemental cycles of the natural world for coherence. Though Ivens is never seen or heard on screen, Rain is still very much an act of self- inscription within a specific social and temporal moment. The film documents Amsterdam as it was in the late 1920s through the eyes of Ivens, the flâneur. The figure of the nineteenth- century city-strolling, people-watching gentleman flâneur has been utilized as a central character by many theorists to explore ways in which our processing of reality is influenced by our physical surroundings, the pace of culture, and our own place in the crowd. Rain’s example, therefore—poetic and small as it may be—pushes each of us as contemporary documentary makers to continue asking where we place self in relation to culture as we try to capture reality. With the term “poetic,” we’re not speaking about lines of verse, but rather summoning the Ancient Greek term poïesis: the act of making. We’re seeking to develop a poetics or language of documentary: the unique formal and structural potentials that can’t be replicated in other mediums. The filmmakers described here as poetic are often also termed avant- garde, roughly translated to mean “ahead of the pack.” This all-encompassing term, often used to jettison anything outside the mainstream, in fact references a distinct international community of filmmakers dating back to the 1920s. Though wildly different in their formal strategies, each of these makers engaged a poetic mode of documentary, seeking out new ways of seeing and rendering the world through the intermediary device of the camera. For these poetic practitioners, the aim of documenting reality was to promote new ways of seeing outside the monolithic “professional” aesthetic of Hollywood and mainstream media, as well as to broaden access to the means of production by using nonprofessional cameras. Their work was often derided as being amateur and, due to taste and format restrictions, was largely excluded from mass exhibition and distribution. Avant-garde filmmaker Maya Deren was an émigré from the Ukraine who revolutionized independent American filmmaking and self-distribution, making independent films from the early 1940s through the late 1950s. In her famous treatise “Amateur versus Professional,” she confronts head-on the supposed prerequisite of expensive equipment to make meaningful work:

Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright But above all, the amateur ﬁlm-maker, with his small, light-weight equipment, has an inconspicuousness (for candid shooting) and a physical mobility which is well the envy of most

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professionals, burdened as they are by their many-ton monsters, cables and crews. Don’t forget that no tripod has yet been built which is as miraculously versatile in movement as the complex system of supports, joints, muscles and nerves which is the human body, which, with a bit of practice, makes possible the enormous variety of camera angles and visual action. You have all this and a brain too, in one neat, compact, mobile package. (46)

Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera (1945), a collaboration with African American dancer Talley Beatty, captures a seamless dance performance by Beatty. Yet by playing with traditional rules of continuity editing (continuity of motion, screen direction, and match cutting), Deren poetically permits the dance to break space and time, moving from a forest to an apartment, to a great museum hall, into the sky, and finally back to a natural vista, where Beatty looks down onto the landscape. The film—very short and completely silent—represents the documentary reality of a dance performance and the power of Beatty’s body, but it also functions on metaphoric levels, suggesting the daily performances each of us must navigate across different spaces and social terrains in our lives. American filmmaker Stan Brakhage goes even further in calling for a poetic approach to reality in Metaphors on Vision, admonishing filmmakers to throw out instruction manuals along with preconceived notions of filmed reality:

By deliberately spitting on the lens or wrecking its focal intention, one can attain the early stages of impressionism. . . . One may hand hold the camera and inherit worlds of space. One may over and underexpose the film. One may use the filters of the world, fog, downpours, unbalanced lights, neons with neurotic color temperatures, glass which was never designed for a camera, or even glass which was, but which can be used against specifications, or one may photograph half an hour after sunrise or before sunset, those marvelous taboo hours when the film labs will guarantee nothing, or one may go into the night with a specified daylight film or vice versa. One may become the supreme trickster, with hatfuls of all the rabbits listed above breeding madly. . . . As is, the “absolute realism” of the motion picture image is a contemporary mechanical myth. . . . The “absolute realism” of the motion picture image is unrealized, therefore, potential magic. (230)

Though deemed “experimental” by many, some of Brakhage’s poetic practices arguably constitute the apex of realism, challenging André Bazin’s ontology of the photographic image (discussed in Chapter 1) in the process. For Mothlight (1963), Brakhage manually affixed moth wings, flower petals, and other foliage to celluloid and passed the strips through an optical printer, exploring new levels of indexicality between real objects and their photographic representation. Like most of Brakhage’s films, the viewing experience of Mothlight is a silent one, focused on sight, but the film’s pulsing, organic patterns have a

palpable, almost audible quality to their rhythms. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Figure 2.6 Through poetic play with continuity of motion, screen direction, and match cutting, Taley Beatty dances across space and time in Maya Deren’s A Study in Choreography for Camera.

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Figure 2.7 Strips from a print of Stan Brakhage’s Mothlight take the indexicality of photography literally. Brakhage affixed moth wings, flowers, and leaves to clear leader and passed the strips through an optical printer to produce a projectable film print. Images courtesy of the Estate of Stan Brakhage and Fred Camper (www.fredcamper.com).

Again, do not mistakenly dismiss the poetic mode as mere formal play. Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog, analyzed in Chapter 1, is fully poetic in its approaches to addressing the European Holocaust, but alternately wrenching, scathing, and politically charged from start to finish. The orchestral score by Hanns Eisler is at times jarringly light and sprightly, juxtaposed against macabre images of the camps that press the very limits of photographic representation. This contrapuntal approach is a risky one, but it succeeds in underscoring the film’s final indictment of a world that looked the other way while these events occurred and now often prefers to relegate them to history rather than confront them in a reflection upon modernity. Camp survivor Jean Cayrol’s poetry, read in voice-over by actor Michel Boquet, not only provides an actual survivor’s perspective, but also the added perspective afforded by metaphor, meter, and performance. Resnais shoots the camps as the contemporary ruins they are now, but his image track is compiled largely of appropriated images from the Nazi archive, the Allied photography unit, and the Nuremberg trial proceedings. He weaves these sources into rhythmic waves of words, music, and image—at times measured and mournful, followed by forceful indictment—using the poetic mode to represent reality in startling and enduring fashion. The irony of the early avant-garde legacy is that these practitioners’ often-derided, renegade poetic strategies have been progressively assimilated by the mainstream, influencing and shaping a visual language now seen as normal for a post-MTV culture. MTV (Music Television), an American cable and satellite media outlet, began airing music videos in 1981 and quickly turned that short, audiovisual form into a global phenomenon (and itself into a lucrative Viacom Inc. holding) with a pastiche of kinetic, avant-garde techniques lending a countercultural veneer to increasingly commercialized pop product. Though MTV’s cultural centrality has waned in the digital age of online streaming video outlets, the foregrounding of formal style has continued as a tradition in much commercial Internet content, though typically not as a means of cultural questioning or critique but to imbue product with a sense of edge and contemporaneity. And yet as evidenced by our Chapter 1 example of Sadie Benning, subsequent generations of makers continue to invent poetic strategies in response to the dominant media of their time. As a teenager, making work with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision toy camera, Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Benning incorporated the zine aesthetic of 1990s counterculture into a queer poetics of cultural questioning and self-expression. As you develop formal approaches to your own

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documentaries or as you come up against limitations or obstacles during the production process, revisit the words of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage quoted in this section for both inspiration and challenge. Question the dominant uses of the media and technologies of your cultural moment. Are you fully utilizing the poetic potentials of documentary form possible with the tools at your disposal? Sometimes an unexpected approach not only solves a problem (the inability to schedule an interview, to access an archival clip, or to afford a particular piece of equipment); it may also encourage new ways of documenting and understanding “reality.”

Documentary as Hammer: The Expository Mode

The now-ubiquitous term documentary did not become associated with filmed reality until three decades into the history of motion pictures. When writing a review of another Flaherty film, Moana, in 1926, John Grierson described the film as having a “documentary value” (Winston 8), referencing the Latin etymology documentum: example, proof. The fact that histories of documentary often begin with Grierson is testament—for better and arguably for worse—to his prevailing legacies of shaping the form and function of social issue documentary. Grierson, a Scotsman by birth, traveled to the United States during his studies, where he met and befriended Robert Flaherty. He returned to the United Kingdom with a strong, personal mission for the role of cinema in society, charging that documentary is in fact the “creative treatment of actuality” (Winston 11), providing license for the shaping of events or information toward decidedly political or nationalistic ends. In one of his most famous quotes, Grierson charged that “art is not a mirror but a hammer. It is a weapon in our hands to see and say what is right and good and beautiful, and hammer it out as the mold and pattern of men’s action” (Fox 78). Calling cinema “a pulpit” and not shying from the designation “propagandist,” Grierson believed strongly that the function of film was to frame reality and deliver it back to the masses in a fashion that united the country, offered hope of social betterment, and underscored the ways in which the current operators of government and industry were working to improve the social welfare of regular citizens. Any echoes of the Soviet filmmakers detected here are not coincidental; though works such as Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin had been banned from public screening in England, Grierson’s own first film, Drifters, premiered at the London Film Society in 1929 in a double bill with Eisenstein’s film. Drifters focuses on the daily routine of Scottish herring fishermen and plays out a narrative of humans vs. nature and the arrival of machinery and industry into this timeworn duet. Much in the spirit of Flaherty, Grierson romanticizes the traditions and quaint, old ways of the fishermen. But in the spirit of Grierson’s Soviet contemporaries, the film rallies proletariats around new industrial fishing methods that are promised to only improve the fishermen’s honored legacy. The film thereby ultimately smooths over the social problem of encroaching mechanization and industrialization by linking such changes into a national narrative of progress. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Grierson did not personally make many more films and yet his name is associated with hundreds of productions spanning the British Commonwealth, from Canada to New Zealand.

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He attracted and trained a great number of camera operators and filmmakers over the years—often referred to collectively as the Grierson Group—who produced many films in his prescribed manner. Grierson lent his services to the Empire Marketing Board (a group vested in promoting the products of the British Empire) before moving over to the General Post Office for a time. Frustrated with government bureaucracy, Grierson later sought out film subsidies from private industry, most notably the British Gas Council. As such, the aims of Grierson and his group were always uncomfortably linked to commerce and government, both in their sources of financing and the resultant approaches to subject matter. Despite such seemingly blatant conflicts of interest in Griersonian social issue documentary works such Coalface, Workers and Jobs, and Housing Problems (all produced in 1935), Grierson’s impact upon documentary practice is inescapable. Critic Brian Winston highlights two Griersonian legacies in particular: the problem moment structure and the victim tradition (40), both exemplified with continued regularity via the expository mode of documentary. Housing Problems, a 1935 film by Grierson protégés Arthur Elton and Edgar Anstey, exemplifies all three of these concepts in action. A disembodied, male voice with a refined accent provides exposition over silent images of the Stepney slums—sagging roofs, children playing in narrow alleys a few feet from factory entrances, crumbling walls caked in grit, and people piled on top of one another in squalor. We then go inside several of these collapsing homes. Housing Problems is historically notable as one of the earliest instances of synchronous sound field interviews. New recording equipment permitted location sound to be recorded in synchronicity with film images, and several of the residents are asked to personally describe their dissatisfaction with the living conditions of the slums. In cockney accents much different from the narrator’s, they speak of children dying, infestations of rats and vermin, and lack of running water. As resident Mrs. Hill intones:

This house is getting on my nerves. We’re shored up in every room. There’s a staircase but you can’t walk up it unless you turn till you’re seasick. One leg you want longer than the other. And as the upstairs is coming downstairs, well it’s sinking. We went to see the new houses and they’re lovely. But here it gets on your nerves for everything’s ﬁlthy. Dirty, ﬁlthy walls, and the vermin in the walls is wicked.

The image track cuts away to close-ups of insects crawling up the walls to visually support the information provided, linking the expository mode’s guiding voice-over track and subordinate images in a literal, simplistic fashion. Though a technical milestone, permitting residents of the gas industry’s slums to speak on camera certainly does not make them active participants. Rather, they function as victims of their circumstances and the providers of carefully selected sound bites within a work funded by the British Gas Council. The ﬁlm then cuts to the new public housing blocks of the Quarry Road Estate and enthusiastic responses from residents like Mrs. Reddington, rescued and relocated there. The ﬁlm ends with a satisfying sense of closure and catharsis. The problems of the slums may be quite real, but they are only momentary and readily changeable thanks to the efforts of corporations and city councils. Most disturbing, with the rescuing of these “victims” and the end of this “problem moment,” comes foreclosure of any real engagement with larger underlying social and labor issues such as class disparity, workers’ rights, public health, and poverty. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Herein lie the historical background and practical realities of the expository mode. Still the preferred mode of most journalistic reportage and television documentaries, the expository

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Figure 2.8 Frames from Housing Problems. From left to right: Mrs. Hill speaks of the substandard conditions in the Stepney slums; Mrs. Reddington provides closure and catharsis, praising her new home in the Quarry Road Estate; a scene of the Stepney slums; a model of the new Quarry Road Estate complex.

mode “explains” with the purpose of offering a linear, logical, didactic argument. The image track is usually silent; synchronous location sound is often replaced by a disembodied, voice-over narration that serves as the film’s organizing principle. After seventy-plus years of such voice-overs, we as a society have an almost Pavlovian response of conferring authority and credibility to a disembodied narrator—a propensity that is naïve at best. Human subjects, whether experts or lay individuals, typically appear as talking heads, recruited not as agented participants but as sound bites to advance or support the linear argument of the piece. The expository form also typically masks the identity and positioning of the filmmakers, who are unseen and unknown, funneling their stance through the seemingly objective and authoritative narrator. This further exacerbates a distinct power imbalance between producer and subject. Not every recruitment of the expository mode necessarily perpetuates victim traditions and problem moment structures. Expository methods can be a quick and effective means of imparting background information or context necessary to understand the rest of a documentary, which can then be designed using some of the other more progressive modes defined in this chapter.

Direct Cinema: The Observational Mode

Technological and conceptual innovations by a group of American filmmakers (including Robert Drew, D.A. Pennebaker, Richard Leacock, Albert and David Maysles, and Frederick Wiseman) revolutionized documentary form and practice in the 1960s. With the advent of small, lightweight, crystal sync 16mm cameras and portable tape recorders, the ability to capture synchronous sound in the field with freedom of motion and reduced obtrusiveness gave way to a movement of documentary fittingly referred to as direct cinema, or what we will term the observational mode. Drew and his associates first introduced the possibilities of such equipment in Primary (1960), a film that follows John F. Kennedy and rival Hubert Humphrey in their pursuit of the Democratic presidential nomination. Drew was granted largely unfettered access to both candidates during the 1960 Wisconsin primary, and lightweight, less obtrusive equipment permitted his crew to push through the crowds at stump speeches and to hover in the corner as the candidates interacted with campaign staffers and their own families. The terms direct cinema and observational cinema were coined to describe the level of access and Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright immediacy such filmmaking afforded. It was felt that the camera crew was progressively forgotten or acclimated to, permitting the filmmakers to capture action as it occurred

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without influencing its course. Gone were the voice-overs and subordinate image tracks of expository documentary. Such direct cinema favored long takes in which audiences were permitted to experience an event in real time, without the intrusion of explanatory voice-over. In Salesman (1968), the Maysles brothers and Charlotte Zwerin focus their camera on a group of door-to-door Bible salesmen traveling up and down the East Coast trying to cobble together a living. The idea that the camera somehow does not affect the action playing out in front of it is more plausible in Salesman than in other documentaries of the genre precisely because its characters are salesmen. The filmmakers observe as the men refine and adjust their pitches and tactics, receiving similarly canned pep talks from their district sales managers. The salesmen are professional charlatans, but the camera progressively discerns various painful levels of reality in each man’s performance. The enthusiastic monologues delivered in customers’ kitchens; the bluster and posturing between salesmen as they compete and protect sales leads; the assurances given to their wives over the telephone, promising enough money will come in to keep the family afloat; the mantras repeated to themselves, trying to keep up energy and hope so that the sharks around them won’t smell blood in the water—all these performances start to wear at the edges and collide with one another to reveal the worn-out men underneath. Perhaps the American master of direct cinema is Frederick Wiseman, who refined the technique into his own notion of observational cinema. Producing over thirty films exclusively in this mode over the past four decades, Wiseman is the strongest proponent of a mode in which the documentary filmmaker is observer. By gaining access to a location and normalizing his presence there until he can simply act as a fly on the wall, Wiseman and his crew record interactions in a nonintrusive fashion and later compile the long takes through editing to create meaning. In the observational mode, no questions are asked in interviews and no voice-over track adds context. Wiseman’s work is far from neutral, however. The choice of what to turn the camera toward and how such footage is later contextualized through editing powerfully shape the politics and meaning of his films. Famous for his terse titles and social institution subjects such as High School (1968), Hospital (1970), and Welfare (1975), Wiseman’s works are populist in their stances and critical of the bureaucracy and governmental waste that prevent social services and justice from being delivered to the poor and disenfranchised. In stark contrast to Griersonian expository documentaries, Wiseman’s observational films are complicated, following multiple characters and their situations. Unlike Grierson’s problem moment structures, Wiseman’s films leave audiences reeling from the state of American society, but Wiseman also refrains from proposing any possible remedies or courses of action, which can prove frustrating, even paralyzing, for some viewers. Working with a single cameraperson, Wiseman operates the audio recorder himself, listening to the situations he places himself into and signaling to his cinematographer to roll when he feels something is worth capturing. In High School, Wiseman and his cinematographer Richard Leiterman are granted surprising access to an array of situations at Northeastern High, a predominately white high school in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Shot in 1968, the film is a cinematic time capsule, preserving the first glints of a mounting countercultural movement. Issues of race, gender, and national politics would soon explode the conservatism of the postwar baby boomers, and the generational tension is palpable in High School’s frames. In an English class, a twenty-something teacher presenting a unit on poetry uses Simon Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright and Garfunkel’s “The Dangling Conversation” as her text. Elsewhere, a young male student refuses to take detention, and a school administrator tells him,

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ADMINISTRATOR: We’re out to establish that you’re a man and that you can take orders. We want to prove to them that you can take the orders. STUDENT: Well, Mr. Allen, you see it’s all against my principles. You have to stand for something. ADMINISTRATOR: Yes but I think . . . Principles aren’t involved here. I think it’s a question now of, uh, of uh, proving yourself to be a man. It’s a question here of how do we follow rules and regulations. If there’s a mistake made, there’s an approach to it. STUDENT: I should prove that I’m a man and that’s what I intend to do by doing what I, in my opinion, is what I think is right. ADMINISTRATOR: Are you going to take the detention or aren’t you? I feel that you should. STUDENT: I’ll take it, but under protest.

In a rare forum of dissent, a group of misﬁt students meets as a ﬁlm club but instead wind up debating school policy with a young and energetic Hispanic teacher. A young man with sunglasses and a chain necklace says,

I’m not qualiﬁed to make gigantic judgments about the school, but I think in its attitude towards education and its relations with the world today, this school is miserable. It’s cloistered, it’s secluded, it’s completely sheltered from everything that’s going on in the world, and I think it’s wrong. And that has to be changed, and I think that’s our purpose here. Not to talk about ﬁlms.

Wiseman clashes this moment of rupture with the film’s closing faculty meeting, where an older female administrator reads a letter from a recent graduate, presently fighting over in Vietnam. Heralding this youth as “a nobody” that the war has made “a somebody” she tells her colleagues, “When you get a letter like this, to me it means that we are very successful at Northeast High School.” Wiseman’s choice to end here is clearly an ironic one; the administrator’s words are unable to contain the rumblings of change and dissent that have been discovered by Wiseman from within the administrator’s own school. The handheld, black-and-white images of Wiseman’s films have come to typify the common documentary aesthetic in many people’s minds. Along with the expository form’s narrator and talking-head interviews, the observational aesthetic is certainly the mode most emulated in mockumentaries or fictional programming such as police procedurals or courtroom dramas striving for a feel of verisimilitude. In the observational mode, the camera records the uninterrupted actions and interactions of the environment before it. Again, the documentary’s producers are unseen and unheard. There is no interaction with participants, potentially leading to a power imbalance between producer and observed subject. Human subjects are not typically active agents in their representation, but rather are documented and watched. Early ethnographic films also

Figure 2.9 Frames from High School. From left to right: a student protests detention; an administrator

tells him to take the detention and prove himself “to be a man”; one of Northeast High’s few black Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright students; two of the emerging counterculture generation stand out from the conformity of their classmates’ attire.

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traditionally utilized this mode during shooting, later imposing expository voice-over onto the material in postproduction. When reﬂecting upon his career at a 2016 IDFA (International Documentary Festival Amsterdam) screening of Hospital, Wiseman took issue with his documentaries being described as “observational”:

. . . because for me that suggests that you just set up the camera in the corner of the room and let it run forever. It smacks of anthropological ﬁlmmaking, which I don’t think I do. These movies are made up of hundreds and thousands of choices. So you have to observe, you have to see what’s going on, but you also have to choose what it is you’re going to shoot, the way you’re going to shoot it and the way you’re going to use it. That’s not observational. Observational, to me, is too passive a term. (Wise)

Wiseman underscores the deceptive neutrality of observational filmmaking. Though all the practitioners profiled in this section never appear in their films and their voices are never heard, choices in what to film and how to edit material create a distinct point of view in every work. Ultimately, one must consider the power dynamics set up through observational practice, the central premise of which denies any opportunity for interaction between filmmaker and subjects. That said, observational moments or sequences can add incredible power to a documentary, allowing action to unfold with an immediacy unrivaled by other modes. But to construct a documentary solely through this mode can raise ethical quandaries, create a sense of distance from the subjects, deny possibilities for dialogue, and limit the proffering of possible solutions or courses of action that audiences might take. It is now quite rare to see documentary works produced solely in the observational mode. That said, Harvard University’s Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) is an interesting contemporary space where makers and scholars are reexamining and redefining the range of technical and aesthetic approaches, as well as the full spectrum—from transparency to reflexivity—possible within the tenets of observational and direct cinema. Leviathan (2012), directed by Lucien Castaing-Taylor (who is also director of the SEL) and Véréna Paravel, observes the routines and cycles of a Massachusetts fishing trawler and its crew. Though it never engages in interviews and often favors long, static takes, the documentary is far from transparent in its aesthetic approaches. Lightweight, waterproof GoPro digital cameras are strapped to fishermen’s helmets, sent overboard in nets, and mounted to the deck, affording angles and perspectives so beyond the physical capacities of a traditional cameraperson that they become highly reflexive, calling attention to the recording apparatus and process and bringing literal associations to the Go Pro’s “fish-eye” lens. Described by SEL filmmakers Libbie D. Cohn and J.P. Sniadecki as a “single-shot documentary,” People’s Park (2012) offers audiences a seventy-eight-minute real-time stroll through Chengdu, China’s main public social space. Though we never see or hear the makers, and though none of the park’s visitors ever verbally addresses the camera, the documentary’s observational approaches are again simultaneously immersive and reflexive. We are certainly absorbed by the characters and activities that pass before the lens, but if the floating camerawork doesn’t remind us of the makers’ presence, the park visitors persistently breaking the fourth wall (a theater term referring to the implied fourth wall or barrier between audiences in their seats and the three-walled set and its performers on Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright stage) and looking into camera likely will. Rather than purporting to be a fly on the wall, Sniadecki acknowledges that the presence of their wheelchair-mounted camera and its

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Figure 2.10 Top: frames from Leviathan, shot with a GoPro provide extreme underwater, bird’s-eye, and ﬁsh-eye perspectives of a ﬁshing trawler’s routines. Bottom: park attendees in People’s Park return the gaze of the passing camera and even perform for it.

attached microphones obviously attracted curiosity and attention. He told The New York Times, “We were offering ourselves up as a spectacle to be observed, as much as the people performing in the park” (Lim AR12). Before the advent of video technologies, long takes were limited in duration by the number of feet of film stock a camera’s magazine could hold; a seventy-eight-minute single take was an impossibility. Now, in our digital moment, such durations are possible, but decidedly rare, as the pace of editing seems only to be getting more rapid in popular media. As the shot in People’s Park continues uninterrupted, we become more and more aware of how editorially manipulated the original fly-on-the-wall works of direct cinema in fact were. Sensory Ethnography Lab filmmakers are working to transcend the more troubling legacies of both ethnographic and the observational mode, pushing the directness of direct cinema and the poetics of documentary toward new digital-age possibilities that hearken back to the avant-garde aims of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage celebrated earlier.

Cinéma Vérité: The Participatory Mode

While direct cinema was being developed in the United States, experiments with the same lightweight, sync-sound technologies in France were yielding an entirely different documentary form with an opposing stance on the potential relationships between camera, maker, and subject. Jean Rouch, a French filmmaker with a history of making ethnographic/anthropological documentaries in Africa, had become increasingly ambivalent about the traditional gap between maker and subject. Later in life he would famously term anthropology “the elder daughter of colonialism, a discipline reserved to those with power interrogating people without it” and describe his own evolution toward “shared anthropology . . . an anthropological dialogue between people belonging to different cultures” (Ruby 1). Teaming up with sociologist Edgar Morin, the two enlisted a cast of real-life Parisians to create the participatory cinema experiment Chronicle of a Summer/Chronique d’un été (1961). The film exemplifies a participatory mode from the start, with Rouch and Morin appearing on screen with Marceline, one of the chosen subjects, discussing the process of making the film and debating certain approaches. In our earlier discussion of the reflexive Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright mode, we described works that foreground aesthetic and technical processes, making viewers aware that they are indeed watching a film. The participatory mode goes a step

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further, with the filmmakers recruiting their subjects as active participants, further breaking down or at least consciously addressing the inherent power imbalance between producer and subject. In an episode from Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch and Morin send Marceline and another character, Nadine, out onto the streets of Paris with a camera operator and a microphone. The two participants in turn become practitioners, approaching strangers and asking the seemingly innocuous question “Are you happy?” The question is not a frivolous one; in the summer of 1961, France was still only two decades beyond Nazi occupation, and Adolf Eichmann was being tried in front of the world, bringing the memories of Nazi war atrocities back to popular consciousness. Such memories were complicated in France by the ongoing, bloody Algerian War, as Algerians fought against their French colonizers for independence. The Algerian War made many French citizens turn a mirror onto themselves and ask what sorts of atrocities were being perpetuated in their own time in the name of imperialist aims. Rouch and Morin continue to participate in the film, if not on screen then from behind the camera. They set up situations in which their selected characters are asked to engage with one another or answer prompted questions ranging in topic from the state of their personal lives to the politics of their country. Rouch coined the term cinéma vérité to describe this type of filmmaking. He believed the camera necessarily affected the actions of those in front of it and sought to embrace that by using the camera as a catalyst, provoking situations and their resultant truths. Cinéma vérité and direct cinema, though clearly oppositional in their underlying intent and technical practices, are nonetheless terms often used interchangeably in popular discussions, making for great confusion. For our purposes, just as we have referred to direct cinema as an observational mode, we will henceforth refer to the collaborative style of cinema vérité, in which the subjects are permitted to take an active role in the creation of the text, as a participatory mode. Out of all the characters in a Chronicle of a Summer, Marceline depicts some of the more interesting and controversial possibilities of a participatory approach. Rouch brings together Marceline and some French Africans for a discussion, and links and contrasts are made between the experiences of European Jews and colonized Africans. Rouch, knowing full well the answer for himself, asks one of the African men what he thinks the meaning of the numbered tattoo on Marceline’s wrist is. The man does not know, joking that perhaps it is a telephone number. Marceline explains that she was interned in a concentration camp during World War II. One might question the ethics of such overt machinations by Rouch, but what does ensue is a discussion of different but shared experiences of oppression, occupation, and violent subjugation under the Nazis and under colonial expansion. Rather than an exploitation of Marceline’s past or a duping of the African man, an exchange occurs between the two that proves to be of larger sociohistorical import for audiences as well. This scene is closely followed by long takes of Marceline walking alone through Paris, recounting memories of her father, Nazi occupation, deportation, and loss during the war years. Perhaps less remarkable by today’s standards, the sequence was revolutionary for its breaking of the talking-head interview context, setting Marceline’s remembrance into motion out in the streets. Marceline has a lapel microphone and totes the sound recorder herself; freeing herself and the filmmakers from the customarily close presence of the camera necessary to keep the sound recordist and boom microphone out of frame. In fact, the shots range from close to extremely wide, Marceline at times dwarfed in the frame by the Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright city around her. A new form of flâneur, Marceline is literally given personal space to walk out her trauma, summon her remembrances, and offer testimony.

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Toward the film’s end, the participatory experiment comes to a head as the cast is assembled and shown the film to this point. Their conversation and reactions to what they’ve seen and how they’ve been depicted are in turn filmed and become part of the final documentary. The responses are varied, often critical, and revolve largely around the fundamental question of whether truth is attainable on camera. Some of the participants conclude that truth is only possible in the private confessional moments characters have, such as Marceline’s walking scene, while others claim these scenes are “immodest.” Marceline’s own reaction to seeing herself in the aforementioned scene is to question the truth of her own experience:

They were extremely intimate memories, the most pervasive memories I have, but if you will, when I said those words, I was recalling things at the moment I said them, I said them with feelings, but I was absolutely not involved with those feelings between shootings, or else I should have been . . . on the verge of a nervous breakdown, and that wasn’t the case at all.

In a reflexive scene that follows, Rouch and Morin ponder these reactions to the film, mulling over the fact that characters were deemed either not real enough or exhibitionists. One could argue that in a world that predated reality television and social media “selfies,” the intimacy and depth of personal revelation that the camera and filmmakers drew from the participants was threatening to audiences. Marceline’s doubting of her own performance could be seen as a documentation of the vagaries of memory and trauma. Putting words to such experiences can be transformative but also perhaps testament to the inadequacy of language—the clumsiness of words in fully expressing the magnitude of an experience that forever defies clear and full comprehension. It is left for viewers of Chronicle of a Summer to draw their own conclusions about the merits and liabilities of the film and the participatory process of its making. The differences between the levels of participatory engagement Rouch’s characters are afforded and the Grierson Group’s sound bites from slum dwellers in Housing Problems are hopefully clear. In the latter approach, the slum residents are denied any form of control over their representation; their purpose is simply to provide before and after testimonies the filmmakers can insert into the linear, expository story of progress. In contrast, Rouch and Morin’s subjects are asked to bare themselves, but they are also instrumental in shaping and reacting to their depictions. The result is an unruly film that refuses narrative catharsis or a simple conclusion. Chronicle of a Summer pushes the reflexive and participatory modes to their extremes. The possibilities of these modes become the film’s focus. Remember we have already examined more contemporary instances of these modes in action in Chapter 1. Hole in Space, The Love Tapes, and the Quipu Project each represent innovative participatory approaches, reminding us that whatever specific form they take, participatory strategies are motivated by an underlying intent to break down power differentials and divisions, permitting documentary subjects to become active participants, authorities, and collaborators.

The Emergence of Video: Taking on TV and Top-Down Conglomerate Media

Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Before continuing with our remaining modes, it is ﬁrst necessary to spend a moment marking the historic arrival of video as a medium. The performative, autobiographical,and essayistic

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modes yet to come each provide distinct approaches to documentary form and content particularly afforded by the emergence of video technologies. With cameras now coming as standard features computers and mobile devices, consumer video technologies have become ubiquitous and commonplace. Yet before 1965, video was not considered a medium, but rather a storage format used by network television to archive segments and programs. The introduction of portable video technology by Sony in 1965, becoming truly portable with the CV Portapak in 1968, provided the first alternative to film as a means of audiovisual, time-based recording. Art and activist collectives formed overnight, intent upon using video to challenge corporatized network television as the predominant mediator of reality. The emergence of video cameras coincided with a distinct moment in U.S. politics and culture. Strong antiwar and civil rights movements of the time had generated a spirit of general distrust and collective resistance against authority and dominant forms of media. The formation of video collectives and the production of guerrilla television, detailed perhaps most comprehensively by Deirdre Boyle in her book Subject to Change: Guerrilla Television Revisited, speaks to a moment when the political climate and popular zeitgeist converged to influence the use of a new media technology. Had video emerged earlier, in the fifties, perhaps, or later, in the eighties, who knows what course the medium would have taken? The Portapak was far from cheap, necessitating the formation of collectives such as Top Value Television (TVTV) in San Francisco and Paper Tiger Television in New York, which shared equipment among members. Each collective had its own mission, but a shared aim was to produce documentary programming that challenged both the format and selective coverage of network news and documentary. These collectives felt that both the format and content of American long-form television documentary by the “big three” network programs of the time—CBS Reports, NBC’s White Papers, and ABC’s Focus—were conservative and ossified in their reportage, answering more to the dollar of advertisers than the pursuit of truth. Though nonviolent, the notion of guerrilla television took its cue from guerrilla warfare tactics in promoting a more agile, decentralized, and populist approach to media production. Collective members saw video as a means of going out into the world and creating social issue work by and for the people, challenging the hegemony of top-down media. By top- down I refer to the directional flow of information in the media apparatus from a few controlling producers down to a mass of public consumers. This is not to say that there weren’t pioneers working within and shaking up the mainstream network system. Edward R. Murrow broke an incredible amount of ground in his work at CBS with producer Fred Friendly, including their 1954 See It Now episode “A Report on Senator Joseph R. McCarthy,” which led to the Red Scare senator’s ultimate downfall. Despite their awards and accolades, however, Murrow and Friendly continued to have to fight within the network to get their programming aired. See It Now was ultimately unable to maintain a corporate sponsor and was pulled by CBS in 1958. Soon after, Murrow was invited to speak at the Radio and Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) conference, and he delivered his now-famous “Wires and Lights in a Box” speech, in which he pulls no punches:

Our history will be what we make it. And if there are any historians about ﬁfty or a hundred years from now, and there should be preserved the kinescopes for one week of all three networks, they will there ﬁnd recorded in black and white, or color, evidence of decadence, escapism and Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright insulation from the realities of the world in which we live.

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Many of the early video collectives we will now explore failed, but their attempts reflexively exposed the systems of top-down control that dominate us. Their examples in both spirit and practice can still serve as valuable touchstones for current digital media revolutions. Top Value Television (TVTV) offered a bottom-up guerrilla TV approach to journalistic documentary with Four More Years (1972), which documents the 1972 Republican National Convention in Miami Beach, Florida. As the title attests, with the war raging in Vietnam and a powerful peace movement organizing among the ranks of a youth counterculture and many returning veterans, Richard Nixon was campaigning for four more years of Republican rule in the White House. Nineteen members of the TVTV cooperative, armed with portable video equipment, managed to acquire press credentials and took their cameras not only onto the convention floor but also beyond the convention center’s walls. Their reporting represented a radical break from mainstream networks, which remained tethered to the main convention floor, their lead anchors perched up in the stadium rafters in soundproof glass boxes, far removed from the action. The video serves as a historical document, showing not only the divide between guerrilla TV and the traditional “objective” network practice it sought to undermine, but also the inception of spontaneous reportage techniques by TVTV members which have since been co-opted and made standard practice by the major networks and cable news outlets. With a freedom of movement impossible for the large, equipment-laden network crews, TVTV correspondents could focus more on reflexively exposing the convention and its news media coverage for the scripted pageants that they were. Rather than staying on the convention floor, we see the lavish cocktail parties for delegates and lobbyists going on outside the major networks’ framings. Young Republicans and “Nixonettes” paint signs and plan cheers while similarly aged antiwar protesters camp outside the hall in Flamingo Park, along with veterans against the Vietnam War. TVTV crosscuts supporters chanting “Four More Years!” and “Hey! Hey! What do you say? Nixon, Agnew all the way!” with protesters marching to the rhythm of “Hey! Hey! Ho! Ho! Tricky Dicky’s got to go!” Passing young delegates react in disgust to the presence of the protesters, one even offering:

They don’t have any right to do this. And I think they should just take the National Guard and just turn it loose on them right now. That’s what they’re here for, isn’t it? We might end up with something akin to Kent State on a larger scale. But it would be worth it.

The result is a combination of long, riveting observational moments and participatory interviews in which the TVTV reporters ask a question, then let the camera roll as individuals from disparate positions use their moment in the frame to let off steam, to campaign, or to express dissent. In a truly reflexive moment, Nixon’s daughter Tricia passes the camera at a cocktail party and looking into the lens of the small Portapak remarks, “That’s incredible.” The cameraman concedes from off screen, “Yes, it’s very small.” Most interesting is how TVTV reporters capture a sense of malaise and boredom from the mainstream press who, perhaps because of the TVTV reporters’ youthfulness and unthreatening equipment, open up to the TVTV crews with surprising candor. After recording an NBC announcer introducing that NBC’s coverage is “brought to you by the Gulf Oil Corporation,” NBC floor correspondent Cathy Mackin characterizes the convention proceedings as “a very packaged, plastic kind of thing” and weighs in on her network’s coverage by saying that she is “put off by the way we’re staying with the platform,” calling that sort of coverage “busywork.” Veteran anchors of today make youthful appearances. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright CBS’s Mike Wallace is discontent at being stuck in his slow quadrant of the convention floor, while most of the action seems to be “in the VIP area, and Dan Rather has that

A Brief History: Movements and Modes 2 49

section.” He concedes he’d rather be watching the convention on TV at home. ABC’s Herb Kaplan deﬁnes “news” as “Things that happen,” while CBS’s Roger Mudd gives TVTV the silent treatment. Even Walter Cronkite, the esteemed anchor of the CBS evening news for nineteen years who was succeeded by Dan Rather, grants TVTV an audience in the CBS booth (Cronkite was himself a minor topic of news during the convention for not standing up in his press box during “The Star Spangled Banner”). When asked about the power of network news in shaping reality, he answers:

I don’t think people ought to believe only one news medium. I don’t think they ought to believe me, I don’t think they ought to believe [David] Brinkley or anybody else who’s on the air, and I don’t think they ought to get all their news from one television broadcast, or even all their news from television. They ought to read and they ought to go to opinion journals and all the rest of it, and I think it’s terribly important that this be taught in the public schools. Because otherwise we’re going to get into a situation because of economic pressures and other things that television’s all you’ve got left. And that would be disastrous.

One could argue that as print journalism crumbles and twenty-four-hour cable news franchises move away from journalism and toward infotainment, Cronkite’s worst nightmare has in fact already materialized. Conversely, the emergence of online media outlets and the capacity to access global media via the web make the sort of comparative consumption that Cronkite calls for more possible than ever before. The era of guerrilla TV and its countercultural collectives was, for the most part, short- lived. As video artist and scholar Martha Rosler charges in “Video: Shedding the Utopian Moment,” her look back on the ﬁrst twenty years of the medium, early artists and collectives may have taken on TV and clearly established its centrality to our culture, but in the long run such art never fully analyzed TV’s effects, proposed a viable alternative discourse, or extended TV or video’s control to others outside the institution or the artistic elite. The seventies saw the gradual dissolution of early collectives, largely due to internal tensions caused by the clashing of multiple subjectivities. Ironically, many of the founders were later absorbed into positions of power within the very mainstream system they’d set out to challenge. Alternative, independent media entities do still exist, however, notably in the form of Paper Tiger Television and Downtown Community Television (DCTV). Paper Tiger, a collective founded in 1981, pushed the limits of public access television in New York City with a mix of political and artistic programming, all produced by and directed toward the local community. Since then, it has grown into a model for do-it-yourself community media production, working to dismantle the myth and power of corporate mass media through their public access series, media workshops, and community screening series.

Figure 2.11 Frames from Four More Years. From left to right: an elderly Republican delegate on the Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright convention hall ﬂoor; a protester marching outside the hall; Tricia Nixon passing the camera at a reception; Walter Cronkite opining from the CBS booth.

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Downtown Community Television was founded a decade earlier in 1972, not as a collective but as a nonprofit media organization. DCTV’s founders Jon Alpert and his wife Keiko Tsuno first began working and broadcasting, not via public access but rather from the back of an old mail truck. Since those humble beginnings on the streets of Chinatown, DCTV has grown and diversified, providing media training for socially and economically disenfranchised individuals while also producing and distributing a range of educational and documentary programming. Alpert is especially interesting for the ways in which he has managed to keep one foot in corporate media—producing material for nearly every major network and cable channel and winning fifteen Emmys to date—while also continuing to run DCTV, one of the nation’s most enduring nonprofit community media organizations. The participatory, immersive nature of his approach is evidenced by the fact that he is the only person to date to win Emmys both as a producer/director and in the technical categories of cinematography and editing. Though analog in its origins, DCTV continues to serve as an important model for independent media production, a topic we will discuss at length in Chapter 8 in relation to web-based organizations such as Brave New Films. As mentioned in our discussion of the public sphere at the close of Chapter 1, traditional distinctions between journalism and documentary continue to blur in our digital moment, as do once-clear demarcations of mediums and distribution platforms. The Internet has exploded twentieth-century categories of film, television, cable, and print media. What began in 1996 as the print arts and culture magazine VICE, for example, evolved into VICE Media, a game-changing outlet for web-delivered short documentaries focused on countercultural topics an investigative journalism pieces. In 2016, the company also launched its own cable network VICELAND to air its original programming. In 2011, in response to the waning of print circulation and the emergence of players like VICE, traditional outlets such as The New York Times began their Op-Docs web series as an online extension of their print Opinion Pages. Op-Docs invites both established and emerging practitioners to make short, human- interest documentaries for streaming online. In 2012 the cable news network CNN launched CNN Films, through which it both commissions new short and long-form documentaries and licenses and airs independently produced work, streaming some online and airing others within the televised CNN news stream. Companies such as Netflix and Amazon are no longer simply delivery platforms for streaming media, but content producers, commissioning and distributing original documentary works and series both in theaters and online. Media production houses such as Participant Media are also creating their own cable TV networks like Pivot to show both licensed and original series. Such diversification is also graying distinctions between independent and commercial media: with stakes owned by three major global media conglomerates—The Walt Disney Company, Rogers Communications, and Hearst Company—VICELAND is far from guerrilla TV. But the upsides are that documentary has never before had such cultural and market attention, and the forms documentary media can take (feature-length, short-form, serialized, interactive, transmedia, etc.) are only expanding.

Body as Conduit: The Performative Mode

Before the widespread proliferation of video, a wide range of marginalized groups and identities were omitted from representation and denied access to the means of production. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright The emergence of video technologies coincided with the emergence of identity politics movements, and though the role of video in the expansion of agency and program content

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may certainly be traced through any number of social and political contexts, video’s implications hold special significance in the emergence first of female, then gay and lesbian, and more recently, of queer identities, from out of a decidedly patriarchal and heterosexual media history. Female and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer- identified (LGBTQ) media makers and participants have proven instrumental in shaping the course of contemporary documentary, perhaps most significantly in cultivating a performative mode. Popularizing feminist adages like “The personal is political,” and “Your body is a battleground,” these practitioners turned the camera around to record their own bodies as a means of social change. Many scholars have lumped performative and autobiographical modes of documentary together, but they bear important distinctions. In the next section, we will explore the autobiographical mode of documenting self as a distinct practice. The documentary examples recruited to exemplify the performative and autobiographical modes in these two sections will intentionally focus on two pairings of documentaries grappling with (1) female bodies; and (2) queer bodies of color. This symmetry has been invoked not only because of the historical importance of identity politics movements in cultivating these modes but also to provide an opportunity for direct comparison and contrast of these two documentary modes as they are recruited to represent shared subject matter with distinctly different results.

Feminist Performativity

Whereas first-wave feminists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century championed basic rights such as voting and property ownership, the 1970s marked the emergence of second-wave feminism—first-wavers’ daughters and granddaughters tackling more endemic social barriers for women including reproductive rights, perceived “roles” for women in society, and even the grammar of cinema. In 1975, an essay entitled “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” published in Screen took the film studies world by storm. Its author Laura Mulvey, one of the first feminist media critics, argued that Hollywood narrative is based on a formal language that perpetuates the dominant patriarchal order to which we have become so accustomed that we consider it “normal” or “real.” Mulvey defines three inherent “looks” in cinema: the look of the camera and the look of the audience are subjugated to the look of the main, male protagonist, leading us to experience the narrative though his point of view. She claims that we, as audience members, therefore experience cinema through an assumed masculinist gaze (not only cis male but, in line with patriarchal power structures, white and heterosexual as well). Mulvey writes:

It is said that analyzing pleasure, or beauty, destroys it. That is the intention of this article. The satisfaction and reinforcement of the ego that represent the high point of film history hitherto must be attacked. Not in favor of a reconstructed new pleasure, which cannot exist in the abstract, nor in intellectualized unpleasure, but to make way for a total negation of the ease and plenitude of the narrative fiction film. The alternative is the thrill that comes from leaving the past behind without rejecting it, transcending outworn or oppressive forms, or daring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a new language of desire. (306)

Mulvey challenged women, heretofore the bearers of the gaze, not the agented producers of Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright meaning, to create alternative, nonﬁction media that smashed the pleasure of dominant forms, a call that second-wave feminist video artists seized and ran with.

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In 1977, scholar, artist, and activist Martha Rosler created Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained. In the forty-minute video, we hear Rosler on a voice-over track as a woman undresses and re-dresses on screen and is systematically probed, traced, and measured by an increasing number of lab-coated individuals. Each measurement is announced to another technician who proclaims it “above average,” “below average,” or “average,” whereupon one of three additional technicians makes a corresponding sound by whistle, kazoo, or bell. The video plays on old practices of eugenics (scientiﬁc measurement of bodies to assert the supremacy of certain races or to promote the perpetuation of “desirable” traits) and patriarchal ideas of subjugating others through the power of “evidence.” But Rosler’s argument is that such measurement and judgment is no longer the domain of science but of culture at large, especially for women who now bear the added stigma of measuring self against social expectations. Rosler’s voice tells us:

I needn’t remind you about scrutiny, about the scientiﬁc study of human beings. Visions of the self, about the excruciating look at the self from outside as though it were a thing divorced from the inner self? How one learns to manufacture oneself as a product? How one learns to see oneself as a being in a state of culture as opposed to a being in a state of nature. How to measure oneself by the degree of artiﬁce. . . . This is a work about how to think about yourself. It is a work about how she is supposed to think about herself. How she learns to scrutinize herself, to see herself as a map, a terrain, a product constantly recreating itself inch by inch. Groomed, manufactured, programmed, re-programmed, controlled; a servile mechanism in which one learns to utilize every mechanism of feedback.

Rosler’s piece was recruited by second-wave feminists of her time as a means of making women reconsider the social and personal expectations (shaving, makeup application, dieting, dressing) deemed “normal” for their gender. The piece is not an easy one to watch. Viewers might assume the voice on the soundtrack is Rosler’s own, but few would necessarily realize the woman on screen whom she refers to in third person is in fact herself. In her performative act, the gap between maker and subject has been closed, but Rosler uses her body more as informational conduit than agented subject. Here lies the distinction between the performative mode and the upcoming autobiographical mode.In Vital Statistics, Rosler is not presenting herself and her life as subject; rather, she has recruited her body and voice to perform the encompassing role of “citizen” in a feminist critique. She uses her physical self as a conduit to express ideas of social control and bodily repression. For our purposes we will therefore use the performative

mode to encompass instances when the documentary maker transcribes subjects as Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Figure 2.12 Three frames of Martha Rosler offering her own body for a feminist critique in Vital Statistics of a Citizen, Simply Obtained.

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actors, playing out and physicalizing abstract ideas, reenacting or reimagining events for which there are no images, or trying on and inhabiting personas not their own.

Queer Performativity

In Paris Is Burning (1991), Jennie Livingston shows us the “ball scene” of the late 1980s, in which New York’s black and Latin gay and transgender community perform identities in ball competitions that fuse the beauty pageant, fashion runway, dance floor, and community center. The categories of performance are perhaps most revealing—not just the stuff of traditional drag performativity. Here the drag includes performances of white privilege in categories such as “Business Executive Realness” and “Town and Country.” A “Schoolboy/ Schoolgirl Realness” contestant walks the floor at a ball wearing wire-rimmed glasses, a cardigan, and a Yale T-shirt. He carries books, twirls to a sitting position, and cracks one studiously. A “High Fashion Winter Sportswear: Poconos vs. Catskills” contestant slicks his hair back and struts his 1980s style, après ski attire, complete with mock turtleneck and designer sunglasses. An “Executive Realness” contestant removes his trench coat, revealing a three-piece pinstripe suit. He swings his briefcase up onto the judges’ table and clicks it open, revealing a copy of the 1986 flight schedules for TWA Europe. Veteran performer Dorian Corey explains:

In real life you can’t get a job as an executive unless you have good educational background and the opportunity. Now, the fact that you are not an executive is really because of the social standing of life. That’s just a pure thing. Black people have a hard time getting anywhere. And those that do are usually straight. In a ballroom you can be anything you want. You’re not really an executive but you’re looking like an executive, and therefore you’re showing the straight world that I can be an executive. If I had the opportunity I could be one. Because I can look it. And that is like a fulﬁllment. Your peers, your friends are telling you, “Oh you’d make a wonderful executive.”

It bears noting that Livingston’s documentation of these performative balls is supplemented by participatory interviews and observational scenes with contestants, both in their homes and outside in their neighborhoods, providing dimension to her participants. But as Dorian Corey underscores, the power of these ball performances comes in the fact that they are not autobiographies but at once exuberant and painful performances of aspiration and disenfranchisement. The judging criterion is “realness” and the goal to not get “read” (have one’s ﬂaws pointed out and magniﬁed in an insult) by one’s competitors. Through these performative acts, Paris Is Burning’s participants successfully queer identity, revealing the extent to which gender, sexuality, class, and power are constructed by outward signs

Figure 2.13 Frames from Paris Is Burning. Left to right: a white businessman waits at a crosswalk,

cigar in mouth; an “Executive Realness” ball contestant doffs his raincoat and turns for the judges; a Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright “real” ‘80s power suit approaches Elizabeth Arden on Fifth Avenue; a contestant performs her version of opulence.

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and performances, and at the same time how endemically social mobility is circumscribed by skin color. Using “queer” as a verb like this underscores how queer theory is not comprised of a set of abstract concepts, but rather commands a form of active, daily performance by each of us, inviting us to question cultural “norms” and our own presumptions and prejudices, exploring how these dynamics may in fact be culturally constructed and regulated forms of hegemony perpetuated through a range of political and social forces, including the media we watch and produce.

Broader Use of the Performative Mode

Despite its important historical origins within identity politics movements, the performative mode is certainly not restricted to use in such documentaries. We already discussed an instance of the performative mode in Chapter 1, when analyzing Rea Tajiri’s video History and Memory. Among the postmodern array of media sources she gathers and combines to challenge America’s screen memories of World War II Japanese American internment, Tajiri reenacts one of the few memory fragments of the internment camps her mother ever shared—filling a canteen with water at a pump in the dry camp. Tajiri chooses to perform this reenactment herself, rather than casting an actress, and though the documentary also engages poetic and autobiographical modes this moment is distinctly performative. Tajiri was not yet born when her mother was in the camps, and because of restrictions on photography there are no family images from the camps that she can draw from in her video. This performative reenactment of her mother’s memory underscores the representational voids both in Tajiri’s family history and in American popular memory. Perhaps the most well known use of the performative mode in documentary comes in The Thin Blue Line (1988). Errol Morris casts actors to reenact the alleged incidents of a 1976 traffic stop during which a Dallas police officer was killed, a murder for which Randall Dale Adams was convicted and sentenced to life in prison. The documentary contains multiple performed reenactments of the crime based on contradictory courtroom testimonies that challenge Adams’s involvement and guilt. As a result of public attention after the documentary’s release, Adams’s conviction was revisited and overturned, and he was ultimately freed. Through Morris’s documentary, we see that the performative mode can indeed be a powerful approach to embodying the hypothetical and reenacting events for which there are no images, with such approaches producing documentary evidence of life- changing significance. The Act of Killing (2012) is both controversial and compelling in its use of the performative mode. The documentary explores the historical legacies of the 1965–1966 Indonesian Genocide, when over a million individuals—ethnic Chinese and those deemed “communists” or “intellectuals” by the new Suharto government—were murdered by gangsters-for-hire. Rather than face any process of incrimination or restorative justice, these killers are now considered popular heroes and continue to hold leadership positions in state-sponsored paramilitary organizations. The documentary’s central character Anwar Congo admits to killing close to 1,000 individuals himself. Joshua Oppenheimer and his co-directors Christine Synn and an Indonesian collaborator credited only as Anonymous (attesting to the continued danger faced by Indonesians who question this version of history) engage these North Sumatran death squad leaders, trying to fathom the capacity of individuals to carry out killing of such scale and savagery. Before the military overthrow, many of these perpetrators Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright were “movie theater gangsters,” selling black market theater tickets and using cinema spaces as their hangouts and headquarters. When the directors ask them to participate in a

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documentary testifying to their murders, the men not only agree but take this as an opportunity to reenact the killings through the filter of their beloved Hollywood cinema genres and the screen gangsters on which they have long fashioned themselves. Congo and his fellow perpetrators proceed to write scripts and produce, design, and reperform their genocidal acts through the filters of gangster, western, war, horror, and even musical genres, facilitated by Oppenheimer and a hired Indonesian crew. In one off-set scene, Congo appears on an Indonesian talk show to promote the film they are making as an innovative mode of engaging young people with history. Dressed as a hybrid cowboy/gangster, he speaks to his compatriots’ long-standing affinity for cinema, telling the host, “Each genre had its own method [for killing]. Like in mafia movies they strangle the guy in the car and dump the body. So we did that too.” We see Congo direct and perform in a western scene aimed to provide “humor” in which one of the men, dressed in drag, plays a communist woman who gets raped and murdered. In the documentary’s most realist reenactment, present-day Pancasila Youth paramilitaries replicate the 1965 massacre of the residents of Kampung Kolam village, with current residents, many related to those who were killed, playing the victims. Congo shouts direction through a megaphone, “Take no prisoners! Destroy them all! Burn down their houses! Exterminate them to their roots!” The level of production value is disturbing, including the burning of buildings, and when the director yells “cut” one woman extra is actually unconscious and many of the child extras can’t stop crying. A Pancasila Youth leader tells his crying daughter, “Feby your acting was great but stop crying. You’re embarrassing me. Film stars only cry for a moment.” It seems the performance has reached a tipping point in verisimilitude for Congo as well. He surveys the set and ruminates,

What I regret . . . honestly I never expected it would look this awful. My friends keep telling me to act more sadistic, but then I saw the women and children. Imagine those children’s future. They have been tortured. Now their houses will be burned down. What future do they have? They will curse us for the rest of their lives. This was so very, very, very. . .

He doesn’t finish. Through these lavish performative scenes, the narrative of heroism that has sustained Congo for close to fifty years begins to crumble. He performs as himself in a scene where the ghosts of dead communists come back to haunt and kill him and admits to having nightmares in real life. Soon after, he directs a gangster scene in which he plays the interrogated and subsequently murdered victim. The method of killing performed is Congo’s former method of choice: strangulation with a wire. By the end of the take he’s in a catatonic state, unable to communicate with his cast mates. The documentary culminates in a final rooftop scene, where the performative buffer of Hollywood genres is dropped. Congo appears as himself, at his preferred killing site, and as he tries to testify to the events that occurred there, all that he has repressed seems to finally return. He tells the camera, “I know it was wrong—but I had to do it,” and uttering these words sends him into a state of gagging, which progressively escalates. He becomes doubled over, retching, unable to continue speaking. The documentary ends, with audiences left to decide whether the performative mode has truly driven Congo to physically, psychologically, and morally reckon with his past, or if this is simply his greatest performance yet. Oppenheimer makes clear that his aim with the project was not to scapegoat a few Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright individuals; he sees its approaches as a means of exposing the continued systemic performances and disavowals that perpetuate all cultural systems of power, including the

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Figure 2.14 A range of performative moments by Anwar Congo in The Act of Killing. Top, left to right: Congo directs and performs in a western rape scene, is featured in a musical number, and appears in his real-life “gangster” persona on a television talk show. Bottom: the ghosts of “communists” haunt, murder, and torture Congo in a horror scene; Congo plays the interrogated and murdered victim of a gangster scene; Congo appears as himself in the documentary’s ﬁnal scene, and recounting his past actions makes him physically sick.

United States (which actively sought to destabilize the Suharno regime in Indonesia that preceded Suharto). He characterizes the project’s performative strategies as “an intervention to open a space for a radical reimagining of the Indonesian present, and how the past is kept alive in the present in a very destructive and disturbing way” (Rapold). What is certain is that The Act of Killing is one of the most original and disturbing examples of participatory and performative documentary practices that will likely ever be seen.

Performing Self: The Autobiographical Mode

Baring oneself to a public is at the heart of the autobiographical mode. The emotional and personal life experiences of the producer become the documented reality. Such documentaries offer an embodied approach to representation, a stark contrast to the expository and observational modes, where subjectivity or the presence of the maker are deemed contaminations. As we’ll see through the examples that follow, when successful, the example of the self becomes a means of framing and personalizing political and historical questions of larger social relevance. At its best, the autobiographical mode not only closes the gap between producer and subject but also the space between maker and audience members, who are invited to see and know the eye and the “I” behind the camera.

Third-Wave Feminism and Autobiography

Early performative feminist works such as Martha Rosler’s Vital Statistics may have succeeded in derailing the traditional male-driven gaze, but many argue that in their drive to Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright produce an alternate gaze, early feminist video makers wound up creating an elitist counter cinema, the very performativity of which, in the absence of a real subjectivity with whom to

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identify, alienated viewers and came across as preachy or punishing. Accordingly, third-wave feminism, emerging in the 1990s alongside the gay rights movement and queer theory, championed space for personal nuance and diversity in notions of gender, sexuality, and other registers of identity and modeled the potentials of an autobiographical mode of documentary. In her 1996 article “Female Transgressions,” Laura Kipnis terms Rosler’s Vital Statistics “in both its polemic and its formal strategy, an experiment in radical unpleasure” (335). She argues that such work, using the female body not as embodied subject but as “gambit,” only provides women with two spectatorial positions—either self-denial (I don’t do that!) or self-excoriation (I’m guilty of that!)—and that the piece’s militancy and detachment deny the opportunity to acknowledge pain or the space to permit empathy. Kipnis instead calls upon female video makers to be “transgressive,” using their gender and personal identity as a form of play rather than a form of oppression. She argues that second-wave feminism’s wane and unpopularity was often a result of video strategies that were not about “speaking to” the audience but rather leveling a series of interdictions at them against (hetero) sexuality, humor, popular culture, and pleasure. Female transgression for Kipnis involves a queering of politics and a subversion of fixed identities. All women are not the same, and as such feminist work should underscore individual uniqueness, unruliness, and plurality. In Saddle Sores: A Blue Western (1998), artist Vanalyne Green gets personal, recounting her contraction of genital herpes from Bob, a “cowboy” ranch hand. Utilizing video images of the frontier landscape, appropriated clips from classic westerns, abstract images of her body, video clips of herself and close friends talking, popular images of cowboy iconography (from cigarette ads to Remington paintings), and U.S. Army sex education films, Green’s video plays on both intensely private and public/popular levels. There is Vanalyne’s personal shock and short-lived shame, followed by anger, questions about the medical condition’s implications on the future of her sex life, and ultimately acceptance and the courage to educate and empower others. Putting her own face (and body) to the subject of sexually transmitted disease, Green disarms us, makes us laugh, and ultimately prompts us to think, exploring public taboos about illness and perceptions of those with a medical condition as “dirty” or “promiscuous.” The video subverts the ideology of “the cowboy” as America’s icon of health and heroism, lampooning popular representations, from John Ford films to the Marlboro Man, which built the cowboy persona and male symbol over the course of the twentieth century. Through autobiographical expression of a private experience, Saddle Sores sends out a loud, clear public service announcement: if John Wayne can have an STD, anyone can.

Figure 2.15 Frames from Saddle Sores: A Blue Western. From left to right: two shots of Vanalyne Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Green documenting her gynecological exam; Green’s own video footage of an iconic cowboy; Green playfully decorates a portrait of Remington—a cowboy mythologizer—with animated herpes sores.

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Gay Rights Media and Queer Autobiography

Gay activists ﬁrst began using video in a concerted fashion in the face of the AIDS crisis in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In a pre-Internet world, groups like ACT UP understood the performative power of rupturing the customary use and ﬂow of public space as a way of getting mainstream media’s attention and coverage. James Wentzy’s Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP (2002) is comprised entirely of the group’s internal video documentation of planning meetings and the resultant public actions. We see how activists became experts at performative modes of protest, staging skeleton-costumed die-ins on the steps of the Food and Drug Administration, kiss-ins in front of hospitals accused of discriminatory treatment practices, or political funerals—carrying the caskets of individuals who died of AIDS down Fifth Avenue in New York City during rush hour or staging a funeral protest with an open casket in front of the White House. Such visual drama in the streets provided optics that network news camera crews would turn out for, permitting ACT UP to get its messages out to a primetime audience on the evening news without having to pay a dime to corporate media. Beyond such collective performative efforts, however, certain individuals soon began engaging the autobiographical mode, putting their own faces and stories to the socially divisive issues of AIDS and gay identity at large. Before making Tongues Untied (1989), artist, activist, and documentary maker Marlon Riggs had already received an Emmy for his 1986 documentary Ethnic Notions, which traced black stereotypes in America. He would go on to win a 1992 Peabody Award for Color Adjustment (1991), which subjected American television to the same scrutiny. Funded partially with National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) monies, Tongues Untied places Riggs center stage as he pronounces both his blackness and gayness to audiences. Riggs appears both as performative conduit for the message— ”Brother to Brother. Brother to Brother. Black men loving black men is an act of resistance”—and also as autobiographer, recounting his own experiences with invisibility in the gay community (because of his race) and ostracism from the black community (for his sexuality).

Figure 2.16 Two frames from ACT UP performative protests included in Fight Back, Fight AIDS: 15 Years of ACT UP. Left: ACT UP’s 1991 “Day of Desperation Protest” occupies Grand Central Station during rush hour. Members used balloons to launch a banner up into the vaulted ceiling of the central

rotunda. Right: press and news crews push in to record Wayne Turner at ACT UP’s 1998 open-casket Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright “Political Funeral for Steve Michael” in front of the White House. Michael was the founder of ACT UP’s Washington, D.C. chapter and Turner was his partner.

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The inscriptions of self by practitioners like Green and Riggs are all the more powerful given the history of autobiography in Western culture. As a literary form, autobiographies were traditionally the endeavors of white men of significant accomplishment or social scrutiny. Riggs’s performance of self is the full inverse of such a model. His is a story of being pushed to the margins by a gay community, whose mediated fantasies did not include black men unless in the most specific of “Mandingo” fantasies, and a black community, whose members turned their backs on “punks” like him. His story embodies many of the same conflicts intellectualized in Martha Rosler’s piece, about turning cultural ostracism into self-hatred and self-regulation, but circumvents the distancing effect of Vital Statistics’s strategies. Riggs narrates his own first-person struggle to strive for a white ideal, finally gaining the personal strength to call out to himself and to other black men to love and support one another in their alternative identities as gay men. Alternately painful, funny, lyrical, and empowering, Tongues Untied also proved controversial after its premiere on POV—American public television’s longest-running bastion for new independent documentary—in July 1991. Right-wing Christians and Republicans chose Riggs’s video as the latest in a line of works to vilify publicly in the name of “morality” and the upholding of “community standards.” Spearheaded by Republican Senator Jesse Helms and Christian Coalition head Pat Robertson, the attacks distorting Riggs’s documentary hinged on the fact that the project had received federal National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) funding. Charges were levied that taxpayer dollars were being used to promote the homosexual lifestyle and to produce gay pornography. Robertson’s ranks excerpted and distributed clips from the video to members of Congress that, out of context, completely devalued and misrepresented Riggs’s work. The one iconic passage from the video that was recycled on network news for weeks was a slow pullout on shirtless white male torsos standing on the street during San Francisco’s Folsom Street Fair. In Tongues Untied, Riggs shows the clip while describing his own invisibility as a black man in gay culture, which only depicts blacks as part of a stereotype. In the sequence, he goes on to acknowledge his self-excoriation and buying into the myth of white superiority, even in his attractions and fantasies. Riggs tells us:

I avoided the question, “Why?” Pretended not to notice the absence of black images in this new gay life. In bookstores, poster shops, film festivals, even my own fantasies. Tried not to notice the few images of blacks that were most popular. Something in Oz, in me, was amiss, but I tried not to notice. I was intent on the search for my reflection, love, affirmation in eyes of blue, grey, green. Searching, I discovered something I didn’t expect, something decades of determined assimilation could not blind me to. In this great gay Mecca, I was an invisible man. I had no shadow, no substance, no place, no history, no reflection. I was an alien, unseen. And seen, unwanted. Here as in Hepzibah [Junior High School in Augusta, Georgia], I was a nigger still.

The irony of Robertson’s clip selection would be comical were it not part of such a concerted and divisive campaign. He chose a solitary clip of a muscular, white torso to represent all of Tongues Untied, rendering Riggs’s blackness and the fundamental issues of the video invisible even in its public viliﬁcation. PBS stations across the United States cancelled and pulled their scheduled broadcasts of Tongues Untied, a chilling reminder that it is often a vocal minority who determines who and what may be heard by the rest of U.S. society, even on “public” television. Riggs rose to the challenge, becoming a national spokesperson for artistic and vocal Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright freedom with energy and grace before dying from AIDS in 1994. In his powerful article “Tongues Re-Tied,” published posthumously, Riggs stands up to what he terms the “vice

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Figure 2.17 Frames from Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied. From left to right: the iconic white torso image used in right-wing moral outrage over the video’s partial NEA funding; Riggs is a black face in the crowd on San Francisco’s Castro Street; Riggs at age six, when he ﬁrst began to fathom his difference and the meaning of slurs such as “punk” (a derogatory term to describe gay black men); in an act of reappropriating and reempowering denigrating slurs and stereotypes, Riggs and his collaborators humorously but powerfully initiate us into the language of “Snap!,” a posturing and discursive means of standing up for one’s self with performative grace, rather than resorting to physical violence.

squad,” asking why society, in the face of right-wingers shouting about the “misuse of American taxpayer’s dollars,” always seems to forget that black and gay/lesbian/ transgender Americans pay taxes too? He calls sex, blackness, and homosexuality “triple taboos” in increasing order of repudiation and chides minority groups for their own silence and complicity in changing themselves to fit a hegemonic definition of “normal.” Whose community and whose standards are the Robertsons and Falwells speaking of? Riggs breaks “assimilation” down as nothing more than a process of obeying “master codes” of courteous speech, proper subject matter, conventional aesthetics, and mainstream appeal. In his queer reading of American media, politics, and economics, he argues that charges of obscenity are ultimately less about sex than they are about power—the continued erasure of minorities and the marginalized by a vocal minority, aided and abetted by corporations, networks, and studios living in perpetual terror of bad publicity and profit loss. Vanalyne Green and Marlon Riggs took autobiographical risks, exposing themselves in times when production technologies were far less accessible than they are today. By placing themselves both behind and in front of the camera and expressing personal challenges and political struggles, their uses of the autobiographical mode should prove instructive to each of us as documentary makers, regardless of our own matrices of identity. Their examples dismantle notions of documentary production as an endeavor requiring access to specialized equipment and extensive financial support, instead redefining the process as one of maximizing whatever tools are at one’s disposal and remembering that the personal can be both an engaging and politically powerful route to cultural questioning and documentary representation. In our digital moment, when “selfies” and personal confessions and rants have become daily commonplaces on social media and on reality TV, we should all reconnect to the politics and poetics of early feminist and queer autobiographers, transforming isolated acts of self-exposure into deeper, more retrospective, socially engaged, and formally innovative works of digital autobiography.

Trying Out Reality: The Essayistic Mode

When one thinks of the essay, it is perhaps imagined foremost as a literary form, a practice Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright of writing dating back to the sixteenth century and French Renaissance writer and nobleman Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne popularized a mode of writing that takes its cue from the

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French verb essayer—“to test” or “to try.” Coming from a verb as it does, this mode is an active one, in which a proposed idea or question is tested by a range of means and intersecting lines of argument. One stab may lead to a tangentially related concept, personal anecdote, or new approach, providing an unexpected, and present-tense realness to the journey. The essayistic mode of documentary should by no means be imagined as a meandering devolution into self-indulgent anecdotes and a loss of coherence, however. The art of a great written or documentary essay hinges upon artfully weaving personal experience, history, cultural analysis, and multiple viewpoints with a sense of structural progression and care. Quite often an essay does not arrive at a finite conclusion, yet the ideas discovered during the process may reinform the initial query in unforeseen ways, leaving the viewer or reader with a sense of arrival and broadened perspective. This is no easy feat, but an exciting one when executed well. In “The Electronic Essay,” Michael Renov makes the case for video as a medium particularly suited to an essayistic mode of exploration. He references the early days of video, where individuals searching out the inherent properties of the medium became transfixed on the instantaneous feedback loop possible between camera, television monitor, and artist. Remember that film was not only a prohibitively expensive medium but also one necessitating inherent temporal delays between shooting, processing, and screening, delays which video collapsed. Video’s initial electronic and now digital forms reduce the time between an idea and its formal expression to a point far more in line with artistic media such as painting and writing. This ability for reflexive mirroring and constant reassessment is itself a long-standing precondition of the essayistic form (Renov 185). We can see an example of early video artists exploring the implications of this immediacy in Richard Serra and Nancy Holt’s Boomerang (1974). The video consists of Holt sitting in a studio wearing earphones that are connected to a video monitor. Her own recorded voice feeds back to her as she speaks, and the loop from camera to monitor actually creates a slight delay. But even this tiny lag shifts her perception of time and self completely. Holt struggles to speak, slowing down and stalling as her words bounce back into her ears.

The words . . . coming back seem slow. They don’t seem to have the same forcefulness . . . as I speak. I think it’s also slowing . . . me . . . down. I think that it makes my . . . thinking . . . slower. I have a double take on myself. I am once removed . . . from myself. The words become like . . . things. I’m throwing things out into the world and they are boomeranging . . . back. Boomerannngigingnngng. Boommemerannnggigng . . . back.

Boomerang is itself a short experiment, not an essayistic documentary, but it underscores video as a means to explore phenomenology, self, and society through the prism of a medium, which is the essence of the essayistic mode. Critic Rosalind Krauss wrote in 1976 that artists positioning themselves between video camera and monitor—“machines that are the opening and closing of a parenthesis”—was such a frequent phenomenon that video as a medium subscribed to an “aesthetics of narcissism” (180). But narcissism, usually levied as a pejorative in popular culture, is actually an essential psychological process. Searching for one’s mirror—in culture, in others, in history—is a necessary means by which we construct a full sense of self. By extension, a documentarian who tests ideas in the laboratory of the world stands to create a work with Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright not only claims to the real but also simultaneous revelations of self and society in the process.

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In The Gleaners and I/Les glaneurs et la glaneuse (2001), Agnes Varda begins her essayistic video with a personal curiosity: a Jean-François Millet painting of women gleaning leftover wheat shafts from the fields after the harvest. The painting prompts Varda to begin looking into the history of gleaning—foraging in already-harvested furrows for the forgotten or discarded potato or cabbage. What ensues is an eighty-two-minute digital video romp across France in which Varda seeks out modern-day gleaners of all sorts—those who continue the tradition in country fields; people surviving off the garbage left at farmers’ markets and tossed into grocery dumpsters; artists who create work entirely from found objects; and even Varda’s own creative process. “These new small cameras, they are digital, fantastic. Their effects are stroboscopic, narcissistic, and even hyper-realistic,” she muses. Varda offers up the apt analogy that the documentary process is itself a form of gleaning—selecting, proposing, and discarding pieces of reality in the search for value, utility, and meaning. At one point, Varda forgets to turn the camera off, resulting in a stretch of jerky footage of the lens cap swinging about as she tromps through a field. Certainly fodder for the cutting room floor by most directors’ standards, Varda instead gleans worth from the shot, setting it to music and playfully offering up a “dance of the lens cap” interlude. Through Varda’s skillful links and extrapolations, the notion of what it means to glean in contemporary society broadens out to frame larger thematic questions about what is privileged and valued in French society and what is thrown away. Pulling out yet another level, Varda nudges viewers to ask not only what but who is privileged. Rummaging through the souvenirs she gleaned on a trip to Japan, Varda shows us some postcards of Rembrandt paintings she bought at a Tokyo exhibition. Her one hand records the other, wrinkled and liver-spotted, holding a postcard of Rembrandt’s Saskia von Uylenburgh in Profile. Varda muses:

Saskia up close, and then my hand up close. I mean, this is my project: to ﬁlm with one hand my other hand. To enter into the horror of it. I ﬁnd it extraordinary. I feel as if I am an animal, worse, I am an animal I don’t know.

Varda, a veteran avant-garde filmmaker who mixed with the likes of Maya Deren and Stan Brakhage in the 1960s, was seventy-two years old when she made Gleaners. As our narrator, interlocutor, and guide, we come to see quite poignantly that her documentary is also about our own corporeality—germination, ripening, and death. Will parts of our lives be gleaned and preserved for posterity, or will our existences simply be discarded and forgotten after our deaths? The documentary contains moments that are expository (relating the history of gleaning), observational (shooting people rummaging through the garbage left from a farmers’ market), poetic (the dance of the lens cap), reflexive (one hand filming the other), participatory (various characters invite Varda into their worlds and share their gleaning, favoring active engagement over talking heads), performative (Varda hefts a bundle of wheat on her shoulder and strikes the pose of Jules Breton’s The Gleaner right alongside the actual painting in the Arras Museum gallery), and autobiographical (Varda reveals her own idiosyncrasies, confesses her fears, and shares her joys throughout). But it is the essayistic mode that holds all these approaches together. Initial curiosity about a painting weaves outward in an ever-widening investigation to form a surprising humanistic tapestry, the documentary whole far greater than the sum of its parts. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright As seen in both Boomerang and The Gleaners and I, many essayistic documentaries again close the gap between maker and subject, including the maker as an identified

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Figure 2.18 Frames from The Gleaners and I. Top, left to right: Agnes Varda performatively reenacts Jules Breton’s painting The Gleaner; Varda records her own hand passing across Rembrandt reproductions. Bottom: artist Hervé shows a painting incorporating gleaned objects; an old woman gleans through the garbage left from a Paris farmer’s market; heart-shaped potatoes gleaned by Varda.

protagonist or guide for the exploration of a cultural issue or question. Similarly, in Supersize Me (2004) Morgan Spurlock turns himself into an experimental subject, exploring the hazards of a fast-food nation by eating only McDonalds food for one month. This quest and the dramatic health consequences that ensue provide a structure for larger social examination of food access, economics, and health in America. Thematic, reflective, fragmentary, and serpentine, essayistic works start out asking one question, but soon split and morph into other subsidiary lines of investigation, finally arriving at an unexpected but synthesizing destination. The goal of essayistic documentaries is not absolute knowledge or an expository, linear, “factual” account. Instead, this mode encourages the pursuit of greater understanding, comprised of multiple, perhaps even contradictory perspectives, often personally implicating the maker in the search and its findings.

New Forms of Experience: The Interactive Mode

Just as the advent and popular reach of electronic video technologies opened up possibilities for performative, autobiographical, and essayistic modes of engagement, digital technologies and the Internet are expanding the forms and functions of an interactive mode of documentary. In 2011, composer Darren Solomon was embedding YouTube videos into a website page he was building and discovered that he could have more than one embedded video play simultaneously. A composer accustomed to layering musical parts to produce a work, he was inspired to put out an open call on his website, via e-mail, and on Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright YouTube soliciting one- to two-minute instrumental video clips from others. Along with some basic technical recommendations about mix levels and how to upload submissions to

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Figure 2.19 Elegant in its simplicity, the website interface of In B Flat 2.0 requires an interactive mode of engagement by site visitors who are invited to become conductors/video jockeys of their experience.

YouTube, his main stipulation was simply that all music be in the key of B-flat major. From the submissions received and his own recordings, he selected twenty, and embedded them in a simple grid at www.inbflat.net, with only these instructions to visitors: “play these together, some or all, start them at any time, in any order.” A link to more information leads to a FAQ page where Solomon discusses the genesis of the project, historicizes other instances of collaborative music making, and invites visitors to experiment with other ways to present or remix the media components of what he calls In B Flat 2.0 (2011). In B Flat 2.0 certainly exemplifies a participatory mode of production, similar in many ways to the Chapter 1 examples of The Love Tapes in its soliciting and facilitation of collaboration. But Solomon’s web page requires another distinct level of participation: interaction from visitors. The piece is not a linear documentary work that starts, runs, and ends in a singular, linear manner for a fixed duration. In order to experience it, visitors must decide which windows to click on and in what order. They can continue cycling the video feeds, or choose to stop any or all of them at any time. They can adjust volume levels of individual windows to favor certain instruments in the sound mix. Notions of authorship extend beyond the production of the work’s media components and web interface; site visitors must interact with the work and in doing so, author their own particular experience of it. The use of the verb “play” to refer to the starting and stopping of media becomes the function of the piece: Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright to play. Spectatorship transforms from a passive, dictated experience to an active, self- directed one. Elegant for its simplicity in form and low production cost, In B Flat 2.0

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suggests that particular emergent possibilities of our digital moment are opening up new forms of documentary designed to permit an interactive mode of production and audience engagement. Interactive media is not new. Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose video Confessions of a Chameleon was examined in Chapter 1, has been exploring ideas of audience interactivity in her works since the 1970s. Marsha Kinder and her Labyrinth Project team at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg Center for Communication and Journalism were pioneers in the production of what Kinder and other scholars such as Lev Manovich term database narratives. Since the 1990s Labyrinth has experimented with ways to use new media platforms to produce documentary works that challenge the idea that documentary storytelling must occur through linear film and video texts with a clear start and end and a fixed running time. Instead, Kinder and her collaborators have looked to the networked structures of databases for inspiration. Amassing a database of archival materials on a subject and additional original Labyrinth-team-produced media (interviews and short video pieces), they then design interfaces through which individuals can access and explore the stories such material can tell. Such interfaces began in the form of CD- and DVD-ROMs and projects such as Mysteries and Desire: Searching the Worlds of John Rechy (1999), an interactive memoir of queer Chicano novelist John Rechy, and have evolved into immersive museum exhibitions such as Jewish Homegrown History: Immigration, Identity and Intermarriage (2012), a cultural history of Jewish life in the United States, presented at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles, which made it possible for visitors not only to dial up particular stories and experiences through the exhibition interfaces but also to contribute their own stories, photographs, and home movies to the database of exhibited materials. Interactivity can thereby come in two particularly interesting forms through this mode—first, in terms of the agency visitors have in navigating programmed content in a nonlinear fashion at their own pace and in their own order; and second, in potentially permitting visitors to contribute content to the database and become shared producers/authors. Such interactive projects exemplify the principles of what writer and philosopher Umberto Eco has called open works: those works of writing and art in which, rather than intending a “closed,” singular experience, authors intentionally invite interpretation and contribution to the form, function, and meaning of a text. In Chapter 1, we mentioned Jehane Noujaim’s The Square (2013) as a documentary that evidences the potentials for a digital public sphere in its chronicling of young Egyptian activists using mobile technologies and social media platforms to shape both the course of the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its coverage in the international press. The documentary is observational, reflexive, and participatory in its engagement of modes. It certainly invites active engagement and interpretation, but like most documentary feature films and videos its form and content are closed. Noujaim and her editors selected particular material from their extensive cache of footage and crafted an elegant progression and structure through it. Watching the documentary is a linear, durational experience that lasts 108 minutes and remains consistent from one screening to the next. With 18 Days in Egypt (2011–) co-creators Jigar Metha and Yasmin Elayat seek to engage the same Egyptian sociopolitical context and moment, but through a distinctly interactive form they call a “web-native collaborative documentary project.” Freely accessible at www.18daysinegypt.com, the project aims to collect and archive a dynamic history of the Egyptian uprising and its aftermath comprised entirely of user-produced social media and mobile technology content. Metha, a documentary maker and journalist, teamed up with Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright Elayat, a software developer who designed an interface called GroupStream, to host and facilitate the project. Contributors can add story “streams” though a prompted process that

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first asks for the date the story occurred, followed by an opportunity to provide a title and a text-based description. A Google Maps integration permits contributors to specifically geotag where their story took place. Users are then asked “Who was there with you? Who can help tell your story?” and integrations with social media sites and e-mail providers permit contributors to send invitations to their contacts to become collaborators on a story stream. A final interface window permits a wide range of content contribution options: photos, videos, and posts can be added through integrations with social and streaming media sites including Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, or YouTube or by simply providing a web URL. Media files in a range of formats can also be directly uploaded into the interface, which is also equipped with a word processing editor to add textual elements. An editing window then allows the user to reorder and refine stream content, and before publishing, users are prompted to provide keywords to help index the story and make site content searchable. Each completed stream then appears as a thumbnail portal on the site’s interface, which can be displayed and sorted in a number of ways: by the date of the historical event documented, by the date of user upload, by popularity, or via a “recommended” option curated by the site’s community managers. Contributors and visitors can also share completed streams to other social media sites, spreading the reach of the stories produced and potentially attracting new visitors or contributors to the 18 Days in Egypt site. The story streams are highly diverse in the identity of the contributors, the degree of singular authorship or collaboration entailed, the language used, the types of documentary evidence provided, and the temporal and experiential distance from the events recounted. Contributor Menna Awad’s streams all date from 2012 and scrutinize political and social progress a year since the uprising. In a May 30, 2012 stream titled “Disappointment of an Egyptian Voter” she uses both personal cellphone and sourced photographs, along with text cards, to recount her excitement at voting in an election for the first time but quickly becoming disillusioned by distrust in the credibility of the electoral process and her limited choice of runoff candidates. In another stream entitled “Sexual harassment Against Women—Epidemic?” she uses text and sourced photos and videos to speak to the harassment and violence experienced by female participants in the uprising and in subsequent incidents as female activists march to demand an end to such harassment. In a series of individual streams, Noon El captured and posted retrospective testimonies from uprising protesters a year later as they congregated in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2012 for a mass remembrance rally. This comparison of The Square and 18 Days in Egypt is intended to underscore that any topic, historical event, or story can be approached via a range of modes, with distinctly different results. It is not intended to privilege or celebrate one approach over another. For all its interactive potential, the open experience of 18 Days in Egypt can prove quite fragmentary and decontextualized, while the closed structure of The Square offers audiences a more directed and arguably deeper engagement with and investment in the stories and actions of six young activists—each selected for the distinct range of social, political, religious, national, and personal identifications they represent and the means of documentation/activism they engaged during the uprising. Despite the exciting potential to serve as ongoing, collaborative databases and archives, open works require their producers to commit to ongoing site management, hosting, and maintenance in order to sustain their promised functions. This can prove costly and labor-intensive, and what may be a cutting- edge interface design today can become quickly outmoded as HTML coding capacities, media player plugins, and social media platforms evolve. Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright French media maker David Dufresne set out to make a documentary about the town of Fort McMurray, the Alberta, Canada, town where the lives and livelihoods of every resident

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Figure 2.20 A screenshot from the online collaborative, interactive web documentary 18 Days in Egypt shows eight different user-produced story streams that refract the 2011 Egyptian uprising and its ongoing sociopolitical legacies through a range of positions and perspectives.

are tied to the development of the region’s oil sands, the world’s third largest reserve. His crew spent sixty days on location, shooting thousands of hours of material and interviewing fifty-five townspeople—ranging in perspective and position from the mayor to an industry rep from the Oil Sands Developers Group, to a First Nations elder in opposition to the oil industry, to a strip club proprietor. Dufresne wanted to make a documentary work that challenges individuals to grapple with global choices about energy production and environmental sustainability. But as he expressed in a 2013 video interview, “It’s a very serious matter that may seem unappealing but concerns everybody. . . . Unfortunately people don’t care anymore” (Lamontagne). So rather than making a linear documentary, he and his extensive team of collaborators made what they call a “documentary game.” Fort McMoney (2013) is a free, web-hosted, immersive, first-person adventure game, released in three episodes, in which you, the player, “visit” the town of Fort McMurray. Through the interface, you are placed in the role of investigator. Hotspots trigger a branching series of options. When you meet individuals, you have the choice to “interview them,” which triggers the playing of video and audio interview material. Periodically, through your dashboard, you’re invited to debate with other web players, via an integrated @FortMcMoney Twitter feed, about issues related to oil production and to vote on particular issue referendums that will influence the future of the virtual Fort McMoney. The results of these votes are tabulated and visualized Sim City-style, making players feel personally implicated in the course of the town’s governance, economic future, and global environmental impact. You earn points for each mode of engagement, and the narrative trajectory of the game involves trying to get out of town to actually visit an oil sands mining site. Often, in the Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright forums, players share information with one another about how to access particular sites or areas of the town interface. In order to maximize the reach of the work, it has been made

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Figure 2.21 Interface views from the documentary game Fort McMoney. Left: the main dashboard view, which provides mission progress statistics, the results of a recent player referendum, and the latest user comments. Right: a ﬁrst-person interface view with an invitation to “interview” a town resident.

available in English, French, and German, also reflecting the co-production backing of the endeavor by the National Film Board of Canada, Montreal media house Toxa, and Franco- German media outlet ARTE. What grounds the experience as a documentary are over 100 short video pieces embedded in the interface that engage with the actual sites, residents, oil workers, business proprietors, activists, and lobbyists whose lives and livelihoods are tied to Fort McMurray and its oil industry. The complex, contingent, branching nature of the experience approximates the complexity of the issues at hand. Dufresne and his team did not want to provide a simplistic pro- or anti- message, but rather sought to challenge and invite an apathetic culture to take an active role in exploring the issue and its implications on their own attitudes and actions. In our digital moment, the range of interactive forms documentary media can take continues to expand in dizzying ways. 360° cameras and virtual reality headsets are producing immersive environments that are shattering conceptions of the image frame. Geospatial locative technologies are turning our mobile devices into dynamic portals, through which site-specific histories and information can be layered onto our physical surroundings. Algorithms are allowing for the high-speed processing of big data sets, and applications and web interfaces are being designed to visualize that data and tell stories with it. Amid all this experimentation and change, more traditional linear, documentaries will likely continue to coexist. Audiences will continue to value the experience of a director making aesthetic and narrative choices and sequencing a story or argument in a particular way. As you consider newfound interactive forms, ask yourself what distinct possibilities this mode uniquely affords that would not otherwise be possible through a linear documentary film or video. Whatever modes you select, make sure that your chosen form best serves your intended functions.

Multimodal Making

As many of the examples of this chapter verify, the same documentary will likely engage multiple modes. The Act of Killing begins with expository title cards contextualizing the history Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. rights All Routledge. 2017. © Copyright of the 1955–1956 Indonesian massacre central to understanding the contemporary dynamics explored in the documentary. The collaboration between ﬁlmmakers and the

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“movie theater gangsters” is certainly participatory but also uniquely performative. There are reflexive moments throughout the documentary when participants address “Joshua” behind the camera and in turn, when Joshua Oppenheimer interrupts, directly challenging their evasive and revisionist accounts of history. At other times, an observational camera captures real-time interactions and moments between characters. You might argue there is overlap between several of the modes, say, between the reflexive and the autobiographical. But though the autobiographical mode may be inherently reflexive, engagement of a reflexive strategy is not necessarily autobiographical. Each of the nine modes of making detailed in this chapter points to a distinctive history and a matrix of formal, creative, and ethical approaches to documentary practice that can serve as tools for analyzing existing media and developing and realizing your own productions. The modes you recruit will profoundly shape the look, feel, sound, structure, and meaning of the story you tell and how it affects audiences. It is vital to explore your options carefully and to have a strong sense of approach before the unruliness of reality descends upon you during the production process. As you analyze media or design your own projects, refer to Appendix H, Quick Reference: Documentary Modes, which provides a short synopsis of each mode and examples of documentary works engaging each.

INTO PRACTICE

Analysis

The key to successful contemporary documentary study and practice lies in having a conversance with past strategies and practices of representing reality, along with the social, cultural, and political contexts that facilitated these modes of production. It is imperative that you watch and experience as many documentaries as possible. With the Internet, an increasing number of documentaries from the past are now being rereleased and made accessible. By watching contemporaneous films such as Man with a Movie Camera, Nanook of the North, and Housing Problems (or another Grierson Group endeavor), one begins to see the simultaneous conversations and divergences that occurred between early twentieth-century documentaries. Similarly, comparing the strategies of mid-century cinema vérité and direct cinema reveals both ontological debates about the role of documentary and the discrete potentials of observational, reflexive, and participatory modes. Testing out a range of contemporary interactive documentaries informs the range of interface designs and modes of engagement possible, and the successes and limitations of each. It would be interesting, for example, to explore the similarities, both in chosen subject matters and populist proclivities, of Jon Alpert and Frederick Wiseman. Wiseman’s Hospital (1970) and Alpert’s Healthcare: Your Money or Your Life (1978) are quite similar in certain respects, but Wiseman’s adherence to the observational mode and Alpert’s reflexive and participatory involvement make for two very different viewing experiences. Both works are successful on their own merits, and screening them consecutively would serve as an instructive exercise both in discerning modes and in calibrating your own style and approach toward documenting human subjects.

70 2 A Brief History: Movements and Modes

1. Who is the maker, and how is their presence felt? Do we ever see or hear him or her? What is the relationship or dynamic created between maker and subject, and how does this affect your reception of the documentary? 2. What are the formal strategies used in the documentary? Does information come primarily from a voice-over, interviews or dialogue, observation of characters, or via other feeds and formal approaches? How do these formal choices inﬂuence your perceptions of reality? How do the dynamic between maker/subject and the formal strategies employed reﬂect the modes at work? How do the chosen modes impact your access to and engagement with the documentary? 3. Is there a single mode engaged or do the makers draw upon several? Are these choices effective or problematic in their results? Can you imagine ways other modes could have been engaged to document the same issue? If so, how would these changes affect the politics and meanings expressed or the type of audience reached?

Development

As a means of further familiarizing yourself with these modes while also advancing your own project development, take the list of ideas you began after Chapter 1 and think about the best mode or combination of modes you might use to approach each subject. Chances are your topics and the functions you’ve assigned to them already signal inherent choices in approach. Similarly, if you feel a mode is not suitable, force yourself to articulate specifically why this is so. Every maker approaches a topic from a very different place (background, ethnicity, beliefs, budget, access to means of production), and so there are no right or wrong strategies, only the choices best suited to your project’s reality. As part of this exploration, remember to address where your own presence and stance as maker will emerge in the mix. Not every documentary can or should be performative, autobiographical, or overtly reflexive. But you, as producer, will always be indelibly present in your work in multiple ways. Be sure these fingerprints and reflections are conscious ones.

Practice

As a practical exercise, I recommend completing Project 2: Exploring Modes of Representation in Appendix B. You can carry out this project even if you do not have a video camera. Selecting a human subject who is an expert at a certain process, anything from dating fossil remains to doing laundry, you will document this process via a range of

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Works Cited

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Ruby, Jay. Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film & Anthropology. University of Chicago Press, 2000. Sherwood, Robert E. “Nanook of the North.” The Best Moving Pictures of 1922–23, Small, Maynard & Company, 1923, pp. 3–8. Vertov, Dziga. Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Edited by Annette Michelson and translated by Kevin O’Brien, University of California Press, 1985. Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real. British Film Institute, 1995. Wise, Damon. “Documentary Veteran Frederick Wiseman Doesn’t Like Description ‘Observational Cinema’.” Variety, 22 November 2016, www.variety.com/2016/ﬁlm/festivals/

Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [11 March 2019]. Created from rmit on 2019-03-11 00:32:13.