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From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-Linear Documentary

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From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-Linear Documentary From Voice to Listening: Becoming Implicated Through Multi-linear Documentary Kim Munro The contemporary mediated landscape with its multitude of voices gives the impression that there are ever more opportunities to speak, stake claims, and have a voice. This illusion capitalizes on discontent, giving a forum for an outpouring of personal grievances and despair about the increasing inequality between rich and poor, environmental degradation, and the alienating loneliness of individualizing technology and late cap- italism. This enablement of voicing highlights the imperative that we do not just need more opportunities to speak; rather, we also need new ways of listening. This chapter addresses what it might mean to enact a methodology of listening as a documentary practice that enables multiple constructions of knowledge as well as reveals what might be diffcult, complex, and urgent. This creates a loop of listening and speaking that works together as an integrated dialogue. Through a process of listening, documentary can be re-positioned as a tool of critical and pedagogical engagement. K. Munro (*) RMIT University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2018 279 G. Cammaer et al. (eds.), Critical Distance in Documentary Media, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96767-7_14 280 K. MUNRO A documentary practice that foregrounds listening as both a methodological process and as an audience experience can destabilize traditional binaries and implicate the practitioner and audience in the documentary project within an ecology of relationships, multiple per- spectives, and complexity. Attentiveness towards what it means to listen places an ethical focus on the receivers of these voices and implicates them in a relationship of responsibility and social critique. This chapter looks at a number of documentary projects that fore- ground listening as both a methodological practice and an audience experience. These works include Natalie Bookchin’s Now he’s out in pub- lic and everyone can see (2012 and 2017) and Long Story Short (2016), Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill’s Empire: The Unintended Consequences of Dutch Colonialism (2012–2014) and before Rosemarie Lerner and Maria Court’s Quipu Project (2015). These works operate across a num- ber of platforms. In discussing these works, I chart a progression in terms of documentary strategies from voice to listening: from speaking outwards through the material, to the demand to be listened to, towards involving the audience in the listening project. The deconstruction of the traditional linear form, inherited from documentary flm and its con- comitant de-focus on speaking outwards towards one of listening, creates a critical distance that effectively positions the audience within a space of active inquiry and implication, forcing them to distance themselves from reductive views and take a position of responsibility. I propose that implicating the flmmaker, participants, and audience through listening can subvert and displace the privilege and dominance afforded to voice and speaking to reveal more complex relationships and destabilize, fxed knowledge. To make a work that uses listening as a methodology, as well as translating this into how the work is experienced, can address critical issues in the world and make incursions into the structural inequality of representation. BECOMING MINORITARIAN: FROM VOICE TO LISTENING Conventional documentary practice has been largely concerned with matters of voice, although not necessarily with listening. A focus on speaking and voice creates privileged positions of power in terms of rep- resentation and who gets to speak. Power is still afforded primarily to the flmmakers (or producers) who shape the fnal artefact—traditionally a linear flm intended for broadcast and/or cinema release. FROM VOICE TO LISTENING: BECOMING IMPLICATED … 281 Power is also encoded in well-established documentary conventions and binary relationships such as flmmaker-subject or flmmaker-audience, as well as modes of transmission and models of distribution. While the doc- umentarian’s drive has been towards worthy pursuits of giving voice to people and bearing witness to issues, stories, and situations less visible, the main focus is generally on the act of speaking, informing, and conveying. Often cited in discussions of documentary voice is Bill Nichols’s infu- ential essay from 1983, “The Voice of Documentary”. Updated through several iterations, most recently in 2017, this essay has continued to be a seminal source of reference for debates around the notion of doc- umentary voice. For Nichols “voice” is the “intangible, moiré-like pat- tern formed by the unique interaction of all a flm’s codes” (1983, 18). According to Nichols, documentary voice encompasses elements of flm style such as framing, shot length, editing decisions, and music as well as the participants and the interaction between themselves and the flmmak- ers. This defnition can largely be termed authorship. Irina Leimbacher claims a broad and over-theorized conceptualization of “voice” has led to confusing and divergent interpretations and meanings (2017). Even when the concept of voice considers whom the flm is speaking to, what it says and how it says it, it is still primarily making a proposition or argu- ment about the world. The authorial voice that speaks, whether liter- ally or through other flmic techniques, shapes the material into a single channel of knowledge. More recently, the diversifcation of documentary forms, modes of participation, and tools has resulted in a proliferation of voices, resulting in works that are more polyvocal. These forms often have a less overarching authorial framing, indicative of a more variable ontology. However, the inclusion of more voices has exposed a growing lack of ability to listen to them, for if everyone is talking, then who is listening? The proliferation of voices means that often smaller, quieter, and more divergent ones become engulfed by the most dominant ones, refective of a persisting majoritarian discourse. This does not mean the most dominant voices are the more numerous, but rather are afforded the most power through their privileged position within a major cul- ture or discourse (Deleuze and Guattari 1986). Rethinking how we can both produce and engage with documentary works through foreground- ing the act of listening can enable the speaking subject to move towards a listening subject in a process of becoming minoritarian (Braidotti 2014). The act of listening is, therefore, one of a critical opening up 282 K. MUNRO that can encompass a distancing from a position of self-concern and knowledge towards an ethical consideration of one another and a multi- tude of perspectives. LISTENING AS DOCUMENTARY PRACTICE Listening has always been central to the practice of documentary making. The documentary interview continues to be a mainstay of the form, either as part of the initial research or as the main audio-visual material of the flm. Predicated on the concept of the speaking subject, vocaliza- tion is often considered to be the most direct way to transfer experience and testimony. Nichols speaks about a paradigmatic shift in the use of interviews in the “participatory mode” of documentary as from “I speak about them to you” to “I speak with them for us (me and you)” (2010, 180). However, theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha are more critical of the reliance on the interview for claims of authenticity (1993, 90–109). Additionally, the use of participants’ voices is often tempered in post-production and constrained by the requirements of the form that is shaped according to pre-determined authorial intentions. Shifting land- scapes of documentary production, largely brought about by decreased sources of funding as well as increasingly conservative mandates and dic- tates on form driven by television programming, have pushed documen- tary makers to use alternative modes of production while critiquing and challenging conventional approaches. These strategies are often a com- bination of using more accessible technologies and the desire to subvert traditional top-down models through more collaborative and participa- tory approaches. While these practices are important, they also create a false sense of progress towards a more democratic ideal of empowerment through voicing. While there is a tendency to think that having a voice is equal to having power, according to Deborah Bird Rose, this is still a privileged position, always projecting outwards, as it is one that does not has to consider the other: Power lies in the ability not to hear what is being said, not to experience the consequences of one’s actions, but rather to go on in one’s self-centric and insulated way. The communication is all one way and the pole of power sustains its privilege by refusing any feedback that would cause to open itself to dialogue. (2015, 128) FROM VOICE TO LISTENING: BECOMING IMPLICATED … 283 The axis of power accorded to those who capitalize on the spoken word exists on a continuum. While Rose’s claim might pertain to those who occupy positions of evident power, any act of uni-directional speaking claims a space that is incontestable. RE-PRESENTING A MULTITUDE OF VOICES AND HOW TO BE HEARD Filmmaker and video artist Natalie Bookchin’s work makes use of per- sonal vernacular video material to re-present and make visible broader concerns in a polyvocal way. There is something voyeuristically unsettling about watching Bookchin’s work. Often compiled
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