Lives Are Led: Autobiographical Film and the New Documentary a Thesis
Lives are Led: Autobiographical Film and the New Documentary
A thesis/film by John Henry Hookham B.A. (Hons), Dip ATFM (LIFS), MA (Witwatersrand)
Creative Industries Research & Application Centre
Queensland University of Technology
Submitted for PhD 2004
2 Keywords: autobiographical film, documentary, South Africa, exile, immigration, autobiography, memoir, apartheid
‘An autobiography is, by definition, a man’s (sic) own story of his life. It has one advantage over other forms of literature and certainly over my own art form, the cinema. That is this: there’s nobody who can contradict the author. This is my book about my life. There is no producer or film cutter or studio boss who can make me change it. For once in my creative life I am about to have the last word.’
(LeRoy, 1974: 3)
3 4 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This project has taken five years to complete. Many people gave willingly of their time and made huge contributions to the film. Friends, family, neighbours, students, colleagues and complete strangers participated in the making of the film as actors, interview subjects or technicians. I would like to most sincerely thank all of them.
In particular, I would like to thank my editor, Tanya Schneider for all her intelligent and astute suggestions, hard work and dedication to the project.
A great big thank you to Evan Olman who came to South Africa with me and made me realise how good it would be to have a son.
My thanks also go to my supervisor Brad Haseman for his kind and generous support, his enthusiasm and frank comments.
And then there is my other supervisor, Gary MacLennan. I simply cannot thank Gary enough. His contribution was enormous, both intellectually and emotionally. But most of all, I would like to thank Gary for the gift of friendship.
Finally, I would like to thank my family, my wife Marian and daughter Bohemia, for their support, suggestions and many ideas. Without their love none of this would have been possible.
5 6 ABSTRACT
This thesis consists of two parts: an autobiographical documentary film and a written exegesis. The film, My Lovers Both, is a record of two journeys back to my native South Africa wherein I confront aspects of my past. These two trips offer a means to explore a personal history around the experiences of immigration, displacement and exile.
In the exegesis, I argue that autobiography is changing and rather than offering catalogues of public achievement, contemporary personal histories deal with sites of trauma and challenge dominant narratives of official memory. Likewise, the New Documentary is embracing fictional strategies and moving towards increased subjectivity and introspection. As a consequence, new forms are created that generate novel insights into causality and time.
The exegesis goes on to examine the major influences on my work as a filmmaker and then articulates a reflective analysis of the creative process which produced My Lovers Both.
7
8 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND...... 11
CHAPTER ONE: ...... 22 The Autobiographical Moment
CHAPTER TWO ...... 52 Towards an Understanding of the New Documentary
CHAPTER THREE ...... 89 Major Influences
CHAPTER FOUR...... 125 Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 150
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STATEMENT OF ORIGINAL AUTHORSHIP
The work contained in this thesis has not been previously submitted for a degree or diploma at any other higher education institution. To the best of my knowledge and belief, the thesis contains no material previously published or written by another person except where due reference is made.
Signature:
Date:
10 INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND
‘That is really the trouble with an autobiography you do not of course you do not believe yourself why should you, you know so well so very well that it is not yourself, it could not be yourself because you cannot remember right and if you do remember right and if you do remember right it does not sound right because it is not right. You are of course never yourself.’
(Stein, 1999: 186)
This PhD thesis is in two parts – a written component which follows herewith and a documentary film. The two components complement each other and should be read/viewed together. It is envisaged that the reader/viewer will read this Introduction and then Chapters 1, 2 and 3. Then she/he will view the film before reading the reflective analysis in Chapter 4. The documentary film accounts for approximately 75 per cent of the thesis and the written component about 25 per cent.
The documentary is autobiographical and therefore it is probably appropriate, at the outset, for me to fill in some background details. Let me tell you something about the social milieu in which I grew up. Something about context. I was born in South Africa two years after the apartheid government came to power and so all my formative years were lived under that oppressive regime. What was it like being a white South African at that time? In most Hollywood films whites are presented as privileged beneficiaries, the clichéd racist villains of apartheid. But in my experience, the most consistent overriding emotion for white people was guilt; not for anything they did so much as for what they didn’t do. Or what they were unable to do. Or what they were afraid to do.
But some whites took a stand and fought vociferously against apartheid. In Chapter Three I will deal with the case of the Slovo family and the autobiographical writings that grew from that experience. However it must be said that if I still lived in South Africa, the film I have made would have been inconceivable. I would never ever have considered making it. It would have been
11 truly unthinkable. Its fate would have been summed up in judgements such as: ‘Another whining white making a film about the most egotistical subject imaginable. A film about himself!’ Even in Australia people have looked at me as if I am mad. ‘You’re making a film about what? Yourself? Who’s going to want to watch it?’ But at least in Australia I feel sufficiently liberated from guilt to contemplate making it.
And now let me tell you something about what I tried to do in the documentary. It’s an autobiographical film that combines both fictional and documentary conventions. In September 1999, I returned to South Africa for the first time in six years to begin the film by shooting interviews with some seminal people from my past. This was only the beginning, because in 2001 I also shot re-enactments and re-constructions using actors to play former friends and lovers.
There is of course nothing new in the use of re-enactments in documentary. Indeed they are the very stuff of the docudrama genre. However no less an authority than the great documentarist, Joris Ivens, had the following to say about the use of re-enactments:
We must never leave things for reconstruction. When we have to reconstruct certain scenes, however, we must give careful consideration to this work. We must not risk untruthfulness and damage the true value of the documentary (Ivens, 1983: 91).
Ivens’s remarks strike us now as rather dated and even Manichean in a time when the New Documentary has, as we will see in Chapter Two, launched wholesale raids on the armoury of fiction. Nevertheless, Ivens’s emphasis on the importance of the relationship between truth and documentary is very relevant to the consideration of documentary films, perhaps especially so in the case of autobiographical documentary. Moreover he clearly understood the communicative dimension of truth when he added: ‘I think three minutes of untruthfulness in an hour long documentary makes the whole film lose credibility’ (Ivens, 1983: 91).
12 In the interest of truth and credibility though, one should acknowledge at least one gap in Ivens’s own practice. This is made apparent in Pieter Jan Smit’s meditation on the human costs of Soviet industrialisation in Magnitogorsk: Forging the New Man (1996) which amounts to a devastating critique of the truth claims of Ivens’s own 1932 documentary, Song of the Heroes. Smit reveals clearly that Ivens worked within what Matt Payne has termed the tradition of Soviet Orientalism and his film was indeed a ‘propaganda paen’ (Payne, 1996: 102).
Within my own film I have chosen to deal with the ‘truth claim’ problem by structurally using a kind of ‘bracketing’ device, namely the journeys back to South Africa in which I encounter figures from the past and the present. Each of these people has a different version of some of the events that occurred, or alternatively they placed a different emphasis on the events that transpired. These are placed against my memory of how I see the past and also how I view the present.
I also returned to South Africa in 2002/3 and this gave the film the shape of a tale of two journeys. I became the cinematographer for the second trip. This stylistic difference marks the space of change and difference both within me and also in how I now see South Africa. It also marks a different emphasis in the autobiographical impulse in that the camera is now turned away from me (by me) to face my family and my wife’s family. This particular focus is what Michael Renov has termed ‘domestic ethnography’ (cited in Gaines, 1999: 141), whereby the filmmaker is connected to her/his subject by complex familial ties. Renov points out that ‘domestic ethnography is a kind of supplementary autobiographical practice; it functions as a vehicle of self-examination, a means through which to construct self-knowledge through recourse to the familial other’ (cited in Gaines, 1999: 141).
If the first journey in my film can be summed up as ‘Goodbye to all that’, or farewelling the past-in-the-present, then the second visit operates as a metaphor for what happens when the past-in-the-present is absented and is replaced not by a living ‘in the now’, but by a dread of the absence of the future-in-the-present (Bhaskar, 2002b: 104). I explore more fully these notions of time and the implications of my second visit in Chapter Four.
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Overall with my film I hoped to achieve a rambling, episodic, perhaps picaresque tale. I played the part of the sometimes on-screen narrator who guides the audience from one incident to the next and from one time period to another. In the process I had to face up to some of the darkest aspects of my own character. Originally I wanted all this to be accompanied by endless digressions and asides covering a range of topics from political commitment to the male midlife crisis, to evolutionary psychology, to white guilt, to the impossibility of love. Perhaps fortunately, this is not the way it turned out and the film now is less self-reflexive and more conventional than my early conceptions of it.
The incidents in the past were confined to events in my life between the period 1983 to 1986. During this time I was living in Johannesburg and teaching at Wits University. In 1985 the country was in turmoil and civil disobedience was widespread. Dissidents and political protestors, following an ANC directive, were attempting to make the country ‘ungovernable’ in order to destroy the apartheid regime and foment revolution.
The apartheid government responded by declaring a State of Emergency. The Security Police were given extraordinary powers that enabled them to arrest and detain anyone suspected of opposing the government in any way. The Rule of Law was thrown out of the window and ordinary citizens could be imprisoned and held indefinitely. Torture was commonplace and there were a number of deaths in detention. Other people were simply rounded up by the police and disappeared forever. Their bodies have never been recovered.
At this time, I was approached by a friend who asked me if I would be prepared to hide some people in my house until ‘things quietened down’. I agreed and that night three men and one woman were brought to my home. They were concealed in the trunks of two cars and ran into the house under the cover of darkness.
Three of them stayed with my partner and me for about a month, never leaving the house. The fourth one stayed with us for almost three months. During all this time
14 he never went outside. We did not realise at that time that we were harbouring ‘Public Enemy Number One’.
His name is Obed Bapela and he is now a major figure in the new democratic government in South Africa, where he runs the ANC party machine and chairs the party in Gauteng Province. When I went back to South Africa in September 1999, he was one of the people I interviewed for the film.
Some of these incidents are dramatised in the film. This results in a mixture of fictional and documentary traditions in an attempt to offer insight into a highly individual life not just through facts but also through the imagination - or as the fictional editor in Barbara Vine’s The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy suggested ‘(with) some imagination, some emotion, surely’ (Vine, 1998: 37).
In addition, I have used a number of other strategies not normally associated with the sober traditions of documentary practice. I am referring here to the juxtaposition of newsreel archival footage with rock music, used to convey a sense of ironic distance to the subject matter. The editing techniques employed here, particularly the sequence where the former State President, P.W. Botha, announces a State of Emergency, are those of MTV or music videos. Johannes Kerkorrel’s (his name translates to Churchorgan) satirical lyrics cut to images of riots on the streets of Soweto are the domain of the New Documentary, wherein ‘voice-over narration, found footage, interviews, re-enactments and printed texts mingle in a pastiche that implicitly rejects the boundary distinctions of prior filmic modes’ (Arthur, 1993: 127).
This mixture of different narrative and filmic strategies is also characteristic of contemporary autobiography which recognises that the past can never be genuinely recaptured. Rather, the narrating self tells a series of stories in order to give coherence to the past. In my own case, I have tried to give a number of honest accounts of what transpired by allowing friends and lovers from the past to narrate their versions of events. In editing the film, it has been my decision about what to retain and what to excise. Perhaps then, only one account prevails, my own story that tells something of my life but by no means all of it. After all, I was ‘guided by
15 unconscious desires as much as by conscious interpretive strategies. (And) like the Freudian projection of screen memories, autobiography conceals as much as it reveals’ (Kosta, 1994: 17).
The approach I have taken to the written component of the thesis is different in that here I have tried to reveal what is concealed, or rather what is not immediately apparent. As a consequence, in Chapter One, I consider the nature of autobiography in both verbal and visual media. I examine the relationship between autobiography and self-revelation and truth. Here a particular case study is developed with an examination of Peter Jackson’s Forgotten Silver, one of the most famous or notorious of the new genre - mockumentary.
Chapter Two deals with the New Documentary. This movement has been very influential with regard to my own film. The chapter considers some of the themes most relevant to an understanding of the New Documentary. These include the ‘Aesthetics of Failure’, ‘epistemic hesitation’, ‘delirium versus the discourses of sobriety’, ‘the death of the subject’ and the ‘One and the Many’.
Chapter Three gives an account of the work of a number of filmmakers whose work has influenced my own practice. While the filmmakers discussed are a diverse group, they have in common an interest in the autobiographical moment.
The thesis concludes with a ‘Dear John’. In terms of form, this is in some ways perhaps the most controversial aspect of this thesis. The conclusion is an imaginary letter to me, which gives a reflexive response to my own film. I have chosen this form because I wish to bridge the two parts of the thesis. I have no wish to disguise the problems which arise from the bivalent nature of a creative thesis. The film and the written component ideally work together; however there is an inherent tension between these two processes. The novelist Joseph Conrad summed up the problems very well in a letter to the critic Richard Cutle:
It is a strange fate that everything that I have, of set artistic purpose, laboured to leave indefinite, suggestive, in the penumbra of initial inspiration, should have that light turned on to it and its
16 insignificance…exposed for any fool to comment upon or even for average minds to be disappointed with. Didn’t it ever occur to you, my dear Cutle that I knew what I was doing in leaving the facts of my life and even of my tales in the background. Explicitness, my dear fellow, is fatal to the glamour of all artistic work, robbing it of all suggestiveness, destroying all illusion. You seem to believe in literalness and explicitness, in facts and also in expression. Yet nothing is more clear than the utter insignificance of explicit statement and also its power to call attention away from things that matter in the region of art (Conrad, 1963: 232).
Moreover, if the critic is potentially the ‘fool’ to the artist’s role of ‘straight guy’, there is also the problem of the essential differences between the languages of the film and the written text. On this point, Vilém Flusser has argued that the world of text and the world of images - the two parts of this thesis - are at least potentially antithetical. For Flusser:
[The] space and time peculiar to the image is none other than the world of magic, a world in which everything is repeated and in which everything participates in a significant context (Flusser, 1983:9).
By contrast, the world of writing is that:
…of the linear world of history in which nothing is repeated and in which everything has causes and will have consequences. For example, in the historical world, sunrise is the cause of the cock’s crowing; in the magical one, sunrise signifies crowing and crowing signifies sunrise. The significance of images is magical (Flusser, 1983: 9).
Flusser goes on to point out that there is a tradition, a history of hostility between writing and the image. Writing creates abstract conceptual thought while images are the essence of imaginative thought. Arguably it is this tension between writing and images that lies behind the difficulty in a creative thesis like this. In any case, I have found the task of writing, analysing and theorising about my film easier if I filter my comments through the distancing device of another character. By
17 adopting the literary form of the letter to myself then it became easier for me to be objective and reflective about what I had done.
Finally I wish to consider briefly the relationship of my film and accompanying written component to the field of documentary studies. A useful and contemporary characterisation of this field is available if we examine the themes of the panels for the upcoming Visible Evidence Conference to be held in Bristol in December, 2003. This year, fifteen panels have been convened for this highly influential, interdisciplinary conference. I have selected three of these which, I believe, are not only representative of the field covered by contemporary documentary studies but which also relate quite specifically to the central concerns of my documentary film.
The first panel I have chosen is convened by Michael Renov and is entitled The Memory of History. Renov states that he has a ‘longstanding interest in documentary’s unique capacity to represent historical phenomena’ (Renov at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm). In the panel abstract, he quotes Walter Benjamin who wrote: ‘In the trace we gain possession of the thing’ (cited in Renov at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm). With this as a starting point, Renov points out that ‘one of the chief social functions of documentary practice has been its ability to resurrect and interrogate past events through oral testimony’ (Renov at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible- evidence/Panels.htm). The panel then will attempt to explore the function of memory in historical representation in documentary film and video.
The issue of memory is central to my film, My Lovers Both. Memory and history are repeated themes in the film which begins with my voice saying: ‘Let me begin with something I remember’. Throughout the film, participants reminisce about the past and recollect both personal and public historical events. This theme is highlighted at one point when my father, due to loss of short term memory, forgets what he is saying. Memory, of course, is one of the qualities that make us human and to lose one’s memory is to lose part of our humanity. So to record and witness this sequence was particularly painful. The film also attempts to create links and connections between my micro-history and the macro-history of South Africa. For,
18 as J.M.Coetzee tells us: ‘autobiography is very much like history: a way of explaining the present in terms of its origins’ (Coetzee, 1999: 28).
The issue of historical representation is also the subject of a panel convened by Patricia Zimmerman and Catherine Portuges entitled Archives of the Future: Artifacts, Historiography, Witnessing and Documentary. Herein, the convenors investigate the connections between documentary and critical historiographic theory as articulated by such writers as Hayden White and Tzetan Todorov. These writers:
argue that the incongruities between the past and present should not be evened out, but instead considered as multiple, contradictory temporalities to be pointed to the future and collective action (Zimmerman and Portuges at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm).
Zimmerman and Portuges go on to suggest that through witnessing and artifacts, documentary can ‘imagine historiographic forms that engage a different notion of time, causality, action and ethics’ (Zimmerman and Portuges at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm). These are some of the issues that I will explore in Chapter Two when I deal with questions of Chance and Synchronicity.
Zimmerman and Portuges also stress that they are:
not interested in exploring documentary practices that engage in a nostalgic, unified history for nation building… (but rather) we are interested in works that reimagine and open up the archive, that think through the practice of history and witnessing, and that engage the social and political international/transnational landscapes through transformation (Zimmerman and Portuges at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible- evidence/Panels.htm).
The issues they raise are some of the primary concerns in My Lovers Both where the history I offer is neither nostalgic nor unified. The official history of South
19 Africa has been written and is typified by hagiographies like Mandela and De Klerk. The history I tell though is, I think, a more fragmented and pessimistic one. It is a history that sees the coming to power of the African National Congress as not so much a righteous dream fulfilled but rather a series of shabby compromises.
The third panel I consider is called The Transnational “I”, and in his abstract, the convenor, Jonathan Kahana examines personal documentaries that use film as an expressive and subjective medium. He argues that:
In the work of many contemporary documentary filmmakers, the problems of cinema’s speaking subject are made to reflect the contingencies of identity in a time of geopolitical anxiety (Kahana at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm).
Kahana wishes to explore the tension between first-person discourse and experiences of repatriation, displacement, migration and exile. As the reader/viewer will, no doubt observe, these are once again questions that are central to My Lovers Both. It is almost as if he has my film in mind when he calls for papers that consider ‘the relation between documentary forms of first-person expression and questions of place, passage, national or ethnic identity’ (Kahana at http://humanities.uwe.ac.uk/visible-evidence/Panels.htm).
In terms of the specific contributions of the film and the exegesis to knowledge I would claim that my placing of subjectivity in the New Documentary within the problematics of the Death of the Subject takes us beyond the current dominant position which has been most clearly championed by Michael Renov. In addition I believe that my work by resurrecting the concepts of contingency, fate, chance and synchronicity, helps to advance our understanding of the role of time within the New Documentary. I have also attempted both in the film and the theory to add to our understanding of the relationships between the New Documentary and personal and collective memory and history. I have also endeavoured to argue that the New Documentary has to be understood in terms of the working out of the problematics of the fictionalisation of the documentary form.
20 Such concerns are of course not unique to the New Documentary as will be seen in the following chapter which deals with the nature of autobiography.
21 CHAPTER ONE THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MOMENT
1.1 THE NATURE OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
‘One casts the net of memory, throws it over oneself and pulls oneself in, predator and prey all in one, over the threshold of time, the threshold of space, in order to see who we were and who we have become.’ (Bachmann, 1990: 9)
If this was fiction, if what I was writing was a novel, then what transpired last night would seem too contrived, too coincidental. Altogether too neat. But it happened. And I will describe exactly what occurred. Really.
I was tired and decided to go to bed early. I was also distracted because my supervisor had asked me to draft an introduction to my thesis. The section I was mulling over was on the nature of autobiography and I felt quite desperate. I really didn’t have a clue what I was going to write. In frustration I began reading the book I had just bought that morning - the latest Barbara Vine called The Chimney Sweeper’s Boy. The novel begins with the death of a distinguished writer, a Booker Prize nominee. After the funeral, the author’s former editor invites the Great Man’s daughter to lunch. It seems he has a proposition for her:
‘I expect you’re aware,’ he said when Hope’s risotto had arrived, ‘of the recent popularity of a certain kind of biography. I mean a child’s memoir of a parent, usually but not invariably a father... Have you come across that sort of book?’
‘I don’t know’, Hope said.
‘Usually it’s the parent that’s famous, not the child, though both may be. I can think of one or two where neither was famous but the parent’s life was so interesting and the writing style so absorbing that the memoir was still a success in spite of it’ (Vine, 1998: 35).
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With the arrival of the main course he comes straight to the point.
‘Would you write a memoir of your father?... Your relationship with him, how it was when you were a small child, what it was like being his daughter. Oh, and his origins, his background, his family, what he came out of. The stories he told you, the games he played with you.’ ... She said with her mouth full, ‘I couldn’t write anything. I haven’t any imagination.’
This would be facts, not imagination. Well, some imagination, some emotion, surely. But he knew it was hopeless... He thought of bereaved children’s memoirs and of titles. Mommie Dearest at one end of the quality scale and When Did You Last See Your Father? at the other. Classics like A Voyage Round My Father. Then there was that Germaine Greer book he admired with all the detective work in it... (Vine, 1998: 37).
The fictional editor in this extract draws our attention to some issues germane to any study of autobiography. Some of these conventions and expectations of the form include: revelations of the famous, the writer’s personal motivation, the sanative effects of writing, the vicissitudes of memory, the injunction on truth- telling, the transformation of experience into art and the difficulty of defining autobiography by reference to generic conventions. Let us now examine which of these might be considered quintessential elements of autobiography.
In the first instance, the editor focuses on the expectation of fame. Traditional autobiography is not usually published about, or indeed written by Ms or Mr Average (see revisions to this in 1.5). In autobiography we seldom encounter the commonplace. Rarely are typical, well-regulated lives sedulously described. We are offered not ordinary but extraordinary lives. We relive the unusual experiences of protagonists who have, most commonly, achieved some degree of success in their lives. Usually the autobiographer has begun with humble origins and against all the odds has managed to overcome obstacles and win through. Pain, poverty, ignorance and oppression are encountered along the path of life but finally
23 something is gained even if it is only self knowledge. Personal experience is heightened either in the subject matter or through the style of presentation.
The urge to write about a parent is driven by different forces from those that drive one to write about oneself. The autobiographer attempts to create a continuous and determinate work of self-portraiture in order ‘to make sense for others of what is already intelligible to the narrating self’ (Egan, 1988: 90). This is often accompanied by a desperate need for self-exposure, an overwhelming desire:
to lay bare one’s heart, to write the book about oneself in which the concern for sincerity would be carried to such lengths that…the paper would shrivel and flare at each touch of his fiery pen (Leiris, 1968: 10).
Sometimes external forces combine to make the telling more urgent. The poet Breyten Breytenbach’s (1984) autobiographical The True Confessions of an Albino Terrorist was written after his release from a South African jail. He had been imprisoned for seven years, the first two of which were served in solitary confinement. The need to deliver himself from his prison experiences, to purge himself of his incarceration was so compelling, so overwhelming that he dictated the book to his wife Yolande in the weeks immediately following his release:
Now I must get rid of the unreality. I must vomit. I must eject this darkness... You must allow me to regurgitate all the words, like the arabesques of a blind mind (Breytenbach, 1984: 27).
The presumption then is that the act of writing about one’s self, about one’s past experiences, is deemed to have a cathartic or therapeutic effect on the author. The intimate revelations of autobiography have their origins in the religious sacrament of confession and, like the writings of Saint Augustine and Rousseau, ‘confessional autobiography may be the record of a transformation of errors by values; or it may be a search for values’ (Spender, 1980: 121).
Thus autobiography is presumed to be didactic and to have a (sentimental or other) educational role to play. The instructional function of autobiography extends not
24 only to the author or producer of the text but also to the reader or viewer. Critics, authors and readers all seem to agree that there are lessons to be learned from autobiography, that by exposing ourselves to someone else’s trials and tribulations, we acquire knowledge.
In order to reap these benefits, in order to profit from autobiography, there is, as expected, a price to be paid. The author must be prepared to enter the past and to relive former experiences. Not only pleasurable but also painful events must be confronted. Idyllic childhood memories must compete with triumphs and disasters. Heroic actions must be contrasted with despicable ones. All must be revealed. The process is worthless unless the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth is told. That such a process is not without its cost can be seen from Louise Bourgeois’s remarks about her autobiographical drawings:
For me, drawing is a form of diary. I could not help but make them as a means to exorcise or deconstruct daily fears; they (the themes) are recurrent, precise, accurate, self-incriminating and immediately regretted. Still you let them be, because the truth is better than nothing (Bourgeois cited in Bernadac, 1996: 13).
But how possible is it to be completely truthful? How can we restrict ourselves to the ‘facts not imagination’ (Vine, 1998: 37) injunction of Vine’s fictional editor? Surely we have to rely on our memories, which are not only fallible and flawed but also biased and downright selective. As Doris Lessing comments in her autobiography:
Writing these memoirs, I have learned a good deal about memory’s little tricks, most of all how it simplifies, tidies up, makes sharp contrasts of light and shade (Lessing, 1997: 327).
Borges explores this notion in one of his short stories where the protagonist has a faultless, consummate memory. He possesses perfect recall and can remember every detail of every day of his life. But to remember a day takes a day. By reliving a day he consequently loses a day.
25
In so-called ‘real life’, of course perfect memories are by and large non-existent. Thus the British Historian Eric Hobsbawm, speaking of his interviews with the old Fabians, remarks acerbically that ‘on any independently verifiable fact their memory was likely to be wrong’ (Hobsbawm, 1997: 308). So memory chooses and, in so doing, colours what really transpired. The truth is misrepresented and falsified. Facts become distorted. Years later, events which at the time seemed all encompassing, overwhelming and potent, with hindsight and the passing of time now seem incidental and insignificant. And the opposite is equally true. Only in the present can one assess the relevance of past actions. To travel back in time is to look into a distorting mirror. For, as L.P. Hartley tells us: ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there’ (Hartley, 1972: 7). This is a point to which I will return in Chapter Two when I discuss Agata Bielik-Robson’s thesis on ‘bad timing and the gift of meaning’ (Bielik-Robson, 2000).
Apart from the prescription on truth telling, autobiography has at least one other obligation which even more sharply differentiates it from other biographical forms, and this is a commitment to self-disclosure; the autobiographer is bound to give us a very private account of her/his life. She/he is compelled not only to tell us those facts that other people might be able to discover regarding her/his public and social achievements, but also those facts that only the autobiographer is able to know about her/himself. The record must reveal motives, hopes, aspirations, weaknesses and failings known only to the subject.
Thus autobiography does set the autobiographer a very special problem. The theme of his book is himself (sic). Yet if he treats this theme as though he were another person writing about himself, then he evades the basic truth of autobiography which is: ‘I am alone in the universe’ (Spender, 1980: 117).
Thus autobiography offers us an insight into a highly individual life and the uniqueness of this life is conveyed to us not just through facts but also through the imagination, or as the fictional editor suggested, ‘some imagination, some emotion, surely’ (Vine, 1998: 37). Personal experience must not just be described,
26 it must be shaped; the fragments of a life must be ordered and given creative, aesthetic form to render the events comprehensible and meaningful. The autobiographer must create order from the incomprehensibility of everyday life so that we see, on looking back, a development that ‘appears to have a curious “inevitable” quality, like a line of fate in the palm of the hand’ (Nash, 1949: 17).
Accordingly, James Olney talks of the study of autobiography as ‘a study of the way experience is transformed into literature’(Olney, 1980: 10). In this ‘transformation’, the autobiographical form can take many different shapes. It can present itself as straight reportage or it can utilise traditional narrative devices. These devices may be unself-conscious or they may be reflexive. The events can be portrayed naturalistically or fantastically.
Autobiography is not defined by the quality of the writing nor is it limited by a particular form. It is not confined to certain generic conventions and it is as likely (as once again Vine’s fictional editor points out) to be a detective novel as a spiritual confession. James Ellroy’s (1996) noir novel, My Dark Places, wherein the author attempts to track down the real-life killer of his mother, is a case in point.
The fact that autobiography may utilise fictional conventions does not make it fiction. Neither can we call it fictional because it sometimes can and often does distort the ‘truth’. Autobiography is significantly different from fiction because readers and viewers treat it that way. Readers and audiences regard autobiography as experiential rather than novelistic. What essentially differentiates autobiography from other forms is the expectations readers and viewers bring to the genre. Consequently, any definition of autobiography must include this referential function.
This gives rise to the question of coincidence. Both fiction and autobiography attempt to order experience and to search for patterns in both life and art; aesthetic patterns and ontological patterns. But because readers accept fiction as being fabular, coincidence is deemed less acceptable in a novel than in an autobiography, in ‘real life’. In autobiography we happily accept the possibility of
27 coincidence. Robert Dessaix alerts us to this in his book A Mother’s Disgrace suggesting that:
Perhaps there’s a better word (‘irony of circumstance’, ‘random synchronicity’) but ‘coincidence’ will do for now. Life is littered with coincidences, of course. This narrative is littered with coincidences, for that matter, as characters in my tale brush past each other unaware that from the point of view of a storyteller yet to emerge narrative lines are mysteriously knotting, branching and forming patterns (Dessaix, 1994: 188).
I endeavour to explore the significance of coincidence or contingency for the New Documentary in Chapter Two, but for the moment I will give a most striking example of the impact of contingency on the autobiographical. It comes from D.M. Thomas in his autobiography, Memories and Hallucinations, where he writes:
I am frightened by the coincidences that seem to cluster around art - even bad art or non-art. Once, I was reading to a class of students a poem I’d written about a nestling. Our cat, grey Lucinda, had mauled the baby bird before we could interfere. The poem was new, I thought it better than it was; it would later go into the wastepaper basket. As I was reading the weak verses to my class, my voice full of compassion and vanity, there was a knock on the classroom door. One of my colleagues entered, his hands cupped around something tiny. ‘I found this outside,’ he explained, in a troubled voice; ‘can anyone suggest what I can do with it?’ My students gasped; he was showing us an injured nestling (Thomas, 1989: 2).
28 1.2 AUTOBIOGRAPHY: VERBAL AND VISUAL MEDIA
‘—but no matter how I speak, hesitantly or fluently, whether I use my own words or the inadequate leftist jargon, as I offer explanation after explanation trying to clarify, as I send message after message trying to explain my new life, my words do not get through to him, they get lost somewhere before reaching his ears. I lead a different life, speak another language.’ (Stefan, 1975: 177)
The word bios meaning ‘life’ lies at the centre of autobiography. Bios is also the root of a number of other English words, for example biology but also bioscope and biograph. These words denote the cinema generally and the film apparatus specifically. In fact, D.W. Griffith, the American cinematic pioneer and director of the seminal Birth of a Nation, named his production company ‘Biograph’ - as if film were the life story of the world, a transparent graph of reality. Right from the origins of cinema, then, biographies or stories of lives have been the mainspring for numerous films. Hollywood produced hundreds of ‘biopics’ or biographical films depicting the lives of historical persons. In fact,
released with increasing regularity from the earliest days of the cinema to the end of the studio era, the biopic played a powerful part in creating and sustaining public history (Custen, 1992 : 2).
Today, we live in a culture committed to complex technologies and intricate social dependencies wherein film and video are gradually displacing other modes of communication. Novels are constantly being adapted for the screen and, just as the visual media are colonising other literary forms, it is not inconceivable that not just biographical but also autobiographical films and videos will begin to be made in greater numbers.
Accordingly, an autobiographer’s chosen medium may just as easily be visual as verbal. This is the case with the sculptor Louise Bourgeois, whose work springs from ‘a physically experienced exploration of her own past’ (Bernadac, 1996: 8). Equally the series of self-portraits that Rembrandt painted might be seen to
29 constitute an autobiography of sorts, since when viewed together they preserve ‘his own psychic history - from the bright optimism of youth to the worn resignation of his declining years’ (Gardner, 1970: 586).
Likewise, John Berger, commenting on Titian’s artwork, argues that we can tell something about our own time from our fascination with paintings such as those of the late Rembrandt:
Why do I immediately think of Titian as an old man? Out of solidarity - given my own age? No, I don’t think so. It’s to do with our century and the bitterness of its experience. It’s always searching for rage and wisdom rather than harmony. Late Remrandts, late Goyas, Beethoven’s last sonatas and quartets, late Titians… Imagine the élan of a century whose old master was the young Raphael! (Berger cited in Berger and Berger, 2003: 9-10).
In their spiritual concern, Rembrandt’s self-portraits also resemble the autobiographical literary counterparts of his contemporaries. Early autobiographies were, as I have suggested in the previous section, confessional acts based on religious tenets. Only towards the beginning of the nineteenth century did a modern autobiographical consciousness begin to introduce itself. Thereafter secular autobiography developed from spiritual autobiography into a specific literary mode or genre.
Since then, the dominant medium for autobiography has been literature and most critics stress the written component in autobiography. Lejeune defines it as: ‘A retrospective account in prose that a real person makes of his own existence’ (Lejeune, 1975: 14). For Olney it is ‘the most elusive of literary documents’ (Olney, 1980: 3) and Shapiro argues that ‘in theme, structure and intention autobiography is frequently indistinguishable from other varieties of literary art’ (cited in Olney, 1980: 18) (my italics).
Historically, film has often suffered from an inferiority complex when compared to literature. At its inception it was seen simply as a fairground attraction with little future and certainly with no artistic merit. But in the 1920s, critics and
30 theoreticians like Delluc and Canudo eloquently argued that the new medium would soon challenge the dominance of written language (cited in Monaco, 1980: 5). It was, however, not until 1948 that Alexandre Astruc published a highly influential essay calling on filmmakers to realise the full potential of their art and make cinema ‘a means of writing just as flexible and subtle as written language’ (cited in Monaco, 1980: 5). Astruc wanted film to be:
a form in which and by which an artist can express his (sic) thoughts, however abstract they may be, or translate his obsessions exactly as he does in a contemporary essay or novel (cited in Monaco, 1980: 5).
Significantly, he called this approach to cinema - camera-stylo or camera pen.
Astruc’s conception of cinema had a profound influence on a group of French film critics and filmmakers, among them Francois Truffaut, whose autobiographical films this thesis will examine at length. Truffaut responded to Astruc’s call by writing: ‘The film of tomorrow seems to me even more personal than a novel, individual and autobiographical like a confession or a diary’ (cited in Durovicova, 1981: 126) (my italics). Truffaut and his colleagues later became known as the Nouvelle Vague or New Wave. During the 1950s, writing for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, they developed a conceptual framework for film based upon auteurism or authorship. At the heart of this lay the premise that the true ‘author’ of a film, the controlling artistic persona, was not the scriptwriter but the director. This principle was applied by the Cahiers critics not only to the European art cinema but also to Hollywood where, until then, it was presumed that the production line working methods of the studios and their institutional framework prevented personal vision from being realised.
The Cahier critics argued that a film director who is a genuine artist could overcome these industrial constraints and stamp his/her own personality onto a film. The expression of this individual personality could be traced either thematically or stylistically through the whole body of the auteur’s work. The specificity of film was thereby fore-grounded and the Cahiers critics concentrated on those elements over which the director had control, namely mise en scene.
31 Through mise en scene the director was able to transform the material given to him/her and write his/her individuality into the film. Thus,
mise en scene begins to be conceived as an effectivity, producing meaning and relating spectators to meanings, rather than as a transparency, allowing them to be seen...(this results in) an awareness of the relationship between strategies of mise en scene and the production of ideologies (Caughie, 1981:13).
Auteurism’s radical contribution to film criticism and theory has subsequently been challenged and modified by the intervention of semiotics and psychoanalysis into the field of film theory. There has been an ‘attempt to give the theory of authorship a context within a theory of textuality, of the subject and of film as a discourse’ (Caughie, 1981: 200). As it exists in its present form, it would be fair to say that auteurism is probably the most controversial area of contemporary film theory.
Nevertheless it must be acknowledged that the issue of authorship is central to any consideration of autobiography in film or video. For, unlike written autobiographies, films are made not by individuals working alone but by a team wherein different people are accorded specialised roles such as camera operator, sound recordist, director, scriptwriter etc. The person whose autobiography is being produced may only have written the screenplay or may only have a limited control over the aesthetic realisation of the production. Or alternatively, the film may be made single handedly by the autobiographer who fulfills all the key roles - scriptwriter, director, camera operator, editor and so on. The autobiographer may also act in the film, playing her/himself as a character, or an actor might be hired to play the part. If the film spans a lifetime, different actors may be hired to play the part of the central protagonist at different ages in her/his life. Or any combination of these is possible. The variations are numerous.
All these factors need to be taken into consideration when viewing an autobiographical film. Whatever information is available regarding production constraints will, in part, determine how we define and evaluate autobiographical
32 films. Our expectations will also depend upon the contributions we infer to be offered by the various artistic collaborators such as production designers, cinematographers and so forth. Their stylistic choices will greatly influence an audience’s response to the film.
The technical opportunities available to the filmmaker as opposed to the writer also need to be given consideration. Camerawork, for example, is not neutral (or even natural). The camera does not simply record events placed in front of it but rather it establishes relationships and adopts attitudes toward the objects of its gaze.
Editing too can also affect and alter meaning. Filmmakers have been aware of this from as early as the turn of the century when the Russian, Kuleshov (Thompson, 1993: 131), conducted his famous experiment. Today we assume that meaning can be imposed by the juxtaposition of images through editing.
This principle is humorously and succinctly illustrated in Francois Truffaut’s autobiographical film, Love on the Run. Herein the protagonist Antoine Doinel is suffering from a bad case of male mid-life crisis. In a chance encounter he literally bumps into Colette, his first love, the object of his adolescent yearnings who dumped him for another some twenty-five years earlier. Over a cup of coffee they begin to talk about the past. He asks her why she threw him over for another. She says he acted immaturely and courted her too persistently and obsessively. The final straw was when he moved into an apartment directly across the street from her parents’ home.
While she tells us this, there is a flashback to the past where we see the young Antoine moving all his belongings into an apartment opposite Colette’s. We then return to the (fictional) present where Antoine takes exception to her version of events. He argues that she was the one who pursued him and that she had moved into an apartment across the way from him. And here once again there is a flashback to the past where the identical shots are edited together in a different order so as to substantiate Antoine’s narrative, to reinforce his version of ‘the truth’. What is particularly interesting about this sequence is that it is edited out of
33 an earlier film made some years before with both actors substantially younger. And, a member of the audience who is familiar with the earlier film would be able to recognise that Colette’s is the more accurate rendition of the past (although clearly both characters present biased and jaundiced versions of their romantic history).
The film dramatises, therefore, not only editing’s ability to offer multiple renditions of a single event but also the fallibility of memory. Furthermore, what is vividly demonstrated is that narrators have their own agendas and that the version of history we receive depends to an extent upon who is telling the tale. Thus the truth does contain a subjective element (Bhaskar, 1993: 271). What is at stake here is the relation between the subject (narrator) and the object (reality). As Bhaskar puts it:
…we can make use of metaphors like matching or expressing to capture the relationship between subject and object, and this relation is clearly within subjectivity, not, as naïve realists think, within objectivity - just as we can articulate the relationship between language and the world only in language (Bhaskar, 1993: 271).
Elizabeth Bruss takes this point even further and argues that film techniques fundamentally threaten the very nature of autobiography itself:
The unity of subjectivity and subject matter - the implied identity of author, narrator and protagonist on which classical autobiography depends - seems to be shattered by film; the autobiographical self decomposes, schisms, into almost mutually exclusive elements of the person filmed (entirely visible; recorded and projected) and the person filming (entirely hidden; behind the camera eye) (Bruss, 1980: 297).
Bruss treats both writing and filming as ‘signifying practices’ and proceeds to compare the two media. She argues that autobiography is predicated on sole authorship and that in film we cannot expect the same intimate involvement we receive in literature. She also contends that:
34
Images lack the articulation and, hence, the selectivity of sentences; they do not distinguish between subjects and predicates in a way that allows us to discriminate between the essential and the accidental (Bruss, 1980: 301).
There are two issues here. In the first instance, it must be acknowledged that authorship is indeed highly problematic in film and that the particular production practices and conditions under which a film is made must be given scrupulous consideration when evaluating any autobiographical film. But it seems erroneous to suggest that film is less selective than literature. Surely one of the functions of editing is to alert the audience to what is ‘essential’? One of the purposes of cutting from long shot to close-up is to cue the viewer to take note of a particular item of information (the letter hidden under the pillow) or a revelatory gesture (the twitching eyelid).
Bruss also argues that the ways in which the subjective camera is used ‘are poor substitutes for the array of modal qualifiers and performatives that define the speaker’s subjective position vis a vis his subject matter’ (Bruss, 1980: 306). In support of her argument she cites the case of Robert Montgomery’s The Lady in the Lake (1947), a film which quite literally attempts to mimic or reproduce the first person singular narration of the novel on which it was based by shooting everything as if seen from the protagonist’s physical and geographical point of view. As a consequence we only ever see the hero when he is reflected in a mirror in the decor.
Now it is generally recognised that the formal experiments of The Lady in the Lake are naive in the extreme. The film was deemed a failure and research suggests that this ‘literal’ reproduction of subjectivity has never subsequently been repeated in the history of cinema. The fact that Bruss has chosen such an unrepresentative case seems to me suggestive of the weakness of her argument. Most films that utilise first person subjectivity employ a convention whereby the voice-over narration is in the first person whereas the images are seldom presented from the strictly physical point of view of the characters. That is to say, the images are presented from a third person perspective, or more correctly, from the
35 camera’s perspective. In this, it seems to me their technique is not dissimilar from that employed in written media where a writer’s point of view is just as much a narrational convention.
Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that some filmmakers occasionally place the subjective camera from the protagonist’s actual point of view and exploit the limited visual perspective that this offers. In the case of a filmmaker like Hitchcock, this enables him to both increase the audience’s identification with and empathetic response to the character as well as intensifying his particular brand of suspense. Admittedly this is significantly different from the way in which point of view is utilised in verbal media and there is probably no real equivalent in literature.
To put it plainly, verbal and visual media do things differently. They function differently and they produce different effects. Nevertheless, some theoreticians and critics, such as Bruss, continue to compare them and to stress what they perceive to be literature’s advantages over film or video. Barbara Kosta, however, modifies this by noting that Bruss’s position:
does not necessarily indicate an intrinsic deficiency within the filmic medium but rather reveals the rigid conventions that have established themselves within the making and viewing processes of films (Kosta, 1994: 23).
Accordingly, one medium (visual) should not be treated as a poor imitation of the other (verbal), but they should be clearly differentiated.
This is similar to Hayden White’s call to make a distinction between historiography, the representation of history by verbal means, and historiophoty, which is the representation of history by visual images together with written discourses. For White, film and video are constituted by discourses that are:
36 capable of telling us things about its referents that are both different from what can be told in verbal discourse and also of a kind that can only be told by means of visual images (White, 1985: 193).
In terms, then, of White’s distinction, my film My Lovers Both could be regarded as instance of historiophoty.
1.3 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FILM: FACT AND/OR FICTION
‘We know that in his work Proust did not describe a life as it actually was, but a life as it was remembered by the one who had lived it. And yet even this statement is imprecise and far too crude. For the important thing for the remembering author is not what he experienced but the weaving of his memory, the Penelope work of recollection. Or should one call it rather a Penelope work of forgetting?’ (Benjamin, 1978: 84)
Consider the following: On October 29 1995, at 9 pm, a television viewer in New Zealand would have been able to tune in to Channel 3, the commercial network and watch an episode of NYPD Blue. Our hypothetical audience member, let us call her Kirsty, could have watched as Andy and Bobby were called out to investigate an armed robbery and homicide. She would have seen them questioning eye witnesses, chasing suspects down mean streets and interrogating sleaze bags at the station. Kirsty would also have been able to enter the private lives of the central protagonists and been privy to the marital intrigues of Andy and Sylvia. She might also have noted, (depending upon the level of sophistication of her media consciousness), that throughout much of the episode the camera was hand-held and utilised fast whip pans in a manner usually associated with cinema verite type documentaries.
After the show, Kirsty might have consulted her TV Times and noticed that on Channel 1, TVNZ was screening what was billed as a local documentary, Forgotten Silver (1995), about an ‘extraordinary pioneering New Zealand filmmaker’ (cited in Jackson, 1995). Prior to this she might even have witnessed
37 some of the pre-screening hype and publicity for the film, which included clips showing noted film historians proclaiming the discovery of ‘an unknown genius who now... belongs in the Pantheon of great cinema artists and innovators’ (cited in Jackson, 1995). Kirsty might have changed channels out of boredom or genuine interest and if she had, she would probably have been surprised but what she discovered.
For, Forgotten Silver purports to be the biography of one Colin McKenzie, an early pioneering New Zealand filmmaker unremembered by the official film historians. The film tells us that he was an adventurous and imaginative technical innovator who invented a bicycle driven camera, a steam powered projector and made his own film stock from boiled flax leaves and egg whites. He also discovered ways of recording sound on film and creating colour emulsions some time before these became standard in the industry. Not only was Colin McKenzie a technical wizard but he also anticipated a number of artistic developments such as tracking shots and biblical epics. Unfortunately, he was dogged by financial and political problems that forced him to conceal his finest work from the world. Only by chance has his output been discovered and can his importance to the history of cinema now be acknowledged.
On the surface, Forgotten Silver appears to be a fairly ordinary documentary which reconstructs the biography of an extraordinary man using conventions familiar to almost any television viewer. First of all, there is the filmmaker Peter Jackson who begins the first-person narration and introduces us to the subject. He personalises the story by telling us that he knew Colin McKenzie’s widow ‘all his life’ and called her ‘Auntie Hannah’ (Jackson, 1995). Then there are the ‘expert witnesses’ like film archivist Jonathan Morris, actor Sam Neill, film historian Leonard Maltin and even producer Harvey Weinstein, who comments in an interview: ‘This New Zealand filmmaker is going to rank among the greats - D.W. Griffiths and I think in some ways he’s infinitely better’ (cited in Jackson, 1995). They all serve to ‘authenticate’ the information the film offers. Naturally the American accents help.
38 There is also a third person narrator whose accent is British or neutral mid Atlantic, the tone authorative and omniscient - a man’s voice, highly persuasive. This Voice-over accompanies the footage that reconstructs Colin’s life story. At first, we see photographs of Colin as a young boy growing up on his father’s farm. These are followed by photographs of Colin as a young man behind a turn of the century movie camera, editing in a cutting room and so on. All are suitably aged, faded and even scratched. Then there are clips from some of Colin’s films, more ‘expert testimony’ in the form of interviews with Hannah and others. There is archival footage of Dunedin at the turn of the century, archival footage from the First World War. In addition there is footage from Colin’s films which are scratched and faded, showing the effects of rough handling and poor storage over time. And finally there is his death scene during the Spanish Civil War which looks very self-consciously like something shot by Robert Capa.
It all seems so real. So factual, so genuine, so authentic. But it’s not. It’s nothing but a pack of lies. Colin McKenzie is a figment of Peter Jackson’s imagination. He never existed. He’s a fictional character.
It would seem, however, that at the time of screening most members of the general public in New Zealand believed that the biography they had witnessed narrated the life story of a real person. All available evidence indicates that they were convinced that they had been given a bona fide factual account of the life of an extraordinary man. People wrote letters to the newspapers wherein they celebrated another innovative New Zealander. For them Colin McKenzie was the embodiment of ‘Kiwi ingenuity’. They wondered why they had never heard of him before, for here surely was another Edmund Hilary, another giant from this small isolated country. Their letters were filled with patriotic pride as they celebrated their hero’s achievements.
Naturally, this was followed by vitriolic resentment when Jackson informed the press that his film Forgotten Silver was a fiction. The New Zealand public felt that they had been duped. They believed themselves to be the innocent victims of a cruel and ugly hoax. Newspapers were inundated with letters from angry viewers demanding an apology from both the filmmaker and the network. They argued that
39 responsible artists told the truth. A documentary, a non-fiction film, must be grounded in actuality. It must tell us about ‘real life’. It cannot purport to be about real people if those people are fictional. That’s dishonest. They complained that the filmmaker had lied, that he had deceived his audience.
A typical response was that of D.E. Drake who wrote:
All the elaborate lead-up to the documentary before and during the weekend declared it was a portrayal of McKenzie’s brilliance as a film- maker, that all New Zealanders should be proud of him, and that he should be appropriately remembered. There was no suggestion whatsoever that any of the film was not true. The viewing public has been cruelly deceived…The credibility of TVNZ and its documentary makers has now gone out the window, and that is a pity, for they have produced and screened some fine films. But more than that, TVNZ has created a hoax, and, in effect, has used public funds (New Zealand on Air) fraudulently. For that reason it should be called to account (Drake, D. Timaru Herald, 1 November 1995, cited at http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/mock-doc/fs.shtml).
Somewhat more succinct was Sue Anderson’s acerbic comment, ‘Peter Jackson and his Silver Screen conspirators should be shot’ (Anderson, ‘Letter to the Editor’, New Zealand Listener, 25 November 1995 cited at http://www.waikato.ac.nz/film/mock-doc/fs.shtml).
Of course Jackson replied that that was not the case at all. Nowhere had he told the audience that this was a true story and that it was based upon fact. He had simply used the conventions of documentary to tell a fictional story. He apologised but the damage had been done. Nothing he said made the slightest bit of difference. The Kiwi public was very angry. People were affronted. In point of fact, they were self-righteously fuming.
And Jackson’s protestations of innocence seemed somewhat hollow to the good citizens. The deception was hardly incidental or accidental. But what is
40 interesting to note however is that what the film achieved was a clever substitution of one genre for another. The film obeys the generic laws of the ‘tall-tale’ with a cleverly timed increase in the exaggeration which grows steadily ever more ingenious and outrageous. However the film was not indexed as a tall-tale and, as a consequence, the pleasure that tall-tales give was denied to many if not most of the viewers.
Hopefully the case of Forgotten Silver serves to illustrate a number of issues. On a theoretical level it is a reminder to us that truth often comes to us in the form of telling or communication. As such there is, as Bhaskar has pointed out, a normative-fiduciary level. Here a truth claim is advanced and we are asked to trust the teller and believe in and act on the claim (Bhaskar, 1993: 217).
Forgotten Silver also underlines the fact that the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in biographical and autobiographical films is not simple and clear-cut. Stephen Shapiro argues, for example, that in theme, structure and intention, autobiography is frequently indistinguishable from other varieties of literary art (Shapiro, 1968: 24). And writing about Cowper’s autobiography, Spacks contends that the author makes
himself into something very like a fictional character... Reading his work may provide the same imaginative complexities as experiencing a novel; the presumed difference in authorial intent between fiction and factual records makes little necessary difference in effect (Spacks, 1976: 91).
It could also be argued that autobiographical films and fiction films share narrative and aesthetic devices, like parallel editing, and that, as a result, autobiographies present their subjects fictionally.
Certainly it must be acknowledged that fiction and non-fiction films utilise similar technical and narrational strategies. NYPD Blue, as I pointed out earlier, employs formal techniques, like hand-held shaky camera moves, that are usually associated with documentary. But no viewers (even in New Zealand) complain about Andy Sipowitz’s fictive status. Some fictional films (eg Reds) also use documentary
41 conventions like interviews, and non-fiction films such as The Thin Blue Line (1988) exploit devices like flashbacks, crosscutting and re-enactments which are central components of the fiction film. But, once again, no one seems to be confused as to the factual status of such films. The distinction between fiction and non-fiction in the cinema cannot therefore depend upon formal techniques or stylistic conventions alone.
The context in which these devices normally appear additionally needs to be considered. For example, a fictional piece, like NYPD Blue, seldom incorporates only documentary conventions. The camerawork must be seen alongside other formal elements such as iconography, generic conventions, characterisation, dramatic development, stylized lighting effects and so on. All of these together constitute the comprehensive viewing experience that identifies the fictional or other status of the film. Mandel suggests that this too is the case with adventurous autobiographical writing that experiments with fable and fact. When experience and imagination are fused, ‘a swatch of autobiography out of context may have the appearance of fiction’ (Mandel cited in Benstock, 1988: 62), but this does not make it fiction.
Forgotten Silver, however, makes almost exclusive use of documentary conventions throughout the film. All of the techniques, taken together, cue the audience into believing that they are watching a documentary. Only the cognoscenti or film buffs would be able to read the in-jokes. It is designed to mislead, to fool the audience.
The film is also improperly indexed. As we have seen, it is often impossible to tell the fictional status of a film by viewing it. Likewise it is impossible to tell whether one is reading a novel or a memoir unless it has come labelled or indexed as such. Distributors normally alert viewers or readers to the specific form of non-fictional exposition of their texts. These important protocols need to be followed and respected because ‘the distinction between non-fiction and fiction is a distinction between the commitment of the texts, not between the surface structure of the texts’ (Carroll 1996: 287). Clearly Forgotten Silver’s distributors and the filmmaker chose to exploit this subtle distinction in order to confuse the audience
42 by ambiguously or erroneously indexing, or intentionally neglecting to index, the film.
But some critics go further in their attempts to deconstruct the distinction between fiction and non-fiction in film. Michael Renov, for example, argues that: ‘all discursive forms - documentary included - are, if not fictional, at least fictive, this by virtue of their tropic character’ (Renov, 1992: 3). Here Renov is influenced by the writings of the postmodernist historiographer Hayden White, who claims that historical narratives depend upon given plot structures, like tragedy, that are associated with rhetorical tropes like metaphor and synecdoche. These narratives are subject to distortion in that one historian might present certain facts as a tragedy while another might present the same facts comically. The events portrayed might have a basis in fact but the narratives are constructions, fictions. As a consequence he contends that they will be distorted or fictional and that no objectivity is possible.
For Renov, White’s aphorism ‘Lives are led, stories are told’ (White, 1985: 90) refers to the fact that, for him, narrative structure is not a real feature of the past but a construction, a way in which we write about the past. An autobiography then is a re-invention, a reconsideration of the past. Our life is only tragic if we write it that way; we could just as easily reconstruct it comically.
Noel Carroll, on the other hand, takes exception to this position and to Renov’s extrapolation of White’s contentions. He finds the notion that different plot structures are optional to be implausible since ‘a major ingredient in the stories that historians tell involves causal relationships’ (Carroll, 1996: 289). Furthermore, he argues that all narrative structures depend upon causation and that there is no reason to assume that those causal relationships are fictional. Indeed:
insofar as relations between causes and effects ... are part of the fabric of courses of events, narrative structures may be said to illuminate those courses of events rather than to impose upon them (Carroll, 1996: 290).
43 By the same token, we cannot assume that all narratives are distortions of the facts. By following an actual course of events, a particular story might, in fact, discover and reveal patterns of relations between causes and effects. Carroll goes on to offer examples of films which defy White’s and Renov’s generalisations about non-fiction narrative. For Carroll this does not exclude the fact that ‘some narratives may distort history and may impose preconceived ideas upon it. But that is something that must be determined on a case-by-case basis’ (Carroll, 1996: 291). He argues therefore that no a priori argument for narrative distortion exists.
It seems to me, therefore, that the contention that all films are fictional is unconvincing. I am reminded in this instance of Hegel’s scathing comment on Schelling’s idea of the Absolute:
To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black - this is cognition naively reduced to vacuity’ (Hegel, 1977: 9).
What then is the status of autobiographical film? I would argue that autobiographical film is different from fiction film because there is an implied truth claim by the author which the audience expects. In other words, while there are no formal or technical differences between autobiography and fiction, once a film is indexed as autobiography, the audience expects the author to tell the truth about her/his life. For Mandel, ‘what defictionalizes autobiography is both the reader’s powers of co-creation and the author’s animation in the present of his or her past’ (Mandel cited in Benstock, 1988: 64).
Furthermore, autobiography may not tell the whole truth since it often only deals with a part of a life. Often, rather than giving us a coherent or comprehensive portrait, only a portion of the life is detailed. Shawn Slovo’s A World Apart (1988), for example, is only concerned with examining a critical year in her adolescent life. Likewise, Truffaut’s autobiographical film The Four Hundred Blows (1959) concludes with Antoine still a teenager. But the overwhelming
44 impression should be of a commitment on the part of the author to telling the truth. This does not mean that the films assert the literal truth but rather they assert truth claims. For, ‘a defining characteristic of non-fiction discourse is that it makes direct assertions about the actual world, not that it makes true assertions’ (Plantinga, 1996: 321).
The point here is an important and controversial one. Plantinga is struggling to combat prevailing postmodernist sceptical notions of not only the making of documentary films but also of the writing of history. Here the work of Hayden White has been crucial. Hans Kellner has summed up his legacy well. Reviewing White’s work, he asserts:
Although White believes that historical texts are an ideal place to study narrative realism because historians traditionally claim to represent reality itself rather than fictional simulacra, his inquiry into the ideology of narrative forms and his use of tropology extend to all narrative forms. White’s work also serves as a warning to any criticism or would-be New Historicism that would ground readings of texts in given historical contexts. History cannot serve as a neutral, factual support for their interpretations, because it has the same hermeneutic foundations as other humanistic studies. Any image of a historical context is itself, taken as a whole, a prior interpretation chosen for a particular purpose and is in no way less problematic than the literary text that constitutes its part (Kellner at http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/hayden _white.html.)
Again there is a great deal of theoretical confusion at play. A way through the confusion has, however, been clearly outlined by Roy Bhaskar with his defence of the concepts of epistemic relativity and judgemental rationality. Here Bhaskar argues:
Transcendental realism explicitly asserts the non-identity of the objects of the transitive (ontological) and intransitive (epistemological) dimensions,
45 of thought and being. And it relegates the notion of a correspondence between them to the status of a metaphor for the aim of an adequate practice in which the cognitive matter is worked into a matching representation of a non-cognitive object. It entails acceptance of (i) the principle of epistemic relativity, which states that all beliefs are socially produced, so that all knowledge is transient, and neither truth-values nor criteria of rationality exist outside historical time. But it entails the rejection of (ii) the doctrine of judgemental relativism, which maintains that all beliefs are equally valid, in the sense that there can be no rational grounds for preferring one to another. It thus stands opposed to epistemic absolutism and epistemic irrationalism alike. Relativists have wrongly inferred (ii) from (i), while anti-relativists have wrongly taken the unacceptability of (ii) as a reductio of (i) (Bhaskar, 1989: 23-4).
In terms of recent disputes within documentary theory we can arguably locate Noel Carroll at the pole of ‘epistemic absolutism’ in that he is anxious to assert the possibility of epistemic certainty and refute the necessity of postmodernist skepticism (Carroll, 1996: 283-306). Certainly we can place Michael Renov within the camp of ‘judgemental irrationalism’ as he draws upon a perspectivalist approach to truth (Renov, 1993). Both positions, however, are mistaken. It is true that all statements about the world then are relative, because they are socially produced and can be bettered or surpassed by other people. So epistemic absolutism is unsustainable.
The key point which postmodernists, or in Bhaskar’s terms ‘epistemic irrationalists’, fail to grasp, is that because our knowledge of the world is relative and capable of being surpassed it does not mean that all accounts or descriptions of reality are equal. We can judge rationally between different accounts of reality in terms not of their rhetorical excellence, but of their adequacy as descriptions of reality. And of course we do this all the time.
46 1.4 AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL FILM AS HISTORICAL DOCUMENT
‘All history resolves itself very easily into the biography of a few stout and earnest persons.’ (Emerson cited in Custen, 1992: 1)
As I mentioned in section 1.1, traditional autobiography is usually concerned with revelations by famous people who write authoritatively, presenting us with clearly analysed accounts of their personal contributions to history. These texts,
do not admit internal cracks and disjunctions, rifts and ruptures. The whole thrust of such works is to seal up and cover over gaps in memory, dislocations in time and space, insecurities, hesitations and blind spots. The consciousness behind the narrative “I” develops over time…(but) remains stable. The dissection of self-analysis premises the cohesion of a restructured self. Any hint of the disparate, the disassociated, is overlooked or enfolded into a narrative of synthesis (Benstock, 1988: 57).
Indeed, this model of autobiography has been increasingly eroded in recent years. Critics such as Shari Benstock claim that many contemporary memoirists are changing autobiographical writing and that the form is changing so that the boundaries between fiction and non-fiction are being blurred. Drusilla Modjeska goes so far as to assert that ‘more and more I’m coming to think that there’s a new form of writing emerging’ (Modjeska, 2000(a): 5).
Characteristic of the new form is a turning away from the terrain of eminent people and ‘long narratives of life’ (Modjeska, 2000(b): 6). Here we do not encounter noteworthy lives explored from a position of wisdom and authority. Rather, the contemporary autobiographer frequently holds up for scrutiny ordinary (not famous) lives, small excerpts from lives (not end-of-career lives) and replaces the once authoritative autobiographical subject with an uncertain character in search of memory, identity and the nature of the ‘I’. The writer’s inner world now becomes the central concern for contemporary autobiographers and while the use
47 of the ‘I’ remains the principal narrative tool, there is often a sense of unease about presenting the remembered world through one point of view. Subjectivity is often shared through another’s consciousness and the internal world is interrupted and discontinuous. As Modjeska notes: ‘If the self is a lens, then it is fractured, prismatic, contingent. There is fluidity between past and present’ (Modjeska, 2000(a): 6).
Barbara Kosta suggests that it might be more appropriate to use the term ‘personal history’ instead of ‘contemporary autobiography’. For her this is a more accurate description of the kinds of writing and filmmaking that she sees currently being produced. ‘Personal history’ entails transcribing personal experience from a subjective viewpoint. It encompasses the concept of creating narratives of the self wherein ‘the subjective viewpoint diverges from the notion of the universal, unitary self exhibited in traditional autobiographies’ (Kosta, 1994:19).
Furthermore, by joining the terms personal and history we break down the customary boundary between the private and the public sphere. The term ‘private history’ then forms a connection between these two spheres and draws attention to the artificiality of separating them. For Kosta, combining personal with history stresses the subjectivity of history and emphasizes that history is a narrative construct.
These ‘personal histories’ then, like all histories, can be seen as a set of discursive practices, mediations distanced from the real events by time and space and subject to narrative restructuring. For, as Hayden White reminds us:
No history, visual or verbal, ‘mirrors’ all or even the greater parts of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an account and this is true of even the most narrowly restricted ‘micro history’ (White, 1985: 1194).
When autobiographers tell their ‘personal histories’ by reconstructing their own pasts, they, of necessity, provoke a confrontation with the larger histories of the societies where they grew up. The act of remembering connects their stories with
48 the stories of others and with a larger ‘macro history.’ But the kinds of connections the writer makes can be sharply delineated.
The psychoanalyst, Ewa Hoffman, draws a distinction between two types of autobiographical narrative: the public narrative where the reference to the externality of Fate plays a main role and the private narrative which unfolds in the hermetic sphere of intimate affairs. She contrasts stories told by European and American patients and emphasises their stylistic differences (Hoffman, 1994: 326). For instance, she finds that the Europeans tend to talk about themselves as victims of History whose lives have been dramatically changed by unexpected and powerful events such as war, occupation, political change. By contrast, she argues that American narratives were concerned with highly personal, private moments of acute crisis when their self-controlled lives failed in painful ways. Hoffman notes that:
the private narratives (of Americans) do not make any use of the presence of fate whereas the public narratives (of Europeans), to the contrary, seem to be fuelled by them and constructed on the basis of their ambivalence (Hoffman, 1994: 327).
Hoffman’s claims need, of course, to be backed up by empirical evidence but they are very suggestive. In addition, they provide an interesting complement to Jim Lane’s pioneering study of American autobiographical documentaries, in that Lane does not, unlike Hoffman, seek to contrast American autobiographies with those of non-Americans (Lane, 2002). Moreover, if we were to accept Hoffman’s observations, then, as we will see further elaborated in Chapter Three, Ross McElwee’s work appears as a classic example of the ‘highly personal, private’ narrative. We can compare this to the autobiography of H. G. Wells, where we find a public narrative which is much concerned to locate its subject within the great cycles of Fate and Time. Thus Wells writes:
I began this autobiography primarily to reassure myself during a phase of fatigue, restlessness and vexation, and it has achieved its purpose of reassurance. I wrote myself out of that mood of discontent and forgot
49 myself and a mosquito swarm of bothers in writing about my sustaining ideas. My ruffled persona has been restored and the statement of the idea of modern world-state has reduced my personal and passing irritations and distractions to their proper insignificance. So long as one lives as an individual, vanities, lassitudes, lapses and inconsistencies will hover about and creep back into the picture, but I find nevertheless that this faith and service of constructive world revolution does hold together my mind and will in a prevailing unity, that it makes life continually worth living, transcends and minimizes all momentary and incidental frustrations and takes the sting out of the thought of death. The stream of life out of which we rise and to which we return has been restored to dominance in my consciousness, and though the part I play is, I believe, essential, it is significant only through the whole (Wells, 1934: 824-5).
Here I would place my own autobiographical film as attempting to occupy something of a middle position between the private, or personal, and public autobiography. I do deal with notions of fate but I am also concerned to record, like McElwee, those ‘passing irritations and distractions’ that Wells purports to despise.
Finally, it should be pointed out that these ‘personal histories’ are particular kinds of documents. Unlike traditional autobiographers, such as Wells, who used their life stories to validate their careers, contemporary autobiographers seldom celebrate their great deeds. These ‘private histories’ are not about public success. Rather the writers tend to visit sites of trauma. For,
it is grief that propels them into a consideration of their lives, a telling and a retelling of the fragments that lodge in memory, until a narrative arises that allows them to go forward again (Modjeska, 2000(a) : 7).
This same impulse is present in the New Documentary. The New Documentary, however, must be understood not simply in terms of grief or trauma, but also, as the individual’s response to her own history. This must, in turn, be understood in political and macro-historical terms. Here Jim Lane in his discussion of American
50 autobiographical documentaries provides us with a paradigmatic approach. He seeks to understand the moment of the New Documentary, by arguing that:
Documentary became autobiographical when Americans who were involved in countercultural movements turned to autobiographical discourses as a form of politics. Personal themes, autobiographies, and self-representations informed much of U.S. cultural life. This marked an extraordinary moment in contemporary American history. The historian David Hollinger identifies this period as a time in which Americans became aware of their own historicity: “When we accept our own historical particularity, we shy away from essentialist constructions of human nature, from transcendentalist arguments about it, and from timeless rules for justifying claims about it”…Hollinger’s observations serve as a temperate warning to negative generalisation about autobiographical discourse. The autobiographical documentary is one such example of individuals acknowledging their “historical particularity” and resisting the narcissistic indulgences to which many critics have reacted negatively (Lane, 2002: 21).
It is this that accounts for what Lane identifies as the convergence between autobiography and documentary. We need to understand, moreover, that the interaction between autobiography and documentary has had an impact on both forms. In this instance Lane argues that ‘fundamentally changing the possibilities of documentary by introducing autobiography, documentarists have created new forms of selfhood’ (Lane 2002: 22). It is towards a deeper analysis of this process and, hopefully, a fuller understanding of the particularities of the New Documentary that we now turn.
51 CHAPTER TWO
TOWARDS AN UNDERSTANDING OF THE NEW DOCUMENTARY
‘With regard to knowledge of truths, the artist has a weaker morality than the thinker; he (sic) will on no account let himself be deprived of brilliant and profound interpretations of life, and defends himself against temperate and simple methods and results. He is apparently fighting for the higher worthiness and meaning of mankind; in reality he will not renounce the most efficacious presuppositions for his art, the fantastical, mythical, uncertain, extreme, the sense of the symbolical, the over-valuation of personality, the belief that genius is something miraculous—he considers, therefore, the continuance of his art of creation as more important than the scientific devotion to truth in every shape, however simple this may appear.’ (Nietzsche, cited in Hollingdale, 1977: 125)
2.1 NEW DOCUMENTARY DIRECTIONS
‘The past should not be the object of mere contemplation if the present is to be meaningful. For if the past were viewed as a “frozen reality” it would either dominate and immobilize the present or be discarded as irrelevant to today’s concerns.’ (Constantino, cited in Armes, 1987: 305)
Errol Morris’s documentary The Thin Blue Line (1988) is concerned with the investigation of a murder and with exposing the fact that the wrong man has been convicted of the crime. The film is constructed from interviews with participants, archival footage and re-enactments using actors. There is no voice-over commentary and the entire film is shot with fluid camera work and highly stylised, deep chiaroscuro lighting in rich vibrant colours. The soundtrack is punctuated by Philip Glass’s haunting score which contributes to the unusually (for a documentary) aestheticised mise-en-scène.
52 The re-enactments give contradictory eye-witness accounts of the murder wherein the dramatised material changes to accommodate new testimony. This radical story-telling method is similar to that employed by the Japanese director, Kurosawa, in his fictional film, Rashomon (1951). But Morris’s methodology according to Thompson and Bordwell, suggests that the truth can only be discovered through multiple, biased retellings of the events. Out of the multiplicity of lies, half-truths, evasions, cover-ups and uncertainties, the facts emerge and the film was able to help free Randall Adams, the man falsely accused of the murder. Kristin Thompson and David Bordwell note that the film,
grants that personal bias, cultural predispositions and cinematic conventions often mislead us; but it also declares that the documentarist can find a persuasive approximation to truth (Thompson and Bordwell, 1994: 692).
Morris avoids any kind of journalistic objectivity in his films but still seeks to portray the truth. For him:
Truth is not subjective. When you make claims such as poison gas was used in Auschwitz, there is a true and false answer. Just as there is a true and false answer to the question of whether Randall Adams shot police officer Robert Wood on that roadway in West Dallas. This is not up for grabs. You don’t take an audience survey (cited in Grundmann, 2000: 5).
The Thin Blue Line is an example of what is generally referred to as the ‘New Documentary’ and Errol Morris one of the leading exponents of the form. For, as Grundmann argues:
Morris’s films are as far from documentary as they can be without taking the leap into fictional narrative; he so consciously and consistently blurs the lines between fact and fiction, reality and fantasy, objectivity and subjectivity that the use of real-life subjects and lack of a pre-written script seem to be the only thread by which hangs his documentary classification (Grundmann, 2000: 4).
53
So what do we understand by the term ‘New Documentary’? How do we classify the form? And here I should point out that although this term suggests that documentary is changing and evolving, I am not attempting to imply that there is a linear or progressive development in the form towards more refinement or towards a more authentic representation of actuality. Rather it is simply a recognition that the form is changing and adapting, but not in a Darwinian sense. Rather the form is expanding by colonising new terrain, borrowing from earlier documentary styles and other diverse cinematic forms such as the home movie, mainstream fiction and the avant-garde.
Broadly speaking one can identify two major developments or qualities in the ‘New Documentary’. These are: 1) the fictionalisation of the documentary 2) subjectivity and greater introspection
I now wish to explore these developments by considering them in the light of my own film project. What is particularly clear to me is that the documentary movement is developing a self-consciousness of its own history. There is as yet no clear consensus with regard to that history. However I think it is useful to begin by examining the traditional dichotomy between the ‘reflective lyrical’ documentary, as exemplified by Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922), and the ‘earnest didacticism’ of the early Soviet documentaries (Bowden, 1976: 200). Here I largely accept Michael Renov’s argument that the latter tradition has stagnated into what he has termed the ‘discourses of sobriety’ (Renov, 1993: 32). The alternatives to such stagnation within the earnest didactic tradition would appear to be the absolute degeneration into Reality Television or alternatively an embracing of the New Documentary (Miller at
To my mind the situation with the ‘earnest didactic’ strand of documentary production is analogous to the crisis that confronted religion in the Nineteenth Century following the publication of Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species. Then Matthew Arnold wrote: ‘Our religion has materialised itself in the fact, in the
54 supposed fact; it has attached its emotion to the fact and now the fact is failing it’ (Arnold, 1888: 1). If one substitutes ‘documentary’ for ‘religion’ in this quotation, then one has the fundamental point I am striving to make.
As we know, Arnold’s solution was to turn to poetry, that is the aesthetic, as a ‘consolation and a stay’ (Arnold, 1888:1). It is in essence my argument that documentary production must follow the same path and turn to the aesthetic. Thus, in terms of the history of the documentary form, I contend strongly that there is much to learn from the tradition of poetic documentaries such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a City (1927), Dziga Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929), and Joris Ivens’s, Rain (1929). However, for me this turn to the aesthetic is not a simple matter of reviving the ‘lyrical tradition’. Rather what is needed is a thorough examination of developments in the New Documentary. To achieve this I begin by canvassing Paul Arthur’s extremely influential characterisations of the New Documentary in terms of the Aesthetics of Failure (Arthur, 1993: 126). I then proceed to argue that although such a characterisation has been extremely valuable that it has tended to underestimate the fundamental imperatives at work. Here I tentatively suggest that what is happening is the fictionalisation of the documentary.
This process exists at two levels. Firstly and most obviously the New Documentary raids the technical armoury of fiction filmmaking to achieve its aims. But at a more profound level the New Documentary also seeks to take the path of interiority and subjectivity - a path that hitherto documentarists have felt to be the exclusive concern of the fiction film. This turn to subjectivity has meant that the documentary theorist has firstly to address many of the contemporary concerns that have been thought of in terms of the ‘death of the subject’. In addition, the raid on the armoury of fiction has meant that many of the traditional problems that beset the novel now confront the documentary. In this instance I draw upon Jay Bernstein’s work on the philosophy of the novel to show how the New Documentary grapples with the central issue of form versus life (Bernstein, 1984). This latter issue I reconfigure in terms of the struggle to make meaning of life and the role of contingency in its dual alternatives of chance or synchronicity.
55 2.2 THE NEW DOCUMENTARY AND THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE
‘The moment of his revelation is described in a passage that is dropped without warning into the hymn of hate for Atlas House with which he opens his autobiography: it is just added to the list of the horrors of the place that his father was once found lying in the back yard after suffering an accident that left him crippled for life. Details of the accident are given, but on examination they turn out to be improbable.’ (West, 1984: 188)
The concept of the Aesthetics of Failure was developed first by Paul Arthur in Michael Renov’s very influential anthology Theorizing Documentary. Therein Arthur attempted to summarise the impact of post-structuralism on documentary filmmaking. He speculated that:
The prospect for completion of a straightforward documentary project of any strip may be under interrogation. [This has resulted in] failure to adequately represent the person, event, or social situation stated as the film’s explicit task function as an inverted guarantee of authenticity. The new works are textual parasites, fragments or residues of earlier works which for one reason or another became impossible to realise. One ramification of postmodern aesthetics, precipitated in part by the anti- metaphysical bent of poststructuralist theory, is that certain types of artistic mastery are culturally suspect. The epistemic ambition to speak from a totalising framework of knowledge about some fully intelligible reality is anathema (Arthur, 1993: 128).
The Aesthetics of Failure then is closely linked to the problematic of truth telling. It is supposed to be a guarantee of the trustworthiness of the filmmaker if he or she presents himself as non-authoritative. For Arthur, ‘the New Documentary’s most salient quality is an explicit centering of the filmmaking process and a heavily ironized inscription of the filmmaker as (unstable) subject, an anti-hero for our times’ (Arthur, 1993: 127). Again this is a category that has to be understood on
56 several levels. In filmic terms the argument that we can trust the filmmaker, because he does not claim to be speaking with the ‘Voice of God’, is essentially a rejection of a particular tradition within documentary filmmaking.
On a philosophical level it is not difficult to detect the impact of the truth model advocated by Nietzsche. He wrote in On Truth and Lies:
What, then, is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms - in short, a sum of human relations, which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins (cited in Kaufmann, 1968: 46-7).
Nietzsche was, of course, not unaware of the problems this produces. His solution was to accept the necessity of truth and attempt to reconcile this with its impossibility through the mechanism of forgetting. Thus he argued: ‘Only through forgetfulness can man ever achieve the illusion of possessing a “truth”…’ (cited in Kaufmann, 1968: 45).
This would, however, fairly obviously be not a very successful solution. For a start the assertion that ‘truth is an illusion’ has often been countered by pointing out that such a statement is in itself contradictory and self-cancelling.
On a philosophical level, Bhaskar has pointed out that, in asserting truth is a ‘mobile army of metaphors’, Nietzsche is confusing truth and meaning. Bhaskar explains:
Nietzsche would not have exaggerated if he had said that (a) meaning is and (b) truth depends upon a mobile army of metaphors - at least in
57 science, as where in reading a contemporary research report in micro- physics one will find all manner of secondary and tertiary qualities, such as strangeness and colour, attributed to charges and particles (metaphors too) (Bhaskar, 1993: 136).
Moreover, according to Bhaskar, Nietzsche’s confusion extends the claim for the necessity of forgetting that there is no such thing as the truth. Here Bhaskar points out that, ‘what is Necessary is not what is untenable’ (Bhaskar, 1993: 148).
Thus, in terms of the social, cultural, political, economic and ecological crises that grip the human species, it would seem that there is no one that can do anything. It is just such an analysis that underpins the work of James Heartfield on the ‘Death of the Subject’ (Heartfield, 2002: 102-110). A similar point had been made earlier by the South African philosopher Alex Callinicos (Callinicos, 1989: 162-171). Heartfield argues that:
At every level of society, in public and private life, there is a loss of nerve and people try to evade accountability and responsibility. Politicians seek an alibi in globalisation, businessmen in consultants and facilitators, scientists in ethical committees; everybody needs support and counselling. We now inhabit a culture of complaint and victimhood, in which everybody blames somebody or something - their genes, their hormones, their childhood, their parents, their education, their dysfunctional relationships, their adverse experiences - for whatever difficulties they face (Heartfield cited in Fitzpatrick, 2002).
On a more directly philosophical level, Slavoj Žižek has located the death of the subject in the rise of a number of philosophical positions ranging from Heideggerian phenomenology, Post-Althusserianism and deconstructionist feminism (Žižek, 1995: 4). The point I am making here is that one can read the construction of the filmmaker within the New Documentary as reflecting the ‘death of the subject’, a point which I will take up in greater detail in a section on subjectivity proper. For the moment I will be content with pointing out that
58 Žižek’s Cartesian hero seems impossible in a world dominated by a general feeling that ‘there are no good guys any more’.
Possibly in this instance we can take as typical the case of Salman Rushdie. In his review of Rushdie’s novel Shame, Aijaz Ahmed interprets Rushdie’s message as one that claims that betrayal is a universal phenomenon. But as Ahmed points out one cannot argue that human beings always and inevitably betray each other (Ahmed, 1992).
Although Ahmad is surely correct, the argument here is that out of despair such as Rushdie’s is born the figure of the documentary filmmaker who substitutes his own personal failure, his own general incompetence, for the general failure of humanity. In so doing he strikes us as someone who has an authentic speaking position.
No discussion of the Aesthetics of Failure would be complete without considering the gender basis of the concept. Here Debbie Beattie has pointed out that the category of the Aesthetics of Failure was necessarily masculine (Beattie, 2001). Beattie argues that if a woman filmmaker presented herself as a failure, she would be read in terms of traditional sexist categories such as the dumb blonde, the idiotic female etc.
The argument here has interesting and suggestive analogies with Kristeva’s writing on the abject (Kristeva, 1982). As Trudy Mercer has pointed out:
Kristeva’s work associates women with the abject, the feminine, and the maternal body. These are not spaces from which a full subject speaks, and, because of this, the type of hysterical laugh that Kristeva describes Céline as possessing is not available in the same way to women writers. As a man, Céline is able to enter a carnivalesque space and laugh hysterically at the horror he finds when he confronts abjection. For a woman to perform the same laugh as Céline, she would have to perform some interesting gymnastics. First, she would need to become a full subject (to have the
59 phallus, not lack it), then confront abjection while simultaneously rejecting and inhabiting the feminine (Mercer, 2002).
It is much easier, however, for a male to portray himself as a bungling incompetent. And this is the image that both Ross McElwee and Michael Moore offer of themselves in their films. In their work we find the Aesthetics of Failure most vividly realised. In Roger and Me (1989), for example, when Moore invades the General Motors stockholders’ meeting his microphone is turned off. His body seems to freeze into a grotesque posture signifying at once his insignificance and his failure to attract the attention of his ‘superiors’. These points are reinforced by shots of the Chairman of General Motors, Roger Smith, and his allies chuckling triumphantly over their out-manoeuvring of Moore. However, Moore the artist may pose as a failure but he exacts a savage revenge on Smith, when at the conclusion of the film he inter-cuts the Chairman’s Christmas message with scenes from yet another eviction back in Flint.
On a more personal level we can see the Aesthetics of Failure at work in McElwee’s Sherman’s March (1986) when he accidentally switches off his tape recorder just as Pat is doing her cellulite exercises. Then McElwee’s car breaks down, he cannot frame his characters properly and the amusement park ride has technical difficulties. In Time Indefinite (1993) his camera battery runs flat just as he is announcing his impending marriage. As Arthur notes about the Aesthetics of Failure: ‘What the device certifies through negative mastery is finally the sincerity and truth of the filmmaker’s observations about himself, women and social attitudes’ (Arthur, 1993: 129).
To sum up then, the Aesthetics of Failure is a concept developed to account for the practice of a number of influential documentary filmmakers, primarily Moore and McElwee. Of course, it is important to acknowledge that the concept does not account for the whole practice of a filmmaker as complex as McElwee. We will see this when I come to deal with his films in greater detail in Chapter 3. The concept itself remains under-theorised. To develop the notion I think one has to understand it firstly as a rejection of the ‘Voice of God’ strand within documentary practice. It can also be read as a trope for the failure of agency among progressive
60 sections of society. This could be extended to a reading which sees the Aesthetics of Failure as the failure or the limits of both the politics of redemptive memory and of aesthetic intervention in the world.
Memory and the Necessity and Failure of Redemption
The philosopher most associated with the theme of redemptive memory is of course Walter Benjamin. This theme is also given its most poetic expression in the trope of the Angel of History who wants to turn back and redeem the disasters of the past but cannot:
This is how one pictures the Angel of History. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward (Benjamin, at
If the Angel fails, what then of we humans? Here Benjamin’s trope has to be understood within his view that the past had a claim on us. Thus in the second thesis he argues:
The past carries with it a temporal index by which it is referred to redemption. There is a secret agreement between past generations and the present one. Our coming was expected on earth. Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power moreover to which the past has a prior claim (Benjamin, at http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html, my emphasis).
61 This thesis may be read, especially with its notion of a ‘weak Messianic power’, as an acknowledgment of the inevitability of failure. We will never be able to right the wrongs of the past. Such an act can only be performed by a true Messiah, if she/he comes, but at least our act of memory is some recompense. Moreover it is a duty owed to the past.
It is important, however, to understand that the past in question is not simply our past but also the past of the Other, and that we visit it not as a refuge from the present but to attempt to make a better future. The differences here may be subtle but I think they can be made somewhat clearer if we contrast Sartre’s Baudelaire with Benjamin’s Angel of History. Both are turned towards the past but for radically different purposes. According to Sartre, Baudelaire chose,
to advance backwards with his face turned towards the past, crouching on the floor of the car which was taking him away with his eyes fixed on the disappearing road. Few existences have been more stagnant than his. For him the die was already cast at the age of twenty-one. Everything had stopped. He had had his chance and lost for ever. By 1846 he had spent half his capital, written most of his poems, given his relations with his parents their definitive form, contracted the venereal disease, which slowly rotted him, met the woman who would weigh like lead on every hour of his life and made the voyage, which provided the whole of his work with exotic images (Sartre, 1967: 163).
Sartre’s Baudelaire then, whatever his relationship may be to the real Baudelaire, is a character that ceases to grow and commit himself to a better future. The past for him is more like a museum, which he haunts as a refuge from the task of making a better world. That is the source of his failure.
The Angel of History fails too, but it is defeated by great historical forces. Similarly the autobiographical filmmaker is surely on an impossible mission. For, how can one redeem that which is gone? Perhaps one could argue here from the therapeutic disciplines that one can make whole the present person and thus facilitate a better future. Again there is a sense in which John Pilger’s insistence on
62 remembering the fate of the Aboriginal Australian is an argument that this is as a necessary step towards the building of a healthy Australia in the future (MacLennan, 2000: 125).
Whatever the case here, I would like to stress that Benjamin’s attitude towards the past and towards memory is essentially an ethical one. It is a good thing, we ought to remember the victims of what Hegel termed ‘the slaughter-bench of history’ (Hegel, 1997: 62). But I would also like to argue that this impulse is not merely ethical. It is what gives us our identity and makes us human. To illustrate this argument, I would like now to turn to a consideration of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece Blade Runner (1982).
Memory, (Eye)dentity and Blade Runner
Tyrell: Commerce, is our goal here at Tyrell. More human than human is our motto. Rachael is an experiment, nothing more. We began to recognize in them strange obsessions. After all they are emotionally inexperienced with only a few years in which to store up the experiences which you and I take for granted. If we give them the past we create a cushion or pillow for their emotions and consequently we can control them better.
Blade Runner is a complex, multi-layered film. Now a cult classic it proved a flop on its first release in 1982 (Pontolilo, 1997). Among the many themes canvassed in this film, I have chosen for the purposes of my thesis that of memory. If Benjamin gave us an ethics of memory, Blade Runner reminds us of the importance of memory to being human, for as Pontolillo points out:
More than any film before or since, Blade Runner explores three profound and unsettling questions: Who am I? Why am I here? and What does it mean to be human? (Pontolillo, 1997).
I offer the following synopsis to remind the reader of the film’s central concerns:
63 Blade Runner (1982) is a science-fiction film-noir starring Harrison Ford, Rutger Hauer, and Sean Young. It is loosely based on Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? though its title comes from two unrelated novels (Bladerunner by Alan E. Nourse and Blade Runner: A Movie by William S. Burroughs). In November 2019, a former cop - Harrison Ford as Deckard - is given the assignment of tracking down and ‘retiring’ replicants who have rebelled, returned to Earth, and are hiding in Los Angeles. Replicants are extremely complex androids (humanoid robots) bioengineered from skin/flesh cultures by the Tyrell Corporation. As manufactured organisms, they are treated as slaves and employed in work considered too hazardous, boring, or distasteful for humans. The latest generation of replicants (Nexus-6) are virtually indistinguishable from humans. While replicants can outperform humans physically and even mentally, they possess two Achilles heels: a programmed four-year lifespan and the inability to show empathy. This latter weakness forms the basis for discriminating them from humans via a Voight-Kampff (VK) test of empathic responses to carefully worded questions and statements. After a bloody mutiny by a group of Nexus-6 replicants in an off-world colony, replicants were declared illegal (under penalty of death) on Earth. Special police squads called Blade Runner units are employed to detect and eliminate any trespassing replicants. This results in the movie’s title as well as Deckard’s assignment and modus operandi (Pontolillo, 1997).
I have chosen to concentrate on just two moments in this film. These are 1) Rachael’s (Sean Young) discovery that her memories are implants (ie fakes) and so she is not human, and 2) the death of the replicants’ leader Roy Batty (Rutger Hauer).
Elevator: Voice print identification. Your floor number please. Deckard: Deckard, ninety-seven. Elevator: Ninety-seven, thank-you, danke. [ The elevator doors open, and Deckard pulls his gun on Rachael ] Rachael: I wanted to see you, [ pause ] so I waited. Let me help. Deckard: What do I need help for?
64 Rachael: I don’t know why he told you what he did. Deckard: Talk to him. [ Deckard closes his apartment door on Rachael. ] Rachael: He wouldn’t see me. [ Deckard reopens the door, and Rachael enters. ] Deckard: Do you want a drink? No? No? Rachael: You think I’m a replicant, don’t you? [ pause ] Look, it’s me with my mother. Deckard: Yeah. [ pause ] Remember when you were six? You and your brother snuck into an empty building through a basement window--you were gonna play doctor. He showed you his, but when it got to be your turn you chickened and ran. Remember that? You ever tell anybody that? Your mother, Tyrell, anybody, huh? You remember the spider that lived in a bush outside your window: orange body, green legs. Watched her build a web all summer. Then one day there was a big egg in it. The egg hatched-- Rachael: The egg hatched... Deckard: Yeah... Rachael: ...and a hundred baby spiders came out. And they ate her. Deckard: Implants! Those aren’t your memories. They’re somebody else’s. They’re Tyrell’s niece’s. [ pause ] Okay, bad joke. I made a bad joke. You’re not a replicant. Go home, okay? No really, I’m sorry. Go home. [ pause ] Want a drink? I’ll get you a drink. I’ll get a glass. [ Rachael runs away when Deckard turns to get a glass. Then Deckard looks at Rachael’s photo. ] Deckard (voice-over): Tyrell really did a job on Rachael. Right down to a snapshot of a mother she never had, a daughter she never was. Replicants weren’t supposed to have feelings. Neither were blade runners. What the hell was happening to me? [ pause ] Leon’s pictures had to be as phony as Rachael’s. I didn’t know why a replicant would collect photos. Maybe they were like Rachael. They needed memories. [ Deckard, on balcony. ]
Rachael is the latest model of replicant and she is only proved to be one after an exhaustive series of questions. Deckard (Harison Ford) is able to prove to her that
65 she is a replicant because he has access to what should only have been able to be revealed by Rachael. So in this brief exchange we have the thematics of revelation and judgement, which I hope to show are at the centre of the autobiographical documentary. We reveal and are judged. But the control over what is to be revealed remains with us, by and large. Rachael lacks that same control therefore she is not human. However she does have one other quality, which all the replicants share, and which the humans in this film seem to lack or to have lost. She wants memories. She wants to live. She wants to be human. Thus the replicant Leon (Brion James) carries around a photo of his ‘family’ and the leader of the replicants, Roy Batty, says to his maker Tyrell (Joe Turkel), ‘I want more life, fucker!’
Batty and Deckard
[Deckard hits Roy with pipe.] Batty: That hurt. That was irrational. Not to mention, unsportsman like. Ha ha ha. Where are you going? [ Deckard does some amazing climbing, then jumps to next building. Batty follows, after tossing a bird. ] Batty: Quite an experience to live in fear, isn’t it? That’s what it is to be a slave. [ Deckard falls, Batty catches him. ] Batty: I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time like tears in rain. Time to die.
Batty’s final speech is accompanied by layers of symbolism. Thus he has begun to lose feeling and so crucifies himself by sticking a nail into his hand. A bird flies away from his dying body, signifying the flight of his spirit. More importantly, again for my purposes, is that in his final speech as he is about to let go of the life he wanted so desperately to extend, in saving Deckard he gives life to his enemy - the Other. This is yet one more reminder of life as ereignis, the ‘violent gift of
66 Being’, that both creates and destroys (Bielik-Robson, 2000: 81). I have tried to convey something of this in my film by beginning it with my father who gave me life and ending with my daughter to whom I gave life.
I would also like to draw attention once again to the poetic dimension of Batty’s final speech. This is one of the most moving sequences in cinema. Batty reaches out to Deckard and desperately seeks to leave some of his memories behind, to live on in someone else’s memory. What can we say of the memories? Firstly these are of things seen. This of course once more echoes the eye symbolism, which is everywhere in this film. Traditionally the eye is the window to the soul. And it is the existence of our souls that proved to Descartes that we were human and not animals or machines (Descartes, 1964: 109-124). This point of course has, as Thomas Clark points out, been endlessly debated, and a resolution of the controversy is way beyond the scope of this, or perhaps any other, thesis (Clark, 2002).
Interestingly also the memories are of things that have never and probably never will exist - attack ships, c-beams. Yet here in this burst of fantasy, the scriptwiter also establishes one of the essential traits of the human. We imagine and it is our flights of imagination in art that make us truly human.
Being human of course means being a subject, and it is to an analysis of the role of subjectivity that I will now direct my attention.
2.3 THE NEW DOCUMENTARY AND THE TURN TO SUBJECTIVITY
‘It is not an image I am seeking. It’s not an idea. It’s an emotion you want to recreate, an emotion, of wanting of giving, and of destroying.’ (Louise Bourgeois cited in Bernadac, 1996: 7)
The attraction of a number of New Documentarists to the Aesthetics of Failure can also be understood in terms of being yet another variation on the theme of the frustration of the artist (homo aestheticus) at not being able to intervene in the world as does the man of action (homo politicus). Such a failure would seem to
67 have been symbolised by the enigmatic figure of Arthur Rimbaud in his abandonment of poetry and his hopes for a radical and uncommercialised modernity - all at the age of 19. Indeed Merril Cole argues that Rimbaud can be read as the ‘paradigmatic illustration of defeat’ and certainly this is how Marxists have interpreted his career (Cole, 2000: 1). Cole however provides a radical re- reading of Rimbaud’s poem Solde to build the case that Marxism has underestimated the extent to which:
by incorporating the logic of the marketplace, and by pushing that logic past its capacity to make sense… Rimbaud’s poetry [has] effectively pervert[ed] the erotics of cultural reification (Cole, 2000:1).
Interesting as Cole’s contestation of the failure or otherwise of Rimbaud’s enterprise undoubtedly is, there is also a certain sense which, in concentrating on the commodification issue, he has missed another dimension of the problems confronting not only Rimbaud but all artists, be they poets or documentary filmmakers. These themes have been extensively explored in a number of poems ranging from Coleridge’s Kubla Khan, Yeats’ Cuchullain Comforted to Seamus Heaney’s Digging. In all these instances there is a meditation, sometimes implicit, other times explicit, on the subjectivity of the poet/artist. It is an argument of this thesis that such meditation on subjectivity is taking place within the field of the New Documentary.
Michael Renov, for example, has argued that: ‘Within the community of documentary practitioners and critics, “subjectivity” has frequently been constructed as a kind of contamination, to be expected but minimized’ (Renov, 1995: 1). Renov’s discussion of the move away from this position is initially bound up with an analysis of the subjective-objective duality within what he claims is the link between documentary film and the question of science (Renov, 1995: 1). This is a complex issue and indeed as I stressed in Chapter One has generated much confusion within documentary theory. I would repeat however that the first step towards making progress in this matter is to reject the naïve realist version of the relationship between subject and object. This, as Bhaskar has
68 pointed out, argues that we cannot have a non-subjective access to the object (Bhaskar, 1993: 271).
Again, as I stressed in Chapter One, it is of the utmost importance for documentary theory and practice that, having rejected the naïve realist position, we do not move to its polar opposite, where we embrace some form of solipsism. We can only approach the objective through the subjective, the world through language. But that does not mean that being is dependent on our articulation of it or even of our existence (Bhaskar, 1993: 271). In other words, while we will never get a subjective-free account of the world, we can still form judgements about the veracity, accuracy or adequacy of accounts produced within a documentary film, and indeed, as I have pointed out in Chapter One, we do this all the time.
There is however an aspect of the subject-object duality which I have not touched upon before, and which is crucial to an understanding of the contemporary documentary. This can be summed up thus: ‘If the object can only be approached through the subject, the question then arises, “What kind of subject?”’ The answer would seem to be that for many postmodern theorists the subject is either dead or ailing. Indeed, for Marsha Hewitt, ‘the repudiation of the subject and autonomous moral agency occupies a central place in postmodern thought’ (Hewitt, 1997: 1).
Callinicos and Heartfield seem to agree that the ‘death of the subject’ can be laid at the door of Nietzsche and in particular his overwhelming influence on post- structuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault (Callinicos, 1989: 59). Foucault concluded his The Order of Things in this manner:
As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, Man (sic) is an invention of a recent date. And one perhaps nearing to its end…one can certainly wager that Man would be erased, like a face drawn in the sand at the edge of the sea (cited in Heartfield, 2002: 22).
Here Heartfield argues that what Foucault and other post-structuralists have done is to take the Hegelian and Marxist critique of the Enlightenment philosophers’
69 unhistorical view of the bourgeois subject, and to extend that critique to the very notion of a subject (Heartfield, 2002: 24-5).
Foucault’s intent here was undoubtedly the radical one of disturbing the order of things by de-centring the subject. Yet the reported ‘death of the subject’ has not been welcomed by everyone interested in a radical politics. For instance, Hewitt, speaking mainly from a feminist viewpoint, maintains that:
Its [postmodernism’s] insistence on the ‘death of the subject’ has disturbing political and ethical implications not only for women and their struggles for freedom, but for any subjected group. Rosi Braidotti’s description of postmodernism’s regressive and oppressive tendencies is valid beyond the concerns of an ‘emancipatory theory’ and contemporary philosophical discussions on the death of the knowing subject…have the immediate effect of concealing and undermining the attempts of women to find a theoretical voice of their own…in order to deconstruct the subject one must first have gained the right to speak as one (Hewitt, 1997: 1).
I have already mentioned the influence of Nietzsche on postmodernist thinkers such as Foucault. However Slavoj Žižek has argued persuasively that corresponding to the logical matrix of Traditionalism-Modernism-Postmodernism there
are clearly three main readings of Nietzsche: traditional (the Nietzsche of the return to pre-modern aristocratic warrior values against decadent Judaeo-Christian modernity), modern (the Nietzsche of the hermeneutics of doubt and ironic self-probing), and postmodern (the Nietzsche of the play of appearances and differences) (Žižek, 2000: 171).
Arguably each of these readings would give rise to a different view of the subject. Most interestingly, perhaps one could maintain that the construction of the ‘death of the subject’ represents a strong claim based on the postmodernist Nietzsche. A weaker claim however could also be made. Here the subject would not be ‘dead’ but what Heartfield has termed ‘ersatz’. The primary form of the ‘ersatz subject’,
70 ‘pallid and more compromised than the original he displaces’, comes from identity theory, which grew increasingly important with the feminist, gay and black movements of the 1970s (Heartfield, 2002: 87-93).
Heartfield is unimpressed by ‘subject-identity’ and claims that although cultural identity is:
a site of resistance when it is compared to the traditional subject as…an ideal of resistance…identity is flawed. Unlike the classical model of subjectivity, identity is contextual and situated. It draws its authority from its given nature, rather than its future orientation. With identity theory, survival itself is the virtue. The conditions of exclusion or oppression are seen as a source of inner strength and nobility. It seems as if we are in the presence of a return to the stoical consciousness that endures hardship with equanimity. Where the principle of subjectivity is self-determining, identification takes identity from its context and location (Heartfield, 2002: 90).
It would appear that Heartfield is being overly polemical here, not only in his canvassing the very possibility of the classical subject as being non-contextual and non-situated, but also in his dismissal of the subjectivity that arises from the movements. That such identities are far from pallid or merely concerned with survival can be seen if we take the case of the French artist Louise Bourgeois. Currently regarded as an important contemporary western artist, her work is heavily autobiographical in impulse. In some ways her work could be regarded as confirming Heartfield’s characterisation of identity politics as ‘a reworking of externally imposed norms’ (Heartfield, 2002: 90). Indeed Jean Frémon summarises her entire oeuvre as:
Confessions, self-portraits, memories, fantasies of a troubled being who seeks from sculpture the peace and order lacking in her childhood -such is the work of Louise Bourgeois (Frémon cited in Bernadac, 1996: 8).
71 However it is important to note that, contra Heartfield, Bourgeois’s work is not simply a response or a cleaving to the ‘conditions of its formation’ (Heartfield, 2002: 90). In her working through of her childhood and in her revival of ‘art as autobiography’, she provides a clear instance of the capacity of the human not only to survive but also to overcome and transcend the ‘contextual and the situated’ in the form of childhood trauma. In Bourgeios’s case this was apparently her father’s ‘betrayal when he incorporated his mistress Sadie, a young English governess into the family unit’ (Bernadac, 1996: 9).
Heartfield argues that one of the key differences between traditional subjectivity and the ‘ersatz subject’ of identity politics is that the traditional subject is ‘self- determining’ (Heartfield, 2002: 90). That Heartfield does have in mind a Promethean view of the ‘self determining subject’ can be seen in his critique of the ‘emergence of an elite anti-capitalism’ where the scions of leading capitalist families, such as Lord Peter Melchett, head up organisations like Greenpeace (Heartfield, 2002: 209). In his reduction of the ‘self-determining subject’ to the Promethean bourgeois subject, Heartfield is also neglecting here, it seems to me, the role of the artist as creator and self-determiner. Of course every artist is located within a context, but what the artist chooses to do with that context is not pre- determined. A glance at Robert Mapplethrope’s 1982 portrait of the 72 year old Bourgeois smiling wickedly while holding an enormous bronze phallus tucked under her arm would surely prove that she is no mere responder to the identity given her by her past (Bernadac, 1996: 6).
In terms of recent documentary theory, it is also significant that the movements are the source for what Renov has termed the ‘new subjectivities’. Far from seeing these as ‘pallid’, Renov claims that: ‘current documentary self-inscription enacts identities - fluid, multiple, even contradictory - while remaining fully embroiled with public discourse’ (Renov, 1995: 5). Renov’s position must, however, be understood as making a strong case for the poststructuralist notion of the subject. Accordingly he argues:
“The return of the subject” is not, in these works, the occasion for a nostalgia for an unproblematic self-absorption. If what I am calling ‘the
72 new autobiography’ has any claim to theoretical precision, it is due to this work’s construction of subjectivity as a site of instability – flux, drift, perpetual revision –rather than coherence (Renov cited in Lane, 2002: 26).
The Heraclitean origins of Renov’s position should be obvious. Within this world view flux is prioritised over stability. Indeed in a famous fragment Heraclitus claims: ‘You cannot step twice into the same river; for fresh waters are ever flowing in upon you’ (Heraclitus cited in Warner, 1958:26).
One should also note that the logic of Renov’s position is that a priori a coherent subject is either the equivalent of a self-absorbed or narcissistic subject, or is a theoretical impossibility. However an admission or recognition of the reality of change and flux does not rule out the possibility of personal subjective coherence and relative stability and endurance.
The paradigmatic instance of this new subjectivity is for Renov the gay black filmmaker, Marlon Riggs, whose work I will discuss in the next chapter (Renov, 1995: 9).
2.4 FICTIONALISATION OF THE NEW DOCUMENTARY
‘Whoever turns biographer commits himself to lies, to concealment, to hypocrisy, to embellishments and even to dissembling his own lack of understanding, for biographical truth is not to be had and even if one had it, one could not use it.’ (Freud cited in Custen, 1992: 148)
One of the consequences of this turn to subjectivity is that the filmmaker her/himself takes centre stage and becomes a performer foregrounding the presence of an auteur announcing an authorial guiding hand to negotiate a way through the world. Once again this can be seen as a reaction to the orthodoxy to the traditions of direct cinema or cinema verite where the filmmaker was the
73 hidden and silent observer, the ‘absence’. Errol Morris has categorically stated that:
I believe cinema verite set back documentary filmmaking twenty or thirty years. It sees documentary as a sub-species of journalism… There’s no reason why documentaries can’t be as personal as fiction filmmaking and bear the imprint of those who made them (cited in Arthur, 1993:127).
Nevertheless, while a number of contemporary filmmakers embrace fictional strategies and accept that ‘documentaries are a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance’ (Bruzzi, 2000: 154), many critics and documentary theorists have been wary of the performative mode. Bill Nichols, for example, has argued that the more a documentary ‘draws attention to itself’, the further it gets from ‘what it represents’ (Nichols 1991: 97). Stella Bruzzi, on the other hand, celebrates the intrusion of the filmmaker as performer. She argues:
The traditional concept of documentary as striving to represent reality as faithfully as possible is predicated upon the realist assumption that the production process must be disguised, as was the case with direct cinema. Conversely, the new performative documentaries herald a different notion of documentary ‘truth’ that acknowledges the construction and artificiality of even the non-fiction film (Bruzzi, 2000: 154).
The development of the New Documentary can, furthermore, be read as yet another moment in the saga of the ancient philosophical struggle between the One and the Many, with the traditional direct cinema documentary, for instance, taking the place of the One and the New Documentary striving in a postmodernist fashion to articulate the Many. The Many here is to be understood as the flow of reality, the cascade of events that makes up our experience of the world. Confronted with this chaotic flow, the New Documentarist struggles to impose meaning or a Oneness on the Many. In this she/he is of course like every other artist since artistic endeavour began. More particularly however, I would like to take the instance of the novelist and investigate in what ways the task of the novelist is
74 similar to that of the New Documentarist. To do this I will engage with Jay Bernstein’s analysis of Lukac’s theory of the novel.
Bernstein begins his discussion of Lukac’s aesthetic with an analysis of narrative. Here he draws upon Scholes and Kellogg’s work on narrative forms, which can be represented by the following diagram:
Narrative
Empirical Fictional (→real) (→ideal)
History Mimesis Romance Allegory (→fact) (→experience) (→beauty) (→goodness, truth)
(Fig 2.1, Bernstein, 1984: 45)
In terms of the diagram, documentary film can be seen as traditionally belonging to the Category of the Empirical, where through the process of history and mimesis it deals primarily with facts and experience respectively. However it is part of the argument of this thesis, and this chapter in particular, that the New Documentary is a hybrid form which crosses over into the category of the Fictional. It is driven to do so because the problems which it wishes to address, namely those of subjectivity and interiority, cannot be addressed within the Category of the Empirical. To put this another way, the New Documentarist is driven to make sense of the meaning of life, often his/her own, and this cannot be done as, Walter Benjamin pointed out, empirically (cited in Bernstein, 1984: 115) (my italics).
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Benjamin contrasts the novel with the story. The world of the story was that of a secure natural order which had passed with the advent of modernity. Associated with the story was recollection as reminiscence, where experience is presented as diffuse and diverse. However, because the novel lacks the secure order of the natural processes, which give authority to the story, recollection within the novel takes the form of remembrance. Here time is presented not as diffuse but as an act of unification (Bernstein, 1984: 135-6).
As a consequence, within the novel form, events are sequenced as part of a pattern or a whole, and contingency tends to be cancelled out. Remembrance operates to impose a determinate meaning, ‘even if that determinate meaning is the indeterminacy of all meaning’ (Bernstein, 1984: 132). Benjamin explains how remembrance functions as follows:
A man - so says the truth that was meant here - who died at thirty-five will appear to remembrance at every point in his life as a man who dies at the age of thirty-five. In other words, the statement that makes no sense for real life becomes indisputable for remembered life. The nature of the character in the novel cannot be presented any better than is done in this statement, which says that the ‘meaning’ of his life is revealed only in his death. But the reader of a novel actually does look for human beings from whom he derives the ‘meaning of life’. Therefore he must, no matter what, know in advance that he will share their experience of death; if need be their figurative death - the end of the novel - but preferably their actual one…. The novel is significant therefore, not because it presents someone else’s fate to us, perhaps didactically, but because the stranger’s fate by virtue of the flame which consumes it yields us the warmth by which we never draw from our own fate. What draws the reader to the novel is the hope of warming his shivering life with a death he reads about (Benjamin cited in Bernstein, 1984: 136) (original emphasis).
The Scholes-Kellogg diagram can be rephrased, for our purposes, by making use of Hayden White’s famous aphorism: ‘Lives are led, stories are told’ (White,
76 1987: 90). Here we can place the first part of the phrase ‘lives are led’ under the Empirical as it denotes real, historical people who lived real lives. And the second part of the phrase ‘stories are told’ can be placed under the Fictional because we tell fictional stories about the lives of real people (in the biopic, for example). These positions seem obvious and fixed. But then when one considers a New Documentary like Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March, the boundaries begin to blur and the borders become unstable. For is not McElwee a kind of knight errant bent on some (anti?) heroic quest? Shouldn’t his work be classified as ‘Romance’? So it would appear that the New Documentary, by colonising fictional techniques, becomes a hybrid form. But what of allegory? Can the New Documentary function allegorically? This is a question I posed to myself in the construction of my own film My Lovers Both (2003). Most obviously allegory is present in the manner in which the Boer father is used in the excerpt from my earlier film, Getting off the Altitude (1985). However as we will see in the conclusion, I was also seeking in the placement of this excerpt and in the interview on how it was made, to destabilise the externalisation of the figure of the Boer as feared and despised Other. In My Lovers Both I sought to suggest that we South Africans have to encounter and come to terms with a much more sinister and disturbing figure, namely, the ‘Boer within’.
2.5 FATE/CONTINGENCY AND CHANCE
‘When I was fourteen, something happened I’ve not told; in fact, I was going to leave it out. But since it affected my whole life, I don’t know how I could and pretend I was telling my story.’ (Kazan, 1988: 32)
As the New Documentary moves towards fictional techniques in an attempt to capture the texture of the lived experience - the working out of fate - phenomena which had traditionally been outside the domain of the documentary came into focus. I would list here among these the dual but antagonistic faces of contingency/fate - chance and synchronicity. In many ways these contrasting poles can be resumed under the ancient philosophical duality of the One (synchronicity) and the Many (chance) as in the following diagram:
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Contingency/Fate
Chance Synchronicity (Fig 2.2)
Of these two phenomena, Chance and Synchronicity, the former has the more acceptable philosophical pedigree. Nietzsche is the philosopher who emphatically assures us that that there is only chance but that we must accept it. This he proudly proclaimed in Thus Spoke Zarathustra:
A blesser have I become and a Yes-sayer: and therefore strove I long and was a striver, that I might one day get my hands free for blessing. This, however, is my blessing: to stand above everything as its own heaven, its round roof, its azure bell and eternal security: and blessed is he who thus blesses! For all things are baptized at the font of eternity, and beyond good and evil; good and evil themselves, however, are but fugitive shadows and damp afflictions and passing clouds. It is a blessing and not a blasphemy when I teach that ‘above all things there stands the heaven of chance, the heaven of innocence, the heaven of hazard, the heaven of wantonness.’ ‘Of Hazard’- that is the oldest nobility in the world; that gave I back to all things; I emancipated them from bondage under purpose. This freedom and celestial serenity did I put like an azure bell above all things, when I taught that over them and through them, no ‘eternal Will’- wills. This wantonness and folly did I put in place of that Will, when I taught that ‘In everything there is one thing impossible- rationality!’ A little reason, to be sure, a germ of wisdom scattered from star to star- this leaven is mixed in all things: for the sake of folly, wisdom is mixed in all things! A little wisdom is indeed possible; but this blessed security have I found in all things, that they prefer- to dance on the feet of chance. O heaven above me! You pure, you lofty heaven! This is now your purity to me, that there is no eternal reason-spider and reason-cobweb:- That you are to me a dancing-floor for
78 divine chances, that you are to me a table of the Gods, for divine dice and dice-players! (Nietzsche, 1969: 186)
If Nietzsche saw Fate or Chance ruling humanity’s destiny, it is important to note that as his disciple, Michel Foucault points out, this does not mean the passive acceptance of fate. Rather it means that:
Chance is not simply the drawing of lots, but raising the stakes in every attempt to master chance through the will to power. And giving rise to the risk of an even greater chance (Foucault, 1977: 155).
So although there is only chance, it is not to be accepted like the simple ‘drawing of lots’. Rather for Nietzsche and Foucault, chance is to be striven for heroically. As Zarathustra puts it: ‘I am Zarathustra the godless! I cook every chance in my pot. And only when it has been quite cooked do I welcome it as my food’ (Nietzsche, 1969: 192).
For Nietzsche this was the ‘good news’, in that it liberated humanity from the thrall of religion. If all was chance then there was no teleology, no Divine Will to be reckoned with nor any return of the Many to the One as the neo-Platonists had hoped for. Humanity was free to wrestle with fate. Thus he wrote:
From now on, man is included among the most unexpected and exciting lucky throws in the dice game of Heraclitus’s ‘great child’, be he called Zeus or chance; he gives rise to an interest, a tension, a hope, almost a certainty, as if with him something were announcing and preparing itself, as if man were not a goal but only a way, an episode, a bridge, a great promise (Nietzsche, 1967: 85).
This unfortunate dice game, the working out of chance or hazard, can have disastrous consequences for the hapless individual. Early on in The Thin Blue Line, Randall Adams tells us of his fateful meeting with David Harris, the young ‘kid’ who actually committed the murder that Adams has been sentenced for. He poignantly recalls that his car ran out of gas and that Harris then gave him a lift:
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I get up. I go to work on Saturday. Why did I meet this kid? I don’t know. Why did I run out of gas at that time? I don’t know. But it happened. It happened.
2.6 SYNCHRONICITY
‘Something has leaked out through the stitches and some of the serious intention of the world has leaked in: like the sense of high stakes, the desolate chance of real destiny.’ (Doctorow, 1980: 74)
I have already indicated that synchronicity and its concomitant, coincidence do not have a respectable heritage. It is important though to understand that it is not merely some New Age notion popularised by New Age gurus and figures such as the ageing Carl Justav Jung. I would argue rather that synchronicity can be understood as a variation of Apocalyptic thinking where what is hidden is revealed (Bull, 1999). As such it is a very ancient notion. The Apocalyptic itself is best understood as a companion concept to ‘hiddenness’, which Malcolm Bull advances as an alternative to the postmodernist notion of ‘undecidability’.
Hiddenness is a quality which cannot belong to the totally unknown or the inexperienced. This means that,
something must be both potentially knowable and at least partially experienced by someone, this suggests that hiddenness is not a quality independent of knowledge, but rather a function of it. If everything were fully known to everyone nothing would be hidden, and if no one knew anything whatsoever nothing would be hidden either, just unknown. Hiddenness therefore presupposes not just incomplete knowledge but incompleted knowledge, knowledge that is less full than it might be, perhaps than it ought to be. It involves the relationship between what an observer could know and what she does know, and it assumes that the observer knows less than she might. However, this may not be an
80 altogether satisfied definition for it fails to convey the sense that hidden knowledge is not just unrealised knowledge but frustrated knowledge (Bull, 1999:18-19).
On the other hand, ‘undecidability’ is a notion which has been championed by Jacques Derrida and Zymunt Bauman (Bull, 2000: 39-43). For Bauman, the ‘undecidable’ arises from:
Irrationality, chaos, strangerhood, ambivalence [which] are all names for that nameless ‘beyond’ for which the dominant powers that identified themselves as reasons, as forces of order, as natives, as meaning have no use…they have no other meaning but someone’s refusal to tolerate them (Bauman cited in Bull, 2001: 42).
Undecidability does, as Bull admits, convey something of our experience of the contemporary world, but, as he points out, because it is not allowed any positive content in that the undecidable remains undecidable, it cannot, unlike hiddenness, convey the process of revelation or Apocalypse (Bull, 1999: 42-3). The Apocalyptic itself is of course a variously defined phenomenon. Bull gives the following taxonomy:
A genre in which the heavenly mysteries are communicated through supernatural revelation? A belief that all history has a single irreversible conclusion? A teleological framework for the understanding of evil? An attempt to usher in a new era by redefining the rules of the redemptive process? A sense that each passing moment stands in some significant relation to a beginning and an end? A tone of disclosure, perhaps distinct from the content of the discourse, revelatory if only in that it reveals itself (Bull, 1999: 47).
Bull’s own definition of the Apocalyptic is of a process that disrupts the normal view of the world as dual or bivalent. Within the Apocalypse, that which has been excluded, namely contradiction and indeterminacy, are revealed (Bull, 1999: 83). The actual working out of the Apocalypse would seem to be necessarily involved
81 with turmoil and scandal. When that which is hidden is revealed, those who wanted it to remain hidden seem to be scandalised. The current scandal around the revelation of the existence of a gay bishop is a case in point. Similarly with synchronicity, it may be that the scandal surrounding this concept is due to what is revealed - a world beyond the rational comprehension of human beings.
Synchronicity has been defined as: ‘the meeting of a subjective event and an objective event. Their connection doesn’t seem to be attributable to a cause, nor is it attributable to chance’ (Newbury, 1998).
The actual term itself was created by Jung early on in his career, though it was not until he was in his seventies that he formally set down his thoughts on the phenomenon (Main, 2000: 89). According to Roderick Main, Jung
defined it [synchronicity] as ‘meaningful coincidence’ (Jung, 1952b: 827), as ‘acausal parallelism’ (Jung, 1963: 342), or as ‘an acausal connecting principle’ (Jung, 1952b: 828). More fully, he defined it as ‘the simultaneous occurrence of a certain psychic state with one or more external events which appear as meaningful parallels to the momentary subjective state’ (Jung, 1952b:850) (Main, 2000: 89).
Examples of the phenomenon abound in the literature. J.B. Priestley’ Man & Time is a rich source of examples. (Priestley, 1989) Here is one from Jung’s own experience with a patient:
Well, I was sitting opposite her one day, with my back to the window, listening to her flow of rhetoric. She had had an impressive dream the night before, in which someone had given her a golden scarab—a costly piece of jewellery. While she was still telling me this dream, I heard something behind me gently tapping on the window. I turned round and saw that it was a fairly large flying insect that was knocking against the window-pane in the obvious effort to get into the dark room. This seemed to me very strange. I opened the window immediately and caught the insect in the air as it flew in. It was a scarabaeid beetle, or common rose-chafer (Cetonia
82 aurata), whose gold-green colour most nearly resembles that of a golden scarab. I handed the beetle to my patient with the words, ‘Here is your scarab.’ This experience punctured the desired hole in her rationalism and broke the ice of her intellectual resistance. The treatment could now be continued with satisfactory results (Jung, cited in Main, 2000: 89).
Another example of synchronicity where distance is involved is the well documented case of a vision by the Swedish mystic Emanuel Swedenborg:
In 1759 he was staying with friends in Gothenburg. At 6 pm on a Saturday evening in July he had a vision of the great fire that broke out that night in Stockholm. He described the course of the fire in detail to his friends, and when couriers arrived from Gothenburg on Monday and Tuesday with the news, his account was confirmed in every detail. When asked how he had known, he replied that the angels had told him (McLynn, 1996: 496).
Co-incidences or instances of synchronicity like these are considered too artificial or too manipulative when employed in a ‘realist’ novel. As we have seen above, this can be understood in terms of synchronicity’s violation of the novel’s imperative to, as Bernstein puts it, ‘bind time’ (Bernstein, 1984: 109). For an essential element within synchronicity is that time is outside the control of those who experienced the phenomenon. However, if the traditional novelist is constrained to ‘bind time’ it is my argument that the new documentarist is under no such compulsion. Consequently, within my film I attempt to show this inability of the subject to ‘bind time’ by placing myself at the attempted assassination of Verwoerd.
Indeed, Errol Morris embraces artifice in his documentaries, thus opening up a Pandora’s box out of which springs co-incidence and synchronicity. In The Thin Blue Line, for instance, the convicted but innocent man, Randall Adams, tells us:
In October my brother and I left Ohio. We were driving to California. We got into Dallas on a Thursday night. Friday morning while I’m eating eggs and drinking coffee, I get a good job. All these people are supposedly out
83 of work. I’m not in town half a day and I’m getting a job. Everything clicked. It’s as if I’m meant to be here (my italics).
Morris is clearly breaking taboos here, for as Emmanuel Levinas points out, Western philosophy has imposed an ‘order’ which excludes any notion of the transcendent:
Man (sic) is no longer coram Deo. The extraordinary surplus of the proximity between Finite and Infinite falls back into the order. Men, their misery and despair, their wars and sacrifices, the horrible and the sublime are all resolved and summed up in an impassive order of the absolute and the totality. Every disturbance ends up falling back into the order, allowing a broader and more complex order to appear. That is not a purely theoretical view: it is the great experience of our time. The historian finds a natural meaning on all strange outbreaks (Levinas, 1998: 54-5).
Presumably for Levinas, synchronicity would be an example of the ‘extraordinary surplus of the proximity between Finite and Infinite’. In Bull’s terms, the responsibility of the documentary filmmaker must mean that that which has come into hiding should be revealed, no matter how great the scandal of the resulting Apocalypse.
2.7 CONTINGENCY/FATE, BAD TIMING AND THE GIFT OF MEANING
‘There is an event coming, of course, that does concern me and might interest you. Since this is an autobiography, I cannot write about my death. But I do wonder how it will happen and when and have an eerie feeling that I should have some control over the event and even delay it if I’m not ready for it.’ (Kazan, 1988: 782)
As well as broaching matters such as synchronicity, the documentary filmmaker, especially in her/his autobiographical guise, must address the question of time, its relationship with fate and its impact on the subject. Here, according to Bielik-
84 Robson, the classical view going back to Kant is that the ‘subject lives in time, and that time is his (sic) only and proper element’ (Bielik-Robson, 2000: 7). According to the classical view, the relationship between time and the subject flowed in two equal parallel streams. The subject developed consciousness and time passed in parallel.
However there is another model of time, where time is subjective. Thus St. Augustine said:
It is in you, O mind of mine, that I measure the periods of time. Do not shout me down that it exists [objectively]; do not overwhelm yourself with the turbulent flood of your impressions. In you, as I have said, I measure the periods of time. I measure as time present the impression that things make on you as they pass by and what remains after they have passed by -- I do not measure the things themselves which have passed by and left their impression on you. This is what I measure when I measure periods of time (St. Augustine at http://www.ourladyswarriors.org/saints/augcon11.htm#chap1).
The subjective view of time has been well expressed by Robert Burns in his poem To a Mouse: On turning her up in her nest, with the plough, November, 1785
But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft a-gley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy! Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me! The present only toucheth thee: But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear! An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!
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The articulation of such a subjective view of time allows, of course, for an even deeper scepticism about the existence of time and also for the argument by thinkers such as Derrida that time deconstructs subjectivity. The latter has argued that philosophy has traditionally attempted to value the present over the past and the future with a view to ‘freeing the subject from the perils of being in time, of making it more “present” than it actually can ever be’ (Derrida cited in Bielik- Robson, 2000: 72).
Other thinkers such as Freud have argued that time comes to us in the form of events which at the time we experience them do not make sense to us. In this regard, Bielik-Robson draws upon the work of Pierre Bourdieu on gift-exchange among the Algerian peasants to argue that out of Fate events happen to us, which at the time we do not understand. Then in turn we exchange the gift of meaning (Bielik-Robson, 2000: 75). As a consequence, the process involves our cooperation with the work of time, and it is this cooperation which builds our character. Thus,
the subject is essentially badly timed and not only does this predicament not call into question its existence but, quite to the contrary, it appears to form the very core of its being. The subject is submitted to time’s disruptions but they paradoxically seem to be working for - instead of destroying - it. Thanks to them, the subject enters a peculiar give-and-take game with the world according to the rules of which it is supposed to receive being and in exchange, return sense (Bielik-Robson, 2000: 88).
This is a somewhat more secular view of the relationship between time and the subject than that affected by the notion of synchronicity, which involves the interaction between the subject and some transcendent. Both models offer arguments aimed at understanding the dilemmas posed by the apparent randomness of fate.
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2.8 CONCLUSION: THE RE-ENCHANTMENT OF THE DOCUMENTARY?
‘It seems increasingly likely that I really will undertake the expedition that has been preoccupying my imagination now for some days.’ (Ishiguro, 1989: 3)
These sophisticated attitudes towards time and its impact on the subject call for a creative response from the documentary filmmaker. What form should that response take?
One of the more interesting calls has been made by Michael Renov for a turn to the ‘Aesthetics of Delirium’. The notion of ‘Delirium’ is yet another instance of the under theorised in contemporary documentary theory. It emerged first in response to Bill Nichols’s call for a more serious approach to documentary. Renov has labelled the latter’s position as the ‘Discourses of Sobriety’ (Renov, 1993: 148) and called for documentary theory and practice to move to the Aesthetics of Delirium. So then we can initially understand the Aesthetics of Delirium through the via negativa, that is they are not the Discourses of Sobriety.
The Nietzschean antecedents of the Aesthetics of Delirium are also arguably quite clear. It is as if they are a response to the ‘Via Dolorosa of interiority and subjectivity’ (Bernstein, 1984: 228). More deeply they represent a separate attempt to grapple with what Nietzsche termed the wisdom of Silenus:
According to the old story, King Midas had long haunted wise Silenus, Dionysus’s companion, without catching him. When Silenus had finally fallen into his clutches, the king asked him what was the best and most desirable thing of all for mankind. The daemon stood, silent, stiff and motionless, until at last, forced by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and spoke these words: ‘Miserable, ephemeral race, children of hazard and hardship, why do you force me to say what it would be much more fruitful for you not to hear? The best of all things is something entirely outside
87 your grasp: not to be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best thing for you - is to die soon’ (Nietzsche, 1993: 22).
Is there an alternative to the duality of despair and desperation? I would argue strongly ‘yes’, and it is towards a consideration of this that I now turn. I have subtitled the conclusion of this chapter ‘Re-enchantment of the Documentary?’ and framed it as a question because I do not wish to attempt dogma in an area of uncertainty. But I would argue that what is needed at this juncture is a thorough interrogation of what the aesthetic entails. I have, however, no intention of reduplicating the sin of the speculative metaphysicians by reducing multiplicity to unity. The aesthetic turn has many paths, not least for the documentary filmmaker, who is concerned not only with the presentation of the truth but also with its discovery. I suggest here that among the challenges confronting the documentary filmmaker is to find ways to combine artistic exuberance or delirium with sincerity.
As a filmmaker I believe that the New Documentary must strive to articulate something like the aesthetic vision of magic realism, which is based on the everyday but in a way that is committed to looking for what can be mysterious in life, objects and even human actions. I include here phenomena such as synchronicity and the uncanny. I am aware that thinkers such as Adrienne Chisholm have located the impulse to magic realism within Neo-Nietzschean scepticism about the possibility of truth. I would, however, argue that such magic realism or re-enchantment need not necessarily be based on the scepticism occasioned by the clash of truth regimes. Nor need it take the form of the desperate cavorting of a Zarathustra, which, as we have seen above, is how I interpret Renov’s call for a turn to the Aesthetics of Delirium. Rather, the re- enchantment of the documentary form should arise from a realisation and a conviction that, as Gerard Manley Hopkins put it: ‘There lives the dearest freshness deep down things’ (Hopkins, 1964: 19).
88 CHAPTER THREE
MAJOR INFLUENCES
‘There are several ways of making films. Like Jean Renoir and Robert Bresson, who make music. Like Sergei Eisenstein, who paints. Like Stroheim, who wrote sound novels in silent days. Like Alain Renais, who sculpts. And like Socrates, Rossellini I mean, who creates philosophy. The cinema, in other words, can be everything at once, both judge and litigant.’ (Godard cited in Milne, 1968: 208)
This chapter deals with some of the autobiographical filmmakers whose work has influenced me. It is a relatively small field. As Patricia Hampl notes, ‘whatever the reason, autobiographical film, like lyric poetry, remains largely a cottage industry’ (Hampl, 1996: 55). Nevertheless, I am acutely aware of working in a tradition and would like to trace my debt to the filmmakers whose work has moved and impressed me.
3.1 TRUFFAUT
‘In those days there still existed something called magic. A work of art was not the sign of something, it was the thing itself and nothing else (and it depended neither on a name nor on Heidegger for its existence). It was from the public that the sign would come, or not, according to its state of mind.’ (Godard cited in Truffaut, 1988: ix)
I should probably start with Francois Truffaut and The Four Hundred Blows (1959). The film’s treatment of an oppressive educational environment exposed the pain of my own schooldays all too vividly. The poster for the movie shows a picture of Jean-Pierre Leaud looking intently at the camera from behind a wire fence. It is a startling and disturbing image. In the film, the character Antoine Doinel (Truffaut’s alter ego) has been arrested and placed in a cage at the local
89 police station. He is confused and upset, and feels abandoned and alone. I suppose I identified with, and continue to identify with, his outsider status.
Truffaut was one of the French New Wave filmmakers who had been influenced by the writings of Andre Bazin. They started out as critics writing for the journal Cahiers du Cinema, where they developed the politique des auteurs. This was a simple argument which proposed that even in the assembly lines of Hollywood, the personal factor, the personal obsessions of the director could be discerned and that this personal expression was the important element in artistic creation.
Consequently, when they became filmmakers themselves, they wanted to make highly personal films. They wanted to create a personal relationship between the filmmaker and the audience. As Monaco notes, for them
movies must no longer be alienated products which are consumed by mass audiences; they are now intimate conversations between the people behind the camera and the people in front of the screen (Monaco, 1980:8).
Truffaut wanted to offer us an ‘intimate conversation’. And what could be more intimate, more personal than the story of his own life, his autobiography?
The Four Hundred Blows is a vital and intense education sentimentale with some extraordinary and unforgettable sequences. The long final sequence is particularly poignant. Here the young Antoine escapes from the reformatory and runs towards the film’s symbol of freedom – the sea. His ‘break away’ is accompanied by lyrical tracking shots held for a very long time. We stay with the character, following him in real time. We seem, in these long takes, to share a kind of kinetic energy, to experience with him a sense of the physical exhilaration of running free.
And then that amazing moment that always takes my breath away, no matter how many times I’ve seen the movie and no matter that I try to anticipate it. That moment he reaches the sea and turns and looks straight at the camera. The moment of confusion and realisation.
90 Immediately after he’d viewed it, before the film was released, Truffaut’s Cahiers colleague, Jean Luc Godard predicted that The Four Hundred Blows would be ‘the proudest, stubbornest, most obstinate, in other words, most free film in the world’ (cited in Milne 1972:120). The vitality and freshness of the film fulfilled the ideals of the New Wave and Godard was moved to write:
To sum up, what shall I say? This: The Four Hundred Blows will be a film signed Frankness. Rapidity. Art. Novelty. Cinematograph. Originality. Impertinence. Seriousness. Tragedy. Renovation. Ubu-Roi. Fantasy. Ferocity. Affection. Universality. Tenderness (cited in Milne, 1972: 121).
For me, it is a film almost impossible not to identify with and my own response is echoed it seems by the lead actor, Jean-Pierre Leaud’s, feelings. Truffaut records that:
When he saw the final cut, Jeanne-Pierre, who had laughed his way through the shooting, burst into tears: behind this autobiographical chronicle of mine, he recognised the story of his own life (Monaco, 1980: 25).
In 1958 Truffaut was a journalist and something of an ‘enfant terrible’ (Monaco, 1980: 25). He had written disparagingly for years about the very notion of film festivals. And so the organisers of the Cannes Film Festival finally banned him from attending. But the next year he came back, not as a critic but as the director of his first feature, The Four Hundred Blows. It was the official French film entry and Truffaut won the award for Best Director.
Almost thirty years later in 1988, Godard was to recount the significance of this event. In the Foreword to Truffaut’s posthumously published Letters, he writes:
Along the Croisette, bombarded with cheers, there came a strange trio: an elderly eagle whose broad-spanned wings were already greying, a young ruffian, awkward and pale, risen from the depths of a book by Jean Genet or Maurice Sachs and now holding the hand of an even
91 younger boy who was to become the French equivalent of Pasolini’s Ninetto.
Cocteau, Truffaut, Leaud. The elderly angel, Heurtebise, would whisper the passwords: look to your left, look to your right. Smile at the newspapers, smile at the newscasters! Bow to the minister! Slow down! Walk faster!
It was a good time to be alive… (cited in Truffaut, 1988: ix).
If Truffaut had made only The Four Hundred Blows, his contribution to autobiographical film would have been enormous. But he went much further by doing something quite unique in the history of cinema. He made a series of autobiographical films starting with the thirty minute short Antoine and Colette (1962) and following this with the features Stolen Kisses (1968), Bed and Board (1970) and finally, Love on the Run (1979). All films have Antoine Doinel as the central protagonist and all star Jean-Pierre Leaud. The films are shot over a period of years during which time the actor ages and matures physically (but not necessarily emotionally) through the series.
Where The Four Hundred Blows deals with adolescence, the other films all deal with significant moments in the development of Antoine Doinel. There is then, a film about first love (Antoine and Colette), a film about finding your career and place in the world (Stolen Kisses), a film about marriage (Bed and Board) and a film about divorce (Love on the Run). Together they coalesce into a kind of cinematic equivalent of a Bildungsroman.
3.2 ROSENBAUM
‘The past falls into ruin and vanishes only in appearance.’ (Halbwachs, 1980: 27)
The exploration of one’s early life and personal development that we find in the Bildungsroman is the dominant form of a number of German autobiographical
92 films made in the late seventies and early eighties. These were films made by mostly female directors who ‘focused on their childhoods, the silenced and repressed memories of the past, their parents’ lives and the historical context in which they grew up’ (Kosta, 1994:25). Thus, by reconstructing the past, these filmmakers were forced to confront and deal with life under the Third Reich.
The films include Years of Hunger (1979) by Jutta Bruckner, Germany Pale Mother (1979) by Helma Sanders-Brahms, In the Land of my Parents (1981) by Jeanine Meerapfel and Peppermint Peace (1982) by Marianne Rosenbaum. As Barbara Kosta notes, in much autobiographical writing, the home is a place of nostalgia and security, but in these films, the directors ‘portray the home and family as the ground of oppression and discontent’ (Kosta, 1994:122).
The only one of these films I have managed to view is Peppermint Peace. On viewing it, the first thing that struck me was the realisation that there are really so few great films about childhood. Vigo’s Zero for Conduct (1933), Truffaut’s The Four Hundred Blows (1959) and Bresson’s Mouchette (1966) spring to mind but there are very few others that I can think of. Like these, Peppermint Peace powerfully evokes the inner life of a child but is also a feminist statement and a savage indictment of war.
Director Marianne Rosenbaum tells an autobiographical tale about a small child (marvellously enacted by Saskia Tyroller) growing up in Germany at the end of World War II. History is intensely personalised in a series a vivid vignettes – father returning home from the front to burn all his old pictures of Hitler; mother taking down the Fuhrer’s portrait, which leaves a dark stain on the wallpaper that has to now be covered by a mirror; children playing a game of their own invention that involves lying on the ground and covering their heads to avoid bombs; Marianne and her six-year-old friends looking through a keyhole to witness the ‘primal scene’ between a neighbour and an American soldier.
It is this soldier, played by Peter Fonda, who gives the film its title as he hands out peppermint chewing gum in a gesture of friendship. But Mr Peace (as the children
93 have named him) soon finds himself in trouble with the American authorities and is hauled off by the military police.
Marianne interprets this event, in conjunction with other snatches of adult conversation she overhears to be omens, portents of another bloody war. With limited information and analytic skills, the child misinterprets the adult world. Werner Brettschneider has written about the ways in which children process the experiences of war and notes:
The children’s kingdom remains sovereign amidst the ruins. What grown- ups do lies on the fringes, only perceived insofar as it touches the child’s world; it is taken in, reflected and transformed into (the child’s) manner of experiencing (Brettschneider 1982: 25).
And so Marianne imagines a new world war. This one will feature the atomic bomb and sunflower-seed-chewing Russian soldiers. In both dream and fantasy sequences, we become privy to Marianne’s innermost fears. Completely disturbed, she prays to God and the Virgin Mary to stop the war. Finally, through a rather tenuous resolution, her nightmares are appeased. But she, like others of her generation, will remain forever scarred by the trauma induced through constant subjection to enemy bombing.
The film is able to impressively convey the quality of what it is like to be a child by treating all human experience as equivalent. Thus, everyday events are accorded the same weight as dreams, fantasies and religious mysteries. Through the use of black and white and colour cinematography, the film freely moves from the real to the surreal by virtue of a fluid, spontaneous, expressionist style. Subjective shots help to fuse our consciousness with that of the young protagonist’s, so that we experience all the more directly and our deepest compassion is aroused.
The moving camera makes connections between one part of the world and another, drawing the events together in a rich tapestry. This is an example of the concerned cinema at its most profound. Peppermint Peace embodies the ideals of the early
94 French New Wave cinema by combining a distinctly personal, autobiographical subject with a fluent, inventive style.
What interests me particularly about Rosenbaum and the other German filmmakers that Kosta writes about, is their commitment to exploring not only the micro-history of post war Germany but their recognition that this can only be effectively achieved through formal means. As the filmmaker Jutte Bruckner notes:
Autobiographical motivations counter the false generalizations into which we have been moulded for years…We must find new forms to narrate private life, to recognise collective gestures in the most banal ones. I am trying to disrupt the habitual ways we see people (cited in Kosta, 1994:157).
3.3 PENN
‘Our fathers did not kill any father, but we killed or tortured fathers until they gave up or surrendered. Fathers used to be the strongest. That is over. Everything goes on without them now. That is just like us. Fathers ranted, shouted and lashed out. They left the house when they couldn’t take it anymore. We cursed them and hoped they would come back. Fathers knew it. That is why they left and that is why they came back. We killed those who knew nothing about anything and now we are in for it. It is over. The angels are extinguishing anything that smells like father.’ (Morshauser cited in Kosta, 1994: 91)
In the mainstream American cinema, overtly autobiographical films are rare. Most Hollywood filmmakers disavow personal films but some, like Neil Simon and Woody Allen, have explored the terrain. So it’s quite a surprise when a major American director like Arthur Penn announces he is making or has made an autobiographical film.
95 Penn’s work has always interested me. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) was ground- breaking in the way in which it influenced a number of Seventies directors. But it was The Chase (1966) that really stirred me. I was struck, in the first instance, by the sheer physicality of the film – the violence so immediate and direct yet so responsibly treated. The vision is mature and dark. A film that contains so many opposites being at once full of tragic pessimism but also full of love and hope. Richard Porton and Gary Crowdus note that ‘Penn’s films often blend frequently unsettling violence with contemplative sequences; stark aggression coexists with cerebral anguish’ (Porton and Crowdus, 1993: 4).
Two aspects of the film stand out and make it especially interesting for me. The first is the way in which Penn is able to take the iconography of contemporary American political life and incorporate it into his film. So, the killing of Bubber Reeves evokes both the assassination of Robert Kennedy (the casting of the young Robert Redford assisting here) and Jack Ruby’s killing of Lee Harvey Oswald. There are references to the Kennedy assassinations in many of Penn’s films (for example in Night Moves (1975) and Georgia’s Friends (1981)) and Penn had himself worked with both Kennedys. He had served as a television advisor to Jack Kennedy’s campaign and briefed the future President on using the medium of television for better presentation. The outcome was the now famous Nixon- Kennedy debate which many commentators argue turned the electorate from ‘Tricky Dicky’ to the charismatic Jack. For Penn, then, the political reference in Night Moves:
was personal in that respect, but it’s also despairing in that I felt, ‘Oh God, this country…’ I mean, those assassinations – Jack Kennedy, Bobby Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. – were just crushing to people who’d been involved in those movements. I’d been in the Civil Rights movement up to my ears (cited in Porton and Crowdus, 1993:13).
Penn is able to offer us a portrait of a society that is wildly spinning out of control, the very fabric of American life disintegrating before our eyes. Robin Wood once compared The Chase (1966) to Godard’s Weekend (1967) pointing out that the former had all the human qualities that Godard’s film lacked, namely,
96
a sense of the possibility of a mature, adult relationship (Brando and Angie Dickenson), and of the possibility of tenderness and warmth of sympathetic response between people (Jane Fonda-Robert Redford-James Fox), and an ability to see human beings, even largely contemptible ones, in the round, with a certain generosity (Wood, 1969: 171).
And that it is ‘possession of these qualities that makes it impossible for him (Penn) to present other than a tragic and despairing view of life’ (Wood, 1969:171).
Penn’s pessimism is at its darkest in Georgia’s Friends (1981), which was highly influential to the development of my screen writing approach and many of my attitudes regarding autobiographical film. The original screenplay was written by Steve Tesich, who had won the Oscar for best screenplay on Breaking Away (1979, dr. Peter Yates) and had also written Eyewitness (1981, dr. Peter Yates). The story of Georgia’s Friends centres around the early life of Danilo Prozor, an immigrant to America from Yugoslavia, who grows up in a Midwest steel town. It focuses on his enduring friendship with three other young men and his love for a nonconformist young woman, Georgia.
Tesich wrote the film from his own personal experience – his father, a professional soldier, had disappeared during World War II and was presumed dead. After the war it was discovered that he had fled to England to join the Yugoslavian government in exile. Tesich did not see his father from 1943 to 1957 when his mother, sister and he left Yugoslavia and were reunited with his father, who was by then a steel worker in East Chicago, Indiana. A large part of the filming was done in East Chicago where Tesich was raised and many scenes were shot at Roosevelt High School where the screenwriter had actually been a pupil in the early Sixties.
The film is a cinematic bildungsroman and begins with a pull from soft to sharp focus that evokes the haziness of memory. We see a young boy dragging a heavy trunk out of a train. His mother grooms him slightly by smoothing down his blonde hair. Then the voice-over narration by Craig Wasson, who plays Tesich’s
97 alter ego Danilo, plunges us into the story: ‘My father left Yugoslavia shortly after I was born. We were introduced to each other on a train station in Gary, Indiana… America.’
Danilo’s trunk is at once highly symbolic and functions as a kind of running gag in the film. It accompanies the protagonist along his journey of self discovery, his sentimental education, defining defines at all times his immigrant status. Right from the outset, Danilo tries to reach out to his father, to communicate with him, but he is continually thwarted. In the car ride to their house, he plays for his father on his piccolo recorder. The music is appropriately from Dvorak’s Symphony for the New World and will feature throughout the movie. But the father is unmoved and all Danilo can see is the dark mass of his father’s resistant back. It is an obstacle he will face again and again. The boy sees the Stars and Stripes blowing in the breeze and reads a sign – ‘East Chicago, America’. The father responds ‘America’. His voice is full of regret, cynicism and despair. He is not impressed. America means nothing to him. Later in the film he tells Danilo that America is not a land of opportunity. ‘I’m tired and I have to go to work. That is America. Your mother scrubs floors. She works. That is America.’
But Danilo is a true believer. For him the American Dream is real and palpable. Everything is possible. But this is a film made by Arthur Penn, a director whose work, particularly in the Western genre, has been described as ‘revisionist’ (Gianetti, 1981:378). Ironically, Penn’s examination of the American Dream is set in the Sixties, a time of tremendous upheaval, a time when the dream looked as if it had turned sour for all the youth of America. For this was a time of great change characterised by extreme idealism and extreme disillusionment. As Bob Dylan then put it: ‘The times they are a’changing’ (Dylan, 1964).
Tesich himself grew to manhood in those years –
by the mid-Sixties I felt I was becoming who I am today. So, that decade means a lot to me. Not only do I feel I matured then, but in a strange way I feel the United States went through a crucial period where it was forced to mature, too, and come to terms and deal with ideas it had been avoiding as
98 a nation – the Vietnam war, two generations that were going at each other (cited in Amata, 1982: 22).
For Penn, who was twenty years older than Tesich, the Sixties were also seminal and these times are often mirrored in his films:
I think the Sixties generation was a state of mind and it’s really the one I’ve been in since I was born. Really, I’ve always been anti-establishment, the out group, anti-authoritarian (cited in Amata, 1982: 22).
Danilo’s idealism contrasts directly with his father’s cynical pessimism and despair. The portrayal of fathers in films, and indeed all art forms, is deeply significant. In a film that I directed, Meatman (1996), the subject of the film, New Zealand writer Vincent O’Sullivan, comments on his depiction of fathers:
Clearly the father image in our whole make-up is the initial image of authority. And how we relate to authority is probably the most important thing in the shaping of our lives. In quite a lot of my writing I have different kinds of fathers really to provide a way of talking about authority in a human context (Hookham, 1996 ).
Tesich too, is fascinated with writing about father figures. Thus he comments:
I have a feeling I’ll have a father in just about everything I’ll write, because life with my father left such a vivid kind of mark that I’ll keep re- examining it in my work. Very often, as in Georgia’s Friends, it’s just trying not to believe in the kind of doomsday prophecy that the father may have (cited in Amata, 1982: 23).
99 3.4 MARLON RIGGS
‘What’s the point of remembering? Live now! Live now! But I am only remembering so that I can live now.’ (Canetti, 1977: 122)
In the development of not only my own film but also the New Documentary as a whole, an important move is to plot the shift in the documentary’s focus from the public to the private sphere. We can chart this move from the public to the private if we compare Marlon Riggs’s film Ethnic Notions (1987) with his Tongues Untied (1989).
Ethnic Notions presents us with a voice-over narration accompanying images of African-Americans. Its theme concerns the racial representation of the African- American. It marshals evidence from popular culture (films, books, sculptures) and expert testimony. It is a very good film that has become a staple of courses dealing with the construction of ethnic minorities. It aims, I think, for the impersonal/objective and its subject matter draws explicitly on the public sphere. As such, it forms a very sharp contrast with the New Documentary.
The trajectory of Ethnic Notions can be summed up as follows: Public Sphere ⇒
Macro-Political ⇒ the Citizen ⇒ Enlightenment Values ⇒ the Rational ⇒
Discourses of Sobriety ⇒ Expository Documentary. Thus the filmmaker takes on a topic which is clearly in the public realm and deals with macro-political phenomena such as the impact of racism on who is to be considered a citizen. He attempts to win his argument by marshalling evidence and putting this forward rationally. His primary concern is the macro-political one of producing an educated and enlightened citizenry free from irrational prejudice.
Riggs, in his discussion of his approach to the film, has this to say:
The tape required a certain gravity, a certain scholarship, if you will, a certain sense of authority in speaking about those images.
100
And it required a sort of unity or consensus of voice about what those images mean. Given the audience I wanted to reach, I faced a set of real constraints in terms of what people knew and how they would interpret the material. I already knew some common reactions when people saw the images... I realized I had to walk a fairly narrow and straight line; otherwise, things could really go awry. A more experimental, quirky or eccentric form would have deeply and rightly offended an audience that wants to understand the weight of these images in our culture and how much such images have held us down in terms of racism and discrimination and oppression (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
By contrast, the subject of Tongues Untied is Riggs himself. Although the film did become the centre of a vicious public controversy, it is in essence a very private film (Robertiello, 1991). Though of course, ironically, the private gesture is on film.
The original impulse for the film was the ‘Other Countries Workshop’, a New York-based poetry workshop for black gay men (Castro, 2003). Riggs, a non- poet, initially thought in terms of a film of the workshop. However this option appeared ‘boring’, and consequently he opted for the autobiographical form (Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
The choice of the autobiographical was not an easy one for Riggs, and I can identify with his reasons. As he explains:
I didn’t come to this tape’s personal involvement easily. It’s not in my training or my nature or my personality. I’ve always hated being in front of a camera and have never even used my own voice before in a work (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
Primarily he wanted to engage the controversial issue of black men loving white men. It was the turn to the autobiographical, towards confession, that provided
101 him with the means to defuse the controversy. But also the turn towards the autobiographical provided Riggs with his ‘anchor’. For Riggs:
(This was not) a dominant one-and-only point of view. There are a multiplicity of voices in the video, not just my voice. In fact, in terms of total time, the percentage of time with my voice is fairly small. But because I have such a dominant place at a pivotal point in the video, my viewpoint becomes, in a way, a thread throughout. And I hope that this sensibility gives the audience a sense of coherence and cohesion in terms of everything else said (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
In this solution to the problem of form, Riggs mimicked, in an unconscious way perhaps, the move of René Descartes towards the autobiographical in the Discourse, where he avowed his design was,
not to teach here the method everybody ought to follow in order to direct his reason rightly, but only to how I have tried to direct my own… But I offer this work only as a history, or, if you like, a fable, in which there may perhaps be found, besides some examples that may be imitated, many others that it will be well not to follow. I thus hope it will be useful to some people without being harmful to anybody, and that all will be grateful to me for my frankness (Descartes, 1964: 8-9).
The autobiographical, however, as we have seen in Chapter One, carries with it the stigma of self-indulgence and the author has to be self-effacing. Riggs claims he has to be reticent:
How much do you treat the camera as a diary, if you will? How much can you say before it becomes self-indulgent, boring and excessive? I worried, ‘Am I saying too much? What am I holding back?’ It was still too sensitive for me because I didn’t want to be judged on those terms. I constantly faced that struggle. After a while I stopped thinking about being judged. I said, ‘Well, since you put this much out here in terms of your life, you can’t worry now about the little extra eighth of an inch you’re about to
102 give. By now people are with you or they’ve rejected you. You might as well go with it completely (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
For me, watching Tongues Untied was an enlightening experience, both in methodological and thematic terms. Unlike Ethnic Notions there is no impersonal voice-over that we can hide behind. Instead the filmmaker battles with the two identities that have made up his life. He is between the black and the gay. Within the despised identity of the gay, his is the identity that is possibly the most despised of all. He is a gay man that takes it. He is a ‘bottom’.
Riggs himself describes black homosexuality as the ‘triple taboo’ (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991). He also complains bitterly of the attitude of black heterosexual men towards the film and the controversy surrounding it:
Equally predictable in this so-called ‘obscenity’ controversy was the collusion--by silence--of mainstream black America in this nakedly homophobic and covertly racial assault. Black heterosexuals (many of whom consider themselves ‘progressive’ or even ‘Afrocentric revolutionaries’ passively, silently acquiesced as political bed-mates with the likes of Rev Wildmon, James Kilpatrick and the rabidly anti-gay, race- baiting Sen Jesse Helms (cited in Kleinhans and Lesage, 1991).
Riggs’s style throughout this is ‘in your face’. In a way the style is very theatrical - agit prop almost. It is quite baroque in its extravagance. As a filmmaker I see this film as positively liberating in its offering to us of an enormous expansion in the range of the language of the documentary film.
Alex Castro has described the film’s experimental form well:
Tongues weaves poetry, performance, popular culture, personal testimony and history in a complex pattern that emerges as an essentially personal statement. It presents the situation, politics and culture of black gay men using an intense mixture of styles ranging from social documentary to experimental montage, personal narrative and lyric poetry (Castro, 2003).
103
I want to pay particular attention to the drag queen prostitute sequence, not least because in teaching this film I have found this is a sequence which provokes a lively response. This particular sequence gives us the grotesque - a display of a body that only belongs within the gay world. This body is at once sexualized but at the same time parodies the process of sexualisation. It represents such a fundamental challenge to the heterosexual norm of what a ‘brother’ should look like. Here the brother is very much a sister. It dovetails nicely with the opening sequence ‘Brother to brother…’ and speaks to us of Riggs’s alienation from his black brothers.
It would seem initially that Riggs here is visiting the site of the freak show that informs much of the contemporary documentary. However a close reading of the poem performed in the film, shows us that this is no tour of the grotesque but an exercise in solidarity. Let us take a closer look at the key poem:
Grief is not apparel. Not like a dress, a wig or my sister’s high-heeled shoes. It is darker than the man I love who in my fantasies comes for me in a silver, six-cylinder chariot. I walk the waterfront/curbsides in my sister’s high-heeled shoes. Dreaming of him, his name still unknown to my tongue. While I wait for my prince to come, from every other man I demand pay for my kisses. I buy paint for my lips. Stockings for my legs. My own high-heeled slippers and dresses that become me. When he comes, I know I must be beautiful.
104 I will know how to love his body. Standing out here on the waterfront/curbsides I have learned to please a man. He will bring me flowers. He will bring me silk and jewels, I know. While I wait, I’m the only man who loves me. They call me ‘Star’ because I listen to dreams and wishes. But grief is darker. It is a white dress that covers my body. It is a wig that does not rest gently on my head.
In a lecture I gave on this film there was at this point a very interesting discussion sparked off by the poem. Some students commented that the sentiments in the poem were the stuff that adolescent female fantasies were made of and the only difference was that a black man in a wig and high heels was making them. Were the sentiments in the poem ‘adolescent’?
In a sense the lines about waiting for ‘my prince to come’ certainly sound like that. But I prefer to think of the sentiments of this poem as somewhere between camp and tragic drag queen. Neither of these positions turns up regularly in the writings of heterosexuals, although of course Susan Sontag did write a seminal essay about camp. There is an element of pathos about the lines and their intersections with the images. Yet the queen is strong even if she is tragic. She may be waiting for her prince but in the meantime the business goes on.
105 The point becomes clearer perhaps if we understand that this is an Essex Hemphill poem, entitled HOMICIDE / for Ronald Gibson and it was a response to the following news item:
Ronald Gibson, 20, was found shot to death in the 2700 block of Arizona Avenue, N.W. Police said Gibson was wearing a dress and high-heeled shoes at the time of his death. According to Homicide Det. Lloyd Davis, Gibson, also known as ‘Star’, hung out during the past two years in the area near 14th and Fairmont Sts, N.W., an area frequented by drag queens who solicit sex for money. Detectives say they have no suspects and know of no motives in the case. -The Washington Blade, 1/8/82 (cited at http://www.blacklightonline.com/hemphill.html )
What Hemphill and Riggs have been able to do with the poem is to make the transition from spectator/reader of the news to identifier with the Other, a transition which my students largely failed to make. Hemphill and Riggs have also in this process borne out in a very concrete form Descartes’s view on the value of poetry compared to philosophy:
It might seem strange that opinions of weight are found in the works of poets rather than philosophers. The reason is that poets wrote through enthusiasm and imagination; there are in us seeds of knowledge, as of fire in a flint; poets strike them out by imagination, and then they shine more bright (Descartes, 1964: 4).
Another aspect of the Tongues Untied text which I wish to emphasise, is that generally it attempts to show rather than tell. Ethnic Notions talks to us and argues with us that things are wrong and the images we see are harmful. The methodology of Tongues Untied is fundamentally different. It attempts to show more than tell. It searches for what T.S. Eliot called the ‘objective correlative’. Eliot argued that the
only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain
106 of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked (Eliot, 1951: 145).
Let us now take the Eddie Murphy excerpt in Tongues Untied. This is Murphy at his absolute worst. He prances around the stage and talks about ‘faggots’ wanting to see his ass. Riggs cuts to a close up of a gay black man looking directly into the camera. His facial expression shows us he is extremely hurt. There is a hushed voice-over which speaks of how to be silent is to die. We are shown the homophobic comments, but unlike with Ethnic Notions there is no cut to an expert discussing rationally how these are harmful. I think here of Adorno’s comment that art is better at conveying the texture of suffering than philosophy is. As art offers us ‘suffering in the medium of experience’ (Adorno, 1984: 27). In other words philosophy can discuss suffering but only art can show it to us, and this is the key difference between Ethnic Notions and Tongues Untied. Also, it seems to me, understanding the problematics of the representation of suffering provides us with a way of comprehending the trajectory of the New Documentary.
3.5 McELWEE
‘Mainly I’m glad I have the power, the time and the memory to tell the truth about my own life. That is what this experience means to me; let the chips fall where they may. I don’t know why I’ve lived through all that I’ve lived through, except for the privilege of telling it all as I believe it to have happened. People have been complaining for years that I’ve remained silent in the face of intolerable provocation. Now that I’m speaking up, I must say it feels good.’
(Kazan, 1988: 531)
My film would not have taken the shape and form it has without the influence of Ross McElwee. It is important for me to acknowledge the significance of this debt. On my first viewing of Sherman’s March (1988), the film’s form seemed to me to be opening up new possibilities for documentary and I responded positively to the
107 personal intimacies and sensibility of the filmmaker. It felt like (to borrow from St Paul) ‘the scales had fallen from my eyes’.
Sherman’s March begins like a very traditional documentary in the expository mode. We see a map of the region of the South that General Sherman marched his army through together with some archival photographs. This is accompanied by a third person voice-of-God type narration which sets up our expectations that this will be a non-fictional epic hagiography of the great warrior. But these expectations are almost immediately overturned as we hear McElwee’s off-screen voice asking if the scene should be re-shot. We are immediately aware of the film as construct. This is followed by a long shot of the filmmaker sweeping up a large and very sparsely furnished loft in New York City. It is an image of loneliness and emptiness and, to some extent, the rest of the film may be seen as a development of that image. McElwee tells us in voice-over that he has just been dumped by his girlfriend and that he is going South to see his family and make his film about Sherman.
It’s important to note that the narrator at the beginning of the film is none other than Rickie Leacock, one of the founding fathers of the observational or cinema verite documentary movement that began in the Sixties. Cinema verite practitioners strive for a kind of invisibility and try to film actuality without manipulation. They enter a situation of tension and simply film what transpires in front of the lens. They assume that their subjects will ignore the presence of the camera and behave naturally. Leacock was formerly McElwee’s teacher and often appears in McElwee’s films. McElwee in fact acknowledges that the films ‘are, in some offhand sense, a sort of affectionate homage to him’ (cited in Lucia , 1993:33).
But McElwee does not practice standard verite modes of representation. While acknowledging an allegiance to the tradition, he notes that he has approached the style differently by mixing objective recording with subjectivity:
Somehow melding the two - the objective data of the world with a very subjective, very interior consciousness, as expressed through voice-over
108 and on-camera appearances – seemed to give me the clay from two different pits to work with in sculpting something that suited me better than pure cinema verite (cited in Lucia, 1993:32).
Thus, although Sherman’s March begins as a biography it soon moves into autobiography. The documentary is less concerned with retracing the general’s march than it is with giving us a portrait of McElwee attempting to court a number of contemporary Southern women. McElwee presents this as a kind of mock- heroic knightly quest in which he tries to woo the women he meets. But this is only a conceit, a game that the filmmaker expects the audience to enter into. He points out that:
I think the viewer is aware of this… They’re factoring into their subconscious, somehow, the element of this all being a kind of fiction because this guy is trying to film it all. How can he really be sincere, how can he really be serious? (cited in Lucia, 1993: 34)
And the women in the film play along with this too. McElwee has clearly selected them because they are representational or interesting or charismatic. These are not chance encounters. Pat is an aspirant actress, Winnie a PhD scholar who lives independently on an island where she bakes bread and keeps bees, Karen is a lawyer and women’s rights’ activist, Jackie fights for ecological issues, Claudia is a right-winger and religious fundamentalist and Charleen is a free-thinking schoolteacher.
All these women are, of course, giving a performance. They are playing out representational roles. And that’s why McElwee has chosen them. He points out that the observational mode of documentary filmmaking actually seeks out performers, people who have a certain quality that makes them interesting on film – ‘a kind of self-confidence, self-assuredness, mixed perhaps with a degree of vulnerability’ (cited in Lucia, 1993: 35). But, at the same time, there must be something real there too, something we sense behind the performance.
109 I felt that this was the case when I filmed my wife Marian’s family. Her sister Jenny is giving a performance when she flashes her breasts at the camera, Bernard plays his role to perfection and Lulu never stops performing. The same is true of Marian’s younger sister Nicky. She tells a horrific tale of her rape but she is always conscious of the camera, always aware of being on centre stage. Yet it is not simply an act, there is nothing insincere about it. But unless there was such a strong screen presence, I would not have filmed it.
Naturally I also filmed them because they are my family and My Lovers Both is essentially a film about family. Family in a political sense. But this, too, is something I owe to McElwee. He says:
Family is a kind of ultimate political statement because it’s about deciding to give up some of your life for someone who’s helpless and in need of tremendous support and love (cited in Lucia 1993: 35).
For him, ‘politics…demands that you recognise the humanness shared by all people; it’s about how to allow people their humanity’ (cited in Lucia 1993: 35).
Even though McElwee is excellent at handling the micro-politics of family, he seems to stumble a little when he tries to deal with macro-politics. It is perhaps significant that his film about ‘big issues’, Something to do with the Wall (1991), a film about the fall of the Berlin Wall, is probably his least realised work. As I noted in Chapter One, in terms of Hoffman’s distinction between public and private narratives, McElwee’s work is best understood as a problematic instance of the latter genre. He himself acknowledges, in discussing Something to do with the Wall that ‘there’s something that doesn’t quite work about the insistence of personalising the ending…it’s a film that never quite fell together for me’ (cited in Lucia 1993: 37).
In Time Indefinite (1993), McElwee’s most ambitious film to date, he contemplates his family. At the opening of the film he is back in the South and he announces to his extended family his intention to get married. He quotes his mother who used to say: ‘Everything begins and ends with family’. In the course
110 of the film he marries Marilyn. They lose their first child when she has a miscarriage and then his father unexpectedly dies. Finally their son Adrian is born.
In Sherman’s March, McElwee confesses that he films his life in order to have a life. And in Time Indefinite he continues obsessively to film everything he comes in contact with. Early on in the film he treats the filmmaking experience with reverence. He watches an old home movie of his parents and declares with wonder:
Everything seems to shimmer in the light… Everything is sort of quivering with a kind of life that would be very difficult to re-enact. Everything’s in movement – the shadows, the lights, the hand-held camera.
But not everyone in the film is as enthusiastic about his dogged attachment to recording their every move. And at times people often ask or order him to stop filming. His father says: ‘I’ll be glad when that big eye is gone’, referring to the camera. Marilyn chastises him, urging him to stop filming and get dressed when he films her just before their wedding. And Charleen commands him (as she had in Sherman’s March) to turn the camera off as: ‘This is not art, Ross! This is life!’
But when his father dies, he turns the camera off. He tells us that, ‘I didn’t film anything for months.’ And later on in the film the screen once more goes dark. This time it’s when his son Adrian is born. ‘I didn’t film the birth’, McElwee tells us, ‘because I wanted to help the midwife.’ So by the end of Time Indefinite he has learned to live again. To put the camera away for a while and concentrate on life itself. He has come a long way from Sherman’s March, where he concluded that ‘My real life has fallen into the crack between myself and my film.’
In Time Indefinite it’s Charleen who seems to see his purpose best. McElwee takes Marilyn and the newly born Adrian to see her and Charleen warns him about trying to connect things too neatly. As Patricia Hampl notes: ‘In a sense she is warning McElwee about breaking faith with the essential fragmentation of memory, its natural state of decay’ (Hampl, 1996:74). Charleen tells him: ‘You
111 never solve everything, Ross…The only thing you’ve got is a chance at a few passionate hits…It’s the only way to pretend you’re alive.’
Growing up in South Africa has made me very conscious of race issues, and I was acutely aware of the fact that McElwee, despite coming from the American South, had avoided dealing with this in Sherman’s March. It seems very telling that none of the women he courts in the film are black. But in Time Indefinite he broaches the subject of race. Towards the end of the film he is feeling very despondent and returns to his North Carolina home. His parents are now both dead and he finds the black couple, Lucille and Melvin, who have worked for the family for over thirty years, looking after the house. They ask him to film their fiftieth wedding anniversary. The scene is a very moving one wherein he recognises how much they mean to him and how they function as surrogates for his parents. And, as Lucy Fischer notes: ‘he reverses the pattern of Southern race relations, becoming part of their family instead of they becoming part of his’ (Fischer 1998: 341).
McElwee constructs his films as if they were fiction and pays particular attention to the voice-over commentary. He ensures that both the content and tone is astute. The writing for him is central and he says: ‘I labour for hundreds of hours over the narration’ (Lucia 1993: 33). This attention to detailed construction produces documentary films that skirt the border of fiction. For him:
The poles of fiction and non-fiction are constantly bouncing their force fields back and forth between each other. To examine fiction and documentary is to beg that whole question of what it means to set another person before the camera, trying to exact something of their soul (cited in Lucia 1993: 34).
McElwee also uses a range of self-reflexive techniques in his films. Thus he says,
I’m definitely playing that game, which is an old one. Brecht was playing it sixty years ago. I’m making the audience aware that it’s only a movie, but in doing that, of course, it’s a way of drawing people into the movie. That’s certainly a subversion of cinema verite (cited in Lucia 1993: 34).
112
In Time Indefinite there is a very layered sequence where McElwee talks to the camera in a monologue. He is depressed and talks morbidly of the events that have taken place in his life. Then McElwee lays a new monologue over the original synchronous track. The new voice-over criticises the original for being too depressing, too fatalistic. It’s an extraordinary moment in an extraordinary film. McElwee has indicated that he really disliked the original voice-over but felt that he, nevertheless, needed to appear on screen at that time. At the time of editing the film he felt that:
Maybe there’s a way in which I can use the monologue by subverting it. It was an attempt to turn a loss in to a gain, to be honest. In some ways, the scene now represents the ego and the superego at work, at battle there (cited in Lucia 1993: 35).
Six O’Clock News (1997) also utilises a number of self-reflexive strategies. In one scene, a local television news crew come to interview McElwee. They want to question him about his approach to autobiographical documentary. McElwee responds by filming them filming him. Not once but three times, as they film him three times. And then he comments in voice-over:
So what does it mean to film reality anyway? Is it any less real that they are filming themselves coming into my apartment a third time? I don’t ask people to re-enact things when I’m filming but ultimately what difference does it make? I’ll edit this scene for my purposes just as they will edit it for theirs. But is one version more real than the other?
Like McElwee I am interested in attempting to film the real but that does not mean there is not an element of construction in what I do. Films are discursive practices and mediate experience. The process of creating a film inevitably alters the telling of history, even very personal, autobiographical history. As Hayden White notes:
113 No history, visual or verbal, ‘mirrors’ all or even the greater parts of the events or scenes of which it purports to be an account and this is true of even the most narrowly constructed ‘micro history’ (White 1988: 194).
3.6 SOUTH AFRICAN FILMS
‘Of course one knows that real literature is something that has to do with leisure and cultivated people and books and shaded lamps and all that sort of thing. But Hallery wants to drag in not only cathedrals and sanctuaries, but sky-signs and hoardings…He wants literature to embrace whatever is in or whatever changes the mind of the race, except purely personal particulars.’ (Wells 1975: 48)
I have already noted in this chapter that in my opinion McElwee’s one failure as a filmmaker is associated with a big issue like the fall of the Berlin Wall. I interpreted this in terms of Hoffman’s distinction between public and private autobiographies. In other words films, such as McElwee’s Something to do with the Wall raised the issues of the political and its relationship to the personal, especially in its autobiographical guise. I would like now to turn to two attempts to resolve some of the issues involved. These films are especially interesting to me because they are South African and they therefore grapple with some of the issues I confront in my own film.
In his autobiography, Donald Woods points out that often the truth has to be modified in the interests of cinematic credibility. So in the feature film, Cry Freedom (1987), there were four real incidents that occurred that are not included in the film. These incidents were left out, Woods tells us, because:
Sir Richard Attenborough explained that translating true stories into film involved not only the transmitting of true facts to the screen but facts that, no matter how true, would not strain the credulity of the audience (Woods 1987: 8).
114 Woods was in agreement with the director’s decision to omit these incidents as he believed anything which detracted from the credibility of the narrative would cause the power of the story as ‘true story’ to be dissipated. But as he notes, ‘real life is often more dramatic than what we see on the screen’ (Woods 1987 : 10).
Perhaps this is one of the reasons that overtly autobiographical screenplays are rare in mainstream feature films. I have discussed above what I believe to be the notable exceptions, but familial biography is even more unusual in the cinema and there are, to my knowledge, no major features (other than the films I discuss below) where children have either written the screenplays or taken an active part in the making of a film about one or both of their parents.
The two films I wish to discuss here are therefore probably extremely unusual in the history of film since both are based on familial biographies. It is also remarkable that within a few years of each other, two such films located in South Africa should appear. These are Sky Blue (1980, dr John Hookham), written by Chester Dent about his father Hugh, and A World Apart (1988, dr Chris Menges), the screenplay of which was written by Shawn Slovo about her mother Ruth First and absent father Joe Slovo.
As these films are not readily available for viewing, I would like to begin with a brief background and synopsis of each before moving on to a discussion of their aesthetics and the manner in which they function as filmed familial biographies.
Sky Blue is set in the early Sixties and concerns itself with Hugh Dent’s work as a game conservationist and his involvement in a programme to save the white rhino from extinction. At the beginning of the film, the central character, now given the fictitious name Len Hawks, is a failed artist working on a sugar cane farm. While there, he meets Jack Venter (another substitute name for the real life Ian Player, brother of the more famous golfer) a game ranger and committed conservationist who asks him to paint a picture of a white rhino. It transpires Venter is an idealist, a man with a dream. To him the wilderness areas of Natal are metaphysical landscapes where men can recapture their primal relationship with the land and the animals that are their companions. He sees this land as the traditional ancestral
115 home of one of nature’s most extraordinary beasts, the square lipped or white rhino.
This anachronistic survivor from prehistoric times is with the encroachment of civilisation faced with almost certain extinction. Venter believes it is his mission in life to save this magnificent animal for posterity and to create a permanent home for the rhino.
Venter’s vision is a radical and profound one and Len is swept along by his enthusiasm and charisma. He joins Venter’s team of game rangers on the Umfolozi reserve and feels that he has found his destiny. But the life is hard and lonely. Venter becomes concerned about Len’s difficulties coping with the solitude and isolation of the park and persuades Len to write to a young woman, Kate, who was a model for one of Len’s paintings in London.
The woman is a stranger to Venter but he is fascinated by something he sees in the painting. He believes this is the woman for Len and persuades him to write to her and propose marriage.
Kate agrees to his proposal and comes to Africa. They are wed and start a new home together on the reserve. But the first night of their new life together is disastrous. Len’s intrinsic fear of women makes him incapable of consummating the marriage and he runs out into the night and the bush.
At this point in the film the narration shifts to Kate, who poignantly tells the audience how she came out to South Africa knowing no one and expecting to find a totally different kind of world. The lush forests of her imagination give way to the reality of bushveld and thorn trees. Her world of friends and social intercourse is exchanged for the loneliness of a small rondawel on the reserve. Here her attempts to create a meaningful life for herself are plagued by failure and disappointment. Out of her boredom and frustration she grows bitter. Len’s lack of emotional commitment and his physical reserve confuse and sadden her. As a result, when she finally gives birth to a young son she transfers all her pent up emotion on to the boy.
116
She complains to Venter, who tries to improve the situation by introducing wilderness trails for tourists, but this only results in her seeing even less of Len. He has become aware of his own sexuality and his ability to attract the women. He begins a series of light and meaningless affairs with tourists whose romantic notions about game rangers are thereby fulfilled, while his emotional insecurity is bolstered. But Kate is growing more alienated and feels neglected. Finally their marriage collapses and she leaves to return to England, taking her beloved son with her.
The second film, A World Apart, was written by Shawn Slovo. Shawn is the eldest daughter of anti-apartheid activists Joe Slovo and Ruth First. Both her parents were members of the South African Communist Party and the ANC. Both worked in exile to bring about the downfall of the apartheid regime and Joe lived long enough to become the first ANC Minister for Housing in Mandela’s Government before dying of cancer.
Ruth’s fate was very different. On the 17th of August 1982 she was living in exile in Maputo and working at the Edward Modlane University in Mozambique. That morning she collected her mail and carried it to her office. She noticed that one of the letters bore a United Nations stamp but, unbeknown to her, the South African Security Police had placed a deadly explosive device therein. As she slit the seal of the envelope a circuit was broken and the bomb exploded, blowing her to smithereens. The force of the explosion was sufficient to blow the air conditioning unit right out of the building. The walls of the office were covered with her blood and flesh.
These dramatic events are not the subject matter of A World Apart. Rather the film confines itself to events which took place in South Africa in 1963. The story concerns Molly Roth (another fictitious name this time substituting for Shawn Slovo), a 13 year-old adolescent whose parents are members of the South African Communist Party and anti apartheid activists.
117 When the film opens, Molly’s father’s subversive activities force him into exile. Shortly thereafter, her mother is arrested and placed in solitary confinement under the 90 Day Act. Under this legislation anyone could be picked up and held in solitary confinement without charge or recourse to legal advice. Furthermore, at the end of 90 days, the prisoner could be summarily re-arrested and held for another 90 days, prolonging the sentence endlessly.
While their mother is in prison, their grandmother comes to look after the three young girls, whose lives are completely disrupted by the absence of their parents. Her mother’s imprisonment also causes Molly to suffer ostracism at school and rejection by her former friends and peers. Ignorant of what is happening to either of her parents, she feels alone and isolated.
The film crosscuts between Molly’s life on the outside and her mother’s life in prison. Diana (Ruth First’s fictitious name) is constantly interrogated and deprived of reading material. After her allotted 3 months in solitary confinement, Diana is released only to be cruelly re-arrested before she can even make a phone call home. She is subjected to further interrogation and psychological intimidation. Her interrogators force her to make a statement and she begins to believe that she might have betrayed the cause and her comrades. Alone and filled with remorse, Diana attempts suicide. This desperate act stuns her jailors into releasing her. She is allowed to go home but is placed under house arrest.
The family continues to be harassed by the police. Under the intense pressure, a confrontation erupts between Molly and her mother whereby she accuses Diana of putting politics above her family. At the same time a comrade and family friend is killed and Molly is persuaded to see the importance of her mother’s cause. A tentative resolution is reached between mother and child. The film ends with them united in their defiance against the racist regime.
In examining these two films, it is obvious that the first similarity they share is that they are both familial (auto)biographies. And in both the parent who is the subject of
118 the biography is presented as neglectful or of substituting another cause ahead of their parental duty. In A World Apart, even the police interrogators accuse the Ruth First character of being a poor mother.
Although the parents are presented as neglectful, there is, nevertheless, an attempt in both films to ‘redeem’ them. This is particularly the case in A World Apart where Ruth First’s cause, the dismantling of apartheid, is seen as just and right. To illustrate this point I wish to draw from another (auto)biographical text dealing with the same subject, namely Every Secret Thing: My Family, My Country, a book written by Shawn’s sister and Ruth First’s second daughter Gillian. Herein she describes how they as children felt:
We were brought up in a political culture which used self-sacrifice as its fuel... Our parents were rebels, they saw a wrong and they fought to make it right. To do that they had to turn away from the subjective, their eyes were on a greater prize than self. They were fighting for humanity, but we were only children. We knew enough about what our parents were doing to realise that we couldn’t ask them to make another choice, but could we also find a way to hush those inner voices which cried out for safety, security, normality (Slovo, 1997: 98).
She tells us:
We were not, asking them to stay silent ... or to put our needs before the needs of the oppressed. All we wanted was a simple acknowledgement that no political movement can ever fight for justice without there being casualties (Slovo, 1997 :100).
In A World Apart those casualties are children. But in Sky Blue, Chester’s relationship with his father seems much more equivocal. For example, in the first half of the film the Hugh Dent character is portrayed extremely sympathetically, almost romantically and heroically. But in the second half the tone darkens and the film radically shifts its sympathies from father to mother. This is reflected in the structure of the film, in that the narration in the first half is delivered in voice-over
119 from the father’s point of view and in the second half in voice-over from the mother’s point of view. Furthermore, the film goes to great lengths to dramatise a deep chasm between the world of men and the world of women.
This type of parallel action cross-cutting originates with D.W. Griffith and is a convention of the classical Hollywood tradition of filmmaking. In this context its purpose is to compartmentalise and fragment the world into separate domains. Where camera movements like pans or tracks would tend to unite or connect disparate elements, the editing here reinforces the gulf between the domestic world of the mother and the primal masculine world of wilderness.
Sky Blue doesn’t really have an overt feminist agenda, but it nevertheless strongly sides with the mother and one suspects that there is an element of oedipal rage driving the narrative. This is a familiar motif in male familial (auto)biography eg in Chester Himes’s two volumes of autobiography The Quality of Hurt and My Life of Absurdity,which Gary Storhoff contends, ‘reveal his life lived out in rebellion in which he imaginatively slays father figures that he confronts, either historically or literally’ (Storhoff, 1996: 38).
Another key motif explored in both films is the disintegration of the family, and in both films we find the suggestion that the responsibility for this lies with the state and the policy of apartheid. In Sky Blue, the rangers’ attempts to save the white rhino are constantly being hampered by their two worst enemies - poachers and squatters. The former hunt the rhino for its horn, which is believed in some cultures to have aphrodisiacal powers, and the latter, the squatters, are homeless people, people displaced by apartheid, relegated to the ‘homelands’ where there is no work and nowhere to live. They moved onto Umfolozi Game Reserve in great numbers believing that they had a right to farm the land and squat there. The rangers saw it differently. Without the Reserve, the white rhino faced certain extinction.
The Ian Player character is sympathetic but uncompromising. For him the choice is obvious:
120 These people are victims of forces which they do not understand. I sympathise with them. Deeply. But my duty is clear. My whole life is committed to preserving this sanctuary. The rhino must come first.
In a key scene towards the end of the film, the rangers call in the South African police to help them forcibly remove the squatters from the Reserve.
This kind of forceful removal was typical of the way in which apartheid was implemented. Black families were often split apart with the mothers and children being relegated to homelands while fathers were forced to seek work on the goldmines and live in single men’s hostels. To utilise a motif of family disintegration would not therefore be surprising except that here and in A World Apart we are concerned with white rather than black families. And conventionally, white South Africans are portrayed as the privileged beneficiaries, the villains of apartheid. But in these films and in these families, whites can also be the victims of apartheid. But not without guilt. Not without angst.
Even as children we carried internal scales of justice which we used to weigh up ‘their’ needs - the needs of the impoverished masses against ours. How could we win? Compared to the poverty, degradation, discrimination they endured our suffering was negligible (Slovo, 1997: 98).
Gillian Slovo also recounts how recently she had lunch with Mac Maharaj, an old friend of both her parents who is now South Africa’s Minister of Transport. He told her how:
He had watched, in the company of other ANC people, A World Apart,... Mac said he had enjoyed the film but then he added something different: some of his African comrades he said had decided that what the young girl in the film needed was ‘a good slap’. A good slap. It felt like that to me. I read behind the words and breathed in their implications. They conjured up a judgement I knew only too well. We were white kids who indulged ourselves in whining (Slovo, 1997: 97).
121 White people in South Africa did not so much whine as keep silent. There were many whites in South Africa who abhorred apartheid but chose never to act against the State or to speak up, partly one suspects because they felt powerless or because they were intimidated. But it seems to me to be quite significant that these two films are both set in the same historical time period. The early Sixties was a period which was marked by the State’s brutal silencing of dissent, particularly white dissent. The decade began with massive nation-wide protests against the pass laws culminating in Sharpeville in March 1960, when 69 protestors were shot and killed by police. Both films refer to this incident and in fact at one point in Sky Blue the two protagonists go to the cinema where they watch a newsreel depicting the Sharpeville massacre.
Between this incident and 1963, the time period at which both films end, the South African government produced a series of highly repressive laws, such as the 90 Day Act, aimed at effectively silencing its critics and preventing open dissent. By 1963, after the infamous Treason Trial, Mandela was in prison and all effective resistance to the regime in the country was in tatters. The struggle now would take place outside the country by people such as Joe Slovo and Ruth First who were forced into exile. There was no further wide-scale resistance until Soweto erupted 13 years later in 1976. It seems to me then that it is part of both films’ agendas to chart the silencing of white resistance.
Both films have much in common in that they are familial biographies and deal with the same historical period but they are quite radically different in the stylistic strategies they employ. A World Apart functions like a traditional bildungsroman wherein the heroine overcomes obstacles, learns lessons from life so that her true self may be actualised. The film utilises the conventions of realism and ‘classical narration’. This system of narration is omniscient and seamless and presented from a third person perspective. As a consequence, even though the film is concerned with a young woman’s rite of passage, the narration and indeed the camera angles are never delivered from her point of view but rather the camera exercises its omnipresence so that we are often privy to events (such as the interrogations) which Molly could not have witnessed. Furthermore, the film never attempts to draw attention to itself as construct but rather employs a self-effacing ‘invisible’
122 style (the camera at eye level, seamless continuity editing) wherein the events simply unfold.
Sky Blue, on the other hand, has much more self-conscious narrative strategies which draw attention to its own discourse and utilise certain self-reflexive devices. The first image of the film, for example, is of a woman’s hand holding a postcard and this is accompanied by a male voice-over reading from it. We hear: ‘Dear Kate, it is good to be back in Africa again...’ The hand then turns the postcard over as the voice-over continues: ‘As I caught sight of my land I realised...’ and we see the image of a Union Castle Liner. The camera zooms into the postcard until the ship fills the frame. Then we move from still to live action as the postcard comes to life, as it were. This technique is repeated throughout the film - at one point there is a postcard of a leaping springbok suddenly coming to life; later a rhino suddenly moves across a bushveld landscape etc. Each of these postcards marks a new chapter and a new time period in the story, which has an episodic structure.
The postcards also delineate changes in perspective in the narrative as the first series of postcards are narrated by the man and the second series by the woman. Thus a single seamless notion of the truth is jettisoned and we are offered two different interpretations of what transpired. As Liz Stanley has noted: ‘The past, like the present is the result of competing versions of what happened, why it happened and with what consequence’ (Stanley, 1992: 7). The narration thus shifts dramatically both in point of view as well as chronologically so that we sometimes return to the same incidents at different times in the film but portrayed with competing or shifting attitudes. Sky Blue also constantly draws attention to its status as filmic auto/biography and acknowledges its inter-textual relationship with other similar films. As a consequence, at one time in the film, as I have mentioned before, the two main characters go to the cinema where they see a newsreel of Sharpeville and watch Truffaut’s autobiographical film The Four Hundred Blows. Naturally on the way home from the movie they argue about it, revealing their different sensibilities and views about the world.
In recognising itself as construct, Sky Blue seems to be quite prepared to turn real life into story and to create dynamic tensions between reality and illusion, fact and
123 fiction. Indeed both films recognise this by treating the characters as fictional and giving them invented names. But clearly at some level autobiographical works are different from purely imaginative forms. As Barry Olshen suggests:
We must acknowledge that autobiography is not the same as fiction and that its persona is not the same as a character in a novel - not the same to the writers and not the same to the readers (Olshen, 1995: 14).
But this observation becomes problematised and complicated in the case of films where we are not only dealing with the re-telling of a life but also the re-enactment of one. The confusion is further compounded when, as in the case of Sky Blue, we went out of our way to try and cast actors who resembled the real people in both looks and mannerisms.
Indeed sometimes the transformation may be quite overwhelming. Gillian Slovo recounts that when A World Apart was in pre-production:
We met together with Barbara Hershey who was to play Ruth. While Barbara talked about the kind of woman my mother had been, and the kind of clothes she would have worn, I sat there thinking: she is nothing like my mother. And yet, years later on a London tube escalator I caught a glimpse of that same actress’s face advertising another film and, before I had time to censor myself I thought: ‘There’s my mother’ (Slovo, 1997 : 26).
This chapter has endeavoured to outline important influences in my work as a filmmaker. The reader must now become a viewer to detect these same influences in My Lovers Both.
124 CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
‘Maintenant, je m’encrapule le plus possible. Pourquoi? Je veux être poète, et je travaille à me rendre voyant: vous ne comprendrez pas du tout, et je ne saurais presque vous expliquer. Il s’agit d’arriver à l’inconnu par le dérèglement de tous les sens. Les soufrraces sont énormes, mais Il faut être fort, être né poète, et je me suis reconnu poète. Ce n’est pas du tout ma faute. C’est faux de dire: Je Pense. On devrait dire: On me pense. Pardon du jeu de mots. Je est un autre.’ (Rimbaud, 1960: 344) [Now, I debauch myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working at making myself a visionary: you will not understand at all, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a question of arriving at the unknown by the disordered state of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but it is necessary to be strong, to have been born a poet, and I recognized myself a poet. It is not at all my fault. It is false to say: I think. One should say: I am thought. Forgive the pun. I is another.]
Dear John,
Let me be the conceit you are looking for.
Do you remember that dream you told me about? The one that you recounted to your therapist when you were in analysis? Let me see if I remember it…It is a dream about you and your father (or should I say ‘our father’) walking down the street. You are a small boy, about seven years old. You are holding your father’s hand. But it’s not just the two of you. I’m there too. Your twin brother. And I’m holding Dad’s other hand. So now it’s the three of us walking together down the street.
125 You are behaving angelically. You love Dad and want him to see what a good boy you are. I, on the other hand, am behaving very badly. I shout and scream and throw tantrums. You are pleased because you want Dad to notice how good you are and how bad I am. But he doesn’t notice you at all. He directs all his attention to me. He caresses me and soothes me, holds me and loves me. And he ignores you. You are heart-broken. You cannot understand this at all. Why is Dad so busy loving the bad boy? Why can he not see how good you are? Why does he misunderstand you? Can’t he see how good you are? You feel quite desperate. Oh why can’t he see?
And then a piece of glass shard suddenly flies through the air and strikes you in the eye. You do not see it coming and then you are blinded. Everything goes white. And then you wake up.
So that’s the dream the way you told it to me. Except it could not have been me that you told it to. Because I do not exist. You do not have a twin brother. The only place I exist is in your dreams. In your unconscious. I am buried there with all your other fears. Like your fear of being misunderstood. And your fear that people continually misread you and your motives. Or do not see the good side of you but only notice the bad side. The obnoxious, rude side of you. In other words, they always see only me. Even though I do not exist.
But even though I am your bad twin, not everything about me is bad. There are things I can do that you cannot. I am outspoken and forthright when you are reserved and modest. So let me speak for you. Because I know you are worried about this film. I know you are concerned that people will not understand it or your reasons for making it. So let me speak for you. Let me try to say the things you feel too constrained to say.
Let me be your good twin brother.
Looking at your film I have to say that it is obvious that in the beginning an important theme was that of betrayal. The film began by being about relationships
126 and how they have changed and how it has often been the casual moment of treachery that undoes them.
So, the story of your direction of the kissing scene was extraordinary. You promised us the dark side of your character. You succeeded admirably in this instance. When you humiliated your ‘leading man’, it is true what you said that there you wielded the whip.
What follows are my responses to your film. They are in a fairly random order. They might be of use to others who have viewed your film. Some of the themes raised there are:
1. The dialectic of the personal and the political 2. Freedom and anguish 3. Memory - truth - history 4. Friendship- love 5. Fictionalising of the documentary 6. Time
4.1 DIALECTIC OF THE PERSONAL AND THE POLITICAL
On the surface this is fairly well trodden territory. But it is still multi-dimensional and worth considering. Your first memory sets the tone rather well I thought. You begin in 9 April, 1960 when you accompanied Dad to the Rand Easter Show (or the Witwatersrand Union Exposition). The high point of this section is the assassination attempt on Verwoerd. The footage of him bleeding from nose and mouth was extraordinary. To think, however, that he lived only to meet another and final reckoning on 6 September, 1966 at the hands of Dimitri Tsafendas. Moreover the coincidences deepen, do they not, when we think of Liza Key and her film on Tsafendas, The Furiosus (1999)?
There is also the song and your response to it – Jeremy Taylor’s Ballad of the Southern Suburbs (aka Ag Pleez, Deddy):
127 Ag pleez Deddy won’t you take us to the drive-in All six, seven of us, eight, nine, ten We wanna see a flick about Tarzan an’ the Ape-men An’ when the show is over you can bring us back again
Chorus: Popcorn, chewing gum, peanuts an’ bubble gum Ice cream, candy floss an’ Eskimo Pie Ag Deddy how we miss Niggerballs an’ licorice Pepsi Cola, ginger beer And Canada Dry
Ag Pleez Deddy won’t you take us to the fun-fair We wanna have a ride on the bumper-cars We’ll buy a stick of candy floss And eat it on the Octopus Then we’ll take the rocket ship that goes to Mars
Chorus
Ag pleez Deddy won’t you take us to the wrestling We wanna see an ou called Sky High Lee When he fights Willie Liebenberg There’s gonna be a murder ‘Cos Willie’s gonna donner that blerrie yankee
Chorus
Ag pleez Deddy won’t you take us off to Durban It’s only eight hours in the Chevro-lay There’s spans of sea an’ sand an’ sun And fish in the aquari-yum
128 That’s a lekker place for a holi-day
Chorus
Ag Pleez Deddy - VOETSEK!
Ag sis Deddy if we can’t graaf to bioscope Or go off to Durban, life’s a heng of a bore If you won’t take us to the zoo Then what the heck else can we do But go on out and moere all the oukies next door
Chorus
For you that is ‘one of our own songs to sing’. True nothing could express more clearly what is usually called the ‘innocence of childhood’ - an innocence, though that comments on what it was like to be a ‘poor white’. It does not speak of race relations or of the oppression of black people. Nevertheless, the song was banned by the South African Broadcasting Corporation because it was thought to threaten the ‘integrity’ of the State. In reality, the song, with its accurate mimicry of the working class accent, reveals the existence of Otherness within the Master class.
Some of your Australian friends (and you do have some) have called the song ‘racist’. This, I think, is mainly because of the reference to ‘niggerballs’. They think this is a clear racial slur. But you and I know that the niggerballs we had as kids were made of candy. They were black round sweets that changed colour when you sucked them. We never thought of them as possibly referring to the genitalia of African men. They were not ‘niggers’ balls’ but rather ‘niggerballs’ or literally ‘blackballs’ from the Latin ‘niger’ meaning ‘black’. The word for us was simply descriptive and there was nothing offensive about it.
Of course, I know that in the United States, the word ‘nigger’ is highly offensive. But in South Africa it was a word that was seldom used to refer to African people.
129 Rather, the most odious thing you could call a black man was to refer to him as a ‘kaffir’. This was extremely insulting.
For me the song is interesting partly because of what it reveals about the little tricks memory plays with the imagination. You know, do you not, that the song was only recorded and released in 1961, almost a year AFTER Verwoerd was shot at the Rand Show. Yet in your mind’s eye you see those two events as happening simultaneously – you hearing the song and you seeing Verwoerd get shot. The condensation effect, if I can call it that, has fused both your political awareness with the inception of a parochial aesthetic. And I don’t mean ‘parochial’ in a pejorative sense, because I think the most parochial art is the most universal. One has to go within oneself to reach out to others. Hence the interest in autobiography.
But the song is not only a song of innocence. It is also a savage indictment of an entire generation of young, white South African men. Your and my generation. The kids of the Sixties.
When Jeremy Taylor wrote this song it was the beginning of the Sixties and he had just recently arrived in South Africa from England. He began teaching at a school for boys where he heard everyone talking this strange dialect – English with Afrikaans thrown in. He was intrigued by the colourful slang but the song is also about keenly observed behaviour. The boys in the song are oblivious to the oppression that is going on all around them. There is no mention of apartheid and yet somehow we know it is there. But the boys are only interested in consumption and having fun. They want ‘Pepsi Cola, ginger beer and Canada Dry’. They want to go to funfairs and to the beach in Durban. And if they don’t get it, they will turn to violence – they will ‘moere all the oukies next door’, or to translate, they will ‘murder all the people next door’.
And they whine and whine and whine. They can’t stop whinging to Daddy. It’s as if they can’t stand on their own two feet. They are totally dependant upon the Father. Ag pleez Deddy, they cry. But in your film, you go to the Show with your father and see the ultimate father figure, the father of the Nation, the father of
130 apartheid shot down. Verwoerd seems almost avuncular, foolish but benevolent. We almost feel sorry for him.
But it is curious, is it not, that in this section of the film the personal gets overwhelmed by the political? Or the micro-history crumbles under the weight of the macro-history? You say nothing, for example, about how you felt about being with your father. There is nothing of what he said to you or did with you on that day - just an image and then into the newsreel. I certainly think that this is a space where the photographs of you as a kid would help people visualise you. But there are no photos of you. Just a blurred image reconstructing the memory. It seems significant to me that this image of you is out of focus. It is a mask and it is also a reminder that despite all your avowals about disclosure, there is something in reserve.
The image of you at the exposition in Johannesburg is matched at the end of your film with you and your wife and daughter at the ‘Ekka’ (exhibition) in Brisbane. I thought of the mocking comment by Thomas Friedman: ‘With all due respect to revolutionary theorists, the “wretched of the earth” want to go to Disney World - not the barricades’ (cited in Friedman, 1999).
Yet there is no disguising your discontent at the heart of Babylon.
Throughout this film you are of course in the process of character construction. You are creating ‘you’ and except for the sequence with Liza Key - the lesbian/girlfriend -you come across as quite detached and remote. I will have more to say about that when I return to your treatment of her as Other. The lift sequence is, though, an exception. Here your agitation is quite palpable. The fact that the lift will not work is a reminder that the very thingness of things has once again emerged to frustrate you.
That is why I think the spot where you shave and prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet is quite crucial. That along with the close-up of the eye signals several literary references. The ‘eye’ gives us Joris Ivens’s autobiography, The Camera I, and set in train lots of good associations. These include of course the
131 peripatetic documentarist - the poet who begins by filming the rain and 60 years later ends by filming the wind in China. Also in Ivens we have the poet who, as you know, subordinated the poetry to the politics to become the great instance of the Stalinist artist.
On a more complex level, it echoes for me Emmanuel Levinas’s question: ‘How can I appear to myself as a face?’ (Levinas, 1998: 11). I understand Levinas to be saying here that we need to acknowledge the otherness of ourselves. How else to do this but in the mirror and in the eyes of our significant others?
The mirror too has resonances of Lacan’s mirror stage when the infant first glimpses its reflection and comes to understand that it is a divided self. More importantly perhaps, there is the echo of the myth of Dionysus Zagreus with its moral of the dangers of self-contemplation and the power of the image:
To distract his attention the Titans offered the infant Dionysus a mirror and some other childish baubles, and then, while he was admiring his own reflected image, captured him and tore him to pieces (Bull, 2001).
Interestingly, as Malcolm Bull has pointed out, the image of the mirror was very popular with the Neo-Platonists. It, however, represented more than a simple statement of the dangers of self-contemplation.
For them, the mirror of Dionysus was the material world itself. Proclus suggested that when Plato stated that the surface of the world was created smooth, he meant that it had a reflective surface like a mirror, and Plotinus had something similar in mind when he claimed that it was when the souls saw their images in ‘the mirror of Dionysus’ that they descended from unity into material multiplicity (Bull, 2001).
Indeed, it is tempting to read the mirror scene through the metaphor of Neo- Platonic thought, for as Bull argues:
132 In certain respects, it [the mirror metaphor] seems more relevant to the contemporary situation than Hegel’s dialectic [of master and slave], for it hinges on image rather than status, on movement rather than struggle, and on the relation of the one and the many rather than a dyadic rivalry (Bull, 2001).
Moreover, as Patricia Cox has pointed out, the mirror metaphor has particular relevance for the relationship between art (in particular film art perhaps) and meaning.
Mirrored images are creative, and it is through them that contact with the origin is maintained. Thus the mirror of Dionysus suggests that our truest way of looking at life is to look poetically, in figure and image, for it is through these ‘particulars’ that the single hearth of self manifests its presence and becomes a home…. Looking in the mirror of Dionysus is the making of a world in images (Cox, 1983: 112-114).
So the mirror scene is a multi-layered warning to us that a contradictory process has been set in motion when you embark on this film. Memories, dreams, fictions, actualities all jostle each other. You trek from Brisbane to Johannesburg and back again. It is as if you were continually seeking St. Augustine’s City of God and were finding only Babylon.
The shaving also gives me the moment of Prufrock - the anti-hero of modernity, who worries about his bald spot in the middle of WW1. Yet your film does deal with one truly heroic moment. This is when you take the revolutionaries into your house. I am not sure if people who had not lived through those times would understand how dangerous a thing that was to do.
As an artist/filmmaker here you seem to have crossed from the figure of Albert Camus to that of Jean Paul Sartre, from the disengaged libertarian to the engaged fellow traveller (Aronson, 2002).
133 I am thinking especially of Camus’s silence around the Algerian Civil War. He is celebrated as saying after he got the Nobel Prize:
I have always condemned terror. I must also condemn a terrorism which is carried out blindly in the streets of Algiers for example and which one day might strike my mother and my family. I believe in justice but I will defend my mother before justice (cited in Aronson, 2002).
In any case, loyalty to his tribe, the Pieds Noirs, kept him trapped in what Albert Memini described as the role of ‘colonizer of good will’ (cited in Aronson, 2002). Sartre, however, longed to get his hands dirty and explicitly endorsed revolutionary violence.
I think it is interesting to reflect on the existential dimensions of your film character. I do believe that your situation in many ways resembles that of Camus’s. Your refusal of Marxism also is relevant in this context. Yet Marxism is in your film. Annette, the young journalist, types away in front of a poster of Marx. All these years later that is still in your mind’s eye. The revolutionaries come to your home, yet you long for them to leave. Not because of the danger, but because they are wearing out your records. How exquisite! They bore you!
4.2 FREEDOM AND ANGUISH
I have been thinking about the episode where you read from the Birthday Book. You tell us you are (like me) a Selective Exhibitionist. You seem to be suggesting that you have no control over your personality or character – it was given to you by chance, by the simple fact of being born on a particular day. A few hours earlier or later and you would have been quite different. Your whole life would have been different.
What is at stake in this instance could be read in terms of existential anguish - the fear of freedom. It seems to me that you long in this moment for determinism. You do not want the burden of freedom. You have exercised that freedom by returning to South Africa and giving us this disarmingly honest portrait of yourself. Yet you
134 seem consciously or rather unconsciously to seek to deny the element of choice when you consult your astrological chart. You also tell us, in this sequence, that you have selectively exhibited yourself to us. We do not see all of you, only what you have chosen to let us see. The Book tells us that people born on this date,
only let people view what they are doing, less often what they are thinking and hardly at all who they really are…It is as if they live in a house doing the most astonishing things but only open the blinds when it suits them to do so (Goldschneider 1994: 616).
But this selection process is, as you correctly point out in the film, the very essence of autobiography. For as Patricia Hampl writes, ‘long ago I came to believe the impulse toward autobiography has as much to do with reticence as it does with revelation’ (Hampl, 1996: 69).
Yet the act of seeking to read the future needs further interpretation, or is it justification? Walter Benjamin’s Thesis 18 on the philosophy of History contains this:
The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous or empty. Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance--namely, in just the same way. We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance, however. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all those succumb who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time. For every second of time was the straight gate through which Messiah might enter (Benjamin at http://www.tasc.ac.uk/depart/media/staff/ls/WBenjamin/CONCEPT2.html) .
135 Thesis 18 seems to me to be so relevant to what you are trying to get across in the numerology sequence. There is a very complex thing going on here. You are going back to your past yet you succumb to the magic of the future. Benjamin talks disapprovingly of seeing time as ‘homogeneous or empty’. By this I think he meant seeing time in a linear flowing way, as in the onward march of progress. Time for Benjamin was full of discontinuities and always the possibility of revolutionary ruptures. When we consult the oracles we are willing on time another disruption, a discontinuity. We do not want more of the same. In essence, then, the urge to consult the oracles is a utopian impulse - a wish for a better world.
4.3 MEMORY – TRUTH - HISTORY
Your film begins and ends with memory. You have already in your first Chapter admitted the creativity of memory. In your film you seem to take particular approach to what you want to remember. So you opt more for the personal as opposed to the collective memory. I know you visited Robben Island. Yet this ended up on the cutting floor. Why? I think that your trip to Robben Island marked your encounter with collective memory - but one of a particular variety.
Robben Island now has the status of a sacred site. In reality it marks the site not of the birth of the South African revolution but the site of its betrayal. The compromises that Mandelaism stands for are all around you in Johannesburg. No great changes were born out of the rise of the ANC to power. Rather we had yet another shabby compromise. The fundamental social structures of South Africa have remained the same. The rich have stayed rich and the poor have stayed very poor. There was of course a layer of Blacks who were bribed to accept the change or rather the absence of change. And those who could not be trusted to reconstruct themselves were, like Chris Hani, murdered.
You say nothing about any of this. You have much to say about Apartheid and how it touched everybody’s lives - but what of the failure of the revolution? You are content to document the babble of confusion at the dinner table in your house. But you risk much here. There is the danger that your silence could set up echoes
136 of Camus’s silence on the Algerian Civil War. Moreover there is also the danger that you underestimate the link between the politics of memory and the ethics of remembering. This has been explored by Susan Rubin Suleiman in her reading of Marcel Ophuls’s Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie (1988) (Suleiman, 2002: 509-541).
She begins by examining the role of memory. She first addresses the arguments of Charles S. Maier, who has a critique of the memory ‘push’. For him it seems to stand in the way of getting on with our lives. Maier contrasts this with history, which gives us understanding as opposed to the emotion that memory demands.
Now your position to date has been that of Benjamin, which is the moral imperative to remember. Benjamin calls this a weak Messianism - ‘our coming was expected’. The victims of history demand to be remembered. That is our task as the Messiah they expected. In a way we must place ourselves in the role of the Angel of History. We must resist ‘progress’ and tend to the past.
Here another concept is important, that of ‘interruption’ (Roberts, 1998). Official history of South Africa is already being written, as for example in Joseph Sargent’s Mandela and De Klerk (1997) starring Sydney Poitier as Mandela and Michael Caine as De Klerk. It was truly awful. You also know the official history is in place when politicians such as the Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, who always opposed every sanction against South Africa, weeps with joy and pride to meet Mandela.
So this is what is to be interrupted. How? Well it seems to me that in your film you do it in two ways. First and perhaps most interestingly there is the stylistic indecisiveness. Here the eclecticism refuses the kind of stability of the image that official history depends on so much.
Secondly, there is the insistence of making a film about yourself. How does one justify this? The answer is to ask how one can deny anyone the right to tell their story? Several themes emerge from the film. Firstly, there is the overwhelming
137 feeling of inadequacy that the intellectual artist feels in the face of history. This is the influence, I suspect, of McElwee. Confronted by official history, the intellectual offers only his own personal failures and incompetencies as evidence against the official record.
Now you have already told us in Chapter Two that in Arthur’s original formation of the concept in Michael Renov’s anthology, the Aesthetics of Failure is offered as proof that the filmmaker is telling the truth. But it is, I think, primarily as a strategy of interruption that the failures of the filmmaker are to be understood. History is presented to us as the smooth flow of progress, as the unfolding of success. In that context, when the filmmaker puts up his hand and says, ‘I am not a success’, he is attempting to interrupt.
Important allied concepts here are ‘the Medusan view of history’ and the ‘messianic cessation of history’.
Medusa froze the moment and thus interrupted the flow. This gave us Benjamin’s fascination with photographs - the moment frozen. It also, I think, accounts for the fascination with old footage. Here the continuum established by those in power is capable of being interrupted.
If one stops to be kind to the past, to turn and think again over what happened and to contemplate alternatives, history then ceases its flow. That is what we are promised the Messiah will do. The temptation here for the filmmaker/historian is to play the Angel of History. Certainly Pilger does that in his films on Australia. And of course it is a decent thing to do.
Susan Rubin Suleiman’s article discusses, though, what and how to remember. In terms of the ‘how’, memory for her runs the risk of turning into kitsch (I think the final sequence of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) would be a good instance of that). It can also, with regard to the ‘what’ of memory, lead to dogmatism and instrumental manipulation. I can identify with that. This is certainly true of South African politics where some Boers seemed permanently locked in the nineteenth century.
138
So there are two questions here with regard to memory:
1. What should be remembered? 2. How should we enact the remembering?
For me we should remember the downtrodden and marginalised victims of the ‘slaughter bench of history’. We should waste no tears for the passing of the rich and the powerful.
But how is the memory to be enacted? Suleiman quotes Adorno here on the need for ‘a serious working through of the past, the breaking of its spell through an act of clear consciousness’ (Adorno cited in Suleiman, 2002: 509-10). For Suleiman the process of ‘working through’,
…involves making one’s own fears, angers, and prejudices visible, both to oneself and others. That means, for a filmmaker, not standing back behind the protection of the camera, with the illusion of objectivity and the inevitable superiority that that affords, but putting oneself at least occasionally in front of it, even if it makes one look bad - like a sadistic interrogator, or like an ‘aggressive Jew’ who gets the door slammed in this face, or simply, weak, sad, or ridiculous (Suleiman, 2002: 531).
This brings us of course back once more onto the terrain of the Aesthetics of Failure. Before resuming this theme, I would like to contrast it with the Heideggerian position on memory and who is to do the remembering. For Heidegger the key alliance is that between the thinker and the poet. The thinker is the partner of the poet who speaks the spirit of the nation. The thinker’s task is to say the unsaid of the poet. ‘The poet is a man apart, a wanderer – seeking to return to a home and to dwell’ (Foti, 1992: 147).
Heidegger’s stance is linked of course to the destiny of the nation, and the key nation was Germany. Time and politics have thrown a rather unfavourable light on
139 Heidegger’s vision and hubris. The attitude displayed by filmmakers like Michael Moore in Roger and Me and Marcel Ophuls in Hotel Terminus is remarkably different. The artist is still the outsider but the predominant mode of enunciation is irony presented within the Aesthetics of Failure. Instead of the man of destiny we have the little man – a kind of helpless Chaplinesque figure. For modern tastes the contemporary documentary maker is a much more palatable figure than the Heideggerian ‘man of destiny’.
You are tempted I know by the role of the Angel of History. Your impulse is to refuse the notion of progress and to seek instead what has ended up on the cutting room floor or in the rubbish heap of history. This entails of course a disdain for the men of power. Three of these make it into your film. Verwoerd and Botha, not unexpectedly, but also Obed Bapela. Verwoerd and Botha are the necessary demons - the Boers - so conveniently exteriorised as the Despised Other. But what of the third man of power that makes it into your film – Obed?
It is curious, is it not, that above all else, what you seem interested in is not the man of power but the young revolutionary and romantic lover? Is this another attempt at the triumph of art over politics?
4.4 FRIENDSHIP - LOVE
There is much in your film about friendship and of course betrayal. As you know, we have both been reading about Derrida on the political history of the idea of friendship. What Derrida does is to take the duality friend versus enemy. He argues that a notion of friendship depends on a notion of an enemy. As Morrison points out he then tries to de-stabilise or deconstruct the duality friend and enemy to point to a world beyond friendship and beyond enmity (Morrison, 1998/99). What that world would look like, he won’t say of course.
But that is a matter for Derridean scholars I suppose. What interests me first of all is that Derrida helps anchor theoretically the importance of investigating friendship. Indeed Derrida claims that:
140
So, all the concepts which are fundamental in politics - I just mentioned those which Geoff [Bennington] selected: sovereignty, power, representation - were directly or indirectly marked by this canonical concept [i.e. friendship] (Derrida cited in Bennington, 1997).
This emphasis on the importance of friendship would help explain, or justify if you like, much of your film and would help construct it as a bridge from the personal to the political or from the private to the public sphere.
Besides in what would appear to be the key friendship, that of Malcolm and John, there are very interesting layers. You are your usual reticent self here. Indeed your entire behaviour as captured in this film reminds me so much of what Foucault had to say when asked about his own friendship with Georges Bataille and Maurice Blanchot:
Let us speak about friends then, but I will not speak to you of friends as such, I belong perhaps to a rather old-fashioned generation for whom friendship is something at once capital and superstitious. And I confess that I always have some difficulty in completely superimposing or integrating relationships of friendship with organizations, political groups, schools of thought, or academic circles. Friendship for me is a kind of a secret Freemasonry, but with some visible points (cited in Stivale, 2000).
In a way, you and Malcolm could be said to be part of a group of friends which defined yourself against the enemy – The Boer. This is cleverly complicated by the fact that in your film within the film you had chosen to cast Malcolm as the Boer. Your friend played your enemy. It is as if the Despised and Feared Other is now within you and that is too horrible to contemplate. It also points to the very complicated nature not only of friendship but also of enmity.
Sandra Lynch, in her article on notions of friendship in Aristotle and Derrida, quotes Maurice Blanchot:
141 Friendship, this relation without dependence, without episode, into which, however, the utter simplicity of life enters, implies the recognition of a common strangeness… the movement of understanding in which speaking to us, they reserve, even in the greatest familiarity, an infinite distance, this fundamental separation from out of which that which separates us becomes relation (Blanchot cited in Lynch, 2002: 106).
This emphasis on the potential strangeness within friends, means, for Derrida, that we must be ready to recognise and ‘honour in the friend the enemy he can become’ (Lynch, 2002: 103).
There is a very real sense of failure about the enterprise that united all your friends in your youth. This is D’Artagnan of Vingt Ans Plus Tard rather than of The Three Musketeers. Perhaps that accounts for the feeling I get of growing strangeness between you and your former friends. It is, by the way, the recognition of strangeness which you confront in your encounter with Liza Key, ex-girlfriend turned lesbian. She has become Other to you.
But new viewers will not see this side of her. At her insistence you have edited out all references to her present sexual proclivity. So her gayness is hidden. She got very heated about this and claimed you had no respect for her privacy by keeping her references to her present relationships with women in the film. She said you were trying to ‘out her’.
So what is lost in the final cut is your meditation in the car on your relationship with her and the revelation of her sexuality. In that scene you appear to be trying to understand her. But that is only the surface appearance of things. What you are really doing there is struggling to construct and reclaim her as the exotic Other. It was in a very real sense a failure to recognize and accept the true depth of her Otherness.
I am reminded here again of Levinas’s critique of the subject. As Robert Bernasconi puts it:
142 In so far as whatever appears to consciousness is a function of the structures of subjectivity…there are no radical surprises in store for the subject. The self-sufficiency of the subject, its self-satisfaction, is secure because this is a subject who cannot be challenged from outside. The self- possession of self consciousness rules as an arche and is not submitted to the other’s challenge (Bernasconi, 2002: 236).
Moreover, not only was that otherness always there but also within every friendship there is, as Derrida says, the ‘enemy they can become’ (Derrida, 1997: 102).
Hypocrisy, guilt, judgement and responsibility. I took these terms from Aronson’s account of Camus’s and Sartre’s friendship and break up. They seem to me to be the underside of friendship. They are all there in your film, especially in the interviews with Malcolm.
When you deal with love there is that very sweet episode where the runaway revolutionary dallies with the young girl. Again the literary resonances are important for me. Romeo & Juliet of course but also Thomas Hardy’s:
At Time of the Breaking of Nations
Only a man harrowing clods In a slow, silent walk With an old horse that stumbles and nods Half-asleep as they stalk.
Only thin smoke without flame From the heaps of couch-grass; Yet this will go onward the same Though Dynasties die.
Yonder a maid and her wight Come whispering by;
143 War’s annals will fade into night Ere their story die.
What strikes me about the emphasis on love in both the poem and your film is the complexity of the dialectic that is at work here. The failure of politics causes a turn to love - a flight to the personal away from the public when the latter terrain is hopelessly corrupted. So the seeds of the interest in love lie in despair. Nevertheless there is also a very real sense that the capacity for love or friendship provides, as Bhaskar argues in his philosophy of meta-Reality, the grounds for hope for the ultimate redemption of the public sphere (Bhaskar, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c).
4.5 FICTIONALISING OF THE DOCUMENTARY
This for me is the key to your film. It is also the key to your spin on the New Documentary and what you are trying to achieve in your film. If I were to sum up your film it would be that it is about the search for the meaning of a life. Not only your life but also the lives of the people you knew of the generation that were forged in the cradle of fire that was the 80s in South Africa. There is also the realisation that, as Benjamin averred, the meaning of a life is not available in empirical terms. It must be created through an act of imagination - and that is your film.
4.6 TIME
As I have watched your film on its aesthetic journey I have found much that fascinates me - you know that. But I looked back on your early statements of intent and what has transpired is something different. What we seem to have now is something like A Tale of Two Trips. There is only three years between them, but something happened on the first trip that is only hinted at in the film. Something went snap or clicked in you or fell into place. There was a kind of epiphany, a kind of letting go, a sloughing off of the past, an acceptance of the now - maybe.
144 I have talked about your first journey in the film in thematic terms and strangely enough the second part of your film helps me to see it so much more clearly. The first part of your film is about you much more than I suspected. It is about your past and how you reach out to it and in a kind of way embrace it and say goodbye to it.
Yet you come back, perhaps like the cat, because you cannot stay away.
However the second trip has little in common with the first. This is most obvious on the stylistic front. You move from in front of the camera to behind it. You are no longer nervously talking to the camera about how you are feeling. You shift from being a participant to an observer. You are now very much the fly on the wall. It is almost as if you were following the Pythagorean doctrine of inner purification through the contemplation of the underlying order of existence. It was Pythagoras himself who is said to have compared life to a festival, ‘at which slavish men come to compete for fame and profit, but the best people attend as spectators’ (Gregory, 1993 : 8).
So if you are no longer a player so much as a spectator, what do you see?
Firstly, we have the interview with Malcolm. You see he has aged. He has put on weight. His beard is now flecked with grey and the camera follows him as he moves heavily up the stairs. It reminds me of the tea shop girl in the Ezra Pound poem The Tea Shop:
The girl in the tea shop Is not so beautiful as she was, The August has worn against her. She does not get up the stairs so eagerly; Yes, she also will turn middle-aged, And the glow of youth that she spread about us As she brought us our muffins Will be spread about us no longer. She also will turn middle-aged.
145
Yet in this film it is Malcolm who knows you above all. He strives to articulate his understanding. He persistently refers to betrayals, but always in terms of relationships with lovers. Is this the flame flickering before it burns out? What is sad is that he cannot see that the only one you are now worried about betraying is yourself.
Nevertheless he gives you the title for your film - My Lovers Both - and the clearest description of the time of the first journey - the Cradle of Fire. He helps you understand your past and plays a pivotal role in the first part of your film.
You then go on a drive around Johannesburg. You are trying in some ways to see this with the eyes of your daughter. To her it is new - strange. I think by a mysterious process it also becomes strange to you. This is the moment of rupture and discontinuity. The white boss you comment on is a continuity; the white woman begging - a rupture.
I was struck by Marian at the pump trying to explain her strangeness to the black worker. She goes to serve herself and he cannot understand why or what this land she calls Australia is like. This is yet another rupture and perhaps the crucial one. In a way this gives us the reality of the exile - constantly worn down by the burden of the past in the present. Never at home in the new land - a forlorn ghost in the old.
Then to Marian’s family. This is very much a set piece - a nodal moment that contains within it the seeds of the epiphany. What are you trying to achieve here? What do you have in these scenes that the rest of us cannot see?
I think you have both your metonym and your metaphors. In Marxist terms these people look like a class and a caste which time has flung deep into the dustbin of history. They are still fabulously privileged compared with the majority of South Africans, but like the Pieds Noirs of Algeria in the Sixties, they seem doomed.
146 Marian’s family is cocooned from the outside world in their Afrikaner laager. Yet here you have madness. This for you resonates with what you see as a wider madness in society. The student who shoots Malcolm is another instance of madness. Marian’s father is deep in his negative symptoms. That makes him easier to be with. The positive symptoms are nearly impossible to deal with socially but they do respond to medication:
The negative symptoms are - anhedonia - an inability to feel pleasure- alogia or poverty of speech production, flat affect or lack of emotional expressiveness, avolition or lack of motivation and also included are emotional withdrawal, asociality, motor retardation, poor rapport, inappropriate affect, poverty of speech content and attention impairment . (cited at http://hcs.harvard.edu/~husn/BRAIN/vol6/p7-10- Schizophrenia.pdf).
But where there is madness there is also brilliance and this you have in Marian’s sister. Her story is a real pièce. It gives you so much, but above all it gives you self-destruction. You are fascinated and horrified by it. You look and want to do something - who would not? But you can only record. That is the curse of the artist. You can create new worlds in your imagination. Utopias can pour from your pens. But the thingness of reality endures.
So what have you here? A group of people who would rather not talk about their past. Their withdrawal may not be as complete as Marian’s father’s but it seems not dissimilar. Of course, it has the flashing boobs and the reference to pubic hair to affront and titillate the Manichean. But beyond the sexuality these references mark a withdrawal into the private realm. Curiously, only the black girl, Lulu, seems engaged with the world. She has a future.
And it is the thematic exploration of time which makes sense of these scenes. We confront people who seem haunted by the future in the present. People without hope.
147 For that where will you turn? The answer of course lies in Bohemia’s sweet smile. You began the film as a son and you are about to end it as a father. You have not returned home because Australia is never a home to the likes of you.
As in the song:
The winters drive you crazy, and the fishing’s hard and slow, You’re a damned fool if you stay, but there’s no better place to go...(Bok, 1970).
Finally how to sum all this up, this journey which has taken you and me over five years. Let us turn to Raymond Williams writing on George Orwell. He contrasts D. H. Lawrence’s ‘England, my England’ with Lawrence’s ‘England, your England’ (Willimas, 1984: 16). What if we substitute ‘South Africa, my South Africa’ and ‘South Africa, your South Africa’? To do so, is I think, to come to understand the differences between the two pilgrimages you make in your film. In the first trip you are still the exile. There is something of a politics here. It is as if, to paraphrase Orwell, South Africa was ‘a family with the wrong members in control’ (Williams, 1984: 21).
Such a position is just barely tenable in the first part of your film. But by the second trip there is the realisation that one can no longer maintain that the wrong members are in control. The ANC is in power. So the comfortable dream of substituting the ‘right members’ for the ‘wrong’ is no longer available. Indeed, as the barbecue sequence makes clear, the dream has become a nightmare.
At this moment you cease to be an exile. You have instead become a ‘vagrant’. But be of good cheer. You are not alone. As Hubertus von Amelunxen points out in writing about the philosopher Vilem Flusser:
Flusser’s writing is ‘nomadological’; it reflects the fate of being an émigré in the twentieth century, the ‘rootlessness’, the ‘groundlessness’ and the basic insecurity of human destiny (von Amelunxen, 1983: 86).
148 A final turn to art perhaps is called for here. In Gordon Bok’s album Turning toward the Morning, there is a song called Isle au Haut Lullaby (Hay Ledge Song). This song is very sweet and touching. It contains my wish for you:
If I could give you three things, I would give you these: Song and laughter and a wooden home, in the shining sea.
When you see old Isle au Haut, rising in the dawn, You will play in yellow fields, in the morning sun.
Your loving brother
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161 FILMOGRAPHY
Antoine and Colette Bed and Board Berlin: Symphony of a City Birth of a Nation Blade Runner Bonnie and Clyde Breaking Away Chase, the Cry Freedom Ethnic Notions Eyewitness Forgotten Silver Four Hundred Blows Georgia’s Friends Germany, Pale Mother Getting off the Altitude Hotel Terminus: the Life and Times of Klaus Barbie In the Land of my Parents Lady in the Lake, The Love on the Run Magnitogorsk: Forging the New Man Mandela and De Klerk Man with a Movie Camera Meatman Mouchette My Lovers Both Nanook of the North Night Moves NYPD Blue Peppermint Peace Rain Rashomon
162 Roger and Me Saving Private Ryan Sherman’s March Six O’Clock News Sky Blue Something to do with the Wall Song of the Heroes Stolen Kisses Thin Blue Line, The Time Indefinite Tongues Untied Weekend World Apart, A Years of Hunger Zero for Conduct
163 ARCHIVAL ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
In the film, My Lovers Both, a certain amount of archival material was used. This material was supplied courtesy of:
Eye to Eye Film Partnership The South African Broadcasting Corporation The South African National Film and Video Archives Pienaar Family home movies Afravision Channel 7, Brisbane
164