(Self-)Reflexivity and Repetition in Documentary
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Kent Academic Repository Full text document (pdf) Citation for published version UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) thesis, UNSPECIFIED. DOI Link to record in KAR https://kar.kent.ac.uk/87147/ Document Version UNSPECIFIED Copyright & reuse Content in the Kent Academic Repository is made available for research purposes. Unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg Creative Commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. Versions of research The version in the Kent Academic Repository may differ from the final published version. Users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. Users should always cite the published version of record. Enquiries For any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: [email protected] If you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the KAR admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html Subjectivity, (Self-)reflexivity and Repetition in Documentary Silke Panse PhD-Thesis 2007 Film Studies School of Drama, Film and the Visual Arts University of Kent Canterbury Abstract This thesis advances a deterritorialised reading of documentary on several levels: firstly, with respect to the difference between non-fiction and fiction, allowing for a fluctuation between both. As this thesis examines the movements of subjective documentary between self-reflexivity and reflexivity, it argues against an understanding of reflexivity as something that is emotionally distanced from its object and thus relies on a strict separation from both the subject and what it documents, such as for instance the stable irony in many found footage or mock-documentaries. In Werner Herzog’s documentaries by contrast, irony manifests referential instability. This ‘deterritorialised reading’ concerns their oscillation between different levels of fiction and non-fiction as well as between authorship and agency. As his documentaries frequently do not assert a final interpretation and keep the decision about their truth value suspended infinitely, they assure a fluctuation, which concurs with what the early Romantic theorist Friedrich Schlegel says about the oscillation in Romantic irony between self-reflection and its object. However, the belief in the documentary status of a film is necessary to experience this fluctuation in referentiality. Another suggestion this thesis makes concerns the division between filmmaker and protagonist. It argues for a protagonist based reading of documentary that takes account of the diverse stages the protagonists operate on – instead of a purely author-filmmaker or reader-viewer based interpretation. One can then account for, the directions and performances the protagonists have already submitted to before the film team enters their stage. In contrast to a protagonist observed as an isolatable ‘being’ in a documentary conventionally taking place in front of the lens, and a voice reflecting in the commentary about a closed ‘reality’, this study examines documentary works where the filmmakers are not separated from what they comment upon. It is also the re-enactments that the protagonists undergo that deterritorialises the authorial status of the film. Against a conventional notion of documentary, that excludes unacknowledged repetitions instigated by the filmmaker, I argue that the repetitions discussed in this thesis’ documentaries manifest a forward movement. A documentary re-enactment of a concrete and finished event can be the start of a new process, a ‘forward recollection.’ Re-enactments by the very protagonists who have experienced the events in the first place challenge representation in documentary. Acknowledgments I would foremost like to thank the Film Studies department at Kent for their ongoing support and the critical input I have received throughout the conception of this thesis. Writing at Kent allowed me to encompass diverse ways of thinking about film into my work and permitted this thesis to range as deep and wide as it hopefully does. I am grateful especially to my supervisor Elizabeth Cowie as well as Michael Grant, Katie Grant and Murray Smith for inspiring directions and focussing comments. Acknowledgments also go to my friends who have helped me to write and argue in English: Mike Blow, Jon Kear, Andrew Chesher and Paul Allender. In addition, I would like to thank Winfried and Barbara Junge, Tracey Emin, Alexandr Sokurov and Werner Herzog for agreeing to be interviewed by me and for making the works that inspired this thesis, as well as my late parents without whom this would not have been possible. Contents 1 Introduction 1.1 The Context of (Self-)reflexivity 1 2 The Children of Golzow: How Socialist Documentary became Self-Reflexive 12 2.1 Reflections on Change in the Children of Golzow and 7-Up 2.1.1 Capitalist Structuralism 2.1.2 The Fetishization of Change as ‘Specific Difference' 2.2 The Emergence of Self-reflexivity and Self-Consciousness 24 2.2.1 Self-reflexivity as a Result of Longevity 2.2.2 The Shift from the Visual to the Spoken 2.2.3 Temporality as Context 2.2.4 Self-consciousness and ‘Self-realization’ as an Effect of Reunification 2.3 The Ideological Background 35 2.3.1 The Identity of Subjectivity and Objectivity 2.3.2 Lenin’s Theory of Non-reflexive Reflection 2.3.3 The Film Images as ‘a Collective’ 2.3.4 Marx vs. Socialist Realism 2.3.5 The Position of Documentary in Socialist Realism 2.3.6 Scripted Reality 2.3.7 Pedagogy instead of Propaganda 2.3.8 Lenin against Meta-Language and Metaphors 2.3.9 Representation in State Socialism 2.3.10 From Marx and Engels to Marks and Spencer 2.4 From ‘Collective Subjectivity’ to ‘Individual Objectivity’ 53 2.4.1 Negative Commentary to Positive Images 2.4.2 Distance as Objective in Anglo-American Documentary and as Subjective in Socialist Documentary 2.4.3 Negative Questions for an Optimistic Protagonist 2.4.4 Socialist Optimism 2.4.5 The Distance of Film and the Closeness of Television 2.5 Non-alienating Reflexivity 63 2.5.1 Alienation as Surplus Value in Western-style Interview Documentary 2.5.2 The Ethics of Socialist Aesthetics 2.5.3 The Limits of (Self-)reflexivity 2.5.4 Conclusion 3 Opacity through Transparency: Tracey Emin and her Art between the Autobiographical and the Biographical 85 3.1 The Experience of the Biographers 3.2 High Art vs. Low Documentary 3.3 The Self-reflexive Self-Interview 3.4 Birth Outside the Womb 3.5 Autobiographic Art beyond Post-Structuralism 3.6 Containing Fictions 3.7 Promiscuous Narrations 3.8 Infinite Biographical Semiosis 3.9 The Reproach of Repetition 3.10 Documentary and/as Concept and/as Art 3.11 Conclusion 4 The Filmmaker as Rückenfigur, Documentary as Painting in Alexandr Sokurov’s Elegy of a Voyage 119 4.1 The Passive Creator 4.2 The Surfaces of Depths 4.3 Painting as the Window to Documentary 4.4 The Rückenfigur of the Documentary Filmmaker 4.5 The Framing of Pictorial Reality 4.6 Conclusion 5 Werner Herzog’s Documentaries: Material Visions 139 5.1.1 Athletic Documentary 5.1.2 Between the Visionary and the Documentary 5.2 Appearance vs. Experience 145 5.2.1 The Invisibility of Experience 5.2.2 From Anti-narrative Fiction to Narrative Documentary 5.2.3 Physical Causalities 5.2.4 The Inversion of Documentary Causality 5.3 The Documentary Sublime 159 5.3.1 Herzog’s Physical Turn of the Sublime 5.3.2 The Sublime Experienced in the Documentary 5.3.3 The Physical Challenges the Meta-Physical 5.3.4 The Faceification of the Body 5.3.5 Recontextualized Footage 5.4 Self-reflexive vs. Reflexive Irony 183 5.4.1 The Knowing Irony of Found Footage Documentary 5.4.2 Herzog’s Found Footage as Romantic Fragment 5.4.3 Romantic vs. Rhetorical Irony 5.4.4 Irony without Distance 5.4.5 On Irony as Subjective and as Objective 5.4.6 Subjectivity vs. Documentary 5.4.7 Reality vs. Truth 5.4.8 Lacanian Mock-documentary 5.4.9 Reflective Judgment vs. Reflexive Documentary 5.4.10 ‘Poetry of Poetry’ vs ‘Mirrors within Mirrors’ 5.4.11 Third Level Reflection 5.4.12 The German Romantics and Actuality 5.4.13 Metaphors Materialized 5.5 Herzog’s Visions Between the Indexical and the Mental 212 5.5.1 Believing in Documentary? 5.5.2 The Documentary Fantastic 5.5.3 ‘Jesus,’ the Documentary Subject with the Voice of God 5.5.4 Herzog’s ‘Jesus’ as Deleuze’s Simulacrum 5.6 From Repetition of the Same in Fiction to Affirmative Repetition in Documentary 221 5.6.1 Bearing Witness to Indifference 5.6.2 Expressive Artifice in Nature 5.6.3 Between Documenting Fiction and Inventing Documentary 5.6.4 From Fiction as a Deadly Circle to Documentary as Eternal Return 5.6.5 Negative Repetitions in Fiction 5.6.6 Death Drive into Fiction 5.6.7 Dead Reality in Romanticism 5.6.8 Grizzly Fiction 5.7 Re-enactment as Repetition 242 5.7.1 Documentary: Copy without Repetition? 5.7.2 Excursion: Experience vs. Opposition in The Battle of Orgreave 5.7.3 Artist vs. Filmmaker 5.7.4 Towards a Protagonist-based Interpretation of Documentary 5.7.5 Conclusion 6. Conclusion 279 Bibligraphy 282 1 Introduction The central concern of this thesis is the way in which subjectivity relates to self-reflexivity. Is self-reflexivity merely textual and intellectual, thus creating a conventionally reflexive film that produces distance – distance between subject and object, filmmaker and protagonist? Or can there be a complicating self-reflexivity in which both filmmaker and protagonist are, in equal measures, subject and object? The latter alternative is what this thesis argues for, and finds such a mode of reflexivity in Werner Herzog’s documentaries, the socialist documentary serial The Children of Golzow (GDR, 1961-), a video installation by Alexandr Sokurov, Tracey Emin’s autobiographical art and Jeremy Deller’s re-enactment of The Battle of Orgreave (2002).