1 Introduction: Representation and Documentary Emotion

Notes 1 Introduction: Representation and Documentary Emotion 1. Throughout this book I use the term ‘narrative’ to describe how a sequence of events and individuals are represented in a documentary in ways that infer a recognisable ordering of time and space. I acknowl- edge that many scholars limit narrative to the domain of fiction film. In employing the term I wish to emphasise the storytelling capacity of non-fiction and the diverse ways in which documentaries organ- ise the worlds they represent to make these worlds recognisable to viewers. 2. See Perri 6 et al. for a survey of some of this scholarship. 3. A number of philosophers, most notably Hobbes and Spinoza, provide the basis for this line of thought. Political philosophy and feminist theory have, in ways that are gaining more and more theoretical momentum, sought to understand the role of the passions in political life. See Gatens, James, Honneth and Mouffe. 4. See also McGuigan, Ahmed, Brown and Spelman. 5. Stearns and Stearns term this cultural variability of emotion ‘emotionology’ and address the historical dimension of this at some length. 6. See Carl Plantinga and Greg M. Smith, Murray Smith, Malcolm Turvey. 7. The reason for this aversive response to pleasure may well (and understand- ably so) be due to the expansion of feminist film scholarship that sought to dismantle the gendered implications of scopophilia. Documentary, of course, does not exist outside gendered constructions, as will be discussed in Chapter 2. 8. Among the technologies Cowie refers to are the devices constructed by Eadward Muybridge, and, pertinently, those designed by scientists such as the stereoscope. These were integral in linking vision, pleasure and cinematic representations of actuality. While the pleasure tied to the function of display in early cinema has been well theorised, mainly in Tom Gunning’s work on primitive cinema (as I will discuss at greater length in Chapter 2), the non-fiction cinema of early, scientifically inspired devices and then later ‘actualities’ exist as an important facet of the lineage of documentary film. Eric Barnouw is one scholar to begin his history of the non-fiction film not with the social realism of the 1920s but with the earliest cinematic technology that preceded and then included the Lumiere Brothers. Paula Rabinowitz also cites the Lumiere Brothers as the founding fathers of documentary and newsreel. 189 190 The Documentary 9. Although Dyer seems to open a place to discuss a history of signs, he is much more interested in the correspondence between signs and the instances of different historically and culturally determined sensibilities. My interest is in drawing out this aspect of Dyer’s essay to propose an understanding of documentary that both acknowledges the stratum of pre-established relations with the form, as it is constituted through a mutating history of signs, and with intensity in ways that work at the needs and desires pertaining to a given social system. 10. With the rise in the popularity of documentary, particularly the films that follow in the wake of Michael Moore’s style of film-making, the land- scape of political documentary production and reception has changed markedly over the last decade. As Stella Bruzzi observes, documentary has become a global commodity (1). If the committed documentary seeks to mobilise a subject of agency, it is increasingly important in this new era of production to also account for the subject of consumption, and entertainment, that these films engage. 11. The recent book by Lisa Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship: Technologies of Voice and Affect in Postwar Representations of the Child, notwithstanding. In this book, Cartwright argues that 1970s and 80s feminist film theorists missed an opportunity to fully realise the importance of object relations in cinema. 12. The bad object is also the mother. For Klein all loved objects are, simul- taneously, hated. 2 Pleasure and Disgust: Desire and the Female Porn Star 1. Beyond the mainstream, other examples have contributed to this revi- sion of sexual agency, including the film-making of Jane Campion or Catherine Breillait and the figures of Susie Bright, or ‘post-porn Goddess’, Annie Sprinkle. 2. In this sense, my discussion is limited to the problem of how female agency and desire is produced in the text through genre conventions and popular discourse. Questions that pertain to the female viewer and her desirous relationship to pornography and the female porn star are significant, yet this particular question of difference is beyond the scope of this chapter. 3. As Gunning describes, until approximately 1906, actuality films outnum- bered fictional films. It is this era of film culture that is central to his analysis. 4. Muybridge’s well-known images of horses and other animals offered evi- dence of the nature of movement in ways that appealed to a desire for new scientific knowledge and his projections were shown in lecture halls to interested audiences of the time. This focus on zoology soon encom- passed the mechanics of the human body, with naked or semi-naked pictorial accounts of men, women and children performing short tasks and activities. Notes 191 5. See Kaplan (Pornography), Rich (Anti-porn) or Williams (Hard Core). 6. SBS Television (Special Broadcasting Service) is Australia’s smaller, second public service broadcaster with a charter that stipulates that SBS must work to meet the needs of culturally diverse viewing nation. 7. See Arthurs or Boyle for more discussion of ‘docuporn’. 8. See McRobbie, Walkerdine et al., Attwood, Gill and Whelelan. 3 Injury, Identity and Recognition: Rize and Fix: The Story of an Addicted City 1. For work that specifically examines documentary representations of the Holocaust and trauma, see Joshua Hirsch, Shoshana Felman or Janet Walker (who also presents insightful discussions of documentary, memory and the trauma related to incest). 2. Not a Love Story: A Film about Pornography, discussed in the previous chapter, is an interesting example emerging out of the women’s movement. 3. Importantly, in his essay ‘New Subjectivitites: Documentary and Self- Representation in the Post-verite Age’, Renov describes how the social movements of the 1960s and 70s gradually became displaced by the politics of identity that were marshalled by the women’s movement. The emphasis on issues of sexuality, race and ethnicity was evident in documentary by 1990, in films that expressed the ‘disparate cultural identities of the makers’ (The Subject 176). While I am not specifically discussing autobiographical films here, the body of films Renov describes contributes to the politics of the subject in documentary that I am referring to. 4. This point references Jane Gaines’s argument that ‘the documentary film that uses realism for political ends has a special power over the world of which it is a copy because it derives its power from that same world’ (‘Political’ 95). 5. Although both draw on identity discourses, Rize and Fix can be placed slightly differently in relation to traditions of documentary practice. Fix is a product of Canada’s National Film Board (NFB) and was released in the same year as Bowling for Columbine. The film should be contextualised less through a relation to Moore’s film than a history of NFB documentary film-making and its reputation for a long- standing commitment to the production of political documentary. This commitment is evidenced by a history of production that includes Wild’s own work, that of Alanis Obomsawin, George C. Stoney and Bonnie Sherr Klein among many others. Central to Rize, as I will discuss, is the spectacle of dance, and as such it can be positioned alongside other spectacle-oriented documentaries such as Touching the Void. Yet the narrative impetus of the film finds a place in the body of work that explores experiences of racialised oppression, comparable in its African American specificity to Hoop Dreams (1994), or the more recent The Boys of Baraka (2005), among others. 192 The Documentary 6. This specificity is emphasised in the film when, at one point, a piece of ethnographic footage of African tribal dance (actually sourced from one of Leni Riefenstahl’s films on the Nuba, ca 1970s) is interspersed with a contemporary dance sequence. The documentary seems to be referenc- ing, in this manner, a connection between African tribal culture and African American culture: krumping, as a response to oppression and exclusion from capitalist aspiration is a retrieval or revival of a culturally specific practice and thus is posed as a resistant activity. While this locates krumping as, perhaps, a radically specific culture, it also, through essentialising the practice, negates the agency involved in krumping as a subversive tactic, while bringing to the film, the romanticising and objectifying gaze of Riefensthal’s own camera. 7. See NFB (51–2) for more details of the community outreach and market- ing that accompanied the release of the film. 8. The rest of the community that is represented in Fix who struggle with their addiction are also represented in ways that resist articulating an explanatory trauma. However, they are given little voice in the narrative. When compared with Wilson, they become a backdrop for his charis- matic character sketch. Thus they emerge as caricatures, defined solely by their drug use and by their socio-economic status. 9. This is also an unmistakably abject representation of the body of the drug user, echoing my discussion in the previous chapter. The recognition of corporeality and the boundary site of the body is emphasised as it is transgressed by the needle. This re-inscribes the eclipsing of subjectivity. 10. For example, for Scarry, physical pain provides the nation-state with control over a collective imaginary or reality. In another instance, Berlant views a politics of pain as unviable due to the way it is constantly advanced in the public arena as sentimentality, thus positing an intimate public sphere in which the personal is deployed in ways that eclipse the political.

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