Hungarian University of Fine Arts Doctoral School Documentary film, the Filmmaker and Representation DLA Dissertation Manuel F Contreras 2021 Supervisor: Dr. habil Tünde Mariann Varga Abstract: In this paper I study the narratives of otherness that have been an essential part of the historical evolution of documentary film: a dominant gaze in a hegemonically Eurocentric film industry. With a focus on cultural studies, film studies and postcolonial studies, I argue that it is possible to discern how documentary follows a pattern that validates and prolongs that same Eurocentrism through paternalistic, exoticizing and redemptive narratives of the other, the observed and filmed. This has been discussed during the last decades since cinema has permeated culture, cinema reaches peoples and cultures massively. Based on the historical penetration and dominance of American cinema, with now a record concentration of 85% of the world cinema market (Hughey 2014: 19), it is fair to say that film history has to be studied in the frame of the American film industry and its periphery. This asymmetrical relationship, has given as a result the tendency that one sole type of film production is regarded as universal and disseminated as such, while the others are only local expressions (Paranaguá 2003: 9). Sociology, Cultural Studies, Political Sciences, Film Studies and Psychology among other disciplines have approached film discourse in the frame of this present hegemonic production to show that there is, if not a political agenda, a point of view that in many cases modifies, distorts or normalizes aspects of history and reality. Being documentary filmmaking my field of practice, I want to discuss the aforementioned problematics in the documentary film realm with a focus on issues of representation, examining my personal work and other works that relate to it because of their place of origin and/or their role in the current production and distribution system. This paper is divided in five chapters in which I attempt to present in an inductive and comparative approach which are the elements that define and validate the issues of representation in documentary film. I do it from the perspective of a documentary filmmaker, but also, inevitably, as a Colombian filmmaker and cinema spectator, aware if issues of representation depicting me and Colombian people. In the words of Stuart Hall: it is worth remembering that all discourse is 'placed', and the heart has its reasons (1989: 69). 2 In the first chapter entitled “The Short History of Documentary Cinema” I present a case study on Nanook of The North (1922), whose director Robert Flaherty was named father of documentary filmmaking and father of ethnographic cinema, even when the truthfulness of the film and its depiction of the characters are being debated still today. This reveals how the established rules of documentary film practice are connected to issues of representation, then and as a result, now, when we see the validation of Flaherty's observation as the one being repeated in time: a white man that observes the others as exotic, primitive, backwards, etc. The second, third and fourth chapters are respectively entitled “Power”, “Truth” and “Redemption”, as three elements that are related to documentary film practices and consumption. In “Power” I make an analysis of power relations in documentary filmmaking since much of what we have seen in documentary films' history, was born out of the exploration of a distant land or distant community that an explorer filmed, which is what Robert Flaherty did. This type of observation was contended by cinema movements of the second half of the 20th century in Latin America, as a response to how Latin America was being represented by a hegemonic market with an Eurocentric vision: films about poverty. In “Truth” I analyze the evolution of ethnographic cinema in the frame of a constant presence of issues of representation. The ethnographer, as the explorer, creates a representation of the filmed that inevitably follows the preconceptions of the ethnographer's society and education. But ethnographic cinema as a genre, along with anthropology, has been able to express concern about these same issues of representation, creating a discussion around this problematic that has been virtually absent in traditional documentary filmmaking. In “Redemption”, I talk about the current approaches to issues to representation in cinema and how they are connected to cinema as an instrument for the spectator to be redeemed by being a foreign observer, this way the stories being told are tailored to fit this relationship between the spectator and the observed, which is the direct reflection and result of the redemption of the filmmaker when filming the other, ultimately prolonging a type of representation in which the observer, the white, the privileged, the explorer, is not only entitled to observe in othering forms, but also places himself/herself as superior. Power, truth and redemption are critical elements in the study of documentary film practices, but they are also elements that are part of the conception and creation of documentary films, and can be critically viewed by filmmakers when filming, something that I will also include in all of the chapters. I will also examine my interpretations and conclusions in a last chapter entitled “The Living and the Dead”, in which I trace the theoretical and conceptual connections of this document 3 with the practical work made by me as both result and reflexion of this research: the documentary film Los Vivos y Los Muertos. One of the pillars of this dissertation, treated in all the chapters in different aspects, is the argumentation about the unavoidable role of the filmmaker not only as an observer, but as creator and therefore documentary films being the result of the filmmaker's conception of the world, the filmmaker's point of view, which is not an innocent exercise of filmmaking when we can analyze the politics laying behind it, most evidently when the one observing observes another person, community or culture that is considered inferior. In Los Vivos y Los Muertos I film my own life and what happens in it as a way to debate otheristic approaches to filmmaking, following the events brought by the observation of my own drama: the search for my half brother. Through the film I intend to make a reflexion on issues of representation in documentary filmmaking by presenting a filmmaking method that connects with the arguments and concerns presented in this document. 4 Table of contents: Introduction 6 Chapter 1. The Short History of Documentary Film 11 Chapter 2. Power 22 Chapter 3. Truth 40 Chapter 4. Redemption 61 Chapter 5. The Living and the Dead 77 References 87 5 Documentary film, the Filmmaker and Representation Introduction I don't remember exactly what time, but I went to the cinema to watch this documentary film early in the afternoon, at around 1 or 2 pm, in Bogota in 2012. It was a weekday, they were not playing it on Fridays or weekends. The film was played at such unpopular slots because, first of all, it was a documentary, second, it was a Colombian film, reasons why I wanted to watch it. But as I was about to find out, it was not a good film. It was one of those films whose release was more strongly connected to a marketing campaign rather than to its quality. The screening room had around 200 seats but there were only about 10 people including me. The film's title was Ilegal.co (2012) and it was about a very complicated topic: drug trafficking. Complicated because of two of reasons. The first one being that many films have been made about this, so many that they started to look like a copy of each other. But this film was supposed to be different because it is Colombian, I was curious about what I would encounter in this almost unexplored point of view in cinema. The second one, which is the offspring of the first one, is that being a Colombian film, it automatically carries the responsibility of having to approach this topic that should present criticism from a local point of view and satisfy the local audience, the one from the country that produces the drug but is also damaged by it. It can not be a film that replicates what other films on the same topic have said, mainly because of the way things have been said in those films. Colombians as a people feel stigmatized by media and film, it is so obvious that there is even a Wikipedia entry about it (Wikipedia contributors 2021). The film was far from fulfilling those expectations. Its focus was the problems and failures of the war on drugs. It took us to airports where there were miscellaneous police controls, to poor farmers' coca fields being eradicated, to archive footage of Pablo Escobar, to American cigarettes commercials from the 50s and 60s, to interviews with Noam Chomsky and Walter Friedman (in which they say the same they have said in other interviews about the same topic) and to interviews 6 with (less important, apparently) Colombian researchers of the topic. In the last scene of the film they depict a possible future in which, apart from the fact that everybody is wearing silver-color onesies and 3D generated cars float on the streets, drugs might be legalized, or might not. That is the film's conclusive message. In general the film was not well executed, the information and research did not go beyond the superficial and was quite uninteresting to watch since it did not have a cohesive narrative construction. But beyond all this, the real problem with the film lays deeper.