How do we make a documentary that is both political and poetic?
As a praxes drawing its epistemological submissions directly from a visual representation of the world, the documentary film provides its practitioners with a unique opportunity to reflectively and reflexively engage with ideological perspectives. Recognising this is fundamental to the creation of an ethical filmmaking practice, as it holds accountable the documentary form itself for the various pedagogies is employs and disseminates through its lens.
From this point, the overarching question of how to insert a political ideology into the documentary image is thus one of a formal concern. Such a point has been recognised by critics who attribute the representational properties of the form as directly responsible for the ‘vague, unformulated, untheorised’ ideological biases manifesting through imagery (Comolli & Narboni 1999, p. 755). Consequently, in order to move against this tendency of inertia it is important to keep within the forefront of our practice a critical understanding of the film form’s indexicalisation of the world. In doing so, we not only enable ourselves the ability to manipulate the formal structure for pragmatic and ideological means, but further yet, for our own artistic and ethical expressions.
Incorporating this view into my practice, throughout this semester I have attempted to produce media forms which apply an experimental sensibility onto such formal properties including: re-appropriated found footage, non-diegetic use of sound and imagery, fragmented spatial and temporal duration, and an associational structure which negates expository or narrative for the more ambiguous qualities of poetic interpretation. In the following reflection, I will critically explore some of the formal experimentations and limitations evidenced by my earlier works. Specifically, I will contrast the experimental approaches adopted by each brief in the context of other students’ media, in an attempt to recognise more integrated filmmaking practices which are as formally experimental as they are thematically political.
https://vimeo.com/163665311
Reflecting on our first Project Brief 3 Tech-No-Logic, I felt my group successfully employed an experimental usage of re-appropriated footage and audio narration. Chiefly, through Tech-No-Logic’s reappropriation of mass media footage and mainstream pop music, we experimentally reconceptualised the expository mode’s inclinations to ‘propose a perspective, advance an argument, [and] recount history’ (Nichols 2001, p. 105). Indeed, we subverted this paradigm and inserted within it our own political commentary- that being, first world society’s misappropriation and unethical dumping of e-waste in peripheral zones, namely West Ghana.
Specifically, through hijacking the sleek visual vernacular typifying large technology brands (i.e. Apple and Microsoft) and re-contextualising them within a subversive and critical framework, Tech-No-Logic was an attempt at poetically reworking the marketing facades of large corporations in order to reveal their promotion of an unethical, technologically dependent, wasteful consumer culture. Indeed, by hijacking the very aesthetics employed for the marketing and promotion of such technologies, this documentary was one attempt at reclaiming the overarching Capitalist expository documentary- new media advertisement- and in place; inserting its own critiques vis-à-vis juxtaposition and montage.
Yet filmmaking is not only a teleological exercise in representing ideology, but a performative process. For example, the inclusion of such factors as subjects’ informed consent are often deemed integral to the process of ensuring the maintenance of subjects’ legal and moral rights over their own representations (Nash 2012, p.320). Further yet, we might argue that a subject’s active participation within a filmmaking practice is fundamental to the resistance of their own oppression and under-representation within an overarching political discourse.
Such a point was brought up early in the semester through our viewing of John Smith’s experimental documentary Blight (1994-6, UK); a film which rhythmically abstracts its working class subjects’ interviews in a formal echoing of the loss experienced by the community’s collective displacement through London’s urban sprawl. Evidently, to make a documentary both political and poetic, it is not only a manipulation of formal stylistics which must occur but a mediated inclusion of the documentary subjects themselves. In this way, Tech-No-Logic was structurally flawed, as its very components (found footage) formally negate the active participation of key subjects- the communities living in West Ghana. Hence, despite ‘no interviews’ being a constraint of Project Brief 3’s criteria, the poetic enunciation of subjects’ voices (metaphorically or literally) remains within the realm of possibility.
This was made evident when viewing other class members’ work. For example, in Ruby and Patrick’s documentary on housing development, despite not actively interviewing members of the neighbourhood, they managed to incorporate a thematically appropriate poem centred on dislocation and loss. By weaving together spoken poetry and cogent imagery; their film was afforded a profound emotional tone, something between pathos and ennui. Hence, through their employment of a literal and figurative understanding of filmic poetics, their documentary was able to formally enunciate a sense of loss without an explicit voice of god narration or interview excerpts. To these ends, this technique can be viewed as both poetic and experimental due to their unique treatment of the overarching limitation: ‘no interviews’.
Consequently, drawing upon Ruby and Patrick’s usage of poetic formal approaches to sound, in Project Brief 4: Flow I sought to more directly integrate formal poetics with political commentary through unconventional treatment of interview/voice over techniques. Chiefly, this was achieved through the direct inclusion, albeit experimental editing of various interview excerpts from our documentary’s subjects; a technique inspired in part by Smith’s Blight (1994-6). Evidently, by broadening our thematic concerns to the level of lived experiences of menstruation, my group was able to collate together a range of anecdotal material in order to represent various differing perceptions within a short time frame.
Perhaps here, it is important to reflect upon my groups’ embodied experiences with the documentary’s topic of periods- a factor which further enabled us to creatively abstract the audio footage without an exploitative paradigm emerging. For example, by sourcing our interview subjects within our own social circles we were able to stylistically manipulate the audio materials without othering or fetishitically conceiving our subjects’ representations. For example, if we did not have pre-established relationships with our interviewees, an experimental treatment of their stories might be viewed as ethically problematic due to the fact that large portions of their statements were intertwined, and thus, to some degree decontextualised. However, such a fact was mitigated due to a deliberate structural approach which negated outright visual fidelity for a more poetic and metaphorical form.
This was achieved through our formal decision to negate literal representation and explicit delineation of our interviewees and their identities (gender, socio-economic backgrounds, ethnicity, etc). In place of this, we utilised a mixture of found footage and shot footage which was non-photorealistic, having been placed underneath a silhouette mask of underwear. As such, by formally omitting a visual representation of individuals in favour of an unconventional treatment of subject depiction, Flow focuses instead upon the auditory unification of differing lived experiences through visual poetics- a political approach which seeks to challenge the essentialist conflation of cis-gendered women with menstruation, as much as it does metaphorically associate menstruation with un-stigmatised natural phenomena.
Perhaps it is from this point that we might conclusively, though not definitively, suggest that experimental documentary filmmaking is as much political through its processes as it is due to thematic preoccupations. Indeed, by reimagining a filmmaking practice more tethered to a active participation and performative ethics, media practitioners might move towards a more experiential and experimental understanding of the world we seek to re-present.
References:
Comolli, JL & Narboni, J 1999, ‘Cinema Ideology Criticism’, in L Braudy & M Cohen (eds.), Film Theory and Criticism, 5th edn, e-book, Oxford University Press, New York, pp. 752-759, viewed 25 May 2016, <https://equella.rmit.edu.au/rmit/file/961f3fcd-b414-1d92-9e11-073af9415e54/1/31259009996666.pdf>.
Nash, K 2012, ‘Telling stories: the narrative study of documentary ethics’, New Review of Film and Television Studies, vol. 10, no. 3, pp. 318-331, viewed 2 June 2016,
<http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2012.693765>
Nichols, B 2001, Introduction to Documentary, e-book, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, viewed 30 May 2016, <http://www.rmit.eblib.com.au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/patron/FullRecord.aspx?p=129783&echo=1&userid=kpJFh7oGLWK4Q9L59zwl4Q%3d%3d&tstamp=1464665062&id=9934EC6DC9D5E874F9122EAB0200F2C6A847246C>.