Poetic Documentary
This week’s reading by Bettina Frankham explores documentaries that are created with an open form and the ways in which this impacts a users understanding.
In a poetic approach to documentary seen in interactive documentaries, the filmmaker avoids common story form, creating an uncertainty in the user. This style opens up the opportunity for reflection on the work.
The relational aesthetic of a work provides the user to engage with the work and therefore form their initial understanding and so the connections used in a work deeply impact the user’s interpretation. When a user interacts with the work, a unique understanding is formed.
A strategy employed by filmmakers while creating a poetic documentary is the list. The list allows space for the user to engage and reflect, openness for the user to interpret and form unique interpretation of unity among fragments. Works that are structured through lists allow varied understandings to develop through relating the parts. The user has the ability to connect and form a complex meaning when a variety of fragments are engaged with. The users are the activators of the non-linear narrative.
Utilising a list allows the filmmaker to deform the narrative, the user to organise the fragments and form connections between those parts. The list does not provide a solid narrative structure, instead the fragments stimulates thought in relation to association from the users’ own memory, creating a unique interpretation of the material provided. In this method, it acts as a mnemonic device. The user chooses the form of the interactive documentary based on the content they are engaging in.
These films use theme, topic, place or concept to develop their fragments, although the connection between these parts remains ambiguous. As the user has that responsibility to form relations between the fragments, the temporal ordering is not considered significant. Within a poetic documentary ‘the facets are glimpses rather than ideal chronicles’ (Frankham, 2013). Associational form is utilised as the user is likely to create connections between fragments that are juxtaposed through their pictorial qualities and content. Associational form is seen through the formation of fragments one after another (otherwise known as montage) through the choice of the user allowing a diverse array of combinations to be formed. Montage allows significant features within fragments to be accentuated.
The user is the activator of the fragments and therefore responsible for ‘editing’ the structure of the documentary they engage with. Frankham states ‘…material can be organised for the sake of clarity, to obfuscate, to emphasise power structures, to challenge established views or to create a particular experience’ (2013). Users are more aware and accepting of active spectatorship. The users are capable of understanding different formats for presenting information and dealing with the gaps that may be present in these poetic approaches.
Documentarians such as Philip Rosen view their role as responsible for ‘…transforming raw artefacts of the world…into meaningful constructions’ (Frankham, 2013). The poetic approach allows meaning to form through a non-linear narrative. This interpretation encourages the user to make sense of the relations between the fragments. The wider understanding that is formed excuses any gaps that may be present in the poetic documentary that are usually not present in traditional documentary.
Marks mentions there is also a potential for ‘superficial engagement over a critically engaged experience when the structure of a work permits a quick scanning to grasp its intentions’ (Frankam, 2013).