How do we make documentary that is both political and poetic?
To make a political documentary effective, it needs to have poetic conventions. Terry Eagleton, a critic and Professor of English Literature at Lancaster University, argues that poetry is “emotive, original, and sensuously particular, with the texture of personal experience, whereas politics is a question of abstract notions, impersonal institutions, and collective entities.” (1) Politics are rules and regulations for the people, involving well defined determinant ideas, whereas poetry thrives on ambiguity and ambivalence. Inherently, Documentaries are non-fiction, in the fact that it’s informative and factual, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the material being communicated is “true”, and despite documentaries being needing to be factual by nature, good documentaries have a strong focus on narrative, and storytelling. Our Documentary ‘Do you see it?’ focuses on the various different kinds of prejudice that infiltrate society. It displays this theme in a poetic, and indirect way.
“We were all humans until race disconnected us, religion separated us, politics divided us and wealth classified us.”
–Pravinee Hurbungs
We decided that it was important that we avoid cliches of other films that were attempting to communicate similar topics. The film contains no interviews, although I kept a snippet of an interview with Donald Trump, when he announces that he’s the “least racist person”. I justified keeping this in the film because I had isolated only one sentence, rendering it not a voice over in context. I also chose to make the film non photo-realistic, although I justified removing the faces of models, to both avoid defaming and generalizing particular people, and to symbolise a wider context of wealth and fame instead of individuals. We also decided not to feature narration in our short documentary, as would be typical in the generic documentary format, which forces the audience to gather the meaning themselves.
Similarly to the previous short film produced in class, featuring the effects of Nuclear War and ongoing battle between countries, ‘Do you see it?’ attempts to let the audience make up their own mind, without cliche mood swaying techniques such as sad sombre piano accompanied with slow speeches. Our film on war delivered the message of what would happen if humans continued to destroy the world with warfare and nuclear weapons. Most people are already that war is bad, to the point where it’s ignorable, so we wanted to create a film that would emphasise what will happen if we continue to ignore it. As a filmmaker, I think its important to let the audience be able to argue and debate the meaning of a film or message behind a documentary, rather than have the message spelt out clearly, like Alfred Hitchcock would suggest “do it with nothing”, suggesting that the audience will come to conclusions themselves. I’d like to think we’ve achieved both ambiguity as well as a firm message with our film ‘Do you see it?’, rather than featuring messages from us specifically, it references the words of various people affected by different kinds of prejudice.
‘Do you see it?’ functions as a Documentary because it seeks to communicate real life issues, featuring documents from people in completely different situations, facing similar discrimination. It predominantly features Poetic Documentary conventions, with an emphasis on visuals, music, rhythm, mood but also contains a small portion of Reflexive Documentary conventions, with reenactments, though the reenactments are symbolic of a wider picture. (2)
Political Documentary becomes poetic when there is self interest, and real human emotion that goes into the creation, the filming, and the editing of the film. Topics that are political in the sense that they affect a large group of people will always ensue an emotional reaction that can either subconsciously or obviously inspire poetic conventions in a film that would be otherwise monotonous and plain.
On an unrelated note, this project did help me learn about green screen and advance my knowledge on Premiere.
(1) Battersby Eileen, Aug 1996, The politics of poetry, Irish Times; Dublin
(2) Nichols, N 2010, ‘Introduction to Documentary; Grouping the many voices of Documentary’, Indiana University Press, pp. 99-139.