IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.1 (2016) 86
Ed. Erika Balson & Hila Peleg, Documentary Across
Disciplines
Jan Baetens
Copublished with the Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW), Berlin, this volume on documentary filmmaking is a key publication in more than one regard.
First of all, it offers an in-depth and challenging analysis of the situation of the documentary today. The current return to the documentary, which is a cyclical phenomenon in the history of cinema, has a certain number of features that are different from the success and prestige of the documentary in other periods (for instance in early cinema, with the mythical distinction between Lumière and Méliés, the various strands of Neo-Realism, the appearance of cinéma-vérité and its many afterlives in various forms of observational cinema). As in previous periods, there is of course a direct impact of technological changes, such as digitization and the possibility it offers to redefine the traditional relationships between maker and spectator. But much more important is the blurring of boundaries between the various media and genres that are involved in the recent documentary turn. Documentary films are no longer reduced to theatrical projection or television, they enter the world of art galleries and museums, while dismantling the semiotic distinctions between the fixed and the moving image, on the one hand, and between text and image, on the other hand. Finally, there is also a different historical and political agenda that makes the documentary an almost inevitable choice for contemporary filmmakers and artists. First of all, the documentary mode fits the needs of a Zeitgeist that puts the human and social commitment at the center of any form of artistic expression (an absolute rupture with the shallow and inoffensive irony of late postmodernism). Second, new forms of documentary filmmaking also appear necessary because there is a critical awareness of the limits of older forms of the documentary. This is a position clearly summarized by Jean-Marie Straub (a director often quoted in these pages), for whom the documentary of the 60s and the 70s –strongly rejected by most of the works analyzed in this book– was (still) too close to fiction.
A second reason why this collection is so important has to do with the variety of its contents, which blends essays, interviews, poetry, manifestoes –yet no visual essays, which may come as a surprise–, and with its coverage of a very large field. The contributions in the book do not focus exclusively on very recent productions, they also entail a very welcome rereading of historical material and hence the rediscovery of less known material. Some good examples of this creative reconstruction of the medium’s past are the early 1980s observational films by Harun Farocki, which are read against the double backdrop of Wiseman’s work on American institutions and Brecht’s theory of the Lehrstück (“learning play” rather than “didactic play”),
Documentary Across Disciplines
Edited by Erika Balson and Hila Peleg Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2016, 320 pp., 40 b & w illus.
IMAGE [&] NARRATIVE Vol. 17, No.1 (2016) 87 and one of the many gems of Raymond Depardon’s 2003 production, The 10th District Court (10e chambre,
instants d’audience), which is read in its relation to the subgenre of the court room documentary but also as a more general reflection on the notions of evidence and truth in performative documentaries.
As all these examples neatly demonstrate, the rich material of this collection is not limited to one single type of documentary (there is for instance a healthy presence of French theory, which is in this case practice-based theory, as in the progressive elaboration of the film-essay format by authors such as Chris Marker, quoted and analyzed throughout the whole book). It also tackles issues that go far beyond the mere genre or medium of the documentary, raising fundamental questions on the social and political relevance of documentary practices. Absolutely crucial in this regard is the essay by Ariella Azoulay, who proposes an exceptionally thought-provoking reinterpretation of the famous Steichen exhibition, The Family of Man. In this essay, she engages in a critical discussion with the countless critiques that have been formulated against this exhibition, which was accused of wiping out the “history” of the pictured people in order to replace it with a kind of humanist universalism that was nothing else than another word for Western bourgeois capitalism. Azoulay’s text is of course not a defense of what Barthes and many others have been criticizing in The Family of Man, but she convincingly shows that a different approach of (in this case documentary) photography, that is, not as a statement fully controlled by one single author, but as a cultural practice that engages a wide range of agents and whose meaning shifts according to various local and historical contexts, is able to produce very different readings of the same material. These readings disclose instead what remains hidden in Barthes’ and others’ analyses, namely the actual history of the persons and groups on show and the critical possibilities of the exhibition’s montage effects, which make room for resistance to the one-sided view of history (as a linear and unstoppable story of progress that can only destroy other forms of socially embedded temporality).
It would be unfair however to single out just the Azoulay essay. All contributions in the book explore in very refreshing ways general theoretical topics, with a strong emphasis on the thematic level of the documentary (the representation of death, for instance) as well as a systematic combination of close-reading, critical rereading of the existing and often hegemonic literature, personal testimonies, and the attempt to always situate the elements at stake in a larger historical and medium context. Finally, there should also be words of praise for the careful editing of the book and the general readability of all its chapters (a new edition should however include an index and perhaps add some illustrations, most chapters now being without any visual counterpart, which is something that all readers will regret).
Jan Baetens is chief editor of Image (&) Narrative.
