NUEVAS CONVERSACIONS SOBRE CINE DOCUMENTAL (II): MICHAEL CHANAN

Por Ricard Mamblona

La segunda entrevista la realicé a mi maestro Michael Chanan, durante mi estancia becada en Londres y aprendizaje a su lado, el 27 de octubre de 2009.

El profesor Michael Chanan es catedrático de la Roehampton University of London y codirector del Centre for Research in Film and Audiovisual Cultures (CRFAC). Famoso documentalista, es autor de obras tan fundamentales como The Politics of Documentary, entre otros ensayos sobre cine.

 

Which are the main factors that contribute to the development and evolution of this new wave of documentary films?

Well, I guess one has to start by saying that it’s the technology. The danger of saying that is giving the impression that this is determined by the technology, which I don’t believe, obviously.  Well, not “obviously”… I don’t believe it. I think what the technology does, so digital cameras (this camera sitting by itself over there filming us at the moment) is that it makes possible a very low-budget, very intimate form of filming, and of editing and of dissemination.

But when you look at who’s interested in this new documentary, where it’s shown, festivals and so on it becomes clear that there’s a hunger for this kind of film work which is not satisfied either by commercial distributors or by television.  So television documentary follows certain generic formulae which don’t work for so many people any more, for all sorts of reasons, and some of them, some of those generic effects, they’re not even films, they’re illustrated radio programmes. 

And there have been some surveys which seem to reveal that people who go and see documentary in the cinema, that is to say at festivals, in art-houses and so on, are people who watch much less than average television, and they go for subject matter, not for star names except, of course, for those few documentaries which do get into commercial distribution.  Michael Moore gets it, occasionally things like Fog of War, natural history documentaries, those things do get into commercial distribution, but that is not representative particularly of the huge range of work that is being done now.

So it’s not only a great development in the number of productions but also in new aesthetics and trends of documentary film...

Yes, it’s obviously had a huge impact on various levels. The point is without a fairly cheap, easy means of production, you wouldn’t have this huge submerged sector of production. It depends where you’re looking from, but you wouldn’t have the Cine Indígena movement in Latin America or the Cine Picatero in Argentina. You wouldn’t have the enormous amount of production that’s funded by NGO’s around the world, and as soon as you take those examples you see that documentary in that sense is a very democratic force, but democratic outside the official domains of the public sphere. 

It begins to form a parallel public sphere, and this is what the Internet serves to do. So what I’m saying is that there is an interplay between the whole new digital technology and the desire and hunger for that to be used in a certain way, which is beyond the pale as far as the commercial operators are concerned and as far as television is concerned.  We get all sorts of examples on television, because television is kleptomaniac and will use whatever forms, techniques and so forth that are emerging and adapt them to its own requirements.

Do you think the new digital devices provide a better (or simpler) approach to reality?

One answer would be “Yes”, and the other would be “Yes, but be careful”. The answer “Yes” it’s like the tortoise and the hare because reality is something that you can try and get closer and closer to, but you will never actually reach with the camera, for all sorts of reasons.

Fernando Birri already talked about that, at the beginnings of the new Latin American documentary, when he said that documentary is a process of “aproximaciones a la realidad”, a getting closer to reality, or “a reality”. In a way I prefer to say “a reality”. If you say “reality”, that supposes that there is something there which is “the” reality, and I’m not sure about that... I mean, epistemologically I’m sure about that, epistemologically you are sitting there in front of me... I overheard somebody on a mobile phone on the underground the other day saying to his interlocutor “I’m sort of on the train”, and I wanted to say to him, “What do you mean you’re “sort of” on the train? Are you not sitting next to me?”

So yes, reality is there, but the moment there’s a lens between reality and your vision of it, you can’t, I think, talk about “the” reality any more, you have to talk about “a” reality, which is to say, that particular reality which you are seeing and constructing at that moment. So I want to emphasize, this is not a relativist position I’m putting forward about reality, it’s a position which says that the version of reality that you put on the screen is shaped by the way you put it there.

In that context, if you talk about digital cameras, first of all, this is obviously much easier and much more intimate because you can do this piece of filming without having a crew, without having lights and without even putting your eye to the camera. So you get a much more intimate relationship with the people that you’re filming. What happens then when the camera is wielded by somebody who is, in the academic phrase, a participant observer, in other words, people who are using the camera to speak in the first person, of a social group that they are part of (so it might even become a first person plural). Then, is this a kind of even greater penetration of reality? I don’t like that way of putting it. You don’t penetrate reality in that sort of way, but it is a perspective that the external viewer doesn’t have a chance of witnessing, except in this way.

With the possibilities of digital cameras and “manipulating” images and sounds in the editing rooms, do you think that new dangers arise for the traditional values of documentary in terms of “objectivity”?

There’s two or three terms there. We’ll come back to manipulation in a second, but the word “dangers” and the phrase “to the traditional forms of documentary”... “The traditional forms of documentary” can look after themselves. Let’s not suppose that they’re holy and sacred forms that have to be observed. So the dangers are not to the traditional forms of documentary, because we’re not interested in that, the danger is something completely else.

One of the dangers might be precisely the idea that you can manipulate further, but I don’t like the word manipulation because manipulation implies a kind of instrumental intervention. It implies that you’re being a magician in some way, that is to say you’re performing this trick but hiding from the viewer how it’s done, from the spectator, from the audience, how it’s done, so you’re taking them in, in some way.

I don’t accept that notion because there is no art without doing something with the material, with your raw material. So all film-making is a form of manipulation in that sense, which is in a sense quite neutral. So the danger, if there is a danger, is not in more manipulation or less manipulation, it must be something else.

I think the dangers would depend on, for example, the genre that you’re talking about. First person documentary, in certain hands, becomes very narcissistic.  Are we to call that “dangerous”? Or can narcissism also be creative and imaginative? If you compare Michael Moore and Agnès Varda, they’re both narcissistic, but Agnès Varda’s narcissism is actually self-deprecating. Derrida, in the film Derrida, touches on the subject of narcissism, and he’s very self-deprecating about it but he was clearly very narcissistic. Is Michael Moore self-deprecating about his narcissism? No, don’t think so. Does that mean that he represents a kind of danger?  No, I don’t think so.

Is there any contract or “agreement” between the filmmaker and the audience when the film is signed or categorized as a documentary?

Yes, I think that introducing this idea of the contract is very useful, as long as you add a rider. There’s a contract between the film-maker and the subject, there’s a contract between the film-maker and the audience, but they take different forms, and partly they’re unwritten. I say partly, because in this encounter that we’re having now, the contract is unwritten. But if I go out and film professionally I’m supposed to get a written contract from my subject, in which they sign away their rights.

But there’s an unwritten part of the contract as well. In the case of a conversation on film, an interview, part of the unwritten contract might be about that. Actually, there’s a kind of game going on, and that game is a bit like chess, except that it’s a very strange game because you can change the rules while you’re going along. Suppose that I start asking you questions, instead of you asking me questions, then in the middle I’ve suddenly changed the rules. 

The contract between the filmmaker and the audience, insofar as it’s formal, it’s the ticket you buy at the box office.  It’s the right of the person to enter and view the film, or the receipt for the DVD, which means it doesn’t exist if it’s on television, or on the Internet unless you have to pay for it on the Internet.  So most of it is completely unwritten, and part of that unwritten contract is the promise that what you’re looking at is in one way or another real.

One of the nicest ways of describing that is Dai Vaughan in his book For Documentary, when he says “(...) What is the guarantee that what you’re seeing existed in front of the camera at some point?” Of course this is also upset by digitalization and the ease with which you can fabricate things while apparently still leaving them real. But there are limits, and the limits are, for example, the comment of the Hollywood digital animator when asked to comment on one of those first tapes of Osama Bin Laden holding a meeting which went round on television and he’s asked “could this be faked?” Because that was one of the things that was being questioned in the press, and his reply was along the lines of  “look, we can make Harry Potter fly on a broom and we can have spaceships exploding in space, but this, a bad image, out of focus, with poor sound, we couldn’t possible fake that.”  But how do you know? 

It must be, to his eye, but also to anybody else’s eye, that there is a texture, a quality, an arraignment of elements within the image they’re watching, which communicate a certain conviction. So when television news gets hold of videos of the Sri Lanka’s army apparently having just massacred some Tamil Tigers or footage that was on the other night of the latest bombs in Bagdad, this is not official news footage, this is taken by somebody who was there as a witness with a camera, who were they? If they’re activist, political activists, they’re anonymous, probably. And so the television says “we cannot vouch for the authenticity of this footage” because they have to say that, but does anybody doubt that it is authentic? So there’s something in the image that carries that conviction at the limits. The problem is that it isn’t always obvious where the limits are.

In that sense, the documentary filmmaker has an ethical responsibility...

The reason I’m pausing in answering a question about the ethics of the documentary filmmaker is that again there’s more than one answer. And one answer is that it’s not about ethics, it’s about politics. This is the answer that for example Fred Jamieson would give. But I think you have to gloss that.

I do think it’s about politics, but I would say that the ethical position that the filmmaker takes up has to be understood in terms of his or her politics, or the politics of the medium or a political construct around it but that doesn’t mean to say that on the individual level you can’t talk about ethics.

And this is something that I’m puzzling about and trying to think out and understand because I think that I, for a long long time, could never really accept liberal arguments about ethics. Precisely because it seemed to me that what they were hiding were political issues. So I would say that the idea that the documentary filmmaker, on that written contract that the interviewee signs, the release form, they sign away all their rights. Is that ethical?

Actually there might be two answers, again. At least. Because some people would say, “look, the filmmaker, the researcher, is enlisting their freedom of speech or their academic freedom and should not limit their right to do that by giving the subject or the contributor or the interviewee any right to constrain what they’re going to say”. And then, there’s virtually the opposite point of view, which is everything in favour of the subject, of the contributor, of the speaker.  Put it like that and you’ve got a clash with no mediation between them.

As a filmmaker, as a documentarist, I have an ethical responsibility to the people I’m filming. First of all, it’s not ethical if I don’t treat people with respect, with a couple of exceptions, politicians and criminals, because they’re trying to use me, or trying to evade responsibility, and my task is to expose that, but everybody else you must treat with respect.

And that’s on the personal level, but also not distort their representation.  Condense it, and so on and so forth, and obviously we have a kind of bias to people who can do what I’m not doing now, which is be succinct in their response, ‘cause I’m just rabbiting on… why am I rabbiting on? Because to me there’s a very uncertain area here because anything beyond the question of personal interaction does seem to me to be more and more a question of politics. A question of political judgement, a question of the politics of documentary. 

Let me tell you a little story, which kind of illustrates exactly where the tensions are. There we were in 1978 filming a big anti-fascist demonstration in the south of London. We were a two-person crew, we were not working for television, but we looked like we were a television crew because of the equipment we were using and the way we were moving around and so forth. And, at one point, we’re filming a guy who’s lying on the floor with blood pouring out of his head,  because he’d just been smashed by some police batons, and we’re standing there filming his and one of the people who’s there attending him stands up and says “who gave you the right to film him?” What’s the situation? First of all, legally this is something going on in public in a public space, we’re not filming a criminal, of course we’ve got the right to film. But on another level, “Hey, you guys, we’re really on your side, so don’t object”… Not we’re “really” on your side – we are on your side – we’re not television, we’re making a film for the anti-fascist movement, so don’t object. And the third point of view is “forget about it, don’t answer, don’t attempt to answer, there’s no point, don’t intervene in the reality that’s in front of you”. Which of those is the ethical position? All three are part of the situation. We finished the shot and moved on to the next shot.  There’s no double question there.

Talking about politics, do you think digitalization process contributes to democratization of public opinion?

Absolutely, but if we talk about digital and the Internet in terms of democratization then I think we have to understand that we’re talking about something very different from what is meant by democracy in the mouths of the political class and the media.  Because democracy in official terms is a chimera, it doesn’t exist, it never has and never will, but it’s actually getting less democratic, it depends where you are.

It’s a good democratic result that Obama got elected in the United States. It’s a bad democratic result that the BNP got elected to Europe in the last European elections. What’s even worse, of course, is the conduct of an international geopolitics based on the idea that we, the democratic nations, bring democracy to you, the failed State, because, as we have just seen in Afghanistan, that’s not what’s happening. That is completely and totally and utterly false. But the use of digital technology to give the lie to the official version of things is of course highly democratic but it implies a different kind of democracy.

But some countries are using censorship, controlling not only contents but dissemination, and technological tools play a big part in all that...

No, not in some countries, I believe that that’s the situation in China because censorship in China applies either to work that’s produced for the cinema or for television so if you shoot an independent video they don’t have the structures to control that. The result in Chinese documentary, the little I’ve been able to see and the conversations that I’ve had about it and so on give me to understand that this doesn’t mean that you’ve got an explicitly anti-state anti-party dissident documentary in that fully-fledged sense.

I’m thinking now of  the film that I saw on the redevelopment of Shanghai for example, what the filmmaker is giving a very personal perspective on the event.  This is a guy who is actually filming his grandmother who is one of the last residents in one of these little houses in a district that they’re trying to pull down to redevelop, and it’s where he grew up, but he adds just at one or two moments comments on screen which kind of push right to the limits of what can be said publicly and still sell the film to television.

I think one of the most interesting things about these Chinese documentaries is their intensely observational quality, but combined often, or sometimes – I can’t say often, I haven’t seen enough – but combined sometimes with very advanced digital image manipulation techniques. I’ve seen a short, for example, that was funded by an NGO and post-production was done in France. But that I think is a general rule that you find worldwide: lots of short documentaries being made within this parallel sphere are actually being funded by NGOs or perhaps they come from university research projects.

What do you think are the reasons that the new documentary tends towards the first person? We can see some examples of autobiographical, film diary, etc.

This is something we’re all trying to work out, still… First person documentary is not necessarily autobiographical. I think it was a psychoanalyst who commented on the fact that although they’re completely different mediums and completely different practices, there is a certain similarity between the psychoanalyst and the psychoanalyzand and the documentary maker and his or her subject. First of all, each needs the other. Second, the relationship is not symmetrical. Or rather, second, they both involve a form of transference. And third, there is a sense in which the psychoanalyst still has power and there’s certainly a sense in which the filmmaker has power over their subject, although that power is not necessarily the filmmaker so much as, apparently, the camera itself.

If the camera itself has power it’s because it’s seen as representing something within the social formation. But it’s quiet clear that the filmmaker projects onto their subject, and the subject enjoys the narcissism that goes with having that attention paid to you, and there’s a certain kind of streak of exhibitionism.

What would be the ways of elaborating this? One would be to ask why is it that certain people don’t like to be filmed, or sometimes even photographed.  Frankly, I don’t like it. That would be one way to ask that question. Anyway, pose all those questions and then say what happens when the filmmaker is his or her own subject? What happens to that relationship? One of the reasons why this situation has arisen is a mounting distrust in certain quarters that the documentary is as truly objective as it is claimed to be or as it claims itself to be.

One line of attack says this isn’t an objective reality, this is a fiction, just like any other. Which I don’t believe it. And I don’t believe it because the status of the documentary image as a pro-filmic image is different from the status of fiction as a pro-filmic image. It has to do with what lies outside the frame. So I don’t believe that it’s all fiction. But the accusation that it isn’t as objective as it pretends to be doesn’t quite hit the nail on the head because what you have to say is that what is really under suspicion is that what is represented, is ideologically constructed, and people withdraw their trust because they see or even just sense this ideological construction.

One response from the filmmaker is to say - Frederick Wiseman’s made this response – “No I’m not objective, I’m subjective. It’s my point of view.”  But then I want to add a rider, and that is that what appears on the screen: is the objective representation of the filmmaker’s subjectivity.

 

 

What are the most important technological changes that have conditioned documentary forms?

If you run down briefly, first of all, the coming of sound, but not because it solved anything, on the contrary, it presented documentaries with a problem.  Because the arrival of sound was designed for the studio, not for location, not for synch recording on location, and that’s a whole subject area which is not very well investigated, and needs to be.

The second thing is the continuing use of the hand-held 16mm camera. 16 mm originally introduced as an amateur format, but becoming professionalized by war reporters in the Second World War, and then by television. Because television didn’t need 35 mm to start with, the resolution of the television image wasn’t good enough.

Then, the introduction of synch-sound filming at the end of the 50s which leads to cinéma-vérité and direct cinema. In a way, I think that the process of digitalization has just been the continuation of something that began at that moment at the beginning of the 60s. It was already possible at the beginning of the 60s for one person to film all by themselves.

There used to be a reporter team on a BBC news magazine programme in the 1960s – the programme was called Tonight, the reporter team were Trevor Philpott and Slim Hewitt. Trevor Philpott was the reporter in front of the camera, Slim Hewitt filmed with a 16mm motorized Bolex connected to a tape recorder slung on his shoulder. So what you’re doing now with this camera here is merely the very considerable improvement in ease of use, in lowering of cost because it’s mass-produced, all of those things, of a trend, a tendency, a possibility that first appeared on the scene 50 years ago.

What digitalization adds, and is arguably completely new, is not the instruments of production, but the instruments of post-production, the editing. So that now married to the very high quality that you get from digital video, not only can you film all by yourself if you want to, not so much to be advised always, but you can edit all by yourself and you can produce the medium of dissemination all by yourself and you can put it up on the Web all by yourself.

Now, I don’t want to fetishize all of that, I think you have to understand what it is that it allows. One way of capturing it, is to say that it’s the realization of the dream, as it were, of filmmaking as a form of writing, in the words of Astruc with the Caméra-Stylo. And for me in particular, what I find is that this sense that what you do is to write the film is what I find in the editing programme on the timeline as you put the film together. Because if you’ve got either the experience or the chutzpah you don’t write a script any more. You start editing the film, you view what you’ve shot and you start selecting things and you think “that can go with that”, you don’t write it down and then try it out later, you think “that can go with that, let’s put it there.”  And you write the film on the timeline like that. That I think is the essential ingredient that digital video adds to what was already developing at the beginning of the 60s with lightweight equipment.

Don’t you agree that there is not much difference between direct cinema or cinéma vérité in the 50s-60s and the current affairs reporting nowadays?

That’s right. Well, in a way, it’s exactly that. Is that the idea of trying to construct a notion of documentary as a kind of pure art form of some kind doesn’t work at all and one of the reasons that it doesn’t work at all is because there’s a whole range of forms of representation of socio-historical reality. Because there’s a whole range of practices which share the same techniques and skills and problematics which are the essay-film, which is the purest form of documentary in some respects, or the observational documentary, the reportage or the newsreel, even.

It’s like saying “I think most subjects for documentaries could be turned into a documentary of two minutes or two hours” – it’s not the subject, it’s the treatment -.  It’s the form of representation in terms of narrative, or argument, or whatever it is, so there’s this nice story that John Simpson, the BBC reporter, tells, when he was criticized for a news report that was a little bit too long, and he replied “Look, I can tell you the whole of the story of the First World War in one and a half minutes, the thing is there just wouldn’t be very much detail in there.” Just go to the opposite extreme, and put in all the detail you like and you end up with a 16-hour television series. So it’s not the subject, it’s the treatment.

The skills are increasingly the same. They always were the same. When Grierson tried to define documentary, he tried to exclude everything that he thought of as a lower form – newsreel, the educational documentary, the didactic documentary, and so on and so forth -. He wanted to exclude those because he wanted his filmmakers to think in terms of a kind of artistic construct, in theory, that had social responsibility writ large on it. In practice, he never stopped anyone doing anything in any particular way that they wanted to. The skills are the same. So you can’t make those kind of distinctions, it’s pointless.

What are the advantages and disadvantages of television in terms of documentary’s image?

I think basically what’s on television in terms of what people think documentary is, is a complete disaster. You know it’s almost impossible to get a documentary commissioned by television that doesn’t have a commentary on it. The notion that you have to tell people what they’re watching. And as I said before, the worst instances the whole thing is so completely formulaic that it isn’t a film at all, it’s an illustrated radio programme, which is part of the practice of news reportage in this country now. 

What to report on television news if it’s BBC and then turn on the radio and you’ll hear the soundtrack from the television report. On the other hand, there are forms of television documentary that are at least efficacious, and they’re thought of actually not even necessarily as documentary but maybe as factual programming. The other night there was a report on about the side effects of statins. I’m one of the 7 million people in this country who take statins and that I wanted to see that. I’d learn something that was relevant to me, and I did. If you, as a filmmaker, have a choice, you might sometimes say “I want to this for an utterly conventional current affairs slot because it’s going to get an audience of 4 million”. And if I did it as an independent documentary, which could be as aesthetically innovative and imaginative as you like, maybe I’ll get, I’ll be lucky if I get 400,000 – which is a huge number for an independent documentary -, actually, that’s not on television. So you might make that choice, because you think it’s important to reach as large an audience as possible in that instance.  And I’ve done that as well, and I don’t like the results, but that’s a political choice.

Is Reality TV having an influence on the forms of cinematic documentary films?

Of course it has an influence, but the influence is one of negation and refusal, so there are a whole lot of documentaries which refuse to go anywhere near that. I am thinking of Darwin’s Nightmare, or La Libertad from Argentina, Checkpoint, the Israeli film…

So these are a good influences...

I wonder if it isn’t the other way around, that is to say that what television has done, in its kleptomaniac fashion, is to steal from some of the resources of documentary and to fetishize them, and turn them into what we call reality TV, or what some people call reality TV. Because of course it’s a complete misnomer because it isn’t reality in any shape or form, it’s a complete fiction.

What is clear, however, is that it’s dependent on the technology. Somebody recently posted on Youtube, and I’m going to put it up somewhere, a video demonstrating how the entire production setup allows for extremely fast editing of the selection of the material, so it can go out on air that night in the space of an hour (reduced to the space of an hour) It’s dependent on post-production editing.

What is the role the Internet is playing in all of this, now, when you can express your opinions on Youtube and other platforms?

I think there are at least two points of entry into considering that. One would be from the point of view of the viewer, the user, the person sitting in front of their computer, which obviously changes their relationship to the image on the screen. It’s even different from watching the same thing on a television set.  And by the way, part of that difference and part of the difference between those individualized forms of consumption and projection is what happens to the sound.

And the first thing that I think you have to say is that Internet dissemination, in whatever form, blows apart all the conventions and rules about the nature of dissemination, distribution and exhibition. In a way there aren’t any rules any more. At the same time, the increase in production, because it’s coming from small, low-budget and no-budget sources, is absolutely enormous. I’m told that for the upcoming documentary film festival in Pamplona, where there will be twenty films in competition, the number of submissions they’ve had is 2,700. And you get the same kind of figures in every case now. And huge growth in the number of film festivals and documentary film festivals, precisely because people do want to see these things on screen, on a big screen in the cinema, with a collective audience, not just by themselves in front of their computer. 

Another effect, however, which is particularly due to the form of dissemination of the Internet, has to do with form. Because the work which works best in that way is very short. This is not a bad thing, at all. It includes a huge amount of rubbish, but basically it’s not a bad thing at all. On the contrary, it seems to me, and I’ve just taught a workshop in one week, where people had to make three-minute documentaries, that it’s a very difficult task, actually, it’s more difficult than you think, or than one might think at first. In the same way that writing a sonnet or a haiku or any short poetic form actually requires a great deal of discipline and condensation of images and all that sort of thing. So I enjoy those very short films a great deal, when they’re good. Actually, I sometimes enjoy them when they’re bad as well, but that has to do with my own particular form of cinephilia which is directed especially at documentary.

What about documentary films in terms of economic profitability?

There’s a one-line answer to that. Don’t give up your day job. I mean, part of the democratization of the media that you’re talking about is that you don’t have to be a professional filmmaker any more. Actually, this thing has gone in two steps because if you go back to the seventies and the eighties, the aspirant to enter the medium as a documentary filmmaker, when somebody is starting out and they don’t know the shape of the industry, and they’re still at film school or whatever, is that they imagine that they’re going to spend their whole lives directing films. When you get out there into the real world, and have to hustle for work, especially as a freelancer, you discover it doesn’t work that way. So in my generation I have any number of friends who spent most of their time as freelance cinematographers or freelance sound recorders or freelance editors, and every now and again they would be able to get a commission to make a film of their own. 

So the formal division of labour which existed was something which coagulated and then fell apart and then, two years later, the same people might work together again because they knew each other and that was a good way to work. This is very different from big feature and fiction production. Of course in that field you also get people who repeatedly work together but it’s more anonymous and it’s huge. You can have hundreds of people whereas documentaries, even well-funded ones are made by a relatively small core crew (ten, a dozen people at the most, perhaps) with others around them providing particular bits of services and so on.

Now that’s shifted, there are a lot of people who still work that way, obviously, who are professionals and are earning their living that way, but have to move between different jobs within that division of labour, but to give real meaning to this idea that the digital age has produced a democratization of production is to say that you don’t have to be a professional to be able to make good work. So not only don’t give up your day job because you’re not going to be able to make a living at it, but why should you give up your day job, if as part of that, or alongside it, you can also produce video? 

In the same way that any educated person in any contemporary culture can write, and if you can write, you can contribute, in theory, to the public sphere.  Or, nowadays, you can write a blog. Millions and millions of blogs, read by very few people. But some of them are read by quite a few people, and political blogging allows a whole parallel form of public political debate, which often gives the lie completely to the way the commercial public media report things, and the media themselves have a very ambivalent relationship to this new sector because some media professionals enter it as authors themselves, and others are not professional authors in the media but they are contributing. And then there’s whole sphere which is not particularly political, or not ostensibly or not primarily political. 

If I think of the blogs that I like reading, and read regularly, some of them are political, some of them are intellectual opinion, some of them are personal reflections. The personal reflections – the most interesting ones - are probably the ones which give a quasi-political slant on things. But not even particularly deliberately. One of my favourite blogs is written by a London ambulanceman.  So basically it’s an account of the daily life of a London ambulance driver. It’s often revelatory. It’s beautifully written, quite simple, and he’s recounting incidents and commenting on them. 

It sounds like a documentary…

Oh it is, it’s testimonial. And we haven’t said of course that one of the essential things about documentary, and especially first person documentary, is its testimonial quality. Then there are other blogs, which are just somebody just puts up pieces of poetry, literary quotations, paintings and so on, and this is more like a kind of living diary, if you like, not a personal one but a kind of scrapbook but a montage. There is even a blog which calls itself Critical Montages, with reference to Walther Benjamin. I sometimes think that if Adorno and Benjamin were alive today they would be blogging, instead of publishing books that consist of lots of very short commentaries.

 

The fact that you don’t have to be professional to make documentaries, so the number of documentaries has increased a lot in the lasts years, is the reason for the apparition or increase in documentary Festivals?

I think there’s a difference. I’ve been to four documentary film festivals in the last year, some of them specialized. My impression is that what you see in the festivals is produced by professional filmmakers, but with that rider that it doesn’t mean to say that all they’re doing is directing their own films. They are people who are filmmakers and who have the opportunity to make their own films as an author from time to time. 

But probably you have only seen a previous selection by a jury...

But I think the point is that the policy of film festivals on the whole is not to try to gather and duplicate the kind of stuff that you might find on Youtube, which is the personal stuff. I don’t get the impression that I’m seeing in the festivals the kind of campaigning videos that might be produced and put up on the Internet either. But there are huge overlaps between all these areas, because it might be the same people but working in a slightly different way. But I think there is stuff which appears in one part of the arena rather than another.

What do you think Festivals are contributing to the documentary genre? Because it’s not only the screenings, but also different activities…

Absolutely right. They are nodes of social encounter on an international level. One of the most interesting parts for me of going to these film festivals is not just seeing films that I wouldn’t be able to see in any other way, but meeting people. And it’s essential that those people are from other countries, and are coming from places which I don’t get to. And you feel part of an international community. In some ways I personally feel more part of an international community than part of a documentary community here at home.
But at any rate I’ve jokingly said that I became a documentary filmmaker because it enabled me to travel without having to pay for it out of my own pocket. For me, that international projection has always been tremendously succouring. Because it means that although I might have been working, in the case of a particular film, on a local level, or in a particular arena, that I’m doing that feeling that I’m part of and drawing on and relating to what is effectively a global culture already, and has been for a long time. So I think, from the point of view of the filmmaker but also anyone involved in production, exhibition and criticism, that physical coming together and social intercourse at a film festival is very important.

There could be a contradiction here - if there is an award-winning documentary at a Film Festival is this a guarantee to being distributed on television or in the cinema?

No. Clearly not. 

But they receive prize money…

Part of the attraction of most film festivals is that they award prizes with money attached so it’s a good thing. But if I take the “Corto Circuito” festival in Santiago de Compostela that I just came back from, there were two buyers there, one from French television and an independent Irish distributor, and I think that by the end of the festival they had each decided to buy two or three films. But just two or three. And not actually necessarily the prize-winners. I’m never quite sure what it is that their judgement is based on but that’s not to impugn their judgement, some of them are very good at picking out the films they know audiences will respond to.

So festivals, even very small festivals like that, are places which buyers go to in order to see and get their work, and in a very small festival like that there isn’t really very much competition between them because there are very few of them there. Which is very interesting because it suggests that actually if you’re an independent filmmaker trying to get somewhere with your film, and you’re tempted to put everything into trying to get it into a very big film festival, actually maybe it’s the wrong strategy and maybe you would be better by going to a very small one. 

Why is it so difficult to define documentary, and what is the essence of documentary?

This is an issue of philosophical aesthetics. I don’t think it’s just documentary which is difficult to define. I think that aesthetic categories are inherently open and ambiguous. And this applies whether genres, for example, are made up of dominant characteristics, but there’s no specific characteristic which is both essential and sufficient. So this is not a question of television documentary versus Internet documentary or something like that because this is a philosophical issue. So my position is that philosophically speaking I’m against idealist definitions, I’m against essentialist definitions.

I think that the most satisfactory account of what we’re talking about is Wittgenstein talking about the nature of family relations. Documentary is a family of different styles and types of production. The thing about family relations is that members of a family share out between them certain features which are common to the family but you may have two grandchildren who both look in some respect like their common grandfather, but one of them has their grandfather’s eyes and the other has their grandfather’s nose so the two of them don’t look like each other at all but they both have a relationship to their grandfather. Now in the case of families this is genetic. In the case of artistic forms there’s no genetic connection but the connection is the way that artistic and aesthetic paradigms work. When I say paradigms I’m thinking and I draw the term, and I draw this whole construction from the work of Thomas Kuhn on scientific revolutions where for him the paradigm is the theory within which a scientist in a particular discipline is operating. 

But there’s a difference: The difference is that in science you have to be following that theoretical paradigm in order for your work to count as belonging to that science. But in the case of art, the paradigm is not obligatory, it is suggestive. Nonetheless, if you take another theoretical paradigm, if you follow Bakhtin’s idea of genre and artistic utterance as a dialogical form, every artistic utterance is in dialogue with another artistic utterance although that includes the paradigmatic version of what you’re trying to do. That might mean that for somebody who wants to make an observational documentary, that the paradigm might be, let’s say, Don’t look back, or it might be Wiseman. But you’re doing this twenty or thirty years later and what happens? Back in the 1960s nobody ever addressed the camera spontaneously, whereas if you go out and film now, for some reason or other our cultural configurations have changed and people might, even if you don’t intervene in the slightest, people might well address the camera spontaneously.

The Israeli film Checkpoint is for me a paradigm of that because he’s standing there filming these scenes and people spontaneously turn to the camera and talk. They want to be represented in that. So the paradigm that you start off with is one thing and what you end up with is something else but you can still see the relationship. I think paradigms can be shared, and genres can be shared and mixed and violated and so it’s one big happy family. Or unhappy family, as the case may be.

There’s a writer Patricia Semple who has a lovely image that documentary is “a very large frayed umbrella with a lot of different people sheltering underneath it”.

Are you happy with the term “documentary”? Because we are using different names like non-fiction, cinéma du réel

No, I suppose that in most cases I would suppose that the word documentary sticks because one, it seems to cover this general reference to something real out there, but secondly, if you think about it, very rarely do negative terminologies work. So non-fiction is a non-starter. Basically. One of the very few negative terms which doesn’t seem to have a positive equivalent form and was therefore used in a political context for a long, long time: “anti-imperialism”.

But the point is, what happened? Grierson, by accident, launched this word documentary and it’s a wholesome word, and it’s a positive word. So it gets taken up. Why should we change it? It’s arbitrary, in one sense. But this is also the nature of language.

What about post-documentary or post-cinema?

That’s a red herring. When I’m feeling mischievous I’ll talk about post-late-capitalism. What comes after post-modernism?

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