Month: June 2016

In our final piece we were asked to create a documentary that challenged three of the following conventions:

• no interviews
• no voice-over
• only found-footage or other appropriated material
• is non-photorealistic
• deliberately breaks some other identifiable documentary convention

For our final project, Blair and I decided to create a documentary that challenged the first four of those conventions.

But how is this still a documentary? How can a documentary be both political and poetic?

The performative and poetic modes are by far the most experimental of Nichols’ modes and I would argue that our film fits into one of these categories far more than it does any other. The performative mode “stress[es] the emotional complexity of experience” (Nichols, 2010, 202), while the poetic mode treats “people more typically… on a par with other objects as raw material that filmmakers select and arrange into associations and patterns of their choosing” (Nichols, 2010, 162). In this way I feel that our documentary fits snuggly into the poetic mode, but also nicely aligns with the sentiment from the quote about the performative mode, allowing “the emotional complexity of experience” to come through. The key difference between this documentary, which fits into the more experimental of Nichols’ modes, compared with a more traditional documentary, a documentary that would have all of the above conventions intact and not intentionally broken, is the indexical quality of the images, or their photo-realistic nature. A more traditional documentary intentionally leads the viewer to make their own decision, usually the decision the filmmaker wants them to make. In order to manipulate the audience in this way without causing an uproar of sorts they need to create a contract with the audience through the indexical quality of their imagery and sound, building an inherent trust in the almighty ‘voice of god’ narrator. When compared with our film, there is no explicit leading of the audience and the viewer is ultimately left to make up their own decision. Experimental documentaries break the contract which usually exists with a documentary, as they do not ask the audience to trust the information they are providing is truthful, instead creating a new kind of contract with the viewer, one that accepts they already have the knowledge to understand what is occurring and to make up their own mind, simply asking the audience to see the world the way the filmmaker does.

If you look at another poetic documentary I made earlier in the semester, you’ll see how the non-indexical quality of the imagery allows for more abstract conclusions to be drawn, possibly in relation to the viewers own experiences, while also allowing for broader connotations to be created through multiple and often seemingly discordant associations at once (for example, the use of the imagery of propaganda from the stolen generation mixed with Pauline Hanson’s speech about abolishing multiculturalism sends a strong message that can be interpreted literally many ways, but the overall impression, idea and emotional effect resonates similarly to most people):

Documentaries will always push some kind of agenda as they are created for a purpose by the filmmaker. Luckily, this purpose is most often related to social change and causes of social justice and finding a way to bring such important issues to the forefront. Filmmakers often seek to critique the world and the social structures around them and while all documentaries push their creators agendas onto the viewer, experimental films in particular seek not simply factual evidence, they rely upon the widespread nature of the idea they are critiquing and instead seek to open up the viewer’s mind to another, very human experience. Creating an empathetic connection and placing the viewer into the shoes of the individuals in the situation which you are critiquing, rather than simply stating the facts. Nichols’ argued that in order for a documentary to remain ethical within the socio-political realms it operated, it needed to provide its subjects with “agency”, showing them as “an active, self-determining agent of change” as opposed to a “victim” who “suffer[s] from a plight” (Nichols, 2001, 212). This is an interesting point, as films in the poetic mode, such as the two found footage films I have made this semester, often take away a subjects agency, treating the subject as a whole. While this can be seen as a bad thing, the interesting thing about both of the found footage films, Duck and Cover and I Don’t Exactly Hate Women… Utilise the fact that their subjects have no agency in the film as a further critique on the social system which they are criticising.

Thomas Waugh argued that documentary form is inherently committed to social change through his idea of the “committed documentary” (Waugh, 2011). Documentaries are inherently instruments for social change and therefore political critique. For instance, my found footage documentary I Don’t Exactly Hate Women directly critiqued the Hollywood system, a structure deeply embedded within society’s very social structure. The documentary did this through critiquing Hollywood’s portrayal of women, bringing light to the fact that it hasn’t very well changed in the half a century or so since Hollywood came into existence. The film did all of this while being an entirely experimental film, fitting into the poetic mode.

So, in my final answer to that penultimate question, yes, I do believe that a documentary can be both political and poetic. In fact, I believe that the documentary is stronger for it, as the poetic nature of such experimental and convention-breaking films creates far more empathetic films that don’t just reveal the facts, but relate to human existence itself.

• Nichols, Bill, 2010, “Introduction to Documentary, Second Edition.” Bloomington: Indiana University Press, pp. 142-211
• Nichols, Bill, 2001, “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde”, Critical Inquiry, Vol. 27, No. 4 (Summer, 2001), pp. 580-610
• Waugh, Thomas. 2011. “Why Documentary Filmmakers Keep Trying to Change the World, or Why People Changing the World Keep Making Documentaries”. The Right to Play Oneself: Looking Back on Documentary Film [Visible Evidence Series, Volume 23], University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis. pp. 24– 41.