Angels, Stones, Hunters: Murder, Celebrity and Direct Cinema

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CONTENTS

Articles

3–15 A professional without borders: The case of the documentary fi lm-maker Carlos Echeverría in Germany and Argentina

PAOLA MARGULIS

17–30 Emotion, documentary and Van der Keuken’s Face Value

HING TSANG

31–44 New York City: 12 December, 1980

DES O’RAWE

45–60 Angels, Stones, Hunters: Murder, celebrity and direct cinema

AARON TAYLOR

61–74 Poetic licence: Issues of signifi cation and authorship in British television verse-documentary, 1986–96

PETER ATKINSON

Book Reviews

75–76 Documentary Superstars: How Today’s Filmmakers Are Reinventing the Form, Marsha McCreadie (2008)

76–77 Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfi ction Film and Video, Keith Beattie (2008)

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SDF 5 (1) pp. 3–15 Intellect Limited 2011

Studies in Documentary Film Volume 5 Number 1

© 2011 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.3_1

KEYWORDS

cinemadocumentaryprofessionalizationdictatorshipforced disappearance

of people

PAOLA MARGULISUniversidad de Buenos Aires

A professional without

borders: The case of the

documentary film-maker

Carlos Echeverría in Germany

and Argentina

ABSTRACT

This article addresses the post-dictatorship Argentine documentary film-making activity from the standpoint of documentary film-maker Carlos Echeverría’s line of work. In particular, we try to closely follow Echeverría’s documentary production – his experience in Germany, as well as the distinctive production and distribution modalities of his art – in light of the circumstances posed by the documentary profes-sionalization process insinuated during the mid-1980s in Argentina, which gradu-ally gained visibility during the mid-1990s.

In general terms, the analysis will try to focus on the reconfiguration of the documentary production field after the military dictatorship and, mainly, in the way the film Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (Carlos Echeverría, 1987) establishes important narrative and stylistic turning points, thus condensing certain displacements that will begin to take place as from that moment and which will gain significance and magnitude towards the mid-1990s in Argentina.

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1. There is no international English title, however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Juan, as if nothing had happened’.

2. The Full Stop Law, enacted in Argentina in 1986, put an end to all trials against those responsible for the crimes of illegal detention, torture and assassination that were committed during the last dictatorship. The Due Obedience Law, enacted the following year, dictated that it must be assumed, without admitting proof to the contrary, that the acts committed by members of the armed forces were not punishable due to the fact that they had acted out of due obedience.

INTRODUCTION

Towards the professionalization of documentary films in Argentina

This study addresses the field of documentary film production in Argentina post-dictatorship by analysing the work of film-maker Carlos Echeverría. We consider that Echeverría is a figure who is particularly relevant to the process of professionalization of documentary film-making in Argentina. His educa-tion and training in the field of documentary films as well as the way in which he planned and launched his career – with the goal of making a living as a film-maker – make him one of the first exponents of this process of profes-sionalization.

In addition, the political significance of certain films like Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido1 (1987) and Pacto de Silencio/Pact of Silence (2005) has given Echeverría a certain level of international renown. His films have been showed in many international festivals and aired on various European TV channels. In Argentina, the shifting political scenario and the ups and downs of a market for documentary cinema that remains underdeveloped have resulted in scarce distribution of his films and in a method of circulation that is often based more on personal effort than on professional procedures. However, due to their political significance, his documentaries merit a more in-depth analysis than that which has been done so far.

In terms of cinema production in Argentina post-dictatorship, Juan is undoubtedly one of the most important films of the last 30 years. It is among the first documentary works to address the subject of the forced disappear-ance of people during the last military dictatorship, and to interview military officers who held high posts during the period, asking them about the role they played in these disappearances. The possibility of conducting such inter-views would end after the enactment of the Laws of Due Obedience and Full Stop in Argentina.2

Generational change

As a space for reflection about social and political topics, the Argentine docu-mentary film-making activity of the 1980s and 1990s constitutes, to a large extent, a response to the traumatic situations faced by the Argentine society as a consequence of the last military dictatorship that devastated Argentina. From 1976 to 1983, Argentina was submerged in the horror generated by the most dreadful dictatorship the country has ever suffered. Under the govern-ment of the Military Board (Junta Militar) composed of General Jorge R. Videla (Army), Admiral Emilio E. Massera (Navy) and Brigadier Orlando R. Agosti (Air Force) a dictatorial system was implemented, which systematically violated human rights. The system installed consisted in an overall repression operation, which had been carefully planned by the heads of the three armed services. The system implemented ended up in the forced disappearance of about 30,000 people.

The sense of horror also encroached the cultural field. Such factors as constant and reiterated prohibitions, kidnappings, threats and censorship had become the usual currency with full complicity on the part of the media. As from the 1960s, in a context of high politicization of broad sectors within the Argentine society, the cinema started to be used as an instrument of politics. Some groups were formed, which included the Cine Liberación

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3. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Massacre Operation’.

4. The film Operación Masacre has not been produced by any of the groups mentioned above; instead, it has been the result of an initiative carried out by a film-making cooperative. The film, which was based on the namesake police work written by Rodolfo Walsh (who was kidnapped and murdered in 1977), was clandestinely made and it was broadcast many times together with the film Los traidores (Peña and Vallina 2006).

5. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Evita, to whoever wishes to listen’.

6. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Argentine Identity Document (DNI) – The other side of the story’.

7. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Authorization to think’.

8. Fernando ‘Pino’ Solanas placed a key role in this story. In 1985 he released the fiction film titled El exilio de Gardel. (Tangos)/Gardel’s Exile (Tangos). A few years later, in 1988, another film was released, which was titled Sur/The South. It was not until the year 2004 that Solanas went back to documentary film-making with Memoria del saqueo/Social Genocide. In the particular case of Octavio Getino, after making El familiar (1972) (The Spanish

Group (Liberation film-making group) (formed by Fernando Solanas, Octavio Getino and Gerardo Vallejo), which adhered to the Peronist party’s programme and the Cine de la Base group (Base film-making group) (formed by Raymundo Gleyzer, Nerio Barberis, Álvaro Melián and Jorge Denti), which was the cinematographic arm of the Workers’ Revolutionary Party – People’s Revolutionary Army (Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores – Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo a.k.a PRT – ERP). Such films as La hora de los hornos/The Hour of the Furnaces (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968), Los traidores/The Traitors (Raymundo Gleyzer, 1973) and Operación Masacre3 (Jorge Cedrón, 1972)4 were broadcast clandestinely. Discussion broadcast meetings were organized at labour unions, homes, universities, etc. As repression worsened by the second half of the 1970; this situation ended up with these film-makers’ exile, the kidnapping and murder of Raymundo Gleyzer in 1976 and the doubtful circumstances underlying the death of Jorge Cedrón in 1980. Other documentary film-makers, such as Jorge Prelorán, Edgardo Cozarinsky, Carmen Guarini, Carlos Echeverría and Susana Blaunstein (Muñoz) also decided to leave the country, even though they did not consider themselves political exiles.

The documentary film-making activity started to recover gradually after the return of the democratic system of government to the country. A typi-cal feature of those first years may be the success of compilation films (Paranaguá 2003: 64). In such context, several movies of a different political orientation, which had mainly been organized on the basis of archival footage, as it was the case of La republica perdida I/The Lost Republic I and La republica perdida II/The Lost Republic II (Miguel Pérez, 1983; Miguel Pérez, 1986); Evita, quien quiera oír, que oiga (Eduardo Mignogna, 1984),5 DNI (la otra historia) (Luis Brunati, 1989)6 and Permiso para pensar (Eduardo Meilij, 1988),7 had, in some cases, high audience levels, which could have hardly been explained had it not been by resourcing to the meaning ascribed to that type of material in the context of the ongoing transition. After the archive plundering and destruction during the last military dictatorship, the reconstruction of the different versions of Argentina’s national history on the basis of materials on file, provided that type of films with a liberation feeling (Firbas and Meira Monteiro 2006: 73).

Another milestone in that moment of the documentary film-making activ-ity may have probably been related to a generational change. Except for a few exceptions, such as Jorge Denti or Jorge Prelorán, any film-makers who had somehow been devoted to representing reality before the military dicta-torship would no longer make documentary films after the restoration of democracy.8 The post-dictatorship documentary film production sector started to be modelled by a new generation of young people, students and profes-sionals who had just graduated from different film-making courses of stud-ies, and who ‘specialized’ in documentary film-making, thus devoting their professional careers to this type of audio-visual products. There being no specific incentives for documentary films from the Argentine Cinematography Institute (Instituto Nacional de Cinematografía or INC), the works carried out by this new generation of young film-makers, which included names such as Marcelo Céspedes, Tristán Bauer, Alejandro Fernández Mouján, Laura Búa and Silvia Chanvillard, among others, took a forcedly independent modal-ity, which was mainly supported by their political commitment and personal willingness. These first documentary films made in the new era of democracy were, to a large extent, focused on testimony, taking care of the segregation of certain sectors in society.

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title translates as ‘The relative’), he has never made any other film to date.

9. The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo is a social movement created during the last military dictatorial government for the purpose of finding alive the missing people who had been detained, in the first place, and in the second place, in order to determine who had been the people responsible for the crimes against humanity and foster their submission to trial.

10. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Situations on the limit’.

11. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Quarantined. Exile and return’.

12. According to Echeverría, ‘In 1984, Canal 7 offered to air Cuarentena, but an intellectual involved in the Radical government changed his mind and they didn’t dare to air it’ (Ormaechea 2005).

13. San Carlos de Bariloche is a city in the south of Argentina frequently presented as idyllic: it has been called ‘the Switzerland of Argentina’. Its stunning landscapes make it a major tourist centre. Some of those interviewed in the film Juan allude to the way in which the kidnapping and disappearance of Juan Marcos Herman in 1977 seemed to stain the pristine landscape of the Andean town.

14. Interest in local culture and in the way in which information circulated was one early concern

Despite being away from Argentina during those years, Echeverría’s film-making style got over some unsolved political problems, which already affected the country before he left: the dictatorial system of government, the forced disappearance of people and exile itself. It is, at least, striking that these subjects started to be addressed – many times as public denuncia-tions – by Argentine film-makers who were far away from the country during the dictatorship. The films Todo es ausencia/Only Emptiness Remains (Rodolfo Kuhn, 1984, Spain) and Las madres de Plaza de Mayo/The Mothers of Plaza de Mayo (Susana Blaunstein (Muñoz) and Lourdes Portillo, 1985, USA) refer to the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo’s fight for tracing their missing children and getting them back during the dictatorship.9 In Argentina, any subjects related to that recent traumatic past have only started to be addressed deeply by the mid-1990s, which coincided with a renewal of topics and aesthetics in docu-mentary film-making.

THE CAREER OF CARLOS ECHEVERRÍA

Born on 9 August 1958 in San Carlos de Bariloche, a city located in Argentina’s Patagonian Region by the Andes mountain range, Carlos Echeverría had been involved with photography, cinema and journalism since he was very young. Echeverría’s professional career started with his training in documentary film-making in Germany, where he studied documentary cinema at the Munich University of Television and Film and gained professional experience.

In 1982, Echeverría worked on the middle-length feature Grenzfälle (Situaciones en el límite)10 (Carlos Echeverría and Hans-Peter Ziegler, 1982) financed by the University of Television and Film. The film presents a small town in Germany which, like Berlin, was criss-crossed by a wall dividing west from east. A year later, Echeverría finished his first feature-length documen-tary, Cuarentena. Exil und Rückkehr (Cuarentena. Exilio y regreso)11 (1983), on Argentine writer Osvaldo Bayer’s experiences during his exile in Germany and his fervent desire to return to his homeland. The film was funded by the German channel ZDF and supported by the cinema school. The film depicted Bayer’s return to Argentina before the end of the dictatorship in order to witness the democratic elections. Although the film’s themes were aimed at the Argentine public, Cuarentena was seen by only a handful of Argentines. The documentary was aired on the German channel ZDF, and was about to be shown on public television of Argentina (Canal 7); in the end, however, the project fell through. The director believes that this was due to political motives.12

Echeverría’s local involvement and critical viewpoint of the problems facing his hometown, San Carlos de Bariloche,13 – and more generally, the Argentine Patagonia – would come to identify his films. In a country as centralized as Argentina, where one-third of the national population resides in the city of Buenos Aires and its suburbs (a situation exacerbated by the concentration of media sources in the same area), decentralized viewpoints capable of addressing complex issues are quite uncommon.14 However, unlike an anthropological documentary-maker, Echeverría approaches these issues from a position that is not based on otherness (he does not travel to the south searching for the geographical and cultural distance that has been used to define the other); instead, he is guided by his own biography, by his own sense of belonging, a sense that often leads him to recount his films in the first person.15 This decision leads to a shift away from centre of the political conflict without losing sight of the national dimension.

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of Carlos Echeverría. In order to strengthen the Patagonian identity and counteract the oppressive wave of centralist journalism (Interview with the author, 18 March 2009), Echeverría was part of a project to found a regional television channel when he returned from Germany (the project lasted from 1985 to 1988). Another part of the project involved founding a School of Journalism and Television in the Patagonia. Ultimately, however, the project was abandoned due to a lack of funding (Interview with the author, 18 March 2009).

15. The Andean stretch of the Patagonia – Echeverría’s homeland – received a wave of immigrants from Central Europe (Germany, Austria, Switzerland, Hungary and Poland) during the first decades of the twentieth century.

16. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘The mad German: Bariloche in winter’.

17. There is no international English title; however, the Spanish title translates as ‘Kids on the street’.

18. This military uprising on 19 April 1987 (during Holy Week) was the military’s response to the advances made in the lawsuits for violations of human rights during the dictatorship.

The director’s interest in the city of Bariloche became clear early in his first film, Winter in Patagonien. Ein Skipionier erzählt (El Gringo Loco: Invierno en Bariloche)16 (1984), a film that was funded by the Bavarian television channel BR. This middle-length documentary, which was aired on the German channels WDR and BR, recounts the history of Otto Meiling, a German pioneer in tourism in Bariloche who promoted mountain sports and began manufacturing skis. At the same time, filming El Gringo Loco gave Echeverría the chance to return to his city, get in touch with his people and work on the pre-production of the film Juan, als wäre nichts geschehen/Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido (1987). Given the significance of this film, both in terms of Echeverría’s career as well as its relative importance in the field of the Argentine documentary, we will dedicate the following section of this work to an analysis of some of the outstanding moments of the film.

Along with Juan, the film Pacto de Silencio (2005) was another Carlos Echeverría film loaded with political meaning. Both films address issues that, though specific to the city of Bariloche, can be applied to broader questions affecting Argentina. Combining reports with the director’s own biography, the film offers a critique of the cultural and political project of the Germans who came to Argentina after 1945, and condemns Bariloche society for the pact of silence that helped to protect the Nazi officials residing in the city. The film, which was financed by the Argentine Cinema and Visual Arts Institute (Instituto Nacional de Cine y Artes Visuales or INCAA), was aired on televi-sion channels in Germany, France, Finland, Holland and Switzerland. In a similar project with a strong emphasis on local identity, Echeverría directed Querida Mara, Cartas de un viaje por la Patagonia/Dear Mara, Letters from a Patagonia Trip (2007), a film that presents the terrible working conditions of a group of sheep shearers in their long journey across the Patagonia. The docu-mentary recounts the history of the region, focusing on the extermination of the territory’s original inhabitants – the ancestors of one of the sheep shear-ers. Produced by Narcisa Hirsch, Los chicos y la calle17 (2002) is one of the few works that Echeverría agreed to direct. Limited to urban themes, which are uncommon in his films, the documentary tells the stories of several children living on the streets of the city of Buenos Aires.

Due to different political and economic realities (the relations with the Unión Cívica Radical government when the film Cuarentena was completed – in addition to the Holy Week uprising18 that thwarted the plan to premier Juan in the Buenos Aires movie theatres on Corrientes Avenue), the exhibition of Echeverría’s films has been quite limited within Argentina. Television – first in Europe, and finally in Argentina – has been responsible for promoting his films, which were rarely treated to a commercial premier and whose earnings were virtually nil, as Echeverría himself notes:

I made almost nothing from Cuarentena. I earned a bit more with the movie about Otto Mailing. I remember what I spent the money on […] On a washing machine and a VCR to be able to record things and analyze them. And as for Juan […] nothing. I didn’t make a dime.

(Interview with the author, 18 March 2009)

In his own description, the director reveals some of the difficulties of film-making in a place where few films are produced and documentaries take second place to fiction. Although his films are a clear example of the process of professionalization of documentary film-making in Argentina, Echeverría’s

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19. Interview with Carlos Echeverría by Diego Brodersen on the TV programme Ficciones de lo real (Canal 7, 2007).

methods do not correspond to an industrial logic. The selection and approach to the issues covered in his films do not reflect the demands of a specific market – a factor that would undoubtedly facilitate the distribution and exhi-bition of his documentary films; instead, they are tied to the director’s political viewpoints and to his system of beliefs.

JUAN, COMO SI NADA HUBIERA SUCEDIDO

An untimely release

In 1987, Echeverría finished his second full-length documentary feature: Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido. The film looks into the kidnapping of Juan Marcos Herman, the only person disappeared in Bariloche during the last military dictatorship. Juan recounts the efforts made by Esteban Buch, a young journalist, to investigate the kidnapping of Juan Marcos Herman, a law student who was disappeared in Bariloche when visiting his parents on 16 July 1977. The professional search carried out by Buch to find a young man who had been the same age as the journalist when he was disappeared is intertwined with the journalist’s own personal search. As a result, a series of questions are posed during the reconstruction of the events, the search for those responsible and finally, the questioning of the role of Argentine society in the events of the recent past. The journalist’s frustrated attempts to iden-tify those responsible for the kidnapping and disappearance of Juan Herman results in bitter personal lessons. In the process, Echeverría reveals the inter-woven complicities and the silence required to sustain a regime that instituted forced disappearances.

As a film project, Juan is based on the thesis done by Echeverría during the first part of the 1980s at the University of Television and Film Munich (which funded the documentary). The film was not commercially premiered and the few times it was shown, threats were received and no government support was given. The documentary aired on the German television channel WDR and it was shown at the 5th Munich Film Festival. In terms of its exhi-bition within Argentina, Juan was shown at several film festivals, exhibitions and film cycles in different towns. In keeping with the director’s desires, the documentary was shown outside of the theatre circuit every time someone requested it; for theses showings, Echeverría carried a 16mm projector that had been donated to him by German Evangelists.19

On the other hand, it is important to note that TV played an important role in allowing his films to be seen across Argentina. In 1988, the film was aired by a regional TV station, Canal 10 in Tucumán, though not without repercus-sions. As Echeverría recounts:

Some time later, when Juan […] was shown on a Tucumán TV station, the house of the program host (a certain Mr. Parolo) was bombed. The Universidad de Tucumán, which has close relations to Canal 10, invited me to come present the film. As a result of the criminal act, a debate began at the university and a decision was made to air the film again […].

(Ormaechea 2005)

In 2005, a retrospective of Carlos Echeverría was included in the program-ming of the 7th annual BAFICI (International Independent Film Festival of Buenos Aires). This allowed many moviegoers and critics to find out about the director’s work, though even today, he remains unknown to many. In 2008,

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20. Bill Nichols characterizes expository documentaries as those which speak directly to the viewer while images serve as an illustration or counterpoint to the audio. Expository documentaries sustain their arguments through an invisible, omniscient narrator or a ‘voice of God’ that stems from a camera that is ‘speaking’ on the text’s behalf. These documentaries give the viewer the impression of objectivity and sound judgment (Nichols 1997: 68).

21. In addition to being the only person disappeared from Echeverría’s hometown, the director had a more personal connection to the case of Juan Marcos Herman. As Echeverría himself recalls, his father and Juan Herman’s fathers were both doctors, and they moved to the Patagonia at the same time. The families were friends and were in touch with one another after the kidnapping, even after Echeverría left for Germany (Interview with the author, 18 March 2009).

Argentina’s public television station gave the entire country the chance to see the movie nearly twenty years after it was produced. This was the first time the film was shown nationwide.

These factors produced an enormous difference in the way in which the film Juan was received. It is a documentary that, in spite of its great political significance, did not reach the public in time. The many years that passed between the production of Juan and its gradual distribution and exhibition also witnessed a series of changes that would affect the way in which the film was received by the public. These transformations are related to shifts in what could be told in the social context of the transition to democracy, a time in which the struggle to defend human rights came to the forefront; however, the way in which documentary films were viewed also changed over the years. The expository documentary (Nichols 1997)20 was common at the time when Juan was filmed; in terms of Argentine production, the best example is perhaps La república perdida I and II (Miguel Pérez, 1983, 1986). During the 1990s, this type of documentary was gradually replaced by a new aesthetic in which film-makers experimented with the language of cinema-tography. However, in spite of these factors, Echeverría’s film was not dated when it was finally seen by a broader public. On the contrary, both the subject it addresses and the aesthetic resources the film utilizes would be relevant to a new generation of film-makers whose works began to appear halfway into the next decade in Argentina.

Moving away from the first person

Although Carlos Echeverría had a personal interest in the Herman case,21 the director opted not to tell the story in first person and instead shifted the narration to the figure of Esteban Buch (a character whose name and profession within the film coincide with his off-screen identity). In this variation of the first-person documentary, the figure of the director is still present – and in fact, makes itself present corporally, for example, through the recording of his voice – but is relegated to a second person, Esteban Buch. Therefore, this shift does not involve the disappearance of the first person of the director; instead, it allows the journalist room for developing certain questions that will connect him to the narrative through his own biographical ties.

Far from attempting the ‘objectivity’ that prevails in classic documentaries, which are generally recounted in a voice-over, that is, a third person who narrates from an objective perspective, Juan constructs a tale on the subjective search carried out by Buch, one that involves his body, his knowledge and his own personal experiences. At the same time, the learning process and discov-eries made by Esteban Buch within the film go beyond the cinematographic realm, as can be seen in the journalist’s own reflections on what it meant to him to participate in Echeverría film:

Before starting, I had only a vague notion, just some superficial knowl-edge on Juan’s case and more generally, of the disappeared, the repres-sion and the dictatorship. Investigating this case brought me face to face with the actual events, with the reality. I believe that this inner transfor-mation is captured in the film; it was a change that occurred during my investigation […] It was a real process.

(Bariloche 1987)

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This subjective process that occurs both within and beyond the film takes the form of an experience, to the extent that the experience of the film cannot help but affect what is filmed and the documentary offers an account of this process (Comolli 2004). In these cases, as Jean-Louis Comolli argues, ‘The movie is what happens to the actor’ (original emphasis) (Comolli 2004: 55). In other words, the actor and the character merge to form a single figure (Comolli 2004: 48).

In this regard, a dialogue can be established between the performa-tive nature of Echeverría’s documentary and a trend that will become more and more marked starting in the new millennium in Argentina, when direc-tors began examining their own subjectivity in the first person. This trend can be seen in several subjective documentaries such as La televisión y yo (Andrés Di Tella, 2002), Un tal Ragone (Vanesa Ragone, 2002), Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003), M (Nicolás Prividera, 2007) and others.

A starring role for the camera

Interviews are critical to Juan, promoting an exchange that involves the enun-ciation of certain words – none of which had been directly stated in the past – and the response to them (other words or silence). As a result, we believe it is necessary to analyse and deconstruct the complex, strategic weave upon which these interviews are based. Within the film, both the interviews and the testimonies take on a very specific stylistic method – one that was not very common in the Argentine cinema of the 1980s – which includes evidencing the device and the mise-en-scène (camera set-up, the placing of the micro-phones, sound checks, etc.). To achieve this, the film-makes use a double mechanism: a video camera (which is filmed) by a 16mm camera. This artful device leaves us with a double mise-en-scène – one which is explicit, unraveling before the spectator’s eyes through its visualization on the video camera; and another that is propelled by a device we cannot see: the 16mm camera. The bifurcation achieved through this double mechanism can be attributed to two different types of media: cinema and television. The main character, Esteban Buch, is a journalist who, according to some of the others interviewed in the film, is doing a series of interviews for a television programme. Buch wields the video camera, while the workings of the 16mm camera are not shown to us directly. The result of this method is a double mise-en-scène, one that corre-sponds to TV interviews, which is framed by another type of staging more common to auteur documentary films. The way in which TV and film inter-views are reversed in this film is noteworthy, however. Due to its placement, the video camera would only be capable of filming the person being inter-viewed (leaving the journalist out of the shot), a resource that corresponds to documentary film-making; however, it is the cinema camera that reveals the body of the interviewer, thus allowing the film to recover certain methods of television-making, whose main field is that of fiction (in the shot – against the shot) (Comolli 2002: 110).

The expressive strategy used by Echeverría gives the camera a starring role in the film. In the context in which this documentary was shot – between 1985 and 1987 – only a few years after the end of the dictatorship, the power of the military was still very present in the consciousness of Argentina; the military’s authoritarianism – which allowed it to rule, make decisions and censor even the most trivial of affairs – had been impressed onto people’s minds. In this regard, the use of an ‘unauthorized’ camera (that is, a camera not authorized

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22. Another characteristic of the film that is not ‘authorized’ by the military officers interviewed is the involvement of Horacio, Juan Herman’s brother, in the process of filming the documentary (he is the light man). In the middle of the film, Esteban Buch reflects on this: ‘How would those interviewed react if they knew the victim’s brother were involved?’

23. During and after the dictatorship, the military often alleged that left-wing guerrilla groups were responsible for the disappearances.

by the military) that could film and present evidence without requesting permission represents both a political and aesthetic stance.22 Within the film, the video camera takes on a role that is more symbolic than operative: it is there to be shown, not to show something. Its non-transparency and its starring role make a statement: the camera will not be subordinated by the military logic that prevailed during the dictatorship (traces of which still remained when the film was shot). At the same time, the starring role of the video camera places the 16mm camera in the background, although this is the camera that ultimately captures the most imprudent words and attitudes of those interviews. This resource gives the movie camera a crucial role that goes unnoticed by most of those interviewed.

The camera divides the discourse

In spite of the fear that had overrun the popular consciousness, Echeverría’s camera does not request permission to start filming or to continue shooting a given scene. To give an example, the camera is on as it awaits the arrival of Colonel Zárraga, who will be interviewed for the documentary. We see a shot of the facade of the Edificio Libertador on which the silhouette of the colonel is cast as he walks towards the camera. Buch’s voice-over introduces Zárraga as the principal figure of political repression in Bariloche, and the chief of intelligence at the time when Juan was disappeared. When the cameraman finally puts the military officer in the centre of the shot – and after interspers-ing documentary images of the colonel on the job –, Zárraga asks, ‘Ready?’ This is the extent of the preparation for the interview, which will be done right there, standing up, in front of the park that surrounds the building. The camera is entrusted with maximizing the distance with the figure interviewed (a distance that can be visually gauged when Zárraga walks towards the inter-viewer: neither Buch nor Zárraga comes from the same place, nor have they agreed to anything in advance).

On the other hand, by continuing to film the officer without request-ing permission, the camera splits Zárraga into two contradictory characters. On the one hand, there is the Zárraga in the initial segment, outlining the tenets of the military discourse. In this segment, we see the colonel gazing rigidly at the camera, as he fully denies any knowledge or involvement in the Herman case. Instants later, a marked ellipsis offers us a completely different perspective of the officer. The new fragment begins mid-phrase and shows us a partial shot of Zárraga; now he is standing much closer to the camera and looking right at the interviewer, who is off camera (and can thus be identi-fied with the viewer). In this segment, Zárraga’s attitude is totally different: the military officer is relaxed, like someone who does not suspect he is being watched, and he says something he should not. At that moment, the colonel’s body moves forward and backward, and his movements are as eloquent as his words:

The Herman case […] We were at a party. I know his father, he worked at the radio […] […] What they did there was a robbery. What I don’t know is whether it was the feds – I’m only telling you what I heard, mind you – or if it was those guys involved in that group he [Juan] was in. If you ask me, and this is off the record, [he pauses and gazes off camera, in the spot where we suppose the interviewer to be], off the record [he repeats, smiling].23

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The form in which this interview is organized allows the different levels of the discourse to emerge: first, the official level; second, a more informal level in which Zárraga confides what he supposedly heard regarding the kidnapping to the interviewer, and a third level that goes beyond indiscretion, one that is not revealed to us. The military’s request to go ‘off the record’ serves as a framework for censorship, putting a limit not on the recording but on its exhi-bition. It is precisely this moment in which the camera establishes the clearest limit places within the film and it is here as well where its ethics are revealed.

An ‘unauthorized’ camera

The use of the unauthorized camera is most evident in the interview with Lieutenant Colonel Miguel Isturiz at the First Patricios Infantry Regiment (following up on the statements of a witness who claimed that the military officer’s car had been parked outside of the Hermans’ house on the night Juan was taken). Unlike the other interviews incorporated in the film – which included high-ranking military figures from the area where Juan was kidnapped (such as the then-retired General Castelli and Colonel Zárraga) – the interview with Isturiz is marked by great hostility from the beginning. From the start, the viewer can feel the oppressive setting of the regiment. The camera, alert, awaits the encounter with Isturiz. The film crew’s walk into the military official’s office is captured by the 16mm camera, which was not authorized to shoot (as the lieutenant colonel himself clarifies, ordering the production team to hand over the cassettes with the material recorded for their inspection by intelligence officers). The camera, which is carried and transported along with the other equipment needed for the interview, was recording even before the team passed the iron gate to enter the regiment. It follows the production team from the entrance into the lieutenant colo-nel’s office. The clandestine nature of this segment is evident from the badly lit shots and the deficient sound as the cameraman quickly advances. He is carrying the camera at approximately waist level and capturing badly framed shots of the people who walk in front of the camera, while the production team follows the soldier who escorts them into the office where the brusque exchange will take place. In one of these shots, the video camera carried by another member of the production team is revealed. While this strategy allows for a more precise and detailed presentation of the visit to the regi-ment – one without a temporal ellipsis, one that captures all the details in a meeting whose results are difficult to gauge, this resource also serves as a sort of guarantee; a witness (like a security camera) that may be able to record all the images within the military building.

The realistic effects of this segment is very powerful, especially because no efforts are made to improve the shots or to reduce the effects of the badly positioned camera, not even when Lieutenant Colonel Isturiz is presented for the first time in images, coming straight at the camera to open the door to his office as he offers his hand to the visitors. Framed against a backlight, he gives the film crew a sharp order: ‘Seats, please.’ Having shared this jour-ney into the office from a subjective perspective, these images impose upon the spectator the vertigo that results from capturing this unauthorized images, making him/her an unexpected guest at the meeting that is about to take place. At the same time, due to the nature with which they were obtained, these images seem to dispense with the mise-en-scène, creating an idea of the events ‘just as they occurred’.

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24. As if the use of aesthetic resources were put on hold in the most consequential scenes, this method of the double mise-en-scène is abandoned in the interviews with those who may have been directly involved in the kidnapping of Juan Marcos Herman, such as Colonel Zárraga, Lieutenant Colonel Miguel Isturiz and Eduardo, a childhood friend of Juan’s who was suspected of having ratted on him.

The high level of tension and hostility that is evident in the exchange – in which, notably, Esteban Buch is not present as the mediator between the director and the interviewee – does not allow the mise-en-scène to be used as a stylistic resource. In these conditions, the video camera momentarily abandons the symbolic place it has occupied until this moment of the film and returns to its functional role of capturing images. Given the context, it seems that there is little room here for rhetorical games, and the mere act of recording takes precedence.24 Sitting in his office, the military official is filmed constantly by the two cameras and there appears to be no temporal ellipsis (the spectator is witness to the officer answering his phone and asking others to close the door of his office). It is as if all available resources were needed to show this actor as he attempts to deny his involvement in the kidnap-ping of Juan Marcos Herman: the documentary makes use of all of its tools, even the material captured on video, to portray Isturiz’s impunity most accu-rately. To do so, it makes use of different image textures (film and video) and varied perspectives, without any pauses or concessions: the goal is to offer the most comprehensive portrait of someone who has something to hide. In this context, the camera limits itself merely to exhibition, without making things tidier or leaving out interfering elements (the limited possibilities of film-ing within this space subject to the authoritarian logic of the other is clearly manifest). Carelessly placed at the height of the desk, the camera gives us an uneven shot of Isturiz, at a sloping angle that provides a menacing view of the officer. Beyond this detail, however, the powerful position occupied by Isturiz is inscribed on his gestures and attitudes, in his threatening words and the way he watches the camera; all of these gestures are more effective than any stylistic resource that the camera could utilize. In this context, a plain record of the event is the most effective reporting tool. It is merely about revealing, in the most political sense of the term.

LOOKING SOUTHWARD

The camera on its own is capable of creating contradictory effects. While its presence alone can be said to produce falsities (all of us inevitably become actors when standing before the camera), the device itself is capable of expressions that would otherwise not be produced. In Juan we observe a series of refusals to provide any information whatsoever on the kidnapping of Juan Marcos Herman, turning a blind eye that is reproduced at different levels of society and among different ranks of the military (from Juan’s child-hood friends to journalists, photographers and high-ranking military officials). However, there is always something that slips out, something that is revealed by their gestures and gazes, a lapsus that reveals more than the interviewees want to show or can control.

On the other hand, the use of the ‘unauthorized’ camera promises to reveal at least part of the truth due to a simple fact: the people standing in front of the camera are not aware that they are acting. The status of these images is constructed, then, like that of a truth revealed. This method is tanta-mount – in terms of both its form and what it expected to reveal – to journal-ism, the profession of Esteban Buch within the documentary. Within the film, the frame for journalistic protocol repeatedly makes reference to the television world – present in the mind of those interviewed – and to a certain type of journalism that would become predominant in Argentina a decade later: inves-tigative reporting. In this type of journalism, the hidden camera would become

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25. Unlike the ‘unauthorized’ camera, the use of a ‘hidden camera’ involves concealing the tool so that the person interviewed never even suspects that he/she is being filmed.

26. When asked about the use of the hidden camera, Echeverría says:

The use of the hidden camera seems justified to me when the goal is to unveil criminals. I used this technique on a television program, Edición Plus, to condemn those involved in the dictatorship. I am interested in making use of it whenever it allows the spectator to understand certain schemes. The problem is that the hidden camera later became a market attraction and people started to use it for almost anything.

(Ormaechea 2005)

27. Years later, after he had moved back to Argentina, Echeverría would continue doing documentary reports for Spiegel TV.

a fundamental reporting tool.25 In the 1980s, when Echeverría shot his docu-mentary, this device had yet to be used by journalists on Argentine television. However, Juan forecasts the process of transformation that was about to begin. This was perceived by Echeverría himself (in reference to his film): ‘I believe that Juan is essentially a testimonial film, a historic document. In fact, it could mark the beginning of a new kind of reporting’ (Río Negro, 13 July 1987).

During the 1990s, then, the stage for showing unauthorized images shifted in Argentina. In the 1960s and 1970s, the place for showing clandes-tine images had been the cinema; alternative circuits were created for film exhibitions (such as universities, factories, unions, etc.) to incite spectators to join the political struggle. After the transition to democracy, however, the television became the new spot for presenting these unauthorized images. Carlos Echeverría would play an important role in this process, as the jour-nalistic producer of the TV programme Edición Plus from 1992 to 1995. In this programme, hidden cameras were used to denounce those involved in the dictatorship (Ormaechea 2005).26 Through his involvement in this programme, Echeverría was able to capitalize on his experience in Germany during the 1980s, when he prepared a report for an investigative news programme aired by the channel WDR – in a format similar to that he would use ten years later in Edición Plus, on the Argentine Air Force planes manufactured in Germany.27 This brief entry into the world of investigative reporting gave Echeverría the training and tools he would need to film Juan.

A versatile, reflective documentary-maker, Carlos Echeverría is construct-ing a career in which each of his successive experiences build on one another. Far from dispersing the director’s energy, this heterogeneous work mode makes his documentary works deep and complex. One of the singular features of his mode of production involves long-term planning (generally between five and ten years). Pre-production is lengthy in part because Echeverría is especially meticulous, but it is also owed, in part, to the difficulties faced by professional documentary-makers, who must diversify their financing sources in order to make a living. The adversities Echeverría’s films have encountered in terms of distribution are owed, in great part, to specific political issues and circumstances. This was especially true during the first years of democracy when the fears and censorship imposed in the dictatorship had yet to dissi-pate. However, another complication is related to the fact that the field of documentary film-making is still under construction in Argentina; there is no established market for these films and no sure way to get them seen. By gazing southward towards a terrain wrought with complexities (which has no relation to the idyllic territory often evoked in films), Carlos Echeverría sets up a new frame focused on the Patagonia, addressing the issues of the south – traditionally presented as a mythical oasis in Argentine cinema – from a broad, realistic perspective.

REFERENCES

Bariloche (1987), ‘Después de <Juan…> como si nada hubiera pasado. Entrevista sin amagues a Esteban Buch’, September 1987, pp. 4–6.

Comolli, Jean-Louis (2002), Filmar para ver. Escritos de teoría y crítica de cine, Buenos Aires: Ed. Sumurg/FADU.

—— (2004), ‘El anti-espectador, sobre cuatro filmes mutantes’, in Gerardo Yoel (comp.), Pensar el cine 2. Cuerpo(s), temporalidad y nuevas tecnologías, Buenos Aires: Manantial, pp. 45–72.

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Firbas, Paul and Meira Monteiro, Pedro (ed.) (2006), Andrés Di Tella: cine documental y archivo personal. Conversación en Princeton, Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI Editora Iberoamericana.

Nichols, Bill (1997), La representación de la realidad. Cuestiones y conceptos sobre el documental, Buenos Aires: Paidós.

Ormaechea, Luis (2005), ‘Cámara descubierta. El documental según Carlos Echeverría’, Sin Aliento – Diario del Festival Internacional de Cine Independiente, 14 April 2005, p. 2.

Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio (2003), ‘Orígenes, evolución y problemas’ in Paranaguá, Paulo Antonio (Ed.): Cine documental en América Latina, Madrid: Cátedra, pp. 13–78.

Peña, Fernando Martín and Vallina, Carlos (2006), El cine quema. Raymundo Gleyzer, Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor.

Río Negro (1987), ‘<Juan, como si nada hubiera sucedido>, Un documento histó-rico’, 13 July 1987.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Margulis, P. (2011), ‘A professional without borders: The case of the documentary film-maker Carlos Echeverría in Germany and Argentina’, Studies in Documentary Film 5: 1, pp. 3–15, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.3_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Paola Margulis is completing her Ph.D. in social sciences at the Universidad de Buenos Aires – on Argentina’s documentary cinema during the transition to democracy, with a scholarship for graduate studies from the CONICET. She teaches History of the Media at the School of Communications of the Universidad de Buenos Aires. Ms Margulis has written several articles and book chapters on documentary cinema, the status of archival images and the visual depiction of the masses, among other topics.

Contact: Instituto de Investigaciones Gino Germani, Facultad de Ciencias Sociales, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Uriburu 950, 6° piso, (1114) Capital Federal, Buenos Aires, Argentina.E-mail: [email protected]

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KEYWORDS

Van der KeukenDarwinemotionmirror neuronsembodimentdocumentary

HING TSANGUniversity of Surrey

Emotion, documentary and

Van der Keuken’s Face Value

ABSTRACT

This article discusses how the role of emotion in cognition can be explored through documentary form, as exemplified by the work of the late Dutch film-maker Van der Keuken. We argue that his work anticipates and supports recent developments within cognitive and phenomenological accounts of documentary. The article argues that Van der Keuken’s work transcends a facile culture/nature divide, while remain-ing socially and politically committed.

INTRODUCTION

The aim of this essay is to draw more scholarly towards the work of the late and great Dutch documentary film-maker Johan Van der Keuken (1938–2001), with special reference to one of his later most creative films Face Value (1991). My argument is that Van der Keuken’s work anticipates many of the recent concerns within documentary film theory, particularly work that is orientated towards an evolutionary account of intersubjectivity and culture, thus avoid-ing a reification of the culture/nature divide.

While it is not my intention to provide a comprehensive overview of Van der Keuken’s entire work within the space of one brief article, it can be noted that Van der Keuken was an extremely talented and prolific film-maker, making over fifty documentaries, many of which won international prizes, in the space of four decades until his untimely death in 2001. As well as being first and foremost a photographer, Van der Keuken was as interested in the

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work of Eisenstein and Hitchcock as much as he was in the innovations of both Jean Rouch and Richard Leacock (Serge Toubiana 1997: 49). He was also interested in music (in particular, jazz), as well as in painting and poetry. This accounts for several films about artists at different stages of his career, such as A Film for Lucebert (1967) and Lucebert, Time and Farewell (1994), both of which dealt implicitly with the differences and communalities between film and other mediums as well as the interrelationship between the different embod-ied senses. Van der Keuken’s interest in long-term interest in improvised music is shown in Ben Webster (1967), a portrait of the famous black American jazz musician during his stay in the Netherlands during the late 1960s, while Brass Unbound (1993) deals with the emergence of world music across South America, Asia and Africa. Indeed his last films would often traverse several continents while always acknowledging the ambivalent ethical position of Holland and indeed the rest of the First World, towards its former colo-nies. This was true of more overtly politically didactic film such as The New Ice Age (1974), which made direct comparisons between living conditions in Lima Peru and alienated factory workers in the north of Holland, as it was for Amsterdam Global Village (1996), which took us to Van der Keuken’s multi-cultural home city before travelling afar to the different countries from which Amsterdam’s new emigrants originated. His work, which, broadly speaking, occupied a space between observational documentary, experimental cinema and fiction, was indeed championed by the late French film critic Serge Daney (1978) as well as by Canadian film theorist Ron Burnett (1978). They saw in his work both social commitment and an interest in the plasticity of film form, which was unusual within the strictures of documentary orthodoxy.

More recently, Van der Keuken’s importance as a world-class film-maker has been reinforced by Thomas Elsaesser’s recent work on European Cinema (2005). Elsaesser rightly draws our attention to the importance of embodied perception in Van der Keuken’s entire oeuvre, making him both an heir to the kinesthetic work of Dziga Vertov. While there is not the space to reiterate the entire argument of Elsaesser’s groundbreaking article, it should be noted that his analysis connects the experimental formal play of his work with its expe-riential nature. The German film scholar also draws our attention towards the role of the embodied senses in Van der keuken’s work. We are told the following:

His [sic] is the task to teach the eye new skills, and in particular, to develop the eye into an ear, and extend the ear to become a ‘hand’. It would mean seeing the world around the tactile register and learning to experience the body less as a container, and more as a surface. It would be a surface not bounded by frame and view, and instead a permea-ble and vulnerable membrane, combining the properties of screen and filter, veil and curtain, as well as the softness of flesh with the hardness of lacquer.

(Elsaesser 2005: 208)

Furthermore, Elsaesser is also keen to show that Van der Keuken’s work is politically and socially committed through its consistent social description. Elsaesser reminds us that the film-maker’s attempt to transcend a Cartesian mind/body divide can also be seen in wider social and global terms. In refer-ence to one of Van der Keuken’s last films Amsterdam Global Village (1996), we are rightly told that ‘he shows what it means to practice global citizenship, he

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1. Indeed, this essay thoroughly endorses Renov’s statement that ‘the subject in documentary has, to a surprising degree, become the subject of documentary’ (Renov 2004: xxiv), but here I shall not be pursuing approaches to subjectivity derived from figures such as Lacan and Levinas, which Renov has already elaborated in great detail.

shows us the spaces, physical as well as mental, of the present and of memory, that we as human beings must be able to occupy together’(Elsaesser 2005: 211). This is also part of what he finally describes as an ‘ethical map of Europe, part of the globalized world, rather than its panoptic apex’ (Elsaesser 2005: 211). Elsaesser’s barely disguised attack of extreme forms of social constructiv-ism and apparatus theory would also suggest that Van der Keuken’s work anticipates recent developments in film theory, which emphasize the role of embodied emotion for both film-maker and spectator within the context of a wider account of human agency.

EMOTION, EVOLUTION, EMBODIMENT AND DOCUMENTARY THEORY

Most notably, Torben Grodal’s work on embodiment and emotion has taken much from recent developments in the neurosciences. He refers to the fact that social intersubjectivity involves taking the position of the other, whereby first-person and third-person perspectives are linked. His work takes much from the discovery of ‘mirror neurons’ in macaque monkeys and other primates at the university of Parma in the late 1990s, which posits the existence of an innate neuronal system that grounds intersubjective intentionality, whereby ‘the observation of an action leads to the activation of parts of the same cortical neural network that is active during its execution’ (Gallese, Keysers and Rizzolatti 2004: 396). Grodal has adapted this for film theory, through his description of the PECMA flow, which, as an acronym, links perception, emotion cognition and motor action together (Grodal 2009: 146). Elsewhere he also tells us that ‘via mirror neurons, the facial expressions’ emotions reso-nate in the onlooker, and that explains the emotional contagion emanating from close-ups’ (Grodal 2009: 187). By doing so, he has also inadvertently explained much of the rational behind Face Value and what it is like to experi-ence the film on a somatic and emotional level.

Grodal’s work could also be seen as complimentary with ideas that have already been developed within documentary theory.1 Within practice itself, the anthropological film-maker David MacDougall has called for an ‘anthro-pology of consciousness’. Taking from phenomenology, evolutionary theory and developments in the neurosciences, MacDougall remarks that ‘conscious-ness does not separate the experiencing of ideas and mental images from touch, vision, sound, and smell. Nor does it clearly separate the experiencing of others from the experiencing of self’ (MacDougall 1998: 273, emphasis added). This accounts for his emphasis on facial and gestural expression, which by ‘inviting particular emotions of commitment and exchange’ (1998: 51) also allows ‘a sense of the unique personal identity of social actors’ (1998: 257). He also relates the experience of face-to-face interaction during film-making with the viewing process, rightly reminding us that ‘a film rightly registers or traces the process of looking itself, not as a line drawn between the subject and object of viewing, but as an artifact in which the two are inseparably fused’ (1998: 257).

McDougall’s work is complemented by the work of Vivian Sobchack, which is even more overt in its deployment of Merleau Ponty’s existential phenomenology as a way of countering the strictures of formalism and positivism (Sobchack 1992: 15–26). Instead, Sobchack draws connections between the general embodiment of the film-maker and the (profilmic) subject with that of the viewer and the theorist, whereby there exists a correlation between ‘a viewing view and a viewed view’ (Sobchack 1992: 55),

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2. We have followed the customary convention for quoting Peirce where CP stands for the Collected Papers and the numbers refer to the volume and paragraph.

by which ‘two intending perceptions (and persons) can be said to share and communicate conscious experience’ (1992: 190 – also see Grodal 2009: 270). Sobchack also refuses to privilege sight over our other embodied senses. Accordingly, sight itself is ‘a modality of perception that is commutable to my other senses, and vice versa’ (1992: 78), which then entails that ‘we experience films not merely as a reduction of our sensual being but also as an enhancement of it’ (Sobchack 2004: 76, original emphasis).

These observations may even serve to cast a rather favourable light on Nichols’ work on the performative documentary, which has been criticized for either being too close to postmodern scepticism or being conceptually imprecise (Bruzzi 2006: 154–55; Carroll 1996: 286–96; Grodal 2009: 265). His description of the performative documentary as both embodied and situated is not incompat-ible with the other two commentators’ work, and likewise serves as a descrip-tion of much of what is found and experienced in Van der Keuken’s work:

It circulates between the body, with the knowledge resident within it, and history, where knowledge and power contend. Location, body, self: these elements of a world we thought we knew turn strange and unfa-miliar in the landscape of performative documentary.

(Nichols 1994: 102)

In addition, Nichols’ omission of more anthropocentric and language-orientated work, exemplified by Goffman’s (1971) work on the actor and Butler’s (1993) Derridean reading of Austin’s work, might now be seen more favourably. Un-noted by his many critics is the fact that Nichols refers directly to Peirce’s notion of the ‘logical interpretant’, which effectively described habit change on the part of the human agent in evolutionary terms (Short 1992: 120, 2004: 228–33). Nichols asserts that the defamiliarization of performative docu-mentary ‘opens the possibility for change in habit, a transformation of aware-ness, a raised consciousness in those visceral and existential terms that are part of figuration’ (Nichols 1994: 99, emphasis added). Worthy of note is that, Peirce’s notion of habit was part of a much wider evolutionary view of man and his signs, whereby habit was present in bees, plants and even water within streams (Peirce 1931–35, C.P. 4.551/5.492)2 and ‘performance’, in general, was defined in terms of innate ‘instincts’ that ‘are simple and involuntary’ (Peirce 1958, C.P. 7.378). This, according to Peirce, is the context for human semi-osis and the development of the self. Not surprisingly, Nichols speaks of an active implicated viewer, asserting that ‘the sense of partial knowledge and suspended closure, the sense of incompleteness and the need for retrospec-tion, makes of the text what we must make of history’ (Nichols 1994: 147). This is arguably a developmental account of the viewer if not the self in general, whereby our increased capacity to adapt to circumstances is defined through changes in conduct and ‘action’ rather than either formal meaning or verbal definitions (Peirce 1998: 418, also see Grodal 2009: 145–270).

Notwithstanding our controversial recuperation of Nichols sometimes maligned work, it could be argued that a variety of sources within film and documentary theory itself lends strong credence to an account of documentary practice that is responsive rather than indifferent to developments in evolu-tionary theory. This was how MacDougall’s analysis of ethnographic film was presented by film-maker Lucien Taylor reminding us that ‘the presence of the natural alongside the cultural also lends the medium a potentially interdisci-plinary quality’ (MacDougall 1998: 21).

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FROM DARWIN TO DOCUMENTARY

Indeed, it is a classic work from Darwin itself, which can be employed to unify the diverse theoretical strands that we have referred to and also serve to inform the thematic and formal concerns of Van der Keuken’s Face Value and provide a pragmatic clarification for recent ideas within film and documentary theory.

In 1872, Charles Darwin combined text and various types of image, photographic and non-photographic, in a book whose title is partially self-explanatory – The Expression of the Emotions in Man and the Animals. In short, Darwin’s work posits the existence of common facial expressions that transcend individual cultures while positing as well that human facial expressions are rooted in the animal world. Darwin’s thesis is summed up when we are told that the young and old of widely different races, both with man and animals, express the same state of mind by the same movements’ (Darwin 2005: 188) and that this repertory of expressions, common to man and animals, is ‘innate or inherited’ (2005: 188) not acquired or socially conditioned.

While this might seem to be a forerunner of either strict biological deter-minism or behaviourism, it is Darwin’s final chapter on self-attention and shame that accounts for why human intentionality is different from that of an organism simply reacting to the contingencies of a physical environment, since ‘it would require an overwhelming amount of awareness to make us believe that any animal could blush’ (Darwin 2005: 167). Later on, Darwin also elaborates on the intersubjective and hence social nature of these particu-lar embodied states of human consciousness:

But when a blush is excited in solitude, the cause almost always relates to the thoughts of others about us – to acts done in their presence, or suspected by them; or again when we reflect what others would have thought of us had they known of the act.

(2005: 180)

It is this later concluding passage that strongly hints at the forms of self-reflexivity, which is neither formal nor directly linguistic and avoids solipsism because it refuses a separation of subjectivity from intersubjectivity. Therefore, Grodal refers to the functionality of emotions with regard to survival for non-human and human animals alike, but also observes with regard to the latter that ‘most learning processes can in fact take place vicariously, by observing other people and performing a “first person” simulation of their doings’ (Grodal 2009: 190).

Furthermore, there are observations within the work of Darwin and others who developed his experiments that point to us towards documentary practice. Darwin himself makes some interesting observations about how viewers sense that an emotion is either felt or forced and acted out. Careful not to undermine his collaborator’s somewhat theatrical attempts to imitate frowning, we are provided with the slightly damning praise that ‘Mr. Rejlander has simulated this expression with some success’ (Darwin 2005: 140, emphasis added). More importantly, with regard to the reactions of viewers to two photographs of an old man taken by the neurologist Guillaume-Benjamin Duchenne, Darwin remarks that ‘almost everyone recognized that the one represented a true, and the other a false smile’ (2005: 110–92). Darwin then concludes that he is struck by the fact that ‘so many shades of expression are instantly recog-nized without any conscious process of analysis on our part’ (2005: 192, also

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3. Murray Smith (1995) also makes the distinction between ‘alignment’ and ‘allegiance’ with regard to characters in fiction film whereby the former involves an access to the emotions of a character and the latter involves a response to the emotions portrayed, and can be seen as a form of ‘moral evaluation’ (Smith 1995: 84). His approach, I believe, could be deployed much more widely in documentary, especially in films that concentrate on a limited number of characters and are linear in structure, which is not the case of Face Value.

Grodal 1997: 42–45). What has come to be known as the ‘Duchenne marker’ has been the subject of many decades of investigation by the psychologist Paul Ekman (1993) both within the confines of the laboratory and outside it in various social contexts. It might also be noted that Christian van der Gag, a pioneer in mirror neuron research, acknowledges the limitations of some of his own experiments, where he used film clips of actors’ expressions rather than observing ‘spontaneous emotional experience in daily life’ between people who actually know one another where something is actually ‘relevant’ for the subjects involved (van der Gag, Minderaa and Keysers 2007: 195). This brings us to Face Value.

REFLEXIVITY AND EMBODIED SIMULATION IN VAN DER KEUKEN’S FACE VALUE

Face Value is an extremely complex film. It is a two-hour film, consisting of 50 different portraits in as many locations, where there is neither a leading char-acter, nor an obviously strong narrative line led by either voice-over or inter-titles. The viewer does not know where he or she is much of the time, because of the absence of establishing shots, as the film itself moves from one European country to another. Several sequences contain no discernible dialogue and are impossible to locate geographically, unless the viewer is a native of the country or region. In short, there are few of the propositional cues that we would normally associate with much documentary (Bordwell and Thompson 2004: 128; Carroll 1996: 283–306; Grodal 2009: 234–35; Plantinga 1997: 43).

Nevertheless, the first three sequences establish central ideas that are developed consistently throughout the film with regard to embodied affect amongst individuals in front of the camera and also what is experienced by the viewer.3 The film begins with a reference to nineteenth-century photography, where a mother is dressing her daughter in costume in preparation for her being photographed against a painted historical backdrop that depicts Europe’s technological progress through the depiction of cars and steam balloons, thus giving primacy to ‘innate dispositions’ and instincts that are common to all cultures and historical eras (Darwin 2005: 45; Grodal 2009: 58–59).

We are then presented with a self-portrait, which consists of a half-naked Van der Keuken speaking directly to camera, in a way which bears some comparison to the earlier photographs of Rejlander. Like the original photographs in the nineteenth-century work and unlike the rest of the portraits in the film, the image focuses exclusively on the film-maker. The image of Van der Keuken goes out of focus several times and becomes an abstract blur, as if to suggest that the self is never a purely transparent object for any individual, while acknowledging that there is a continuum between self and others. We are told the following:

Behind the eye there’s a thought. In front of the eye, there’s a face. The face sees other faces. It sees things. There’s love, why is there love? I’m a God, like everybody else. Not the God which crushes the others. Without a lens, I don’t see myself. I don’t see myself without a lens. I will be born tomorrow. I will make music with my lens and I won’t see myself.

This also tells us that Van der Keuken is not using his self-image to suggest an attainable form of (Cartesian) transparency. With regard to this, Sobchack,

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speaks of both ‘a partial opacity’, but also ‘a partial transparency that enables both filmmaker and spectator – through instruments – to perceive, express, and communicatively share the world’ (1992: 194). For this reason, Sobchack also criticizes some of the more extreme examples of reflexive films that draw attention to the materiality of film in a way that paradoxically resorts to a notion of invisibility, concealing a ‘barely latent desire to achieve transcendental vision’ (1992: 197), as has McDougall done in his attack on ‘external reflexivity’, which he rightly sees as a way of reifying nineteenth-century positivism because it ‘implies an ultimately achievable correct interpretation and a way of restoring to representation its scientific objectivity’ (MacDougall 1998: 88, see also Plantinga 1997: 214–16).

It can also be said that this sequence (and much of the rest of the film) corresponds with what Carl Plantinga has described as the ‘poetic’ film. According to the American scholar, films of this genre ‘represent their subjects as aesthetic objects or events, emphasizing not the dissemination of factual objects, but the sensual and formal qualities of their subjects’ (1997: 173). He then contrasts this with the ‘open voice’ of direct cinema, which ‘shows, provokes and explores’, and may even ‘imply propositions about the projected world’ (Plantinga 1997: 115–16, original emphasis). As I will attempt to show, Face Value eventually shifts towards the ‘open voice’ because of its reference to major political events in the last century (but without adopting the didactic tone of what Plantinga calls the ‘formal voice’). This is ever so slightly hinted at during the self-portrait, when the screen is ruptured by degraded computer screen imagery showing a target being attacked by missiles during the first Gulf War. Nevertheless, we return to Van der Keuken’s face before we are taken to a Dutch art auction.

Recent speculative work by the neurologist Gallese and the art historian Freedberg is highly informative here. They have attempted to extend earlier experiments on neuronal mechanisms and embodied simulation within a face-to-face intersubjective context to the realm of visual art. They refer to the fact that we simulate the workings of the represented body. Using the work of Michangelo, Goya and Pollack as prime examples, they state that viewers will find themselves ‘automatically simulating the emotional expres-sion, the movement or even the implied movement within the representation’ (Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 197). Secondly, it is also suggested that empa-thetic simulation may also arise from ‘the observation of the gestural traces of the artist’ (2007: 201, emphasis added), so that the viewer experiences a form of ‘somatic response to vigorous handling of the artistic medium and to visual evidence of the movement of the hand more generally’ (2007: 202). Significantly, Freedberg and Gallese also speculate that our empathetic simu-lation of the gestures seen in figurative art may also be extended into the field of abstract non-figurative art.

There is much that is similar here. The sequence begins with a juxtapo-sition of artworks that depict animate and non-animate objects: an impres-sionist landscape and a more abstract still life of cubes and circular objects upon a domestic table. It is followed by an extreme close-up of a Dutch female member of the staff who is speaking to bidders on the telephone, so that her eyes and facial expression are privileged over the social context of the commercial transaction. Her sensuality is then juxtaposed with fragments of another impressionist painting of a reclining nude and fragments of a Gauguin painting of a young Polynesian woman’s face. Therefore, the viewer experiences a direct correlation between our simulation of the Dutch woman’s

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4. Also see Favareau (2002) for an article that engages directly with Gallese’s work from a biosemiotic perspective and discusses its implications for evolutionary theory.

smile and that which occurs in the face of sensual art objects. The latter are also shown in extreme close-up, thereby making us engage empathetically with ‘the gestural traces’ of the artist’s ‘goal-directed movements’ (Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 202). Both the face and representations of facial expres-sion are also contextualized by images of abstract art; broad brushstrokes of a black-and-white painting frame the ushers and the more figurative paintings, while an individual shot of a flat but semi-sculptural painting of regular white squares punctuates the sequence.

It can also be noted that this sequence, like all others, is shot handheld by Van der Keuken himself, so that we also experience ‘a somatic response’ (Freedberg and Gallese 2007: 202) to the movement of the handheld camera and the neuralgic agent behind the image. Our sense of a body moving, breathing, seeing and mirroring the actions of both people and objects is also augmented by the film-maker’s use of the crash zoom, which is controlled by the movement of the film-maker’s finger rather than an electronic automatic zoom. The traces of the film-maker’s fingers also reveal other hands and faces either handling the artwork itself or looking at other faces. Both what we see within the human interaction within the frame and our empathetic simula-tion of directly embodied gestures and their representation suggests a link between directly embodied intersubjectivity and its replication and interpreta-tion through artifacts.

Finally, it could also be noted that the sequence also highlights the persistence of innate dispositions, which are represented in art in general – and which naturally figure in both fiction and documentary film. Grodal refers to forms of romantic and sensual love (2009: 59) that constantly reappear in canonical storytelling, which have now been highlighted by Van der Keuken’s emphasis on sensuality both within and outside the frame of art. In addition, species-specific ‘bonds of love’ (Grodal 2009: 59) are also alluded to in a shot that shows a black-and-white etching of a mother hugging her two children.

THE EVOLUTIONARY CHARGE OF THE REEL

I will now argue that these evolutionary dispositions become increasingly prominent in the film, even when Van der Keuken appears to be draw-ing direct attention to the materiality of the film apparatus and might be accused of displaying the type of ‘external reflexivity’ that has been criti-cized by the very theorists who inform our analysis (MacDougall 1998: 88–89; Plantinga 1997: 214–22; Sobchack 1992: 197). Instead, it could be argued that Van der Keuken’s use of reflexivity should not be seen as a formal epistemo-logical device but serves as a further reminder forms of the evolutionary origin of all forms of ‘conspecific intersubjectivity’ (Gallese 2003: 171).4

Van der Keuken’s line of argument can be seen in the progression of four sequences that move from non-verbal intersubjectivity to a final sequence that draws our attention to the mechanism of filming and projection, but is also the most overtly evolutionary in flavour. All four sequences are underlined by what can be described as ‘biophilia’. Grodal himself refers to the fact that ‘we are mentally predisposed to be interested in other agents, be they human, animal, or supernatural’ (2009: 12), while his compatriot, the biologist Jesper Hoffmeyer, has also reminded us that

on the one side, art is a kind of intersubjectivity guaranteed by the universal appeal of the aesthetic as living form – and on the other side,

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5. Mention should also be made of Edward Wilson’s work. Wilson defines biophilia as ‘the innate tendency to focus upon life and lifelike forms, and in some instances to affiliate with them emotionally’ (Wilson 2002: 134), and is also known for his important attempt as bridging the arts and sciences in Consilience (Wilson 1998).

such a guarantee is only valid in the first place because of the universality of subjectivity for any currently living creature.

(Hoffmeyer 2008: 323)5

We are initially taken to Southern France where we see extreme close-ups of old men watching bird racing. Van der Keuken gives as much prominence to the individual birds as he does to the faces of the old men. The soundtrack plays down the role of language in human communication, privileging the noise of the birds over the conversation of the men. The individualization of the birds hints at the existence of communication instincts within other animates, implying that our evolutionary capacity to link ‘ “I do and I feel” with “he does and he feels”’ (Gallese, Christian and Rizzolatti 2004: 396) is what makes us agents in the first place, and language, though important, might not be seen as the sole originator of this capacity.

This can be seen in what follows immediately – a conversation between two young deaf mutes, set in a meadow away from the city. Van der Keuken’s camera draws our attention to the gestures of the children and their facial expressions that express delight both towards sensorial natural phenomenon such as the sensation of water against skin and the sight of a serpent moving amongst the grass and also a form of pleasure towards the presence of another conversant whose point of view and observations are adopted empathetically by the other as part of what Grodal calls ‘self-feelings’ (Grodal 2009: 190). The fact that the viewer focuses on their facial expressions and their skin tones is a further reminder of what Gallese describes as ‘prereflexive forms of under-standing’ whereby ‘we share with our conspecifics a multiplicity of states that includes actions, sensations and emotions’ even before language enters the equation (Gallese 2003: 171).

A third sequence takes place on a beach in Eastern Europe, where children are seen building sandmen and drawing out the shapes of human faces, while lovers caress one another. Here the connection between human creativity, play and sensual love and a wider evolutionary context is self-evident, but what is really original in Van der Keuken’s work is his incorporation of evolutionary sentiments in a later sequence that reworks this footage in an artificial urban environment in what might otherwise be read as a purely material critique of the mechanisms of film-making. Footage from the beach sequence is now projected upon the faces of a young couple who are kissing passionately. It is sensually arousing in the terms described by Grodal, whereby ‘there is a direct emotional resonance between observing facial expressions of emotional excitement and experiencing their excitement’ (2009: 67). It is also a cultural reference in the sense that it appropriates the screen kiss of fictional films without deconstructing it, thus giving credence to Grodal’s observations that popular films often both represent and appeal to innate dispositions.

Furthermore, the re-projection of the earlier sequence lends an even stronger naturalistic flavour to Sobchack’s argument that ‘the film-maker’s introceptive experienced embodiment relation with the camera as a relation isomorphic with the introceptive structure of relation with the projector (and indeed, with the spectator’s directly introceptive perceptual engagement with the world)’ (Sobchack 1992: 197). Film-making, projection, film subject and film-maker and viewer are literally fused in this sequence because of their implied interchangeability; whereby we and our artifacts are at once subjects that can ‘attribute intentions’ (Gallese 2001: 33) to others in the same way that others and their artifacts can attribute intentions to us as subjects. And this

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6. Thomas Sebeok’s work from the same year states that ‘the process of messages, or semiosis, is an indispensable characteristic of all terrestrial life […] messages are found to perfuse the entire biosphere’ (Sebeok 1991: 22). This points to differences between a biosemiotic approach and a neo-evolutionary approach to the relationship between culture and nature. Also see Hoffmeyer (2008: 318–39) for an insight into key differences between a biosemiotic approach and neo-Darwinism.

7. It is here that Sobchack’s work is extremely useful in clarifying Nichols’ famous notion of mode, as her phenomenological approach attempts to bridge the space between viewer and object, thus refusing to make a distinction between epistemology and ontology which is tacitly upheld in Nichols’ and Plantinga’s works.

occurs in a context that although seemingly artificial is also highly naturalistic. On the one hand the content of the sequence reminds us of sexual instincts that are rooted in the reproductive habits of mammals and aviary species described in detail in Darwin’s classic work (1989), while the re-projected film now emphasizes the textures of seawater and sunlight, thus extending the evolutionary origin of desire and love to a wider biocosmic context, perhaps even hinting at the origin of all life in single cellular life.6

THE ETHICAL CHARGE OF THE REAL

Nevertheless, I began this essay claiming that this film is a socially descrip-tive film. While there is not the space to enter a full description of individual sequences, it should be noted that the film also contains two key interrelated elements: the mortality of the individual and the loss of many lives that occurs through wars fought at a distance. The film was dedicated to Ed van der Elsen, a photographer and friend of Van der Keuken, who died shortly after the film was completed, and an entire scene shows him on a bed in the midst of the woods, accompanied by his lover, while other sequences show young children playing and a Sikh funeral in Southhall – in other words, the life cycle of the individual organism, which is determined by evolutionary processes. In addi-tion, the theme of mortality is extended through references to both past wars such as the War of Independence in Algeria, the Holocaust within Europe and the continuing Palestinian conflict, while other sequences describe the first Gulf War, as a mediatized war, but one in which there was loss of life. The film ends with a direct description of Dutch troops being sent to Kosovo, which, now from a twenty-first century perspective, adds a somewhat tragic note because of the subsequent Srebrenica massacre.

It is here that some of Sobchack’s observations about documentary can be applied and clarified. Sobchack contrasts the different reactions that are expe-rienced by the view with regard to fictional death of an acted character and that of a rabbit in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game (1939). We are told that ‘the experiential moment of the rabbit’s death gains its specific axiological charge of affects and values from an existential and cultural knowledge that exceeds – and contextualizes – the homogenizing devices of both cinematic and narrative representation’ (Sobchack 2004: 271) and she concludes that ‘embodied and extratextual knowledge are all necessary to the full consciousness on one side of the screen and documentary space on the other’ (2004: 285). This can also be further contextualized by her observations about the documentary genre that are now presented as modalities rather than fixed categories,7 whereby ‘documentary is less a thing than an experience’ (Sobchack 1999: 241, origi-nal emphasis) so that potential existential connections made between events or people portrayed (in either fiction or documentary) are dependent on our capacity to draw connections between different areas of lived and observed experience.

Her observations are entirely relevant to Van der Keuken’s description of both events in dark Europe’s past and continuing military interventions in foreign lands. Here the film-maker draws direct connections between the rise of the neo-fascist Right during the 1990s and the Holocaust. As viewers we experience the shaking of a camera filming the obscene ranting of Le Pen at a meeting of La Fronte Nationale in southern France. The handheld camera, in a sense, mirrors the physical gesticulations of the right-wing demagogue, but the ‘gestural traces’ that are reproduced on the screen itself express shame

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8. Also see Short (2004), Deely (2007) and Brier (2008) for further elaboration of a naturalistic account of human habit.

9. See Haack (1998) and Rauch (1993) for work that describes how Peirce’s work on scientific inquiry remains of vital import and relevant to questions of free speech and democracy. Their works may also provide a useful and nuanced alternate for the acrimonious debates between Carroll (1996), Winston (2008) and Renov (2004) as to the relationship between documentary and science.

and disgust, which are also a result of the film-maker’s own lived experience and knowledge of Europe’s own dark history – just as our lived knowledge of the same European lifeworld might allows us to see these ‘gestural traces’ as more than a purely physiological phenomenon. We are then immediately taken to a memorial for the victims of the Holocaust, where we meet a rabbi. The sequence ends with a quotation from Kafka’s The Trial, where we hear the rabbi explaining how difficult this text is for him because of his lived expe-rience, before we finally see Kafka’s grave. This means that what Sobchack describes as a ‘documentary consciousness’ (2004: 274-275) can emerge from fictional works where the individual makes ‘existential connections’ (Sobchack 1999: 251) between the imagined worlds of others and his or her own contin-uing intersubjective life experience. Similarly, it is our own extra-textual expe-rience that would allow us to distinguish the close-ups of Fronte Nationale supporters from those of mourners at the Holocaust memorial, whereby ‘aesthetic values are suddenly diminished and ethical ones are greatly height-ened’ (Sobchack 2004: 271).

In the final sequence, we see friends and family members waving goodbye to sailors on a ship whose full size is not initially revealed. Only the odd Dutch flag gives an indication that the ship is departing for the Balkans. Without knowledge of these events and their continuing consequences, these final faces could be read purely on the level of empathy and sympathy where we either simulate the emotions of the other as if they were our own or the other might become an intentional object for our emotions rather than a prelude for the massacre of men, woman and children in Srebrenica, just as the final shot of the warship departing at sunset can be appreciated for its aesthetic poetic qualities rather than a foretaste of continuing conflicts in the twenty-first century. But this is not what Sobchack (2004) or indeed Grodal intends in either of their references to the ‘real’ (Grodal 2009: 270). Sobchack refers to a set of responsibilities that we obliged to attend to because of our growing awareness of the ‘real’, which ‘engages our awareness not only of the exis-tential consequences of representation but also of our own ethical implication in representation’ (Sobchack 2004: 284, original emphasis). This is part of a wider intersubjective world, where emotions such as rage, shame and anger are part of both our engagement with film and our general human agency (Damasio 2004: 165; Grodal 2009: 57) and presuppose a distinction between the true and the false, rather than ‘indifference, distance, scepticism and unconditional apathy’ (Baudrillard 1994: 61). It presupposes an acknowledge-ment of our capacity for error (related but still distinct from the adaptation of non-human animates within the contingencies of their environments) – which then might allow reflection on the consequences of our thoughts and actions and a modification of our habits.8 As might be noted this is a far cry from post-modern scepticism, and is predicated on general principles of human conduct that are also the basis of the natural sciences, not the other way around – as a longstanding pragmatic tradition has been at pains to remind us.9

As a way of a provisional conclusion, this entails that documentary theory maintains a close dialogue with the content and self-correcting prac-tices of inquiry within the natural sciences rather than turning away from it (Grodal 2009: 5). While this essay can only give a glimpse of the richness of aesthetic form and intellectual ideas in the work of Van der Keuken, it can only be hoped that continued engagement with his work will serve as a vehi-cle for further explorations of the complex relationship between biology and culture within documentary studies and beyond.

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REFERENCES

Baudrillard, Jean (1994), The Illusion of the End (trans. Chris Turner), Cambridge: Polity Press.

Bordwell, D. and Thompson, Kristin (2004), Film Art: An Introduction, 7th edn, Boston and London: McGraw-Hill.

Brier, Soren (2008), Cybersemiotics: Why Information Is Not Enough, Toronto and London: University of Toronto Press.

Bruzzi, Stella (2006), New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 2nd edn, London: Routledge.

Burnett, Ron (1978), ‘Johan Van der Keuken’, Cine-Tracts, 1: 4, pp. 14–21.Butler, Judith (1993), Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’,

London: Routledge.Carroll, Noë l (1996), ‘Nonfiction film and postmodernist skepticism’, in David

Bordwell and Noë l Carroll (eds), Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 283–306.

Damasio, A. (2004), Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, London: Vintage.

Daney, Serge (1978), ‘La radiation cruelle de ce qui est’, Cahiers du Cinema, 290–91, pp. 68–72.

Darwin, Charles ([1872] 2005), The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Stilwell, KS: Digireads.com Publishing.

—— ([1877] 1989), The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, London: Pickering.

Deely, John (2007), Intentionality and Semiotics: A Story of Mutual Fecundation as Told by John Deely, Scranton and London: University of Scranton Press.

Ekman, Paul (1993), ‘Facial expression and emotion’, American Psychologist, 48: 4, pp. 376–79.

Elsaesser, Thomas (2005), European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood, Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Favareau, Donald (2002), ‘Beyond self and other: On the neurosemiotic emer-gence of intersubjectivity’, Sign Systems Studies, 30: 1, pp. 57–100.

Freedberg, David and Gallese, Vittorio (2007), ‘Motion, emotion and empathy in esthetic experience’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 11: 5, pp. 197–203.

Gallese, Vittorio (2001), ‘The “shared manifold” hypothesis: From mirror neurons to empathy’, Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8: 5–7, pp. 33–50.

—— (2003), ‘The roots of empathy: The shared manifold hypothesis and the neural basis of intersubjectivity’, Psychopathology, 36: 4, pp. 171–80.

Gallese, Vittorio, Christian, Keysers and Rizzolatti, Giacomo (2004), ‘A unifying view of the basis of social cognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 8: 9, pp. 396–403.

Goffman, Erving (1971), The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Grodal, Torben (1997), Moving Pictures: A New Theory of Film Genres, Feelings, and Cognition, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

—— (2009), Embodied Visions: Evolution, Emotion, Culture, and Film, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

Haack, Susan (1998), Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Hoffmeyer, Jesper (2008), Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, Scranton and London: Scranton University Press.

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MacDougall, David (1998), Transcultural Cinema, Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Nichols, Bill (1994), Blurred Boundaries: questions of meaning in contempo-rary culture, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Peirce, Charles Sanders (1931–35), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 1–6 (ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1958), Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, Vols. 7–8 (ed. Arthur W. Burks), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

—— (1998), The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, Vol. 2 (1893–1913) (ed. The Peirce Edition Project), Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.

Plantinga, Carl R. (1997), Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Short, Thomas (1992), ‘Peirce’s semiotic theory of the self’, Semiotica, 91: 1/2, pp. 109–31.

—— (2004), ‘The development of Peirce’s theory of signs’, in Cheryl J. Misak (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Peirce, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 214–40.

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Sobchack, Vivian (1992), The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—— (1999), ‘Toward a phenomenology of non-fictional experience’, in Michael Renov and Jane Gaines (ed.), Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 241–54.

—— (2004), Carnal Thoughts: Embodiment and Moving Image Culture, Berkley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press.

Toubiana, Serge (1997), ‘Entretien avec Johan Van der Keuken’, Cahiers du Cinéma, 517: pp. 47–55.

van der Gag, Christiaan, Minderaa, Ruud B. and Keysers, Christian (2007), ‘Facial expressions: What the mirror neuron system can and cannot tell us’, Social Neuroscience, 2: 3, pp. 179–222.

Van der Keuken, Johan (1967), A Film for Lucebert, Ministry of Culture: Amsterdam.

—— (1967), Big Ben: Ben Webster in Europe, VRPO, Hilversum.—— (1974), The New Ice Age, Cineproduktie: Amsterdam /Ministry of Culture:

Amsterdam.—— (1991), Face Value, Dutch Film Fund: Amsterdam/Lucid Eye Films:

Amsterdam/La Sept: Paris/Ikon: Hilversum/WDR: Cologne/WIP: Liège.—— (1993), Brass Unbound, Pieter van Huystee – ID-TV: Amsterdam.—— (1994), Lucebert, Time and Farewell, Pieter van Huystee Film: Amsterdam,

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—— (1998), Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.Winston, Brian (2008), Claiming the Real: The Grierson and Beyond, 2nd edn,

London: BFI.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Tsang, H. (2011), ‘Emotion, documentary and Van der Keuken’s Face Value’, Studies in Documentary Film 5: 1, pp. 17–30, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.17_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Hing Tsang is an independent film-maker and part-time lecturer at the University of Surrey. His current research interests include evolutionary theory, biosemiotics, Peircean sign-theory, phenomenology and documentary cinema. He is currently completing a monograph on Peirce’s notion of the self and its relevance to documentary practice and theory.

Contact: Department of Dance, Film and Theatre, University of Surrey, Guildford Surrey GU2 7XH.E-mail: [email protected]

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KEYWORDS

Jonas MekasFluxfilmsJohn Lennon

and Yoko OnoRaymond DepardonEuropean

Photojournalism

DES O’RAWEQueen’s University

New York City:

12 December, 1980

ABSTRACT

This article discusses two documentary treatments of the 1980 Central Park vigil for John Lennon: Happy Birthday to John (Jonas Mekas, 1995, 16mm, 18 min.) and Dix minutes de silence pour John Lennon/Ten Minutes Silence for John Lennon (Raymond Depardon, 1980, 16mm, 10 min.). It examines the formal and cultural contexts of both films and analyses the reasons why this event was signifi-cant for these film-makers, and how its cinematic representation – and the repre-sentation of New York City – relates to their film methods and broader aesthetic preoccupations. In witnessing the apotheosis of John Lennon as cultural martyr (and natural New Yorker), such documentaries displace their ostensible subject: associa-tively, in the case of Mekas; incidentally, in the case of Depardon; and intentionally, in the case of the mass media.

I arrived in Central Park on the day of the service just as the silent period began. Thousands of mourners had gathered on the grey, cold day, and though it was quiet, you could hear people crying softly. Aside from crying, it was so eerily silent I could hear the sound of my own footsteps.

(Gruen 2005: 215)

On the day of the vigil, visitors in the heart of Manhattan didn’t need to ask for directions, they just followed the crowd. Unlike the hysterical

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1. For a discussion of media responses to Lennon’s death, particularly the US print media, see Fogo (1994). Elliott (1999) remains the most comprehensive study Lennon’s death and its socio-psychological effects.

weeping that I’d seen in Memphis in 1977, the audience on Sunday was more subdued, listening to Lennon songs over a loudspeaker […]. At 2:00 p.m., the crowd began its silent prayer.

(Hillburn 2009: 131)

Shortly before 11.00 p.m. on 8 December 1980, John Lennon and Yoko Ono emerged from a limousine on West 72th Street, Manhattan. They were return-ing to their apartment in the Dakota Building from The Record Plant where they had spent the evening rehearsing and recording a new song, ‘Walking on Thin Ice’. As the couple made their way through the Dakota’s faux gothic entrance, Mark David Chapman approached Lennon and shot him repeat-edly with a .38 calibre handgun. Lennon was rushed to St Luke’s-Roosevelt Hospital in a patrol car and was pronounced dead shortly after admittance. Ono was then taken back to the apartment where a crowd had now gath-ered to light candles, place makeshift wreathes, sing and play music. In the early hours of the morning she sent down a message asking them to disperse, and requesting instead that they gather ‘anywhere and everywhere’ for ‘ten minutes of silent prayer’ on the following Sunday, at 2.00 p.m. Later, Edward Koch, the Democrat mayor of New York, invited people to gather in Central Park for the vigil. Over 225,000 people attended, spreading out across the park, along the Mall, and back towards the police barriers and funereal flot-sam that still lay around the front of the Dakota.

Inevitably, the death of John Lennon was a culturally traumatic event and while there is nothing especially modern (or remarkable) about mass displays of public grief for popular figures and fallen heroes, nevertheless, such exhibitions – amplified as they are by the mass media1 – seem to acquire an added significance in ‘advanced’ societies generally too busy for sudden death, and the slow work of mourning. Perhaps, the grief of those who gath-ered in Central Park that Sunday (mainly white, middle-class, and not yet middle-aged) was less a response to the killing of Lennon than a manifesta-tion of generalized social anxiety, and the phenomenon of symbolic loss. After all, Chapman’s insane act put paid to another American dream, and further diminished the already fading mythology of New York City itself, a place that Lennon, himself, had more than once likened to ‘a little Welsh village with Jones the Fish and Jones the Milk, and where everybody seems to know everybody’ (Norman 2008: 264).

This essay looks at two documentary treatments of the Central Park vigil for Lennon: Jonas Mekas’s Happy Birthday to John (1995, 16mm, 18 min.) and Raymond Depardon’s Dix minutes de silence pour John Lennon/Ten Minutes Silence for John Lennon (1980, 16mm, 10 min.). Mekas and Depardon might seem an unlikely pairing but there are affinities, if not direct points of convergence in outlook and method: both sensibilities have been shaped by migrant experiences, and much of their work, for all its formal differences, is preoccupied with experiences of exile and displacement, rootedness and the meaning of home; the country and the city (and in Mekas’s case, the country in the city); both are Europeans who have developed an intimate social and creative relationship with New York; both are concerned with the place of autobiography in their work, using captions, inter-titles, diary entries, still images and first-person commentary to complicate relations between the imaginary and the documentary. What is also interesting is not simply differences in why and how both film-makers witness the apotheosis of John Lennon as cultural martyr (and natural New Yorker) but also how public

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mourning itself invariably involves the displacement of its ostensible subject: associatively, in the case of Mekas; incidentally, in the case of Depardon; and intentionally, in the case of the mass media.

FLUXUS AND THE WALRUS

Scott MacDonald: The last reel [of Lost, Lost, Lost (1976)] has the John Lennon/Yoko Ono passage. Did you know them?

Jonas Mekas: Yes, I knew Lennon. I’d known Yoko since 1959 or 1960 perhaps. Around 1962 she left for Japan and then decided to come back to New York. But she needed a job, for immigration, so Film Culture gave her her first official job in this country. We have been friends ever since.

(MacDonald 1984: 108)

For over sixty years, Jonas Mekas has been creating a cinematic almanac of everyday events that he assembles afterwards into portraits, elegies and sketches. In compilation works such as Walden (Diaries, Notes, and Sketches) (1969, 16mm, 180 min.), Lost, Lost, Lost (1976, 16mm, 178 min.) and Paradise Not Yet Lost/Oona’s Third Year (1979, 16mm, 98 min.) excerpts from Mekas’s footage are constructed into loose segments, usually captioned by typed and handwritten (often ironic) inter-titles. The films make use of natural ambi-ent noise and (background) music, and can include Mekas’s own wistful commentaries. Words such as ‘notes’, ‘scenes’, ‘excerpts’, ‘sketches’ (like the word ‘lost’) recur throughout his filmography and writings, and the title from one of his later films might describe his entire oeuvre: Autobiography of a Man who Carried his Memory in his Eyes. Despite its haphazard appearance, however, Mekas’s technique adheres to a discernible aesthetic of informality, interruption and fragmentariness that combines handheld single frame shoot-ing with random exposures, superimpositions and varied projection speeds. This practice gives the images an impressionistic ‘flutter-effect’, an effect that calls to mind the (albeit more abstract) ‘flicker’ film techniques developed in the 1960s by people like Paul Sharits, Peter Kubelka and Stan Brakhage.

Mekas, meanwhile, would doubtless object to notions of a personal style or discernible aesthetic. He does not necessarily see himself as a film-maker, as one who directs – makes – films in any conventional or authoritative sense, even an ‘avant-garde’ sense. Instead, he prefers terms such as ‘filmer’, i.e. one who points his camera at whatever is there, whenever he has the inclination to do so, and then selects shots and sequences for occasional works. When footage is reassembled for an alternative film, it is done more in the spirit of a creative archivist than a dutiful chronicler of people and places (Frye 2007). And yet, for all their coherent incoherence, the works also have a lyrical qual-ity to them, as if holding out against abstraction, insisting on real meaning in the midst of their own loose, unsteady, fragile forms. Scenes from the Life of Andy Warhol (1990, 16mm, 36 min.), Zefiro Torna, or Scenes from the Life of George Maciunas (1992, 16mm, 34 min.) and He Stands in a Desert Counting the Seconds of His Life (1985, 16mm, 149 min.), for example, are simultaneously personal and public elegies to artists, and friends. To paraphrase Maureen Turim (writing on the paradoxes that complicate so-called ‘autobiographi-cal film-making’ techniques in Reminiscenes of a Journey to Lithuania (1972, 16mm, 88 min.)), Mekas’s films ‘suggest in their gaps and processes a poetics of our displaced and conflicted selves; at their best, they express more than

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they know’ (Turim 1992: 211). In taking his camera ‘for a walk’ in this way, Mekas has succeeded in creating an expansive body of cinematic work that criss-crosses between documentary forms and avant-garde praxis, history and memory, life and art.

Born in 1922, not far from the Lithuanian city of Biržai, Mekas arrived in New York with his brother, Adolphas, in 1949. In the closing stages of World War II, he had been sent by the Nazis to a forced labour camp near Hamburg, and after the war he spend time working and studying in West Germany before being resettled in the United States as part of the Displaced Persons Program. Moving into the Williamsburg neighbourhood in Brooklyn, the brothers soon made friends with other Brooklyn-based artists and intel-lectuals, many of who were also recent refugees from post-war Europe. The diary films began in the early 1950s as an incidental activity that accidentally acquired larger expressive and historical significance. Perhaps, it is because of their incidental style, their apparent tendency towards spontaneity, snapshot improvisation and flicker-montage techniques that they can constitute such a necessary archive of New York’s post-war film and wider artistic culture. Mekas’s creative, critical and curatorial activities throughout this period have ranged from making theatrical dramas (most notably, The Brig (1964, 16mm, 65 min.)) to multimedia installations, poetry, criticism and publishing; he is a founding editor of Film Culture and for many years a film critic for The Village Voice. He initiated and participated in numerous socially-committed projects, protests and collaborations (not least of which being the Film-Makers’ Cooperative and the Filmmakers’ Cinémathèque/Anthology Film Archives project).

One of his closest artistic associations throughout the 1960s and 1970s was with the Fluxus ‘movement’, and in particular with its original leading light (and a fellow Lithuanian émigré), George Maciunas (1931–1978). Although never a fully recognized Fluxus artist per se, Mekas’s cinematic method has clearly been influenced by that environment. Like Pop, Minimalism, and New Realism, Fluxus was – and still is – dedicated to eradicating distinctions between elite and popular culture, between the subject of art and the object of life. However, it is also more committed than most to being a mode of action, a direct assault on the notion of art as art, on its academic categories and disciplines, and – faithful to its Dadaist forbearers – Fluxus has remained resolute in its belief that the sooner the institutions and aura of art become redundant, the better:

The revelation of Fluxus was that everything is marvellous. One did not especially need to single out soup cans or comic strips like Pop, indus-trial products like Minimalism, underwear and automobile tires like the New Realists. Art was not a special precinct of the real but a way of experiencing whatever – rainfall, the babble of a crow, a sneeze, a flight of a butterfly, to list some of Maciunas’s examples.

(Danto 2005: 337)

Anti-object and interactive, conceptual and instructional, anonymous, undis-ciplined, polemical, playful, and the original source of ‘happenings’ and mail art, the spirit of Fluxus continues to provoke the world of contemporary art and conceptualism to a surprising extent. It is, however, necessary to distinguish between European, North American, Japanese and other varieties of Fluxus, and to avoid over-emphasizing the importance of Maciunas (particularly, if at

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the expense of a more recent history of the movement). It is also best to avoid generalizing about the role of Fluxus within some wider post-war avant-garde culture, and to bear in mind the extent to which the experiential, pedagogical and ‘intermedia’ strategies of Fluxus subvert institutional categories and labels while simultaneously depending on them for its very existence. Caveats aside, throughout the 1960s and 1970s, Fluxus – with the mercurial Maciunas at the helm – was a genuinely influential cultural project, and it made an impact on the world of experimental film-making at this time, especially in New York (Henricks 2003: 130–40; Higgins 2002: 87–99).

In 1965, for example, Maciunas and Mekas inaugurated the Fluxfilm Anthology project to produce and exhibit short experimental films by artists currently associated with Fluxus. By 1970, the Anthology has gathered over forty works, many of which responded ingeniously to Maciunas’ ludic mani-festo (Smith 1998: 3–21). Some were conceived as elements in a larger ‘inter-media’ event, others devised to be screened in a continuous loop, and only a few films seemed to fall foul of the ‘poetic’ seriousness normally associated with avant-garde film culture in North America at this time. The Fluxfilms play with simple, reductive, elementary – if now familiar – notions: the smile, a gesture, numbers, measurements, puns and paradoxes. Maciunas’ 10 Feet (1966, 12.4 sec), for example, comprises nothing other than ten feet of clear film leader, numbered one to ten. George Brecht’s Entrance to Exit (1966, 6.30 min.) plays with concepts of entering, egress, arrival and departure, before fading to black, while Trace #22 (Robert Watts, 1966, 1.15 min.) is a silent X-ray sequence of a mouth eating and speaking, and musician John Cale’s Police Car (1966, 1 min.) is simply the blinking lights of a police car.

Yoko Ono’s Anthology films are also important examples of the Fluxfilm vision: Eyeblink (1966, 1 min.) is a slow motion view of an eye blinking; One (1966, 4.30 min.) is a close-up of a striking and ‘exploding’ match; while Four (1966, 5.30 min.) – anticipating her later No. 4 (Bottoms) (1966, 16mm, 80 min., B&W) and Up Your Legs Forever (1970, Super-8mm, 70 min., colour) films – is a study of human buttocks and their movements (MacDonald 1992: 139–56; 1993: 19–27). The spirit of Fluxfilm would continue to influence Ono’s other later film-making projects, such as Smile/Film No. 5 (1968, 16mm, 58 min.) and Fly (1970, 16mm, 19 min.), but as her relationship with Lennon developed so too film-making increasingly became a vehicle for their musical collaborations: ‘Two Minutes Silence’ from their 1969 album, Unfinished Music No. 2: Life with Lions, for example, commemorates Ono’s miscarried child by paying homage to Cage’s 1952 proto-Fluxus composition, 4’33”; ‘Listen, the Snow is Falling’, the B-side to their 1971 ‘Happy Xmas (War is Over)’ single, was inspired by Dick Higgins’ Winter Carol (1959); and a track on the Mind Games album (1973), ‘Nutopian International Anthem (3 Seconds of Silence)’, is indebted to Cage again, and to Maciunas’ notion of a conceptual republic of Fluxus, subsequently named ‘Nutopia’ by Lennon and Ono (Robertson 2003: 102–71).

Mekas was naturally drawn into the whirlpool of artistic and political activity generated by Maciunas and his circle but his attitude was by no means uncritical and Happy Birthday to John catches something of the problematic nature of Ono and Lennon’s relations to Fluxus, particularly in terms of the film’s dialectical structure; it comprises footage of Lennon and Ono at various events in the early 1970s (the period between Let It Be and his infamous ‘lost weekend’), before concluding with a montage (or collage) of images from Mekas’s attendance at the Central Park vigil, along with his

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2. Another film featuring this press conference and exhibition was made by Ono’s friend and sometime collaborator, Takahiko Limura, Yoko Ono: This is Not Here (1999, Lux (VHS/NTSC), 19 min). A recording of the exhibition press conference is also included as a track on the side-B of The History of Syracuse Music: Volumes VIII & IX (Eceip Records, 1976). Mekas’s inter-title seems to give 1972 as the year of this exhibition at Everson but this is probably incorrect, as is the date given for the party at Allen Klein’s house (12 June 1971), which was held either a week after the Everson exhibition, or on 6 July 1971. The date given in the film for the Central Park vigil (8 December) is in fact the date of Lennon’s death (Kirst 2005). See also, Robertson (2003).

wife (Hollis Melton), and their young daughter (Oona Mekas). Although divided into six inter-titled segments, the film initially seems to derive a clear two-part structure from its soundtrack: the first placing Lennon’s life at this time within a convivial, carefree frame, accompanied by sounds of singing, banter, friends and possibilities, while the second deploys sombre percussion music by Lithuanian abstract composer Dalius Naujokaitis to enunciate a sense of foreboding. Despite the convenience of this caesura, however, the film’s structure probably falls into three parts that can be delineated as follows: firstly, Fluxus and Other Friends; secondly, In Concert; and finally; the Vigil in the Park. In fact, this trilogic shape enables the film to avoid hagiography, allowing space for a more sceptical perspective on the problematic relations between conceptual artists and dominant culture, political activism and pop stars, communities and commodities, hypocrites and chequebooks (Wollen 2004: 15–34). Happy Birthday to John is nothing if not a moral tale.

The film opens with a sequence from the opening of Ono’s ‘There is Not Here’ exhibition at the Everson Museum in Syracuse, New York, on 9 October 1971, the date of Lennon’s 31st birthday.2 The soundtrack for the initial two minutes is taken from a recorded conversation between Lennon and Mekas on the differences between 8mm and Super-8 film-making, dated 19 December 1970. This is then replaced by ambient, unsynchronized noise and chatter from the exhibition press conference where Maciunas can be seen (but not heard) addressing the assembled gathering of friends, journalists and celebri-ties. Someone calls for the ‘cameraman’, while another starts chanting ‘He’s Got the Whole World’, as Lennon is then framed fiddling with a mirror-cube (in his hands). This moment is typical of the ways in which Mekas’s sound-image manipulations and superimpositions appear to inadvertently gener-ate motifs and extended metaphorical associations. Mirrors and reflections recur throughout the film (the ornate convex wall mirror in the hotel room,

Source: Courtesy of Anthology Film Archive.

Figure 1: Three Friends.

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Ono’s pilot sunglasses, the mirror ball lighting effects at the Madison Square Garden concert, etc.), as do shots of people using cameras, wearing glasses, looking to and away, and being on the edge or in a corner of Mekas’s frame. Similarly, the refusal to synchronize sounds and images is always a strategy that will – despite itself – find alternative expressive possibilities (‘at their best, they express more than they know’). The singing of ‘He’s Got the Whole World’, for example, belongs to the post-exhibition birthday party held for Lennon in a room at the Hotel Syracuse. Phil Spector can be seen conducting the celebrity revellers, frantically strumming a guitar. Also in attendance at the party are people like Ringo Starr, Allen Ginsberg, Coby Batty (The Fugs), May Pang, Klaus Voormann (Plastic Ono Band), Phil Oaks (producer), Jim Keltner (drummer/percussionist), Nicky Hopkins (keyboard-player), as well as the exhibition curators, David Ross and Jim Harithan. At one point, we see Lennon with his back to the camera, squatting on the floor, playing a guitar, and singing an impromptu version of ‘Attica State’, the protest song that would subsequently feature on Some Time in New York City, the commer-cially unsuccessful ‘political’ album that Ono and Lennon were working on at this time (Norman 2008: 699–700).

The singing of ‘Attica State’ carries into the succeeding segments: brief out-takes from Up Your Legs Forever followed by footage from a party at producer Allen Klein’s Riverdale home. Again, numerous stars and celebri-ties can be seen mingling and fooling around: Jerry Rubin, Ornette Coleman, Al Aronowitz; Andy Warhol taking photographs with his Polaroid ‘Big Shot’ instant camera, Shirley Clarke being filmed filming (material that would coin-cidentally feature in ‘Part 1’ of her experimental short, The TeePee Video Spaces Troupe: The First Years, 1970–1973), Lennon playing basketball with Miles Davis, and both admiring Lennon’s psychedelic Platinum V Rolls Royce, Ono talking to Betty Mabry and Lennon sharing a joint under a garden parasol as rain begins to fall. This shot marks the first change in the film’s mood and tempo; after it and a few moment’s silence, Naujokaitis’ heavy percussion music dramatically slows the film down even as rapid motion images flutter past from Lennon and Ono’s last headline performance at a Madison Square Garden benefit concert (30 August 1972) with Sha Na Na, Stevie Wonder and Roberta Flack. The segment ends with shots of the appreciative audience, before finally cutting to inter-title and the footage from Central Park where that audience is now shown congregating for the vigil.

Central Park has always been something of locus amoenus for Mekas, most significantly in Walden where his vision of it as a Thoreauian retreat from the busy metropolis, a space for walks, picnics and games in the snow, is expressed unambiguously. This ideal of the park remains very much intact in Happy Birthday to John, a film that is both an elegy (of sorts) for Lennon and a celebration of the park as a great, unifying civic space. It is also a home away from home for the immigrant, Mekas’s reimagined Lithuanian countryside in the middle of Manhattan. If anything, the film associates the park (rather than John Lennon) with freedom, peace and love. Alternating between shots of people moving, gathering and sitting in trees are shots of Mekas’s daughter playing in the leaves, a friend waving and smiling to the camera, a ‘Peace and Love’ banner carelessly hanging from a park fence, and a couple hold-ing hands. The film ends with the camera now pointed up into the trees and towards the sky, before cutting to the child running through a pile of leaves, followed by three separate end-title cards, and a coda-image of a watercolour painting of strawberries (taken from a book of botanical art).

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MANHATTAN TRANSFER

I arrived in New York in the winter of 1980 with a friend. She had just found a job there, and we decided to share a studio. She would leave at dawn and not return until late in the evening. I hardly knew anybody, so I found myself walking all day long, wandering the city from top to bottom.

(Depardon 2009)

By the end of the 1970s, Raymond Depardon had grown disillusioned with contemporary European photojournalism. The halcyon days of the interna-tional press pack and the post-war paparazzi were fading fast amidst the exigencies of television news culture, the demise of quality magazines and the preciousness of the ‘decisive moment’ school of photography. For Depardon, if being factual, objective – being a reporter – meant producing formulaic images of spontaneous events then he resolved to make his photography available to a more impressionistic, unpredictable, autobiographical methods. He had become increasingly drawn to the subjective and aleatory aesthetic of people like Robert Frank and William Klein, American photographer-film-makers whose images of New York street life were becoming influential at this time. This transformation was not simply about trying to make his photography and documentary films less journalistic, less formally subservient to the edito-rial constraints of current affairs, rather it involved recasting these imperatives in ways available to – open to – the subjectivity of the frame itself, a reality represented through the undisguised gaze of an image-maker.

Depardon had been a successful photojournalist both within and beyond France: his work had garnered prestigious awards; he had co-founded the

Source: Courtesy of Anthology Film Archives.

Figure 2: Central Park Diary.

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3. Depardon’s Profils paysans series comprises three films documenting the changing pace and appearance of life in the Cévennes region: L’approache (2001, 88 min.); Le quotidian (2005, 90 min.); and La vie moderne/Modern Life (2008, 88 min.). See also Sam Rohdie’s essay on this trilogy (Rohdie 2010).

Gamma agency, and worked for other organizations including Dalmas and Magnum; he had travelled the planet and photographed some of the horrific consequences of war, famine and poverty, as well as beautiful landscapes and bright, busy cities. In particular, he had worked in Algeria, Vietnam, Chile, Biafra (Nigeria), Lebanon and Chad. In 1970, his business partner and friend, the photographer, Gilles Caron, was kidnapped, and then killed. In 1977, his interviews with François Claustre, a development worker held hostage by Hissène Habré’s Chadian guerillas, played a role in her release, and earned him a Pulitzer Prize. In 1979, after another exhausting assignment (this time in Soviet-occupied Afghanistan with Mujahedeen leader, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and some of his followers) he published his seventh book, Notes. It comprises 100 images, each accompanied by a caption that reflects on an else-where to the photograph, a caption that acts as a ‘relay rather than an anchor’ (Depardon 1998: 594). Notes departs from conventional European photo-journalistic practice and constitutes Depardon’s first unequivocal attempt to replace an objective presentation of photographic ‘evidence’ with a subjective juxtaposition of image and text (Depardon 1979). Two other projects from this period are also related to his radical change in approach: the production of a second feature-length film, San Clemente (1980, 53mm, 90 min., B&W), and the photographs he took in New York City during 1980–81.

In San Clemente, the camera stoically observes the lives of mentally ill patients in various Italian psychiatric hospitals, particular one situated on the Venetian island of San Clemente. ‘I felt at home there’, Depardon later recalled, ‘I was gaining precious knowledge of the art of photographing others without intruding on them – a necessary condition for anyone wandering those corridors and enclosed courtyards’ (Depardon 2009). The images of bewilderment in the film – the vacant and hidden looks, mannerisms, shuf-fles and utterances of its patients – are of course reminiscent of other images and experiences from places of conflict and famine. The reticent framing of human remoteness, desolation and confinement has become characteristic of Depardon’s style: ‘I don’t like extracting lessons from things. I don’t like giving lessons either’ (Depardon 1998: 398). San Clemente also marks the beginning of his series of documentary films exploring the forms and effects of contemporary judico-legal, medical and mass-media processes, films that observe people experiencing first-hand the panoptical capabilities of these systems, for example: Délits flagrants/Caught in the Act (1994, 35mm,109 min.), Faits divers (1984, 35mm, 108 min.), 10e chamber: Instants d’audience/10th District: Moments of Trial (2004, 35mm, 105 min.) and Urgences/Emergencies (1988, 35mm, 105 min.). Such ‘modern’ situations seem in stark contrast to the images of desert landscapes, fields and French farmyards found else-where in his œuvre. However, everything he now photographs, films, writes draws on personal stories and memories to ruminate on the image itself, and what it represents, reflects, excludes and the responsibilities that the compo-sition and circulation of these images confers on their ‘author’. In films such as Empty Quarter, une femme en Afrique/Empty Quarter: A Woman in Africa (1985, 35mm, 90 min., colour), La Captive du desert (1990, 35mm, 90 min., colour) and the Profils paysans trilogy, for example, the lateral framing of open spaces, the informality of narrative structures, the concern with differ-ence and change that pervades images and their meanings are directly influ-enced by existential concerns.3 There is more than enough of everywhere in San Clemente, just as the defiant farmers from the Cévennes region share more than one might think with the nomads and peasant workers of North Africa

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4. He subsequently made a short film, New York, N.Y. (1984, 35mm, 10 min., B&W), comprising three sequence-shots (taken at dawn, midday, night). The first is taken from inside the Roosevelt Island elevated railcar, the second is a shot of commuters walking on a street, and the final shot is again taken from inside the railcar (this time returning to Manhattan). The film has a particularly memorable soundtrack comprising sirens, car-horns, stiletto footsteps and silence.

and South East Asia. Perhaps, the uncertainties and aporias that have preoc-cupied Depardon since the 1970s (here/there, document/fiction, image/text, anchor/relay, objective/subjective, etc.) also issue from the traveller’s desire to rediscover the whereabouts of home: ‘I don’t regret my many pictures of Brigitte Bardot. It’s just that I would have liked to have a good one of my father’ (Depardon 2006: 304).

Depardon’s New York photographs were subsequently published in two books, Correspondance new-yorkaise (1981) and Manhattan Out (2008). The first was compiled from a (daily) photographic commission for Libération during the summer of 1981, and it includes an epilogue comprising photographs of his family farm, and a critical essay by Alain Bergala (Depardon 1981). The second comprises black and white street photographs taken by Depardon in the winter of 1980, photographs that he had originally disregarded.4 Hoping to capture his subjects unawares, he had photographed them at waist and hip level, without using the viewfinder. The resultant images of people walking, jogging, colliding, roller-skating, drinking, cycling, falling over and getting arrested are frequently set against either diverting background activity, or the Manhattan skyline. Many of the subjects are decked in large overcoats and thick winter furs, others hide under their hoods (reminiscent of the figures in San Clemente), a man strolls towards the camera wearing a balaclava, another (with plasters on his nose and ear, and a bottle of champagne in his coat pocket) glances nonchalantly at the photographer. Initially, Depardon felt there was nothing remarkable (noteworthy) about these photographs. He felt he had not made ‘contact’ with Manhattan, and possibly, when set against the contemporary New York street photography of people like Tod Papageorge and Helen Levitt – not to mention the more iconic work of Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Weegee or Diane Arbus – he sensed that he had failed to adapt his photojournalistic and reportage skills to the streets of Manhattan. Twenty-seven years later, Depardon came across the photographs in a storage box and to his amazement they were not at all as he remembered them: ‘It’s interesting to realize that most Americans I captured on photo were looking at the lens and were therefore aware of their picture being taken […] I was convinced at the time that I had them fooled’ (Depardon 2009). It is this expe-rience of New York as an outsider, a wanderer, which also explains the history of Ten Minutes Silence for John Lennon.

In contrast to Happy Birthday to John, Depardon’s film comprises almost entirely a single circular panning shot taken from a fixed position somewhere in the crowd. More reminiscent of his first foray into documentary film-making, Jan Palach (1969, 16mm, 12 min., colour) than his later experiments with ‘direct cinema’ techniques (e.g. Numéros zero (1977, 53mm, 90 min., colour)), the framing formations in Ten Minutes Silence are a product of Depardon’s changing sense of what the camera can capture unawares, unexpected, from the incidental reality of an unfolding event. The film begins abruptly just over two minutes into the vigil with a shot of the crowd. A man squats in the foreground wearing a dark green beret, white scarf and gloves. He occupies the bottom right quarter of the frame. He is bearded and wears a pair of small, round dark spectacles. The camera meets his stillness. He seems unaware of its presence but we cannot be certain, and neither is the film-maker. As with the images in Manhattan Out, it is difficult to know who is performing to the camera and who is not, who is posing by not posing, and so forth. The man’s general appearance resembles that of Lennon, as does the appearance of any number of people drawn into Depardon’s frame throughout the film.

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As the camera proceeds along its path, other figures come into view. A woman wearing a long, red overcoat also features in this opening frame, head down and hands clasped in silent prayer. Again, as the camera continues to pan left, we notice the assertive presence of red (a coat, hat, scarf, badge, paper cup). Although there are no titles at the beginning of the film, the end-title does appear in bold red lettering across a long shot of the dispersing crowd. Red also dominates the mise-en-scène of Jan Palach, although the metaphori-cal connotations are more obvious in that example. As with Mekas’s films, the more Depardon’s frame tries to be innocent, the more unrehearsed repeti-tions, coincidences, patterns of colour and demeanour manifest themselves. Medium close-ups of individual mourners invariably give way to images of larger groups, or clusters of mourners, before coming to rest again on a differ-ent individual. Filmed at some distance from the Bandshell, there seems to be no obvious central attraction with people looking in various directions, some swaying gently with the breeze, others struggle to remain motionless, and observant. Some find the silence uncomfortable. For a few, Depardon’s prob-ing camera momentarily fills the void, a certainty to stare into.

Opposing the prevailing breeze, the camera continues to move left. Two men now dominate the foreground. One is looking upwards, the other wears a Stetson and appears to be either saluting or just holding his hat in place, or both. Avoiding the scrutiny of the camera, a red-haired man in a sleeveless flack jacket turns away and the camera obligingly tilts downwards, as if in disappointment. The dry leaves of late fall come into fuller view, before the Manhattan skyline rises in the background. A man sits on the leave-covered ground, beside him is another man wearing a red bandana. Trees appear, with figures sitting and standing on their branches. Off-screen a camera clicks somewhere, and in the background someone fidgets with a paper bag. These

Source: Courtesy of Palmeraie et Désert.

Figure 3: No one I think is in my tree.

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5. A live ‘Eyewitness Report Special’ of the vigil was broadcast by WABC-TV Channel 7 NYC, introduced by Roger Grimsby, and with a hapless Ernie Anastos reporting from Central Park (shivering, confused about dates and referring at one point to Ono as Lennon’s ‘late widow’). At the time of writing, it was possible to watch the entire programme on YouTube (including the shots of Central Park taken from the helicopter that features in Depardon’s film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v_h_ZUh5QX4).

6. In a recent interview, Depardon described 10 Minutes Silence and New York, N.Y. as ‘two facets of the city’. He also relayed the following vignette:

Towards the end of [10 Minutes Silence] you could hear Lennon’s song ‘Imagine’ rising from the crowd. Yoko Ono, his widow, is known to be intransigent on the matter of copyright, so I kind of hid the film. In 2005, Yoko Ono had come to see the exhibition ‘Lennon in Paris’ and I was able to show it to her. She loved it.

(Guerrin 2010: 25)

sudden sounds do not end the silence rather they interrupt the drone of the helicopter hovering overhead. Casually, the camera pans slightly to the right and then slowly makes its way upwards, past the trees and across the skyline into a patch of clear sky where the helicopter momentarily comes into view.5 The sequence ends with the generalized sound of cheering and applause as a recording of ‘Imagine’ begins playing over the public address system, followed by a cut to a grainy blown-up shot of crowds leaving the park.6 As in Happy Birthday to John, Ten Minutes Silence for John Lennon ends in an uplifting – celebratory, even – mood: a broken city no more?

ENVOI

By December 1980, New York City was careering into another fiscal crisis; its brush with bankruptcy in 1976 and the chaos that had ensued (culminat-ing in the famous blackout of July 1977) were still fresh in many memories. Demographic habits had continued to exacerbate racial polarization (the ‘dual city’ metaphor had by now become a journalistic cliché). Urban policy contin-ued to be perilously ad hoc and indifferent to minority interests despite the fact that (according to the 1980 census) New York had become a ‘majority minor-ity city’ with 45 per cent of its population born outside the United States (or in Puerto Rico), and with Hispanic and black immigrants still heavily concen-trated in the lowest paid jobs. In 1980, the city recorded the highest number of street robberies of the ten largest cities in the United States and approxi-mately 1670 homicides occurred that year (the highest on record, and only surpassed at the height of the ‘Crack Wars’ of the late 1980s and early 1990s). A twelve-day subway strike in early spring quickly exposed the city’s dilapi-dated, dangerous public transport system, and the inadequate ‘resolution’ of this dispute undermined industrial relations in the service sector for over

Source: Courtesy of Palmeraie et Désert.

Figure 4: After the Silence.

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7. For data and analysis on New York City during this period: see Mollenkopf (1988, 1993).

a decade.7 Elsewhere, a ‘cut-and-run’ recession and further inflation were now imminent, the Iranian Embassy Hostage Crisis continued to fester, and Christmas Day would mark the first anniversary of the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan. Perhaps, few events have symbolized the disappointments of an era as aptly as the location, manner and timing of John Lennon’s death. And yet, what is – paradoxically – significant about both Happy Birthday to John and Ten Minutes Silence is how they manage to remove themselves from that event, displacing their own ostensible subject.

In both films categorical distinctions between the factual and the rhetorical, objectivity and intimacy, between journalistic, diaristic and eulogistic motives and forms, dissolve in the reality of what is being filmed. Mekas demytholo-gizes John Lennon and the film’s fragments and flickering images convey the fragility of that life, and the absurdity of its fame. Throughout Happy Birthday to John, Lennon remains elusive, unreachable – invisible, even. The film may open with a recording of his voice in conversation, but the asynchronous nature of the images and sounds succeed in capturing only moments of a life lived through performance, a man strangely awkward, vulnerable and essen-tially out of kilter with whatever world happens to be around him (interviews, exhibitions, parties, concerts). For Depardon also, the event being filmed is elusive, slipping and falling out of the frame, there but not there. This version of the vigil portrays a gathering of the displaced, together but separate, silent but not silent: Ten Minutes Silence is as much a short film about listening as seeing. Behind the image (and mythology) of Ed Koch’s great, civic outpour-ing of grief, Depardon’s wandering plan-séquence reveals a world of disquiet, restless and uncertain, where people seem caught in the act of ambivalence rather than remembrance. Happy Birthday to John and Ten Minutes Silence are less about the death of John Lennon than the heterogeneity of people, places, cultures and histories that constitute New York City on that bitterly cold December afternoon in 1980.

REFERENCES

Danto, Arthur C. (2005), Unnatural Wonders: Essays from the Gap between Art and Life, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 331–47.

Depardon, Raymond (1979), Notes, Paris: Éditions Arfuyen.—— (with Alain Bergala) (1981), Correspondance New-Yorkaise, Paris: Libération

and Éditions de l’Étoile.—— (1998), ‘Journeys and homecomings’, in Voyages (trans. David Britt),

Paris: Hazan, pp. 593–99.—— (2006), Our Farm (trans. Anne Giannini), Arles: Actes Sud.—— (2009), Manhattan Out, Gõttenberg: Steidl.Elliott, Anthony (1999), The Mourning of John Lennon, Berkeley: University of

California Press.Fogo, Fred (1994), ‘I Read the News’: The Social Drama of John Lennon’s Death,

Lantham: Rowan and Littlefield.Frye, Bryan (2007), ‘Me, I just film my life: Interview with Jonas Mekas’, Senses

of Cinema, 44, http://archive.sensesofcinema.com/contents/07/44/jonas-mekas-interview.html. Accessed on 6 June 2010.

Gruen, Bob (2005), John Lennon: The New York Years, New York: Stewart, Tabori & Chang.

Guerrin, Michel (2010), ‘Under the spell of the city: Interview with Raymond Depardon’, Foam Magazine, 23 (Spring), pp. 22–26.

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Henricks, Geoffrey (2003), ‘The flux-mass of George Maciunas’, in G. Henricks (ed.), Critical Mass: Happenings, Performance, Fluxus, Intermedia, and Rutgers University: 1958–1972, New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, pp. 130–40.

Higgins, Hannah (2002), Fluxus Experience, Berkeley: University of California Press.

Hillburn, Robert (2009), Cornflakes with John Lennon and Other Tales from a Rock ‘n’ Roll Life, New York: Rodale Inc.

Kirst, Sean (2005), ‘Imagine: John and Yoko at the Everson and Hotel’, The Post-Standard, December 8, http://syracusethenandnow.org/Dwntwn/Columbus/HotelSyracuse/JohnYokoHotlSyr.htm. Accessed on 27 February 2010.

MacDonald, Scott (1984), ‘Interview with Jonas Mekas [1982/83]’, October, 29, pp. 82–116.

—— (1992), A Critical Cinema: 2: Interviews with Independent Filmmakers, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 139–56.

—— (1993), Avant-Garde Film: Motion Studies, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 19–27.

Mollenkopf, John Hull (1988), Power, Culture, and Place: Essays on New York City, New York: Russell Sage Foundation, pp. 223–58.

—— (1993), New York City in the 1980s: A Social, Economic, and Political Atlas, New York: Simon and Schuster.

Norman, Philip (2008), John Lennon: The Life, London: Harper.Robertson, John (2003), The Art and Music of John Lennon, New York: Citadel

Press.Rohdie, Sam (2010), ‘Profils paysans’, Screening the Past, 29, http://www.

latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/29/profils-paysans.html. Accessed on 10 December, 2010.

Smith, Owen (1998), ‘Developing a fluxable forum: Early performance and publishing’, in Ken Fiedman (ed.), The Fluxus Reader, Chichester: Academic Editions/John Wiley, pp. 3–21.

Turim, Maureen (1992), ‘Reminiscences, subjectivities, and truths’, in David E. James (ed.), To Free the Cinema: Jonas Mekas and the New York Underground, Princeton: Princeton University Press, pp. 193–212.

Wollen, Peter (2004), Paris/Manhattan: Writings on Art, London: Verso, pp. 15–34.

SUGGESTED CITATION

O’Rawe, D. (2011), ‘New York City: 12 December, 1980’, Studies in Documentary Film 5: 1, pp. 31–44, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.31_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Des O’Rawe teaches film studies at Queen’s University, Belfast. His current research and writing focuses on film aesthetics and modernism. Recent arti-cles have appeared in Screening the Past, Kinema: Journal of Film and Audiovisual Media, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Literature/Film Quarterly and Screen. He currently co-edits the ‘Cinema Aesthetics’ series for Manchester University Press.

Contact: Film Studies, Queen’s University, Belfast, BT7 1NN, UK.E-mail: [email protected]

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KEYWORDS

direct cinemaethicsdocumentarymurdercelebritypower

AARON TAYLORUniversity of Lethbridge

Angels, Stones, Hunters:

Murder, celebrity and direct

cinema

ABSTRACT

Direct cinema’s attempt to withhold itself from the world is ethically problem-atic. The helplessness of documentary subjects and audiences is underscored by this observational style. In Gimme Shelter – a concert film by Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin about the Rolling Stones and the fatal violence at the Altamont Speedway Free Festival – social actors are forced to submit to a repre-sentational frame they cannot ‘see’, let alone access. Moreover, the audience’s own distance from the pro-filmic events is doubly assured: the film-maker’s policy of non-interference precludes and/or renders moot a viewer’s impossible desire to inter-cede on the subjects’ behalf.

Becoming the object of a documentary camera’s gaze entails a continual reconciliation of two competing impulses: submission (I yield to a degree of intrusion) and defensiveness (I maintain an inherently felt right to a degree of privacy). To some extent, all documentary endeavours must contend with this inward negotiation, which is experienced by the social actors who consent to our desire for knowledge. Film-makers turn an active and penetrating look upon a particular subject through a powerful technological apparatus, which they alone wield. If this attempt to acquire knowledge can also represent a

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SDF_5.1_Taylor_45-60.indd 45SDF_5.1_Taylor_45-60.indd 45 4/30/11 11:11:04 AM4/30/11 11:11:04 AM

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1. The term ‘direct cinema’ was coined by pioneering film-maker Albert Maysles to describe his film-making technique. It has since been used to refer to the North American style of observational documentaries that emerged in the mid-1950s. Major figures within this movement include Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, Albert and David Maysles, Frederick Wiseman and Canadian film-maker Allan King.

However, the movement has confusingly been referred to interchangeably as ‘direct cinema’ and ‘cinéma vérité’ by writers and film-makers alike, despite the fact that these are two different and culturally specific movements (American and French, respectively) belonging to two different documentary modes (observational and participatory, respectively). Therefore, the phrase ‘direct cinema’ will be used here as a matter of convenience, and will refer (mainly) to the American observational style.

will to power, then a film-maker’s consideration for his or her social actors’ relationship to the look of that ‘fearsome machinery’ warrants axiological attention (D. A. Pennebaker, quoted in Levin 1971: 261).

In particular, the power dynamic between the observer and the perceived in the observational mode is especially fraught. Generally speaking, the prin-cipal aim of this mode is revelatory. Observational film-makers seek to record their subjects candidly in the hopes that a social actor will reveal a truth about his/her situation when s/he is not entirely conscious of the camera’s pres-ence. The most prominent exemplar of the observational mode is the North American movement referred to as ‘direct cinema’.1 However, its promise of apparently unmediated access to any event has been the source of some consternation. It has been argued that the films often position the audience in privileged positions as knowing subjects, whilst sidestepping the ethics of their unobtrusive candour. Bruce Elder’s charge that direct cinema tends to be indiscrete, voyeuristic and sensationalistic is a typical example of such criti-cism (Elder 1989: 128).

And yet, the problems facing direct cinema film-makers – their apparent ethical ambivalence, alleged obfuscation of their own will to power and seem-ing unwillingness to acknowledge the motivations behind their own look – speak to a pair of more fundamental ethical difficulties for documentaries in general, both involving helplessness. For what becomes clear in many canoni-cal works of direct cinema is that (1) the social actors who are looked at often have little control over the frame of representation through which we observe them and (2) the audiences who look are unable to intercede on behalf of those who are observed.

These intertwining incapacities are most evident in two of direct cine-ma’s recurring subjects: popular public figures and death. The most infamous convergence of celebrity and murder in the direct cinema canon occurs in Gimme Shelter (Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Zwerin 1970). A docu-mentation of the Rolling Stones’ 1969 American tour, Gimme Shelter indirectly illustrates the disparity between the power of public and private individuals to affect their respective representational frames. Despite its overtures towards creative interactivity, the film falls short of ethically informed self-awareness, and ultimately obscures the power dynamic between film-maker and subjects. Moreover, Gimme Shelter’s departure from the observational convention of a concealed apparatus is at best a facetiously ambiguous response to the view-er’s helplessness before historical catastrophe. At worst, its reflexivity is merely an attempt to justify its exploitation of the footage that depicts the killing of a young concertgoer, Meredith Hunter, by a Hell’s Angel, Alan Passaro, during the Altamont Speedway Free Festival.

LOOKING AND ETHICAL SPACE

One of the principal aims of this essay is to demonstrate that it is incum-bent upon viewers to be responsive to the particularities of a documentary’s ‘voice’. Bill Nichols defines the ‘voice’ as the audio-visual translation of a film-maker’s rhetorical perspective on the events or issue that s/he documents, which in turn stems from his/her direct moral and political involvement with the historical world (Nichols 2001: 44–45). In characterizing a film-maker’s distinctive ‘voice’, one attends to the stylistic choices s/he makes with regard to plotting, design, framing, staging, cinematography, editing, sound as well as his/her specific mobilization of modal conventions. It is this ‘voice’ that

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acknowledges our belief that the look of the camera does not simply disclose information but reveals the world’s hidden significance. Therefore, acts of looking in documentaries – both the mechanical operation of the camera and human perception – are never innocent; they embody a morally and ideologi-cally loaded rhetorical argument about the world in which the film-maker is directly involved.

One’s awareness of the film-maker as a historically situated individual is cultivated through one’s attention to the quality of his/her rhetorical asser-tion expressed within the film. Richard Porton, for example, focuses on Gimme Shelter’s performance aspects and its complex plotting in order to situate ethi-cally the presence of the film-makers. Although they literally appear in the film briefly, Porton characterizes the Maysles’ and Zwerin’s ‘voice’ by analys-ing the film’s non-linear plotting instead. He concludes that Gimme Shelter’s ‘circumambient structure’ is a sign of the film-makers’ ‘Apollonian detach-ment’: the Maysles and Zwerin refuse to provide summative explanations for the outbreak of violence and murder that they document (Porton 1988: 88). Thus, the presence and ‘voice’ of a film-maker signifies his/her ethical and political commitment (or lack thereof) to the pro-filmic events in which s/he is engaged.

Beyond considering the ethical constitution of a film-maker’s ‘voice’, one also needs to consider the moral implications of his/her attitudes towards the documented social actors s/he documents. As Nichols reminds us, a docu-mentary is as much a record of a film-maker’s regard for a subject with whom s/he is existentially connected as it is a preservation of the historical circum-stances that it represents (Nichols 1991: 80). Therefore, one’s analysis ought to consider the ethical implications of a film-maker’s treatment of and rela-tion to the subjects s/he records: their positioning of social actors within a rhetorical discourse; the means by which they obtain personal revelations; the specifics of the creative process (e.g. dictatorial or collaborative?); etc.

In Gimme Shelter, for example, Zwerin intercuts between footage of the escalating violence at Altamont, and the terse expressions of Mick Jagger and Charlie Watts as they watch the events unfold on the Steenbeck’s viewfinder. For some, Zwerin’s decision to record the Stones observing the Maysles’ footage is not a gesture towards collaborative interactivity; it establishes an implicitly critical view of the band. David Sadkin, for example, argues that the strategy is undertaken in the interests of generating an ‘atmosphere of self-delusion’ (Sadkin 1971: 20). Through this strategic intercutting, the film-makers present viewers with images of a group of hubristic artists being confronted with a dire series of events that they should have anticipated, and perhaps even had a hand in causing to occur. Zwerin and the Maysles observe influential celebrities gradually coming to a more complete comprehension of their radically ambivalent relationship with their audience.

Thus, documentaries provide audiences with the opportunity to assess an indexical record of a film-maker’s regard for the social actors on view. The films use and expose the lives of actual individuals who share the same histor-ical reality with both the film-makers who document them and the viewers who observe them. In other words, film-makers and audiences alike have a contiguous relationship with the space that is represented on-screen, and an existential bond with the social actors who exist in the same world as they do. To that end, documentary space is always-already inscribed as ethical space, and we owe a responsiveness and responsibility towards the film’s subjects with whom we share a mutual existence – even if that subject is no longer

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living (Sobchack 1984: 294). As part of our duty of responsiveness towards documentary subjects, we critically assess a film-maker’s indexical presence in or absence from the frame.

Such analysis is further justified by the fact that documentary film-making is as much a form of ‘social interaction’ as it is a creative activity (Pryluck 2005: 207). The artist’s ability to control the frame of reference in which a social actor is represented requires the film-maker to exercise a duty of care towards the individual whose reality s/he shares. Film-makers are under an obligation not to misrepresent others in the service of an agenda or personal expressivity. By extension, viewers owe social actors a critical duty of care to take film-makers to task if they callously or intentionally manipulate their subjects – particularly if these subjects are anonymous and/or financially disadvantaged private individuals.

LOOKING IN DIRECT CINEMA

In order to appreciate better the various philosophies that inform the intertwin-ing dynamics between looking, knowledge and power within direct cinema, one should first be cognizant of the two general forms of visual scrutiny that a documentary camera brings to bear on the pro-filmic events it observes. An evaluative look scrutinizes actuality in order to appraise, judge and make assertions about the subjects that are viewed. The politically informed rhetoric of expository films such as The Spanish Earth (Joris Ivens, 1937), The Times of Harvey Milk (Rob Epstein, 1984) and No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, 2007) is mobilized in providing critical or advocative views of its subjects. The socially interrogative nature of this look is aligned with the spirit of inves-tigative journalism. By contrast, a revelatory look explores actuality in order to discover a form of knowledge or truth within it. Robert Flaherty’s work in Nanook of the North (1922) is a pioneering example, but this exploratory and non-judgemental view is most often associated with the observational aesthetic of direct cinema.

Whether a film mobilizes an evaluative or revelatory look, both instances raise their own particular ethical concerns. With regard to the subject at hand, what kind of ethical stance does the revelatory look take towards the social actors who are subjected to the director’s representational frame? Or, for that matter, what is its stance towards the helplessness of the viewer in relation to the exposed – and suffering – social actor?

The ethics of direct cinema’s revelatory look are incorporated within its aesthetics. A direct cinema film-maker’s mandate is to remain as unobtru-sive as possible in order to catch a ‘decisive moment’, in which a preoccu-pied subject discloses a private truth about his/her present situation (Elder 1989: 114). The film-maker is in a privileged position to document this moment, for s/he quietly participates in the social life of a subject without intrusion. Ideally, his/her silent presence serves to bear respectful, ‘objective’ (read: ‘neutral’) witness to crucial moments in a social actor’s life. Maintaining a policy of discretion and non-interference, the self-effacement of the direct cinema film-maker is not a form of emotional detachment, but an effort to achieve a dispassionately sympathetic distance. Direct cinema’s self-effacing candour is thus intended as an act of solidarity with a subject, and disruptive, judgemental exploitation is to be avoided. The subject must be permitted to express his/her own truth, rather than be subordinated to a signifying position within a rhetorical discourse. As Albert Maysles describes the process, ‘You

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lead a person from out of that person; in other words, there is something in that person that you draw out […] It’s another way of truly respecting […] an individual that you are filming. We don’t want to impose’ (Zuber 2007: 16). Direct cinema film-makers therefore work through the ethical problem of creating a non-judgemental, communicative relationship with their subject.

Ever watchful for moments of revelation, direct cinema favours the unpre-dictability of what Stephen Mamber dubs ‘the uncontrolled documentary’ (1974). Film-makers eschew shooting scripts, production design and staged directions; instead, they aspire towards improvisation, ‘artlessness’, and spon-taneity. Remaining unobtrusive, film-makers aim to reduce the distracting and intimidating presence of the technical apparatus in order to set social actors at ease and to facilitate the fortuitous capturing of spontaneous drama. Direct cinema crews are minimalist, typically consisting of a sole camera person and sound recordist, and employ lightweight equipment designed for maximum mobility, location shooting under available lighting and the inconspicuous penetration of private space (often through a zoom lens). The most common technique that achieves the impression of unmediated access to the pro-filmic events is a combination of long takes and handheld tracking shots that follow and rapidly reframe dynamic action.

Gimme Shelter, for example, makes use of this technique during an extended sequence in which the Stones are observed listening intently to a working mix of ‘Wild Horses’ during a Sticky Fingers recording session at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio. The song is played in its entirety, despite the fact that it is not a performance moment in a concert context. However, one observes performativity of a different sort, as the band displays varying degrees of self-consciousness in their respective responses to the camera’s look. Keith Richards closes his eyes, slouches back in his seat and coolly lip-synchs along with the vocals: a portrait of decadent repose. Watts, however, meets the camera’s gaze head-on, matching its revelatory gaze with his own slow-burning stare. Taking in aspects of the scene in various long takes, Albert Maysles quickly reframes moments of edifying business: Jagger’s impudent swig from a whisky bottle, Mick Taylor’s surprised half-smile, the syncopated bobbing of Richards’ marvellous snakeskin cowboy boots. It is an important sequence in a film that confronts celebrity figures with troubling facets of their projected image and observes their resultant efforts to maintain a protective front.

Direct cinema is also a reactive documentary movement in its break with the didacticism of expository films. In keeping with observational mandates, direct cinema film-makers do not explicitly proclaim their rhetorical stances. Typically, they refuse to impose an explicit evaluation on the pro-filmic events they observe, or even to make a specific knowledge claim about it. By prefer-ring revelation to exposition, direct cinema is heavily dependent upon our faith in the evidentiary value of the photographic image – that filmed images are an index to a truth about their absent referents. Viewers are invited to tease out the significance of the ambiguous action on their own accord with-out direction from instructive or evaluative rhetorical devices.

Gimme Shelter’s own ambiguity – its reflexivity, fractured plotting and rhetorical opacity – is the source of frequent critical commentary. Stephen Mamber, for example, argues that the film’s ‘feelings of tentativeness, its own admissions of selectivity, are a virtue not shared by the authoritative tone of many documentary films’ (Mamber 1973: 15). Avoiding a rush to judgement, the Maysles and Zwerin strive to keep the imposition of their own knowledge claims to a minimum, provide opportunities for the Rolling Stones to assert

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their own truth and generally do not lead the band to provide them with proof about themselves that supports a preordained idea. While tacitly critical of the Stones’ role in the disastrous concert, they do not assume a position of superiority, nor provide an explicit truth-claim that would allow the viewer to assume comfortably a moral high ground over the band. In other words, they seem to realize that the revelatory look can be an exercise in a film-maker’s will to power. Whether this cultivated ambiguity represents an abdication of moral responsibility will be discussed shortly.

What are viewers expected to do, then, with the kind of knowledge that direct cinema claims to provide? Ultimately, it should be recognized that Gimme Shelter positions audiences as knowing subjects. Its style aims to provide the illusion of unmediated access to the events it observes, but even more importantly, its revelatory look at the Stones as they watch themselves has a crucial instructive function: it invites a group of celebrities to become more conscientious about how they are perceived by others. By extension, such a strategy is potentially important in the cultivation of viewers’ empa-thetic faculties. However, it remains to be seen whether Gimme Shelter is truly able to live up to the ideals of direct cinema, offering viewers the means of testing their own subjective responses to events by imaginatively position-ing them as observers and participants in an all-too real social world. It also remains to be seen whether the observational mode can adequately meet those ideals in the first place.

OBSERVATIONAL PROBLEMS

Despite its various strengths, direct cinema’s investment in non-judgemental ambiguity have left it open to a number of recurring ethical criticisms. One should be aware of the nature of these critiques – how they tend to centre on direct cinema’s hidden politics, openness to contradictory responses and ambivalence. Furthermore, one ought to consider the means by which the participatory mode – particularly cinema vérité – attempts to circumvent these problems. These solutions are helpful in understanding Gimme Shelter’s obser-vational efforts to contend with the ethical dilemma of helplessness in docu-mentary film.

The first problem lies in direct cinema’s naïve perception of the camera as a ‘scientific instrument’ that allows for the objective, empirical observation of surface events (Winston 1993: 43). While this unquestioning faith in the evidentiary value of the photographic image seems innocent enough, it can actually be a serious obstacle to one’s ability to obtain adequate knowledge about a situation. What is typically absent in direct cinema is a broader context within which images gain crucial connotative value. Instead, the image in and of itself is expected to yield up enough evidence for viewers to make up their own mind about a situation. In turn, politics and/or social significance of the situation are obscured (Winston 1995: 152).

For example, one observes Hell’s Angels beating on hippy concertgoers with weighted pool cues in Gimme Shelter, but there is no acknowledgement of the circumstances that lead to the Angels adopting the role of ‘security’ at Altamont. Zwerin and the Maysles do not explain that the Angels’ unof-ficial appointment was likely a feeble and naïve attempt by the Stones’ tour manager, Sam Cutler, and Altamont co-organizer, Rock Scully, to contain and direct the motorcycle gang’s violent proclivities (Booth 2000: 17). More impor-tantly, there is no consideration of the fundamental ideological differences

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between the two countercultural groups. Gimme Shelter does not address the class hatred, racial tensions or political antinomies that give social meaning to the hostilities between two radically different communities.

Aside from the quasi-scientific investment in photographic positivism, direct cinema’s strategic ambiguity may result in contradictory responses that undermine its epistemic use-value. Because direct cinema invites viewers to form independently their own conclusions about the revelations to which they are privy, it risks forms of engagement that do not comfortably cohere with the movement’s intended cultivation of respect and compassion. It is possible that one might come to empathize with a film’s social actors, but one might also be involved formalistically in a kind of poetic immersion, or, simply take a superfi-cially voyeuristic pleasure in the privileged views provided (Nichols 1991: 44).

Gimme Shelter’s deliberate complication of an elucidatory rhetoric that ‘explains’ Altamont, and its scrutinizing of oblivious faces invite conflicting responses. One might respond to Jagger with imaginative feeling as his pleas to the crowd to cease fighting largely fall on deaf ears, or experience a kind of sympathy for the devil as Jagger struggles to maintain a composed front whilst watching the footage of Hunter’s murder. However, one might also simply not care about the social actors on display, and merely appreciate the aesthetic ingenuity of the film’s complex plotting. Alternatively, one’s indif-ference to the film’s social actors might be manifested in a perverse thrill at the taboo images on display. After all, it is a rare documentary that culmi-nates in an actual homicide. As Pauline Kael cynically put it, ‘the violence and murder weren’t scheduled, but the Maysles brothers hit the cinéma-vérité jackpot’ (Kael 1970).

The final ethical critique of direct cinema centres on its claims to impartial-ity and empathy, which actually tend to result in a uniquely ambivalent look at its subjects – particularly when confronted with instances of human fallibil-ity or wilful transgression. In such cases, film-makers are caught between two incongruous moral commitments: evaluation and neutrality. A documentary artist may feel obliged to provide an evaluative claim about a troubling situa-tion, but at what point does this claim become an exemplification of his or her will to power? Contrarily, a proponent of direct cinema’s non-judgemental-ism may wish to respect a social actor by refraining from commenting about his/her failures or contraventions. And yet, at what point does their silence become an abdication of responsibility or even tacit complicity? Despite its underlying humanism and alleged respect for social actors, the strategic ambi-guity of direct cinema may strike some as an insoluble problem.

Gimme Shelter is a cogent instance of this moral ambivalence. Despite their commitment to ambiguity, it can be argued that Zwerin and the Maysles assert their own will to power over the film’s rhetorical frame by offering up images of subjects for the viewer’s moralistic scrutiny. Although the film’s final assessment of the Altamont debacle is never made explicitly clear, a good deal of attention is paid to the social actors to whom various degrees of blame have been accorded. Consequentially, viewers might scan these images in order to assess culpability.

For example, several sequences provide the opportunity to criticize the Stones’ management and the concert’s organizers. Despite the problems in securing a suitable location, few question the wisdom of moving the concert to Altamont Speedway – a treeless site without adequate sanitation, parking, security or barriers erected in front of the three-feet stage – a mere day before the festival was to take place. In fact, the cautions of promoter Ron Schneider

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2. Examples of celebrated styles in the participatory mode include the French cinéma vérité and Québécois cinéma direct movements. Canonical figures include Jean Rouch, Edgar Morin, Chris Marker, Agnes Varda, Michel Brault and Pierre Perrault.

(‘You have no idea what goes on here. It’s an amazing phenomenon. It’s like lemmings to the sea’) are more or less ignored. One of the organizers, attor-ney Melvin Belli, is last seen avoiding the camera’s gaze, flummoxed by the news of the miles-long traffic jam.

Still, the film perhaps reserves its most intensive critical view for the band itself. Mick Jagger, in particular, is the principal target of the film’s scrutiny. Unable to completely prevent their ‘voice’ from manifesting their own will to power, the film-makers later wrote that

the structure of the film [itself] […] tries to render in its maximum complexity the very problems of Jagger’s double self, of his insolent appeal and the fury it can and in fact does provoke, and even the pathos of his final powerlessness.

(Maysles and Zwerin 1971)

Tellingly, the film-makers describe Jagger’s ‘diabolical’ persona as a ‘prob-lem’ that they recognize, but Jagger himself does not completely appreciate – hence his ultimate ‘powerlessness’ that may entice our pity.

As the film-makers are convinced that the singer’s ‘double self’ is a chan-nel for mass hysteria, they are at pains to capture the ‘diabolical’ nature of his charisma. During the ‘Love in Vain’ number, Jagger’s hyperactive burlesquing is reduced to slow motion, and he is seen in multiple exposures, worshipped by the tightly framed faces to which Zwerin cuts. All are bathed in the unholy red wash of a filter, and the implication seems clear: the ‘sinister invisibil-ity’ of the Stones’ muscular rock is capable of whipping a crowd into violent automatons (Schowalter 2000: 95). Whether Jagger as a sole performer can actually posses ‘control over [a] crowd’, as Amy Taubin claims, and then ‘lose’ it is beside the point (Taubin 2000: 8). What appear to be revelatory looks are actually evaluative ones, with the film-makers themselves completely disre-garding their own involvement in the events they film.

Even if one would rather not make too much of this weakened evalua-tive knowledge-claim as a sign of the film-maker’s will to power, one still must contend with direct cinema’s reticence to censure a social actor for his/her perceived moral failings. Vogels, for example, suggests that Gimme Shelter ‘extends culpability beyond Jagger’, but ultimately the film ‘emphasizes that understanding the world means coping with the fact that much of the world is beyond understanding’ (Vogels 2005: 95–96). While this may be true, one could also wonder if the Maysles’ impression of the world’s ultimate elusive-ness is not just a convenient ethical cop-out. In the face of a debacle on the scale of Altamont, the film-makers’ disinterest in engaging in explicit dialogue about culpability might strike some as a critical failure of nerve.

PARTICIPATORY SOLUTIONS AND CELEBRITY WATCHING IN GIMME SHELTER

It has been suggested that the observational mode tends to elicit contradic-tory responses, obscures the power dynamic between film-maker and social actor and/or takes an ambivalent (even unquestioning) stance on the impera-tives that drive the camera’s look. In keeping with these critiques, then, the participatory mode attempts to skirt direct cinema’s problems with objectivity and power through an interrogative self-awareness.2 An ethical auto-critique is a central component in the explicit textual workings of many participatory

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films, and of direct relevance here is whether Gimme Shelter attempts to make such self-conscious overtures by gesturing towards this mode. The central question, however, is if these strategies are genuine and adequate means of addressing the helplessness of social actors in an ethical fashion.

Among other things, Gimme Shelter is a film concerned with celebrity images, and their various production and reception contexts. For a movement interested in revealing the quotidian details of the everyday, direct cinema is frequently quite star struck. Many of direct cinema’s canonical works are about public figures, including John F. Kennedy, Eddie Sachs, Joseph Levine, The Beatles, Jane Fonda, Marlon Brando, Bob Dylan and the Fischer quintu-plets. The Maysles’ own Grey Gardens (1975) draws a good deal of its pathos from the fact that the unvanquished women living in that dilapidated manor are the aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Onassis. However, such a concen-trated interest in celebrity is strategic, for it often allows direct cinema to sidestep the problem of the social actor’s helplessness before the camera’s revelatory look – his/her inability to control the frame of representation in which s/he appears.

The observational mode continually runs into difficulties with its policy of non-interference, and its less-advertised cultivation of authorial expres-sivity. Frederick Wiseman, for example, insists on sole authorial power over ‘his’ material by denying his subjects veto rights and preventing them from previewing any footage (Halberstadt 1974: 22). By contrast, the participatory mode tries to address the power imbalance between film-makers and social actors by ensuring that subjects have a say in the construction of the represen-tational frame in which they appear. Even if this collaborative ideal does not extend to an invitation to share directly in creative activity, the film-makers may grant social actors the right to define the limitations of personal disclo-sure, or even allow them veto power over the material.

The movement’s interactivity is thus an expression of scepticism towards the objective ‘purity’ of documentary representations (Breitrose 1986: 47). Film-makers often actively collaborate with the social actors who appear in their films as a way of critiquing direct cinema’s quasi-ethnographic belief that the medium is transparent and can give us direct insight into a subject’s mind (Rabinowitz 1994: 20). For example, the cinéma vérité classic, Chronicle of a Summer (Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, 1961), shows its social actors attend-ing daily rushes, and includes their critical comments about how they are depicted. Here, the subjects actively critique the frame of representation in which they appear – a refutation of the social actor’s helplessness before the camera’s revelatory or evaluative looks.

Furthermore, the foregrounding of the film-maker’s own specific and situ-ated ‘voice’ is the means by which cinéma vérité compensates for direct cine-ma’s contextual obscurantism. The participatory mode tries to present both the film-maker and subject as specific individuals by stressing their interac-tion within a specific context. Most pertinent is the revelation of the film-maker as a particular identity, rather than an omnipotent and authorial ‘voice’ whose identity is disguised (Lutkehaus and Cool 1999: 119). Such a strategy acknowledges the rootedness of one’s ‘voice’, and does not posit a transcend-ent ‘truth’ about a situation that would only separate the knowing film-maker from the unknowing subject.

Representing actuality without comment, then, is not enough; documented bodies need contextualizing and history needs to be acknowledged as a refer-ent. Participatory film-makers are said to serve as ‘catalysts’ for the action

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they film, and subsequently, they foreground the equipment used to record this action (Barsam 1992: 303). Thus, interactive approaches include the exten-sive use of conversational interviews; on-screen revelation of the recording apparatuses; the direct address of the subject and film-maker to the camera; even the relinquishment of control over the apparatus altogether by provid-ing subjects with the means to document themselves. With its camera as a participant rather than an invisible observer, and its film-makers as ‘provo-cateurs’ rather than unobtrusive bystanders, the participatory mode opened up the observational ‘voice’ to politicized strategies of self-acknowledgement (Barnouw 1993: 255).

In the spirit of documentary film-making as a form of ‘social interac-tion’, then, it might appear that Gimme Shelter’s reflexive strategies obliquely address the issue of misbalanced power between film-makers and subjects. Potential participatory techniques include the strategy of filming the Stones as they watch the footage being edited (giving them the opportunity to view themselves), as well as providing glimpses of various crew members. David Maysles and Zwerin are even seen briefly, working at the Steenbeck, and the former explains their proposed editing strategy to Watts: ‘[We’ll show] all you guys watching [the footage]. We may only be on you for a minute. Then go to almost anything.’ This reflexivity seems entirely in keeping with the film’s interest in staging a tacit confrontation with celebrity. Gimme Shelter provides a view of social actors struggling with their own awareness of the camera’s inquisitive look, just as the camera struggles with the impassivity of those faces as they withhold themselves from a look that expects revelation. On the one hand, then, the film’s reflexivity tacitly addresses documentary film-making’s core power dynamic between the looker and the observed.

On the other hand, however, the film-maker’s decision to include foot-age of the Stones’ visit to the editing suite also smacks of expediency. For the Stones are far from helpless documentary subjects. Zwerin and the Maysles were quite aware of the band’s power as a corporate entity able to exercise legal control over the use of its image. Indeed, the more affluent and influential social actors are as public figures, the more likely they are to obtain veto rights over a documentary’s content. The Maysles had granted Hollywood producer Joe Levine veto power over Showman (1962), and other direct cinema film-makers likewise extended similar rights to the celebrities they filmed: the Kennedy administration, for example, set strict limits on what the Drew Associates could film in Crisis (1963), and John Lennon had veto rights over Pennebaker’s 1971 concert film, Sweet Toronto (Pryluck 2005: 202; Saunders 2007: 28). Gimme Shelter, then, unintentionally underlines the privi-leges accorded to public figures with the economic power to exert influence on how their self-image is appropriated and represented.

In this light, inviting the Stones to the editing suite seems a canny attempt to ‘involve’ them in the process – especially since Gimme Shelter was commis-sioned as a promotional film about the band’s 1969 tour. The Stones had a considerable financial investment in the film: they had paid the Maysles $14,000 for filming the Madison Square Gardens concert featured in the first half of the film, and an additional $129,000 for their work at Altamont (Sragow 2000: 3). Certainly, the Stones were also less likely to be litigious if the Maysles kept up the pretence of transparency. Although a leery Jagger took six months to sign releases, the band ultimately did not exercise their veto rights (Goldstein 1998). They would not be so compliant during their next documentary project: the Stones filed an injunction to bar the release

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of Robert Frank’s film about their 1972 tour, Cocksucker Blues (1972), which featured scenes of coke snorting, heroin shooting, hotel balcony TV-tossing and groupie masturbation.

There is, however, some controversy over the ending of Gimme Shelter. It is unclear who made the decision to cut away from the freeze frame of Jagger – which was initially supposed to end the film – to shots of concertgoers strug-gling away from Altamont into the morning sun. In one account, it was Zwerin who decided that she did not want ‘the finger pointing squarely at Jagger’s nose’ and chose to roll the credits on the departing crowds (Vogels 2005: 94). In another account, however, Stanley Goldstein – a prominent crewmember – claims that the substitution was made at Jagger’s behest (Goldstein 1998). The difference is important: the former account implies an intentional effort to maintain observational ambiguity; the latter account implies an enforced whitewashing of a celebrity’s culpability.

In sum, the film-makers were not worried about exploiting the Stones in the same way that they exploited the anonymous private individuals who appear in the film. And while the band members are not always on their best behaviour, many of the concertgoers appear in an even worse light. Gimme Shelter often objectifies Schneider’s ‘lemmings’ at Altamont as mere trans-gressive bodies. Only rarely do they meet the camera’s look, as when an occa-sional peace sign is flashed at the camera, or when a whacked-out young man embraces a bemused sound recordist. More often, the camera simply gawks. We bear witness to frenetic jiving; young men urinating against a wall; a naked, heavy-set woman who tries to mount the stage. In short, the concertgoers are there to gape at celebrity, and to be ogled in turn by the camera. The film never even identifies Hunter by name, he is just another anonymous, abstracted, victimized body and subjected to a scrutinizing gaze. Only the Stones are accorded the privilege of interactivity. Certainly, no invi-tations to watch the rushes were extended to any of the band’s besotted fans. Interestingly, a strategic attempt to screen footage for the other major organization in the film – Hell’s Angels – had unforeseen and unfortunate consequences for the film-makers, allegedly including a physical assault on cinematographer David Myers and attempts at extortion (Goldstein 1998).

As a final indication of the film’s compromised interactivity, the Maysles fail to disclose fully their own role in the Altamont debacle – specifically, their influence over the concert’s location. Due to a dispute over distribution rights to Gimme Shelter, the concert’s location was changed from Sears Point in Sonoma to Altamont Speedway in Alameda County (Cheshire 2000: 36). Filmways Inc. owned Sears Point racetrack and made the theatrical distribu-tion of the film a condition of the concert organizer’s use of the site (Goldstein 1998). In his role as the film’s producer, David Maysles refused, but conse-quentially, the hasty and ill-planned move to Altamont is probably one of the primary causal factors in the ensuing disaster. The relocation took place a mere 30 hours before the event was scheduled to begin. Perhaps the chaos might still have occurred at a more organized event, but the Maysles’ lack of full disclosure about their relation to the pro-filmic events they are ‘merely observing’ is problematic – especially in a film preoccupied with scrutinizing individuals, as if to sniff out culpability.

These critiques of Gimme Shelter’s problematic reflexivity have not simply been mounted in order to suggest that the participatory mode is more ‘ethi-cal’ than the observational mode, and that the desire to ‘objectively’ reflect actuality is a regressive strategy. Rather, it is more essential for audiences to

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scrutinize closely a documentary’s seeming interactivity. In Gimme Shelter, then, Zwerin and the Maysles do not actually provide a robust account of the quality of the revelations that materialize. As for the private individuals that appear as social actors, they have little recourse in protecting themselves from their particular rhetorical placement within an observational frame. Such helplessness, however, is not experienced by public individuals with substantial financial resources, who are often accorded special treatment by the film-makers in need of their cooperation. In the end, the power discrep-ancy between those who control the look and those who are positioned to be looked at is even more pronounced in observational documentaries that focus on celebrity figures.

OBSERVATIONAL GLIMPSES OF MURDER

Given direct cinema’s policy of non-intervention, objectivity and unobtru-sive looking, the helplessness of viewers watching the suffering of a social actor in an observational films is particularly pronounced. When direct cinema provides views of physical anguish or even death, there is a danger for the film-makers that their cool distance might appear like callous disregard. Or, even worse, this detached view might simply emphasize the subject and view-er’s mutual helplessness to an even greater degree. Gimme Shelter ‘climaxes’ with a glimpse of an actual killing, but the film is also concerned with how the film-makers, the Rolling Stones and the audience come to confront death. On the one hand, the film-makers have rightly denied their participation in staging a killing (Maysles and Zwerin 1970). On the other, they do seem cognizant of the propriety of filming Hunter’s murder and try to construct a complex justification for its inclusion in the film. Therefore, the camera’s reve-latory look requires a careful evaluation of its nature and quality.

To begin with, Gimme Shelter is neither the first, nor the last work of direct cinema to contend with the representation of death. Other examples include The Chair (Robert Drew, 1962), Near Death (Frederick Wiseman, 1989) and Dying at Grace (Allan King, 2003). Documentary films such as these inevita-bly develop aesthetic strategies that contend with these images. Invariably, the ‘raw’ footage that contains this ultimate emblem of helplessness becomes formalized. That is, the film-maker imposes his/her distinct ‘voice’ upon the troubling material in order to contemplate its larger social meaning. Particularly in documentaries that contend with historical atrocity, audiences are aesthet-ically removed from direct contact with the violent unspeakability of taboo images. One undertakes a kind of ‘mediated contemplation’ as a considera-tion of death with various ethical justifications (Sobchack 1984: 299).

Gimme Shelter’s gaze at death qualifies as ‘accidental’ according to the taxonomies laid out by Bill Nichols in Representing Reality (Nichols 1991: 82–89). Its suddenness differs from: the ‘helpless gaze’ at the bloody butch-ery of the animals that are slaughtered in the abattoirs represented in Blood of Beasts (George Franju, 1949); the ‘endangered gaze’ of Leonardo Henrichsen, who films the very soldiers that kill him in The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzmán, 1975–76); the politicized ‘interventional gaze’ of Barbara Kopple and her crew as they draw fire from strikebreakers in Harlan County, USA (1970); and the unblinking ‘humane gaze’ that empathetically main-tains a physical closeness to the patients in palliative care who live out their final days in Dying at Grace. In instances of the ‘accidental gaze’, however, violence comes as a shock for which the camera is unprepared. As in the

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Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, our own inadvertent look at the murder in Gimme Shelter is justified by curiosity: how could this have happened? Indeed, the accidental gaze becomes the subject of scrutiny towards the end of the film, as it shifts from its usual observational tech-niques and brings to bear an intense reflexive concentration upon Baird Bryant’s footage of Hunter’s murder.

Hunter’s death occurs at the end of a concert sequence, during which time Zwerin has not cut back to the Stones watching the footage in the editing suite for almost thirteen minutes. Thus, viewers have been immersed in direct cinema’s ‘present tense’ style for a long period of time. As Jagger finishes ‘Under My Thumb’, he is framed in close-up, and suddenly looks left towards some unseen off-screen space – thus priming the viewer for the event that immediately follows. Zwerin cuts to a fight breaking out in a high-angle long shot, and Bryant zooms in to a medium shot and refocuses. Hunter stands out in his lime green suit and is pushed forward into the light cast by one of the stage’s arc lamps. The scream of his girlfriend, Patty Bredehoft, is caught by a nearby mic, and can be heard over the crowd’s frightened babble. Passaro lurches at Hunter with his knife plunging downwards into the boy’s back, and both fall out of the impromptu spotlight. The crowd surges in for a better look, and even bassist Bill Wyman cranes forward from the stage in the foreground. Bryant finally pans back to the stage when nothing further can be seen.

Abruptly, however, this ‘first-person’ view is interrupted by a revela-tion of the shot’s status as a recorded image. Jagger’s voice-over suddenly intrudes, and he asks David Maysles to ‘roll back on that, please’. Zwerin then cuts to Jagger sliding up closer to the Steenbeck, and Albert Maysles reframes the singer in medium close-up. Another cut reveals the viewfinder as David spools the film backwards to the end of the song. The footage fills the screen once more and begins to play out in slow motion until Passaro comes into contact with Hunter. David pauses the image at the height of the knife’s arc, and holds it as Jagger studies the shot for evidence of Hunter’s gun. Again, David rewinds the film and pauses on an earlier frame in which the gun can vaguely be seen outlined against Bredehoft’s crocheted skirt. The footage moves forward again and is paused as Passaro’s knife descends. Maysles’ visible evidence seems to call for some kind of response, and so, Jagger is heard in voice-over once the image begins to play again. ‘It’s so horrible,’ he says quietly, and Zwerin cuts to a close-up of Jagger watching the footage continue. Albert then subtly pushes in even closer to Jagger’s impassive face.

What are the reasons for revealing the apparatus at this moment? Perhaps this is an ethical attempt to minimize sensationalism – to transform a shocking accidental gaze at murder into a more palatable helpless one. Therefore, the sudden revelation of the viewing situation can come as a cognitive shock to one who has been immersed in the act of watching a genuine killing unfold-ing in real time. One realizes that one’s experience of the murder is second-hand (one watches what Jagger and Maysles are watching). This baring of the device is presented as an interruption to observational immediacy, and thus circumvents the morally indefensible pleasure one might feel by participating in the illusion of unmediated (‘actual’) murder. One is reduced, like Jagger, to a helpless observer who is powerless to prevent Hunter’s death.

A second and more likely reason is that Gimme Shelter is more interested in observing Jagger’s reactions to the footage than it is in the murder itself. Viewers are invited to assess the singer’s response to disaster, and the film’s

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minimized mediation and detachment encourages audiences to arrive at an implicit truth themselves. The crucial question, however, is why does the film provide these views? What are viewers hoping to learn in watching Gimme Shelter, and what is the ultimate nature of the knowledge it provides? Are these revelatory looks sympathetic, asking one to feel pity for Jagger’s help-lessness? Perhaps they encourage an empathetic view, in which one imagines how it might feel to become aware of the unintended results of your own irresponsibility. Or, do the film-makers reflexively prompt a viewer to ques-tion his/her own motives for looking, hinting at the ideological implications of their status as detached onlookers?

Although the character of the film’s knowledge is left somewhat ambigu-ous due to the openness of direct cinema, Gimme Shelter’s judgement is not entirely inconclusive. Rather, it struggles with a fundamental ambivalence in the face of the transgressions it documents, unsure of which ethical impera-tive to pursue – evaluation or neutrality. Given the film-makers’ own undis-closed direct involvement in Altamont, however, such ambivalence seems less a matter of innovative modernism than it does moral disingenuousness, or even evasion.

SOME CONCLUSIONS

It should be clear that documentaries are a record of a film-maker’s regard for the subjects that s/he observes. The camera’s gaze communicates a film-maker’s political intentions and moral values. For this reason, one needs to be keenly attuned to the nature of the film’s look – be it evaluative or revela-tory – and consider whether the rhetorical assertion of a knowledge-claim that accompanies this look might also be an implicit assertion of power over a subject.

The case of Gimme Shelter serves as a reminder of the interconnectedness between documentary aesthetics and ethics. As Calvin Pryluck notes, a film-maker’s decision to employ specific modal conventions can materially affect the social actors with whom s/he works (Pryluck 2005: 195). In keeping with the observational mode’s commitment to ambiguity, non-intervention and transparency, direct cinema can unintentionally reinforce the helplessness of the social actors who are subject to a film-maker’s representational frame, and the helplessness of viewers who are unable to intercede on the subjects’ behalf. Direct cinema’s examinations of celebrity and death are particularly problematic, ethically speaking. They often foreground the movement’s tendency to obscure the power dynamic between the film-maker and subject, its penchant for inviting contradictory responses and its ambivalent position towards moral neutrality and judgementalism. One comes to Gimme Shelter for the confluence of stardom and murder, and leaves troubled by its moral evasiveness – its willingness to penetrate the world and then let it bleed.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I thank James Dobbie for his kind assistance in preparing this essay and my former students in the Documentary Ethics class I taught in 2007 at Brock University. Their insights into and enthusiasm towards this particular subject were inspirational.

This essay is dedicated to Sean Worrall, who helped me learn that if you try sometimes, you’ll find you get what you need.

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REFERENCES

Barnouw, E. (1993), Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film, 2nd edn, New York: Oxford University Press.

Barsam, R. M. (1992), Non-fiction Film: A Critical History, 2nd edn, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Booth, S. (2000), ‘The true adventures of Altamont’, in The Rolling Stones, Altamont & Gimme Shelter, DVD insert booklet, New York: The Criterion Collection, pp. 10–19.

Breitrose, H. (1986), ‘The structures and functions of documentary film’, CILECT Review, 2: 1, pp. 43–56.

Cheshire, G. (2000), ‘The Demonic Charisma of Gimme Shelter’, in The Rolling Stones, Altamont & Gimme Shelter, DVD insert booklet, New York: The Criterion Collection, pp. 34–39.

Elder, B. (1989), Image and Identity: Reflections on Canadian Film and Culture, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.

Goldstein, S. (1998), ‘Written response to “candidates for the national film registry: The Wild One and Gimme Shelter” ’, National Film Preservation Board, 10 November 1998, http://www.loc.gov/film/goldstein.html. Accessed 1 July 2009.

Halberstadt, I. (1974), ‘An interview with Fred Wiseman’, Film-makers Newsletter, 7: 4, pp. 19–25.

Kael, P. (1970), ‘Beyond Pirandello’, The Documentary Blog, 10 September 2007, http://www.thedocumentaryblog.com/index.php/2007/09/10/pauli-ne-kael-vs-gimme-shelter. Accessed 1 July 2009.

Levin, G. R. (ed.) (1971), ‘Interview with Donn Alan Pennebaker’, in Documentary Explorations: 15 Interviews with Film-makers, Garden City: Doubleday, pp. 221–70.

Lutkehaus, N. and Cool, J. (1999), ‘Paradigms lost and found: The “crisis of representation” and visual anthropology’, in J. M. Gaines and M. Renov (eds), Collecting Visible Evidence, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 116–39.

Mamber, S. (1973), ‘Cinéma Vérité and social concerns’, Film Comment, 9: 6, pp. 9–15.

—— (1974), Cinéma Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary, Cambridge: The MIT Press.

Maysles, A., Maysles, D. and Zwerin, C. (1971), ‘A response to Pauline Kael’, The Documentary sBlog, 10 September 2007, http://www.thedocumentary-blog.com/index.php/2007/09/10/pauline-kael-vs-gimme-shelter. Accessed 1 July 2009.

Nichols, B. (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

—— (2001), Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Porton, R. (1988), ‘Gimme Shelter: Dionysus at Altamont’, Persistence of Vision, 6, pp. 83–90.

Pryluck, C. (2005), ‘Ultimately we are all outsiders: The ethics of documen-tary filmmaking’, in A. Rosenthal and J. Corner (eds), New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd edn, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 194–208.

Rabinowitz, P. (1994), They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, London: Verso.

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Sadkin, D. (1971), ‘Gimme Shelter: A Corkscrew or a Cathedral?’, Film-makers Newsletter, 5 December, pp. 20–27.

Saunders, D. (2007), Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, London: Wallflower Press.

Schowalter, D. F. (2000), ‘Remembering the dangers of rock and roll: Toward a historical narrative of the rock festival’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17: 1, pp. 86–102.

Sobchack, V. (1984), ‘Inscribing ethical space: Ten propositions on death, representation and documentary’, Quarterly Review of Film Studies, 9: 4, pp. 283–300.

Sragow, M. (2000), ‘Gimme Shelter: The true story’, Salon, 10 August, http://archive.salon.com/ent/col/srag/2000/08/10/gimme_shelter/index.html. Accessed 1 July 2009.

Taubin, A. (2000), ‘Rock and Roll Zapruder’, in The Rolling Stones, Altamont & Gimme Shelter, DVD insert booklet, New York: The Criterion Collection, pp. 5–8.

Vogels, J. B. (2005), The Direct Cinema of David and Albert Maysles, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.

Winston, B. (1995), Claiming the Real, London: BFI Publishing.—— (1993), ‘The documentary film as scientific inscription’, in M. Renov (ed.),

Theorizing Documentary, New York: Routledge, pp. 37–57.Zuber, S. (2007), ‘The force of reality in direct cinema: An interview with

Albert Maysles’, Post Script, 26: 3, pp. 6–21.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Taylor, A. (2011), ‘Angels, Stones, Hunters: Murder, celebrity and direct cinema’, Studies in Documentary Film 5: 1, pp. 45–60, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.45_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Aaron Taylor is assistant professor in the Department of New Media at the University of Lethbridge. Some of his recent publications include reflections on the supporting player in Quarterly Review of Film and Video (2012), theatri-cal performance styles in Stages of Reality: Theatricality in Cinema (2011), Adam Sandler in Millennial Masculinity (2011), melodramatic villainy in The Journal of Film and Video (2007) and superhero bodies in The Journal of Popular Culture (2007). He is currently writing a study of It’s a Wonderful Life for Wallflower Press’ Cultographies series, and is editing an anthology of essays on screen acting and film theory.

Contact: Department of New Media, Centre for the Arts W864, University of Lethbridge, 4401 University Drive, Lethbridge, Alberta, T1K 3M4, Canada. E-mail: [email protected]

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KEYWORDS

verse-documentaryPeter SymesTony HarrisonSimon ArmitageVoiceBraided Channels

PETER ATKINSONUniversity of Central Lancashire, United Kingdom

Poetic licence: Issues of

signification and authorship

in British television verse-

documentary, 1986–96

ABSTRACT

This article examines the development of the television verse-documentary form in Britain between 1986 and 1996. Close textual analysis is applied to selected works from this period in order to observe the signifying processes involved when verse commentary is used in documentary and a definition for the generic label ‘verse-documentary’ is proposed. Verse-film juxtaposition in the documentary mode is also seen to have implications for the issue of authorship and how a documentary ‘comes to voice’ through what Trish FitzSimons identifies as the ‘braiding’ process.

This article observes the development of the television verse-documentary form in Britain in the period 1986–96, a period during which sixteen such documentaries were produced for British television, which were written by poets and featured commentaries that were either verse or which mostly comprised verse. I classify each of the works being examined here as a ‘verse-documentary’ for the purposes of establishing a clear generic definition. Many films that feature verse document a subject or a situation, and there are a

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number of historical examples of verse-documentaries. During World War II Dylan Thomas wrote for ‘propaganda documentary films’ produced by the Council for the Encouragement of Music and Art (CEMA) in Britain and for the Ministry of Information. Some are narrative films, some contain snatches of verse and one film he contributed to, Our Country (Eldridge, 1945), is a full verse-documentary (see Ackerman 1995). Meanwhile Peter Symes observes John Betjeman as ‘perhaps the most assiduous’ producer of verse-documen-tary prior to the strand that is identified here (1995: ix). Included in Betjeman’s portfolio of verse-documentaries are Marlborough (Stedall, 1962), Thank God Its Sunday (Stedall, 1972), Metroland (Mirzoeff, 1973) and Summoned by Bells (Stedall, 1976). Betjeman largely wrote his verse to film that was already cut, although he was involved with the planning of the films in some cases, Jonathan Stedall notes in his documentary on the poet, The Lost Betjemans (Stedall, 1994). A documentary film noted for its use of verse that most people are familiar with is Night Mail (Watts and Wright, 1936), which actu-ally features only six stanzas of verse by W. H. Auden at the close of the film. Produced by the GPO Film Unit to promote Britain’s state-owned Post Office, Night Mail produces a strong image of hegemonic power, this being precisely its purpose. The 1936 promotional film for Southern Railways The Way to the Sea (Holmes, 1936) also features some nineteen stanzas of verse by Auden.

DEFINING THE ‘VERSE-DOCUMENTARY’ FORM

The sixteen documentaries produced for British television in the period 1986–96 were all collaborations between the poet and the film-maker and I describe these films as verse-documentaries, a label also given the films in the British national press at the time (see Thorpe 1994). I propose a definition of the label verse-documentary as a documentary film:

that is produced as collaboration between a poet and a film-maker, or • film-makers;that is either wholly, or to a very significant extent, driven by verse • commentary;that is produced as the result of research in which the poet is involved;• that is produced with the poet involved in the final editing of the work and • who has input into editing decisions.

One television producer/director, Peter Symes, is associated with the majority of the verse-documentaries listed and discussed in this article and the British poet Tony Harrison was also commissioned as writer for several of the pieces.

The collaboration between the two begins in 1986 when Symes approached Harrison to work on a documentary series about the great cemeteries of the world, Loving Memory (Symes 1987), which includes four separate films (Symes 1991: 385). The series had run into production problems and Harrison was brought in to rescue the project on the strength of his ‘moving’ perform-ance of poems remembering his parents in an Arena documentary dedicated to the poet (Symes letter to author, 11 November 1994). Harrison’s involve-ment was on the condition that ‘all the commentary was in verse’ however, Symes notes, and provided the commission was approached ‘as a true collab-oration’ between the poet and the film-maker (Symes 1995: ix).

The relative success of Harrison’s application of verse commentary to Loving Memory resulted in the commissioning of The Blasphemers’ Banquet

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(Symes 1989) a verse-documentary that addresses the issue of the Ayatollah Khomeini’s pronouncement of a fatwa on author of The Satanic Verses, Salman Rushdie, in February 1989. Broadcast in the Panorama slot on British TV, and gaining an audience of 3.9 million, Blasphemers’ Banquet was the subject of considerable interest and debate in the media and drew public attention to the verse-documentary form. The Times on 1 August 1989 felt the film ‘offered a vengeful and affectingly forceful portrait of religion as the great intellec-tual oppressor and generator of non-reason’. Noting that the Archbishop of Canterbury Robert Runcie had asked the BBC to withdraw the film on the grounds that it would stir religious tension, Valerie Grove noted that ‘The BBC unflinchingly went ahead and showed Tony Harrison’s trenchant, origi-nal and vividly memorable’ film. In the same interview with Grove, Harrison noted that the film did not wish to spark an ‘Islamic v Christian confrontation’ but that ‘[s]omeone has to speak up for the secular frame of mind’ (Grove 1989).

A ‘willingness to experiment with verse in television’ was evident after Loving Memory, Symes notes, and this resulted in ‘an increasing number of opportunities for verse’ (interview with author, 4 November 1994). Symes views the significance of Harrison’s involvement in the field as being a key factor in the development of verse-documentary in Britain towards the end of the 1980s:

[I]t was not until Tony Harrison turned his attention to the form that we saw the beginnings of a real development and the creation of a body of work that actually moved the process onto a different plane. Here at last was work that was beginning to create its own agenda, and in which one can discern a development both in form and in content.

(Symes 1995: ix)

Nicolette Jones observes in 1992 that poetry ‘is flourishing’ in Britain and that it has ‘been reborn as a popular literary or oral tradition’. She continues, ‘[b]ut perhaps it is on television and radio that the most striking instances of poetry’s new-found pulling-power are found’. Jones notes the role the five verse-documentaries Symes and Harrison produced had played in ‘making poetry more accessible’ and stated that success of the films had influenced the BBC’s ‘adventurousness’ in commissioning Symes’s next verse-documentary project, Words on Film (1992b) (Jones 1992). The producer had initially put forward this idea for a series of documentaries directly after the success of Loving Memory in 1987 but the BBC had been reluctant to commission docu-mentaries with a verse commentary at that time. The relative success of The Blasphemers’ Banquet, and the publicity it received, resulted in the BBC buying into and commissioning the Words on Film series, Symes observes (interview with author, 4 November 1994).

With Words on Film, Symes was offered the opportunity of ‘making the technique work’ over six films, using six different directors and six different poets (Symes 1992b: 2–3). Each of the 30-minute films was made within a strict timescale of a ten-day shoot followed by a five-week edit. The poets were involved in editing, rewriting and recutting, he remembers (1992: 4). I now observe how application of verse commentary can be used in approaches to the documentary subject. Some of the facilities the juxtaposition offers that will be discussed are continuity, use of metaphor to create an emotional engagement with the subject, the inclusion of subjective voices and the

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representation of historical material that may be difficult to access. I look firstly at Simon Armitage’s contribution to the series, the verse-documentary film Xanadu (Flitcroft 1992).

Xanadu

The subject Xanadu documents is the Ashfield Valley Housing Estate in Rochdale near Manchester. The 1960s apartment blocks are being cleared for demolition, its construction having been the consequence of bad council plan-ning, the film implies. Voice commentary in Xanadu almost entirely comprises verse and the signification processes involved in verse-film juxtaposition need to be considered. Contiguous signification of individual signifiers is the logic of the progression of prose. As our world is constructed for us by language, so our linguistic ordering of its elements predominantly uses prose logic. Language ‘prescribes a linear figuration of signs’ Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan notes (1993: 119). Historically, film has been perceived as a ‘linear’, sentence-like continuum in which one image on the film strip relates to another by process of contiguity. Meanwhile, the conventions of mainstream narrative film, Stam, Burgoyne and Flitterman-Lewis argue, derive from ‘Classic cinema’ (1992: 188). This, in turn, is modelled on the nineteenth-century realist novel, Paget suggests, who sees ‘unproblematic similarities’ between cinematic and literary modes (1990: 13). The devices narrative film invented to mime real life therefore became harnessed to a prose-based logic. Documentary also utilizes narrative modes.

It should be noted that Armitage had been recommended as a contrib-uting poet for the series by the film-maker who shot Xanadu, Kim Flitcroft. Armitage notes that the producers of the series were,

Very keen that the project should be collaborative in every way between text and picture, between poet and film-makers, so it wasn’t just a ques-tion of writing a load of poems and then going out and filming, Then neither was it a case of making a film and then putting poetry to it. The theory in any case was that it should be a joint venture all the way through.

(interview with author, 5 August 1994)

From Xanadu’s opening scene, the commentary creates different expectations of how the film engages with its subject. Verse accompanies Flitcroft’s shots of Armitage approaching the estate, and this affects the perception of the camera’s images: its movements, its framings, its focus-shifts are read as part of the poetic text. Once inside the estate a handheld camera produces shots as if from the point-of-view of a person making a quick escape through exterior walkways and stairways of an apartment block. As the camera approaches the iron grille at the end of each walkway it is accompanied by the sound of the clunk of an iron door. These shots, which are not accompanied by commen-tary, suggest imprisonment. Armitage is filmed in the next scene entering one of the derelict unoccupied apartments while verse is read by a woman off-camera. The sequence is an example of how the film-maker’s and the poet’s art are ‘very similar’ in as much as they may be involved in ‘playing with rhythm and juxtaposing images’ and using metaphor, as Symes notes (inter-view with author, 4 November 1994). The lines of Armitage’s verse in Xanadu provide a representation of the kinds of life that might exist within Ashfield

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Valley’s apartments and he states that this fictional character represents some of his experiences of working on the estate as a Probation Officer (interview with author, 5 August 1994). Using poetic licence and granting parole to the imaginary inhabitants of the estate, the poet builds a concept of confinement around the word ‘can’,

WOMANYou said in your sleepwe should blaze our wayfrom that basement flaton Memory Laneto a place in the countrywe’d set our hearts onI tipped the petrolbut they called it arson,and being my manyou carried the canfor 18 monthsat Her Majesty’s Pleasure

(Xanadu)

The term ‘the can’ potentially signifies all its possible denotational, connota-tional, idiomatic and metaphorical meanings here. For example: confinement; baseness (‘can’ is slang for toilet); imprisonment (the ‘can’ is slang for prison); and martyrdom (as indicated by the idiomatic phrase ‘carried the can’). A dense polysemy is thus created out of which various interpretations can be read. Mick Imlah, reviewing Xanadu in 1992, wrote that ‘Armitage’s TV verse is a well-judged mixture of loose, sociable couplets and strident performance pieces.’ What is seen in the example of verse-film juxtaposition above is that, as Peter Symes says, ‘you can do a number of imaginative things which are still factual’, they still document something in the real historical world (inter-view with author, 4 November 1994).

Continuing the sequence, Armitage is filmed surveying the apartment with Flitcroft’s camera exploring its interior using pans and tilts over peeling walls and debris-strewn floors. The quick editing of these handheld and sometimes cantered shots makes uncomfortable viewing. Spoken by the poet off-camera at this point, the verse portrays the experience of the imagined male occupant of the flat who is serving a prison sentence. Verse commentary permits an economical evocation of the prisoner’s experience. Armitage’s sixteen two-line stanzas list the hardships of prison life but each one of these is dismissed and a seemingly minor aspect of prison life is singled out as the factor that the prisoner finds most unbearable. The verse section begins,

SimonNot the ounce of snoutbut the smell of the cabbagenot the slopping outbut the smell of the cabbagenot the landing lightbut the smell of the cabbagenot the Governor’s wifebut the smell of the cabbage

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and stanzas 11 and 12 feature the following lines:

not the file in the cakebut the smell of the cabbagenot The Great Escapebut the smell of the cabbage

(Xanadu)

The repetition here intensifies the feeling of the monotonous routine of prison and the limitations it imposes on the inmate and yet we are shown nothing of the prison, the text signifies through association.

This is the type of representation verse commentary facilitates. What Jonathan Culler refers to as verse’s ‘formal patterning’ assures a film continu-ity, a ‘drive’, but one that is not bound by the logic of contiguous signification of lexical or phonetic items (1988: 164). Symes refers to the appeal of poetry’s ‘inherent metricality’ to the film-maker as it provides rhythmic continuity for the edited film text (1995: vii). Poetry usually communicates through a process of internalization of its images in our minds and therefore there is usually no stable subject matter. A camera films aspects of an event or situation, however. Even though such filmic representation is illusory, we make a psychological investment in it and we interpret what we have seen through prose language. The addition of verse to filmic images acts against such interpretation. A verse-drive juxtaposed with filmic text subjects conventional signifying processes to new organization. It highlights how language constructs our world for us, how it confines us to a ‘fixed range of predetermined possibilities’, to quote Bill Nichols (1991: 9). With verse commentary, meanings that words have in ‘other instances of discourse’, to quote Culler, may be assimilated and the dimension of association and choice is emphasized (1988: 164). Different meanings and contexts may become signified, thus setting in motion a reflexive examination of all connotations, of all historical uses of words and terms and the implications of such. This accommodates more individualized readings of a documentary film.

Armitage manipulates linguistic signifiers in his poetic representation of the decaying apartment blocks in Xanadu, his theme being the denial of the ‘idyllic estate or place’ (Xanadu). The Ashfield Valley Estate has ‘twenty-six blocks labeled A to Z’ (Xanadu) all named after British place names. Armitage imagines how this naming process may have been transacted in the plan-ning process in the late 1960s and represents dialogue between members of a parochial Rochdale Council at a meeting through use of verse. This is accom-panied by shots of the empty council chamber but where places are being set for a meeting, this demonstrating how the visual element of a verse documen-tary can anchor the text in the specific historical world. In the representation the Council realizes that there is no British place name that begins with the letter ‘X’ and, in searching the dictionary for a name, they find the definition of the word Xanadu and the reference to Coleridge’s poem Kubla Khan. This is a fabulous place dreamed through the poetic imagination and the refer-ence serves as contrast to the dull and unimaginative process the council-lors use to name the blocks of the Ashfield Valley estate. Verse commentary permits the ready inclusion of such subjective voices in what Trish FitzSimons terms the ‘braided channels’ that comprise the ‘voice’ of a documentary (2009: 142). The formal patterning of the verse binds such a braid with a central thread. Symes observes the advantages that verse affords the documentary producer: ‘You can pretend to be in someone else’s head, you can be a voice,

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1. Phillis Wheatley’s book Poems on Various Subjects (1773) includes the lines: ‘Some view our sable race with scornful eye,/Their colour is a diabolical dye./Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/May be refined, and join the angelic train’. As reproduced in Michael Ferber (1991), The Poetry of William Blake, Penguin Critical Studies, London: Penguin, p. 14.

you can be a statue speaking, you can exhume the dead’ (interview with author, 4 November 1994). He notes how verse was used in the treatment of the subject of Harrison’s Mimmo Perella non è Piu (Mimmo Perella is no More) (Symes 1987). The film documents ‘strange burial customs that exist in Naples’ that involve the exhumation of a corpse about two years after burial and its re-interment in a wall vault. Family members attend this gruesome ritual and when the moment comes to face the corpse, Harrison, with the use of verse, is able to place words into the mind of the man’s widow and then, as Symes notes, ‘slips back almost unnoticed into the third person’ (1995: xii):

Was this the Vincenzo who I slept beside?Vincenzo Cicatiello non è piu.Now, now I know you’ve really died.Till now I only half-believed it true.Being seen in such revolting tatterswouldn’t suit him, He was much too proud!Although he’s dead, she still believes it mattersthat they make him feel he looks right in his shroud.

(Harrison 1992b, Mimmo Perella non è Piu)

Symes felt he could not ‘imagine getting away with this in prose’ and that the verse ‘added a depth and compassion to the film that was intensely moving’. This use of verse in the treatment of a difficult documentary subject ‘allows us to watch’, he contends (Symes 1995: xii, original emphasis). I now look at other techniques that verse commentary facilitates in another of the works in the Words on Film series.

Sweet Thames

The title of Fred D’Aguiar’s Sweet Thames (Mark Harrison 1992a) provides another example of how meanings that words have in other instances of discourse may be assimilated into the verse-documentary text extending the range of signifying potential. The title derives from the line ‘Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song’, which is used in Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century poem Prothalamion and T. S. Eliot uses Spenser’s line in The Waste Land (1922). D’Aguiar uses it several times in his film thus referencing these celebrated historical texts and engaging with the discourses that may surround them.

D’Aguiar uses the word ‘sweet’ as a signifier for that which is desired. He creates a negotiation around the processes of material satisfaction after the time when Britain first colonized areas of the Caribbean and imported goods were shipped up the Thames. The metaphor of refinement (and here D’Aguiar refer-ences the work of eighteenth-century black poet Phillis Wheatley) completes his central image.1 Mark Harrison’s documentary camera observes the actual-ity of the process of refinement in the Tate and Lyle sugar factory. Here the natural colour of raw cane sugar imported from ‘black’ countries around the world is subjected to ‘impurity removing operations’ (Sweet Thames) in order to make it palatable – as Tate and Lyle worker Bill Nelson states in an on-camera interview. This is used as a metaphor: D’Aguiar, who is of African-Caribbean descent, infers that, historically, Britain has refined what it plunders from its colonies to suit the tastes of those at its high tea tables, the hegemony.

Against this image of the ‘sweet’, the desired, D’Aguiar creates a person-ification of the point of entry to Britain’s lifeblood – the ‘Thames-mouth’

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(Sweet Thames). It should be reiterated that the Words on Film documentaries are collaborations between the poet and the film-maker. In a review of Sweet Thames, Thomas Sutcliffe comments that the film was ‘strikingly directed’ by Mark Harrison, who, ‘blended poignant archive film […] with beauti-ful images of the river now’; these giving D’Aguiar’s words ‘a vivid life’. But Sutcliffe also contends that Harrison’s camerawork ‘helped to conceal’ the fact that ‘it wasn’t always very clear’ just what D’Aguiar was trying to say with his words (Sutcliffe 1992).

The film documents particular locations on the river in its approach to central London, the seat of the hegemony. At each point D’Aguiar makes an observation of historical events that have occurred there, particularly in rela-tion to immigration from Britain’s colonies and the operations of the slave trade. At Tilbury, he observes that Jamaican immigrants ‘made history, skank-ing/up the incline of this gangplank’ in the late 1950s, the verse being accom-panied by documentary footage from the period. At Albert Embankment, tribute is paid to Olaudah Equiano, one of the most prominent African activ-ists in Britain in the movement to abolish slavery.

The Thames Barrier provides an image of the gateway to Britain and the notion is conveyed in the text that we are reluctant to open it to immigrants. As the camera shows the barrier D’Aguiar’s voice begins its rhythmical delivery:

Thames Barrier! Before youshut your gates, Before youwhiten the water.

(Sweet Thames)

As the huge gates of iron glide into the unity of their blockade, the stations of the barrier begin to appear as the helmets of suits of armour, evoking an image of the aggressive imperialism that fuelled Britain’s colonizing activities. As the camera shows its partitions smoothing rough water to a flat calm, the barrier comes to signify a device of cultural exclusion, an armour itself, existing at the point of entry into Britain. The metaphors used to create the theme of exclu-sion and of refinement are evident in a stanza at the beginning of the film:

Make it clear and give it stylelike the sugar from Tate and Lyle.Make it last long, make it hardlike the Barrier at Woolwich Dockyard.Sweet Thames run softly till I end my song.

(Sweet Thames)

Black Daisies for the Bride

Shortly after the Words on Film series was completed, Symes and Harrison worked on another verse documentary The Gaze of the Gorgon (Symes 1992a). This work is a polemic in which Harrison blames the horrors of the twenti-eth century on ‘the unearthing of a fifth century BC pediment that featured a giant Gorgon’, by Kaiser Wilhelm the Second soon after the century began (Harrison 1992c: 60). In legend the Gorgon ‘turns men to stone’ and Harrison, Symes observes, sees its shadow as being ‘with us still’ amidst the death and destruction war and in other forms of destructive social behaviour (Symes 1995: xix).

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I now examine the next film Harrison and Symes made, Black Daisies for the Bride (Symes 1993), which marks the beginning of National Alzheimer’s Awareness Week in Britain in July 1993. Black Daisies, which won a Prix Italia in 1993, takes the disease’s progressive destruction of a person’s intellectual attributes as its documentary subject and focuses upon the lives of patients in a Yorkshire hospital. Symes suggests that the work is ‘unclassifiable’, generi-cally because it uses documentary processes – research of historical events and filmic recording of historical reality – and yet interweaves ‘performance with documentary’ as Harrison’s verse was given to performers to sing (1995: xxi). The Guardian viewed the film as ‘an important experiment’ (Herbert 1993); The Times felt that, in its ‘challenging way, it was magnificent’ (Truss 1993).

Documenting dementia is problematic and the process is ‘ethically difficult’, as Symes notes (1995: xxi). In their research for the film Symes and Harrison observed the patients and found that a coherent sense of rhythm endures when the disease begins to take effect and survives even the loss of ability to cohere language as a communicative form. Talking on The Late Show: Black Daisies for the Bride Special on BBC2 television later on the evening the film was broadcast, Harrison observes that even when the ‘rational content of language seemed to have disappeared, the rhythmical content of language was there’. There was ‘a ghostly presence of metre’, they ‘remembered songs’, he states.

Harrison – who insists on writing in verse for all his publications and productions, including film, television and the theatre – lets the retention of the rhythm instinct in the sufferers inform his approach to the documentary. Focusing on three patients, all female, he assigns each a piece of music which features a lyric and which has some relevance for each individual patient’s history. As Lynne Truss wrote in The Times, the film takes ‘the real-life stories of four or five Alzheimer’s sufferers’ and uses popular tunes ‘to bridge the vast chasm separating their former and latter selves’ (Truss 1993). Harrison replaces the original lyrics of these songs with historical information about each patient written in the same metre. Wedding photographs had been found for each subject in the research undertaken on their histories. These are framed by the camera at the beginning of each ‘Song of the Bride’ sequence in which actresses dressed in wedding dresses like those in the photographs perform the songs. And so the history of one of the patients, a fun-loving working-class girl, is set to the tune of popular song ‘Oh! You Beautiful Doll’ (Ayer, 1911), another to the tune of ‘Daisy Bell’ (Dacre, 1892 – the song is better know as ‘Daisy!, Daisy!’). The ‘Song of the Bride’ used to represent historical information about a more middle-class patient is set to ‘Vogliatemi bene’ from Madame Butterfly. Towards the end of the songs a visual metaphor is used for the onset of the disease is used as showers of blossom begin to obscure the view out of the windows.

Harrison and composer Dominic Muldowney also make creative use of the sound recorded by the documentary camera on the ward. Each of the three patients whose history is represented in the film on the recorded docu-mentary footage of the ward is seen to have a particular vocal habit. This is an involuntary noise made repeatedly as the disease begins to deprive the sufferers of their sense of self-control. In the case of the former opera singer, this is the random singing of a particular operatic note. By overdubbing the soundtrack Harrison punctuates the brides’ songs with these involuntary noises that have been ‘found’ in the process of documentation of the ward. These disrupt the ordered and uplifting quality of the music and the regu-larity of the lyrical patterns of the songs and become discordant signifiers of

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mental deterioration. As Hugh Herbert wrote in his review of Black Daisies, ‘Harrison sets the assured rhythms of his poetry to counterpoint the shim-mering minds of the patients’ (Herbert 1993). The poet also introduces an aural metaphor: the whir of the hospital’s electric tug vehicle as it travels the corridors collecting waste bags. This gets louder towards the end of the brides’ songs as it accompanies the shots of the encroaching blizzard of flower petals. This metaphor for the effects of the disease is a subtle use of the sonic dimen-sion of audio-visual text.

It is again seen in Harrison’s film and his approach to his subject that the engagement of verse drive in documentary facilitates inclusion of a diverse range of voices. This process is correspondent with the process FitzSimons observes, here paraphrasing MacDougal, that documentary film-makers go ‘shifting subjectivities’ with others in what she terms the use of ‘ventrilic’ voices (FitzSimons 2009: 135). The notion of the ‘voice’ of a film is problem-atic in the case of verse-documentary though, because of the prominence of the verse commentary. Verse commentary is unconventional in the documen-tary mode and thus it becomes a distinctive feature of the texts in which it is featured. FitzSimons writes that,

Rather than seeing a film-maker’s voice as a singular, individualized category, it is more fruitful to see it as braided, the nature and relation of those braids depending upon a particular context. And to understand that in most versions of documentary there will be forms of voice other than just the film-makers to be expressed.

(FitzSimons 2009: 142)

FitzSimons refers here to ‘vocal metaphors’ rather than actual voices but the formal patterning of a verse commentary gives the braiding process a consist-ent central thread because of its metricality (2009: 131). This binds the text, readily facilitating the inclusion of diverse input: subjective voices; metaphor; snatches of found material from the historical world, quotation and fragments from other aural and visual texts.

Returning to the development of verse-documentary in Britain during the period identified here, Harrison (1995) made his full directorial debut with his verse-film commemorating the 50th anniversary of the nuclear bomb attack on Hiroshima, The Shadow of Hiroshima in 1995. In the same year another verse-documentary was screened that was influenced by the work Harrison had done with the form, Blake Morrison’s Little Angels, Little Devils (White 1994), written by Morrison and directed by Susanna White. I wish to briefly look at this film in the context of the implications institutional production has on the ‘voice’ of a verse-documentary.

GIVING VOICE TO LITTLE ANGELS

Little Angels, Little Devils was commissioned in 1993 as an investigation into the portrayal of childhood in the arts. However the film was given a much more contemporary relevance by the awful abduction and murder of 3-year old James Bulger by two older children in Liverpool in that year. Morrison casts light on the process through which collaboration between the poet and the film-maker can operate. Morrison was approached to be involved in the production by Wall to Wall Television on the strength of the critical success of his book of poems on childhood Dark Glasses (1984). Wall to Wall had already

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undertaken a considerable amount of research on representations of child-hood in the arts for the project. These included archive footage and fragments of quotations on childhood from such notables as Ruskin, A. A. Milne, Charles Kingsley. In their commissioning letter to Morrison in November 1993 they suggest the production be ‘allusive, original and creative in its approach to its material’ and for the writer to be someone who possesses a ‘rare combina-tion of emotional insight and aesthetic sensibility’. The writer suggested to the production company that they should film some sequences at the rectory where he was brought up in rural Yorkshire, which was by this time derelict and about to be repossessed. This becomes a metaphor for the repossession of childhood in the twentieth century in the film. Wall to Wall agreed and Morrison observes that, with a ‘very, very small budget’, the amount of film-ing undertaken for the production was ‘pathetically small’, the bulk of it being done at the house in Yorkshire (interview with author, 2 July 1996). This was supplemented by some general shots – a dove flying, a shot of a small child in a cot. Morrison recalls that he had initially felt that ‘it might be enough for me just to be writing this and that they would, somehow, go away and make a film’. Because he felt passionately about the subject, however, he found himself getting ‘very involved’. ‘They’d respond to the script’, he remembers and then ‘I began to go to the cutting room to see some of the images they’d already assembled and we began to work in collaboration, particularly the Director, and myself’. There were various changes in the way the film was structured and, the writer observes,

At a certain point […] the Producer, who had seen a first version […], really got stuck in for two or three days and started getting hold of materials, suggesting that we moved there, or we moved here – visually more than anything. It wasn’t, particularly, that I was being told what to do, but she kind of got hold of it and gave it a shape, which it didn’t have before.

(interview with author, July 1996)

Symes recalls that on Words on Film the poets were all involved in the editing process in the cutting rooms (1992b: 4). He has also observed elsewhere how Harrison involves himself in the editing process (Symes 1991, 1995). In the case of Morrison’s film however, verse linked together a small and cheaply accessed and produced amount of material and it can be seen that the binding process a verse commentary offers has financial implications. As FitzSimons notes, broadcasters have an impact ‘on the voice of films they commission’, and production companies do also (2009: 133).

The question of authorship is a complex one with these verse-documenta-ries as, in all cases except The Shadow of Hiroshima, which Harrison wrote and directed himself, the poets are put together with an experienced film-maker. Peter Symes produced the four films of the Loving Memory series and directed The Gaze of the Gorgon, The Blasphemers’ Banquet and Black Daisies for the Bride and it has been seen here that these productions are collaborative. Yet, with all the works examined above apart from Black Daisies for the Bride, in which Harrison’s verse is spoken or performed by actors, the use of the term ‘voice’ as related to the poets’ contributions is more than just a ‘vocal metaphor’ pertaining to authorship. When a writer is commissioned to be involved in a documentary, then particular discourses may arise from their involvement. For example, Jackie Kay wrote Twice Through the Heart (Lowthorpe 1992)

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for the Words on Film series. Kay is a feminist writer and therefore particular discourses are brought to her treatment of her subject in the film. The same has been seen with Fred D’Aguiar’s film Sweet Thames: his speaking of his verse in the film, and his presence on-camera in some places, affects the significa-tion of the text that is understood to be from the poet’s viewpoint, despite the contribution of the film-maker. Similarly Tony Harrison, as a working-class boy who won a scholarship to read Classics at university, brings to the verse-documentary form a reputation for being outspoken, a champion of humanist causes who employs ‘a muscular, everyday language within graceful classical forms’, Grove observes (1989). Unlike in the more customary mode of docu-mentary production where there is a process of ‘coming to voice’, the poet, as implied author, is placed in the overall production and affects the signification of the text (FitzSimons 2009: 131).

CONCLUSION

I have outlined a development of verse-documentary in Britain in the period between 1986 and 1996 – another verse-film by Armitage, Saturday Night (Hall 1996), which documents an evening on the streets of Leeds, was broad-cast in 1996. It has been seen that the formal patterning of verse commen-tary acts as ‘drive’ for documentary, even where blank verse is included, and allows the meanings words have in other contexts to become accessible. This occurs as signifiers and are floated free from the more conventional chain of meaning inherent in prose language. The application of verse commentary has also been seen to readily accommodate subjective voices in a text when these might otherwise prove difficult to access. Nichols in 1983 suggested that the documentary voice is ‘that which conveys to us a sense of a text’s point of view’ and is ‘not restricted to any code or feature, such as dialogue or spoken commentary’ (1983: 18). More recently he has suggested that ‘voice’, as para-phrased by FitzSimons here, might ‘also be an attribute of institutions, not just of individuals or individual texts’ (FitzSimons 2009: 140). Developing this argument, FitzSimons contends that ‘[i]nstitutional voice is all the ways that each of the organizations with relevance to documentary film production – broadcasters, government funding bodies, production houses, etc. – “speak” through the choices they collectively make’ (FitzSimons 2009: 140–41). In the verse-documentaries examined here, and in other films in the two series that are observed, the poets appear as implied authors as discussed (indeed, in the television listings, the poets are cited as the authors). But they also represent a facet of the institutional voice; they have been commissioned to contribute their verse and the choice of poets reflects institutional values. In his review of Words on Film, Imlah observes that,

[T]he writers have been selected as if to cover a range of contemporary British concerns and grievances: one black man, one black Scotswoman, another Scot, a lifelong pacifist, a Northern probation officer, and a ‘non-belligerent working-class Catholic’ from Northern Ireland.

(Imlah 1992)

The poets are thus ambiguously positioned with regard to the ‘voice’ of the docu-mentaries they are involved with. In one sense, as implied authors they appear to be the voice of the films; on the other, their involvement in the collaboration and the use of their skill has been instrumental in producing the ‘moiré-like pattern

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formed by the unique interaction of all a film’s codes’ (Nichols 1983: 18). Yet, because of the selection processes involved in the commissioning, their inclusion is also part of the institutional ‘voice’ of the producing institution, the BBC.

Finally, speaking in the television documentary Derek Jarman: Know What I Mean? (Postma, 1988), Jarman states that television ‘replaced the hearth’ and the ‘spirit of storytelling’. Use of verse aligns the television text with far older oral and ‘bardic’ traditions and this in itself may elicit a more emotional response (Fiske and Hartley 1992: 85). As Peter Symes has suggested, verse can ‘cut to the heart of the documentary situation in a way impossible with prose’ (1992b: 2). An example of this is found in the title of Jackie Kay’s film. Twice Through the Heart documents the plight of 63-year-old battered wife Amelia Rossiter who was given life imprisonment for murdering her torment-ing and sexually abusing husband. The words of the title, which are used several times in the course of the film, become a paradox as they refer to both Amelia’s stabbing of her husband and her dual persecution under the patriar-chy of her husband and a male-dominated British justice system.

REFERENCES

Ackerman, John (1995), Dylan Thomas: The Filmscripts, London: J. M. Dent.Culler, Jonathan (1988), Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the

Study of Literature, New York: Cornell University Press.Fiske, John and Hartley, John (1992), Reading Television, London: Routledge.FitzSimons, Trish (2009), ‘Braided channels: A genealogy of the voice of docu-

mentary’, Studies in Documentary Film, 3: 2, pp. 131–45.Flitcroft, Kim (1992), Xanadu, Bristol: BBC Television.Grove, Valerie (1989), ‘The Valerie Grove interview: Tony Harrison’, The

Sunday Times, 6 August.Hall, Brian (1996), Saturday Night, London: Century Films/Real Life for BBC

Television.Harrison, Mark (1992a), Sweet Thames, Bristol: BBC Television.Harrison, Tony (1992b), Mimmo Perella non è Piu, Bristol: BBC Television.—— (1992c), The Gaze of the Gorgon, Newcastle: Bloodaxe.—— (1993), Black Daisies for the Bride, London: Faber and Faber.—— (1995), The Shadow of Hiroshima, London: Channel 4.Herbert, Hugh (1993), ‘Television’, The Guardian, 1 July.Imlah, Mick (1992), ‘Poetry to the people’, Times Literary Supplement, 12 June.Jones, Nicolette (1992), ‘Not averse to scanning new lines’, The Times, 9 June.Lowthorpe, Philippa (1992), Twice Through the Heart, Bristol: BBC Television.Morrison, Blake (1984), Dark Glasses, London: Chatto & Windus and The

Hogarth Press.Nichols, Bill (1983), ‘The Voice of Documentary’, Film Quarterly, 36: 3,

pp. 17–30. —— (1991), Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary,

Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Paget, Derek (1990), Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen & Stage, Manchester:

Manchester University Press.Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith (1993), Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics,

London: Routledge.Stam, Robert, Burgoyne, Robert and Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1992), New

Vocabularies in Film Semiotics: Structuralism, Post-Structuralism and Beyond, London: Routledge.

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Sutcliffe, Thomas (1992), ‘Nothing to declare’, The Independent, 4 July.Symes, Peter (1987), Mimmo Perella Non è Piu, Bristol: BBC Television.—— (1989), The Blasphemers Banquet, Bristol: BBC Television.—— (1991), ‘Blasphemy and death: On film making with Tony Harrison’, in

Neil Astley (ed.), Bloodaxe Critical Anthology 1: Tony Harrison, Newcastle: Bloodaxe, pp. 385–94.

—— (1992a), The Gaze of the Gorgon, Bristol: BBC Television.—— (1992b), ‘Introduction’, in Words on Film (guide book), London: BBC

Education, pp. 2–4.—— (1993), Black Daisies for the Bride, Bristol: BBC Television.—— (1995), ‘Introduction’, in Tony Harrison (ed.), The Shadow of Hiroshima

and Other Film/Poems, London: Faber and Faber, pp. vii–xxiv.Thorpe, Adam (1994), ‘The candyfloss of attention’, The Observer, 5 June.Truss, Lynne (1993), ‘I’d love to hug you, but I fear you’d break,’ The Times,

1 July.White, Susanna (1994), Little Angels, Little Devils, London: Wall to Wall

Television Ltd. for Channel 4.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Atkinson, P. (2011), ‘Poetic licence: Issues of signification and authorship in British television verse-documentary, 1986–96’, Studies in Documentary Film, 5: 1, pp. 61–74, doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.61_1.

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS

Peter Atkinson is senior lecturer in Film and Media at University of Central Lancashire, UK, specializing in popular music and broadcasting. With a Ph.D. on the subject of cultural representations of Liverpool in broadcasting, Peter has several publications on this subject and has given numerous international conference papers on a variety of topics.

Contact: Department of Journalism, Media and Commun ication, University of Central Lancashire, Preston, United Kingdom, PR1 2HE. E-mail: [email protected]

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© 2011 Intellect Ltd Book Reviews. English language. doi: 10.1386/sdf.5.1.75_5

BOOK REVIEWS

DOCUMENTARY SUPERSTARS: HOW TODAY’S FILMMAKERS ARE REINVENTING THE FORM, MARSHA McCREADIE (2008)New York: Allworth Press, 246 pp., ISBN 978-1-58115-508-2, Paperback, USD 15.56

Written as an introductory text on key contemporary documentary film-makers, this volume offers an entertaining and occasionally insightful look at figures such as Werner Herzog, Errol Morris, Kevin McDonald and Morgan Spurlock, among others. The collective of film-makers covered here is broad even if the manner in which they are introduced is idiosyncratic, with each chapter focusing on a grouping of film-makers who are linked in often tenu-ous ways. Herzog and Morris, for example, feature in an early chapter titled ‘The Practitioner and the Visionary’, in a discussion that makes more of their brief personal connections than any similarities in their film-making prac-tices. A later chapter focuses on film-makers adopting a ‘spoofmeister’ role (McCreadie’s term) and includes Rob Reiner, Christopher Guest, Michael Ritchie, Alex Karpovsky and Sacha Baron Cohen. Such a listing in itself suggests the wide-ranging approach taken by the author, jumping from discussions of mockumentary, to reflexive documentaries (to use Bill Nichols’ term), to on-screen performers.

McCreadie has an entertaining style and has chosen to take a deliberately subjective approach towards her subjects, dropping in observations of their appearances at public events and from her own encounters with them, which include comments on their physical presence, fashion and discursive style. The ultimate effect of her approach is to personalize these film-makers while avoiding the role of mere celebrant. McCreadie does not offer empty praise; her tone is critical and searching when it needs to be (for example, she point-edly highlights the lack of acknowledgement of the work of female directors typically accorded within documentary canons). And the range of references McCreadie makes in the course of her commentary is impressive; it is obvious that she is well-versed in documentary literature.

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McCreadie does occasionally stray into areas where she betrays a lack of expertise, something obvious particularly in later chapters where she confuses distinctions between documentary, mockumentary and drama-documen-tary. And where the book is likely to frustrate close readers is in its tenta-tive and unconvincing attempt to provide an overall theoretical focus for its discussions. McCreadie offers the label ‘neo-docs’ in her efforts to identify commonalities in the work of the film-makers featured in the book, and to argue that they collectively represent a distinctive shift in film-making prac-tice. What actually constitutes a ‘neo-doc’ is never clearly or consistently explained, but McCreadie’s definitions variously include a use of satire, an autobiographical frame, an editing style influenced by a ‘web style’ and a reflexive stance towards documentary construction. She tentatively identifies 1988 as a ‘turning point’ for the emergence of neo-docs, but admits that this is merely a guess. This is a vagueness that is frustrating, not least because there are potentially more useful insights to be made within the material McCreadie covers. That, however, would require a more detailed and rigorous approach than she undertakes here. Ultimately this is a volume to give to undergradu-ate students who recognize only Michael Moore as an exemplar of contem-porary documentary, and who require an introduction to a broader range of documentary practices.

Contact: Craig Hight, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hillcrest, New Zealand.E-mail: [email protected]

DOCUMENTARY DISPLAY: RE-VIEWING NONFICTION FILM AND VIDEO, KEITH BEATTIE (2008)London: Wallflower Press, 246 pp., ISBN 978-1-905674-72-5, Paperback, USD 29.50, ISBN 978-1-905674-73-2, Hardback, USD 90.00

This volume offers a detailed analysis of non-fiction film and television texts that have typically been marginalized or neglected entirely within discussions on documentary over the last three decades. In the process it provides a direct and necessary challenge towards key assumptions about the nature and prac-tices of contemporary documentary, and to the manner in which documentary canons have been constructed. Beattie’s project is to reimagine documentary through a consideration of its aesthetics, to explore practices of production and reception associated with forms of ‘documentary as display’.

Drawing from Tom Gunning’s notion of a ‘cinema of attractions’, married with a recognition of the influence of the avant-garde on documentary constructions, Beattie provides detailed discussions of a number of key docu-mentary subgenres. Chapters focus on popular and prominent forms of found footage films; the foregrounding of performance within ‘rockumentary’; the city symphony film; avant-garde tendencies within non-fiction surf film and video; and magnified images within natural science films (microcinema and IMAX). A central argument of the book is that these popular subgenres are

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indicative of how strongly documentary has always incorporated tenden-cies at odds with its rhetorical stance of offering exclusively sober, investiga-tive, intellectual and educative perspectives on reality. Many of the examples Beattie discusses derive instead from the more playful, entertaining, pleasur-able or deliberately ambiguous agendas associated with entertainment forms that are supposedly antithetical to documentary.

Where documentary has been typically assumed to have an emphasis on ‘telling’, such as through direct address to viewers and the presentation of forms of evidence within sequences dominated by an overall logic, Beattie highlights those texts that focus on ‘showing’. Here a display of the human body in performance, for example, or the magnification and slow motion presentation of natural phenomena offers alternative means of conveying nuances and complexities in meaning. The set of dichotomies assumed to underlie and position documentary within visual culture, such as between argument and narrative, politics and aesthetics, cognition and affect, and between aural and visual pleasures, are convincingly subverted by Beattie.

A valuable, but necessarily incomplete, part of this work is Beattie’s discus-sion of the history of the marginalization of issues of display within documen-tary literature. He critiques John Grierson’s narrow conception of the genre, which specifically sidelined avant-garde forms of expression, and begins the task of reinterpreting key works by documentary theorists such as Michael Renov, Bill Nichols and John Corner through an aesthetic lens. For example, he returns to Corner’s discussion of ‘post-documentary’, prompted by the arrival of popular factual television, to suggest that his acknowledgement of the signif-icance of performative and playful forms of display should in fact be placed within a much longer history of such tendencies within documentary culture.

Beattie’s arguments are an impressive and significant contribution to documentary theory. While the focus here is almost exclusively on film and video material, its detailed discussions of documentary aesthetics offer poten-tially broader application, such as to the study of docugames, database docu-mentaries and other digital documentary forms.

Contact: Craig Hight, Screen and Media Studies, University of Waikato, Hillcrest, New Zealand.E-mail: [email protected]

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NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS 2011

GENERALArticles submitted to Studies in Documentary Film should be original and not under consideration by any other publication. They should be written in a clear and concise style.

LANGUAGEThe journal uses standard British English. The Editors reserve the right to alter usage to these ends.

REFEREESStudies in Documentary Film is a refereed journal. Strict anonymity is accorded to both authors and referees.

OPINIONThe views expressed in Studies in Documentary Film are those of the authors, and do not necessarily coincide with those of the Editors or the Editorial or Advisory Boards.

SUBMISSION• Submit the article as an email attachment in Word or

in Rich Text Format.• Your article should not normally exceed 8,000 words

(excluding ‘Notes’), but longer pieces of up to 10,000 words may be considered.

• Include an article abstract of 150–200 words; this will go onto the Intellect website.

• Include a short biography in the third person, which will be included in the journal issue. Please also give your contact details, and an email address, if you wish.

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• Place these items at the beginning of your file, with the headings ‘Abstract’, ‘Contributor’s Details’, and ‘Keywords’.

PRESENTATION• The title of your article should be in bold at the

beginning of the file, without inverted commas.• The text, including the notes, should be in Times

New Roman 12 point.• The text, including the endnotes, must be double-

spaced.• The text should have at least 2.5 cm margins for

annotation by the editorial team.• You may send the text justified or unjustified.• You may, if you wish, break up your text with sub-

titles, which should be set in ordinary text and bold, not ‘all caps’.

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we cannot publish the original text.• Quotations must be within single inverted commas.

Material quoted within cited text should be in double inverted commas.

• Quotations must be within the body of the text unless they exceed approximately four lines of your text. In this case, they should be separated from the body of the text and indented.

• Omitted material should be signalled thus: […]. Note that there are no spaces between the suspen-sion points.

• Avoid breaking up quotations with an inser-tion, for example: ‘This approach to mise-en-scène’, says MacPherson, ‘is not sufficiently elaborated’ (MacPherson 1998: 33).

REFERENCES• The first mention of a film in the article (except if

it is in the title) should include its original title, the director’s surname (not Christian name), and the year of release, thus: The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kino-apparatom, Vertov, 1929). In all subsequent references the title should be translated into English, unless the film is known in all markets by its original title, for example San Soleil.

• We use the Harvard system for bibliographical references. This means that all quotations must be followed by the name of the author, the date of the publication, and the pagination, thus: (Walker 2005: 15). PLEASE DO NOT use ‘(ibid.)’. Note that the punctuation should always FOLLOW the reference within brackets, whether a quotation is within the text or an indented quotation.

• Your references refer the reader to a bibliography at the end of the article, before the endnotes. The heading should be ‘Works Cited’. List the items alphabetically.

Here are examples of the most likely cases:Anon. (1931), ‘Stalin i kino’, Pravda, 28 January 1931.Aitken, I. (1989), ‘John Grierson, Idealism and the Inter-

war Period, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 9.3, pp. 247–258.

Corner, John. (1996), The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester: Manchester UP.

Youngblood, Denise. (1991a), Soviet Cinema in the Silent Era, 1918–1935, Austin: University of Texas Press.

— (1991b), “History” on Film: the historical Melodrama in Early Soviet Cinema’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, 11: 2, pp. 173–184.

Dermody, Susan. (1995), ‘The Pressure of the Unconscious Upon the Image: The Subjective Voice in Documentary’, in Leslie Devereaux and Roger Hillman (eds) Fields of Vision: Essays in Film Studies, Visual Anthropology and Photography. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California P, pp. 292–310.

• ‘Anon.’ for items for which you do not have an author (because all items must be referenced with an author within the text)

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• year date of publication in brackets • commas, not full stops, between parts of item• absence of ‘in’ after the title of a chapter within a

monograph, but please use ‘in’ after chapters in edited volumes

• name of translator of a book within brackets after title and preceded by ‘trans.’, not ‘transl.’ or ‘translated by’

• absence of ‘no.’ for the journal number• colon between journal volume and number• ‘p.’ or ‘pp.’ before page extents.

WEB REFERENCESThese are no different from other references; they must have an author, and that author must be referenced Harvard-style within the text. Unlike paper references, however, web pages can change, so we need a date of access as well as the full web reference. In the list of references at the end of your article, the item should read something like this:Collins, F. (2006), ‘Memory in Ruins; the Woman

Filmmaker in her Father’s Cinema, http://www.latrobe. edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1201/fcfr13a.htm Accessed 3 December 2006.

NOTESNotes appear at the side of appropriate pages, but the numerical sequence runs throughout the article. Notes

should be kept to a minimum. In general, if something is worth saying, it is worth saying in the text itself. A note will divert the reader’s attention away from your argument. If you think a note is necessary, make it as brief and to the point as possible. Use Word’s note-making facility, and ensure that your notes are endnotes, not footnotes. Place note calls outside the punctuation, so AFTER the comma or the full stop. The note call must be in superscripted Arabic (1, 2, 3).

ILLUSTRATIONSArticles may be accompanied by images. It is the author’s responsibility to supply images and ensure they are copyright cleared. Images should be scanned at 300 dpi resolution, saved as tiff files, and sent electronically to the Editor at [email protected]. Do NOT insert images into a word document. Please ensure you insert a figure number at the appropriate position in the text, together with a caption and acknowledgement to the copyright holder or source.

TRANSLITERATIONWe follow the Library of Congress transliteration, using a straight apostrophe: for the soft sing and a curly inverted comma ‘as apostrophe and for quotations.

Any matters concerning the format and presentation of articles not covered by the above notes should be addressed to the Editor.

The guidance on this page is by no means comprehensive: it must be read in conjunction with Intellect Notes for Contributors.

These notes can be referred to by contributors to any of Intellect’s journals, and so are, in turn, not suffi cient; contributors will

also need to refer to the guidance such as this given for each specifi c journal. Intellect Notes for Contributors is obtainable from

http://www.intellectbooks.co.uk/journals/page/index,name=journalstyleguide/ or on request from the Editor of this journal.

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Angels, Stones, Hunters: Murder, Celebrity and Direct Cinema

Documents

Transcript of Angels, Stones, Hunters: Murder, Celebrity and Direct Cinema