For our Sound Studies and Aural Cultures unit, we are writing a podcast about a chosen topic to do with contemporary issues in sound art. This will help us develop a critical awareness when investigating our chosen subjects.
Sound Memory?
What perspective cultural capital do we bring consciously or unconsciously to the forefront?
Who am I capable of gatekeeping or leaving out of the conversation?
Having a responsibility to share the hidden truth of a subject at times being aware of a negative role or connection you might have to it.
We spoke of ‘Nichol’s Documentary Modes’
Poetic, Expository, Participatory, Observational, Reflexive and Performative
“the characteristics of a given mode function as a dominant in a given film…but they do not dictate or determine every aspect of its organization.” (Nichols 2001)
Poetic Mode,
Soviet montage theory, a fictional re-interpretation of history, a good example being Koyaaniqatsi. A mass montage of human life to epic minimalist compositions by Phillip Glass.
Here is a piece by Dziga Vertov, an early poetic documentary proclaimed this style as Kinochestvo, translating as ‘the quality of being cinematic’ is ‘the art of organizing the necessary movements of objects in space as a rhythmical artistic whole’.
I personally believe Poetic mode to be the most suitable form of documentary for study of an artist, like this Picasso documentary, which due to the staged nature of the sets, it’s not too concerned with cinema verite, but like the documentary’s title, the film and Picasso invite us into quite a magical place. A very different type of artist documentary to this would be Wild Combination, following the musician/producer/composer Arthur Russell in a linear way through his life with a collection of Narration and Interviews. I think these are quite stark differences in how an artist can be portrayed, one lends itself to capturing the life of an playful older artist in a sort of heavily performed ‘fly on the wall’ as a nod and celebration, the other more like a obituary for a talented artist tragically lost too early. Both these films arguably carry a sensationalist mystique to them romanticising the artist.
Expository Mode,
Rhetorical content – used in which to make a bold statement but perhaps not back with information, a persuasive piece, looking to get some sort of point across. – this at times being potentially quite rigid.
‘Poetic Mode’ was phased out when works became politicised and served as propaganda, this made way for expository types of documentary which were concerned with a narrative. Images were gathered and placed in service of the narrative (parallel with how sound developed to sync to film, in a sense documentary is film to sound). This can be referred to as Evidentiary Editing. An interesting choice of word, the image is the evidence to the narrative. I can see how image as evidence to a narrative would be critiqued, as from experience, it’s easy to see how images can be manipulating or tell a certain story, film can be cut and edited, photos can be cropped, crucial details left out.
Participatory Mode,
The filmmaker interacts with their subjects, has its drawbacks of when it can be used, useful in certain environments to draw upon a personal attachment the filmmaker may have to the content. When the narrative is from the perspective of the narrator, this can be an example of participatory mode.
This mode brings to mind this documentary I have seen by Agnes Varda, admittedly I have only seen this and Le Bonheur. But in Daguerreotypes, we see the road Varda lived on in the 70s, as she and her daughter go around the shops filming and speaking to all the shop workers.
Observatory Mode,
Fly in the wall style. With the invention of portable sound and camera equipment, Observatory documentaries were concerned with capturing the truth of a scene through no narrative, non diegetic sound, no interviews or scene set-up.
The drawback with observatory documentary however, is that no matter how discreet, these people are still being filmed, therefore it can never be said its a true depiction of reality. Much-like the Picasso documentary and this Ryuichi Sakamoto documentary from the 80s, we see this sort of sensationalised reality of people looking perfect.
This drawback is interesting to me, as sound recordists can have a similar plight to documentary filmmakers in the search of truth. I have recently been stopped recording at Birmingham City Station due to suspicious activity. In a recent Q&A with sound recordist and editor Steve Fanagan, he spoke of using DPA microphones over other types not only for their sound but also how discreet they are, also having issues with people coming up and asking him what he was doing. This phenomena is recorded to dangerous effect in Reality TV, where the kind of pressure to perform in front of the camera can cause strange behaviours, traumatically displayed to a mass population. Having in some cases dire consequences for the mental health of those participants. In stark contrast to this morally dubious entertainment….When documentaries focus on an artist the documentary is made in service of an artists vision of themselves (like ‘live albums’ of the 70s, where the parts were overdubbed to make the bands sound better). This kind flattering portrayal of the artist at work is not what Observatory documentaries probably set out to be, but perhaps the ends of the spectrum are both bad and it’s a balancing act both with moral implications for the filmmaker.
This quite alarming at times documentary has a lot more darkness and paints a less perfect image of our character study. Ondi Tominar has directed lots of character study type documentaries in her long career including the equally absurd Dig!, following the Brian Jonestown Massacre on tour capturing Anton Newcombe at his most out of control kicking a fan in the head from the stage and subsequently losing custody of his child.
Reflexive Mode,
Considers the quality of documentary itself, de-mystifying it’s process. A man with a movie camera, is a reflexive piece of documentary due to its choice to feature the camera operator.
Cinema Vérité, or Kino Pravda. – French and Russian movements retrospectively are concerned with ‘truth’ and purists of these schools consider reflexive mode a break from this pursuit of capturing reality.
This piece is an interesting watch, what sticks out to me is the cameraman is present in a few shots, feels like it fits into a few other modes we talked about later. There is something participatory, reflexive, performative, and there is arguably something observational about this poetic type of filmmaking.
What strikes me most, is this silent film feels more like photography than journalism, and the rhythm to this image driven narrative is not too dissimilar from narrative through editing not musical sound. I would not be surprised if there was a bridge between the poetic documentary and musique concrete compositions.
In The Act of Killing, the director gets an ex-military executioner to re-enact his brutal killings under a oppressive regime responsible for the death of a million of its citizens. These horrifying re-enactments attempt to challenge the executioner to revisit the atrocities he’s committed and ask how he can justify what he has done. I have never had the stomach to watch this documentary as I am quite troubled by the concept of it. It was produced by Werner Herzog and is in his top 5 ‘Greatest Documentaries of All Time’.
Performative Mode,
Filmmaker constructs subject truths, e.g Fahrenheit 911, Michael Moore. This type of mode, is very similar and shares a lot with Expository and Participatory modes and I guess I struggle to see its distinction. It seems often concerned with a strong personality, like an informal version of an expository essay performed by the narrator.
I think the drawbacks here are clear, if the ego of the documentarian is too great, and if the arguments are too binary. The documentary becomes the vessel for a performer, and could be light on fact. If the documentarian belongs to a world that exists outside of colonialist status quo however, record and evidence may be more scarce, therefore an emotional and grounded piece on subjects that fall amongst people who society considers minorities. A more subjective approach is far more suitable, where complex experiences can be explained and felt. Adam Curtis’ documentaries are driven by his personality and philosophies on the world, whilst running like a expository documentary.
On the topic of subject truths, one of the most respected artists of the documentary film genre often admits to bending the truth to suit the narrative of his story. Werner Herzog set out a list of rules for his documentary cinema;
1. By dint of declaration the so-called Cinema Verité is devoid of verité. It reaches a merely superficial truth, the truth of accountants.
2. One well-known representative of Cinema Verité declared publicly that truth can be easily found by taking a camera and trying to be honest. He resembles the night watchman at the Supreme Court who resents the amount of written law and legal procedures. “For me,” he says, “there should be only one single law: the bad guys should go to jail.”
Unfortunately, he is part right, for most of the many, much of the time.
3. Cinema Verité confounds fact and truth, and thus plows only stones. And yet, facts sometimes have a strange and bizarre power that makes their inherent truth seem unbelievable.
4. Fact creates norms, and truth illumination.
5. There are deeper strata of truth in cinema, and there is such a thing as poetic, ecstatic truth. It is mysterious and elusive, and can be reached only through fabrication and imagination and stylization.
6. Filmmakers of Cinema Verité resemble tourists who take pictures amid ancient ruins of facts.
7. Tourism is sin, and travel on foot virtue.
8. Each year at springtime scores of people on snowmobiles crash through the melting ice on the lakes of Minnesota and drown. Pressure is mounting on the new governor to pass a protective law. He, the former wrestler and bodyguard, has the only sage answer to this: “You can’t legislate stupidity.”
9. The gauntlet is hereby thrown down.
10. The moon is dull. Mother Nature doesn’t call, doesn’t speak to you, although a glacier eventually farts. And don’t you listen to the Song of Life.
11. We ought to be grateful that the Universe out there knows no smile.
12. Life in the oceans must be sheer hell. A vast, merciless hell of permanent and immediate danger. So much of a hell that during evolution some species – including man – crawled, fled onto some small continents of solid land, where the Lessons of Darkness continue. (Werner Herzog, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota, 1999)
An article focussing on Werner Herzog from offscreen.com states “It is clear once again from this description that Herzog’s non-fictions can not be considered as ‘pure’ documentaries; his documentaries famously include as much staged and scripted material as ‘real’ footage (as in Fata Morgana, The Wild Blue Yonder, La Soufrière), and indeed overtly deal with the dichotomy fact/truth and with the question of how such truth can be communicated to the spectator through the language of cinema.” -Perhaps this line of thought places Herzog with one foot out of the documentary genre as a hole or places his work somewhere between a reflexive type of documentary and a performative one.
I think it’s clear these modes are flexible and can bleed between each other, and definitely think certain topics are best approached with certain modes in mind, I also think for most documentaries you could argue that they could subjectively belong to a few modes. I see these modes as a helpful historical commentary on the political discourse around documentaries, but personally don’t see how you can truly say one style is better than any other.
I am thinking mostly about the relation between sound and image, when dissolving this information into something useful for podcast. I am seeing potential parallels between the capture of truth on film, and capture of the truth through sound alone. As when we talk about film, film is something that has grown to be half image and half sound. The dichotomy of fact/truth is an interesting thing to consider when looking at the documentary and I found a hard to digest quote from a Herzog interview with the guardian; ‘facts do not constitute truth’. ‘Fake news’ and ‘echo chambers’ are new mainstream concepts to our society as an overarching truth to news is harder and harder to discern.