Repetition: constructing truth though documentary’s artifice.
Practice Research Project (essay and film)
One cannot meaningfully engage with ethnographic film without taking into consideration how truth, in all its intangibility, has been mediated through the filmmaking process. Repetition, with anrimeal is a film that aims to use the artifice of filmmaking as a truth seeking device. Through this approach, the line between artifice and authenticity becomes blurred, revealing a layered truth that engages with the ethics of representation within ethnographic film.
I began with the following questions:
(How) can ethnographic filmmaking become a truth seeking device in itself?
(How) can I respectfully encounter and film someone else’s inner world?
(How) can artifice become authenticity?
(How) can I honour my subject’s truth and avoid my own agenda?
Although not all these open ended questions were touched upon in the film, they became the anchor that kept us grounded in a vast sea of endless ideas during our time filming. Thus, the threads of these questions run strong and invisible though the fabric of Repetition, with anrimeal.
Whilst ethnographic film is still a useful tool for anthropologists to record data and describe cultures (Kerim Friedman, 2020, p. 18), it is also a discipline available to non-anthropologists whereby a film can capture the impression of a sensory lived experience (ibid., p. 20). P. Kerim Friedman particularly emphasises the importance of the relationship between subject and filmmaker (ibid., p. 23). He loosely defines ethnographic film as ‘a family of resemblances looking at features spread out over four dimensions of analysis: disciplinary dialogue, ethnographic subjects, ethnographic styles, and methodological norms’ (ibid., p. 27). Rather needing to fit a rigid set of criteria, an ethnographic film might engage with some but not all of these dimensions. Kerim Friedman places particular emphasis on the relationship fostered between the filmmaker and the subject, arguing that ‘close collaboration’ is what differentiates ethnographic film from ‘exoticizing TV documentaries’ (ibid.).
Adina Pintilie’s Touch Me Not (2018) is a film that certainly centres relationships between subject and filmmaker, as well as inter-subject relations. A research film about intimacy in all its forms, it exists ‘on the fluid border between reality and fiction’ (Pintilie, 2018). Pintilie spent over a year finding likeminded participants who would be able to approach the subject matter with a radical openness (Aiano, 2018). In lieu of the privilege of time- this project was made for University so I had strict deadline- Ana (stage name anrimeal) was my first choice as my ethnographic film subject. A dear friend and long term collaborator of mine, I knew we could deeply interrogate what it means to portray inner truth together, and fairly quickly due to our preexisting relationship.
Similar to the process of Touch Me Not (2018), I initially attempted an ongoing multimedia project where I would set Ana homework that involved writing, filming, creating, watching and reading- I would do the same in a back and forth process. However, the commitment required proved almost immediately impossible against our busy lives. Instead, I asked for a long weekend of her time- the clear time boundaries fostered a sense of ease around the project. I toyed with the idea of brainstorming creative exercises for us to do but in the end decided I would arrive with as few suggestions as possible to leave space for me to encounter her world. Ana, as my subject, was the site of knowledge.
Constructing a truth involves some degree of artifice. This is most notable in ‘docutainment’ (Rich, 2006, p. 110) where viewers are transported to a seamless, almost hyperreal version of events. But even in the case of cinema verité, which almost diametrically opposes docutainment, creative decisions have to be made on behalf of the subject and a truth is constructed; Werner Herzog has famously dubbed cinema verité ‘the truth of accountants’ (2002). Author, Jeanette Winterson, touches upon the idea of truth and reality much in her work, asserting that ‘there is no such thing as autobiography, there is only art and lies’ (1995, p. 57). Here, truth is replaced with art. Bill Nichols, in his book Introduction to Documentary emphasises not truth but reality. He argues that ‘documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform roles as actors do’(Nichols, 2017, p. 6). The grey area between authenticity and artifice in documentary making has always intrigued me, especially the role of acting in creating a sense of truthfulness.
Nanook of the North (Flaherty, 1922) is perhaps one of the most discussed documentaries because of its dubious treatment of reality and its use of acting. Widely considered the first documentary ever made, it follows the life of Allakariallak (renamed Nanook by Flaherty for the documentary) and his family. In one scene, Allakariallak bites a record in confusion (ibid., 00:12:45); Flaherty chooses to present the Inuit as ignorant to technology despite having a team of Inuit helping him with his recording technology (BBC, 2015). Whilst this could be seen as ‘a playful hamming for the camera’, Inuk musician, Tanya Tagaq, describes moments like this condescending, embarrassing and annoying (Tagaq, 2014). In directing Allakariallak and his family to act primitively, Flaherty presents his own limited and ignorant experience of Inuit culture above Allakariallak’s reality. Thus Flaherty’s consistent use of acting in Nanook of the North renders his film more fiction than fact, centering his own version of reality masquerading as Allakariallak’s.
Werner Herzog frequently blurs the line between fact and fiction in his documentaries as an artistic device. Land of Silence and Darkness (1971, 00:01:00), for example, begins with protagonist Fini recounting a memory of ski-flyers (1971, 00:01:00). Herzog, however, fabricated these memories on behalf of Fini (who had never seen ski-flyers), believing the image captured his emotional perception of Fini and her sensory isolation (Herzog, 2002, p. 240). He says of his documentary making style, ‘in my ‘documentaries’ I have constantly explored the intensified truths of the situations I have found myself in and of the characters I have met…’ (ibid., p. 241). From this it is clear that Herzog utilizes artifice in order to instill a sense of his own personal perspective of the stories he is telling and in doing so, prioritises his truth over fact.
In his documentary, The Act of Killing (2012), Joshua Oppenheimer uses staged scenes as a ‘meta-narrative investigation on the possible forms of representation’ (Demaria and Violi, 2020 p. 96). The subjects of the film are gangsters who were employed by the government to carry out mass executions during the Indonesian Genocide. Believing themselves to be the stars of a non-existent film, Arsan and Aminah (ibid., p. 92), they act out the ways in which they killed their victims, blurring the line between fiction and truth. Through these staged scenes as well as the inclusion of the staging itself, Oppenheimer is able to explore the different modes of performance, representation and meta-narrative; ‘a chiasmatic relationship is thus established between the fictionality of the representation and the truth of what is represented’ (ibid., p. 94). It is in this gap that the audience can understand something of the truth of the dead who can no longer tell their story. Performance then becomes a complex tool for presenting a multifaceted and otherwise concealed truth.
Touch Me Not also uses acting exercises and staged scenes as a way to creatively investigate truth. Pintilie employed many investigative exercises, including interviews, guided interactions between subjects and fully staged scenes. In one approach, subjects would bring situations from their dreams, fears and memories to the group, which would then be reenacted by the group so that it could be experienced by the subject with distance in order to gain insight into that situation. Of this Pintilie says, ‘fiction functioned as a sort of safety structure that brought us all together… In a way, you’re the prisoner of a fictional character. In documentary, you are a prisoner of your daily persona’ (Bender, 2019). The resulting film is one that not only explores the complexities of inner truth but invites and holds space for the audience to consider their own relationship to sexuality.
These films show the variety of ways acting can be employed to both conceal and reveal truth in documentary. In my own film, I used acting to explore the process of repetition- a topic that came up frequently in my conversations with Ana about her life and music. Filmmaking itself is a repetitive process. During interviews, it is common practise to ask a subject to repeat themselves so the sentiment of what they’re saying can be comfortably edited. I find this moment to be a swift and fascinating transition from authenticity (a moment something is realised unselfconsciously), to artifice (when the unselfconscious moment must be acted). In their roundtable discussion on ethnographic filmmaking, Peter Biella, Carlo Cubero and Lorenzo Ferrarini, discuss their different approaches to retakes. Whilst Biella has not shot retakes in years, he talks of a project where he ‘wrote drafts of what [he] thought the audience would need to understand’ for the protagonist to read (Vannini et al, 2020, p. 339). Generally, he argues, retakes are more of a service to the filmmaker than the subject and so should be avoided, so as not to make the participants perform. Cubero on the other hand shoots retakes ‘all the time’, but avoids asking participants to repeat phrases or actions as ‘it could look ‘acted’ and the audience will see through your artifice’ (ibid., p. 339). Ferrarini regularly shoots retakes, particularly in films with enacted scenes, but is careful to make sure his participants do not feel ‘awkward or stupid’ (ibid., p.340).
In my own filmmaking, I have found that it is within the moment of a retake that authenticity and artifice become blurred. While filming, I suggested Ana write a line about repetition that she would repeat during interviews over the following days. I would act along with her, pretending it was the first time I had heard the line. These offhand moments (sometimes comical, sometimes profound, sometimes awkward) became the basis of the documentary, bookending Ana’s performance of her repetitive song, Masonry Gargoyles. In editing, I ordered them chronologically by scene, and at first played them one by one. Initially, the audience becomes drawn in, not knowing the line is rehearsed. As the line is repeated, the artifice of the film becomes clear, as well as Ana’s feelings about repeating the line. In the second and third repetition scenes, they play at the same time, displaying Ana’s consistency in her repetition of the line. By the last repetition Ana remarks, ‘it’s stopped being acting… it gets me to a different place each time’ to which I reply ‘me too’ (12:45). In this moment, the journey of repetition comes full circle. What started as authenticity revealed to be artifice becomes authentic once more through the process of repetition.
As well as repetition in the filming process, there is also repetition in the edit. The sound bite, ‘repeating stuff, I mean it’s a way of discovering and living withing a feeling… so if I’m constantly repeating a phrase then I know that that phrase must be important’ appears three times (03:38, 05:35, 11:48) as I believed it encapsulated the idea Ana was articulating in our conversations and, crucially, her song. Due to the repetitive nature of the film, it would probably take a few watches to notice this shot is repeated. The film’s exploration of repetition moves from the abstract to the emotional through Ana’s live performance of Masonry Gargoyles. This performance is once more a blend of artifice and authenticity. I asked Ana to add musical layers onto the selected live take; the resulting harmonies, spatial effects and synths create an audiovisual rupture alongside the liveness of the footage. The creative treatment of sound becomes something akin to Holly Roger’s concept of ‘sonic elongation’, whereby real world sounds are creatively treated to become part of the sound track, transforming ‘actual, real-world sounds into imagined and almost transcendental sound worlds’ (Rogers, 2020, p. 102). Although not all the sounds in Masonry Gargoyles added in post are from the original shoot, as is typical of sonic elongation, the effect is the same; the sound we hear at once ‘travels the same path as the image’ whilst also revealing ‘poeticism’ through its distance from the image, and thus this duality of sound moves the viewer into the reflexive present tense (ibid., p. 113). Indeed, the live audio is able to move into a space between the time of filming and the time of watching. By elongating the sonic world past what we can see, the audience is afforded insight into Ana’s internal world.
If documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’, then artifice can be seen to sit in between the ‘obvious tension between ‘creative treatment’ and ‘actuality’’ (Nichols, 2017, p. 5). Techniques of artifice, such as acting and reflexive post production, enable us to explore both Ana’s inner world, and how her inner world becomes mediated through my perspective and through the ethnographic filmmaking process. Musing on the fictitious nature of reality and vice versa, Winterson asserts that art cannot ‘recall us to sublimity… if it is merely a reflection of actual life. Our real lives are elsewhere. Art finds them’ (1997, p. 59). Repetition, with anrimeal, is a search for this elsewhere truth.
Bibliography
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Beautiful 🧡