After postmodernism: how documentary learned to stop worrying and love representation
Image by Anastasiia Gushchina
BY ANASTASIIA GUSHCHINA
In 1999, Jane M. Gaines titled her introduction to the sixth volume of the Visible Evidence collection “The Real Returns.” In her essay, she discusses a twisted relationship between turn-of-the-century documentary and the world it is supposed to portray. While acknowledging the outcomes of the postmodern crisis that put documentary’s identity in question, Gaines, as her title suggests, nonetheless confirms that documentary is still very much alive and retains an intimate bond to the real. The main question that she addresses can be phrased as follows: if the real persists, how does documentary engage with it?
In 2024, we live in the era of the fake news, “postconfessional” technologies (Fournier 3), and algorithmic bubbles. Yet while our vision is more confined to a media spectacle tailored directly to our individual tastes, and our cynicism about the truth claims media actors produce has grown exponentially, documentaries – films that have intimate ties to reality and truth – are apparently booming (Sherman).
Documentary is dead
Documentary cinema has a long tradition of negotiating its ontological status in the broader context of visual media. Being tied to the modernist notion of objectivity (Renov 130), it is often distinguished from fiction film on the grounds of producing truth claims about the world (Ward 8). Describing documentary cinema as working with “discourses of sobriety,” Bill Nichols suggests that documentary cinema has always been expected to address issues of the historical world and to inspire social change (Nichols 3).
However, this assumption is often disputed both by cinema scholars and media theorists. In “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary,” Linda Williams, for example, claims that at the end of the 20th century, non-fiction film, along with other forms of media, “plunged into a permanent state of the self-reflexive crisis of representation” (10). Following Fredric Jameson’s theorizations of postmodern culture, she argues that documentary struggles with the “loss of faith in the objectivity of the image” (10). This loss of faith emerges from the advancements of digital technology in art and cinema practices. The proliferation of digital special effects, along with image-alteration software has made us question whether there is any world left in film, as the medium has shifted from representing reality to simulating it. This change has ruined viewers’ trust in photographic images and undermined the belief that non-fiction filmmaking could portray reality. It has also forced documentary cinema to reconsider its representational strategies and re-evaluate its relationship to the world.
Long live documentary!
By Anastasiia Guschina
In 2017, Erika Balsom proclaimed: “I want to live in the reality-based community” (n.p.). Her statement is a call to return to a reality that postmodernism deemed collapsed. Balsom writes that in the age of “post-truth politics, the death of facts, fake news, deep-state conspiracies, [and] paranoia on the rise,” reality needs our care as never before (n.p.). And documentary, in her view, is the form that can provide that care.
Balsom argues that the new observational documentaries which started to appear in the 2010s confront “the pedagogy of suspicion” and offer a new way of looking at the world (n.p.). Instead of capturing the truth, they strive to represent reality. Films produced by Eric Baudelaire, Kevin Jerome, and documentarists affiliated with Sensory Ethnography Lab (SEL) at Harvard University aim to depict “the facticity of phenomenal reality and demand belief in it” (Balsom). The crucial difference between these filmmakers’ approach compared to their 20th-century predecessors is the former’s emphasis on experiential knowledge.
For example, the film Leviathan (2012) produced by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor depicts the realities of the commercial fishing industry in North America in an unconventional way. The film consists of shots captured with GoPro cameras which were strapped to fishermen’s bodies, as well as placed around and outside the fishing boats (Castaing-Taylor, et al. 54). Locating cameras in this way helped to produce images that were never still and looked incredibly obscure, making the audience unsure of what they were looking at. Unconventional angles, blurry lenses, extreme close-ups – all these elements allow documentarists to go beyond observation and, in a sense, show the incomprehensibility of both nature and its exploitation. Paired with indistinct environmental sound, the constant abrupt movement in the shots and choppy transitions between them are designed to provoke a physical response in the viewers and cause what Scott MacDonald labels “a sensory trauma” (ch. 9). In that, Leviathan demands to change the cinematic mode of reception – rejecting the long-standing reign of the rational, it prioritizes the corporeal.
By Anastasiia Guschina
People’s Park, another 2012 documentary produced by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn also emphasizes the partiality of vision by presenting one long take of a filmmaker moving through a park in Chengdu, China. The film shows people engaged in common leisure activities, such as dancing and drinking tea but does not try to capture the entirety of the environment. In other words, the film marks a fragment of reality and never attempts to suggest that this representation is comprehensive. The world and people portrayed in People’s Park exist outside the realm of cinema, and the documentary makes sure to draw attention to its mediation. By depicting the crowd reacting to the documentarist moving through the park, it emphasizes her presence. Yet the camera never stops to get closer to the subjects of the film or adjust its position – it establishes boundaries of the filmic space. Thus both Leviathan and People’s Park exercise strategies of partiality to communicate that “simple truths and totalizing meanings are the real fictions” (Balsom).
While new observational documentaries, and in particular SEL’s projects, attempt to render situations which are impossible to describe verbally, another documentary mode that gained prominence after the 1980s – animated non-fiction – goes even further. Animated documentary is often praised for its ability to represent real life experiences that are unavailable for conventional live-action recording (Honess Roe 169). Indeed, many animated documentaries approach such ‘invisible’ topics as working through trauma, dealing with mental illnesses, or reconstructing the past and its memories. In that, I argue, non-fiction animation along with new observational documentaries strives to present a situated experience. Yet while the observational films of the 2010s have chosen vision as their tool of knowledge construction, animation privileges imagination.
To illustrate, Waltz with Bashir, a 2008 anti-war animated documentary that depicts recollections of soldiers who participated in the first Lebanon War, uses animation to convey the perspectives of its subjects. The film consists of animated interviews and visualizations of its participants’ experiences that alternate with fantastical sequences corresponding to the characters’ flashbacks, nightmares, and repressed memories. Ali Folman, the director of the film, explains his choice to opt for animation as a main representational strategy as follows: “If you look at all the elements in the film – memory, lost memory, dreams, the subconscious, hallucinations, drugs, youth, lost youth – the only way to combine all those things in one storyline was drawings and animation” (Abeel). In other words, Folman treats animation not just as a substitution for a live footage that simply does not exist, but also as the only acceptable method of representing issues that do not manifest themselves visually in our shared reality. Extensive use of visual metaphors allows him to depict both “factual memories that can be empirically (ideally or in practice) verified and factical memories that remain beyond empirical verification” (Landesman and Bendor 356). Animation offers means to show what it is like to struggle with amnesia, confront the unspoken and traumatic past, and come to terms with the war’s aftermath (Honess Roe 146, 162). In short, it creates a way to look more closely at the world and acknowledges the complexity and variety of human experiences. With that, it also opens the possibility of engaging with “subject matters traditionally beyond the documentary purview” (Honess Roe 2).
By Anastasiia Guschina
The same holds true for another animated film – Ryan, an Oscar-winning short from 2004. Exploring a different narrative from Waltz with Bashir, Ryan nevertheless incorporates similar representational strategies to depict its subjects’ state of mind. The documentary shows a conversation between Chris Landreth, the author of the film, and his subject Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator whose career was interrupted by his struggle with psychological problems and substance abuse (Fore 281). In the short, Landreth uses computer-generated photorealistic animation along with fantastical insets to convey both his own and Larkin’s subjectivities. By adding strange-looking colourful shapes and lines around his and Larkin’s animated avatars and allowing their appearances to transform depending on the topic of their conversation, Landreth demonstrates that human emotional life “may exceed the surface” of a body and may as well “inhabit that surface” (Fore 284). Calling his style “psycho-realism,” Landreth highlights the connection that exists between the psychological and the physical – in doing so, he demonstrates “how mental scars are rendered visible” (Honess Roe 129).
Coda
Here I would like to return to the question posed in the beginning of this essay: if the real persists, how does documentary engage with it? My answer would now be – through vision and imagination.
As observational documentary approaches actuality from a noninterventionist position and animated documentary accesses it through the fantasmatic, contemporary non-fiction redefines itself, no longer trying to present “a neutral picturing of reality,” but rather “a way of coming to terms with [it] by means of working with and through images and narratives” (Balsom and Peleg 13). Thus both modes, in Balsom’s words, “place an immense trust in their viewers” (n.p.) and announce, “Dare to believe in what you see” (Daney as qtd. in Balsom and Peleg 14). In other words, they force us to assume, ‘This is so, isn’t it?’ And in the contemporary context, this question does not appeal to rationality or reason, but to experiential knowledge. Thus the real transforms, but it still, indeed, returns.
Works cited
Abeel, Erica. “On the verge between reality, fantasy and dreams: “Waltz with Bashir” director Ari Folman.” IndieWire, 18 Dec. 2008, indiewire.com/2008/12/on-the-verge-between-reality-fantasy-and-dreams-waltz-with-bashir-director-ari-folman-71156. Accessed 28 May 2021.
Balsom, Erika, and Hila Peleg. “Introduction: The Documentary Attitude.” Documentary Across Disciplines, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016, pp. 10–19.
Balsom, Erika. “The Reality-Based Community.” e-flux, vol. 83, no. 1, 2017, e-flux.com/journal/83/142332/the-reality-based-community. Accessed 28 May 2021.
Castaing-Taylor, Lucien, et al. “The Cruel Radiance of What Is.” Documentary Across Disciplines, edited by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2016, pp. 40–78.
Fore, Steve. “Reenacting Ryan: The Fantasmatic and the Animated Documentary.” Animation, vol. 6, no. 3, Nov. 2011, pp. 277–292.
Fournier, Lauren. Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2022.
Gaines, Jane M. “Introduction: “The Real Returns”.” Collecting Visible Evidence, edited by Michael Renov and Jane M. Gaines, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999, pp. 1–18.
Honess Roe, Annabelle. Animated Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013.
Landesman, Ohad, and Roy Bendor. “Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir.” Animation, vol. 6, no. 3, Nov. 2011, pp. 353–70.
Leviathan. Directed by Véréna Paravel and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2012.
MacDonald, Scott. “Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Sensory Ethnography.” American Ethnographic Film and Personal Documentary: The Cambridge Turn, University of California Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, ebookcentral-proquest-com.ezproxy.lib.ucalgary.ca/lib/ucalgary-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1207483.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1991.
People’s Park. Directed by J.P. Sniadecki and Libbie Dina Cohn, 2012.
Renov, Michael. “Documentary Disavowals and the Digital.” The Subject of Documentary, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004, pp. 130–147.
Ryan. Directed by Chris Landreth, 2004.
Sherman, Maria. “Welcome to the Documentary Renaissance.” Netflix Tudum, https://www.netflix.com/tudum/articles/netflix-documentary-renaissance-kanye-west. Accessed 11 Feb. 2024.
Waltz with Bashir. Directed by Ari Folman, 2008.
Ward, Paul. Documentary: The Margins of Reality, London: Wallflower Press, 2005.
Williams, Linda. “Mirrors without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Film Quarterly, vol. 46, no. 3, 1993, pp. 9–21.
Anastasiia Gushchina is a PhD candidate at the department of Communication, Media and Film at the University of Calgary and a Frances Spratt Fellow at Calgary Institute for Humanities. Her PhD project examines techniques and production processes of independent animated documentaries of the 1990s-2010s. Her work appeared in Animation Studies, animation: an interdisciplinary journal, Senses of Cinema, and Fantasy/Animation. She is a winner of Maureen Furniss Award 2022, Sherry Clarkson Prize 2022, Jonathan Kahana Graduate Writing Award 2023 for her writings in documentary and animation. Her research interests include film and animation theory, film philosophy, and documentary practices in visual arts.
