Díptico Jodorowsky

Alejandro Jodorowsky no hacía una película desde el 1990 (la difícil de conseguir The Rainbow Thief), pero esto en ninguna medida significa que el hombre ha estado en hiato. Un campeón de la creación artística, Jodorowsky ha publicado libros de todo tipo: novelas, fábulas, memorias, terapia psicomágica, descripciones del tarot, comics e incontables blog posts y tweets. Su producción es tan vasta que dudo haya alguien al día con todo.

Sin embargo se le extrañaba en el cine, sí. Fando y Lis (1968), El topo (1970), La montaña sagrada (1973) y Santa Sangre (1989) son joyas de culto, referencias indispensables del surrealismo latinoamericano. Cuando en el 2013 se dio a conocer su regreso al cine con el documental Jodowrosky’s Dune y su épica autobiográfica La danza de la realidad, la celebración fue notable, sobretodo por que ambas consiguieron distribución. El 2014 lo ha traído de nuevo a las salas pero debemos sacar las pinzas.

La más interesante de las dos es Jodorowsky’s Dune, el documental dirigido por Frank Pavich sobre la malograda adaptación al cine de la novela de Frank Herbert. Además del excéntrico Jodorowsky (todavía encantador con su inglés al garete), lo que resalta de esta historia de cine fallido es, probablemente, los implicados en el diseño de aquella mítica producción. De hecho, la inclusión paulatina de cada miembro de su equipo (en la tradición narrativa de Ocean’s Eleven), es lo que estructura y da momentum al documental de Pavich; una intriga meta-cinematográfica.

Luego del reconocimiento internacional de La montaña sagrada, el productor francés Michel Seydoux le da vía libre a Jodo para realizar la película que quiera y el chileno escoge el complejo clásico de ciencia ficción Dune. Su intensión era crear por medio del filme el equivalente a un viaje de LSD que abriera la conciencia de la audiencia; una peli sin precedentes. Para crear el universo interplanetario de Dune reclutó al dibujante Jean “Moebius” Giraud (quién se quedo colaborando con Jodorowsky hasta su muerte), H.R. Giger y Dan O’Bannon, un dream team indiscutible. Los diseños creados por estos tres maestros aún sobreviven en el libraco de pre producción que compaginaron y que se paseo por los estudios sin éxito. La película nos da la oportunidad de verlos y maravillarnos de la inventiva y visión adelantada de estos creadores. Para tormento de Jodorowsky, los magistrales diseños fueron “robados” o “re-interpretados” por muchísimas películas de los 70’s y 80’s, incluidas las sagas de Star Wars y Alien.

El elenco tentativo también tenía su encanto siendo los más destacados Orson Welles como un tirano espacial y Salvador Dalí como el Emperador del Universo. Reticentes al principio, a ambos los convenció por medio de trucos ingeniosos que le dan chispa cómica a la narración. Por último, y para que nos demos de cabeza con las posibilidades perdidas, Pink Floyd iba a componer la música.

Estoy seguro que miles de películas al año no pasan de la etapa de pre-producción y que vistas desde los ojos de sus realizadores casi todas tienen una potencialidad creativa que merita contarse (la obra frustrada de Terry Gillian, por ejemplo). Evidente fan de Jodo, Pavich hace un alegato de injusticia y se lamenta con su héroe de la terrible suerte que sufrió el filme. Aunque el entusiasmo de Jodorowsky es contagioso, el documental busca redimirlo como genio a toda costa con los testimonios de dos o tres apóstoles y proclamarlo padre del cine de ciencia ficción contemporáneo, sin adentrarse demasiado en las razones (gastos desmesurados, un director caótico, ¿hispano-fobia?, el alto contenido de violencia, sexualidad y “new age”), por las cuales un proyecto de este tipo no pudo ser logrado en el Hollywood de la época. Al menos Pavich le da su momento de vendernos el proyecto con un entretenido documental que lo pone de protagonista indiscutible y nos hace suspirar por lo que pudo ser.

Gracias a Jodorowsky’s Dune, el mencionado productor Seydoux se reunió por primera vez con Jodo desde aquellos crueles 70’s, resolvieron su enemistad silenciosa y se decidieron por colaborar de nuevo. Esta vez la película se realizó. Se trata de La danza de la realidad, filme de auto-ficción surrealista que narra tanto la sufrida niñez de Alejandro en el pueblo de Tocopilla, Chile, como la ardua transformación de Jaime, su padre, de tirano abusivo a hombre en paz con sus demonios.

Todos los ingredientes de su obra y obsesiones coinciden en el filme: los aforismos, los actos de psicomagia, el mundo grotesco del circo, la presencia de enanos, mutilados, prostitutas, travestis, proscritos, militares, revolucionarios, burgueses emperifollados, sexualidad violenta, desnudos, iconografía religiosa, tarot, procesiones y los animales realengos por doquier. Incluso tenemos a un Jodorowsky de 82 años que se sobre-impone en pantalla, enuncia quotes y toca de maneras extrañas a su “yo” niño. Se nota cierto deseo de que esta fuera su película “total”, sin embargo, mucho falla. El valor de shock se ha perdido. Lo que en los 60’s y 70’s resultó innovador ahora se siente anquilosado, repetitivo e indulgente. La narrativa da bandazos por todos lados sin decidirse nunca a tomarse la pausa para indagar. El director chileno siempre ha sido caprichoso y tangencial al construir sus historias, cierto, pero acá estos caprichos resultan en unas representaciones planas llenas de clichés (sobretodo y lamentablemente, al momento de retratar el quehacer revolucionario de la época); los episodios no cuajan o se dejan crudos, sin profundidad. Quiere abarcar tanto que termina desarrollando muy poco de los innumerables cuentos presentes.

Aunque la película ha sido comparada a la clásica Amarcord (1974) en su crónica de pueblo pequeño, las intenciones son diferentes. Federico Fellini realizó una película coral y ambiental, el pueblo entero es protagonista, hay un tránsito por las vidas de muchos, ese es su logro. Jodorowsky en vez se dedica a reiterar, al parecer uno por uno, los eventos de su niñez jodia. Tanto su padre, un machista stalinista, como el pueblo de Tocopilla se presentan como verdugos. La victimización del niño es rotunda. No quiero decir con esto que sus vivencias infantiles no hayan sido efectivamente dolorosas y traumáticas, sino que la representación de las mismas rayan en la sobreactuación. El valor terapéutico de la obra esta claro y es esencial para entender la propuesta del director, pero los gritos incesantes, el llanto histérico, el eterno canto operático de la madre, los temblequeos y miraditas de terror del niño, dejan las actuaciones en un registro exagerado sin variaciones de tono. Para los espectadores que no hablan español quizás esto no sea tan notable o problemático, de la misma manera en que no sabría como catalogar una actuación en japonés con sus característicos exabruptos por dar un ejemplo.

La segunda mitad dedicada a la travesía revolucionaria de Jaime y su transformación espiritual es la más lograda de la película. Los matices de esa “realidad” son más amplios y los episodios están más o menos concluidos. Brontis Jodorowsky haciendo de su abuelo es una presencia fuerte en esta parte y aunque errático dentro de la totalidad, logra sostener como actor la propuesta regada de su padre/director.

Hay que mencionar que en los lugares en los que se ha presentado, La danza de la realidad ha sido recibida con reseñas y críticas mayormente positivas. Algunas destacan las fallas que menciono en este escrito pero igual la consideran una película genial por su capacidad de revisar y hacer las paces con el pasado mediante estrategias imaginativas y fantasías poéticas. En este último aspecto coincido, eso nadie se lo puede quitar al maestro Jodorowsky.

Claims to Truth in Documentary Pt. 4

“History Throws its Empty Bottles Out the Window”

For this final installment of my series, let us look at perhaps the most enigmatic of these filmmakers, Chris Marker, and his approach to the notions of Truth and Signature. After having seen a wide sampling of his work, I find that, to approach a filmmaker like Chris Marker, one has to forgo any attempts at summarizing or finding a clear center to his work and instead must approach his work as the convergence of multiple interests. Marker’s filmmaking style has been usually called essayistic. Nora Alter, in dealing with Marker, reminds us that “to essay, within the French tradition at the time, meant “to assay,” “to weigh,” as well as “to attempt,” suggesting an open-ended, evaluative, and speculative search” (18). She goes on to add that the essay’s “weapons are humor, irony, satire, and paradox; its atmosphere is contradiction and the collision of opposites” (18).  I believe this is as close as one can get to a definition of Marker’s film work; yes, he is oftentimes humorous, ironic, satiric, paradoxical, but, above all, his work exhibits the never-ending presence of contradictions and opposing notions, as if the filmmaker were in a constant search for Truth but always recognizing himself the caveat, a humility of sorts, that such a search is futile. Thus, for Marker, I would assert, the task of filmmaking is about the search for truths, often banal, sometimes revelatory, but always many. 

Chris Marker

Having belonged to the Dziga Vertov group along with Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, one finds in Marker the type of documentary filmmaking that characterized Vertov himself. Vertov’s mantra called for the “capturing of life unawares.” The camera eye, or Kino Eye as Vertov called it, possessed the capacity of registering things that the human eye was incapable of. Marker takes this mantra and commingles it with a personal montage style to construct not just films, but voyages into the heart of humanity. Marker’s work, thus, devotes its focus to those sites where humanity has deposited all that defines it; the archives of history and memory dominate Marker’s filmic gaze. Consequently, one finds in watching a Marker film the trite and the historically paradigmatic, the personal and the worldly, together, converging. Marker’s method functions in what I would characterize as an echo. Moments appear in his films which initially seem to have no import, only to return later as a marker of something relevant to his approach. All the while, Marker questions the dependability of history and memory alike, noting how in the example of film, images come to substitute any original memory one might have retained of the earlier moment. As the narrator of Sans Soleil (1983) expresses at one point in the film, 

I wonder how people remember things who don't film, don't photograph, don't tape. 

                How has mankind managed to remember? I know: it wrote the Bible. The new 

                Bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself 

                constantly just to know it existed.

One can see here an awareness of the act of filmmaking and life itself as a questioning of existence, defining existence as an attempt toward remembrances and the subsequent lapses in memory that accompany such an effort. 

From Sans Soleil

Marker’s approach is best captured in what is considered by many to be his masterpiece; the aforementioned Sans Soleil. Here, Marker can be found constantly blurring any lines usually held on to by the majority of documentary filmmakers. Sans Soleil captures life unawares (and sometimes fully aware) in various locations: Okinawa, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, L’île de France, Isle of Sal, San Francisco and Iceland. Through either the use of stock footage or the inclusion of images captured by Marker himself, these locations, mostly islands, are brought together, according to Nora Alter, by “Marker’s fascination with the dual literal and figurative meaning of island as an isolated monad separated from the mainland and operating according to its own, relatively autonomous flow of time” (104). The director’s female narrator reads letters received from “Sandor Kransa,” one of the many pseudonyms Marker used throughout his life as an artist. Sandor has been visiting all these locations, some for the first time, others in return voyages which bring about questions of how the writer has thought of the former and remembered the latter. With all these choices, Marker offers something that at points resembles a travel film or an anthropologic study, at others a historical review, and even at others personal home videos or collages. As a result, the same object possesses multiple forms, all of which, when brought together, capture a sense of what the Russian Formalists called “ostranenie.” The viewer finds him or herself questioning what is fact, what is fiction, whose experiences are truly being captured, and, more importantly, what does it all mean? 

From Sans Soleil

During the intro, the film presents us with three highly contrasting images. The first is the image of three children walking along a field in Iceland. The voice over provides some context to the image. 

The first image he told me about was of three children on a road in

Iceland, in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of happiness and 

                also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never 

                worked. 

This image suddenly leaves the screen and in its place Marker chooses to leave the space completely black. At this point the voice over adds, “He wrote me: one day I'll have to put it all alone at the beginning of a film with a long piece of black leader; if they don't see happiness in the picture, at least they'll see the black.” However, along with the image of the children and the black leader, Marker includes the image of a fighter jet being put away inside an aircraft carrier. No mention of this image ever comes up during the intro or at any point during the rest of the film, for that matter. The image is just there. Right at the beginning Marker establishes a disconnect between the image track and the aural track. 

From Sans Soleil

Such a disconnect is key to Marker’s oeuvre. Like the New Wave filmmakers, which included the members of the Vertov Group, sound becomes an extension to the montage techniques available for documentary filmmakers to exploit. Various interpretations could be offered regarding the addition of the aircraft image: maybe Marker wanted to signal his history of activist filmmaking, which included critiques of the Vietnam War; perhaps he wanted to juxtapose an image of “happiness” with an image that calls attention to the bellicose nature of a modernity characterized by the military-industrial complex; perhaps, he wanted to signal a flash of some underlying memories in something that calls attention to the collective, historical unconscious; or maybe he wanted to train the eye to the multiple cuts that will follow. Whatever the case is, Marker never offers an explanation. Instead, in referencing the creation of the same film we are witnessing, he is calling on the audience to remain aware to the fact that they are watching a constructed object where the filmmaker ultimately has the privileged position. But I would contend that it also goes beyond this; in this sequence, the filmmaker is, I believe, showing the capacity of film to deal with the difficulties of recollecting the “moment” and the truths that originate from the moment. Thus, when asked about the film, each audience member will chose to construct his or her own narrative, much as the letters of Sandor Kransa are trying to construct the narrative of this particular construction. 

As the film continues, the voiceover constantly refers to different letters received by the speaker. One particular detail remains constant in the speakers narration of said letters; the speaker always prefaces her incursions with some variation of “He wrote me” or “He spoke to me.” If we consider that Sandor is Marker himself, then we see how Marker reinscribes the voice of the filmmaker in his film. However, this inscription is variously problematic. Firstly, Marker has opted for a separate personae, so while his symbolic voice is contained within the text embedded inside the film, Marker, it could be said, is seeking an erasure of sorts, a death of the auteur.

From Le fond de l'air est rouge (1977)

This notion isn’t new to Marker, an engaged Leftist, who in many of the works he directed prior to Sans Soleil opted to include his name in the credits as a technician along with the other “workers” involved in the films. Marker has always sought the erasure of his direct presence. But then, there’s also the fact that the physical voice “speaking the testimony” is someone other than the filmmaker. The physical voice is female, at a distance, away from the events in both space and time, witnessing them solely by way of the written text, but also disembodied; we are never allowed access to this narrator. Therefore, one must conclude that Marker seeks a total erasure by way of these multiple distancing choices. Yet, despite all of this, Marker’s signature manifests precisely because of these choices. After all, Marker is the one responsible for the text as well as for the majority of the images contained in the film. He is also responsible for the editing. But Marker’s signature, contrary to Wiseman’s silent disruptions or Morris’ physical vocalizations (see previous blog entries here at CineCero for more on these two filmmakers), works by way of a play of signification, a game of chance revelations, or what I would call Marker’s (fluctuating) assemblages of truth.

The assemblages of truth are at the center of Marker’s ultimate attempt at (and recognition of) various truths. And this play, a game of open possibilities, seemingly detached like a child’s act of playing, becomes the reason why Marker can at least question Truth in favor of some truths; the pieces of information, experiences, and recollections turn, in effect, into pieces to a game for Marker. Approached like a game, the search for truths admits variety over totality, playfulness over complete seriousness, randomness over stricture. And, as a result, this flexibility allows Marker to freely revisit instances in order to reinterpret “what once was.” This way, Marker recognizes the mutability of truths not just from the vantage point of personal perspectives but through the very perspective of changes through time and space.

From Sans Soleil

For example, close to the beginning of Sans Soleil, Marker’s camera captures Japanese citizens either sleeping or reading on a ferry that is taking them back to the Japanese mainland. The narrator tells us from one of Sandor’s letters, 

He wrote: I'm just back from Hokkaido, the Northern Island. Rich 

                and hurried Japanese take the plane, others take the ferry: waiting, 

                immobility, snatches of sleep. Curiously all of that makes me think 

                of a past or future war: night trains, air raids, fallout shelters, small 

                fragments of war enshrined in everyday life. He liked the fragility of 

                those moments suspended in time. Those memories whose only 

                function had been to leave behind nothing but memories. He wrote: 

                I've been round the world several times and now only banality still 

                interests me.

The mutability of history and memory are brought into question in the juxtaposition of the text and the images. While we are offered images of relaxation and stasis, the letter retrieves haunting memories of conflicts. Noticeably, neither indexical nor iconic references are contained in such an instance. Instead, we find Marker’s work emphasizing the third category of Peirce’s typology of signs; Marker opts for the Symbolic as his choice image. Thus, in conjunction with the voiceover, the images of Japanese people lying down in wait elicit the specter of Nagasaki and Hiroshima at the same time that they call forth memories of other conflicts around the world. That is why Marker adds images of Vietnam, Guinea Bissau, Cape Verde, and other locations where conflict has changed the face of history and scarred the memories of the modern subject. 

Later, close to the end of the film, Marker takes these same images, as well as the more trivial ones he has provided of cats, emus, and other animals, real or otherwise, and filters them through a visual digitizer. Speaking of the memories of a strike calling for the liberation of a Japanese activist in 1973 (elicited during a visit to Narita), Sandor’s letter tells us,  

My pal Hayao Yamaneko has found a solution: if the images of the 

                present don't change, then change the images of the past. He showed 

                me the clashes of the sixties treated by his synthesizer: pictures that 

                are less deceptive he says—with the conviction of a fanatic—than 

                those you see on television. At least they proclaim themselves to be 

                what they are: images, not the portable and compact form of an 

                already inaccessible reality. Hayao calls his machine's world the 'zone,' 

                an homage to Tarkovsky. What Narita brought back to me, like a 

                shattered hologram, was an intact fragment of the generation of the sixties.

From Sans Soleil

To begin, it must be pointed out that “Hayao Yamaneko” is none other than Marker again; another personae which provides additional separation while being spoken into the film. Marker is the one who owns the digitizer and the one who is removing the indexical and iconic characteristics of the images he has built throughout the film, instead deciding to provide audiences with images that do not contain the same nearness to the original moments, those moments which the conventional documentary seeks to capture. The solarized images bear an imprint of the original images, but fail in capturing a Real. Like footprints in the snow, Marker’s images of history and memory are voided from their direct referents; in the place of these erased images, we are called to supply our recollections of the earlier images, all the while questioning whether in fact we are capable of eliciting these images. After all, many of the images were taken in for their indexical or iconic reference. Now, bestowed with a malleable symbolic imprint, the audience finds itself in the same situation it would when attempting a recollection of his or her personal history, his or her personal memories. And like the snow that helped capture these moments, the film in its mechanical mobility -- a recognition of our experience of life as a collection of moments in time and space -- eventually “melts away,” leaving at its end a trail of “memories whose only function had been to leave behind nothing but memories.” As Catherine Lupton reminds us, Marker once took the liberty to rephrase the notion of cinéma vérité, deciding upon a different label which better defined his documentary philosophy; “Faced with (Jean) Rouch’s label..., with its troublesome connotation of some general truth discovered through cinema, Marker is credited with promptly rephrasing it as ‘ciné, ma vérite,’” i.e. cinema, my truth (84). 

What we experience in Marker’s films, then, is the convergence of these pieces, placed on an imaginary board which allow for a multiplicity of moves, operations, and outcomes. These pieces are then arbitrarily brought together, permitting Marker and the audience to create open-ended truths whose interpretation respects Marker’s and each individual audience member’s experience within a personal, social and historic context. The process proves malleable enough to permit variations, or assemblages of truths, that contest each other, moving away from any form of a totalitarian claim to Truth. 

Agnes Varda's Tribute to Marker

Conclusion

As I finish this series, allow me to consider this idea of Voice once more. At the start of her book Recording Reality, Desiring The Real, Elizabeth Cowie brings up the idea of the voice in documentaries. 

Documentary, in presenting the sights and sounds of reality, 

                enables reality to “speak” at the same time as it “speaks about” 

                reality. It thus realizes the desires that cinematography 

                inaugurated: of knowing reality through its images and sounds, 

                that is -- figuratively -- of allowing reality to speak for itself. (1)

I’ve tried to tease out the voices, or signatures, I believe can be found in each filmmaker’s work. Simultaneously, I’ve sought to analyze how these signatures mark each filmmaker’s claim to Truth or truths. Despite their admiration for the Flahertys and Griersons as well as the traditions these creators originated, I would assert that the three filmmakers here showcased exhibit a full break away from the traditional modes of documentary. Each style functions and achieves something different from the others. To claim that one style works better than the others is to not fully grasp each filmmakers attempt at discovering something otherwise left hidden. If anything, these directors have shown that “to assay,” “to weigh,” and over all, “to attempt” a Truth is part of the makeup of being human. If it is true (for lack of a better term) that “films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousnesses that construct competing truths” (Williams 385), then at least in their work these filmmakers have revealed the dialogue that comes from these ideologies and consciousnesses. But above all, by simply engaging in the act of “speaking,” in one way or another, these filmmakers, I believe, are allowing for some level of “reality to speak for itself.” They may not grasp the Real, which is always already out of reach; but as I expressed before, for these filmmakers the documentary is “truly” ultimately about the approach, the need to explore, and not the need to answer. 

Each director here documented is invested in exploring his own notion of the truth. Thus, the idea of “ciné, ma vérite,” a notion that I would interpret as the individual search for a truth, grounds documentary to its traditional origins while it allows for the ongoing flexibility in its explorations. The arrival of digitized images offers an added “problem” to consider in documentary’s notion of Truth. Marker, I believe, was ahead of the curve in his recognition of the image as the inherent problem of a mode dictated by the visual register. Considering Marker’s notion, I would contend that, while the focus on the image worked for the tradition of the documentary as a way to explore truths -- starting with the Lumière brothers, on to Grierson and Flaherty, and later on with the three directors here showcased -- moving on in the digital age documentary as a form will need to focus on the development of the signature as its focus in meaning-making. Much as audiences tired of the capturing of the Real during the origins of the documentary, audiences in a post-Postmodern world, exposed to “reality television” will inevitably grow cynical to the idea of Truth, instead searching for a return to a “creative treatment of actuality” that actually allows for the Voice of the filmmaker to make his or her own personal statement. The inscription of the signature will then call forth a dialogue between filmmaker and audience. Therein lies the future of the documentary; in offering a space for truths to engage in dialogue, shifting the focus from the untrustworthy image onto the openness of Voices in dialogue. 

Previous installments: 

Part 1: http://cinecero.blogspot.com/2014/03/claims-to-truth-in-documentary-pt-1.html

Part 2: http://cinecero.blogspot.com/2014/04/claims-to-truth-in-documentary-pt-2.html

Part 3: http://cinecero.blogspot.com/2014/05/claims-to-truth-in-documentary-pt-3.html

Alter, Nora. Chris Marker. U of Illinois P: Urbana, 2006.

Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring The Real. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 2011.

Lupton, Catherine. Chris Marker: Memories of the Future. Reaktion Books: London, 2005. 

Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil. 1983. Criterion Collection. DVD. 2007.

Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner, Eds. New Challenges for Documentary. 2nd Edition. Manchester UP: Manchester, 2005. 

Williams, Linda. “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary.” Rosenthal 59-78.

Claims to Truth in Documentary Pt 3.

The Real Speaks

Contrary to Frederick Wiseman, whose physical voice never becomes part of the elements captured in his films, Errol Morris constantly finds ways to reinscribe his voice, both physically and authorially, in his work. As a matter of fact, despite expressing admiration for Wiseman, Morris makes a point of emphasizing that his work is far from the Direct Cinema or cinéma vérité style usually aligned with Wiseman and other filmmakers of the latter’s ilk. In an interview, Morris observes that 

"[t]here’s a whole style to cinéma-vérité -- you take very light equipment, use available light, follow the action, remain as unobtrusive as possible. I do the exact opposite.... These people are performing for the camera. They’re perfectly aware of what’s going on." (Bloom 4)

Errol Morris

Morris, a former private detective, employs the documentary -- he prefers the term “nonfiction film” -- as a mode of investigation. Morris’ nonfiction films usually take on a subject -- the failure of justice and capital punishment, the pet cemetery industry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, the incident at Abu Ghraib -- and deconstruct it to its elements, searching for a truth by way of multiple accounts and perspectives as well as the use of multiple narrative modes. 

Stylistically, Morris’ work exhibits certain consistent traits: the films employ low-key lighting, similar to the type one would find in an American Noir film; reenactments share the same filmic space with interviews and testimonies; music, oftentimes by Phillip Glass, drives the rhythm of the “plot” the same way one would find in any suspense film. But more importantly, for the film’s interviews, Morris has devised a particular system which he’s called the Interrotron, which sets up two screens, one in front of the interviewer, the other in front of the interviewee, from which each party can engage with the other as if it were in a face-to-face interview. That way, Morris can have his subjects break down the forth wall, as they look towards the camera.

Morris and his Interrotron

This method has expanded, to the point where now Morris uses what he calls the Megatron, the same system whose difference lies in the use of (oftentimes) over four cameras which allow the filmmaker to recompose the image during the same interview. Thus, as one absorbs the trajectory of Morris’ work, one notices an increasing tendency towards a more ornate filmic construction which blurs the lines between the traditional documentary film and the Hollywood fiction film. With regards to this style, particularly as it pertains to reenactments, Morris has expressed in an interview his reasons for such a choice.

"Now, I’m very fond of pointing out to people, people talk about reenactments, “why do you use reenactments?” I like to point out that reality is reenacted inside of our skulls, routinely. That’s how we know about the world. We don’t -- We walk around in the world. The world isn’t walking around in us. We take in evidence with our senses. And we try to figure out on the basis of what we learn, what we read, what we see, what’s out there." (Meyer)

This tendency has elicited the scorn of various critics who believe that the use of these appendages in conjunction with the indexical material disqualifies Morris’ claim to Truth. 

Despite all of these embellishments, other critics like Brian Winston have lauded Morris’ films for approaching a brand of truth otherwise inaccessible; a type of truth achievable only with the use of what Winston calls the “dramadoc.” Winston, a historiographer of the documentary form, has noted how the attack on the use of the reenactment is a break with the form’s acceptance of such a method in the past. 

"What matters here is that the creation of a form, ‘dramadoc,’ which is all reconstruction, has helped cast the use of reconstruction in the old form, ‘documentary,’ into doubt. In so doing, it served to confirm the triumph of the journalistic ‘fly-on-the-wall’ Direct Cinema style as being the only legitimate documentary form. The result was that documentarists were now lambasted about the ‘reconstruction’ they had always used, directly denying one of documentary’s foundations." (Lies 25)

Initially, one would find the idea of using and, oftentimes, prioritizing these elements -- lighting, mise-en-scène, extra-diegetic music, a variety of multi-speed and multi-sensitive film stocks -- to go against the documentary’s claim to Truth. As Bill Nichols has noted, when viewing a documentary, audience members take what occurred in front of the camera (the profilmic event), and the “historical referent” as being “congruent with one another. The image is the referent projected onto a screen. In documentary we often begin by assuming that the intermediary stage -- that which occurred in front of the camera -- remains identical to the actual event that we could have ourselves witnessed in the historical world” (25). 

However, therein lies the presence of the signature in Morris’ films. Morris as the filmmaker makes no bones about the hyper-constructedness of his films. In a sense, he needs the films to emphasize the iconic, not the indexical, since all the events he chooses to “document” have already passed, much as they did for someone like Flaherty. It would seem that for Morris the filmmaker has to saturate all the senses, cause them to tire and become lax, and once he or she achieves this, peel away the layers of simulacra, the veneer of each situation, thus giving rise in the audience to what can be described as a hyperawareness or “wink” on the part of the director. Morris’ highly lauded The Thin Blue Line contains an example of this method. 

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

The Thin Blue Line weaves together the details surrounding the 1977 murder of Robert Wood, a Texas police officer, as well as the eventual conviction of Randall Adams as a result of incriminating testimony. Morris brings together about six different reenactments of the testimony provided by various witnesses to the crime, newspaper clippings, photographs, forensic documents, and has these share a filmic space with direct interviews with some of the actors, including Randall Adams himself. Consequently, as Elizabeth Cowie has written with regards to the use of the image in documentaries, “[the image] becomes narrated in the transformation of the document into the documentary as a presentation of the facts and the testimony of participants in the events and action shown” (31). Employing all this material, Morris builds a narrative space where diverging accounts converge, never seemingly prioritizing one over the others. However, as the film progresses, and without the need for Morris to speak up until the end, the audience can tease out which side the filmmaker aligns with. In the process, Morris subverts the witness accounts, including that of David Harris, the person who we ultimately find out allegedly committed the crime. 

Morris’ signature can be perceived in the sequence that includes the testimonies of Emily Miller, Robert Miller, and Michael Randell, the three key witnesses of the prosecution. Morris has shown in his work to have an interest in odd characters and these three personages fit the bill. During the trial Emily Miller came forward stating that she had seen Adams in the driver’s side of the vehicle and that she had witnessed the moment when Adams supposedly shot Officer Wood, going so far as to say that she saw his face clearly out the driver’s side window. Robert Miller, Emily Miller’s husband, who was driving the car as they passed the stopped vehicles, simply maintained his wife’s testimony. Michael Randell, who was also driving past the scene moments prior to the shots, also testified to seeing Adams’s face clearly. These three testimonies are believed to have been main reason for sending Adams to jail. However, during his interviews, Morris allows the witnesses to debase their own testimonies themselves. First, Emily Miller and Robert Miller are portrayed as a dysfunctional couple and in dire need of money, since Mrs. Miller had been laid off two weeks prior to the testimony in the Adams case for stealing at her job. 

Emily Miller in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

Morris edits in moments where Mrs. Miller expresses a desire throughout her life to be a detective, or the wife of one, so that she could be involved in deciphering crimes and finding the culprits, longing to beat the police in the resolution of a crime. After this information, Morris provides instances that would allow audiences to start questioning the veracity and integrity of the Millers as witnesses. For example, the husband, who is portrayed as just following his wife’s will, goes as far as to admit that his wife once called in the authorities after they had had an argument, accusing him of smuggling drugs from El Paso which allegedly turned out to be a false accusation. The film also shows the Millers doubting the entire sequence of events and the details attached to the case. Mr. Miller constantly states on camera that he didn’t see anything, “but she did” referring to his wife. Mr. Miller even adds that his recollection of the man that night didn’t accord with the man he eventually saw in court.  Mrs. Miller herself states at one point of her testimony on film that “it was hard to see in that car.” Morris intersperses these comments with images of text reading “too nosey” and “$21,000.” These flashes, which apparently come from the transcripts of the trial, punctuate details the same way that a crime scene photographer would capture at the scene of a crime. But instead of a knife or bullet holes, Morris’ choices feel as if he is commenting on the details themselves. According to other participants, and the Millers themselves, they got involved in a situation in which it is questionable if they actually had anything to offer in the first place. The sequence of events as Morris constructs it would indicate that the Millers could have as easily not been at the scene of the crime, but moreover, that their entire motive to provide information to the authorities was the $21,000 offered for any information having to do with the crime. 

Michael Randell in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

Michael Randell is presented using the same technique. Randell, a salesman, claims to have photographic memory, an ability that allowed him to recall the vivid details of that night. However, in an almost humorous sequence, Morris’s camera finds Randell doubting his own details. 

"I'm a salesman. And you develop something like total recall. I don't forget places, things, or streets, because it's a habit. Something I just picked up. I just stare intensely at people and try to figure them out. Being nosey, I just stare. 
I was leaving the Plush Pub one night, driving a 1977 Cadillac, heading west on Hampton. I noticed a officer had two individuals pulled over to the curb in a blue...some type of vehicle. It was...it was a blue...it was a blue...I think...it was a blue Ford. It was a blue something.
The driver, I think had long blonde hair and a mustache. And the other one didn't have no hairs on his face.

A person that's white going through that area at night - he's a sore thumb to stick out for the first reason. And if they don't look right, they're gonna stop you.

The officer, he walked up to the vehicle. He had walked up. His car was...let me see...I don't know if it was behind or in front, but I knew he had him pulled over, and he was up to the car. I think he was up to the car. Let me think. Yeah he was up to the car... and I was going by... he had to have been up to the car. I didn't see no bullet. I didn't see no gunfire. Because I went on." (Morris)

In the act of allowing the witness to speak uninterrupted, and in the way Morris picks and chooses the moments in which to present the reenactment or to present Randell’s confused looks, seemingly searching for the details in his memory bank, Morris is actually “speaking” himself, addressing the audience by presenting how faulty this witnesses’ recollections are; in other words, and here I agree with Elizabeth Cowie’s reading of Lacan with regards to Truth, Morris becomes “Truth’s witness.” As Lacan has pointed out “Truth draws its guarantee from somewhere other than the Reality it concerns: it draws it from Speech” (qtd in Cowie 27). Morris juxtaposes Randell’s account of seeing two men in the car against the Miller’s testimony of just seeing one man in the vehicle. Randell goes on to accuse the Miller’s of fabricating their testimony just to get the money. In the way it is all presented, Morris is in essence commenting on -- “witnessing” -- the inconsistency of the testimonies, a detail which according to Morris should have been enough to raise a red flag in the decision of convicting a man to death. But as Randell states in his final appearance in the film, 

"They already decided what to do with you in the hall. That's why they call it the Hall of Justice --- the scales are not balanced. The scales are in the hall, and they go up and down. They might go up for you in favor one way and they might go down against you. So if they DA wants you to hang 15 or 20 years, you hung."

David Harris in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

But perhaps the clearest instance of a signature in Morris’ film involves David Harris and his testimony. Throughout the film, Morris comes back every so often to both Harris’ and Adams’ contending versions of the truth. We see Harris grappling with his recollections, constantly looking off into the horizon; Adams never minces words, seemingly having the capacity to retrace all the details of his whereabouts and experiences of that night. We see Adams dressed in jail clothing, his last name clearly on display on the screen. Harris, however, is only show wearing a collared, orange “shirt.” Morris’ mise-en-scène during the Adams interview segments include the grilled partition that separates inmates from visitors. For Harris’ interventions, Morris opts for what looks like tiled columns in the background, omitting any markers that could inform the audience of the location. As the film progresses, Harris becomes more and more cynical and forgetful, his statements often punctuated by an “I guess” or an “I don’t know.” Eventually, at the hour twenty-five minute mark, during one of Harris’ last instances in the film, he’s recounting the events after he identified Adams on a police line. Right at the end of the sequence, Morris’ camera unexplainably lingers on Harris for an additional beat. It is at this time that Harris lifts up his hands to scratch his head that we see that throughout the entire film he has been in handcuffs. Suddenly, the orange shirt gains new meaning as do the tiled pillars behind him. At the time we find out Harris was on death row for the killing of a Texas man. Morris, by choosing the way he composed the shot, withholding details of location, and selecting when to edit, has manipulated the amount of information the audience has received from him. Moreover, Morris reveals the artifice of his own film; much in the same way that all the witnesses and records have manipulated the act of narrating for their own purposes, Morris exposes that he himself has been constructing a narrative, molding it to his film’s needs.   Thus, Morris’ use of evidence in his films aligns with Spence and Navarro’s idea that “when it appears in a documentary, evidence has already been interpreted by the documentarian and arranged in a particular way; its impact ... usually the result of this kind of arrangement” (40). 

The filmmaker’s voice has been prevalent all along. But now at the end of the film, Morris decides to also include his physical voice in the film. And the construction of this moment speaks volumes about his choice. According to Morris, he was granted only one day to access Harris for interview. During the second session, Morris’ camera jammed. Rather than stop, Morris decided to record the rest of the interview with audio tape only. During this encounter, Harris opens up to the point where he ultimately admits to having committed the crime himself, and that Adams was a scapegoat, a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Aside from the importance of this testimony for the eventual exoneration of Adams, the cinematic dynamic of this moment does various things. To begin, Morris, albeit by accident, removes the indexical register of the interview; the audience is only presented with a tape recorder from various angles, but never do we see Morris or Adams in this all too important event. Second, Morris can now be heard asking his questions. Morris has brought himself physically into the film without the necessity of actually seeing him. Finally, this moment, which lacks a direct visual signifier, will come to resignify the entire film. Therefore, in a film as constructed as this one, where the visual detail has saturated and dictated our comprehension of the events, Morris eventually resorts to the act of removing the visual detail. 

Meditating on Truth in an interview, Morris has noted the faultiness of the image as way to approach Truth. 
"Someone comes up to you and they say “well I’m a postmodernist. I really don’t care about truth. Truth is subjective. Or there are all kinds of different versions of truth. Your truth; my truth; someone else’s truth.” and then you say to them, “Well, then it doesn’t matter to you who pulled the trigger. It doesn’t matter to you whether someone committed murder or not. Or someone in jail is innocent or not. It’s just a matter of personal opinion. Our intuitions, I believe our intuitions strongly are that it does matter. It matters a great deal what happened in the world. You know, our vision is incomplete in every respect. We try to find out about the world by collecting evidence, by thinking about things, by looking at things. Nothing that we ever create is complete. But you try to figure out what our relationship is to reality, to the real world, to what happened, to what transpired. Use every means at your disposal."
Thus, after the barrage of images, Morris seeks the employment of another one of the available means; speech becomes such a tool. At this point, Morris literally speaks his way into the film, by “stating” that this moment, this final testimony, stands in for a Truth greater than all that which we have been experiencing all along. As a result, “Truth... (becomes) not a quality or meaning that is immanent in reality; rather, it is an effect of human discourse” (Cowie 26). Morris can finally peel away all the ‘truth’ which turns into minutiae, simulacra, in the context of the only information needed in the decipherment of the case. In the process, this highly orchestrated film, I believe, becomes an anti-film. Thus, it’s the “Voice” which ultimately returns Randall Adams to liberty. It might have been an accident that brought about this moment, but the accident became a revelation for Morris. Although his work still exhibits the use of reenactments, low key lighting, driving music, and multiple film stock choices, films like Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure have taken advantage of the incursion of the filmmaker’s voice into the final product, always integrating this same anti-film quality, this filmmaker’s signature, into his subsequent films. 

Bloom, Livia, Ed. Errol Morris: Interviews. UP of Mississippi: Jackson, 2009.

Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring The Real. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 2011.

Meyer, Michael. “Recovering Reality: Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib.” Columbia Journalism Review. March 5, 2008. <http://www.cjr.org/video/recovering_reality.php>

Morris, Errol. The Thin Blue Line. 1988. MGM. DVD. 2005. 

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1991. 

Spence, Louise and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. Rutgers UP: New Brunswick, 2011. 

Winston, Brian. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. BFI: London, 2000.

Claims to Truth in Documentary Pt. 2

Disrupting The Real

  Using a cinematic style usually associated with the Direct Cinema movement of the 1960s, Frederick Wiseman’s brand of filmmaking focuses greatly on the diverse institutions either organized, provided or policed by the State, in his case, the U.S. Films such as Blind (1986), Near Death (1989), and Law and Order (1969) offer glimpses into the lives of people, usually sequestered either because of law or health issues, and their day-to-day activities in these institutions of education, detainment and care. As Brian Winston writes, “Frederick Wiseman was drawn to direct cinema ... by ‘the idea of using film and film technology to have a look at what’s going on in the world’” (Real 151). These snapshots also include family members as well as those who provide the services in said institutions. 

Frederick Wiseman

  However, it is the more controversial works, such as Hospital (1969) and, perhaps more famously, Titicut Follies (1967), which have been credited with exposing those instances when these institutions fail in providing the dignified and humane treatment usually demanded from such establishments. Without any voiceover to guide the spectator and opting for the extensive use of long shots, Wiseman, a former lawyer and law professor, constructs films which make the viewer feel as if he or she were granted entry into institutional spaces usually outside the bounds of the public gaze. Thus, the viewer gets a sense of privileged access in the engagement with Wiseman’s subjects. As Michael Chanan has noted, “[f]or Wiseman, the institution is a social microcosm that reveals an inevitable gap between aims and practices which can be ‘dramatised’ through observational cinema” (226). Chanan adds that Wiseman calls such an approach in the “dramatization” of the documentary “reality fictions” (226) which, I would contend, recalls, or better yet, signals an approach to the documentary similar, at least philosophically, to John Grierson’s “creative treatment of actuality.”  

Poster for Titicut Follies (1967)

  Titicut Follies presents the daily goings-on at Massachusetts’ Bridgewater State Hospital, an institution for the confinement of the criminally insane. In the process, Wiseman exposes the audience to the increasingly abusive treatment of the inmates on the part of those running the hospital. Ward attendants verbally harass or physically punish the patient-inmates; doctors’ interrogations seem to go according to scripted procedures, which never take into account the true needs and improvements/deficiencies of the patients; overall, the perspective goes from seeing a hospital to recognizing an institution mainly employed in torture. What is interesting about this spectacle is that the State and its representatives granted Wiseman access to film such events; they seemingly found nothing wrong, at least at the beginning, with letting an outsider see the events that went on inside the hospital. Wiseman believes that his approach to documenting – embedding a camera into a particular space, waiting until its subjects become used to the presence of the camera and the filmmakers, constantly filming even in moments when seemingly nothing is occurring; what Brian Winston calls the “‘wait and watch’ method” — allows for an unfiltered access to moments that would otherwise remain out of reach. In particular, Wiseman’s belief in the invisibility of the camera becomes his emphasized modus operandi. And judging from the behavior of the guardians in Titicut Follies, one gets a sense of witnessing these events without the awareness of many of those participating. 

  The history of this film’s distribution is rife with multiple battles involving the State and the subjects themselves. Despite obtaining permission from the State, the latter later contended, upon finding out about the film’s “true” content, that Wiseman was in fact breaching both the privacy of the inmates and the privacy of the State to function for the benefit of its citizens. Lawsuits went from accusing Wiseman of filming patients who never gave their consent, to claiming that subjects where in fact wards of the State, ultimately to allegations that the need for the destruction of the film itself served the greater interest of the citizens of Massachusetts. In the end, the film survived on the grounds of documentary being art and protected under freedom of speech. Yet, despite the ruling, the State of Massachusetts banned the film, looking to avoid criticism from the very citizens it supposedly wanted to protect. 

  At first viewing the film itself appears as an exercise in minimalism. Shooting in 16 mm black and white stock with just one camera handled by one cameraperson and one boom microphone, with Wiseman himself carrying the audio equipment, the film weaves into different situations over Wiseman’s month-long documenting of the hospital. Most of the episodes, such as the internment of prisoners, a doctor’s interview of a self-confessed pedophile, a situation involving an inmate who dirties his cell with feces and blood every night, and many more, are usually constructed using long takes. One gets the sense of witnessing the events in the same fashion that Wiseman and his crew did during filming. Thus, the film comes across as straightforward in its representation of life at Bridgewater. Chanan notes that the “observational style of documentary that emerges in the 1960s, above all in the work of Wiseman, ...chooses to respect the unities of time and space, but this is only an option, strongly associated with the technique of the long take” (106). 

  However, one sequence in particular, at the 50th minute mark, offers what I would consider to be Wiseman’s attempt at revealing a kernel of Truth. The sequence involves an inmate who has refused to eat and drink for days. With various employees at his side, the ward’s doctor confronts the inmate, threatening the latter with force-feeding by tube if he continues his refusal to eat on his own. Despite the threats, the inmate persists on his refusal. As a result, the doctor takes the drastic measure of inserting a tube down the man’s nose and into his stomach, as other men hold the inmate down on a table. 

  Wiseman holds the shot on the proceedings, even capturing the fact that the hospital lacked enough vaseline to cover the entire tube in order to make its insertion more tolerable. During this event, something occurs which has not happened before in the film; Wiseman intersperses shots of the same inmate some time in the near future, dead on an embalmer’s table, being prepared for his wake. Wiseman offers no explanation, trusting that the jump cuts will provide his audience with all the information they need. It is the only time Wiseman employs the technique, and various effects come with it. 

  First, Wiseman catches the audience by surprise, offering no warning for the image of a dead person, with his face contorted in apparent pain. The image feels invasive in the sense that in the same instance that the audience is reeling from the horrendous spectacle of an inmate being force fed, Wiseman increases the moment’s visceral investment with an image that confronts the audience directly with death. Second, Wiseman, who has lulled the audience into accepting the film’s realtime feel by way of the long shot, breaches this contract by breaking the film’s apparent, though illusory, linear temporality. The audience is suddenly projected into the future, thus, in its moment of self-reflexiveness the film reveals the fact that the filmmaker knows more than the audience.  Wiseman has withheld information; he has seen the effects of his month-long sojourn at Bridgewater. And he has decided to provide said information by way of a disruptive cutting style. Finally, in a Lacanian sense, Wiseman’s disruption has confronted the audience with the Real; something that remained out of reach, latent, and repressed has come to the surface for an instance. But like the Real, that something which in the scheme of the overall film would seem to be the Truth, is immediately lost, somehow absorbed into each individual audience member. The filmic mechanism and its characteristic movement forces the vanishment of that kernel of momentary reality. Moreover, if someone tried to access that moment in the form of a still image, he or she would find that such a kernel remains elusive since such an attempt would disrupt the film’s indexical nature. After all, a film depends on movement to achieve all its effects.

  In such a filmic moment, Wiseman, I believe, reveals what I call the filmmaker’s signature. Wiseman unveils a truth that in his film takes over, by filtering all that the audience has witnessed up to that moment in the film. The audience is forced to reassess all that it has seen and heard before and is similarly called to keep the event in mind as the film moves on. Up to this moment, Wiseman has given us the liberty to question his film, its stylistic methods as vessels of truth, but, in this moment of disruption, Wiseman unveils a greater Truth which he’s removing from our criticism; Death and its disruptive force on the film is unquestionable in its finality. Said moment becomes Wiseman’s true intention; this institution, which is responsible for the safety and care of its patients, has failed. 

         

       The moment marks all the other moments like a wound that has healed but remains somewhat visible, a reminder/remainder of what has occurred. Consequently, while Wiseman’s method has been associated with a detachment that is solely interested in capturing reality, the disruptive instance reveals a “Voice”, or signature, which is guiding our experience. Carolyn Anderson and Thomas W. Benson have written that “Wiseman testified that he ‘wanted to put the audience for the film in the state hospital’; he ‘wanted to put the audience in the midst of Bridgewater immediately’” (39). As Bill Nichols remarks, Wiseman’s uses of editing in this particular sequence “work to make an editorial point in the spirit of expository cinema rather than allow events to unfold according to their own rhythm” (41). As a result, Wiseman’s “wait and watch” method allows the filmmaker to claim a truth, at least in this film, in the act of amending the method through its very disruption. At least as far as Titicut Follies is concerned, Truth for Wiseman is accessible by way of a severity that cancels the method itself.  

Anderson, Carolyn and Thomas W. Benson. Documentary Dilemmas: Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies. Southern Illinois UP: Carbondale, 1991.

Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. BFI: London, 2007. 

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1991. 

Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations. BFI: London, 1995. 

---. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. BFI: London, 2000.

Wiseman, Frederick. Titicut Follies. 1967. Zipporah: Cambridge, 2007.