CHAPTER SIX ON THE REAL AND THE VISIBLE IN EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARY FILM DANIEL JEWESBURY

Its been customary to understand documentary and fine art filmmaking as very distinct practices. Documentary has its own traditions and history, its terms of critique, its academic engagements (for instance with anthropology and sociology) that are, at first glance, quite divergent from the interests of experimental filmmakers. Of course, as long as there has been documentary filmmaking, there have been those artists who wished to subvert or interrogate its processes of meaning-making; Luis Buuels Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread, 1933)1 is perhaps one of the earliest examples. The presumed objectivity, the transcendent subject position of much early documentary film the claim to open a window on the world jarred with modernist and structuralist artists, many of whom concentrated on the qualities of the medium itself (the materiality of film, colour, or light, for instance in the films of Stan Brakhage or Anthony McCall; or the grammar and technics of film in the works of Michael Snow or John Smith). There has recently been a marked growth in interest in documentary amongst fine art filmmakers, coupled with a critical engagement with the limits and tensions of the form. Arguably there has always been a strand within art film that has drawn on the real, even if it has not been recognised as documentary per se. The structuralism mentioned above was concerned primarily with the conditions and perhaps the impossibility of making meaning through representation; and from the 1960s onward, with the invention of the video camera, many artists used the static camera to record performances and other live art, producing a document, if not a documentary.

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Contemporary fine art film explores documentary as a form with which it is possible to experiment, and engages with it reflexively, often reminding us of the constructedness of its meanings (not that they are necessarily any less real for being constructs). This form of experimental documentary is now widely distributed and established in the mainstream of art discourse: Luke Fowlers All Divided Selves (2011)2, a mesmeric collage on the life, work and thought of R. D. Laing, using both archive and original material, was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2012, while the feature-length film portraits of Ben Rivers have received nationwide distribution in UK independent cinemas. Two of the most influential filmmakers within the world of fine art film in the UK have been John Smith and Patrick Keiller. Smiths works from the mid 1970s onward take the processes of making and watching film apart. They have a performative quality, often featuring Smith in front of the camera or in a voice-over, but they are also social documents that attempt to use the complexity and richness of film to explore difficult concepts. They are also, often, very funny. Smiths playful disruptions of the viewers expectations in terms of shot order, editing and the relationship between image and sound result in works that explode and unravel outwards, formally, and produce a strange filmic world which belies the modesty of the subject matter explored. Often, this material is that which is on Smiths doorstep in north-east London. Patrick Keillers series of pseudo-documentaries London (1994)3, Robinson in Space (1997)4 and Robinson in Ruins (2010)5 are concentrated examinations of the social, political and economic conditions of Britain. Keiller employs a static camera, very long takes, and unstaged footage; the only actors employed are those speaking the voice-overs that he writes, which recount the exploits of a fictional observer of the decline of British culture and society, Robinson. These texts are reminiscent of the writings of W. G. Sebald: dense meditations which combine the autobiographical and the fictional, and employ a disguised first- or third-person voice, but which weave together threads from history, geography and political economics with musings on the absurdities of culture. Inherent in both these artists works is a desire not simply to represent, but to discover and reconstruct the real. This real is not something which it is possible simply to perceive unproblematically and depict, it is not the superficial appearance of things; rather, it is something which lies behind that which is immediately available to the senses, that which is visible to

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the camera. It is the accumulation of social relations that structures the choices and experiences of individuals, the social forces which move through those individuals, the political and economic conditions of existence which are usually obscure, mystified, difficult to apprehend, let alone make perceptible. Keillers combination of mundane, fixed medium shots of the quotidian life of London, or of England, with dense, often ludicrous voice-over and apparently ambient sound turns his films into multi-layered essays, sometimes polemical, sometimes humorous, sometimes incomprehensible in a single viewing. The films reveal themselves gradually and reward multiple readings. The fact that many artists are now intent on exploring this dimension of the political (that is, the political as a set of social-cultural-economic discourses which shape us, and our environment, and which we attempt to influence or interrupt) makes the form of the documentary particularly appealing. But it is a form to which they bring critiques of authorship, and an awareness of formal analysis that is necessary to understand how the documentary film can never be a neutral or objective comment. Of course these critiques, this reflexivity, have their own history within documentary film practice; but overwhelmingly, the documentary is still a medium in which certain technical and authorial tropes persist. The construction of truth through conventions of editing and framing, the use of voice of God narration, and so on, are found in documentaries today just as they were 70 years ago. The fine art documentary, or what I prefer to call the experimental documentary, offers different approaches to both the potential content and the form of documentary film. In fine art, the fictional voice can be used to approach an investigation of reality, just as factual material can be used to unravel preconceived or unquestioned ideas of truth. The idea of what material might constitute documentary is thus immediately broadened in the hands of fine artists. Fine art film also foregrounds aesthetic concerns which are different to those of the documentary filmmaker: the aesthetic and the ethical, which is to say considerations of formal qualities, on one hand, and the approach to theme and subject matter, on the other, are in close dialogue with one another. There is no pre-existing form for experimental documentary; each subject brings with it its own requirements, its own demands, and the filmmaker has to approach the production and especially the editing of the film with an idea

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of how the form that they are building can bring the viewer into the complexities of the subject matter, as an active, critical reader.

NLR, 31", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2010

This triangular critical and ethical relationship between the artist, the filmtext and the viewer is crucially important in experimental documentary. Over a prolonged period during the 1980s and 90s the real was a category which could only be spoken of in art if one were to demonstrate ones disbelief in it, ones awareness of its obsolescence or irrelevance. The acknowledgement that such excesses resulted in throwing out the baby with the bathwater, not only in art but in politics and critical theory more generally, comes with a reassertion of the artist as an ethical agent, responsible for the text that they bring into the world, and moreover of the viewer as a partner in the reading of that text.

Representation and the real

The examples that Ive used to illustrate this short overview of experimental documentary are by no means exhaustive but I believe that

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an account of them helps to understand the concepts I have been outlining. In addition to discussing some of the problems and questions approached in two pieces of of my own work, I offer a reading of the film Bernadette (2008), by artist Duncan Campbell.6 Campbells film is a portrait, constructed primarily through archive footage, of the Irish politician and activist Bernadette Devlin McAliskey; but it is also an investigation of historical process and of documentary form itself. The film is constructed both from archive footage and original material, and is structured in three sections: a hesitant, faltering introduction, in which we see black-and-white close-up shots of a womans hands and feet; the archival material, spanning McAliskeys brief public political life in the 1970s; and a final section in which a voice-over departs from the story of McAliskeys life to explore the broader theme of how a life can be told, narrativised, at all. The film persistently questions the authority, the transparency and the veracity of documentary, personal testimony and historical narrative; yet it is not in itself opposed to the possibility of documentary, and nor is it anti-historical. Much as it depends on withholding explanations, on confusing and destabilising understanding, it does not suppose that the pursuit of understanding or meaning is somehow pointless, or that meaning should be deferred and relativised endlessly and indefinitely. Campbell seeks to recover history as a process; it is that process which is his subject matter. By appropriating the texts through which history is rehearsed, Campbell makes communicable, visible, their inherent contradictions. This is not just about stating, in a more or less banal fashion, that historical meaning is contested, but about finding a form through which the contradictions within and between sources can be performed. There are other formal-rhetorical tensions that repeatedly come to the surface in Bernadette: between, on one hand, the various competing, mutually exclusive attempts to tell events, the accounts which Campbell uses as his source, which, in their sum, exceed the events they seek to describe and to own; and on the other hand, Campbells acknowledgement of the incommensurability of these accounts, such that the events (these moments of a life) clearly exceed any attempts to describe or contain them. Alongside this tension between history and historiography, a further tension is enacted, between those conceptions of history in which impersonal forces move with their own detached, transcendent motivation,

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and those in which individuals shape the conditions of their existence through decisive actions, and through personal conflicts and relationships. What we see, then, is not the life story of an Irish political leader, but a repeated struggle to make out of all this not-adding-up a form in which, ultimately, something can be communicated, not merely about the past, but its heavy bearing on the present; and not merely about that present, but about its great debt to the future. In the film, the desire for a story to be told comes tantalisingly close to being satisfied on a number of occasions: Bernadette is interviewed outside the Houses of Parliament after punching the Home Secretary, on the floor of the Commons, the day after Bloody Sunday; asked whether she will apologise she hisses that she is only sorry I didnt get him by the throat. Bernadette is interviewed about her trip to meet the Black Panthers in New York. Bernadette gives a speech; Bernadette explains that she will not be leaving Downing Street until she has seen the Prime Minister; Bernadette is released from jail after her conviction for incitement to riot in 1969. Even the occasional interruption of the narrative, with out-takes from unused news footage, cannot interrupt its irresistible flow. The events are charged with excitement and danger; the figure of McAliskey herself, a strange combination of media image and controlled revolutionary rhetoric, is compelling, even endearing in her humorous, self-deprecating moments. But at a certain point the film steps back from this urgent unfolding of history, at no clear signal, and enters a reflective, introspective segment. McAliskey talks to an off-camera interviewer at some point in the late 1970s, looking back even from this point many years ago, prompted to identify the self that she thought had endured throughout this time. The archive footage is complemented by still images, and a female voice, with an accent not dissimilar to McAliskeys own, begins to read from the autobiography that she published as a young, newly-elected MP. It begins to seem that this will after all remain a story, told in the central characters own confident words. But once again, the stream of certainty and clarity, of credible story, breaks down, this time with an exclaimed, Christ! When did you start saying I to myself to yourself all the time? Immediately, the status of the voice as an internalised Bernadette, recounting her thoughts and reflections unproblematically, according to the conceits and conventions of film, becomes untenable. For a while the voice still operates as some sort of voice of or to Bernadette, a questioning from within, but quickly this too disintegrates as the voice detaches itself further, once again becomes disembodied, replaces I with you. The

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voice recalls traumas, losses, childhood hurts, but these seem not to be specific to Bernadette, not to add anything to the understanding of the story that we believed we were following, the details fictional, or relating to some other life, with little or no reference to Bernadette herself. This estranged voice cuts across the story that had been expected, its final inscrutable words, a voice, not your own, you dont know, emphasising the unfinishability of this narrative, this story. Its worth mentioning a temptation, on the part of many who encounter Bernadette, to talk expansively and unreflexively about the life and deeds of its subject the real flesh-and-blood Bernadette Devlin in her own words as if this were actually a film about her; thus the beginning and end segments, which clearly upset this reading, are glossed over as if they were merely a troublesome formal mannerism. But the tendency to hagiography is the viewers, not the artists. However much Devlin has been chosen as a figure in whom historical potential seems to coalesce at a certain time, who briefly appears able to cancel out the contradictions of class and sectarian attachment, to carry a genuine mandate for a politics of popular revolution, she is ultimately, once the persistence of those contradictions has been definitively asserted, just an individual, left alone, with the same range of limited choices as any other individual. In my film NLR (2010)7, I have approached some similar contexts: the film is a portrait of a street, in the north inner city of Belfast, in a republican district called New Lodge. The film sets out to explore the distinct unity of atmosphere of the New Lodge Road, and is structured as a walk along the street, from north to south. Many similar link roads in the inner city, running between the major arterial routes, were demolished between the 1960s and the 1980s; on others, the peace walls either cut straight across them or run down either side, turning them into lifeless corridors. NLR presents a filmic impression of the activity that still thrives on a single street, through a concentration on colours, details, surfaces, styles of houses and flats, movement, comings and goings. By prolonging the gaze of the viewer on these individual elements, the time of the walk about six minutes is expanded and unravelled into a half-hour investigation of the particularities of this place. New Lodge is heavily defined to outsiders by its political (self) image. As with Bernadette, NLR is not about New Lodge in the straightforward sense; it is not a film about its political identity or its particular history. Nor is it a film made for New Lodge, celebrating a community. But a

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central part, even of the superficial visual identity of the area, is its explicit political self-representation. This is most obvious in the roads various murals, which present a certain framing of the area's history and character.

NLR, 31", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2010

NLR, then, sets itself a specific problem: how to make a film in New Lodge thats neither political propaganda (whether nave or knowing), nor bad journalism, nor unreflexive documentary, nor reductive community project, but which instead can foreground the contradictions that shape the area, and then use these as the setting for some other, further considerations. How, in short, to make political representations in a place where Politics-with-a-capital-P have been so narrowly defined, and where representation became such an automatic, clichd affair. In part, the answer adopted to this problem is to foreground the problem itself: by concentrating in great detail on the exterior surfaces of the street the walls, the pavements, the arrangements of colour and lines the film underlines its own outsider status, emphasising that these surfaces are themselves the boundaries between private and public, inside and outside.

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In this highly-politicised area, in a rapidly-regenerating city, such boundaries are by no means simple however, and the soundtrack questions the degree to which any space is really private here; and by extension, whether any is truly public. In the soundtrack, a male and a female voice dramatise, through an indirect, alternating argument, some of these ideas, recalling fragmented remembrances of their own past relationship. The voices also explore their different ideas of belonging in this community, with the woman expressing her exasperation at the litany of stories hoarded and repeated by the man:
I tried explaining to him that even the most complex, detailed surface, a wall, or a skin, conceals something else that lies beneath. He took me too literally, he didnt understand, so he just discarded what Id said. He thought that I must be a fool. He continued with his stories about what happened, where, to whom. How Terence had been walking down towards that corner when he heard the crack behind him and felt the hot whistle through his hair, about Lenny picking up his sisters kids and taking them to his mothers house when he knew there was something on, and how everyone else knew then to bring their kids in too. About the time the football broke the glass in the old gas lamp, and the darts team leaving on the bus, and the day the pub was knocked down. About the flats and the houses on the long streets, and the theatre, and the club. Tommys band that he had with his brothers, they played in every dance hall there was. And in the clubs. Hed tell me about Jamesy who went to a different dance every night, and always with a different girl, but never missed a days work, and about Gerard who threw the stew from the stove at them when they came for him and then jumped the back wall....

Their sharply contrasting ideas of the nature of the political are, in fact, the contradictions and uneasy settlements of the film itself, brought out into the open and given form, rather than made to conform to a more convenient narrative. This fictional material, then, tackles directly the problems of making a film of this type in this very particular place. Gilligan (2009)8 is a short silent film, again shot in Belfast, asking who has the right to speak in the contemporary, perpetually-regenerating city. A series of seemingly expressionistic marks, graffiti painted on a hoarding, are explored insistently by the camera and an obscured message is eventually pieced back together: BARRY GILLIGAN HAS ?S TO ANSWER ABOUT THIS LAND. The words have been painted and erased,

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Gilligan, 4", 16mm, Daniel Jewesbury 2009

repainted and again erased (even physically gouged out of the plywood hoarding), and again repainted. The significance of this text is never explained but it is, in essence, the same story that is told about similar plots of land in every city: a story of dispossession, exclusion, privatisation and clearance, revealed through an ongoing battle to speak or to silence. The bright exterior shots, and the panning movement used in them, are contrasted with a series of interiors, some in total darkness, filmed in an old industrial service elevator as it moves between floors. The abstract, inscrutable marks of the obscured graffiti are thus punctuated with black: a rectangle of light flashes by from top to bottom or vice versa, as the small window in the lift passes by another floor, and black returns. Every so often the lift stops, and the square of light remains stationary in the frame. The formal texture of the film, for instance this montaging of different shots from different environments, is less deliberate than one might ordinarily expect from a documentary film, thats to say the relationship between different shots, in space and in time, is never clearly established, and no narrator gives an overall context, or explains why we are looking at these particular shots. In this way the film attempts to allow

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for an amount of chance in the way in which individual viewers might construct a world and a narrative from the film. There is a central thematic that it is intended to communicate the peculiar way in which the graffiti, and its obscuring, reveal something that has been repressed about this plot of land, about the city, and about politics and economics in a regenerating, post-conflict city; but there is also an attempt to create movement, unease, tension and so on for their own sakes, as mechanics that are as important to reading the film as the telling of any particular story. Similarly, NLR sets out to combine and juxtapose the individual visual, musical and narrative elements so as to produce something more than simply the sum of these parts, a suggestive, subjective world in which various questions, emotions and formal relations can come to the fore and be considered. The films interrogate their own form, then, not through a self-conscious foregrounding of the unreliability or unfixability of their meaning, in which the film is ultimately staged as a (potentially rather dry) selfreflexive metafilm, but through an intentional, non-deliberative playfulness: an openness to openness, one could say.

Conclusion
Experimental documentary is an attempt to dramatise the political, that is, to give form to the tensions and conflicts of which the social is composed, the ineffable reality that structures all things around us, and all our relationships with one another, but which we can have great difficulty perceiving. It activates the space of narrative and of representation, making us active participants in the construction and consideration of meaning-making. Inasmuch as various individual film works can be said to cohere into a genre, this is a genre which has responded to the supposed crisis of meaning within documentary media and its related academic disciplines, by reasserting the real as a category which is both knowable and describable. Crucially, this is not a real which has been rediscovered, uninflected by debates around authorship, meaning-making or subjectivity; rather it is the real as a set of active processes, relationships between forces that are constantly in flux, exchanges of power, and struggles to make and to assert meaning; the real as an ongoing, dialectical exchange involving very many actors and groups across society. To this end, experimental documentary strives to make form and content mutually supportive of one another, which is to say, mutually enquiring. Structural conventions of film form (edits, montage, camera movement,

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narrative development, relationships between sound and vision and so on) are not simply foregrounded or deconstructed, for their own sake. Rather, a genuinely experimental approach to these tools of filmmaking means that new structures and forms, new ways of combining moving images, sounds, subject matter and meaning are continually innovated by artists who are as concerned with the formal integrity of a piece of work as with its communicative potential. This does not involve privileging one above the other, since it is precisely through this formal innovation and integrity that an awareness of the various levels of the real, in all its interrelatedness, its complexity and its fluidity, are approached in film: this is a genuinely complementary process. The aim of the films Ive discussed and the approach that they typify is to instate a genuinely critical realism in the fields of visual art and documentary film, fields which continue to expand and diversify through their ongoing engagement with one another.

Notes
1 2

Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan (Land Without Bread), 1933, Luis Bunuel, Spain. All Divided Selves, 2011, Luke Fowler, UK. 3 London, 1994, Patrick Keiller, UK. 4 Robinson in Space, 1997, Patrick Keiller, UK. 5 Robinson in Ruins, 2010, Patrick Keiller, UK. 6 Bernadette, 2008, Duncan Campbell, UK. 7 NLR, 2010, Daniel Jewesbury, Ireland. 8 Gilligan, 2009, Daniel Jewesbury, Ireland.