Powers and Orbits
(The viewfinder: image – icon – ideogram) The second part of: Fact-Totem: Documentary politics through footage and footnotes
By Mitchell Miller
… profound changes are impending on the ancient craft of the Beautiful. In all the arts there is a physical component that can no longer be treated as it used to be, which cannot remain unaffected by our modern knowledge and power. Paul Valery, as quoted in Walter Benjamin,The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction Unless we are prepared to claim special attributes for the poet – the attribute of vision – and unless we are prepared to admit the work of the artist (that is to say, the function of the imagination) as an essential part of the modern world there is no real reason for our continuing to bother with any of the arts any more, or with any imaginary activity. Humphrey Jennings, Pandaemonium: The Coming of the machine I often feel people define themselves better by their aberrant forms of behaviour than when they actually sit down for the interview. Nick Broomfield. 1.
image: Hope and experience
image, im’ij, n. likeness: a statue: an idol: a representation in the mind, an idea: a picture or representation (not necessarily visual) in the imagination or memory (continues) … Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary There are many who would contest that Documentary filmmaking could be considered a form of art. A smaller number would argue it is antithetical not only to art but to cinema. Others might contend that its only fit purpose is educative and informational and its worst, pure propaganda or popular voyeurism. Certainly, a programme such as ITV1’s Holidays from Hell is neither cinematic nor particularly transcendent (except in the base sense of enjoying other’s misery) but then Caddyshack 2 is conspicuously absent from most comprehensive film histories, and there are no current proposals to downgrade Das Kabinet der Dr Caligari as a result. At the very least, Documentary is an imaginative process,
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definable (crudely) as ‘imagining what a fact looks like’, of rescuing the evocative (or didactic) image from the confusion of reality – of envisioning information. The same could also be said of the diagrams or cutaways found in textbooks, or of Google Earth, which has countered years of cartographic abstraction with the hyper-realism of aerial photography. Documentary films then, are extractions, then abstractions, from the rawness of experience for the purposes of exposition, entirely consistent with the last few millennia of intellectual history, one broadly defined by establishing authority over how reality is interpreted. Put another way, it is a process of refining information into abstracts through which we can understand, and communicate that understanding. We do not usually think of documentaries as ‘abstract’ at all. This is despite the existence of some very abstract documentary conventions that we take somewhat for granted. There was a time when almost every documentary or public information film was authorised by the ‘Voice of God’ (VoG). This was not, of course, the deity filling in His quiet hours but the unseen
narrator of the piece, perfect in both diction and knowledge and able to describe and define the information the film conveyed. In most cases the VoG was disembodied, with the Received Pronunciation of the narrator finally sloughing off all bodily vernaculars into a higher plan of ideal transmission. But the VoG was, nevertheless, all He claimed to be; as Kafka proved, Bureaucracy was in itself a God and British documentary was certainly the epiphany of the (roughly) tripartite Bureaucratic deity; Management set the theme, Research found the content; Production got the footage that illustrated the knowledge. The 1960s saw this change. Documentaries and the documentarians who made them looked back to the cinema that had, in the 1930s, first propelled their genre into the public consciousness. Italian neorealism begat Cinema Verite which in the US became Direct Cinema. Rather than tell, documentarians encouraged their audiences to return to the original experience from which our various intellectual constructs – knowledge, information, wisdom – are refined. Semi-amateur filmmakers such as Albert and David Maysles emphasised the importance of immediacy, of their audience seeing the subject not as an abstract theme or historical period, but an individual in whom that wider theme is somehow incarnate. Lives were examined collectively; experience was valued over knowledge and social or political truths were represented in microcosm; in the medium distance shot of the Reading clan immortalised in Paul Watson’s The Family crowded into a seventies living room or the facial tics of a French wartime collaborateur. The latter refers of course, to The Sorrow and the Pity, Marcel Orphuls’ Verite masterpiece, arguably one of the greatest nonfiction film ever made. While it is in part a narrated, essayed piece straight from the God-spot it is clear at all times that the authority of this voice is fragmentary, a Frankenstein of personal recollections, newsreels and contemporary radio broadcasts from which this knowledge is constructed. The narrator does not, crucially, gainsay or contradict the experiences or viewpoints of the film’s participants with his own ‘global’ knowledge. In fact, the presence of a ‘narrator’ (Orphuls himself) or a ‘voice’ that binds the film together is mostly detected in the dialogue of interviews with the subjects. In this film, the participants’ recollections, their experiences were as valid and interesting as ‘the knowledge’ he himself had collected through his research. Orphuls’ film is a powerful demonstration that if mounted and edited in the right fashion, the most rambling anecdote can obtain its own historical, even artistic value. Marcel Orphuls is not customarily compared to Norman Mailer, but like the novelist he held some esteem in the brutal potential of combat as a means of uncovering the truth – what in more old fashioned times was known as ‘the dialectic’. Beneath the elegance of its editing and the carefully unfolded narrative, lies the interplay between the body of evidence and the wellspring of experience. They sometimes agree, they often conflict, but appreciating the contribution of either is what makes the film truthful. Read a certain way, the true subject of TSATP is the gradual social conditioning of ‘memory’ – some might say, of the image. The social conditioning of memory is explored in Karen Guthrie and Nina Pope’s Bata-ville:We are not afraid of the future, a documentary-cum-video art piece that presents it
as almost an anthropological oddity. If The Sorrow and The Pity is a good example of a narrative reconstructed for the sake of its audience then Bata-ville documents an event that elicits a sense of shared experience for the sake of those who are filmed (the audience merely reaping the dividends of such an endeavour). The film charts a bus journey by ex-employees of the Bata Shoe Company from two of its decommissioned English plants (one in Maryport, the other in East Tilbury) to the heart of the Bata empire and the Moravian town of Zlin. Described by the artists as a ‘collective imagining’ of the meaning behind the maxim ‘we are not afraid of the future’, coined by the enigmatic founder-svengali Tomas Bata, the group ruminates over games of bingo, egg dumps, appliqué and pop quizzes while Europe whizzes by the window. If this film really was (as its subtitle claims) about imagining the future then it would be something of a fraud. It is instead an exercise in re-imagining the past through means personal, collective and at times parodic. The many encomia to the lost days of Bata are undercut by the confrontation implied in the makeup of ‘the passengers’ (some from Maryport, some from East Tilbury and a group of guests known as ‘The Others’). As this group travels through the trace signatures of Bata’s utopianism (now largely historic) Pope and Guthrie’s concerted effort to find sympathies across the various divides becomes something akin to shadow puppetry, once we understand the extent to which Tomas Bata (and his various sons cum clones) were in themselves determined architects of a collective experience. There is also a neatness in a ‘socially engaged artwork’ exploring a socially engaged business empire. The question that the audience must consider in either case is where social engagement becomes social engineering. Pope and Guthrie are essentially mounting an expedition into the heart of Bata’s image, the super-self he and his descendants grew and expanded into every corner of their commercial empire, based on a homespun, paternalist, utilitarian-collectivist ideology (some might say theology). Bata viewed life and work as intimately connected and created a holistic environment for production and infrastructure, exporting it wholesale wherever he set up shop. Bata built towns adjacent to their plants according to a common prototype, of which East Tilsbury is an excellent example: the breeze-block-shaped detached houses of Bata Avenue, a town square, its cinema and a hotel for Bata executives (now council housing). The company exhorted its employees to ‘work collectively, live individually’ (like his Jewish compatriot Kafka, Bata the man was a prolific aphorist). His was a utopian netherworld, an empire within empires governed by aphorisms coined with a promiscuity that if directed to other outlets, could father a nation of children. In a sense, that is precisely what this patriarchal industrialist was doing. His unique line in ‘Bataspeak’ echoes the clean, suburban aesthetics of his new towns, small masterpieces representing a self-contained, glibly expressed paradigm. For an audience within living memory of the Second World War such a proverbial, folksy (or should we say ‘volksy’?) ideology has inevitably sinister connotations to which the ex-Bata employees seem largely oblivious. For them, Bata’s time was a good one, one of security, hope and belonging – as he put it, ‘harmony and efficiency’. The hold of nostalgia is powerful, resistant even to the (confirmed) myth that Bata
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used a converted lift as an office to spy upon any one of the floors of his office. Such revelations darken the psychological texture of Bata’s philanthropy, and the ‘collective imagining’ at play here, suggestive of a superego-empire tainted by an insidious id. Like a lesser Augustus, Bata not only exported reproductions of his hometown across the globe (just as the Romans cloned the eternal city across their Empire) but of his own physical image, graven in bronze statues found in offices, town squares and parks. Like Augustus, Bata knew the importance of showing the right sort of face, and his is a fatherly visage, one to shelter under. Bata was the organic centre; the Bata company one vast amputation of this ‘private citizen’s’ sense and sensibilities. These could take a slightly weird turn, with human progress viewed in terms of perfecting footwear – Guthrie gives us a rather extraordinary Bata reading in which we find Bata’s substance and image mixed: Let us not be afraid of the future. Half the people of the world are walking barefoot, and hardly 5% of all the inhabitants are well shod. Here we can see best, how little we have done so far and how great a task is waiting for all the shoemakers of this world. Augustus always insisted he was just an old soldier; Mao, a simple teacher; Bata, the eternal cobbler. The image and its power within the world of the real is a popular subject for contemporary documentarians. In Vit Kusak and Filip Remunda’s Czech Dreams, a non-existent supermarket development cooked up by the directors sets off an elaborate advertising and public relations campaign to promote absolutely nothing (beyond the consumerist hunger of their fellow Czechs). There is however, something much more substantial behind the image of Bata, be they relics or those left behind once the quality of the image has faded. Bata-ville began as a site-specific work commissioned by Thurrock Council and Commissions East in the now semiderelict (and to be demolished) Bata-ville of East Tilbury, whereby a ‘Travel Agency’ operated from the former Bata director’s office. The pseudo agency served as a place to share memories, recall experiences and collect Bata memorabilia. It was also a site where the artists brought their ‘global’ knowledge of the Bata phenomenon into contact with the direct, ongoing experiences of those who lived in his town and turned out his shoes. During this long process of creating ‘socially engaged art’ Pope recruited Guthrie (who had serendipitously moved to Maryport, another Bata outpost) and a film crew to document the cathartic journey to Zlin. The result is part art-cinema and part video-artintervention of the type pioneered by the1970s Ant Farm collective. Like a Media Burn or a The Eternal Frame, Bata-ville is a manufactured event that sloughs various layers of significance in the playing out its conceit. It is phoney, yet the truth lies in its contrivance, in the interplay between artist, event and the resultant image – in the case of Media Burn a Cadillac bursting through a wall of televisions – in Bata-ville the two artists locked in an embrace with one of their film’s ‘subjects’.
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Whatever one calls it, this film makes it clear that this is social engineering in the past tense. A visit to one of Bata’s Dutch plants suggests that social engineering is now a poor second to the monetarist’s bottom-line. And here can we not identify the root explanation of the sadness that bubbles beneath the surface of the ex-Bata employees? Bata has become historical. Bata himself has been reduced from the image of an international social experiment to a celebrity, a very drastic, somewhat grotesque ideological shrinkage. And then there is the odd case of Pope and Guthrie themselves, dressed in the garb of 1960s hostesses, a role they perform throughout the film, drawing from the kitsch heritage of the Great British Bus Trip. The nostalgia this conjures is a bittersweet counter to the relegation of the Bata lifestyle to mere memorabilia, with the two artists physically representing this shared past of the passengers – a living folk memory akin to the narrator and eponymous researcher in Patrick Keiller’s Robinson films of the late nineties, or to a lesser extent the Amanda of Jem Cohen’s hybrid film Chain (USA, 2004). Like Broomfield they are the action, driving the film from in front of the camera in the slightly skewwhiff image of the documentarian. In these instances, the alert audience is jolted into the recognition that the images presented are, however bland, part of a performance. Through the medium of Paul Schofield’s anecdotal voiceover, Keiller riffs on his beautiful shots of London landscapes, inventing fact or context (and the faceless, neurotic and sexually repressed Robinson, the personified, embodied research department) to conjure an imaginative justification for showing them to us. This is blatant in the antics of Pope and Guthrie, who embody this performative aspect of the documentary art. Their tour guide costumes, the affectation at the heart of the piece is meant to symbolise many things – some very specific to the site in which they chose to work. Most universal though, is its reference to the era of the Great British Bus Trip – all bad weather, sand in the sandwiches, ruddy-cheeked endurance. The Bata trip is nothing like this but it does remind us of a time when father figures could make their caprices analogous to truth, and holidaymakers happily submitted to the authority of a bus driver and a silver-tongued ‘shotgun’ at the front who, whatever experience might tell them, they could trust enough to make the world pleasant, orderly, sensible - if only for a while. 2. icon: Maysles’ Privileged Trajectory (or, ‘Guerrillas in the midst’) icon: A painting by a Greek or Russian Orthodox believer on PANEL, generally of a religious subject strictly prescribed by tradition, and using an equally strictly prescribed pattern of representation. An authentic icon can be of any age from the 6th c. A.D. to the present day. The Thames and Hudson Dictionary of Art Terms
As Benjamin implied in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, almost anything can be flattened into an image. But with Bata-ville there is flesh and blood to be contended with, leading us to wonder whether it is possible to reinject some air into the imaginary nozzle and offer at least the illusion of a substantial reckoning with whatever is behind that image. This is the dilemma central to much modern documentary, especially where its subject is fame and its malcontents. If Bata-ville is a journey into the image of Tomas Bata, as projected, protected and perceived from a number of different standpoints – the company, the artists, the casual observer and his ex-employees – then he remains, ultimately, both famous and unknown, curiously two dimensional. Pope and Guthrie deliberately made a film that was neither investigative nor analytical; Audiences looking for insight into his personality will find only the shadows he has chosen to cast. This encounter with the Bata image is a source of creative tension between the artists/others and the Bata employees – and it is this conflict that provides its central interest. The knowledge of the artists is learned, abstract, gleaned from their reading and their research. The knowledge of ‘The Others’ draws from a wider frame of reference and an apparently wider set of values against which they process their own experience of the Bata subculture – but their reasoning must, in a sense, begin from the abstract of either history or the imagination. The passengers however, mostly working class people of middle age, have firsthand experience of the Bata lifestyle, from which they attempt to understand the abstraction Pope and Guthrie make of it. While their devotion to their old employers may seem sentimental and outmoded it is clearly deeper and more complex than the fleeting impressions of either the artists or The Others. The extent of this complexity becomes abundantly clear as we start to appreciate the divides between the two groups of Bata employees and between them and The Others. The film begins with Cyril explaining in a Cumbrian rumble that his response to the East Tilbury contingent (who they are en route to pick up) and the artists and writers who are ‘The Others’ is conditional: ‘If they’re at the same level as us, don’t think themselves a bit better, we’ll mix, no problem.’ It is not entirely clear whether this is a reassurance, a threat, or both, but it becomes very clear that class and regional divides are as, if not more, significant than the shared Bata experience of their younger days. Indeed, that experience serves only to intensify old resentments and hurts. The closure of Maryport in favour of East Tilbury is one of these, while all of the UK workers struggle to find their enthusiasm towards the still-thriving (and largely automated) Bata plant in the Netherlands. And while all may be fluent in Bataspeak, there are accents and twists to be made on the words. One of ‘The Others’ makes a telling alteration to Bata’s guiding maxim: from ‘we are not’ to ‘we are shit scared of the future’. The older working class passengers cluck the tongues a little at this; but is it concern over a potty mouth, or the subversion of a maxim that in their present situation, amplifies their differences where once it united them? It is this drama that holds our attention; this is not really a film about the Bata, but an extended reaction shot of those exposed first or secondhand to the powerful image of himself he chose to create, those who fell into orbit
around his extraordinary presence. For the audience this is a curiously distant feeling, viewed from the birdwatcher’s hide of the amphitheatre or living room. Travelling on the bus is a head-and-shoulders bust of the original Tomas Bata, seated ironically next to his exemployees. It serves as a useful reminder just how iconic this individual was, and abstract to those who attempt to get to know him. The word ‘icon’ or ‘iconic’ is so overused it has almost worn off its treads. Needless to say it rarely refers to Orthodox devotions. The era of Hollywood bequeathed us the notion of living icons, screen stars whose physical reality is nevertheless mitigated by an abstracted ‘pattern of representation’ essential to maintaining their appeal and public interest. The Hollywood icon is generally of interest for these abstract qualities that reappear in countless films and PR junkets; similarly, their public often takes considerable pleasure in trying to gain insight into the actual person beneath the icon itself through issues as banal as their favourite ice cream or as profound as their view on the current situation in Iraq. To Albert and David Maysles the artificiality of the interview was the antithesis of their observational style of filmmaking, a rehearsal of superficial questions and rehearsed answers. With Love from Truman is a Maysles short film that attacks the futility of the set-piece encounter. Watching a young journalist interview the, by now, iconic writer we appreciate Capote in all his creepy, calculating grandeur as he ably performs the role of literary diva. In Meet Marlon Brando (1966) the interview-performance is similarly exposed and superbly satirical. In it we find Brando at his youthful peak, before he took on his hamster physiology. Ostensibly, this is a record of a few days spent with Brando as he promoted Morituri, but its real concern is the realpolitik of such interrogations; the power of those who are in conscious control of their image – and the younger, twinkly-eyed Brando is certainly that – to protect it and to dispose with others at their own indulgence. Nevertheless, we identify here with the powerful, beset as Brando is by some truly awful lines of questioning, despite his own disingenuousness (‘I’m a huckster and I’m here thumping the tub for Morituri’) in subverting the proceedings even as he adds to his own considerable mystique – Brando’s brand. Unlike the working people of Bata-ville, the Maysles’ subjects were often, though not exclusively the famous and the powerful, for whom the ability to exercise this micro politics of the self was of paramount importance –Capote, Muhammad Ali and the Rolling Stones (in Gimme Shelter). To such people, the revealing interview, the close-up of the camera are all ban extension of their selves – the stored value of their particular currency. But it can also become a threat if indeed, said currency relies upon their personality being an abstract idea in the mind of the public. The Maysles’ attempt to circumvent this by seeking out the ‘aberrant’ behaviour Broomfield speaks of, and they attempt to capture it not by a frontal approach (as attempted by the journalists) but from the sidelines. There are similar tactics deployed by Pope and Guthrie in their film. The repeated question ‘Are you afraid of the future?’ is as supple and as meaningless as any junket question. They segue from the sidelines in their pressed uniforms, imposing their performance on an unsuspecting world, and when they have met Tomas Bata Snr at a Zlin restaurant, their first comment is on his performance to camera: ‘He was good’.
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As for ‘us’, safely ensconced in our ‘hide’, we enjoy Brando’s mastery of the pre-emptive strike. In each encounter with the hacks and their banal questions, we watch the actor manipulate, sabotage and undercut each with a raptor’s precision. Is this not in fact a natural history; not so much ‘life in the raw’, as a carefully elicited anthropological drama of powers and their orbits? Powers, in the form of the Brandos, Alis, or Capotes under study, and the orbit of those who experience and engage with that power, propelled into the inner circle or forcibly ejected , unable to establish real contact. Neither do we – we come to understand how a Brando works, how to read the icon according to its own rules. But just as the angular form of a Russian Madonna tells you nothing of the texture of her skin, the brightness of her eyes or the demeanour of Mary, nor will the brinkmanship on display reveal much about Brando’s internal conflicts, or his exact thought processes. We stay, firmly, in the Hollywood solar system, and the three different bodies in orbit around Brando’s presence – closest is the journalist, burned by the rays, in the middle distance are the Bros. Maysles who hold the camera, and in the cold fringes the audience experiencing everything at secondhand. This experience is all important; the Maysles give a rare opportunity to experience the Brando face up close – beautifully rendering every eye crease and movement of the lips, often cutting off the lower chin and top of the head to focus on the all important central strip, the predatory glint in his eye. Everyone is watching everyone else – the audience watching the whole drama, the journalist making their trepidatious approach, Brando himself sizing up the meat. Only the Maysles have the true God-spot – the privileged position from which to observe and frame these occurrences – from Voice of God to Eye of God. One is reminded of David Edelstein’s note on Brando’s style of performance:
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manner in which their screen presence is abstracted. When the questions imply the most significant answers, there is no tasteful cutaway or injection of supporting information to fill the silences. Orphuls’ film is in some respects a defence of the interviewing technique as a means of revealing something of the truth (if not the ‘backstage’ reality of Maysles’). But the differences with Maysles go much further, for though Orphuls makes much of experience as a source of knowledge, knowledge is his trade nevertheless. His presentation is considered and triangulated. Maysles is all experience, all the present – no cutaway to an explanatory passage on the Bouvier family in Grey Gardens (1975), not even a newsreel or newspaper headline. It remains utterly of its moment – or indeed, of the clinical background from which the psychologist Albert Maysles had emerged sealed within the here and now (or there and now) of appreciating and distilling the ‘patient’s’ experience. No wonder Maysles primarily describes his technique in terms of patience – pun intended? Maysles’ innovations in documentary were often so successful that imitation by other filmmakers is largely unconscious. One ‘Brandoesque’ device – to have the subject look at footage of themself from earlier in the filming process – first appears in Gimme Shelter. Here, The Rolling Stones watch with horror, amusement and perplexity at the footage from their disastrous Altamont concert, the preceding negotiations and the tape of a post-debacle radio programme. It is in these odd moments of self-surveillance that the veneer of the icon is peeled away, where honest reactions and emotions are involuntarily betrayed through confrontation with the raw material of the rock stars’ image. Maysles lays the machinations behind the seemingly spontaneous rock lifestyle bare, not just to the audience, but his subject. Similarly, in Oliver Stone’s Comandante (2003), our first images of Castro are of the aged dictator considering how best the cameraman can get him into frame:
In his acting, there is something of the higher consciousness that Harold Bloom speaks of in the character of Hamlet – watching himself as he watches others.
Let me take a closer look at myself. If I get close … I have to see where it looks the best.
It is, it should be said, greatly enjoyable as spectacle and it is entirely appropriate that the film Brando promotes is Morituri, rebranded only a few weeks later as The Saboteur. The power of the Maysles’ technique rested in its avoidance of the theatre of interview and its use of the extended take, the honing in on the expressions and tics of the people who are, or were, there at that point in time. We see the same in The Sorrow and the Pity where, instead of watching Capote as he considers or Brando as he manipulates, we watch the wrinkled faces of wartime survivors as they consider how best to present their own selves in Orphuls’ film. Long before media savvy has been assumed among the general populace we realise how aware these people are of the need to deport themselves correctly onscreen, to shape the
But then, friend and enemy alike are never in doubt that the first bona fide media-age autocrat knows the value of watching himself. In fact, he is so self-aware he is able to abstract his ‘self’ altogether, into a note perfect performance of jokes, homilies and gestures. Stone’s use of set piece, again, through the viewfinder, creates an infinity effect which is the punctum to the studium of the whole piece. This sort of set-piece multiplicity of views can also be attempted with those with much less to lose, though the tenor is inevitably very different. In Hubert Sauper’s Darwin’s Nightmare (2006) (one of the best Verite documentaries of recent few years) the director confronts Tanzanian call girls with the image of themselves together with a friend murdered during the course of their filming. Their reaction to her trace signature
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on Sauper’s viewfinder is not easy to describe in words – it remains an image of grief and despair best left to the experience offered by the screen(s). Whatever it is, it is neither abstract, nor ‘iconic’, but belonging entirely to the reality of the situation. 3. ideogram:The search for character ideogram. i-dE-&-’gram, ‘I: a picture or symbol used in a system of writing to represent a thing or an idea but not a particular word or phrase for it; especially: one that represents not the object pictured but some thing or idea that the object pictured is supposed to suggest.’ Merriam Webster Anyone who spends time in conversation with present-day documentarians will note the common occurrence of the word ‘character’. Filmmakers speak of ‘finding’ and ‘placing’ characters within their film. If anything is revealing of the manipulations at play in much non-fiction then it is this very peculiar usage of a term usually reserved for the constructs of fiction. The documentarian quoted below is the Israeli director Yoav Shamir:
the part of the filmmaker.Viewed a certain way, it seems somewhat obscene. These are after all, real people, with complex lives who have not chosen (as has Brando) to create an abstract version of themselves for the enjoyment of the public. Do we not routinely conspire to make society intelligible through ordering our surface impressions of other human beings in relation to our own selves? But if the answers to these are ‘yes’ it still does not make this any less of an unusual convention. It may also be a borrowing from psychology and anthropology, with which documentary has a certain consanguinity. The psychologist Albert Maysles always referred to subjects not characters, but as he filmed he may well have considered the psychological concept of character structure, the traits that are displayed as an individual reacts to various kinds of ‘challenges’ (or journalist’s questions, or images of dead friends). The ‘structure’ relates to the resistance of the individual to change (what might be called a natural ‘fear of the future’) or disruption. This brings to mind the shocked expression on Charlie Watts’ face in Gimme Shelter as he relives the events at Altamont through the television screen, or the tears of a Bata employee after she is shown one of the new factory robots. Character in this respect is defined through pain and trauma – which in the world of the modern documentary (where the best films invariably emerge from the worst situations) seems as fair a definition as any. The most transparent, if mean-spirited process of characterisation in documentary, is to be found in its bastard offspring such as Big Brother
You need to have that in your characters, something that pulls the audience in. As shown through his first couple of documentary films, Shamir’s touch with ‘character’ is sure, with little obvious signs of caricature or distortion. Then again, there are plenty of documentaries, such as Spellbound, where the director and editor have adopted something of the screenwriter’s craft in fashioning broad character types out of real people. This tendency is recognisable from the Anglo-American obsession with character and its development as the driver of a three or five-act narrative. The ‘human ideogram’, the ‘character’ may just represent a documentary abstraction as extreme as the abstraction of powerful individuals into icons. In the case of the latter, canny documentarians attempt to break down and see through the symbolism, or at least show it for what it is. But in their own use of character, they fashion real people – their subjects – into fictionalised extensions of their own psyches. What they create is as much a flat, two-dimensional surface impression as the icon, with the exception that the audience is steadily convinced. This seems quite an extraordinary – and invasive – act on
where clever editing and set-pieces are used to elevate or condemn housemates into good, bad or indifferent characters (the latter being the slow ones in the herd, to be quickly voted off). The petty traumas to which the programme makers subject the ‘housemates’ are crucial in ‘building’ these characters. A girl coaxed into a hot-tub with a male easily becomes the house slattern; the person most often called into ‘the diary room’ quickly becomes underhand and devious. The people within the Big Brother situation even start to believe. For all the opportunities reality television should give us to experience another person in the round, it is also able to repaint them in very broad terms through the
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subtlest manipulations of the footage. This use of character generally goes unstudied and unremarked. Ostensibly, the method and purpose are clear enough, the debate is surely one of rights and privileges. Does a documentarian have the right to simplify someone’s outward traits into something that satisfies their creative ambitions? The question returns us to the big yellow bus of Bata-ville, and the confusion of one of the East Tilbury passengers: One of the difficulties I’ve had is coping with Nina and Karen’s attire. I thought well, why are all these people taking them seriously … ? Why indeed? One reason for the documentarian’s adoption of the character device may be that in the process of filming, they have themselves adopted a character of sorts. The tour guide persona of Pope and Guthrie is obviously a characterisation; but it is at work too in the films of Nick Broomfield, where he plays the twit, or Michael Moore where he plays the bumpkin with the Big, Important Question. Even where the filmmaker does not venture before camera, the demeanour of documentarians, who must engage with large numbers of people they have usually never met, is all important. The competing truths of ‘employees’ and ‘others’, the tension between experience and knowledge, the very possibility of reaching a shared understanding of a given set of facts (and what prevents it), not to mention the ethical difficulties of making art out of all of these things make Bata-ville a fascinating specimen slide of the modern documentary. The film is not informational, but analytical as to the structure of the information. The film is lit in brash, flat light that recalls the vividness of a dream. Shots linger on significant moments, or cut between headand shoulder close-ups of passengers and the video-diary interludes. Throughout all of this segue the remarkable spectacle of Pope and Guthrie, each aware (and somewhat painfully) of the precariousness of their position; to most of the passengers for most of the time, Pope and Guthrie are themselves philanthropists who give them a unique opportunity for a holiday that might offer some catharsis to the pain of redundancy. This is true; but Bata-ville is an art project through which Pope and Guthrie bolster their own prestige – their own professional image. If they are goofy, funny and engaging in the process, it is no less a performance than in Meet Marlon Brando.
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The audience is of course implicated in this gentle deception – partly because it has, next to the filmmakers, the most perfect knowledge, including revealing scenes from Pope and Guthrie’s hotel room. Their uniforms may as well be ironclad; dressed in them they glide through Bata factories and installations with a strange serenity and confidence, which becomes so great they can even accost the current Tomas Bata at the dinner table.1 Like a bizarre offshoot of the VoG their charade gifts them a remarkable degree of licence – or ‘privilege’. The more one watches Bata-ville, the more one concludes that as a comment on the privileges enjoyed by our popular media it functions as both spoof and expose. So far as spoof goes, the viewer could choose to regard this as merely a burlesque of the well-spoken educated middle classes who glide (or ‘Broomfield’) in and out of various field sites for various documentary purposes. The documentarian’s camera or the anthropologist’s notebook are routinely wielded as analytical instrument and covert talisman. This leads us to the expose. With ‘The Others’ we have a group defined largely by the status of its members, each of whom is in some way a creator of meaning. On the bus, this implied authority is subverted; they remain peripheral to the main event (Pope admits that this element of the project never quite developed as they hoped). Nevertheless, their articulation of what we see them seeing – half-amused, half-horrified – is the most readily persuasive. But they can only provide a judgement on the material; to attach any meaning to the fading image of Bata authority lies with the employees, of a class who would normally be ‘the subjects’ or ‘characters’ in a more conventional documentary. Those in fact, who represent experience. In such moments our attentions switch from the role play of the two artists to the role reversals taking place on the bus; instead of the working classes being ‘the others’, framed and exoticised by the camera it is the media savvy and media literate ‘manufacturers’ who stand out most painfully. Which gives Bata-ville its unique, if slightly frustrating filmic value. One leaves it with the nagging sense that something profound has been quietly put forward concerning our entertainment of knowledge and experience. We ask ourselves whether the twosome should make art out of these people’s lives, fears and anxieties – yet, do we not – or should we not – ask exactly the same of the documentaries and various bastardised reality offshoots that fill the nightly TV schedules? Endnote 1. Of course, as the artists themselves confess, this is masquerade by the seat of the pants (or hem of the skirts). What prevents Bata-ville from becoming a cheap stunt or a purely voyeuristic exercise is that Pope and Guthrie themselves engage in the confessional, continually questioning their own ‘right’ to do this and their subsequent anxieties over their assumption of that right. This provides (accidentally, one suspects) a chance to open out the chinks in the ‘presenters’’ armour and to momentarily shock the viewer out of any easy acceptance of their antics.