Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Share your Criticker Collections with the rest of the community!
iconogassed
Posts: 919
7281 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:41 pm

Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by iconogassed »

https://www.criticker.com/films/?filter=e73888

Documentaries that explore the form itself (Chronicle of a Summer) or are about documentary filmmakers or movements (Capturing Reality). I consider the first kind to include F for Fake and probably some other game-like efforts.

Now the question is, whether an autobiographical documentary is a de facto documentary about a documentarian. A question worthy of an autobiographical documentary. For these purposes I think the answer is "not always".

Sometimes documentaries that don't start out this way become introspective or self-critical enough to qualify, I think. Perhaps Stories We Tell, Sherman's March, My Kid Could Paint That.

CosmicMonkey
Posts: 594
1271 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:52 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by CosmicMonkey »

Would Grizzly Man count? It's essentially a documentary about an amateur documentary film-maker.

iconogassed
Posts: 919
7281 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:41 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by iconogassed »

Interesting example, but I would have to say no, as the film's raison d'etre is not his achievement in filmmaking but his psychology and broader notoriety, nor does the film explore the mechanics of documentary, at least as divorced from Treadwell's particular niche. I also wouldn't include The Video Diary of Ricardo Lopez.

I would also stress that home videos are not documentary films, in the same way that a diary is not necessarily a "book". The latter can be if it is marketed persuasively or is tied to an important historical event or happens to be really really good, but still almost always undergoes the revisions or structuring necessary to prepare it for public consumption, at which point it stops becoming a diary and becomes something else.

CosmicMonkey
Posts: 594
1271 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:52 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by CosmicMonkey »

iconogassed wrote:
Wed Sep 23, 2020 10:32 pm
Interesting example, but I would have to say no, as the film's raison d'etre is not his achievement in filmmaking but his psychology and broader notoriety, nor does the film explore the mechanics of documentary, at least as divorced from Treadwell's particular niche. I also wouldn't include The Video Diary of Ricardo Lopez.

I would also stress that home videos are not documentary films, in the same way that a diary is not necessarily a "book". The latter can be if it is marketed persuasively or is tied to an important historical event or happens to be really really good, but still almost always undergoes the revisions or structuring necessary to prepare it for public consumption, at which point it stops becoming a diary and becomes something else.
I agree with your first point, and think that is a valid reason to exclude the movie based on what your intention for this collection is. The film is primarily about Treadwell as a person, and the film-making aspect of it is secondary to that, but I have to disagree with your second point.

If an artist sketches in their private journal is that still art? If a musician plays alone in their home and no one else is listening is that still music? I don't think that whether the intended audience is public, private or personal changes the nature of art or redefines what medium(s) it belongs to. I would argue that home videos absolutely are a valid form of amateur film-making, whether they are documentary or fictional in nature, and likewise that diaries are a natural and valid form of amateur literature.

iconogassed
Posts: 919
7281 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:41 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by iconogassed »

My own fault I guess, but that is all well beyond the scope. You will note that I was careful not to use words like "art" or "literature" (let alone music!), for this very reason.

If an artist sketches in their private journal is that still art?
If you mean to imply that it automatically is, then no, absolutely not. (Your choice of "artist" instead of "person" is telling. I assume you define "artist" as "someone who creates art" and "art" as "something created by an artist")

wrote:I would argue that home videos absolutely are a valid form of amateur film-making, whether they are documentary or fictional in nature, and likewise that diaries are a natural and valid form of amateur literature.
This doesn't contradict anything I wrote. I was not speaking of "valid forms of amateur literature" or "valid forms of amateur filmmaking". I was speaking of what constitutes "a book" or "a documentary film". A twenty-second close-up of your toejam is valid amateur filmmaking, but it's not a documentary.

I don't think that whether the intended audience is public, private or personal changes the nature of art or redefines what medium(s) it belongs to.
I'm sorry, but it does. If you can't grasp how Henry Darger disproves your point I don't know what to tell you.

I would also gently suggest you read more history, like on the place of personal writing in jurisprudence. That private writing is fundamentally different from writing intended for public consumption, that it is in fact closer to thought than to speech, is a concept with a rich history and very real implications.

Creatively speaking, you cannot automatically lump all diaries in with "art". It is flat-out crazy to assert there is no meaningful difference in expression and composition between keeping a journal and writing a novel.

Context changes meaning. Brillo Boxes is art. Brillo boxes are not art.

CosmicMonkey
Posts: 594
1271 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sun Apr 05, 2009 6:52 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by CosmicMonkey »

Okay, I don't know the things you're referencing here, but obviously I do need to do more reading on this, before engaging in this discussion again. I'll check out the writing of Henry Darger and read up on the history of legal jurisprudence(I finished half a history degree in university, but never took a class on legal history.) Thanks for the recs.

iconogassed
Posts: 919
7281 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:41 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by iconogassed »

Some points of clarification on issues that may have been lost in my efforts to be pithy rather than comprehensive:

- a film that is not fictional is not necessarily a documentary, either. There are other traditions to which it might belong, avant-garde or otherwise--see the structural film collection for some examples. Though there are works in there that can plausibly be called documentary, too. It should go without saying that these distinctions are imperfect and often overlapping and sometimes arbitrary, and may differ in other contexts.

- of course many great documentaries have been compiled largely from "home movies", including one of my favourite films, As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty, but it is in the ways that it is not a home movie, the editorial transformation of perspective and structure, that make it something else.

- I wasn't disqualifying Treadwell as a documentarian necessarily--he has undoubtedly contributed to the tradition in some...important ways. Second graph was more a general point prompted by Ricardo Lopez, who obviously has less claim to the title. Although like Schreber's Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, his diaries are certainly a valuable document of madness while manifest.

iconogassed
Posts: 919
7281 Ratings
Your TCI: na
Joined: Sat Apr 26, 2008 4:41 pm

Re: Meta-documentaries/documentaries about documentaries

Post by iconogassed »

A decidedly amateur sketch of a sketch of a survey to follow.

re arbitrary, see djross's review of Debord's Sur le passage de quelques personnes à travers une assez courte unité de temps (1959), which quotes a passage from the film regarding the inevitable reduction in that "something else":

What makes most documentaries so easy to understand is the arbitrary limitation of their subject matter. They confine themselves to depicting fragmented social functions and their isolated products. In contrast, imagine the full complexity of a moment that is not resolved into a work, a moment whose development contains interrelated facts and values and whose meaning is not yet apparent. The subject matter of a documentary could be this kind of confused totality.
more:

The dictatorship of the proletariat is a relentless struggle, bloody and bloodless, violent and peaceful, military and economic, educative and administrative, against the forces and traditions of the old society. But in this country, it is once again the men of order who have rebelled and reinforced their power. They've been allowed to aggravate the grotesqueness of the ruling conditions according to their will, embellishing their system with the funereal ceremonies of the past. Years, like a single instant prolonged to this moment, come to an end. What was directly lived reappears frozen in the distance, engraved in the tastes and illusions of an era, and carried off with it.
...
There are now people who pride themselves on being authors of films, as others were of novels. Even more backward than the novelists, since they are unaware of the decomposition and exhaustion of individual expression in our time, unaware that the arts of passivity are over and done. They are sometimes praised for their sincerity since they dramatize with more personal depth the conventions of which their life consists. There is talk about "liberating the cinema." But what does it matter to us if one more art is liberated to the point that [Tom, Dick, or Harry] can use it to complacently express their servile sentiments? The only interesting venture is the liberation of everyday life, not only in a historical perspective, but for us, right now. This project implies the withering away of all the alienated forms of communication. The cinema must be destroyed, too.
The underground film scene in New York active at the same time as Debord & co. provides a contrast to the efforts of the Situationsts in terms of a philosophical cinema. It may as well have been Jonas Mekas's efforts referred to above, re liberation. As recounted by Robert Sklar in Movie-Made America:

"We want to remind [man] that there is such a thing as home," Mekas said, "where he can be, once in a while, alone and with himself and with a few that he loves close to him, and be with himself and his soul--that's the meaning of the home movie, the private visions of our movies. We want to surround this earth with our home movies."

Edison wanted to bring the movie image into the home; Mekas wanted to put the home into the moving image. In one sense avant-garde home movies were meant to be like everyone else's home movies: expressions of personal vision, of family events, of communal experience. From this perspective, no distinctions were to be drawn between one film and another, between professional and amateur, artist and hobbyist. Film indeed became the democratic medium, where all men and women with cameras in hand were not merely created equal, they remained equal. To make judgments among films was to make invidious comparisons among souls. You would not claim that your dreams are better, more imaginative, more artful than mine, or mine than yours: they are unique to our personal histories and inner compulsions, hence incomparable. The same with personal cinema: at one point in the 1960s, Andy Warhol put forward the view that every frame of film was just as good as any other frame.

For viewers, of course, the democratic theory of filmmaking often failed to work. They found some films fascinating, others boring; some skilfully assembled, others technically inept. Up to a point, anyone was permitted to show his or her films at the screening rooms and festivals of the New American Cinema movement or list them in catalogues published by the filmmakers' co-operatives. But distinctions were continually being made. One primary distinction that could not be suppressed was between amateur and artist. It was not merely a matter of some filmmakers preferring one designation and some insisting on the other; it was rooted in different ways of making films.

For amateurs, filmmaking could take several forms. It could be a means of recording life experience, fulfilling what Parker Tyler called, in his study on underground films, one of the "most neglected functions" of the film camera, "that of invading and recording realms which have to some degree remained taboo--too private, too shocking, too immoral for photographic reproduction." (Commercial sexploitation films in the early 1970s largely usurped this aspect of the underground filmmaker's role.) It could also be a means of organizing and experiencing life: filmmaking not only for the purpose of making images on celluloid, but as an opportunity to put one's dreams and desires into practice before the camera.
Maybe there wasn't much radical in that scene, in Debord's Marxian sense. Mekas's vision of a joyful and satisfying personal cinema had no quibble with servile sentiments. P. Adams Sitney, in Eyes Upside Down, his study of the American avant-garde cinema through the lens of Emerson and transcendentalism, emphasizes the absence of guilt, erotic disappointment, or regret in the many, many hours of Mekas's film diaries. His work was dense with allusions and embraced nostalgia, though it was nostalgia in flux, under constant reassessment. Sitney on Mekas's Walden (a/k/a Diaries, Notes, and Sketches), which covers approximately four years of Mekas's life in the '60s:

The chant about home movies is a fool's cogito. Home is the complex word in that formula; for when Mekas raises making intimate, amateur films to an existential principle, he is also confessing that making films of home is his mode of living. But what does home mean in this film? The second use of the word in Walden initiates a dramatic cut: After an opening invocation of spring that included a portrait of filmmakers “TONY CONRAD AND BEVERLY GRANT AT THEIR SECOND AVENUE HOME,” he shows himself in bed, unable to sleep; the title, “I THOUGHT OF HOME,” suddenly introduces an idyllic scene of boats on a pond (actually in Central Park), followed immediately by the title “WALDEN” and the first of the adolescent girls fondling a flower in the park. The editing equates home and Walden, suggesting they conjoin in a remote, inaccessible, or lost place, radiated by an idealized light of memory (and yet illustrating that it is a mere forty blocks away from his room in the Chelsea Hotel).
Mekas's comments on the origin of his 'diary' style:

There was a tree in Central Park that I wanted to [film]. I really liked that tree, and I kept filming at the very beginning—when I began. And then I look on the viewer and it’s not the same. It’s just a tree standing there: it’s boring.

And then I began filming the tree in little fragments: I fragmented; I condensed . . . and then you can see the wind in it; then you can see some energy in it. Then it became something else. Ah, that’s more interesting! That’s my tree! That’s the tree that I like, not just a tree that is naturalistic and boring, not what I saw in that tree when I was looking.

I’m trying to get to why I’m looking at what I’m filming, why I’m filming it, and how I’m filming. The style reflects what I feel. . . . I’m trying to understand myself, what I do. . . . I’m totally ignorant of what I’m doing.
Sitney goes on:

The three stages of the story of the tree—observation, fragmentation, and revelation—go to the core of Mekas’s enterprise. The effort to mold the cinematic material into some kind of conformity with experience initiates a dialectic of self-analysis. Starting off in ignorance of his own intentions, he transforms the image and its context to make it both more interesting and more his own. But it is the later editing phase that pushes him to understand why he has fixed upon the original object. Often the random juxtaposition of shots taken at different times and in different places on the original roll of film reveals unanticipated meaningfulness:

"From [John Cage] I learned that chance is one of the great editors. You shoot something one day, forget it, shoot something the next day and forget the details of that. . . . When you finally string it all together, you discover all sorts of connections. I thought at first that I should do more editing and not rely on chance. But I came to realize that, of course, there is no chance: whatever you film you make certain decisions, even when you don’t know what you do. The most essential, the most important editing takes place during the shooting as a result of these decisions."
Maybe there is a suggestion in all this that the subject of Mekas's documentaries is indeed something like that "confused totality". Primacy is placed on that which is unknowable in the moment and only legible in some later fainter form. To the extent that they are resolved into works, their unresolved qualities are essential to their nature.

Said mediation and fragmentation comes under attack in another film by Debord, Critique de la séparation (1961):

The events that occur in our individual existence as it is now organized, the events that really concern us and require our participation, generally merit nothing more than our indifference as distant and bored spectators. In contrast, the situations presented in artistic works are often attractive, situations that would merit our active participation. This is a paradox to reverse, to put back on its feet. This is what must be realized in practice. As for this idiotic spectacle of the filtered and fragmented past, full of sound and fury, it is not a question now of transforming or “adapting” it into another neatly ordered spectacle that would play the game of neatly ordered comprehension and participation. No. A coherent artistic expression expresses nothing but the coherence of the past, nothing but passivity.

It is necessary to destroy memory in art. To undermine the conventions of its communication. To demoralize its fans. What a task! As in a blurry drunken vision, the memory and language of the film fade out simultaneously. At the extreme, miserable subjectivity is reversed into a certain sort of objectivity: a documentation of the conditions of noncommunication.
Maybe Mekas's mammoth As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty offers something of a--characteristically flip--last word on la séparation:

Didn't all those French guys tell you how to read the images? Yes, they told you. So, please read these images and you’ll be able to tell everything about me.
Warhol's approach differed greatly from that of Mekas, who nevertheless hailed Warhol as a major force. Where Mekas fragmented his representations to recreate a more dynamically-felt picture of reality, i.e. not boring, Warhol fragmented nothing: a man sleeps for six hours, the Empire State Building stands for eight, i.e. boring. Since these films correspond to no previous notion of cinematic time, they cannot properly be said to reflect any previous notion of memory. Warhol's choice to screen the films at sixteen frames per second was seen as central to their meaning and importance: it's what convinced Stan Brakhage that they were not being taken in by a charlatan, that Warhol was indeed, to quote Sklar, "[impelling] the viewer to a new awareness of perceptual experience." To the topic of this thread (finally!), are they documentaries? I don't know. I guess I don't disagree in principle with Empire being included on 'greatest documentary' lists like it has.

Of course Warhol was no revolutionary. In a nice turn of phrase, Stephen Koch, in his very sympathetic Stargazer: Andy Warhol and His Films branded Warhol a "tycoon of passivity". The extent to which this supremely impactful passivity was virus or mirror is the great irresolvable tension.

As to how Debord's arguments might figure into our present situation, I will refrain from pontificating (you're welcome) and defer to Steven Shaviro and his 2013 essay "Acceleration Aesthetics" (collected in No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism)

Every supposedly "transgressive" act or representation expands the field of capital investment. It opens up new territories to appropriate, and jump-starts new processes from which to extract surplus value. What else could happen, at a time when leisure and enjoyment have themselves become forms of labour? Business and marketing practices today are increasingly focused upon novelty and innovation. More rapid turnover is one way to combat what Marx called the tendential fall of the rate of profit. Far from being subversive or oppositional, transgression is the actual motor of capitalist expansion today: the way that it renews itself in orgies of "creative destruction."

In other words, political economy today is driven by resonating loops of positive feedback. Finance operates according to a transgressive cultural logic of manic innovation and ever-ramifying metalevels of self-referential abstraction. This easily reaches the point where financial derivatives, for instance, float in a hyperspace of pure contingency, free of indexical relation, as Elie Ayache shows, to any “underlying” whatsoever. At the same time that it floats off into digital abstraction, however, neoliberalism also operates directly on our bodies. Data are extracted from everything that we feel and think and do. These data are appropriated and consolidated, and then packaged and sold back to us.
Debord, again, finally:

It must be admitted that none of this is very clear. It is a completely typical drunken monologue, with its incomprehensible allusions and tiresome delivery. With its vain phrases that do not await response and its overbearing explanations. And its silences.

Post Reply