Away from Copying: The Art of Documentary Practice

Michael Renov

'I think of my films as documentaries. I never fantasize. I have never invented something just for the sake of making an interesting image. I am always struggling to get an equivalent on film to what I actually see'. Stan Brakhage.

The late Stan Brakhage is considered by many to be America's premiere avant-garde film-maker with a career spanning 50 years and more than 100 films. One of his first films, Wonder Ring (1955), was a short work commissioned by artist Joseph Cornell who wished to have a filmic memento made of New York's Third Avenue El before its destruction. It is a luminous work, silent, filled with shimmering images that play at the edges of abstraction. Some of these dancing images are reflections captured from the imperfect window glass of the moving car, rippling distortions attracting the eye of the film-maker, neither graphically produced nor optically printed on film. These images are the product of Brakhage's visual fascination, offered up to the viewer as the equivalent of what he sees. It is what we ourselves might have seen had we been there and had we been so attentive.

Critic P. Adams Sitney has called such works as Wonder Ring lyrical films': 'The lyrical film postulates the filmmaker behind the camera as the first-person protagonist of the film. The images of the film are what he sees, filmed in such a way that we never forget his presence and we know how he is reacting to his vision.' The subject matter of such a film as Wonder Ring is the visible world – the stuff of documentary – enlivened by the eye and mind of the film-maker, a dialectical play of subject and object. Although the documentary tradition has tended to repress the emphasis on the subjectivity of the maker in favour of the world on the other side of the lens, the non-fiction film is always the result of an encounter between the two.

Much the same could be said of photography which demonstrated its capacity for the literal transcription of reality as early as 1839. A gesture, a face, an event could now be rescued from time's passage; the photograph delivered an incontestable existential warrant, bearing the physical traces of the light beams that once touched the object itself. The photograph, like its progeny the documentary film, bears witness. But witness to what? To history, no doubt, as long as we trust the image's indexicality, its physical connectedness to the referent, not so easy to do in this digital age. But Roland Barthes for one has argued otherwise. 'I would ... say that the photographer bears witness essentially to his own subjectivity, the way in which he establishes himself as a subject faced with an object.' For Barthes, every photograph is a fabulous relic of pastness but it is, even before that, a physical expression of a perceiving self. Subject trumps object.

As a paradigm for documentary film-maker and historical world, I prefer the notion of the encounter, a dialogue between seer and seen, the subjectivity of the maker facing the objecthood of the world. Most often in the documentary tradition, the world rather than the filtering sensibility has taken precedence. But there is nothing inherent to the documentary endeavour that requires that this be so. Perhaps this is the way to describe the simultaneous convergence and disparity between the work of the documentary practitioner and that of the contemporary artist faced with a world overflowing with human drama and contingency. The documentary film-maker has generally opted for emphasizing the social field, the call to arms or public enlightenment, over the lens that filters and focalizes that field. In a literary context, the late-sixteenth-century essayist Michel de Montaigne termed this dialectic between seer and seen 'the measure of sight' versus 'the measure of things.' According to this calculus, the visionary artist opts for interrogating vision itself while the documentarist sets his sights on the world around him and on the need to transform it through his interventions. But I would stress the point that these tendencies have always been emphases along a dynamic continuum rather than defining differences.

That is why I began with reference to the work of a self-proclaimed visionary such as Stan Brakhage or American avant-gardist Peter Hutton who has produced a series of New York Portraits which show us a city filled with sky, clouds and changing light conditions. It is a silent city seen through the eyes of a former painter and merchant seaman whose inclination is to look skyward. Hutton produces portraits attuned more to perceptual thresholds and tantalizing visual patterns than to teeming city streets. New York Portrait, Part III (1990) is a city symphony cut to the measure of Hutton's visual imagination, presented as a series of vignettes which document the city, the film-maker's sensibility and the capabilities of Kodak's Tri-X film stock which Hutton has used almost exclusively for a quarter of a century.

But why would I choose to begin a discussion of innovations in documentary film-making with references to the work of film-makers outside the documentary canon? In tracing some of the important new directions that have evolved within the realm of documentary film-making in the past two decades, it seems to me crucial to begin by establishing both a conceptual grounding for such innovation as well as a sense of its historical antecedents. I would argue that there has been an explosion of contemporary work in which film- and video makers have explored the historical world from diverse perspectives, employing a range of methods and approaches. These artists are drawn to the world 'out there' as documentarists have since the Lumières but shaped and informed by the world 'in here,' by their personal experience, cultural and sexual identities, their political and aesthetic engagements. There is a new balance being struck between subject and object and the result is a reinvention of documentary practice. In this regard, I will make reference to the uses of personal voice and performance in Marlon Riggs' Tongues Untied (1989) and Sadie Benning's It Wasn't Love (1992), the combining of live action and animation in Jonathan Hodgson's Feeling My Way (1997), the reinscription of documentary temporality in Peter Forgacs' The Maelstrom (1997), the revision of the city symphony in Jem Cohen's Lost Book Found (1995) and the movement beyond traditional...