Issue 7: Summer 2011
The Thin Line Between Documentary and Fiction Part One
David Brancaleone
What follows is the first part of an essay whic h Experimental Conversations is publishing in three sections. Parts II and III will appear over the next two issues.
"His own idea of cinema... to film the world just as it is. The way it was at the beginning, before it became something to do with gunshots." You might think these words are from a Godard film or interview. Actually, they are spoken by the narrator of Davide Ferrario's After Midnight (Dopo Mezzanotte, 2002). But the whole question of early cinema being a unique moment in film history when everything was still possible, the inclusion of documentary, the immediacy of language, the spontaneity of street scenes... is a growing contemporary preoccupation, with roots in what Badiou has called "a passion for the real".
Let's begin with the films: Davide Ferrario's After Midnight, Agnés Varda's Gleaners and I (Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, 2000), Simone Bitton's Wall (2004), Jael Bartana's Summer Camp (2007), Ari Folman's Waltz with Bashir (2009) and Gideon Koppel's Sleeping Furiously (2009) all raise questions about genre, habitual classifications, classical cinema and alternatives to it.
After Midnight is set in the Turin Museum of Cinema. Night watchman Martino meets Amanda whom he has seen (and even filmed in black and white with his antiquated relic of a windup cine-camera) but only from a safe distance. She works in a takeaway, selling hamburgers and fries. Her boyfriend is an amiable car thief, good looking and smart. For the umpteenth time, she tries to leave five minutes early to catch the last bus, but her boss won't let her. This time, though, she loses her temper. She is exasperated; she spills hot oil over him and runs away. She sees Martino, an anonymous regular customer, who agrees she can hide in the cinema museum where he works nights. He lets her into his personal world of the moving image, populated only by installations of former film sets and displays of memorabilia such as a bra designed by Howard Hawks for his lead actress who, in the event, refused to wear it. The camera frames a famous photograph of a screen goddess, lying naked on red velvet; Amanda sees all around her a fascinating new world of artifice, including its machinery behind the scenes, as her story brings her into the space of the cinema archive (the building hordes film projectors, editing rooms, shelves stacked high with thousands of reels of cinema history). Of course, she is attracted to Martino and a love triangle forms between herself, Martino and the car thief boyfriend. Martino cites another love triangle, in a Nouvelle Vague film by François Truffaut, Jules et Jim (1962), explaining to the rest of the triangle that the characters will die. In the end, it is only the car thief who dies in an accidental shooting. His last view of the world is of a giant, eternal Silvio Berlusconi smiling at him from the side of a van, before Martino and Amanda get together, and he quits his job, crossing the threshold from the silent world of the cinema museum into the messy world of twenty-first century Turin.
After Midnight
Ferrario has a background in writing, film criticism and documentary films as well as, in recent years, making features. After Midnight works on several levels: a simple love story but somehow one that blurs the boundaries between the tangible and real, between filmic events and what happens off screen. There are two moments in the film when Italian Neorealism – never cited directly or even indirectly – comes to prominence. In the first, set in a working class diner on the periphery of Turin, Martino’s cousin tries to explain to him how he thinks Martino relates to the world. As he speaks, the distant drone of the everyday and the noise of television, are barely audible but the glimmer of the TV screen is reflected in Maurizio’s eyes, fixed distractedly off screen, in our direction; however, Maurizio’s real attention is focused on his cousin. The actor Silvio Orlando lends his Neapolitan voice to a voiceover narration as an all-knowing author figure, explaining that:
“Maurizio, Martino’s cousin, prefers to read the Sports Page which, when you think about it, is just another type of horoscope. Maurizio is fond of his cousin, despite certain differences of opinion and personality."
Maurizio:"You’re always with this little machine. This museum piece. You know, last night I watched a film, you know, ehm, Monica Bellucci was present, those legs, feline they were. She was walking towards me like this. It’s like, if you had this camera right here, if you blindfolded yourself and put yourself in front of the screen – oh I know you don’t like me handling it, so actually let me put it back right here, sorry – the camera would crack up, look."
Narrator: "You know, actually, Martino couldn’t care less about cinema and movie stars. He has his own idea of cinema, inspired directly by the Lumiére Brothers, to film the world… just as it is. The way it was at the beginning, before it became something to do with gunshots. ”
Then, while Orlando is making this observation about the Lumiére Brothers, a montage of their famous footage of a railway platform appears on screen, followed by Martino filming a modern train, just like them. Then he is seen in an editing suite. These shots are intercut with short black and white images from his shooting. The whole process takes place while the commentary binds together film and film-within-the-film, closely interlinking the plot with the plot of the history of cinema. Something is left unsaid in this overt recognition of origin which works through indirect and direct citation, with clips from cinema’s very beginnings, the Lumiére Brothers, Giovanni Pastrone’s Il Fuoco (1915), Buster Keaton’s gags from One Week (1920) and The Scarecrow (1920). The clips are woven into the story, reclaimed for our present, making them part of it. The result is an ongoing dialogue with the past; one which interacts with it filmically, that is to say, through visual language, rather than only through script and characters’ lines.
How to explain the paradox of documentary traces in Italian fiction? And why is it that an Italian director can ignore Italian cinema, except for its origins? Let us re-read Orlando’s words addressed to the audience, in his narrative commentary: “his own idea of cinema […] to film the world just as it is. The way it was at the beginning, before it became something to do with gunshots”. Actually, this idea matches Godard’s thesis in the six hour long Histoire(s) du cinéma (1988-98), whether in book form, in DVD format or as a soundtrack released separately on CD. Apart from its length, Histoire(s) took twenty years to make and has been discussed in public on every opportunity by Godard, many of whose other films have been made in a matter of weeks. Because it is Godard, after all, who puts the whole question of the history of cinema back on the table, as a question and an indictment of cinema’s lack of commitment to the real; Godard who celebrates early cinema for not being only an earlier phase of what became the Hollywood star and studio mogul system of power, but a unique moment in film history when everything was possible – despite all the technical limitations of the time.
After Midnight
After Midnight includes so many aspects of post-war Italian film, for example, in its techniques and choices in casting, sometimes in the lighting, in the dialogues, the use of everyday dialect and language, the acting even, the spontaneity of the street scenes, the cinematography done with video and on the cheap, the inclusion of documentary, the immediacy of the language which has not been dubbed, the background noise. Martino, in answer to Amanda’s question about red neon numbers appearing around the roof of the building which houses the cinema museum, explains that these numbers are the Fibonacci sequence of numbers. Fibonacci was an Italian mathematician who found that a number is the sum of the previous two in his sequence. Martino goes on to say that to him, the existence of Fibonacci’s numerical sequence is proof that the world adds up; it means something after all. It sounds like a statement of intent. The observation is picked up later on, but by the narrator, not by Martino. A black and white shot of the river, part of Martino’s film within the film, filmed using Martino’s 16mm windup-camera, leads into the southern voice of the narrator Silvio Orlando (who stands in for the director and writer Ferrario), musing: “if, as Fibonacci’s numbers suggest, the world has any sense, right now, Martino really doesn’t understand what that sense might be. But films are not life and it is necessary to make a choice. He has to choose between life and film.”
This statement comes at a hinge in the story, a key moment; the point when the character is faced with a choice; whether to remain uncommitted, within the boundaries of his safe life, populated by history and fiction, in a living archive, or whether to leave that safety and engage, interact with another human being in the flesh, and face the uncertainties of not knowing how the real-life plot will go.
Later on in the film, we meet Martino’s cousin again in the same working class diner. Maurizio is not a cliché movie star. Like Martino and Amanda, he looks more like a character in a Neorealist film, say, the male protagonists in Roberto Rossellini’s Stromboli (1949) or Vittorio De Sica’s Bicycle Thieves (Ladri de biciclette, 1948) or Umberto D (1952). Neither Martino nor Maurizio speak in a northern accent. Like Martino, he also belongs to Turin’s Italian immigrant population from the South which moved there in the 1960s to find work in Fiat or one of the satellite factories of what is known as the ‘Industrial Triangle’. Maurizio’s words do not sound like rehearsed lines, instead, you get the impression that here is someone who is trying to say something about a subject that he would not normally think about, let alone talk about and stumbles to find the right words. What is more, the words of the script (some of which I have translated directly below) really sound like ordinary speech. It costs Maurizio the character a lot of effort to speak in this way, as it would, because he is trying to explain something which is alien to his habitual conversation. In listening to him speaking, you witness how he struggles and how even his syntax is clumsy, but ultimately, effective. He is able to speak of manipulation in his own way. After all, as the voiceover has told us, Maurizio feels more comfortable talking sport or remarking on the legs of Monica Bellucci. But in this scene he is talking film aesthetics which makes his performance and its association to Neorealism all the more striking:
“Because me, I hate films. Films show you a side of reality which just is not what you might think of that real side that really is like that. Practically speaking, they show it to you the way they want you to see it. Yes, it is a real side of things, but not just the way it is. They dress it up and dress it up again, so that when you see that thing, you see it the way they want you to see it. Know what I mean?’”
After Midnight
In the plot, these two moments are hinges for the reflection that rescues Martino so that he can cross the threshold between the two worlds, one of recording the world, the other living in the world. The commentator had already answered Maurizio’s point in the previous scene. Martino does not do make believe. He does documentary, which requires from him an effort to set things up so a s to let the world present itself.
Agnés Varda was in Ireland for the 22nd Cork French Film Festival (6th-13 March 2011), giving master classes and presenting a retrospective of some of her films, shorts and features. One of the surviving Nouvelle Vague film-makers, she made Cléo from 5 to 7 (Cleo de 5 a 7, 1962), a day-in-the-life of a pop star who does not know she has cancer, in which Paris is filmed as it is, adopting documentary-style techniques for a feature film, something her friends on the Left and Right Bank were also doing at the time. Varda has recently made her self-portrait, The Beaches of Agnès (Les Plages d'Agnès, 2009) which won the best Documentary César Award, in which scenes from her films are montaged with photography and new footage, and The Gleaners and I and its follow-up, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse...deux ans aprés (2002).
Back in 1968, Varda pointed out in a joint interview with Godard: “I don’t believe in the term ‘art film' ” (Varda in Sterritt, 1998, 17). Forty years ago, that distinction that rules what Rhodie calls “classic” cinema, has always translated into the fact that Hollywood’s commercial outlets will not show certain films, typically European ones, by directors who are not mainstream, regardless of how much they are contributing to film as an art form.
In The Gleaners and I, Varda appears as herself, as she travels from place to place, from the countryside to Paris and to small towns, from inner city to rural France. Everywhere she goes she meets and speaks to scavengers, people who live on scraps of food, on odds and ends found in skips in the street. She points the movie camera where it is rarely pointed. There is no fictional plot, but there is a sequence, a frame of reference (beginning with the iconography of gleaners in nineteenth century art). But in the film, Varda’s life experience comes into play as she listens to what people have to say. The respondents are faced with a human being who speaks with them, not just with an optical lens ‘capturing’ their physical appearance, their clothes and features, the sound of their voices, their gestures. The more she moves around seeking and looking, the more she finds unexpected realities in the world around us. She shows that you do not have to go on a virtual journey to the North or South Pole with David Attenborough to make extraordinary encounters. The follow-up, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse...deux ans aprés, also feature length, is more than a sequel. It acknowledges the time of film-making as producing a filmic event and by engaging in dialogue with the same people two years on. It creates a time-frame of two years, a real and filmic before and after; and a quality of listening which allows the people interviewed the freedom to respond, without being bombarded by questions or rebuttals, but also attaches significance to the passage of time and the sifting of memory, even in a passing remark, which find a place on the screen, however fleeting.
The Gleaners and I
She meets a young man outside a large supermarket in Paris who is scavenging in the skips in a methodical way, salvaging packaged food that has been thrown away and filling his rucksack. He explains that there is enough food to keep him alive. The camera follows him to the building where he lives. It then transpires that he is unemployed, though he is highly educated and well spoken, and chooses to work for free teaching black immigrants French and sharing a living-space with them. The sequel retraces the same journey, finding the same people who are interviewed again, including the French teacher still working with the immigrants out of personal conviction. He is not a character. There is no construction nor do he or the other individuals seek out Varda. As for her, the interviews are a lesson in genuine participation, for they do not patronise people. What is experimental is that Varda actually listens. In the artworld much is written about participation and audience, but mostly it sounds hollow when you compare declared intentions with artefacts. By comparison, in The Gleaners and I, people are given the space and time to talk. There are few questions and much empathy. It is the opposite of a spectacle; no voyeurism, only a sense of mutual understanding. It is she who personally engages with the people with whom the film crew stop to talk. Varda steps out of her role as film-maker into that of interlocutor and does so without plugging away at the theme, without hounding people. These films expose poverty with matter-of-factness, but also, tellingly, the dogged resistance against it. The people she meets emerge with their own dignity, outside mainstream perceptions of the edges of society, the usual portrayals of corporate media with which we are all familiar.
Simone Bitton’s Wall (2004) can also be classed as a somewhat unusual documentary and one which, like Varda’s films, also raises questions about the genre, in practice, extending its scope. Like Varda, Bitton approaches people and places with a similar softness or discretion. There is no pursuit here either: the camera lingers, takes in the horizon, allows dead time where there is no dialogue, as in an Antonioni film, to have its time on the screen, something impossible on television, as she notes herself in conversation with Elia Suleiman the Palestinian filmmaker (“Simone Bitton in Conversation with Elia Suleiman”, 2004). Nothing could be further removed from Michael Moore’s documentaries which drive home a point relentlessly, where the evidence is foregrounded, and emphasised by Moore’s intervention as authoritative figure who engages with the audience directly. And very different also from Baron Cohen’s Borat (2006) which uses black comedy and sets up extreme situations to confront the people who agree to be interviewed and filmed with their views and mirrors them back, looking larger and uglier on screen. The opening words which accompany a very long shot in Wall of a built section of the new Israeli wall dividing Israel from Palestinian territory, record a conversation between the film-maker Simone Bitton and Israeli children:
“You are coming here to play? We are just wandering. What was here before? I don’t know. Don’t film me! What’s this? It’s the wall. What for? They shoot Arabs from here. No Arabs shoot at us. So we hide behind the wall. Who shoots at whom? There’s an Arab village here. Beit Jala. We ran away. We thought you were Arabs. We saw the camera and thought it was a weapon. That stick. It looks like a weapon. But you came back. We saw who you are. Who are we? Jews, what a question”
Summer Camp
The film opens with these voices of children and their unmediated views. Bitton, however, presses them to consider their point of view and questions their assumptions of her identity. The opening sequence lasts over three minutes. As the children respond to her questions, the camera moves across in a tracking shot that films a long section of the Wall which is decorated with all kinds of inventive murals. Because the camera lingers, as in an art gallery, the viewer is given the time to relate to the bright coloured paintings on the hard grey concrete surface of the Wall and consider the clash between the creative freedom of street art and the imposition of segregation which the Wall signifies. Even if the film consisted only of those first three and a half minutes, one would have seen the comparison between the freedom of colour and shape on the surface and the forced confinement or containment of the Wall on which the paintings were made.
An interview with the Israeli Chief of Defence, in which he tells Bitton that “the seam” is the line which now divides the Israelis from the Palestinians and that it was built to ensure defence of Israeli citizens, is spliced with natural sound, voices, machines, diggers, traffic, humming, lathes, while Bitton asks few questions, letting the images tell their story. Then the sound of longing, sensuous, Arabic music comments on the sight of the large modular sections of wall being slotted into line, like building bricks in a child’s toy Lego set. The craning into position in real time is filmed and is witnessed as it unfolds before filmmakers and viewers alike. You could be on any construction site, except that this one is filmed at the very moment in which it is segregating Arabs from Jews in the Palestinian territories.
Several minutes of footage gradually track the closing off of the sky and the landscape, when the foreground blanks out the geography of place. It becomes segregation. There is no need for too many words, since Bitton finds the way to say more with the moving image, but exceeds the rules of documentary in the length of sequences, thus reaching the symbolic, the poetic level of metonymn. The people are given back their voices to say how they understand what was at the time the latest development in the war in Palestine: the construction of a high concrete fence forcibly dividing the land, and without the consent of one of the two sides whose land it is. The film was made during the construction which adds to thinking about it as filming a dynamic not yet completed, less of a representation, more of a presentation of a new situation, or the latest development of an existing situation; the conflict, the war between two people while the world looks on. The Wall increases existing division between Israelis and Palestinians with an added exclusion solidified into a three-dimensional obstacle.
More than a gesture, the Wall is an ontological and symbolic denial of space. The film is a presentation of this denial, which avoids rhetoric, eschews long perorations; simply a walk around the sites open to filming and a conversation with those on both sides of the new fence under construction. You cannot ignore it. It looks like it is there to stay. You can see and hear the rumbling Caterpillars, the sounds of footsteps of the workers, see the cables, the sensors, the rolls of barbed wire unfurl along the perimeter. In the background, the rolling landscape with gentle hills, and a white scar winding its way through the parched earth where the ground is being prepared for the engineering work. Ironically, Arabs are employed on the site as builders. The images tell the story as much, if not more than the few words of the conversations with such a variety of people from both sides. The filming transports you into that space, as if you yourself lived there and were witnessing this new reality, what it would be like to live day in, day out with this new form of segregation imposed on you and what it is like now to queue up for hours waiting to get through the newly set up controls to go to your job on the other side, or to risk your life climbing through without a pass.
Wall avoids putting Bitton’s outlook into words. Her views are only articulated in an interview with Elia Suleiman, accompanying the film. That is when you hear Bitton saying to Suleiman, a Palestinian film-maker who makes fiction:
“Spoliating the lands, encaging the Palestinians, not letting them have a state. It brings the Jews back to the ghetto. Not as a metaphor; in reality. The West has a great responsibility in all this. They have clapped, accepted what the Israeli government has done. This Wall. It just has to be filmed”.
She continues: “Just looked at. It is to be watched. People see so many films, still they don’t understand. If we want to be understood, in fiction, in documentary, it will not work this way. I cannot go back talking about the Middle East.”
Bitton describes herself as part-Jewish, part-Palestinian, though the 'New York Times' review of her film was sceptical, treating her film with ironic distance (the subtext, the lingering unasked question in the paper is ‘how could she?’). Bitton came from a background of television to film, as the Palestinian film-maker says in conversation with her, which, he goes on to say, explains that she was faced with the cinematic freedoms that television cannot provide, for example, relying on imagery more than on words, and changing her habitual technique of fast cutting to doing long takes. Where a television documentary would have provided much more information, her film shows no figures, no maps, no information, no indication of what side of the wall she is filming from. This prompts Suleiman to ask the question as to why she has opted for a documentary at all, instead of a fiction. Her response is that all the classical fictions from Israel and Palestine with a linear story seem false. Suleiman draws attention to the opening shot which achieves an objecthood of sorts; he calls it: “the weight of the cement. The weight of time.” What strikes him are the close-ups of people trying to get through, passing through the cracks, which say so much, not only of suffering, but directly, in the imagery of hands, fingers, just in the way it is composed: “That dance of death was there, at the same time, [there is] an animation to it” he says.
Wall is immediate, by comparison with The Green Line, a work by the Mexican artist Francis Alÿs, no more than a simple gesture. It features a video documenting the artist trying to walk the Green Line, an invisible division on the ground (but marked on the geo-political map) between Israel and Occupied Palestinian territories. Alÿs performs the division through his physical presence, walking the arbitrary geography of Israeli politics.
By comparison with Alÿs’s symbolic one-off gesture, which conveys meaning by enlisting the artist’s own body in performing the invisible boundary line, Yael Bartana’s video Summer Camp (2007) documents the 4th summer camp in July 2006 organised by the “Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions” (ICAHD). Israelis, Palestinians and others responded to an advertisement to build a house on the site of the demolished village of Anta, destroyed by the Israeli occupation army in 2005. The film records what actually happened. The viewing context is key here, since the video was shown in the gallery space of the artworld’s biggest art exhibition, the international art event held every five years in Germany, Documenta XII. Summer Camp was screened in a structure which was a perfect replica of the Assembly Hall of the State of Israel in the first years in the 1940s when Israel considered itself a country with Socialist leanings. Bartana played Jewish songs from the 1930s and 1940s which express the desire to construct a homeland, a nation state, a desire which clashes with the reality of Israel today, demonstrated by Bartana’s art documentary, in which Palestinian dwellings are destroyed, as part of Israel’s politics of oppression. The film tracks the building of a two-storey dwelling on land without permission from the Israeli authorities, and its bulldozing soon after. The ‘what if’ gesture (if you try to build, you can be sure that they will destroy) produces immediate results, with no need for sound, no commentary, other than the 1940s song to accompany the demolition. It criticises the status quo by witnessing its consequences. Slavoj Žižek rephrases the last sentence in Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to read: “What one should not speak about, thereof one cannot remain silent”. As he explains, “if you want to speak about a social system, you cannot remain silent about its repressed excess. The point is not to tell the whole Truth but, precisely, to append to the (official) Whole the uneasy supplement which denounces its falsity” (Žižek, 168).
Waltz With Bashir
Ari Folman is also an Israeli whose Waltz with Bashir (2009) is an animation, but also very much a documentary as we shall see. His film is based on interviews with real people, former soldiers, conscripts who were in his same tank battalion, serving in Lebanon in 1982. In an accompanying interview, Folman presents the film as if it belonged to a genre, in terms of American fiction, citing Faulkner’s novel Heart of Darkness and the crazy meaninglessness of war, as in Vietnam, and referencing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979). But this Postmodern approach which claimed that the world is chaotic, so that any genuine attempt at analysis does not make sense, for there are no longer metanarratives, no history, which leads to the conclusion that there can be no explanation (thus appealing to chaos theory and problematics theory in maths), is disingenuous in relation to what emerges from Folman’s film. It forms one long journey of discovery, reaching out into the past of suppressed memory for the missing elements, Folman’s recollection and reliving of the trauma of witnessing the slaughter of Muslims by Christians in a refugee camp, without intervening. Something similar happened in Bosnia Herzogovina in the 1990s, with the Dutch Army serving as UN peace keeping troops standing by while a massacre was taking place under their eyes.
Waltz with Bashir records through animation how Folman slowly relived his traumatic experience shut out except for memory flashbacks, by seeking out other veterans of the war in Lebanon. Perhaps the film is the result of Rotavision which can transform film footage into animation with flat colours and crisp black outlines, as if you were looking at a stylised cartoon version of live action. Be that as it may, even if this was the process to achieve the animation, the question is why Folman did not opt to do a documentary of real people. As the film progresses, after the opening dream sequence, in which another veteran from the war recalls his recurring nightmare of twenty-four dogs racing through the streets towards his apartment, when the scene changes to an interior bar scene in a smoke filled room, you get the sense that although the characters seem to be animated drawings, there is something about the setting, the long shots, the tracking, the close-ups, the shot/reverse shots that strengthen the impression that the drawings serve as masks to mediate the real, partly concealing or rendering as fiction the actual figures, the real people. Their identity is marked by signs in English and Hebrew on the screen, just as when in a news documentary consisting of interviews, the identity of the interviewee appears in the same frame. The point is, however, clarified by the last few minutes of the film, in which the animation and spoken commentary of Folman and others accompany the recollection of the slaughter by the Christian Falangists of the Arabs in the refugee camp. In those last minutes, after the depiction of violence, the animated drawings are replaced by documentary footage of 1982, showing dead bodies of children and of adults killed in the camps, shots of a crowd of mourning women mad with pain and screaming in the streets of Lebanon. That is when you realise that the only way Folman could have made this film was to create a distance between the reality of the viewer and the reality of the slaughter that he himself had suppressed from his mind for twenty years. Only now, in the last few minutes of the film, is it possible, to show the live footage and for the viewer to watch and not leave. It is through the interruption of the film spectacle, or Brechtian distanciation, that Folman succeeds and raises interesting questions about realism.
Waltz With Bashir
Like Varda, Gideon Koppel was also in Ireland recently, in Limerick, where he came to a screening of his Sleeping Furiously (2009), about the village in which he grew up in Mid Wales. Afterwards, he agreed to answer questions. Although the film came across as a documentary, he spoke of it, the story and the people, as if it were a fictional account and they fictional characters. I mentioned French film-making and Agnès Varda’s The Gleaners and I, which, it turned out, is a strong point of reference for him.
A library van takes books round the village in Mid Wales providing the film with its continuity and giving a narrative structure to life in a small village, far away from the city. There is a personal dimension, the tenderness of a family portrait: his mother lives in the village and his father’s grave is filmed with his mother tending it; the people in the village appear in their meeting with the local council to discuss the imminent closure of the school which was originally founded by the people, but, they were told, has too few students to stay open; as well as other aspects of the community’s life. The pace of the film and the editing is leisurely, not unlike Simone Bitton’s Wall. It translates into the apparent ease with which scenes seem to unfold in their own time. Entertaining an audience is not a consideration: you watch and listen to life as it unfolds day by day. I thought for a moment of Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood and the quaint, funny characterisations. Well, perhaps in every village there are still echoes of the kind of closed life Thomas was poking fun at, but only a faint one, compared to the days when Baptist and Presbyterian communities were strong in Wales over seventy years ago. In this regard, a telling scene is an almost empty church (no more than five people sitting in the dark pews). Long gone are the days when individuals could be ostracised for years by the community for not attending Chapel, with all the consequences that entailed (as happened in the living memory of an elderly inhabitant of Llandeilo, near Carmarthen).
What about the social conditions in this outpost of the United Kingdom, since Wales seems not to have recovered from the days when Margaret Thatcher totally destroyed its economy overnight, closing down all the coal mines? What about the inverse phenomenon, the repopulation of Wales by English people moving into the country? For Koppel, all this was up to the viewer. As far as he is concerned, there is no such agenda. Elements, perhaps, that is, if you could notice them; if you chose to; if you were familiar with the background. The way he spoke of the film made it his subjective viewing experience and one which he was unwilling to generalise. This is a markedly different Wales for anyone who has lived there and is familiar with the area, aware of the problems of young people who must leave to get work elsewhere, and familiar with the difficulties of shrinking communities. The reality of life in Wales today confronts one with a less nostalgic side than the one explored by someone who left Wales and is looking back on the place of childhood and the family home.
Likewise, given that Sleeping Furiously was made only recently, it is significant that Koppel rejects the categorisation of documentary, drawing attention instead to aspects which had required setting up situations, such as a scene in a school, in which the teacher’s hands baking a cake are the only part of her to appear in the film, or where a music teacher playing an instrument and filmed while rehearsing is not really the teacher, but a film substitute. Nanni Moretti was mentioned. Moretti’s approach, ever since his first film, Ecce Bombo (1978) has always been to put himself as author in the picture, claiming legitimacy as author, as Italian Everyman who witnesses his own life in the context of the life of Italy, his country, as well as subject within the film, and thus challenging received ideas about autobiography, documentary and fiction and crossing the boundaries these dictate. This can be said, to give just one example, of Moretti’s Caro Diario (1994). Come to think of it, I can see certain analogies.
To Be Continued...
David Brancaleone lectures in social art history and theory on the undergraduate courses and critical theory on the new MA in social art practice in the environment, in the Limerick School of Art and Design, LIT. He was short listed in 2008 for the Shannon Consortium Teaching Excellence Award, which he won in 2011. He studied History of Art at La Sapienza, Rome University. In 2002, he earned his doctorate in Combined Historical Studies at the Warburg Institute. David has worked as a researcher for Christie's in the National Archives, Kew, on the Sotheby's MA course, and as Deputy Directory of the Central Registry of Information on WWII Looted Art, after being a Design Manager in publishing, and winning the Duke of Edinburgh Award for Educational Publishing in 1992. A contributor to Circa magazine, Enclave Review, Vertigo, with an extended article on the films of Jean-Luc Godard, and on documentary and cinema of poetry for Experimental Conversations, he has also published a translation of a Renaissance Italian text on printing, a critical edition of a medieval work by Raymond Lull, and has given several conference papers on the philosophy and aesthetics of Alain Badiou, published articles on the commodification of education, on World War II looted art, and is currently researching a book on aesthetics and politics.