“Documentary
calls for specific techniques to give cinematic embodiment to lived encounter
and historical events, experience and reflection, research and argumentation...
It calls for an ethics of responsibility, an aesthetics of film form, and a
politics of representation.” (Bill Nichols)
Do you agree with this description
of documentary film practice?
Describe the “specific techniques”
deployed by Alain Resnais in Night and
Fog and Chris Marker in La Jetee
to achieve their cinematic purposes. How have these film-makers brought
together their sense of ethics, film form and politics to create these rich
works of cinema?
Documentary is a
blend of technique and aesthetics in an attempt to create a reflection of
reality. Technique creates an impression of reality whereas it is actually a
mere replica of it created through a “form of discourse fabricating its
effects, impressions and point of view”1. This tampering with
reality automatically leads to questioning whether it is the right thing to do.
The technique used in a film is also linked with the director’s own sense of
right and wrong as he would not wish to create a film that he himself feels
goes against his moral sense. It is,
thus, extremely difficult to separate the aspects of documentary into the
essentials of ethics, film-form and politics as they are so intricately
interlinked and interwoven.
“You photograph
the natural life, but you also, by your own juxtaposition of detail, create an
interpretation of it.”2 Thus writes Grierson, on the topic of
documentary cinema. He also writes that this “creative intention” is manifested
in several methods used by the film maker. A film maker may emphasise on the
individual, like Flaherty in Nanook and Chris Marker in La Jetee or on a section of the masses, as in Fredrick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies and Alain Resnais in Night and Fog .
In Night and Fog, Resnais uses what is described as the direct address style. There is a narrative voice, powerful in its oratory skills, using a highly rhetorical language. It evokes in the audience a sense of sobriety and doom with its almost monotonous but highly evocative and expressive eloquence. It is this voice that lets the audience know about the specifics of the inhuman conditions of the concentration camps. Towards the beginning, it rings with sarcasm as it speaks of the construction of the concentration camps: “A concentration camp is built like, a stadium or a big hotel. Men in the field survey the land. You need contractors, estimates, competitive bids. A steam shovel hangs motionless from a factory rig. And no doubt a bribe or two.”3 Sympathy is evoked at every turn for the victims of oppression by the Kapo and the S.S. At the end of the documentary the narrator says “Nine million dead haunt this landscape. Who is on the lookout from this strange tower to warn us of the coming of new executioners? Are their faces really different from our own?”4These questions bring out the relevance of the documentary even in the world of today, and not just as a depiction of a past atrocity. The background music also lilts in a peculiar way, building an appropriate atmosphere for the visuals of violence and death. However, it does not overpower or overwhelm the visuals or the narrative.
The visuals in the film vividly support the audio with their starkness. The film consists of a mixture of stock footage and contemporary shots which portray with the dire conditions in the Nazi concentration camps and the despicable use of the gas chambers. The vivid shots of death and decay as well as humiliation add a strong support to the voice which decries the acts of violence committed by the Nazi. There is a switch between coloured and black-and- white images to depict the past and the present, respectively. The present depiction of the abandoned concentration camps echoes a false sense of peace which is almost eerie. The bare infrastructure of the camps with their barbed wire fencing, their cramped wooden berths and the hospital building is juxtaposed with horrific shots of dead bodies hanging on the fence and emaciated people dying in their hospital beds with their eyes bulging open or shivering from disease. This switching back and forth between the past and the present adds to the sense of terror of the past images because of their drastic difference from the deceptive silence and apparent harmlessness of the present landscape and infrastructure.
In “An Introduction to the Art
and Politics of Representation of Film”, Professor Bob Nowlan writes “Documentary
film makers decide: what to include and
what to exclude in what they show us, from what distances and what angles, for what
durations of time, in what Order, through what kinds of lenses, in what kinds of
light, in black and white or in colour
and in what shades and hues, with what degrees of sharpness, brightness, and contrast,
in What degrees of focus and exposure,
and accompanied by what kinds of sounds. . . The "why" of representation is the "Politics" of representation.”5
As such, if we look at a documentary like Night
and Fog, the reasoning behind the depiction of the Nazi concentration camps
is interlinked with the question of whether it was the right thing to do.
Herein lies the relationship between the ethics and politics of representation.
In Resnais’ documentary, the reasoning behind the effects of audio and
visual is a very apparent desire to portray the ruthless and brutal violence
committed upon the people at large in the Nazi concentration camps. The film is
obviously an outcry against the atrocities of Hitler, Himmler, the S.S., the
Kapo and the Nazis in general. The phrase “the camera never lies” can be
considered redundant in the context of this heavily biased documentary. The art of manipulation of reality can also be
observed in the post production censoring of the scene where French officers
are shown to be herding citizens towards the trains headed to concentration
camps. Resnais painted a beam in the scene which would obscure the officer’s
clothing. As such, it may be asked how far this manipulation of reality is
ethical or moral. It is definitely a manipulation of reality to please the
French government. Resnais’ goal was to show the morbid acts committed upon the
prisoners in the concentration camps. However, this act of omission seems to
undermine the vastness of the Nazi network which consisted of supporters and
helpers from amongst the other nations as well.
Another angle from which ethics comes into play is the use of graphic
detail which may seem invasive to the subject of the film, in this case the
prisoners of the concentration camps. Their deaths are shown through
photographs and video clippings of terrifying detail, along with the
humiliation they had to face. The dehumanisation of the people in the camps
also becomes obvious in the showing of how their bodies are used after their
deaths to make soap or their skin acts as paper. The scene where the bulldozer
shoves mounds of bodies to a mass grave was considered by the contemporary
censor board to be too violent. Although a note of extreme sympathy for the
prisoner and disgust for the captor rings throughout the documentary, it may
still be questioned as to whether it is ethically right to show these people at
their lowest points and as such invade their privacy. “With the development of
lightweight equipment and the growth of an aesthetic of direct cinema, the
ethical problem of the relationship of filmmakers to the people in their films
became more amorphous. It is not quite so easy to condemn the work of men like
Leacock, the Maysles brothers, and Wiseman. They have shown us aspects of our
world that in other times would have been obscured from view; in this there is
a gain. In gain there is perhaps a loss.”6 If such a view is held to
be true, then the ambiguity remains regarding the question of morality.
Resnais’ intention behind showing the film was to expose Nazi cruelty against
the regular citizens who were herded off to concentration camps which he deemed
was necessary in the contemporary context of a world reeling in the aftermaths
of the war ten years after it is over. Therefore whether the seeming invasion
of privacy of his subjects is essential and ethically right cannot be
completely assessed objectively, more than a century later.
La Jetee is an avant-garde
science fiction film. As such it is seemingly incongruent with the discussion
on documentary cinema. However, even in this film, there is an attempt to
replicate a reality of what may happen in the future. The style of this post
apocalyptic film is almost like that of a direct-address documentary film with
a narrator telling the story of the man who was sent to the past and future. La Jetee, despite being a film, is
shown, almost entirely, through a series of still photographs, one succeeding
the other to keep pace with the narration, the film continuing for twenty eight
whole minutes. The effect is striking as it seems to take on the form of fell
truth supported by pictures. The use of black-and white pictures instead of
colour seems to add to this sense of authenticity.
The events of the film take place
at some time in the future after the end of World War III, during the course of
which Paris was destroyed. The calamitous consequences of such a war are
brought out when the narrator says with a touch of irony, “And sometime later,
Paris was destroyed. Many died. Some thought they had won. Others were taken
prisoner. The survivors settled underground. Above ground, Paris and no doubt
most of the world was uninhabitable, riddled with radioactivity. The victors
stood guard over an empire of rats.” 7 The film then takes us to the
experiments being made on the prisoners of war and subsequently to the one
prisoner who is the main focus of the film. He is taken to the laboratory for
the experiments to take place. Since man is trapped in terms of space, the
experiments are to send him back and forth through time in order to get
valuable supplies and information. This man has been chosen because of the vivid
mental pictures that he is capable of seeing and a vision of a woman and a man
crumpling to the ground he had seen as a boy. The brutal experiments, in the
form of injections and electric shocks to the eyes, send him first to the past
where he meets a woman whom he seems to have been searching for. They meet
several times through the course of the experiments and he finds himself
falling in love with her, connecting on a level of complete mutual trust.
However the first experiment is ended and the second sends him to the future
where he sees a Paris rebuilt. When he asks the people of the future to give
him information on how to survive, they arm him with this powerful knowledge.
Once his captors have the information they need, he is taken to another part of
the camp, presumably to die. However, he is rescued by the people from the
future who ask him to go with them. He wishes instead to go back to the past to
that day he had seen as a boy in hopes of seeing the woman again. It is only
when he is on the pier and sees the man from the underground camp that he
realises that the body he had seen crumpling as a child was the death of a man,
his own death.
The film, though short, has an immediate impact on the audience with its realistic
portrayal and unexpected ending. “This is a film that attains the precious
combination of a narrative force as ineluctable as tragedy and a style as
lyrical as haiku. Whereas science fiction as a genre tends to render human
beings mere appliances for the true mechanical hero, technology in this film is
poetically evoked, not transfigured. . .”8 The film, no matter how realistic or
evocative, however, is not in any way a documentary which is a representation
of reality. It is based on a hypothesis of a post apocalyptic world as a result
of a Third World War that has not and perhaps will never happen. It is a mere
interpretation of one mind about what may happen in the future. However, in
such a situation, we may question whether it is truly so completely detached
from the genre of documentary which is after all the film-maker’s
interpretation of the present or past.
The question of ethics is not exactly something that comes into play in
context of a science fiction film. The director of the film, while trying to
coat the film with a sense of realism, has in no way made any kind of claim
that it is based on fact or any kind of reality. Thus the moral question of one
interpretation of the truth being shown as the whole truth does not exist in
the context of this film. The question of invasion of privacy and voyeurism in
the relation between the film-maker and his subject is also irrelevant as the
torture inflicted on the man is not real, but acted out. As such, the actor,
having read the script and listened to directions, is mostly aware of how he is
going to be portrayed in the film. Herein lies its most fundamental difference
from documentary cinema.
Both La Jetee and Night and Fog deal with the theme of the
effects of the World War. While Night and
Fog looks back to the holocaust in the backdrop of the Second World War, La Jetee looks to the future and the
possible repercussions of a Third World War. They have a similarity when it
comes to technique as both make use of black-and-white photographs or videos,
whether to demarcate the past from the present as in the case of Night and Fog or to provide a sense of
authenticity as in the case of La Jetee.
They are also both based on the direct address style, with the voice of the
narrator directly speaking to the audience. However, this is where the
similarities end. While Night and Fog
is a documentary, based on facts, interpreted by the director in a certain way,
La Jetee is based completely on
fiction, no matter how realistic it is made to seem. Still, whether it is the
documentary of Resnais or the avant-garde film of Chris Marker, it cannot be
denied that both films are a perfect blend of technique and aesthetic which
keeps the viewer enraptured through from beginning to end.
Works Cited:
·
“A Movement is Founded- First Principles of
Documentary”- John Grierson 2
·
“The Voice of Documentary”- Bill Nichols 1
·
“Ethics”- Brian Winston
·
“Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of
Documentary Filming”- Calvin Pryluck 6
·
“La Jetee.
Cine-Roman by Chris Marker” – Henry Pickford 8
·
“An Introduction to the Art and Politics of
Representation of Film”- Professor Bob Nowlan 5
·
“La Jetee Screenplay” 7
·
“Night and Fog Screenplay” 3, 4
·
Wikipedia
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