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6 Sensational cinema T he director John Waters, known for his transgressive films, once said, ‘If someone vomits while watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.’ That is not a cinematic experience most of us would pay good money for. Nor is it how most people think of films, which are more often regarded as either enjoyable or instructive. Yet films are not always so amenable. They are capable of producing strong physical reactions in us, including tears, nausea and sexual arousal. Again and again, the cinema demonstrates the close links
9 Observation in the cinema T here is a lot of observation in the cinema, certainly in fiction films. Hitchcock’s Rear Window (1954) is all about what happens when city dwellers watch each other’s activities in neighbouring apartments. René Clair, in his light-hearted film And Then There Were None (1945), spies on weekend guests at a house party as they spy on one another through keyholes. Most of Abbas Kiarostami’s film The Wind Will Carry Us (1999) is about villagers observing the antics of a social scientist from the city who has come to observe them. Then
5 The third tendency in cinema L ooking back, we can identify at least three tendencies in the topography of cinema. The first seems intrinsic to the earliest films and fundamental to the idea of spectacle and spectatorship. It is based on presenting something simply to be ‘looked at’ and predates the invention of cinema, since it includes everything from the circus to sports events, stage plays, paintings, sculptures and still photographs. Early cinema presented a framed moving photograph to the spectator. It was taken from a fixed position, was uncut and
The looking machine calls for the redemption of documentary cinema, exploring the potential and promise of the genre at a time when it appears under increasing threat from reality television, historical re-enactments, designer packaging and corporate authorship. The book consists of a set of essays, each focused on a particular theme derived from the author’s own experience as a filmmaker. It provides a practice-based, critical perspective on the history of documentary, how films evoke space, time and physical sensations, questions of aesthetics, and the intellectual and emotional relationships between filmmakers and their subjects. It is especially concerned with the potential of film to broaden the base of human knowledge, distinct from its expression in written texts. Among its underlying concerns are the political and ethical implications of how films are actually made, and the constraints that may prevent filmmakers from honestly showing what they have seen. While defending the importance of the documentary idea, MacDougall urges us to consider how the form can become a ‘cinema of consciousness’ that more accurately represents the sensory and everyday aspects of human life. Building on his experience bridging anthropology and cinema, he argues that this means resisting the inherent ethnocentrism of both our own society and the societies we film.
of the cinematic imagination predates the cinema itself, in that it represents a way of thinking that was already being prepared for cinema in nineteenth century literature and photography. Unlike Soviet montage, which often sought to shock the viewer with the disjunctions between shots, this cinematic approach aimed to direct the psychological processes of the viewer in a gentler and more indirect way. Through the experiments of directors such as D. W. Griffith, Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock it was to become the dominant way of putting shots together, adopted
. In considering the filmmaker’s role, Edgar Morin (Rouch’s co-director on Chronique d’un été ) described the situation this way: The truth which the cinema may achieve cannot disregard the observer or the seeker; in other words, it cannot avoid the abstractive operation which the human mind applies to reality in order to understand it. Understanding always involves linking reality to the structures of the human mind and the structures of the human mind to
of where we might imagine ourselves to be when watching a film, for we were always simultaneously in the film and somewhere else. In watching films there was never a definitive ‘here’, only a ‘there’. There was, of course, the position the cinematographer had occupied, and there was also the hall or cinema where we were watching the film. But neither of these fully resolved our sense of being both in and out of the film, of failing to find our own position. The cinema has searched for answers to this problem ever since. Even before films were invented, stereo
or theory. I can therefore make no claim to being encyclopaedic, whether writing about documentary or about fiction films. In many ways these are speculative essays, reflecting both convictions and uncertainties, and the intermediate position of someone whose career spans documentary filmmaking and anthropology. The book is in three parts, moving from a personal to a wider view; from the immediacy of filmmaking to the ways that films address us as viewers; and from the growth of documentary cinema as a genre to its role in anthropology and public discourse. Part I
more enterprising would probably be discarded. 161 LookingMachine.indb 161 12/11/2018 12:54:18 F i l m , a n t h r o p o l o g y a n d t h e d o c u m e n t a r y t ra d i t i o n Flaherty and Grierson Although documentary films had existed for more than two decades, documentary cinema is generally dated from the release of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, in 1922. There had been travel films before, and Flaherty himself had made such a film in the Arctic before making Nanook. It was destroyed by fire, supposedly from a cigarette that Flaherty dropped in
saying: ‘I am drawn to this thing, I demand something from it: to know more about it, to learn its true nature, to discover what, if anything, it means to me.’ This kind of questioning seems pre-linguistic, yet it is a mode of enquiry that is fundamental to our patterns of observation and essential to the way we acquire most kinds of knowledge. Most documentary films tend to give answers to questions rather than ask them. More speculative films tend to be made by filmmakers with an intuitive approach to the cinema. For filmmakers like Chris Marker, Johan van der Keuken