T H E D O C U M E N T A R Y O E U V R E O F A L I O N A V A N D E R H O R S T
P E R F O R M I N G
M E M O R Y A N D
A U T H O R S H I P
MA Thesis Film Studies Professional Oriented Track (Documentary)
University of Amsterdam
Supervisor: Dhr. dr. F.A.M. (Erik) Laeven Second reader: Dhr. dr. F.J.J.W. (Floris) Paalman
Student number: 10634231 June 28, 2019
2 For my father
3
Ugliness is beauty that cannot be contained within the soul.
It is the transformational force of poetry or imagery,
that is what you are looking for as a filmmaker,
or an artist.
Aliona van der Horst4
Contents
Preface………5
Introduction………...……7
Chapter 1: The rise of subjective documentary filmmaking………12
1.1Origins: a cinema of auteurs……….12
1.2The start of female documentary authorship ………...14
1.3Defining the practice: a mode instead of a genre………..17
Chapter 2: Memory, emotion & narrative………...20
2.1 Cognitive frameworks: narrative, emotion and memory ……….20
2.2 Media and memory: remembering (without) experience………...22
2.3 Memory is mediated………...24
2.4 Prosthetic memory: the artificial limb made of imagined memories………...….…..25
2.5 The filmic translation of personal memory………26
Chapter 3: Turning memory into narrative in Voices of Bam………...…28
3.1 Voices of Bam’s narrative of experience: wandering through the rubble………28
3.2 The inner voices talking: active remembering in direct address……….…….. 30
3.3 Resembling memory and emphasising absence……….………33
Chapter 4: Negotiating and performing authorship in Water Children.…………...………..38
4.1 Reflexivity on art and life………38
4.2 Self-reflexive authorship as negotiation and performance………....44
4.3 Performing experience and subjective perspective: the two visual languages…….49
Chapter 5: The performance of memory and authorship in Love is Potatoes………..53
5.1 Van der Horst’s inheritance: six square meters of memorabilia………53
5.2 Silent mothers and interrogative daughters: the generational gap in memory…….55
5.3 Van der Horst’s negotiation of authorship:The struggle with buried memories of a painful past ………57
5.4 Van der Horst’s response to denial: memory performance………...61
5.5 A new kind of historiography: Aliona van der Horst and the personal frame……...64
Conclusion……….…..……….……...68
Epilogue………...………….……...73
Bibliography………...……..74
5
Preface
Utrecht, 27 mei 2019
Beste Aliona,
Misschien herinner je me nog, maar misschien ook niet. Een aantal jaar geleden liep ik stage bij Zeppers Film. Je was in die tijd al bezig met Liefde is aardappelen, of Zes Vierkante Meter zoals geloof ik toen de werktitel was. Inmiddels kruis je mijn pad wederom, maar deze keer via een andere weg. Deze keer gaat het over mijn scriptie voor mijn master Film Studies aan de UvA, die ik heb gewijd aan jouw auteurschap.
Ik was lang terughoudend je hierover te lichten, want wat betekent een analyse van auteurschap nu eigenlijk? Is dat niet juist hetgeen een regisseur in het ongewisse wil laten? Zou ik dingen niet op een andere manier hebben geïnterpreteerd dan dat ze zijn bedoeld? Maar ik kwam ook al vrij snel tot de conclusie: waarschijnlijk is juist dat de kracht van film. Dat het de films zijn, geboren uit het brein van een regisseur, die transformeren en zelf op zoek gaan naar betekenis, wanneer ze hun vleugels uitslaan in de wijde wereld.
Een belangrijke reden waarom ik je werk wilde analyseren was dat het aansloot bij een periode in mijn leven die getekend is door een poëtische mix van elementen en thema’s die ik herken in jouw werk: naast dromerigheid, vrouwelijk auteurschap, de mijmering van associaties, zelfreflectie en kunst als troost, ook de betekenis én verschijningsvorm van herinnering.
Want hoezeer ik mijzelf ook uit deze scriptie schrijf als academicus, toch vind ik dat ik open moet zijn over mijn persoonlijke betrokkenheid met je werk die hoe dan ook deze thesis heeft gekleurd. Ik heb niet voor niks herinnering als centraal aspect gekozen. Terwijl ik aan deze masterthesis werkte, ruimde ik de twee huizen van mijn jeugd uit. Het ene was het huis van mijn vader, een
alleenstaande schapenboer in Gelderland, die heel plotseling overleed. Mijn zusjes en ik – toen 18, 19 en 22 - bezaten opeens een boerderij. Een huis vol herinneringen, relikwieën aan vroegere
plattelandsfamilies en oude romances, schapenstiften, oude kaarten, boeken, een wei vol schapen en vooral een hoop troep.
Ook mijn vader was een verzamelaar en ook nogal fan van Rusland. Uiteraard ben ik vernoemd naar Dokter Zhivago. Het was een stronteigenwijze academicus die eigenlijk het liefst zijn hele leven boer was geweest. Hij had het altijd gecombineerd, zijn schapen als uit de hand gelopen hobby naast zijn werk aan de Universiteit van Nijmegen. Het was een intellectueel die het boerenleven zag als utopie. Met het grootste gemak begaf hij zich onder zowel juristen als koeienboeren, met dezelfde mate van interesse– alleen wel met een ander accent. Ergens zie ik daarin een analogie met Ryzhy. We hebben het nooit over je werk gehad, maar ik denk dat hij Liefde is Aardappelen vooral heel mooi had gevonden. Eenvoudige boerenfamilies waren altijd zijn favoriete onderwerp in de kunst. Nog geen maand na zijn dood onderging mijn zusje, leverpatiënt vanaf dat ze klein is, haar eerste levertransplantatie. Een rare tijd waarin voor rouw geen plek was, maar eerder voor blijdschap dat ze het had overleefd. Helaas ging het niet lang goed en leefden we in spanning onder het oppervlak. Toch wilden we vooral ook gewoon normaal leven – ik ging verder met een documentaire
researchstage bij Submarine voor een online documentaire-project over de oorlog in Syrië. Heen en weer was het leven tussen het ziekenhuis in Groningen en onze huizen in Utrecht – twee zusjes tegenover elkaar in hetzelfde appartementencomplex, allebei gingen we er op een andere manier mee om.
6
Werken ging me beter af dan een strijd alleen voor de computer. Ik legde mijn scriptie telkens weg; hoe kon ik bezig zijn met academisch gezever als zij aan het vechten was voor haar leven? Na een tweede levertransplantatie hing haar leven aan een zijden draadje. En toen herstelde ze zich na enkele maanden wonderlijk genoeg opeens. Niet volledig – en de toekomst blijft onzeker - maar de situatie is beter dan in jaren. Ze studeert, heeft weer wat energie en is niet meer geel. Dat heeft erin geresulteerd dat ik het afgelopen halfjaar écht aan mijn scriptie heb kunnen werken en nu eindelijk deze brief stuur.
Dit terwijl ik nog een huis aan het uitruimen ben: dat van mijn moeder. Die heeft besloten eindelijk weer terug te gaan naar haar wortels: Vlissingen. De zee roept haar al jaren. Met de verkoop van haar huis, verlies ik voorgoed alle banden met mijn geboorteplek Druten, een klein dorpje in Gelderland aan de Waal. Ergens lach ik om hoe alles in het leven dan altijd samen lijkt te komen in momenten: vandaag lever ik de eerste versie van mijn scriptie in, terwijl de verhuisdozen van Druten naar Vlissingen gaan. Het is wederom een labyrint van herinneringen, verspreid over dozen en vastgekleefd in de muren en grond van het huis van mijn jeugd, waar ik me in onderdompel. Maar het markeert ook het einde van een best lastige periode waarin herinneringen ronddwaalden zonder huis. Misschien is het een metafoor voor een nieuw begin, bedenk ik me onder de appelboom, grinnikend in mijn schoot geworpen door het leven.
Het schrijven over herinnering was niet alleen meditatief, het was ook noodzakelijk. Meer dan ooit is me duidelijk hoeveel herinneringen in ons hoofd bestaan door het werk van verhalenvertellers, waaronder documentairemakers zoals jij. Mijn beeld over Japan – Rusland- Iran - het zijn prothetische herinneringen die voelen als mijn eigen herinnering. Het heeft mijn eigen passie voor het vertellen van verhalen, in documentaire, maar ook in scenario en in literatuur, alleen maar versterkt. En dat is mede te danken aan jouw auteurschap. Het einde van deze scriptie was lang een blind einddoel: langzaamaan ga ik nu weer nadenken naar wat hierna komt, of dat documentaire research is, of misschien toch schrijven. Ik zie wel wat er het eerst op mijn pad komt. Momenteel zit ik in de laatste fase, eind juni lever ik mijn definitieve scriptie in, die ik je zal sturen als je dat leuk vindt.
Het was niet per se mijn bedoeling om mijn hele familiegeschiedenis hier uit de doeken te doen, maar ach, soms ontkom je er niet aan. Maar ik denk dat het te wijten is aan wat jij hebt gedaan: de
personages uit jouw films worden een spiegel waar je jezelf in ziet. Ik wilde je alleen vragen of je misschien – bij wijze van epiloog op deze masterscriptie – interesse hebt om een keertje een kopje koffie te drinken. Ik ben in het echte leven een stuk minder sentimenteel dan op papier.
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Introduction
Over the past two decades, there has been a shift in the field of documentary studies towards the acknowledgement of the documentary director as an auteur. This might sound strange nowadays with a lot of famous documentary filmmakers, but for a long time ‘documentary’ was not easily linked to ‘authorship’. Fiction films are often associated with the notion of an
auteur, whereas for documentary, it is a different story. Why? As documentary scholar Stella
Bruzzi (2011) points out, “the intervention of an auteur disrupts the non-fiction film’s supposed allegiance to transparency and truthfulness”(112). Bruzzi acknowledges that the documentary genre, supposedly telling ‘truths’, has struggled with being linked to a subjective author/director who framed these ‘truths’. But with the rise of a more performative and reflexive type of documentary filmmaking since the 1990s in which the director’s presence is no longer shunned, the position of the documentary auteur deserves to be considered in more detail too.
In this thesis I will examine the authorship of Aliona van der Horst (Moscow, 1970), a documentary auteur whose oeuvre consists of a wide variety of films with an outspoken filmic style. From the moment she started her career in 1997, many of her poetic documentaries have been internationally awarded and highly appreciated.1 Her most known works are Love
is Potatoes (2017), Water Children (2011), Boris Ryzhy (2008), Voices of Bam (2006), The Hermitage Dwellers (2006) and The Lady with the White Hat (1997). The reason for the
international appeal of her work isundoubtedly correlated with her very defined style of poetic filmmaking and the international topics she addresses. Van der Horst also frequently appears as a guest lecturer at film festivals and film schools, that welcome her creative and poetic take on documentary filmmaking.
Born as a child of a Russian mother and a Dutch father, Van der Horst’s dual nationality seems to have translated within her work as a documentary filmmaker. Van der Horst grew up in The Netherlands with a Russian-oriented upbringing, not only due to her mother’s Russian nationality, but also because of her father who studied in Moscow. Van der Horst decided to study Russian literature, after which she also graduated from film school. She started her career as a documentary filmmaker with her graduate film Lady With the White
1 She was awarded with the special Jury Prize at the Tribeca Film Festival, the Grand Prix of the FIFA, the Best Mid-length
Documentary Award at IDFA, the Best Documentary Award of Edinburgh film festival, Best Feature Documentary at Doxa Vancouver, the ‘Gouden Kalf’ for Long Documentary and the ‘Kristallen Film’ award (presented when films reach 10.000 visitors in Dutch theatres).
8
Hat (1997), which immediately landed her career as an internationally awarded documentary
filmmaker, depicting a Ukrainian school teacher that was unrightfully put in a psychiatric clinic for refusing to work for the KGB (like many people in the former Soviet Union). In most of her other films, Van der Horst depicts Russia’s troubled history, often finding a way to consider (politically inflicted) tragedies that have been swept under the rug.2
But Van der Horst’s documentaries are not bound to Russia’s borders, with Voices of
Bam (2006) being set in Iran, Water Children (2011) in Japan and a few other films set in The
Netherlands. Rather, they are bound by an auteurist style of filmmaking that features personal stories. Over the past two decades, she has developed a personal essayistic mode of
documentary filmmaking that pays a lot of attention to poetic cinematography, rhythm, associational montage, sound and music. Most of her films are in collaboration with cinematographer Maasja Ooms, who is responsible for most of their dreamlike visual style. The poetic long takes that look like they come straight out of a Tarkovsky film (showing movements of the elements and provide a sensory experience), have become one of the key characteristics of Van der Horst’s work.
When I first saw Water Children (2011), a film about fertility, I had a deeply emotional experience and it stayed with me for a long time. Not only the poetic feel of the film had triggered this reaction, but also the way in which Van der Horst incorporated herself and her feelings into the film. During the process of making the film, Van der Horst felt she had to include her personal fear of remaining childless, although she did not intend on being in the film. But precisely because of this inclusion of her memories and feelings in relation to her personal struggle with fertility (her fear of remaining childless), I felt a more intimate connection with her and the women she portrayed.
When studying the discourse of documentary authorship, I searched for a theoretical approach that would help to describe Aliona van der Horst’s authorship in its totality: not only her outspoken filmic style with a strong connection to art and other artists, her fascination with the theme of loss and her use of metaphors to create multiple layers of meaning, but also how her personal relationship with the depicted world is translated into a
2 For instance also in Boris Ryzhy (2008), a film about a Russian poet that committed suicide, whose work is a tribute to the
Perestroika generation, a generation that was lost in the violence of the gang fights after the fall of the Soviet Union. Or, by depicting her parents’ love story in After the Spring of ’68 (2001): a film that shows how the clashing political climates - communism versus capitalism -prevented her parents from being together and damaged their relationship. And for instance also in The Hermitage Dwellers (2006), a filmic ode to Russia’s most renowned museum, its art and employees, that also shows how the museum survived the Russian Revolution, Stalin’s reign, WWII, and the post-Soviet years.
9 filmic strategy that has an emotional effect on the viewer. Throughout her work, Van der Horst marks her identity as a filmmaker, but also her own personal identity – while she remains concerned with depicting the other.
In this thesis, I want to investigate how Van der Horst creates her signature film style that accomplishes a level of personal engagement that results in an emotional viewing
experience. In the first chapter, I shall consider how the personal presence of the filmmaker within documentary has been theorised by film scholars as Bill Nichols, Michael Renov and Jim Lane and more specifically within the essayistic tradition by Laura Rascaroli. I will show how personal modes of filmmaking can be linked to the politicised origins of female
documentary authorship in the 1970s. Various concepts used to describe this tradition by Lane are still relevant to understand Van der Horst’s work.
I’m aware of the wide scale and diversity of the discourse of documentary authorship, such as varying definitions of the filmmaker in debates about essayistic documentary, or even the theoretical objections to the possibility of an auteur in (documentary) filmmaking in general, since some consider documentary filmmaking only as a collective enterprise. Van der Horst’s films are obviously not created solely, but emerge from collaborations with her
crewmembers.3 However, I consider her personal vision – both expressed in content and style - strongly apparent in every film by her hand. Not much of the debate is focused on the way in which the documentary filmmaker’s presence might give meaning to the story, especially if the story is not (only) about the filmmaker. In purpose of my research, I have chosen to base my notion of authorship primarily on a theoretical framework that focuses on the presence of the documentary auteur as an active point of engagement, which I found in the work of Trent Griffiths (2014). But in order to consider Van der Horst’s authorship in its totality, I selected a variety of theoretical frameworks, not only originating from film studies, but also from memory studies.
Theorising memory in relationship to documentary provides tools for a more detailed textual analysis that can provide a deeper understanding of the emotional engagement Van der Horst’s films evoke through both form and content. In this respect, memory functions as an umbrella term that encompasses both aesthetics, the role of the director and the viewer’s engagement. Various theorisations of memory allow us to explain the relationship between form and content in Van der Horst’s work, and how they work together as experience.
3 In particular her regular cinematographer Maasja Ooms, but also recurring composer Harry de Wit, or Tomoko
10 Memory allows us to explain Van der Horst’s filmic style and how she creates intimacy and a certain sphere through visualisation of internal thoughts and experiences, making her films more experiences than straight-lined narratives. In chapter two, we will see how cognitive research on memory’s relation to documentary allows us to explain documentary form and content, and how narratives engage us with a process that presents an experience. In addition, we shall see that looking into the mediality of memories (Dijck 2007, 2004) can help us understand how media shape the way in which we remember, and how documentary can function as a prosthetic memory that is able to function as a stand-in for memory based on lived-experience. We will also see how filmmakers can feature an ethical awareness in their depiction of (traumatic) personal memory within their films. This awareness, as I will argue in this thesis, may be coming from a position of postmemory, a concept introduced to clarify the way in which personal ‘inherited’ familial memories are marked by a generational gap (Hirsch 1997, 2008). This allows us to explain how a position of postmemory may influence the filmmaking of a new generation of filmmakers.
From chapter three on, I will start with a detailed textual analysis of three of Van der Horst’s films, which I consider representative of her oeuvre of twenty years of filmmaking (see filmography) and her authorship. The order in which I discuss these three films is not only chronological, from her first feature film from 2006 to her most recent film in 2017, but also shows her increasing personal presence in her films. I have selected Voices of Bam (2006), Van der Horst’s first feature documentary, which she co-directed with Maasja Ooms, to show how she finds a filmic translation for personal, intimate memories and how she rejects
conventional modes of filming personal loss and disaster.
In chapter four, I will discuss Water Children (2011) and show how Van der Horst uses performativity and (self-)reflexivity to portray the authorship of the artist Tomoko
Mukaiyama, but also of herself and her involvement. By the work of Trent Griffiths, I propose recontextualising the current debates on performativity and reflexivity in terms of self-reflexivity as a tool for empathy rather than showing epistemological awareness, and to show how Van der Horst’s performative involvement results in an active point of engagement. In chapter five, I will show how in Love is Potatoes (2017) these two important tendencies within Van der Horst’s work seem to come together in a synthesis which actualises memory as performance framed by a present auteur and how this allows her to reshape collective traumatic memories.
11 Like Van der Horst does in her films, I want to be reflexive of my own position within this examination of her work. The choice to dive into the work of a female documentary director places herself in the context of her family did not come out of nowhere. For the past few years, I have always been drawn to filmmakers who incorporated their memories in their stories by using performance and reflexive filmic techniques.4 Little by little it dawned on me that I am fascinated with the cinematic personal language of the concept of memory, and that this may have something to do with my own memories and family history. When I was writing this thesis, my father suddenly died and my sister became very seriously ill. Because of this, I spent a lot of time thinking about my own past, reflecting on what my memories actually meant. I found comfort in watching films that were also about loss, life, death and family histories and how to reflect on my own position in everything that had happened. Examining Van der Horst’s films, in particular Love is Potatoes, for me has been a way to deal with my own memories and emotions. While Van der Horst was cleaning out this 6m2 square room on my laptop screen, I was cleaning out my father’s farm. And although this is my academic master thesis and not a personal work of mourning, this thesis undoubtedly has a strong personal connection to my life that has influenced the way I personally engage with her work.
4 For instance the work of Agnès Varda, who reflects upon her cinematic oeuvre in the autobiographical documentary Les
Plages d’Agnès (2008), in which she plays with her own memories through performances and playful montage. Or Sarah
Polley, who creates a kaleidoscopic meditation on the meaning of family ‘memories’ or ‘stories’ in her autobiographic Stories
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Chapter 1: The rise of subjective documentary filmmaking
1.1 Origins: a cinema of auteurs
Before exploring Van der Horst’s authorship, I would like to show how the notion of a documentary auteur slowly emerged in the documentary landscape, which contributes to a better understanding of her filmmaking strategies in context. Secondly, I will narrow this down to how essayistic documentary has been theorised, and how essay film is connected to certain tendencies within female documentary authorship, which prove a preoccupation with the filmic representation of memory and experience through engagement with the depicted world.
It was not until the “autobiographical outbreak of the 1980s and the 1990s” - as Michael Renov has famously put it - that personal documentaries started to conquer the documentary landscape (2004, xxii). Nowadays, we are very used to the fact that many documentaries give more prominence to the filmmaker, but the expression of a subjective perspective in documentary has long been controversial. This has everything to do with the origins of documentary and the claim that documentaries have to be ‘objective’ (Nichols 2010, 21–24). As the famous documentary theorist Bill Nichols has pointed out, the dominant modes of documentary representation had been based on realist-conventions that avoided a disruption between the viewer and the on-screen created world – and thus did not reveal the presence of the filmmaker in documentary itself (156). But over the past few decades, other ways of documentary representation have emerged and they seem to have dropped this ‘notion of objectivity’ increasingly. Although the six modes of documentary filmmaking, which
Nichols distinguishes, provide a relatively simple way to sketch the origins of subjective documentary, they are very general and tend towards a genealogical approach.5
One of the most important authors in the theoretical discourse on the characteristics of subjectivity in documentary film that I will discuss in this thesis is Laura Rascaroli. Her monograph The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and The Essay Film (2009) is a thorough investigation on essayistic cinema, but she also pays attention to other forms of subjective
5 Although Bill Nichols states in Introduction to Documentary (2010) that his six modes are not strictly chronological, nor does
he argue that are they exact and a precise fit for any type of documentary, he does connect them to a certain timeframe while in fact the characteristics he adjudges to the expository, poetic, observational, participatory and performative mode are more interwoven and nuanced within current documentary traditions.
13 filmmaking.6 First of all, I will examine how certain technological and historical
developments have paved the way for personal documentary filmmaking. Investigating the rise of the prominence of subjectivity in documentary, there are two important tendencies that need to be addressed. Firstly, as Rascaroli puts it, this is the “process of postmodernism of social and artistic fields”, and secondly, “a continuation and the evolution of filmic practices that emerged within European modernism” (2009, 4).
As Rascaroli argues, subjectivity was already expressed way before the era of postmodernity, firstly in the form of “personal cinema” of the avant-gardist, (mostly) European filmmakers in the 1950s and 1960s (2009, 6). In the 1940s, in the idea of
‘cinematic subjectivity’ emerged in French film theory. This auteur theory as it was called by Andrew Sarris (Truffaut’s manifesto from 1954 called it la politique des auteurs), prompted the director as the artistic mastermind overseeing the production crew and therefore responsible for the cinematographic quality. The foundations of this auteur theory, derived from literature studies, were largely based on the cinematic theories of André Bazin and Alexandre Astruc. Astruc coined the concept of the ‘caméra-stylo’ (camera pen), arguing that directors should use their camera like writing with a pen. He urged directors to see cinema as a way for directors to express their thoughts, as their own visual trademark (Rascaroli 2009, 26).
In the second half of the 1950s, this idea crystallised in the nouvelle vague movement that emerged in France.7 Although French pioneers had already sought ways to express their personal dreams within their films, it was this new wave of filmmakers who really
experimented with their personal style as directors (26). This movement was characterised by a very personal style that created auteurist style and voice in their fiction films (Rascaroli 2009, 24). With new editing techniques, new lightweight portable cameras and a great need for change, the nouvelle vague directors broke many of the dominant ‘rules’ in cinema and created room for new forms of cinema production.
Although this movement took place within the field of fiction film, it also had major consequences for documentary production. In fact mostly the Left-Bank group of the nouvelle
vague experimented with personal non-fiction films, such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda.
In France, many first-person, short documentaries were produced that approached
6 Rascaroli mainly focuses on the ontological origins of the essay film and on the paradigm shifts that have coincided with
changes in filmic style. Michael Renov does pay a little more attention to other technological developments that also contributed to the rise of subjective filmmaking.
7 Filmmakers such as (the Cahier du cinéma critics/directors group of) Jean-Luc Godard, François Truffaut, Eric Rohmer,
14 documentary in the same way as the fiction films of the nouvelle vague: with their own
approach to reality and their own vision featured (Rascaroli 2009, 28).
In addition to this trend, other French filmmakers such as Jean Rouch experimented with new documentary production modes like the participatory ethnographic documentary such as Chronicle of a Summer (1961), which he directed with Edgar Morin. With the now available lightweight cameras and synchronous sound and image, it became easier to go into the world without a large camera crew (Nichols 2010, 179). The participation of the
filmmaker with documentary subjects became an important aspect within films, and was no longer shunned. The cinema verité movement rooted from Rouch’ work in France at the end of the 1950s (Bordwell and Thompson 2010, 448). Cinema verité introduced new techniques, such as avoiding authoritative voice-overs and incorporating self-reflexivity (Rascaroli 2009, 44). The French filmmaker Chris Marker criticised cinema verité for the notion that some sort of truth could be grasped from the filming. In his films he proposed a critical standpoint towards his own subjective perspective and the address of the spectator was now very direct (Rascaroli 2009, 66).
1.2 The start of female documentary authorship
In the 1970s, the cinema verité principles seemed to gradually disappear. Like Rasaroli, other scholars as Michael Renov, Jim Lane and Julia Lesage have convincingly argued that there is a strong link between the growing foregrounding of subjectivism as a filmmaking strategy within the documentaries, and a growing awareness in terms of class and gender debates from the 1970s onwards (Rascaroli 2009; Renov 2004; Lane 2002; Lesage 1999). As Renov argues in his article "New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in the Post-Verité age,” the direct-cinema filmmakers of the 1960s were mostly white men who could easily shun self-reference since they “had assumed the mantle of filmic representation with the ease and self-assurance of a birthright” (1999, 94). Subjectivism within documentaries therefore also emerged as an alternative to the hegemony of the ‘white male’, which was closely related to the various social-economic movements that emerged in the period of 1970 to 1990: in particular the women’s movement, but also the black power movements and the new gay and lesbian politics (Renov 1999, 89). Renov discusses the impact of the women’s movement on the foregrounding of the personal lives of women:
15 Women and the issues that mattered to them – forthright interpersonal
communication; equal stress on the integrity of process as well as product; open and universally accessible structures for decision making; shared responsibility for the domestic and familial – received scant attention. The women’s
movement changed all that and helped to usher in an era in which a range of “personal” issues – namely race, sexuality, and ethnicity – became consciously politicised. In all cases, subjectivity, a grounding in the personal and the experiential, fuelled the engine of political action (1999, 89).
Renov explains that in the cultural climate of this time in the Western world of the sixties and seventies, feminism contributed significantly in shift from the politics of the social into the politics of identity (1999, 89). Lane’s chapter “Women and the Autobiographical
Documentary” in The Autobiographical Documentary in America (2002) also focuses on the aspect of female identity in relation to personal documentary. Since female filmmakers have highlighted their significant different position in society by expressing their views and
opinions about identity, it is relevant to further discuss the characteristics of women’s personal accounts in more detail.
Lane advocates four important aspects of women’s subjective documentary
filmmaking, supported by the work of literary theorists as James Olney and Annette Kuhn, and with that of film theorists like Julia Lesage, Patricia Erens and E. Ann Kapplan, which he describes as: ‘historical intervention’, ‘writing’, ‘alterity’ and ‘dialogic engagement’ (145). He argues that a lot of personal documentaries emerged from the second wave of the women’s movement of the 1970s. Based on the work of historians Robin Morgan and Sara Evans, Lane notes that the women’s movement helped to spread the notion that showing the personal lives of women became of great importance, since the position of women had long been under- or misrepresented (146). Documentary filmmaking was suited as a means to create social change for many female filmmakers, some of whom had been in
underappreciated positions within the direct-cinema movement, as Joyce Chopra (Lane 2002, 145). Olney, talking about literature, argues that women’s autobiography is the only writing mode that brings such a detailed description from within a ‘culture’, that it gives “privileged access to experience” (Lane 2002, 147).
Lane notes that these female documentaries can be divided in two categories: firstly biographical portraits of women as positive role models, and secondly films that centre on important female topics such as birth control, abuse, marriage and abortion (146). Lane
16 argues, by the work of film theorist Annette Kuhn, that we can even speak of a specific
feminine cinematic writing mode:
[…] Kuhn traces the shift from the biographical or issue-oriented films to autobiography as a move toward a specifically feminine mode of
cinematographic writing that marks a transformation from a collective, participatory cinema to an individuated cinema (147).
Within these individuated women’s films, the construction of identity in the form of autobiography is mostly interpersonal, instead of the traditional notion of autobiography given by George Gusdorf’s model of autobiography within literary traditions, who sees it as a ‘unified self represented across time’ (Lane 2002, 148). This relational exploration of the self, for example to dominant structures or persons within their own families, has often started with some sort of marginalisation of the filmmaker in some kind; whether that is because they have chosen their career as a filmmaker, or for other reasons (Lane 2002, 148). It is in this sense that Lane talks about the concept of “alterity”. Although autobiographical films made by men have also been about families and are often also interpersonal, the films of female filmmakers stand out because of their wide variety in strategies that are deployed to critique power, especially that of their family (Lane 2002, 148). Lesage argues that:
Unlike social-issue documentarists working in a realist mode, (many) women artists do not presume to represent a continuous stable identity or a cohesive self. Rather they pursue an epistemological investigation of what kinds of relations might constitute the self, using as a laboratory their own
consciousness (Lesage 1999, 311).
Fourthly, there is the concept of “dialogic engagement”. Literary theorist Sidonie Smith argues that the female autobiographical documentary directors do this in a way that lies ‘within and outside the male dominance as they strive for self-representation’ (Lane 2002, 149). Lane claims that the female directors take on the role of daughter, sister, mother or girlfriend within their documentaries, while at the same time criticising gender issues. The production of the autobiographical documentary, the act of choosing to record their story and choosing film as a tool, can be seen in many of these films as a struggle for acceptance (Lane 2002, 149). Lane quotes film theorist Julia Lesage:
Women have taken up the romantic artist’s quest, arising out of culturally induced paralysis to look inward, and express themselves, with a whole
17 different tenor. Their motives, tactics, and results are completely different from those of their male forebears and counterparts. Heirs to the romantic tradition of using art as a tool for psychic expression, women and artists from
dispossessed groups have used the tactics of the romantic artist to give voice to what had been voiceless in their environments, to provide especially for their group the open and public articulation of other subjectivities that the dominant culture systematically denies and silences (Lane 2002, 150; Lesage 1999, 326-327).
Although over the last few decades women’s role in society has changed, the characteristics of the female authorship, as described by Lane, are still relevant and applicable to Van der Horst’s authorship, whose work fits into the categories of ‘historical intervention’, ‘alterity’, ‘dialogic engagement’, and ‘writing’, and which overlap with concepts from memory studies.
1.3 Defining the practice: a mode instead of a genre
Since birth of female subjective documentary in the 1970s, the documentary landscape has changed. The number of personal non-fiction films, made by both female and male directors, has grown immensely. In the 1980s the camcorder emerged, which made documentary production way cheaper and easier than 35 mm or 16 mm filmstrip. This technological development resulted in a boost of the recording of ‘autobiographical’ material, since it was now easy to access the equipment to record one’s life. In addition, the development of
computers and the spread of the Internet in the 21st century made the personal perspective so
prevalent as it had never been before (Renov 2004).
These developments also represent larger paradigm shifts that have changed non-fiction cinema at a philosophical level. In a globalised world full of images, many scholars have drawn comparisons between postmodernity and the fragmentary nature of human
experience today. Rascaroli notes that increasingly fragmented experience in our everyday lives as a result of these developments in technology, ask for new ways of representation that
include a sense of uncertainty (2009, 4). Searching for answers in autobiographical
documentary for example, is a way of searching for unity in one’s fragmented life (2009, 5). Subjectivity is often featured because the faith in the traditional values of objectivism within documentary have started to decline. The scepticism towards authoritative accounts of representing ‘truth’ within documentary has grown and many filmmakers try to reflect that
18 awareness in their films by incorporating subjectivity in varying degrees in their cinematic writing style.
We have seen that different factors have contributed to the rise of subjective
tendencies within documentary traditions. However, it is difficult to choose an umbrella term that encompasses the wide variety of forms subjective filmmaking since there have been so many terms coined in an effort to capture the wide diversity of it: autobiographical
documentary, metadocumentary, autobiographical film, essay film, egodocumentary, hybrid documentary; just to name a few. Renov and Lane discuss the start of autobiographical documentary production when discussing this ‘genre’. Although autobiographical
documentary is definitely a form that highlights subjectivity, this is a narrow definition that excludes many films that express subjectivity without being strictly autobiographical. And this is of key importance if we want to understand the place of films like Van der Horst’s in the landscape of documentary film. Alisa Lebow has proposed as ‘first person film’ as a “less imperfect” alternative since she mostly sees subjective filmmaking as a mode of address instead of a strictly defined genre (Lebow 2012, 2). Lebow states:
First person films can be poetic, political, prophetic or absurd. They can be autobiographical in full, or only implicitly and in part. They may take the form of self-portrait, or indeed, a portrait of another. They are, very often, not a cinema of ‘me’, but about someone close, dear, beloved or intriguing, who nonetheless informs the filmmaker’s sense of him or herself (15).
Another - and in this thesis more suitable – term, since Van der Horst’s films are not only autobiographical, is ‘essay film’. Hans Richter first coined the term in the 1940s in his article “Der Filmessay, Eine neue Form des Dokumentarfilms”. He regards it a new form of
documentary and applauds its purpose to “visualise thoughts on screen”, resulting in a more emotional and intellectual type of cinema (Rascaroli 2009, 24).
Rascaroli proposes not to think of essay films as a strict genre, but rather as a mode in which a certain topic is cinematographically investigated. Within this mode, we can look at the attitude of the essayist, his or her idiosyncratic outlook, experimentation with the medium and the reflection on the workings of that medium (2008, 33). Rascaroli suggests viewing “subjectivity as the product of the text’s adoption of certain strategies” (2009, 12). She classifies works as Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955), Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia
19 (1957) and Jean-Luc Godard’s Here and Elsewhere (1976) as examples of the essayistic mode (2009, 2). Rascaroli argues:
Metalinguistic, autobiographical and reflective, they all posit a well-defined, extra-textual authorial figure as their point of origin and of constant reference; they strongly articulate a subjective, personal point of view; and they set up a particular communicative structure, largely as I will argue, on the address to the spectator, or interpellation (2009, 3).
Rascaroli states that essay films can be very personal, without having to be strictly
autobiographical (2009, 106). The rejection of a strict distinction between autobiography and biography is useful in this thesis, since I would propose understanding Van der Horst’s authorship as a personal mode of filmmaking with varying levels of subjectivity, but all characterised by a strong ‘authorial figure’. Although I am primarily concerned with
understanding the filmic strategies that Van der Horst deploys within in her work, and not with a genre analysis, I consider these concepts helpful in showing how the construction of memory and identity form the backbone of the work of a lot of female, essayistic filmmakers8:
Reading the films of Heddy Honigmann, Annelies van Noortwijk argues that through a paradigm shift from postmodernism towards what she proposes to refer to as meta-modernism, a new kind of poetics comes to the fore in which senses of ‘sameness’ and ‘presence’ and a drive towards inter-subjective
connection and dialogue are pivotal. At the same time a turn to the subject, the real and the private, are the preferred strategies to address the central topics in contemporary culture: that of (often traumatic) memory and identity. Indeed, the re-evaluation of the female subject as an active, embodied and emotional individual is fundamental to such a shift (Ulfsdotter and Backman Rogers 2018, 5).
This focus on the subjective qualities of memory and experience is still quite vague. Memory studies can provide a welcome addition to better understand how the filmic assemblage of memory and identity can blur the lines between ‘the actual’ and ‘the imagined’. In this thesis I will show, with various theorisations from the field of memory studies, how filmic strategies embody this memory and identity, and how they work together to create the intimate and emotional sphere of Van der Horst’s films.
8 I must include here that I think this is not only the case for documentaries from female filmmakers, but that I recognise the
20
Chapter 2: Memory, emotion & narrative
2.1 Cognitive frameworks: narrative, emotion and memory
Different theories on the relationship between memory and cinema provide useful concepts to better understand Van der Horst’s work, to analyse its effect (how does documentary narrative evoke emotions?), its content (how does mediated memory relate to a collective traumatic memory?) and its form (how is memory visualised?).
Some scholars in the field of cognitive psychology such as Douwe Draaisma (2000) and Henry Roediger (1980) try to explain how the human body works by using the cinematic apparatus as a metaphor. They compare the functioning of the human eye to that of the lens of a camera, and for example, the memory of events in our mind’s “storage” with the camera’s film strip/digital storage (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018). Other scholars such as Alison Landsberg (2004) and Marianne Hirsch (1997) attempt to explain cinema’s
characteristics by using concepts borrowed from the field of (cultural) memory studies, such as
collective memory, postmemory and prosthetic memory (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018,
17). Another group explores the continuous interaction between cinema and memory, such as Ib Bondebjerg (2014), who combines cognitivist thought and media, and José van Dijck (2004; 2007; 2008), who examines the interactions between media materiality and cultural memory. I will focus on the latter two groups, agreeing with the notion that there are similarities in the structure of human memory and documentary narrative, both evoking emotions in an active process, but also considering documentary as a ‘carrier’ of cultural memory.
The notion that memory is an active process rather than a fixed object or solidly ‘saved’ in the human mind has become prevalent within most academic fields that pay attention to memory (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018, 17). Based on cognitivist theory, Bondebjerg shows how memory, narrative, and emotion are deeply intertwined. Cognitive research, which has gained a more prominent place within humanities and social studies over the last two decades, can help us understand why narrative structures in documentary are built in a certain way and how they influence the viewer on a cognitive and emotional level (Bondebjerg 2014, 13). Bondebjerg explains human memory as ‘the cognitive, emotional dimension through which humans combine short-term memory and long-term memory’ (18). By citing the work of Jonathan Gottschall, Bondebjerg argues that humans make sense of the world by
21 shown that in certain situations, such as the confrontation with ‘stories, images and human interaction’, certain emotional structures are activated (15). In this sense, stories are not only something we see in films and read in books, but are also fundamental frames in which we understand and remember the world. Bjondeberg quotes cognitive linguist George Lakoff:
Complex narratives – the kind we find in anyone’s life story, as well as in fairy tales, novels and drama – are made up of smaller narratives with very simple structures. Those structures are called “frames” or “scripts”. Frames are among the cognitive structures we think with […] the neural circuitry needed to crate frame structures is relatively simple, and so frames tend to structure a huge amount of our thought […] dramatic event structures are carried out by brain circuitry. The same event structure circuitry can be used to live out an action or narrative, or to understand the actions of others or the structure of the story. In addition, neural binding can create emotional experiences […] narratives and frames are not just brain structures with intellectual content, but rather with integrated intellectual emotional content (2014, 15).
Susan Radstone and Katherine Hodgkin also emphasise that remembering is an action, a creative process in which we try to reconstruct or re-actualise an absent reality of the past. Film as a medium is well suited for doing this, because it can externally represent this memory actualisation process. A film can show the content of memories, and at the same time it can incorporate the ‘act of remembering’ (Rincón, Cuevas, and Torregrosa 2018, 17).
Documentary in particular mimics “patterns of social and psychological involvement” of everyday life in its rhetoric structure (Bondebjerg 2014, 21). As opposed to social
constructionist theory, cognitivist film theory stresses the fact that narrative structures are not only cultural and social constructs, but are in fact partly biologically determined in our brain (Bondebjerg 2014, 14). These cognitive structures in our brain are translated to different forms of documentary rhetoric that engage with these structures. The expectation of documentary in general is mostly that it makes direct claims about the real world, whereas fiction films do so in a more indirect way (Bondebjerg 2014, 14). But within different sub-genres of documentary, there is variation in how they engage the viewer with reality through certain strategies. These strategies differ in the way they combine narrative, emotion and memory. When a filmmaker revisits situations, subjects, objects or events from the past in his or her narrative, they trigger a unique interplay of the viewer’s emotions, personal experience
22 and own memories (Bondebjerg 2014, 17).9
2.2 Media and memory: remembering (without) experience
Since the 1990s, remembrance has seemed to grow immensely within media practices. As Van Alphen points out, we have reached an era in which remembrance practices are everywhere – even so that we might even call it a genre (2007, 63). Whether that is a memorial, a museum, historical documentaries, Hollywood biopics, they all feature a past which we can activity revisit in the present. The frame in which the past is presented is not neutral – media can make us feel the past too. That has everything to do with the way we engage with these structures on an emotional level.
In this age of remembering, topics that have been unable to be addressed for a long time are now being pushed everywhere. We can see this, for example, in documentaries about topics as trauma, migration, the Holocaust, other genocides and wars (Van Alphen 2007, 63). The remembrance practices present us with things we have often not even experienced for ourselves. In 1997, Marianne Hirsch (being the child of a Holocaust survivor) coined the influential term ‘postmemory’. By introducing this type of memory, she explains a type of memory that a second generation can ‘inherit’ from their parents after a trauma. A generation of children who grew up as children from a traumatised generation, often have a very
powerful memory of that trauma although they have not experienced it themselves (Hirsch 2008, 103). This type of memory is interesting since “its connection to its object or source is mediated not through recollection but through an imaginative investment and creation” (Hirsch 1997, 22). Postmemory is thus partly similar to prosthetic memory in its imaginative character, but the difference is that with the concept of postmemory, Hirsch really focuses on the aspect of the ‘generational gap’ in remembering. It has mainly been used in relation to the remembrance of the holocaust. Even though the children of holocaust survivors have not experienced this trauma, it is still part of who they are and how they relate themselves to history. A trauma such as the holocaust is for most people today something that they have not witnessed for themselves, but it still continues to affect the next generation in the present. In other words, they do remember it – partly because of transmission of stories within the private sphere of the family, partly because of mediated images. As Hirsch argues, this second
9 Bondebjerg categorises these strategies in a somewhat similar way as Bill Nichols; he identifies authoritative, observational,
23 generation can grow up in the shadow of these ‘inherited memories’ of traumatic events, with the risk of not having the freedom to create own memories and stories (2008, 107).
The second generation after a traumatised generation is heavily reliant on photographic images as a source of information on the trauma (Hirsch 2008, 111). She underlines the importance of family photographs as ‘a medium for postmemory’ and their affective power with the work of Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Georges Didi-Huberman (M. Hirsch 2008, 115). Hirsch states:
When we look at photographic images from a lost past world, especially one that has been annihilated by force, we look not only for information or confirmation, but also for an intimate material and affective connection. We look to be shocked (Benjamin), touched, wounded, and pricked (Barthes’s
punctum), torn apart (Didi-Huberman), and photographs thus become
screens—spaces of projection and approximation and of protection. Small, two-dimensional, delimited by their frames, photographs minimise the disaster they depict and screen their viewers from it. But in seeming to open a window to the past and materialising the viewer’s relationship to it, they also give a glimpse of its enormity and its power. They can tell us as much about our own needs and desires (as readers and spectators) as they can about the past world they presumably depict. While authentication and projection can work against each other, the powerful tropes of familiality can also, and sometimes
problematically, obscure their distinction. The fragmentariness and the two-dimensional flatness of the photographic image, moreover, make it especially open to narrative elaboration and embroidery and to symbolisation (M. Hirsch 2008, 116–17).
If we want to explain this theory in relation to documentary practices, we can argue that in the past decades many filmmakers incorporated this postmemory position. James Young has extended Hirsch’ theory and argues that, also in relationship to the holocaust, postmemorial work should feature this fragmentary nature of memory. Especially the generation (of artists) after a period of trauma has the obligation to depict the past ethically; that means to feature this fragmentary nature, the uncertainty and the gaps in knowledge in experience, rather than hiding it (Young 2000, 6). Although Young talks about the holocaust, this can also be easily applied to other historical traumas. As Michael J. Lazzara points out in the case of Latin-American post-dictatorship era, a new generation of filmmakers has reflected this
postmemory position with cinematic techniques that feature performativity and reflexivity within the documentary landscape (Lazzara 2009).
24 2.3 Memory is mediated
José van Dijck’s theory on mediated memories, a term she coined to describe personal cultural memory and its mediality, has been very influential within the field of memory studies. This concept of mediated memories is relevant here because it also explores the relationship
between private memories, for instance looking at collections of our memorabilia that we keep in the shoebox under our beds, as sites where the personal and collective meet (Van Dijck 2007, 2). Van Dijck claims that memory and media should not be seen as fixed objects; they are continuously in interaction and influence each other. Media technology does not simply transmit memory; it shapes it into something new. Memories are not just saved to the ‘hard disk’ of our brain, nor are they safely stored in the objects we remember them by. Rather they are mediated. Van Dijck: “Mediated memories perform acts of remembrance and communication at the crossroads of body, matter, and culture” (2004, 364). These memories are ‘mediated’ for three reasons. First of all, these objects mediate memories to us. Next to that, they exemplify relationships to groups of people. Thirdly, they are made of certain media: whether it is a VHS videotape, the fabric of a concert bracelet, a polaroid sheet or an mp3 file (Van Dijck 2007, 1).
With the concept of mediated memories, Van Dijck reconceptualises the relationship between the brain, material objects and the cultural climate from which they stem (2007, 28). New media technology create new practices of remembering that will change the way cultural memory is shaped (2007, 29). Our personal online ‘objects’ such as playlists, social media profiles, digital videos and photos are now also an important part of how we remember. In our digital culture, these mediated memories are not only more visible all around us, but at the same time we create much more of them, for instance on social media (2004, 364).
Film as a medium has the ability to register events, to revisit existing mediated memories, and at the same time to shape public identity (Van Dijck 2008, 71). If we look at documentary, a lot of mediated memory objects are incorporated in filmic representation, which creates new mediated memories in its own right. Van Dijck argues that the
incorporation of family home movies in documentaries should therefore be considered with some reservations:
Family portraits captured in moving images are never simply retrospectives – found footage as relics of the past – but they are complex constructions of mental projections
25 and technological substrates, […] and technical substrates interwoven with socio-
cultural norms and conventions […] (2008, 77).
Van der Horst revisits many analogue private items in her films, such as letters, photos, albums, clippings, notes and tapes. Most of her films form a sharp contrast with
contemporary digital culture, since she mainly revisits analogue memory objects. But the mediality of these items influences the poetic and affective quality in which they convey their message; they radiate nostalgia and mark a past time, and take on a new meaning in their newly mediated form (the film).
2.4 Prosthetic memory: the artificial limb made of imagined memories
Alison Landsberg is known for her influential contribution to the memory discourse with her introduction of the concept of ‘prosthetic memory’ (2004). With this term, she refers to the abilities of modern media to shape cultural public memory of traumatic events. With mass media like television, cinema and the Internet, part of our understanding of collective memory is shaped by memories of events we have not experienced for ourselves. We have only seen certain events through mediated images, nevertheless they often feel so real that we regard them as our own memories. These memories therefore are prosthetic, as Landsberg argues, and function like “an artificial limb, actually worn on the body” (20). They are artificial since they are imagined memories, but at the same time these memories are real and important in our understanding of the world. Landsberg points to the ethical possibilities this brings for media in a capitalist society (18). By visiting a movie theatre and watching a film about a war we did not witness, it is possible to create a prosthetic memory of that war. Because we empathise with the characters we see on screen, we actually deeply feel this memory and consider it as one of our own memories. This prosthetic memory can change our subjective viewpoints on war in general, just as a personal memory of a lived-through event would (2). Cinema
therefore has the potential to actively reshape the way we think about others in terms of race, class and gender differences, because it is now possible to literally see through the eyes of the other (148).
Janet Walker argues that a certain type of films present an alternative way to recreate the feeling of traumatic events (2005, 189). She defines films that try to depict historical traumas as trauma cinema. A common feature of trauma cinema seems to be the use of
26 fragmentary, sensory and abstract cinematic strategies (190). Often it features an experience to make the viewer part of this traumatic memory (189).
2.5 The filmic translation of personal memory
Anthropologist and filmmaker David MacDougall provides us with a framework that can help us consider how that experience of memory is translated into film. He points out that cinema is faced with a difficult task. How can we represent memory’s ‘images’ and
arrangement if they are never seen? In other words, how does a director create an audio-visual translation on screen for that what we cannot see? Memory has an elusive and incoherent nature and is composed of sensory and verbal data (MacDougall 1998, 231). MacDougall convincingly discusses memory’s difficult relationship with representing it in film:
It [memory] offers us the past in flashes and fragments, and in what seems a hodge-podge of mental “media”. We seem to glimpse images, hear sounds, use unspoken words and reexperience such physical sensations as pressure and movement. It is in this multidimensionality that memory perhaps finds its closest counterpart in the varied and intersecting representational systems of film. But given this complexity, and equally the aura of insubstantiality and dreaming that frequently surrounds memory, we may ask whether in trying to represent memory in film we do something significantly different from other kinds of visual and textual representation. We create signs for things seen only in the mind’s eye. Are they nevertheless signs like any other? (1998, 231) MacDougall notes that films that focus on memory are not able to record memory in itself. Instead they capture the ‘secondary representatives of memory’. He points to the external signs of remembering, such as physical objects that have survived the wheel of time, or revisiting places that have a connection to the past for the subject of the documentary. The showing of these objects in documentary is not the same as the memory in itself, since the objects are now different than they were in the past (1998, 232–33). Their status has changed with time passing by, for instance Polaroid pictures were an example of new technology in the early 1970s, but are popular today because they mediate a nostalgic and vintage (old) look. This is a shift in meaning and interpretation of those objects that is easily overlooked. Many documentaries tend to treat these objects if they actually are the memory itself. Interviews in documentary are often edited with photographs and archival footage, which are inserted to function as an exemplification of the memory of the interviewee (MacDougall 1998, 232).
27 Traditionally, these secondary representatives of memory are incorporated into film in various ways. MacDougall categorises these “signs” in four different categories: signs of survival,
replacement, resemblance and absence. These signs are useful, since they break down the
different ways in which a director is able to visualise the memories of subjects, or that of him or herself. The signs of survival, replacement and resemblance are most often used in the
depiction of any personal memory in documentary, but it seems that combining these three with the fourth category of signs of absence, seems to distinguish a specific directorial
28
Chapter 3: Turning memory into narrative in Voices of Bam
3.1 Voices of Bam’s narrative of experience: wandering through the rubble
In Van der Horst’s first feature documentary Voices of Bam (2006), she depicts the daily life of the surviving inhabitants of Bam, a medieval city in Iran that was completely destroyed by an earthquake in December 2003. This resulted in the death of a third of the entire city’s
population of 100.000. Voices of Bam is a poetic mosaic documentary without real
protagonists: it shows a chorus of more than ten voices of survivors who share their personal memories while they perform their daily rituals such as washing the dishes, walking to the market, rebuilding a home and riding a motorcycle. The camera stays with them for a while and follows them in their daily habits, after which it moves on to the next participant with a new story, leaving the previous participants behind (and who do not reappear in the film). In this way, the film’s narrative is structured as a journey in the present of watching the film.
The film, which she co-directed with her cinematographer Maasja Ooms, was produced under unusual circumstances. In a seminar, Van der Horst explains that during the research for this film, Ooms and Van der Horst established the idea for the outspoken filmic style, which was based on the culture of lamenting the dead by talking to their photographs, which they experienced everywhere in Bam (Scottish Documentary Institute 2017). After three research visits to Bam during which she recorded these voice-overs that form the base of the film (later on, this will be described in more detail), Van der Horst was denied entry to Iran for unknown reasons. Luckily, Ooms was able to enter the country and record the imagery. The film thus contains fewer filmmaker-participant interactions than most other films of Van der Horst, because she was not on set filming the imagery. But because the voice-overs had already been recorded and edited by Van der Horst earlier, the basic structure and visual style of the film were already determined; Ooms knew what she had to look for in terms of the accompanying imagery.10 Despite these circumstances, Voices of Bam
convincingly shows how Van der Horst brings together memory, experience and emotion in her narratives.
Voices of Bam breaks with the realist documentary conventions of depicting historical
traumatic events. There is no authoritative voice-over and no clear historical narrative (Bondebjerg 2014, 19). Instead, the filmmakers are invisible and silent throughout the film
10 Ooms even listened to Van der Horst’s montage of voice-over on earplugs while shooting the imagery, in order to search
29 and seem to follow daily life as it unfolds before their eyes. Van der Horst does not use
interviews to acquire a testimony from her participants. Doing interviews is usually a common strategy for depicting historical events according to Bondebjerg (19). He also acknowledges the incorporation of newsreel footage as another important characteristic of historic
documentary (19). Van der Horst however, discards the archival (news) footage of the earthquake, such as images of bodies pulled from under the rubble, crying women on the streets or ambulances approaching and vanishing. Because of this rejection, she limits herself to the present day as source of imagery. This is an ethical choice, taking into consideration the painful confrontation of the survivors with horrific news images. But it is also an aesthetical choice, because the exclusive use of poetic cinematography also strongly contributes to the immersive and emotional viewing experience of the film.
From a fly-on-the-wall perspective, the camera continues to follow the different participants and their surroundings, discovering what is left of Bam like a “ghost wandering through the city” (“Voices of Bam” n.d.). The film only consists of long takes shot on Super 16 film, which give the film its visual poetic aesthetic. The participants in the film are first introduced by long observational takes that allow the viewer to immerse their self in the world of this person.
Image 1: Voices of Bam, 00:02:07.
30 3.2 The inner voices talking: active remembering in direct address
These dreamlike and surreal shots of the cityscape in rubble are accompanied by an audio track consisting of the voice-overs of survivors of the earthquake and an intricate soundscape that guides the viewer’s focus into an internal world of experience.11 In these voice-overs, most of the participants talk directly to a person they have lost, sharing their intimate thoughts and memories in a one-way-conversation. Others talk directly to God.12 They address their loved one or God with their concerns to move on with life after their death and how they can cope without them. Since these internal thoughts are only featured in the voice-over (and never visually articulated in on-screen scenes), this results in the fact that the whole film has the experience of being inside someone’s head. This is amplified by the fact that Van der Horst has asked the participants to speak slow or whisper in these voice-overs. This generates a greater sense of intimacy. It creates a feeling of proximity and trust, because usually we only allow someone to whisper in our ear when we know (and trust) someone. In this way, the mode of address is personal and has a strong emotional resonance.
She finds an audio-visual translation that respects the intimacy of personal memory. It shows that while moving on in everyday life, your head is still somewhere else: with the lost people you love. She honours the different ways in which the participants want to talk about their own grief and memories, instead of forcing them to reply to (invasive) questions about a trauma (as many directors do). She also edits these voice-overs in a different way: instead of combining them with a close-up of the participant, they are usually combined with wide frames as the camera zooms out to show the surroundings after a close-up of a participant. In this way, the viewer is stimulated to discover meaning in the various elements of the
surroundings while listening to the voice-over: for instance different people walking on a square (image 6).
These voice-overs are often combined with family pictures from before the earthquake within the film. The happy family pictures with the family members smiling (image 2)
contrast with the appearance of the documentary’s participants in the present day (image 1). These photographs are signs of survival, a term MacDougall coins for images and objects that
11 The soundscape, composed by Harry de Wit, is also very important for the emotional sphere in Voices of Bam and deserves
to be examined more closely, but due to limited room within this thesis I will focus on the use of voice-over.
12 There is one story in the film in which two inner voices talk to each other (and thus are both still alive). That is the story of
the couple whose wedding is portrayed in the film. In the voice-over of their inner voices, they tell the other how their forbidden love for the other felt before the earthquake and how their marriage a finally allowed after the earthquake.
