M.A. Media Studies: Television and Cross-Media Culture Master Thesis
A Performance of Reality: Aesthetic strategies of new music documentaries by the example of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck.
by Anna-Lena Willems
Date of completion: 16.06.2017 Supervisor: Dr. Sudeep Dasgupta Second Reader: Dr. Jaap Kooijman
Table of Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Documentary in Theory 4
2.1 Documentary: Definitions and Genre 4
2.1.1 Introducing and Defining Documentary 4
2.1.2 Periods, Movements and Modes of Documentary 7
2.1.3 Music Documentary 9
2.2 Modes and Aesthetic Strategies 16
2.2.1 Approaching Reality and Knowledge 16
2.2.2 Performative Documentary 17
2.2.3 The Performative Mode and Music Documentary 20
2.2.3 Aesthetic Strategies of New Music Documentary 22
3. Analysis 26
3.1 20,000 Days On Earth 27
3.2 Cobain: Montage of Heck 41
4. Conclusion 57
Bibliography 61
Filmography & Videography 63
1. Introduction
Documentary is a versatile and constantly shifting film genre, that caused innumerable paradigm shifts and movements throughout the past century of its existence. What doc-umentary films all have in common, is their attempt to create an audiovisual representa-tion of a certain form of reality. Unequal though, is how they approach and understand reality, truth, and knowledge. The aesthetics and values of documentary films differ and range from objective to subjective, factual to sensual, observing to intervening, aestheti-cized to realistic. Depending on the subjects they treat, the relation between creative aestheticization, and on the other hand truthfulness and authenticity, requires to be bal-anced differently. Aesthetic subjects, so the assumption, require and allow for a higher creative treatment than factual subjects would do. This thesis wants to contribute filling the research gap about a particular sub genre of non-fictional film, the music documen-tary, and plead for its relevance for the development of contemporary documentary aes-thetics.
While there is a lot of research done about documentary film in general, there is a tremendous lack of academic attention towards music documentary. Although the emer-gence of music documentary dates back to the 1960s, the research field about the genre just slowly starts do develop within the current decade. The Music Documentary: Acid Rock to Electropop by Edgar (et. al. 2013) is one of the first comprehensive volumes that exclusively look at music documentary film, and argue to consider the genre as essential cultural artifact for documenting popular music and their stars and figureheads. Populäre Musikkulturen im Film, a German anthology by Carsten Heinze published in 2016 refers to this work and seeks to find a more precise definition of the genre, examine the roots of music documentary, specific traits, and subdivisions in detail. Heinze engages with the important question of what happens to the aesthetics and narrative strategies, when documentary film meets an inherently aesthetic subject like pop music.
The performative documentary mode, as defined by Bruzzi (2006), understands documentary filmmaking as a performative act. The meaning and sense of a documen-tary is grasped as a reality on its own, that comes into being through the process of film-making, which basically is a negotiating conversation between the filmmaker and the ac-tual reality. This mode allows for a great artistic license, interpretational freedom, and aesthetics that are suitable for the representation of subjectivity, performance, and
cre-ativity. In contrast to more traditional documentary modes, the performative documentary does not follow a realistic and objective paradigm, but grasps knowledge and reality as an embodied and highly subjective matter. In many other types of documentary, that treat for instance historical, social or political subjects, the creation of an aesthetic experience is not the primary concern. Those documentary films rather tend to base their represen-tational capacity on the investigation of non-aesthetic, factual knowledge, and maybe even carry the demand for objectivity. In music documentary on the other hand, aesthetic experience is essential. To create an authentic representation of the reality of pop music and its social context, new music documentaries increasingly break with the traditions of the genre. Pop culture is understood as a music-centered cultural field. A conglomerate of music, style, media, strongly depending on performance and identification (Kleiner 25). Pop culture is a fundamentally performative and aesthetic culture. Performance constant-ly creates new relations between subjects and objects, performers and their audiences (23). While in the 1970s, most music documentaries were to categorize as rockumen-taries, in which the filmmaker takes an observing, at most a questioner position, and por-traits bands or music cultures out of a realistically observing distance, new music docu-mentaries tend to be highly creative and make use of performative aesthetics, imagina-tion and artistic stylizaimagina-tions (Heinze 171). Thus, performative documentary modes strongly relate to the qualities of pop music culture, and enables the films to use aesthet-ics and paradigms that can portray the aesthetaesthet-ics and performance of pop music from within. At the exemplary analysis of two recent music documentaries, this thesis wants to examine, by means of which aesthetic strategies new music documentaries incorporate the aesthetic and sensual experience of pop music, performance and creativity of their subject, and translate them into a cinematic documentary text.Two very recent research objects will be analyzed: 20,000 Days on Earth, released in UK 2014, directed by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, and Cobain: Montage of Heck by Brett Morgen, published in US 2015. Both documentaries, as will be shown in the close reading analysis, occupy hybrid and rather unconventional ways of storytelling. Brett Morgen recombines In Cobain: Montage of Heck, Brett Morgen recombines common elements of documentary like interviews, voice-over, archive footage with rather unconventional strategies. In mul-tiple layers of animation, music and sound recordings, diary entries and lyrics, he creates an aesthetically loaded collage about the subject Kurt Cobain. 20,000 Days on Earth on the other hand, gives insight to the inner life of Nick Cave and his creative processes as an artist. One part of the documentary focusses on the fictionalized 20,000th day in Nick
Cave’s life, which constitutes the film a genre blurring example. The other part engages with the creative process of writing and recording of music, and uses less performative aesthetics.
The chapter structure of this thesis will build up as follows. Chapter 2.1 will firstly introduce to documentary film and provide a general definition of the genre. Therefore, Bill Nichols’ Introduction to Documentary (2010) provides the groundwork for the docu-mentary discourse. An historic overview of the periods of docudocu-mentary film will follow, including different paradigm movements and stylistic modes, with the purpose to empha-size the diversity and divergences of documentary film. Further, this chapter will provide general knowledge about the development of music documentary, elaborate the specifics of this aesthetic related genre, discuss contemporary debates about the qualities of mu-sic documentary, and draw a connection between performativity and mumu-sic documentary. This part will widely draw upon the work of Heinze and his anthology Populäre Musikkul-turen im Film (2016). The following chapter 2.2 will take a closer look at performativity. In a first step, on the basis of Michael Renov (2004), different ways to approach reality and knowledge will be examined, as for example the comparison of subjective and objective perspectives, or factual and embodied knowledge. The next subchapter reflects upon the performative documentary mode, elaborated in two different versions by Bill Nichols (2010) and Stella Bruzzi (2006). Thereafter, the performative documentary mode will be related to the specific qualities of music documentary, especially bringing into focus why the performative documentary mode is suitable for the traits of pop music as documen-tary subject. Lastly, the chapter will list and examine various aesthetic strategies that are, according to Heinze, commonly used in new music documentaries. Those aesthetic strategies, namely multi-layered montage, self performance, home videos, re-enactment and enactment, and animation, will be used as analysis tools for the case study of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck. Subsequently, chapter 3 will pro-vide the case analysis of the two stated research objects. Looking at both the overall structure of the music documentaries and their use of aesthetic strategies, it will be ex-amined how both films use performativity to express the aesthetic reality and sensual qualities of performance, pop music and its social context.
2. Documentary in Theory
This chapter will provide the theoretical fundament of this thesis. Chapter 2.1 will define documentary film and discuss various modes, periods and movements, as well as provide a definition and the historic development of music documentary film. Chapter 2.2 will examine different approaches about the performative mode of documentary, set per-formance in relation to music documentary, and explain relevant aesthetic strategies that are commonly used in music documentary, and will be relevant as examination tools for the case analysis of 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Montage of Heck.
2.1 Documentary: Definitions and Genre
2.1.1 Introducing and Defining Documentary
Documentary is a multifaceted film genre and there is a multiplicity of ideas about what a documentary exactly is. The variety of modes and aesthetics in documentary film make it difficult to cumulate them all in one precise definition. As Nichols emphasizes: „We might well wonder what, if anything, all these films have in common“ (6). One could suppose that documentary differs from fictional film by being non-fictive in the first place. But even this quality is debatable, considering the variety of documentary aesthetics that have no indexical relation to the represented reality. Music, reenactment, enactment, an-imation or set-up events are used in documentary and constitute the creative and aes-theticized level of the genre. More conventional conceptualizations of documentary theo-ry see a discrepancy between the aestheticization of a documentatheo-ry and its validity. The traditional paradigm is: „the less polished the film the more credible it will be found“ (Bruzzi 9). The indexical image, the strict correspondence between the recorded imprint (images as well as sounds) and actual reality, constitutes, according to these ap-proaches, the authenticity and value of a documentary film. This indexical quality of a document is what makes the documentary image „appear as a vital source of evidence“ (Nichols 35). „Documentary practice and theory have always had a problem with aesthetics - or to be more precise with aestheticisation“, states Bruzzi (9). However, as the majority of approaches subtend, documentary is not to equalize with a reality re-producing document, but to understand as a representation of reality. Documentaries use the evidence, the relation of their images to the real world, to interpret reality, make
pro-posals and offer perspectives about it (Nichols 35). While the validity of a reproduction, a document, is measured in its equivalence to the original, a representation is judged by „the nature of the pleasure it offers, the value of the insight it provides, and the quality of the perspective it instills“ (13). Thus, documentary can certainly not be defined as a repli-cation of reality. Neither should replirepli-cation be the aim of documentary film. So, what is the appropriate definition of documentary?
A popular definition was proposed by John Grierson in the 1930s. The documen-tary film, he states, is a „creative treatment of actuality“ (Grierson in Nichols 6). Grier-son’s approach includes a diversity of forms and aesthetic qualities a documentary film can possess. To understand documentary film as a „creative treatment“ of the actual re-ality emphasizes that documentary is neither reproduction nor fictional invention. Nichols claims, that the division of non-fiction and fiction is a „matter of degree, not a black-and-white-division“ and depends on the degree to which the story is referring to actuality and to which it is created by the filmmaker (7). Nevertheless, documentaries must fulfill cer-tain criteria that constitute them as documentaries. A direct reference to the historical re-ality distinguishes documentary from fiction film. As Nichols describes in his fundamental work Introduction To Documentary (2010), „the documentary form balances creative vi-sion with a respect for the historical world“ and further „draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective“.
Following how Nichols interprets Grierson, documentary is a representation of ac-tuality, always constituted in influence of creative decisions, perspectives of filmmakers or subjects, and the film-making process. Also fictional films can certainly address as-pects of reality, but they also introduce new and unverifiable events that create fictional worlds and narratives (Nichols 7). Relevant for the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is the balance to which degree the story corresponds to actuality, and to which it is created by the filmmaker (12). Most documentary images and sounds stem from the ac-tual historic world, or at least refer to people and events that belong there. Documen-taries respect known facts and provide „verifiable evidence“ (7), albeit they can follow varying notions of knowledge and truth, which will be examined later in this thesis.
Another quality of documentary film that Nichols points out is that „documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform roles“ but a certain expression of them-selves (8). Even though this might be considered as a performance that is exclusively acted out for the documentary camera, it differs from fictional performances in that the person of the documentary represents a version of his or her actual self.
Self-presenta-tion is always determined by the choice of details that a person wants to reveal of his or her personality. People in documentaries decide „to be frank or guarded, emotional or reserved, inquisitive or distant, all in accord with how an interaction unfolds moment by moment“ (Nichols 9). Equally essential, for Nichols, is the story-telling power of docu-mentary. Documentaries „tell stories about what happens in the real world“, he states (10). The documentary narration has to be a representation of what actually happened. It does not matter which perspective the story takes or by means of which aesthetics it is realized, as long as it does not invent something imaginative. It is important to notice that „for any given event, more than one story exists to represent and interpret it“ (14). Ran-cière also engages with this quality of documentary. He points out that documentary dif-fers from fiction film only by not treating „the real as an effect to be produced“ but „as a fact to be understood“ instead (Rancière in Baumbach 66). The aesthetics of documen-tary film are tools to construct meaning and perspective. Documentaries take images of the real as points of contestations, and use montage and aesthetics to create values and meaning, and foreground certain aspects. Therefore, the diversity of stories, arguments and perspectives, that a documentary can take for only single subject, is potentially end-less. Documentaries engage with facts and knowledge, but the storytelling process gives meaning and interpretation to them (Rancière in Baumbach 66). For Rancière and for Nichols, reality is not self-evident. There is not only one truth that can be represented in a documentary narrative. Based on this arguments and his criteria of documentary film, Nichols proposes a detailed but still very integrating definition of documentary:
„Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social ac-tors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible pro-posal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a dictional allegory“ (14).
This thesis will take this definition as a starting point. Although this version does not con-cretely distinguish different types and modes of documentary, it is able to include a large spectrum of documentary types that use different cinematic techniques, and is as such relatively resistant to the constantly changing boundaries of the genre.
2.1.2 Periods, Movements and Modes of Documentary
For the purpose of this thesis, this chapter will only provide a briefly historical overview, limited on the key periods and movements of documentary, and the modes that will be helpful to understand the following arguments. There are for example the shifts that were prerequisites for the performative documentary mode to come into being, and the music documentary as a genre to develop. The pre-documentary phase begins with the first filmic recordings of non fictional events, like the iconic L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat of the Lumière brothers in 1895. The first actual documentary films date back to the 1920s, to the silent documentary period, which was superseded by the inven-tion of sound synch in mid 1930s (Winston 2). In Introducinven-tion to Documentary (2010), Nichols divides different periods, movements and modes of documentary film. Periods are to be seen as historical timespans in which documentary films share common char-acteristics or qualities. The most important periods in the history of documentary are the following (29f):
• 1930s - 1950s: Documentary films focus on contemporary social or economic issues, and use voice-over commentary and arranged images.
• 1960s: Lightweight camera and synchronous sound recording technology change the possibilities of filmmaking. Documentary makers are enabled with new mobility and fo-cus more on social actors and participation in everyday life situations. In this period, observational and participatory documentaries become more popular than the exposi-tory mode and voice-over stylistics of the former period.
• 1970s - 1980s: Documentary begins to treat historical subjects more, and make use of archive footage and interviews to enrich perspectives; the latter likewise for contempo-rary topics. Historical documentaries tend to take perspectives of ordinary people rather than taking perspective „from above“.
• 1980s: The current „Golden Age“ of documentary begins and constantly readjusts the forms of non-fictional filmmaking since then. The boundaries of the genre broaden, au-diences become increasingly international, and the voice of the filmmakers and authors are increasingly important. By now, documentary has entered the multimedia sphere, and ranges from cinema and television to an overall presence in online media (e.g. YouTube or interactive documentaries).
Movements in contrast are no historical category but formal or informal groups of filmmakers that share similarities regarding their filmic approaches and stylistics. When film movements arise, they often come up with a collective statement or Manifest that defines the group’s goals and principles (29). Nichols describes the most important movements of documentary film (28f.):
• The Soviet Union documentary film movement was pioneering on the development of the documentary genre from the1920s to early 1930s and committed to avant-garde aesthetics and techniques.
• The British Documentary Movement of the 1930s, which also John Grierson belongs to, made documentaries for governmental purposes and political propaganda, espe-cially in working class interests.
• The Free Cinema movement, acting in Britain of the 1950s, focused on bringing a new aesthetic look on subjects of the contemporary life of the British. They veered away from the governmental influence of their predecessors but still were concerned with the representation of the working class people.
• The observational filmmaking movement, cinema vérité or Direct Cinema, developed in the 1960’s America and adapted neutral and objective positions and featured an ob-serving, non-interventionalist camera. With this observational style, filmmakers sought to represent reality more authentic and truthful. Although this approach is highly debat-ed, observational documentary filmmaking persists until today.
The third category is Nichols’ popular differentiation of the six documentary modes, which most works in documentary studies refers to (31f). His modes are no his-torical classification but describe „viable ways of using the resources of the cinema to make documentary films“, that persist over different periods and movements (30). Nichols emphasizes that the modes are not stable but vary by national, periodical, and individual influences:
• Poetic mode: describes associative, tonal and rhythmic documentaries, following no conventional arrangements or narrations. Poetic documentaries often focus on person-al experience and show experimentperson-al filmmaking quperson-alities.
• Expository mode: builds up a clearly structured argumentative narration that is empha-sized by voice-over commentary.
• Observational mode: the camera aims to remain in an observing and unobtrusive posi-tion. Little arrangement and montage, and no use of commentary. Engaging with everyday life events mostly, enabled by the technological renewals of mobile camera gear in the 1960s.
• Participatory mode: features the interactive relation between the subject and the film-maker through interviews and conversations. For the means of historical subjects, ar-chive footage is a common aesthetic.
• Reflexive mode: enhancement of the participatory mode in which the filmmaker re-veals, questions and debates the process of filmmaking. The viewer’s attention is called to the constructedness of the documentary and issues of representing reality. • Performative mode: emphasizes subjectivity and emotional expression of the subject.
Performative documentaries involve the audience on a sensual and personal level and feature affect instead of objectivity. The performative documentary mode will be further examined in chapter 2.2.1.
2.1.3 Music Documentary
Based on the proposed definition, and with the key modes and periods of docu-mentary in mind, the following chapter will approach the sub genre of music documen-tary. As the works consulted, the thesis focusses on music documentaries in the context of Western pop music culture. Music documentary has received no systematic academic attention by now, neither in film nor in documentary studies. Instead, the genre is often accused to pursue promotional intentions and serve fandom more than documentary values and qualities - and thus, to not be worthy of closer examination (Chanan, Edgar). Chanan stresses that this deliberate ignorance is no longer justifiable, not at least be-cause the genre provided a variety of examples by now whose filmic qualities are „para-digmatic for documentary as such“ (337). The Music Documentary (2013), edited by Robert Edgar et. al, rates as the first essay volume that seeks to close this research gap, engaging with the diversity of music documentary, key periods, methodologies and cine-matic techniques. Based on their book, and the referring volume Populäre Musikkulturen im Film (2016) by Heinze, this chapter will provide a summarizing history of music docu-mentary, propose a definition of the genre and debate contemporary academic discourse about music documentary; the latter especially with regards to the controversial
allega-tion of music documentary to be a promoallega-tional genre and thus less valuable form of doc-umentary film.
Origin and Development of Music Documentary
The origin of music documentary takes place in the 1960s, favored by the new technical possibilities of filming (Chanan 338). Prior to the introduction of portable cam-eras and synchronous sound recording, music as a subject of documentary was of no interest for filmmakers. For the first time, technology allowed for capturing music right in its place of performance. Prior to the 1960s, documentaries were strongly expected to have primarily educational intentions. With the 1970s the acceptance of less scientific approaches and entertaining effects of documentary increased (Saffle 47). This devel-opment was equally essential for music documentary to establish, since music documen-tary breaks with many traditional qualities of the documendocumen-tary genre. Caused by the aes-thetic and sensational nature of the subject music, music documentaries „interrogate the more traditional depiction of the truth as stable, objective, and knowable“ (Grant/Slo-niowski in Saffle 43). As Chanan defines very vague, music documentary is more than the simple recording of musical performance. It has to capture the social contexts of mu-sic as well (341). The first films meeting this condition were the tour-documentaries Char-lie is My Darling (1965), a rockumentary by Peter Whitehead about the Rolling Stones, and the popular Bob Dylan film Dont Look Back [sic] by Don Pennebaker, released in 1967. Both are travelogues, consisting of verbal statements and musical performances. As common for early rockumentary, Pennebaker follows the observational credo of Direct Cinema. Whitehead additionally turns to interviews and montage techniques (Chanan 341). A quality ascribed to popular music is the ability to capture historical impressions of popular culture. Tony Palmer’s documentary series All You Need Is Love (1977) is regu-larly referred to as the first series to turn popular music history into a non-fictional narra-tive (Edgar et. al. xii). As Long and Wall quote Palmer: „When people want to know what it meant to be alive in 1965, they’ll listen to The Beatles“ (31). Following this idea, music documentary can be seen as a visualized time-witness of a socio-historical timespan, which is an essential quality for the genre’s relevance. Pointing to the vast stylistic variety in the contemporary music documentary - from autobiographic films and artists portraits, over festival documentaries and rockumentaries - Heinze registers a new international heyday of the genre in the current decade (153). This new forms of music documentary
exemplary show what Nichols describes as the „Golden Age“ period of documentary. They show that documentary in general has opened up for genre-blurring aesthetics and merging of stylistics and modes. Recently, music documentary has extended its quantity, the richness of its subjects, and the variety of its aesthetic strategies. Many new music documentaries use innovative techniques of narration and representation, that connect all different forms of past and classic music documentaries with each other. Techniques like re-enactment, animation or extensively artistic, multi-layered montage strategies cre-ate biographic myths and genercre-ate access into music history. Often, the films take hybrid forms and consist of multiple image and sound sources that are composed to complex systems of association and reference (Heinze 171).
Defining Music Documentary
In order to define music documentary more precisely, Heinze relates the specific qualities of music documentary back to Nichols’ documentary definition, and elaborates in which characteristics music documentary differs from documentary about other sub-jects. He emphasizes that music documentaries and documentaries in general propose perspectives on reality, constituted of cinematic footage that was taken from social reality and condensed to a certain assertion by a filmmaker (Heinze 164). Music documentary narratives are often told in essentially subjective perspectives. The degree of enactment and performance, that Nichols adduces as a benchmark to divide non-fiction from fiction, loses much of its importance. The genre is grounded on aesthetic and art, since pop and rock music is always based on the aesthetic performance of an artistic self, and on the sensual experience of music (Heinze 168). Therefore, the notion of truth and authenticity has to be rethought in music documentary, as it is all along connected to certain forms of creation and exaggeration. The clear differentiation between fiction and non-fiction, Heinze argues, is not one worth to maintain in music documentary studies, because the imaginary and illusionary is an inherent part of pop music culture. As an example, he names the creational process of producing songs and melodies, or the overall perfor-mance of an artistic personality (168).
Concerning the first quality that Nichols proposes as essential for documentary film, „documentaries are about reality“ (7), Heinze stresses the importance of merging fact and fiction in music documentary. Genre-blurring elements are common features to represent the social context and extensively sensual reality of popular music. The pop
culture is highly related to the act of performance, and the generation of myths and iconic images of musicians and stars (170). Referring to Nichols’ second point, „documentaries are about real people“ who present themselves to viewer as themselves (8), Heinze em-phasizes the special position that personalities of pop and rock musicians occupy. The personality of a musician embraces, next to the private one, a public version of self that is constantly acted in form of a pop cultural habitus. In music documentary, the perfor-mance of self can be seen as doubled, because the musician already performs the public version of self, which is performed again in the documentary context (171). „Documen-taries tell stories about what happened in the real world“ (10), as it is Nichols’ last fun-damental feature of documentary film, emphasizes that documentary film not only ob-serves reality but actively tells a story that represents actual events out of a certain per-spective. Sometimes, documentaries tend to use personalization and sensual expres-sions to intensify the tangibility of broader dynamics to the viewer. Heinze states that the storytelling power of documentary, the narrative aspect, is of special importance for mu-sic documentaries, because the subject itself (the scene, band, or mumu-sician) gets its meaning and significance firstly through cultural and medial forms of narration. Summing Heinze’s arguments up, music documentaries:
• are about the performative reality of pop and rock music and its social context.
• are about musicians and performers, that act out a pop cultural identity and habitus, and present themselves to the viewer in a performance of those.
• tell stories about the cultural significance of musicians, bands or scenes.
A typically dramatic composition of music documentary is therefore the musicians’ career, from its advancement to its decay (Heinze 171).Heinze sees the very fascination of music documentaries in their ability to lend a form of immortality to musicians and star figures. The fundamental desire of film to capture and conserve its own subject, is in the pop cultural context strongly related to the conservation of youth, since pop music is a highly youth-oriented environment (Heinze 162). Temporally seen, music documentary is a rather contemporary genre, compared to documentaries about political or social sub-jects (Saffle 43). Most of the films focus on living artists. A smaller strand of pop music documentary is made in retrospective, and tells the story of a musician posthumously. The latter films often use techniques like re-enactment or strongly focus on archive footage. A third part of music documentaries combines both recent and retrospective
sources. The use of music, as it is critically debated in other documentary types, plays obviously a different role in music documentary where it is part of the subject itself. Music can be used in different ways; either it is used in synchronous relation to the image, for example in live and on-stage situations, or extra-diegetic in highly constructive ways, say as emotionalizing background music, commentary, connective element between se-quences of associative technique (Heinze 154).
Documentary or Promotion?: Academic Discourse about Music Documentary
The lack of academic interest in music documentary studies is often explained by a reproach. Several authors, as for instance The Music Documentary (2013) editor Edgar, debate about the genre’s fulfillment of documentary values. Music documentary is often accused to be a tool of brand and star promotion and thus not worth the academic effort in documentary studies. Is this stigmatization really justified? Firstly, star and celebrity cult plays a huge role in pop music culture, which is why most of the music doc-umentaries focus on biographical stories about musicians and bands. According to Edgar, a basic principle of music documentary is to reveal the private person behind the star persona and thereby to „explode the myth“ that fan culture creates around musicians (18). Like celebrities use social media accounts nowadays, the documentaries would aim to give an impression of authenticity and in this way subliminally support the star brand. With promotional intent, Edgar argues, biographical music documentaries would set up a „questionable mise-en-scène“ about the musician that is not corresponding to actuality, and thus contradicting to the virtues of documentary. This reproach is targeted on main-stream related examples, just as on „more respectable quarters of music documentary“, how Edgar refers to Martin Scorsese’s portraits about George Harrison and Bob Dylan (19). Other authors, like Niebling, divide music documenting films into different cate-gories: rockumentary and music documentary. To her, music documentaries follow more journalistic principles, and take a rather objective and distanced perspective on the sub-ject. They question the stardom of the musicians and aim to „deconstruct any mythologi-cal pretexts“ (35f.). Rockumentaries on the other hand, whether depicting a band on tour, or a scene, are influenced by the filmmaker’s personal affinity to the subject (34). Al-though the first generation of rockumentary used to follow the observational credo of Di-rect Cinema, Niebling sees a promotional purpose in recent rockumentaries. She argues, rockumentaries „embrace and use the mythology by relying on concepts of stardom and
an overall emotional approach“ (35). Similar to Edgar, Niebling states that the films adapt mise-en-scène techniques and feature generic conventions of promotional quality, like sensual and emotional approaching of the subject, mystifications of the musicians or techniques as „excessive appearance of certain musicians as interview partners“ (34f.). For both Niebling and Edgar, the fact that most music documentaries, respectively rock-umentaries, sustain and depict the stardom of musicians, and approach the subject of pop music in emotional and performative instead of matter-of-fact like ways, seems to be connected to a certain purposely falsification of reality. Thus, they regard the narrational qualities and aesthetics of recent music documentary as being at odds with the ideal qualities and values of documentary, and how it should represent reality.
The Performative Reality of Pop Music
As it is the aim of this thesis to examine how the very reality of pop, meaning the aesthetic, emotional and sensual level of experiencing music and its cultural context, is transported and visualized in music documentaries, it will be argued against this criti-cism. The arguments of Edgar and Niebling about the commercialization and promotional character of music documentary miss out to reflect on the aesthetic nature of pop music as a filmic subject. The existing „overlap between the music documentary and accelera-tion of celebrity culture“ (Edgar 14) might easily lead to the assumpaccelera-tion that music docu-mentary contradicts to the traditional docudocu-mentary values of objectivity and reportage, just in behalf of promotional reasons. This thesis suggests instead, that the reason for music documentary’s rejection of objectivity and other classical documentary values is located in the performative nature of the subject. Pop music and its context is an intense-ly aesthetic and subjective, experience-based subject, that is moreover related to per-sonal identification, style emotions and taste. For this reason, pop culture and music re-quire a different, more embodied and sensual approach of reality, that allows to audio-visualize the sensual and performative world of pop music and its context. Referring back to how Heinze describes of the characteristics of music documentary, the relation be-tween reality and representation requires reconsideration. The mise-en-scène, that Edgar and Niebling criticize, has not necessarily the intention to promote the musician or band shown but is rather to understand as an expression if the performative reality of pop music culture. For a better understanding, pop culture will briefly be defined as the cultural context of pop music. Kleiner understands the notion of pop as „weit gefassten
musikzentrierten Traditionsbegriff“, as a broad concept that is centered in the field of mu-sic. The term gathers everything that deduces from the origin of pop, beginning with the first youth cultures of the 1950s. Pop culture is to perceive as an open field, an unstable „conglomerate“ of music, identification, style, scene and media (25). Essential is also its close reference to the present (which is why music documentary is contemporary). Pop culture is an everyday life culture, an ongoing process of creating meaning and significa-tion. Therefore, it is to consider as an aesthetic culture of everyday life (22). Pop culture is (in contrast to art) a fundamentally performative culture, in which performance con-stantly creates new relations between subjects and objects, or performers and audiences (23).
Through this definition, the significance of musicians as the performer-figures of pop becomes clear. Considering Heinze’s point about the storytelling in music documen-tary, the meaning and significance of a musician or band as figure(s) of pop culture, as celebrities or stars, is a pop cultural narrative in itself. Stars hold a very specific role for the reception of pop music, because they are the performative embodiment and commu-nication of musical genres and style (Jost & Huwyler 150). Their appearance in the me-dia (be it their music, journalistic interviews, television or radio appearances), determines their popularity and cultural significance. Jost and Huwyler speak of a „media biography“ that stars develops during their popularity, which is to understand as a fragmentary biog-raphy of the public self that becomes completed in the imagination of the audience. This cultural significance is what makes the musician a person of public interest and available for fandom. The persona cult in pop music is the reason why the most dramatic composi-tions of music documentaries focus on the biography and career of the musician (Heinze 171). As Heinze furthermore states, the personality of a musician is a specific case, be-cause musicians already perform a public expression. Jost and Huwyler go further and suggest to acknowledge the media appearance of popular musicians as active construc-tion and presentaconstruc-tion of their identity. If a music documentary wants to represent the real-ity of pop music culture, it has to deal with all this specifics of a very performative and subjectively formed reality. The notion of authenticity and truth in music documentary is to perceive differently than in other documentaries. Generally, the question of modes and values is very reliant on the documentary subject. This thesis understands music docu-mentaries as an extensively performative documentary genre. The creational aspect of music and the sensual level of experiencing pop culture is hardly representable without performative aesthetics and forms of subjectivity and sensuality. A distanced and
fact-based perspective on pop music, without a certain degree of mise-en-scène, is not able to represent the reality of pop. Music journalism, and also music documentary filmmak-ing, holds always a portion of subjectivity and taste, and is influenced by the sensual and emotional experiences of the journalist, respectively filmmaker, about the subject.
2.2 Modes and Aesthetic Strategies
This chapter will connect music documentary and performance with each other. In a first step, a closer look is directed towards approaches of reality and knowledge in the documentary context. Afterwards, the performative documentary modes of Nichols and Bruzzi will be explained and then linked to the qualities of music documentary. At last, a selection of aesthetic techniques will be provided that are commonly used in performa-tive documentaries, as the exemplary analyzed 20,000 Days on Earth and Cobain: Mon-tage of Heck.
2.2.1 Approaching Reality and Knowledge
Having another look at the documentary definition by Nichols, examined in chap-ter 2.1.1, one can find multiple influences of subjectivity and perspective. Documentaries tell stories that are shaped and arranged by a filmmaker, that are presented in specific perspectives, in which real people decide about what to present to the viewer about themselves (Nichols 4). All of this is essentially influenced by subjective decisions and personal view on the reality. Nichols also points out, that „for any given event, more than one story exists to represent and interpret it“ (14). Two different documentaries about the same subject can therefore tell a totally different story in the end. To have a closer look at various understandings of reality and knowledge, an accurate distinction between sub-jectivity and obsub-jectivity is important. Renov explains, that the differentiation of obsub-jectivity and subjectivity in non-fiction film was historically linked to the scientific perception (173). The dichotomy between objectivity and subjectivity, developed by mid of the 19th centu-ry, connects objective to the attributes „factual, fair-minded (neutral) and hence reliable“ whereas subjective is „based on impressions rather than facts, and hence as influenced by personal feelings and relatively unreliable“ (Marcus in Renov 173). Since post World War II, objectivity was considered as main value for both non-fiction film and science.
Previously, the term subject has referred to the substance and to how things are in them-selves, while objective described the way things are observed and perceived (Renov 173). The new dualistic distinction then, which is basically the exact opposite, came into effect as an orientation for non-fiction film as much as for journalistic reportage. Objectivi-ty became something rewarded; judgements and reports shall likewise not be influenced by any personal views. Taking this linguistic history into account, Renov points out, it is not very surprising that the community of documentary practice took subjectivity „as a kind of contamination, to be expected but minimized“ (174). Only in the last decades, the hierarchy between subjectivity and objectivity in documentary film is getting rearranged, and objectivity loses its position as the ultimate goal of documentary filmmaking. As al-ready argued, the qualities of music documentary requires distancing from objectivity, to make the specific reality of pop music and pop culture tangible, and representable. The performative documentary mode is an approach that unites documentaries with a subjec-tive and embodied understanding of knowledge. Performasubjec-tive documentaries focus on expressions, personal views and subjective interpretations of the actual world.
2.2.2 Performative Documentary
The performative documentary mode, as developed by Nichols and redefined by Bruzzi, is a useful analysis tool for music documentaries. Knowledge and truth is per-ceived as embodied, as influenced by subjective experience and individual perspectives. The performative documentary mode is therefore able to transport and visualize the aes-thetic and sensual experiences connected with the subject of pop music.
The Performative Documentary with Nichols
Performative documentary, as defined by Nichols, challenges the predominant understanding of knowledge, comprehension and understanding in documentary studies (199). Unlike the Western philosophy, which describes knowledge as something abstract and disembodied, for instance factual information, performative documentaries perceive knowledge as a concrete and embodied matter. Abstract knowledge can be generalized, replicated and exchanged, while it maintains unaltered of personal influences. In the per-formative perspective, stemming from poetry and literature traditions, knowledge is based on personal experiences and can indeed be demonstrated and represented, but
not factually replicated (200). The general idea is, that many different factors alter the perception of the world, and constitute subjective meanings. „Experience and memory, emotional involvement, the precise context, questions of value and belief, commitment and principle all enter into out understanding of those aspects of the world most often addressed by documentary“, states Nichols (202). The performative documentary seeks to emphasize this subjective dimension. It includes personal perspectives, experiences and memories of the subject, as well as the perspective of the filmmaker. For this pur-pose, performative documentaries make use of narrative techniques that are rather un-usual for other documentary modes. Sometimes, even genre blurring elements, like fic-tionalized enactment, find their way to the narration and move the documentary away from „a realist representation of the historical world and towards poetic liberties“ (203). The term of performance, for Nichols, refers to the „tradition of acting as a way to bring heightened emotional involvement to a situation or role“ (203). The personal perspective becomes the viewers’ „port of entry“ to social or political issues (209). Compared to sci-entific and fact-based documentaries, performative documentaries request a higher en-gagement of the viewer to gain sense and understanding out of the narrative. Next to enactment, Nichols names some other fictionalizing aesthetic techniques that are com-monly used in this mode. „Point-of-view shots, musical scores, renderings of subjective states of mind, flashbacks, and freeze frames“ are techniques that address the viewer in subjectiveness (206). Also, animation is a common aesthetic strategy in performative documentary, used as a device to express and visualize emotional and embodied knowl-edge (204).
The Performative Documentary with Bruzzi
Bruzzi offers in her book New Documentary (2006), partially referring to Nichols, a different perspective on the performative documentary. Her approach aims to challenge the prevailing understanding of documentary authenticity, and the relationship between reality and its representation in documentary film. Referring to the literature of the past decades, Bruzzi observes a tension between the idealized image of an objectively index-ical documentary and a simultaneous conscientiousness about its unattainability: „Re-peatedly invoked by documentary theory is the idealized notion, on the one hand, of the pure documentary in which the relationship between the image and the real is straight-forward and, on the other, the very impossibility of this aspiration“ (5). Bruzzi questions
the idealized attempt of the prevailing documentary conceptualizations and argues against the assumption that the valuableness of a documentary is to measure in its effort for objectivity and strict avoidance of aestheticization. With this assumption, she argues, documentary filmmaking is inevitably damned to fail (6).
Bruzzi’s central thesis is that making a documentary is always „a negotiation be-tween filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance“, an interpretation of reality out of a certain perspective (186). The viewer, she states, is well aware of this fact. While Bruzzi’s critique on the relation between documentary aesthetics and the representation of reality is relatively repetitive, her understanding of documentary film as a performative act in itself, is her innovation. A significant difference between Bruzzi’s and Nichols’ ap-proach of the performative documentary is their reference to J. L. Austin’s notion of per-formance. For Nichols, other than for Bruzzi, the notion of performativity does not refer to Austin, who defines performative speech by its ability to change the nature of reality. A common example are a minister’s words at a wedding, „I pronounce you man and wife“, that actively perform the act of marriage. In contrast to Nichols, Bruzzi states that per-formative documentaries act in the same way. The parallel between the linguistic and the documentary performance is expressed in „the enactment of the notion that a documen-tary only comes into being as it is performed, that although its factual basis (or docu-ment) can pre-date any recording or representation of it, the film itself is necessarily per-formative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reali-ty“ (186). For Bruzzi, not the representation of a pre-filmic reality is essential for docu-mentary, but the creation of meaning through the negotiating performance between the filmmaker and the reality. The performative act of creating a filmic perspective or an ar-gument about reality constitutes the meaning and sense of a documentary. Some per-formative documentaries emphasize the constructedness of filmmaking by means of their own aesthetics. What is usually a hidden aspect in classical documentaries, reveals „the impossibilities of authentic documentary representation“ (185). Thereby, the perfor-mance, as it is used in a non-fictional context, evokes an alienating reaction for the view-er. It functions as a „distancing device“ that calls attention to the constructed nature of non-fictional film. Performative documentaries, Bruzzi writes, can make their construction visible in two different ways. Either, they are a performance of the filmmaker, who active-ly reflects the process of filmmaking (which is very similar to Nichols’ reflexive mode and is exemplified in the documentaries of Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield) or, the second option, the documentary deals with a performative subject and is in itself aesthetically
highly stylized (which applies to most recent music documentaries). Both variations like-wise create alienation. By being „frequently in conjunction […] with an elaborate and os-tentatiously inauthentic visual style“, they make sure not to pretend being an objective representation of reality (186). Bruzzi’s and Nichols’ approaches of performative docu-mentary follows the same understanding of knowledge and truth. When reality is under-stood as depending on subjectivity, experience and personal meaning, documentary in-evitably can only be a representation of a perspective, and thus a filmic construction but never only observing. The performative documentary breaks with traditional documentary concepts and the realist opinion that the production process and creational part of a doc-umentary film has to maintain transparent (186). To accept the idea that non-fiction film is as authored and constructed as fiction film, allows the performative documentary to en-gage with subjective perspectives and to be more aestheticized and „self-consciously arty and expressive“ than documentaries that are committed to indexicality (197).
2.2.3 The Performative Mode and Music Documentary
The performative documentary is for several reasons a suitable mode for music documentary to express the performative reality of pop music. The way in which the per-formative documentary mode, of both Nichols and Bruzzi, deals with the notion of knowl-edge and truth goes along with the reality music documentary engages with. With the generation of cultural meaning and significance of pop musicians, and the aesthetic ex-perience of music and its culture, knowledge is something not primarily logical or factual but embodied and sensual, connected to the subjective truth of cultural meanings. Beat-tie expresses the conditions of knowledge production in music documentary very accu-rately:
„The form of knowledge produced within this mode [the music documentary] is subjective, affective, visceral and sensuous and as such is a part of broader visual culture which ‘ac-knowledges appeals to the senses as a form of knowledge production. This form of knowledge production is distinct from appeals to the intellect or cognitive faculty. For the intellect, logic prevails over affect; for the senses the converse holds, bringing with it a distinct form of knowledge.’ In these terms ‘[t]he visual is no longer a means of verifying the certainty of facts pertaining to an objective, external world and truths about this world conveyed linguistically. The visual now constitutes the terrain of subjective experience’“ (134).
Like Heinze (2016) equally states for the music documentary, indexicality and ob-jectivity of the image and representation is not relevant for the generation of knowledge and expression of meaning. Taking Bruzzi’s notion of performance into account, there is another parallel to the performative reality of pop music. The significance of a pop or rock musician, or a scene, is just as performed as the meaning of a performative documen-tary. Both performances are negotiations that create meaning, either between filmmaker, reality and viewer, or between a performer and the audience. Looking at the two different types of visible performativity in documentary that Bruzzi distinguishes, music documen-taries fit into the second category; they deal with a performative subject and are heavily stylized and aestheticized. Performing musicians generate a double-layered performance in music documentary. First, there is the performative enactment for the documentary camera, and then there is the performance of music on stage or as a cultural habitus: „Making music is a form of behavior that already involves the whole person in an act of expressive communication“, states Chanan (341). The camera, in most circumstances, can observe the musician in the same way the audience does, without further affecting the situation. In music documentary, factuality always implies performance, while the de-gree of display is depending on the approach of the filmmaker and the production cir-cumstances (Niebling 34). The performative documentary mode offers both plenty of space to visualize performance and to visualize in performative aesthetics.
Genre blurring is a common technique that Heinze (2016) lists in the context of music documentary and Nichols (2010) likewise for the performative mode. Music docu-mentary requests the abolishment of a strict border between fact and fiction, not at least because aestheticization plays a significant role. Bruzzi describes the aesthetics of the performative documentary as very arty and self-conscious (2006). The subject of music and pop culture, understood as an aesthetic and music centered culture of everyday life (Kleiner 2013), is best visualized with a a high degree of aesthetic freedom. Music doc-umentary is a visualization of a pop cultural subject that overcomes the struggle to repre-sent the aesthetic experience of pop in a verbal or merely non-aesthetically informational form (Long and Wall 37). Specific for music documentary aesthetics, in comparison to other documentary categories, is the representation, use and visualization of music. As music is an audible and elusive but not objectively representable sound phenomenon, it is a controversially discussed topic of documentary studies (Corner in Heinze 154). It is a question of aesthetics, how a sound phenomenon can be transformed from a tonal
aes-thetic experience into a audiovisual one (160). While music in the documentary discourse is often blamed for being a fictionalizing element, it has an essential function for the struction of filmic reality in music documentary. To perceive documentary just as con-structed as any other type of film, like the performative documentary mode does, allows for a higher creativity in the use of music, too.
2.2.3 Aesthetic Strategies of New Music Documentary
New music documentaries arrange their narratives in multiple layers of performa-tive aesthetics. This chapter will therefore examine different aesthetic strategies that are used with the intent to express subjective and sensual experiences. The following list is not exhaustive but focusses on techniques that Heinze (2016) names as common aes-thetics for new music documentary, and which thus are relevant for the following film analysis.
Multi-layered Montage
Depending on the degree of artistic freedom, Mundhenke points out that the structure and arrangement of the documentary film-footage can be considered as an artistically performative or experimental act by the filmmaker (207). The degree of influence can range from extensively stylized montage, that rearranges the order of the non-filmic ac-tuality in total, to very marginal interventions that do not get noticed. The artistic montage is not to understand as fictionalizing element but more in the category of media-art. In any case, montage is a filter and arrangement for the purpose of storytelling, and always takes influence on the filmic reality (Mundhenke 207). Heinze names the multi-layered, associative composition of image and sound, often even stemming from various sources, as an aesthetic strategy that often is used in recent music documentaries (171).
Self Performance and First-Person Narratives
Self performances or also first-person narratives are suitable strategies to represent em-bodied, subjective perspectives and experiences, as well as transport emotional or sen-sual subjects. The subjective documentary style firstly emerged after the 1960s period of documentary making, when the objective paradigm had opened up. A political shift in the
1970s directed a new focus on the politics of everyday life, such as second wave femi-nism. Driven thereby was a new „interrogation of identity and subjectivity and of a vividly corporeal rather than intellectualized self“ which led to increasingly subjective and per-sonal documentaries as well (Renov 171). The pop music context, understood as a cul-ture of everyday life, is in a similar way connected to issues of identity, subjective mean-ing and identification. Better than any perspective from the outside, a person itself can express this subjects.Self performance and first-person storytelling can transport subjec-tive perspecsubjec-tives and emotions immediately on its own terms. The audience engages with the subject though a subjective perspective, told by the person itself.
Home Videos
The phenomenon that amateurish home video material is used in documentaries has started in the 1990s (Orgeron 102). This „primary footage taken by the subject(s)“ of themselves is used as a „narrational and illustrative tool“ to represent history and memo-ry. Home videos are (auto)biographic forms of memory-collection and are always subject to the editorial decisions of the videographer. He or she is the one who decides about the inclusions and exclusions of what to represent from his or her personal life (853).There-fore, the home video is not less constructed and performative as other footage. The di-rector of the documentary then, occupies a rearranging role. He edits the primary video footage a second time, and interprets it while embedding it into the documentary narra-tion and context. Thereby, the documentary maker is reliant on the pre-made decisions of the videographer. Making home videos became a trend hobby of American families post World War II and even increased with the technological development of portable video cameras in the 1980s and 90s. Caused by this, published home videos often show American family life and parenthood. Used in documentary, this video material „facilitates the narration of the domestically centered melodramas“ - which does not necessarily have to underpin the perfect-family image that is often associated with home videos (853). In many examples, as Orgeron points out, home videos show the exact opposite and „expose the family in various states of decay and dissolution, capturing the antithesis of domestic harmony“ (854). The primary video footage of the subject has certainly a pri-vacy revealing element, that constitutes its fascination. It carries the „promise of a glimpse beyond the surface, an invitation to see the unlovely elements typically con-cealed by the curtain drawn on private lives“ (857).
Reenactment and Enactment
As reenactment, Nichols defines the „more or less authentic re-creation of prior events“ in documentary (2008:72). Reenactment was commonly used, until the cinéma vérité movement of the 1960s claimed that „everything expect what took place in front of the camera without rehearsal or prompting to be a fabrication“ was inauthentic and thus con-tradicting to the principles of documentary. Today, reenactments is a frequently used aes-thetic again, reflecting the temporal aspect of documentaries as much as the „presence of fantasy“ (2008:73). Temporally seen, something past is enabled to „rejoin the present“ (2008:79). Nichols emphasizes, that reenactment always „introduces a fantasmatic ele-ment“, because the repetition of history can only be created by the filmmaker through constructed representations or reenactments that has no indexical bond to the historic event itself (2008:74). Reenacted images are „clearly a view rather than the view from which the past yields up its truth“ (2008:80), which shows the performative aspect of the reenactment. Nichols distinguishes different types of reenactment. The „realist dramati-zation“ is a dramatic reenactment in the most closely realistic style, used for instance in flashbacks and docudrama. „Typifications“, as the name already reveals, do not refer to an actual historic event but rather show typifications of „past patterns, rituals and rou-tines“. „Stylizations“ then are creatively stylized reenactments, like animated documen-tary, which do not „serve any indexical linkage to the actual event but give voice to the acutely selective […] perspective“ from which it is experienced (2008:84f). If a documen-tary denies a clearly visible distinction between reenactment and enactment, the ques-tion of ficques-tion becomes an issue. Enactment does not refer to a certain past event but de-scribes fictitious acting. As Nichols emphasizes, many performative documentaries make use of enactment: „The free combination of the actual and the imagined is a common feature“ (202). The same can be said about music documentary (Heinze 2016), in which genre blurring aesthetics stay in context with artistic expressions of music and perfor-mances of a musicians.
Animation
Animation can be another useful aesthetic strategy for performative documentary. Nichols describes animated documentary sequences as a „powerful tool“ for the
purpos-es of the performative mode (204). In traditional documentary discourse, animation is seen as a controversial technique that breaks with the notion of the realist image and the indexical relationship between the filmic image and the actual event that it represents (Nichols in Honess Roa 216). Animation is neither observational, nor, as it is always con-nected to creativity, can it be objective. Since performative documentary already refuse these presumptions, animation as an aesthetic strategy does not stand at odds with it. Animation in documentary can function as a substitution for absent filmed material. The animation stands in for scenes that would either be impossible to visualize by live-action footage, or it stands in for footage that is hard or impossible to get, like of past events (Honess Roe 226). In the latter case, the animated sequence can be seen as a re-en-actment that, in most cases, aims to „closely resemble“ the look of a live-recording of a historic event of which no original record exists. For its closeness to the look of reality, Honess Roe calls this mode of animation mimetic substitution. Another version of anima-tion is non-mimetic substituanima-tion, in which animaanima-tion does not seek to create an illusionary look of filmed images but rather is a loose interpretation of the soundtrack, for instance an interview. Non-mimetic animation grasps animation as a „medium in its own rights […] that has the potential to express meaning through its aesthetic realization“ (226). When animation in documentary is used to represent past events, it necessarily does so in an extensively stylized way that „clearly possess a strongly subjective, even expressionistic, quality“ (Nichols 14). Through its subjectivity, animation is far from “any standard sense of documentary realism“. Nevertheless, the reference to reality remains plausible as a visual representation of a subjective state of mind. The last function of animation, evoca-tion, is not a substitution for absent material but visualizes the non-representable aspects of life (Honness Roe 227). In terms of „concepts, emotions, feelings and states of mind“, animation functions as „a tool to evoke the experiential in the form of ideas, feelings and sensibilities“, mostly in symbolic or abstract styles and aesthetics. Here, animated se-quences enable the audience to experience a subjective perspective of somebody else. Evocative animation comes often to use as a visualizing layer for original soundtrack of interviews and helps for a better understanding of the film’s subject (228). By all three modes, animation „broadens the epistemological potential of documentary“ and is a way to expand documentary’s focus on „the world“ on an „enhanced perspective on reality by presenting the world in a breadth and depth that live action alone cannot“ (229).
3. Analysis
The purpose of this thesis is to examine how new music documentaries deal with the performative aspects and sensual experiences of pop music culture, and which aes-thetic strategies are used to transport and visualize this performative and aesaes-thetic reali-ty. In the following two case studies will be made that provide a close analysis of a recent music documentary. The first example will be 20,000 Days on Earth, a genre blurring documentary by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard about musician and author Nick Cave which was released in 2014 (UK). The second object is Cobain: Montage of Heck, a 2015 (US) documentary about Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain, directed by Brett Morgen. Both films focus on the musician respectively performer himself and offer a biographical perspective. The documentaries are to understand as performative, although each in a different way. 20,000 Days on Earth is a very cinematic music documentary with a highly performative subject, blurring the boundaries of feature film and documentary. Nick Cave presents himself in a filmic performance that pulls the viewer deep into a poetic expres-sion of his inner life and the process of creative writing. Cobain: Montage of Heck is a performative documentary that is aesthetically highly stylized. Brett Morgen creates an audiovisual, multi-layered collage, made out of various media documents provided by relatives and friends of Kurt Cobain. The outcome is an authored interpretation of the re-ality about Kurt Cobain, combining interview footage, archive material and animated imaginations about Cobain’s history. Both films follow biographic attempts about the re-spective musician, and play with the boundaries of the documentary genre by pursuing very creative film aesthetics. They are two examples that appropriately represent the bandwidth of common themes and aesthetics of the contemporary music documentary genre. The analysis will refer back to the genre discourse provided in chapter 2, and es-pecially discuss the role of performativity for the two music documentaries. It will be ex-amined if the films can be understood as performative documentaries, as well as how the performative nature of pop music is transcribed into documentary representation and vi-sualization. Beyond, there will be a close analysis of particular scenes and the overall aesthetics that visualize pop music as aesthetic experiences, and transport the process of creativity and the reality of being a performer to the viewer. The aesthetic strategies elaborated in chapter 2.2.3., multi-layered montage, self performance, home videos, re-enactment and animation, will function as tools in order to analyze how the two films are a hybrid mix between traditional and performative documentary.
