Impossible objectivity: free indirect perspectives in Finnish documentary cinema

ABSTRACT

This article argues that contemporary Finnish documentary cinema departs from the paradigm of authentic representations and instead builds on impossible objectivity. In so doing, the documentary films discussed in the article engage with a free indirect modality of expression and foreground multiplicity. This article suggests that this could open up a new way of understanding the work of documentary cinema: instead of authentic representations documentary cinema could be approached as a modality that expresses and experiments with the underpinning layers of customary perspectives and habitual speaking positions.

KEYWORDS:

• Free indirect discourse
• performative documentary
• framing
• representation
• multiplicity
• collectivity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCiD

Ilona Hongisto http://orcid.org/0000-0003-2213-7393

Notes

1. In the documentary realm, Hällfors is particularly known for her collaborations with Pirjo Honkasalo, for example in The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (Melankolian kolme huonetta 2004), and Färm is the cinematographer of such recent works as Steam of Life (Miesten Vuoro, Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen 2010) and Auf Wiedersehen Finnland (Virpi Suutari 2010). Both were involved in Along the Road Little Child (Pitkin tietä pieni lapsi, Susanna Helke and Virpi Suutari 2005) and Punksters and Youngsters (Punk – tauti joka ei tapa, Jouko Aaltonen 2008).

2. Bruzzi distinguishes her take on the performative from Bill Nichols's postulation of the performative documentary mode in Blurred Boundaries (1994). She notes that Nichols's proposition comes with the suspicion that performative documentaries ultimately draw more attention to themselves than the reality they represent (Bruzzi 2006, 186). Nichols's later writing is fascinating in this regard, as it takes a stronger stance in finding affirmative tones for the performative: ‘The world as represented by performative documentaries becomes, however, suffused by evocative tones and expressive shadings that constantly remind us that the world is more than the sum of the visible evidence we draw from it’ (Nichols 2001, 134).

3. Elizabeth Cowie's Lacanian treatment of the documentary, and particularly the productive impasse she detects in the ‘unrepresentable’, is another way of approaching the impossibilities involved in the representational paradigm. Here, the real is the unrepresentable that cannot be fully apprehended, but that is nevertheless desired in recordings of reality (Cowie 2013, 10, 118–134).

4. In recent Finnish documentary cinema, there is also a strand that invests heavily on emotional speech, particularly in the confessional mode. Visa Koiso-Kanttila's Father to Son (Isältä pojalle 2004) and Portrait of a Man (Miehen kuva 2010), as well as Joonas Berghäll and Mika Hotakainen's Steam of Life (2010) display men speaking about their emotions for the camera. The topics range from familial relations to love and relationships, while the documentaries reflect the stereotype of a quiet Finnish man. Here, the stereotype that Finnish men do not speak about their emotions is used to construct solid confessional speaking positions. However, particularly in Steam of Life, the seemingly subjective speaking positions in fact assume a universalising function where one man's subjective confession becomes everyman's emotion. On the affective politics of confessional speech in Finnish documentary, see Koivunen 2012.

5. In Hanan al-Cinema, Marks (2015, 2–9) notes that the past 20 years of cinema from the Arab-speaking world has struggled with the impossibility of representation. Colonialism, authoritarian governments and censorship have made it impossible for filmmakers to either produce objective visions or adhere to subjective views. This, Marks argues, has produced a vivid tradition of moving-image works that start from the middle, from the impossibility of representation. Although the Finnish situation is not comparable to the Arab-speaking world, it is nevertheless interesting that a similar desire to experiment with speaking positions and visual perspectives is evident in both.

6. Deleuze (1986, 73) notes that Pasolini activates V.N. Volosinov's (Mikhail Bakhtin) take on free indirect discourse in his conceptualization. Volosinov (1973, 129) argues that ‘indirect discourse “hears” a message differently; it actively receives and brings to bear in transmission different factors, different aspects of the message than do other patterns.’ Scheinman (1998) uses Bakhtin's related idea of the polyphonous text in her analysis of dialogic imagination in Jean Rouch's Les maîtres fous (1954).

7. I would like to thank Alanna Thain for bringing Branigan's postulation to my attention. In her forthcoming book, Bodies in Time: Affect, Suspense, Cinema (University of Minnesota Press), Thain takes Branigan's notion of ‘impossible space’ and mobilizes it in an exciting discussion of time and the ‘impossible objective shot’ in David Lynch's cinema.

8. All references to the making of the documentary are from the 12th volume of Suomen kansallisfilmografia (National filmography) edited by Sakari Toiviainen and published in 2005 by Edita and the Finnish Film Archive. The entry for Helke and Suutari's Sin is available online at http://www.elonet.fi/fi/elokuva/167061 (accessed 10 October 2015).

9. Pasolini (1988, 185) goes as far as claiming that the pretextual characters – the ones who speak indirectly in first person singular – have to be analogous to the filmmaker in language, culture, and psychology. Otherwise the film runs the risk of mythicizing or categorizing them unethically.

10. My account of the relationship between the fiction film project and the documentary is based on a personal conversation with Susanna Helke as well as the synopsis and script of the fiction film she kindly made available for me (see also Helke 2008, 60–62; Hongisto 2013).

11. In my previous work, I have discussed framing and the documentary from the points of view of aesthetics, time and becoming (Hongisto 2015) as well as research methodologies in arts and cultural studies (Hongisto 2013; Tiainen, Kontturi, and Hongisto 2015).

12. In Deleuze's film-philosophy, this is an issue of ‘inventing a people’. He delineates modern political cinema as a speech-act in free indirect discourse that is geared to invent a people when ‘the people are missing’ (Deleuze 1989, 223–224; see also Pisters 2006). Here, invention aligns with the notions of fabulation and the powers of the false. On these aspects in documentary cinema, see Hongisto (2015, 65–97) and Hongisto and Pape (2015).

Additional information

Funding

The research conducted for this article was generously supported by the Academy of Finland [grant number 265933].

Notes on contributors

Ilona Hongisto

Notes on contributor

Ilona Hongisto is Lecturer in Media Studies at Macquarie University, Sydney, and Honorary Fellow at the Victorian College of the Arts, the University of Melbourne. She works across the fields of screen and cultural studies, media theory and political philosophy, and specializes in documentary media. Her most recent work focuses on the ethics and aesthetics of storytelling, geopolitics and the cultural industries that condition documentary filmmaking. Hongisto has published widely on questions concerning the documentary; including the monograph Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics (Amsterdam University Press, 2015) and peer-reviewed articles in such journals as Studies in Documentary Film, Journal of Scandinavian Cinema, Cultural Studies Review and Transformations.