Mapping and problematising the enunciating subject within my documentary practice

ABSTRACT

ABC Colombia (86 min, 2007) and Home Sweet Home (90 min, 2012) are the first two films of a trilogy exploring places and communities to which I am personally connected, questioning – from an insider/outsider perspective – the relationship between place and identity and notions of home and belonging. Through the analysis of both the process of making and the works’ final form, the article examines the nature of documentary filmmaking as a relational process, a form of engagement with the world. Addressing how each film articulates questions of authorship, enunciation, narration and communication the article also traces and problematises the surfacing of the enunciating subject, how I inhabit my films as an author. In particular, it critically engages with the shift from a more traditional ‘participatory observation’ mode of address to the progressive negotiation of a plurality of modes and ‘voices’, and to a more explicitly articulated personal viewpoint. In the ever-changing post-modern and post-grand narrative scene the challenge for a filmmaker today, I argue, is to develop a subjective cinema capable of negotiating the coexistence of different registers of address in open dialogue with each other, each interpellating the spectator in their own distinctive way.

KEYWORDS:

• First-person documentary
• subjective cinema
• essay film
• place-identity
• ABC Colombia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Enrica Colusso is a documentary filmmaker particularly interested in documentary as a cognitive and relational process and in documentary film form, theory and practice. She has realised several award-winning documentaries including: Home Sweet Home (90 min, 2012) ABC Colombia (86 min, 2007), No Risk No Champagne (90 min, 2002) and Fine Pena Mai - Life after life (90 min, 1995). Recently, she has started exploring new form of documentary storytelling and realised her first interactive project Ghost Town (2013–2016). She teaches Film at Roehampton University, in London.

ORCID

Enrica Colusso http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2847-3833

Notes

1. In light of this, terms such as cognitive (from Latin cognoscere ‘to get to know, recognise’) and relational should be best framed within a certain tradition of visual anthropology, which posits filmmaking as a way-of-knowing and making sense of the world, ‘a new approach to anthropological knowledge’ (MacDougall 1998, 61), rather than within the general focus on the mental activity of viewers as the object of inquiry of Cognitive Film Theory (Nannicelli and Taberham 2014)

2. Allowing for the reflexive account of how the knowledge represented was produced to be embedded in the film narrative.

3. Adriano Aprà and Marco Bertozzi (just to mention a few).

4. Colusso, Rossetto, Rosi.

5. The films underlying this article were submitted to the Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 2008 and the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014.

6. ABC Colombia – which won several awards including the Spirit award at Brooklyn film festival – was screened at over 30 festivals and broadcast by ARTE, More4, PBS World ‘Global Voices’ and Yle Tv. It was also used by several organisations engaging in conflict analysis and resolution, including the USA Congress, while examining Colombian paramilitary communities to inform votes on an aid bill, and screened at the Geneva Forum on Social Change (Geneva University, June 2009).

7. Quoted in Renov (2004, xxi).

8. In 1988/1989, I attended Rouch’s documentary school, before joining the National Film and Television School (NFTS). The time spent at Varan was quite influential in laying the seeds for the development of my self-reflexive and interrogative practice combining personal stories with political mindfulness.

9. The theme of paradise versus hell is weaved throughout the film, generally through images of animals.

10. Of Mexican origins, these corridos are forbidden as they glorify the narco/mafioso’s culture and their values around violence, revenge, getting rich through illegal activities, defying the authorities, etc. Published illegally and distributed through the black market, the corridos are extremely popular with local youths, who feel a personal connection to the stories and know most of them by heart.

11. For an extensive analysis of the relationship with my film characters and its ethical dimension see my article ‘The space between the filmmaker and the subject – the ethical encounter’, in Studies in Documentary Film, Volume 11 - Issue 2, 141–156.

12. Interpelling here is used from the author/filmmaker’s perspective, speaking as a producer of narrative (rather than an interpreter), in this case one that is articulated as a multi-vocal and multimodal narrative, calling upon the spectator in different ways.

13. The two books directly cited (and read onscreen) are Berger’s And Our Faces, My Hearth, as Brief as Photos (2005) and Anna Milton’s Ground Control: Fear and Happiness in the Twenty-First-Century City (2012).

14. These travelling shots invoke the figure of the flâneur (Benjamin). Also, as a way of ‘walking through place’, they can be seen as drawing parallels between walking in the city and ethnographic fieldwork, inviting viewer to attend to the ‘embodied and phenomenological aspects of place-making’ (Pink 2008).

15. Augé distinguishes place as a physical space defined as ‘relational, historical and concerned with identity’ (1995, 77), from non-places – spaces of transition absent of identity, human relationships, or the traces of history – which increasingly dominate our existence, and suggests that our sense of place, as old as humanity, is coming to an end. For a further understanding of this fascinating, albeit historically connoted, notion see: Augé (1995).

16. The city as environment and subject of artistic inquiry is central to modernity’s dialectic between eternal and transitory.

17. My desire to explore open textuality further led me to experiment with non-linear narrative in my interactive database documentary Ghost Town (2013–2016). I will further explore the notion of ‘open work’ in relationship to my recent interactive work in an article discussing my interactive documentary Ghost Town, forthcoming.

The underlying research materials for this article can be accessed at:

ABC Colombia: https://vimeo.com/111630428/3b2a2c0ed0

Home Sweet Home: https://vimeo.com/109438255