ABSTRACT
In the documentary Occupy Love (2012), the filmmaker proposes social movements can be love stories. Taking the filmmaker’s claim seriously, this article questions whether social documentaries can be understood as love stories and, if so, how different formations of love in documentary shape the communities they produce. Looking at three key examples, Triumph of the Will (1935), Roger & Me (1989), and Occupy Love, this article uses the philosophy of Jean-Luc Nancy to analyze the different types of communities and loving attachments engendered by each film. Taking the view that not all documentary love stories are ethical, it demonstrates how some documentaries subvert the ethics of community by reinforcing neoliberal individualism, while others violently eradicate difference in their drive toward total communion. Finally, some documentaries render the community ‘inoperable’ by illustrating the collective as a network of heterogeneous individuals who are nevertheless committed to a shared ethos. In the final analysis, all three documentaries raise questions about the possibilities and problems associated with thinking community through documentary.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. See Kracauer (Citation2004[1947]), Hinton (Citation1975), Stupp (Citation1978), Neale (Citation1979), Soussloff and Nichols (Citation1996), Devereaux (Citation1998), Tomasulo (Citation1998), Marcus (Citation2004), Tegel (Citation2006), Lewis (Citation2007), Trimborn (Citation2008), Scott (Citation2009), Weber (Citation2013), Sennett (Citation2014), Saunders (Citation2016), and the Special Section on Leni Riefenstahl in Film Culture (Citation1973).
2. Original credit for the prospect of a ‘documentary communism’ should go to reviewer Scott Birdwise (York University). Special thanks to both reviewers for their insightful critiques and suggestions for revising this paper.
Kracauer, S. 2004. From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film. edited by L. Quaresima. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ( Original work published 1947). Hinton, D. B. 1975. “Triumph of the Will: Document or Artifice?” Cinema Journal 15 (1): 48–57. doi:10.2307/1225104. Stupp, V. O. 1978. “Myth, Meaning, and Message in ‘The Triumph of the Will’.” Film Criticism 2 (2/3): 40–49. Neale, S. 1979. “Triumph of the Will: Notes on Documentary and Spectacle.” Screen 20 (1): 63–86. doi:10.1093/screen/20.1.63. Soussloff, C. M., and B. Nichols. 1996. “Leni Riefenstahl: The Power of the Image.” Discourse 18 (3): 20–44. Devereaux, M. 1998. “Beauty and Evil: The Case of Leni Riefenstahl’s ‘Triumph of the Will’.” In Aesthetics and Ethics: Essays at the Intersection, edited by J. Levinson, 227–256, Cambridge University Press. Tomasulo, F. P. 1998. “The Mass Psychology of Fascist Cinema.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video, edited by B. K. Grant and J. Sloniowski, 99–118. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Marcus, A. 2004. “Reappraising Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will.” Film Studies 4: 75–86. doi:10.7227/FS.4.5. Tegel, S. 2006. “Leni Riefenstahl: Art and Politics.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video 23 (3): 185–200. doi:10.1080/105092090503169. Lewis, R. 2007. “Questionable Intent: Documentary Cinema and the Authorial Fallacy.” Studies in Documentary Film 1 (3): 265–278. doi:10.1386/sdf.2007.1.issue-3. Trimborn, J. 2008. Leni Riefenstahl: A Life. Translated by E. McCown. New York, NY: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Scott, I. 2009. “Frank Capra and Leni Riefenstahl: Politics, Propaganda and the Personal.” Comparative American Studies 7 (4): 285–297. doi:10.1179/147757009X12571600892054. Weber, S. 2013. “Clouds: On a Possible Relation of Terror and Terrorism to Aesthetics.” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 88 (3): 339–362. doi:10.1080/00168890.2013.820639. Sennett, A. 2014. “Film Propaganda: Triumph of the Willas a Case Study.” Framework: the Journal of Cinema and Media 55 (1): 45–65. doi:10.13110/framework.55.1.0045. Saunders, T. 2016. “Filming the Nazi Flag: Leni Riefenstahl and the Cinema of National Arousal.” Quarterly Review of Film & Video 33 (1): 23–45. doi:10.1080/10509208.2015.1094329. “Special Section on Leni Riefenstahl.” 1973. Film Culture 56–57: 90–226.