The filmmaker’s engagement with the subject in contemporary documentary: Foreign Parts as a case study

Abstract

The filmmaker’s engagement with the subject was an important element in Robert J. Flaherty’s film documenting the life of Nanook and his family, the legendary Nanook of the North (1922), and of course it continues to be relevant in contemporary documentaries, such as the film Foreign Parts (2010), directed by French director Verena Paravel and US filmmaker J. P. Sniadecki. In these films, the approach to the reality of the subjects is documented from an ethnographic perspective, where the main objective is to examine how they live. To this end, the filmmaker has to spend hours and hours living alongside the subjects, establishing a relationship with them that is documented by the camera. To identify how this translates onto the screen is the main purpose of this article. To do this, I will adopt the approach to character engagement taken by cognitive film theory, since as I want to demonstrate this perspective is very useful for explaining the relationship established between filmmaker and subject in this kind of film. Especially useful to this explanation is the ‘structure of sympathy’ posited by Murray Smith (2004), which involves three concepts: recognition, alignment, and allegiance.

Keywords:

• Documentary
• contemporary cinema
• Foreign Parts
• Verena Paravel
• character engagement
• filmmaker-subject relationship

Notes

1. ‘Chop shop’ in the local slang means an undercover workshop where cars are broken up for spare parts to be sold on the black market.

2. It should be noted, however, that how the filmmaker engages with the subject over the filming process is only one facet of the filmmaker–subject relationship in documentary filmmaking; other facets related more to ethical issues can also be explored, such as the consequences of the filmmaker´s intervention in the subject´s life and the filmmaker´s obligations and responsibilities toward the subjects. Calvin Pryluck’s ‘Ultimately We Are All Outsiders,’ originally published in 1976, can be considered one of the earliest papers to address the potential impact of the filmmaker´s presence on the subject´s life. Since that time, this ethical concern has become a common feature in debates about filmmakers’ obligations and responsibilities toward their subjects (Gross, Katz, and Ruby 1988, 6; Aibel 1988, 117; Winston 2000, 18–9; Nichols 1991, 116; Maccarone 2010, 202; Nash 2011, 226, 235; Rughani 2013, 100).

3. For further discussion of this subject, see Christian Metz, Psychoanalysis and Cinema: The Imaginary Signifier, trans. Celia Britton. Annwyl Williams, Ben Brewster and Alfred Guzzetti (London: Macmillan, 1982) and Laura Mulvey, 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', Screen, vol. 16, no. 3 (1975).

4. For further discussion of Gregory Currie´s simulation theory, see Margrethe Bruun Vaage’s article ‘The Role of Empathy in Gregory Currie´s Philosophy of Film’ (2009).

5. The other five are: identification with the male gaze, identification with the threatened or victimized, intellectual identification, the use of cinematic devices, and identification with the star.

6. I am referring here to two of the six modes proposed by Bill Nichols in his book Introduction to Documentary, in which he identifies ‘six modes of representation that function something like sub-genres of the documentary film genre itself: poetic, expository, participatory, observational, reflexive, performative’ (2001, 99).

7. Recently, various terms have been proposed for this type of film: Rancière (2006), for example, uses the term ‘documentary fiction’; Jones (2005) uses ‘fiction-documentary hybrids’; Rhodes and Springer (2006, 5) propose ‘docufiction’; and Rodríguez-Mangual (2008, 299) opts for ‘fictual faction.’ Noël Carroll meanwhile suggests the term 'films of presumptive assertion ‘(2003, 194) in order to identify ‘what people mean to talk about when they speak informally of “documentaries” and “nonfiction films”’ (2003, 219) in the Griersonian sense of documentary. Although there is no consensus as to which term should be used to define this type of film, there does appear to be general agreement that there has been a resurgence of this hybrid genre in contemporary cinema (Vaughan 1999, 64; Jones 2005; Rhodes and Springer 2006, 4 and Landesman 2006, 45).