Dok-revue-1-2004-středa-27-10 - MFDF Jihlava

Interview
with Guy Gauthier
Home Movies
The films that everyone hates, the films that belong to father
How did you start writing your book about documentary film?
How did you select the films?
I started writing this book a long time ago. Since that time I’ve
written other books. I wanted, at the time, to concentrate on
the fact that documentary film was not recognized as an art.
I wanted to show that these works had imprints of the author’s
personality within them. I saw many documentaries, but I didn’t
go about it in a systematic way. I used random screenings and
television programs. Throughout this hunt for documentaries
I kept careful notes, and from these notes, I started to structure
my book.
In your book you hardly deal at all with documentary film from
countries like Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, as well as
countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
You’re absolutely right. References to those cinematographies
are either completely missing or very sporadic. There are two
reasons for this. On the one hand, I wasn’t able to get some
films, as was the case with Czech cinematography. I knew that
Chytilova, Passer and others had shot documentaries, but these
films weren’t available in France. On the other hand, in Latin
American countries and many Arabic lands, documentary does
not have a continuous tradition. Often we see it only in limited
time periods. And when I was writing the book, for example, the
current and very interesting stream of Iranian documentaries
whose leading figure is Abbas Kiarostami didn’t exist yet. I would
structure it completely differently today. Otherwise I am now
concentrating on French work. Some months ago I published
the book A Century of French Documentary Film.
How do you understand contemporary documentary film?
Do you fundamentally differentiate documentary and fiction
film?
Today documentary has developed to a point at which countless
variations exist. At first documentaries were just short films.
Today they usually last several hours, and short film production
is dominated by fiction films. Documentary can be descriptive,
it can simply record reality, but it can also take the form of an
essay. Like, for instance, Michael Moore’s much–talked–about
Fahrenheit 911. And moreover, for me, terminology isn’t that
important. This difference is easy to see in Nicholas Philibert’s
film To Be and to Have (2002). He was accused of staging
events for the camera, but the film is nonetheless documentary,
because after the film crew leaves the village continues to exist.
Individual characters exist and appear in the film in their real
social roles. For instance, if you were to film a baker at work, of
course he wouldn’t act totally naturally, but he would also never
stylize his performance into what would be, for him, a foreign
role. If you were to cast Alain Delon in the role of the baker, it
would be something different. He could play that role well and
believably, but it would only be a starting point for the dramatic
construction of a story.
David Čeněk
Translated by Alice Lovejoy
Home movies are the most precious and despised form of cinema.
Made–in–America spectaculars remain the most visible form
of the movies, while on the other end of the visibility spectrum
lie home movies, with their spontaneous, off–the–cuff, anti–stylings.
It is the most familiar form of documentary. Is it any wonder
that the entire genre has within it a heart filled with suspicion,
even revulsion? Oh please, not that, not a documentary. In other
words: not a home movie, not myself, the long unedited hours.
Don‘t force me to look at myself as an object, a thing, gathered
up in a loop of time without end. Condemned to repeat the same
gestures until I die as a young man.
It is unrelenting footage that rolls on and on. It has an aimless
determination, a persistence that lives outside the subject matter.
You are looking into the mind of home video. It is innocent,
aimless, determined, real.
They used to provide title kits for the home movie, where fathers
could adhere plastic letters to a board. F–I–S–H–I–N–G T–R–I–
P. S–W–I–M–M–I–N–G L–E–S–S–O–N–S. and most commonly
T–H–E E–N–D. But even with the title‘s declaration of closure,
everyone knows there is no real end to the home movie, except
in death. When the home movie maker is buried, or burned up in
the crematorium, that‘s when the movies will end and not a second
before. Even if granddad or father or mother hasn‘t pulled
out the camera for years, there‘s always a chance they might one
day again. While watching these home flickers the room fills with
the hope that it will end soon, that the hosts (father or mother)
will die. The subject is shot, exposed, and then wishes for death.
But not before he has left a trace, a mark on the rock. Hamlet‘s
last words: Remember
me (put me back together again, reassemble the parts, sharpen
the dialogues.)
The reason why „The End“ isn‘t the end, is because all home
movies are part of a single movie, episodes of a larger reel, the
lights may come on, the projector‘s overheated, it‘s
getting late. But there will be another night
and another, and most cruelly, this serial
form embraces massive repetitions.
Another birthday, another holiday,
another vacation. (These are also
pictures of the leisure class.
Queens had
their portraits made. Mom
runs her make–up and
daughter is there to gather
the evidence.) Certain elements
repeat over and
again. Questions of power
for instance. Who is looked
at and who does the looking.
Till death do us part.
You keep on looking because
things combine to hold you fast–
a sense of the random, the amateurish,
the accidental, the impending. You
don‘t think of the tape as boring or interesting.
It is crude, it is blunt, it is relentless. It is the
jostled part of your mind, the film that runs through your
hotel brain under all the thoughts you know you‘re thinking.
In my house the man who called himself father was behind the
camera. Pretty standard fare. The hard gender roles of male
and female were underlined by the home movie camera. It‘s his
camera, you, the woman, have to stand in front of it, sometimes,
though mostly it‘s for the kids. It‘s his look, and most of all his
direction. Stand over there! Walk towards me! Edward Said
describes his father shooting volumes of home movie footage of
his sister and himself, in locations all over the
middle east. But always the same shot, father at the helm, directing
them, move here, then here, then he would have them run
towards the camera. In Zamalek, Jerusalem, the streets of Cairo.
Running towards the source of the image, and of themselves.
You know how kids get involved, how the camera shows them
that every subject is potentially charged, a million things they
never see with the unaided eye. They investigate the meaning
of inert objects and dumb pets and they poke at family privacy.
They learn to see things twice.
Home movies belong to dad, but video is a game everyone can
play. The kids, dammit, they‘re already digital. They‘re either
on or they‘re off. So now it‘s not just the look of authority, the
patriarch looking over his holdings, his possessions (this is my
couch, this is my car, this is my daughter). Now the underlings
can reproduce the world on their own, in video. Never mind digital
versus analog, this is castration. Child‘s play behind the lens,
looking back at the father. Less direction required now that video
allows you to keep rolling. Don‘t need to tell father what to do.
Not that far. But far enough.
The world is lurking in the camera, already framed, waiting for
the boy or girl who will come along and take up the device, learn
the instrument.
What‘s this? Looks like someone‘s home movies. Home movies
as insult, as palaver. Are you looking at me? Don‘t give me
that home movie look. The home movie is diminutive, small
and contained, its subject is the home, but the home is also its
distribution outlet, the lonely place it may be released again, as
memory, before a trapped audience. An audience which is also
the cast. Not him again. Not her again. Not doing that. How you
could have ever done that? And you, how could you ever have
filmed it?
There‘s something about the nature of the tape, the grain of the
image, the sputtering black–and–white tones, the starkness–you
think this is more real, truer–to–life than anything around you.
The things around you have a rehearsed and layered and cosmetic
look. The tape is superreal, or maybe underreal is the way
you want to put it. It is what lies at the scraped bottom of all the
layers you have added. And this is another reason why you keep
on looking.
There is a new separation between production and exhibition.
In the old days of the home movie there is the ritual of lights out
and the movie screen and each reel lasts only three minutes. But
today home movies are on TV, which reflects its real function. I‘m
tired, I‘ve had a long day, I don‘t want to think about anything,
what‘s on TV? TV is escape, time to shut down the mind, fill up
the retinas with images from elsewhere.
But the pictures don‘t stay out there,
they‘re also here. They‘re also your
pictures. The pictures of dreams
and fantasies, even in villages
where they draw water from
wells and there‘s only one
TV to gather round watching
pop stars from the first
world flog their wares. It
takes root in that place,
and now, with the home
movie, it comes full circle.
It‘s you, you‘re looking into
the distance, the place of
distraction, the place without
thought, and you see
yourself. Perhaps this isn‘t the
kind of distraction you had in
mind. The hidden truth behind the
camcorder is that while no one could
possibly be interested in these home movies
except the people who are in them, for the
most part, these subjects don‘t want to watch at all.
The hidden truth is they all have to die, the maker has to die so
the movie can end, and then everyone in the
footage has to die to release it from its vault, its secret place, the
home. Then this footage can find its way into the hands of strangers,
reenergized in acts of archeology and reconstruction. Why
that smile? That dress? It is a wasteful production to be sure,
most home movies will become landfill, just like their makers,
but for the remnants that survive, there will be waiting hands,
chance encounters, which will make these memories sing again.
Not as something from once upon a time, but now. Memories
of the present.
The chance quality of the encounter. Random energies that
approach a common point. There‘s something here that speaks
to you directly, saying terrible things about forces beyond your
control, lines of intersection that cut through history and logic
and every reasonable layer of expectation.
And you keep on looking. You look because this is the nature
of the footage, to make a channeled path through time, to give
things a shape and a destiny.
All quotations from Underworld by Don DeLillo (New York:
Scribner, 1997)
Mike Hoolboom