Everybody´s doing it: or how digital finished off the

documentary (thank you, sir)

Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria

Short fictitious introduction

If, in his first film, Nanook of the North (1922),

Robert Flaherty had included the moment in which some

members of his team cut an igloo in half to let the light in

and so pretend he was filming the characters waking up

after a long sleep; or if he had shot his own hand showing

Nanook how to make the gramophone work – the Eskimo

thought it was really funny – perhaps the history of the

documentary would have been different. If there had been

an inscription of the hand of the director in the

documentary even before it received its name, maybe we

would not be writing this article today. However, that is

fiction-film, fiction-history, or a hypothesis on which to

base an article. Despite the fact that Flaherty’s film

contained a fairly long list of interventions by the director

on reality to adapt it as far as possible to the story he

wanted to tell, the evolution of documentary film-making

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over the years tilted the balance towards (supposed) truth,

even to the extent of putting the documentary on a level

with a piece of reality dug out of the rocks that surround us,

with the help of a sophisticated apparatus called a camera.

So, according to the documentary theory that would end up

imposing itself through the North American direct cinema

of the 1960s (and its later TV perversions), films would be

nothing more or less than raw depictions of reality,

fragments of truth torn from the world and ‘canned’ –

previously in celluloid and now in digital formats – for later

consumption. No trace of the hand of Flaherty is to be seen.

Filming with the hand: rewriting the documentary

Actually, we had to wait several years before we saw

the hand of Flaherty on the screen. In fact, until 2000, when

the veteran director Agnès Varda presented her film Les

glaneurs et la glaneuse (The gleaners and I, 2000) in the

Cannes Film Festival. It is a documentary that wanders

about in search of characters who scrape around in the

garbage and the throw-offs of capitalist hyper-consumption,

looking for food to survive and discarded materials to turn

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them into art. The hand of Flaherty was already there in the

film’s title, in the second part of the title in which Varda

openly included herself in the film, introducing the ‘I’ into

the story and, as a result, an inevitable subjectivity. In

reality, however, her hand appeared graphically and literally

in one of the most beautiful sequences of the film, which

could be taken as an epitome and the ‘officialisation’ of the

shake-up that documentary cinema has undergone in recent

years. Sitting in the passenger seat in a car, Agnès Varda

shoots trucks they overtake on the highway, framing them

with her wrinkled hand. Varda is not really filming the

trucks, but her own hand, which is trying to capture a

reality that fades away and is left behind, like the trucks

along the way; a fleeting reality that is impossible to get a

handle on. Her small digital camera is unable to film the

world, it just captures the gesture of a filmmaker who tries

to shoot the world without managing to do so. In this short

sequence Agnès Varda expressed several of the changes,

challenges and revolutions that documentary cinema has

undergone in recent years in a masterly manner:

digitalisation, the universalisation of production (linked to

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the propagation of amateurism), a decline in objective

discourse and sobriety, and associated with that, the mise en

scène of subjectivity that has finished off the documentary

as we knew it. Luckily, we should say.

“Let’s do it: everyone’s a documentary maker

Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it

Ev’rybody’s doin’ it, doin’ it, doin’ it

Ain’t that music touchin’ your heart?

Hear that trombone bustin’ apart?

Come, come, come, come, let us start

Ev’ry body’s doin’ it now”

Before Cole Porter and his sexual ode “Let’s do it”,

Irving Berlin released “Ev’rybody's doin’ it” in 1912, a

song (also deeply sexual) that could now be the official

hymn of digital filmmakers, of the new documentary that

has emerged from the heat of the technological revolution.

Everyone is doing it. “Come on, come on, let’s do it too.”

What many filmmakers had dreamed of for years – cinema

in the hand of the director like the fountain pen in the hand

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of the writer – did not become a reality with 16 mm. or

super 8, nor with the first video technologies of the 1980s,

but only with the arrival on the scene of digital technologies

at the start of the 21st century. These made things cheaper

and easier, and popularised all the processes of making an

audiovisual work overnight, so filmmaking became

accessible to anyone: “Thanks to the increase and greater

accessibility of technological tools, thanks to the diversity

of artistic models, because of the spreading need for

images, production is exploding. First phenomenon: like a

painter or a writer, a director can find a studio in his own

room and create a magnificent oeuvre all alone and in

complete freedom.”.1 Cinema made from home, at home

and for home, not in Cinexín format but with the possibility

of controlling all the stages of production from shooting to

distribution (and almost exhibition, in video channels, also

digital, born in the Internet) and including editing and

sound. It is as if the famous telegram that Jean-Luc Godard

sent the National Film Theatre in London in 1968,

apologising for his absence in a conference in which he was

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1 Nicole Brenez in Jonathan Rosenbaum & Adrian Martin (eds.) Movie Mutations: The Changing Face of World Cinephilia, London, BFI, 2003, p. 176.

due to speak, became a reality: “If am not there take anyone

in the street, the poorest if possible, give him my 100

pounds and talk with him of images and sound and you will

learn from him much more than from me because it is the

poor people who are really inventing the language stop your

anonymous Godard”.

Tarnation (2003), by Jonathan Caouette, was an early

mirage of something that would become a reality years

later: the possibility of making a film with domestic

software and, in this case, a large number of family images

taken over more than twenty years. The credits for the

producers (Gus Van Sant, John Cameron Mitchell) do not

correspond to the orthodox model; they had access to the

initial versions of the film and helped Caouette to focus, cut

and circulate the film in the right places. The first version

of Tarnation appeared in MIX NYC, the gay and lesbian

experimental film festival of New York, then in Sundance

and later in the Directors’ Fortnight of the Cannes Festival,

with the force of a bombshell in a situation in which the

term ‘digitalisation’ still sounded like some kind of

mediaeval punishment or, in the best case scenario, an

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uncertain and frightening future. Thanks to iMovie (Apple’s

domestic video editing software), Caouette created a kind

of cinematographic exorcism that was dizzy, hallucinatory

and kaleidoscopic, and applied it to a collection of home

videos that narrated the tortuous story of the director and

his mentally ill mother.

Both Tarnation and Varda’s film showed that

professional tools were not necessary to make a film, and

that the technology that was being installed in people’s

homes (low-cost video cameras and editing programmes

that could be used on any PC) was quite sufficient. They

marked out a path of independence in which they could

function as epitomes and which would end up, in just five

or six years, generating a lively quasi-industrial scene

dominated by self-production in which each author works

as if in a guerrilla cell, being self-sufficient, producing and

distributing the product autonomously.

We might wonder why digital technologies initially

produced an explosion of documentary films and a number

of perverse/perverted variants but not a multiplication of

fiction, and see this as one of the most interesting

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phenomena in the contemporary audiovisual world. Instead

of launching into fiction, why did the new filmmakers,

armed with their small DV cameras, film things that were

closest to them? Why did they go for documentary and not

fiction? The historian and filmmaker Michael Chanan, as

well as examining the reduction in production costs and a

certain weariness on the part of spectators vis-à-vis

classical fictions or the pseudo-real spectacles on TV,

proposes a vision of the documentary as the last bastion of

debate and civil participation in society: “The documentary

camera stays rooted in the reality of society, and from there

it reminds us all that the filmmaker is a citizen of the world,

our world, and is free to manifest his/her vision of the

world (...) In contrast to the pseudo-public space of the

media, the documentary creates a civic space for debate”2.

According to Chanan, the documentary has enjoyed

renewed validity because it has set itself up “behind the

back of censorship”, as the final space for civil society

participation and political commitment (not necessarily

demagogic). However, the consequences are perhaps more

interesting than the factors that triggered this off: a

82 Michael Chanan, “El documental y el espacio público”, Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 57-58, October 2007-February 2008, p. 87.

complete restructuring of the concept of documentary. In

contrast to documentary models that restricted themselves

to using video technology as a cheap alternative to

traditional 35 mm. and replicated the classical modes of

film narrative – only in video – and tried to conceal their

use of ‘impure’ or ‘unworthy’ technologies, trying to pass

them off as shot in celluloid3, a whole new wave of

filmmakers quickly recognised the expressive, artistic,

political and aesthetic possibilities of the new digital tools,

beyond their simple economic advantages.

A new medium finally ends up imposing a new

language, as the Colombian director Luis Ospina explains:

“I never saw video as an enemy or an intruder. When all the

doors of filmmaking were closed to me in the mid-1980s, I

saw video as a kind of resurrection. The cinema is dead,

long live video. (...) With video, no longer seen as a bastard

brother of the cinema, I felt the emotion and the stimulus of

working in a new medium that was less coded and more

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3 “If something characterises the work of Mercedes Álvarez and José Luis Guerín it is that they get involved in a classicism that is not only documentary (Flaherty would be their model, as well as that of El sol del membrillo) but also narrative. On one hand, in both filmmakers we find strategies from other forms of classic documentary such as the docudrama: the inclusion of social actors that play themselves, the imposition of micro-narratives and the orientation provided by a script that is perhaps not written but clearly guided by the director. (...) On the other, a pre-planning that often responds to a classic paradigm consisting of montage, continuity and the breakdown of scenes through the technique of the reverse shot”. Elena Oroz and Gonzalo de Pedro, “Centralisation y dispersión (Dos movimientos para cartografiar la 'especificidad' del documentary producido en Cataluña en la última década)”, in Casimiro Torreiro (ed.) Realidad y creación en el cine de no-fiction, Madrid, Cátedra, 2010, p. 69.

open to experimentation. I was able to solve a number of

expressive needs because I was not only subjected to

cinematographic language but also to the new possibilities

offered by video. Video allowed me to work in a kind of

permanent postmodern collage in which I could mix all the

formats, incorporate archive material from a large number

of sources, generate texts and create special effects that

would be too expensive otherwise”4. This postmodern

collage Ospina refers to, and which he put into practice in

his film Un tigre de papel (2007) – a powerful reflection

on the documentary form as an equally big lie as any other,

just as susceptible to manipulation as any other – is one of

the main characteristics of what John Corner called “post-

documentary”5, a label that perfectly describes the way the

rules of the documentary have been overwhelmed in recent

years, although it has undermined it as an autonomous and

coded entity (and therefore is easily recognised, parodied

and criticised) and has helped to bring about a healthy

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4 Interview with Luis Ospina, partially unpublished, and partly published in "Una nostalgia crítica", Gonzalo de Pedro. Cahiers du Cinéma- España, no. 36. Special supplement, p. XXVII.

5 “The term “documentary” is always much safer when used as an adjective rather than as a noun, although its noun usage is, of course, a form of abbreviation, championed by the cinema pioneers and established through sheer familiarity. To ask “Is this a documentary project? is more useful than to ask “Is this film a documentary?” with its inflection toward firm definitional criteria and the sense of something being more object than practice”. John Corner, “Performing the Real: Documentary Diversions (with Afterword)”, in Susan Murray, Laurie Ouellette (eds.) Reality TV: Remaking Television Culture, New York University, 2009.

overwhelming of its forms and subjects. An almost baroque

excess, which Tarnation anticipated prophetically with its

maelstrom of images – recycled and revisited time and time

again – that announces the fruitful audiovisual nonsense

that Caouette would create ten years later in All Tomorrow

Parties (2009), an authentic film of the YouTube era. It is

dizzy, constructed on the basis of borrowed images, and is

given over to the devouring rhythm of images and icons.

Tarnation already showed some of the features that would

later be the main ones of the documentary genre in the

binary age: audiovisual voracity, audiovisual ‘cannibalism’

and ‘carnavalism’ and, above all, the highlighting of the

director’s subjectivity. In Caouette’s film the camera turned

definitively on its axis, and by extending the field of

filming, focused its lens on those who (traditionally) had

always remained (or almost always) off camera: the

filmmaker and his reality. Strictly speaking, Tarnation was

not the first film to show this extension of the documentary

field and highlight what had previously belonged to the

realm of the private, but it did have the virtue of doing it in

everyone’s view. A few years before, Varda’s film also used

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this same turn of the camera, filming her wrinkled hands

and her old age as examples of the place where the filming

and talking took place. The old, all-knowing voice of the

descriptive documentary, belonging to no particular place

and containing uncontested truth, was replaced by a story in

the first person that was stuck to the wrinkles and the folds

of private life: this is me, this is how I am, and from here,

with these hands, I am speaking to you and filming you.

That is my truth, then.

Digitalism: the world is no longer what we see

If something has become unstable and shaky with the

arrival of digital technology it is the old confusion between

‘documentary’ and ‘truth’ that gave documentary cinema

(here we are talking of cinema, i.e. celluloid, images printed

on a physical medium) an almost mystical quality in

relation to reality, as if the mere printing of light on the

medium would give the filmed images the nature of an

immutable truth. The old “train of shadows” that Gorki

talked about has now become a hyper junction of highways

where the zeros and ones of the digital images circulate

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towards a thousand different screens and cameras, without

physical media, without that trace that linked the world and

its audiovisual reflection, in a digital interface that is

reconfiguring the image of the world, forcing us to rethink

our relationship with what is real and, perhaps, to assume it

as a construction and a discourse, not as something

objective and accessible through technology. In a way,

digital filming has highlighted the impossibility of

documenting a world that cannot be grasped definitively, a

reality that not is ‘out there’ (as Mulder and Scully would

have liked) but one that is constructed from subjectivity.

Hence the optimism unleashed by the new digital recording

devices, initially seen as the tools dreamt of by the old

filmmakers of direct cinema that seemed to promise, with

their almost infinite recordings, the long-desired access to

what is hidden behind reality. This gave rise to the only

possible certainty: digital video would not be of use in

freezing the truth, although it would serve to renew the

definition of documentary: “When everything is digital, a

sum of bits, there are no longer any spectres to turn to, no

shadows to pay tribute to. That Bazinian ontological-ethic

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is not only in crisis, it has been rejected by the new nature

of the media”6. Some have seen this change as a crisis, but

it has actually been an opportunity to popularise and extend

the documentary through its perversion-dissolution.

If this digital change produced fiction films that

imitated the codes of the industry (but at a lower cost),

especially in the early years, in the field of the documentary

there has been an explosion of new modes and of others

that had been left in some corner of the history of the

cinema and that now in the digital age enjoy a new and

renewed validity: intimate cinema, the film diary or new

readings of direct cinema and cinéma vérité. These

approaches have undermined two of the pillars of orthodox

documentary cinema: the documentary understood as a

discourse of sobriety, and the idea of an objective

knowledge attached to a sober and scientific discourse.

John Grierson, to whom the very name ‘documentary’ is

attributed, always considered it an artistic but social

undertaking at the service of a set of values, and Bill

Nichols, the author of the indispensible Representing

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6 Josep María Català & Josetxo Cerdán, “Después de lo real. Pensar las formas del documental, hoy” (monograph), Archivos de la Filmoteca, no. 57-58, October 2007-February 2008, p. 17.

Reality, always linked documentary discourse to others

such as scientific, religious, political and educational, all of

them instrumental powers that “can and should change the

world, do things and give rise to consequences”7. This

could not be further from the intentions of the post-

documentary regarding influencing reality: how can one

have an influence on something that is hardly known and

cannot be unravelled? Here is the second of the key

differences. In contrast with the traditional knowledge

offered by an orthodox documentary, a kind of seamless

discourse, a ‘His Master’s Voice’ that gives the spectator an

insight into reality, these documentary makers work on

what has been called “incarnated knowledge”, that is, a

voice with its roots in the world, one that always speaks to

us from its own subjectivity8. A confusion, which started in

the 1960s and has been amply disseminated by TV

documentary forms, has led to pair documentary with

objectivity; now this has given way to a much more fruitful

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7 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality. Issues and Concepts in Documentary, Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1991 Spanish edition: La representation de la realidad. Cuestiones y conceptos sobre el documental, Barcelona, Paidós, 1991, p. 32).

8 “Traditionally, the word ‘documentary’ suggested something full and complete, facts and knowledge, explanations of the social world and the mechanisms that drive it. More recently, however, ‘documentary’ suggests something incomplete and uncertain, compilation and impressions, images of personal worlds and of its subjective construction. A change of epistemological proportions has taken place. What counts as knowledge is no longer what it usually was”. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington, Indiana University Press, 1994, p. 1.

situation in which the ‘truth’, if it exists, does not lie in the

medium but in the filmmaker. As Josep María Català and

Josetxo Cerdán put it: “This is the risk that documentary

fundamentalism runs when it insists on conserving the

purity of the genre, because it does not seem to take into

account the fact that the medium does not guarantee truth;

that lies with the filmmaker. Therefore, it is better to think

that all documentaries are liable to lie than believing that all

are true because they are documentaries”9.

Performative documentary, as defined by Bill Nichols,

in which the director stands in front of the camera and

guides the narration, has gradually been destabilised while

gaining reflexivity in the process. Indeed, some authors

have called it the “aesthetic of failure”10 and it has ended up

in a fruitful – and far from paralysing –scepticism in which,

far from wanting to represent a solid and seamless world or

a consolidated vision of reality, the post-documentary

maker turns his/her inability to portray the world into the

raw material of a representation which, as Laia Quílez says,

16

9 Català & Cerdán, op. cit. p. 17.

10 Paul Arthur, “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)”, in Michael Renov (ed.) Theorizing Documentary, Nueva York, Routledge/AFI Film Reader, 1993, p. 126.

“is neither unambiguous nor complete”11. An awareness

that one cannot encapsulate everything, and that the little

that can be said should be done from the humility (in some

cases) of someone who knows his/her limitations, is

undoubtedly the great divide that separates contemporary

documentary from what orthodox documentary consecrated

as an immovable canon. Filmmakers such as Jim McBride,

with his prophetical David Holzman’s Diary (1967), a

fake that poked fun at the all-embracing intentions of the

as-yet-unborn diary-based documentary, highlighting that

the idea was impossible to carry out, Alan Berliner, with his

family portraits, or Ross McElwee and his travel journals,

opened up the way (still using film cameras) to others such

as Alain Cavalier or Avi Mograbi, both of them fully

installed in digital instability.

I am my masks: reality is performance

Any notion of truth having been destroyed by the

binary codes of zeros and ones, post-documentary

filmmakers seem to have taken refuge in increasingly

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11 Laia Quílez Esteve, “Cuando el documentalista se ríe de sí mismo. La estética del fracaso y el documental performativo en Avi Mograbi, Ross McElwee y Alan Berliner”, in Elena Oroz & Gonzalo de Pedro (eds.) La risa oblicua: tangentes, paralelismos e intersecciones entre documental y humor, Madrid, Ocho y Medio, 2009, p. 133.

intimate and obscure areas, in corners of a world that is

impossible to capture. After a long (and more or less

successful) career in conventional films, the Frenchman

Alain Cavalier gave up the avenues of conventional fiction

(and production) and set off on a more intimate type of

filmmaking that started by portraying others in Portraits,

(1988), his long series of portraits of working women made

in 16 mm. This hinted at ways in which he would later

develop in digital filmmaking; where he has turned to the

constant and obsessive shooting of his life at home and

travelling. His film diary work has increased considerably,

with his amateur digital camera in his hand. Since his first

masterpiece of this stage of ugly digital work in progress –

Le filmeur (2007) – Cavalier has extended the limits of

what can be filmed beyond modesty, with an almost smelly

portrait of his illness and daily life, with all its misery and

shadows, in a line that he continued, with humour, in Lieux

Saints (2007), a collection of portraits of public and private

urinals and toilets. The latest result is Irène (2009), a

digital exorcism of a former lover who died in a traffic

accident. Confessional and shameless – and always ‘in

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progress’ – recurrent images and sound can be found in all

his films: the image is his portrait, camera in hand, captured

in a mirror, a glass, a reflection, always half-hidden behind

the camera, always deformed. Then there is the sound,

produced by him with the movement of his hands on the

camera. Imperfections, split or blurred reflections, noises

from the hand that moves the camera, anomalies that

constantly underscore the narration instead of hiding it, and

which even question the experience of daily life as

something evident and illuminating. Traces, perhaps, of the

unheimlich of Freud whereby the daily becomes something

sinister. It is about constantly feeling strange vis-à-vis the

world, even in the most intimate domain. Avi Mograbi has

also worked in this area in films such as August: A

Moment Before the Eruption (2002). He digitally

fragments his own self-portrait in what is not only a

representation of the political schizophrenia that surrounds

him but also of his own identity – ungraspable and

unintelligible – seen as a jigsaw puzzle that it is impossible

to complete. The series of digital manipulations that

Mograbi deploys in his films – noises, masks on the faces

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of the soldiers in Z-32 (2009), decomposed and fragmented

images – is no more than a reflection of a documentary that

is aware of the impossibility of offering a complete truth, an

authentic portrait of what is before the camera. The way in

which Z-32 introduces the doubts around its own making,

in a deeply postmodern reflective gesture, highlights the

self-referencing bias that contemporary documentary has

acquired. This path has also been trodden by many other

filmmakers that look to documentary to unravel its

processes and challenge the genre.

The work of Cameron Jamie – a filmmaker from the

world of contemporary art12 – also reflects, in a very

different way to Mograbi or Cavalier, on this unintelligible

reality (in this case, perverse and obscure). Instead of taking

refuge in the folds of daily life, Jamie takes his camera out

onto the street to find another world, one that offers no

explanations or answers. Kranky Klaus (2003) takes on

the appearance of an almost ethnographic portrait of a

deeply-rooted custom in villages in the mountains of

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12 The fact that Jamie’s work, like that of Deimantas Narkevicius or quite a few others, can circulate in experimental and documentary festivals or museums and galleries shows that digital technology has created the strongly desired convergence between “the two shores”, museums and cinema. This convergence is not, however, exclusively technological, it is also conceptual: documentaries have entered museums when the old forms were surpassed, giving way to more reflexive and performative (and even more hesitant) hybrid forms, in a glorious and fertile lack of definition.

Austria: one day at Christmas, a group of men disguised as

monsters walk through the village whipping and frightening

children and passers-by, sowing panic without any apparent

limits. Jamie, in the best tradition of Catherine Russell’s

experimental ethnography, far from explaining what it is

going on, simply films it in a clearly lackadaisical way (the

film looks amateurish, with a strident soundtrack by the

grunge and sludge metal group The Melvins and home-

made sound), in a display of violence that is beyond belief,

but with no explanations given: “The strangeness of the

Other in representation is the awareness of his unknowable

nature, the realisation that seeing is not, after all, knowing.

(...) The failure of realism when presenting proof of what is

real is the radical possibility of experimental ethnography”,

states Catherine Russell13. Jamie is concerned with

capturing the moment in which the group of ‘monsters’

stops in a bar where, having removed their masks, they

knock back a few beers; this highlights the inevitable

construction of what we have been shown until that

moment. That Jamie’s films, for example Spook House

(2003) or Jo (2004), skirt more around Z horror movies

2113 Catherine Russell, “Otra mirada”, en Archivos de la Filmoteca op. cit. p. 152.

than classical fiction shows how contemporary

documentary increasingly seeks references that are not

exclusively academic and orthodox, in a growing impurity

that enriches it while taking it apart at the same time.

Jamie’s work, half way between contemporary art and

cinema, also serves as a kind of bridge to highlight two

aspects that contemporary documentary has put to the

forefront: on one hand, the staging of any act, the

performative nature of any action, the realisation that

identity (or, rather, identities) are not only constructions and

masks to act in society; and on the other, the interest in

dysfunctional realities that are outside what is correct and

visible.

This work on reality and identities as a mask has taken

on different forms in contemporary documentary. From the

actresses that Jia Zhang-ke introduces into the real

testimonies of 24 City (2008) to the much more elaborate

(and interesting) theatrical recreations that Rithy Panh uses

in S21, the Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003) or in

The Burnt Theatre (2005) to evoke his country’s painful

past, as if we can only face up to the most human horror

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through repeated and theatricalised gestures devoid of any

emotion14, contemporary documentary has gradually done

away with any naturalness, emphasising the strangeness of

reality, in an awareness that masks only hide other masks

and that we will never find the skin hidden under them. The

work of Raya Martin in his trilogy (still in progress) about

the successive colonial eras in the Philippines – A Short

F i lm About the Indio Nac ional (2007) and

Independencia (2009) – takes this idea of theatricality and

constant fake documentary to the extreme, recreating,

through a combination of fiction and documentary,

impossible and non-existent images from Philippine cinema

in a radical gesture of rewriting history that does not hide

the fake element. The hieratic portraits in Portrait (Portret,

2002) by Sergei Loznitsa, which only capture the time of

the portrait itself, the (already mentioned) digital masks on

the Israeli soldiers in Z-32, the brutal simplicity of

Fengming, a Chinese Memoir (He Fengming, Wang Bing,

2007), through a single shot of a woman who tells her

personal history to the camera while the ambient light fades

23

14 “When the inherent feature of traumatic experience is that it resists verbalisation and narrative structuring, one can only resort to the memory of gestures, of the mechanical portrayal of horror”, Elena Oroz, "Pequeños gestos, enormes consecuencias", Cahiers du Cinéma-España, no. 31, p. 49.

away and the director remains impassive or, going to the

extreme, animated documentaries such as Waltz with

Bashir (2008) by Ari Folman are other examples of how

digital documentary digital has found – at the limits of what

it never would have filmed – sufficient reason to continue

shooting while blowing the portrayal processes of orthodox

documentary to shreds.

The Portuguese director Pedro Costa not only found an

aesthetic route in digital filmmaking but also an ethical one

that has allowed him to hang around the ruins of post-

colonial Lisbon to film (over the years) a group of

unfortunates left on the fringes of their own country. In an

interview, he recalled a phrase that the main character in his

film Juventude em Marcha (2006) said to him while

shooting, a phrase that was very revealing about the

impossibility of digging below the wrinkles on people’s

faces: “Don’t worry, don’t think that you will get to know

me in depth because you have a camera in your hand”.

Costa added a reflection to this comment: “I am reassured

and protected by knowing, as he says, that I will not stop

doing it precisely because I am never going to achieve it”15.

2415 Sara Brito, “Un maestro portugués, novato en España”, Público, 13 June 2010.

In Costa the two tendencies of digital documentary referred

to earlier come together: the awareness of the mask (Ne

change rien (2009) – his portrait of the actress Jeanne

Balibar is exactly the portrait of the mask that hides behind

the supreme mask, the face of an actress) – and work with

the most invisible aspects of society.

This last aspect – the interest of contemporary

documentary in those aspects of the visible that are

precisely the most invisible or hidden – has something to do

with the defence that Chanan makes of the documentary as

a space that is open to civic intervention and political and

social protest, but also with how far what can be considered

filmable goes. It is not only subjectivity that has taken

documentary by storm, it is also the most invisible part of

that subjectivity: going back to Tarnation, it is not only the

story of a son and his sick mother, it is also the brutal

confession of a young gay who is looking for himself

through images of his life. Le plein pays (2009) by Antoine

Boutet looks at the daily life of a social outcast, a man who

lives withdrawn from the world, digging the ground and

recording songs from the radio to memorise them. Boutet

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constructs a portrait that, yet again, does not explain or ask

anything, it simply accompanies. However, it not only

contains the mark of the director, who is present in what he

shoots, but a certain element of vindication of an apparently

‘absurd’ way of life but one which ends up subverting the

notion of work as a way of defining one’s place in society

and as a social currency. American Alley (2009), by Kim

Dong-ryung, does something similar with a group of

Eastern European prostitutes in South Korea: from the

proximity that her job as a social worker gave her, the

director pulls apart the trap of love as a form of domination

and constructs a first-order feminist vindication without

falling into demagogy. Or RIP in pieces America (2009),

by Dominique Gagnon, who re-filmed videos that YouTube

users classified as “inappropriate” over several months

before the webmasters could remove them. He not only

reflects on the channels through which images circulate,

and systems of censorship and self-censorship, but also

creates a fairly terrifying portrait of the political

underground in the US through his gallery of

“inappropriate” internet users and people out on the fringes

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of politics. Finally, in a list that could be endless, Mirages

(2009), by Olivier Dury, is a film half-way between

plasticity and physicality that links in with the fascination

of contemporary films with bodies in movement. In this

case the director (the camera-man) traces the long journey

of a group of emigrants to Spain through the deserts of

Niger as far as Algeria. There are no words or interviews,

just the idea of capturing a movement and rescuing it –

perhaps without any great hopes – from a certain

invisibility. Some cameras, like Pedro Costa’s, stay close to

the bodies they film; they do not interrogate them but

basically ask questions of the film about its role in that

particular room, that particular truck, or that forgotten

corner of the world. “We said the documentary is political

because it invites society to observe its own individuals and

its own concerns”, says Chanan16.

Everything is archive: the explosion of found footage

We said earlier that Tarnation anticipated the almost

cannibal-like voracity that some forms of post-documentary

have adopted, an iconic and audiovisual cannibalism, the

2716 Chanan Ibid p. 94.

heir of found footage that has expanded exponentially while

the universal archive of images within anyone’s reach grew,

thanks to the internet and the increasingly large number of

video pages17, audiovisual portals that have opened the door

to a cinema made without a camera. The growing

fascination with found footage of varying quality is simply

yet another consequence of the ‘fall’ of images as exact

correlates of what is real. In the words of Chris Marker

(probably the first great VJ of contemporary cinema, the

first digital filmmaker before digital came along) images

“are shown as they are, images, and not the portable and

compact form of a reality that is no longer accessible”,

filmmakers can finally handle them at will without

worrying about perverting their relationship to the world.

This explosion of found footage rewrites the classical

rapprochement of documentary cinema to archive material,

because the new recyclers do not resort to archive images

for their historical nature, nor to quote or document a

particular moment in history; they do so to create

discourses based on pure fascination with images or to

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17 The first one to appear was YouTube.com, in February 2005 (five years ago, an eternity in digital terms). It has been followed by many others such as Vimeo, aimed at consolidating a community of audiovisual creators, Archive.org, an authentic digital ‘library of Alexandria’, or Ubu.com, dedicated to the archives of avant-garde artistic movements.

explore the terrain of film essay (for which all the images

and all the reality are an archive with which to create a

discourse). In the work of filmmakers such as Péter

Forgács, who uses archive footage in a classical manner,

and Gustav Deutsch, as a representative of the experimental

side. or in the most troublemaking examples of digital

appropriation (the mash-up, the remix, the culture of the

VJ), work with archives in contemporary documentary does

not seek to blur the edges of the images to integrate them

into the narrative discourse but prefers to highlight the

corners and the points of friction – as if they were the

marks of the hand that holds the scissors – avoiding the

transparency of the classical documentary and

foregrounding the manipulations, the defects, the de-

contextualisation and the losses or perversions of meaning.

Thus is how films appear such as Iraqi Short Films

(Mauro Andrizzi, 2008), an authentic product of the

YouTube era in which the images are consumed

fragmented. It compiles hundreds of videos on the Iraq war,

recorded by US and British soldiers and also by Islamist

militias, and subjects them to processes of digital

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manipulation; some are evident, others not, in an operation

that simply aims to strip away the status of the image as an

authentic vehicle of information. Then there is the recent

Material (Thomas Heise, 2009), which shows us how

contemporary documentary approaches the archive (in this

case the director’s own, consisting of images that he had

rejected for other films) with a certain mistrust and

scepticism. In Material the accumulation of unpublished

images on the fall of the Berlin Wall from the side of the

German Democratic Republic does not so much set out to

illustrate an unknown aspect of history as to confront the

viewer with his/her own ignorance and to witness the

process of construction of a film as something that is in

constant formation, something that asks questions about

history instead of providing answers, challenges the validity

of images (the residue of historical processes) to recover

and reconstruct the past. The film also reflects on the

imperishable and changing value of images that are

destined to be forgotten.

In a way, we could consider that the proliferation of the

audiovisual collage is yet another product of the fall of the

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documentary as a sober discourse, as we mentioned at the

start. This fall has given rise (among other things) to a

celebration of the image per se, now freed of the yoke of

simply being an image-footprint.

Spanish coda: decentralisations, degenerations and

“heterodocsies”

The “documentary boom” that the Spanish media

promoted so strongly in the early 2000s, in the light of the

(surprising) success of some documentaries in movie

theatres and a (more or less buoyant) audiovisual sector

could not, however, hide a certain stagnation of production

in subsidised formulas which, although they helped to stir

up the Spanish filmmaking panorama, also managed to

contribute to hide other documentaries that were much

more in line with what was happening internationally18.

This was particularly the case in Catalonia, which saw the

documentary as a cheaper way to subsist and, in the

process, legitimise itself intellectually. In contrast to the

initiatives of modernity that imposed a new documentary

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18 A more detailed description of the documentary boom in Spain, and its links to cinematographic modernity, can be found in the abovementioned article by Elena Oroz and Gonzalo de Pedro titled “Centralización y dispersión…”

orthodoxy – in which digital technologies were little more

than a way to save money while shooting or, at most, a way

to go deeper into reality on the basis of the heritage from

Bazin – a whole new, lively and suggestive scene of

directors emerged. These directors not only saw digital as

an opportunity for self-production, but particularly as a set

of new tools to construct new languages and new

documentary practices between the impure, the mixed, and

the hybrid.

Apart from self-production and digitalization, perhaps

the most outstanding characteristic (in its ability to

regenerate itself) of this Spanish scene is the way in which

it has structured itself as an authentic reality parallel to the

audiovisual sector. These Spanish post-documentary

makers are neither marginal nor underground; they operate

as an autonomous and authentically decentralised network,

one that has clearly surpassed (mainly by ignoring them)

the centres of power of Madrid and Barcelona. There is no

‘dispersion of centres’ as such (nor the filmmaking models

they impose), rather a process of going beyond the old

systems of industrial power towards a decentralised

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movement without hierarchies that works, perhaps, as a

digital network in which each author is simultaneously

producer-distributor and even exhibitor. These are small

autonomous cells of audiovisual creation that are really

independent, sometimes voluntarily and on other occasions

compulsorily. It is a new post-documentary culture that has

led to the emergence of small-scale support structures (e.g.

TV stations such as ‘Xarxa de Televisions Locals’ in

Catalonia, with its ‘Designation of Origin’ project, the

‘Gran Angular’ programme of TVE in Catalonia, websites

like Blogs & Docs, distributors of video art and

documentary such as Hamaca, festivals like Punto de Vista

or Las Palmas, or museums such as ARTIUM in Vitoria or

the CCCB in Barcelona). These have not only laid a solid

basis for a really strong and decentralised network (which is

increasingly necessary), they have also helped to give this

parallel reality a high profile and to sustain it.

Among these structures (some of them are actually

quite weak) we would highlight two projects, both of which

emerged from festivals. They are on the periphery in

geographical terms, but set out to give publicity to these

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parallel digital practices. They also played a key role in

bringing together the disperse reality of authors who were

not always connected with each other. We should

emphasise the point that the two projects emerged from

film festivals, perhaps because these have been the only

vehicles in the classical audiovisual domain that have taken

the initiative of opening up and approaching a territory that

the sector regarded as unknown (even dangerous). The first

was the ‘D-Generación’ programme, consisting of

underground experiences in non-fictional Spanish film,

directed by Josetxo Cerdán and Antonio Weinrichter for the

Festival of Las Palmas in 2007. It has its second edition in

2009, this time with help from the Instituto Cervantes. Then

there is the Heterodocsias project, also set up in 2007 by

Carlos Muguiro for the Punto de Vista Festival, of which he

was artistic director at the time. In 2008 it took the form of

a production project under the name of ‘La mano que

mira’ (the hand that looks). Born almost at the same time,

the first focused on the buoyant audiovisual scene and the

second set out to trace a map of Spanish heterodoxy in the

present, past and future. Both programmes agreed on the

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need to invent new terms in order to work on a reality that

few people had explored before. The Punto de Vista project

chose the term ‘Heterodocsias’, a blend of the union

between heterodoxy and documentary which was explained

as follows: “It was our destiny; heterodoxy in the cinema

and the heterodox documentary”19. The programmers in

Las Palmas played with the “D” of digital and

documentary, and linked to the term “generation”, came up

with the suggestive “D-generación”20, which well defines

the paths of rewriting and perversion that documentary has

taken in recent years.

The list of heterodox and degenerate authors proposed

by these two projects gives us a good idea of a panorama

that is growing steadily, combining recognised filmmakers

who also work on the other side of the camera with other,

younger names, video artists or anonymous figures of the

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19 “The difficulty of the project (…) arose from a dual lack of definition which meant that it was difficult to grasp and its content debatable: on the one hand, the term ‘documentary’ and what it has to do with heterodoxy. After all, what is documentary? And above all, what do we call ‘heterodoxy’? Far from being a problem, however, this resistance to definition made it clear that we were entering a cinematographic terrain that was completely free, uncontrollable, wild, neither colonised nor civilised, where names were insufficient and are permanently beyond meaning. That was our destiny: heterodoxy in the cinema and the heterodox documentary. To refer to this unnameable terrain we coined the term Heterodocsia”. Carlos Muguiro and Gonzalo de Pedro, “Presentation. Heterodoxos y heterodocsias”, in Heterodocsias. Pistas para una historia secreta del cine documental en España, Festival Punto de Vista, 2007, p. 2.

20 “It refers, in first place, to the fact that we are considered a new generation, although – and we are pleased at this contradiction – not all of them can be grouped in terms of generation (...) The letter ‘D’ refers to what was previously known as ‘documentary’: these films emerge from that formless terrain in which non-fiction film radicalises its principles and flirts with other experiences (...) the proposals are always distant from any scholasticism or tradition, anything that can mean tracking formal alignments. In this process of expansion, which, as we have said, is born from the documentary and almost goes against documentary (…), there is a certain idea of cross-breeding or degeneration (…). And finally, pushing the semantics a bit, these filmmakers are “d-generate” because what they do is outside genre”. Josetxo Cerdán and Antonio Weinrichter, “D-Generación: a modo de reflexión introductoria”, in D-Generación. Experiencias subterráneas de la no-fiction española, Festival de Las Palmas-Instituto Cervantes, 2009, p.13.

audiovisual world who have found a fruitful form of

expression and work in this path of the post-documentary

and the new do it yourself. This list is necessarily (and

fortunately) partial and incomplete, because the number of

authors who are working in this quasi-industrial reality is

growing and changing all the time. So, the catalogue of the

‘D-generación’ project can be extended, it is not a closed

edition, and ‘Heterodocsias’ has grown and consolidated

itself as a programme of production within the Punto de

Vista festival, indicating an awareness of working in a

territory in constant expansion, and also the need to create

support, production and distribution networks outside the

traditional circuits.

The features highlighted in the international part of this

article, those that define this digital post-documentary, can

also be applied to the Spanish panorama of cannibalistic,

impure and cross-bred cinema. From the assimilation of

digital technologies as a creative tool to the liberty of

working with a concept, the documentary has freed itself of

its previous burdens and has become a field open to

subjectivity, impurity, humour and experimentation. This

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fall of the documentary as a discourse of sobriety that has

shaken up the international panorama has led, in Spain, to

something playful, carnivalesque-cannibalistic that portrays

subjectivities or invisible realities, and dialogue, not so

much with fiction, but with impure or forgotten forms of

audiovisual such as experimental film, video art, B-movies,

or even TV genres. The list of authors and titles is as long

as it is changing, and we could quote Lluís Escartín, who,

in Terra incógnita (2004) portrayed his countrymen of the

Penedés (a region near Barcelona) with the surprise of

someone who visits another planet; El sastre (2007), by

Óscar Pérez, a powerful re-reading of direct cinema that

makes a full-frontal attack on the idea of the “fly on the

wall” and illustrates the construction that is always hidden

behind images; or the terrifying cannibalistic mix by María

Cañas, an authentic destroyer of found footage in the

YouTube era, who attacks the purity of the image, its link to

reality and the very concept of “author’s rights” in films

such as La Cosa Nuestra (2006). However, if we had to

choose a work that could represent them all, it could be

Life Between Worlds, Not In Fixed Reality (2008), a film

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by Andrés Duque made for the Heterodocsias project titled

‘The hand that looks’ of the Punto de Vista festival, in

which seven authors had to film a kind of daily diary with a

mobile phone. With the lesser definition than a telephone

provides, Duque made the film to highlight the impurity of

the image and the beauty of the pixels. It is a sequence shot

that starts in a conventional shoot, with the usual apparatus

and paraphernalia, and gradually moves away until it comes

across a black cleaning lady in another part of the house

who carries on with her work while she watches weddings

from her country of origin on TV. It is a journey, from the

industry to personal images, made with the plasticity of the

new media and the impurity of a non-professional piece of

equipment. It serves as a manifesto, compendium and

gateway into an audiovisual panorama that looks forward to

the future and also turns its back – as does Duque’s camera

– on what interests conventional cinema to focus on other

realities that are dysfunctional, invisible, and subjective. It

does this based on an awareness that it is perhaps

impossible to understand what the camera records (in the

same way that Andrés Duque does not understand what the

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cleaning lady is showing him) but it still worthwhile

continuing to shoot.

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