This year’s Dokuarts 12 symposium took place in Berlin on October 11th and looked at the current relevance of nuances, with presentations and panel discussions focused on the significance of developing intuition and sensibility in the realms of documentary filmmaking. Speakers were Sarah Cooper (Professor of Film Studies, King’s College London), Matthias Dell (film, television, and theatre critic), Britta Hartmann (Professor of Film Studies and Audiovisual Media Culture, University of Bonn), Christoph Hübner (filmmaker) and Rania Stephan (artist and filmmaker). Moderation was by Bert Rebhandl (film critic).
In her presentation Nuance and ‘The Botany of Desire’ Professor Sarah Cooper refers to the book The Botany of Desire (2001) by Michael Pollan, (made into a PBS documentary in 2009, directed by Michael Schwarz) which foregrounds four plants – the apple tree, tulip, marijuana, and potato – and follows their symbiotic relationship with humans, which have served to sustain survival and co-evolution. She claims the way that humans are undoubtedly affecting the natural world means we are forced to take a macro rather than micro (nuanced) assimilation, concluding that the documentary film is central in this appropriation, not least on television with its mass viewing population.
Cooper assesses Roland Barthes’ 1978 book The Neutral in which he considers nuances to be the very things that are covered in the authoritarianisms of binary choices, which are eclipsed by what he terms the tyranny of meaning. For Barthes, the nuance in which the individual resides is a will to live rather than a will to possess. Attending to the neutral is a way of attending to the present moment. This can relate to the audio-visual realm too. Macro-micro/global-local divisions are examples of binary logic and it is the place of documentary in the nuances of mass appeal that interests Sarah Cooper most in an ethical sense. When asked whether it is too challenging to think of this in the way that Barthes did, Cooper says that although in the present time it may be difficult for Barthes’ thinking to sit parallel with what is going on in an ecologically challenging world, it is a different way of looking at things and therefore worthwhile in itself, so having different ways of engaging with these questions is important.
Filmmaker Rania Stephan presented a lecture called Me and My Shadow, looking at the changing practice of editing as an artistic tool for working with films and images. She spoke of using archives and how that is doing some creative with something that already exists and used examples of her work in relation to the potentials and challenges of using advanced digital editing tools. The relationship between reel and the real still lend their full weight to the debate about film and representation. In early cinema editing wasn’t considered a laborious rather than creative task. Women were assigned these seemingly menial tasks and only later did men edit when opinions changed. Dziga Vertov considered editing to be the combination of related pieces using addition, subtraction, multiplication, division and factoring out, the latter of which means taking decisions. Editing is never final! It is always suspended and open to interpretation in the spectator’s mind.
During the first Gulf War on Iraq in 1991, led by the United States, Serge Daney wrote a seminal article entitled Montage Obligé – La guerre, le Golfe et le petit écran (Compulsory editing – War, the Gulf and the small screen) in which he discussed the coverage of the war by French television. It later led him to write opinion pieces about television in the daily newspaper Libération, reflecting on how Cinema has crossed over from the silver screen to the small liquid screen of television. There he developed his idea about the difference between the visual and the image, which is essential for understanding the new media landscape that was piercing through these times. Daney said, “To make life simpler I decided to make a clear distinction between the image and the visual. The visual would be the optical verification of impurely technical operation. The visual is without reverse shot, it lacks nothing; it is closed, a little like the pornographic image of spectacle which is only the ecstatic verification of the working of organs and nothing more. The image we loved in cinema to the point of obscenity, the situation would rather be the contrary. The image always takes place at the border of two force fields. It is meant to bear witness to a certain otherness and although it always has a central point, it always lacks something. The image is always more and less than itself.” Jean-Luc Godard also once said that the news on television doesn’t show us anything because the person is sitting in front of the image, covering it all up.
Stephan worked on Avid for the first time in a Lebanese documentary in 1999. When Final Cut Pro was released she immediately questioned the name, considering it too easy to use, limiting its use for production competence and more suited as a tool for advertising films. Its final version Final Cut 10 in 2011 was its ultimate demise. It was as though someone was editing on auto pilot. Editors hated it and people who use Final Cut today use an old version. Adobe Premiere was invented in 2003 (the year of the second Gulf War and invasion of Iraq by the United States) and absorbs all video formats that are computed and absorbed from within in one seamless workflow where everything is virtual. With Adobe editing tools, in accepted one-minute format social media videos, it is the text that comes alive within the image in different formats and colors. The purpose for this is that in different viewing capacities, the viewer can always read what is being said. However, one is distanced from the image. It seems that the media is being divided into two worlds. One is the special effects editor and designer, a multi-task person doing everything. The second is a highly technical world requiring a massive amount of labor and technical skill with colossal production budgets.
Stephan summarised by saying that editing alone is not a choice anymore but a necessity. In this world of social media we are now faced with the challenge that the text has replaced the image in that it occupies nearly the whole of the image. Therefore, she sees her own editing work as a tool of resistance to stop the flow of images and reshuffle them for configuration between two images, to refresh the gaze and propose new meanings and emotions in the cuts. It is a physical, mental, technical, design and artistic practice where images have to remain alive. Spending much of her time storing on larger hard disks, Stephan fears a future where perhaps we will no longer be able to make images as they will already be in some image bank, like Cloud.
Rania Stephan’s short film experiment Threshold (2018) is solely composed of transitional door and threshold scenes from an old Egyptian science fiction film called The Master of Time (1987, Dir. Kamal El Sheikh). An unusual topic for an Egyptian film, it follows a scientist obsessed by extending human life into eternity. In a most entertaining and humorous way, Stephan succeeds in radically editing and condensing the original film to fulfil the scientist’s prophecy. Oscillating on the threshold between fiction and abstraction, non-linearity and the sublime, nuances are foregrounded to create a new variable from an original story. Stephan’s film played on the first night of the Dokuarts 2018 season, supporting the main feature Arcadia by Paul Wright.