At the Visible Evidence 2022 Conference in Gdansk, Poland, together with Susana de Sousa Dias, Minou Norouzi, Antonio Gómez and Rania Gaafar, we led a workshop aiming to reassess questions of authorship in documentary in times of global capitalism and interconnectedness. Our interest in this topic, which is arguably anything but new in the critical consideration of documentary film, was triggered by certain reactions to Susana de Sousa Dias’ recent film Fordlândia Malaise, which was shot in the Brazilian Amazon. The objections did not so much concern the film as such as the fact that it was made by a Portuguese (read “former colonial power,” “Western,” “hegemon”). Rather than considering the film through the unfolding of its inherent truth content as mediated by its formal configuration, such criticisms derive the critical agency of the film from the attributed identity of the filmmaker. What is assumed is not only that the latter predetermines the potential meaning of the film as a whole, but also that documentary film is necessarily concerned with the representation of reality as it appears from a certain perspective.

Fordlandia Malaise – Excerpt from Kintop on Vimeo.

To be sure, of course we totally agree that it is crucial to recognize the right of any people to represent themselves as they deem appropriate, and to challenge and subvert imposed ideas about their world. Problematizing hegemonic representations of certain realities, especially those of minorities, exploited or neglected communities, is indubitably as important today as it was when postcolonial, feminist, queer and/or indigenous theoreticians and filmmakers began articulating their critiques. It is also true that even though critical approaches to documentaries about foreign realities, especially ethnographic and anthropological filmmaking, are nowadays well-established in the humanities, film studies and critical theory, depictions arrogating the legitimacy to speak about/for the Other continue to dominate the contemporary media landscape, and thereby buttress the global neoliberal, (neo)colonial domination of the so-called West. Until today, most popular formats recur to the authoritative claim of scientificity and pretend to explain “the Other(s)” through an allegedly “neutral” frame. Countless mainstream productions wrap the same positivist scheme in a sensationalist garb, for instance by promising to reveal hidden aspects of non-western realities through spectacular forms, all-too coherent narratives and a certain fetishization of the “authentic.” What all those documentary approaches presuppose are clear distinctions between Self and Other, past and present, here and elsewhere, thereby obstructing the political and social intertwinements and interdependencies of divergent realities in a global flow. Much critical work remains to be done to problematize hegemonic, biased, and one-sided representations of “the others” by “us” or “the others” for “us.” However, reducing a film and the reality it seeks to address to an a priori identitarian attribution, no matter if the latter concerns the filmmaker or the people appearing in the film, is in the end just as questionable a position as its counterpart, the blind acceptance of a dominant representation.

In Can the Subaltern Speak? Gayatri Spivak characterizes the subaltern–a term she adopts from Antonio Gramsci, who used it to describe a certain category of population without representative structures–as incapable to speak or rather, to be heard. Subalternity is thus for her the absence of a position of enunciation. Elevating formerly subalterns to the status of speakers might integrate them into the dominant power relations as potential actors, and thus serve a particular cause (i.e. fighting for specific right). However, it does not disrupt the underlying power structures as such or open up new ways of thinking radically different ways of coming together. Produced by colonial epistemic violence, subalternity can only be grasped through the societal relations through which it appears as such. Requesting from “the subaltern” to represent themselves, inside the very scheme that informs the established power structure, is thus perpetuating rather than subverting it, even if certain individuals or groups might profit from improved conditions. Pooja Rangan has compellingly shown how participatory documentary largely reproduces this logic. In her book Immediations, she unfolds the “humanitarian impulse” which sanctions the reigning power relations by reproducing its implicit division between those who act and those who suffer, without even recognizing the tendentious underpinnings on which they are based. If, as Trinh T. Min-ha (1990) famously wrote, “meaning can […] be political only when it does not let itself be easily stabilized and when it does not rely on any single source of authority, but, rather, empties it, or decentralizes it”, then any unilateral position is problematic in documentary filmmaking, and any a priori presupposition of superior morality or objectivity should be challenged.

The problem of seizing a foreign reality through filmic means cannot be reduced to a problem of authorship. It concerns the concept of reality itself, or rather the dialectic between the highly complex material, social, historically developed reality on the one hand, and its apprehension through conceptual and perceptual habits, values and norms, including the common assumption that documentary is necessarily concerned with representation. But how can we take the criticisms of hegemonic reasoning and representation in documentary film seriously without succumbing to yet another patronizing attitude? How can a reality be approached through filmic and conceptual means without imposing ideas in order to make it fit our (dominant/ orientalist/ paternalistic/ “Western”) worldview? How can the political and social intertwinements and interdependencies of divergent realities in a global flow be grasped?

In his book Cinema 2: The Time-Image (1985), Gilles Deleuze proposes to tackle such questions by shifting the perspective, through a particular analysis of Jean Rouch’s experimental documentary Moi, un Noir (1958). According to Deleuze, that which is addressed through the film is not the real as such; the question is not to represent the truth. For the discourse of truth is also colonized; it is already occupied by the dominating power. What happens is something else: through a kind of “verbal delirium,” the main character played by Nigerian Oumarou Ganda regains imaginative and linguistic power. By conquering the colonizer’s language, he actively performs cinema’s potential to contribute to the invention of a new people, a people that neither complies with “Western” ideas of a noble savage, nor with racist ascriptions of backwardness or misery. What happens is a sort of “double becoming,” through which “the real characters become another by storytelling, but the author, too, himself becomes another”. As Trinh T. Minh-ha writes in When the Moon Waxes Red, “Otherness becomes empowering critical difference when it is not given, but recreated.”

Moi.Un.Noir.1959.DVDrip.x264.AC3-SaL(3) from PhilDoc on Vimeo.

In order to understand the hegemonic or emancipatory agency of documentary, we think it is important to develop a concept of reality elastic enough to grasp the multifold, antagonistic relations between people, powers, and ecologies. At the same time, reality is also shaped by the signs, gestures and their potential meaning in a societal context. The relation between reality and film is complex: just as film mediates that which is taken for reality, reality transforms itself through the images and sounds supposed to mediate it. Jacques Rancière wrote in his Film Fables that “[t]he privilege of the so-called documentary film is that it is not obliged to create the feeling of the real, and this allows it to treat the real as a problem and to experiment more freely with the variable games of action and life, significance and insignificance.” The question of documentary for him is not so much one of representation, but one of problematization, of putting certain common sensical ideas and perceptions into crisis, if we understand the idea of crises (derived from the Greek verb κρίνω – to decide, to separate, to judge) as that which seizes a critical situation, in which “new ’causes’ […] disturb the existing equilibrium”(Valéry). Documentary, then, would not so much illustrate a certain preestablished idea of reality and corroborate it by reproducing the schema on which it relies, but open it up, reconfigure the signs and movements so as to think, perceive, apprehend it differently. It would be, first and foremost, a question of form–of how social forms and aesthetic forms interrelate, how they are mediated one through the other, and how certain configurations enable to crack open gridlocked conceptions and perceptions that keep the reigning power structures intact. Rather than reflecting “reality as it is”, documentary would then be about subverting that which appears as given. Jill Godmilow, in her recent book Kill the documentary, advocates for what she calls post-realist film, in a similar manner. “The postrealist film comes in many forms”, she writes, “but always seeks to crack the code of the status quo, to drill even small holes in our social imaginaire, our naturalized worldview that suggests what is understood as normal, reasonable, commonsensical, and generally accepted by all.” (p. 31).

Giovanbattista Tusa is Researcher in Philosophy and Ecology at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA) at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa where he coordinates the research program X-CENTRIC FUTURES.

Stefanie Baumann is a researcher in philosophy at the Nova Institute of Philosophy (IFILNOVA, New University of Lisbon), where she coordinates the working group “Thinking Documentary Film” and the research project «Mediating the Real. Philosophy and Documentary Film».