Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 47

James Leo Cahill

University of Toronto

Authorship and its conceptual limits have significantly shaped documentary's history, at least as it has been told in the capitalist West. In the Anglophone tradition, one need only return to a few of the primal scenes of the mode's conceptualization – John Grierson's 1926 review of Robert Flaherty's Moana in the New York Sun and his “First Principles of Documentary” of 1932–1934 – in order to trace the assertion of documentary as an evaluative category and authorship as that which divides documentaries from the supposedly “lower” forms of filmed actuality comprising the larger field of nonfiction cinema. In “First Principles” Grierson writes, “Documentary is a clumsy description, but let it stand. The French who first used the term only meant travelogue. It gave them a solid high‐sounding excuse for the shimmying (and otherwise discursive) exoticisms of the Vieux Colombier. Meanwhile documentary has gone on its way” (Grierson 1971: 146). Grierson dismissively and incorrectly attributed the French use of the term documentaire with a limited understanding rooted in travelogues and other “shimmying exoticisms” projected at places like the Théâtre du Vieux Colombier, a Parisian avant‐garde cinema directed by Jean Tedesco that was known for its eclectic and imaginative programs, and was an important supporter of historical and emergent nonfiction and documentary cinemas.¹ Recalling his famous formula of the “creative treatment of actuality” outlined in 1933 in “The Documentary Producer” (Grierson 2016: 216), Grierson reserved the term documentary for work that he believed transcended the merely descriptive nature of nonfiction materials through “arrangements, rearrangements, and creative shapings” of “natural material” that produced revelatory insights (Grierson 1971: 146). If his negative example of the Vieux Colombier aimed to foreclose an already declining exhibitor‐as‐author model where individual texts blurred into a larger program format, as well as the indulgence in “shimmying exoticisms” of various sorts, Grierson leaves no doubt to the centrality of a creative agent – an author – in the elevating work of arranging and shaping representations of reality into a form that merits the designator documentary. One recognizes here a species of the structural opposition between the “raw” and the “cooked,” which Grierson himself describes as a distinction between “lower” and “higher” categories of documentary (Lévi‐Strauss 1964; Grierson 1971: 145; Gunning 1997). Simply cranking a senseless camera could produce nonfiction footage, but even forms that require considerable technical expertise, such as animal and scientific films, rarely met the criterion of elevation for Grierson. Documentary required a considerable quantity of intentional intervention. Grierson was otherwise flexible about who might occupy the role of the authoring agent or agency: be it in the form of a “producer,” which he likens to both a schoolmaster and knee‐wife, an “artist” or “director” (Grierson 2016: 215–216), or institutions such as the Empire Marketing Board and National Film Board (discussed by Zoë Druick in her contribution to this section).

Despite Grierson's dismissals, a rather rich and polyform practice of the film documentaire had been developing in France for three decades, setting the stage for the very concerns Grierson and his cohort would alternately instrumentalize and repress in the Anglophone context. Beginning with the convenient target of France – as but a first step in a more globally minded provincialization and denaturalization of the Grierson model – an alternate genealogy of documentary emerges that also gives the author a privileged place, even if in the form of a split and multiplying subject. The ascription of the “documentary interest” and “undeniable documentary value” of films had already been made in 1898 and 1899 by the Lumière company camera operator and film archive champion Boleslas Matuszewski and the surgeon Eugène‐Louis Doyen (Matuszewski 1898: 6; Doyen 1899: 3). Doyen filmed his surgical procedures in order to have a record of his performances for his own study, for use in medical training of students, and as a contribution of historical records for the posterity of the profession, claiming that unlike other modes of documentation, films were uniquely capable of capturing and communicating a surgeon's “personality” (Doyen 1899: 2–3; Lefebvre 2004). Two camera operators – Ambroise‐François Parnaland and Clément Maurice – worked in parallel filming Doyen's procedures in order to maximize coverage and ensure redundancy in case of mechanical failures. The film strips were not cut together since a key element of the truth claims of surgical demonstrations relied upon asserting the integrity of the surgical performance. In addition to his contributions to scientific cinema, cinema pedagogy, and the conceptualization of documentary film, Doyen also inaugurated important legal precedents in France for establishing that films were authored creations and determining who counted as a film author, and as film historian Thierry Lefebvre notes, whether an author and a legal owner of a film were necessarily the same thing (Lefebvre 2004: 61).

In February 1905 the Tribunal civil de la Seine decided a suit in favor Doyen and against Parnaland in a dispute over who was the rightful author and owner of footage they produced together beginning in 1898 (Anon 1905: 76–77). Doyen objected to Parnaland's arrangement with Société générale des phonographes et cinématographes to distribute some of the film strips that he had recorded, in part because the public exhibition of such films at fairgrounds and other locations where films were shown could damage the doctor's reputation. Doyen's claim to authorship rested on having commissioned the filming and appearing as its primary subject. Parnaland's claim relied on him having recorded the footage with precise technical knowledge and a camera of his own devising. Based upon Doyen's role as the one who commissioned the films, the tribunal determined that films were works of intelligence (rather than a simple canned commodity) protected by the laws of 19–24 July 1793, establishing author's rights (droit d'auteur), and the laws of 11 March 1902, which extended author's rights to sculpture and architecture and set a precedent for the consideration of such “industrial arts” as photography and cinematography (Anon 1905: 76; Nesbit 1987: 236). The court also found that Parnaland violated Doyen's “image rights” by exhibiting films of his likeness without his expressed permission, and on these grounds found Parnaland and Société générale des phonographs et cinématographes culpable, and required them to pay Doyen 8,000 francs in restitutions as well as pay to have this settlement publicized in 15 papers of Doyen's choosing² (Anon 1905: 77).

This case helped establish an important legal precedent for films as authored works. But it would be short‐sighted and ahistorical to discount Parnaland's claims to authorship as merely frivolous or the work of an opportunistic conman – regardless of whether or not one agrees with the outcome of the case. For it is in these contesting claims to the footage that the specificity and stakes of documentary and nonfiction authorship complicates understandings imported from literary and other artistic contexts while also revealing the limiting nature of legal definition of cinematic authorship in France. It would be a mistake to consider these rulings as either the final word or a universal model for documentary film authorship: alternative models of authorship not based in a concept of possessive individualism were being developed. For example, in a 1928 interview, the filmmaker André Sauvage bristled at the term documentary due to its etymological links with the traite documentaire (bill), which he felt was too freighted with implications of functional commerce and structures of debt rather than the lofty ideals of a cinematic art. Yet his definition of the cinematic documentary as an “art of the real” that required of the filmmaker “to multiply himself, to ceaselessly forget and rediscover himself, to prodigiously decenter himself” suggests a radical understanding of the cinematic author that owes a considerable debt to the documentarian's encounters with the historical real (Anon 1928: 19–20).

The designation of authorship has a separating function, inscribing an imaginary line above or below which the creative responsibility of a film gets retroactively assigned by a movie's credits. A recent lawsuit in France over La Marche de l'empereur/March of the Penguins (Luc Jacquet, France, 2005), echoes the conflict between Doyen and Parnaland and testifies to the enduring status of authorship as a critical category through which documentaries get defined, conceptualized, regulated, and studied, not just in terms of textual properties and questions of style, but in terms of the ways they manifest contested categories of labor and cultural value. In approaching the production of March of the Penguins, director Luc Jacquet claimed he “wanted the film to have a fresh look that only a crew who had never been down there [Antarctica] before could give” (Most 2007). He thus chose to send the cinematographers down to work primarily in his absence. The cinematographers Laurent Chalet and Jérôme Maison spent over a year in Antarctica filming, suffering numerous hardships, including getting lost in a blizzard that required a month of medical convalescence and then enduring a very difficult transition back to everyday life after such long stretches of isolation. Jacquet, who was in France during almost the entire shoot, later appropriated the stories of their adventures as his own experiences during promotion for the film, inspiring David Fontaine to quip in the pages of Canard enchaîné: “Sometimes I is another, or more precisely, two others” (Fontaine 2006; Most 2007). Jacquet's project was originally intended to be a documentary for television, but it was reconceived as a feature film based upon the quality and drama of the footage (the original French version is more narrative in the style of a Disney’s True‐Life Adventures series, whereas the English dub, thanks to Morgan Freeman's narration, is more soberly documentary). Chalet thus made a case for co‐authorship since the director was neither present nor in direct communication with Chalet and Maison for much of the filming. Given the footage was shot in the wild, Chalet argued that he was more than a technician following orders, he was an artist making important creative choices in the field (Maison for his part, continued to collaborate with Jacquet, and did not participate in the suit) (Anon 2006a). Anne Boissard, lawyer for the production company Bonne Pioche, successfully appealed to precedent in making a case in favor of Jacquet, referring to the law of 1957 that restricted the role of cinematic author to the director, the screenwriter, and musical score composer (Vulser 2006; Nesbit 1987: 239). The implication, ironically, is that those most directly responsible for the capture and creation of the images in a documentary film are often denied any claim of authorship over these images.

A century of legal disputes from Doyen vs. Parnaland to Jacquet vs. Chalet have consistently favored a rather narrow definition of authorship and with it a rather narrow sense of what counts as documentary. But that such suits continue to be filed and fought suggests that even within a rather narrow sense of authorship corresponding to conceptions of expression as ultimately a question of individual private property, “author” is not a stable, self‐contained signifier. It is not the responsibility of scholars to respect the status quo or secured common sense understandings of such concepts, but rather to critically examine the historical specificity of consolidated patterns as well as their fissures. As Cynthia Chris and David Gerstner propose, authorship is best approached as a “frictive” phenomenon (Chris and Gerstner 2013: 11). If authorship may be understood as a category of creative labor and an agency (individual, collective, even transhuman) involved in the production of intentional expressions, everything else about authors and authorship requires scrupulous attention to context. In the revolution‐era Soviet Union – as Philip Rosen and Alla Gadassik discuss in their contributions to this book – practices of authorship critical of the singular bourgeois subject were being explored. Relatedly, in the People's Republic of China, we find conceptions of popular authorship distinct from Western capitalist and Soviet socialist models developed to privilege the collective – the people – as the ultimate agent and author of creative works (Pang 2013: 72–86). Questions of documentary authorship require an approach to the term as a condensation or nodal point for a network of creative acts, enactments of subjectivity and agency, forms of labor, and regulative practices that produce and circulate texts. The question of documentary authorship may require – with apologies to Bruno Latour – the development of an Author‐Network Theory or AuNT, to account for the interplay of forces involved in the creation of nonfiction and documentary films.

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It is the collective endeavor of the contributors to this section to apply critical pressure to the concepts of the authors, authorship, and authoring agencies in documentary and nonfiction media, opening paths for a refreshed historiography of these fundamental concepts and their continued nonlinear development and contestation in our own present. Working across diverse geographical and historical contexts – such as the Revolution‐era Soviet Union, post–World War II Canada and Europe, and contemporary China – as well as with varied foci – from individual creative actors, to governmental agencies and corporations, to posthuman networked systems of ambient surveillance – the contributors offer both historical specificity and a generative conceptual flexibility for approaching nonfiction and documentary authorship.

Philip Rosen and Alla Gadassik consider how the aesthetic shifts instantiated by the Russian Revolution and its valorization of collective effort informed authorship as well as models of cinema historiography. Rosen's “Now and Then: On the Documentary Regime, Vertov, and History,” extends his substantial reflections on documentary, film history, and historiography in Change Mummified: Cinema, Historicity, Theory (2001). Viewing Vertov's Kino‐Nedelia (1918–1919), he asks “was this the emergence of the Vertov we now know?” The recognizability of “Vertov” as a distinct authorial vision animates reflections on the proximity of documentary and experimental media practices for how they organize and possibly disorganize approaches to film history. Rosen sees Vertov's work as a model of historical temporalization, wherein it may be understood as configuring the relationship of now and then, transformation and stasis, as well as the historical object and historiographical subject (what Rosen refers to as the “historical subject in the future of the historical objects”). The Vertovian documentary, which assembles indexical signs into daring temporal configurations, concretizes a practice of radical historical thinking. Gadassik's “A Skillful Isis: Esfir Shub and the Documentarian as Caretaker” considers the innovative work of Shub as both a pioneer of the documentary compilation film but also as exemplary of the “authorial invisibility” of the many women working as editors and editorial assistants (montagesses) in the revolution‐era film industry. Gadassik examines the tensions between editing as a formal property and as one of the stages of film production. Through her attention to the gendered dynamics of the distribution of labor and credit, as well as to the material specificities of this work, she proposes a feminist theory of distributed and anonymous authorship. Expanding upon Sergei Eisenstein's likening of the editorial assistant to the Egyptian goddess Isis, who reassembled the body parts of her husband Osiris in order to reanimate him, Gadassik concludes that Shub's often anonymous labor “is precisely what allowed [her] to function, like Isis, as a gatherer and compiler of historical bodies and faces that would have otherwise remained on the battleground of the artistic revolution.” Gadassik does similar work for the montagesses and the many women who labored in and through anonymous authorship. Rosen and Gadassik pose variations of a question tidily formulated by Jonathan Gray (2013): When is an author? Their contributions allow us to examine the manners in which authorship shifts in minor and substantial ways throughout the film production process, but also how our perceptions of authorship (and who or what is an author) shift over time.

The tensions between individuals and collectives evident in the cases of revolutionary art forms, or between artisans, departments, and industrial practices that characterize what André Bazin christened “the genius of the system” of classical studio filmmaking (Bazin 1957: 11) are brought further into relief by the substantial role of institutions, granting agencies, and corporations in the production and distribution of nonfiction and documentary films. Such attention opens to analysis how authorship gets configured in such well‐known cases as the institutions that Grierson helped found and lead – the Empire Marketing Board and the National Film Board of Canada, and other such government film agencies that Zoë Druick examines in her contribution – or in the cases of nonfilm corporations, such as the furriers (Revillon Frères) who sponsored Robert Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922) or to the oil and energy corporations examined by Brian R. Jacobson in his contribution to this section. Druick and Jacobson ask what conceptual adjustments must be made to authorship when the subjectivity expressed is not the first person I (which has, perhaps, always been a convenient reduction of the many voices and hands that contribute to the production of a text) and, alternately, how must personhood be rethought when claimed by corporation? What adjustments to interpretive and analytic practices should scholars bring to the textual products of institutional and corporate entities, for whom the film plays a far more explicit mediating function between organization and imagined public, and is often a means to another, noncinematic, end?

Jacobson's “Corporate Authorship: French Industrial Culture and the Culture of French Industry” draws on a deep well of archival research in developing a “symbiotic” approach to authorship through his consideration of documentaries made for corporations. Using the case study of the relationship between Société Cinétest (a producer of industrial films) and the oil company Société Nationale des Pétroles d'Aquitaine, Jacobson racks focus between a micro‐level attention to the artisans and would‐be auteurs at work and a macro‐level attention to the corporate images that are the expression of abstract corporate authors. He expands our understanding of the entwined histories of documentary capture and forms of extractive capitalism and petrocultures, considering the aesthetics and visual cultures of modern energy. Like Gadassik's study of the analog information processing powers of the montagesses, Zoë Druick's “Documentality: The Postwar Mental Health Film and the Database Logic of the Government Film Agency” interweaves close and distant readings of two series of mental health films – Mental Mechanisms, which enjoyed wide distribution, and Mental Symptoms, which was intended for use by medical professionals – to sketch a genealogy of what we now call the “database documentary” that develops through the instrumental use of documentary film as a tool of governmentality, or as she develops it with reference to Hito Steyerl, “documentality.” Conceptualizing the post–World War II efforts of the National Film Board of Canada as an “information apparatus of the welfare state,” Druick reads the state‐sponsored documentaries as entries into a bureaucratic archive and proto‐database of modern life. These case studies consider authorship at the level of the state, the film institution, and the clinic, and pose the “text” as not just the films, but the attempted management of an imagined national population as “written” and administered in the liberal state's image.

Audiovisual writing and erasure in or against the state's image forms the subject of the final entry to this section on Authors, Authorship, and Authoring Agents. Joshua Neves's “Unmanned Capture: Automatic Cameras and Lifeless Subjects in Contemporary Documentary” analyzes the highly networked, posthuman modality of unmanned capture. Foregrounding the connective aspects of AuNT, he explores the forms of audiovisual recording in which the presumptive ethical agent of an in‐the‐flesh human camera operator – often theorized as bearing witness to what she records – has been redistributed between computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, and human actors working remotely, such as in the case of camera‐equipped drones and closed‐circuit surveillance video. To this, he also adds the countervailing emergence of forms of highly subjective and personal witnesses through cell‐phone video uploads that produce a form of event perspectivalism, whose unruly potential is increasingly tamed by algorithmic processing and interpretation. Neves mobilizes episodes from across the globe (including Tripoli, Foshon, and Ferguson) to consider how such emergent forms of networked and unmanned audiovisual encounter push at the limits of actuality, authorship, and what, following Michael Renov (2004), we might (still?) call the “subject of documentary.” Who is or isn't made recognizable by such distributed audio‐visual practices in the era of unmanned capture? How do these new forms of nonfiction image‐making and interpretation participate in the redistribution and reconsideration not just of authorship but of “the human subject and subjectivity”? These questions indicate the stakes involved in the struggle over whose images, voices, and lives count – and how they get counted – in the cacophony of a globalized audiovisual public sphere, and why historically and theoretically nuanced approaches to authors, authorship, and authoring agencies remain vital to the study of documentary and nonfiction media.