Knowledge Through Experimental Forms
For a long time, I considered myself to be sort of documentary-averse. Anybody who’s seen a documentary made in the 21st century is probably aware, at least at some level, of the sort of grammar commonly used by these films. All of the docs recommended to me fell under some political or social agenda (and were usually recommended by friends with similar views), and felt too much like extended news segments with their talking heads and reliance on over-narration that seemed more focused on facts and rhetoric than making an actually watchable film. Then, like so many self-consciously hip high schoolers, I stumbled into watching the Banksy documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop (recommended by my hipper-than-me mother) and had my perspective changed. This was something different. There were talking head interviews, sure, but never before had I seen something that was not a documentary as I had known them to be, but more of a film that just happened to be non-fiction. This was a self-reflexive film, addressing questions of what art was, where the film’s subject and filmmaker switch places gradually throughout.
Exit Through the Gift Shop didn’t invent the wheel, though. The film’s most significant reference point would probably be Orson Welles’ 1975 film F for Fake, a fiction/non-fiction hybrid about the famous art forger Elmyr de Hory. The film collects a collage of found footage and meta-narrative digressions from Welles about the nature of art itself to expand the film into one of the first widely-recognized “film essays”, whose style is more indebted to Dadaist art than narrative features of the time. Further expanding this mode in 1983 was Chris Marker’s Sans Soleil, an even more experimental film essay about memory and its relation to history which is told through travelogue-like footage taken primarily in Guinea-Bissau and Japan. Both films defy convention in order to explore larger truths with real-world subjects, and both have been considered some of the best films of their kind ever made. Comparing these films to more traditional documentaries is perhaps unfair and off-base, since experimental documentaries employ their own grammar, the subtleties of which tend to be the focus of pretty high-level film academia. But above all, the films still serve the same purpose as any documentary: to inform on and explore non-fiction subjects.
Experimental forms work wonders with more nature-focused films as well. Jean Painlevé (1902-1989) was a French biologist whose film work was created typically in supplement to his research studies on marine life. However, unlike most stock nature footage shot by such researchers, Painlevé’s work often evoked surrealist and avant-garde cinema in the way his camera lingered on animal habits, often abstracting their motions and highlighting the alien lifestyles present underneath the sea. A Criterion Collection release of Painlevé’s collected films is entitled “Science is Fiction”, which, aside from sounding like some bullshit stock phrase from that guy in your Philosophy 101 discussion, could actually serve as a good selling point for the experimental documentary as a whole. The truths of the world are as interesting and as strange as fiction, so their cinematic treatment deserves just as much freedom and vitality.
While operating with longer-form paradigms, more straightforward nature films tend to feel confined by their subject. The free-associative editing present in many avant-garde films, however, can tie in concepts from across history and culture, and the importance of the natural world can be highlighted by inextricably linking it to industrialized society. This is typified by The Lanthanide Series, a film from 2014 by Erin Espelie that was recently screened as part of WUD Film’s Starlight Cinema series. Espelie, like Painlevé, is a researcher by training (having an undergraduate degree in microbiology from Cornell) who has gradually moved into making documentary films over her career. The Lanthanide Series is structured so that each rare earth element in the lanthanide series (atomic numbers 57 through 71) gets a short devoted chapter, focusing on that element and how its use has changed from old times where it was traditionally employed for more spiritual purposes, to modern times where they’re used in things such as phones and computers. This being an experimental essay film, most of the film’s narration is not about the metals or their history specifically, but is rather a slew of quotations from prose authors ranging from Clarice Lispector to W. B. Yeats. These ethereal, out-of-context quotations paired with the films jump-cutting of both original and stock footage documenting the elements in every day life (including a lengthy and enjoyable sequence taken from an educational video on how glass is made) form a collage of a film, one that traverses the spectrums of past and present, science and humanities, and tangible and imaginary all simultaneously.
Another film shown later as part of the Starlight Cinema series, a doc from 2015 called Topophilia by Peter Bo Rappmund, focuses similarly on modern society’s influence on and re-appropriation of the natural world. However, Rappmund’s film is a far more restrained feature, with no narration or soundtrack aside from the ambient sound of the landscapes photographed. The film unfolds as a series of time-lapse still takes of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline and the areas around it, following it all along its 800-mile length. Using a variety of lapse-speeds, sometimes different speeds within the same frame, Rappmund creates a disorienting effect where objects in the same physical space appear to be on different timelines completely. With this structure in place, the film becomes an exercise in observing the juxtaposition of an elaborate man-made pipeline with the natural world around it.
The more abstract nature of both of these films also allows them to find ambiguity where other films find cold, hard information. And this is why they’re so important.
Rappmund and Espelie both want their audiences to be the scientists themselves, observing a collection of natural phenomena and making conclusions about what it means. In a sort of meta-aware way, avant-garde documentaries mimic the scientific process itself, making us viewers effectively the philosophical researchers. Common documentary films seem to have been claimed as the films of the intelligentsia, and any socially aware friend you have certainly has a shortlist of documentaries that you have to see in order to open your eyes to any given issue. But what these documentaries so often fail to facilitate is the active engagement and inquiry of the viewer. The freedom of experimental forms allows filmmakers to address the complexity of their subject in a cubist mode, avoiding proselytizing and becoming the most pure collaboration of image, sound, and information that they can muster. I believe that this creates stronger thinkers among the viewing public. In the name of knowledge, avant-garde documentaries must be understood and embraced in order to further film-watching as an active and informative process.