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The horror of a doppelganger in documentary film
Abstract
The paper applies Lacanian psychoanalysis to a well-known phenomenon in documentary practice, namely, that those who appear in films usually violently dislike their representation in the final film. Broadcasting organizations have sets of rules and regulations to deal with this ‘inconvenience’. I put forward a suggestion that the source of this anxiety lies in the notion of the double, which draws from Freud's ‘The Uncanny’ (1910) as recently developed by philosopher Mladen Dolar. I apply it to the process of documentary filmmaking. I give an example of the documentary The Best Job in the World (2009), which I directed for BBC1. In it, the participants were first invited to create their own short digital self-portraits with the material shot by us and edited later. I quote from their reports submitted in due course about their feelings about their portrayal in the film. The issue of control over one's representation seems of crucial importance. It appears that the arrival of ‘the double’, which the contributors had no control over created a sense of deep discomfort, even when that ‘double’ appeared more flattering that the contributors' perceptions of their own selves, suggesting more complicated unconscious processes.
The chapter begins as a theoretical statement but ends up being an ‘auto-ethnographic’ account of the author’s experiences of the production process of making the documentary Married to the Eiffel Tower. The chapter touches on the issues of ‘transference’ out of the clinic as well as loss and an attempt not to grieve, replacing it instead with a frantic activity.
Despite the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema share the same birthday, as 1895
saw the publication of Sigmund Freud’s Studies in Hysteria and the first public
presentation of the moving image by the Lumière brothers, and the huge influence of
Lacanian psychoanalysis on (fiction) film theory, little, if anything, has been written
about the relationship between the documentary film-maker and the subject of his
or her film in terms of unpacking that relationship in psychoanalytical terms. This
article employs some psychoanalytical ideas in order to investigate that relationship,
focusing in particular on transference. The article also includes a case study of the
author’s relationship with the subject of her film The Conman with 14 Wives,
broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 5 in 2006.
The ethics of collecting testimonies in documentary filmmaking has been the subject of academic discussion for decades, in particular since Claude Lanzmann’s landmark film Shoah (1985). There are occasions however when a subject of a potential film would like to tell his or her story but for some reason is unable to speak. Language breaks down when an attempt is made to symbolize the trauma. This article gives an account of the author’s experience of such an instance in making a three-part documentary series for the National Geographic about refugees coming to London. The article uses Lacanian psychoanalytical thought to give a theoretical framework to the events leading to the use of animation in the series.
Documentary has once again emerged as one of the most vital cultural forms, whether seen in cinemas or inside the home, as digital, film, or video. This book looks at the history of documentary and its contemporary forms, showing how it has been simultaneously understood as factual, as story, as art, and as political, addressing the seeming paradox between the pleasures of spectacle in the documentary and its project of informing and educating. The book claims that, as a radical film form, documentary has been a way for filmmakers to acknowledge historical and contemporary realities by presenting images of these realities. If documentary is the desire to know reality through its images and sounds, it asks, what kind of speaking (and speaking about) emerges in documentary, and how are we engaged by it? In considering this and other questions, the book examines a range of noteworthy films, including Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke, John Huston’s Let There Be Light, and MilicaTomi’s Portrait of My Mother.
Despite the fact that psychoanalysis and cinema share the same birthday, as 1895 saw the publication of Sigmund Freud's Studies in Hysteria and the first public presentation of the moving image by the Lumière brothers, and the huge influence of Lacanian psychoanalysis on (fiction) film theory, little, if anything, has been written about the relationship between the documentary film-maker and the subject of his or her film in terms of unpacking that relationship in psychoanalytical terms. This article employs some psychoanalytical ideas in order to investigate that relationship, focusing in particular on transference. The article also includes a case study of the author's relationship with the subject of her film The Conman with 14 Wives, broadcast in the United Kingdom on Channel 5 in 2006.
Theorizing Documentary, Michael Renov. ed. New York: Routledge, 1993, 261 pp. Illus., index.
In this book I explore the ways in which texts of a certain period—the texts of psychoanalysis, of literature, and of literary theory—both speak about and speak through the profound story of traumatic experience. The chapters . . . explore the complex ways that knowing and not knowing are entangled in the language of trauma and in the stories associated with it. Each one of these texts engages, in its own specific way, a central problem of listening, of knowing, and of representing that emerges from the actual experience of the crisis.
My main endeavor is . . . to trace in each of these texts a different story, the story or the textual itinerary of insistently recurring words or figures. The key figures my analysis uncovers and highlights—the figures of "departure," "falling," "burning," or "awakening"— in their insistence, here engender stories that in fact emerge out of the rhetorical potential and the literary resonance of these figures, a literary dimension that cannot be reduced to the thematic content of the text or to what the theory encodes, and that, beyond what we know or theorize about it, stubbornly persists in bearing witness to some forgotten wound. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)
The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917 – 1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works
- S Freud
Freud, S. [1919] 1951. 'The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, Volume XVII (1917 – 1919): An Infantile Neurosis and Other Works.' 217– 256.
Animating the Real – Trauma and Animation in Documentary
- A Piotrowska
Piotrowska, A. 2011. 'Animating the Real – Trauma and Animation in Documentary.' Animation: An Interdisciplinary Journal 6 (3), 335– 353.
Theorizing Documentary
- M Renov
Renov, M. 1993. Theorizing Documentary. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.
The Voice in Cinema. Translated By C. Gorbman
- M Chion
Chion, M. [1982] 1999. The Voice in Cinema. Translated By C. Gorbman. New York: Columbia University Press. Cowie, E. 2011. Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesotta Press.
The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema of the New Library of Psychoanalysis
- A Sabbadini
Sabbadini, A. 2003. 'The Couch and the Silver Screen: Psychoanalytic Reflections on European Cinema.' In Volume 44 of the New Library of Psychoanalysis. London and New York: Brunner-Routledge.
Collecting Visible Evidence
- J Gaines
- M Renov
Gaines, J., and M. Renov. 1999. Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press.
Gaze and Voice as Love Objects
- Z Iž
- R Salecl
Z ˇ iž, S., and R. Salecl, eds. 1996. Gaze and Voice as Love Objects. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Why Psychoanalysis? Uppsala: NSU Press. New Review of Film and Television Studies
- A Zupančič
Zupančič, A. 2008. Why Psychoanalysis? Uppsala: NSU Press. New Review of Film and Television Studies
Documentary: Witness and Self Revelation
- J Ellis
Ellis, J. 2012. Documentary: Witness and Self Revelation. Abingdon and New York: Routledge.
The Subject of Documentary, Visible evidence
- M Renov
Renov, M. 2004. The Subject of Documentary, Visible evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Beyond Interpellation
- M Dolar
Dolar, M. 1993. 'Beyond Interpellation.' Qui Parle 6 (2): 75 – 96.