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Karen Pearlman
OBSERVATION
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ART & LIFE
Karen Pearlman
Dr Karen Pearlman, PhD, is Head of Screen Studies at AFTRS and author of
Cutting Rhythms: Shaping the Film Edit.
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Don’t get me wrong, there are lots of great ones. Arts documentaries that
bring images and sounds of great art to the screen, that reach audience numbers
exponentially greater than the art works can reach hanging on gallery walls or
being performed in theatres; arts documentaries that explore creativity and inspire
us to be creative ourselves, to reach for the heights of human achievement.
But the core proposition of a documentary about art is awed. It is what
spiritual philosopher Ram Dass would call “pointing at the moon”. What he
means is: a spiritual teacher can only point at enlightenment, he cannot make you
enlightened or tell you what enlightenment is, you have to experience it yourself.
The description is not it, it is just pointing at it.
Documentaries about art are useful in their pointing at art, but they are not
the direct experience, and they often even prevent direct engagement with the
works of art they depict. In this article I will look at how this happens and the
ways that documentarymakers try to make up for the barrier between the audience
and the art, which they inadvertently construct. From there I’d like to reverse
the question and consider ar t and documentary from another angle, which I will
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call ‘documentary art’, by which I mean art – from photographs to installations
and contemporar y performance – that includes the real, made poetic. The craft of
this sort of documentary art has been evolving – and debated with the question:
“Is it art or is it documentary?”– since the early days of photography and lm.
So I propose to tease out some of the issues and ideas that fuel both the evolution
and the debate.
My credentials for entering these two debates, one about arts documentaries
and one about documentary art, come from both sides of the fence. I have, as
a dancer, been the subject of one or two arts documentaries, and my own arts
practice has had a recurrent thread over the years of making art from found and
staged fragments of real life. I am not yet enlightened, but I do have experience
both at pointing at the moon and of trying to get there.
Pointi ng at the Moon – Doc uMen tary abou t art
A documentary about visual art has two inherent obstacles to grapple with.
The rst is that the documentarymaker makes very personal choices on behalf of
the viewer as to where we will view a work and for how long. These choices, when
made by each person seeing the work live, are among the great pleasures of viewing
art and one of the key ways in which art can have meaning for an individual. So,
the act of choosing proximity, angle and duration that an arts documentarymaker
engages in takes that privilege away from the viewer (and often replaces it with
choices determined by practical constraints that do not always add to the aesthetic
experience of the audience.)
The other obstacle is that the medium of video collapses the tactile qualities of
a painting or a sculpture into a series of pixels, each of which has the same energy,
text ure and form. Without wander ing into the realm of physics, where I am utt erly
out of my depth, it is difcult to say what it is that is special about the presence of
a variegated texture, weight or space in relation to the living breathing presence of
one’s own live, un-pixelated body, but it is easy to make a metaphor: a video image
of art is like a skype hug. We are grateful for skype allowing us to see the faces
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and hear the voices of our loved ones, but just as pixels are not persons, then unless
they are part of video art, pixels diminish the energy and effect of the art.
In a funny way, a documenta ry about performing ar ts has the opposite issue to
gr a p p l e wi t h : pe r for m a nc e s cr e a t ed for st a g e s are to o ph ysica l fo r th e ca me r a . In th e
early days of the movies actors had to come up with new techniques for performing
in dramatic screen stories, and the actors who were most successful on stage were
not necessarily the most successful at making the transfer to screen. The common
wisdom on this phenomenon is that a stage performance is too big for close-ups or
for the great big screens on which movies are projected. The camera is much more
intimate than an audience, intruding on the actors’ space and magnifying tiny,
nuanced gestures to communicate across the divide between audience and actor.
The logical extension of this common wisdom is that a documentary about a stage
performance is going to struggle. A terrifyingly raw or operatic live performance
is going to look histrionic on screen. The apparatus of the camera comes between
the performer and the living, breathing audience. So the documentary may be
‘about’ the energy of the performer, but it is not an experience of that energy.
Similarly, a transcendently graceful dance, performed by a company of
startling and physically truthful dancers, looks small or disintegrated onscreen in
the wide shots used to capture the size and scale of the action. The documentary
recording of a live performance either has to stand far away to see the pattern the
dancers make in space, so that each individually magical, committed and vibrant
dancer is diminished to the size of your little nger on screen, or they have to
move in and catch the body of just one dancer. This can either be capturing the
body from head to toe or capturing the feel of a gesture by framing up just a hand
or a foot, a face or a torso. In either case the TV audience watching at home then
misses the larger shape and ow of the dance, we miss the unfolding ow of the
choreography. Most importantly we miss the chance to choose, with our own eyes
and kinaesthetic empathies, the way in which we will follow the dance – where
we’ll look, when, and why.
It is worth noting, at this juncture, that documentary is not xed; it is evolving
and confronting these issues all the time. Wim Wenders, in Sydney in 2011 for the
Opera House screening of his 3D dance documentary Pina, talked about 3D and
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how it had nally solved the problem of capturing dance on screen for him. While
I am delighted that the work of the great choreographer Pina Bausch has been
so elegantly and movingly documented in 3D – which is certainly a medium for
dance if there ever was one – I remain unconvinced by Wenders argument that 3D
has solved the problem. Watching the documentary I am still conscious that it is
‘about’ the work, it is not the work itself. It is documentation of the highest order,
sensitively framed, cut with restraint and a high level of acuity, but nonetheless
documentation of art, rather than the art itself. (This is not true of all dance on
screen, in fact there is a burgeoning worldwide movement of creativity in the art
of dance made for the screen – dance which is not made for the stage and then
captured, but which is created in the frame and choreographed through the cut.)
If a documentary is going to struggle to reveal the art to an audience, then
the documentarymaker must have other tactics for eliciting audience emotional
engagement, and the primary one of these is, of course, the audience engagement
with the artist as a character.
But this is tricky too, for two reasons.
One is that very often artists are nowhere near as interesting as their artwork.
If they are fully realised artists, then the meaning, the poetry, the wonder is in
the art, not in them. As seen, for example, at writer’s festivals, novelists who pour
forth poetics on the human condition are very often tongue-tied about their own.
Actors create raging Lears and recalcitrant Hamlets onstage but have limited
insight in real life. Just as watching a screen adaptation of a beloved book can be
disappointing, watching the creator of a beloved work is often deating – we can’t
see the genius we admire, it is all in the work itself.
Another tactic art docomakers employ is to make a story from the artist’s
struggles, because when we engage emotionally with a character onscreen, our
most immediate engagement comes from empathising with their struggles. We
align ourselves emotionally with characters as they ‘quest’ towards some goal
and overcome some obstacles. But this strategy works best with dead artists
who were unrecognised in their time. If a documentary is being made about a
living artist, then usually that artist is already regarded as signicant enough to
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make a documentary about. They have overcome the most frustrating obstacle an
artist faces in the 21st century: being ignored. It is truly a case where the act of
observation changes what is being observed. A story of an artist struggling for
recognition is hardly viable when the artist is recognised enough to be the subject
of a documentary.
The exception to this of course is when the artist belongs to a minority group,
an under-privileged group, is disabled or discriminated against for some reason.
Then documentaries such as Mad Hot Ballroom (Agrelo, 2005) about a group of
NYC public school kids who are inspired by dancing, or Guerillas in our Midst
(Harrison, 1992) about a women’s art group taking some radical and inventive
actions against the male-dominated art world, get made. But these lms are not
really about art, they are about issues, struggles, discrimination and activism.
Art is the activist vehicle, but not the story.
..
... very often artists are nowhere near as
interesting as their artwork.
..
The other ‘story’ an arts documentary might tell is a creative process story.
How does the artist make the work? Where does inspiration come from? Can the
secrets be revealed? Well, sort of. But not really. The creative process is largely
internal, and watching your Auntie paint some owers would look pretty much
the same as watching Georgia O’Keefe do it. We cannot see the decision-making
process, the technique and the wisdom that has been internalised, and even if the
artist is articulate about it, its nest articulation is still in the work.
There are exceptions of course, usually in the performing arts. One exception
is in watching theatrical, operatic or dance creative processes. Because companies
have to communicate in order to create we can observe the dynamics of these
communications, and they can be very ‘dynamic’ indeed. (I was in one rehearsal
where the artistic director started throwing chairs to try to get what he wanted.
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Very dynamic.) But again, our attention strays from the creative process to the
interpersonal politics. This can make for fascinating viewing, and high melodrama
– The House series (Waldman, 1996) about the backstage machinations of the
behemoth organisation Covent Gardens, is a good example – but this is about
intrigue, bitchiness, tears and triumphs, not art.
The question arises, “Are music documentaries an exception?” I tend to think
they are, for a number of reasons. The rst is that music is part of the art of
lm as well as a stand-alone art. So, our cultural experience of watching music
synchronised to moving images, and having each art deepen the other, is vast. Also,
we are extremely well versed in reception of music through mechanical means
– from the iPod, back to the rst gramophone record we have been conditioned
to expect and value music as much as in reproduction as live renditions. These
mechanical reproductions are unchanged – often even enhanced by being
synchronised to images. However, the best of music documentaries, such as those
by master music documentarian Bob Connolly, are still actually made wonderful
by the seamless integration of music and story. In both Facing the Music and Mrs
Carey’s Concert, Connolly picks characters who are deep in struggle and creates
the opportunity for the music in their lives to poeticise his portraits and their
journeys.
These documentaries then are actually integrated musical/narrative artworks,
not pointing at the moon but taking us there, and as such they begin to be part of
the next part of this discussion: documentary art.
DocuM entary in art
In the late 1990s I co-edited a book, with Richard James Allen, of Australian
contemporary performance scripts. (Performing the Unnameable, Currency
Press, 1999). Our objective was to capture a new form of literature – the writing
generated by contemporary performance-devising strategies. Of the 17 works
we nally included in the anthology only two started with words on a page. The
rest of these ‘scripts’ were generated through improvisation and real-life stories
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recounted by performers or their interview subjects. A couple of years after editing
that book, I saw a documentary called The Hundredth Room by Sarah Gibson
about grieving, in which she had integrated animations and tried to document not a
thing or a person but a feeling. The images combined with her voiceover – which
was drawn from her real life – had the same poeticised quality of one of these
real-life stories told by a performer. It was real and true, but it was astheticised.
It was given resonance and no small part of its truthfulness by structure, design
and re-composition.
I began to notice art using documentary and documentary using art all around
me. Our vocabularies struggle to keep up with the new hybrids and variations on
what we might call “the creative treatment of actuality” as John Grierson dened
‘documentary’ when he coined the term back in the 20s.
A few examples spring to mind and some of the debates that they have
catalysed.
There is, of course, the aforementioned Pina Bausch who didn’t use video on
stage, but always mined the real lives, the real feelings, the real responses of her
performers for creatively developing into dances. It is not a question of whether
what she made were ‘documentaries’, they were not, but they were real in a way
that shook the world’s understanding of performance, of what it was possible to
evoke, to experience, to create from a real life, or the group of committed and
ercely generous real lives, Bausch gathered around her. It is this very erceness
and liveness that makes the work so hard to ‘document’. It is as though the
dancers really endanger themselves by being so exposed each night on stage, but
by capturing it on lm it becomes performance, safely stored, a past event, not a
dangerous, real, possibility.
Acclaimed choreographer Bill T. Jones took this one step further in 1994 when
he had people who were dying of AIDS in his dance piece Still/Here and sparked a
critical storm. The online archive of The New Yorker magazine offers a summary
of their leading dance critic Arlene Croce’s view of this: “By working dying people
into his act, Jones is putting himself beyond the reach of criticism. The dying
people are viewed on videotape. Jones has crossed the line between theatre and
reality …” Croce refused to rev iew the work. Le ss tha n 20 year s later I would nd
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it hard to convince my young students that there ever was a line such as the one
Croce is trying to defend. It has long since fallen, leaving us with works ranging
from William Yang’s performance pieces in which he coolly describes the events
he witnessed in his lifetime as a photographer while showing us his actual photos
of the people involved, to Lynette Walworth’s amazing and compelling installation
the Evolution of Fearlessness which, to quote from her website “features the
portraits of eleven women residing in Australia … who have lived through wars‚
survived concentration camps or extreme acts of violence”.
These pieces are documentary art. They take the real and frame it, structure
it, edit it, give it rhythm, timing, texture, nuance, just as a documentarymaker
would, to tell a story, but they do it to make an artistic experience.
These art works are moving closer to documentary by incorporating screen
media, or, as is the case of my own ongoing series about my family which is told
in episodic screen dances – ‘choreographed’ excerpts from our real lives – being
made as screen media. We could also say that documentary is moving closer to
art with lms such as Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008) or the work of Brian Hill
which, like contemporary performance, takes the words and stories of real people,
re-writes them as poetry or song and then gives them back to the real people
to ‘perform’. But in fact, documentary has a long tradition of being made from
an artistic impulse. Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, 1927,
makes direct reference to it being art in its title, as does Basil Wright’s Song of
Ceylon (1934) which was one of many self consciously artistic lms produced by
John Grierson.
These ‘documentaries’ of Grierson’s which might include scores by Benjamin
Britten, poetry by W.H. Auden or the work of ‘movement artist’ Len Lye, lead
me to wonder if perhaps when Grierson said that the denition of documentary
was “creative treatment of actuality” he did not mean to exclude art at all, but to
encourage and inspire the nding of art in life.
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