A Journal for Film and Audiovisual Media
SHOOTING THE PAST? FOUND FOOTAGE FILMMAKING AND POPULAR MEMORYHowshould we as documentary filmmakers picture the past? How should we conduct the struggle for memory? Clearly a major resource for the representation of history and the celebration of popular memory is the treasure trove of archival images, both still and moving, that are now available to us in the photographic and film archives. But how should we deal with this stockpile of images as primary evidence and mute testimony to a unattainable past or as narrative resource capable of releasing the submerged voices of cheap jordans history and of attending to their story?
Over the last number of years in collaboration with my editor Roger Buck at Napier University, I have developed an archivally based, creative film practice which explores aspects of Ireland's post Famine past and the Irish diaspora in America. The Hard Road To Klondike (Bell: 1999) drew on a rich reservoir of early film material both actuality and fictional in order to retell the classic Irish emigrant story of Mic MacGiobhan's tramp through frontier America to the Yukon. The Last Storyteller? (Bell: 2002) concerned itself with the work of the Irish Folk Lore Commission and its veteran collector Sen hEochaidh and mused on the eclipse of traditional storytelling. It used similar archival strategies to those employed in Klondike to retell some of the uncanny and provoking fairy and folk tales collected by Sen in Donegal from the 1930s to the 1950s.(1) My latest film, Rebel Frontier (Bell: 2004) again uses archival material and in this case a fictionalised narration based on actual historical sources in order to tell the story of the Irish and Finnish miners of Butte Montana and their struggle against US involvement in the First World War.
In this paper I seek to make sense of my own creative documentary work and its use of archive material as both historical trace and as narrative resource. Let me list the issues which I wish to explore here: the evidential status of photographic archive within the contemporary documentary film; the use of voice over and related issues of subjectivity; the role of fictive tropes and strategies within factual filmmaking. How should we as filmmakers and indeed as historians operating in and through documentary film practice evaluate the evidential and expressive status of the still http://www.cheapjordans.us/air-jordan-retro-1101/air-jordan-retro-12 and moving archival image? What, in other words, are the ethical, epistemological and creative issues involved in handling the shifting boundary of fact and fiction in the creative documentary?
Needless to say my approach is that of a practitioner concerned with illuminating the creative and critical auspices of my own work rather than that of a film theorist per se. Filmmaking is always an exploration and testing of ideas about the medium, its creative capacities and its mode of public address. Film Studies has become over abstract as a discipline and as it has become more institutionalised within the academy a wedge has been driven between theoretical work and a living film culture. On the other hand, avant garde film practice within which critical theory and creative practice were often in a productive alignment has become increasingly marginalised within the film and television industry. Perhaps we need to acknowledge the potential contribution that practice based forms of analysis might make to addressing these material problems within film culture. One of the challenges of practice based research is to encourage artists to engage in auto critique. Can the filmmaker/ researcher render explicit the form of tacit knowledge arrived at in and through their practice by engaging in a process of reflective appropriation?
The Mummification of History
Theorist Joachim Paech (1989: 59) reminds us of the preservative power of the archival image, "The ephemeral historical moment becomes a permanent presence in the moving image in these archives of history". The photographic image, still or moving, as Bazin observed (1981), embalms or mummifies history providing in its visual trace a "second degree original". Within cheap air jordan 1 shoes the traditional television documentary with its journalistic auspices photographic sources are treated as transparent to the historical reality they purport to depict and accordingly as primary evidence. But these evidential claims rest on a particular understanding of the photographic image. In Paech's words, "The signifying material has to become invisible in favour of the intensified visibility of the signified" (58).
The indexical character of the photographic image is seen to underwrite the documentary's claim to facticity. The photographic image signals the presence of the camera on the scene at the historical moment of image capture. Pioneer film theorists like Bazin and Kracauer (1960) drew a strong association between the indexical character of the photographic image and the primacy of realism as a code within cinema. Both this understanding of photography and the privileging of realism(2)have shaped the conventional notion that documentary film is primarily an instrument of unproblematic observation and record capable of being pressed into didactic service.
However in a digital age we have all become more sceptical about the indexical claims of photography and more aware that the use of archive by documentary filmmakers is influenced by other considerations other than the purely evidential after all we are storytellers first and foremost.
Across a range of disciplines, social anthropology, historiography, geography, cultural studies, there has been a recognition of the transformative powers of narration with regards to the assemblage of empirical fact and its communication to an audience via a mass medium. Indeed is strange that narratological concerns have up to now played such a limited role in the discussion of documentary film. This is largely to be explained by the assumed primacy of photographic practice within this filmic form and by the claims to verisimilitude thought to reside in magical powers of "the pencil of nature". In addition, as Bill Nichols (1991) points out, a "discourse of sobriety" shrouds documentary film closely related to its didactic public educational role. This serves to insulate the documentary from the fictive and commercial contaminations of Hollywood but it also obscures the role of figuration and narration with the creative strategies employed by non fiction filmmakers.
The departure point for the new documentary criticism (Nicholls 1991, 1994, 2001, Bruzzi 2000) has been an engagement with the realist claims traditionally made for the documentary film and a recognition that contemporary creative documentary practice has begun to problematise the boundary between the factual and the fictive.
The Films
The projects I wish to discuss were largely based on autobiographical sources and on a creative appropriation of a wide range of archive material. Klondike was adapted from Mic Mac Gabhann's account of his upbringing in Donegal on the north western seaboard of Ireland and his subsequent travels as a migrant labourer in Scotland and the US. His story was transcribed by folk lore collector Sen hEochaidh and subsequently published in book form, first in Irish and subsequently in an English translation. In turn, Storyteller draws on the field diaries hEochaidh's kept as collector for the Irish Folk Lore Commission. These give an account of his life as a collector in Donegal from the mid 1930s to the 1970s. Both films involved extensive historical research on the lives of Irish migrant workers and on folk belief and social practice in the western sea board. Both draw on a rich reservoir of archival images, still and moving, portraying rural life in the west of Ireland from the 1930s to the 1950s and in the case of Klondike on early US silent cinema. Both films are narrated by Irish actor Stephen Rea. Rebel Frontier employs a fictive autobiographical voice (narrated by Martin Sheen), ostensibly that of a young Pinkerton agent, to provide witness to the dramatic events unfolding in Butte in 1917 as the town's miners find themselves locked in a titanic struggle with both the Anaconda Mining Company and the US state.
The archival collages, which are a feature of all three films, use both actuality material, both professionally shot and of home movie origin. They also use material from fiction films. No attempt is made to distinguish between these sources in their assembly and in my films. Archival sequences are removed from their original narrative context whether these be fictional or documentary films and employed as a narrative resource within new story structures. Nor is it used as presented evidence of a now gone way of life. The relationship between the voice over and the found footage in these films is not of a "point and see" character. Word and image lack an ordered referentiality. In both films images are often assembled with a view to achieving expressive force or to probe the veracity of accounts rather than as evidential proof.
Take, for example, the sequence in Klondike which portrays the arrival of Mic Mac Gabhann in New York in the 1890s on board an emigrant ship. Stephen Rea voices Mac Gabhann's commentary,
On the eleventh day it was announced we http://www.cheapjordans.us were coming near New York. I gathered myself and tried to move around a bit
New York was like a dream. I gazed wide eyed at Manhattan
and wandered through its streets in a daze
This scene is "covered" visually with a montage made up of the following elements:
Sequence from the Kalem 1910 fiction feature The Lad From Old Ireland showing emigrants on the deck of passenger boat
Live action photography scenes of Liberty Island and lower Manhattan and of tenements and homeless people on the streets of the lower east side
Sequence from Edison's New York paper collection, circa 1903, showing a cop moving on a street trader, a scene clearly posed for the camera.
Sequence from The Lad From Old Ireland showing the hero (played by Kalem director Sydney Olcott) on the New York quayside caught up in the bustle of the port.
Trick film sequence (speeded up time lapse) of the erection of the Star cinema from the Edison New York Paper Collection, 1902.
Sequence from the 1901 Edison variety What Happened on 23rd Street portraying an iconic moment in which a girl's dress is lifted by rush of hot air from a sidewalk vent.
This montage involves then fictional elements, period actualities of New York, short varieties of staged incidents and live action footage seeking to capture the historical resonances in the contemporary city. As in other found footage films, no attempt is made to discriminate between these different sort of footage by the use of any framing or titling device (although at one point the sound track with its dubbed sound of a cine projector at work does explicitly invite the audience to peep into a cinema of attractions).
I guess when we were assembling this sequence we had in mind the historical reality that for many of the newly arrived emigrants their first port of call in the city may well have been the nickelodeons of Broadway to view salacious Edison varieties like What Happened on 23rd Street. With this introduction to cinema came also a new way of narrating and remembering. Cinema became both a conduit delivering "the shock of modernity" but also as it developed its power of storytelling (Gunning 1994) a reservoir of memory. Its fairly clear for instance that Mac Gabhann's epic is indebted in its narrative drive and descriptive economy to post Griffith popular cinema.
The key feature of these films is, I would argue, their handling of visual archive, both still and moving, in conjunction and counterpoint with a particular sort of voice over. At the beginning of the movie, Rea, sleepily intones over archival images of the Aran islands in the 1930s (Mac Gabhan was born in 1865 and in north west Donegal, two hundred miles north of Connemara),