http://www.yadinproductions.com/but_is_it_documentary.htm
SILENCE
BUT IS IT DOCUMENTARY? by ORLY YADIN, JULY 2003
(Paper presented at the conference The Holocaust and the Moving Image held at the Imperial War Museum, London and published in the book by the same name by Wallflower Press. Reproduced here courtesy of Wallflower Press and Toby Haggith of the IWM. To find out more about the book, please go to www.wallflowerpress.co.uk)
The film I presented at the IWM conference in April 2001 appeared on the surface to differ from the other films or television programmes shown there. My film SILENCE (co-produced and co-directed with Sylvie Bringas) is a short animation film. It contains no archival images of the Holocaust, no interviews with survivors, experts or eyewitnesses, no shots of the locations where these events took place, and yet it is a documentary and a true story. Just as the title of this publication suggests, all forms of documentary are merely RE-presentations of reality and in that sense, an animation film is no different from any other film style.
So many films and television programmes have been made over the past 50 years about Holocaust-related experiences that when my friend Tana, a survivor, asked me in 1996 to make a film about her own story, I refused. Tana was born in 1940 in Berlin and was sent as a child to Theresienstadt. By some miraculous coincidence her grandmother had been sent separately to the same camp, found her and kept her hidden until liberation. In 1945, Grandmother and 5-year-old Tana were sent to Sweden where they had relatives. Tana’s mother had died in Auschwitz but Tana did not discover the details until much later. Basically, throughout her childhood and adolescence, Tana was taught to, and made to, keep silent and not to ask questions of her relatives. Only when she left Sweden as an adult, on her journey to start a new life in the USA, did the Swedish uncle and aunt hand her a bunch of letters they had kept all these years: letters sent to them from Berlin by her mother, begging them to obtain visas for her and her baby daughter. To what extent they were responsible for not helping the family escape from Germany in time – we shall never know, but obviously, they too had kept silent. Like many survivors, Tana became adept at adapting to new surroundings and blending in. Until quite recently she even kept her concentration camp experiences from her friends. There were so many silences relating to her story – self-imposed and inflicted on others - that we originally thought of calling our film SILENCES. Eventually we decided that one generic “silence” would stand for more than the plural of the word.
Whilst I was interested in Tana’s story for personal reasons, I could not imagine, initially, how to produce a film that would shed new light on survivors’ experiences and how to reach out to a new audience. Apart from a couple of photographs and three letters, Tana had no visual documentation of her childhood. Apart from the Nazi propaganda film made of Theresienstadt, there was no footage that I knew of that could help illuminate her story. I was not interested in filming yet another interview with a survivor talking about events she experienced at a much younger age. So, I kept on saying no to the idea of making a film. Tana, however, was persistent. She was determined to end her silence, but didn’t want to face an audience herself.
At the time I had a production company – Halo Productions - that specialised in animation films. Over 10 years I had produced a variety of animation films – almost all based on true stories or “issue” subjects. I’m not sure, therefore, why it took so long for the penny to drop. Eventually it was a conversation between myself and my partner at Halo - Sylvie Bringas – that led to a flash of inspiration and to a realization that if we could animate Tana’s childhood experiences and enter the realm of imagination that way, then the film could work for us.
Before describing in more detail how we constructed SILENCE, here are a few more general thoughts about the compatibility of animation and documentary.
- Animation can be the most honest form of documentary filmmaking:
I write this partly to provoke, partly because I believe there is much truth in this statement. The power of the photographic image is so great that even the most sophisticated of we viewers easily forgets that any documentary we see on the screen is not a transparent record of life but a filmmaker’s interpretation of it. This could be merely in the choice of framing and lighting, in setting up situations, or in the way the shots are edited together to give new meaning. The honesty of animation lies in the fact that the filmmaker is completely upfront about his or her intervention with the subject and if we believe the film to be true it is because we believe the intention was true. In historical documentaries, where frequently there is no suitable footage to be found of a specific event or a specific person, filmmakers choose to re-enact, to film modern day locations, to use graphics. They might even resort to using the “wrong” footage in desperation! A documentary animation film claims from the start: what you are seeing is not a photographic record but it is nonetheless a true re-presentation of a reality.
- Animation is less exploitative of its subjects:
One of the advantages of using animation when making a documentary about a living person (even when it is about their past) is that there is no danger of being uncomfortably voyeuristic. So often we see a film which penetrates into the really personal domain, into sensitive subjects (and first-hand experiences of the holocaust certainly fall into that realm) and I tend to ask myself to what extent is our interest one of real concern and to what extent a morbid and voyeuristic fascination with the subject. Adopting to use animation is a gesture of respect by the filmmaker towards the subject. It also points to the limitations of traditional documentary methods at adequately revealing the survivors’ (or other personal) experiences.
- Animation can take the viewer to locations unreachable through conventional photography:
Animation can show us an unfilmed past and can enter the depths of human emotions. A child’s experience of being in a concentration camp as remembered 50 years later – how to convey it? Through archival footage of children found by the allies at the end of the War? Through symbolic effects of dark and light? By filming an interview with a 60-year-old woman and trying to imagine her as little girl? Or… … by creating a child’s world through animated images! This, in a nutshell, was what convinced me to proceed with developing the film. As producers of animation films, our hope was that telling the story through animation would enable us to recreate the little girl’s point of view and help the audience to identify with the central character. We did not want to use clichéd archival images and did not feel that an interview with Tana could achieve the same impact. As the development of the film progressed, and the more we talked with Tana, we realised also that there were other points of view we wanted to put across. We wanted to question the war-time role of her Swedish relatives through the range of Tana’s emotions, but without pointing out blame that was not proven. We wanted to show the inherent racism in Sweden – attitudes never expressed directly, but which still had an effect on a little dark-haired girl amongst her blond classmates. We tried to construct the images in such a way as to imply all this without having to spell it out. Animation is very useful for saying a lot in very few frames, and saying it ambiguously enough for the audience to bring its own interpretation and experience to the screen.
- And finally: animated characters can seem more real than actors:
Perversely, a strange thing happens with the so-called non-realistic medium animation: once we, the audience, accept that we are entering an animated world, we tend to suspend disbelief and the animation acquires a verisimilitude that drama-documentaries hardly ever achieve. In drama-documentaries, however convincing the actors may be, the viewer never wholly forgets that they are actors standing in for someone else, someone who really existed but cannot be seen.
The process of making the film:
The background to SILENCE is the holocaust. The story itself is about a damaged childhood and the strategies for survival that an orphaned child develops when prevented from speaking out about her memories and pain. It is also the story of lost identities and the search for new ones.
Tana came to me with a poem-like piece about her childhood, co-written to music with composer Noa Ain and commissioned in 1995 by the municipality of Stockholm for an on-stage performance. This text needed to be adapted to the medium of film. It was beautiful in itself, but very long, wordy and sentimental as a sound track. Animation can condense a remarkable amount of material with utmost fluidity and the film had to be precisely 11 minutes-long (a Channel 4 commission). Gradually Sylvie and I deconstructed the poem and stripped it from sentiment and from words that could be better expressed through images. One option was to interview Tana and then edit the interview to length, but we decided that with such a short film and so much to say, the voice-over had to be scripted as tightly as the visuals were storyboarded.
We decided that the film would have two main sections with visual styles to echo the two locations of the film: Theresienstadt and Stockholm. We chose to work with two animators whose work we knew: Ruth Lingford with her black and white woodcut style images (reminiscent of Käthe Kollwitz) for the camp scenes, and Tim Webb for the colourful, crowded, Swedish part of the story. For the Swedish section, we were initially inspired by the drawings of Charlotte Salomon[i] and showed them to Tim as a guideline for the kind of cinematic framing we were interested in. We then worked on a storyboard and on re-writing the voice over. From the storyboard and a rough voice-over guide we set about hiring our team – animators and painters to flesh out the film. We recorded Tana’s reading of the script only after the picture was locked. Up until the last minute, as the film was taking shape, we kept fine-tuning the words. One of our main concerns was not to spell everything out and to leave space for the spectators to bring of themselves to what they saw and heard. Throughout the whole process, we collaborated closely with Tana who commented on all our ideas. At times we walked a tight rope between respecting her sensitivities and trying to take the spectator into a more objective, universal sphere. I’m pleased to say that my friendship with Tana survived the tensions of filmmaking.
SILENCE has been shown throughout the world – on TV, in film festivals, in schools and in museums. In Sweden it is apparently now compulsory viewing for high school kids. Reactions to the film have followed a similar pattern: a priori disbelief at the combination of “animation and holocaust” or “animation and documentary”; then very strong and emotional reactions to the film itself and an understanding of the medium we had chosen. A historical documentary, regardless of the media it uses – archival footage, dramatic reconstruction or animation - succeeds when it takes you to the heart of a historical moment and has a clear vision of what it is trying to say.
I hope we did that.
http://www.mediarights.org/news/2008/03/18/upstream_drawing_truth_animation_in_documentary
Upstream: Drawing Truth: Animation in Documentary
Published on March 18, 2008
By Shira Golding
When Richard Linklater’s philosophical exploration Waking Life came out in 2001, animation was still largely considered to be “kid stuff” by American audiences. Aside from anime enthusiasts who had long-known the power and potential of the medium, viewers weren’t used to the idea that an animated feature could make them think and perhaps even shed light on historical events and contemporary struggles for social justice. But the tide is changing. Marjane Satrapi’s 2007 animated feature Persepolis provides a much-needed glimpse into Iranian life and culture, and has been embraced by audiences and critics around the country, suggesting that the time for serious animation is here.
This shift comes just in time for the release of Brett Morgan’s Chicago 10, which melds animation and archival footage to tell the story of resistance and repression surrounding the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Morgan is not the first documentarian to use the technique in recent years. Michael Moore worked with the creators of South Park to present his take on the United States’ origins in Bowling for Columbine, and the Bulgarian-based Zographic captured the grotesquery of McNugget production in Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. But Chicago 10 takes the integration of animation into documentary to a new level, which begs the question: if documentary is a reality-based medium, one which seeks to present some version of “truth,” how does the highly-creative art form of animation fit in?
Chicago 10 trailer...
Chicago 10 trailer...
The Pinch-Hitter
When filmmakers Judith Helfand and Daniel Gold were editing Blue Vinyl back in 2001, they hit a wall. While their vérité footage was telling Judith’s personal story with humor and nuance, they simultaneously had a lot of information that they were trying to communicate to the audience about polyvinyl chloride and its effects on people and the environment, and they were struggling to find an elegant way to say it all.
That’s when one of their editors introduced them to animator Emily Hubley. The daughter of animation icons John and Faith Hubley, Emily had helped directors Peter Friedman and Jean-François Brunet visualize the phenomenon of programmed cell death in the award-winning 1995 film Death by Design. In other words, she had the unique ability of being able to transform really complex, hard-to-explain concepts into beautiful and easy-to-comprehend images.
Hubley, in collaboration with animator Jeremiah Dickey , was able to help Judith and Dan solve major problems they were having in the editing room.
“There were these really difficult spots that either seemed too didactic or too information-heavy,” Helfand recalls. “We could have easily overwhelmed folks or put them off — tone was so essential.”
Emily Hubley and Jeremiah Dickey illustrate the effects of PVC on the body in Blue Vinyl.
Hubley and Dickey used the same hand-drawn technique that they used to make the animations in John Cameron Mitchell’s Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Individual drawings were scanned or digitally photographed and stitched together using Adobe After Effects.
It turned out that animation was just what they needed. “Animation is this extraordinary, liberating art form that can connect the dots in this unbelievable way and set people at ease,” Judith explains. “Perhaps when they watch it, they remember being a kid and being told a simple story, and they think to themselves, ‘Okay, I’ll listen, I’ll go there. You can take me there.’”
In a way, that’s the ultimate challenge in documentary filmmaking – getting an audience to go along for the ride. Sometimes animation can be just the thing you need for viewers to go that extra step. As animator Jeremiah Dickey puts it, “It is literally another dimension. You can really do anything, anything you can think of.”
Hedwig and the Angry Itch...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zU3U7E1Odc&NR=1&feature=endscreen
Hedwig and the Angry Itch...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_zU3U7E1Odc&NR=1&feature=endscreen
Multimedia Conversations
Helfand and Gold had such a positive experience working with the medium in Blue Vinyl that when it came time to make their next feature documentary, Everything’s Cool , they knew from the start that animation would play a key role. Starting early in the production process, the directors would meet with Hubley and Dickey to have what Dan Gold calls “multimedia conversations.”
They would get together at a café with laptops and pens and paper and discuss the big ideas of the film. And while they were talking, the animators would be sketching and doodling. “We would go back and forth with words,” Gold explains. “And then they’d hold up a drawing and we’d look at it and say ‘That part is right, but this part isn’t quite right because it’s doesn’t fit with some truth we knew from interviewing people or from the verité.’ And then the image would evolve.”
As much a media analysis as an exploration of environmental issues, Everything’s Cool is about the gap between what scientists have known about global warming and the information that has actually penetrated public consciousness. Because the animators were so involved from the earliest stages of production, their work played a major role in shaping the film.
The final sequence that the audience sees right before the closing credits is an animation of what the filmmakers call a “clockotine,” a combination of a clock and a guillotine. “We wanted the viewer to get the feeling of ‘Oh my gosh, we’re running out of time. We have to deal with this,’” Helfand explains. “If we had just had someone say that, it wouldn’t have worked. Words and language just get you so far, but then you need a place where people can have a moment of repose, where they can take everything they’ve just learned and have it work on them in a much more visceral way.”
Everything's Cool...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NqJ59Y3XA
Everything's Cool...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I_NqJ59Y3XA
The Art of the Experiential Documentary
Filmmaker Brett Morgan also strives for a visceral encounter with audiences. While he himself “can’t even draw a happy face,” Morgan has found that animation is the perfect tool for him to create what he calls “experiential documentaries.” Eschewing many of the mainstays of conventional documentary – talking heads, historical dates, third-person voice-over narration – he makes films that attempt to embody the spirit of his subjects.
Morgan’s 2002 The Kid Stays in the Picture drops viewers into the whirlwind world of Hollywood mega-producer Bob Evans. To bring two-dimensional images to life, artists used a photo animation technique that literally moves the viewer through the images. The result is a mesmerizing experience that, for Morgan, captures the essence of Bob Evans’ charismatic personality. “For me the style of the film is dictated by the subject matter. As filmmakers, I think that’s where we need to take our cue.”
His latest feature, Chicago 10, employs a combination of archival footage, a rousing soundtrack and a variety of animation styles to tell the story of the famous group of activists who were accused of inciting riots during the 1968 Democratic Party Convention in Chicago. The titular “10” includes those commonly referred to as the “Chicago 7” (Abbie Hoffman, Jerry Rubin and co.), as well as Black Panther Party leader Bobby Seale, who was pulled into the trial even though he only made a brief appearance in Chicago during the time of the Convention, and their defense lawyers, William Kunstler and Leonard Weinglass, all of whom Morgan considers to be partners in action.
Brett Morgan used motion-capture animation to bring to life the infamous 1968 freedom of speech trial in Chicago 10.
While many have heard stories of the explosive atmosphere of the trial, cameras were not allowed in the courtroom at the time, and Morgan had to come up with an engaging way to bring the court transcripts to life. After concluding that hand-drawn animation was beyond his budget, he decided to use motion-capture, the same technique used in video games, for these scenes.
While some reviewers have been confused, this is not the same technique used in Richard Linklater’s Waking Life. While in rotoscoping illustrators trace over live-action video, motion-capture involves recording the live action of actors through markers attached to their bodies and then using this information to animate three-dimensional models in a digital environment (the same technique used to create the character of Golem in The Lord of the Rings trilogy). Brett Morgan actually did much of the motion-capture body acting himself. “I was maneuvering the characters and driving them emotionally. I had absolute total control in a way that I wouldn’t have had in any other animation style.”
With actors Hanka Azaria, Liev Schrieber, Mark Ruffalo, Nick Nolte and Jeffrey Wright lending their voices to Abbie Hoffman and the other activists and people involved in the trial, the film allows audiences to experience the court case in a way that was not possible before. While medium purists might question the role of actors and animated reenactment in a documentary, Morgan feels that these were the best tools to tell the story. “I’m not a journalist and I’m not a historian,” says Morgan. “I believe that acknowledging the subjective nature of the medium can create a more honest approach to documentary.”
Working with three different animation studios, Asterisk, Curious Pictures and Yowza Animation, all in all more than one hundred and fifty people contributed to Chicago 10‘s numerous animated sequences. According to Morgan, different scenes called for different styles. While motion-capture was used for the courtroom, a more hand-drawn approach was used for other segments, including a dramatic night scene in which riot police descend on Lincoln Park.
As the film plays, the viewer gets dropped into ever-changing environments, each with a different look and feel and each exposing them to a different perspective. “They weren’t supposed to work cohesively,” according to Morgan. “It’s a mash-up. It’s an appropriation of all these different imageries into something new and in a way post-modern…I wanted to break the audience out of the illusion in the Brechtian sense, to constantly keep them guessing and to constantly remind them that these are mere representations.”
The Waking Life...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2DeTet98o
The Waking Life...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk2DeTet98o
Inspiring Action
Ultimately, all of these techniques are tools of engagement. Morgan wants young people in particular to be inspired by Chicago 10, and his aesthetic choices were always informed by this goal. In Everything’s Cool, Helfand and Gold want viewers to get beyond media spin and take action to protect the environment, and, as Gold explains, animation enabled them to “break through the limitations of words in their literal sense and bring people to another place in their minds.”
While Everything’s Cool partnered with the Step It Up campaign to provide viewers with ways to get involved in environmental advocacy, Chicago 10producer Participant Media is focusing on voting as a form of activism. To that end, they’ve partnered with Declare Yourself to host an online mash-up video contest in which people are invited to remix animation and live action clips from the film to express their feelings about political issues. In this way the mash-up spirit that Morgan strove for while making the film is being deeply embraced by the outreach and marketing efforts, where anyone can become an animator and have their voice heard.
The Right Tool for Me?
By this point, you are probably asking yourself, “How do I get in on the action?” But before you jump on the animation bandwagon for your next project, animator Jeremiah Dickey encourages filmmakers to “think long and hard about it.” Dickey, who also created animated sequences for Rory Kennedy’s documentary Indian Point: Imagining the Unimaginable, explains that “the actual process of making animation is almost antithetical to the process of making a documentary. With animation you sit down and plan out what you want, and then a month later you have it, whereas within the process of making a documentary, the entire film could change in that time.”
For Brett Morgan, animation is the perfect storytelling tool.
Dickey’s longtime collaborator Emily Hubley follows this rule of thumb: “Never animate something you can capture in live action and never shoot anything that would be better served by animation.” That’s a rule she had to consider every day while working on her feature-length directorial debut, The Toe Tactic , which premiered at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival. The film uses a combination of live action and animation to tell the story of a young woman who is grieving for her father’s death.
“You have to love the art form and totally respect it,” insists Helfand. “If you do, animation can liberate you to think about your film in a totally new way.”
The Toe Tactic...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4LYmGlfYww
The Toe Tactic...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u4LYmGlfYww
ANIMATION RESOURCES
• ASIFA-East, animation community for NY and the East Coast
• Cartoon Brew, animation discussion blog
• Animation World Network, features listings of animators
ANIMATED INSPIRATION
• Watch the intro to the TV show Wild Wild West (1965), one of Emily Hubley’s favorites
• Watch the Hubleys’ Cockaboody (1973) (featuring Emily Hubley’s voice when she was a pre-schooler!)
• Abraham Ravett’s Everything for You (1989)
• Watch the animation A Brief History of America from Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine
• The films of Oscar award winning animator John Canemaker
• Check out the animated-featurePersepolis
• The animations of Norman McLaren
• Animated shorts from the Media That Matters Film Festival: Power Up, The News Is What We Make It, Pizza Surveillance Feature, Neglected Sky, The Luckiest Nut in the World, The Meatrix, The Children of Birmingham, Luv Me Latex
http://filmint.nu/?p=1809
Film International
Friday, May 6th, 2011 | Posted by Film International
Colourful Claims: towards a theory of animated documentary
By Jonathan Rozenkrantz.
Every film is a documentary. (Bill Nichols 2001)
There is no such thing as documentary [...]. (Trinh T. Minh-ha 1993)
Why bother? When a concept is conceived of in ways so opposed that one scholar will define it in absolute terms and another will deny its existence, is there really any point in pursuing any kind of consensus definition? This article takes a critical look at attempts to theorize animated documentary and it would seem that in starting to think about such a contradictory concept we should understand what the contradiction might be in the first place. To do so, a definition of what documentary film usually is would be the logical starting point, but unfortunately, as the introductory quotes indicate, documentary itself can – and has been – conceived of in ways so different that any argument about what documentary film is, is likely to face a well thought-out counter-argument somewhere else.
Taken out of their contexts, Bill Nichols’ and Trinh T. Minh-ha’s juxtaposed statements seem somewhat careless, almost absurd, diametrically opposed as they are. In reality they constitute introductions to elaborate discussions in which Nichols argues from the standpoint that ‘[e]ven the most whimsical of fictions gives evidence of the culture that produced it’, (Nichols 2001: 1) while Minh-ha’s claim is that ‘[t]ruth, even when “caught on the run”, does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames’ (Minh-ha 1993: 92). The two statements seem irreconcilable; they do not even seem to refer to the same problem: Nichols is discussing the relation between documentary and fiction, while Minh-ha’s argument is about the impossibility of catching ’truth’ with a camera. However, in all their polarity they point in the same direction. If all film is documentary, it is because it documents – and, in effect, ‘gives evidence of’ – the culture that produced it and the people within that culture. If, on the other hand, the documentary cannot be, it is exactly because this documentation is impossible, truth being beyond the reach of cinematic technology. Whether we consider it possible or not, then, ‘documentary’ seems to connote film’s relation to the concrete and conceptual categories of ‘evidence’ and ‘truth’.
How ‘true’, then, is animation? Here, too, scholars seem to differ. Paul Wells, a central point of reference in the discourse of animated documentary claims that ‘the very subjectivity involved in producing animation [...] means that any aspiration towards suggesting reality in animation becomes difficult to execute. For example, the intention to create “documentary” in animation is inhibited by the fact that the medium cannot be objective.’ At its best, animation can show a documentary tendency, by mimicking the conventions of live-action documentary film and engaging with social reality (Wells 1998: 27-28).
Wells thus rejects animation’s documentary potential on the grounds of its lacking objectivity, but the more ‘defensive’ discourse questions the idea(l) of objectivity itself. Journalist Beige Luciano-Adams, for instance, triumphantly proclaims that ‘the myth of objectivity has long been shattered. [...] Witnessing is a complex act, and the cults of vérité and direct cinema often overestimate anchors of their own lasting, authoritative prowess’ (Luciano-Adams 2009: 22). Perhaps he is right as far as general documentary theory is concerned, but with Wells remaining an authority in animation studies, this ‘myth’ might not yet constitute a closed chapter in the book of animated documentary.
If we are to believe Bill Nichols, documentary objectivity can be understood in at least three ways: firstly, it signifies a sort of commonsensical and omniscient third-person perspective; secondly it can be understood as a view free from personal bias, one that conveys disinterestedness; thirdly, an objective documentary would be one that simply presents the facts and leaves the audience to make up its own mind (Nichols 1991: 196). Wells seems to cling on to a causal chain combining all three. Being drawn, the animated film is always necessarily subjective; a manifestation of the animator’s specific point-of-view. This, in turn, implies a bias that inevitably leads the audience away from that objective truth that constitutes what Wells considers to be documentary’s primary intention. While he suggests that animation does enable a more persuasive display of subjective reality, the conclusion is that ‘sometimes the credibility of the first-person address may be viewed as a questionable credential in the pursuit of documentary truth’ (Wells 1998: 27).
What Wells fails to see is that documentary objectivity is a mirage and the third-person view equally as questionable as the first-person address, since it merely masks what is necessarily true to any truth claim: that a claim requires a ‘claimer’. There is, of course, a difference between placing a camera before an event and constructing the event completely, but the fact remains that the camera was placed there by someone, for some reason. Of course there is such a thing as ‘accidental’ footage; however, no footage is included in a documentary film accidentally. If the idea(l) of objectivity is somehow embedded in the automatism of photographic technology, we could perhaps conclude that surveillance cameras produce the most objective kind of footage there is. Once the camera is installed, it more or less handles itself, waiting to catch any irregularity that happens to occur in front of it. This, however, is exactly where the issue is: the surveillance camera hardly just happens to be there, it carries a strong intentionality within its existence: its very raison d’être is to catch irregularities.
This is not to say that striving towards objectivity is intrinsically manipulative or malicious. The point is that objectivity remains beyond reach even in a live-action context and that Wells’ criterion, for that reason, becomes counter-productive. If objectivity constitutes the basic requirement of documentary, Minh-ha is right: there is no such thing. But documentary and animated documentary do exist, as far as cinematic categories can ever exist: as concepts and objects just waiting to be scrutinized. To deny their existence is to halt the discussion and to render their scrutiny obsolete. It is therefore more constructive, granted that there are films out there that claim to be animated documentaries, not to ask whether there can be such a thing but rather: how does the thing relate to the already established – if not by all accepted – category of ‘normal’ documentary?
It is no coincidence, Paul Ward argues, that A is for Autism (Tim Webb, 1992) includes drawings of actual sufferers from autism, considering that a significant number of animated documentaries are ‘interactive’ in the sense that they constitute collaborations between the filmmaker and his or her subjects (Ward 2005: 94-95). With this statement, Ward is making a reference to the typology of documentary modes developed by Bill Nichols, in which one of the distinctive characteristics of the ‘interactive’ one is that ‘[t]extual authority shifts toward the social actors recruited: their comments and responses provide a central part of the film’s argument’ (Nichols 1991: 44). In fact, one finds quite a tendency to invoke Nichols’ typology in the discourse of animated documentary. It has been argued, for instance, that ‘[a]nimation can also potentially compensate where other, similarly disaffected media can fall short, by introducing a certain transparency and self-consciousness to the mix’ (Luciano-Adams 2009: 26). The term ‘transparency’, usually signifying an effacing of the medium (in classical Hollywood narrative, for instance), here means the opposite: a sort of visibility into the core of representation; ‘[a]nimation can be helpful because no one thinks it’s real’ (Richard Robbins cited in Luciano-Adams 2009: 26). The argument implicitly evokes the ‘reflexive’ mode of documentary: ‘[i]nstead of seeing through documentaries to the world beyond them, reflexive documentaries ask us to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation’ (Nichols 2001: 125). This parallel is drawn even more explicitly by Sybil DelGaudio, who argues that animation ‘acts as a form of “metacommentary” within a documentary’, inviting the audience to reflect on the adequacy of cinematic representation, but also on the relativity of so called facts (DelGaudio 1997: 192-93).
Gunnar Strøm (2003: 52) prefers to place a number of animated documentaries within the ‘performative’ mode, since he perceives them to be more concerned with form than with content. This is unfortunately a somewhat careless reading of Nichols; the key to a performative documentary is that it ‘does not draw our attention to the formal qualities or political context of the film directly so much as deflect our attention from the referential quality of documentary altogether’ (Nichols: 1994: 93). If there is a certain investment in aesthetics, it is not an end in itself, but a means to convey something about the plurality of reality; the subjectivity of ‘truth’. Strøm’s mistake is easy to make considering that animation has a unique aesthetic dimension to it and it is therefore important to remember that animated documentaries cannot be considered performative solely by virtue of this quality.
Paul Wells makes an effort to develop a more specific typology that applies directly to animated documentaries. The fact that he calls his first category ‘imitative’ indicates that his mission isn’t so much to validate animated films as documentaries, as to find a language to discuss the ways in which they differ from what he considers to be the ‘real’ ones. Curiously though, constant parallels to Nichols’ modes are drawn, at times so carelessly that it seems that the main reason they are mentioned is to give credibility to Wells’ project. Wells’ ‘imitative’ mode, for instance, seeks to mimic the expository documentary, since it “self-consciously foregrounds its construction [...]. Nicholls [sic] has argued that this type of film is an expository mode of documentary because it ultimately foregrounds its didacticism” (Wells 1997: 42). But, as Ward (2008) has noted in direct response, ‘[t]he fact is that Nichols makes very clear that the expository mode, while leaning heavily on didacticism, does not really foreground it.’
As far as Wells’ ‘subjective’ mode is concerned, it mixes Nichols’ ‘observational’ mode with the ‘interactive’, ‘defining the role of the animator as observer, re-creating what has happened from the stimulus of aural sources’ (Wells 1997: 44). The ‘reflexive’ mode returns in Wells’ ‘fantastic’ mode, including films that seek to ‘de-familiarise the documentary object [...]. This is documentary not as “film of record” but as “film of recognition”, revealing the underlying value systems and relationships beneath rationalised, supposedly civilised, naturalised cultures’ (Wells 1997: 44). Wells’ fourth and final mode is the ‘post-modern’, in which the documentary image is rendered ‘merely ‘an image’ and not an authentic representation’ (Wells 1997: 45). The parallel here is Nichols’ performative documentary with its destabilized referent.
Evidently, the invocation of Nichols’ typology is frequent in the discourse of animated documentary, with close to every mode covered to define particular films or the form as such. Insofar as the motive is to enable a more elaborate discussion of an object whose theoretical language is at a somewhat rudimentary stage, there is definitely a point. However, there seems to be a tendency to ‘squeeze’ this object into a frame of reference in order to validate it, that is to say that if we manage to fit an animated film into one of Nichols’ categories we have, so to speak, proven that it is a documentary. The problem, if such is the case, is that Nichols’ typology rests on the premise that documentary is made with photographic live-action film – to such degree that he explicitly excludes digital live-action film from his earlier discussions (Nichols 1991: 268).
This doesn’t mean that his typology can’t shed light on certain aspects of animated documentary, but rather that it fails to take a crucial one into consideration, namely that animation differs significantly from live-action film in a way that has consequences for its documentary claim. Consequently, Michael Renov’s (1993: 29) take on documentary proves to be more illuminating, since he notes that the most elemental of documentary functions is to record, reveal or preserve. That said, we must ask ourselves how and what an animated image preserves, ‘[f]or, of course, one crucial parameter of persuasion in documentary could not occur were it not for the veridical stamp of documentary’s indexical sign-status, itself a condition of the record/preserve mode understood as the first documentary function.’
A is for Autism...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4aYWGLgc24
A is for Autism...http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4aYWGLgc24
Medium Matters
Wells questions animation’s documentary potential because of its lacking objectivity, while I claim that objectivity is an unattainable ideal, without, for that matter, denying that animation does provide certain difficulties of representation that separates it from live-action film. Others, however, take on such a defensive stance for animation that they end up arguing quite differently. Sybil DelGaudio’s starting point is that the very questioning of photography’s credential opens up for considering animation as a suitable documentary device; in other words it is by way of photography’s non-credibility that animation becomes credible (DelGaudio 1997: 190). David Bordwell (2009) argues in a somewhat similar manner: a documentary, he says, can consist of wholly staged footage, presenting ‘facts’ that might or might not be accurate. What makes the film a documentary is that it’s claiming them to be true and ‘[o]nce we see documentary films as tacitly asserting a state of affairs to be factual, we can see that no particular sort of images guarantees a film to be a doc.’ Paul Ward likewise states that ‘[a]lthough animation can be said to foreground the manipulation involved in a representation, this manipulation actually goes on with all texts […]. [T]here is no reason why an animated documentary should be considered less valid (or ‘less real’) than a live action one’ (Ward 2008).
All three theorists would probably agree that a key to documentary is that it uses reality as its referent. The conclusion they seem to draw, however, is that the inevitable manipulation inherent in any process of signification renders one signifier as good as the other. This is not the sort of semi-nihilist stance that denies documentary entirely (or worse: reality itself), but at its most extreme – and I admit that I am pushing the implication of their argument to its limit – it seems to profess that the medium doesn’t matter. This is a highly problematic stance because it fails to acknowledge that the difference between animation and live-action is not a mere matter of conventions. There is a divide that is also existential. In Roland Barthes’ (2000: 80) haunting and beautiful meditation on photography Camera Lucida, that special existential bond that connects a photograph to its object is investigated:
‘It is often said that it was the painters who invented Photography […]. I say: no, it was the chemists. For the noeme ”That-has-been” was possible only on the day when a scientific circumstance (the discovery that silver halogens were sensitive to light) made it possible to recover and print directly the luminous rays emitted by a variously lighted object. The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent.’ (Barthes 2000: 80)
Roland Barthes
The noeme of photography, then, is that what we see in a particular photograph has, at some moment, actually existed. The photographic referent, as Barthes points out, is not the ‘optionally real thing to which an image or a sign refers but the necessarily real thing which has been placed before the lens, without which there would be no photograph’ (Barthes 2000: 76). The truth about the photograph is thus twofold: it requires a referent, but, consequently, it also gives evidence of that same referent’s existence. This becomes the essential difference between a photograph and a painting, since the latter ‘can feign reality without having seen it’ (Barthes 2000: 76). Barthes’ observation pinpoints the problem of using animation as a documentary device, insofar as we consider animation to be a succession of drawings. The painting’s existence isn’t dependent on an object outside of itself; the painting is an object in itself. This is its freedom, but also, ultimately, its limitation: since the painting doesn’t require a ‘pro-painterly’ object – an actual referent in the physical world – it can’t really serve as evidence of such an object either, not even where there happens to be one.
A documentary is the sum of the documents that constitute it; the film’s truth claim may be supported by evidence such as verbal testimonies, written documents and so on. Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that the photographic technology on which the documentary film rests produces a category of evidence that is existentially different, and this difference lies in that, ultimately, a document can never prove anything else than its own and its producer’s (former) existence. A written confession on a sheet of paper only proves that someone, at some point, wrote what is written. What is written, however, doesn’t necessarily have to correspond with anything else. The same goes for the painting: as far as evidentiality is concerned, it only proves that it was painted, while what it represents can be completely self-referential. Another way of saying this is that texts and paintings don’t require ‘real’ referents; real producers are perfectly sufficient, and this is where photography ultimately stands out: here the producer is, in part, the referent; without the object there would be no photograph.
Barthes’ fascination with photography makes him commit semiologic sacrilege: he denies the distinction between sign and referent. With a witty, yet highly problematic reference to Magritte’s famous painting, he claims that by nature ‘the Photograph [...] has something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe’ (Barthes 2000: 5), and he goes one to state that the photograph ‘belongs to that class of laminated objects whose two leaves cannot be separated without destroying them both’ (Barthes 2000: 6). We must be cautious not be carried away by his compelling metaphor. The photograph certainly emanates from the referent, but the referent exists regardless of its being photographed or not. The causal chain is one-way: no object – no photograph; the object may ‘destroy’ the photograph (by its non-existence) but the photograph can only ‘destroy’ the object abstractly (by social influence). ‘When watching the most “verité” of films, we should recall, with Magritte, that this too is not a pipe’, Renov (1993: 26) writes, and he is perfectly right. Pace Barthes, the photochemical pipe is no more smokable than Magritte’s. However, Magritte’s pipe – which is painted – is not a non-pipe of the same order as the vérité one. While the painted non-pipe may have an actual, physical pipe as its referent, it might as well be conceived from a purely conceptual pipe: a pipe in general. This can never be said about the photographic non-pipe, whose referent – whose very source of emanation – will always be a pipe in particular.
The semiotic system of Charles Sanders Peirce sheds further light on the distinction. The index is one of three basic categories of signs, the others being the icon and the symbol. A sign, here, can also be understood as a signifying relation; the way an image, for instance, relates to its referent. While no image is ‘purely’ indexical or iconic, one category will dominate and in the case of photography it is, according to Peirce, the index. D. N. Rodowick (2007: 115) writes that ‘the index is determined by causal relations, or, in Peirce’s terminology, “real connections.”’ It is first and foremost a sign of existence; it confirms that something has been. The icon, on the other hand, is the sign that signifies by resemblance. If the object in Magritte’s painting is recognizable as a pipe (even if it isn’t one), it is because it stands in an iconic relation to its referent. Photographic signification, of course, also has an iconic level – in some sense a superior one since the similarity between the photograph and its object is particularly strong. Nevertheless, since this is the causal effect of an indexical imprint, it is of minor significance to Peirce, who argues that the photograph resembles its referent because it is physically (indexically) forced to do so (Peirce cited in Nichols 1991: 149).
Similarly, we could say that a drawing is indexical insofar as we refer to the material trace of a brush on a canvas. The relation between the drawing and the object it represents, however, is predominantly iconic and consequently animation is first and foremost iconic too. At first sight, Rodowick seems to differ, arguing that cel animations have a strong indexical quality since each photographed frame records and documents a past process that took place in the physical world (Rodowick 2007: 121). A close look at his argument, however, shows that he is shifting focus from the signifying relation between a) the drawing and its object to b) the photograph and the drawing. In other words: he is making the drawing itself the object, that is to say the referent.
André Bazin
André Bazin (1967: 166) finds another ways to distinguish photography from painting. It is only the painting, he argues, that actually has a frame, and by ‘frame’ he means an edge that emphasizes the existential divide between the microcosm of the painting (a world) and the macrocosm of the natural world outside of it (the world). Film, on the other hand, simply masks a portion of reality. There is a screen but no frame, because we know that beyond its edge, the world continues into infinity. Borrowing Bazin’s argument we find that in spite of being cinematic (i.e. conveying movement), animation belongs to the painted realm. In animation there is no world beyond. The screen is a frame. As Folman[i] ascends from the sea onto the burning shores of Beirut, we might wonder whether the water is colder than the air; we forget that his feet never touch the water. There is no Folman below the surface; there is no fire beyond the frame. What we see is all there is. We never see human beings being shot in Waltz with Bashir. We merely see likenesses of such events. The visual evidence of an animated documentary is consequently of a completely different order than the one live-action footage provides and this is where Rodowick’s argument about animation’s indexicality becomes a non-issue. Semiotically speaking: if indices are signs of existence, the only existence that an animated image can ever attest to is that of the drawings that constitute it. Any indication towards the world outside of the film would have to be understood as iconic.
Indexicality is no new concept in the discussion of animated documentary. It seems, however, that the significance of Peirce’s signs is largely underestimated and in some cases even misunderstood. Ward, who otherwise shows a great sensibility in all of his discussions, seems to misread indexicality as a mere resemblance between the sign and its referent, thinking that it relates to the mimetic qualities of the photographic image (Ward 2005: 84). The problem is that the index doesn’t resemble its referent. Or, more specifically: ‘indexicality’ doesn’t refer to the resemblance between an image and its object; that relation would be called ‘iconic’. Ward seems to be confusing the two categories, perhaps because he misses that Peirce’s point isn’t that the index corresponds, but that the index physically forces the photograph to correspond (i.e., to be iconic). If indexicality was a mere question of mimesis – of convention or of style – I would have to agree that the distinction between index and icon is a banality. But, as I hope to have shown, indexicality is a ‘sign of existence’ and, so to speak, an existentially significant sign. There is a causality to the indexical image that the iconic one lacks; hence, the argument that every documentary is a construct and therefore animation is no less documentary is a non sequitur.
After almost 90 minutes of animation Waltz with Bashir suddenly shifts to actual news footage, showing the aftermath of the Sabra and Shatila massacre. We see and hear the despairing women as they bewail their murdered families and we are shown the mutilated corpses of the people they are bewailing. ‘That decision was always meant to be’, Folman has commented, ‘it was always there since the very beginning. It’s not an artistic decision; it’s an ideological decision. I think it puts the whole film in proportion because you see in the end that real people were massacred’ (Folman cited in McClanahan 2009).
There is a striking parallel in The Sinking of the Lusitania (Winsor McCay, 1918), an animated documentary that predates Waltz with Bashir by 90 years, which also uses photographic material to verify its claims. Considered to be the first animated documentary, it functions as a reconstruction of the 1915 war tragedy when a German U-boat torpedoed the ocean liner Lusitania, killing approximately 1,200 passengers (among them several prominent Americans, including playwright Charles Klein and author Elbert Hubbard). Roughly halfway into the film, the animation is interrupted by a series of photographic portraits showing a number of prominent people who died in the attack on the ocean liner. Not only are we confronted with faces, but with names and even titles. The effect is quite different from Folman’s; rather than to shock, the still images of motionless men instead ask us to contemplate the serious loss that the sinking of the Lusitania signified. Nevertheless, the purpose is the same. The fact that two animated documentaries from completely different epochs utilize what I term photographic verifiers is no coincidence: it is as if the indexical trace makes itself wanted in one way or another. By that, the claim that the medium doesn’t matter proves to be little more than the desire of a discourse that seems so anxious to validate its object that it refuses to acknowledge its weaknesses.
This is not to say that the truth provided by a photograph or a live-action shot is fixed. On the contrary: it changes as soon as it is contextualized. Granted that an image seldom appears ‘by itself’, it is practically always burdened with some degree of meaning that is, so to speak, ‘attached’. This doesn’t make ‘What-has-been’ irrelevant or false; the noeme remains, although covered in additional layers of meaning. Consequently, the photographic verifier certainly verifies something, but that this something is the same as the thing that the filmmaker wants to verify with it isn’t quite as certain.
Waltz with Bashir
Of course, not all animated documentaries include photographic material. It seems, however, that the indexical bond to a pro-filmic reality remains, if not a requirement, then at least an expectation, and when this bond isn’t to be found in the images it moves elsewhere. Waltz with Bashir has been called an illustrated radio documentary (Hedenström 2009), a definition that puts sound in the primary position of the film’s documentary devices. This is not without good reason: hearing the memories told by the people who actually lived them undoubtedly adds to the credibility of the film. Sound, we could say, fills the gap that the non-indexical image has left. Here, however, we must remember that it isn’t so much what is being said that constitutes the indexical evidence but merely the fact that it is being said (by what we believe to be the real, living agent that the image iconically represents). If the ‘reality’ of the photograph lies in its continuous relation to its object – whereby the photograph becomes a message without a code (Barthes 1990: 17) – the same could be said about recorded sound. But this is only true as long as we only hear it as sound and not as language. As soon as we start listening to what is being said we are dealing with a system – that is to say a code. This is the paradox and persuasive potential of acoustic indexicality: if we are careless enough, the necessary ‘reality’ of sound is confused with the relative ‘truth’ of language. A message without a code becomes coded transparently.
Ward points out that animated documentaries catch viewers in ‘a paradoxical position – simultaneously knowing that what they are seeing is a complete fabrication, while what they are hearing is a record of a real interaction’ (Ward 2006: 123). This is true as far as this interaction is understood as ‘pure’ sound, but sound as language is always already a fabrication. Thus, as much as acoustic indexicality may function as an authenticator of iconic images, it nevertheless brings us back to the problem of non-indexical signification: what does a sound recording prove? The story being told or a story being told? Not to mention the somewhat synaesthetic counter-effect that is easy to forget: that drawings colour sound.
Digital Documents
A digital camera records an event and that event is later watched as a moving image. Perceptually speaking, there is little difference between, for instance, a talking-head interview recorded digitally or on 35mm film. There may be visual deviations; a tone and texture that make the footage identifiable as either/or, but overall we perceive both in the same way: as technical recordings of past events. Nevertheless, there is a crucial difference that is perhaps best explained semiologically. Barthes (1990: 17) argues that the movement from object to photograph doesn’t require a transformation, ‘it is in no way necessary to divide up this reality into units and to constitute these units as signs, […] there is no necessity to set up a relay, that is to say a code, between object and its image.’ The photograph signifies without a code, something which can’t be said about the description of that same photograph, since a necessary transformation takes place as the index is transformed into that symbolic sign-system we call language. Indeed, language is that primary ’other’ with which Barthes’ photographic signification is contrasted, but the way he describes what photography isn’t – the division into units that are constituted as signs – he could just as well be talking about digital technology.
Waltz with Bashir
Just like in the transformation from image to text, digital photography transforms its referent into a symbolic code, although not a lingual but a numerical one. The difference is that the code is then reconstituted, not into words, but into an image that actually resembles the original object. From object to image there are thus two transformations, meaning that ‘a “digital image” is always marked by a fundamental discontinuity as if riven by, yet encompassing, two separate dimensions’ (Rodowick 2007: 113-14). If it is the continuity between sign and referent that grants photography its unique evidential force, something happens when the referent is divided into discrete units: the indexical link is broken, a possibility to reassemble the units arises and with that, an unprecedented possibility to fiddle with ‘What-has-been’. Mathematically speaking: ‘digital acquisition quantifies the world as a manipulable series of numbers’ (Rodowick 2007: 116). More concretely: digital technology allows images to alter recorded reality. Objects that look real can even turn out to be computer generated, that is to say digitally ‘drawn’. This, of course, becomes quite a problem for documentary film, since its primary proof – the photographic image – no longer seems to prove anything.
The digital document seems to bring photography and painting closer together. Suddenly we have a ”photograph” in which a physical referent is no longer necessary, and when there is one, it is digitally deconstructed into a symbolic code and reconstituted into an iconic likeness. Indexicality, insofar as we understand it as the causal bond between image and object, prevails merely as a possibility. Symptomatically, Rodowick (2007: 105-6) sees digital cinema as a return of a certain ‘graphism’; ‘[t]he image becomes not only more painterly but also more imaginative. Its powers of documentation are diminished or decentered in relation to the presentation of counterfactually conditional worlds.’ Does this mean that we are finally facing the moment when the medium ceases to matter: no more difference between pixel and paint; photograph and painting; animated documentary and live-action one? In due time, perhaps. But we shouldn’t forget that we are facing a process rather than a proper revolution. For cultural as well as technological reasons we haven’t reached the point where the index and the noeme can be completely overlooked, or when the painting and the photograph finally become indistinguishable. In present reality, digital cameras continue being used to record events and we have yet to be fooled by computer generated ‘actors’. For the time being I dare to conclude that the veracity of digital film may be doubted, but in animation there is no doubt that what is seen isn’t a recording of an actual referent, but an iconic representation of a possible one.
Conclusion
The contradictory concept of animated documentary raises a number of relevant questions regarding the problem of representing reality. If the potency of a documentary’s truth claim is relative to the documents that constitute it, the animated documentary is significantly weakened by its lack of the fundamental evidential ingredient that is traditionally associated with documentary film: the photographic raw material. This is a problem that the ‘defensive’ discourse of animated documentary fails to acknowledge, arguing instead that every documentary is a construct and that, consequently, animated documentaries are just as ‘real’ as live-action ones. The ultimate fallacy of such argument is that it doesn’t take into consideration that two constructs are never the same and that each one is limited by its material. A wooden house will stand the wind but a brick house will resist fire and equally: a documentary film that lacks that causal, indexical link to pro-filmic reality that the live-action film has, will have more difficulty standing the huffing and puffing of a spectator who equates documentary film with visual proof.
The problem isn’t that animation cannot be objective. No film can. At its best, objectivity is a noble ideal to strive towards; at its worst, it is a manipulative claim. The real issue is the existential difference between the photograph and the drawing, where the former requires and gives evidence of its referent while the latter doesn’t. This doesn’t mean that the potential of animated documentary should be denied. It merely means that drawings document differently. My aim has not been to discredit animated documentary but to point out that such films do provide a problem, that this problem differs from the ones of live-action and that any discussion about the veracity of animated documentary that doesn’t take this into consideration is starting out wrong.
Jonathan Rozenkrantz is about to complete his MA studies at the Department of Cinema Studies at Stockholm University, where he has also guest lectured. His writings have appeared in Tidningen Kulturen and in the publications of several Swedish film festivals.
References
Barthes, Roland (1990 [1977]), “The Photographic Message”, in Stephen Heath (ed), Image-Music-Text London: Fontana Press.
Bazin, André (1967), “Painting and Cinema” in Hugh Gray (ed), What is Cinema? Vol. 1 Berkeley, University of California Press.
Bordwell, David (2009), “Showing what can’t be filmed”, Observations on film art, 4 March. Accessed 24 August 2010.
DelGaudio, Sybil (1997), “If truth be told, can ‘toons tell it? Documentary and animation”, Film History, 9: 2, pp. 189-99.
Gustafsson Hedenström, Mats (2009), “Waltz with Bashir”, Kommunalarbetaren, 16 February. Accessed 24 August 2010.
Luciano-Adams, Beige (2009), “When Docs Get Graphic: Animation Meets Actuality”, Documentary, 28: 2 (Spring), pp. 22-26.
McClanahan, Erik (2009), “Waltz with Bashir: Interview with Ari Folman”, Secrets of the City, 28 January. Accessed 24 August 2010.
Min-ha, Trinh T. (1993), ”The Totalizing Quest of Meaning”, in Michael Renov (ed), Theorizing Documentary New York: Routledge.
Renov, Michael (1993), “Toward a Poetics of Documentary”, in his (ed), Theorizing Documentary New York: Routledge.
Strøm, Gunnar (2003), “The Animated Documentary”, Animation Journal, 11, pp. 46-63.
—— (2006), “Animated Interactions: Animation Aesthetics and the World of the ‘Interactive’ Documentary”, in Suzanne Buchan (ed), Animated ‘Worlds’ Estleigh: John Libbey.
—— (2008), “‘Animated Realities’: the animated film, documentary, realism”, Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture, 8: 2. Accessed 24 August 2010.
Wells, Paul (1997), “The Beautiful Village and the True Village: A Consideration of Animation and the Documentary Aesthetic”, in his (ed), Art and Animation London: Academy Group / John Wiley, pp. 40-45.
Keynote abstracts:
Paul Ward
Animated Documentary: Performance, Practice, Pedagogy: This presentation examines animated documentary in relation to notions of performance, practice and pedagogy. I am not interested simply in a notion of ‘performance’ as we might understand it in an ‘acting’ sense (someone ‘playing a role’ in a re‐enactment), but that of the animator performing specific actions in order to interpret factual material. This performative function of the animator raises questions about practice and how documentary‐animators need to negotiate a peculiar position in relation to their subject matter, research, history and theory. This, in turn, connects to pedagogy: how teaching and learning principles of animation can re‐energise our understanding of documentary (and vice versa). It is through the critical juxtaposition of all these elements that a deeper understanding of animated documentary will emerge.
Sheila Sofian
Creative Challenges in the Production of Documentary Animation: This presentation examines Documentary Animation from a filmmaker's perspective. Is it appropriate to use animation in nonfiction films? When does animation enhance the audience's understanding of a film’s topic and when does it distract from or dilute the content? Does the use of animation in documentary filmmaking reveal the filmmaking process in a more overt fashion than live action filmmaking, and what controversies arise as a result? How does the use of animation in nonfiction films challenge convention, and are animated documentaries accepted by audiences as legitimate? I will discuss these issues and others I have encountered when producing and exhibiting my films, illustrating the presentation with excerpts from my own work.
Paul Wells
‘Never Mind the Bollackers’: Repositories, Sites and Archives in Animated Non‐Fiction:
Drawing on sources as varied as my mother’s living room, a collection of netsuke, police photographs, a made‐up actress, and several Norwegian oil wells, this discussion will seek to address what function animated non‐fiction performs, and seeks to anticipate how its fundamental characteristics might service the future understanding of our contemporary culture. In a recent article in American Scientist, Kurt Bollacker warned against a ‘digital dark age,’ where all contemporary digital works might be lost to a rapid corruption of the data itself and the loss of the technical means by which they might be read. Taking this both as a material threat and a pertinent metaphor, this presentation will look at animated non‐fiction as a ‘repository’, a ‘site’ and an ‘archive’. I will evaluate the exponential rise in the production of animated non‐fiction – now more usually and narrowly defined within the parameters of ‘animated documentary’ – and note the role that animation, an intrinsically illusionist form, is playing in defining matters of record, privileging ‘human documents’, and revising historiography. My discussion will seek to take into account the development and current trajectory of ‘animated documentary’, the potential need to review the terms and definitions of animated ‘non‐fiction’, and will engage with the mode’s attractions as a form of creative citizenship.
Panel abstracts:
Nadide Gizem Akgülgil
Using Animation in a Philosophical Film: Waking Life: Richard Linklater’s Waking Life (2001) uses digital rotoscoping to explore the subject of lucid dreaming. Determinism, Realism, Existentialism, Semiotics, Buddhism, Taoism, and the theory of Evolution Theory are just some of the subjects covered by the discourses of the film’s interviewees. Fluid backgrounds, changing objects and adding simplified formulas to the background distract the audience’s attention, alienate the viewer from the discourse and make it possible for the viewer to experience some kind of lucid dreaming. This presentation uses Linklater’s film to examine the relationship between animation and reality. A range of philosophical issues, including those explored directly within the film itself and those raised by the work’s production method and aesthetic, will be explored.
Mark Bartlett
Fictional Fact and Factual Fiction: The Document vs. the Documentary: We've been 'here' many times before ‐ 'here' referring to the liminal zone between fact and fiction. My talk will discuss some of the philosophical parameters of this cyclically appearing zone, asking what, if anything, animated epistemologies have to add, philosophically, to the debates. I will anchor my critique in two ways: firstly, through a discussion of theories of naïve realism; and secondly, through a comparison of animated scientific visualization to animated blockbuster fictional film. The former will be represented by Conception and Scientific Content, conceptual direction by Alain Viel and Robert A. Lue, animated by John Leibler, 2006; and the latter by James Cameron’s Avatar, 2010. My premise is that fact and fiction are illusory endpoints of the spectrum of hybrid states of ‘realism’ that lie between them. One implication of this premise is that all documents are fictional facts, just as all documentary is factual fiction. A second implication is that no analytical method can escape this dilemma. In other words, the limitation to these two objects of study requires that any film theory worth its salt must account for the legitimacy of the ‘documentary effect.’ I will demonstrate that a scientific‐aesthetic realism is, paradoxically, the very ground on which animation’s documentary form rests. In Avatar, fantasy is firmly rooted in scientific realism. It is scientific legitimacy that determines the film’s aesthetic imaginary. In Leibler’s animation, ‘fact’ is rooted in aesthetic realism. It is aesthetic legitimacy that determines its scientific imaginary. Scientific legitimacy sits in judgment of aesthetic imagination, just as aesthetic imagination sits in judgment of scientific legitimacy. In the former case, we are hypothesizers of and experimenters with fact; in the later case, aesthetic critics of fiction. Only when we play both roles are we able theorists of the documentary effect.
Daniel Bartoš
Thinking in Images: Representing Native Knowledge within Contemporary Visual Technologies: How could different world views be represented in new audiovisual media? Is it possible to represent non‐Occidental forms of native knowledge with contemporary visual technologies originally created by western civilization? This presentation focuses on Australian indigenous Aboriginal cultures, the use of animation as visual medium, and Sol Worth and John Adair’s Through Navajo Eyes, a cornerstone of contemporary visual anthropology. Worth and Adair brought film cameras into the Navajo community and let the Navajo people use it – they called this technique bio‐documentary, an attempt to enable the viewer to see the world, as the filmed participant sees it themselves through the prism of their native culture. Animation, the main media platform in my own research project, can be seen as a logical extension of Worth & Adair’s experiment. I would like to go one step further in my practice, creating a computer‐animated short film in the same manner as Adair & Worth created their first bio‐documents. Such a film can then be called a bio‐animateddocument. I will explore various examples of how producers approach cross‐cultural filmmaking projects, and these might be undertaken within the realm of computer animation. I ask whether or not the use of modern audiovisual technologies offers a means to cultural survival for a range of disappearing indigenous social groupings around the globe.
Greg Bevan and Marc Bosward
“I Speak about Myself to You:” Renegotiating the Voice of Documentary through Animation Aesthetics: Documentary practice has long been encumbered with journalistic and pseudo‐scientific expectations: the gathering of evidence, the balancing of material, and the objective presentation of accurate and informative data. Overwhelmingly, documentary audiences are encouraged to believe in an objective reality and, by extension, to anticipate filmmakers’ fidelity to it in moving image works that purport to offer an honest, rational and sensible point of view. The introduction of animation aesthetics into documentary realism offers filmmakers a wider choice of expressive tools to define, extend and affirm their own personal voice, and also to interrogate conventional notions of knowledge, reliability and authority. This paper will offer a practical assessment of these issues, offering new approaches for filmmakers to explore the epistemological resonance of their craft, and to extend the formal and thematic parameters which determine documentary's status as nonfiction testimony. It examines the inherent transformative, non‐representational and illusory nature of animation in relation to the construction of authorial voice for documentary. Drawing on the theory and practice of filmmakers Aleksandr Sokurov and Alexander Kluge, we assess the extent to which truth can be derived from expressionistic aesthetic components as readily as it can from the narration of factual information and photographic reality. Can animation in documentary assimilate fiction into fact and synthesise truth and fantasy? Furthermore, we argue that the didactic voice of traditional, expository documentary encourages passive observation, while animation can provoke a more poetic interpretation of the filmic diegesis. How might the authenticity of documentary material be legitimised by foregrounding authorial mediation, rather than by attempting to camouflage filmmakers’ subjectivity?
Suzanne Buchan
Animated Psychogeography: Documenting Urban Space: The still photograph can reveal much about an urban space’s mood, history and decay. But animation, as a creative practice, can combine the stillness and death of the photograph with the vivacity and hum of the filmed city. Animators usurp architecture from its physical foundations, and reinterpret it using an array of invasive techniques: photocopiers, drawing, digital technologies, collage, superimposition and mixed media. Transcending the space‐time continuum of still and live action documentary photography, animation can achieve a condensation that finds its equivalent only in human imagination. This paper asks the question: where does the urban documentary stop and fiction and/or autobiography begin? It aims to reveal the powerful interpretative qualities of animators’ uses of documentary stills, shots and sequences of cities and urban spaces in combination with traditional and digital animation techniques to create new forms of narrative and new ways of documenting and experiencing built environments. George Griffin's Block Print (1977) is a love affair with a Manhattan block: live action and negative, Xeroxed and finally a flip‐book version transform an objective record of a walk around the block into a personal interpretation of a New York neighbourhood. Paul Vester's Picnic (1987) combines documentary photography and animated imagery to express the artist's particular relationship with the cities and urban spaces he deconstructs. And, in documentaries on Second Life, the shift from the photochemical index to subjective digital and virtual interpretation and creation of urban spaces raises a set of compelling questions about our understanding of the impact of animation on the moving image document. I will demonstrate that these animated invasive techniques in documentary and fiction can coconstitute one another in a psychogeographic simultaneity.
Myria Christophini
Animating Peace: Animation has historically proven a medium attractive to those seeking to inform, indoctrinate, and/or direct the masses. My research examines the potential of animation to be utilised as a tool for peace. My particular case study is the divided island of Cyprus. Cyprus has a fraught history: its geographic location between East and West has rendered it strategically important to differing powers. A former British colony, it has been partitioned in various stages since 1963. Following forced mass population movements of both Greek and Turkish Cypriots, the two communities now live in segregated displacement from one another: Greek Cypriots in the south of the island, Turkish Cypriots in the north. Neither community had any contact the other until as late as 2004. Nowadays, however, the leaders of the two communities are conducting talks which, if successful, will lead to a united country. However, the reality is that the two communities remain suspicious and cautious of each other. Many of the younger generation have never had any contact with the other community, and their image of the latter stems mainly from older generations’ descriptions of past conflicts and their articulation of distorted nationalist stereotypes. Animation has the potential to help in the process of bringing the two communities of Cyprus together. Questionnaires I conducted amongst members of both have formed a pivotal aspect of my research. These questionnaires were inspired by the future workshops of peace scholars Elise Boulding and Karl W. Deutch, and they document both the opinions of people regarding the ongoing conflict and drawings which relate to individuals’ perception of the other community and their image of a shared future. I am currently developing my own animations based on this material, and my paper addresses how conversations with the people of Cyprus have translated into my animation practice.
Charles daCosta
Stirring It Up: Priming the Ordinary and Prodding the Invisible into the Animated Spectacle: Animation is the art of impossible worlds that are granted the illusion of life to in order to foment realities that may at first be virtual, but go on to facilitate the creation of new non‐brick‐and‐mortar actualities. Animation is therefore a powerful conduit for effecting emergent realisms and delivering [new and old] truths. The production of any meaningful animation is often the outcome of time‐consuming technical and artistic endeavors. Therefore, focus is frequently allocated to questions of aesthetics and technique and attention given to the spectacle and ‘look’ of animated work. On the other hand, documentaries are largely awarded gravitas because of concentration on their depiction of the factual. Given these narrow modes of assessment, the notion of the animated documentary (or Animentary) can seem contrarian. This paper suggests that the spectacular characteristics located in the animated form serve a useful purpose in channelling viewers and audiences to documentary content that might otherwise attract little interest. In order to demonstrate the nexus between this mode of thinking and practice, this paper is accompanied by a six‐minute Claymation production, School Dinners, the pilot for a series designed to examine black British presence and counter stereotypes of Black Britons’ location within discourse on national history.
Phil Davis and Sujan Shrestha
The Truth in Illusion: Collaborative Approaches and Pedagogy in Documentary Animation: Documentary and animation are often seen as opposites on the spectrum of filmmaking genres and techniques, but there is a rich history of the combination of these approaches. The rise of such hybrid practices has become a vital bridge for combining unique styles of animated films today. We as artists/teachers are also exploring a collaboration of methods and techniques for teaching “Documentary Animation” as a synthesis of faculty/student interpretations in a college campus environment, combining nonfiction audio with traditional and digital animated mediums, and balancing on the line between objective and subjective cinema. We explore hybrid methods of teaching, utilizing lectures, online discussion boards/blogs, and group collaboration, all leading to a completed animated film. Our processes and methods are inspired and informed by figures in the history of animation including Winsor McCay, Oskar Fischinger, Norman McLaren, John and Faith Hubley, George Griffin, John Canemaker, Adam Elliot, Joanna Priestley, Jim Trainor and Dennis Tupicoff. Through lectures, discussions, and production of animated sequences, the reconciliation of opposing purposes, ideas and strengths are investigated and explored. Biases are analyzed, presented and discussed in classroom critiques, and ultimately, the unique expression of a combined animated illusion of documentary is produced. This collaboration investigates and explores the use of mixed media techniques through history, aesthetic, technique, genre and the amalgamation of fact and fiction in a documentary animated film. Sujan Shrestha is an Assistant Professor at Towson University, where he teaches courses in interactive media and animation within the Digital Art and Design Concentration. He received his BA in Interactive Media and Animation and MFA in Imaging and Digital Arts from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, where he focused on documentary film and animation.
Nea Ehrlich
Virtual Documents and Animated Photography: The recent proliferation of animated documentaries is a distinct development of the ‘documentary turn’ in visual culture, one that contributes to the discourse about combinations of fact and fiction in contemporary art and documentation. In the visual language of animation, the assumed indexicality of the camera is replaced by the obviously constructed animated image. By flaunting its theatrical and interpretive nature through stylized and un‐naturalistic depictions of people and events, animation is developing as a new form of documentation that raises questions concerning past definitions of documentary practice, what indeed can be documented and the blurred boundaries of fact and fiction in contemporary culture. My paper will examine some of the themes that animation introduces about its engagement with contemporary social and political issues: Can animation continue to be considered fictional or un‐indexical if there is no other way to visually document realities such as virtual worlds, altered states of mind, memories and personal views of the ‘real’? Does animation ‘expand’ the scope of the ‘real’ by documenting the virtual? What new questions are raised by these new forms of documentation? And how do on‐line virtual experiences create new knowledge about 'actual' current events? What is the cultural significance of animated documentaries’ severed link to material reality? What kind of knowledge can be produced through documentation that unabashedly visually disguises its subjects in order to expose new information?
Ann Marie Fleming
Abstract: Ann Marie Fleming is an artist and independent Canadian filmmaker. She has made over a dozen film projects working in a variety of different genres (animation, experimental, documentary and dramatic), and often dealing with themes of family, history and memory. Her first feature, New Shoes (1990), was invited to the Rotterdam and Berlin Film festivals and was shown at the MOMA in New York City. Her accompanying short animated doc, New Shoes: an interview in exactly 5 minutes, won the Best Short prize at the Toronto International Film Festival. Her film Blue Skies (2002) also won the same award. Her latest film, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors (2010), was selected for Canada’s Top Ten in 2011. Anne Marie’s other work includes My Obscure Object of Desire (2007), an exploration of romance for cel phone culture; Running (2008) was scored and played live with the Victoria Symphony; Landslide (2008) is a karaoke homage to the eponymous Fleetwood Mac coming‐of age‐hit. Her most recent feature films, The French Guy (2005) and The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam (2003), both co‐produced with the National Film Board of Canada, have garnered many awards. In 2007 Riverhead Books published her graphic novel adaptation of the latter film. That work has been listed on the top 10 graphic novels for teens by the American Library Association and has been nominated for two Eisner Awards for excellence in comics.
Andy Frith and Robert Jefferson
Beyond Actuality: The Animated Response: In The Struggle for the Film, Hans Richter suggested that the selective nature of filmmaking was particularly acute in animation, arguing that animation allowed the filmmaker the ability to record and interpret at the same time. John Grierson spoke of how documentary involved “the creative treatment of actuality;” animators by default engage in the creative treatments of the apparatus of recording. The duality of recording and interpreting simultaneously renders the animated response so resonant, while also making it difficult to see the boundaries between fictive narratives and objective truth. This paper asks where an animated documentary ends and an imaginative response to the subject matter that goes beyond actuality begins. We discuss our creative approaches, decisions and techniques in relation to live animation projects we have been involved in. In our own creative work it is a common commissioner’s trope to ask filmmakers to respond to an environment, an activity or develop portraiture. Most recently, Robert began a conventional documentary on the American maverick composer Harry Partch only to abandon that in favour of a frame‐level response to the music, which at once finds a visual equivalent for the aural world of Partch’s heterodoxy while responding to the deeper motifs and meanings of the composer’s life. As part of a forthcoming exhibition, Andy considers the use of animation in order to expose the inner life of objects, exploring documentary storytelling by using the contents of a china cabinet, juxtaposing objects to create a specific narrative and animated elements to penetrate the surface of conventional documentary.
Jeffrey Geiger
“Like nothing you ever saw before outside of a dream”: Animating Aerial Vision: During the 1930s and 1940s, the development of what Paul Virilio calls ‘global vision’ was further perfected through innovations in both photography and flight. In the pages of US Camera in the mid‐1930s, for instance, one could witness aerial views over the earth never before seen: in one shot a ‘global panorama’ of the Black Hills of North Dakota, taken from ‘the division between the troposphere and the stratosphere,’ revealed ‘the actual curvature of the earth—photographed from the highest point ever reached by man.’ A few years later, even as global vision was being authenticated through photographic evidence, the world was experiencing the most radical experience of divided perception—global warfare. Considerable attention has been paid (cf. Virilio, Kittler) to the idea of photographic ‘indexicality’ in enhancing the mastery of modern aerial vision, yet documentary animation’s key role in producing this vision has gone almost unnoticed. This paper analyses an emphasis on aerial perspectives and mapping (both actual and conceptual) in US wartime documentaries ranging from Valley of the Tennessee (1944), Northwest USA (1945), and The Bridge (1944), to The Memphis Belle (1944), focusing on animation’s central role in valorising the ideological power of the aerial view. Documentary animation long has imaginatively situated or ‘emplaced’ spectators in concrete but seemingly unobtainable spaces—for example, the maps and charts that open Nanook of the North (1922). Yet animation techniques, rather than acting as mere supplements (in Derridean terms) to documentary reality, work integrally with photographic liveness and evidence to construct documentary ‘realityscapes’. This paper, then, articulates the rise of aerial perception while simultaneously locating animation at the heart of the ‘classic’ documentary’s social and ideological functions.
Meghan Gilbride
Memory Lapses: Visualizing the Porosity of Remembrance in Marie‐Margaux Tsakiri‐ Scanatovits’ My Mother’s Coat: A young girl wraps her arms around her mother’s waist. In an instinctive response, the mother encloses her daughter within her long fur coat. This image is bare, only a few incomplete lines sketching out the two figures. But the viewer feels the softness of that coat, recognizing the familiar sensation of resting one’s head against a loved one, and melting into the comforting warmth of their body. Through the subtle movements of its fragmented visual imagery, Marie‐ Margaux Tsakiri‐Scanatovits’ animated short My Mother’s Coat conveys this shared intimacy of familial love, articulating the interconnectedness of lived experience, the titular coat becoming a connective fibre of experience between mother and daughter. This discussion of My Mother’s Coat examines the porous nature of individual memory, suggesting that the utterance of the personal is innately collective. The mother’s memories are her daughter’s. Both have a shared investment in the past, both are an extension of each other’s lives, and through the film, each viewer becomes linked to this process of remembrance. Engaging with Walter Benjamin’s writings on storytelling, Marianne Hirsch’s notion of postmemory, and Svetlana Boym’s discussion of diasporic nostalgia, this analysis explores how My Mother’s Coat binds together individual memories within the reservoir of collective experience. This investigation examines the expansive capabilities of simplified visual representation, and argues that Tsakiri‐Scanatovits’ employment of a disjointed narrative structure and animation style speaks to the illusory nature of memory, as the film desperately struggles to reconstruct a past that is just within reach, yet eternally escapes one’s grasp.
Leon Gurevitch
The Documentary Attraction: Animation, Simulation and the Rhetoric of Expertise: The digital attraction has received a great deal of attention as a means of framing contemporary understandings of Hollywood spectacle. Almost no attention, however, has been given to the place of attractions in documentary filmmaking. Though spectacular special effects have generally functioned within the realm of the fantastic, something unusual happens to the visual attraction in a documentary context. In the absence of live footage (or even in support of it), animated and simulated spectacle is frequently deployed within documentary filmmaking in the interests of ‘expertise’. While Jonathan Beller argues that the CG spectacle represents the capital and labour power invested in the cinematic image, we might argue that similar CG simulations function in documentary filmmaking to represent research labour power. Hollywood directors describe their motivation for special effects sequences in fundamentally promotional terms, ‘selling’ the viewer on the verisimilitude of the spectacle. This paper asks if CG animations and simulations in documentary film are not similarly motivated. Rather than enlightening audiences regarding the technicalities of various situations or events, might CG simulations actually function to persuade the viewer of the time and effort put into making the documentary, therefore acting as an index of the filmmaker’s veracity? Taking a broad range of documentaries by progressive documentarians on the one hand and pseudo‐documentary infomercials by corporations on the other, this paper asks if the function of the attraction unites these forms as much as their ideological differences divide them.
Taru Henriksson
Animated Feelings of Femininity: Three Case Studies from Finnish Female Filmmakers: Finnish documentary films by women have in recent years introduced new shifts from traditional documentary filmmaking into more poetic and experimental forms, adding animated or fictive elements especially when expressing feelings and femininity. This presentation investigates three documentary films– Learned by Heart (Marjut Rimminen/Päivi Takala, 2007), Little Snow Animal (Miia Tervo, 2009), and Monster Birthday (Marika Väisänen, 2009) – from Finnish female filmmakers who combine animation and documentary material in their work. I ask how femininity and female emotions are expressed through these modern filmmaking methods. The subject matter of these films covers female life from childhood into teenage experience. Femininity and female emotions such as loneliness, acceptance, resentment, angst, joy and hope are expressed through the animated methods used by the makers of this work. Together with documentary material they attach poetical forms of narration to questions of history and modern‐day society.
Jonathan Hodgson
Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex: Wonderland: The Trouble with Love and Sex is a full‐length animated documentary that takes the viewer inside the counselling rooms of Relate. It was broadcast on Wednesday 11th May on BBC2 and BBC HD. During preproduction of the film I seriously doubted whether animation could be effective in conveying complex and understated emotions and feared that an animated interpretation of the subtle nuances of body language on display in the counselling room might not be registered by viewers with the same instinctive recognition that live action would facilitate: animated characters are often stylised, larger‐than‐life caricatures. I was concerned that a more naturalistic animation style would be less compelling and fail to measure up to live action when it came to questions of emotional intensity. Contrary to my initial fears, the overwhelming response to Wonderland has been that people felt more engaged and could connect more closely with the problems experienced by the contributors, specifically because the stories were unfolding through the medium of animation. It seemed that animation allowed viewers to lose themselves in real‐life stories. By hiding the identities of the contributors behind an animated ‘screen’, viewers were able to shed a layer of prejudice and judgement that might otherwise obstruct and interfere with the flow of empathy. The personal issues discussed onscreen became perceived as universal problems. This presentation shows examples of development work, clips of the completed film and talks about the creative journey that I and my production team went on to develop the first fulllength animated documentary made for British television.
Lilly Husbands
The Kaleidoscopic Windscreen: Stuart Hilton’s Experimental Animated Documentary Six Weeks in June: Paul Ward has described Stuart Hilton’s six‐minute animated documentary Six Weeks in June (1998) as ‘a redefinition of the subjective documentary as a graphic stream‐of‐consciousness travelogue.’ This paper suggests that the film can be seen as an experimental animated road movie, one with its roots in the traditions of early European and mid‐20th century American avant‐garde filmmaking. Six Weeks in June is an animated example of the subjective, autobiographical strain in experimental documentary, a work perfectly in tune with Michael Renov’s definition of the ‘expressive’ documentary as a genre within which ‘the focus… typically remains the impression of the world on the artist’s sensorium and his or her interpretation of that datum… or the radical reworking of the documentary material to create sound/image relationships unavailable in nature.’ Six Weeks in June harks back to modernist poetic documentaries of the 1920s (such as the city symphonies) and to American avant‐garde works such as Bruce Baillie’s Quixote (1965, revised 1967) and Robert Breer’s animated film Fuji (USA 1974). This paper examines the ways in which Hilton’s animation illustrates an interest in formal experiment and the ambiguities of spatial and temporal fragmentation. It consider how Six Weeks in June’s use of audiovisual counterpoint (in the Eisensteinian sense) plays into its overall effect as a work of art that seeks to capture the fleeting, flickering perceptions that enter into consciousness whilst experiencing the variegated wonder of being on the road.
Nanette Kraaikamp
Drawings to Remember: The South African Artist William Kentridge is well‐known for his Drawings for Projection films in which he animates his charcoal drawings. By using animation he fully uses and shows the potential of the ‘archaic’ medium of drawing. This paper analyzes Kentridge’s animated film Felix in Exile, a work made up of forty charcoal drawings amended and filmed during each step of the process, and addressing the traumatic history of South Africa during apartheid. Stop‐motion technique and Kendridge’s working method gives a good insight into the process of drawing. In that respect, Felix in Exile can be considered a meta‐drawing. On the other hand, the film also produces a powerful representation of recent history. The movement and process of drawing merges with the representation of the past, feeding collective memory in the present. This paper explores the relationship between Kentridge’s drawing mechanisms and the representation of history, time and memory. It asks a series of questions: What is it exactly that causes the affect of this film? How are mechanisms of drawing and animation related to history? How does this film mediate time and memory? How is trauma inscribed? These issues are explored with particular reference to Walter Benjamin’s On the Concept of History and On the Mimetic Faculty and several different theories of drawing.
Ohad Landesman and Roy Bendor
Animated Recollection and Spectatorial Experience in Waltz with Bashir: Ari Folman’s animated war memoir Waltz with Bashir (2008) mobilizes the power of digital animation to reproduce his experience of the 1982 Lebanon War. Exploring the ways in which the film combines a commentary on memory with a moral stance on war, we argue that Waltz with Bashir exemplifies the capacity of animated documentaries to show what is otherwise difficult or impossible to represent in non‐animated documentaries, while also fostering a new relationship between the viewer and the documentary text. Folman’s film synthetically produces a rich, consistent and thus trustworthy sense of reality for its viewers. This is not despite but because of its unique aesthetic choices. Weaving together analyses of the film’s content and form with accounts of their reception, we discuss how Waltz with Bashir evokes certain somatic responses within individuals, and consider the political significance these responses may engender. This strategy shifts focus from the properties of the text itself toward the viewer’s engagement with it, echoing Vivian Sobchack’s remark that the documentary is “less a ‘thing’ than an ‘experience.’”. By exemplifying the way experience is distributed across viewer, text and world, Bashir’s unique filmic language becomes an example of Walter Benjamin’s “technique of awakening,” affecting even those viewers who never witnessed the Lebanon War directly. Unbound by the restricting indexicality of the photographic image, animation in this instance functions less as a distancing mechanism and more as an aesthetically unique strategy that allows Waltz with Bashir to comment on the relations of experience and memory in general.
Pascal Lefèvre
The Modes of Animated Documentary: Even in these times of postmodern hybrids (faction, mock‐documentary, docudrama, etc.), the distinction between fact and fiction retains an enduring cultural vitality. For Plantinga, the practices of asserted veridical representation are conventional, historical, and contextual. While traditional documentary is built on the seemingly objective nature of the photographic image, animated documentaries confront the viewer often with a personal and handmade interpretation of the world. By their overt artificial nature, animated documentaries seem to challenge traditional documentary epistemology. This paper asks if and/or how animated documentaries can be located within in the six categories or modes of documentary film production set out by Bill Nichols: the poetic, the expository, the observational, the participatory, the reflexive, and the performative. Some would probably argue that an animated documentary belongs by definition to the reflexive mode, with its reliance on suggestion rather than fact, its emphasis on the expressive nature of film, and its anti‐realist techniques. Nevertheless, this paper attempts to argue that, at least on a theoretical level, one could conceive of animated documentaries that also fit in the other modes outlined by Nichols. In order to do this, however, we need to reconceptualise these modes for specific application to the field of animation.
Lawrence Thomas Martinelli
The Reasons for Animating Reality: Animated Documentary and Re‐enactment in the Works of Jonas Odell: In the three most recent works by Jonas Odell – Never like the First Time, Lies and Tussilago – we can deduce some of the reasons why his films are de facto generally considered to be animated documentaries. Each of the short films in question starts from a collection of real interviews with persons questioned on specific issues. Such audio material, integrated in the films as voiceover, is the foundation on which Odell’s narrations are based. By the style, techniques and languages used, the animator‐filmmaker “packages” his stories in such a way as to make them undeniably more interesting and attractive to a wider audience. Odell’s choices of style and technique are closely related to the stories told, dictated not only by aesthetic needs but also (and mostly) from the sense and the meaning of the narratives themselves. In Never like the First Time, each of the four episodes corresponds to particular styles tailored for each of the protagonists interviewed, in terms of age, gender, experience and tone. Such distinctions are constant in all the short films examined here. Odell’s technical and stylistic choices allow a range of communicational codes – be they metaphorical, emotional, subjective or artistic – to translate into images the tone or the inflection of the interviewee’s voice, his/her subjectivity, but also (and even more) the voice and subjectivity of the filmic author who interprets this material.
Mihaela Mihailova
Animation in American Nonfiction Film of the Silent Era: An Unlikely Union?: Maureen Furniss has suggested that live‐action and animation can be juxtaposed under the opposing tendencies of mimesis and abstraction. However, as she notes, reading the two tendencies as inherently disparate is dangerously simplistic. For instance, the very first decades of cinema history saw instances of collaboration between animation and nonfiction. Early animated shorts contain live‐action scenes of animators completing lighting sketches. Likewise, animated sequences depicting phenomena inaccessible to the camera are found in early nonfiction shorts. Thus, in early cinema, allegedly incompatible systems of representation entered into a productive union. This paper examines silent American nonfiction films from the period 1918‐1927 as examples of the curious interplay between two apparently irreconcilable mimetic modes, and as case studies for the examination of the functions which the drawn image fulfils in actualities, educational films, instructional shorts, and travelogues. It explores issues such as subjectivity in nonfiction, animation’s impact on the spectator’s relationship with scientific subjects, and the nonfiction film as a spectacle. It emphasizes animation’s role as a metacommentary on its own expressive limitations, as well as those of nonfiction, foregrounding the challenges of conveying reality by means of a single representational mode. The marriage of animation and nonfiction in early cinema has given birth to a cinematic form which simultaneously inhabits the realms of the imaginary and the real, the subjective and the objective. At once liberated from the concreteness of the photographic record and limited in their abstraction by the requirements of scientific content, these films occupy a position between mechanical recording and pure artistic creation, questioning the existence of such extremes. The works in question foreground the futility of attempting to capture reality as such while celebrating the cinematic medium’s infinite capacity for discovering new realities.
Samantha Moore
“Does this Look Right?” Working inside the Collaborative Frame: The collaborative nature of what goes on inside the frame and how to develop a methodology for that collaboration is something which increasingly interests me within my animated documentary practice. This paper explores the extent to which the frame within an animated documentary can become a collaborative space, working with the interviewees to create the image, and how a filmmaker might go about creating and sustaining that collaboration. There are a number of motivating factors behind an attempt to make the frame a collaborative space. The integrity of the image to claim documentary status and its relationship to indexicality is one. The authenticity of the (particularly internal) experience translated into visuals is also a key concern. The relationship between subject and filmmaker is yet another important element. Using key examples from my own practice and that of others, this paper examines what collaboration inside the frame is, why it might be attempted, and what impact it might have upon audience, film maker and subject. I consider how a methodology of collaborative working might be developed and how that could be applied to practice. While I do not claim a collaborative approach as peculiar to animated documentary as such, I do think that there are representational issues about the extent to which the image can be presented/ manipulated from a particular perspective (and why this might be so) which animated documentary allows us to explore and understand further.
Tsvetomira Nikolova
The "Uncanny Valley" Hypothesis and/in Animated Documentaries: Japanese robotics and cyber‐design specialist Masahiro Mori’s “Uncanny Valley” hypothesis has recently been in the spotlight within Animation Studies, as has the Animated Documentary genre. Animation usually tries to avoid the effects of the “uncanny valley”. In the production of the wellknown films Wall –E (2008) and Up (2009), for instance, the risk of falling into the “uncanny valley” was a subject of open discussion and the authors of both films looked for solutions and design principles which would enable them to avoid it. As an animated filmmaker, I have recently done some research on the “uncanny valley”, particularly on its origins. I am also interested in animated documentaries, and on many occasions have noticed that directors of such work tend, whether knowingly or unwillingly, towards the “uncanny valley” in their practice, regardless of the purpose of the films in question. Some of these films attempt to represent objectively significant and dramatic events, while others deal with personal, usually traumatic, experiences of such events, or with purely personal drama. Sometimes, animated documentaries try to extract something singular and essential from dull, mundane reality. There are also attempts to combine reality, imagination and dream in an “animated stream of consciousness” – a reality that many of us would recognize as similar to our subjective inner worlds. All these kinds of animated documentaries often border on the “uncanny valley”, or even cross that invisible border. It is this boundary that this paper explores with reference to several relevant films.
Anna Ida Orosz
Ah, America! and Ah, America, Again!: This paper offers a comparative analysis of two Hungarian documentaries – one animated, the other, live action – about the exodus experienced in Hungary at the turn of the twentieth century: István Orosz’s Ah, America! (1984) and Péter Forgács’ Hunky Blues – The American Dream (2009). These films explore the massive migration of working people from the Austro‐Hungarian Monarchy to America a century or so ago. While both works strive to evoke history as an experience that the viewer can identify with, they depict the same subject in different documentary modes, and hence, with different outcomes. This paper discusses how the two films in question wrench free of a photographically reproductive conception of documentary. According to Bill Nichols’ famous typology of documentary modes, Ah, America! can be defined as a performative work. The auteuristic and constructed nature of the film’s animated form and its pursuit of stylization and abstract qualities enable its viewer to understand more general processes that are at work in society, a consequence of the film’s provision of an allegorical interpretation of these processes. However, Hunky Blues – a combination of a poetic voice and a more “conventional” expository mode – is able to see history “from above” as well as “from below”. In the interpretation depicted in Hunky Blues, History with a capital “H” can be reconstructed within a finished narrative and can also be re‐experienced through the private stories and the cameras of the age. Ah, America! uses both animated and live‐action sequences to depict a very specific, as well as a more universal picture of emigration. Hunky Blues fits into and also expands Forgács’s well‐known sequence of poetic documentary reworkings of amateur live action sequences into historical documents. Because of their distinctive formal features and narrative strategies, the two films transform the same raw material drawn from the historical world in individual ways, and thus offer different interpretations of the same historical story.
Manki Park
The Role of "Animated Interviews" in Online Virtual Worlds: Documentary Avatars: This paper investigates how animated interviews have changed and shifted from their use in films like John and Faith Hubley’s Moonbird (1959), Windy Day (1968) and Cockaboody (1972), through Peter Lord and David Sproxton’s series Conversation Pieces (1978–1983) for Aardman Animation, to Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2009). Essentially, the recorded voice in these films is illustrated after the fact, using a variety of animation techniques. I explore the use of the subjective voice as a mode of actuality when it is allied to animated imagery in real time, through the use of an avatar. I address the issue of animated avatar interviews in online games such as Second Life and Mabinogi, asking if this can be viewed as an alternative performative mode in the documentary context, and can function as ‘actuality’. Assuming that the capturing and recording of the natural game playing works as an equivalent to live action ‘footage’, I assess if this process of collation can be viewed as a ‘documentary’ in itself. I investigate how ‘documentary’ avatar playing represents material phenomena which cannot necessarily be defined by the recognition of indexical elements and factors, but which functions at the levels of personal and individual subjectivity, cultural or ethnic identities, somehow occupying a space between animation and ‘reality’. I examine how an animated interview in the virtual world can play a role in documenting certain people and their ‘voice’. Exploring the construction of such identities by looking at ‘the doppelganger’, ‘the split‐personality’, ‘the avatar’ etc., this paper also addresses the specific case of a divided or doubled nation: Korea. I suggest a view of ‘Korean‐ness’ within its sociocultural context through the use and analysis of online gaming environments as animated documentary.
Debra Pentecost
Trauma in the War Zone: Film Strategies in Waltz with Bashir: This paper examines Ari Folman’s multi‐award winning animated documentary Waltz With Bashir (2008). It argues that Waltz With Bashir is innovative in its visual and narrative strategies for storytelling about war, utilizing animation to effectively portray the psychosocial components involved in participating in the war zone. While the use of realistic animation is successful in allowing viewers to forget they are watching drawn images, the choice of animation as a narrative tool allows aspects of war to be conveyed, such as dream sequences and surreal visions, which powerfully contribute to a reckoning of trauma and post‐traumatic stress disorder; the coping mechanisms of soldiers and veterans; and the complex processes involved in memory, including the nature of memory, and its recovery and suppression. In Folman’s work, animation augments some of the limitations of traditional live‐action documentary.
Annegret Richter
DOK Leipzig: the Home of Animated Documentary: For the past 15 years animated documentaries have been part of the International Leipzig Festival for Documentary and Animated Films, in a special programme called Animadoc. DOK Leipzig has always been a festival of two genres, animation and documentary. But it became apparent that there are films that do not fit in either of these categories, but instead exist in‐between, films that are animated but clearly deal with a documentary subject. At the time the festival first decided to take a closer look at such works, the term ‘animated documentary’ was still very vague and hardly used by filmmakers or academics. Now, the blurring of genre boundaries seems omnipresent and animated documentaries are everywhere. Still, when looking at the wide variety of styles, techniques, themes and production modes, it seems that there is as yet no definition of what criteria a film has to fulfil in order to be called an animated documentary. This paper discusses the idea behind the annual Animadoc programme at DOK Leipzig, explaining why the programme came to life in 1997 and how the festival team define the term ‘animated documentary’ in their everyday work. I also reflect upon changes over recent years regarding what films are labelled as ‘animated documentary’, taking into account the background of the filmmaker, the purpose of the film and the context of a growing interest in cross‐genre work.
Bella Honess Roe
Spectacular Reality: The Pleasurable Tensions of Surface, Content and Context in Animated Documentary: Conventionally, documentaries ask the viewer to look beyond the surface of the image, to the reality it represents by virtue of its physical, indexical bond with the profilmic. Some animated documentaries continue in this vein. Certain types of non‐fiction television and film style digital animation to closely resemble the look and feel of the filmed image. From Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC, 1999) to The Wonders of the Solar System (BBC, 2010), computer imagery is seamlessly integrated with a live‐action equivalent and animated material is constructed to look indistinguishable from a filmed counterpart. These types of animated documentaries elide the ontological complexity of the image, and invite us to marvel at the achievement of this elision. Walking with Dinosaurs, for example, was aired with a making‐of special which drew attention to the high‐tech process of its image construction. In other types of animated documentary, where animation may stand in for live action with less concern for realism or seek to evoke feelings and psychological states, we may also experience this dichotomous position: marvelling at the aesthetic of the image while looking (or hearing) beyond it to the reality it represents. This paper explores the idea of how reality is made spectacular through animation. The animated image is presented as something to wonder and marvel at. However, at the same time these spectacular images may offer us a deeper and richer knowledge of reality. An (often pleasurable) ontological tension is created between textual, extra‐textual and referent in animated documentaries, and I query the concomitant implications for the epistemological status of such media texts.
Michelle Salamon
Animated Documentary in Relation to Time and Memory: As we grow older and further from certain events in our lives, our ability to access memories and also the mental faculty of retaining and recalling past experience fades. Judging by the many available systems, techniques or tools that claim to improve our capacity to retain information, experiences or events, there exists a fascination with improving and assisting memory retrieval. The holy grail of ‘total recall’ promises the user a cornucopia of related life enhancements. This paper examines how animated documentary can potentially represent some insight into memory through the mode’s ability to depict and present via a temporal format the abstract activity of recollection. Animation is an ideal medium for retrieving memories and invoking concrete and substantive manifestations from an artist’s memory. It can mimic the random recall format through which we experience the act of recollection; it is able to portray such instances through use of imaging mechanisms, such as drawing or modelling of scenes, characters and experiences gleaned from the animator or artist’s memories. Paul Wells describes one of the roles of drawing as an “expression of the various registers of reality.” This paper examines how the sequencing of drawn images combined with the use of stylistic qualities can express and document the act of remembering. It uses as illustrative examples animators who have created films that clearly illustrate this idea through their use of drawn animation.
Paul Sellors
Drawing a Clear Line between Fact and Fiction in the Animated Documentary Abstract: The assertion that certain means of cinematic representation (such as animation) in documentary filmmaking blurs boundaries between fact and fiction rests on misconceptions about those two terms, not to mention the relationship between reality and representation. This paper argues that a study of animation in factual filmmaking helps to clarify both the function of representation in documentary film and the rigid boundary that divides factual from fictional assertions. The distinction between fact and fiction is essentially a concern for the metaphysics of modality. Documentary filmmakers maintain an obligation to represent denotatively existent or possible objects and states of affairs, whereas fiction filmmakers do not. Documentary filmmakers need not succeed in their representations. They may be mistaken, or they may lie. Nevertheless, their representations concern reality and not fictions. ‘Truth’ implies a representational correspondence with a fact. Documentary filmmakers and theorists have rightly recognised that uninflected cinematic images are indexical signs and therefore truthfully represent pro‐filmic reality. However, documentary films are not just collections of truthful sounds and images, but assertions about actual states of affairs. Sounds and images in a documentary film serve as evidence for the filmmakers’ overall purpose, but the film is not reducible to those sounds and images. Other aspects of reality, such as philosophical and mathematical reasoning, are factual but not photographable. Such existent ideas, though, can be represented in text, equations, diagrams, models, and animations. Analysing the 1960 National Film Board of Canada documentary Universe, I argue that documentary filmmaking is not determined by indexical representations, but by the filmmakers’ obligation to express knowledge and beliefs about reality.
Jennifer Serra
The Rê Bordosa Dossier – a Semio‐Pragmatic Approach: As a hybrid of documentary and animation, the animated documentary confronts notions of objectivity and transparency commonly associated with understandings of documentary film. This paper uses a Semio‐ Pragmatic approach to analyse how spectators can recognise the animated documentary as a discursive strategy used to make assertions about the world within which we live. According to the French semio‐pragmatist Roger Odin, documentary films contain textual and contextual information that persuade the spectator to make a “documentarizing lecture,” constructing an enunciator supposed to be real, one who guarantees the truth of the assertions that a given film proposes. This paper explores Odin’s approach through a case study of the Brazilian animated documentary Dossier Rê Bordosa (2008), a short film that investigates the reasons behind the decision of the Brazilian cartoonist Angeli to “murder” one of his most famous creations, the underground diva Rê Bordosa. The film shows interviews with real people and fictional characters created by the cartoonist, arranging them in the same diegetic universe. My discussion of this film illustrates how the aesthetic devices the work uses do not determine the mode of film lecture, and how the spectator can distinguish a documentary animation from a fiction film. It is precisely the kind of interaction established with the historical world that creates the difference between the animated documentary and the fictional animation.
Cathy Slim
The Power of Artificiality in Documentary Animation: Documentary theory over the decades has prioritised the study of photographic representation, filmed reality and the relation to ‘truth’. Brian Winston, for instance, worries that modern technology “undermines the mimetic power of photographic processes,” and that digital manipulation “will have a profound and perhaps fatal impact on the documentary film”. Yet 21st‐century theory adapts and matures alongside digital evolution, and documentary film makers incorporate performance and manipulation into their work, echoing early Griersonian notions of documentary as the creative treatment of actuality. The preoccupation with actuality as evidence has shifted to acknowledge the sophisticated viewer and the fact that a film’s truth is contained in collective information that is not dependant on the filming of real events/people. With reference to historical and contemporary documentary theory, this paper explores the cognitive effect of artificiality through comparative analysis of three animated documentaries: Samantha Moore’s Beloved Ones, Emily Bissland’s In the Same Boat, and Eric Ledune’s Do It Yourself. The overt artificiality of documentary animation results in reflexive viewing, a heightened state of critical awareness. This viewing experience is an intellectually immersive and non‐cathartic one: the spectator engages in stringing the disparate elements of sound, visual style and thematic content together in order to form the message/‘truth’ of a film and interpret its factual orientation. I argue that animated documentary renders, to use Vertov’s words, “a higher mathematics of fact.”
Maike Thies
Animated Documentary’s Potential to Deconstruct Stereotypes of Mental and Physical Disease: This paper draws upon my research into animated documentaries that explore the topic of mental or physical disability. Through analysis of a representative set of animated documentaries – for example, Shira Avni’s Tying Your Own Shoes (2009), Chris Landreth’s Ryan (2004), Julie Engaas’ Sound Shadows (2008), and Andy Glynne’s Animated Minds (2003‐ 2009) – I will introduce the parameters of a mode of animated documentary storytelling which has the potential to deconstruct stereotypes and provide a new perspective on people living with mental or physical disorders. I argue that the main goal of such animated documentaries must be that they build up an immersive, empathy‐based understanding of what it means to live with a special need. Neill's theory of Empathy and Film Fiction, Paul Wells’ work in The Margins of Reality and Dai Vaughan’s theory of the spectator’s response are central theoretical points of reference for the discussion presented here.
Andrew Warstat
Lewis Klahr and the Shuddering Image: Lewis Klahr’s animated films show reality: not as a straightforward, unmediated and accessible realm ‘out there’, but as a phenomenon enmeshed in the image culture of America and Europe. Films such as False Aging (2008) or the monumental series Engram Sepals (1994‐2000) are literally built from the documents and material residue of our recent past, creating dense psycho‐social narratives out of reanimated ‘dead’ images. Klahr’s formal techniques (stop frame and cut out) are as archaic as the objects and images seen in his films, as ‘clumsy’ or outmoded as the content of the works. It would be easy, then, to suggest that the films simply wallow in a now‐lost, surreal past, their ostensible content showing a fascinating, melancholic – but essentially ‘sealed off’ – reality. But taking Klahr’s films simply as allegories of a now‐dead image culture is only half the picture: the films are also documents belonging to a ‘cultural autobiography’. In order to understand what this might mean, this paper proposes that we view Klahr’s films as realist documents in relation to two arguments. Firstly, Siegfried Kracauer’s suggestion that film engages reality through its constructed “material dimension”. Kracauer proposes that film – instead of mimetically reflecting reality – “looks under the table” of modernity to show us the “process of materialization” (how things do or don’t enter into meaning in a world dominated by exchange value). This suggestion proposes film to have an ontological, documentary value on the basis of an engagement with ‘things’. Secondly, Adorno’s proposal in Aesthetic Theory that the shuddering (animated?) image is encoded with a (hidden, social) content that provokes unease in the viewer. When machines break, through technical incompetence, or via deliberate artistic action, the shuddering image – in the case of this paper, Lewis Klahr’s films – shows us real, contingent things shaken lose from the nightmare world of the commodity.
David Williams
Sheila Graber and the Art of Documation: A section of the animation opus of former Art teacher Sheila Graber is concerned with showing how artists worked and thought through the medium of animation. This paper shows the different ways that Graber has tackled the use of animation as an art teaching tool. Four Views of Landscape (1976) constructs familiar paintings of Constable, Monet, Turner and Van Gogh using a caricature of each painter as the generator. Michael Angelo (also 1976) uses a similar character technique in a more biographical way. William Blake (1978) moves the concept into a much more dynamic arena: created to accompany an exhibition of Blake’s paintings and etchings, the film robustly animates his private temporal and spiritual mythology without a voiceover explanation, in an explosion of images that is both aesthetic and disturbing. The Face in Art (1979) is a time machine that clearly demonstrates the strength of metamorphosis in animation, not only a chronicle of the endeavour to capture the endless variations of the human face in art but also an amalgam of the way that visual memory works. Expressionism (1981) works in some ways like a verbal pun. It not only expresses the core of the Expressionists’ angst, but also illustrates the facial expressions of the the film’s human subject matter. The work that most directly sums up Sheila’s desire to draw people into the study of art and the artist is Mondrian (1978). To the music of the Boogie‐woogie that the artist took such great joy in, the film presents a wonderfully chronological graphology of his abstract geometries. This paper explores the above‐noted section of Sheila Graber’s overall opus as a strong evocation of the unique properties of animation documentation.
