hispanic research journal, Vol. 15 No. 1, February 2014, 61–74
Melodramatic Thought in Contemporary Spanish Documentaries Josep M. Catalá Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
One of the most unexpected transformations that documentary cinema experienced by the end of the twentieth century, due to its subjective turn, was the emergence of a melodramatic documentary film. This subgenre has been particularly significant in the field of contemporary Spanish documentary. In general, the trend is distinguished by the use of emotions not only as an aesthetic but also as a hermeneutic factor. In contemporary Spanish documentary, this aesthetic hermeneutics of emotions can be detected in the work of different filmmakers, such as Joaquín Jordà, José Luis Guerin, María Cañas, Isaki Lacuesta, Elías León Seminiani, Andrés Duque, and Víctor Erice. In their films, a paradoxical melodramatic impulse is promoted, the paradox coming from the fact that traditional documentary, also called ‘cinema of the real’, has always been considered the audiovisual field most distant from emotions and subjectivity. The exploration of this phenomenon allows for an understanding of the transformation of contemporary documentary, while proposing an innovative concept of realism and the motivation for investigating the relationship between image, emotion, and knowledge. keywords Spanish documentary film, melodrama, hermeneutics, knowledge, realism, emotions
Why does anything fail in life? Because of tenderness (Theodor Fontane) It is better for people to know each other through emotions rather than statistics. (Roberto Rossellini)
Monkey business In 1999, Joaquín Jordà presented an unusual documentary, Monos como Becky, an exploration of two opposing and asymmetrical types of madness: one of the mentally © W. S. Maney & Son Ltd 2014
DOI 10.1179/1468273713Z.00000000074
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ill, and the other of those who seek to heal the mentally ill through barbaric methods. The narrative is accompanied by several considerations from the filmmaker about his own sudden illness, which influenced the final outcome of the documentary. It could be considered the second Spanish melodramatic documentary, following the enigmatic film by José Luis Guerin, Tren de sombras (1997), shot three years earlier, in which the play between reality and fiction allows for the discovery of a substratum of hidden passions. These are two very different films, at opposite ends of the spectrum of documentary filmmaking, but they have two things in common: they go beyond the classical limits of this type of cinema and they explore topics directly related to the emotional sphere. These two melodramatic documentaries, the first two of this disturbing genre made in Spain and two of the few produced in the world in the same period, share a precursor made many years earlier by another unorthodox Spanish documentary filmmaker, Basilio Martin Patino, Canciones para después de una guerra (1971), a genuinely melodramatic documentary that was not considered as such at the time because the necessary conceptual parameters for understanding this genre or mode were not yet established. One of the key features of this unique documentary genre is evident in another of Patino’s projects, Espejos en la niebla (2008), an installation composed of several documentary videos exploring the emotional history of a specific region of Salamanca during the twentieth century. Significantly, the project was subtitled an audiovisual essay, to which we would only need to add the adjective ‘melodramatic’ to close the circle of my argument. Between the two coordinates configured by Jordà’s and Guerin’s films, on the one hand, and Patino’s installation, on the other, is the work of a group of young filmmakers whose offerings, despite their diversity, can be included within the framework of this melodramatic form of documentary. To a greater or lesser extent, this form is reflective and also follows the mode of the essay, which means that it is related to thought. These filmmakers include Isaki Lacuesta, Andrés Duque, María Cañas, and Elías León Siminiani. Joaquin Jordà was already a veteran filmmaker when he suffered a stroke while preparing a new documentary. This misfortune propelled his project towards a multifaceted reflection on madness which, by mixing fact and fiction, proposed a rethinking of the criteria for reality and normality. In this sense, Monos como Becky plays with excess in a multifaceted manner since, on the one hand, it explores the figure of the Portuguese neuropsychiatrist Egas Moniz, who received the Nobel Prize for his lobotomy experiments, and, on the other, it presents a group of mental institution inmates who are asked to interpret a farce about madness. At the same time, while Moniz’s character is played by an actor who once underwent a lobotomy, Jordà appears in the film to represent himself as a victim of a stroke. There is no doubt that Jordà raises his issues in emotional ways, but he does it not so much by appealing directly to the spectator’s feelings but by pursuing a kind of rational emotionality that is presented through exaggeration and excess as a staging of this emotional drive. As Belinda Smaill indicates in her study about the relationship between documentaries and emotions, it is possible that ‘emotion also encompasses a discourse of feeling, that the signifiers of affect are read without actually being experienced, and (encompasses also) the way meaning can move in conjunction with or be assimilated to feeling’ (Smaill, 2010: 7). Monos como Becky does more than
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provoke emotions or produce affects; it represents them by pushing them to the limit, resulting in an exercise that is ultimately not so much sentimental as epistemological. Jordà’s film is crucial to the context I am defining here, firstly, because it is from 1999, on the brink of a new millennium whose first decade saw the unfolding of the melodramatic documentary mode in Spain, and also because it is made by a filmmaker who started out as an avant-gardist within the renowned Escuela de Barcelona of the 1960s and later turned to political documentary. This is a film that defines the substrata on which the melodramatic documentary is developed, namely, as a transformation of classical avant-garde trends towards a new realism, and also as the establishment of a new political position focused more on the inner universe than on the social landscape.
Through a glass, darkly It would be a mistake to assume that the new melodramatic documentary merely involves a narcissistic shift of a reactionary nature, as this would suggest that it turns its back on the two vectors through which, traditionally, the progressive film aesthetics of modernity have developed: avant-garde tendencies and social documentary forms. This would be a reductionist view of a phenomenon that must be considered, instead, as a symptom of deeper changes in the individual’s relationship with reality, society, and technology. It is a trend that can be seen in contemporary documentaries around the world, and especially in the Spanish film scene, which provides numerous examples that are very useful for identifying its main features. The complex voyeuristic device assembled by José Luis Guerin in the project that accompanies his film En la ciudad de Sylvia (2007) is, in this sense, very revealing. It consists of a collection of photos the filmmaker took while shooting the film and which were assembled in a video entitled Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia (2007).1 If the film is the story of a voyeur, which is also told by exposing the phenomenology of his gaze, the photographs constitute real proof of that impulse, materialized in a series of shots whose voyeurism is still more radical than the one in the feature film itself, because the gazing subject in them is concealed by the photographic image without a countershot revealing its presence. Photographic images here are more excessive, then, than film images, and they are even more melodramatic because the emotional force of the object of desire keeps increasing as it is insistently captured by a camera from which it seems to be trying to escape. Observed women are obsessively persecuted by a voyeuristic camera that objectivizes — and also hides — the true voyeur, that is, the person carrying it. Guerin’s films are more complex than they appear, and also more than he would like to admit. In this case, the melodramatic documentary reaches its peak because it reconfigures the entire structure: the director, the audience, the camera, and the filmed subject. All of this becomes an emotional reality that informs us of the role performed by each of its elements, but it does so without negating the emotional aura that surrounds them. It is, therefore, a melodramatic essay that simultaneously attracts and repels the spectators, making them accomplices of an impulse on which they are also required to reflect. 1
See the article by Santos Zunzunegui in this issue.
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Guerin’s photographic film (which, as noted above, accompanies his fictional film on the same subject as an epistemological and emotional commentary about its basic proposals) reveals how the filmmaker becomes part of observed reality in the melodramatic documentary, as he or she turns out to be an integral component of its visual form. This does not happen in the same way as in the self-reflexive documentary, where the film director generally appears in person: now the filmmaker is modifying the texture of reality more significantly with his or her emotional presence. The gaze does not come from a focalization process that the author, from the other side of the camera, directs at an external reality, but constitutes an emotional projection of the body that reconfigures the image of the real. The result is that what melodramatic documentary shows us is a reflection of the subject in a reality modified by his or her emotions. Documentaries are still a mirror (in this case a distorting one); however, they are a mirror reflecting not just reality, but also the documentary filmmakers themselves, represented by the curvature that their emotions impose on the real. Unas fotos en la ciudad de Sylvia transforms the immaterial gaze into a bodygaze directed at the object of desire which eventually returns transformed into an image that is a gaze-body. Guerin looks at women through his camera, thus creating images corresponding not only to his voyeuristic act of looking, but also to the phantasmagorical presence of his body over the images that frame women in a specific environment. But his is a two-way street, since the image returns to the filmmaker and then to the spectator as a complete visualization where the technical camera is no longer an intermediary, but has incorporated the filmmaker’s body-presence. In an earlier context, these operations would perhaps have been simply labelled formalist and would have been attributed to a matter of style. But concepts such as formalism or style are no longer useful to qualify the new modes of documentaries that explore subjectivity, a subjectivity that turns outward and is expressed mainly through formalized emotions. From the metaphor of the window, the documentary is forced now to turn to the metaphor of the skin. In this sense, the title of one of Almodóvar’s latest films, La piel que habito (2011), even if it has no direct connection to this phenomenology (beyond the fact that it is a melodrama taken to the extreme), is nevertheless useful as a metaphorical description of this technique. Melodramatic documentary images are, in principle, the skin of the reality in which the filmmakers decide to live, and in so doing they emotionally transform this skin in a similar way to how the skin of the face is changed by the emotions of the subject that inhabits it. Another of Guerin’s recent productions perfectly illustrates this operation: it is a cinematic correspondence with Jonas Mekas.2 Transferring the idea of correspondence from writing to film is another sign of the phenomenology that encompasses the melodramatic documentary, which emerged as part of the subjective turn of the documentary that took place during the second half of the 1990s, and led to a proliferation of film journals, biographical or autobiographical films and self-portraits, as well as a remarkable recovery and a no less prolific recycling of home movies. The melodramatic documentary is part of this aesthetic landscape but expands its boundaries through an amplification of its fundamental characteristics. 2
See the articles by Jordi Balló and Ivan Pintor, and by Fernando Canet, both in this issue.
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The epistolary genre is, along with diaries, the most subjective and emotional of the literary genres. In a letter, writers project their identity without the filter of traditional narrative devices, or they transform these into a form of self-expression. When letters were handwritten, the writing itself was also a way to display the identity of the author, a clue whose scientific resonance we encounter nowadays in graphology. Contemporary film correspondence thus entails updating a genre that email and social networks have condemned to extinction, and this revival can be fully realized because documentary filmmakers express themselves through sound (voiceover) and image, so that aspects of the pen stroke are recovered and through them the authors are embodied. In Guest (2010), Guerin uses the genre of the travel journal audiovisually to document his presence at various film festivals during two years. As noted above, diaries are, along with personal letters, one of the literary genres in which subjectivity is more directly expressed. The diary is like a letter that the author addresses to himor herself, an exploration of subjective impressions intended to frame a story or a biography of the self. But the film diary is unique because it uses camera and editing instead of the pen and paper of traditional personal journals and correspondence. When Alexandre Astruc, after the arrival of the former ultra-light 16-mm camera, referred to the caméra stylo (‘camera-pen’), he merely provided a metaphorical expression for the freedom that this new device offered filmmakers. However, today’s digital tools not only make the metaphor real, but also extend its reach. The caméra stylo presaged a phenomenon that only now has truly become a reality: the alignment of the processes of filming and writing. And this has happened not only at the technical level, but also in the imagination. Film diaries and filmic correspondence depend on the intimate relationship between the authors and the digital devices they are using, and also on the intimacy, similar to that of the writer, that these devices provide them with. The melodramatic documentary has emerged in the context of this newly acquired intimacy. The intimate space, of an inner nature, was a product of the construction of Western subjectivity that started in the Renaissance. But this notion of inner space began to collapse at the beginning of the twentieth century when Freudian theory effectively stripped the subject of its autonomy. During that century, and especially with the help of the new media, intimate space became public, gradually turning outward, while the subject lost control over it. The traditional process of thinking suffered, as the subject was not prepared to exercise it in this new, externalized condition. Peter Sloterdijk, in his essay You Must Change Your Life (2013), formulates a chronicle of this conversion from traditional thinking to a kind of thought-exercise, whose results can be seen today in sports and especially in how the body acts in them. Consequently, Guest represents a true documentary of the body, a body that exercises and produces images through its movements. Its images are, as noted above, gaze-bodies: they aim to imprint the presence of the author’s body onto the images of places captured by the conjunction of gaze and camera. These places are no longer objective, since they have become objects of the body, mirror images of it. But even if it is true that exercise of the body has largely replaced exercise of the mind, the thinking function and its need for emotional expression have not disappeared altogether as a result. Instead, they have experienced a drastic transformation.
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In sports, for instance, through the increasingly popular walking and running exercises, jogging, and so on,3 the body expresses a primary emotionality that is absolutely externalized: it can also be considered an excess, but one that does not build knowledge except within the body itself, as its transformation: a sort of body building.4 If this running or walking — in the mode of the traditional flâneur — is accompanied by a camera, as it is in Guerin’s film, then the body becomes an image that epistemologically transcends mere exercise. This phenomenology is characteristic of the new small digital cameras, which are so closely related to the body that they produce images that are corporeal — related to the movements of the body — rather than purely visual. The melodramatic gesture, extreme expression of the passions, which authors like Bill Viola explore through the slow-motion of bodies in works and installations such as The Passions (2003) or The Quintet Series (2000), becomes an almost routine elaboration, whether or not for aesthetic purposes, with the use of these small digital cameras. Guerin’s documentary Guest would thus be an aesthetic distillation of the technological melodramatization that I am talking about. It would be a gesture of corporeal extraversion, the opposite of previous and prototypical trends towards mental introversion. Present-day documentary filmmakers are rediscovering the intimate space, but they are finding it in the exterior, public space: in the place where culture has located it without establishing direct links with the subject. This external intimate space has previously been addressed through what was called mass psychology, not directly through the individual, and dealt with in an industrial fashion using exceedingly pragmatic techniques. But at the same time this technique of melodramatization becomes closely associated with the new kind of individual-authors, these filmmakers find the way to recover intimate space, and they do so not through introspection but through an act of extroversion that pours their identity over the reality transformed into image by the camera. The process is similar to the way that the writer of private journals captures reality and, after processing it in his or her imagination, decants it onto the paper through writing. If, in the era of writing, one could metaphorically say that the resulting text was an author’s image, now for documentary filmmakers this process is more literal because its results are a set of images in which they have emotionally invested themselves in a way that transfigures reality.
Chance and necessity Andrés Duque’s documentaries illustrate these operations quite well. Color perro que huye (2011) or Ensayo final para utopía (2012) are unrestrained mixtures of autobiographical film, personal diary, and observational documentary. They are all this and at the same time none of this, since the mixture transforms all these elements and results in the appearance of a syncopated set of image-emotions, images of an emotionally loaded reality in which the filmmaker actively participates as if he were dancing with it for all of us to see. 3
4
It is worth noting that nowadays, in Western countries, marathons sometimes attract more people than political demonstrations: in these encounters, the mind is subjugated to a body that is working out, and emotion is reduced to effort. This means a revival of the Cartesian split between mind and body, but in the opposite direction.
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It could be said that Duque’s documentaries are chaotic, that they are apparently disorganized, but this is true only if we contemplate them from a classic documentary perspective. Such a perspective is bound to a narrative tradition that imposes a certain order on impressions in either of their two roles: as impressions captured or as sentiments expressed. But Duque’s films could be considered a kind of stream of consciousness that runs through reality itself. The chaos that characterizes reality as Duque finds it is not organized by a subsequent rational process as in classic documentary, but rather appears cluttered. This disorder, nevertheless, is not the same as natural disorder: it is a personal turmoil resulting from the labour of the imagination of the author, whose emotions filter out original chaos of reality. The peculiar arrangement in which things appear on the screen is emotional rather than rational: it is the way in which the filmmaker chooses to present himself to the viewer: as a disordered body made up of emotionally impregnated pieces of reality. Duque is Venezuelan but has spent many years working in Spain and, therefore, his films can be considered characteristically rooted in the melodramatic tone of some of the contemporary documentaries of this country. There are no specific historical reasons that could explain why certain filmmakers decide to divert their focus and contemplate reality through their own identity instead of directly. Due to the historical period in which it emerged, this trend could be related to the general disappointment that grew in the late 1990s with the political transition that had transformed Spain in the mid-1970s, after Franco’s death. But this would mostly affect mature filmmakers like Jordà or Patino, though the latter was always an iconoclast, even in avant-garde terms. In Canciones para después de una guerra, Patino had already explored the territory of the emotions through a mixture of archival footage and popular songs. Rather than a historical disappointment, perhaps it should be described as the depletion of a specific kind of imagination. In Spain now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, we like to speak of the process of the political transition as if it were the only explanation for what has happened in the country over at least the last two decades. But the economic, political, and moral crisis currently affecting the whole of Europe should alert us to a much more widespread phenomenon that is also related to the exhaustion of a certain type of imaginary, one that was connected both to modernity and to certain aspects of postmodernism. It can therefore be argued that melodramatic documentary arose out of the exhaustion of both the avant-garde and the traditional model of political documentary. The typically formalist game of the avant-garde now dissolves into an exercise of subjective restructuring of reality. At the same time, politics, in the midst of the emergence of a challenging ‘post-masses’ era, is focused on restructuring the self, the subject, while technology repositions the body with respect to reality as well as with respect to the problematic identity that inhabits it. This set of transformations — one of reality and one of the subject, both in conjunction with the body — thus converge in the visual representation of reality and result in the excessively emotionalized reality of melodrama.
The way we were Sometimes, the documentary filmmaker’s own interests promote what, following Massumi, might be called the melodramatic effects that are revealed in the
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mise-en-scène or the dramaturgical elements of the documentary. This is what happens in several of Isaki Lacuesta’s films. Cinema has always taught us, and the melodramatic documentary underlines the point, that what we call reality is neither alien to the gaze on it, nor to the emotions produced by its different situations. It is an error — which the melodramatic documentary now takes care to correct — to assert that reality is like an immutable stage, invariably indifferent to the events taking place upon it. Since reality has been linked primarily to a gaze, what happens is inseparable from the place where it occurs: the three elements — gaze, place, and event — establish the image of the real that the melodramatic documentary displays in a new set of interactions. This play of relationships can be clearly identified in one of Isaki Lacuesta’s most peculiar documentaries, El cuaderno de barro (2012). This film could be superficially described as the recording of a performance by the painter Miquel Barceló, who along with the choreographer Josef Nadf is dramatically working on a wall of mud before the watchful eyes of the inhabitants of a village in Mali. But the camera captures several events at the same time which, interlaced, become melodramatic: on the one hand, the actions of European people, disproportionate in every respect and especially surprising for African viewers; on the other hand, the theatrical dispositif comprised of the wall of mud and the spectators of the performance, both located in an African territory but one of them symbolically transported to an imaginary universe by the manipulation that the two European artists perform on it. None of the elements is indifferent to the others; it is not a sum of diverse perspectives relating to events that could be considered separately. The documentary shows us a reality affected by excessiveness, and does so with images that are also excessive, because they expose a discourse beyond the limits of each one of the elements that compose it. At around the same time, Lacuesta directed a documentary about Ava Gardner’s relationship with Spain, which arose from a particular interest of the filmmaker’s. But in the process, his fascination transforms the film images, producing true emotionimages. This documentary also emphasizes a melodramatic substratum of Spanish culture, conspicuously manifested in Almodóvar films, and that relates almost directly to Patino’s Canciones después de una guerra, made almost forty years earlier. The actress Ava Gardner is certainly a melodramatic figure, especially for Spanish society which, with her and through her, entered an era of emotional exploitation of audiences through the spectacularization of famous people. Her presence in our country in the 1950s, followed by such emblematic figures as Frank Sinatra and surrounded by typically Spanish characters like the bullfighter and actor Mario Cabré, left behind a legend somewhere between the romantic and the scandalous that still carries weight, since it is part of the sentimental culture of a whole generation. Isaki Lacuesta has not hesitated to approach her figure and the emotional halo that surrounds it in La noche que no acaba (2010), a title certainly reminiscent of a bolero, a musical style that is well known for producing remarkably melodramatic forms. Lacuesta’s documentary is not kitsch, but rather a reflection on kitsch, by way of making the power of the image-emotion evident. Lacuesta began his career with an exercise of what could be called ‘post-biography’ in a film which, through an intricate combination of fact and fiction, tells the story of an eccentric character, the poet and boxer Arthur Cravan, who mysteriously disappeared in 1918 in the Gulf of Mexico after travelling through Europe and taking part
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in a boxing match in Barcelona against the world heavyweight champion, Jack Johnson. For the film, Cravan vs. Cravan (2002), Lacuesta created the character of another boxer and artist who follows Cravan’s footsteps through all the countries where he stayed before his disappearance. With these three films, Lacuesta engages in a series of practices of excess: an art performance in Africa, the legend of a Hollywood actress in Spain, and the biography of an eccentric individual. On different levels, the films themselves become emotionally excessive. The excess of passion is reflected in them in various ways, such as the intricate structure through which the filmmaker develops Cravan’s biography or by the apparent distance and serenity he employs in the exorbitant African episode. On the other hand, the review of Ava Gardner’s legend is presented through a series of audiovisual arguments allegorizing the fascination that the actress aroused in him and in certain sectors of the country. It can also be asserted that the three films display a didactic motivation mixed with the melodramatic excess associated with the actions depicted. Thus, a tension appears in the three films between the two poles that feed the melodramatic documentary: on one side, the emotional excess and, on the other, a tendency to explain reality by way of the emotions.
Tears are intellectual things When we talk about emotions, we are faced with a varied nomenclature that describes a range of phenomena that are highly diverse even if interrelated as elements of the same emotional machinery. We could initiate an interesting debate here on the differences between sensation and emotion, because melodrama is precisely the overcoming of what is purely sensitive: the cognitive and, to some extent, epistemological overcoming of the sensitive. It is an emotional overcoming that arouses emotions and turns them into a platform of knowledge. Antonio Damasio argues that ‘emotions and reactions are related to the body, feelings to the mind’ (2011: 18), which means that when we talk of a melodramatic documentary that is simultaneously reflective, we are referring to this special type of emotion that constitutes the feelings. This could be the reason why in this kind of documentary excessiveness can also be restrained in its formal aspects and why the disproportion could be the product of a dialectical tension between these and the expectations aroused by a specific content. Because of their interaction, the different emotional levels considered in studies on emotions configure a kind of machinery which, however, does not quite achieve the condition of system due to its laxity. It is rather what we can call an ecological disposition, an emotional ecology. We know that Structuralism and systems theory, each from a different perspective, aim to highlight the underlying structures that organize reality in the form of language, although the concept of language is more literal in Structuralism than in systems theory. However, in both cases the typical linguistic imagination of the twentieth century was present. The linguistic feature of these schemes implied the correlation of all elements of the structure, which were subject to a general law: a variation of any of the elements would modify all the rest. On the other hand, the concept of ecology disclaims the determination of general laws and
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introduces the concept of a field in which elements can enter and exit as freely as they can move within it. They are not a simple accumulation, but a set that allows for different concatenations and therefore produces different discourses depending on the itinerary. Both the individual items and their circumstantial interaction are symptomatic and, therefore, significant, although this type of meaning is neither stable nor definitive; on the contrary, it is subject to constant modifications that come from as many hermeneutic processes. In an emotional ecology, as in any ecologically interrelated field, transformations occur but do not work mechanically, in the sense that they are finite and predictable. Transformations give rise to new ecological situations, new phenomenological relations not necessarily global because they neither modify any of the elements nor nullify the previous situation: they simply open a new horizon. The proposals that Elías León Siminiani has been compiling for years reflect something similar to this concept. These are a series of essay pieces he has grouped under the general title of Conceptos clave del mundo moderno (1998–2009) and in which he has proceeded ironically to examine several characteristics of our society through an audio-visual discourse which, as it progresses, creates new perspectives on that society and the elements that compose it. Each of the pieces — La oficina, El permiso, Digital, Tránsito — explores a region of the American dream, that is, of its imaginary, and therefore becomes a small emotional ecology in which objects, rituals, and customs lose the nexus that held them to a culturally established landscape, and establish new relationships to their environment and to the viewer. The world’s surface loses consistency in this operation and the emotional mechanisms, previously concealed, suddenly emerge. The American dream is revealed as an authentic dreamlike state in which condensation and displacement, typical mechanisms of dreams, have emotionally subverted the real. Siminiani appeals to irony when examining the American dream, but his irony is related to specific aspects of American society represented audiovisually. Thus, irony itself becomes a subjective chisel that shapes images, revealing meanings hidden by the veil of everyday life, by the indifferent gaze that comes along. We could say that affects work here in the way Brian Massumi explains: ‘affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in the actually existing, particular things that embody them’ (1995: 96). The melodramatic action pushes the affective quality of the events to the surface, preparing them to be contrasted with a rational perspective that, nevertheless, is not free of emotions. Even if ‘feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal’ (Shouse, 2005: 1), in documentary melodrama all of them are entangled in a web of relationships across which the personal and the subjective, the social and the unconscious, circulate. According to Richard Wolheim, emotions are states of mind governed by mental dispositions (1999: 2). In this sense, the melodramatic documentary stages mental states, that is, it produces image-emotions ready to be subjected to critical examination. To resolve this conflict between emotion and reason I will refer to what Martha C. Nussbaum says in her Landscapes of Thought, as it expresses very well what I am proposing: ‘emotions involve judgments relating to important things, assessments in which, by attributing to an external objective relevance for our well-being, we recognize our needy and incomplete nature in the face of portions of the world that
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we do not fully control’ (2008: 43). In other words, and this is the second point I wish to stress, we cannot evaluate reality, we cannot think about it, unless this action is mediated by an emotion. Some contemporary documentary filmmakers seem to believe that only through emotions can we bridge the gap that has opened up between subject and reality, the one represented by the historical avant-gardes through their obsessive process of disfigurement and fragmentation, always in the search of a new awareness which, as the futurists believed, would be post-human. These filmmakers who make emotionally driven documentaries seem to agree that emotions have an epistemological value because they are pathways that allow us to penetrate reality in a broader and deeper way. The gaze, being emotionally invested, ceases to be a scalpel limited to dissecting the world and becomes a device capable of assimilating a set of visible, intelligible, and passionate elements. Melodrama is, in this field, the most precise tool for developing a hermeneutics of what can be called reason-emotion. And it does so by building image-emotions that are loaded with knowledge, and also through a rational-emotional sensibility capable of capturing reality within melodramatic parameters. In this sense, melodrama does not only mean excessiveness (although this characteristic is just one of the consequences of its epistemological work); it also means an emotional distance that allows reason to be exercised without losing the livelihood of emotion.
A geography of emotions Contemporary documentaries are inevitably melodramatic, unless they are specifically related to classical modes. This is not only true in Spain, although it is there where the subjective turn that characterizes the evolution of contemporary documentaries has become more directly melodramatic. But it is also obvious that the post-avantgarde situation in which we find ourselves today means that aesthetic productions contain, to a greater or lesser degree, a didactic aspect: contemporary aesthetics pose epistemological problems because they refer to a reality that is being discovered as if it had never been seen before; a complex reality to be reconsidered, re-thought, from the subjective point of view that is, therefore, emotional. In this sense, the documentary should be regarded as a cinema of thought, thought that does not avoid the emotional, because it either contemplates reality through emotions or presents, represents or exposes reality emotionally. The exhibition project between Víctor Erice and Abbas Kiarostami, sponsored by several institutions (the Centre de Cultura Contemporània de Barcelona [CCCB], La Casa Encendida in Madrid, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris),5 perfectly expresses this mixture of emotion, excess, and didacticism that characterizes the melodramatic mood of many contemporary Spanish documentaries. Similar characteristics can be encountered in Patino’s Espejos en la niebla or in the recycling of his own work that he presented in installations such as Paraísos (2006). In this work, Patino manipulates the images of his earlier films by overlapping them or framing them with neo-theatrical devices, thereby performing an exercise of melodramatisation on them in an effort to draw out what their original realism had been hiding. 5
See the article by Jordi Balló and Ivan Pintor in this issue.
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In both cases, there is a display of identity through visual elements arranged in unexpected ways. The method becomes a style, and subjects are revealed through an external network, a spatial dispersion composed of rooms, cubicles, projections, video monitors, windows, frames, and so on, all of them visualizing the self by means of a series of audiovisual folds. In a similar way, certain works by one of Spain’s most radical documentary filmmakers, María Cañas, constitute the linear version of this kind of unfurling which could be called ‘architectonic’, since it shows a peculiar architecture of the self. Some of Cañas’s documentary offerings display a formal disposition appropriate to the depiction of a reality that reveals its stratified structure in contrast to the superficial idea that essentially empirical views have of this reality. Her use of archive images and the collages she makes with them place her within the sector of the found footage documentary filmmakers, although her use of this footage is clearly emotional and extreme. In a series of small pieces such as Love is the Devil (2007), Kiss the Fire, The Choir of the Black Soul (2007), and Kiss the Murder (2008),6 this filmmaker repeatedly explores the territory of the documentary melodrama through collages of emotionally charged images; to be precise, through the use of image-emotions extracted from fiction films mostly belonging to the genre of melodrama. What in art installations constitutes a deployment of emotional spaces becomes in Cañas’s film collages a refolding of these spaces to create image-emotion layers that rhythmically play with one another.
The uncanny and the sublime It seems obvious that, as Shouse suggests, the viewers’ relationship with almost any kind of documentary is frequently emotional, something which, in any case, defines the link they establish with films in general. Melodramatic documentaries are always based on emotions and, moreover, they function by formally exacerbating emotions. Nevertheless, the intention expressed or implied by the filmmaker is not so much to elicit emotions as to expose reality, in its various aspects, through image-emotions that are able to highlight certain aspects of that reality. In this sense, it could be said that emotions work, paraphrasing Derrida, as a supplement of the supplement. If, as Derrida’s interpretation of Rousseau implies, culture, writing, and image are devices that respectively supplement the shortages of nature, speech, and things (Derrida, 1976: passim), then it could be argued that the melodramatic gesture in general is a supplement of the supplement. Derrida adds that, in fact, rather than addressing the shortcomings, what these supplements really do is contribute to the purity of the original. Melodrama could then be considered the true supplement that would defamiliarize the initial proposals of nature, speech, and things. This would be the basis on which the didactic trend of melodramatic documentaries would arise. Let us take, for example, Erice’s autobiographical film La Morte Rouge (2006), made to accompany the aforementioned Erice/Kiarostami exhibition. In this film, the director recalls his childhood in relation to a film belonging to the classical Sherlock Holmes series, The Scarlet Claw (Roy William Neill, 1944), which had particularly touched him. The autobiographical narrative, which includes a documentary vision 6
All titles are originally in English.
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of San Sebastian and film footage and photographs of post-civil war Spain, is thus mediated by another film considered more a terror film than a simple thriller. The film images, accompanied by the director’s voice, are charged with a terrifying sensation without ever losing their documentary status or their didactic tendency. Melodrama defamiliarizes reality because it pushes it toward excessiveness: it seems that there is too much reality visually represented in documentary films, but only because emotions give them an extra epistemological layer. What this kind of films promotes is a melodrama of representation. And what is excessive is not only the anecdote, the story, or the gestures as an expression of the passions, but, especially, the represented reality itself. In this sense, certain contemporary Spanish documentary filmmakers try to understand society and themselves in new and more powerful ways, thereby joining a more universal aesthetic trend that may represent a major breakthrough in the way we consider realism.
Bibliography Damasio, A. 2011. En busca de Spinoza. Barcelona: Destino. Derrida, J. 1976. Of Grammatology. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Massumi, B. 1995. The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, 31, ‘The Politics of Systems and Environments, Part II’: 83–109. Nussbaum, M. C. 2008. Paisajes del pensamiento. La inteligencia de las emociones. Barcelona: Paidós. Smaill, B. 2010. The Documentary. Politics, Emotion, Culture. Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan. Shouse, E. 2005. Feeling, Emotion, Affect. M/C Journal, 8(6) [online] [accessed 12 June 2013]. Available at: Sloterdijk, P. 2013. You Must Change Your Life. Cambridge: Polity Press. Wolheim, R. 1999. On the Emotions. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Entre las transformaciones que el cine documental ha experimentado con la llegada del final del siglo XX debido a su giro hacia lo subjetivo, la menos esperada podría ser la emergencia de los documentales melodramáticos. Este subgénero ha sido particularmente significante en el campo del documental contemporáneo español. En general esta tendencia se caracteriza por el uso de las emociones no sólo como un factor estético sino también hermenéutico. En el cine español esta estética hermenéutica de las emociones puede ser detectada en trabajos de algunos cineastas, como es el caso de Joaquín Jordà, José Luis Guerin, María Cañas, Isaki Lacuesta, Elías León Seminiani, Andrés Duque y Víctor Erice. En sus films se promueve un impulso paradójicamente melodramático, que es paradójico por el hecho de que el documental tradicional, también llamado ‘cine de lo real’, ha sido ese campo del audiovisual que más distante se ha mantenido de las emociones y de la subjetividad. La exploración de este fenómeno permite entender la transformación del documental contemporáneo, al tiempo que propone un innovador concepto de realismo y motiva la investigación de las relaciones entre imagen, emoción y conocimiento. palabras clave documental, melodrama, documental español, hermenéutica, conocimiento, realismo, emociones
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Notes on contributor Josep M. Catalá is Professor of Audiovisual Communication at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and researches on the following topics: complex image, contemporary documentary film, film essay, interface theory. He has published the following books in recent years: La imagen compleja (2005), La forma de lo real (2008), Pasión y conocimiento: el nuevo realismo melodramático (2009), La imagen interfaz (2010), and El murmullo de las imágenes: imaginación, documental y silencio (2012). Correspondence to: Dr Josep M. Catalá, Plaça Cívica, 08193 Bellaterra (Cerdanyola del Vallès), Spain. Email:
[email protected]
