AMY HARDIE reviews Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film, by Agniezka Piotrowska…
IT is a strange proposition: why would you allow someone you hardly know, to make a doppelganger, a simulacrum, a weird double, of your likeness? And then manipulate your image and words to fit their own agenda?
Agniezka Piotrowska – in her book, Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film – illuminates the oddness of the ‘contract’ between director and the human subject that lies at the heart of documentary filmmaking, bringing the tools of psychoanalysis, case studies and auto-ethnography to unpack what she calls the ‘dark art of documentary making’.
She suggests that the documentary’s subject, its main character or protagonist, is motivated by the pleasure and intensity of the encounter with the listening filmmaker.
Documentary protagonists are seduced, she says, through their “yearning for recognition”.
And, as the dialogue between filmmaker and protagonist builds, she argues that a key process in psychoanalysis, transference, takes place.
Drawing heavily on Dolar and Lacan as well as Freud, she argues that this process of transference is inevitable as the “analyst becomes the analysand’s object of unconscious desire as he or she presents himself in an embodied presence, ready to fill the analysand’s desire for love”.
Piotrowska says that the documentary proganoist is seduced by the pleasure of being heard, seen, and yet the outcome is often feeling betrayed. The person on the screen, which looks exactly like you, uses your voice, is somehow a betrayal of self: a doppelganger pressed into service of someone else’s story, with a hidden puppeteer pulling the strings: the documentary director.
Piotrovska is at her most compelling when she writes from her own experience as a documentary director.
She shares the motivations and tensions caused by making documentaries as a living, the need for the ‘story’ and the pressures of the commissioning editors and the audiences, noting how they impact on the developing relationship with the protagonist.
It is a series of pressures the protagonist remains unaware of, and, in this sense, the director is holding back information that is actually directing their relationship. It is unequal, as is the relationship between therapist and client, but in the case of the documentary director, the person holding the power and receiving the secret confidences of the ‘client’ does not have a therapeutic agenda – they simply need the protagonist to tell a story they can sell in the media marketplace.
It is a stinging depiction of the encounter between filmmaker and their client/protagonist.
Piotrovska’s marshalls case studies, including Lanzmann’s Shoah, Kieslowksi’s Camera Buff, Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, and Piotrovska’s own ‘The Conman with 14 wives‘ to show how the protagnist can be betrayed.
She brings perspectives from Lacan, Butler, Badiou, Derrida and Kant to illuminate the complexity of that filmmaker/subject encounter. Discussions of transference, the unconscious, the violence in ‘making speak’, simulacrum, or doppelganger, the camera gaze masquerading as truth are unpacked within a Levinasian framework of responsibility for the other.
Her conclusions are stark: “I therefore declare the quest for the truth in documentary encounters a possible ‘simulacrum’, and instead advocate a collaborative effort of creating true fictions that people we make films about can live with.”
I am impressed by Piotrovska’s conceptual excavation of her and other’s process of creating a story using real people. Her careful articulation of academic and psychotherapeutic processes that underlie that encounter is illuminating. And she has grasped a genuine danger in documentary filmmaking.
Should we then generalise that the encounter between protagonist and director as one of violence and betrayal?
She is right to argue that documentary has the potential to cause feelings of hurt and anger, and right again, to identify the encounter between director and protagonist as central to that potential. But this is a little like saying that brutal divorces prove that romantic love is intrinsically dangerous and high risk, and so we should avoid it. Of course it is high risk – it is also one of our most meaningful drivers of personal happiness, art and human growth.
It is an odd omission that Piotrovska ignores the many instances when that power of the documentary encounter is used to create reflection, beauty and audience identification with a protagonist where the protagonist feels heard, seen and appreciated. It is this creative potential that lies behind the work of documentary in conflict negotiation, for instance in the films of conciliation – here – that have been made in Azerbaijan, Nagorny Karabakh and Armenia.
It is this potential that gets tapped when documentaries change unjust social hegemony – for instance, in Franny Armstrong’s McLibel and Drowned Out. Indeed, when that documentary encounter utilises the transference between protagonist and director, the camera can mirror the protagonist who can see and value themselves through an other’s eyes.
As a documentary maker working for the Maggie’s Centres and in a hospice, that is certainly my experience and my aim. I would welcome Piotrovska’s elucidation of the positive aspects of the power of the documentary encounter: after such a lucid and thorough explication, her conclusions seem hasty and oddly one-sided.
Nevertheless, I commend this book for her diligent articulation of the complex involvement of filmmakers with their subjects.
Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film is a potent addition to the growing library of research through practice, yielding new and illuminating insights that can contribute to an increasingly sophisticated understanding of knowledge.
Title: Psychoanalysis and Ethics in Documentary Film
Author: Agniezka Piotrowska.
Publisher: Routledge
Date of publication: September 2013
Price: £29.99
ISBN number: 978-0-415-81349-5
Buy the book here or here (Kindle edition).
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Amy Hardie is head of research at the Scottish Documentary Institute.
