Fiction and Documentary
I am no longer interested in making commercial films. I want to do something
else and the most important part of my work is finding somebody to help
me identify and invent a different figure. In this sense my work is "anti
film". I am not interested in the acting capabilities of any one
person, I’m not bothered about what a person can do because I believe
that people are capable of everything and anything. What I look for is
a personality that is a bit different, a unique sensibility which I feel
is present in someone. This inner life and the atmosphere I create in
order to bring it to light are the two means I use to achieve emotion
on film. It is an organic, structured dramatisation, and, by the way,
organic in a specifically Russian sense. Within our culture, energy that
rises to the surface is something terrifying, and one really ought not
to show it. In all of my films I have attempted to preserve this organic
situation, out of a sense of respect for those with whom I work. One should
not forget that the actors will also see the film and nobody wants to
see a terribly demonstrative image of themselves. I don’t want the
people I have workd with to come up to me in a few years time and say:
"But why on earth did you do all that?" Professionally speaking
I don’t have any problems any more, I understand my job and that
is why I have developed alternative methods. Basically, I don’t worry
about the film, I work with people I trust and do my best not to disappoint
them.
Alexander Sokurov. Cahiers du cinema n. 442, 1991.
(Transl. Aissé de Bonneval)
Waiting for the tears gas
"How do we invent our lives out of a limited
range of possibilities, and how are our lives invented for us by those
in power?" As I have already suggested, if these questions are asked
only within the institutional boundaries of elite culture, only within
the "art world", then the answers will be merely academic. Given
a certain poverty of means, this art aims toward a wider audience, and
toward considerations of concrete social transformation. […]
A political critique of the documentary genre is sorely needed. Socially
conscious American artists have much to learn from both the successes
and the mistakes, compromises and collaborations of their Progressive
Era and the New Deal predecessors. How do we assess the close historical
partnership of documentary artists and social democrats? How do we assess
the relation between form and politics in the work of the more progressive
Worker’s Film and Photo League? How do we avoid a kind of aestheticized
political nostalgia in viewing the work of the 1930s? And how about the
co-optation of the documentary style by corporate capitalism (notably
the oil companies and the television networks) in the late 1940s? How
do we disentangle ourselves from the authoritarian and bureaucratic aspects
of the genre, from its implicit positivism? (All of this is evidenced
in any one second of an Edward R. Murrow or a Walter Cronkite telecasts.)
How do we produce an art that elicits dialogue rather than uncritical,
pseudo-political affirmation?[…]
The most intimate, human-scale relationship to suffer mystification in
all this is the specific social engagement that results in the image:
the negotiation between photographer and subject in the making of a portrait,
the seduction, coercion, collaboration, or rip off. But if we widen the
angle of our view, we find that the broader institutional politics of
elite and "popular" culture are also being obscured in the romance
of the photographer as artist.
Allan Sekula, European Photography, n.2, fall
1999-winter 2000
