(Harmony Korine’s video acceptance speech at CPH:DOX, via Michael Tully)
Four weeks and four festivals, each blearily backing into the next. Its Day 1 at IDFA, but I’m still chewing on CPH:DOX, like those tough, salty, delicious Danish licorice that linger.
CPH:DOX director Tine Fischer summed up the the goals of her event smartly in remarks at the festival’s closing ceremony. They, CPH:DOX, are striving to “create more space for documentaries.” The Copenhagen festival covered the usual ways of creating such space in their Forum, the focus of which was both traditional and “out of the box” distribution strategies. But most festivals have such discussions these days, almost to the point of overkill. Where CPH:DOX most boldly opens the spaces for how we conceptualize and categorize documentary is in their curatorial approach. Only here would Harmony Korine’s TRASH HUMPERS win the DOX:AWARD for, well, we assume best “documentary.”
Michael Tully has a great wrap here, as does Allison Willmore here, and there are comments on the awards here and here.
The answer to the question of whether TRASH HUMPERS is or isn’t a documentary is immaterial to me. The point is can the work support the question, does it wedge itself into that shrinking gap between conventional documentary and drama? This is the most interesting space in current cinema and, top-of-head, some of my favourite work of the past year – BIG RIVER MAN, THE SOUND OF INSECTS, ENJOY POVERTY, THE RED CHAPEL – exists here. Why shouldn’t documentary festivals claim it, even if that means offending “the truth of accountants,” as Herzog put it.
Are we assuming a visually illiterate audience that is unnable to navigate their way through the consciousness and cues of a given work? In fact, I would argue that films like TRASH HUMPERS and 77 DORONSHIP (another off-doc in the DOX competition), are precisely the kinds of filmmaking that are essential to documentary film festivals, provoking and reframing questions of representation.
Early in my programming, um, career I recall Barbara Kopple asking me not to use the word “documentary” in describing her film MY GENERATION. It seemed like a strange request, given that MY GENERATION was very much a conventional documentary. Then I realized it wasn’t that she was challenging the boundaries of the form, it was simply that she didn’t want to be boxed into being a “documentary filmmaker.” In a time when few filmmakers crossed between docs and drama, when “documentary” was still a dreary term to the Industry and audience at large, Kopple was simply wanting to keep her options open.
In the current context many filmmakers move effortlessly between docs, narrative, music videos, commercials, etc….maybe sometimes too effortlessly. Yet, even so, while the term “documentary” has acquired a certain hipness, it remains restrictive in aesthetic terms. Its up to filmmakers, programmers, media and ultimately audiences to ventilate “documentary” as much as possible, to keep all the options open.
Last night, IDFA topper Ally Derks put it another way. In her opening night remarks at the world’s most important documentary festival, Ally used the term “the art of information” to describe the form. While the phrase reflects IDFA’s more traditional core, the emphasis on aesthetic concerns is another cue that many of us, having perhaps seen a new wave crest, are looking for something more, the next level, an expansion of the form, more space.