Downcast Eyes Reality TV
On Documentary

This text belongs to the video Downcast Eyes Reality TV that I produced as my final work for my BA at the Amsterdam Rietveld Art Academy, exhibited in late June 2023.
Downcast Eyes Reality TV is an experimental documentary or an essay film using auto-ethnographic techniques. The film deals with makers that use documentary methodologies in their work. Between the spring of 2022 and the spring of 2023, I recorded ten interviews with artists that work in this field in Amsterdam, Dakar and Berlin.

I started working on this topic as I needed to know how to negotiate the position of the maker in relation to the power of the lens. My own lens. I needed to question my chosen framing and focus, especially when filming people, faces, bodies, and communities. Most of the topics I wanted to work with represented a realm outside of my geographic and familiar sphere, and I realized this posed a pretty serious problem. I wondered if documentary practices outside of my intimate self were even still possible in the contemporary political climate, or under which conditions they were allowed to exist. My initial intention was thus to figure out the difference between intrigue and fetishization, and what subjects are available to makers while other subjects are off limits. I think the space these questions came from was a space of indignation, because I realized I did not want to only work with subjects close to me in my intimate sphere. I am interested in how norms adapt quickly and quietly, sometimes for the better, often for the worse. And to investigate norms, one must look outside of oneself as well. The problem I found with the act of looking outside oneself is that it involves so many rules and regulations.

The act of looking, observing, and gazing implies a certain political positioning and functions as a filter and mirror at the same time. I cannot merely look around and process what I notice. I am a political entity that, for better or worse, carries the weight of my history, race, position, and my mothers’ liberalism on my shoulders. So the eye is political; how I look, what I look at and what I see. The intimate gaze becomes the public gaze and an inherently political one.

(This is a premise that I accept, although I still fantasize there is a core in all of us that allows for depoliticized and soulful interaction. I would like to think that some art can be, if it so wishes, an unmediated and free sphere. Or perhaps the best works are those that combine both the unmediated and soulful within a larger political momentum.) 

Anna Ehrenstein told me in an interview with her: “There is a liberal left that only makes art that deals with its own identity and it gets boring and everybody is tired.” But the alternative seemed thorny. I wondered, who I could work with? How far could I diverge from my profile in collaborations and art projects? I wondered if I was limited to other female art students in their mid-twenties. Other Europeans? Other Slovenian-Americans? My friends and family and country? How could I potentially make documentaries or investigate changing norms and urban/digital scapes that weren’t anchored in my place of origin without fetishizing and extracting knowledge? 
I wondered if I could look outside of myself and my sphere. I wondered what were the ways to start working with topics that I don’t know that well, new spaces and communities I want to know more about, without taking advantage and gaining power with my gaze. I wondered if I could gaze without othering. 

I wanted to see if it was possible to use documentary as a method for learning and exploring and pursuing my curiosities, as a method of access, because my curiosity is the only driving force behind my creative or intellectual attempts. I would go so far as to say that curiosity is the only driving force behind my getting out of bed every morning. I have this urge to explore. And then I found out that the word “explore” itself has a colonial connotation. A friend informed me about this and I laughed. I looked it up and it is true, it makes sense. So I won’t use the verb explore anymore. I want to find an alternative word, a non-colonial version, but making up new words is hard. Every neutral sound I make is caught in a sticky web of lexical semantics packed with history. There are no neutral, innocent concepts. 

(Think of Googling, for instance. If you are curious about something, you will most probably use the Macintosh alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer, the web browser Safari. If you consider the name and its function, Safari has unavoidable colonial connotations of exploring, observing, and conquering.)

The answers I found to a lot of my questions were often related to context and respect. If you correctly contextualize your curiosity, you can create however you wish. With the help of authors such as Susan Sontag and Ariella Azoulay – who both write about photography, power relations, and the civil contracts that bind the documenter, the subject and the eventual viewer of the photograph or video – my awareness of the ethics involved in the act of exploration and curiosity deepened. 

Contemporary theorists such as Stanley Wolukau-Wanambwa and Mark Sealy guided and shaped my understanding of political identity, race, and the right of access to cultural narratives. Another pleasant discovery was Irmgards Emmelhainz, who, in her essay Beyond Identity showed me I was not crazy, misguided or essentially conservative for questioning these narrow principles of reach and access. My intuition dictates that it must be possible and even wonderful to work with subjects outside of my intimate and inherently narrow, localized sphere. How else can one possibly widen one’s horizon? And then there is Hito Steyerl, who, in her book The Color of Truth, wrote of these same questions ten years ago in connection with documentary methodologies in contemporary fine art and film. It seems to be a pestering question of representation, access, and truth. 

So naturally, the conversations I was having and the things I was reading took a gradual spiral from the relationship with the artist’s chosen subject and this political sphere of representation and documenting towards something more intangible, more to do with the nature of truth and reality. Truth itself has a Western colonial ring to it, with all its observing, quantifying, categorizing and the absolute final wrapped-up version of events. 
The opacity of truth found in documentary methodologies was what many of my collaborators said they found most interesting. The intimate, subjective filter was often used as a way of accentuating this opacity. Precisely the inherent incapability of the truth is exciting if not used for nefarious purposes of political propaganda and wider narrative control. “You have to accept and assume that something is autonomous,” I was told by Zachary Formwalt. I should always acknowledge the autonomy and independence of the subject I try to frame. No wonder documentary is dead, never to return in its original form. Autonomous, rather. Amsterdam-based artist Francisca Khamis should be credited with her explanation: “It’s also just a document of the specific moment, and that specific moment is always a chosen moment. You choose the frame and that’s already a decision, and in that there is a personal willingness of the framing, and that’s not real in the end, because the reality is this,” gesturing with hands spread wide, “and I choose this,” narrowing her hands until they are almost touching.

A documentary can never be more than a document of a moment and a gaze, even if it relies on quantitative data. The interaction between the truth, the moment, and the gaze almost must be played with. I think rather than showing the actual subject I want to film, I am showing the relationship between the moment it is filmed, my gaze that frames it, and the truth that it presents. 

The subtle and purposeful integration of fiction into reality begins to take place as an expression of a subjective point of view, and a method of hiding in plain sight; so subtle you are not completely sure what is what. To accept and accentuate the fiction in any factual narrative of research is a method of bending reality and claying it, playing. I sense a deep, tugging undercurrent of how fundamental the weaving of fiction and factual narratives is towards new world-building, but also old-world deconstructing. The integration of fictional angles in the presentation of non-fiction is more than incompatible, it is more than an experimental tool of contemporary documentary-making. It is a method for mutability and divergent world augmentation.