SEO Dong-jin, Professor of the Department of Intermedia Art at Kaywon University of Art & Design

 

1.

What kinds of influence would the ontological turn—a reputation winner of contemporary philosophy for the last 10 years or so—exert upon documentary films? Is this question too impetuous? Or would is it just another marginal question that is something rather pleasant to dwell on for those who would like to focus on criticism or theory? To dismiss the question as random, with the sensation that the films, and especially the visual ones have brought to major art exhibitions is impossible. Recently, it has become more and more frequent for me to run into pieces asserting that their sources of inspiration were ontological philosophy, as if offering some advice to spectators who otherwise fail to recognize their motivation. For instance, a visual piece that I came across at the 2016 Gwangju Biennale put a brazen emphasis on its inspiration from OOO (Object-Oriented Ontology). Marie Kølbæk Iversen’s piece “Mirror Therapy” is another example.

Meanwhile, Anton Vidokle, the leader of e-flux, a leading art criticism web journal, presented a similar work at the Gwangju Biennale. He and his associated artists are preoccupied in illuminating the mysterious materialistic thought that prevailed in the Russian Revolution in the early 20th century while being crazy about the cosmism, an all but sudden resurrection. He submitted The Communist Revolution Was Caused By The Sun, the second installment of his cosmist trilogy for exhibition. His work traces and replays a new cosmist imagination as if resonating with the arguments of radical geologists or ecologists today, who contend the end of Holocene and the arrival of Anthropocene in reference to the helio-biology hypothesis of Russian cosmist scientist Alexander Chizhevsky. Cosmism is a peculiar and attractive Russian idealistic movement in which socialism, mysticism, science, etc. are blended. This quasi-philosophical ontology, developed almost a century ago by Russian thinker Nikolai Fedorov and his fellow philosophers, eccentric scientists, and revolutionaries, charms lots of artists today. This ontology seeks an escape to a new civilization through ontological breakthrough, instead of transitioning to socialism with the aid of shifting modes of production.

In addition, the forgotten fountainhead of radical ontology was rediscovered by Mackenzie Wark, who made his name in situationist aesthetics with his English translation of the major works of Alexander Bogdanov, a Russian legendary Machist philosopher. Bogdanov was a kind of heretical philosopher who pushed Marxism into materialist ontology while compounding Machist philosophy and Marxism. Lenin leveled a harsh criticism on Bogdanov’s Empiriomonism: Articles on Philosophy in his notorious philosophical writing, Materialism and Empirio-criticism. But now is the time when Bogdanov seems to be more attractive than Lenin, and Engels, who was obsessed with dialectics of nature, is more dashing than Marx. It would surely be amazing for those who tried to separate Marx’s critical materialism from Engel’s mechanical approach.

In the meantime, I came across the unusual documentary Rat Film at the 2017 Jeonju International Film Festival. The director claims this film to be a documentary, and in the credit list of the film festival’s program book, it is categorized as a documentary film. But if you are familiar with recent trends of film scenes, you might want to categorize this film as an essay film. When considering the provocation of essay films’ disapproval on the separation between fiction and documentary, or fiction and non-fiction, this film deviates from conventional documentary films in many ways. Seemingly, this film adopts a wide range of conventional documentary styles using anthropological research, referencing historical archives and scientific experiments, as well as on-site recording of everyday lives, etc. Director Theo Anthony presents a film lacking nothing to fit in its entirety into the documentary genre. However, there is still hesitation to classify this film as a documentary. In the program book for the 2017 Jeonju International Film Festival, Jang Byungwon, a programmer of the Jeonju International Film Festival wrote that “The film also becomes a documentary about class, as the records of infection in Baltimore are revealed and the underlying class issues raised. The monotonous narration is reminiscent of Werner Herzog, but the unique style is closer to the essays of Harun Farocki and Chris Marker” (Program book of the 2017 Jeonju International Film Festival, p. 214).

 

2.

In essence, it is a film that succeeds in documentary films’ tradition, but gets close to an essay. Here we explain what segregates and converges the boundaries of documentary and essay at once. There is, however, no clear picture of what the rhetoric of ‘a documentary, yet close to an essay’ designates. At first, it sounds as if something called an “essay film” is the result of ambiguous dissatisfaction with documentary films. This kind of assumption or hypothesis is based on the idea that there is some independent form of film or documentary, and another form like an essay, but not a distinct form inside the documentary genre, or essay-formed documentary, and films could fluctuate between these two forms. This segregation practice invites a negative distance between documentary and essay from the beginning. That is, an essay is different from a documentary, but the differences here are not so simple as the difference between apple and orange. It appears in somewhat mutual negatory relationships.

This movement toward essay must have been built upon a certain foundation. There might be many explanations for this background, but ‘post-truth,’ which was selected as the 2016 word of the year by Oxford dictionary, is our first and the most convenient guess. This announces the arrival of a horrid world in which no one is interested in truth, and more palatable information is preselected for consumption. In this context, any controversies on the relationships between documentary and fiction, fiction and non-fiction, fabricated narrative and objective fact, would not be an issue if such controversies are only sustained on the common grounds that truth does exist and it should exist. Such arguments, thus, are considered stories of a good old past when people would quarrel over what the cinematic truth should be, while also probing in what direction the wind of truth blows. Now truth-turned-unconvertible draft seems to be an idea for which only some paranoiac maniacs would wait.

Not long ago, a general programming cable channel JTBC grabbed viewers’ interests with a somehow meta-critical section called as ‘Fact Check’ in its prime-time news shows, which broadcasts news focusing on the criticism over fake news. This unusual format of news on news ostracizes the absolute myth that news presents facts that happened, and throws satire during an age when news itself is constantly adjudicated for its own authenticity. The interest on this objective facticity antiquates the heated debates on the malaise of fact-worshipping positivist ideology. The positivist contention that nothing can’t be verified objectively in the real world has created interesting controversies when faced with the criticism that nothing is clear whether it is an object or a fact. When we come to think of the emergence of a concept, or ‘alternative fact,’ however, we cannot help but be more alarmed at the values of fact or truth that are ruined beyond any of our recuperative efforts. This concept became public through heated discussions on the mass media about the reports of the presidential inauguration of Donald Trump. A column in a Korean newspaper provided its own report on this issue as below:

“It all started with the presidential inauguration photo of Barack Obama in 2009 with that of Donald Trump in comparison, released by Reuters. The venue of Obama’s inauguration was densely filled with crowds, but Trump’s inauguration venue was sparsely crowded. The press announced Trump’s presidency as the most unpopular presidency starting with the lowest approval rate using these photos for their basis. But Sean Spicer, White House Press Secretary had a briefing where he said that ‘Inauguration had largest audience ever,’ and the media refuted this briefing, all at once, arguing that White House Press Secretary lied about inauguration. However, the explanation of White House backfired a bigger controversy when during an interview conducted on a NBC network program U.S. Counselor to the President Kellyanne Conway explained that Spicer gave alternative facts. When pressed by the host to explain the reason of false briefing, she came up with a peculiar term, or ‘alternative facts.’ The Washington Post commented that this kind of conduct would be a strategy to cover up the fact by making a fire of fury, and it, in this precise sense, has something in common with ‘post-truth.’ And post-truth designates a situation in which emotions, or the subjective beliefs hold greater influences on public opinion than the fact.” – (Financial Times, Jan. 25, 2017, p. 31)

If this is the way the world works, there is no space left for documentaries, and we might guess that a fateful menace is pressing documentaries whose ethical and aesthetical beliefs are based on the calling of ‘we are to deliver truth.’ But that is just an overstatement.

 

3.

Rat Film spreads out stories on rats based on the city of Baltimore. The film mentions the history of racial and class segregation conducted in Baltimore while suggesting, or referring to the terror over malaise—or the terror over notorious pest—caused by rodents, or rats in this case. However, it feels like that there is something important missing about the way this film unfolds in this summary. If this film is to deliver such segregation practices, it would be enough to relay and deliver the voices of Afro-American labor class who are excluded from the Caucasian groups who enjoy more comfortable lives due to a geographical and political trick of exclusion called zoning. The film, instead, evades a convenient and metaphorical treatment of rats, or disgusting and parasitic animals, as Afro-American, low-class people, which would otherwise portray black-white conflicts, as a substitute for class conflicts. The voiceover in the film spares some places for every impersonal object emerging on the screen as well as for humans.

The director puts up numerous things as subjects of enunciation in the film. The subjects could be rats, blueprints, or scientific experiments, or a pest control operator, or a person whose biggest joy is to play with rats. The encounter with this film is an escape from the ongoing convention of documentary films, or the usual conviction that everything occurs within the segregating line between human and the rest of the world, and the subjects who can have any experiences about the world cannot be anything but humans. The film discreetly delivers certain messages in which the right to speak up needs to be provided to objects as well as human-subjects, and the world is not just intertwined with the relationships between subjects, or human and objects, or facts of humans, but is in motion among infinite objects that mix and alternate with one another. In addition, these messages suggest the exact realization of an ideological desire that the philosophy after the new ontological turn never tried to accomplish.

When we experience reality through virtual media, as Rat Film suggests, we supplement and expand experiences through those mediated by some technological apparatus, rather than experience the world as human subjects. For instance, the experience of movement in urban space does not build a direct relationship between me and the space, but produces a virtual one created in the mixture of technological and visual media, such as roads, automobile, GPS, monitor, etc. If we think deeply on this issue, this type of virtual experience is not just limited to the practice of recognition and experience onto outer reality via today’s cutting-edge 3D simulation monitors or goggles. Those practices are the repetition and expansion of something that has been executed for a long time now. There have been methods to virtualize ways of recognizing and experiencing space—urbanization and urban planning projects, as well as scientific measurements, research, and experiments to facilitate those projects. New technologies of information and telecommunication, such as so-called internet of things, big data, etc. are not totally different from those technologies and apparatuses devised from demography, statistics, biology, etc. They are surely the repetition of old school technology.

If we keep tracing the virtuality of experiences in this manner, humans can be reduced to objects equipped with recognition and experience abilities, and these objects have always been the equivalent subjects to human over the left. Rat Film affirms that there is no room for documentaries covering the world of human subjects anymore. The documentaries representing human subjects as ones leading desiccated and drifting lives—and not as objects—are declared old fashioned by this film. By the time our thoughts have taken us this far, we put ourselves some distance from the political line regarding on documentaries, which designates documentaries as practices of ‘critique’ to expose subjective truths existing beyond the world of materialized lives under the capitalist world, and beyond the status of reified humans, or human becoming objects.

In this sense, relationships between essay films and documentaries are revitalized. One of the common notions regarding the concept of essay is that it is a form of writing in which one can express its own utterly private subjectivity. Godard, who likes to call himself as an essayist, once commented that cinema is “thinking form, and formalizing thought” in his History of Cinema. This somehow trite comment might be considered a remark on his materialistic creed on cinema as he asserts that cinema itself is the subject. In other words, cinema is not a tool to express ideology or opinion, but cinema itself is the thought, and it formalizes the thought. Following this idea, cinema does not need any other subjects beyond cinema except its images and sounds. There is no need for characters to offer explanations and regulate images outside the frame or within the frame. Cinema transforms itself into an impersonal subject, and addresses us. Hereby, we are fully capable of approving that the object, or cinema, is in fact, a subject that does not lack anything when compared with human mental activities.

Then, this type of Godardian cinema materialism is something far from the principles of essay films. Among various opinions on the characteristics of essay films, one of the most favored definitions is the presence of personal author’s voice. Voiceover is the most familiar example, and written texts inserted on the screen belong to this category. This kind of author intervention and participation is also one of the characteristics of films directed by Chris Marker; his work is considered a model of essay films. The subjective impulses of essay films, which regard its pinnacle the exposure of private subjectivities, are far from the critical documentaries that assume audiences of collective subjects, and demand self-reflection onto audiences based on the reality presented and fabricated on the screen. This shift might be caused by the circumstances in which the decline of utopian politics after the breakdown of real socialism failed to locate liberating subjects, such as those of socialist movements or national liberation movements in the past. The private subjectivity presented in essay films, then, would be an indicator of a certain sense of defeat, which is impossible in other worlds.

If documentary films are aiming to construct resistant human subjects who are critical of reality regardless of their class, gender, or nationality, while exploring the possibility of another experience and representation, it is quite plausible to argue that essay films are re-inviting subjects in a world where there are no such subjects, or they become debilitated. Those subjects, of course, would not be the same as in the past. These subjects are not the ones standing against the reality, but just poorly demoted ones living in his or her world where almost everything is subject.
Commonly, in animal documentary TV shows, animals speak to audiences through dubbed voices; popsicles, dishes, pencils, etc. features in natural history documentaries that dissect the histories of things, also get talkative about their lives as if they have been through hardships like those of humans. We already arrived in a world where everything is subject without too much resistance.

In this context, we might be able to reverse the usual assumptions on essay films. Would essay films be not a new cinematic approach to reveal private subjectivity, but a post-documentary one to approve a certain escape impulse from the personal and social human-subject that documentaries have always earmarked as their premise? We just cannot foresee this yet.

A turn occurred with the decline of anticipation that has fallen upon social humans, the subject of revolution and resistance, and the places of subjectivities can now be arranged to machines, information, animals, natural things, etc.—for this sort of turn, philosophy would call it as ontological one. Documentaries would not to be relieved to be an exception for this turn. Rat Film exemplifies this transition, and it drew favorable responses from many audiences. Now we are going to have a chance to take a look at transition we are approaching, and what kinds of impact it would have on the history of documentary films.