Documentary Blogging #2

August 6, 2007

A central question in documentary making is that of voice. A large percentage of documentaries are aimed at giving unusual or forgotten characters a voice. The unspoken philosophy is that the audience will be enriched by exposure to a voice (of an individual or a group) they otherwise would never have heard. I agree that there is value in hearing such voices, but I also wonder if that is not a limiting philosophy. In other words: if you rely on people to explain themselves, there will be things you can never learn.

That may sound counterintuitive, so let me explain. A culture is a culture precisely because of its all-encompassing nature. Actions and beliefs have an interrelated logic: "Why do we do this? We do that for such and such a reason." Or we could turn this around: "Why do we believe that? Look at how it makes sense in terms of the way we live." The circular nature of culture means that walking up and asking someone about their beliefs or practices is bound to be problematic. The answers will always be generated from within the cultural system.

It is here that I most feel my comparative literature roots, a department in which it is standard practice to dismiss authorial intention. Those intentions are replaced by a stable of counter-intuitive interpretive methods. Freud, Marx, and later post-structuralist and post-colonial thinkers all worked with strategies that concentrated on elements of the text that the original author would not talk about were we able to quizz him or her.. in fact the author might be drop-jaw surprised at the interpretations that had sprung up around the text.

There is much in my comparative literature background that I dislike.. and one big issue is the proliferation of interpretations with a complete disregard for cultural contexts.. but some of this thinkin has influenced my approach to documentaries. I define my interest as being in the "cultural landscape" of Dearborn.. and my work is to figure out how Islam and Arab American identity work there way into this landscape. My primary questions thus have a certain "meta" edge to them: "How does this mosque fit in to this particular landscape?" The answer to questions like this will often come back fairly bland: "We built it in this year and chose this spot because it was available". But the key, so far as I am concerned, is to recognize that broader cultural patterns are playing out underneath those conscious decisions. My work is to decipher those patterns and then serve up my findings as interpretations. An interview can give me context, but it cannot deliver an interpretation of a place.. which by its nature requires someone standing outside the cultural system.