It’s a bit of a missed opportunity that South Africa’s only festival dedicated to documentary film doesn’t open with Peter Wintonick’s Cinéma Vérité: Defining the Moment, since many issues raised in it are key to the other films being screened.
The first is the question of what a documentary is, or what it sets out to do. For years, “documentary” meant “terminally dull informational film”, which one of Wintonick’s interviewees says were boring because they were lectures.
The development of cameras, which can be carried and operated by one person, with sync sound attached, enabled pioneers of Cinéma Vérité to dispense with scripts and strive to make “uncontrolled cinema”.
Freed from the logic of the lecture, documentaries could instead make use of dramatic logic. On Encounters II, Waiting for Harvey owes much of its dramatic combination of pathos and humour to the fact that the viewer knows that the director has no control over the final outcomes of the four stories. Eddie Edwards’s The Fight uses a similar situation to heighten the audience’s feeling for the young boxer upon whom the film centres. And Hitman Hart presents a section of its gripping climax at its start, then retraces the year prior to it within the atmosphere of great conflict thus created.
The cinéma vérité dictum “shoot first and decide how to structure things later” also highlights the importance of the editing stage of the film-making process. Again, several films on the programme are superb examples of the art of good editing.
South African Henion Han’s Letter to My Cousin in China is exquisitely edited: look out for the beansprouts, and admire the opening montages of still photographs and Han’s father’s Super 8 footage. The superb editing of spoken interview material juxtaposed with carefully selected visuals is also the key to the subtle power of The Hunt. In both these documentaries, one does not once see a “talking head” shot.
Then there is the notion of truth itself in the context of the documentary film. None of the film-makers interviewed by Wintonick, and I would guess, none of the directors whose films are part of Encounters II, believes that they can present objective truth in their work.
Many of the directors draw the audience’s attention to themselves and their position behind the camera. Some do so via the inclusion of their voice asking questions or prompting an interviewee, some by visually including themselves in the film.
Several South African directors (including Rough Ride‘s Dumisani Phakathi, Edwards, and Han) do the latter, in an interesting attempt to highlight the fact that what is being presented to the viewer is the researches and opinions of a single person.
In films such as The Hunt or Made in India, though, such devices are not used. However, Niek Koppen and Patricia Plattner nonetheless manage to provide compelling evidence of the relevance of legendary cameraman Albert Maysles’ argument: if you as film-maker convey complete respect and empathy to the person being filmed, you allow them to simply be themselves. The sensitive manner in which these directors film their subjects means that neither of these exceptional documentaries should be missed.
Sometimes, the camera does function as an invader of peoples’ lives and private spaces, yet they also seem to either trust the documentarian or to simply desire to have their stories told more than they want to preserve their privacy. In this regard, Paul Watson’s A Wedding in the Family makes for particularly interesting viewing.
Most of the film-makers (both South African and international) will be introducing their films during the first week of screenings, and audiences will be able to ask them questions or participate in debate created by the panel discussions
of the films set up by the festival organisers. This will add a stimulating critical dimension to the viewing of this fascinating range of documentaries.
Also included in the programme is a short season of documentaries produced under the auspices of the Close Encounters development iniative that is now in its second year.
The success of last year’s inaugural Close Encounters Laboratory has been phenomenal. Four of 1999’s proposed films were commissioned by e.tv, and critically acclaimed when they were screened earlier this year. Now they have also won three of the top four Documentary Awards at the National Television Association’s Avanti Awards.
The documentaries are notable for their subtle explorations of South African history and reality from the point of view of ordinary people. Instead of a view from above which concentrates on the big dates and important political figures, these films present South African experience from below.
Encounters II is on from June 18 to July 1 at Cinema Nouveau, V&A Waterfront, Cape Town. Programmes are available at
Ster-Kinekor cinemas, at Computicket and online at www.bigworld.co.za/encounters