The smartphone has turned nearly everyone into a photographer.  While sometimes when I think about this, it makes my photos feel insignificant—the process, as a whole, is extremely significant and incredible.  The movement of people capturing nearly every hour of their lives has shaped technology, tourism, photography, and society in such a major way.  I can hop on instagram and look at most of my friends’ visual diaries, see what they were doing last week through their own lens.  More interesting, however, is doing this to myself through the photo gallery on my iPhone and seeing the photos I did not post to facebook or instagram, or show to anyone. 

In scrolling through my images to find something to write about for this assignment, I went back to almost a year ago—when I traveled to Europe.  I spent some time in London and while I was there, stayed with an old friend who lives in East London.   While she was at work, I had a lot of time to walk around the streets of East London and took pictures to keep me company.  I think that’s what people do now.  If you’re alone waiting on someone, if you’re walking by yourself somewhere, if you’re in a bathroom, it’s not unusual to take a picture—of yourself, people or places around you, anything.  In a city that you think of as being busy, with tall red buses, old buildings, the queen, etc., I took the most pictures of simple things—trees, parks, sidewalks, the canal.  I never posted any of them because I wasn’t in any of them.  Most of the things I post to facebook are pictures of me having a good time with friends and family—not a bunch of flowers I saw.

In recalling the moments when I took this photos, I realized that it creates a different image of London.  It seems like a neighborhood; it seems simple; it seems quiet.  I believe that these photos touch on the mode of anthropology, as it studies a certain place of certain people.  Even though there aren’t people shown in these photos, you can tell from them, the types of people that made the imagery happen.  In addition, I feel like it touches on the anthropology of the ease of smartphone photography.  Lastly, I feel that it is slightly autobiographical, as it touches on a personal story.

Performative documentary

The pictures depict a small town girl named Isabel Wenzel who is seemingly independent minded, outgoing, has a passion for travel and exploration of cultures, is fashionable and fitness conscious. The documentary is an onscreen picturization of the transition of this twenty something girl to a free spirited girl who follows her dreams of living it up. In the first picture the subject, boards a train as she sets out on a journey to fulfill her desire of traveling to new places.

As she embarks on this unknown journey, she has mixed feelings of leaving her hometown, family, and all the old memories behind and starting on an unknown yet exciting voyage of exploration and freedom. There are butterflies in her stomach, and the way the filmmaker portrays her naivety, and innocence onscreen, often diverts the subject from her firm intentions and resolute aspirations. The girl is sharp, tenacious, and very adventurous. She seems to have a sinking feeling as she lets go off strings aka her precious family ties, in search of freedom. The scenes seem like reconstructions on the film sets and the subject plays the part of her role as an actor.  Despite this early move into a drama-doc territory, at times shifting towards fiction, the pictures are classified as performative documentary.

The emotions of the free spirited, adventure, loving girl is symbolic of a new generation of young women who live on life on the fast lane. This social group wants to break free from all bondage and constrictions society imposes on them. This is typical of the performative documentary style. In fact, a consistent feature that marks a performative documentary is that of treating a social group as a whole.  In this depiction, the girl Isabel belongs and personifies a social group and performs her story to the filmmaker. Her story is not uncommon to the social group she is a part of. Because she is directing the story to the filmmaker, instead of the filmmaker directing the story to the girl, this type of filmmaking is called a performative documentary.

Performative Documentary always entails direct cinema and is a narration of the story of a subject. Here the camera is up close and personal with the unfolding of the girl Isabel’s personal life, and various events associated with it. The second picture is shot right up on the girl Isabel when she is taking a dip in the cool water of the pool. As the girl travels on her journey of exploration, she lands in the tropical land of South America. Here she soaks herself in the natural beauty, flora of the place, experiments with the local attire, and braces their culture and traditions. These camera shots make the scene look very natural and personal. A refreshing and rejuvenating feeling washes her negative emotions and past scars as she soaks her skin in the fresh waters.

In the third picture, she rediscovers herself and celebrates her new found freedom as she is physically revived and mentally recharged. The burst of happiness and love for life is clearly captured in this picture as she leaves behind all the emotional baggage of the past and is ready to embrace life and fall in love. She looks relaxed and content. This is an example of direct cinema that strikes an emotional chord with the audience. In the last picture, the audience sees Isabel mingling with the indigenous tribal culture of the new place as she decides to make New Mexico her home. The native Americans and Isabel share common traits such as love for antique culture, arts, crafts, dance adventure, community bonding and nomadic living. In the last picture, she is dressed in the authentic Native Indian clothing and is about to perform an Aztec dance with her new found mates. The simplicity of the culture of the Native Americans wins her heart and Isabel’s life is now filled with adventure, love, color, and excitement. As we can see from the above story, Performative documentary is a cool style of documentary filming.

Documentary filmmakers use different modes of representation. The various styles adopted in documentary history has intrigued the audience, made them more insightful about the subject and has altered their expectations about documentary films and their real purpose. 

The style of Reflexive mode constructs the nature of the documentary cinema in a way that it sometimes reconstructs the truth to be able to give a dramatic effect to the viewers about the subject of the documentary. Reflexive mode gives a more realistic picture of the hard facts, depicts not only subjects of historical importance but also highlights the issues pertaining to the representation of the subject and constructing the cinema.

The Performative mode on the other hand, involves emotions and social aspect of the cinema and its impact on the audience.  The performative mode focuses on the subjective matter and eliminates objectivity from the cinema thus altering the interpretation of the subject by the audience.  The two modes of cinema making are similar in a way that they encourage participatory form of interviewing by the filmmakers to gather information about the society.  However, they have a distinct effect of the audience perception about the same subject.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam released in 1992, is a display of reflexive mode of documentary where Trinh portrays Vietnamese women and their culture through historical periods such as childhood, youth, adulthood, old age, rituals, and life events such as marriage, domestic events, and funerals. It is a complex representation of Vietnamese women shown playing important roles in the society with power, status and intimacy and who also hailed from different walks of life. In order to capture the real picture of the Vietnamese culture, off-screen interviews staged in the United States were conducted on actresses. Therefore, the reflexive interviews construct the truth and in many scenes the stages and real overlap to give the audience a perception of reality.

Documentary interviewing captures and frame objective reality of the subjects and presents it in a credible way for audience to have confidence in the facts and testimonies provided by the interviewees. In this film, there is no validity of the filmmaker’s subjective point of view that the audience can get emotionally attached to. Hence, it has a reflexive mode of documentary film making as opposed to the performative style. It is more of a realistic representation of information gathered by interacting with staged interviewees from various social-economic backgrounds sharing the real life experiences of women in post war Vietnam.

In the film, Trinh uses techniques of stopping the cinematic flow, in the end, and interviewing the actors about their experience as scripted interviewees. This helps the audience visualize the complexities of behind the scenes shooting and filming a documentary. Similar to Trinh’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam, in reflexive documentaries, filmmakers are involved in the inner construction of the film, by interviewing scripted actors to represent the truth with no display of any emotional involvement whatsoever. This is unlike performative films that are based on emotions of the filmmaker on the subject  that get passed on to the audience who perceives it as reality.

Through the use of interviewing staged actors, the filmmaker Trinh attempts at readjusting the preconceived opinions and reconstructing the assumptions of the audience about the subject. By altering the perception of the audience, she is able to trigger their minds to explore the truth behind the film’s representation and thereby enhance their awareness and expand their knowledge about the subject.