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Doing
Documentary
Gitte Villesen's Documentary Reflection of the Social
by Daniel Pies
"Do you always look so intense when you film?...Or are you
just stoned?" - voice-over, music in the background, a fair.
Martin steps in front of the camera. A quick cut, another, the camera
swings unsteadily downwards: ground, legs, feet out of focus. "Would
you please hold this?" The camera rights itself, Martin reappears,
this time in close-up. "I'm on?" He briefly mimes a showman
promoting his attractions, then switches register, adopting a wooing,
intimate style: "Couldn't you open the other eye too, then
you would look a lot cuter." No reply. His request, however,
seems to have been granted: "Yeah!" and, pointing at the
camera, "'cause your eye does look better than through this
one." Martin raises his beer-bottle, toasts with the camerawoman,
drinks: "She can drink while she's filming." And then,
still in close-up, frontal: "Do you get a discount on film
somewhere? It's far out that you just keep on filming..." Martin
changes tack: "Do you want to film my shorts?" The camera
readily accepts his invitation, pans down the front of his body,
shows Martin displaying his ripped Bermudas. He begins pleading:
"Quit that filming! You're unbelievable...How 'bout we go dancing
instead?" No reply. No reaction. The camera holds him in close-up.
Martin grows impatient. He makes a fresh start, assumes a new series
of roles. He is a mesmerizer gesticulating hypnotically at the camera,
intoning: "You're sleeping, you're sleeping...Feel how your
eyelids are getting heavier and heavier...You feel like putting
your video camera down and drinking some beer and going out partying
and dancing all night long." Nothing. Further advances, cajolery,
pleas to stop filming. All go unanswered, fruitless. If he comes
too close to the camera, it steps back a few paces. If he tries
to evade it by approaching from the side, it pans round, keeping
in front of his face and holding him off. In the end, a frustrated
Martin concedes defeat and vanishes in the bustle of the fair.
The Rules of the Game: Documentary as Social Interaction
"Vorbasse Horse Fair and Market" (1994) was filmed in
one evening at the horse market of the out-of-the-way Danish village
of Vorbasse. It is one of Gitte Villesen's first video works. Its
sole (and fortuitous) protagonist is Martin. At first sight, "Vorbasse
Horse Fair and Market" seems to be a surprisingly immediate
and simply structured work. It consists of a single sequence lasting
some ten minutes filmed with a hand camera and punctuated by a few
raw cuts. The film fades in with a full shot, a small group of people
appear gathering round a try-your-strength machine. One of them,
Martin, notices the camera (and Gitte), waves, leaves the group
and steps up to the camera. The camera pulls him into focus head
on, in close-up. Martin's face almost fills the frame. He addresses
the camera directly, at close quarters. The camera returns his gaze.
The game begins.
It is this head-on, close-up framing, the directness of the confrontation
that draws the viewer into the work. He identifies himself as the
subject of the gaze and moves into the imaginary position behind
the camera. He feels addressed. For a moment the medium becomes
transparent, vanishes as a technique of representation. At the level
of the image itself, however, the contrary occurs: the medium emerges
as an increasingly central part of the communication. Here, the
camera is not only immaterial gaze but also a physical object that
structures and marks out the social actors' performances. On the
one hand, the camera as gaze signifies to Martin the attention paid
to him, thus occasioning and catalyzing his actions and performances.
As the film unfolds, however, the camera as physical object progressively
crystallizes as their material boundary. As gaze, the camera works
as a bait, keeping Martin's interest alive and provoking him to
perform. As physical object, it serves as a shield, fending off
his bodily advances and keeping him at a distance. Villesen's steadfast
refusal to drop this shield, without ever averting her gaze, keeps
the game of representation in flow. The dialectic of address and
denial, pull and push, impels both the subject and the object of
the gaze to perpetually new actions and reactions, acts and performances,
which are in turn captured as images by the camera.
Despite its at first ostensibly simple structure "Vorbasse
Horse Fair and Market" thus evolves as a complex commentary
on the activity of documentation itself. Villesen stages this activity
as an antagonistic game that demarcates and explores the parameters
of the documentary undertaking. Her camera creates a mobile stage
of social interaction that involves actors both in front of and
behind it in a mutually constitutive process of depiction and performance,
in a social game of representation. By portraying the activity of
documentation as a process based on social cooperation and confrontation,
however, the concept and understanding of the documentary itself
is transformed. In this perspective, documentary can no longer be
understood as detached observation simply recording and depicting
a purportedly pre-existent social reality which itself remains untouched
by it. Instead, the practice of documentation emerges as a specific
form of participation in precisely that reality which is being documented.
It situates the documentarist as a 'participant observer' who himself
shapes and produces the depicted reality in an interactive social
process generated by the camera, i.e. in a game of representation.
Moving on within the metaphor of documentary as a game of representation
raises the question who lays down the rules and limits of this game.
Who decides what roles its agents are to play? And under what provisions,
with what goals and interests, do they take part? Villesen's video
demonstrates that documentary practice is never just a game of representation,
but always also over representation: a game of power. "Vorbasse
Horse Fair and Market" makes this explicit by staging the dynamics
of social interaction driven by the documentary activity not as
a symmetrical relationship but as an asymmetrical and antagonistic
one. Although the addresses, movements and interactions always do
evolve in a direct relation between the subject and the object of
the gaze, it becomes equally clear that it is Villesen as subject
of the gaze, who lays down the rules and limits of the interaction.
Despite Martin's requests and pleas, the camera is never switched
off or laid aside, the imaginary borderline drawn by the camera
as physical object never violated. It is, however, not only in the
asymmetry of the gaze that the hierarchization of the documentary
procedure comes out, but also in the asymmetry of the gender-specific
roles that are acted out as well as in the conflicting goals and
interests persued by the players. Villesen readily adopts the position
of female object of desire urged on her by Martin, even accentuating
the conventional passivity of the role by holding his gaze while
not verbally answering his addresses. Underhand, however, she redefines
her role in the name of her own interests. While Martin, in the
role of suitor, woos Gitte, Gitte bestows just enough attention
to ensure his continued participation in the game - to thus secure
her own profit as subject of the documentary gaze: the images of
his performance.
"Vorbasse Horse Fair and Market" thus turns out to be
not only the document of an entertaining evening in Vorbasse, but
above all as the document of a performative self-reflection. The
essence of documentary here shows itself not as allegedly uninvolved
observation, but is identified as a social process that itself generates
the documents of its own execution. Moreover, it becomes transparent
that the power relations that the social process of documentation
establishes between its agents are unevenly distributed. The subject
of the documentary gaze evidently acts as that authority which controls
the representation of its object. This power of the gaze is aggressively
played out in Vorbasse. By situating the practice of documentation
as a question of power over the game of representation, the political
and ethical dimension of the reflection of the documentary is opened
up as a sphere of enquiry: What might a responsible wielding of
the power that the camera confers on the subject of the gaze look
like? And what documentary forms can be regarded as appropriate
and adequate representations of those that are represented?
Speculative Constellations: An Ethics of Knowledge
Situating the question of the legitimacy and adequacy of social
representation as the central problem of documentary praxis is the
critical achievement of "Vorbasse Horse Fair and Market".
It can be read as the self-reflexive starting and focal point of
Villesen's entire oeuvre. While Vorbasse, however, aggressively
pinpoints the ethical and political dimension of documentary praxis
by depicting the process as an asymmetrical and antagonistic relation,
in later works Villesen explores alternative forms of documentation
that seek a more balanced and cooperative treatment of the problem
of documentary representation. Although she explicitly takes up
the metaphor of documentary as antagonistic game once more in "Three
Times Ludo" (1995) - the work consists of three videos in which
Villesen plays two games of ludo with each of three different people
-, pointing up the positionality and situatedness of her involvement
in the proceedings and thus her stakes in the game of documentation
by means of a raw editing technique, the plane of social interaction
is already shaped in a much more dialogical manner. The series of
video portraits titled "Willy" (1996) then transposes
the ludic character of documentary interaction into theatrical form,
the protagonist performing himself and his passions as actor of
himself in dialogue with the camera (and Villesen as 'director').
In subsequent portraits of individuals and social networks, such
as "Ingeborg the Busker Queen" (1998), "Bus Stops
and Parties" (2000), or "Viggo, Møller, Jacob,
and I at Søren Welling's Small Town Museum" (2000),
Villesen develops an increasingly open, mobile and situationally
flexible form of camerawork that shapes the documentary events as
a dialogical and dynamic social exchange, without, however, denying
the positionality of the gaze.
At the level of presentation, too, Villesen's works evince increasingly
open and dynamic forms of documentary praxis. Her strategy here
is to multiply and spatialize the media and formats of documentation.
The videos are supplemented with collages, texts, posters and folders
and are installed, at least in part, in multi-channel ensembles.
The documentary material is thus spread out over different levels
of mediation, which then merge in the space of installation as a
complex configuration. This becomes particularly clear in Villesen's
installation "The Building - the Bikeshop - Andy's Furniture"
(2001). Subject of the work is the "Creative Re-Use Warehouse",
a sprawling Chicago structure bought by the artist Dan Peterman
some years ago and housing studios, small workshops, a kitchen and
various community projects. Villesen reconstructs this social field
in four photo collages and a video installation. Placed outside
the entrance to the projection room, the collages display the various
projects, activities and users of the Chicago Warehouse in fragmentary
diagrams. The video installation comprises three projections. In
long sequences they show detailed interviews Villesen conducted
while the interviewees went about their work in the building. Proceeding
tentatively and circuitously, the conversations are frequently interrupted
by the activities the interviewees perform. Here, Villesen neither
takes up the role of the detached observer, nor that of the interviewer
seeking to elicit specific information. Instead, the deliberately
uncentred camerawork (distracted by surrounding activity), occasional
changes before the camera (as when Villesen hands it to Andy the
furniture maker so she can test one of his chairs) and the free
handling of the conversations position her as an integral part of
a flexible process of social interaction which, though it is guided
by certain interests, is open enough to unfold a diverse range of
views and attitudes on aspirations, living space and the social
structure of projects.
Moreover, the spatial arrangement of the different projections and
their non-linear temporal choreography translates the diachronic
sequences of the individual interviews into a constellation of complex
synchronicity. The sequences are projected on two adjoining walls.
On the one wall are two adjacent screens, on the other a third crossing
the corner to join them. With soundtrack, no more than one separate
sequence (one interview with one person in one room) is shown on
each screen at a time. The rest of the screens remain dark, except
when, from time to time, they are animated by short, silent sequences
showing other activities in other parts of the Warehouse. To the
accompaniment of these brief parallel inserts, then, the individual
interview sequences run progressively through the room's three screens.
In the course of time, the spatial and temporal dynamics of the
installation thus gradually unfold the picture of a complex architectural
and social structure, within which various synchronous spheres of
activity co-exist in a loose network.
By interweaving different formal systems of reference, Villesen
contextualizes the presented material to reconstruct the object
of her investigation as a specific social field. She creates a 'stage
of knowledge' that interlinks the individual sequences by inserting
them as singular elements into a dense network of communication.
Although the interplay between the elements of the constellation
is coordinated at a formal level, it is not framed by an overriding
interpretive principle. Characteristic of this mode of documentary
formatting of 'knowledge' seems to be a commitment to the singularity
of the presented material. Its integrity is safeguarded precisely
because it is not subjected to a discursive logic and represented
as an instance of the universal. And it is exactly this refusal
to violate the material's particularity by subordinating it to a
universalizing perspective that opens up the speculative dimension
of the constellation. It situates the viewer as an active agent
who is no longer simply required to follow a linear argument but
who must keep recombining the elements of the constellation in new
and potentially conflicting ways. One might ask, for instance: How
are these micropolitics of social organization to be understood?
What forms of normativity are they directed against? And which forms
of normativity might inhere in these alternative ways of life themselves?
The universal here does not frame the particular, but rather emerges
from it as problem and potential. If one were to speak of an ethics
in relation to Villesen's documentary production and presentation
of knowledge, then in the sense of a commitment to the singularity
of a particular, embodied form of social knowledge whose inscription
into the registers of the representative is persistently denied.
Micropolitics of the Everyday: An Aesthetics of Existence
Villesen's refusal to violate the specificity and particularity
of different ways of life by subsuming them under a unifying perspective
follows a strong ethical impulse. It is the attempt to find legitimate
and adequate forms of (re)presenting the social and biographical
without reducing the complexity of the (re)presented. The installation
of documentary material as a speculative constellation moreover
situates the viewer as an active instance of mediation. He is called
upon to contextualize the individual elements of the constellation
within the horizon of his own experience, in an individual process
of reception.
But just what worlds of experience are these that open themselves
to the viewer in relation to his own experience? What attitudes
and approaches to living one's life does Villesen document? What
is their political significance and is there any underlying common
factor? Realized in collaboration with Lars Erik Frank, Villesen's
"Solveig" (2002) is a particularly good place to begin
asking these questions. Subject of the work is Solveig. Thrice married,
the father of three daughters, Solveig lived most of her life as
Niels. At the age of 62, she decided to change her name to Solveig
and continue to live her life as a woman. The work itself consists
of a two-channel video installation. The left-hand screen shows
a film some ten minutes long edited from two 7-8-hour conversations
Villesen and Frank conducted with Solveig. On view is only Solveig,
sitting in her living-room and talking about her life as a man,
her decision to live as a woman, to call herself Solveig and her
private and political struggles for recognition. The camera frames
her in static close-ups. For the viewer the conversation unfolds
almost as a monologue, only occasional voice-over acknowledgements
and remarks recall Villesen's and Frank's presence as partners and
initiators. Black frames interrupt the sequence, indicating omissions
and cuts. In contrast to the intimate, calm, serious narrative taking
place on the left-hand screen, the right-hand screen shows Solveig,
Frank and Villesen (behind the camera) in lively and playful interaction.
The sequence has three parts, each introduced by an insert with
the date. The first one shows Solveig, sometimes in split screen,
choosing flowers in a gardening centre, returning to her flat, planting
the flowers she just bought on her balcony. In the second, we see
Solveig in her living-room, this time in a bigger frame, in the
background her kitchen. She displays her TV appearances and numerous
newspaper and magazine articles about herself. The camera repeatedly
zooms in on the press photos and pans across them. Now and then,
parallel to Solveig's narrative, the television in her flat showing
video recordings of her TV appearances comes on a split screen.
In the final sequence, Solveig is shown picnicking on a park bench
with Frank and Villesen (both mostly off-screen) and buying the
drinks and sandwiches beforehand in a shopping arcade.
While the left-hand screen shows Solveig in an intimate setting
immersed in intense reflections on her own life, on the right-hand
screen she is presented engaged in lively exchange as she goes about
her routines of daily and public life. Although the verbal exchanges
between her and the filmmakers do keep reverting to her life and,
above all, her public and institutional recognition as a woman,
it is more in passing: relaxed, cheerful, almost parenthetical.
Thus the project of Solveig's life emerges on one screen in the
form of an introverted verbal reflection, while it presents itself
in the performative mode of daily living and animated interaction
with her surroundings on the other. With this differentiation a
further dimension of the two-channel projection opens up: It concerns
the relationship between desire and reality. On one side, the focussed
reflection of the desire to live and be recognized as a woman as
well as the concomitant difficulties; on the other, the everyday,
lived reality of this desire. Desire and reality here are not exposed
as the two unbridgeable worlds bourgeois ideology often makes out,
but rather revealed as mutually constitutive and effectively at
play in the successful shaping of ones own life in accordance with
individual desire and in negotiation with the norms and expectations
of the social.
The representation of the shaping of an individual existence as
a successful negotiation between norm and deviation, expressed so
starkly in "Solveig", is characteristic of Villesen's
works. Whether it is Kathrine's and Bent's producer/collector relationship
in "Kathrine makes them and Bent collects them" (1998),
the social network of the Creative Re-Use Warehouse in "The
Building - the Bikeshop - Andy's Furniture", or Willy's passion
for cars, cats and music - Villesen explores the everyday reality
of the dialectics between norm and deviation in its individual and
collective variants. Her protagonists neither appear as heroic nor
as conformist subjects. They rather become visible as locally situated
'subjectivities' that give form to their lives by cultivating and
acting out their (actually quite heterogeneous) desires, convictions
and passions in a micropolitics of the everyday. Villesen thus gives
evidence to the notion of an ethical relation to the self, which
Foucault in his late work referred to as an 'aesthetics of existence'.
Her works portray an ensemble of 'practices of the self' or 'arts
of existence', through which subjects "seek to transform themselves,
to change themselves in their singular being, to make their life
into a work that carries certain aesthetic values..." (1).
Here, it becomes apparent that the aesthetic process of transforming
one's own existence is carried out in the mode of an "ethical
self-constitution" (2) which takes the form of a micropolitics
of the everyday. In this perspective, the shape of an individual
existence neither arises from an autonomous and heroic act of self-projection,
nor from a complete and unreserved submission to a pre-existing
code of rules. It emerges instead from the praxis and reflexivity
of lived life off which an individual shape is wrested in persistent
negotiation with the rules and norms of the social. The specific
shape of the ways of life documented by Villesen are thus revealed
as an 'aesthetics of existence' that, on the one hand, clearly and
indisputably bears the individual signature of its 'authors'' and,
on the other hand, the traces of the negotiations effected between
deviation and normativity, between the transgression of certain
social rules and the conscious or unconscious recognition of others.
Villesen portrays these 'aesthetics of existence' in speculative
constellations, which not only present her subjects but also mark
herself - not as dominating over, but as responsible for the documentary
game of representation.
1) Michel Foucault: "Der Gebrauch der Lüste", Suhrkamp
Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1998, p. 18.
2) Wilhelm Schmid: "Die Geburt der Philosophie im Garten der
Lüste", Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1994, p. 24.
Translation from German by Christopher Jenkin-Jones, Munich
Published in the catalogue for the Danish Pavillion / 51th Venice
Biennale
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