Define me if you can - the Paradocs section

“This is a Paradocs film, and we don’t discuss Paradocs films, they are more artistic experiments.” This is how Into the Belly of the Whale was presented to the public at the IDFA, which also worked as a justification for the absence of debate after the screening. The two main ideas of this section are well summarized in this short sentence: The lack of discussion (and therefore, the idea of ’cinematic freedom’, since everything goes), and the impression of being ’more artistic’ than the other films in competition.

The absence of clear criteria while selecting films for Paradocs (read the interview with its programmer here) is a clear part of the noble openness to every kind of film which seems to be the image the festival wants to give to this selection. Since hypothetically everything can be in it, the label of ’documentary’ gets lost as one could hardly defend the presence of the amazing short animation The Death of an Insect as a documentary. Let’s remember, however, that less than 10% of the films watched are chosen, so there is surely some sort of criterion to narrow them down.

from Birth of a Nation

One argument to consider a film as a documentary is that reality has to be a starting point. Well, that could be the criterion, but not an exclusive one – let’s just think of the great number of fiction films that start from reality as well. In general, one could even support the idea that every single film, fictional or not, comes from reality, which excludes this as a relevant distinction. Some, such as theorist François Niney, suggest that documentaries are necessarily reflecting a reality, unlike fictions, which are not obliged to do so. Once again, this does not help us much, since fictions are “not obliged” to connect to reality, but they can do just as much (or even better) than some documentaries.

OK, let’s admit we do not know exactly how to define documentaries. “But I can recognize one when I see it”, one could argue. ’Documentary’ becomes a concept just as abstract as those of ’freedom’, ’loneliness’ or ’relevance’ – we can hardly describe them, but we know how to spot them when they’re around. That’s the paradox in Paradocs: there is nothing as concrete and as abstract as a documentary, and the selection pushes this contradiction to its limit. We have the most varied experimentations put together in a single selection, but in order to make it clearer, we can try to narrow them down into three major kinds.

The first one would be the classic video art that we normally see in contemporary museums, for example. This is clearly the case of Marbre, Minispectacles: Touché, Douche, Souche and Birth of a Nation, which all work with repetition, fragmented visuals, multiple screens, no narration and no chronology, no search for identification or pathos from the audience. These are rather cerebral experiments, built and perceived in general as a reaction to common commercial documentaries, mostly the narrative and political ones. These art videos dare to be “more artistic”, as the presenter of Into the Belly of the Whale had said – they seem to reflect above all on cinema and images themselves, not belonging to a social and political context. They are made by cinephiles and for cinephiles, in such a way that the exclusion of the ’average public’ as a possible consumer makes them more distinguished and socially noble in people’s eyes.

The two other kinds of Paradocs films are less pretentious and more connected to society. Some of these films are those that defy not the narrative system, but the production one, presenting images that could be generally associated as ’poor’, ’ugly’, and ’precarious’. Bigos 06 and Rancho Texas perfectly fit this category, in which the frontiers between the genius and the poor, amateur production are quite delicate. Their inclusion in the IDFA programme makes us look at them in a different and ’artistic’ way, trying to find the interest that could have justified their selection. Nevertheless, in a different context, they could easily be dismissed as homemade experiences with no artistic merit.

Finally, there are those videos that could hardly fit the documentary category, unless we expand ’documentary’ to ’everything with a minimal connection to reality’, as mentioned above. They seem to have been chosen mostly because of their visual impact - these are big productions - and slight subversion of their genres, such as The Arbor (a quite conventional film in essence, but with actors lip-synching the actual interviewees) and Picture’s Concise Anatomy (a film whose interest is mostly found in its astonishing post-production effects). They do not represent radical experiments, but the experimentation is their very theme and major importance – one could hardly defend the outstanding qualities of The Arbor if there were no lip-synching device.

As we can see, the experimentations go in all directions: they can be narrative, aesthetic or even related to the common idea of quality (the ’beautiful-because-they-are-ugly’ films). Any slight deviance seems to fit this category, which makes the limit of Paradocs its own extent. With many exciting films and other works, well.. god-knows-why they have been put there, Paradocs becomes the selection of everything else, the big label under which we throw all the films we do not know how to deal with. This section can be very exciting, but one has to know how to make choices and find a way through it. It feels just like looking for that one rare masterpiece in a gigantic and messy second-hand bookstore.

By Bruno Carmelo