Documentary
FilmPolitics, Aesthetics and
Ethics
IDFA,
18th edition
24 Nov.-4 Dec. 2005; Amsterdam
Event website: http://www.idfa.nl
Shadow Festival, 6th edition
22-30 November 2005, Amsterdam
Event website: http://www.shadowfestival.nl
Reviewed by Martha Blassnigg
University of Plymouth
martha.blassnigg@gmail.com
The International Documentary Filmfestival
Amsterdam (IDFA) has already been
introduced to Leonardo readers
as one of the worlds largest documentary
film forum (see Leonardo reviews
March 2005 and Leonardo 38/5).
Last year the reviews focus was
on debates and workshops around new media
and documentary film form, which again
this year culminated in the Mediamatic
workshop, a forum for interactive political
film and its multi-linear forms and dialogues
between the maker and the player (for
more information, see http://www.mediamatic.net).
This review will discuss this years
festival and contrast it with the Shadow
Festival, which has been set up as
IDFAs counter festival. It
will in particular discuss some aspects
of creative, innovative or unconventional
contemporary documentary filmmaking and
emphasize the inherent tensions between
aesthetics, content and ethics.
The discourse on the documentary film
genre, in retrospect, has often suffered
from a neglect of discussions around form,
structure, and composition in an aesthetic
and ethical framework. In contrast, the
content has not only been overemphasized
but sometimes even been manipulated for
ideological purposes. IDFA
has more than once used the festival to
promote the rights for free speech for
documentary filmmakers and the subjects
appearing in the films; the festival along
with a selection of European and American
propaganda films the Second World War
stimulated a critical and self-conscious
discussion of propaganda within contemporary
documentary filmmaking with regard to
documentary as means for ideologically
driven goals. In particular, due to the
fact that on a subtle level many documentary
films on the market can be criticized
for their lack of reflectivity and the
neglect of spaces for the audiences interpretations
to make up their own mind.
The apparent difficulties of IDFA
to come to terms with the balancing act
between film content and film form reflects
a growing imbalance of the festival in
which the socio-political agendamanifest
in a variety of IDFAs activitiesdominates
over a critical reflection of the subject
of film form. IDFAs mission
statement on their website addresses these
issues and the festival seems to show
a shift in sequence of the ideas starting
with film form, followed by content toward
communication with the audiences where
shock and sensation constitutes an important
part in the description. Through this
imbalance, the festival does not acknowledge
sufficiently the critical agency of the
audience, especially those who expect
documentary film to express an intelligible,
reflective, and critical approach in the
very form and construction of its medium
and the festivals self-conscious
communication and address in this matter.
At IDFA, slightly too often, one
gains the impression that the festival
is displaying and selling the "better
television programs", which director
Ally Derks seems to confirm when she stated
in her opening speech: "After all
the incoherent media violence that we
get served up, a bit of depth is a welcome
change."
No doubt with more than 3000 submissions
a year, one can see the festivals
potential to not merely distance itself
from the general populist media market,
but to develop into a serious forum for
documentary film as an intervention not
only with regard to content but with regard
to film form and characteristics inherent
in its medium. The broadness of the IDFA
every year includes a number of films
whos makers are informed by such
a subtle understanding of film form, ethics
of the approach, and a healthy tension
between aesthetic, visual pleasure and
a critical discussion of the content.
Two of the highlights of this years
edition were a retrospective of French
photographer and filmmaker Raymond Depardon,
to whom the Netherlands Filmmuseum
dedicated a retrospective, exhibition,
press-conference and a Master class in
collaboration with IDFA, and the
premiere of Dutch filmmaker Jos de Putters
How Many Roads, which follows the
previous success of Dans, Grozny Dans
(The Damned and the Sacred, 2002). (For
more information on the film program,
see http://www.idfa.nl)
While IDFAs engagement with
political and social issues deserves special
recognition, in order to fulfill the festivals
aim to become a true forum for "films
for thought", it seems necessary
to reflect more consciously within the
festival program, the contextualization
and the selection of the films on the
awareness that films is able to raise
through emotional involvement and through
intelligent filmmaking. Examples such
as KZ by Rex Bloomstein or Our
Daily Bread by Nikolaus Geyrhalter
as well as those previously mentioned,
open up a discussion of an intellectually
sophisticated, self-reflective, ethically
conscious style alongside the possibility
of an emphatic involvement of the audiences.
Alas, it is only in some of the programmed
films themselves where these underrated
topics can be found and evaluated rather
than in the festival communications and
address. Despite this apparent lack of
contextualization and critical self-awareness
of the festivals public interface,
the program of IDFA comprises more
than 300 films and as such does offer
a rich variety for every taste. To be
sure, critical discussions are provided
in the special debates and forums (for
more information, see IDFAcademy (sic)
at http://www.idfa.nl), but rarely after
the film screenings since the programming
is often too tight for a meaningful Q&A.
IDFA never seems to have invested
much in these discussion sessions, which
could be a vital aspect of the festival
and serve as a direct interface with the
audiences. As a consequence, it never
reveals itself as a fully thought through
event.
To show interesting, politically "urgent"
and critical films is a task of high value
in itself, and IDFA certainly provides
one of the biggest but also most productive
markets for documentary film, but this
engagement may not be considered as sufficient
if IDFA has ambitions to be taken
seriously as a critical discussion forum
for documentary film beyond developing
its markets. If it is serious about the
development of the IDFAcademy,
then it would do well to take advise from
the broad range of its own constituency.
For those visitors seeking the more subtle
discourses within the genre documentary
film in a dialogue withand
not separated fromthe socio-political
discussions raised by the content, may
find more common ground at the Shadow
Festival, founded by Stephen Mayakovski
as counter festival to International
Documentary Filmfestival Amsterdam (IDFA)
running at the same time. The Shadow
Festival focuses almost entirely on
radical, critical, and artistic approaches
to film form and claims to show creative,
innovative or even unconventional contemporary
documentary filmmaking and establishes
a critical podium for contact and dialogue
between the filmmakers and the public.
While the IDFA film program invites
to cherry pick from a broad range of documentaries,
the critical film viewer may find herself
commuting to the Shadow Festival for
more radical experiments with film form
and in particular the extended and well
informed discussions after each screening.
Despite its innovative, creative, and
radical claims for the documentary film
genre, in its sixth edition it still has
remained a festival in the shadow of IDFA.
This could be due to the lack of a clear
profile outline, or possibly the necessary
acknowledgement of an impossibility of
detaching form from content, without running
the risk of emptying the film of any content.
To its credit the Shadow Festival
compliments a full 10 days visit to IDFA
by enriching the viewers critical
thinking about the documentary film as
genre in addition to a collection of innovative
films. One of the strategies and merits
of the Shadow Festival is to invite
documentary filmmakers whos work
lies at the edge of the genre every afternoon
for a two hour master class-type
presentation with discussion and to take
at least 30-45 minutes for a panel discussion
after each film screening. This editions
special guests for the workshops were
Cherry Duyns, Albert Elings and Eugenie
Jansen, Joe Gibbons, Mike Hoolboom, Clemens
Klopfenstein, Ken Kobland, Stefan Kolbe
and Chris Wright (for more information,
see http://www.shadowfestival.nl).
Some of the outstanding contributions
to the Shadow Festival 2005 were
Sergei Loznitsas Fabrika
(Russia), a documentary on a steel and
plaster factory in which for part of the
time the film runs backwards, reminding
of Vertovs use of film aesthetics
as political statement. The color compositions
and sounds of the film made it an intense
physical experience and reminded the audiences
of the powers of cinema in its early days.
Malerei heute (Painting Nowheute
meaning today and nowadays) by Stefan
Hayn and Anja-Christin Remmert (Germany)
has been described by Mayakovski as a
"typical Shadow Festival film":
156 hand-painted watercolors of billboards
by Hayn in the city of Berlin between
1998-2005 stand in contrast with intermittent
moving image footage constructing a chronological
collage that explores the social and political
changes in a coalition of public and private
domains. With a voice over on an intellectual
account of impressions, opinions, and
political facts of the time, this film
expresses a true "cinema of thought"-
while another highlight of the festival
appeals to discussions of consciousness:
Taimagura Baachan (Taimagura Grandma)
by Yoshihiko Sumikawa (Japan). While filming
Masayo Mukaida and her husband over the
course of 15 years, Sumikawa was not merely
interested in showing us their rural lives
and interconnectedness with nature and
the spiritual world in this last village
to receive electricity in Japan, but also
his interest lies in discovering the reasons
for Masayos happiness. He explained
that he only could stop filming when he
not only understood her happiness, but
once he was able to experience it himself.
This jewel of a film made transparent
how film in its form and content is constructed
by a network of individual conscious interactions
between film subject, filmmaker and audiences.
The most obvious overlap between the Shadow
Festival and IDFA is in IDFAs
Paradocs section, which focuses
on media artists productions and
a connection between the cinema and art-galleries.
While at IDFA this still has remained
a peripheral event, the Shadow Festival
embraces programs with short films, installation
pieces and audio-visual experiments and
integrates these into the main program.
As both festivals earn their own merits,
my suggestion as a devotee of both would
be for the Shadow Festival to come
out from under the shadow of the IDFA
to shine in its own right, which without
doubt it deserves.
(For the even more experimentally oriented
viewer, it should be noted that in the
week after IDFA and the Shadow
Festival, the Impakt Festival
took place in Utrecht, with the subtitle
"adventures in sound and image"for
more information, see http://www.impakt.nl/)
Websites:
International Documentary Filmfestival
Amsterdam: http://www.idfa.nl
Shadow Festival, Amsterdam: http://www.shadowfestival.nl
Impakt Festival, Utrecht: http://www.impakt.nl
Netherlands Filmmuseum: http://www.filmmuseum.nl