On The Poetic

The Lyrical or poetic approach employed by some documentarians has a long and illustrious history, crossing many cultural, national and generational boundaries. Although, as with other stylistic oeuvre it has swung in and out of fashionable usage throughout the last century and into the present one. It has had its champions and detractors. First of all, there are obvious difficulties in appropriating one form of art i.e. Poetry as a literary form into that of another, in this case recorded sound and visual movement. Let us just take the terminology to mean a transposition of one art form into another not as a carbon copy or pastiche but as a reflection and inference, and as a short cut to defining it from other methods deployed in visual documentation, such as continuity editing.

The techniques employed using a more lyrical, lengthy stylistic approach to camera shots, editing, music, a Foley soundtrack and the lack of dialogue or dialogue that does not seem to directly propel a linear narrative in a forward arc, has often been deployed in avant-garde film and by practitioners who would define themselves as artist rather than documentary maker.

Narrative or the absence of an obvious chronological story is also something to be discussed later.

‘’Poetic mode: emphasizes visual associations, tonal or rhythmical qualities, descriptive passages, and formal organization. Examples: The Bridge (1928); Song of Ceylon (1934); Listen to Britain (1941); Night and Fog (1955); and Koyaanisqatsi. This mode bears a close proximity to experimental, personal, and avant-garde filmmaking.’’(Nichols, 2010:31)

To give context to an investigation into poetic or lyrical works let us first refer to why such an approach has been scorned and mocked by some critics and fallen out of usage in the generality of mainstream documentary, programmes that we would access through primetime terrestrial, cable and satellite television schedules or cinema.

Humphrey Jennings work during World war II are prime examples of a lyrical style, deploying visually collaged images . ‘Listen to Britain’ (1942) and ‘Fires Were Started’(1943),were produced as propaganda and morale boosters for the British public but Edgar Anstey his Crown Film Unit colleague, later dismissed these techniques as ineffectual, in terms of being able to motivate a useful pragmatic or political response, stating that they ‘’will not encourage anyone to do anything at all ‘’(quoted in Sussex 144). The films produced by the Crown Film unit are now seen conversely by many as mythologizing the British war effort and its people’s, as much as any speech by Winston Churchill, or propaganda as soap opera, as in the Hollywood take on British stoicism, portrayed in films like ‘Mrs Miniver’(Mrs. Miniver, 1942). Critics have argued,(J. Leach 1989:9) that such films have reinforced and constructed The Great British Imperial myth as a force for good as much as that of The Dunkirk Spirit or that of fair play and the public- school system.

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Fig.11 and 12 Stills from Listen To Britain. Humphrey Jennings 1942

Marxian theorists would argue that such films are complicit with the idea of a utopian classless society that reinforced the feeling that there was no requirement for social change after the war, and it helped to uphold the status quo during it. At the other side of the political spectrum, the appropriation by the right has fed into Conservative, Thatcherism, ideologies, and now UKIP and Brexit ones which may be why liberal minded British documentarians have often shied away from this stylistic approach. The poetic can be used to portray subjects in an intrinsically impersonal way, where the ‘’personal vision’’ of its creator isn’t paramount or desired, where an overlaid narrative is absent or subservient to the moving images.

One could hypothesize that the Poetics of propaganda and or indeed the propaganda of the poetic can, in fact, be more powerful and seductive because the beautiful and visually arresting belie a serious message. In Blue Planet II (2017), a desolated and barren coral reef, the result of climate change, is no less beautifully shot by camera crew than that of a thriving aquatic eco- system, the contrasting images and the gorgeously macabre is as affectual in conveying a powerful political polemic as is the spoken narration.

‘’The idea that the more transformed or ‘aestheticized’ an image is, the less ‘authentic’ or politically valuable it becomes, is one that needs to be seriously questioned. Why can’t beauty be a call to action? The unsupported and careless use of ’aestheticization’ to condemn artists who deal with politically charged subjects recalls Brecht’s statement that ‘’’the right thinking ‘’ people amongst us , whom Stalin in another context distinguishes from creative people, have a habit of spell-binding our minds with certain words used in an extremely arbitrary sense’.(Documentary, 2013:107)

In Michael Renovo’s essay Toward A Poetics of Documentary (Musser, 2016:91) he analyses and deconstructs the poetics of documentary by breaking it down into four discursive elements, which were , preservation( making a record of an event),persuasion (often highlighting a social injustice and engaging the audience to think about or take action due to a sense of outrage), analysis or interrogation, and expressivity which covers aesthetics.

Werner Herzog’s lengthy contribution is at once unique and a catalyst as well as an inspirational force within documentary, having called it a quest for ‘’ecstatic truth.’’ His documentaries are never hum-drum or mundane but theatrical, almost operatic in scale and style and usually self-narrated. Comixing the visually poetic and the

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melodramatic, his controversial Grizzly Man (2005) where bear eats the protagonist is an exquisitely ghoulish example of his work. The gallows humour has the audience aghast and yet rooting for the bear rather than it’s deluded human meal, who had spoken, whilst alive, of the bears as if they were his friends and allies.

Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten dreams (2011) is perhaps hailed as one of his most visually arresting. Using one of human kinds first documents, the cave paintings of stone age man. Self-narrated, he decries the institutional restrictions which means he is unable to light and shoot the cave paintings to their full advantage. It combines science with the artistic and the romantic assertion that the audience are viewing something they will never see in person, it creates a sense of wonder, if you will.

Fig.13 From ‘Cave of Forgotten Dreams.’ Werner Herzog 2010.

And again, when interviewed Jem Cohen had this to say about the subject of subversion and poetics:

’’ Overall, I’m interested in a tradition of what I call lyrical documentary, and in my course, I use the word ‘lyrical’ in part because I’m interested in the way Walker Evans used the word ‘lyric’. ..They become something else: they become Walker Evans pictures…He uses that word ‘lyric’ and it’s not quite the same as ‘poetic’. I love poetry, but I’m not talking about more labored attempts to  be poetic. A lot of what I’m trying to indicate is just that there is a tradition, a thread. People have this strange tendency to think we are just now discovering hybrid genres, and they often neglect a history .’’(Macfarlane, 2014)

Contemporaneous lyrical techniques then, may be used in ways that pay homage to historical genres and be as emotive as any other technique deployed by its creator.

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