LIDF

The LIDF tends not to theme or editorialise the programme in advance. Themes emerge each year, and some themes never go away. In some cases, the latter is tragic.

Broadly, you may say, the films fall into two categories: materialist and existential. Those that question structures, and those that question the reason for existence. Both are necessary, and both have to be combined. This does not distinguish documentary film from fiction. Documentary films contribute to the fictions of the world. From its earliest incarnations the world seen in documentaries is a world distorted. But, documentary films always ask for dialogue, the ‘mad(e)ness’ is apparent and inseparable from the viewing experience. They make the real more interesting because it is put into question.

The gaze of the movie camera is similar to the anthropological gaze. Both possess the same duality of the eye/I: The optical apparatus and the reflexive consciousness. Both observe, record, speak of, and often, for others. Under such circumstances truth becomes not just an epistemological conundrum but, one of praxis and consequences. Documentary filmmaking, as much as anthropology, has suffered from the crisis of subjectivity.

The truth and truthfulness of documentary filmmaking, really means, when one begins to think about it, ‘the relevance of documentary film’. How can we assess its relevance if we cannot assess its truthfulness? Why should this question arise, what sort of discomfort can it point to? We could start by looking towards anthropology again and one of its recent theoretical touchstones, a notion that has, to a lesser or greater extent, entered everyday thought: reflexivity.

The development of a reflexive attitude was a response to a problem of truthfulness and the truthfulness of knowledge. The truthfulness of the anthropological gaze as it is enmeshed in power relations, and the truthfulness of its subsequent voices that is equally enmeshed in power relations although of a different order. As an anthropologist recently put it: ‘We lie; they lie’. The question becomes: has reflexivity overcome the problem of truthfulness, and if not, why not?

The problem of truthfulness is the problem of the ‘other’ and is always present in documentary film. Is intersubjectivity possible? It may be possible to look at this differently by flipping the idea of truthfulness on its head and thinking about ignorance. The question of ignorance, or mis-recognition, leads us towards an ethic of responsibility, and a theory that not only recognises deviations from truth, untruthful behaviour, but goes beyond that and suggests an ontological reason for this. We must try and explain why it is that consciousness can choose between evading or accepting its responsibilities?

What we may say – and this is relevant to documentary film and might make documentary film relevant – is that social structures and human behaviour are in fact negative towards the truth, ignorance is an intentional act. Ignorance is not only about not knowing but also about avoiding knowledge about ignoring it through indifference or intention. Ignorance is therefore choice – the rejection of truth is far more revealing than the recognition of truth. Ignorance is choice, analysis and phenomenological description of behaviour seeking to avoid the truth. The ontological difficulty with knowing, of being a knowing subject, a consciousness in the world, becomes a problem of morality. Ignorance conditions knowledge and is defined, that is, both as possibility of knowledge and as possibility of remaining ignorant.

Documentary film always posits the question of explaining how a world inhabited by a plurality of separate and conflicting consciousness could become a coherent world. How is this reflected in the festival programme? It is there in the myriad viewpoints, in the tension that exists between camera and subject, in all the ways of seeing. It exists most potently in the third gaze, that of the questioning viewer. Each film should be an irritant, a destabilising tremor that will not go away, unfinished, begun only when it is shared and talked about later.