From attics and basements
- Marina Drozdova
- May 25, 2022
- 3 min read
Updated: Jul 10, 2022
The season of amateur footage in documentaries.
Current festival season offers a wave of documentaries, centered on amateur footage. Typically – for decades – amateur footage has been used as illustration of authors’ concepts, but now it’s becoming a plot or a main character in documentaries. Is this a result of distrust of interpretations?
Indicative is the French film “Et j’aime à la fureur”, Andre Bonzel, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival before the pandemic. It is a cinematic novel – in the manner of Galsworthy and Maupassant. The director inherited a box with film reels and as a result invented a half-fictional/ half-real story about his great-great-grandfather, who was a friend of Lumiere brothers. Thus family members have been engaged in amateur filming for more than a hundred years, making this film a unique experience of filmmaking.
“Retours à Reims (Fragments)” by Jean-Gabriel Periot – the film about labor movement in France from the beginning of the 20th century to the beginning of the present times based on memoirs of Didier Eribon – was shown at IDFA (Amsterdam, Netherlands). The style of video editing combines the amateur chronicles of private life with news reels images. Spontaneity of the former destroy the officialdom of the latter.
Another cinematic novella (which won one of the main prizes at IDFA – Award for Best Creative Use of Archive) is “Ultraviolette et le gang des cracheuses de sang” by Robin Huzinger (France). After her grandmother's death the director found a collection of letters. The discovery immersed her in the intricacies of teenage lesbian love story, set in the 1920s in a tuberculosis sanatorium. Masterful editing transforms the excerpts from documentaries of that period into something resembling amateur film diaries.
“Journey to the Sun” from Portugal by Susanna de Sousa Dias and Ansgar Schaefer tells the story of 5,000 kids from Austria who were invited to Portugal after Second World War to put on some weight and to warm up after war years. The directors did huge research and managed to find amateur footage done by family members that adopted children - the rarest evidence of their difficult life in a foreign country.
“A night of knowing nothing” by Payal Kapadia (France-India, Cannes IFF – the award for Best Documentary Film) is an experimental detective story, which is a real “mishmash” of images. The box with reel is found, this time in the basement of the film school. The images seem topsy turvy and chaotic, but the director first creates and afterwards solves a cinematic crossword puzzle.
At the Visions du reel festival (Nyon, Switzerland) “Herbaria” by Leandro Listori (Argentina, Germany – Special Jury Award) was greeted with applause. The film draws parallels between the botanical collections – herbaria – and film archives, where original negative reels are stored for decades in metal boxes. The images, captured on film, retain their authenticity and mystique – just like dried plants do not lose their delicacy, despite the fact that they have turned pale.
And in the film “O, collecting eggs despite the time”, Pim Zvier (Netherlands, IDFA – The Award for Best Directing), an unexpected comparison is drawn between the fragile footage, filmed by unknown authors, and the branch of ornithology associated with the study and collection of bird eggs.
And, finally, a nugget of the genre "Three minutes – A lengthening" by Bianca Stigter (Netherlands, UK). The inhabitants, Jews in a Polish village, pose in front of the lens of an amateur cameraman on a sunny day in 1938. There are only three minutes left of that footage. Who are these people in front of the camera? And who among them would have survived the Holocaust? Zooming in for a close-up, moving from face to face, the director is looking for indications of their destinies.
In amateur footage History speaks for itself - stammering and coughing.
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