Cette conférence inaugurale a été donnée en juin 2017 à l'Attenborough Centre for the Creative Arts, dans le cadre du colloque international « Poetics and Politics of Documentary » organisé par l'University of Sussex, où Eyal Sivan intervenait aux côtés du cinéaste John Greyson. Il y interroge une tension centrale du documentaire contemporain, entre représentation du réel comme spectacle rédempteur et documentaire pensé comme expérience émancipatrice, entre empathie et analyse critique.
Résumé (abstract) :
Documentary practice, its funding and distribution streams, are in permanent development and expansion. Never before was documentary so visible, accessible, diverse, popular and profitable as it is now. This apparent “success” is being analysed and justified by the growing emphasis on character and story driven documentary projects.
But also as signifying the emerging understanding of the possibilities offered to documentary practice by the emotional and sensorial engagement of the spectator. Consider the current focus on ‘good characters’ and ‘dramatic narratives’ or on ‘emotional’ and ‘sensorial experience’ as symptoms of documentary’s transformation into popular entertainment or at least a mass-form. Rather than being a sign of de-politicisation of the documentary practice, I suggest that we are witnessing a redefinition of the political role of the documentary.
This redefinition of the political in/of documentary considers the representation of reality as a redemptory spectacle, marginalising the documentary as an emancipatory experience. In fact, documentary becomes a tool for the construction of binary oppositions: pleasure vs. thought; empathy vs. analysis. Documentary practice serves then only to mirror and amplify current political discourse.
This ‘entertainment trend’ supported by the dominant actors, gatekeepers and financiers, represents a challenge to documentary practice as a social-political tool. It marginalises its function as a platform of research, of subjective expression, and a framework of criticality. But rather than considering this the end of an era, a shift, a transformation, or the advent of the dark days of the documentary practice, I would like to propose, using my on-going research “framing perpetrators” concerning the documentary representation of political evil, that the tension between empathy and politics and the question of the politics of empathy are at the heart of the documentary from its very inception.
The current hegemonic political trend expressed through mainstream documentary practice obliges us practitioners (and represents an opportunity) to redefine the critical role of a radical documentary practice.
Voir le programme du colloque (résumé) → · Voir la page du colloque, University of Sussex →