DE CARÁCTER OFICIAL

Chanan too (2007) notes this surprising lack of extensive literature about documentary and psychoanalysis (Chanan 2007: 216), before singling out Emmanuel Berman’s paper in ‘The Couch and The Silver Screen’ (2001) as an exception (Berman in Sabaddini 2003: 213). Berman says that as documentaries are about real people and not actors playing a fictional script, they ‘tend to become invested in their relationship with the filmmaker in a way that evokes what goes on in psychoanalysis or psychotherapy: ‘the process of transference and countertransference (…)’ (Berman in Chanan 2007: 216). I review in greater detail what ‘transference’ means in psychoanalysis in chapter 2, but here it is worth recalling again that it is a special attachment which is formed between the analyst and analysand – and which, Freud and Lacan suggested, also takes place outside the clinic in a different way.

Berman’s actual presentation in Andrea Sabbadini’s book (2003) is a short

transcript of a conference interview between him (he is a psychoanalytic psychotherapist) and two documentary filmmakers. In it he wonders further about the documentary filmmaker’s motivation to choose one and not another topic or subject. He goes on to say that in the case of a filmmaker there might be a deep identification with the subject or some other attempt to find out something relating to the hidden unconscious mind of the documentarian.

What is the motivation of the other side, that of the protagonist? (…) the need to be heard, the need to be seen, a wish for mirroring, a wish for a sympathetic ear (Berman in Sabbadini 2003: 221).

Berman asks the filmmakers about their recollections of making the films. One of the directors, Michal Aviad, was making a film about Israeli soldiers. Her original desire was to expose the violence and stupidity of the Israeli Army. She spent weeks and months with them and it was hard for a number of reasons: she felt lonely and missed other women to start with. Her testimony focuses on her changing feelings and attitudes to those she was filming: the more she talked to the soldiers and got them to talk to her, the more she began to empathise with them: she began to be fond of them in ways she did not expect. My contention is that she might well be talking about transference here. The filmmaker does not use psychoanalytic language but her description of the shift she feels is significant:

As time passed, I started to like them and felt a terrible conflict between my mission to portray the unpleasant aspects of Israel and male culture, and at the same time not wanting to offend them personally. After this film I made a decision only to make films about people whom I love!!!

(Aviad in Sabbadini 2003: 219).

Chanan interprets Berman’s statements in his own quite brutal way, stating that

‘on the filmmaker’s side there is scopophilia or even voyeurism, while on the side of the subject there is narcissism and often exhibitionism’ (Chanan 2007: 216).

This brusque summing up does not do justice to the issue of the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of her/his film. Berman’s final analysis is extremely brief but far more interesting as he draws a clear parallel between the process of making a documentary film and psychotherapy.

This may be one of the elements in which protagonists of documentary

films are a bit, only a bit of course, like analytic or psychotherapy patients who come to a place where there will be a lot of attention to their story, hopefully in an empathetic, sympathetic, interested, respectful way, and some wish for the other, the director or the therapist, to be the spokesperson, to be the one who will help crystallize one’s story, will help to understand and see things. I think that there are some similarities between the two processes (…) (Berman in Sabbadini 2003:

221).

Berman is a psychotherapist and whatever else a documentary process might be, its aim is not the cure of its subject. As already mentioned it might be more akin to psychoanalysis, particularly the Lacanian one, in which the aim is learning about one’s unconscious mechanisms rather than the necessarily ‘getting better’.

My point, however, remains different: the unconscious mechanisms which take place in psychoanalysis might take place in the documentary encounter for a variety of reasons explored further in the chapters that follow. The point is not that the documentary encounter is ‘like’ psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; it is rather the exact opposite: through the structure of the encounter and powerful unconscious mechanisms a situation might arise leading to a profound

‘misrecognition’ on the part of the subject of the film and the filmmaker alike. A documentary encounter might feel like a special safe place in which one is listened to and even loved, but that private space will soon enough be turned into a public spectacle – a process which carries with it inherent dangers. I return to this later.

Berman also wonders whether there are sometimes instances when the subject of the film becomes the filmmaker’s psychotherapist, like perhaps in Ferenczi’s

‘mutual therapy’ (ibid.: 222) ¹⁹. It is my view that the mechanisms taking place in the encounter are far more complex and the notion of ‘mutual therapy’ misses the point. It is rather a collision of repetitions, repressions and desires, which I will discuss in chapter 2.

Berman stresses that the filmmaker in the course of making the film will be experiencing all kinds of difficult emotions vis-à-vis his or her subjects, including: ‘the anxiety on the part of the filmmakers not to exploit their subjects, not want to make them feel exploited’ (ibid.: 222). I argue that the filmmaker

19Also mentioned, for example, in Parker (2011: 187).

might feel sadness and loss linked to transference-love but also a sense of shame on occasion, which I will discuss in chapters 3 and 5.

The term ‘transference’ appears in other documentary studies texts, albeit very infrequently. The editors of Feminism and Documentary (1999), Diane Waldman and Janet Walker, confirm that, despite psychoanalysis’ complicated relationship to feminism (as broadly outlined in this chapter) and its almost exclusive concern with fiction film, there is a place for it in feminist documentary studies. They offer a particular definition for ‘transference’ – as a ‘transference’ to knowledge through ‘the meeting of the past and present staged in psychoanalytic transference in the analytic confrontation between the analyst and the analysand, where conflicts of the past reemerge so that can be worked through in the process of reconstruction’ (Waldman & Walker 1999: 25). They believe it is a feature of historic documentary and consider a possible ‘transference’ to history and the process of talking about the past rather than the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject of the film.

Michael Renov in his book The Subject of Documentary (2004) acknowledges the unconscious throughout the book, which deals with autobiographical texts. Renov gives one instance of ‘transference’ in very particular project by filmmaker and teacher Wendy Clarke who worked in a prison. She encouraged her ‘students’ to create video letters addressed to one particular person in the group. These ‘letters’

were then put together in a kind of documentary, One to One (1990) (Renov 2004:

207) in which these ‘imaginary’ conversations between the two people were edited together by the third, the filmmaker. Here the video letters became increasingly more intimate – and Renov ventures that ‘transference’ (Renov 2004:

208) might have taken place somehow between these people through seeing these video diaries.

Another book in the Visible Evidence series, Alisa Lebow’s (2008) First Person Jewish, is an ambitious undertaking. It interrogates the post-modern autobiographical voice in documentary and experimental film, the issue of Jewishness and how the queer voice in film might relate to it. Lebow analyses a selection of a dozen or so films in some detail, including the work of Chantal Akerman and Alan Berliner, as well as her own film Treyf (1998), co-directed

with Cynthia Madansky.

Lebow offers an interesting psychoanalytical interpretation for Akerman’s work, namely as a repetition of an unresolved (unconscious) repression. Lebow also names ‘evacuation’ as Akerman’s ‘Primal Scene’ without explaining in detail what the latter actually is in Freud. Interestingly, she does offer a further comment in a footnote, buried at the end of the book: ‘Clearly Akerman is not referring specifically to the Freudian primal scene of the child witnessing his or her parents engaged in sexual intercourse. However, it is fair to say that the elements of fear of loss, and of annihilation, experienced by the child (Akerman, in this case) through her perception of her parents’ experience retains some significant elements of Freud’s interpretation of the original “Wolfman” scenario’ (Lebow 2008: 168). I would also wonder whether one could perhaps suggest that Akerman is sublimating her trauma – rather than just ‘repressing’ it. I come back to repetition, repression and sublimation in my next chapter.

Lebow also successfully employs a different psychoanalytical concept, namely, the Lacanian Mirror Stage in her discussion of the Jewish filmmakers’ re-organising the often painful family past into a more agreeable narrative, perhaps as an expression of their unconscious desire to re-find their Imaginary ‘jubilant’

but misrecognized reflection. The notion of transference in documentary is not touched upon. However, significantly, Lebow attempts to offer analyses and interpretations that are very different from the abstract, structurally and semiotically influenced analyses of psychoanalytical film theory.

Lebow and Renov appear to be interested in a more embodied approach, on which I propose to build: the encounter between the filmmaker and the subject of the film is not an abstract linguistic or visual or even ideological encounter: there are real people involved and their intersubjective encounters will involve affect too.

Their worlds will collide in their work on the film. I return to Lebow’s work later in the thesis.