VENDEDORES, INDIGENTES, LOCOS, PÍCAROS, Y APODOS

In the previous chapters I have suggested that the mechanics of the encounter in psychotherapy, psychoanalysis and documentary film are similar: one person tells his or her personal story, gives an account of her/himself, and the other listens and is in some position of power and knowledge. In documentary film the latter is the filmmaker. These encounters might lead to complicated unconscious mechanisms being triggered, leading to intense and sometimes difficult relationships between those who make the films and those who appear in them, particularly, as we have seen in chapter 3, when the subject is somehow intimate or dealing with trauma or both. It is worth repeating the point I made in chapter 1 which is that it is not that the documentary encounter is ‘like’ psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; it is rather the opposite: through unconscious mechanisms described in psychoanalysis a situation might arise leading to a profound sense of transference between the parties involved resulting in a variety of passionate engagements but also

‘misrecognitions’ and potential betrayals on the part of the subject of the film and the filmmaker alike. Might there also be a tension between the funders’ or the broadcaster’s desire to present often an ‘objective’ or at least a ‘safe’ text and the filmmakers’ and their subjects’ desires to show something which at least has traces of the actual original engagement.

It is also important to reflect on the economy of these encounters: there are big differences here, as previously stated, in particular regarding the objectives of the encounters (obviously, the making of the film is at the outset very different from a psychoanalytic or psychotherapeutic encounter as is the blurring between the public and the private etc.). The way in which this encounter is initiated is also crucial. Another issue is the issue of money, which is dealt with differently in

42 http://www.bbc.co.uk/guidelines/editorialguidelines/page/guidelines-fairness-contributors-informed-consent (accessed 10^th July 2012)

In reality if the contributor insists the she or he has been misinformed, it is almost impossible to hold on to the contribution. The point is they have to want to do it.

both instances: nonetheless, interestingly, it is always the one who talks who either pays the money or doesn’t get any financial benefit from the encounter. The one who listens – and of course does other things too (analyses, offers treatment, makes a film etc) – makes all the money. The listening in our culture constitutes labour it seems for which one should get paid because nobody has time to just

‘listen’ without some other objective attached to it.

To spell it out: in the psychoanalytical or psychotherapeutic encounter, or to be precise, an encounter between an analysand and a psychoanalyst, it is mostly a patient, a person in some pain, at best an analysand in training analysis, who comes forward and asks to be analysed by a professional who, at least in part, is in the profession because they have some interest in ‘helping’ people (although clearly there could be a host of other reasons too). On the other hand, the love they offer is paid for and measured in 50 minute chunks (or some other variable chunks – as in Lacanian analysis). Either way, that encounter involves a direct monetary transaction in which, most of the time if not all the time, the patient – the analysand – is the one who pays.

In an encounter between a filmmaker and the subject of a documentary, it is usually the filmmaker who comes forward and asks for permission, to make a film about the given person or an institution. There are financial considerations too but not professing to be able to offer any cures. You don’t need to pay me, you just need to tell me your story’. But then of course, at some point or other, the filmmaker has to add: ‘I also probably won’t be paying you’⁴³. In Butler’s work, which I engage with in this chapter, she sees a person’s position vis-à-vis power as the key constitutive element of becoming the subject. In her later writing, however, she begins to see the situation differently; the constitution of the subject does not only take place in our relation to the Law but also, more importantly in the relation to the Other. I propose that an invitation to be a subject of a

43The latter is actually a rule in documentary filmmaking: certainly when I was trained at the BBC more than 20 years ago, it was absolutely prohibited that any money should change hands in a documentary making process. This supposedly was to ensure the non-mercantile nature of the commitment of the potential subject of the film. Of course, given the extraordinary amount of time that is often required on the part of the film’s

‘characters’, one wonders whether this is in fact an exploitative rule. Production companies of late have had to relax that requirement. Nonetheless, for better or worse, this is the tradition of documentary filmmaking, at least in the UK.

documentary film might be perceived, or misperceived, as a rupture and a moment of recognition: ‘in the asking, in the petition, we have already become something new, since we are constituted by virtue of the address, a need and desire for the Other that takes place in language in the broadest sense, one without which we could not be. To ask for recognition, or to offer it, is precisely not to ask for recognition for what one already is. It is to solicit a becoming, to instigate a transformation, to petition the future always in relation to the Other’ (Butler 2004:

44). I believe that it is this unconscious, or indeed conscious at times, yearning for some kind of recognition, if not love, is at the heart of the initial interpellation to the documentary project.

The reasons for consenting to a documentary project are thus complicated. A potential subject is indeed ‘interpellated’ into this new relationship through a literal hailing: ‘Hey, may I make I film about you?’ In Althusser, as we shall see directly, the process of ‘hailing’ is a metaphor for being subjugated to the dominant social and economic system into which one is born. In documentary, there appears more of a choice – there is a moment– where a person approached by the filmmaker could just turn the offer down – but mostly, in the vast majority of the cases, and certainly in my experience, they agree – even if there is some difficulty to start with and even if the request is a demand for a confessional disclosure. This chapter thus is an attempt to theorise the initial, slightly mysterious, crucial moment, which then transforms itself into a commitment to the project.

I suggest that a subject already interpellated to a larger capitalist system might unconsciously desire another interpellation – in order to have a chance to become more than a cog in the capitalist wheel, as it were. This is a narcissistic desire to be sure but it is also perhaps a desire for love as suggested by Mladen Dolar (1993: 81-86). I propose that it is through that gap that a filmmaker’s call is heard.

If we assume this might be the case, then the ethical issues present in the documentary project will be quite serious.

In this chapter I therefore review the notion of ‘interpellation’ as presented by Althusser in order to confirm that one is always already interpellated into the late capitalist system. I then briefly look at Butler’s reformulation of the Althusserian

notion of interpellation as the subject’s relationship to power is perhaps more complicated than Althusser suggests. I pause to reflect on Butler’s notion of the subjects’ ‘passionate attachments’ (which can be seen as another way of defining transference outside the clinic) to those who subjugate them – which Butler theorises as the subject’s passionate attachment to the Law – as a version of the Hegelian Master-Slave dynamic.

I suggest that the filmmaker’s arrival gives the potential subject of a documentary film a momentary chance to get out his or her subjugation to the dominant societal system. This I suggest, after Dolar, takes place through a kind of ‘falling in love’

with the filmmaker, and the whole possibility of change, which is, perhaps, illusory – most of the time. My hypothesis is that the encounter offers a lure of a momentary escape from the dominant system. In Lacanian terms one could perhaps suggest that it is a kind of reverse ‘suture’ – a movement from the Symbolic back to the Imaginary dyadic relationship – just as any falling in love might be. The filmmaker in this instance acts as a metaphor and ‘the stand in’, the Semblant or Semblance, for the unconscious desire and fantasy of the potential subject ⁴⁴.

I first examine Althusser’s original text in some detail, before moving to a discussion of Butler’s re-formulation of it and Dolar’s crucial intervention. Let’s remind ourselves first of the role of Althusser in post-1968 film criticism.

1.2 Althusser, Film Theory and the Revolution that Never Was