Aesthetics of Documentary: Beyond Reality

My documentary A Perilous Journey uses Poetic Mode to create a dynamic rhythm of my trip around Iceland in April 2022, aiming to show how photography has somehow weakened my memory and logic. This documentary also invites the viewer to consider the relationship between photography, memory, and fact. I divide it into two parts, Doubtful Points and Out of Thin Air, using the jumpy, blurred, and fragmented historical images (e.g. natural landscapes and human activities) to link a virtual event that emphasizes poetic and associative qualities. In this process, I give my historical world, or memory, a kind of formal and aesthetic integrity (Nichol, 2010). This summary will illustrate how my documentary transforms the notion of “fact”. Firstly, I use aesthetic techniques to deploy a poetic cinematic experience, thus changing the language of describing “fact”. Then, the nature of the documentary itself reflects the change in my editing practice from a one-way narrative to the creation of an organic dialogue (Patarin-Jossec, 2022; Stoller, 1992). Finally, this change and the privileged status of documentary - reflecting the truth - make the “deception” more credible (Landesman, 2008).

Instead of emphasizing narrative storytelling, my documentary experiments with aesthetic techniques to create an organic dialogue where the viewer thinks about the relationship between aesthetics and reality. These techniques create a framework of aesthetic language that is different from reality and invites the viewer to engage in a participatory immersion experience (Patarin-Jossec, 2022). Firstly, I open up a mediated space between fiction and reality with a soundtrack that carries an atmosphere of danger (Le Roy & Vanderbeeken, 2018). Secondly, I controlled the pace of the film with freeze frames, rewinding, and slow motion. Here, I reduce the narration of the sound and picture synchronization in favor of the main passages of live scenes with sound and picture. Finally, the colors in the film deploy a visual narrative and cinematic experience, which induces the imagination of mechanical reproduction techniques and modernity. Overall, in the use of these techniques, the images represent an anti-utopian but real truth, where the viewer becomes part of my narrative. In other words, the documentary leaves the meaning carried by the images of travel to be understood and evaluated by the viewer.

It is worth emphasizing that my film, as a poetic documentary, has the privileged status of both “creating illusion” and “reflecting the reality of the world” (Landesman, 2008). That is to say, in my fictional aesthetic environment, the shaky handheld camera and unstructured spontaneous movements naturalize and rationalize the reproduction of truth, making the “deception” more credible. As a result, the viewer’s perception of the danger of the Icelandic journey is blurred and distorted as they engage in dialogue with the film. Although they have the agency to think and understand, they are forced to walk into the overall aesthetic atmosphere of this documentary.

In conclusion, due to the mixture of historical images and aesthetic techniques, my documentary could be defined to some extent as a hybrid documentary, which is highly subjective and emphasizes poetic and associative experimental images. Here, truth is made rather than represented, and “deception” is obscured by the privilege of the documentary to “make the truth”.