Roberto Minervini’s fifth feature, and third documentary, presents its viewers with numerous intimate portraits of the Black experience in the southern US. Intercutting a number of interconnected vignettes ranging from the personal experiences of men, women, and young brothers to an exploration of the New Black Panther Party. Amid all these touching, complicated, and, most importantly, intimately real micro-narratives there remained one huge dissonance between me, in the cinema, and the people recorded. There was never, not once, an acknowledgement of the camera, or Minervini behind it, by the filmed. No dialogue was shared with Minervini from his subjects, and not once did any of them (this is including a sub-ten year old boy) even glance at the camera. Only in two or three fleeting moments was there any acknowledgement of Minervini’s infiltration of these Black neighbourhoods, and even then it was from those who were not his direct subjects—police officers and passer-bys. This struck me as hugely problematic because as the film’s credits rolled I realised all the information I had learnt about the person who had mediated, and ultimately controlled, my experience navigating this unfamiliar landscape was that he was, at least in name, Italian—an outsider.
Such a revelation could be taken in many ways. Most would brashly cast off his opinion, rights and knowledge in attempting to depict a reality far from his lived experience. However this was not my immediate reaction. My reaction was one of simpler confusion—why was Minervini there? Who was he? Why was this film made? And the question that burned most brightly in my mind was why did he keep himself and his camera invisible to the audience? The latter became especially complex given the film’s form, both visually and structurally. Visually, the film is primarily shot through intimate close-ups—a device that is comparatively scarce in run-and-gun documentary. Structurally, the vignettes often took shape as miniature narratives. The elder brother Ronaldo looking after, and in many ways raising, the younger Titus playing off against Judy Hill opening and eventually closing the bar of her dreams. The combination of these elements had me continually second-guessing what the film was documenting? Was it documenting real lives as they would have unfolded in Minervini’s absence, or was it fictionalising and pushing their lives in certain directions? Obviously, either of these has large ethical implications (what documentary practice doesn't!), but the largest problem was that the film appeared to want me to believe the former while very clearly reshaping parts of reality into the latter. But why?
Minervini, in the subsequent Q&A, suggested that his absence was due to the fact the film was not about him, but about the people in front of the camera. This concept easily correlates with his formal practice. However, recalling my confusion of the credit’s revealing an Italian man, this answers none of the who or why this filmmaker had undertaken this project. With such questions looming one often assumes the worst; a distant filmmaker rushing into a new cultural space, tearing it open to reveal its multitude of (often exotic) differences then rushing back to their safe-space to mould a representation of these individuals whom the filmmaker, undoubtedly, has gained little true understanding of. Yet, fortunately, in this case this could not be further from the truth. After the film Minervini laid himself bare, explaining his drive to make the film stemmed from a deep dissatisfaction with his own stereotypes and prejudices towards poorer black communities which he lived amongst (living in Texas). Thus he set out to rectify these prejudices, initially without his camera. For 8-12 months he spent time meeting, talking and “hanging out” with individuals from a number of cities. Then he took his camera to those who felt comfortable to share their experience with him, and today—two years after he began filming—he remains in keen touch with his subjects (now friends) and continues to work actively to improve the experience within like communities. As he described these instances they played like music to my ears, reassuring me that these people had not been wholly exploited for the image of their struggle—Minervini was someone who, at least in how he sold himself, deeply cared… But how would any viewer of his film ever be able to know this without supplement? As a self-enclosed work, I strongly believe no film should need justification or explanation to be complete. Here, then, we must again posit; why did he remove any inclusion (or even hint) of his existence and intimate relationship with his subjects?
Attempting to unpick this through the film’s form, we quickly recognise tropes of the ‘fly on the wall’ documentary, taken to the extreme. Film scholar Bill Nichols describes this mode as an “observational documentary”, continuing the legacy of the ‘actuality’ filmmakers of the 60s/70s. This mode rejects the filmmaker in favour of pure observation of viewing its subjects, and is thus often praised for its ability to present reality as it truly is, without much manipulation (of course there are many arguments against this). Yet Minervini appears to have taken this mode in a slightly different direction. The film appears to actively reject the camera’s presence, along with the entire concept of off-screen space. How, for example, do the brothers avoid looking at the camera when it is positioned directly in front of them tracking as they walk towards it? This suggests, to me, there must have been an explicit discussion between Minervini and the filmed to ensure that they do not look or interact. As such moving the documentary farther from achieving an observational truth, while attempting to retain the style’s aesthetic. Ultimately duping the audience into believing that this occurred naturally.*
Moreover, Minervini explained that all the instances we viewed in the film were “success stories” of the filming process—but what did he mean exactly? He suggested these were successes where he was accepted into his subjects’ space—but it also holds a strong implication of successes in filming what he had hoped. What then of all the failures? Moments of being rejected by the community, people showing distress towards the presence of the camera and filmmaker, which all undoubtedly stem from his status as a probing outsider. These unseen moments seem invaluable in untangling many of the questions the film initially left with me, as the name of an Italian director flashed up in the credits. So again, we revolve back to why is there no trace of Minervini within the film? We have no clear answer, but his selection of ‘successes’ and his rejection of the off-screen show a clear moulding and mediation of reality, which strays far from the ideals of the ‘fly on the wall’ documentary’.
Now, mediation is not a bad thing. Especially as all cinema, documentary or otherwise, is mediated in some shape or form to achieve a desired effect (through every single choice). The danger is the claim of an unmediated truth. Within documentary especially it is easy for viewers to be convinced that they are viewing a whole truth. Often, through many informational documentaries, this is of little harm. We can be taught about the process of a power plant through video with relative ambivalence towards its mode of documentary if all we are looking for, and all that is being communicated, is based on hard facts (i.e. Joe works in X, doing Y, to achieve Z reaction). But What You Gonna Do isn’t probing for these hard facts. Yes it shows many people in what they always do, but its goal is to document a less tangible racial and class experience. Thus, in this case, and many like it, I believe it is important for the filmmaker to display to us, within the text, that they are clearly the mediator. As such hinting towards their place in the environment, why they are there and, ultimately, what their relationship with the subject is. But this does not mean, in any shape or form, that the documentarian has to build their own personality to take over the documentary space—in the vein of Wim Wenders or Werner Herzog. On the contrary, this can remain subtle, fleeting and without clear intent.
A strong example of this is within Zhao Liang’s Crime and Punishment, and remains scattered throughout his filmography from Petition to Paper Airplanes. Zhao approaches his subjects in a similar way to Minervini. He approaches people in vastly different social situations to his own and films them quietly without any direct on-screen interaction. The run-time of Crime and Punishment is spent, much like What You Gonna Do, watching conversations unfold—yet this time centring on the daily conflicts within a police station on the China-North Korea border. The moments which stick in my memory the most vividly, are the fleeting inputs we get from Zhao. The first of which is when he is left alone with an arrested man, and gives him a tender piece of advice. Secondly, is when tensions begin to escalate, and the police turn towards violence. An officer quickly smothers the camera and tells Zhao to stop recording.
These moments provide something vastly different from our usual on-screen/voice-over documentarian (Wenders, Herzog, Louis Theroux). They remind us, explicitly, that what we are watching is being mediated by both the documentarian (through their input) and the simple presence of a camera. The latter of which is articulated perfectly by Zhao showing a ‘failure’ to film (as opposed to Minervini ‘success stories’), when Zhao is forced to stop recording. Halting the recording, and thus restricting what we can view in the cinema, in fact proves hugely informative (perhaps even more so than an image), articulating the self-censorship one often enacts while being recorded.** Ultimately, then, this revealing of the off-screen, and acceptance of oneself as existing behind (and controlling) the camera act as important reminders of the mediation that occurs within documentary—while sidestepping the, often, clumsy auteur/personality lead approach of being on screen. Zhao perfectly, and subtly, reinforced a reflexivity in the audience; ensuring that they remember both what they are watching and how it came into being.
In sum, the importance of revealing the observational documentary’s mediation is clear. If Minervini had implemented even a single moment of this ilk within What You Gonna Do my many questions would have been answered, at least partially. If he had revealed one, or more, of his countless ‘failures’ in filming his subject perhaps we would have gained greater insight of not only the process of filming but also the subjects’ feelings towards it—bridging the gap between a somewhat distorted fly on the wall truth, and the reality of the film’s creation both for the filmmaker and for the subjects. Instead Minervini’s film shows clear intent to remove these elements, which proves much more damaging than their natural non-existence. The subject’s endless avoidance of both the camera and the filmmaker within the film has proved, in this case, to not only be damaging to my understanding of the film but also creates a false image of distance between the filmmaker and the filmed. And without the supplemental information presented by the filmmaker post-screening, viewers of this film will be left with many ideological questions which will, ultimately, sour their relationship to the film.
Yet we could counter this argument with one arguing that the inclusion of the filmmaker will effect how the audience interacts with the filmed subject. But the problem with such a retort is that this approach clearly encourages viewers to take the fly on the wall (observational) documentary passively as an unmediated truth when, as we have discussed, this is far from the case as the filmmaker is altering the lived reality through both the camera and their presence. Here, one final example comes to mind from Minervini’s film. Ronaldo, the older brother, is being lectured by his mother who touches on a large past incident which had resulted in Ronaldo’s punishment. Ronaldo quickly lurches forward begging that she doesn’t reveal what the event was, she continues nonetheless. I viewed this moment as Ronaldo clearly trying to censor his personal life from Minervini, and his camera. Attempting to keep hidden a shame, even without looking towards or interacting with Minervini himself. I am sure there were many, many, moments akin to this one which were cut from the final film in favour of the visage of unmediated truth. Yet it is in exactly these moments, the rupturing of the subject-filmmaker division, that the reality of documentary truly emerges.
~Leo
What You Gonna Do When the World’s on Fire? (2019)
2/4/2
8/13
Endnotes & Reference
*Of course, here I am willing to withdraw this critique if, however unlikely it seems, Minervini in fact didn’t set these boundaries. However, in this case, the representational issue would likely move towards the editing process—which, in this case, has then removed any trace of subject-filmmaker interaction.
**This instance, taking place during police violence, obviously has many more implications I will not touch on here.
For more on Bill Nichols’ documentary modes check out:
· Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, 2nd Edition. (USA: Indiana University Press) p.179