Untitled: Who is the Author of a Dead Man’s Film?

Countless artworks will never reach our senses, given up on, unreleased or unfinished in the creator’s time. Once discovered should we then complete this work or leave it incomplete, release it or let it sit where the artist left it? Does this change when the art is being created by a team rather than by an individual? These questions obviously vary greatly work-to-work and medium-to-medium, but it is central to Glawogger’s final documentary Untitled.

The film opens informing us of the conditions of production, explaining Glawogger’s wish to travel and make a film about ‘nothing’ and telling us of his tragic death ending his journey across Europe and western Africa. He died leaving behind only rushes and a diary of writings. These raw materials were then edited together by Monika Willi (a veteran editor of many of Michael Haneke’s films). The film provides a number of titles to Willi’s role in the process. The film itself states she ‘realised’ and edited the project, whereas online databases cite her as a co-director, editor and co-writer. However finickity this distinction may seem it cuts down to a deeper argument or where the film is actually created—in the creation of the footage or in the editing alone.

The first is easy to consider in the usual production chain, especially of fiction film. The director writes/obtains a script, directs the photography and then directs the editing. Even removing the final step or directing the editing process we can see the foundations of ‘script to screen’ by deciding on the shots, pace, dialogue and directing actors. However if we shift this from fiction to documentary things become blurred (especially considering a travel documentary such as this, without a specific subject to follow—think Samsara , 2011). In this context the footage constitutes something closer to the script, or even a foundation for a script, rather than a set of images created specifically to follow a storyline or concept we have a collection of disconnected images that need to be connected in the process of editing.

Considering the footage thus, as a raw material, we can find a wealth of examples where the director is in fact only the manipulator of these images. Take Douglas Gordon’s 24 Hour Psycho, a film which takes Hitchcock’s Psycho and slows it down to around 2fps so the film is exactly 24 hour, yet here Gordon is the director—not merely the editor. Similarly we can find this with Woody Allen’s What’s up Tiger Lilly, that again uses the entirety of another feature film (International Secret Police: Key of Keys) and altered it via dubbing which permitted Woody Allen the title of director. We can go even further with the found footage of Lewis Klahr’s Her Fragrant Emulsion—editing together footage of the actress Mimsy Farmer, emulating the ins and outs of a relationship with her on-screen appearance. However these examples focus around a change in the intention of the use of the footage, changing Psycho’s suspense into an exploration of inevitability and Mimsy Farmer’s many roles into a single star image. But is this so different to what has happened in Untitled?

From the short audio clip at the film’s opening, where Glawogger explains he wants the film to be about ‘nothing’, it seems that he least of all wants the film to be about himself. Yet, almost inevitably after his death, the implementation of diary passages emulating a nostalgia for home (Europe) during his explorations of the vastly differing cultures of west Africa, it becomes a film about Glawogger and his time standing behind the images we behold. In one of the most touching and memorable moments it quotes his diary, talking in an array of first and third person language, recalling a moment where he (or the character he is making of himself) calls out for the Liberian village to hide him somewhere away from the western modernist world where he won’t be found. This moment, as powerful as it is for a number of reasons, enacts this exact change of motivation and purpose of the film—moving it from an exploration and comparison of cultures into an exploration of an outsider within these cultures. Whether this was Glawogger’s intention or not I cannot be certain, but for me it feels like this isn’t the film he intended to create.

This revolves us back to the role of the editor who, for whatever reason, has implemented these new meanings and enacted different creative decisions than Glawogger would have, had he been around to direct. Thus would it be better to class Glawogger as the director of photography, as he directed the photography of the documentary footage, but not the films final director as it appears to stray from his intended creative direction? Instead we would take Monika Willi as the director, as the person who ‘realised’ the film (exactly the French term for film director; Réalisateur). This isn’t an attempt to demote Glawogger from creating interesting and challenging works, and crafting the raw materials for this work, but I ask you—would you want your name to be flaunted as the creator of something which you were not able create?

[Obviously there is further discussion with this example; as Glawogger died during the creation of the film he was physically unable to complete the film, but I’m sure his name is used, at least in part, to respect the memory of an ambitious filmmaker.]

If you’re yet to see Untitled you can catch it on MUBI, which is now free for (film?) students!

Untitled (2017)

4/4/2

10/13

~Leo