The Implicit Lies in Documentary

A documentary film which charts the final days of the eponymous Bangkok theatre, Scala delves into the personal histories of the in-house workers and director Ananta Thitanat herself, who spent her childhood on the grounds as the daughter of a nearby theatre worker. The film’s languorous, persistent shots and steady angles demonstrate a preoccupation with encapsulating interactions between people and space as they unfold organically, observed through the lens of a distant camera.

Scala is overrun with seemingly candid shots—a man’s wandering eye settles on the camera lens and waggles his eyebrows in a moment of unexpected playfulness; an unidentified woman talks to the filmmaker as she goes to throw out bags of rubbish; a gaggle of men engage in cheeky political gossip before exhorting Thitanat to cut that section out of the film. The film captures passing moments that would otherwise only exist in memory, privileging the pedestrian—the humdrum and prosaic. Each frame reveals a fixation with capturing life as it is experienced. As a viewer, I indeed get the sense that I am watching life as it is lived by other people, and yet I know that the film is ultimately a construction; that everything it includes is a conscious decision.  

There is no indication that the documentary was meticulously scripted with any of the subjects prior; no sign of a rehearsed speech. The camera prowls on the sidelines, recording the casual speech of the people in the film as they methodically work on tearing down the theatre piece by piece.

Figure 1: A worker stares straight into the camera. (Source: Scala 2022, taken from Vimeo)

Film scholar Dirk Eitzen highlights the fictionality of the documentary genre: “[e]very representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the sense that it is an artificial construct, a highly contrived and selective view of the world, produced for some purpose and therefore unavoidably reflecting a given subjectivity or point of view”.In a similar vein, filmmaker Fiona Otway points out that filmmaking “necessitates choices about where to point the camera, what to include in the frame, how long to hold a shot, when to cut from one shot to the next, whose point of view to privilege, which emotions to emphasise, what facts to underscore, and so on”. 2 In short, the argument is that the making of any documentary comprises a multitude of inescapable choices. Like Etizen, Otway observes that documentaries “are immeasurably shaped and biased by the information that is excluded from the text”.  

Film academics Birgit Beumers and Mark Lipovetsky likewise suggest the lack of a “documentary truth”, and mention “how convenient the documentary image can be for the creation of ideological (and other) mythological designs”.Given that documentaries purport to tell the truth a la cinema verité, the medium is especially susceptible to manipulation that is often political. The “use of documentary forms does not confirm, but rather, undermines the notions of “truth” and “authenticity” associated with “documentation”. 

While all this may be true, something must be said for the documentary film which does not lay claim to truth, which is aware of its own fictionality. Scala appears to be a prime example of this given its self-reflexive instances and consistent portrayal of a multiplicity of individual stories and perspectives. There are numerous instances in the film where the people speaking make reference to the camera, and warn other speakers not to mention controversial topics as it is rolling. 

Figure 2: The cinema workers engage in banter. (Source: Scala 2022, taken from Vimeo) 

Figure 3: One worker asks the director to cut out politically sensitive discussions. (Source: Scala 2022, taken from Vimeo) 

The endearingly unmanicured documentary displays a stark honesty about the events behind its creation, even seeming to draw attention to its artificial constructScala’s audience is given the privilege of observing the process of its genesis, which seems to occur within the film as it is being watched. Thitanat’s refusal to cut things out gives the viewer a sense of the film’s candour and sincerity in eschewing any embellishment of discourseimplicating itself as a creation that strives for genuine representationall the while acknowledging its impossibility.  

Figure 4: A woman strikes up a conversation with Thitanat by the waste bins. (Source: Scala 2022, taken from Vimeo) 

Etizen suggests we must pay attention to the in-between space, “to account for the practical, everyday differences between fiction and nonfiction—differences that we experience as real and that can have real consequences for how we get along in the world, even though they may be in a sense imaginary”. The postmodernist movement of the late 20th century follows a related line of argument—it suggests the non-existence of a single, irrefutable truth; of a definable, accessible centre. The various threads of creative representation are valuable and exist as truths in their own right, simply for the fact that they have been perceived, experienced, and lived.  

Scala distances itself from the doomed pursuit of a single absolute truth and the erroneous privileging of truth as the only worthwhile end. It never claims to provide an undistorted snapshot of reality, instead rooting itself in personal stories—Thitanat engages in poignant voiceover that reconstructs the cinema as it exists in her memory, and asks the theatre workers to share their own experiences of the space. Thitanat’s debut feature does not shy away from the injection of subjectivity and personal viewpoints, and in so doing creates rich, many-hued layers of truth and experience. 

In an interview with historian Ann-Lousie Shapiro, documentary filmmaker Jill Godmilow proposed a new term broadly referring to films traditionally categorised as documentaries: “films of edification”, or “edifiers”. 4 She reasons that the label “avoids the classic truth claims of documentary and acknowledges the intention to persuade and to elevate—to raise up the audience to a more sophisticated or refined notion of what is”. 

Perhaps this is what Scala strives towards. Its existence recognises the impossibility of ever truly representing reality; embracing the fact that to represent is to interpret; to portray is to construct; to immortalise is to reflect. And in so doing, the film’s message is granted a special, resonant poignancy that stays with its viewers. 


 

Endnotes:  

  1. Eitzen, Dirk. “When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception.” Cinema Journal 35, no. 1 (1995): 81–102. https://doi.org/10.2307/1225809. 
  2. Otway, Fiona. “The Unreliable Narrator in Documentary.” Journal of Film and Video 67, no. 3–4 (2015): 3–23. https://doi.org/10.5406/jfilmvideo.67.3-4.0003. 
  3. Lipovetsky, Mark, and Birgit Beumers. “Reality Performance: Documentary Trends in Post-Soviet Russian Theatre.” Contemporary Theatre Review 18, no. 3 (2008): 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1080/10486800802123583. 
  4. Godmilow, Jill, and Ann-Louise Shapiro. “How Real Is the Reality in Documentary Film?” History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 80–101. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505576. 

Our 2022 articles offered a selection across four broad categories to facilitate your perusal. This article was part of the THINK category: Essays and analysis to spark greater thought into the films programmed and ideas discussed. For the curious and thinkers.

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