sharing as documentation (as practice)
The focus of my filmmaking work is shifting, and I’ve felt a strong instinct to start documenting and sharing around the process of its creation lately. But at the same time, I’ve been conflicted about the act of “sharing”; how it too easily tips into performance of self — we’ve definitely reached (passed?) peak influencer — and I feel more than a little ambivalence about contributing to the madness and noise.
I’m calling many of my past behaviours and un-interrogated assumptions into question with this shift, and think there has to be a purpose behind sharing which is more than just being seen.
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Amidst all the recent brouhaha (mine included) around the BFI’s Sight & Sound Top Films of All Time #1 spot being awarded to the first female filmmaker recipient (Chantal Akerman for the magnificent Jeanne Dielman 23 1080 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles), was the ever wise, tempering, insightful perspective of Jemma Desai.
Desai is a writer, curator and “reluctant artist” whom I consider a personal warrior on the frontlines of the elite, colonialist cultural institutional war. (And folks, it is a war, trust me.)
I first found her via her desktop performance, What do we want from each other after we have told our stories? during lockdown when dear god I needed the tonic, and I got that a fire lit under me and am now the better for it. Anyway, I encourage you to explore her work (including This Work Isn’t For Us, which I think will go down in history as one of THE texts of 21st century cultural work, imho).
The totality of her words (I mean, you have to click through and read her caption) have me spinning quietly, but the clarion call that sounded to me most starkly was her quoting Lorraine O’Grady on the idea of an audience who “will know” (Desai’s caption & fourth slide), and the documentation of work for that speculative future audience.
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Some of the most valuable texts to me over the years have been artists writing (diarising) or talking conversationally about their work in both the throes of its creation, and retrospectively. I can’t imagine that the auto-documentation of my own work will be of particular use to anyone (except perhaps myself in the name of a process-fulcrum), but I’m inspired by Desai and O’Grady re: the idea of that speculative audience. If I am to write about the work and its messy winding ways in order for a potential future audient to come to it (and perhaps their own work) in another way, then I have to be honest, consistent and considered.
And this actually helps alleviate a lot of my anxiety around the fear of “sharing as performative”. It becomes sharing instead as document (or documentation) and documentation as a part of practice. Writing about the work becomes part of the work itself.
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I’ve flown under the radar as a writer/director for the last few years and not produced much, mostly because I’ve felt my voice has been so outside of what I’ve seen demanded and celebrated. I’ve chipped away at myself with my little hammer and chisel, until what I made and how I sounded fit the bill, no matter how depleted, panicky and miserable it has left me.
So it feels a lot like starting over. Sloughing off an old skin, going through the ceremonial fire, climbing out of a chasm — pick your metaphor. Documenting the work in public therefore becomes very much an act of holding myself accountable to this pretty sizeable ideological, philosophical and artistic shift in direction (and approach).
It is the work bearing witness to itself, and asking to be borne witness at the same time. It is the work declaring itself legitimate. Worthy, perhaps, of coming into being.
