for Dok.revue, March 2025
- What do you consider the most distinctive aspect of camera work—and the cinematographer’s approach—in documentary filmmaking?
To make an image means working in stereo, there is an exchange between what is front of the camera and the person behind it. The camera is the meeting place of that exchange, and makes a record. Most of the time this doesn’t happen. Cameras are usually used as a defense to guard us from experience, to keep us above all from feeling anything. Please let my body resemble the digital data flow that neoliberalism requires. This keeps the artist at what John Berger calls “a copying distance.”
“When a painting is lifeless it is the result of the painter not having the nerve to get close enough for a collaboration to start. He stays at a copying distance. Or, as in mannerist periods like today, he stays at an art-historical distance, playing stylistic tricks which the model knows nothing about.” John Berger, The Shape of a Pocket
- Can you name a documentary film where you particularly appreciate the camera work? What makes it stand out to you?
Pipit Dalam Badai (Sparrow in a Storm) by Indonesian filmmaker Van Luber Parensen. In a series of simple frames, Paresen conjures a centuries-long history of Dutch colonization drenched in a casual and effortless beauty. The camera embraces a plant life of “weeds,” plants that cannot be turned into money, unlike the new crops introduced by the Dutch (coffee, tobacco, sugar and opium, occasionally glimpsed at the margins of the frame). The fledgling state of Indonesia appears in the faces of his own children, usually shot low to the ground, from their perspective, as if the camera was another child following their unpredictable movements, their joys and consternations. Because he has a deep relationship with everyone in front of his camera, the pictures remain close, at a touching distance.
This essay film is also a home movie, a fiction, a poem of resistance that unfolds in a fog of indistinct boundaries. It reflects on the ways “Europe” lives on as wound and dream destination, as the gateway to modernity that creates a terrifying cascade of separations—between human and non-human, fathers and children, flower and weed, master and slave. But the camera works steadily to blur those divisions, to begin again the work of healing. Most remarkably the camera moves alongside its subjects so that life is still happening—a piece of paper turns into a boat, poisonous gas becomes clouds—the camera turns everything it touches into a relationship humming with the thrall of life.