Castaing-Taylor and Paravel's GoPro Sensorium: Leviathan (2012), Experimental Documentary, and Subjective Sounds

"Ethnographic film is the documentary's avant-garde. Who is more self-conscious than an anthropologist with a movie camera?"

—J. Hoberman

"Film language is the language of moving, seeing, and hearing. More than any other medium or art form, film uses experience to express experience."

—Ilsa Barbash and Lucien Taylor (1)

the term "experimental documentary," at first glance, can be considered an oxymoron at worst or a hybrid category at best that in either case illuminates the assumed dialectical tensions between formal experimentation and cultural representation.¹ Experimental documentary filmmaking conflates this dichotomy at the level of aesthetics, or as Stella Bruzzi puts it, "aestheticization" of a given reality (9). The use of expressive, cinematic techniques, often celebrated in fictional filmmaking as an imaginative means for the filmmaker to engage and enhance the emotional involvement of the viewer with the filmmaker's stories and characters, often meets critical resistance when applied to documentary forms, including those whose origins are not necessarily related to their cinematic incarnations. Erik Barnouw, for example, in his seminal book Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film (1993), categorizes documentaries into nonfiction conventions or trends that existed before the advent of documentary filmmaking with terms such as "explorer," "reporter," "advocate," "poet," and "observer," among others. Barnouw's classification relates closer to "the essay, diary, autobiography, notebook, editorial, evocation, eulogy, exhortation, description or report" (Nichols, Introduction 72). These conceptual, and largely literary, nonfiction templates provide a reference point for how experimentation in the popular imagination can be preconceived as counterintuitive to nonfiction's enterprise for verifiable knowledge. Elsewhere, John Corner points out that the application of documentary aesthetics "has not been surprisingly framed by an interest in cognition, in how documentaries construct and project knowledge and the use of this by viewers" (20–21). Rather, in the documentary's quest to capture visible evidence of its social subject, the use of expressive cinematic techniques in nonfictional modes—such as dynamic dolly camera movement in Alain Resnais's Nuit et Brouillard [Night and Fog] (1955); stylized, noir-like cinematography and reenactments in Errol Morris's The Thin Blue Line (1988); and kinetic music video editing with staged musical numbers in Alma Har'el's Bombay Beach (2011)—short-circuits this supposed link to unmediated knowledge. In more extreme visual measures, experimental documentary bypasses it altogether.

The use of formal experimentation with cultural representation does more than just dismantle the universal impulse toward the discourse of objectivity in mainstream documentary filmmaking—it is also a discourse that itself has lost creditability with the wider acceptance, or at least the acknowledgment, that any form of documentary filmmaking is inherently subjective. Theorists such as Trinh T. Minh-ha notably refute definitions of the documentary as a filmic form or approach altogether, despite its cinematic tradition, due to its untenable conflation of fixed notions of truth with meaning. She argues that "[t]ruth, even when 'caught on the run,' does not yield itself either in names or in (filmic) frames; and meaning should be prevented from coming to closure at what is said and what is shown" (92). What documentaries can offer, at best in her estimation, is a visual representation of a meaning that is already once removed from what it purports to signify. She provocatively asks: "What is one to do with films which set out to determine truth from falsity while the visibility of this truth lies precisely in the fact that it is false?" (92). Although this debate continues, experimental documentary offers recourse in its acknowledgment of the fluctuation of both truth and meaning in a nonfiction filmic form.

Formalism in documentary filmmaking also dismantles the notion of objective experience and memory. It departs from rhetoric and persuasion commonly used in journalistic and issue-oriented nonfiction forms and also calls into question Andre Bazin's notion of the transparency of the image and its implicit connection with observational documentary as cinema's direct link to reality.² Experimental documentaries engage with the nonfiction world through a different form of cognition, which I refer to as...