VMAC Article

MANIFESTO: Living Documentary, Negotiating With Framing, Natalie A. CHAO

The way we frame others must first be negotiated with the way we frame ourselves.

There is no ‘female’ gaze — if there is one it is much more than a look, it is the way we look, think, and feel through each of our senses. It is how we objectify ourselves and others within our inner (sub)consciousness and towards each other in our external reality. Politicising the gaze disturbs the potential for empathy.

What is a living documentary? I do not know the answer but I want to relentlessly pursue this question. How we experience and process reality into memory (forgotten and misremembered), emotions (personal and collective), desires (unrecognised and hidden) and questions (open and closed) to carry us forward into the abstract poetry of our minds… Far away from the static linearity of plot.

The language (words evoked from experiences) we create becomes emotion (as expressed through the filmic medium) before manifesting into motion (in our ‘real’ lives).

We need to give the camera away. If we cannot bear the thought of doing so then we must confront that we are using the camera as a weapon and our intention is to load, aim and shoot our subjects — pretending to ‘see’ as they do, or worse, trapping them in our objectivity.

I want to map out and trace memories between the personal and political, bring the act of archiving into the now, and remember who and what it is for, always. How do we tell the emotional narratives of our rapidly changing time and space while freeing ourselves from timelines and statistics?

“Seldom seen but always there.” While I may not know my mother very well in an observable manner, I now know her in an unobservable way. Film allows these inner worlds to materialise just long enough for a collective and shared experience.

The archive repeats itself until we lose our desire to remember. To create from the archive means to let go and follow our desire to see the past with present eyes and cope with reality.

Absence is presence, memory is fiction.

What separates us except time and space? Our desire to remember.

Nothing should be left unquestioned, and yet everything is still just ordinary life.

Perhaps the instability of the female ‘I’ comes from dualistic Western thinking and identity politics, etc… but how do we run away from language itself? Maybe by writing ourselves willingly into the fabric of our films. We forget to remember that we are just embedded narratives of ourselves.

Words and bodies cannot be separated.

When does the photograph become the memory? When everything is eternal, nothing is eternal.

Live the questions you ask in every piece of work you make. When the answer is another question, go on to create more work.

All meaning is created through relationship, which means all meaning is relative. So let’s not try to make meaning with images, but relationships with the people who exist in and outside of our frames.

A documentary should not be scared to exist without images.

We should honour the look of memory: with all its inaccurate flaws and revelations of our desires, anxieties, regret, and loss… Film is not mental time travel, we cannot cheat by editing our timelines. All we can do is accept the medium as a mediator between these made up realities, a record keeper of who we are at each time we decide to look back.

Cartier-Bresson said: “Thinking should be happening before and after the taking of a photograph, never during.” As much as I’ve reflected on the need to understand why we are choosing a composition or moving with the camera a certain way, when we’re rolling I know that everything just happens on its own. That is poetry. It has always been poetry. But with this feeling comes the risk of making mistakes, as I felt paralysed a year ago while shooting a scene that I will never want to watch again. But the possibility of both is what is demanded of the craft. I must not be scared.

I will never forget the first time I found my mother’s wedding video. There she was, in her wedding dress, the camcorder held close to her veil. A pan to her parents — who sit there stoically by the hotel room window — then a quick pan back to the mirror. I’ve never seen her do a self-portrait, she died before selfies came to be, and in these three small seconds I felt her presence. I replay that part, over and over. It’s her! Holding a camera. Capturing, loving, feeling. Yet I can’t ever return that gaze, so there is also an absence. I know I cannot possess her. I can only hold onto her image — nothing more. But what separates us except time and space? That is the question that has haunted me ever since. Upon witnessing this most intimate moment, I started questioning everything I learned and achieved in my early cinematography career. Why was it that I felt more moved by a few blurry pixels on VHS than the images I’ve captured with top of the grade cinema cameras and full lighting crews?

I have spent a lot of time this past year reflecting and honing conversations around the topic of ‘the gaze.’ Most notably about the politicisation of it, but on a more personal level, the repercussions of framing anything at all. I find that there are many questions I started asking a year ago, but have now stopped because they became either irrelevant and ignorant in nature, or I discovered hidden and more uncomfortable questions that must be interrogated beforehand. I will try the list them below:

(first layer)
Does ‘the female gaze’ exist? How about a racial one, then? Who am I to photograph anyone? Why must I photograph THIS subject at THIS time? What is the difference between a documentary and fiction? Does videography maintain an ambiguous presence, rarely examined in between these genres?

(second layer)
What is the instability of the female ‘I’? What does it mean to embody a narrative voice? Does a distinction between interdependent and independent cultural perspective need to be addressed? Can we escape identity politics with filmmaking? How?

(third layer)
What is my own relationship to my own body? Why do I hate my body sometimes? When did I start framing women in my mind outside of the camera viewfinder?

At the time of writing this manifesto, Hong Kong is caught in a perpetual state of collective trauma and resistance. The walls are at war with each other, as every graffiti is scrubbed out in a way that intends to silence dissent in the most visible way. We want to remember the trauma because we cannot let go of the rage inside of us. I realise so much of what I had written has to do with the question: Why do we want to remember? While revising the original draft of this manifesto, I thought about replacing many of the original questions with ones I had lived through while documenting the protests last year. But it seems that I am not ready to let go of these questions, especially the ones I know in my body and mind that I have contradicted. These questions kept me accountable as a documentarian and a protester. It remains a record of who I was and still aspire to be — even when violence becomes part of our everyday, and the decision to speak becomes heavier, why should I erase this? Hong Kong is now a politicised subject, and our bodies are quickly objectified as being part of the ‘historic,’ ‘macro-political’ narrative. How to reclaim our breathing, screaming and fighting bodies, NOW? How to not lose ourselves as being markers on a timeline, numbers in a statistic? We keep allowing ourselves to search for these questions, reject them, ask them again, forget them, survive past them.

 

(Originally published in Our Manifestos 2: Videography, Documentary Impulses, HK: Floating Projects, 2021. Copy-editor: Zach McLane)

(The views and opinions expressed in this article published are those of the author/s. They do not necessarily represent the views of VMAC.)

 

 

 

Staff Pick
Video Café, 2004, Leaflet

If video art is associated with boredom, the Video Café tries to change that by incorporating the ambience of a coffee shop culture to promote the appreciation of video art. According to our records, the first Video Café took place in 1996.

In 2004, Video Café held a total of five gatherings with different themes. Video Café is not only about screening, but also offers space for participants to read related books and magazines, invites artists to share and discuss video and new media creation with the public, and provides resources and communication opportunities for video artists and interested members of the public.

 

 

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VMAC, Videotage’s collection of video and media arts, is a witness to the development of video and media culture in Hong Kong over the past 35 years. Featuring artists from varied backgrounds, VMAC covers diverse genres including shorts, video essays, experimental films and animations. VMAC Newsletter, published on a bi-monthly basis, provides an up-to-date conversation on media arts and their preservation while highlighting the collection and its contextual materials.