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Theory and Practice

 

David Furnham, Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, UK

Les Cyclistes: Liberating the Documentary Genre/Democratising the Audience, Towards a Theorising Practice

Keywords: art, mixed media, participation, cycling, Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts

This paper addresses the relationship between theory and practice as developed through three consecutive, related, research-by-practice projects, that aim to provide new knowledge and understanding both for the academy and general community. The creation of three events presented at three site-specific venues has provided, and continues to provide, opportunities to record audience reactions and evaluate their experience against the construction of creative sound-image texts and novel presentational strategies. Les Cyclistes is the third and culminating investigation, and will complete in 2007. The project is funded by the Arts Council, the Lansdown Centre for Electronic Arts, Middlesex University, where I am Reader in Media Arts, and the Arts and Humanities Council (AHRC). It is further supported by local and regional councils and institutional bodies associated with cycling. However, it remains an independent project redefining the documentary genre as a social/arts installation, taking as its theme the differences between French and English cultures concerning cycling. Les Cyclistes will tour to cycling events, museums and art galleries during 2006 and 2007. This paper explores some of the underlying assumptions of this project and those that led to it. My experience suggests that ideas constantly jostle with practice, each informing the other. By dint of the questions I have posed for each project I am moving to a point where I am beginning to articulate a theorised practice where there is a total, known consistency between the philosophical underpinning of the attitudes expressed towards the subject, the way sound-image texts are patterned and structured, and the presentational strategies and design layout of the environments for reception. Whilst this is individual to my own work as an artist, these are complex holistic projects and the underlying principles inform a number of important debates, not least the relationship of theory to practice; the dissemination of new works to the community in addition to that of the gallery; and the status of mixed media projects. Above all else, the projects address issues of the relationship between narrative and play in a very direct way. My hypothesis is that through play and a ‘loitering’ narrative, the documentary genre, built on mixing media – performance, archive and contemporary film, artefacts and magazines – as a live event may have impact as a refreshed artistic endeavour. This approach to the genre enables the audience to have a high-quality experience in locating individual memories and applying their own critical processes. The provocation of the absurdist approach provides reaction points for the audience. Put another way, the aim of these three post-doctoral research-by-practice projects is to find a new understanding – new definitions – for the documentary genre by democratising the processes of realisation and the way in which an audience receive messages.

In a Breton farmhouse, as the sun sets over the rolling countryside outside, a group of farmers and their wives sit around the TV to watch the tape, The Artist, the Farmer and the Landscape, which I made as part of my Ph.D., Documentary Practice. The men sit on one side of the room around the table, their wives on the opposite side. Some are late so the tape is restarted. Others recognise a friend in a crowd scene so the tape is rewound. They laugh in recognition of themselves and they mutter in agreement at the narration based on André Gorz’s attitudes to work. In fact, they had taken control and had appropriated the tape as their own. This was my inciting incident, and I wanted to find out how I could move forward to reach out and involve people generally, in popular culture and their own histories.

The poetics of documentary are usually marginalised. Classification systems have been used by many writers (for example, Renov), but by their very nature classification systems promote what is rather than what could be. Carl Plantinga, who defines a documentary in terms of voice, selection, ordering, openings and closures, has embraced a more useful and dynamic approach. My approach to documentary is to go further and raise issues of performance and the purposes of sound-image patterning, and to examine presentational strategies and reception.

There are six main areas of concern, which are involved in the realisation of these mixed media projects.

The aim of Les Cyclistes is to combine all of these considerations into one consistent whole – to represent a theorising practice and attain a level of articulation where the constant engagement of ideas with the processes of realisation offers moments of insight and leads to the creation of the social/arts installation.

Two projects, which preceded Les Cyclistes have provided a significant contribution to this endeavour. They are:

Tati – A Chance to Whistle: Three original documentary works; CDROM; interactive games; archive photographs and artefacts; and performance set within a designed space. First presented at the De La Warr Galleries, 2000.

The Cinema of Comic Illusions: A live show based on an interpretation of the presentation strategies found in early cinema, and an analysis of the early comic absurd films which were largely responsible for the growth of the film industry. The show was first presented on the site of film pioneer G. A. Smith’s film studio (1900-1903), St Ann’s Well Gardens, Brighton and Hove, 2003.

In each project the past mixes with the present to give relevance to both. Each poses questions of narrative, play and mixing media – i.e. the purposes of textual patterning and structure, the construction of reception spaces and the interaction on and off screen of performance and located artefacts.

For the main documentary: Tati – A Chance to Whistle, Michel Chion (writer and sonic artist) and Roy Hudd (actor) wander around modern-day Paris. This is set against Tati’s constructed world of extracts from his prophetic films Mon Oncle and Playtime. The documentary aims to illustrate that it is still possible for people today to see the comic social absurdities of daily life. This aim enabled a creative and novel use of sound/image patterning. I was able to use the ‘long shot’ and sometimes ‘long take’ to film observations of people in public spaces, thereby connecting to Tati’s dramatised style. This was enhanced by the contributions of Michel Chion and Roy Hudd who interacted separately in different public spaces. This heightened the feeling that what is ‘out there’, in the social world, may be observed and transformed into a hyperreality which communicates that within one sense of ‘being there’ exists another. The important point is that the viewers of the documentary draw the comparison for themselves. The documentary is less concerned with narrative structure than with allowing the viewer space to make connections – the viewer is actively involved in working out meaning.

This definition of the hyperreal is also found in Hyperréalismes USA 1965-1975, the book based on the Strasbourg exhibition of American art works based on Hyperrealism. Here, the fine artist transforms the wide-angle photograph into an oil-on-canvas painting. The same definition of transformation usefully applies to the films of Tati, who transforms observations into ‘gags’, and those of the early comic filmmakers of which more will be said later.

Meanwhile Tati is a good starting point, for a detailed analysis of his films does generate ideas about performance, about how meaning is located within patterns of sound and image, about text structuring and about novel presentational strategies. As Chion writes:

‘In his non-dramatised and loitering cinema, in a general shot, which he makes his own, Tati can spread out the signs, gags and characters over the surface of the screen without hierarchy’ (Chion: 1997:29)

Tati offers us a subtle sense of the absurd. He observed the social world exactly as it unfolded before him. As a comic mime-artist and filmmaker, he transformed his observations into an imaginative humanist world. In this he pits the individual against an incoming tide of regimentation. Through repetition, variation and deviation he creates a virtual world, into which we may all enter, which is both joyful and sad at the same time. I adopted a similar approach for the event: Tati – A Chance to Whistle.

Exhibition plan: Tati - A Chance to Whistle

Fig. 1. The plan for the exhibition: Tati – A Chance to Whistle, 2000.

‘If we want to receive a message, we mustn’t above all acknowledge it nor show we have picked it up, for when that happens, mysteriously enough – but that is how it is – communication breaks down.’ (Chion: 1987: 146)

The space for the event Tati – A Chance to Whistle (see Fig.1. ), becomes an extension of both Tati’s constructed world and my own documentaries – a place to discover. There are four sets – each representing a set from a Tati film – in the left image (anti-clockwise from the front/right) are representations of the apartments from Playtime, Jour de Fete, and Les Vacances de M. Hulot, and upstairs (right image) a recreation of the garden from Mon Oncle. In each there are seats, specially chosen for their association with each film, to view the tapes. The spectators became a part of their own ‘Tatiesque’ film. To give a few examples: at Bexhill, people came and watched the tapes and kept watching (one film was of 50-minutes duration, the other two of 20-minutes each). Sometimes, the visitor became the guide when returning with friends to the galleries. People came as family groups and sat in the seats as at home. One man, in shorts, came daily at 4.00pm and walked around, cognac in hand.

The spectators interacted with the ‘window cleaner’ or ‘French waiter’ (both played by the same actor) berating the fact that he never cleaned the windows or served at the tables. The workshops provided further opportunities for interaction, giving people not used to acting the chance to ‘let loose’.

The event, like the films of Tati, is not hierarchical. Everyone may join in. In addition to the films there were games – the interactive CDROM, the ‘match the photos to the sound’ competition, the interactive fish and Mon Oncle garden stepping-stones, all played to this aim. Quite a few people were so determined to match sounds to photographs that they spent the whole day bustling around the galleries. One important result observed, was the pleasure people derived from recognising objects used in the documentaries, which were on display as artefacts from the films. There were links from the films to the artefacts and photographs enabling the presentational strategies to create a virtual world – the Tati-esque – for the spectators to explore and create their own knowledge base.

In the visitors’ book one entry read ‘Top quality, Top drawer, Top Tati.’ I think this remark focuses on the function of the whole experience of allowing people access to the ideas of Tati’s films not just in relationship to my ‘texts’ but also at the level of experience, which is something to be thought over, similar to the Theatre of the Absurd described in Esslin’s classic book.

For Esslin, the Theatre of the Absurd:

‘is concerned with a psychological reality expressed in images that are outward projections of states of mind, fears, dreams, nightmares and conflicts… The total action of a play, instead of proceeding from point A to point B, gradually builds up the complex pattern of the poetic image. The spectators’ suspense consists in waiting for the gradual completion of the pattern, which will enable them to see the image as a whole. And only when that image is assembled can the spectator begin to explore not so much its meaning as its structure, texture, and impact.’

In the Theatre of the Absurd:

‘stripped of all his illusions and vaguely felt fears and anxieties, the spectator can face this situation consciously… dissolved and discharged through liberating laughter at the recognition of the fundamental absurdity of the universe. (Esslin: 414)

Esslin goes on to link the Theatre of the Absurd to the traditions of music hall and pantomime comics and early comic cinema – a theatre of performance built on gesture and looks where meaning is constructed through patterns of sound and the performance image. Little Tich was a master of comic timing (see Findlater) and his Little Boots act a masterpiece in displaying the eccentric character, depicting how one meaning is followed by another and another to narrative effect. He battles with his top hat and three-feet-long boots but in the end stands on high – victorious, as are the audience – a totally magical cathartic experience. For Esslin, silent film comedy is without doubt one of the decisive influences on the Theatre of the Absurd. It has the quality of nightmare and displays a world in constant and wholly purposeless movement. It repeatedly demonstrates the deep poetic power of wordless and purposeless action.

For the second project, The Cinema of Comic Illusions, I started with the proposition developed by Rae Ruth Gordon that the early absurd comic films of Calino, Onésime and to a lesser extent Linder, work in two ways. First, through the agitated performance from the comics, stimulating the audience to enter an unknown world of what Gordon calls ‘the low life.’ I won’t pursue that here. What is important is that the audience enters another world. The stories are slight but the fast movements suggest a world of hysteria or madness. The filmmakers use the technology of cinema to transform reality into a heightened reality. In Calino Fireman, the film is speeded up as firemen rush to a fire. Their incompetence is exaggerated by slowing down the film as they fill buckets with water. In this mad world they put out the fire, but there is no fire, and Calino Fireman is rewarded with a medal for putting out a fire that didn’t exist! Second, Gordon argues that the experience is enhanced for the audience who also experience the jerky movements of the film as it passes through the projector gate. The audience physically experiences qualities of hysteria and madness.

Marquee plan for The Cinema of Comic Illusions

Fig. 2. Plan for the marquee presentation of The Cinema of Comic Illusions at St. Ann’s Well Gardens, site of film pioneer G.A. Smith’s film studio, 1900-1903.

I also examined the presentation strategies of early cinema (see Fig. 2.). For this I created a show which integrated performance on- and off-screen, thoroughly mixing the past with the present, contemporary video with archive film footage, and the outside with the inside. A system of movements was developed in the public space for the actors who performed either as historical characters or as ‘bonimenteurs’, presenters who also created sound effects (Iris No 22) They – the actors – then moved between the screen and the public spaces, creating a circulation of movement. The pianist accompanied both the films and the live performance. Sound, a combination of music, sound effects, verbal commentary and performance on and off-screen, was experienced by the audience, from all directions. This made considerable demands on the audience – they had to concentrate. By concentrating they were able to pick up the many messages on offer. The liveliness of this cinematic experience, with its absurd ‘heightened’ live performances, presented in a marquee and in the park where the film pioneer G. A. Smith had his studios, demonstrated, to me at least, the possibility of presenting work in the community as a social/arts experience. A vast amount of information about early cinema could be communicated through the interactions of mixed media presentation. The whole experience was an apt reminder of the original ‘liveliness’ of the cinematic experience and the pleasure it had for audiences. These early films provide an understanding of the absurd relating to eccentricity, the hysterical and the mad, at one level, and the succession of looks and gestures at another, which are appraised, incorporated into and re-invented with Les Cyclistes.

In making Les Cyclistes, I am trying to bring together the concepts of performance, sound/image patterning and constructed visitor space through an installation, using a marquee and historic Citroen Hy Van. The set is a cyclist’s rather odd kitchen, a winner’s podium and ‘cinema’ van interior. The event is taken directly to the community – site-specific locations – cycle rallies, runs, races and museums – and hopefully, an art gallery. The installation also includes an interactive cycle created by colleagues at Middlesex University, and an area where cycle enthusiasts can record their cycling stories on video. This could become a useful archive resource in itself.

Les Cyclistes aims to bring everything together in terms of textual patterning and reception – all driven so that the spectators recognise, feel and react to the virtual world of the absurd, where live performance (stories and song), contemporary video and archive film, artefacts, the photograph, and periodicals – in short the past and present, inside and out – juxtapose in a world where ‘connections between’ becomes a modus operandi. This, in its creative processes, seems to belong as much to the installation artist as to the traditional documentary maker.

Diagram for the marquee

Fig. 3. Diagram for the Marquee with cycling enthusiast’s kitchen, podium and interactive cycle.

For Les Cyclistes, I have moved from the two-dimensional documentary narrative into a three-dimensional space based on play – albeit within certain narrative boundaries. For the audience, making connections is pleasurable in that it is playful and leads to new knowledge and understanding. The space actively involves the spectators who, if they so choose, become participants in the proceedings. For the audience, situated centrally in the ‘poetics’ of the event it becomes a question of a game to play!

‘If we want to receive a message, we mustn’t above all acknowledge it nor show we have picked it up, for when that happens, mysteriously enough – but that is how it is – communication breaks down.’ (Chion: 1987: 146)

Cycling strikes me, as you might have guessed by now, as something of an absurd activity and my interest comes about from being with friends who are compulsive cycling enthusiasts. They potter about fixing things to the bicycle; they go mile after mile, suffering on a narrow seat, and bumping along pot-holed roads, only to return to where they started! It all appears quite pointless! The French are no better. They send their youths to join club racing, and in the Tour de France cyclists ride 200kms per day for three weeks up and down mountains in all weathers! To add to the absurdity fifteen million people, from across Europe, mostly with camper vans, stand at the roadside all day to see them pass, which takes less than a minute. These are the observed realities upon which I work to create the installation and films. They link to French and British newsreels and feature films and these will be used to heighten reality.

My research comprises a variety of interacting activities: first-hand observations (often recorded onto video) of cycling rallies, races and runs; conversations with cyclists, local government cycling officers and cycling museum curators; book, archive, film and photographic research; and research on phenomenology, the absurd and improvisation. The constant evaluation and re-valuation of all this knowledge informs practice. As the process of realisation moves forward so practice informs the theoretical. For example, characters I meet are shaped into ‘ideal-type’ performed characters. The industrial model (developed in broadcast television) is being replaced with an arts model. The arts model is more open-ended and confident in considering creative possibilities. In this theorising practice what is assessed is the consistency between practice strategies (methods), decisions and the governing ideas that shape both the whole and the particular.

The development and making of the film Allez, Allez, Allez demonstrates the above point. The film was created with five actors over two weeks in France. The story tells of the adventures of a group of British cyclists on holiday, who watch the Tour de France time trials and Stage 1 of the race. It concludes with their paying homage to Tom Simpson, the British cyclist whose memorial on Mount Ventoux marks the spot where he collapsed and died while competing in the 1967 Tour de France.

The realisation of the film Allez, Allez, Allez raises questions about the qualities of the absurd and how they manifest themselves through a mix of performance and recorded documentary observations. The film also raises questions about the position of the audience in relation to the text. This film, like the installation of which it is a part, is constructed so as to allow the audience to consider textures and moods rather than simply follow a story.

The role of the director, as applied to the filming of Allez, Allez, Allez was to democratise the filming process, for example by including rehearsals that enabled the actors to take control of their own character’s destinies. This process was also applied to the filming of non-actors. At the moment of filming the director and crew were as actively involved in the event as the participants – all were in a state of readiness to respond to the occasion as it unfolds.

The definition of the characters became clear in the course of the development of the film. The actors adopted specific character-types: the playful innocent; the eccentric; the gentle absurd; and the frenetically mad. These distinctions defined each character in behavioural terms and may link to selected observed behaviour. Actions developed by the actors relate also to the location and the moods that each character generates. Through practice I have been able to differentiate within the broad term ‘absurd’.

Ideas drawn from improvisation in theatre became a key methodology to develop such ‘phenomenologically’-based characters, which in some ways follow the ‘ideal’ characters discussed in The Phenomenology of the Social World by Schultz. They exhibit core behavioural patterns within their social space. This is a feature observed in Tati’s film characters, for example, the street cleaner in Mon Oncle. The street cleaner is played by the film’s still photographer and is seen never to pick up a leaf, although there are many in the road. He is constantly interrupted and it is this, in relation to his body language, which creates humour. Similarly, Onésime and Calino in the more manic films of the early period create humour from developing lines of character drawn from particular actions.

These ways of describing ‘character’ can be realised through improvisation. Frost and Yarrow’s analysis is highly relevant. Discussing Lecoq’s method they define improvisation as a centrally-imaginative activity of performance, based on gesture. In discussing the Theatre de Complicité they note:

‘Their work relies on exact observation and subsequent stylisation of movement and mood, sharpened by the interplay between idiosyncratic rhythms developed by each performer.’ (Frost and Yarrow: 72)

This is a way forward when thinking of integrating actors’ performance and their respective characters and those non-fictionalised characters filmed in public spaces. It is possible to produce a set of ‘ideal’ characters from both types – actors and non-actors. Both are acting according to the moment where anything has the potential to happen and sometimes does.

‘For Lecoq it is a state of disponibilité – a state of calmness, of balance, in which the readiness is all ... It is a state in which the truth is revealed, not covered up by tricks ... It is having the confidence to do and say what is appropriate, and to have the confidence to make the choice.’ (Frost and Yarrow: 152)

absurd boules; child at Tour de France

Fig. 4. An absurd game of boules (left); Interacting with a child at the Tour de France (right).

Fig. 4. (left), shows actors Stephen Whinnery and Danny Schlesinger playing Boules, an idea developed from watching Boules players in Provence. On the right the actors are shown waiting for the Tour de France to pass by. As they wait, a small child leans over to play with the bells and horns that Danny has placed on a set of bicycle handlebars. These two examples demonstrate two approaches to developing ‘character’ – by transforming observed behaviour into the comic, and by engaging with the public.

The editing of Allez, Allez, Allez, as with the other recording, is concerned with locating exact meanings as they are generated through facial movements and body gestures. Sound is used to emphasise these meanings. Locations are ‘cast’ as much as the actors in that they function to build up the ‘poetic’ image. The village of the Tour de France is an ideal type, representing many such villages – with its church, two bars and some bends in the road. This method draws on the insights gained from the analysis of Tati’s films and early absurd films from Onesime and Calino where location is important in registering the social world.

There is an interest in using the device of the ‘long shot long take’ which has the hypnotic, almost mesmerising quality of drawing people into the scene. This may be compared to techniques used in the early documentary films of Mitchell and Kenyon.

The overall intention of Les Cyclistes is to offer the audience pleasure, gained from being part of this heightened observational approach. Slowly, to paraphrase Esslin, the complex pattern of the poetic image is constructed so that the audience recognises that image as a whole, its structure, texture and pattern. This is linked to the ‘absurd’ point that through humour the sense of the pointlessness of human action and behaviour develops.

The installation in its entirety also plays to the idea of the absurd. The design of the marquee, with its representational kitchen and podium, allows for a circulation of movement as if the visitor has just dropped in. The cycling enthusiast is also at home there. The actor in this installation has a number of ‘repertorios’ to bring to the particular audience – an improvisation of stories, songs and attitudes both physical and verbal. The kitchen has a sideboard and workbench, laden with magazines, artefacts and video projections (on small portable DVD screens). On the large map of France, the ‘window’ and the podium there are further video projections. These are specially-made films revealing British and French cultural differences in relation to cycling. As part of the installation there is a space to record cycling stories onto videotape, and an interactive cycle, which, via monitors as mirrors, allows the person aboard to see a landscape pass quickly or slowly according to the speed of the practice cycle. Finally the historic Citroen vehicle becomes an intimate cinema and an artefact recognised for the part it played in the film Allez, Allez, Allez. The audience, by roaming through the event become character vectors in their own film.

The idea of the tour is to present the project at a variety of venues located near to or at cycling events. This will provide the opportunity to collect audience responses to the material by observing how people actually use the space, and through semi-structured interviews. These responses will be evaluated against the original aims and will feed into the outcomes, both written outcomes and those expressed in the form of performance strategies.

The Project as a Theorising Practice

Research may be seen as a constant jostling of ideas and practices with occasional flashes of insight. This is what I term the milieu of theory and practice. A consistent theoretical position emerges through practice as a creative process. In my case, I have put together ideas of the absurd and hyperreal with those of improvisation, narrative and play, to produce an energised active response from the audience. The idea of the tour is to take the work directly to targeted audiences. By design the audience participates in the new, unfolding documentary. There is a loop of engagement for the audience as they encounter live performance, roam around the video, artefacts and periodicals, try the interactive cycle, and record their cycling stories. It is also possible that the form of this event might encourage the engagement of an audience who would probably not visit Les Cyclistes if it were housed in a formal gallery space.

The project reveals much about how audiences respond to time-based media. For me, Les Cyclistes demonstrates the importance of transmitting a multiplicity of meanings to be received and considered by each member of the audience – it is non-hierarchical. To this end the documentary genre may seek new modes of expression. Documentary is able to liberate itself from traditional narrative forms by democratising the audience through a playful engagement with knowledge, thus increasing levels of understanding.

This may be evaluated at the point of presentation. I will test the assumptions made about the project by interviewing visitors and observing audience reactions at the time of the tour presentations. The data collected will be set against actual outcomes. This method is known as Illuminative Evaluation and will give valuable insights into understanding audience reception and a way forward to the next project!

Digital technology has a key role in enabling the entire event. Light-weight digital cameras are easily transportable and allow the immediate capture of any moment of action and thus moment of meaning. Editing software allows immediate control over all aspects of the image and the creation of spatial sound opens up a whole range of creative possibilities. Display is via an array of sophisticated monitors and video projectors. In the ‘enthusiast’s kitchen’, or ‘winner’s podium’, images may be displayed and juxtaposed in a variety of ways.

Les Cyclistes gives a definition to research by practice as an ongoing process where the articulation of results is also ongoing. At a very practical level such articulations have helped develop the project socio-politically, for example when talking to institutional funders, local government officers or cycling organisations who have helped enable the progress of the project. Within the academy I have been able to develop new programmes and share my findings with colleagues across many disciplines. It is timely. There are those who decry such an approach as being without academic rigor. I disagree. It is vital to understand and engage at first hand with the central role of creativity in bringing forth new knowledge for both science and the arts – a meta-practice. The position here is reminiscent of the structure of a Godard film – revealing and breaking previously agreed codes whilst working with those codes. But even this fixes boundaries – more orthodoxy! I argue for the importance of exploring new pathways in order to see what results – to be expansive and take the risk! Research by practice does lead to new understanding, new curricula, and an energised teaching and learning milieu. The results may be presented as peer review, as live presentations, through website publication and articles. I believe that in research there should be trust in the moment of discovery, as it will lead to new knowledge. Fulfilling AHRC criteria, this project speaks both to the academy and to the world at large. But be aware – the cross-disciplinary approach is a challenge, and at present institutions may not always be structured in a way that supports such an approach.

November 2005

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