PERFORMANCE AND THE HYBRID DOCUMENTARY
The primary aim of my research is to explore how film form relates to the remediation of memory. In this chapter sample, I will begin by identifying films and other works that foreground or complicate processes of reenactment in relation to the moving image, focusing on recent documentary using discourses around reality and representation from the fields of contemporary art, media theory, memory studies and visual culture.
The use of reenactment within documentary is not a new practice, and—conscious that I am reperforming the words of many others—has been an inherent part of the genre since Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) and the ‘ethnofictions’ of Jean Rouch. The restaging of memory and scenes from the past has been present since the form’s inception. The blurring of fiction and documentary filmmaking approaches has also been much discussed during recent years, often with the catch-all buzzword ‘hybrid’ or the older ’docufiction’ being used to refer to to a wealth of films with a range of formal methodologies: from docudramas leaning heavily on the reconstruction (Man on Wire, Touching the Void, The Imposter); mockumentaries (This is Spinal Tap, Man Bites Dog); pseudo-documentaries (fiction shot in a documentary style such as I’m Still Here and, to some degree, Dreams of a Life or Stories We Tell); and ‘fake-fiction’ films (coined by Pierre Bismuth to describe documentaries that use the language of fiction). Whilst these definitions are fluid, it is the inherently performative hybrid or docufiction film that is key to my research.
Bill Nichols’ seminal study, Blurred Boundaries (1995), posits that the performative mode of documentary filmmaking emphasises the subjective nature of the documentary filmmaker.[1] Following Judith Butler’s notion of ‘performativity’, Stella Bruzzi elaborates further, stating, ‘[…] there are two broad categories of documentary that could be termed performative: films that feature performative subjects and which visually are heavily stylised and those that are inherently performative and feature the intrusive presence of the filmmaker’[2]. Bruzzi cites Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Michael Moore as examples of the latter (we could also include Borat or The Ambassador whose fictional subjects intrude into ‘real’ worlds). In my opinion, however, Bruzzi’s polarisation of these categories is too simplistic for the films that are being made today, which often fluctuate between and incorporate both. These films may also contaminate things further by introducing one or more of Nichols’ other modes, most commonly the participatory or reflexive. The way that Abbas Kiarostami’s Close Up or the Koker Trilogy complicate relationships between actor and character or Ulrich Seidl’s films introduce ’theatrical artifice to […] mortifying real-life situations’ have set a benchmark for new understandings of the performative hybrid.
Luke Moody presents a more nuanced analysis of the hybrid in his 2013 essay Act Normal: hybrid tendencies in Documentary Film. He describes how, ‘it is [now] difficult to separate the boundaries of drama and documentary when the reality many filmmakers experience and record is already hybridised. The social self is the telepresent self, premediated, auto-fictionalised, auto-caricatured an imitator of the fictions we weave’.[3] The different types of hybrid that Moody proposes[4] are all connected by their relation to ‘the contemporary performative impulse’[5]: with ideas around mediation and authenticity at their very core. With the rise of ‘arthouse hybrids’ which unilaterally move between documentary as fiction/ fiction as documentary, showing the often non-hierarchical relationships between director, crew, and the (mostly) non-actors who play versions of themselves (Miguel Gomes, Albert Serra, Lisandro Alonso, Pedro Costa, Apichatpong Weerasethkul, Ben Rivers and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab); films which reveal the performative constructs or ‘auto mise en scène’[6] of real, everyday life (Kate Plays Christine, Actress, Under the Sun); and the performance of film-memory avatars or auxiliary egos presented in recent ‘mainstream’ documentaries (Author: The JT Leroy Story, LoveTrue), it seems that the relationship between mediated memories, performance and the hybrid documentary demands further examination.
PRACTISING MEMORY THROUGH FILM
Over the last year, I have been developing my first feature-length film, (N)OSTALGIA, as part of the British Council, Sheffield Doc/Fest and Docudays UA’s DocWorks UA/UK programme, a cross-cultural initiative between documentary filmmakers in the UK and Ukraine. In the text that follows, I will discuss the creative development of my project since I began working in Ukraine[7] and my understandings of the performance of memory narratives within this sphere. Since 2014/14, Ukraine has undergone huge social, political, cultural and economic change, brought on by the Maidan revolution, the annexation of Crimea and the war in the Donbas. The problematics of national memory narratives, cultural identity, language politics and forced displacement are omnipresent, accelerated by the country’s recent and rapid erasure of the Soviet past. I have used interviews and personal testimonies[8] to provide a counterpoint to the official memory narratives that are being publicly redefined and frame my observations using films and other moving image works that explicitly engage with concepts of reenactment, memory, the museum and the monument.
(N)OSTALGIA is a performative hybrid, taking place between Ukraine and Svalbard, a remote archipelago between Norway and the North Pole. Following documentary theatre director, Pavel Yurov,[9] on his journey through different mining communities searching for stories for his new play and his own roots, the film chronicles our journey as subject and filmmaker from the sprawling mines of the industrial Donbas—[10]Pavel’s home region—to the crumbling utopia of Pyramiden, another former Soviet frontier-land at the edge of the Arctic Circle and a migration route for Ukrainian miners since the 1930s. Constructed through a combination of observational documentary footage, interviews, scripted scenes and improvised travelogue, the film echoes Miguel Gomes’ ‘kaleidoscopic hybrid’ Our Beloved Month of August; Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige’s ode to cinema as witness, Je Veux Voir; and Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour: a testament to seeing and remembering through opposing cultural perspectives. Through our own personal observations and reflections throughout the filmmaking process, we each propose a deep examination of our own cultural identities, the persistence of East/West propaganda and our changing relationship with ‘the other’.

[1] Nichols’ other modes are the poetic, expository, participatory and reflexive.
[2] {Bruzzi, 2006 #631@187}
[3] {Moody, #174}
[4] They are ‘Performing the Archive’ (The Act of Killing, The Arbor, The Battle of Orgreave); ‘The Literate Layer’ (essayistic films such as those by Terrence Davies, John Akomfrah, Chris Marker); ‘Intelligent Provocateur’ (Renzo Martens, Mads Brügger); ‘Improvised Self’ (Alma Har’el’s Bombay Beach, and, I would add, her 2016 ‘psychodrama’, LoveTrue, The Wolfpack and Author: The JT Leroy Story); and, finally, ‘Reflexive Acting/ Casting Couch’ (Self-Made and, as I suggest, Casting JonBenét and Kate Plays Christine).
[5] Sven Lütticken’
[6] (a performance or staging of the self by documentary subjects which is particularly strong in front of the camera)
[7] Throughout this text I have used the Ukrainian transliteration of place names and people rather than the Russian, which is still used frequently in written English. I believe this is extremely important when discussing contested territories such as the Donbas (Donbass in Russian), Donetsk and Luhansk (Lugansk in Russian) as well as, I believe, in facilitating an ownership of national memory and place (so Kyiv rather than Kiev and never ‘The Ukraine’ which, since independence, Ukrainians find particularly denigrative, since it historically was used to describe their country as ’the borderland’ of Russia). In cases where I have cited a text that uses the Russian spelling, I have changed it to the common Ukrainian spelling for consistency.
[8] These were conducted over three research trips to Kyiv between December 2016-March 2017.
[9] Pavel is also a former hostage of the pro-Russian separatist militia led by Igor Girkin (aka Strelkov). He was imprisoned in Slovyansk in April 2014, when the war first broke out in the Donbas, and remained in captivity for 70 days, until the town was sieged by the Ukrainian army in July 2014 and the rebels were forced to retreat to Donetsk and Luhansk: the areas which remain occupied today.
[10] (Government-controlled)