Turning the poetic mode against expectations.
Depth Two
dir. Ognjen Glavonić, 2016, Serbia
80m
genre: Poetic
available VOD at DocAlliance and Kanopy
Rick Altman famously distinguishes between genre syntax and genre semantics. Genre innovation frequently takes place at the recombination of one genre’s syntax with another’s semantics. I think something like that is going on in Depth Two.
At first glance the film is a poetic documentary with static tableau shots of (mostly empty) landscape in Serbia and Kosovo. Some of the shots are pastoral, some of them postindustrial. They are accompanied with a rich sound design giving some of the perspective and textual missing from the visuals themselves. In short, this could be any number of poetic documentaries that play on the festival circuit, documenting Southeastern Europe as a postcommunist geography of loss and nostalgia.
Yet, Depth Two uses a series of voiceovers from interviews. They are not identified until the very end and they never are matched with a visual of the person speaking. But slowly, the interviews provide an account of a major human rights atrocity in Kosovo and various aspects of it, from the coverup to the discovery.
Like in other poetic documentaries the exposition is not provided quickly but is doled out, with significant gaps on the sound track. Yet there is a drama formed by the suspense of new information. It is not exactly a crime procedural documentary but it savvily uses some of the editing aesthetic of these to engage the spectator in something that cannot be seen, other than at a remote historical distance.
Depth Two is not a popular documentary but it does overlap some elements on top of the poetic documentary and in the process upturns expectations that a poetic doc normally might have.