Much of the drama of poetic documentary comes in how a familiar stylistic approach might be harnassed unpredicatbly.
Home of the Resistance
dir. Ivan Ramljak, 2018, Croatia
genre: poetic, mid-length
I happen to be re-reading Jason Mittell’s Complex TV for a class I’m teaching and have his argument about the operational aesthetic. In a sense most formalist film (particularly what Bordwell terms parametric narration) would entail an operational aesthetic. But I take his notion of the operational aesthetic to invoke a play between audience expectation, conventions, and aesthetic play. The stakes are obviously different with a popular medium, but I think festival documentaries have a version of this too, or can have a version.
Take one long take in Home of the Resistance, a portrait of a memorial to the Yugoslav resistance during World War II. The documentary is very much part of a larger trend in films interrogating post-Communist memory, and in this case the nearly-abandoned “Memorial Home for WWII Resistance Fighters and Youth of Yugoslavia” is an apt occasion to think of the disjunction between then and now.
Many of the long takes are languorous, but one shows a man ascending steps to the building complex, set at the top of the hill. Throughout the shot a sign is visible in the left of the frame, reading (translated) “Use Stairs at Your Own Risk.” However, in the slow take, the man appears in the frame and finally makes it to the top. At the very end of the shot, he looks at notices the sign. It is this type of ironic gesture which is common in festival documentaries but does not play out in the same way. The profilmic is too unpredictable, the connections too serendipitous.
Similarly, much of the film seems familiar in its presentation of abandoned rooms. Forgotten spaces are a major trope of contemporary doc, especially in poetic docs. However, the workers who maintain the Memorial become the star of the documentary. Not in their individuality (the film never presents their names or lets them speak) but rather in the Sisyphian tasks they perform, preserving historical memory and maintaining the facilities.
Finally, the film finds nice echoes between the architecture and the film screen. People look in windows, or we as spectators look out. The shot below would not be out of place in a Geyrhalter film – or several others of its ilk – but it’s also distinctively tied to the filmmaker’s project of asking what it means to remember half-forgotten memorial spaces. I have to wonder if it also expresses a nationally Croatian documentary sensibility as well but I do not feel equipped to make such a categorical call.
