What does it mean for a documentary to be humanist? Viveiro
dir.Pedro Filipe Marques, 2019, Portugal
genre: poetic/portrait
For reasons articulated by Roland Barthes in his essay on the Family of Man photography exhibit, humanism has been a dirty word for film scholars. Implicit in humanism, the argument goes, is a spectatorship that overwhelmingly evacuates any historical understanding by treating human experience as transcending historical context. I don’t know that Barthes is arguing this, but I sense in the anti-humanist line that there’s an evacuation of the social.
It’s a compelling argument, but I do not fully buy it. First, some human experiences transcend smaller scale cultural horizons, even if important aspects of those experiences are constrained and inflected by our experiences, culture, and material conditions of us as individual viewers. Second, I do think many viewers are capable of viewing dually, and of knowing something about the subjects on screen are outside our immediate understanding.
At the least, some humanist documentaries resonate with me. But it’s hard for me to place just what makes a portrait documentary’s appeal humanist.
Viveiro is a good case in point. Formally it’s a poetic documentary about a soccer training camp in Northern Portugal. For much of the film, the players – teen and preteens, mostly boys – are a structuring absence. They enter the frame briefly, or lie just at the edge. Their voices can be heard off screen. Occasionally they’ll seek out the coach, but in general the coach and his wife are the subjects of the film, which foregrounds their labor in running the camp: washing clothes, folding socks, organizing uniforms or lunches. It captures their emotional attachment to the matches, too.
I keep thinking about what makes this a humanist portrait, or why I consider it one. First, it manages to capture the small unguarded gestures of its subject. Second, it foregrounds moments in the film, emphasizing foibles (arguments, emotive reactions) over directly communicative material. Third, it creates an intimacy between spectator and subject.
These choices come to the fore in the final segment featuring long shots of each of the children. It’s a wonderful touch, I thought, and one that captured a sense of what sport means for those involved.
This is why I’m skeptical about anti-humanist positions in documentary. The examples I saw that were less humanist provided absolutely no more social analysis than Viveiro. Arguably they provided less.
Of course, humanism is a selling point, a way to engage spectators who might otherwise find a poetic documentary about a youth soccer camp challenging. But it can also be the raison d’etre of the film. After all, the poetic form is more experiential than expository forms that might be more analytical.