When the personification of the camera gets wedded to documentary theme.
Taste of Cement
dir. Ziad Kalthoum, 2017, Germany/Lebanon/Syria/United Arab Emirates/Qatar
genre: poetic
I’ll admit I’m not always crazy about some of the prosumer cameras (drones, GoPros, etc.) used increasingly in documentary – for reasons that would take a longer post to reflect on. But of course, shots made with these cameras are increasingly common, including in documentaries I really like. So, stepping back from my initial distaste of them (and it’s a general disposition, not a hard-fast rule), I thought I’d reflect on how prosumer cameras can function in the festival documentary.
Taste of Cement is a good example for the way it alternates the locked down framing common in poetic documentaries with the more mobile cameras. Notably, it is not a full-on experiment with them like Leviathan, but rather integrates them into the feature-doc aesthetic. The film opens with a drone shot moving from a close view of a construction sight to a skyline shot of Beirut. This contrast sets up the central conceit of the film, the dual displacement of Syrian construction workers, displaced from their home but also separated from city life in their current location.
Elsewhere, the film uses graphic matches to suggest the continuity between the worker’s experience in Syria and Lebanon….
…. or the metaphorical connection of their lives to the construction of the city, as this shot mimicking a cement mixer’s perspective.
What is interesting about the prosumer cameras is that it pushes the documentary narration either toward objective omniscience (others have noted the mechanical surveillance-like quality of the drone shot) or toward personification (from wearable cameras, or cameras so mobile they suggest a human-like perspective). Taste of Cement activates both objective and subjective simultaneously: the personified camera invokes the subjectivity of the workers while the workers themselves remain relatively unindividuated.
As I’ve been developing my work on the festival documentary, I’ve been drawn to note that this tension is a common one.