More reflections on documentaries as puzzles.
The Game (Les Proies)
dir. Marine de Contes, 2018, France
Genre: Observational
I’m not generally inclined to cognitivist film studies but one Bordwellian idea from cognitivism that I’ve found valuable, especially for documentary studies, is the way that films can teach their own ideal spectatorship – and that spectatorship can be an active cognitive act to learn, or guess, this pattern. For this reason, puzzle films have been a privileged object of study among the cognitivists.
I’ve written about the connection between documentary and puzzle films before, but The Game is not a puzzle-film documentary. It is structured mostly in linear fashion, its style adheres to much of the conventions of an observational documentary, especially those of a subgenre dealing with detailing a process, like Loznitsa’s The Factory or Clerici’s Hand Gestures. Les Proies probably translates better as The Prey or Birds of Prey, but The Game is fitting for the sense of play (and, implicitly of rules)
The documentary follows a family who living for a couple of months each year in the Landes de Gascogne forest to pursue wood-pigeon hunting. Director de Contes observes the process in detail: the traps, the decoy pigeons, the lures, the false hopes, and the waiting. However, there is no expository title introducing the topic and no exposition to explain what the hunters are doing at any given point. De Contes has explained that she came in to this community of hunters as an outsider, knowing nothing of the practice, and she has captured that subjective orientation in the film itself.
What’s remarkable to me is that there’s no aggressively formal experimentation here, nor any purposive narrational enigma. Rather, in pursuing observational style in its purest form, The Game puts the spectator in a kind of guessing game, and the drama of the editing and structure engages the viewer in a suspense on what of the process will make sense to the distant observer. I continue to think that documentary scholars overlook just how complex observational documentary can be.
The Game has a secondary motif about the forest itself as an ecosystem. Sonically and visual it invokes the space and environment of the activity, and captures the different uses that people have made of this (privately owned) forest.
