The lineage of humor in structural film.
Mittelmeer
dir. Jean-Marc Chapoulie, 2019, France
genre: structural documentary
It’s not really a complaint, but most festival documentaries are pretty humorless. I don’t mind, since my tastes respond to the serious tone and serious subject matter of many documentaries. But I’ve been at film festivals this week, watching a lot of films, and the presence of one film with a sense of humor in a program made me realize how few lighter moments I’d seen.
Mittelmeer is not a comedic film per se. In many respects it’s a challenging film that at 73 minutes running time entertained some of the audience (audible laughter) but drove many to walk out of the film mid-projection. I would consider it a documentary in the structural vein. Director Chapoulie and co-writer Nathalie Quintane rely almost exclusively on live-streamed webcam footage of the Mediterranean, with some supplemental YouTube videos. The locations include beach resorts, harbor cams, and container ship CCTV.
The soundtrack, meanwhile, has a different bricolage: forced artificial Foley and the director’s conversation with his son and with Quintane. The son, in fact, serves as a humorous interlocutor to the film’s project, serving at times as the stand in for the casual spectator (“will this be shown in the cinemas?” he asks at one point) and at times as a media critic.
I found the film’s playful approach in sound and in editing refreshing. To me it’s a reminder of a tradition of playful humor in the structural film, a tradition that’s often lost in the search for formal and conceptual rigor.
