Why don’t more documentaries use landscape like fiction films?
Two Way Mirror
Katarina Zrinka Matijevic, 2016, Croatia
genre: essay
Two Way Mirror is sumptuously photographed. It uses a series of slow, generally static shots of the region in Croatia. But there the formal similarity stops with with the poetic landscape film. Here, macro lenses, time lapse, visual effects and color correction all yield a pictorialism akin with commercial photograph, or fiction film.
The point of Two Way Mirror is that the sublime landscape provides a metaphorical foil for the filmmaker Matijevic’s struggle with depression and loss. But in its way it raised an interested question for me: of all the contemporary documentaries to depict landscape, why do so few of them make landscapes look attractive? After all, landscape in fiction film often provides an occasion for beauty, even in its most conventionalized form. Documentaries may operate with lower budgets and lower production values, but this barrier is lower than ever, and Two Way Mirror is hardly a high-budget documentary. Rather, I suspect that the poetic documentary privilege distanciation in its depiction of landscapes. Spaces become alienated, and caught between nature and development, often uneasily. Frequently, landscape come to stand in for the alienation of the documentary characters. There may be an offbeat beauty to the cinematography but it’s rarely a straightforward sense of making the landscape attractive in itself.
So it’s refreshing to me that Two Way Mirror is doing something different. At first the images were glossy for my taste but I quickly appreciated it for that very reason.