When the spoken exposition takes the upper hand.
Corporate Accountability
Jonathan Perel, 2020, Argentina
genre: poetic, essay
I’m a big fan of Jonathan Perel’s Toponomy, so I was excited to see Corporate Accountability, which functions as a kind of companion piece to Toponomy. Where the former shows the architectural and social legacy of a planned town built during the 1970s military dictatorship, Corporate Accountability calls out the industrial corporations who actively abetted the disapperances.
Stylistically, Corporate Accountability relies on static, formally composed shots of the exterior spaces of the corporations in questions – usually the industrial plants, past or present, that was the scene of the reported human rights violation. The shots hold in long take, generally a sequence shot for each corporation’s location. Each company/location forms one part of the film’s structure (out of 25 segments in total).
Over each, the voiceover narration (I’m guessing Perel’s, but it’s not credited, at least that I could see) provides an account of testimonials from an unpublished report from Argentina’s Ministry of Justice and Human Rights. Seemingly read verbatim, the report lists reported worker disappearances from the factories, those who were involved, dates of the events, numbers of workers affected, and the financial benefit to the firm in state write-offs of corporation debt. Toward the end of the documentary, the voiceover begins listing the names of many of the disappeared workers.
It’s an affecting testimony, doubly so because of the gap between then and now and between the vacated or alienated spaces of the present with the human rights violations kept out of plain view. (And beyond these corporations, the responsibility of the U.S. government and European parent companies.)
However, the voiceover is also challenging. Partly, for me at least, I know the broad strokes of this historical period but not the names of generals. Compounding this is my lack of ability to understand Spanish, making the odd circuit from written report to spoken narration back to written subtitles.
But it’s beyond my own particularly knowledge, or the knowledge of viewers outside Argentina. The spoken account is dense with numbers, names, dates, and details, fitting to a formal and political document but not attune to the cadence of cinematic voiceover. In many ways, this is the point, since Perel seems interested in treating the archive as the archive, not merely as a surface phenomenon. We have to imagine the actions described in the report, at remove. But unlike other documentaries relying on oral testimony, like Depth Two, Corporate Accountability is a third person account of anonymized and collected testimonials.
In all, I’m left with the impression of a documentary that has certain elements of the essay film but that evacuates the voiceover of the auteur personality often associated with the essay film. I can imagine an animated documentary version of Corporate Accountability, or one heavy on reenactment. But Corporate Accountability pushes the other direction to emphasize the lack of media accountability in the 1970s. In doing so, it pushes us as spectators to deal with the written word as spoken, despite the difficulties of doing so.