How the stand-in figure can work.
Railway Men
Erige Sehiri, 2018, Tunisia/Switzerland/France/Qatar
genre: character-driven
One longstanding goal of social documentary is to harnass the raw material of documentary (reportage, observational footage, interviews) to criticize existing political institutions and bodies. The approach may vary whether it’s a journalistic-style doc (like the Frontline series) or a committed doc, but either way, the crusading function is built in to the narrational system of the documentary.
The character-driven documentary tries to pursue the same goal through different means. It uses a stand-in crusader figure, around whom the film organizes its affective pull. Rather than the documentary directly exposing and critiquing institutions and calling for specific change, it’s the crusader who is goal-oriented and who faces external obstacles (from the institution or from public opinion) or internal doubts.
Then there’s another approach, under the influence of festival documentary aesthetics, in which the crusader is a character shown at remove. In Railway Men, one employee for Tunisia’s railway, Issameddine, seeks to document and publicize the poor safety record of the railway’s operations. His crusade stands in for a set of issues facing post-Arab Spring Tunisia: linger corruption, proper governmental oversight, and infrastructural development.
So at first glance Railway Men fits the character-driven approach to the issue crusader. And there is an arc for Issameddine.
And yet, the film does not organize spectatorial identification around Issameddine (or at least not mostly). Rather, it presents some combination of observational and interview footage of four railway workers, the rank and file who are affected by the dangers of the rail line. But in organizing the documentary as a largely detached composite portrait, Railway Men makes the crusader another subject we watch at remove.
In other words, one thing the festival documentary can do well is to capture the experiential subjectivity of its subjects – the tedium of driving a train, the hypnotic nature of landscape, or the confusion of mechanical troubles. But these are at odds for the machinations of the crusade: investigation and confrontation.