The expository mode makes a surprise reappearance.
Lotus
dir. Mohammadreza Vatandoust, 2018, Iran
genre: poetic/portrait
One useful outcome of the blogging approach to documentary watching for me has been the way it focuses me to pay attention to the smaller aspects of documentary filmmaking. Starting from the films lets them pose some of the aesthetic and conceptual problems to work through.
Like the expository title. It’s something common in documentary, so many don’t pay much attention to it. I’ve thought about before in some contexts, but it really came to my attention watching Lotus, a short from Iran. The film follows an elderly woman who goes through a series of ritual-like activities: making a fire, making tea, making dinner, packing, and sleeping. The observational style frames these activities in closer shots, with no exposition of who the woman or what the space is.
Eventually, some of her interview words suggests some of her story, but only obliquely. The spectator learns there is a son on the island but none of the circumstances.
The full exposition comes at the very end, with an expository title:
This structure is common. Sometimes it’s reversed in order, with the expository title coming first, as in The Act of Killing…
For a film noted for its doc-fiction aspects, it’s remarkable how important the title is in anchoring the meaning of the film.
Lotus‘s end title also anchors the meaning but the stakes are different. In the end-title structure sets up an opposition between the poetic-observational segment and the expository “reveal.” These work symbiotically. The expository end helps spectators who may be confused by the material – it seems too poetic for many until the ending recoups it into documentary significance. At the same time, the exposition allows the poetic section freer reign. In contrast to other observational shorts, the editing does not have to provide the exposition for what we’re watching.
In the interplay is a low-key puzzle for the spectator. Lotus is like many other films, too. Paradoxically, the reappearance of the expository mode in the festival is in service of narrational ambiguity.