Melancholy and the essay film form.
Crop
dir. Marouan Omara, Johanna Domke, 2013, Egypt/Germany
genre: poetic, essay film
I first became aware of Crop from Kay Dickinson’s work. She reads the film symptomatically as a type of elite/exilic Egyptian cinema that’s found a home in the festival film. Indeed, the documentary, a portrait of Al-Ahram, a state newspaper in Egypt, theorizes the media as an elite institution.
The film is dialogical. In my book project I am arguing for a fairly well defined new poetic documentary genre. Here, on the image track is a poetic documentary, much along the lines that one sees in the festival circuit. Static shots, formal compositions, of otherwise observational shots of workers at Al-Ahram, from the journalists or catering staff to the board of directors.
The sound track, too, has the hallmarks of poetic docs, with a composite of source sound (and Foley), without scoring or even identifiable conversation.
But over this film is another, an essay film in which a photojournalist from Al-Ahram narrates a history of journalism in Egypt from Nassar to the Egyptian Spring. The man missed covering the Tahrir Square protests because of a heart attack, and a sense of melancholy remove characterizes the narration: as a journalist, he missed the major political event of recent Egyptian history, and his separation doubles for Al-Ahram’s generational and institutional remove from the Egyptian Spring.
For me, the film is an interesting twist on the poetic form, which tends to abstract or defamiliarize its subject matter. A poetic doc of Al-Ahram would incline us as spectators to read it as a social institution, but by juxtaposing an essay film on top of this film, Crop adds a sense of melancholy. The sense of disjunction is powerful, in part because the images never illustrate or exactly correspond to the voiceover narration. In this regard, Crop is equally close to a cycle of documentaries wistful about dying institutions, films like How to Make a Book With Steidl (Gereon Wetzel, Jörg Adolph, 2010).
I do want to continue to think about how we can understand documentaries as a type of popular sociology.