Mille et un jours (A Thousand and One Days)

Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time

Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly, Singin’ in the Rain

Introduction: Subject, Source, Speaker

The question ‘who speaks?’ is central in narrative theory, in spite of recent attempts to dismiss it. These cannot quite succeed, because of the implied question of narrative responsibility. Where does a presentation, opinion or vision come from, who are their target audiences, and what is the ‘force’, in Lyotard's concept of language as the figural, that makes sense? This question is always pertinent, in all cultural texts. Speaking is generally assumed to be a linguistic act, but in film, where an explicit narrative voice is more the exception than the rule, the narrative emerges from different sources; from the figures who appear in the filmic world to begin with. I argue in this chapter that this makes the question more rather than less relevant. The medium helps us probe the complexities of narration precisely because it cannot be personified in a ‘voice’. The question is of crucial importance, especially in documentaries where ‘who speaks?’ becomes ‘whose truth?’ I have experimented with a solution to the conundrum that seems to produce an opposition between the issue of responsibility and the logical and linguistic convictions of some theories. My ethical, political and aesthetic commitments to the genre compel me to make the documentary films, hence, do the telling with, rather than about, people. Therefore, we cannot ignore the question of the subject or source.

This question is even more acutely relevant when the people, whom I consider interlocutors or participants rather than ‘subjects’, come from a culture different from that of the filmmakers, and all concerned are thereby steeped in what has become an essentialising idea, ‘cultural difference’. This cultural difference requires reflecting on, and dealing with, the ethical as well as the epistemological aspect of a genre that easily becomes intrusive, manipulative, exoticising and voyeuristic, resulting in a disempowering effect. The film I will analyse in these respects is the first full-length film I (co-)made; the first film that made me acutely aware of the rich yield of insight to be gained from making images as a form of analysis.