The Camera Never Dreams:

An essay towards Sunless (Sans Soleil)

Daniel Pimley

Copyright © 2007 Daniel Pimley

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, transmitted or utilized in any form
or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without written permission from the author.

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 On July 3rd 1839 François Arago stood in the Chamber of Deputies, France, in
order to persuade the French government to purchase Louis Daguerre’s patents for the
revolutionary Daguerreotype photographic process. In his arguments, Arago was keen
to emphasise the scientific applications of the apparatus. “The camera was to join, as
Arago listed them, ‘the thermometer, barometer, hygrometer’, and the telescope and
microscope” (1)
. The government were persuaded and bought the patents. Arago’s
stance at the founding moment of photography was one that widely persists today: the
camera is to be considered as being fundamentally an instrument of science, not of art.
Before anyone had even conceived the notion of documentary photography, the seeds
of a conflict had been planted.

By the 1870s cameras and printing presses were being used to disseminate and
to discover scientific knowledge that could not be attained any other way. Pioneering
motion studies, such as Eadweard Muybridge’s Palo Alto horse sequences were
sealing the reputation of the camera as an instrument that operated without inflection.
The photograph was thought to be the visual analogue of the written factual record
(“the camera never lies”). However John Taylor observes in his examination of 1930s
documentary realism that this is a common misconception. “Representation is always
problematic, no less in photography than in language, film, sculpture or painting.
And the fundamental quality of any representation is that it is constructed.” (2)

Despite this conflict, the perception of photography as factual record persisted

into and throughout the 20th century, reinforced by the insurmountable influence of the
newspaper and photo-journalism. In addition to the technical restraints the printing
press imposed on reportage photography, the newspaper editor imposed many formal
restraints on the medium to pander to the public’s pre-conception of what an accurate
observation was. Taylor notes: “novelty in lighting, ambiguity in space, or an attempt
to strike a mood were not dominant characteristics of the newspaper photograph.” (3)

The camera’s ability to provide sharp images of events had become its limiting factor.
People considered a sufficiently in-focus photograph to be an accurate factual record
of the event, as if ‘the truth’ was inherent in the clarity of the image. Accepted without
question by the public, photographs became “the yardstick by which the printed word
was measured as ‘accurate’ or ‘emotional’.” (4)
The further the written word moved
from the reality portrayed in an accompanying photograph, the more subjective and
the less accurate the written word was considered.

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 There are valuable exceptions to this rule, such as Robert Capa’s photographs
of the D-Day landings, June 1944, taken when he joined the first wave of troops to
land on the Normandy beeches. His photographs are often printed accompanied by a
personal written account of the experience from Capa:

“I didn’t dare to
take my eyes off the finder of my Contax and frantically shot frame
after frame. Half a minute later, my camera jammed – my roll was
finished.
I reached in my bag for a new roll, and my wet, shaking hands ruined
the roll before I could insert it in the camera.” (5)

Capa’s account is subjective and emotional, yet his images do not lessen the
perceived accuracy of his words. His visually striking photographs of the landing -
smeared, grainy and slightly out of focus - actually validate the drama of his written
account. Famously, when his film rolls were received for developing at the London
press office an over-zealous darkroom technician turned the heat too high in the dryer
and melted the emulsions. Out of 106 pictures, only 8 were salvaged (6) and even these
were badly damaged. The damage makes the images even more startling: the smear of
the action is enhanced, the detail lost, and the pattern of the sprocket holes on the
negative has spilled visibly into the frame. One of the 8 salvaged pictures made the
cover of TIME magazine. The pictures are uniquely interesting among contemporary
reportage photography because they acknowledge the possibility of subjective reality
in the photographic record. Capa’s photographs could not claim to be ‘the truth’ in the
accepted sense but they could claim to be ‘a truth’ - they were true to his experience.

This illustrates a conflict in representation that is ongoing today. On one side,

the belief that reality is totally subjective, that every representation is constructed and
interpreted. On the other side is the belief that the only problem reality poses is “to go
and look and see what things there are” (7). By the 1960s the horizons of documentary
filmmaking were about to be significantly widened, and the documentary film drawn
to the centre of the conflict. Richard Leacock, a documentary filmmaker and soon to
be key figure, had talked about the “idea of photographing events as they occurred” (8)
and his ideas were about to be realised.

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 In the early 1960s the Eclair hand-held camera and the Nagra sound recorder
appeared, making portable, independent, sync recording possible for the first time in
the history of cinema. These technical advances allowed a revolution in documentary
filmmaking practices to take place, and filmmakers made uncompromising claims for
the technology. They believed they were finally able to “make good on documentary
film’s promise to show ‘actuality’ on screen.” (9)
Almost immediately the filmmakers
deployed the new technology to this end, developing new ethics of ‘non-intervention’
to chase the elusive ideals of objectivity and of the film as evidence. So the cinéma-
vérité or direct cinema movement was formed. Leacock and Al Maysles made the
groundbreaking documentary, Primary, and other films followed soon afterwards. The
vérité filmmakers talked of capturing events and of creating a ‘window on the world’.
It was a purely observational mode of documentary. 120 years after François Arago
had first claimed the camera in the name of science, the vérité filmmakers were
reasserting that claim. Their attitude, argues Brian Winston, was that the camera was
“an instrument of scientific inscription producing evidence objective enough to be
‘judged’ by a spectator.” (10)

However, many of the conventions of cinéma-vérité can be easily recognised -

despite its attempts to hide the processes of its creation, they still exist. “The long
takes, the lack of commentary, absence of cinematic lighting, and the persistent use of
black and white stock long after the television news had switched to colour” (11) had all
become stylistic nuances used to pander to the cinéma-vérité audience’s newly formed
pre-conceptions of what actuality should look like. Capa’s famous D-Day photographs
had altered the public perception of how reportage photography should look, and in
due course the new look became convention: “cinematographers were noting that the
authenticity of war footage was becoming connected in the audience’s minds with
shaky black and white shots” (12). In the 1960s Jean-Luc Godard proved that audiences
were making similar associations with cinéma-vérité techniques when he used the
same techniques to bring a sense of immediacy and authenticity to his fiction films.
Even if, as claimed, the purely observational documentary could be achieved using
the new technology (it could not) it still would not attain the status of a factual record
of events. Non-interventionism is no guarantor of factual accuracy because the act of
observation is subjective. As Colin MacCabe rightly insists, “There is no neutral place
from which we can see… the scene ‘as it really is’.” (13)

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 Many critics have concluded that the conventional modes of representation are
reliant on a passive audience willing to accept the filmmaker's portrayal of reality
without question. The claim of observational documentary that the indisputable truth
could be captured in the recorded image implied that “all one has to do is contemplate
and texts will deliver up their meaning.” (14)
In response to this claim some critics of
observational documentary argued for “difficult art, an art that forces its audience into
an active interpretive response.” (15) According to Bill Nichols “many filmmakers with
a desire to address the conventions of representation have taken up the reflexive mode
[of documentary] in order to challenge the impression of reality that the other modes
convey.” (16) Chris Marker is one such filmmaker. With Jean-Luc Godard, he was once
a member of the Dziga Vertov Group of filmmakers. Marker's work is self-reflexive
and challenging even for a film-literate audience, displaying interests akin to Vertov in
the precise and overt manipulation of the medium to control the audience’s perception
and interpretation of it. Marker’s desire to share with his audience an understanding of
the complexity of representation is a defining characteristic of his film, Sunless.

In his analysis of Sunless, Jon Kear observes that “for Marker, it is an ethical
imperative of representation that it declare its means.” (17) From the first sequence this
is at work. We watch serene silent footage of three children walking in an Icelandic
landscape, which has the “artless simplicity and intimacy” (18)
of a home movie, after
which a length of black leader runs. “He said that it was the image of happiness, and
also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it never worked” says
the narrator, as the black leader is interrupted by acquired footage of an American war
plane descending into an aircraft carrier, creating a skilfully constructed association
(contrary to the narrator’s assertion) between the innocence of childhood and the
horror of war that entirely alters our perception of the images. The narrator continues
“If they don’t see happiness in the picture, at least they’ll see the black.” Of course,
Marker knows that we perceive a lot more than that.

Throughout Sunless Marker is openly searching for a form of representation

that approximates human consciousness. He uses various recurring icons and themes
throughout Sunless – animals, cultural nuance, history/memory – as the subject matter
for his film experiment. Each time a theme is revisited, our perception of it is altered
as we infer new meaning from the ever-changing context of everything that has come
before. The film considers history/memory to be in a constant state of transformation;

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history repeats itself as the past echoes into the future and distant events touch in the
spiral of time. Marker employs montage extensively, constructing complex sequences
that allude to our remembering and forgetting, using association and dissociation of
images to mimic the scattered nature of our memory recall. Sunless overwhelms the
viewer with its rapid and dislocated editing style and the narration hypnotises with its
philosophical postcards from this dreamscape. Is the camera filming the tangle of the
traveller's thoughts and memories, or the narrator's, or is the camera itself dreaming?
At one point the narrator describes an idea the traveller has had for a future project to
be called Sunless, implying that Marker considers this film only one of many possible
solutions to this representational puzzle. The most radical of the film's experiments in
representation, “the Zone”, is interesting when considered in this context.

The Zone is a process of electronically transforming images into an abstract

and barely recognisable form, intended to reveal to us the unsatisfactory nature of all
forms of representation. Through the Zone, Marker shows us transformed archive
images, television pictures, and previous images from Sunless. Of the transformed
television images, the narrator comments that after transformation they are more
truthful: “at least they [now] proclaim themselves to be what they are: images, not the
portable and compact form of an already inaccessible reality.” The presence of images
from Sunless in the Zone is a reminder that they too are no more or less constructed
and interpreted than any form of representation.

As filmmaking moves into the digital age, the relevance of Marker’s argument
becomes ever more apparent. The zone’s crude transformations may be obvious to us,
but it is the process that is significant. With modern digital technology, an image can
be subtly or radically altered without leaving any obvious artefacts of the process.
Brian Winston claims “digitalisation destroys the photographic image as evidence of
anything except the process of digitalisation.” (20)
The implications of this statement
are troubling: if the digital image is untrustworthy as a document of anything but its
own creation, the observational mode of documentary cannot exist in the digital age,
and the position of the self-reflexive mode becomes one of complete scepticism.
However observational documentary makers have embraced small lightweight digital
camcorders as an advance towards the ideal of non-interventionism. If digitalisation is
not destroying observational documentary, then the issue of realism is more complex
than cinéma-vérité’s filmmakers and critics would have us believe.

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 The danger of the self-reflexive mode of documentary, a danger very apparent
in Sunless, is that it “closes in on itself… [and] becomes a loop which effaces social
analysis” (21) as it seeks to challenge the observational mode, and in so doing becomes
hopelessly entangled in the search for alternative forms of truth in representation that
are equally elusive.

Dana Polan has argued for a revised approach to conventional theories of

representation in order to avoid these pitfalls. She approaches representation not as a
process of controlling a submissive audience, but as a contract in which the audience
“willingly agrees to relate to codes in a certain way.” (22)
Within the structure of a
contract we can see audiences’ changing perceptions of what constitutes realism and
truth as a natural process, an ever-evolving language of codes. Each new technique
that the filmmaker deploys only temporarily attains new heights of realism in the
minds of an audience, until the language evolves again.

Within this structure the theory of realism as being ‘contained’ in the image
must be set aside. The filmmaker manipulates the audience’s perception of realism by
using the mutually understood and agreed-upon language of code and convention.
Self-reflexivity becomes an invaluable tool for filmmakers to make audiences aware
of the language, and so ensure its continued evolution. Photography’s claim to the
ideal of the factual record may finally be destroyed by the coming of the digital age,
but the debate on realism will continue as long as there are filmmakers and audiences.

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Notes

1. Brian Winston, Claiming The Real, British Film Institute, London, 1995, p. 127.
2. John Taylor, 'Picturing the Past – Documentary Realism in the 1930s' in Ten-8,
issue no. 11, p. 18.
3. Ibid, p. 19.
4. Ibid, p. 17.
5. Robert Capa, Images of War, 2nd edition, Hamlyn, London, 1964, p. 109.
6. Ibid, p. 110.
7. Colin MacCabe, 'Realism and the Cinema: Notes on some Brechtian theses' in Screen,
issue no. 15, 1974, p. 12.
8. Winston, p. 146.
9. Ibid, p. 148.
10. Ibid, p. 151.
11. Ibid, p. 162.
12. Robert Allen and Douglas Gomery, Film History: Theory and Practice, Knopf,
New York, 1985, p. 221.
13. MacCabe, p. 15.
14. Dana B. Polan, 'Brecht and the Politics of Self-Reflexive Cinema' in Jump Cut,
issue no. 17, p. 29.
15. Ibid, p. 29.
16. Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary,
Indiana University Press, Indianapolis, 1991, pp. 32-33.
17. Jon Kear, Cinetek Series: Sunless, Flick Books, New York, 1999, p. 30.
18. Ibid, p. 12.
19. Ibid, p. 39.
20. Winston, p. 259.
21. Polan, p. 30.
22. Ibid, p. 30.