In a typical case, however, the people whose life and sufferings and death are chronicled in film, quite often in the most graphic way, are not asked to sign a privacy agreement; in most cases they are not even aware of the nature of the undertaking; they do not notice that their life is being recorded; they are unaware that they are exposed, defenseless, vulnerable, naked, in a physical or psychological sense. In the world of Facebook, we are getting used to the face of intrusion into one’s privacy; the most intimate moments of life have a concrete face attached to them on the computer screen. Staring at the large movie screen, in the company of unknown others, we nevertheless still have a different and uncomfortable feeling: as opposed to the mostly spontaneous-looking videos on the internet, the documentary is associated with calculation, careful and purposeful editing.
Surprisingly, even in the case of a feature film—like Michael Haneke’s Amour, when watching the painful progressive physical and mental deterioration of the protagonists, even despite the full knowledge that we see two excellent actors, that both Jean-Louis Trintignant and Emmanuelle Riva gave their full consent, and received huge honoraria for their performance—we feel unease, sometime shame, while peering into the most intimate aspects of their life. First Cousin Once Removed, the opening film of the 10th Verzio Festival, not a feature film but an auteur-documentary, chronicles the renowned poet Edwin Honig’s descent into Alzheimer’s disease. The filmmaker, who was related to the protagonist, had received permission from the poet at the beginning of the multi-year filming process, when Honig was still lucid. The result is a harrowing and beautiful work on basic questions of life and death, of depths where strangers, audiences, perhaps, should not be allowed to descend.
We are slowly getting used to the situation where we live in the middle of an ongoing reality-show, a permanent documentary, where everything and anything happens and can happen in front of our eyes in real time. Nobody asks for permission, nobody grants consent, we never read the terms of service, we do not know what terms and conditions may apply. Nonetheless, it is not difficult to make a case that we are humans in part because we are able to distinguish between internal and external, private and public; things that we should keep for ourselves even when they might be the concerns of others as well. To watch serious films about the transgression of this borderline may, paradoxically, enrich us: we argue with ourselves, trying to reconcile our curiosity with our sense of shame, and might learn what not to show and not to watch, and that sometimes the most appropriate gesture is to look the other way.
István Rév
director of OSA Archívum