It’s All Acting, Mate: Editing Truth and Performance in Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon

The trailer and early reviews for Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s You Can See Everything have come out, and I was struck by some similarities in the way critics were discussing that film and the slippery documentary portrait I edited, Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon.

Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon:

• “overt creative evasiveness”
• Gordon is “an active author of his own mythos”
• “subject and saboteur”​
• “the lifelong, self-stylized performance of eccentricity”
• “reframes our perception of the artist but also of biographical documentary filmmaking”
• "Gordon remains a somewhat elusive figure... You get the sense he doesn’t really know either, and perhaps that’s the point"

You Can See Everything:

• “is the truth really nakedly present, or is it palatably performed?”
• “without ever arriving at some definitive new truth”
• “it understands how elusive such truth can be”
• “its willingness to sit with contradiction”
• “skeptical … about the process of documentary filmmaking itself”
• “its refusal to provide easy answers feels less like a flaw than the point”

​The films are very different, but both are portraits of subjects who refuse to give their filmmakers easy answers and actively participate in constructing the films being made about them. Both use performance to complicate rather than conceal the subject, draw the filmmaker in front of the camera and turn the relationship between filmmaker and subject into part of the portrait itself.

It got me thinking again about documentary performance. As something potentially revealing in itself rather than something to get through or around in the hope of eventually reaching the “real” person. And, more specifically, about what performance is doing in Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon.

Towards the end of Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, the artist is carrying a heavy work across his studio, with the help of director Finlay Pretsell. With a sudden gasp, Douglas trips and collapses to the floor. As Douglas lies there, frozen for a moment, Finlay asks if he is alright. Douglas jumps up and says he’s fine, quipping “It’s all acting, mate.” It’s a funny line, but like a lot of things Douglas says it manages to destabilise what has just happened. Was he struggling or pretending to struggle? Was the admission itself another performance? Does knowing that he was acting make the preceding moment less useful as documentary, or does the fact that he chose to perform that particular version of himself tell us something we couldn’t have discovered by waiting for him to forget the camera was there? I know that in dramatic terms it’s a great emotional lever for reminding the viewer that Douglas is both a vulnerable figure and a playful trickster, provides a visual metaphor for the weight of art on Douglas’ shoulder, and nicely rounds off his relationship with Finlay, all as we head towards the film’s conclusion. So who cares what’s true?

This problem/solution runs through the film. Douglas is an extraordinarily performative person and is completely aware of it. Performance and the supposed absence of performance are observed and narrated by someone sophisticated enough to know that the documentary camera is always asking him to become Douglas Gordon, or perhaps one of many Douglas Gordons.

There is an assumption embedded in much documentary filmmaking that somewhere under the dust and grime of performance lies the gleaming truth of the real person. Keep filming for long enough and eventually it rubs off. Ask the question another way. Leave the camera rolling after the interview has supposedly finished. Catch the glance before the answer, a hesitation, or the moment when the subject forgets they are being watched. These become privileged moments in the edit because they seem to offer access to a version of the person uncorrupted by their awareness of being filmed. I am increasingly unsure why this version should automatically be considered more truthful. The director/editor Robert Greene (no stranger to dancing on the edge of documentary performance) says that "the best documentary characters have always been, on some level, great performers." Why should identifiable performance be considered less revealing than supposed authenticity?

The sociologist Erving Goffman argued in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), that social identity is something we enact in relation to other people, and that the fact that it is enacted does not make it false:

“All the world is not, of course, a stage, but the crucial ways in which it isn’t are not easy to specify.” 

Ordinary social life already contains staging, roles, conventions, rehearsed behaviours, audiences and attempts to control how we are perceived. Performance isn’t confined to theatrical pretence. Talking differently to your mother than to a curator is performance. Changing your behaviour when you walk into a gallery opening is performance. Telling a story in a particular way because you know your friend enjoys it is performance. So is Douglas becoming combative with Finlay, becoming charming with somebody else, playing the outrageous artist, telling a childhood story, or announcing to the camera that he is performing. These performances are affected by the construction of the film and the presence of the camera, but they don't necessarily begin and end with those conditions.

Goffman writes that the self is “a dramatic effect arising diffusely from a scene that is presented.” An uncomfortable idea behind his dramaturgical understanding of social interactions is that there may not be a completely formed, authentic self sitting behind all these performances. Goffman goes further: what if the distinction itself is misleading? What if performance is not something obscuring the self, or lack of, underneath, but constructing it?

The question becomes particularly strange when making a portrait of an artist, because performance is so often central to the way an artist constructs a public and private self. To remove it in search of some supposedly purified person underneath could be removing precisely the thing you are trying to understand. Douglas jokes, provokes, threatens, exaggerates, cries, directs, contradicts, insults, withdraws and seduces in ways that make you question where the line between his art and his life lies, or if there even is one. He also repeatedly tells us that this is what he is doing. Rather than concealing the mechanism of ambiguous interpretation he makes the mechanism the subject - “ambiguity is what it’s all about”, he says. Some people find this uncomfortable, countering that they want clarity on who he is, but I think what they are asking for is the comfort of a lie, because Douglas, like all of us, is not a singular definitive version that can be cleanly articulated but a complex series of interrelated performances. I think the discomfort comes from a denial of that amorphous sense of self that we know deep down is true, and a fear of the hard work of interpretation required to understand how these performances might coalesce.

Documentary has been worrying about this problem for most of its history. Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin made the instability explicit in their sociological experiment documentary Chronicle of a Summer. From the basis of a debate on whether or not it is possible to be sincere on camera, Rouch and Morin conduct interviews with an array of participants and then screen those interviews to the same interviewees and film the responses. Some accused others of performing or being false. What initially looked like a failure of their experiment in authenticity eventually became its essential conclusion, that the problem wasn’t deciding which people had been authentic and which had performed but discovering that the distinction was clouded, and perhaps unimportant when determining the truth and meaning of what was conveyed. Morin came to the wonderfully troublesome conclusion that in trying to leave theatre behind and reach life directly, they had discovered that life itself also contained theatre. Despite the seminal standing of the film, more than sixty years later documentary still seems strangely embarrassed by this determination.

We routinely manufacture situations in which people will perform and then edit those performances according to an idea of authenticity that has no basis other than our own empathic senses. There is nothing wrong with recognising value in spontaneous emotion, but the problem is imagining that spontaneity has some exclusive relationship with truth. We sit someone under lights, clip a microphone to their shirt, put three lenses and several strangers in front of them, ask them to revisit the death of their mother or the worst thing they have ever done and then judge one answer to be more “real” because some mannerism or broken voice affected us emotionally in the way we would hope. Often, comfort under these conditions is seen as a prerequisite to cultivating a useful account from the person interviewed - which is distinctly different to how the police might use some of the same tools to cultivate their desired truth.

The film scholar Stella Bruzzi has argued against this anxiety by describing documentaries as inherently performative encounters in which subject, filmmaker, apparatus, and eventually spectator, create meaning together:

"What else is a documentary but a dialogue between a filmmaker, a crew, and a situation that, although in existence prior to their arrival, has irrevocably been changed by that arrival?" 

The camera doesn't record reality, but rather its presence becomes one of the conditions under which this particular reality occurs. That seems obvious when written down, yet a huge amount of documentary grammar is designed to conceal it. The clean interview removes the question. The reaction shot suggests causal continuity between things that may have happened some time apart. Archive illustrates testimony as if one simply confirms the other. Conflicting accounts are organised until one becomes dominant. Repetitions are removed, contradictory statements are reconciled, characters acquire arcs, difficult ambiguity is clarified, and eventually several hundred hours of messy, inconsistent human behaviour emerge as ninety intelligible minutes in which everyone seems to know why they did what they did. An act of turning the chaos of life into coherence. But coherence is not the same thing as truth.

Film editing is uniquely capable of making somebody appear coherent. If someone gives a dozen contradictory explanations, I can simply select the three that agree. If their behaviour changes wildly between one shoot and the next, I can choose the behaviour that best serves the version of them the film has already established. If someone contradicts themselves ten minutes into a stirring sequence, I can remove the contradiction because the audience has already understood the “point” - the director’s version of the supposed truth. But all I’ve really done is to make a Director's Cut of the performances originally self-directed by the participants filmed.

A 'good' editor spends a great deal of time removing things that feel repetitive, extraneous, contradictory or unresolved, but sometimes that is exactly the wrong thing to do. With Douglas, contradiction slowly became less like a problem to solve and more like the material from which the portrait could be made. He insists that he doesn’t seek approval and then repeatedly negotiates how he will be represented. He describes himself as fearless and then speaks about the enormous responsibilities he feels towards his family. He constructs the dangerous mythology of the artist surrounded by knives, fire, broken glass and chaos, while elsewhere insisting that what matters about him is that he looks after people. He wants Finlay to direct him, complains when Finlay does so, tries to direct the film himself and then reminds Finlay that the real question of trust will come later, in the editing. You could treat these as inconsistencies requiring editorial management, but they are better understood as the inconsistencies that are Douglas Gordon.

Portraiture has never required a single stable view of a person. Warhol’s Screen Tests (incidentally, the Nico portrait features in Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon) take almost the opposite route by imposing an absurd degree of stillness and simplicity on the subject and watch the effort of maintaining a pose become part of the portrait. As the strange tension between posing and simply existing gives the films their psychological charge, the absurdity of demarcating where performance begins and ends is plain to see. Kiarostami’s hybrid casting in Close-Up goes further and makes any comfortable distinction between performance and documentary almost useless. The real people involved in Hossein Sabzian’s impersonation of filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalbaf replay events from their own lives, producing a film in which reconstruction becomes another route into the emotional reality of what happened rather than a contaminant of it. 

This seems particularly important in documentary portraiture because the desire to find someone’s “real self” can easily become an act of editorial arrogance. It assumes that the filmmakers can see through the subject better than they can see themselves, stripping away statements deemed inauthentic until the supposedly authentic person underneath has been uncovered. Filmmaker and theorist Trinh T. Minh-ha, who argues stridently that "to use an image is to enter fiction", offers a much more interesting conception of representation when she talks about “speaking nearby” rather than speaking about somebody, wherein the filmmaker acknowledges the gap between themselves and the subject rather than using filmmaking to close it. Meaning is deliberately prevented from becoming complete and the person represented retains some ability to contradict the representation, presenting no definitive version of the multifarious subject. I like this as an idea of editing, as the timeline constantly encourages closure. Every narrative instinct pushes towards the satisfying moment where disparate information suddenly locks together and the audience understands who this person really is. But perhaps the editor of a portrait occasionally has the opposite responsibility to protect the gaps whereby the audience can determine the meaning of contradictions and inconsistencies for themselves.

Documentary is often described through John Grierson’s famous formulation as the “creative treatment of actuality”, yet the creative half of that formulation often seems to become subordinate to the fear of mishandling the actuality. Of course there are ethical reasons for this fear, the editor possesses terrifying power. We can alter sequence, emphasis, duration and context and manufacture causation - even  making an ordinary pause appear accusatory. A responsible documentary practice has to recognise those dangers. But responsibility does not require aesthetic timidity. Sometimes the fear of manipulating reality produces the pretence that reality can be transferred intact, which is a distortion in itself.

In Douglas Gordon by Douglas Gordon, the temptation to resolve Douglas was always available because Douglas continually offers explanations of himself. He is simultaneously subject, critic, narrator and occasionally aspiring director. He even tells Finlay what the film ought to reveal: “the things that people don’t know which are important to [him]". The working-class boy from Maryhill becomes the Turner Prize-winning artist, who becomes the provocative celebrity artist, who becomes the father, who becomes the son worrying about the death of his mother, who becomes the performer aware of the camera, who becomes the exhausted man after the performance, who then notices that the exhausted man is being filmed and turns him into another performance. If you tried to decide which one was singularly authentic, you could spend the rest of your life editing the film.

There is a moment in the film when Douglas says he can behave as if he is an actor even though he isn’t one, stating plainly that he knows where there is a stage and he performs.  This could be received as a warning about his unreliability as a documentary subject. I think it’s closer to an instruction about how to look at subjects under a lens. The goal of a portrait needn’t be to penetrate the performances until the definitive person finally appears - there isn’t one. There are personas, deceptions, self-deceptions, evasions, confessions, contradictions, roles, responsibilities, jokes, tricks, mythologies and moments when several of these things seem to occupy the same space at the same time. A documentary shouldn’t collapse these various aspects into some artificial simplification, but instead revel in the strange complexity of human performance.


More on documentary performance:

Robert Greene made a list of the 20 greatest documentary performers