Cadrer le monde

This week’s theme is all about photography. The static image, a smaller component of cinema with a magic all its own, distinct from the art of the moving image. Whether it’s a raw material for documentaries, a source of fascination, a record of a time that was, or a false lead to dupe the credulous, photography makes a frequent appearance in documentary cinema. These five films will give you enough time to really *see*, to stop and observe. They offer a welcome respite from a world where the incessant flow of moving images leaves your eyes blurred and your vision stunted.

PHOTOGRAPHERS AT WORK

When the master Czech photographer Josef Koudelka frames a shot, he takes little steps: first to the side, then to the other, then one more to the side. In Koudelka: Shooting Holy Land, his assistant Gilad Baram films him hunting for never-before-seen shots on Palestinian land, as well as shots to redo. Koudelka is filmed waiting, hesitating, taking a step this way, then that way, surrounded by concrete, by barriers and barbed wire, seeking to transfer his obsession onto large-format film, namely: what *is* a wall?  The World of Luigi Ghirri examines the work of this Italian photographer from an emotional perspective by trying to duplicate his way of seeing the world: in Kodachrome, attentive to the shapes of things, at times a little pastel. Which is to say: with joy, and a little melancholy. Gianni Celati, the well-known Italian writer, made this film about his photographer friend, traveling from encounter to encounter to capture this portrait: a telling portrait of a way of seeing.  A photograph can change the world, an image can cause a geo-political earthquake and a snapshot can transform those who look at it. Yet sometimes the direction of this effect is inverted; the act of taking a photograph can save a life. We step into the world of Anne J. Gibson, a woman with a troubled past marked by abuses and a break with her family, as witnesses to the transformative and redemptive power of art. Gibson, a woman with an abundance of sensitivity, instinct and caring curiosity, succeeded in channeling her need for intensity by diving into the local colour of Toronto’s Kensington Market and capturing its characters on film. This posthumously released film—its director Michka Saäl having passed away suddenly during post-production—speaks to the appropriate distance between an artist and its subject. It’s an almost physical skill that can’t be taught but only felt in a surprising alchemy between the photographer’s body, mind and camera. Gibson clearly possessed this gift. New Memories is made with the same spirit. 

WHAT IS AND IMAGE WORTH? It would be banal to observe that there are too many images in the world. Existing as we do in the midst of what could easily be qualified as a visual dictatorship, we are overwhelmed with images on a daily basis. From the omnipresence of increasingly totalitarian advertisements to online life that envelops every sphere of our lives and audiovisual “content” force-fed to us at a rate our eyes are no longer able to capture. While Helen Doyle’s Frameworks: Images of a Changing World starts from this observation, it quickly shifts focus to consider images that are meaningful. Through interviews with photojournalists who have witnessed the worst depravities of the modern world, Doyle invites us to remember that it’s not images that are dangerous, it’s our ability to decode and continue to see them. A deeply important film that serves to restore meaning to the tumult of the world. We close this week with a documentary that uses photography to build a discourse: Guillermina. Here, it is static images and the ways they build on one another that bring new meaning to the story told by voice-over. Photographs as archives. In Cuba, in the first half of the 20th century, dozens of Black women, nannies, pose with the white children under their care. Black women whose images are slowly fading from the film: because their skin is underexposed or simply because they were always hidden. They were useful slaves for watching children, but had no right to be captured in photographs, no place in family photo albums or in history. With Guillermina, the image returns, an unalterable witness to a shameful past; one that the filmmaker invites us to face.