'Voices from El-Sayed' – Documentary as Drama and the Marginalisation of 'Staged Cinema'

posted by Jett Loe

(Jett and Gareth are at the Full Frame Documentary Festival in Durham, North Carolina.  For the next few days these posts are their first impressions of films screened there)

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Click below to hear our interview with ‘Voices from El-Sayed’ director Oded Adomi Leshem:

The Film Talk – Part 57 – Full Frame Documentary Festival – Day 2

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Voices from El-Sayed / Directed by Oded Adomi Leshem

Documentaries?  Drama?  Of what use is such a distinction?  This I asked while watching the new doc ‘Voices from El-Sayed’, (aka A Snail in the Desert / Shablul Bamidbar), by Oded Adomi Leshem.

Shot with an artist’s eye, this beautifully polished tale of a Bedouin village in the Negev desert that is home to the world’s largest deaf community has more drama than most Hollywood product – and for a reason.  Contemporary mainstream film-making has become so ossified, its characters and narrative beats so constricted and restricted by adherence to the McKee algorithm that any and all genuine surprise or discovery has been, by necessity, removed.

So now we must turn to the documentary for the thrill we used to get from drama.

But the documentary is side-lined, ghettoised – put off in some small corner of the cinematic world – some ‘worthy’ area, where to see a documentary is to feel better about oneself because somehow to actually recognise the real world is seen as noteworthy.

What rubbish.

Our culture seems to have been in such decline that the default position is to embrace artifice – to escape – as often as possible.  To narcotise ourselves to such a degree that even to acknowledge the real by watching a documentary is seen as laudable.

Well this is going to change – and ‘Voices from El-Sayed’ shows a way forward.

‘Voices’ uses techniques developed by decades of ‘staged cinema’ * to create something that has the narrative drive of a drama with the possibility of the unknown that documentaries can provide.  So, for example, we have a shot of father – an upset man – a man who is worried about his son, (to offset his deafness the child has received a cochlear implant which does not seem to be working), traveling in a lift.

The lift descends.

In the background we hear the disembodied voice of the lift announce the arriving floor.

Now this would be standard in a well-produced drama:  an upset character’s mental state is signified by having the camera, (and thereby us), go down, down, down in an elevator – the voice of the elevator is something the child can not hear and so becomes a simple reminder of the dilemma the characters find themselves in.

But this is a documentary.  So the result is more powerful than in conventional drama.  We get the delight that comes from processing thematic resonances, (as seen in decades of staged cinema: Kubrick was great as this – see ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ for a superb example of dialogue that is both naturalistic yet serves the purpose of the drama – “Honey have you seen my wallet?”, “What is the babysitter’s name?”, etc), combined with the narrative tension that comes from the genuine unknowability of real life.

This is the way forward for cinema.  With the technology to produce and distribute movies, (marketing in another question), becoming dramatically more available, (everyone has a video camera now – in the their phone, their iPod; editing software has become ubiquitous, media storage costs have collapsed, etc.), this is the exciting new form for movies.  The old distinction between ‘drama’ and ‘documentary’ isn’t applicable, (the distinction itself in part caused by the old technology – it was such an industrial process to make movies that if you did something different with them, (as in lifting the camera off a tripod, taking it out of the studio and pointing it an a non-actor), you needed a different category.

Well no more.  What do you call a video recorded on a webcam and distributed on YouTube?  Is that a documentary?  It doesn’t matter.

The new default category for cinema is what we used to call documentary.  It is staged cinema, ‘dramatic films’ that need to be categorised now; put in their separate little bin.

And after you watch the brilliant ‘Voices from El-Sayed’ you won’t be as interested in seeing them.

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For their inspiration in the creation of this post special thanks to the Thom Powers, Eugene Hernandez and Ronnie Scheib panel at Full Frame: ‘Wanted for Review’ and Thom’s article ‘Wanted: Documentary Critics’.

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* ‘Staged Cinema’: my phrase for non-documentary film; the new default for movies should be what we used to call the documentary – if your film features actors reading memorised lines let’s call that ‘staged cinema’ from now on.

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(Photos from top: framegrab from ‘Voices from El-Sayed’, production shot from the film, framegrab and above ‘Voices’ director Oded taken at Full Frame)

This entry was posted on Saturday, April 4th, 2009 at 12:56 pm. It is filed under Blog, Directors, Documentaries, Drama, Film Festivals, Jett Loe, Jett Loe Reviews, Reviews, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.