Deception and Ethics in ?O, Zoo!
(The Making of a Fiction Film)
by
Michael Zryd
Like
all "anti-documentary” films–those which call into question the
documentary genre's easy claims to epistemological certainty–Phil Hoffman's ?O, Zoo! (The Making of a Fiction Film)
must be approached in terms of the particular documentary form it questions and
the particular context of its maker and making. In ?O,
Zoo! Hoffman plays off the filmic projects of John Grierson
and Peter Greenaway to furnish an admirably tentative
meditation on two knotted ethical problems of film form. One concerns
the way that sound/image constructions attempt to dictate meaning in
conventional documentary. The second takes on film’s photographic claims to
certainty in one of documentary’s favourite subjects: the representation of
death. These intersecting planes of
subjectivity and convention, and these ethical meditations, create a turbulence
underneath the disarmingly simple and elegant surface of ?O, Zoo!, a turbulence
which accounts for the emotional resonance of its ending(s), and for its
troubling aftertaste
Founding
Fathers
?O, Zoo! is, in some
ways, atypical of Hoffman's work, being his most directly analytical
examination of a set of film conventions.
In films like On the Pond (1978) and passing through/torn
formations (1987), a much more meditative and lyrical mix of image, sound,
and narration offers an intensely personal view of childhood and family. Somewhere Between Jalostotitlan
and Encarnacion (1984) deals with Hoffman's
reaction to an isolated incident in
Robert Frank's influence is
central to the development of Hoffman's sensibility. Aware of the filters the
apparatus imposes between film and experience, the filmmaker seeks direct
contact with his subjects. With Frank, Hoffman shares a concern for the
articulation of the filmmaker's subjectivity, and for the camera's power to
record and reveal events. Unlike Frank,
however, Hoffman's approach is tentative; as Blaine Allan puts it, Hoffman
places himself "on the temporal and spatial edges of an event”
(1987:91). In The Road Ended at the Beach,
Hoffman ironizes the Frank persona to point, finally,
to the folly of attempting to recapture the immediacy of the Beat generation's
attitude to "experience.” When he
finally finds Frank in
If The
Road Ended at the Beach can be seen as Hoffman's attempt to exorcize
the ghost of Robert Frank, ?O, Zoo! finds
him tackling two more figures of influence: John Grierson
and Peter Greenaway.
In ?O, Zoo!, they are paired as the Founding
Father and the Grand Inquisitor of the institutional documentary. Hoffman links the two unmistakably, though not
explicitly, in a passage in the first sequence of the film:
"That spring, I went to the
The "fiction film” is A Zed and
Two Noughts (1985); the director, Greenaway. Hoffman
and Greenaway met at the 1984 Grierson
Documentary Seminar held in
Grierson
hovers as a key figure behind both the Canadian and British documentary traditions,
and is thus a point of departure for both Hoffman and Greenaway. His unique
legacy as film director and administrator, to the end of an openly propagandistic
film product in the service of the state, makes the "Griersonian” mode of documentary a particularly acute model
of what Noël Burch calls an "Institutional Mode of Representation” (1979).
Certainly, one can identify an NFB house-style with as many
stylistics as any
Hoffman's confrontation with the Grierson mold and
myth and with Greenaway's analytic project are
oblique, even affectionate. ?O, Zoo! adapts the central formal device of Greenaway's
critique–a coherent voice-over ordering disparate images to create a hermetic
non-referential fictional universe–to the rhetorical traditions of the narrated
personal diary-film of the independent filmmaker. The fiction of the grandfather frames
Hoffman's own penetration of Greenaway's narrative
film production, less to satirize (*1) Greenaway than
to harness the skeptical dynamic of Greenaway's
voice-over/image relation. While the extreme artifice characteristic of Greenaway’s later cinema is concentrated into his elaborate
visual tableaux, in his earlier films, Greenaway’s
artifice is concentrated in the complex counterpoint between his soundtrack
(Colin Cantlie’s voiceover narration and Michael
Nyman’s music) and “documentary” imagery. Hoffman mobilizes Greenaway’s
counterpoint but refuses to capitulate his filmic
world entirely to fiction; instead, Hoffman keeps his meditation on events focussed on what he calls "lived experiences”.
Sound
Models
In "The Creative Use of Sound” (1933) Grierson
outlines his defence of the freedom and power of
sound. Clearly inspired by the
1929 "Statement on Sound” co-signed by Eisenstein, Pudovkin,
and Alexandrov, Grierson
insists, like the Soviets, that "the final question is how we are to use
sound creatively rather than reproductively” (1966:158). Yet, though he maintains the mobility of the
sound montage-piece, Grierson prescribes a limit to
the possibilities of asynchronous sound:
"Our rule should be to have the mute
strip and the sound complementary to each other, helping each other along. That is what Pudovkin
meant when he talks about asynchronous sound." (1966:159)
By invoking Pudovkin
instead of Eisenstein, Grierson demonstrates his
preference for linear coherence at the expense of a dialectical approach that
would expose contradiction. In this respect, when Grierson
calls for art to be a "hammer” (cited in Morris 1987:41), he is far from
Eisenstein's "kino-fist."
Complementary
sound/image relations serve the production of coherent, stable meanings in the
text. Later in the essay, when Grierson speaks of the use of "chorus,” he says it
must be in the service of unity: "By the chorus, characters are brought
together and a single mood permeates a whole location” (1966:160).
Interestingly, he notes of the "recitative chorus” that "the very crudest
form of this is the commentary you find ordinarily attached to ‘interest’
films” (1966:161). 1 Yet even if Grierson
favours, at this early point in the 1930s, a
voice-over narration "which adds dramatic or poetic colour to the action”
(1966:161), that "colour” must not in any way create conflict. Rather, it must enhance meaning. As he said
of the general desired effect of the propaganda film, the voiceover should
"inspire confidence” not present "problems” (Morris, 1987:45). Grierson’s dislike
of Humphrey Jennings's WWII films demonstrates how the "creative use of
sound” must not be in any way disturbing. Moreover, the overarching dominance
of the "recititive chorus” in the Canadian WWII
documentaries made under Grierson's command
demonstrates how the route of least resistance to a strong propaganda message
is through "authoritative narration” (Elder,1986-87:
157).
The complementary voice-over/image relation is the bedrock of the institutional
documentary. The image track is arranged to illustrate the
narrator's descriptions and the indexical power of the [**add: photographic]
[**sorry to add a word, but not all images are indexical] image is harnessed
to the rhetoric of the soundtrack. This
places its referential authority in the service of an authoritative voice-over
narrator, usually male, whose own vocal performance is coded by standardized
diction, pacing, clarity of tone, and coherence.
Greenaway's mimicry of this convention is superlative. In
Vertical Features Remake, Colin Cantlie's
"BBC voice” explains the attempts of the “Institute for Restoration and
Reclamation” to reconstruct a film by a “Tulse Luper.” As names and places appear on the soundtrack,
photographs, drawings, and moving images appear on the image track to illustrate
the often convoluted but always self-assured narration. The insistence of the illustration is key to the satire; the film cuts to the same photograph of
Tulse Luper no fewer than 23 times.
Hoffman's clearest appropriation of Greenaway's method of constructing a fiction in fake documentary
form appears in the opening sequence of ?O,
Zoo!. Instead of attacking the
authority of the institutional narrator (Greenaway’s
target), Hoffman undermines a different set of conventions: those surrounding
the authority of the filmmaker-narrator of the personal diary film. Interestingly, ?O,
Zoo! is the only early film of Hoffman's where
he does not read his own narration. Reminiscent
of Hollis Frampton's (nostalgia) (1971), where Frampton has Michael
Snow read the voice-over of his most obviously "autobiographical” film,
Hoffman puts himself at one remove from the "revelations” contained in
?O, Zoo!.
Sound-Image
Relations and Fake Framing
The film opens in silence on a lion roaring--a joke on the MGM lion
announcing the beginning of another, more familiar, kind
of fiction film. The image is sepia-toned (as will be all the
images of this sequence), connoting age. The silence is broken by the voice
of the male narrator :
"The footage was found by my sister in
my grandfather's loft. Having been at one time a newsreel cameraman,
grandfather knew to keep the cannister well-sealed,
and since the loft was relatively cool and dry, there was no noticeable
deterioration."
The voice is flat and deliberate, not a
BBC voice but a voice appropriate to a personal diary film. This explanation of
the image’s integrity and lack of deterioration makes reference to the
filmmaking process, while bringing the viewer into the confidence of the
voiceover. The narrator assumes we know
that a cool, dry loft and a well-sealed canister will prevent a film from
deteriorating. The immediate wedding of
image and voice-over, its personal tone, and the reflexive explanations attempt
to pull us into the film, consistently set against the institutional film:
"I recalled seeing my grandfather's old
newsreels ... There was a marked difference
between the repetitive nature of the news film and the footage found in the
loft."
If
Hoffman differentiates the “voice” of the institutional newsreel from that
of the personal diarist, he also invokes his own tradition: Canadian experimental
filmmaking. One shot of the stock footage
Hoffman uses has already been incorporated by experimental filmmaker David
Rimmer into his film, Waiting for the Queen
(1973). The allusion is, first, proleptic of the levels of intertextuality
in the film as Grierson, Greenaway,
Vermeer, and a variety of tropes of structural film make "appearances”
in ?O, Zoo!.
More specifically, it refers to the tradition of Canadian experimental
filmmaking that interrogates the photographic image. Rimmer, for example,
often uses stock footage to study image degradation through looping, so Hoffman's
term "repetitive” is apt. When
Hoffman later implies that the NFB is an organization devoted to the filming
of wildlife, he makes allusion both to Greenaway's
obsessive filming of animals (and the setting of A Zed and Two Noughts in a zoo) and to the stereotypical NFB nature
documentary. The inversion is here
complete: within the fiction, the "personal” images of the grandfather
are linked, by subject, to the institution of the NFB. Meanwhile, the stock
institutional images of the public event allude to the independent experimental
tradition.
Another
important arena of cinematic critique in ?O,
Zoo! is the film’s use of direct address to set
reflexive traps for the spectator. In the next section, the narrator directly
addresses the viewer in the imperative:
"There was something peculiar about
grandfather's footage. Watch. Wait for
the flash marking the beginning of the shot and then start counting."
Once again, the direct address
underlines the reflexivity of the film by acknowledging our presence as
spectators, underscoring its apparent honesty and transparency--even as it more forcefully
tells us how to interpret the images (there is something "peculiar” to
watch for). But the voice-over tricks
us. After the flash, the narrator falls
silent for about 20 seconds over a close up of a camel rhythmically
chewing. Following the narrator's
orders, we begin to count and fall into sync with the camel's chewing. But as the shot proceeds, the chewing gets
more and more erratic and our counting struggles to keep its
own pace. Finally, the voice-over
returns to rescue the viewer and explain the "peculiarity":
"Most of the shots are exactly 28
seconds in length."
Instructed to count, we are defeated by
the rhythm of the image. The narrator’s
knowledge further points to our failure:
"I was impressed with both the
precision and self-control my grandfather expressed in shooting this unusual
material as compared with the erratic camera work displayed in the
newsreels."
"Precision and self-control” are qualities of the text and its "maker,” but not of the viewer. Moreover, the “self-control” is an arbitrary limit set by the apparatus; Hoffman's camera is a spring-wound Bolex, whose full shot length is 28 seconds at 24 fps.
In addition
to direct address, ?O, Zoo!’s
voiceover plays with codes of documentary evidence, specifically with one of
the most banal elements of the cameraperson’s trade: camera logs. ?O, Zoo!
takes this elementary “document” and uses it to
critique Grierson’s “technocratic” logic of
classification. The narrator suggests:
"More clues as to the nature of my
grandfather's discipline were found on a slip of paper secreted in the film
canisters."
After the shots of the camel, the film
cuts to a close up of a piece of paper titled "Camera Negative Report
Card,” dated 6/6/45, with neat, legible printing listing six shots, all under
the heading "Day 17": "Lion"; "Elephant slo-mo"; "Fallen Elephant tries to get up";
"Elephant gets up"; "Camel Chewing"; "Insert Humps.”
Here is another piece of the film apparatus exposed – and if we read quickly
enough, we can see that shot list supports what we've been seeing. But questions arise: if this is a slip of
paper the contemporary narrator has found, why would it be filmed with the same
sepia tone as the grandfather’s footage?
The characteristics of different documents (paper and film) begin to
collapse into one another.
Later
in the film, we see that the contemporary filmmaker also uses these cards to
chart the progress of his
Next, the
long passage explaining the "making of a short film around the making of a
fiction film” establishes ?O, Zoo!'s link to Greenaway
and Grierson:
"The footage was found in the
winter. That spring, I went to the
This passage appears over shots of
animals (a seal, peacocks, an ostrich); images which
reinforce the grand father's employment with the institution dedicated to
wildlife photography. The phrase,
"documentation and categorization”, alludes to Greenaway’s
obsession with classification and naming - that technocratic rage to order laid bare in Greenaway's films by
the hyperbolic application of that rage. Though the allusion is no more than a
nod to Greenaway's project, in recognizing their
shared heritage in Grierson, Hoffman acknowledges the
ideological implications underlying how documentary convention orders
experience - and the subversive nature of any questioning of that ordering.
After the
close up of the ostrich and the narrator's statement, "I can still hear my
grandfather's remarks...”, we cut to a slow motion
shot of what seems to be the shadow of two gorillas. The gorilla is a Darwinian
“founding father”–and it turns out that the shadows of what appear to be two
gorillas are in fact those of a single gorilla and the filmmaker. Once again,
in the spirit of Greenaway, Hoffman slyly undercuts
claims to cultural authority. On the
soundtrack, we hear a mechanical whirring, then an old man's voice fighting
through static and muted sound:
"That old battle-axe! What
the hell does he know about this country anyway? All he knows about [sound unclear here] is whoring
and crammed up pubs!"
The narrator presents another piece of
documentation, apparently a tape recording of the grandfather's voice (the
voice explains the whirring as a tape recorder rewind), literalizing the idiom,
"I can still hear him say....” What
the narrator hears in his mind can be conjured for the film. The question, "What does he know about
this land anyhow?” refers to Grierson's status as a
foreigner to
The
tape recording introduces a new element into the soundtrack besides the
narrator's voice. The next image, of a
gorilla cage next to a spinning water sprinkler, contains a "sync"
sound effect of a jet water sprinkler playing underneath the narration:
"Though the director was from the same
country as the old battle-axe, I couldn't see a connection. I couldn't see why he'd been invited to the
seminar. Yet there seemed to be
similarities between my grandfather's footage and the films the director
presented at the seminar. I thought I
would try to incorporate my grandfather's footage with the film I would take on
location in
The "sync” water sprinkler sound
(an allusion to another of Greenaway's obsessions,
water), and the introduction of music, fleshes out the possible range of sound
at the narrator's disposal. The gradual
and very subtle introduction of each sound option in O, Zoo! parallels the increasingly arbitrary rhetorical power of the
narrator and the complexity of the fiction he weaves. The
“authenticity” of the "personal” voice-over is first established, and then
used as a springboard for the introduction of more and more conventional
rhetorical effects. All of this
precedes the announcement of the film's overarching form: “As usual, I would
keep a diary of the whole affair”.
Faking
Death: the Ethics of Representation, Fiction, and Actuality
This
short film around a fiction film has its own enigmas to be worked out in its
"narrative” progression. In the passage above, the narrator puzzles over
the connections between Greenaway and Grierson, between Greenaway and
the Documentary seminar. On one ingenuous
level, of course, the puzzlement is justified; Greenaway's
films are, indeed, fictions, and further, are absolutely antipathetic to "Griersonian” documentaries.
In specific reference to the 1984 seminar, the "puzzlement”
registered by the narrator translated to outrage on the part of many conference
participants. The challenge that the
anti-documentaries shown at the seminar presented to seminar participants,
for whom the Grierson Documentary Seminar was typically
a "tribute” to Grierson's official legacy,
led to violent debates and charges that films like Greenaway's
The Falls were senseless hoaxes. In ?O, Zoo!, Hoffman seems
to be quietly satirizing this debate.
Working
out the relations between Greenaway and Grierson is one problem
the narrator will tackle. The second is the resemblance he notes between his
"grandfather's footage” and Greenaway's
films. On the level of the fiction,
the narrator says he will incorporate his grandfather's footage into the film
he is "about to make” in
These
two levels interpenetrate to present two problems: one to the viewer, the
problem of reading ?O, Zoo! between
the levels of fiction and actuality, between the image and the voice-over.
The second problem is Hoffman's. When he says, "as usual”
he would keep a diary of the whole affair, Hoffman is situating the film within
his own practice and his own preoccupations - not Greenaway's
assured multiplication and excavation of fictions but his own tentative probings of the problems of representation. The "resolution”
of these problems of reading and making appears as the film finally incorporates
the two missing shots from the Day 1×
shot card: "Elephant tries to get up,” "Elephant gets up.” Just after the diary section shows us the right
half of the grandfather's shot report, the narrator tells a two-minute long
story over a black screen, about his witnessing and filming an elephant having
a heart attack at the
The
effect of this enclosure of a frame around ?O,
Zoo! is double-edged.
In one way, these last two shots expose the artifice of the voice-over.
The events of the first shot (the elephant rocking back and forth,
the attendants shoving bales of hay under the elephant) match the earlier
voice-over, but in the second shot, the elephant gets up. The narrator lies twice. First, he developed
the footage, and second, the events of the story are contradicted by the image.
This decisive break in the fiction takes place by a radical separation of
voice-over and image: the story is told over a black screen, the final images
are silent. With this separation, the
viewer can return to the film to reconstruct, in a sense, its non-meaning,
and to question and revise the “authenticity” of the versions of
events the film presents.
Working
through these possibilities, of course, suggests that a thoroughgoing skepticism
is called for in the viewer's relation to the film, and especially to the
narrator's voice-over. For example, do the final images tell the whole
story? Is there more elephant footage
than is shown or listed? Is the order
of the last two images correct? However, thoroughgoing skepticism is not,
it seems to me, the final affect of ?O,
Zoo!. It is important to note here a crucial difference
between Greenaway and Hoffman: Greenaway's oeuvre is obsessively interwoven with recurring
images, themes, and characters, but his fictions are rigorously hermetic and
unconcerned with the codes of realism. In ?O, Zoo!, Hoffman exposes the hoax; moreover,
the emotional resonance of the elephant's struggle is highly charged and excruciating
to watch. One suspects that if the
story of the elephant's death is a fiction, it is still a fiction filtered
through Hoffman's sense of the crisis of representation.
The
key to Hoffman's sense of his own intertextuality is the line in the voice-over, "I've
come across this problem before.” This
statement refers to Hoffman's film made a year earlier, Somewhere Between.... ,
where Hoffman, travelling by bus in
When
Hoffman showed Somewhere Between... at the 1984 Grierson
Seminar, he was taken to task by a veteran war corespondent,
Don North, who wanted to see the scene of the Mexican boy's death. Shelley Stamp, reporting on the conference,
writes, "[North] felt that the film would have been stronger with the
addition of the death. What North missed,
I think, was the very structure this absence provided, and Hoffman's implied
critique of North's type of filmmaking”. The nature of Hoffman's critique is clearer
in ?O, Zoo! In the voice-over story, the narrator
rationalizes his decision to film the scene with the lame excuse: "Maybe
the television networks would buy the film and tell people the tragedies in
their neighborhood”. After the
elephant "dies”, he admits, "My idea of selling the film to
the network now just seems an embarrassing thought, an irresponsible plan”.
The
"social utility” arguments of sensationalist news and documentary makers
and institutions always carry a hint of the National Enquirer
("because people want to know”) – an epistephilia
which borders on what Tom Gunning has called the spectatorial
mode of curiositas
(1989:38). But it is important not to
see Hoffman's tentative meditations on the problematic of representation as
party to the opposing camp which censors representation under the flag of
"responsibility to subject" - the simplistic and squeamish argument
that filming "takes advantage” of the subject. Rather, Hoffman understands film's power to
mediate between the consciousness of the filmmaker and the viewer; his
hesitations around the problem of representation reflect a personal ambivalence
about the necessary link between his vision and the viewer's. In an "artist's statement” for the Art
Gallery of Ontario, Hoffman writes,
"By means of the personal content of my
films I seek to uncover subjective aspects of the way events were
recorded. Focusing on the way that I, as
a filmmaker, can and do influence both form and content allows room for the
viewer to reflect upon ways in which meaning is constructed in film. Using the processes of reflection and
revision, I seek to examine and express how we bring meaning to past and
present lived experiences."
If this statement names the terms of
Hoffman's meditation on representation it does not reflect the intensity of the
tension felt between the extraordinary control a filmmaker has over images and
the guilt they arouse, nor the sense of danger around Hoffman’s approach of the
particular "lived experience” at the core of these films, namely, bearing
witness to death.
In
the voice-over of the elephant story, Hoffman includes a sentence that
clarifies this intensity of responsibility and danger:
"concentrating
on the image I had filmed as if my mind was the film and the permanent trace of
the elephant's death was projected brightly inside. Somehow it's my responsibility now."
Hoffman makes explicit that central
insight and concern of radical independent film practice and theory: film's
status as a radical metaphor for consciousness and its relation to the
world. The capacity of
film to mediate the relation between consciousness ("as if my mind was the
film"), and events in the world, centres around its indexical nature
("permanent trace"). This mediation with carries the potential
to represent death and suggests a radically powerful level of epistemological
inquiry carrying both an intimation of the ecstatic - outside space and time -
and what Jean Epstein has called "a warning of something monstrous” at the
heart of cinema (1977:21). The
"responsibility” Hoffman feels around this encounter with death is keyed by the phrase
"projected". For if film is a radical metaphor for consciousness, we
must understand the double-hinged nature of that metaphor as it swings between
filmmaker and spectator. Hoffman's
hesitations regarding filming, or developing, or showing his experience of
death revolves around a terror of the urgent but reckless energy that
representation burns into the filmmaker and the viewer.
If the filming of a moment of death is the central expressive theme
of Hoffman's film, its representation and deferral is never divorced from
his recognition that the weight of film history and convention always interposes
itself and structures the spectator's access to the image. The engagement
of film history in ?O, Zoo!,
especially with the Griersonian documentary tradition with its central claim to
absolute truth, underlines the epistemological stakes behind Hoffman's questioning.
Hoffman wants to bring the conventions and history of the construction
of certainty to crisis, to clear a space for the spectator to approach, with
Hoffman, the intensity of fascination and doubt inscribed in that image which
appears literally as supplement, as coda, to the text of the film. The point
is not to escape mediation - this is not an Edenic
pure image. Nor is it to restore certainty. Rather, Hoffman clears a space
for consciousness to reengage the world in "lived experience” via
representation.
Works
Cited
Allan, Blaine. "It's Not Finished Yet (Some Notes on
[Burch, Noël. “Film’s Institutional
Mode of Representation and the Soviet Response.” October 11 (Winter
1979): 77-96.]
Della Penna,
Paul, and Jim Shedden. " The Falls .”
Cineaction! 9 (July 1987): 20- 4.
Elder, Kathryn. "The Legacy of John Grierson.” Journal
of Canadian Studies 21.4 (Winter 1986-87): 152-61.
Epstein, Jean. “The
Universe Head Over Heels.” Trans. Stuart Liebman. October 3 (Spring 1977): 21-25.
Grierson,
John. "The
Creative Use of Sound.” Grierson
on Documentary. Ed. Forsyth Hardy.
Gunning, Tom. “An Aesthetic of
Astonishment: Early Film and the (In)credulous
Spectator.” Art & Text 34 (Spring 1989): 31-45.
Hoffman, Phil. "Artists and their Work: Phil Hoffman.” Pamphlet.
Morris, Peter. "Rethinking Grierson: The Ideology of John Grierson.”
Dialogue: Canadian and Quebec Cinema. Eds. Pierre Verroneau, Michael Dorland, and Seth Feldman.
Stamp, Shelley. Program Notes for Somewhere Between... . pamphlet.
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real:
The Documentary Film Revisited.
* “In one
delicious sequence, Hoffman ironizes Greenaway’s move to big budget feature filmmaking. While Greenaway’s
crew makes futile attempts to corral a flock of flamingos, Hoffman simply sets
up a feed bucket in front of his Bolex. A flamingo
approaches and he gets the shot; personal control of the apparatus has its
rewards.”
** “My thanks to Karyn Sandlos for her excellent editorial work on this essay