The filmmaker’s engagement with the subject in contemporary documentary: Foreign Parts as a case study

Abstract

The filmmaker’s engagement with the subject was an important element in Robert J. Flaherty’s film documenting the life of Nanook and his family, the legendary Nanook of the North (1922), and of course it continues to be relevant in contemporary documentaries, such as the film Foreign Parts (2010), directed by French director Verena Paravel and US filmmaker J. P. Sniadecki. In these films, the approach to the reality of the subjects is documented from an ethnographic perspective, where the main objective is to examine how they live. To this end, the filmmaker has to spend hours and hours living alongside the subjects, establishing a relationship with them that is documented by the camera. To identify how this translates onto the screen is the main purpose of this article. To do this, I will adopt the approach to character engagement taken by cognitive film theory, since as I want to demonstrate this perspective is very useful for explaining the relationship established between filmmaker and subject in this kind of film. Especially useful to this explanation is the ‘structure of sympathy’ posited by Murray Smith (2004), which involves three concepts: recognition, alignment, and allegiance.