What it Means
to Render
Tao Ruspoli
Martin Heidegger said that a work of art "creates truth". In this paper I will try to explain what this means and how it relates to documentary art (if it exists). As particular examples, I will examine two documentary projects: James Agee’s and Walker Evans’ book In Praise of Famous Men and the documentary film made in part about this book entitled "To Render a Life." These two projects attempt to document the lives of three very poor families in the deep south.
Both the documentaries attempt to and ask what it means to render a life. I believe that if James Agee in particular understood what it means "to render" and what it means "to create a work of art" differently, he could have been cured of his incessant insecurities about his ability to succeed at his task. He believed that documenting lives of real human beings would necessarily yield a result that was nothing more than an imperfect representation of his subject. He felt that the filtering process "reality" goes through, both through the writer and the reader necessitates distortion. For Agee, this is especially true in writing and the problem already is ameliorated in photographs. In his words, "If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, [etc. etc]." Furthermore, Agee balks at the notion that his work might be called "art", as if this would further distance him from his subject. Similarly, a documentary film maker interviewed in "To Render a Life" states something to the effect of, "All representation is a distortion which is going to find a home in the work. If it works it will be because it has a form which is totally artificial."
This attitude toward representation does nothing but make representation seem futile. If we view representative art as an imperfect copy of some pre-existing reality, an assumption many documentarists make, then the only point of taking on the task of representation is to create a faulty substitute for the experience of witnessing the events or people documented first hand.
I would like to think this is not the case. In order to support this view, we have to understand the function of art differently. Art, in my view, does not merely reflect a reality, but in a more important way, it creates it. What does this mean, and how does it do this? Answering the second question will hopefully shed light on the first: By enframing, or pointing out an event, or even an attitude, the work brings that event into our field of vision, and therefore causes it to exist. In other words, in language, for instance, it is in naming something that thing comes into being. To take a rather banal example, if we draw a line around a section of a piece of wood, the space created within that line we do not consider a separate entity. However, we can easily imagine a culture where only certain people are allowed to draw this line, and once the line is drawn, the space becomes sacred and is therefore named. In a certain sense, something has come into existence.
How does this apply to art? Art does to more complex ideas and events what language in this example does to an object. So when Agee describes his encounter with a Negro couple, he brings to light, or brings into existence, an event that would go completely unnoticed by most people. I don’t wish to quote the lengthy passage where he describes this experience, but let us take just one sentence: "[I] broke into a trot. At the sound of the twist of my shoe in the gravel, the young woman’s whole body was jerked down tight as a fist into a crouch from which immediately, the rear foot skidding in the loose stone so that she nearly fell, like a kicked cow scrambling out of a creek, eyes crazy, chin stretched tight, she sprang forward into the first motions of a running not human but of a suddenly terrified wild animal." Someone actually present at this event, which Agee makes sound as if monumental changes were going one, would probably hardly have noticed. Even if someone else were in Agee’s shoes at the time, that person would not have seen what happened in the same way. Even if Agee had not written about it the way he did, these few moments would have been as lost as the thousands of breaths one takes in a single day.
It is in writing about it, that Agee not only brings it into being, but hopefully causes the reader to acknowledge such moments in his life himself. Similarly, a documentary film, or any film for that matter, by enframing an event, by choosing to film it instead of the infinite other occurrences going on at the same exact moment, causes us to see something we would not see even if we were present at the time. It is important to notice that the act of enframing itself brings to light a multiple layer of experiences. Not only is the artist’s view being shared ("Taking pictures of suffering is a way to scream" says a photographer in the film), but so is the experience of the "documentees". For example, even the people being filmed in "to Render a Life", probably were unaware of many of the things they did to survive until the film makers chose to examine it. In an amusing example, the woman in the film is cleaning the floors and she bumps her elbow into the camera. She is totally unaware of what she is doing! I’m not saying that she is being absent minded, but that her acts were being done in the same way we walk through doors or drive our cars (in other words, unconsciously.)
Now how does this affect the way we see the differences in the film and the book project? In his book, Agee alternates drastically between succeeding at this type of enframing and seriously doubting his success. But deep down, he must realize that merely by pointing out that a "piece of cloth" would suffice in rendering the lives of his subjects, he is in a sort of meta-level, succeeding in writing at illustrating something for the reader. I mean, if we aren’t going to take Agee’s digressions as merely the doubts of an insecure mind, we have to understand that each of the issues he brings up are themselves attempts at this kind of representation. Similarly, when the film makers discuss their interactions with and effects on their subjects, these aren’t just interesting little facts about the life of a documentarist but they shed some extra light on the way the subjects cope with situations such as having people film them for a year. In other words, the self reflexivity present in both the book and the film serve to document something other than the lives of their subjects. Namely, they bring to light the effects of their work on their subject.
The Harvard professor asks how it is that we should read a book that renders a life without taking it as "just a book". Agee similarly worries about people picking up people’s lives "as if they were a book." Obviously, if we read the book as pure entertainment, we are missing something, but this is a reflection not of the work, but of the reader. If the work is succeeding, or "working", the book itself (or the film) is the only way we have of experiencing that which the authors, or artists, wish for us to experience. I underline "only" because I can’t emphasize enough that the work is not a substitution for an experience, but is an experience in itself. Furthermore, it is not a "mere" experience, since so many experiences go unnoticed, but in calling attention to themselves as works, the book and the film both exist in order to "name" something in the same way the language example does.
The photographer in the film approaches this when he says that although Agee wrote with passion, you can only cut away at so much passion before you cut away at the essence. I take it he is saying that it is in the attitude one takes toward something (after all, you can never completely do away with attitude--even an "objective" attitude is still an attitude) that that thing receives part of its essence.
February 27, 1996