The Elderphone

Unlike “conventional” cinema, which utilizes reality as a representation to support its narrative, in documentary cinema, the utilization and presence of reality is open to discussion and can be rearranged, processed, manipulated, and so on, while seeking opportunities for the filmmaker’s personal presence to view reality in a fresher light. This personal element becomes a strong marker, as we often emphasize in cinema. However, perhaps most importantly, the repetition of the term “personal” in this cinematic work is a political interruption, which, in Jacques Ranciere’s framework of thinking, is to change or at least disrupt the order of “the sensible,” “the unseen,” “the unheard,” and so on, to make the invisible and inaudible part of the order so that they become visible and audible.

Within this framework, documentary cinema becomes political as it does not only lead to a specific cinematic approach, but the notion of documentary is often referred to as capturing space in an undivided state when it is filled with bodies and objects whose identities have not been placed within a predetermined order. Hence, it is a kind of raw reality that still has its own autonomy, unlike fictional cinema, where the meaning of space and its bodily inhabitants has been divided and distributed into a certain order of meaning and connected to a specific social setting. Unlike fictional cinema, which tends to be pedagogical, documentary cinema seems to imply a certain equivalence since the possibilities of presenting space and bodies in a particular configuration are widely open.

The potential for equivalency in documentary cinema is indirectly influenced by the development of increasingly personalized technology and media. As documentary cinema tends to be personal and intimate, its unpredictability and diversity increasingly reach the complexity and expansion of the reality surrounding humans. The development of digital media technology has indeed celebrated personality. However, the next question, when the “ unseen” and “ unheard” take part in the existing order, forming a new order, is how documentary cinema can continue to provide expansion, unpredictability, complexity, to be continuously defended in a festival, just as equality, according to Ranciere himself, is a situation that is continuously presupposed, and not a purpose.

–Akbar Yumni