Doctoral thesis: ‘Animated Documentary Ethics through the Neurodiversity Paradigm’

My doctoral thesis is available to download here. The thesis was the written component of a research by practice PhD. Drawing on Autism, a short animated documetnary which served as a key practice artefact, is available here. My doctoral research was part of the Autism through Cinema project at Queen Mary University of London, which was funded by the Wellcome Trust (209795/Z/17/Z).

Abstract: Animated documentary scholarship has grown significantly but the ethics of this practice remains under explored. Animated documentaries afford their filmmakers greater responsibility over the visual representation of participants, while the practice’s aptitude for evoking mental phenomena
has resulted in a tendency to focus on narratives featuring marginalised participants. Animation increases the number of creative decisions made in these documentaries, multiplying the opportunities to express unconscious bias. This may manifest in the film’s aesthetics, including the use of problematic stereotypes or the othering of participants. Autism representation is a useful topic for examining animated documentary ethics because members of the autistic community have authored a framework for ethics, the neurodiversity paradigm. Three areas of existing scholarship are explored: the neurodiversity paradigm, live-action documentary ethics, and animated
documentary theory. Four existing animated documentaries that attempt to represent autistic participants are analysed: Hole, an autobiographical film, Mm-Hmm, co-directed by the non-autistic sibling of an autistic participant, An Alien in the Playground, directed by a non-autistic filmmaker with no existing connection to their participant, and A is for Autism, which adopts a collaborative method where a non-autistic filmmaker and autistic participants share creative responsibilities. Through research by film practice, a new method of ethical production was developed during the creation of Drawing on Autism, a short animated documentary featuring one autistic participant. This film set the template for the development of Divergent Minds, a long form animated documentary featuring five autistic participants. While this film remains a work in progress, the narrative structure is complete, and some scenes have been developed into animatics. The original contribution of this thesis is a method for ethically producing animated documentary films, what I
term the collaborative reflexive cycle, which relies on four means for mitigating the aforementioned risks: participant collaboration, positional reflexivity, textual reflexivity, and filmmaker self-scrutiny.

Postdoc 1: Introducing the CONNECT autistic co-created anti-stigma video game project

The aim of this series of blog posts is to give me the opportunity to reflect upon the initial stages of the CONNECT game project. I need to start the process of translating our practical game design collaboration into tangible research outcomes. In my practice-based film studies PhD, I was a non-autistic identifying practitioners/researcher, studying the ethical challenge of editing documentary interviews with autistic participants and turning them into animated documentaries. However, in this project my role is quite different because I am neither a participant nor a practitioner, as I don’t identify as autistic and I have no game design experience. This project positions me as a more conventional humanities and social science researcher, engaged in something akin to arts based participatory action research, responsible for developing and managing the collaborative method.   

The CONNECT Project Group:

As of March 2025, I joined a neurodiverse, interdisciplinary, participatory research collective, known as CONNECT, which is based in the Maritime provinces of Canada. CONNECT, was extrapolated from the French title, CONtinuité des soiNs et des sErviCes pour les adultes autists, which translates to Continuity of Care and Services for Autistic Adults. The project was founded in 2017 by lead researcher, Dr. Caroline Jose, along with four autistic self-advocates (I’ll add their names here if they’d like to be mentioned). Jose is affiliated with the Vitalité Health Network and Université de Moncton. With Jose as my supervisor, we secured funding to start the game development, in addition to my own post-doctoral research fellowship, based at Université de Moncton.

With the exception of one researcher and the professional game design collaborators from Spandrel Interactive, each member of the CONNECT project group identifies as neurodivergent. While a majority of the group identify as autistic, we are neurodiverse in that there are some members who are non-autistic identifying, and there are others who use multiple labels. Including myself, I’ve heard members refer to being autistic, dyslexic, schizoaffective, attention deficit hyperactive, and having dissociative identities. My assumption is that a thorough survey would indicate more descriptive terms like this.

Our Project – Changing Perceptions of Autism Through a Video Game:

Under Caroline’s leadership, we received a Catalyst grant from the Canadian Institute of Research Health. Our proposal was submitted with two titles:

Formal Title: Addressing structural ableism in the digital world to improve health equity of real-world autistics: an autistic co-led, interdisciplinary and multisectoral approach to ethical representation in video game design

Lay Title: A game changing approach to autism de-stigmatization: addressing harmful stereotypes of autism in the video game industry by engaging autistics in the design process

We intend to raise additional funding to design and implement an impact study for measuring how the CONNECT game changes players attitudes towards autism and autistics. However, if we get funding for that, this will be the research focus of one of my colleagues. Therefore, I must consider the game’s impact, as beyond the scope of my research.

My research focus will be observing, analysing, and co-developing the participatory method for co-creating the CONNECT video game. This means:

  1. I will co-design and monitor our method of collaboration during the video game’s development and production.
  2. I will creatively contribute to the game development, drawing from my own perspectives, which are informed by my arts and humanities background in research by practice, participatory research, neurodiversity studies, autism representation studies, and non-fiction media ethics.
  3. I will conduct a qualitative study to gage how each contributing member is experiencing the collaborative method and the work in progress game.

We are working under the assumption that an effective way to produce a game that is capable of reducing autism-stigma in players is to ensure that:

  1. All creative decision-making during the game’s development will be made by, informed by, or ratified by the autistic contributors.
  2. While essentially fictional, the narrative content and game mechanics should be informed by the lived experiences and personal insights of the autistic contributors

It is my responsibility in the CONNECT video game project to ensure the coherence and efficacy of our collaborative method and maintain ethical standards.  As such, I am very interested in finding out to what extent the autistic CONNECT members perceive the work-in-progress components of the game as authentically representing autistic lived experiences. Additionally, I’d like to develop a procedure for actioning feedback, e.g. if a CONNECT contributor identifies an inaccuracy or a problematic connotation in some aspect of the work in progress game, how can that be most efficiently fed back to the contracted game developers.

By the time we have produced the first public facing version of this game, something akin to a demo, I hope to be able to clearly articulate the method through which we achieved these results, so that other groups, with different concerns, have a framework for co-designing their own game as a means to confront oppression.  

The CONNECT Game Project teams:

The project members are divided into three groups, with some members straddling multiple teams.

  1. The research team, consisting of professional researchers and administrators,
  2. The developer team, professional game designers and producers mostly based at the company Spandrel Interactive
  3. The creative team, a group of autistic self-advocates who have agreed to volunteer their time, ideas, and energy in order to lead the creative decision making in the game design process. Some creative team members have lots of game design experience, while others have none.

Positionality and group authorship:

An additional theoretical interest for me is understanding better the blurriness of collaborative authorship. This is important because the positionality of our group is crucial to the authenticity of the finished game and the research findings. We have about a dozen people contributing to a media artefact but, in theory, the creative decision making should be driven by the autistic subset in the group, the creative team, most of whom are inexperienced as game designers. What is currently not clear is how dogmatic should we be about these boundaries? Is there a qualitative difference between a creative decision made by a non-autistic contributor that was later ratified by the autistic members of the creative team, compared to a creative decision made by an autistic contributor? Is it practically possible for every creative decision to be made by members of the autistic creative team? Would being very strict about who can make a creative decision put the project momentum and progress of the game at risk? Would we put the anti-stigma credibility of the game at risk if we were very relaxed about who can make creative decisions? 

It is important to note that, so far, our research design has been responsive. Partly as a reflection of our philosophical stance, partly as practical measure, we have been adapting our plans to unanticipated needs and team dynamics which started to emerge as soon as we stared. As such, the research team has not imposed a predetermined method for collaboration. As we collectively experiment in response to individual tasks, I have found myself taking an active role, rather than attempting neutral observation. I am an active member of the team, contributing my ideas and opinions. Although I am neurodivergent, because I don’t identify as autistic, I often feel a tension where I’m not sure if I should make space for other’s ideas by holding back my own or share them freely. What is clear to me, is that I am one of the least well position team members to author autism themed storylines or develop an autistic character. That said, having completed a PhD where I used the neurodiversity paradigm as a conceptual framework for producing ethical representations of autistic participants in animated documentaries, I have a lot of relevant knowledge, experience and skills. As such, I have found I feel qualified to contribute to our collaborative discussions and I sometimes weigh in on creative decision making. 

The role of reflexivity:

The CONNECT project group will need to figure out what level of reflexivity to include in the game, or how to address this through meta textual artefacts, like press releases. We don’t yet know how important it will be for the player to be accurately informed about the nuances of group authorship.  Presumably, part of the games anti stigma strategy will be to inform the player the game is a product of an autistic co-creation project, so it is likely we’ll need to be thoughtful about how the player will be reflexively addressed, either before or during or after game play. I look forwards to this topic being explored later in the process.

A Note on Terminology:

Throughout the lifespan of CONNECT research projects, Dr. Caroline Jose has focused on Patient Oriented Research or Patient Engagement, the equivalent of participatory research design in the social sciences. Partly due to my background in practice-based arts research, combined with my long running interests in anti-psychiatry, democratic psychiatry, and the neurodiversity paradigm, referring to the autistic colleagues as patients feels alien to me because of the inference of hierarchy. However, in order to maintain a degree of continuity with the CONNECT project’s previous research output and Jose’s widely celebrated Patient Engagement Tool Kit, which is aimed at drawing the medical establishment’s attention towards participatory research principles, I will use both terms in my writing, depending on the context.

Public Talk – ‘Animated documentaries: challenges and opportunities’, panel discussion at DocuDays UA, the Ukrainian human rights film festival

Alex Widdowson and Piotr Kardas talk about how to find a balance between the seemingly limitless potential of animation and the duty of a documentary filmmaker to create authentic and ethical representations of people and the world.

Watch the full talk here: https://docuspace.org/eng/project/dokumentalna-animaciya–vikliki-ta-mozhlivosti

Even though the first successful animated documentary (The Sinking of the Lusitania) was released in 1918, the genre was considered as a paradox for a long time, and needed a couple of quite powerful breakthroughs – Waltz with Bashir and Flee – to win recognition from the wider audience and industry decision-makers. Today animation’s use in documentary filmmaking has truly flourished. More and more filmmakers are finding their creative freedom and new exciting challenges in this genre. 

DocuDays UA, a Ukranian Human Rights Film Festival, invited Piotr Kardas, a film curator specialising in animated documentaries, and Alex Widdowson, a London-based multi-award-winning animated documentary director and researcher specialising in the representation of neurodivergence and psychology, to talk about how documentary and animation can be used and mixed creatively in filmmaking, as well as how to find a balance between the seemingly limitless potential of animation and the duty of a documentary filmmaker to create authentic and ethical representations of people and the world.

PARTICIPANTS:

Piotr Kardas (moderator): the founder and director of the O!PLA Animation Film Festival and many other festivals, including the animated documentary festival Raising of the Lusitania

Alex Widdowson (guest speaker): multi-award-winning British animated documentary filmmaker, the director of the Factual Animation Film Festival, a co-host of the Autism through Cinema Podcast, and a Ph.D. candidate at Queen Mary University of London, researching animated documentary ethics.

‘To thine own self be true’ and Pluralist Ethics

Jay Ruby identified three essential ethical responsibilities a filmmaker must grapple with in documentary production:

(1) the image maker’s personal moral contract to produce an image that is somehow a true reflection of their intention in making the image in the first place-to, use a cliché, it is being true to one’s self; (2) the moral obligation of the producer to his or her subjects; and (3) the moral obligation of the producer to the potential audience.

(2005: 211)

The filmmaker’s responsibly to their own creative autonomy is the least intuitive aspect of the documentary triad of ethical commitments because creativity is not commonly associated with the field of ethics. This is because because a person’s commitment to themselves contravenes the dominant perception of ethics as concerned with the treatment of others or the principles of how to behave in a society.

I would argue, a useful way to reflect upon Ruby’s use of Shakespeare’s aphorism, ‘to thine own self be true’ (2003, 1.3: 32), is to see it within the framework of pluralist ethics.

Pluralist, relativist, and sceptical theorisations of ethics were developed to account for the wide variety of normative definitions of “moral” behaviour. They each argue the variety in values and behavioural codes are informed by a specific context, history, and culture. The strong argument of meta ethical relativism positions each moral framework as alternatives to one another. They are equally legitimate in context, but ultimately incomparable, because of differences in material, social and historical conditions (Baghramian and Coliva, 2020: 228). A sceptical position asserts there is no such thing as ethical truth because ethics is entirely subjective and thus lacks any foundation (Baghramian in Boland Smith, 2021). Whereas a value pluralist would argue:
‘…. there are many objective ends and ultimate values, some incompatible with others, pursued by different societies at various times, or by different groups in the same society, or by particular individuals within them. People can lead valuable moral lives by pursuing conflicting but equally ultimate and objective ends.’ (Baghramian and Coliva, 2020: 250-251).

Ethical progress has occurred in human history, for example the abolishment of slavery and the improvement of women’s rights, and some moral principles can be defined uncontroversially, particularly negative ones such as “torturing children is bad”. So, while pluralism postulates the existence of ethical truths, it posits that it is both hard to define and there may be many correct answers (Baghramian in Boland Smith, 2021). Some value systems or individual acts may be more ethical than others, and competition between these perspectives may account for ethical progress.

“Being true to oneself” is an investment of trust in one’s own judgment, over normative codes of ethics. From a pluralist perspective, this can be seen as a commitment to behave in a way that, while distinct from others, is still anchored by meaningful insights, that aspire towards elusive ethical truths.
I have deconstructed Ruby’s formulation to show that autonomy, rather than being antithetical to ethics, can guide individualised interpretations of what counts as ethical behaviour. Furthermore, many philosophers — including Ayn Rand (1964), Jean-Paul Sartre (2015), Simone de Beauvoir (1948) and Jacques Lacan (2013) — have argued that autonomy is a virtue that should orient one’s ethics. It is beyond the scope of this text to engage fully with each of these theorists on the topic of autonomy. My point is a filmmaker’s commitment to their own creative autonomy, is a relevant ethical consideration to balance against the treatment of participants and a responsibility to their spectators.

Bibliography:

COLIVA, A. & BAGHRAMIAN, M. 2020. Relativism. London: Routledge.

DE BEAUVOIR, S. & FRECHTMAN, B. 1948. The Ethics of Ambiguity… Translated… by Bernard Frechtman, New York.

KANT, I. 1949. Immanuel Kant: The Critique of Practical Reason and other Writings in Moral Philosophy, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

LACAN, J. & MILLER, J.-A. 2013. The ethics of psychoanalysis 1959-1960: The seminar of Jacques Lacan, London: Routledge.

RAND, A. 1964. The Virtue of Selfishness. In: RAND, A. (ed.) The Virtue of Selfishness: A New Concept of Egoism. New York: Signet.

ROWLAND SMITH, R. 2022. The paradox of moral codes | David Friedman, Timothy Williamson and Maria Baghramian. In: ROWLAND SMITH, R., FRIEDMAN, D., WILLIAMSON, T. & BAGHRAMIAN, M. (eds.) Philosophy for our Times. London: Institute of Art and Ideas.

RUBY, J. 2005 [1979]. The Ethics of Image Making. In: ROSENTHAL, A. & CORNER, J. (eds.) New Challenges for Documentary. 2nd ed. ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

SARTRE, J.-P. 2015. Being and nothingness. Central Works of Philosophy v4: Twentieth Century: Moore to Popper, 4, 155.

SHAKESPEAR, W. 2003. Hamlet, Prince of Denmark. The Complete Works of Shakespeare. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Storytellers: Alex Widdowson

by Addison Dlott

The Storytellers is an interview series that seeks to understand what it takes to tell better stories from the perspectives of professional storytellers from all walks of life. In this series, we’ll talk about story crafting, narrative devices, and dissect the unique challenges of visual, written and oral storytelling. Originally posted on Adapt.

About Alex Widdowson

Documentary Director and Researcher

Alex Widdowson is a London based multi-award-winning animated documentary director and researcher specializing in the representation of neurodivergence and psychology. In addition to freelancing and his work as festival producer for Factual Animation Film Festival, he lectures on animation at the University of Hertfordshire and is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary University of London, researching animated documentary ethics.   

What are the unique challenges and opportunities that come with telling a nonfiction story through an animated lens?

The unique challenges and opportunities for me revolve around representation and ethics. With animated documentary, well, with all documentary, you have a responsibility to your participant…a duty of care. You have a responsibility to your audiences, which are around issues of truthfulness in film, and then you’ve got your own responsibility as a creative practitioner to be true to yourself.

You can totally control how your participant looks and what they do and where they are. And it’s enormous power.

Animated documentary really expands all of those responsibilities. You can totally control how your participant looks and what they do and where they are. And it’s enormous power. And with that, it undermines the truth, the reliability of the image. You might support that with interviews, but maybe you don’t.

What’s good about animation is that it’s a modular process. Maybe you start with an interview, you then reflect on how you want to interpret that interview through animation as a meta commentary on what was said in that moment. But then you can also go back to your participant and say, “these are some ideas of how it might look,” and you can work together on that. I’ve had this interesting innovation, in this new film Drawing on Autism, I then record those collaborative discussions, and fold them back into the narrative of the film. When it comes to talking about structure, a lot of it is changed and doesn’t so much rely on conventional short story structure. 

How are you taking a good story and making it great?

It feels a bit like distillation, you know, the way you’re just constantly refining. You take a few seconds off here, a few seconds off there…you have to be really decisive. When I’m editing, I work in layered channels. And if I know something is brilliant, I’ll put it on the top layer. If I’m not sure about something, I might knock it down a layer. Sometimes I delete the bottom two rows and then start again. It is very rare I delete something, and I miss it. Which is a surprise, you think, “oh, but maybe that could be used in another way,” it’s not true. You don’t need everything; you don’t need to hold onto those things and be precious in that way. You just can’t when you’re working in the short format.

It is very rare I delete something, and I miss it.

It’s quite different now that I’m grappling with longer form material, but I’m still using the same technique where you just chip away. I think it might have been Michelangelo that talked about “there’s a sculpture in the granite block somewhere.” And he just has to find it. It feels like that sometimes. You listen to it a thousand times when you’re making the film, it just feels like it was always there, and it wasn’t, it is something you’ve basically crafted. Yes, it’s based on a conversation, but it’s very much constructed in a way that felt right to you. There is a high degree of artificiality and constructiveness in all documentary practice, and you can tell a story in different ways, but there’s something sort of fateful about it at the end, where you feel like it was always there, and you just had to find it.

Why does storytelling matter and why is it powerful?

We are a storytelling species. We think that science is the thing that guides us in this modern age. I don’t think it’s true. There are very few people who actually have the expertise to really grapple with the science and understand just how messy everything is. What we get as a public is massively simplified and tied into some sort of narrative of how we should all behave. 

When we go to therapy or have a deep discussion with a friend to try and understand the mess of our personal lives or our inner thoughts, we have to tell each other stories for it to be digestible. It’s just how our brains work.

We are a storytelling species.

Doing a PhD, you start to realize how slippery everything is and, especially a humanities PhD, starts to show you just how fluid language is and all knowledge…there’s a certain lifespan to everything we think we know is a fact. At some point it will be changed or the ideological system that views it will think of it very differently.

What questions do you ask yourself before starting to tell a story?

I used to rely on my personal angle, like, “I can relate to this topic. That’s something I’m passionate about. This is a person who knows a lot about it. Maybe we’ll have a chat about it.” And I’d be careful not to promise too much. There’s a low cost of sitting down with someone and having a chat for an hour or two. There’s a huge cost of spending six months making an animated film about it. But I think ethics is a much more important issue. Are you the right person to tell this story?

I started off with [telling] my own story, but in terms of ethics, I built up my confidence telling the stories of people I knew. And then I thought, “it’s time to really use all these skills to tackle a topic I don’t have significant prior knowledge of.”

And what does that mean, ethically, to enter a community and say, “well, I can help you tell your story,” Or “we can tell a story that you think that needs to be told, but I don’t have that primary experience myself.” And it does cause problems and you do make mistakes and you are just not up to speed with how people like to describe themselves. 

Speaking for or entering a community…that’s a big problem.

I didn’t start my PhD in autism representation and animated documentary ethics knowing the difference between a person with autism and autistic person. It wasn’t intuitive to me. But speaking for or entering a community…that’s a big problem. And so, I’ve been spending years trying to work out how to reduce all those risks and develop methods that are intensely collaborative, and reflexive and positional. I started to learn from the autistic advocates about the neurodiversity paradigm and how relevant it was to me, and I developed a new comfort with my own diagnosis and realized I was in a very comparable position, and I should be talking about the fact I’m schizoaffective more often.

I started my career by making films about those experiences of psychosis. I still experience some form of neurodivergence that marks me as different from other people, but I wouldn’t give it up. It’s who I am. There’s probably an enormous number of people with quite scary labels to others, that just don’t talk about it. I’m glad to advocate for the schizoaffective community.

How are you measuring the impact of the films you make?

I’m not industrialized enough to be able to collect that data and know for sure. I get people writing me messages to say how much [my films] mean to them. Certainly, that happened a lot when [Music & Clowns] was released by the New York Times. 

I think as an artist, it’s very hard to know if you’ve done well. I mean, sometimes it isn’t hard at all. I finished Music & Clowns and I was like, “yeah, I can die now.” I finally made an artwork I’m totally proud of. I know it’s great, and that’s an incredibly rare experience as an artist. I didn’t have the same feeling with other projects. I’ve never had that simple, “yeah, this is brilliant. I’m very happy with this.” In many ways, Music & Clowns was the easiest film I’ve ever made, because there was 30 years of research that went into it.

Open Workshop Residency

Write up by Martina Scarpelli from November 3, 2022

How do you ethically represent a group you are not a member of?

With the help of British autistic participants, filmmaker and PhD candidate Alex Widdowson reimagines the way we represent neurodiversity in animated documentary films.

Divergent Minds (working title) is a feature length animated documentary about the neurodiversity paradigm, autism representation, and collaborative film practice, featuring four autistic participants and the director. Throughout a series of interviews, the film investigates how non-member status can make you blind to the emergence of problematic representations, such as stereotypes, and how these issues emerge unconsciously.

In his research and through his films Alex developed methods to mitigate the risks associated with representing minority groups. Methods including a focus on collaboration, the sharing of power and the use of animation for visualization of interviews. Crucially, animated documentary, unlike its live action counterpart, is a modular production process, where the images are created after interviews. This allows for the director and participants to negotiate how to best approach their representation. If these conversations are also recorded, they can be fed back into the narrative of the film. This collaborative reflexive cycle empowers the participants, reveals to the audience their evolving relationships with the director, and forces the filmmaker to acknowledge and address their ignorance and unconscious bias.

Alex Widdowson is currently attending the Open Workshop residency, working on a 60-minute animatic edit, build from the first round of interviews with his participants. His latest short film “Drawing on Autism” was recently released online and serves as a proof of concept for his current work. With a little irony, the film is a thoughtful exploration of how easily unconscious bias can emerge in animated documentary practice, while highlighting the pros and cons of using the medium to explore factual narratives.

You can watch it here: https://vimeo.com/alexwiddowson/drawing-on-autism

Drawing on Autism is available online

Director’s statement:
Drawing on Autism is an investigation into the ethics of representation in animated documentaries. Although I am neurodivergent, I’m not autistic, so when working with my anonymous participant, an autistic friend, I needed to be mindful of well-rehearsed and problematic autism tropes. These tropes seem to say more about the desires and needs of neurotypical audiences or filmmakers than they do about the autistic subjects. Moreover, animation presents a distinct set of ethical dilemmas. Without the mechanical indifference of a camera, the act of observation is substituted for expressive or symbolic representation. A mode of representation where the artist is responsible for how the documentary participant looks, where they appear, and what they do. Through collaborative feedback I attempt to share these responsibilities with my participant, while making use of positional and textual reflexivity to equip my audiences with the information they need to scrutinise my documentary interventions.
– Alex Widdowson

Aeon.co was kind enough to repost the film with the following article:

An animator wonders: can you ever depict someone without making them a caricature?

The UK filmmaker Alex Widdowson crafts short animations that explore psychology, personality and neurodiversity. In Drawing on Autism, Widdowson considers the complex ethics of his work. Speaking with the Autistic man at the centre of his latest animated project, Widdowson wonders if he can ever animate him in a way that doesn’t reduce him to a caricature or otherwise misrepresent him. Is he being careful to the point of paranoia? Or does, perhaps, his exacting internal vigilance ultimately improve his work? As their conversation unfolds, Widdowson pivots between animation styles as if to comment on his own uncertainty. From this self-referential structure, an intricate, revealing and often funny portrait of the two men at its centre arises. Through his construction, Widdowson also crafts a thoughtful meditation on broader, and often controversial, questions of representation in entertainment and the arts.

Awards and Accolades:
Winner – UK Research & Innovation: Research in Film Awards 2021 – Best Doctoral and Early Career Film
Winner – Rising of Lucitania AnimaDoc Film Festival 2022 – Best AnimaDoc Blue Ribend Award (Student Jury)
Nominated – Edinburgh International Film Festival 2022 – Norman McLaren Award for Best British Animation
Nominated – UK Research & Innovation: Research in Film Awards 2021 – Best Animated Film

Official Selection:
Rhode Island International Film Festival 2021 (Premier)
Raindance 2021
Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival 2021
New Orleans Film Festival 2021
Berlin Festival of Animation 2021
Spark Animation 2021
Factual Animation Film Festival 2021
Montreal International Animation Festival 2021
Big Cartoon Festival 2021
London Short Film Festival 2022
Fargo Film Festival 2022
Cinemagic ON THE PULSE Short Film Festival 2022
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2022

Credits:
Directed, produced, and animated by Alex Widdowson
Sound design and music by Vicky Freund
Additional animation by Ciara Kerr
Additional art direction by Dan Castro
Made with support from Autism through Cinema, Queen Mary University of London, and the Wellcome Trust
Alex Widdowson © 2021

Science Gallery interview about Music & Clowns

On the 15th May 2022 I was interviewed by Dr Gareth M. Thomas, Sociologist at Cardiff University, about my film Music & Clowns (2018). This was organised by Science Gallery Bengaluru, part of their #PSYCHE online exhibition.

you can watch the full film here:

The Gaze: Psychoanalysis, Ideology, and Representation

My primary interest in writing about cinematic theories of the Gaze is to establish how various forms of looking are manifesting in my own animated documentary practice. While traditionally this discourse is organised around spectatorship and not practice, I aim to relate the various theories of the cinematic gaze to the actions, decisions and assumptions required for filmmaking in order to influence spectators.

My research explores the representation of autistic participants in animated documentaries that I create. Despite not being autistic I am neurodivergent in various ways and have developed a strong allegiance to the neurodiversity paradigm of understanding psychological and neurological forms of difference. I intend to investigate how the theoretical Gaze may be useful for understanding how my position and ideology manifest in film, how audiences may be interpolated into these perspectives and to what extent I have control over this process.

I am equally interested in what Gaze theory means for animation; a medium in which the filmmaker utterly controls how the characters appear, behave and interact; a medium with no physical constraints on the way the filmmaker orchestrates and filters reality through mimesis, stylisation and invention. There is a limitless potential for how I could construct the mode of looking through mise-en-scène and through the interactions between characters that I perform as an animator. Through this frame by frame control of each aspect of the image, animation has the potential to be a powerful vehicle for propaganda as well as unconscious projection.  However, it is beyond the remit of this article to fully expound the intersection of animation, documentary, and psychoanalysis. First, I must explore how the Gaze has been used in film theory and evaluate its relevance to my animated documentary practice.

Origins

Within film theory, conceptions of the gaze were established in the 1970’s by psychoanalytic film theorists, Jean-Louis Baudry, Raymond Bellour, and Christian Metz, who related the experienced of cinema viewing to Lacan’s theorisation of the Mirror stage, an illusory encounter that starts when the child first sees themselves in the mirror and is deceived into feeling a sense of complete self-identity (McGowen 2007: 2). According to early Lacanian film theorists the cinematic spectator identifies with the events on the screen in the way the child develops the illusion of coherent self-identity through the encounter with one’s reflection (ibid.). Metz wrote ‘The spectator is absent from the screen as perceived, but also (the two things inevitably go together) present there and even ‘all-present’ as perceiver. At every moment I am in the film by my look’s caress’ (Metz 1982: 54). These Lacanian film theorists were able to connect the illusory qualities of film, specifically the spectator’s false identification with the film, to the process through which ideological interpellation takes place. i.e. the adoption of social behaviours and identities presented through films that correlate to hegemonic social structures and ideologies (McGowen 2007:1-2). Baudry ties these various threads together neatly: ‘The arrangement of the different elements—projector, darkened hall, screen—in addition to reproducing in a striking way the mise-en-scène of Plato’s cave . . . reconstructs the situation necessary to the release of the ‘mirror stage’ discovered by Lacan.’ (Baudry 1985: 539). This invocation of Plato’s cave firmly positions the film theorist at a vantage point from which they can reveal the illusions of cinema and their ideological power over a population.

From a Lacanian perspective these authors are arguing that the cinematic image resides in and perpetuates the Imaginary order, one of three organising realms with which humans grapple. The Imaginary order deals with the function of imagery and illusion, often working to mask the presence of the other two orders, the Symbolic and the Real. Whereas the Imaginary order is what we see, the Symbolic order is the collection of organising elements and forces within our world, in other words, language, social structures and ideology. At this early stage in Lacan’s research, he had yet to fully develop his theorisation of the Real, but at its essence it is that which exists beyond the possibilities of perception and symbolic organisation. It is the traumatic threat of what exists beyond what we can see, understand, or articulate. Its existence can be inferred through the inconsistencies and failures of ideology (McGowen 2007: 3).

These early Lacanian film theorists identified cinema with the Imaginary order, demonstrating that it was an illusory force which allowed spectators to enjoy narratives by inviting them to take part in temporary fantasies. However, with their critical distance the theorist task was to pull back the curtains of the Imaginary order to reveal the Symbolic order, the ideologies that orient these shared fantasies into predetermined modes for living one’s life or organising a society.

Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema

Laura Mulvey in her seminal essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema (1975) developed a feminist stance based on this psychoanalytic perspective on spectatorship and the various forms of looking that take place within the cinematic experience. She argued that in classic Hollywood films there is an interplay between three sets of looks that align with the coordinates of phallocentric ideology, a synonym for patriarchy: [1] the look of the camera which is typically under the control of a male director, [2] the look of the male characters, who are typically active agents in the progression of the plot and [3] the look of the audience from the dark comfort of the cinema, enjoying the activity of the male actors and the sexualised presentation of the female actors (1975: 17). It is particularly telling how the camera often simulates the perspective of the male protagonists looking at female characters, who are themselves presented as passive and sexualised. These encounters with female characters often function as rest stops for the male protagonist as they journey through the plot. 

Mulvey observed that within the mechanisms of classic Hollywood cinema audiences were assumed to be, or prioritised as, male. Non-male viewers were left to either identify with the passivity of the female supporting roles or they could temporarily identify with the activity of the male character. In other words, women were given no other option but to be interpellated within the ideological system of patriarchy. Mulvey described the Male Gaze to be the phenomenon of expression and interpolation of patriarchal ideology, through this three-way matrix of cinematic looking. She relied on Lacan’s theory of the Mirror Stage to account for the diverse audience members misrecognising themselves within the cinematic experience (1975: 9-10).

What I find useful to take from Mulvey is the formulation of Gaze showing the filmmaker already interpolated within ideologies. These ideological beliefs will manifest in the Symbolic organisation of the film, masked by Imaginary field of the visual. Both cinematic aesthetics and character performances reflect these ideologies, along with the “ideal” audience the director is attempting to appeal to. As such the process of looking, from the position of spectator, interpolates each spectator into the Symbolic order of patriarchy, whether they are male or not. The Gaze is, according to Mulvey, the invisible Symbolic order, present within the Imaginary dominated field of vision which organises the way the filmmaker chooses to create or capture images and directs the actors, while also emerging in the finished film as a captivating force that organises the audience’s method of looking by predetermining visual pleasure.

If a feminist directs a film one would expect they would construct an artefact that reflects feminist ideologies. I have been told anecdotally that one does not need to be a woman to be a feminist, one simply needs to educate themselves to a sufficient extend that they raise their consciousness. Therefore, a man could theoretically execute the feminist Gaze if he had sufficiently internalised this ideology. I am intrigued firstly by the question of whether this level of ideological investment could be reached without lived experience of being a woman. Surely some aspects of this man’s unconscious activity will preserve internalised patriarchy. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, if a man was able somehow to execute a feminist Gaze, would this be recognised as authentically feminist, i.e. how important is the alignment between identity (Ego) and ideology, to inspire authenticity?  I feel there is good justification for scepticism, as without lived experience of being a woman under patriarchy, a man would be left with a somewhat academic understanding of oppression, and their own status within this system of power may still leave them vulnerable to ideological blind spots. These questions will be explored at greater length in a future post on positionality. 

The essence of what Mulvey is doing in her essay is identifying the illusory power that cinema has over its spectators, no matter who they are. However, through the use of psychoanalytic tools she shows how the Imaginary order can be lifted to reveal a hidden ideological structure, the Symbolic order. In this formulation the film theorist is analyst, the spectator analysand, and the film dreamlike materials to be picked apart. Interestingly the analysis reveals insights, not into the spectator, nor does it say much about the director other than the expectation that both are fully interpolated within the symbolic order of patriarchy. 

Oppositional Gaze

Despite Mulvey’s success and good intentions, a wave of criticism developed around her conception of the Gaze, an example of which is Bell Hooks essay “The Oppositional Gaze” (2014). According to Hooks, Mulvey overlooked her own positioning within racist hierarchies when formulating a theory of spectatorship. Hooks contests that ‘many feminist film critics continue to structure their discourse as though it speaks about “women” when in actuality it speaks only about white women.’ (2014: 123). Hooks goes on to argue that Black men are interpolated within white notions of Male Gaze successfully as it gave them an opportunity to look at white women within the safety of the dark cinema space, an act that would have otherwise gone punished throughout American history (Ibid. 118). Where as ‘black female spectators have had to develop looking relations within a cinematic context that constructs our presence as absence, that denies the “body” of the black female so as to perpetuate white supremacy and with it a phallocentric spectatorship where the woman to be looked at and desired is “white.”’(Ibid.). Hooks calls this specific looking relation the Oppositional Gaze, a way of looking defined by involuntary critical distance. A certain enjoyment that comes from unpicking the racist and sexist ideology’s manifest in a film. ‘Watching movies from a feminist perspective, Mulvey arrived at that location of disaffection that is the starting point for many black women approaching cinema within the lived harsh reality of racism’ (2014: 125). In Lacanian terms, Hooks is arguing that Mulvey and her predecessors have over emphasised the all-encompassing and uniformed illusory force of the cinema over spectators. These White theorists did not see beyond their own positions within the Symbolic order when applying these psychoanalytic tools, rendering their own subject positions as universal, and female Blackness as unaccounted for or invisible. Hooks expands the theorization of spectatorship by highlighting the plurality of experiences among spectators.  She illuminates how people in privileged positions may be unintentionally tying into systems of oppression by omitting any acknowledgement of how the topic at hand, e.g. feminism, intersects with other powers structures, such as race.

Hook’s Oppositional Gaze makes me mindful about how class, race, gender, sexuality, etc. [1] may intersect with my future participants’ experience of autism, [2] may inform the way in which I represent my participants and [3] will inform a plurality of interpretive positions held by the various spectators of my work. 

Hook’s work has made me think about how likely I am, as a practitioner, to produce films that are complicit with hegemonic ideologies which I theoretically oppose, but do little to address, because they either benefit me or do not negatively impact me. For example, I identify as middle class, and I live in Britain, a country with sharp class divisions. If in the process of making a short film about autism, I was to choose to edit out dialogue that relates to access to education, housing and jobs, because I felt that it deviated too far from the theme of autism, I would be glossing over an important intersectional issue. This in-itself is an act of complicity with a Symbolic order that suppresses class struggle. Either consciously or unconsciously, I would be averting my spectator’s look from financial, educational, and employment inequalities which might shape the lived experience of autism. Looking back at my practice so far in this PhD, I have made one film that features a single autistic participant collaborator who is cis-gendered white male with a similar level of education to myself. It is my ambition to develop a film with multiple autistic participants. I believe it would be problematic if each participant occupied the same subject position within society.  

From a Lacanian perspective, Hooks is arguing that Mulvey’s totalising conception of the Imaginary order, having the power to interpolate each and every spectator in to the Symbolic order hidden behind the Gaze, falls short of accounting for intersectional issues that position individuals differently in relation to the Symbolic order. Mulvey’s reading of psychoanalysis is unable to account for the distinct experience of the individual spectator.

The Transgender Gaze

Returning to the conception of cinema aesthetics manifesting ideology, Judith Halberstam, analyses the film Boys Don’t Cry (1999)in her article on the Transgender Gaze (2001). In this film, the fictional adaptation of a true story in which, a teenage trans man, Brandon, engages in a romantic relationship with a cis woman, Lana, before being brutally outed, raped and murdered by two cis men, Tom and John.

Halberstam provided an example where multiple modes of looking – male, female and transgender –were each able to manifest in a single cinematic scene, demonstrating that cinematic Gaze can be a fluid construction and is not necessarily anchored by the identity of the director, in this instance Kimberly Peirce, who identifies as queergender (Dry 2019). Halberstam points out how the looking of each character is manifest in a scene where John and Tom force Brandon to expose his genitalia, while failing to make Lana look. ‘The brutality of their action here is clearly identified as a violent mode of looking, and the film identifies the male gaze with that form of knowledge which resides in the literal’ (2001: 295). In addition to the persecutory male look, the supportive female look of the lover is manifest as a point of view shot of her looking away. Finally, Brandon’s mode of looking is manifest as an exchange of looks between the protagonist’s naked sexed body, and the male gendered third person perspective of the same character. ‘In this shot/reverse-shot sequence between the castrated and the transgender Brandons, the transgender gaze is constituted as a look divided within itself, a point of view that comes from (at least) two places at the once one clothed and one naked.’ (Ibid.)

Halberstam, compared to Mulvey and Hooks, places little emphasis on spectatorship in this short article. Unlike the patriarchal films analysed in Mulvey’s essay, Boys Don’t Cry undermines the pervasive and potent role of heteronormative ideology. Halberstam sees this film as a radical departure from the hegemonic Symbolic organisation of gender and sexuality. Instead, the filmmaker aestheticizes queer ideology, manifest through the performative modes of looking in the film, each presenting contrasting perspectives on gender and sexuality.

In my most recent animated documentary, Drawing on Autism (2021), I worked collaboratively with an autistic participant. In the film we meet on screen and, while I execute labour involved in animation, the representations of the participant are informed by their appearance and words. These representations are either authorised by them or subject to their scrutiny later in the film. What I am unclear about is whether this mode of collaboration is precise enough to allow me to ethically manifest my own and my participant’s modes of looking. Despite a collaborative ethos, am I totally in control of the modes of looking present in this film, and my participant happens to be fine with how I represent him.

My current insights tell me that Drawing on Autism does show my participant looking, and being looked at by me, but as I am utterly in control of his animated character’s actions and context, the film is unmistakably a product of my own process of looking. However, I have been researching autism in the context of the social model of disability. This ideological stance is best summarised by the goals of the neurodiversity movement, and I can feel over the past 18 months how this ideology has shaped how I see autism, in addition to my own neurodivergent status. So, while it may be unreasonable to suggest that this film presents the Autistic Gaze, no matter how collaborative the film is, it is possible to suggest the film is a manifestation of the neurodiversity ideology and thus the Neurodivergent Gaze. It is still unclear to me if I would have been able to reach this ideological position without myself being neurodivergent.

The Neurotypical Gaze

Drawing on Autism was developed in opposition to what John-James Laidlow calls the “Neurotypical Gaze” (2020). Laidlow presents the perspectives of Mulvey, Hooks and Halberstam before exploring issues relating to the representation of autism. Specifically Laidlow addresses the association autism in the media has with young, white, maleness; the idea that trapped inside the autistic body is a neurotypical true self;  the romantic conflation of autistic difference and childlike innocence; the over representation of autistic savants, a autistic person who in the eyes of neurotypicals makes up for their difference through compensatory talents; and the tactic of not ever naming a character who is coded as autistic as actually autistic. These tropes, while not explicitly connected to the mechanism of looking by the camera or the other characters, do appeal to an assumed neurotypical audience and reflect the medical ideology that positions autism as a developmental disorder, a deviation from an idealised norm (2020).

Laidlow discusses what would be called evocation within animated documentary discourse (Hones Roe 2011: 227), simulations of subjective experiences of autism, specifically moments of sensory overload, rendered through point of view footage combined with distorting visual effects. Laidlow states: ‘Even with the relatively few autistic characters we are shown, neurotypical people try to control the way we see and look at the world.’ Laidlow describes the misguided futility of these evocations as ‘attempt[s] at disability simulation to raise awareness, rather than just listening to the experiences of autistic people and trying to empathise with them’ (2020).

My own research into animated documentary practice has shown me that the majority of evocative animated documentary’s that attempt to represent cognitive difference are unethical as they mislead the audience into trusting what they are seeing is based on authentic insights into the participants subjectivity, when more often than not it is the filmmakers’ othering look, masquerading as the look of the participant. The exception to this is Samantha Moore’s collaborative feedback cycle which allows the neurodivergent participants to verify the veracity of animated representations of their subjective brain-state phenomena (Moore 2015).

Laidlow’s video essay is the logical extension of the work started by the early psychoanalytic film theorists. Mulvey in particular set out an approach that connects the various acts of looking that take place in the production and reception of a film to the ideological structures that inform it. Laidlow also builds upon a more fluid conception of Gaze presented by Halberstam, as a mode of simulated looking, evocation or affective performance, each of which relates to ideology masked behind an Imaginary illusion. However, with each stage in this progression, the topics presented have more to do with matters of identity politics and representation than psychoanalysis.

Contemporary theorisation of Lacan and the Gaze

Mulvey and her predecessors’ conception of the Gaze argues for the spectator’s visual experience of cinema being dominated by a deceptive encounter with the Imaginary order, one of illusory identification, functioning to hide the Symbolic order, the architecture of ideology. The logical conclusion that Mulvey reached was to either maintain conscious distance when watching a film or make films that promote consciousness through Brechtian distancing devises or reflexivity, as demonstrated by Mulvey and Peter Wollen’s film, Riddles of the Sphinx (1977), (McGowen 2007:15). According to Todd McGowen, these approaches represent an abandonment of the psychoanalytic project: one must remain conscious and fortify the ego, while attempting to supress unconscious enjoyment. It strips psychoanalysis of its power to develop insight through examining unconscious activity (ibid.) and is another way for the ego to ‘avoid the Real of the Gaze’ (2007:14).

McGowen explains this phenomenon by pointing out that early Lacanian film theorists had limited access to Lacan’s work beyond his Mirror Stage essay (2007: 4). Through research into Lacan’s full body of work McGowen illuminates that this conception of the Gaze is incomplete. It was developed by Lacan in a way that associates the Gaze closely with encroachments of the order of the Real, that which exists beyond symbolisation. ‘As a manifestation of the real rather than of the imaginary, the gaze marks a disturbance in the functioning of ideology rather than its expression’ (2007: 7).

McGowen reorients the cinematic Gaze as the invisible but proactive distortion of the visible realm during the process of spectatorship.

‘The gaze exists in the way that the spectator’s perspective distorts the field of the visible, thereby indicating the spectator’s involvement in a scene from which the spectator seems excluded. It makes clear the effect of subjective activity on what the subject sees in the picture, revealing that the picture is not simply there to be seen and that seeing is not a neutral activity.’ (2007:7).

From this contemporary reading of Lacan, the Gaze is a manifestation of the spectator’s loss of mastery over the image, however, rather than this relating to an Imaginary masking of the Symbolic, this lack of mastery is unconsciously connected to our own death and our inability to comprehend or control it, i.e. the Real (ibid.). Referring to Lacan’s expounding of the Gaze through Hans Holbein’s portrait The Ambassadors (1533), McGowen explains the Gaze as the distorted image of a skull within the painting. ‘Even when a manifestation of the gaze does not make death evident directly like this, it nonetheless carries the association insofar as the gaze itself marks the point in the image at which the subject is completely subjected to it. The gaze is the point at which the subject loses its subjective privilege and becomes wholly embodied in the object’ (2007:7).

McGowen uses the subjective encounter with the image to show how this conception of the Gaze can account for the problems of different experiences of spectatorship and group identity raised by Hooks (ibid). The Gaze is the mechanism with which each image is perceived uniquely by each viewer, as this shows how the spectators’ unconscious desire is incorporated into how they look at and absorbed the film. 

The Gaze functions as the object cause of desire, (object petit a), i.e. the Gaze is the hidden object within our vision that ignites our desire, propelling us along the trajectory of the scopic drive, in search of this unattainable partial object.  Attempting to capture and contain this invisible blot in the screen’s content is a futile task but through its pursuit we may come close to experiencing the nature of our unconscious desires. Experiencing the tension between what we unconsciously desire and what we thought we wanted can erupt in a kind of traumatic enjoyment (Jouissance) (2007:15).

The Gaze and our unconscious desire, by definition, elude our conscious comprehension, however, the experience of Jouissance is a visceral conscious phenomenon. As cinematic spectators, we can use moments of Jouissance to work back to detect the presence of the Gaze and it’s adjacent position to the Real. Through these traumatic glimpses, we can hypothesise structural inconsistencies within the Symbolic order where the Real is erupting, i.e. ideological weaknesses (ibid.).

McGowen argues that in order to analyse these moments of jouissance present in the experience of cinematic identification, we must first fully invest in the phantasmatic experience of cinema. Only through uncritical identification with the film universe will we be offered glimpses of the Real and the insights they provide into the fragile nature of the Symbolic order. McGowen exceeds the ambitions of early Lacanian film theorist by suggesting that psychoanalytic tools can not only illuminate hegemonic ideological domination but provide insights into how films can be used to erode it (2007: 15).

The Gaze and Animated Documentary Practice

What does a developed understanding of Lacan’s theory of the Gaze mean for me as a practitioner using animated documentary to represent autism? I see three possibilities:

[1] I could continue to follow Mulvey’s example by employing Brechtian distancing devices to activate spectators of my film into thinking critically about the ideological dialectic between the Neurodiversity paradigm and the medical model of autism, both of which will contribute to the Symbolic organisation of the film. This could be a productive means of steering the audience away from the traumatic Real which would threaten the stability of the Neurodiversity ideology. This consciousness raising approach to structuring a film reflects the identity focused organisation of the Neurodiversity movement, one that leaves little room for universal theories of the unconscious and resists psychoanalysis following a century of problematic therapeutic interventions with autistics and their families (Robert 2011).

[2] I could place more emphasis on the likelihood that I will through the film express internalised neuro-ableist biases. Even as someone who does occupy a neurodivergent position, my ignorance of the affective reality of autistic experience may align me closer to “neurotypical” hegemony than the neurodiversity paradigm. If this is true, then I could diminish my own power within the film production by seeking to involve my autistic participants as much as possible in every aspect of creation when it comes to the development and production of these animated documentaries. Through cocreation, there is a greater chance that any problematic representations that I create as expressions of my own unconscious bias, will be flagged by my participants who are likely to be more highly tuned to these issues. Furthermore, the final animated documentary will be a sublimation of multiple subjects’ conscious and unconscious activity. As a collaboration this film would present an aggregation of the ideological forces at play within myself and my autistic participant collaborators.

[3] I could acknowledge that a pro-neurodiversity film will to an extend result in Imaginary identification on the part of the spectator. At face value, this is a powerful way to interpolate the audience into seeing disability through the social model i.e. documentary as propaganda. However, I must anticipate the risk that some spectators may experience Jouissance when watching this film, and thus have revealed to them possible weaknesses in this ideology. A film about neurodiversity must on some level offer a critique of the medical model of autism. It may be worthwhile experimenting with methods for curating within a single film both circumstances in which traumatic Jouissance may flourish and where it may be diffused. If this is successfully identified, Jouissance can be encouraged when portraying the medical model, followed by a swich in mode discouraging its emergence when addressing the neurodiversity paradigm, that way jouissance is directed like an ideological weapon. A starting point for experimentation would be to employ Brechtian distancing devices while arguing for neurodiversity, this would result in the fortification of the ego and the defence of said ideology within the Symbolic order, before switching to a more fanciful excessive and traumatic poeticism while critiquing the medical model of autism, that would hopefully promote Jouissance and allow for insights in to the ideological weakness of seeing Autism as a disorder. What would evidently be lost is the illusion of balance and ‘discourse of sobriety’ that characterises the documentary canon (Nichols 1991: 50).    

I believe animated documentary is dynamic enough as a medium to explore all three of these methods within the same film. The very fact that the participants are drawn helps stimulate illusory identification (McCloud 1993, 31), while total control of the image and the slow pace of production gives time to reflect on the nature of the medium, stimulating the inclusion of reflexive devices. Furthermore, the iterative process of constructing the audio edit, style frames and animatic before entering production provides ample room for consultation and collaboration with participants. 

I have come to see Mulvey’s use of psychoanalytic tools as limited and perhaps even misleading, but non-the-less useful. They were a means to an end. And end that was thoroughly productive and emancipatory in its far-reaching influence. However, the concept of the Gaze has evolved in popular discourse far enough away from Lacan’s intentions, that it could be better replaced by the rhetoric of representation. That said, I am interested in continuing my theoretical engagement with Lacan. His insights will; [1] help me to analyse my own unconscious activity as a filmmaker, [2] help me predict how spectators will respond to my work and [3] provide the basic model for understanding discourse with another. Drawing influence from Piotrowska (2013), I believe there are great similarities and problematic differences between the therapeutic and the documentary relationships. A fuller understanding of this is essential for what is ethically at stake in my practice.

Bibliography

BAUDRY, J.-L. 1985. Basic effects of the cinematographic apparatus. Movies and methods, 2.

DRY, J. 2019. As
‘Boys Don’t Cry’ Joins National Film Registry, Kimberly Peirce Addresses Its
Complicated History. IndiWire Film [Online]. Available from: https://www.indiewire.com/2019/12/kimberly-peirce-interview-boys-dont-cry-transgender-1202196536/ [Accessed 12 Dec 2019.

HALBERSTAM, J. 2001. The transgender gaze in Boys Don’t Cry. Screen, 42, 294-298.

HONESS ROE, A. 2011. Absence, excess and epistemological expansion: Towards a framework for the study of animated documentary. Animation, 6, 215-230.

HOOKS, B. 2014. Black looks: Race and representation, Routledge.

The Neurotypical Gaze, 2020. Directed by LAIDLOW, J.-J.

MCCLOUD, S. 1993. Understanding comics: The invisible art. Northampton, Mass.

MCGOWAN, T. 2007. Real Gaze, The: Film Theory after Lacan.

METZ, C. 1982. Psychoanalysis and cinema: the imaginary signifer, London, Macmillan.

MOORE, S. 2015. Out of sight: using animation to document perceptual brain states. Loughborough University.

MULVEY, L. & PLEASURE, V. 1975. Narrative Cinema’. Screen, 16, 6-18.

Riddles of the Sphinx, 1977. Directed by MULVEY, L. & WOLLEN, P.: British Film Institute.

NICHOLS, B. 1991. Representing reality : issues and concepts in documentary, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.

Boys Don’t Cry, 1999. Directed by PEIRCE, K. USA: Fox Searchlight Pictures.

PIOTROWSKA, A. 2013. Psychoanalysis and ethics in documentary film, Routledge.

The Wall or psychoanalysis put to the test on autism, 2011. Directed by ROBERT, S. France.

Agnieska Piotrowska’s PhD thesis Psychoanalysis and Ethics in documentary Film

Agnieska Piotrowska, in her PhD thesis, Psychoanalysis and Ethics in documentary Film (2012),  argues that the bond that develops between a filmmaker and participant is akin to transference love, a psychoanalytic term that describes an attachment that develops between analyst and analysand, determined by the power dynamics in the relationship. Piotrowska argues the intense experience of documentary production typically culminates in a betrayal where, unlike analysis, a film is produced that is largely under the control of the director and thus reflects their fantasies and desires as opposed to the participants. The film is then irrevocably released to the public often to the horror of the participant. While Piotrowska does not provide a solution to this dilemma, her extensive analysis of reflexivity in documentary practice is helpful in addressing broader ethical concerns.

Is documentary unethical?

Piotrowska refers to Krzysztof Kieślowski a Polish director who pivoted in his career from documentary to fiction, reportedly for ethical reasons (2012: 104). Kieślowski wrote ‘…I am frightened of real tears. In fact, I don’t know if I have the right to photograph them.’ (in Cousins & MacDonald 1988: 316).

Slavoj Žižek (2006) quotes Kieślowski’s words in his analysis of the documentary form arguing that it is fundamentally predatory, and subsequently unethical. He characterises the genera as ‘emotional pornography’ (Žižek 2006: 30). Žižek evokes a ‘No trespassers!’ sign and proclaims that to avoid ‘pornographic obscenity’ tender subjects should only be approached via fiction (Žižek 2006: 31).

Piotrowska suggests, Žižek may have drawn too bold a conclusion from his reading of Kieślowski’s documentary work. Žižek bases his conclusion partly on a scene in Kieślowski’s reflections on his 1974 documentary First Love, in which a farther cries after his first child is born (Piotrowska 2012: 106). However, Kieślowski’s later account of ethical concerns in his documentary work was more closely connected to the necessity and inescapabilty of manipulating reality through the documentary process. This is in contrast to Žižek’s explicit focus on the unwieldly intrusion into the intimate lives of documentary participants (Kieślowski & Stok 1993: 64).

Žižek and Kieślowski are referring to different formulations of unethical behaviour when analysing the filmmaker’s decision to abandon documentary practice. I have come to refer to the primary commitments for a documentary filmmaker as the documentary ethics trichotomy, based on Jay Ruby’s list of moral responsibilities that every documentary director must balance:

‘(1) the image maker’s personal moral contract to produce an image that is somehow a true reflection of their intention in making the image in the first place-to, use a cliché, it is being true to one’s self; (2) the moral obligation of the producer to his or her subjects; and (3) the moral obligation of the producer to the potential audience’ (2005: 211).

Žižek explicitly refers to the director neglecting their duty of care towards the participant, which includes the right to privacy (Pryluck 2005: 200). Thus, Žižek conceives Kieślowski over emphasising his commitment to his audience, or in other words strictly adhering to the public’s right to know the truth. It may also be argued that Žižek is suggesting that Kieślowski over played his commitment to his own film by channelling an obscene and intrusive desire to capture compelling footage.

This subtly contrasts Kieślowski’s own conception of his unethical activity. He clearly identifies regret and unease regarding the over emphasis on his own ethical commitment to his documentary practice, at the expense of both a breach in his commitment to factual reporting for his audience and possibly the exploitation of participants in order to do so.

Žižek’s misreading of Kieślowski’s motivations for leaving documentary undermines the argument that documentary is a predatory practice. While Kieślowski shared these concerns to an extent, he was focused on his misleading of the audience and the inability to create objective artefacts for displaying truth.

Calvin Pryluck identifies a key insight into how to balance two poles of the documentary ethics trichotomy. The participants right to privacy and their control over the outcome of the film should be proportional to their power and standing in society, the less powerful they are, the more their rights should be exercised. The greater the participants standing in society the greater the public’s right to intrude in their lives and the less influence they should have over the final film (Ruby 2005: 204-205).

While the participant’s influence over the outcome of the film does have a baring on the director’s moral commitment to their work, there is no variable within this formulation that indicates how a director should understand their commitment to themselves, i.e. what circumstances would affect a director to question their own desires.  This is where Piotrowska’s psychoanalytic insights into the nature of the director’s unconscious desire become useful.

Before moving on to Piotrowska’s psychoanalytic reading of the documentary participant relationship, I would argue that animated documentary can resist what Žižek characterises as ‘pornographic obscenity’ (Žižek 2006: 30-31). The intrusive capturing of images would be replaced by the careful reconstruction of mimetic, stylised or evocative images, each of which could be approved by the participant before entering production. Similarly, Kieslowski’s concerns regarding the manipulation of reality at the expense of the audience’s reception of truth would be mitigated by an animated image which is recognisably constructed and makes no false claim to be representative of anything other than an impression of reality by the artist.

 

The psychoanalysis metaphor for documentary practice

Elizabeth Cowie (2011) argues there is a tension in all documentary practice between the ‘scientific recording of what one sees and somehow the desire to give it meaning and perhaps make it more beautiful.’ She refers to these as ‘contradictory desires’ (2011: 2). Cowie also identifies unconscious desires present in the makeup of documentary production, shifting the nature of the debate from ‘a discourse of sobriety’ (Nichols 1991: 4, Nichols 2010: 36), something akin to scientific investigation, to a ‘discourse of desire’ (Cowie in Gaines 1999: 25) in which the director is pursuing and delivering pleasure as well as knowledge to their audience (Piotrowska 2012: 91).  Michael Renov extends this argument calling documentary a ‘discourse of jouissance’, suggesting the filmmaker’s unconscious desires are likely to be exercised through the practice amidst attempts to represent reality (Renov 2004: 23).

In stark contrast to Nichols’ discourse of sobriety and the scientific objectivity that it connotes, Piotrowska argues the nature of the relationship between filmmaker and participant is a space of psychoanalytic turbulence in which both parties express unconscious desires, typically in the form of transferential love (Piotrowska, 2012: 74). Transference is not a phenomenon exclusive to the practice of psychoanalysis. When Jacque Lacan drew his own conclusions about the nature of transference in a psychoanalytic context, he used examples from outside of the clinic, including the dynamics between teachers and students (Piotrowska 2012: 72).

‘It is the idea of the illusion of knowledge inducing desire, which makes transference relevant in interrogating relationships outside the clinic too – in education in particular but also in other situations which feature a potential imbalance of power’ (Ibid.).

Lacan, however, does not insist that transference must be avoided, it is an inevitable phenomenon that should be embraced and accepted as a kind of love. A love that can be utilised as a tool in the psychoanalytic process (Ibid.: 73).

Piotrowska makes the connection between psychoanalysis and documentary explicit:

‘Documentary filmmakers often appear the perfect canvases on which to draw one’s emotions. Just like psychoanalyst, they listen, they try to stay ‘professional’ regardless of their drives, they attempt to hold on to their boundaries in order not to reveal too much of themselves to those about whom they make films. These very attempts of course make them perfect candidates for experiencing transference from those who they make films about.’ (ibid.: 74)

Piotrowska emphasizes that while there is an erotic subtext to transference it is not necessarily sexual in nature (ibid.: 79). It is instead a bond formed by one’s counterpart occupying a subject position that triggers unconscious desires in oneself. Lacan also makes no distinction between transference and countertransference, suggesting both the analysand and analyst are experiencing the same phenomena (ibid.: 72).

Piotrowska suggest another way in which documentary and Lacanian psychoanalysis are similar is that documentary does not attempt to remedy the problems in the lives of the participants. Lacanian analysis aims to develop understanding of an analysand’s unconscious activity rather than cure it (Piotrowska 2012: 56).

Piotrowska makes some compelling arguments as to why the relationship between filmmaker and documentary participant is akin to analyst and analysand. To support her argument she explores a number of case studies from her own documentary practice and analyses the relationship between Claude Lanzmann and Abraham Bomba during the production of Shoah (1985) (Piotrowska 2012: 208-212).

As Piotrowska illuminates the presence of transferential love as an inevitable factor in documentary production, it is the differences between filmmaking and psychoanalysis that expose the possible ethical dilemmas.

‘The point is not that the documentary encounter is ‘like’ psychotherapy or psychoanalysis; it is rather the exact opposite: through the structure of the encounter and powerful unconscious mechanisms a situation might arise leading to a profound ‘misrecognition’ on the part of the subject of the film and the filmmaker alike. A documentary encounter might feel like a special safe place in which one is listened to and even loved, but that private space will soon enough be turned into a public spectacle – a process which carries with it inherent dangers.’ (2012: 56)

Documentary filmmakers, while attempting to hold together professional boundaries, lack the frameworks for understanding and making use of transferential love. ‘Because these phenomena are not named in documentary film, they remain hidden and create confusion and sometimes hurt’ (Piotrowska 2012: 74).

What makes these circumstances even more concerning is that the more vulnerable you are as a participant the more susceptible you may be to desire the filmmaker’s attention and inferred insights. ‘The filmmaker in the society of spectacle, can in some circumstances become a bearer of a clear possibility for symbolising the potential subject’s relationship with the Real [the Lacanian term for the unsymbolised] and thus be particularly seductive for those whose traumas appear un-symbolisable’ (2012: 140). For example, it is possible that the trauma of the Holocaust contributed to Bomba developing a transferential relationship with Lanzmann.

According to Piotrowska, the completion of a documentary film typically culminates in various forms of betrayal.

‘Having agreed to take part in a documentary project, sometimes longed for it to come to being, having had complex fantasies about the film and the filmmaker, when the film is finished, the people in it mostly hate it. This phenomenon is so ubiquitous that the executives in broadcast television usually forbid the filmmakers to show their films to their subjects before the documentaries are screened.’ (2012: 216)

The participant has no say over how the film takes its form. As a result, the film reflects more closely the unconscious desires and fantasies of the filmmaker, rather than the participant. After seeing the film there is now no way to stop its release.

Without stating it explicitly, the specific problems Piotrowska has pointed out illuminate possible antidotes to what she considers common ethical failures in documentary practice. Transferential love may develop between filmmaker and participant, I have certainly felt a sense of bonding take place in many of the film’s I’ve directed. This must be acknowledged by the filmmaker as more than a convenient benefit and recognised as an ethical conflict. In accordance they should adjust their duty of care to match the possibility that they have seduced their participant into a nonsexual loving relationship and visa versa. By rendering this knowledge conscious, Piotrowska can help a director to examine the nature of their and their participant’s desires. As a result, a director can wield a greater consideration for the participants best interests and help keep in check the director’s commitment to their own creative vision.

As transference is likely to be proportional to the vulnerability of the participant, any adjustments in the power relations between filmmaker and participant, can be proportional to Pryluck’s suggestions regarding how to adjust one’s approach towards a participant according to their standing in society. For instance, if a participant is from a marginalised group they could be invited to collaborate in the edit and creative development of the documentary. This will shape a film so it reflects a negotiation between theirs and the director’s desires and fantasies. This opportunity would not be offered to someone who had much more power in society than the director, such as a politician, as they are less likely to fall victim to transference and the greater public interest in exposing their private life out ways their right to privacy. This approach should reduce the likely hood that vulnerable participants feel betrayed and helpless upon the release of the film.

I feel slightly uneasy about assuming a marginalised participant is unconsciously experiencing love for me based on my power to illuminate them and hear their story. It feels obscenely presumptuous. However, it is important to hold in one’s mined that Piotrowska is drawing attention to unconscious activity as appose to concrete realities. She has articulated in psychoanalytic terms, the ethical imbalance when working with someone where there is an inherent power imbalance. It is also worth noting that much of psychoanalysis can induce an uneasy effect if rendered too literally.

 

Reflexivity

While Piotrowska does not allude to increased collaborative involvement with the participants as a possible antidote to the power imbalances that can result in transference, she does refer to reflexivity as a best practice quality of ethical documentary filmmaking. This is, in the first instance important because reflexivity encourages the filmmaker to self-scrutinise, leading to the illumination and negotiation of unconscious desires. Secondly, reflexivity allows for the audience to understand better the position from which the filmmaker is approaching the topic or participant. Thirdly, it can be used to encourage ethical engagement from audiences by forcing them to maintain a certain distance from the seductive qualities of the film.

In contrast to Nichols’ ‘discourse of sobriety’ (1991: 4, 2010: 36), Piotrowska conceives of documentary production, in part, as the product of a turbulent web of unconscious activity on the part of the director. ‘[Documentary filmmakers] mostly keep making different versions of the same film, perhaps unconsciously reworking some kind of trauma in a process of sublimation’ (2012: 68). According to Lacan, the psychoanalyst usually possesses some form of unconscious libidinal desire towards the analysand which must be rendered clear in their mind (Piotrowska 2012:72). ‘[This] is an important move as it dislodges the lingering stance in psychoanalysis of the psychoanalyst possessing all the power and solutions’ (Ibid.). Both the analyst and documentary filmmaker benefit from greater understanding of their own motivations and fallibility. Without self-reflexivity they would likely be trapped in cycles of behaviour that may be unethical. They could draw in their participants or analysands into an ill-defined dance in which repressed desires or traumas determine the terms of engagement.

From the perspective of the audience, there is a clear advantage to having as much insight into a filmmaker as possible when decoding how they have subjectively interpreted reality for the purposes of a documentary (Piotrowska 2012: 25).  As Julian Barnes puts it in his fiction writing, ‘we need to know the history of the historian in order to understand the version that is being put in front of us’ (2011:12).

Susan Scheibler drew a distinction between the ‘constative’ and ‘performative’ tensions within the documentary genre, the constative referring to knowledge that is objective and unchanging, and the performative, as emblematic of subjective perspectives (in Renov 1993: 137). Piotrowska points out that ‘performative’ can also mean a documentary team setting up events that will unfold on camera.  ‘This issue of the camera creating reality, which is not exactly staged but somehow impacted by the process itself, is also an important ethical issue in the genre – it is that notion too which bothered Krzysztof Kieślowski’ (Piotrowska 2012: 95). Even if the footage captured in a documentary production was a true reflection of “objective reality”, Piotrowska argues that it is much easier to manipulate the footage through editing than most audiences realised. ‘The spectator might have no idea how his or her perception has been altered through quite simple means: just cutting out a hesitation or a question could make an enormous difference to how you perceive the piece’ (2012: 95). Stella Bruzzi, echoes Scheibler in arguing that documentary is not a record of reality but rather a recording of a kind of ‘performance’ in the world (Bruzzi 2000: 3).

As an antidote to the performative manipulations of reality and the subjective undercurrent of the genre of documentary, Bruzzi identifies ‘performative documentary’, or what Nichols would call the participatory mode, in which the filmmaker enters the filmic frame as a participant (2001: 33).  The filmmaker’s onscreen presence illuminates a certain honesty about the subjectivity of the film text as opposed to an objective record of events as they would occur naturally (Bruzzi 2000: 155). Piotrowska refers to Nick Broomfield’s performative (or in Nichols terminology, participatory) documentaries as a key example of this practice.

‘He is dismantling the conventional documentary because, in his mind, it doesn’t work. His films are ‘voyages of discovery for him’ and he wants ‘to take the audience with him’ (Broomfield in Jones et al 2010: 30), thus empowering them. The point is the filmmaker’s desire to demonstrate in some way the process of the filmmaking.’ (Piotrowska 2012: 96).

This reflexive aesthetic has its roots in Bertolt Brecht’s radical theatre, specifically his Verfremdungseffekt (distancing effect), which ‘reveal the workings of the theatre in order to empower the spectator to question rather than just to have a pleasant experience… Brecht wanted the artifice of the theatre to be stripped down so that the spectator, rather than suspending her disbelief, could instead become a co-author of the performance.’ (Piotrowska 2012: 97-98).

Piotrowska connects this distancing effect in documentary with the psychoanalytic term ‘suture’ which describes the painful transition from the Imaginary into the Symbolic i.e. the uncomfortable intersection between the realm of senses and the realm of language and the other (2012: 105). Piotrowska uses suture ‘to describe the spectators’ rupture from the illusory identification with the screen to the realisation that it is but an illusion through a reminder that the frame of the screen frames the limit of the spectator’s experience’ (Ibid.). As such, distancing effects hopefully jolt the audience out of a passive role and into the poise of a critic.

According to Ruby’s trichotomy of ethical responsibilities documentary filmmakers must consider, reflexivity is a direct response to ‘the moral obligation of the producer to the potential audience’ (Ruby 2005: 211). By treating the audience as active thinking agents and equipping them with the material to decode the desires and prejudices present in the text, the filmmaker would have acted ethically towards the audience. Piotrowska concludes that ‘the method of cutting out the author/the filmmaker rather than inscribing him or her into the text, has produced the greatest deceptions in the history of documentary film’ (2012: 118).

In my own animated documentary practice I have started to follow Broomfield’s example by including myself and my microphones in the films I animate. It is important to me to expose to the audience how strange a scenario a documentary interview is. The added artificiality of the images being purposefully rendered as opposed to captured, further highlights to the audience how I have performed my interpretation of reality. It is also important for me to be clearly present as the directing force behind the film, so the audience can understand the origin of these interpretations. Including these reflexive commitments helps me examine my own conscious desires and prejudices. I am aware I will be held accountable by my audience. This in turn heightens my sense of concern for gaining a balance between the ethical demands of my participant, my audience, and my creative project.

 

 

Bibliography

Barnes, J. (2011) The Sense of an Ending. London: Jonathan Cape.

Bruzzi, S. (2000) New Documentary: A Critical Introduction. London: Routledge.

Cousins, M. and MacDonald, K. (ed.) (1988) Imagining Reality. London: Faber & Faber.

Cowie, E. (2011) Recording Reality, Desiring the Real. London & Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press.

Gaines, J. & Renov, M. (eds.) (1999) Collecting Visible Evidence. Minneapolis: University of Minnesotta Press.

Jones, C., Jolliffe, G. & Zinnes, A. (2010) The Guerilla Film Makers Handbook. The Ultimate Guide to Digital Filmmaking. London: Continuum.

Kieślowski, K. & Stok, D. (1993) Kieślowski on Kieślowski. Trans. by D. Stok. London: Faber & Faber.

Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nichols, B. (2001) Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Nichols, B. (2010 [2001]) Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Parker, I. (2011) Lacanian Psychoanalysis: Revolutions in Subjectivity. London & New York: Routledge.

Pryluck, C. [1976] ‘Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary Filmmaking’ in New challenges for Documentary. (2005) ed. A. Rosenthal, J. Corner. Manchester University Press.

Renov, M. (1993) Theorizing Documentary. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Renov, M. (2004) The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesotta Press.

Ruby, J. [1979] ‘The Ethics of Image making; or, “They’re going to Put me in the Movies, They’re Going to Make a Big Star Out of Me…’ in New challenges for Documentary. (2005) ed. A. Rosenthal, J. Corner. Manchester University Press.

Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View. Cambridge. Mass: MIT Press.

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