The following is an edited and revised transcript of a 2019 telephone conversation.

Jem Cohen

It turns out we’ve had converging concerns about “storytelling” and documentary for some time. When I first started questioning how and why the term had gotten so dominant in documentary I poked around online and was reminded that it was also a prevailing trope in corporate and advertising realms where “every brand and company must have a story.” I wondered why I didn’t see more discussion around the whole issue. I’d once naively believed that documentary was a kind of safe harbor away from the commercial formulas forced onto so many narrative films: three-act structure, arc towards catharsis, indomitable characters undergoing emotional journeys, and so on. So I was doubly concerned to see that “storytelling” had become a kind of directive pushing documentary closer to both conventional (i.e. Hollywood) narrative and those even more blatantly corporate and commercial realms. Luckily one such online search brought me to your 2009 blog post, which offered such a thoughtful, critical take—I was so happy to find it.{1} I’d clipped an article by Ralph Arlyck from The (AIVF) Independent called “Stranger Than Fiction” way back in 2001 in which he expressed concerns about being pressured towards storytelling formulas by broadcasters, but the discussion felt so rare.{2}

Frankly, your blog post was gutsy in ways I wasn’t prepared to be. I’m ashamed to say it, but in recent years I’ve found funding and institutional support so precarious that I’d been hesitant to publicly express my thoughts. I didn’t want to offend gatekeepers, and also didn’t want to come across as someone with an “anti-story” axe to grind. So many people who use the term “storytelling” do so innocuously or with good intentions and I have no interest in attacking them. But it was a relief to see your piece and, eventually, the manifesto and call for discussion on the World Records site. So, I’m thankful to you and to Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow and company for fearlessly going public and pushing for engaged discussion.

Rick Prelinger

You’ve been making work that emerges in the festival and feature film world but you’re also fundamentally an experimentalist. I don’t want to force names on you or anybody but I would think you have some latitude to speak, unless you’re feeling dependent on the kind of people that want things to fit under conventional umbrellas.

JC

Well, I don’t know what I am. I don’t really identify as an experimental filmmaker per se. I navigate different territories and certainly have to deal with calls for entry and funding that fall well outside of “experimental film.” My features, Chain (2004) and Museum Hours (2012), are fiction-doc hybrids, intentionally hard to pin down. In those I created what I think of as a Trojan horse in which narrative exists but gets subverted. Narrative draws people in, but what interests me most is when the storytelling gets quietly dismantled so other things can emerge. Lost Book Found (1996) was an earlier attempt to entangle observational documentary and essay with narrative, but I’d been doing odd hybrids since my very first film in the early 80s. 1994’s Buried in Light took its shape from shortwave radio and foreign language dictionaries. Counting, from 2015, melds city symphony, diary film, and essay in fifteen numbered chapters. So most of my work has an observational, nonfiction core but ends up in some gray area.

Trailer for LOST BOOK FOUND, Jem Cohen (1996).

I’ve always found it worth remembering that the origins of documentary often had little or nothing to do with storytelling. The Lumières were primarily observational. Vertov’s Man With a Movie Camera is simultaneously a freewheeling city symphony and a self-reflexive meditation on the cameraperson’s role in remaking the world. Of course, Vertov’s radical reinventions got him into deep trouble with the gatekeepers of his day.

My very favorite films include mindblowing hybrids like Franju’s Le Sang des bêtes (1949), Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1963), and many films by Chantal Akerman and Chris Marker. One could say that Sans Soleil (1983) is full of stories; but it’s so unconstrained and elusive. Story doesn’t have to dominate. That’s something you spoke so intelligently about in your blog post when describing other possible forms that films could take. It’s heartening to me to see this debate not just as a reaction against recent formulas, but as a reclamation of possibilities that documentary laid out from its very beginnings.

RP

What’s happening is in many ways a replay, as you mentioned with Vertov, of a trend that we’ve often seen in any kind of a medium that is predominantly for entertainment and only secondarily for artwork and experimentation. On the one hand, there have been changes that have opened up mediamaking to many more people. There are amazing possibilities for production and more inclusivity in terms of the kind of work that can get made and shown. More so-called experimental work is being made than ever (although in fact a lot of it only seems experimental in that it borrows stylistic and representational tools from experimental work), but we’re still seeing marginalization of work that’s out of the box and most of the financial support stays where it’s always been, despite the development of immersive media, interactive documentaries, and participatory pieces.

We might trace the idea of documentary as “storytelling” back to people like Cara Mertes, originally at POV, and Sheila Nevins at HBO, who are ultimately storytellers. I mention these names not in a negative sense, but to characterize them as people who saw an opportunity and moved it along. They wanted documentary to reach a broader audience and so they thought about how to work in a more populist mode. They specifically engaged or commissioned people who were experimental, radical, or independent to make material for a much broader audience and sometimes even sat in the cutting room to make sure that character development was integral to the film. There was a certain kind of symmetry and balance to the filmmaking that they were supporting that mimicked Aristotelian drama as we know it, and the three-act structure often ended with hope.

JC

Nevins originally wanted to be a theater director. When she became documentary gatekeeper at HBO, she may have been injecting her desire for narrative into nonfiction. She was certainly effective, grooming documentary to be more commercially viable in ways that became so influential that people sometimes seem to forget that there are alternatives to the formula that was refined at HBO. I will say that there’s a recent and extraordinary anomaly in the nomination of RaMell Ross’s Hale County, This Morning, This Evening (2018) for an Academy Award. It is a genuinely experimental film that elevates close observation above storytelling. I don’t care about Oscar nominations, but the fact that it was even in the running is a hopeful sign that there can be more room for other formats. But maybe most importantly, I want to talk about the variety of alternatives available to us.

RP

I’m not very interested in cinema anymore. I mean, I love movies. Part of this has been what happens in my Lost Landscapes programs. I want more from films! I no longer subscribe to the idea that you bring people into a room, you turn the lights off, they watch the movie, and it’s a closed experience. In my programs, a silent audio track is supplemented through an anticipated audience participation.

JC

Well, our rebellions against mainstream cinema are different, though they do converge. I don’t have a problem with people being asked to sit in a dark room and pay quiet attention to a film for a set duration. To me, interactivity can be internal or mental. And I love enforced inactivity as a respite from the distractions we’re so inundated with. My main problem is with predictability, the way ambiguity is chased away and films are expected to fall into the same shapes and trajectories, like products based on previously successful products. I should also note that I do a lot of “live” cinema, working with projected images and live soundtracks, which is a turn away from “normal” movie-going and a return to early cinema. Empires of Tin (2013) and We Have an Anchor (2012) were essentially feature-length essays merging observational documentary with readings and live music into some unidentifiable cross-genre thing. They don’t have the interactive aspect with the audience that you’ve been investigating though, which is clearly a great adventure.

Trailer for EVENING’S CIVIL TWILIGHT IN EMPIRES OF TIN, Jem Cohen (2008).

RP

But to think of the film just as a starting point and for the real work to happen outside the movie—I think that’s such a powerful idea, especially today when we have savvy audiences, many of whom are not satisfied with the world as it is. Public assembly is so powerful and people are chipping away at it in every way possible. First off, with the privatization of looking at films, at first with home video and now with Netflix. Second with the sort of fetishization of the film experience, the policing of it—no talking, no phones, long waits in a long line—there’s a restrictive wrapper around the film experience.

The other thing I’m interested in comes from my being an archivist. Archivists learn quite quickly that most films are silent and that sound films are the minority because most films are shot MOS and sound is only grafted on in post-production. So, it makes you think about what could fill that area besides music and narration that quite often are used to tell people what to think. Only rarely, as in the case of Marker and other great filmmakers, do films take people’s thoughts in a more interesting direction than simple literal explanation or overdetermination.

Thirdly, what I’ve also learned with Lost Landscapes is that most film is unedited as well as being silent. Most film is raw: it’s dailies, it’s rushes, it’s shot for reasons other than the dramatic. It’s home movies, it’s process plates, it’s outtakes. Why can’t we look at that stuff, too? Why can’t audiences get interested in raw historical material?

The fact is that audiences do get into all this at Landscapes events. The closure and narrative is almost a hundred percent supplied by the audience, determined by them on the fly as they try to build a sense of causality and logic and fit this piece of footage that they’re seeing into their sense of what’s going on. One of my lifetime projects is to get people interested in raw evidence, to look at an article in an old Time magazine rather than hear a narrator say what it means. I’m interested in audiences working a little harder and therefore giving them more to do. I think they like it if you do this in a friendly and compassionate and mutually experimental way. This is an exciting kind of filmmaking.

JC

In regard to working with raw, documentary evidence and asking the audience to make their own connections, Charles Reznikoff’s Testimony (1934) comes to mind. It’s drawn from court transcripts and he boldly insists on realigning it as “poetry.” Do you know it?

RP

Yeah I love Testimony! He adds cadence and some paraphrase and that gives it a poetic rhythm.

JC

I’d add Humphrey Jennings’s book Pandaemonium 1660–1886: The Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers, originally from the 1950s, and one of my big influences for Chain. And of course Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project (1927- 1940) is an endlessly wild gathering of texts and reflections to dip into at any point and rearrange, in the mind at least.

Another area of non-storytelling possibility is of course virtual reality. I know all too little about it, but it seems to be a place where people are able to recognize the value of new, experiential approaches that aren’t necessarily about storytelling. The same could be said for a number of documentaries connected to the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab, some of which are also presented as installations.

But honestly, I still feel like I actually want a rarefied cinema experience, even with no popcorn crunching; just full, quiet engagement, an increasingly rare opportunity to be away from the hectic world. I’d even go for those isolated seats that Anthology Film Archives had when they first opened. That was hilarious.

RP

Yeah, those crazy booths!

JC

You were supposed to engage with the film on your own and block out the sense of anybody else being next to you. So they built dividers, which was insane but in its way kind of wonderful. Anyhow, even if I’m not exactly with you in terms of the need to reinvent cinema as a participatory thing, I am with you in the sense of wondering: why not have both?

RP

I’m also saying “both/and!” Did you ever go to the movies at the Fulton Mall in downtown Brooklyn? Audience members, who are primarily African Americans, are totally interacting with the screen: laughing, talking, vocalizing their reactions and feelings as and to the group. In fact this whole thing started for me in 1991 when I brought locally shot footage back to South Dakota and I saw European Americans talking back to the screen in a way I had never seen, more like they were in Brooklyn.

JC

Yes! The Britton, South Dakota footage you discovered where local residents’ portraits were filmed and then shown in the town movie house in the 1930s? I think those must have been some of the most wonderful screenings in cinema history—both the original shows and the later ones you organized. It helps that the footage is so strong, even though it’s “only” locals standing in front of the camera. I often teach that as a “ground zero” of documentary. It’s so simple but it can be experienced and analyzed in many different ways. It’s a time capsule of clothing and history as well as socioeconomic realities, and it retains mystery. Filmmakers also made their own interpretations, like Vanessa Renwick taking shots of children and adding organ music, creating a haunting and haunted experience. When you brought those films back to South Dakota, there was simply the miraculous gift to the audience of “Here I am in South Dakota and these are my ancestors, coming home.”

RP

You know it was all by chance. I had bought this footage. Then somebody came to do a story on the archives and wrote it up in the New Yorker. Then the mayor of Britton called and people helped bring me to South Dakota. When we did the screening, I couldn’t believe how open and uninhibited people were in the theater.

I’ve always hated the fact that archives are so rarefied. Going to an archival screening is like going to church, where there’s so many rules. Jarrett Drake, who’s a former archivist who critiques whiteness in archives, talks about the three characteristics of archives he picked up when he was visiting Eastern State Penitentiary in Philly. He says archives are characterized by silence, solitude, and surveillance—you’re watched, you work alone, and you don’t connect with others.

You’ve been to our collection, the Prelinger Library which is primarily a collection of nineteenth and twentieth century historical ephemera, periodicals, maps, and books, most published in the United States.{3} You know that it’s first and foremost about a sense of “this is fun, let do it together.” It’s offered to users as a kind of pedagogical approach to archives and history where one can be engaged in both understanding the world and then working to change it. A deep aesthetic experience is part of that for sure, but so is letting out your hair because a lot of learning is collective.

The Library of Congress puts on an annual event called Mostly Lost, where they invite people to screen unattributed reels and identify them. It’s often people that know silent film really well—they know the looks of sets, what comes out of certain kinds of cameras, and so on. People shout out possibilities and material often gets identified. It’s a way of crowdsourcing that becomes almost a game.

Similarly, before we started scanning everything, Megan (my partner in the archives) and I would project home movies in our living room. We did this for about two years almost every night, and we’d race to be first to Google the name of a store in a shot, or the intersection of US 30 and State Road 152 to figure out what city it’s in. It was so much fun.

JC

I want to return to some practical matters, to talk about limited funds and gatekeepers. In the past fifteen to twenty years I’ve found it very rare to encounter any kind of documentary call for entries or funding application that didn’t reference “storytelling.” When they spell out “We are looking for nonfiction storytelling with strong characters who undergo transformative journeys,” I feel like: “does that mean you’re telling me not to even apply, if that’s not what I do?” We’re faced with an expectation that borders on a demand. Again, I don’t think it’s necessarily even intentional, but there can be an institutional laziness in which these terms get used in a sort of loosey-goosey way to suggest that documentary needs to be warmed up and lubricated, probably to make it more commercial and popular, and that’s what we all should aim for.

RP

I think most of these gatekeepers aren’t artists or makers. I have a hunch that storytelling as we now know it was initially reintroduced as a radical discourse about privileging narratives of ordinary people, underrepresented people, over narratives that had been created by the entertainment machine. In the 70s, for example when I was hanging around a lot with “Marxist cultural workers,” as some artists and filmmakers then called themselves, people were talking about storytelling as if it were restoring the voice and agency of workers, people of color, immigrants, women. By restoring these narratives to the foreground, storytelling was understood as a liberatory practice. But, as people from the left began to infiltrate the entertainment industry and then got kind of bought off, I think storytelling became mainstream and even conservative. When they introduce the Oscar for best screenplay, someone always says “story is the base of everything we do, and it’s how we understand ourselves.” Well, perhaps it’s true, but it doesn’t mean people who live in China or Indigenous people in what’s now the US all share the same sense of what narrative is.

JC

Even within one geography or culture, narrative can be so wide-ranging. Some of the most potent fiction film encounters I’ve had are when narratives turn out to be radical rejections of predictable storytelling. When I first saw Cassavetes’ films and realized I had no idea what was going to happen next, no idea how or when they would end—that blew my mind! Even with films by as big a control freak as Hitchcock, he undermines the apparent story with the MacGuffin and other methods, and it’s his own creepy psychological subtexts that really matter anyhow, not the story. But those are rare filmmakers, and given Hollywood’s eternally tedious obsession with driving films and viewers to market, some of us felt we could escape by going over to this place called “documentary,” which stood apart. So it was all the more disturbing to sense that the very things that had delimited and diminished possibilities for narrative cinema were invading documentary. Of course, storytelling isn’t a Hollywood thing, it’s a human thing. It’s valid to note that humans have always told stories; that that’s what they did around the ancient campfire; that it’s a basic human characteristic, even a need. But we tend to forget that to experience and organize the world there are many other modes. One is observation—looking and listening—which does not necessarily take on any specified arc or acts or shapes. There’s also dream and daydream, which are absolutely core human activities in which we create extremely fractured narratives, if they are narratives at all. We dream and daydream in any shapes we need to and digression is probably the dominant mode. And we have other possibilities for imposing meaning and organization that are also very human, such as making lists or poems or collages or lyrical forms that are more like music. You wrote in your blog about organizing a film with as basic a rubric as morning-to-night, a form often embraced in city symphonies. So I think it would be healthy to recognize that since there are other modes that are just as human as traditional storytelling, why privilege one over the other and insist that one is more “natural”?

Trailer for COUNTING, Jem Cohen (2015).

I’ve always found it strange that much of so-called experimental cinema is marginalized as supposedly alien to the average person’s experience. You know, that it’s somehow only viable for elites or academics or weirdos or whatever, because it’s difficult. But I often feel when I’m watching good experimental films that they’re simply closer to basic human consciousness and common experience than either narrative cinema or formulaic documentary. Closer to memory, to dreaming, to how we all actually see and think.

RP

Yes. You know photographers run into this the whole time. People just aren’t encouraged to look and to open their eyes.

JC

We have this opportunity with cinema, perhaps more than in any other of the arts—to somehow get at how the mind works, at consciousness—and yet we’re so scared of that. Both filmmakers and presenters hold back—out of fear about work being too challenging or that it has to have a clearly identifiable agenda to succeed commercially. Makers and audiences are deprived of freer exploration.

RP

A lot of it has to do with this issue of why are we actually making films. Are we making films for the strokes we get from people or what?

JC

Well, that’s an eternal quandary. When I make films I want them to at least potentially function for anyone. One of my points of return as a filmmaker is in gathering everyday observations, often of things on the periphery, things that are overlooked but are actually commonalities. They’re pieces of the world we all experience when we’re looking out of the window or riding the bus or walking around . . . so they’re not actually alienating at all.

But again, it’s one thing to talk about what we hope to do and another to talk about what we’re actually able to make and distribute and get seen. The logistical struggles remain so fraught, especially when there’s so little support to go around. I kind of suspect that if this “Beyond Story” discussion is heard, some of the gatekeepers might actually say, “oh that’s not what we really meant, we actually do want to be open-minded about innovative forms and new possibilities! We’re thrilled about Hale County,” and maybe then they’d consider changing the terminology, because that’s what a lot of it comes down to. Do they really need the comfort of predictable forms, or is this perhaps more about language, the way terminology gets embedded and becomes self-perpetuating? Then there’s the issue you touched on re: Marxism and how the idea of “untold stories” got distorted into something else altogether. It reminds me of another dominant term in documentary: “impact.” The notion of impact is often wedded to “storytelling” because storytelling is seen as the tried-and-true route to affecting the audience emotionally, which helps convince them, and that’s tied in with what are often legitimate, pressing concerns about instigating change. I don’t doubt that many gatekeepers and funding agencies really are trying to make a better world. That’s understandable, but it doesn’t have to mean enforced, limiting directives for filmmakers and “cookie-cutter” documentaries. I think we also change the world by changing how people see, and offering other ways by which people can be part of the process of creating meaning.

RP

We need to make room for experimental and different kinds of work and think of it as a kind of inclusion. Inclusion isn’t just gender, race, class, ability, and so on. Inclusion is also the way that you need to express yourself. Especially among people who regard themselves as radically open to new ways of making media, we need to remain open and avoid these restrictive categories. But at the same time we can’t fetishize experimentation for its own sake, right? Because there are a lot of bad films that aren’t conventionally narrative.

JC

Yeah, experimentation can be torture but it can also be liberating, and sometimes it’s both.

At the panel event at UnionDocs with Sable Elysse Smith, Travis Wilkerson, Brett Story, and Alexandra Juhasz, some of the filmmakers indicated that the problem they had with enforced storytelling was an implication about accepting the stories we’re told; that maybe the push towards comfortable storytelling might actually be antithetical to a necessary, radical rejection of the broader stories told by the dominant culture. That was an interesting angle and, you know, the way I see it is: let all the angles blossom. But it also seems clear that nobody wants this to be an attack. The tendency to form warring factions isn’t productive. But there does need to be a challenge and I hope this is a moment in which that can happen.