Los Angeles in 1980, beyond the image of glamorous Hollywood: Agnès Varda arranges a series of enduring static framings, or tableaux vivants, where Sabine Mamou plays the role of ’Emilie’, the assistant of a director, who is busy typing a manuscript an of taking care of her son ’Martin’, played by Varda’s son Mathieu Demy. The title of the film Documenteur (Agnès Varda, 1981), plays with the French word for ‘liar’, menteur, underscoring the role of artifice with which the director aims at a genuine something that she wished for the film to convey. I propose to think in dialogue with this quiet drama of everyday life to highlight the poetics of enactment and the politics of the gesture which are at the core of documentary cinema as film art and screen attraction.

Typical for this playful meta-film, and Varda’s essayistic style, is the humoristic self-criticism included by the end of what seems to be an endless, almost annoying loop of poetic repetition and a listing of words to an occasionally quicker succession of images in the first part of the film. The voice-over, performed by the famous actress Delphine Seyrig, goes on to pronounce a series of words in her suggestive French accent: ‘soupe, solitude, separation, absence’, and where one may just start to think, ‘please give me a break’, Varda promptly inserts a close framing of a bucket of dying fish, and the narrator concludes: ‘Yes, set phrases and explanations are disgusting’.

Documenteur provides a personal note in the form of a scripted, but reflexive mise-en-scène on the subject of urban isolation, everyday frustration and pleasures of combining parenting and writing, living and dreaming. The film was made directly after Varda’s essay film on the mural paintings of Los Angeles, murals put in dialogue with life stories and the vibrant cultural life of the city, a film typically, and equally playfully entitled Mur Murs (1980). Despite the difference in style, the two films overlap visually and it is possible to imagine Documenteur as a personal journal edited and finalized in retrospect, but propelled by Varda’s own life during the making of Mur Murs a year earlier. ‘Mur Murs’ (1980), meaning both ‘wall walls’ or ‘mural murals and ‘murmurs’, mumbling is the beautiful title of a film that demonstrates the poetics and attentive interest of the essay film; a schoolbook example of documentary enactment also in terms of the working of découpage, montage and mise-en-scène, where the framed and orchestrated LA murals an integrated exemplify the cultural, social and political function of art as part of local life stories and communities. As different murals are put into dialogue by montage, the narrator imagines the sum of these spectacular LA murals to suggest a shared ‘dreaming together’.

In Documenteur, footage of these striking LA murals reappears in the diegetic space of a quiet, uneventful drama, where sequences shot on location in a local neighborhood blend with other scripted scenes in the fictive home of the two main characters, or in the streets with the involuntary and, at times, apparently collaborative presence of locals and people passing by.

Los Angeles in 1980, beyond the image of glamorous Hollywood: Agnès Varda arranges a series of enduring static framings, or tableaux vivants, where Sabine Mamou acts as her alter ego, a newly arrived French author and single mother. Mathieu Demy, Varda’s own son, features as the son. The title of the film Documenteur (Agnès Varda, 1981), plays with the French word for ‘liar’, menteur, underscoring the role of artifice with which the director aims at a genuine something that she wished for the film to convey. This paper proposes a reassessment of both ‘authenticity’ and ‘enactment’ through, and in dialogue with, this and other classical and recent documentary allegories (Russell, 1998), to highlight cinema as ‘an art of the gesture’ (Agamben, 2006 [1996]) and acting in the sense of a collaborate project to forge an image of shared experience and a sounding of lived time (Wahlberg, 2018). Special attention will be paid to documentary experiences of filmed subjects in the act of speaking, to direct sound and its opposite (Chion, 1994; Honess Roe and Maria Pramaggiore, 2018), to cinematic silence as a sounding event of time passing.

Obscure Light opens in silence with a black frame. A preface in white letters conveys the historical context of Portuguese fascism (1926-1974), the horrific results of Salazar’s dictatorship (1932-1970), including the long term incarceration of generations of ‘Communists’, and the transnational trauma of the colonial war (1961-1974). Similar to the previous two film, Still Life (Natureza Morta. Visages d’une Dictature, 2005) and 48 (2010), Obscure Light (2017) involves the viewer in a material, critical and poetic enactment of rare archival images and fragments of oral history to invoke a complex time period that is painfully present and therefore rarely addressed in public life. This time, de Sousa Dias closes in on the history of a single Portuguese family and the memories of three siblings. The childhood of Isabel, Rui, and Álvaro Pato was marked by the longing for their absent parents and the ever present threat of the PIDE/DGS.

In cliose dialogue with Susana De Sousa Dias' film Obscure Light, this short reflection highlights the possibilities of experiemental documentary to provide an allegory of memory and forgetting; an audiovisual historiography that works against the notion of an enclosed narrative to propose film as a vector for memorywork. Ideally, these are artistic projects that encourage public recognition of contested histories and shared experiences that call for alternative strategies of telling and of bridging between the present and the past.