Boundaries and Wholes in Documentary Form

I’d like to post today about the connection between the generic forms of Sa-I-Gu and the film version of Twilight. We asked in class whether these could be considered documentaries in the “normal” sense of the word. As part of those discussions, we noted the familiarity of Sa-I-Gu – it reminds us of the sort of thing we see on the History Channel frequently these days. We also questioned the validity of considering Twilight a documentary, as it is so heavily edited and self-consciously performative. What I wonder – and Mandy definitely helped my consideration of this with her presentation – is how far removed the one actually is from the other.

The editing in the types of films that we call documentaries is always going to have ideological implications beyond what is immediately apparent. In Twilight, the transitions between the different sections or groupings of monologues are much more clear; we understand the prepared emotional response for which we are being set up. However, in films like Sa-I-Gu, the editing – much as in a traditional narrative film – functions through juxtaposition to set up a similar thematic and, furthermore, ideological mindset for the viewer. I thought Mandy’s close reading of the placement of the funeral sequences in Sa-I-Gu was an excellent way of illustrating this phenomenon.

Cheng says of Smith that her work “speaks simultaneously to a desire for and a failure of community. It delineates boundaries even as it breaks them” (189). While Smith’s film is certainly not a documentary proper (I’ve been thinking of it as a docudrama), that delineation and breaking of boundaries can, I think, be understood as reflective of the role of editing in the documentary form. In a documentary, delineation and boundaries are constantly made visible reinforced — this person did this, this person reacts this way, we see this footage of a riot, we see this photograph — while, simultaneously, the entire point of the documentary is to reconstruct something true to life, bringing these pieces together to attempt to form a cohesive whole. And realizing this makes me agree more than I initially did with Lowe. Sa-I-Gu may perform the same ideological functions in editing that other documentaries do, but it doesn’t attempt to construct a whole in the same way.