How to use reality in design like a documentary filmmaker
What fashion designers can learn from films that look again at the world around them.
By Rosalind Jana
Because this series relies on close viewing, MUBI is offering our student readers 60 days free: mubi.com/1granary. And don’t worry, if you’ve already graduated, you can still start with one month free, see here.
Much of design education is built on the idea of precedent: find the references, build the moodboard, see what ideas emerge. This process is crucial, but it’s not the only way to resource your imagination and critical thinking. In this segment of 1 Granary’s ongoing series with MUBI, we use three documentaries to explore different ways of looking at – and being receptive to – what surrounds us, thinking through how those lessons can be applied to design.
‘Surroundings’ here does not refer only to the things one sees when they leave the house. Rather, it is about all the layers of the world that we move through and are moulded by, often without realising. One of these films is about the family narratives we absorb from childhood, and the sticky process of searching for the truth. Another focuses on the cultural atmosphere each generation is steeped in, using interviews and Hollywood clips to construct its argument. The third, a 12-minute-long dazzler, prowls along the streets, turning everyday sights into fractured, frenetic artworks.
Each one takes something that already exists – a family’s memories, a century of footage, city lights – and places pressure on it. What happens to that material when you reconstruct it, frame it, take a step back or lean in to look at it again closely?
The reflexive documentary: Stories We Tell (Sarah Polley, 2012)
The premise of Sarah Polley’s documentary is deceptively simple. The Canadian actor and filmmaker sets out to make a film about her mother Diane, who died when Polley was 11. To do so, she interviews her siblings, family friends, her father, and other significant people in her mother’s life, giving them all the same prompt: “tell me the whole story… as if I don’t know the whole story.” Their recollections, which, inevitably, contradict one another as much as they converge, are woven together with Super-8 home footage, Polley’s mother an incandescent presence as she larks around on her honeymoon, plays with her kids in the pool, and dances through parties and across theatre stages.
However, deceptive is the operative word here. As the documentary progresses, the viewer realises that what we’re watching is not a straightforward recollection of the past. With deft timing (and some beautifully controlled editing), Polley drops in one revelation after another, each of them exploding our understanding of the woman we thought we were getting to know. Memory is neither linear nor objective but kaleidoscopic, pieced together from competing, often irreconcilable points of view. Towards its denouement, the Super-8 camera shifts, and we are confronted with the fact that much of the ‘found’ footage featured here is in fact artificial, Polley recreating her own childhood as she directs actors playing her mother, father and siblings.
This is a reflexive style of documentary making: when a documentary deliberately shows its construction and asks the viewer to interrogate their own perceptions and judgements. Polley uses the form to draw attention to the act of storytelling itself, constantly interrupting to remind the viewer that someone is carefully controlling what we see: choosing what to include, deciding when to cut, interrogating their own motives for making the project in the first place.
For a designer, this is a film about the choices that are often obscured. Why this framing? Why this image? If designing is also a form of storytelling, then it’s worth asking whether the shaping of that story should be hidden or shown.
Exercise: Ask two or three people close to a project – a collaborator, a stylist, a friend who watched you make it – to describe what it is “about,” without giving away anything yourself. Where do their answers overlap? Where do they pull apart? Now go further than just noting the gaps or contradictions: decide how visible to make your own role in resolving it. Will the final piece pretend if there was only ever one version? Or will it show its seams and inner workings?
The compilation film: The Celluloid Closet (Rob Epstein & Jeffrey Friedman, 1995)
Based on Vito Russo’s book of the same name, this elegant film narrated by Lily Tomlin draws on a century of existing Hollywood footage to trace a hidden history of queerness on screen: rereading characterisations, knowing glances, throwaway quips, and euphemisms to chart the effects of censorship and the consequences of learning to read between the lines. It opens with a brief clip from 1895 – two men dancing together in one of the earliest pieces of film ever shot – and moves chronologically through a series of tropes and cinematic trends: the effeminate “sissy” played for laughs in the silent era, the innuendo smuggled past censors during the Hays Code decades, and later, the recurring figure of the predatory or murderous queer villain, a pattern that resurfaces with terrific style in the form of Sharon Stone’s Catherine Tramell in Basic Instinct.
The film works via a process of pattern recognition, stringing together individual scenes and wider cultural histories to tell a story about hiding in plain sight. In doing so, the filmmakers aren’t simply surfacing meanings that certain directors and actors knowingly buried; they’re also recontextualising material, digging out the implications that were latent rather than intended. This is crucial viewing for any designer for two reasons. The first is straightforward: a working knowledge of cinema history is a must. The second is more useful as a method: the film is, in effect, training your eye to recognise pattern beneath surface, especially when that means reading against the grain.
That is a transferable skill, one any designer working with reference, archive, or inherited material can hone. It’s also the engine behind a specific documentary technique: the compilation film. The form dates to Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty in 1927. Rather than shoot anything new, a compilation film is built from footage that already exists, collaged and juxtaposed until it produces a new meaning from the original material.
Exercise: Go back to something you made before: a past project, an old sketchbook, a piece of research you set aside because you weren’t quite sure what to do with it. Look at it again and try to work out what the through line is to your current preoccupations. What does the old material tell you now that it didn’t (or couldn’t) tell you then?
The city symphony: Broadway by Light (William Klein, 1958)
Before he made fashion photographs or feature films, William Klein trained as a painter. His 12-minute directorial debut is an obsessive study of line, colour, form, and, most crucially, light. Klein’s camera is trained on the neon signage of Times Square at night, a razzmatazz blend of branding, slogans, and theatre marquees. Orson Welles called it the first film he’d seen “in which colour was absolutely necessary.” There is no real story, or rather, the story is one of urban motion: we are advertised to, seduced, dazzled, the same handful of logos and letters dissolving and reforming until they become pure abstraction. The closest thing to a human character are the silhouetted figures who appear now and then on the marquees, perched on stepladders like acrobats, changing the letters for tomorrow’s listings. Klein said that he wanted to show how “obsessive [and] brainwashing” these beautiful signs were, the accompanying score veering between jaunty and eerie as it captures the exhilarating, faintly sinister thrill of being sold to.
In her 1927 essay “Street Haunting: A London Adventure”, Virginia Woolf writes about the pleasure of walking through the city and absorbing everything in her path, a state of being in which the armour of self is shed, and one is reduced merely to a being who watches: “a central oyster of perceptiveness, an enormous eye.” Klein’s camera does something close to this. It does not interrogate the signs it films, or explicitly ask what they mean. It simply looks, gathering colour and motion the way Woolf’s eye gathers the city’s “floating islands of pale light.”
In this respect, Klein’s film belongs to a genre called the city symphony: a tradition that goes back to the 1920s, with films like Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis and Man with a Movie Camera. In these films, the city is captured through rhythm and montage. It is the main character, but one that is constructed from endless, incoherent fragments. The city supplies the structure – its traffic, its buildings, the people who move through it – and the filmmaker’s job is to find the patterns already pulsing. Nothing in Broadway by Light was staged. Klein’s contribution was deciding where to point the camera, how long to hold a shot or how far to zoom in, and what to cut next to what.
Exercise: Spend 20 minutes outside, ideally somewhere bustling – a high street, a market, a train station, a city centre – and collect the images, sounds, or objects that exist there. You can sketch, photograph or record. Afterwards, edit what you collected down to the ten strongest observations. What did the selection reveal?
*and again, if you’re not a student you can still start with one month free, see here.
