Amidst the Flies

What if reality were only really reflected as it is to the eyes of a fly? That seemed to be the implicit proposition behind the most famous metaphor of direct cinema — the fly on the wall. In the late 1950s, when the foundations of this cinematic movement were laid, the possibility of bringing cinema into everyday life opened a new frontier for realism. Portable cameras and the smaller crew needed on a film set allowed fiction to be sustained in such a way that filmmakers went completely unnoticed and could cultivate a gaze as detached from the facts as that of a fly on the wall. Although they flirted with that metaphor, the pioneers of direct cinema did not like being referred to as flies on the wall. Making their films required an emotional connection that was inconceivable for the apathetic gaze of a fly.

However, who said that the gaze of flies was apathetic, or that it had to align with the realistic promises of direct cinema? Flies, for starters, don't see with two eyes but with thousands of individual receptors that sacrifice detail in favour of speed. Rather than having bifocal vision, flies see with thousands of sensors that capture light and produce a pixelated, abstract, and hyper-fast image. While the human eye needs just 24 frames per second to merge static images into an illusion of continuous motion, the fly's brain processes light at a dizzying speed, capturing up to 250 images in that same interval of time. This means that if a fly were to enter a cinema auditorium, it would not see a smooth film, but a bewildering succession of static slides separated by long abysses of darkness.

This Punto de Vista Festival focus questions the ways in which the fly-on-the-wall gaze has been dismantled in a series of recent documentaries. One of the features that the pieces presented here have in common is a visual and biographical affinity with the Sensory Ethnography Lab —SEL— at Harvard University. These films invite us to shift our ethnographic perspective and explore other ways of engaging with the world: from China’s instant cities to the marks of armed conflict in Guatemala, in addition to the sonic unconscious of Robert Gardner's ethnographic missions in West Papua and the distribution of the sensible and the edible in Palestine. The programme culminates with a masterclass by Lucien Castaing-Taylor —Director of the SEL— and the screening of some of his Sheep Rushes, short pieces that accompanied the production of Sweetgrass —2009, together with Ilisa Barbash—, a film that received the audience prize at the 6th edition of Punto de Vista, 2010.

Xavier Nueno