OTHER VOICES – MICHAEL GLAWOGGER, Contemporary Documentary

EDUARDO WILLIAMS Nov 18, 2022

Pascal Vandelanoitte
STRUCTURE OF THE LECTURE
1. Short intro on a global approach in documentary film – case study Michael
Glawogger
2. Intro on Eduardo Williams, The Human Surge
3. Screening
4. Class discussion on The Human Surge
5. 17 o’clock - Intro Writing an Essay – together with Leen Engelen
MICHAEL GLAWOGGER
Austria, 1959-2014
Fiction film + documentary film
2 important collaborators:
 editor Monika Willi (cf. Michael Haneke)
 cameraman Wolfgang Thaler (cf. Ulrich Seidl)

Common characteristic in documentary work:

Layerings of shock, beauty, thoughtfulness and empathy
Idea of globalisation and global world very prominent
TRILOGY ON HARD LABOUR
Megacities 1998
Mumbai / Moscow / Mexico City /New York

Workingman’s Death 2005

Ukraine / Indonesia / Nigeria / Pakistan /
China / Germany

Whores’ Glory 2011

Thailand / Bangladesh / Mexico
CHARACTERISTICS
•INTIMATE ACCESS to individuals living on the border of things: connecting with people >
Megacities

•IMAGES & AESTHETIC

• Experimental film background: influence on images, sound, rhythm
(for those interested: check the work of Nikolaus Geyrhalter)

•STRUCTURE:
• chapters to create rhythm
• Rhythm of music, camera, image > Fragment Whores’ Glory – Bangladesh
• Echoes covering the chapters
•NARRATION
• Nuanced story paying attention to social, economic, religious aspects, not only a sentimental approach.
• No explaining voice-over.
CHARACTERISTICS (II)
•HORROR AND BEAUTY
• Mixture of horror and beauty – “beauty as the splendor of truth”
• Mix of realism and composition (musical & pictorial)

•TOPICS
• Contradictory situations
• Places and situations that speak for themselves; Connection to economical and social context in a subtle way
• Life & conditions are hard, but optimism survives
• See f.e. Untitled; Workingman’s Death: between solitary and social, between worn-out and hero

•ENACTING:
• “I alter reality in order to show reality”
• See also masterclass by Glawogger
EDUARDO WILLIAMS – THE HUMAN
SURGE
GLOBAL WORLD: EDUARDO WILLIAMS,
THE HUMAN SURGE, 2016
Global narrative, 3 locations (Argentina, Mozambique, Philippines)
Nearly no characterisation, nor story development – observational aesthetic
Connecting the young men and women:
 Dependance on smartphones, laptops, internet
 Indifference to the surrounding reality
 Setting: fragile economic position
SCREENING
OBSERVATIONS
Earth as a network of unseen relations and
connections
 Binary postion between the West and the rest
of the world
See screenshots: going to one location to another
through the vision of a webcast
difference between “reality” and “digital
world” becomes diffuse
OBSERVATIONS

Second transition: camera is not only a

witness, but also a guide - framing &
editing
 Characters not only in relation to the
global world
 Also in (lack of) relation to the ecosystem
of the world
QUOTES
BALSOM, E. (2017). THE HUMAN SURGE. SIGHT AND SOUND, 27(7), 58.

Popular accounts of the role of digital technologies in everyday life tend to

teeter on the bleeding edge of innovation, in thrall to accelerated cycles of
novelty and obsolescence, pitched somewhere between the aspirational and
the anxiety-ridden. Cinema, too, peers incessantly ahead. It overwhelmingly
approaches technology within a science-fiction idiom, adopting a forecast
mentality to project a future that is often dystopian and invariably
spectacular. Rarely is it that a film revels in banal, habitual uses of
digital devices – their boredom, disappointment, malfunction. Eduardo
Williams’s excellent debut feature The Human Surge does precisely this,
gently puncturing myriad myths of networked existence with an
attentiveness to the stubborn persistence of bodies, to the unevenness of
development, to the weak links and strong ties that connect us across
distances great and small.
QUOTES
BALSOM, E. (2017). THE HUMAN SURGE. SIGHT
AND SOUND, 27(7), 58.
… the film’s own temporality eschews the structuring drive of narrative, instead
finding form through the repetition of motifs across geography, whether it is the
passage of a figure into or out of an enclosed dark space, the action of wading
in water, or a frustrated search for internet access. (…)

These are not the humanist seers of Italian neorealism but their 21st-century
descendants, products of a distracted, mediatised existence. (…)

This troubling of meaning is a central component of the film’s larger retreat from
an administered existence in which information must be delivered in a clear,
stable, purposeful manner, and in which time is money, something to be spent,
not passed. In its approach to temporality, narrative and meaning alike, The
Human Surge turns its back on notions of progress, rationality and
instrumental reason.
QUOTES
BALSOM, E. (2017). THE HUMAN SURGE. SIGHT AND SOUND, 27(7), 58.

In this aimless time, the sensuousness of corporeality is ubiquitous, nowhere more so than in the social
interactions between groups of young men in Argentina and Mozambique who perform for webcams in
assorted states of undress, looking for fun and money. (…)

The bodies of The Human Surge are, it must be said, primarily youthful male bodies; the film is among other
things a study of a certain kind of masculinity – inchoate, out of or against work, uninterested in
responsibility, more body than voice, a node in a social network rather than a partner in a couple. (…)

There are no iPhones, laptops or tablets used in this film. Instead, we see old desktops, phones with cracked
screens or dead batteries. These are machines that offer the dubious promise of communication only to
break it, uses of technology that push back against planned obsolescence. Although a lack of connectivity
troubles its characters, The Human Surge holds out the possibility that they are better off for it. When the
shine of technological novelty finally makes an entry, it is in an eerie coda of masked workers assembling
tablets in a factory. This steely environment is devoid of the skin, earth, water and drift that pervade the rest
of the film.
QUESTIONS FOR CLASS DISCUSSION
(need for) characterisation?
To stage or not to stage
How to film in different locations & contexts?
What story do you tell?
Whose story do you tell as external filmmaker?
NEXT WEEK: NOV 24 & 25 – SURPLUS CINEMA
FEMINISMS AND FILMMAKING IN THE
CONTEXT OF GREECE AND ITS INTERTWINING
DIASPORAS
full program : https://beursschouwburg.be/en/events/surplus-cinema/
As part of this class, all students will follow:
Nov 24, 19.30 screening program “Out of the tourist gaze” @
Beursschouwburg. (Ticket: use the magic words LUCA or DocNomads at
the entrance)
Nov 25, 14.00 masterclass with Eva Stefani @ campus, small auditorium

Some optional and interesting things: you are also strongly encouraged
to follow both other screenings at Beursschouwburg:
Nov 23, Nov 25, 19.30: optional screenings at BSB (use the same magic
words to enter)
a free workshop “camera work as care work” on Wednesday Nov 23
13:30 - 18:30 – register here
WRITING A PAPER Literature
Citation
LITERATURE
First 3 places for your hunt:
- LUCA library
- CINEMATEK library
- LIMO system through LUCA library
GUIDELINES FOR WRITING PAPERS
QUOTING & CITING
Any use of another author’s research, ideas, or language without proper attribution may be considered
plagiarism. Therefore, it is of utmost importance to refer to and credit all of your sources.

Mention your sources in your text

- not only if you literally quote them “…”
- also if what you write is inspired by someone else’s text, or a paraphrasing
even if you are not verbatim copying text fragments, you are still (and always) supposed to refer to the
original source.

> in text citation, f.e. In an interview (Quinn 2013: 61-74) Nick Broomfield spoke about his approach to
documentary filmmaking.
>footnote, f.e. In an interview Nick Broomfield spoke about his approach to documentary filmmaking.²
BIBLIOGRAPHY
At the end of your paper, add a full bibliography with all sources you used.
Write your bibliography in one consistent style – APA, Chicago, Author-Date, …

To make it easier for you: use tools!

- Word has a tab “References” that you can use for your citations and bibliography
in a consistent form
- programs as Endnote etc. come with more options