Translative Performance in Documentary Film: Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson's Facing the Music

Abstract

Facing the Music (2001) is a film that performs at many levels. While its primary narrative is about the effects of government funding cuts to universities, and specifically the effect on the University of Sydney's Music Department, the film also weaves other more generic stories about people and how they interact with each other. Connolly's and Anderson's complex and confronting style of observational film-making is examined in the context of this film for the ways in which it ‘assumes' that film can ‘translate’ the details of people's everyday lives into a broad discussion of particular social issues and conflicts. As with all translations, however, some meanings inadvertently are lost and others added. Drawing on Walter Benjamin's idea of ‘translatability’ and Brecht's concept of gest, this paper describes how particular cultural meanings which are embedded within the documentary film, Facing the Music, can be accessed through the ways in which the audiovisual text ‘melodramatically’ presents people and profilmic events. Thomas Elsaesser's definition of classic fictional melodrama, as a ‘closed’ world of ‘inner’ violence where ‘characters are acted upon’, becomes a guide to understanding the film's secondary narratives about the operation of particular stereotypical, binary representations: men and women; artists and ‘the rest of the world’; academics (‘gown’) and other people (‘town’). Using Laura Mulvey's further distinction of ‘matriarchal’ and ‘patriarchal’ melodramas. Facing the Music is described as a ‘matriarchal’ documentary melodrama. The film's selective translation of how people live their lives in a particular social situation is thereby discussed as a further translation into the broader discourses of gender and power relations in a society.