Dereferencing the Real: Documentary Mediascapes in the Films of Carlos Marcovich (¿Quién diablos es Juliette? and Cuatro labios)

Abstract

This chapter aims to present a novel theoretical framework for conceptualizing referentiality in the documentary film form. This theory is elaborated through an examination of the unstable frontiers between fiction and documentary as evinced in two contemporary Mexican (in one case, Cuban-Mexican) films. Both films produce something akin to a complex visual meta-discourse on the nature of documentary reference, so that the framework presented here is merely an attempt to formulate discursively a set of visual processes that have perhaps become endemic at least in reflexive and performative modes of documentary filmmaking. Even looking back to its earliest roots, however, the documentary film form has always been haunted by the specter of reference.¹ From Vertov’s Kino-Pravda or truth-cinema to North American “Direct Cinema,” passing through cinéma vérité, theorists and practitioners have worked within a fundamental episteme that assumes that at some level the desire to re-fer, literally to bring again something prior to itself, is what differentiates documentary filmmaking from fiction. That a priori thing of which documentary film is a re-presentation has various names that have always been the subject of hot debate, from truth and authenticity, to society and everyday reality. Although the more reflexive modes of documentary and its theorization have engaged complex debate about the referential processes at its heart, about the degree of authenticity of the different techniques it can employ, and indeed about what counts as “real” in the first place, the idea of reference to some reality, or actuality, remains as the constitutive building block underlying the formal procedures by which documentary defines itself as a “genre.”