Resumen de Dramaturgias de lo difuso. Reality fictions, el cine-denuncia de Frederick Wiseman
- español
Frederick Wiseman (Massachusetts, 1930) ha elaborado, a través de cerca de cuarenta proyectos documentales como director y productor, una minuciosa disección de las instituciones norteamericanas, que en expresión del propio autor forman una suerte de historia natural de las tensiones y conflictos que caracterizan el presente de los EEUU.
La forma documental utilizada por Wiseman, aparentemente próxima a los lábiles postulados del cinema-verité, aborda este proyecto como un análisis meticuloso de la vida cotidiana observada desde la convivencia con los sujetos que pueblan cárceles, hospitales, residencias, casas de acogida, centros de enseñanza, atención social,...a partir de la cual propone una peculiar representación, en clave discretamente documental, de los problemas estructurales de la sociedad desarrollada.
Este trabajo, analiza desde un a perspectiva textual, el modo en que el cine de Wiseman no aspira a describir o explicar las claves de los fenómenos sociales que somete a escrutinio, sino que realiza, mediante un particular desvío formal, una suerte de distanciamiento o “extrañamiento” que cortocircuita el impulso proyectivo del espectador y lo interpela al menos en dos direcciones: confrontándolo con la problemática social objeto de representación y al mismo tiempo implicando, en la misma representación, el trabajo fílmico que la construye y propone a la mirada. Las reality fictions de Wiseman se presentan como una forma fílmica que piensa e indaga las relaciones de poder y de desigualdad que dan sentido a las instituciones norteamericanas objeto de observación.
- English
Frederick Wiseman (Massachusetts, 1930) has elaborated, through forty documentary projects as director and producer, a detailed dissection of the North-American institutions that, as expressed by the author himself, forms some sort of natural history of tensions and conflicts that characterizes the current times of the USA.
The form of documentary used by Wiseman, apparently close to the postulates of the cinema-verité, tackles this project making a thorough analysis of the daily life observed from the coexistence with the subjects that inhabit prisons, hospitals, residences, refuges, education centers, social attention centers... from which he offers a distinctive representation, in a discrete documentary key, of the structural problems of the developed society.
This work analyses from a textual perspective the way in which Wiseman’s cinema doesn’t aspire to describe or explain the keys of the social phenomena that are subject to scrutiny, but that executes, by means of a particular formal deviation, some sort of distancing or strangening that destabilizes the participative impulse of the spectator in the represented drama and interpelates it at least in two directions. On the one hand, it confronts it to the social problematic object of representation and, at the same time. On the other hand, it implies, in the same representation, the cinematographic work that builds it and proposes it to the look. The reality fictions by Wiseman are presented as a filmic form that thinks and questions the power and inequality relationships that give sense to the North-American institutions object to observation.
This cinematographic document also presents a distinguished pedagogical dimension, susceptible of being tackled by means of two complementary exercises. The first exercise takes the represented world as an object of analysis and puts the emphasis in the tensions and conflicts that characterize the daily life of the institutions about which the documentary focuses its attention. The second exercise has a meta-linguistic reach that questions the documentary form, this is, its documentary character and its budget, conventions and ethic positionings from which it has been elaborated. The documentary in general and the cinematographic practices of Wiseman, in particular, entail this double exercise. In contrast with the traditional documentary modalities naturalize the second them, trying to make it translucent and of veiling the ideological judgment that they entail, the cinema of Wiseman makes this underlying ethic positioning stand out and subjects them to a scrutiny of the spectator. This semantic turn is done in a propedeutic way that signifies and, at the same time, reflects on the world through the form that displays it.
