• 1 Laura Rascaroli, The Personal Camera. Subjective Cinema and Essay Film, London: Wallflower Pr (...)

1In the last three decades, the authority of the traditional documentary and its aura of objectivity have weakened.1 The idea of “truth” in documentary film has evolved beyond the concept of visible evidence as contemporary documentary filmmakers would rather follow the logic of their own line of argument than the use of a transparent mise-en-scène to represent the world. According to Antonio Weinrichter,

• 3 The concept of “impure materials” refers here to the footage that has not been directly (...)
• 4 According to Bill Nichols, “the performative mode: emphasizes the subjective or expressive as (...)

2The free combination of visual materials from different sources, such as private home movies, archival footage and imaginary re-enactments, conveys a ‘subjective truth’ that reveals the filmmaker’s perception of historical events. From this perspective, impure materials3 become useful resources to tell stories, to develop arguments and to express emotions in documentaries that deal with issues of memory and identity. The best example of this paradigm shift is the emergence of performative and autobiographical documentaries in which the filmmaker’s individual experiences are usually presented as a synecdoche for his or her community, generation, country or time.4

• 5 Michael Moore was born in Flint, Michigan, in 1954; Terence Davies in Liverpool, United Kingd (...)

3Representative of this trend are Roger & Me (1989), Of Time and the City (2008) and My Winnipeg (2007), three urban self-portraits respectively directed by Michael Moore, Terence Davies and Guy Maddin. These filmmakers, born in industrial cities between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s,5 shape a similar elegiac discourse about the loss of their childhood’s cityscape using first-person narratives to reflect on the urban decay and the subsequent redevelopment of their hometowns. Despite these similarities, their films belong to three documentary traditions that are not always related: first, Roger & Me widened the possibilities of political documentary with its blend of committed activism, guerrilla practices and ironic self-portrait; second, Of Time and the City recalls a missing industrial cityscape through archival footage and personal memories, dealing with political issues through a highly stylized poetic voice; and finally, My Winnipeg appropriates real found footage to fake it with fictional re-enactments shot by Maddin himself, turning his fabrications into an alternative history of Winnipeg. Through the analysis of these case studies, we propose to delve into the post-industrial urban experience which the filmmakers convey from a subjective standpoint.

• 6 See Paul Arthur, “’Everything Is Personal’: Michael Moore and the Documentary Essay,” in Ma (...)
• 7 B. Nichols, op. cit., 13, 18.

4The emergence of first-person narratives can be considered as an adaptation of the artists to changing socio-economic structures and political practices: the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s coincided with the breakdown of master narratives, which led cultural discourses to introduce an individual and even narcissistic dimension. In this context, the gradual disillusionment with collective utopias among social activists has involved the evolution of their struggle towards the demands of specific communities. Autobiographical and subjective strategies connect the performative documentary to the contemporary political agenda: community issues replace collective struggles in documentaries produced and directed by filmmakers from underrepresented or misrepresented groups — including women, gays and lesbians, ethnic minorities and developing countries.6 These filmmakers more often than not resort to the first-person narration to increase the audience’s involvement in the subject matter of their films, hoping the autobiographical approach may help their stories reach a collective dimension. As Bill Nichols explains, documentary filmmakers no longer address the audience from an authoritative perspective, thereby changing the traditional formulation from “I speak about them to you” to “I or We speak about us to you,” which expresses a deeper personal commitment.7

• 8 Autobiographical filmmakers like Jonas Mekas, Ross McElwee, Alan Berliner and Alain (...)
• 9 First-person filmmakers like Chris Marker, Jean-Luc Godard, Michael Moore and Terence Davie (...)
• 10 Self-fiction filmmakers like Nanni Moretti and Guy Maddin maintain their real identity in f (...)
• 11 This concept was originally developed by French historian Pierre Nora to refer to the (...)
• 12 Other examples of this combination of urban history and identity issues in the American and (...)

5The autobiographical approach pervades several genres: autobiographies8 can be distinguished from first-person narratives9 and self-fiction10, even though all of these explore the dialectical relationship between history and memory. Documentary filmmakers stretch the concept of truth beyond the traditional understanding of objectivity: not only do they make up characters and tell fictional stories based on real referents, as Robert Flaherty and John Grierson did in the 1920s and 1930s, but they also reveal their own personality when showing the world from a subjective standpoint. Michael Moore, Terence Davies and Guy Maddin portray themselves while recounting their hometowns’ historical evolution. They use different film devices that link their identity to their home cities seen as space-time anchors. They recover old cityscapes to question the changes that have affected them, paying particular attention to their own “places of memory”.11 Thus, Roger & Me, Of Time and the City and My Winnipeg exemplify the subjective turn and the spatial turn that documentary film genre has undergone since the 1980s.12

• 13 Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli, From Moscow to Madrid. Postmodern Cities, Europe (...)

6Flint, Liverpool and Winnipeg function as ‘city-referents’ in these films, allowing the viewer to recover the image of the place at the time of the shooting and as perceived by their contemporary residents. However, they also exist as ‘characters’ since any city is “the product of countless and intermingled instances of representation”, as Ewa Mazierska and Laura Rascaroli argue, meaning that these cities may also nurture a state of mind derived from their previous representations.13 For this reason, Michael Moore, Terence Davies and Guy Maddin articulate highly critical views of their hometowns’ changing landscapes by combining both the ‘city-referent’ and ‘the city-character’: thus, while a single frame can contain the whole memory of a place, both for what it shows (the past or current image of a place) and for what it suggests (its missing image), it simultaneously captures the consequences of economic shifts as visible traces on the urban surface. In this regard, the films explore “environmental images” which Kevin Lynch has defined in the following terms:

• 15 Sergio Rizzo, “The Left’s Biggest Star: Michael Moore as Commercial Author,” in M. (...)
• 16 See Gaylyn Studlar, “Class, Gender, Race and Masculine Masquerade in the Documentaries of M (...)

8Michael Moore’s best mise-en-scène and editing ideas were incipient in his first feature film Roger & Me: the quest structure, the practice of ambush interviews, the détournement of found footage and the creation of his own film character — dubbed the “schlump in a ball cap” by Sergio Rizzo.15 His close relationship with Flint is an important part of that character, since it allows him to introduce himself as a member of the working-class in opposition to the elite.16 The city provides the central focus of Roger & Me and Moore has periodically returned there to reaffirm his film persona as an ordinary citizen concerned about his community. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) include conspicuous references to Flint, recalling Moore’s working-class origin which, along with his on-screen presence, has become the main mark of subjectivity in his films. Although he has never been an autobiographical filmmaker, Moore uses the subjective approach to develop what Douglas Kellner defines as:

• 19 Miles Orvell, “Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation: American Dream and Roger & (...)
• 20 The interview begins as follows: Jacobson: “The impression that one has from the mo (...)
• 21 G. Studlar, op. cit., 53.
• 22 M. Orvell, op. cit., 136.
• 23 See M. Orvell, op. cit., 138; J. Lane, op. cit., 138; and María Luisa Ortega, Espej (...)

11In terms of narrative structure, Roger & Me follows Moore’s political discourse and not chronological order, sacrificing “historical accuracy in order to achieve the unity of satiric fiction”.19 The manipulation of facts and figures, justified as a narrative device, has stirred up much controversy, starting with a famous interview in which critic Harlan Jacobson accused Moore of tampering with the chronological sequence of events.20 On the one hand, Roger & Me has been criticized for its lack of structure and its failure to create a coherent socio-political analysis;21 on the other, it has been hailed by other critics for its ability to convey “the oblique truth of satire”.22 No matter the narrative path, the documentary conveys the local perception of a socio-economic process, equating Moore’s failure to interview Roger Smith with the feeling of powerlessness experienced by laid-off workers.23 Although Manufacturing Dissent (Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk, 2007) recently revealed that Moore had actually obtained an interview with Smith but chose not to include it, which undercut a crucial premise of the film and damaged its credibility, it does not affect the metaphorical meaning of the hunt for Smith.

• 24 P. Arthur, op. cit., 112.

13Paul Arthur explains that Roger & Me is “a melding of personal experience and social history”:24

• 26 Moore may have followed the influence of his cinematographer, Kevin Rafferty, who used the (...)
• 27 According to Merlin Coverley, the détournement “demonstrates how an avant-garde art (...)

14The combination of various types of footage26 follows the logic of situationist détournement,27 parodying all the fake optimism conveyed by beauty queens and television personalities whose messages fail to grasp the situation of the community. Moore’s humour pervades the film, producing ironical dichotomies that further his political arguments: he develops a musical score in counterpoint to the image track, using songs and upbeat lyrics to criticize the effects of urban decay. Thus, while “Wouldn’t It Be Nice” is played over a tracking shot that depicts the abandoned city, including its dilapidated buildings and empty houses, the sequence is intercut with close-ups on rats and extracts from radio programmes that comment on the increasing rates of pests and crime. The choice of this particular song was suggested by Moore’s interviewee, who recalls listening to it as he suffered an anxiety attack when learning that he might be fired for the umpteenth time: its upbeat lyrics contrast with the man’s depressive mood and thereby parody all those positive messages that were unable to improve Flint’s situation.

• 28 The clearest example was the local government project to promote the town as a tourist dest (...)

15The lack of prospects in Flint is illustrated by a gradual demobilization of the community: politicians and trade unionists demonstrate during the big parade that commemorates the Great Flint Sit Down Strike, while believing that going on strike will not prevent companies from locking out their employees. After the failure of the rejuvenation attempts made by local authorities, Flint,28 as Moore and the people of his generation remember it, was disappearing in the 1980s. According to U.S. census figures, its population declined from 159,611 in 1980 to 140,761 in 1990, an 11.8% decrease which can be situated within the wider context of five decades, during which the town lost half its population due to the macroeconomic process of deindustrialization: the population of Flint, numbering about 196,940 in 1960, dropped to 102,434 according to the 2010 US census.

• 29 M. Orvell, op. cit., 134.

17The solutions to this crisis proposed by the people interviewed, including Ronald Reagan, are either migration to the Sun Belt or the invention of new jobs. Moore highlights the absurd situations that the crisis has led to by focusing on several individual cases: a woman sells rabbits as pets or meat; a security guard of the new county jail watches his old workmates now turned criminals; former General Motors workers have been hired as employees in the fast food sector. In the latter illustration, a manager of Taco Bell explains to camera that former industrial workers quit their jobs at Taco Bell because they are unable to keep pace with the hectic rhythm of making tacos and burritos: “Many of them say this is a lot of hard work [...] because assembly work is easy. […] At Taco Bell, every day’s a new day. Every time you turn around, it’s a different challenge.” This example becomes a metaphor for the social stagnation of the working class, which is unable to switch to the service industry. Moore’s sympathy for the workers’ predicament and the plight of the city29 accounts for his personal involvement with the community, which remains the key factor in his conveying the bitter experience of the industrial decline.

• 30 “Dirty Old Town” is a song written by Ewan MacColl in reference to Salford, a city located (...)
• 31 This sentence paraphrases Michael Zyrd’s definition of found-footage filmmaking: “Found-foo (...)
• 32 See Julia Hallam, “City of Change and Challenge: The Cine-Societies’ Response to the Redev (...)

18While Roger & Me depicts the destruction of Flint’s industrial base and social fabric, Of Time and the City retrospectively recalls post-war Liverpool at a time when the city had already moved on a new path of economic development as a business, shopping and tourist city. Liverpool’s former cityscape could only be retrieved through personal memories and images of the past. Terence Davies appropriates archival footage to “comment on the cultural discourses and narrative patterns behind history” and to “critically investigate the history behind the image.”31 Most footage comes from films commissioned by the city’s Public Relations office, as well as from other documentaries produced by public institutions like the BBC or the BFI, such as A Day in Liverpool (Anton Dyer, 1929), Morning in the Streets (Denis Mitchell, 1959), Liverpool Sounding (Ken People, 1967) and Who Cares (Nick Broomfield, 1971).32 These materials are edited according to a dual time frame, juxtaposing the past tense of archival images with the present tense of the commentary, allowing Davies to develop an emotional inquiry into his own memoryscape instead of simply expressing nostalgia for the old Liverpool. This device identifies Of Time and the City as an essay film, according to Paul Arthur’s reflections on the use of archival images in this genre:

• 34 See Antonio Weinrichter, “Distant Voices, Still Lives. Times of a Return,” in Q. Ca (...)

19This film preserves the original meaning of old footage, documenting the past in Liverpool, yet its editing and commentary superimpose a new sense and appropriate the visuals of the past into Davies’s subjective discourse. His Liverpool does not match the real city, but is an imaginary place that only exists in his memories. This intimate geography unfolds on the screen without a linear narrative, because his stories follow an emotional order and not a chronological one,34 as Michael Moore’s documentaries do but for different reasons.

• 35 See Nigel Floyd, “A Pebble in the Pool & Ships like Magic,” Monthly Film Bulletin, (...)

20To give an example, Davies describes the narrative device of his film Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) through the metaphor of a pebble dropped into a pool: that pebble is like the sudden memory that unleashes all subsequent evocations, and the different layers of memory can be compared to the ripples in the pool.35 The flashbacks are not always related to the present, as Wendy Everett has explained in commenting on Distant Voices, Still Lives:

• 37 Ibidem, 167.

21Davies incorporates popular songs to revive collective memory just like that pebble in a pool; the music recreates “a remembered past but also, simultaneously, interrogate[s] and deconstruct[s] that past.”37 The songs do not exactly accompany the images but contrast with them, thus creating a dialectical tension between the image track and the musical score, articulating a critical account of Liverpool’s urban evolution. This strategy links the filmmaker’s personal memories with the audience’s collective experience by arousing shared feelings.

22Of Time and the City was produced as part of the Liverpool European Capital of Culture 2008 event and marked Davies’s return to the cityscape already explored in The Terence Davies Trilogy (1983) — formed by the shorts Children (1976), Madonna and Child (1980) and Death and Transfiguration (1983) — as well as in the feature films Distant Voices, Still Lives and The Long Day Closes (1992). All these films use Liverpool as setting, but they show the city either in the present or in the past instead of establishing a dialectic between both periods, as Of Time and the City does.

• 40 See Eulàlia Iglesias, “Of Time and the City. Return to Liverpool,” in Q. Casas (ed. (...)
• 41 When he took the photograph, Bernard Fallon was a student in the Liverpool College of Art a (...)

26Peggy Lee’s music is played over a sequence that retraces the transformation of Liverpool’s urban landscape: the film depicts post-war terraced houses and cuts to concrete tower blocks, juxtaposing footage of everyday family life in Arcadian neighbourhoods with images of their decay and demolition. The sequence ends with the cold and impersonal cityscape of the new habitat, where people look trapped. Peggy Lee’s song evokes a bright future that was never true for working-class Liverpudlians,40 which Davies illustrates through a careful selection of archival images: an old lady removes a used can from a lift while people stand isolated on their balconies. Davies also inserts a well-known photograph by Bernard Fallon, “The Long Walk,”41 which is part of the photographic series that documents the city’s everyday life from 1966 and 1975: “Liverpool: The Long Way Home.” This image portrays a lonely man walking down Everton Brow amid ruins and rubble and has become emblematic of Liverpool’s urban decay because it conveys the mood of the period between demolition and reconstruction.

• 42 Ricardo Aldarondo, “Songs for a lifetime,” in Q. Casas (ed.), op. cit., 204.

27Davies criticizes the replacement of “a citizen-friendly town planning approach that fostered communication among people” by “another, overcrowded model based on concrete tower blocks, graffiti and neglect.”42 The same criticism is conveyed by Bacarisse’s music in another sequence: the terraced houses are linked to the main theme, a guitar solo, whereas the images of concrete tower blocks are associated with the same theme played by an orchestra. The music expresses Davies’s negative perception of urban change, emphasizing the emotional experience of living through urban rejuvenation. This device explores what Michel Chion calls the added value of music:

• 44 Manuel Yáñez Murillo, “Interview with Terence Davies,” in Q. Casas (ed.), op. cit., (...)

28Davies uses music as a rhetorical device to suggest that post-war urban planning created a hostile environment for community life. He then borrows from Mahler to describe his later discovery of a renewed city: when he returned to Liverpool to record contemporary images for this documentary, Davies felt like “an alien in his own land”,44 but he later realized that life had gone on beyond his frozen memories when filming young people’s new social routines, such as going out at night, and children discovering the world in the street. These children look at the city as something new, with the same curiosity that Davies felt at their age, which means that the city is still alive: it has re-emerged in a completely different historical time. Liverpool was resurrected in the 2000s, which the film announces through the composition of a visual sequence that relates archival images of urban decay in late 1960s and early 1970s Liverpool, referring to the last years that Davies spent in his hometown, with Mahler’s symphony explicitly entitled “Resurrection”.

• 45 According to Francesc Muñoz, “[o]n the one hand, [banalscapes] have a local character, beca (...)

29Fireworks explode over the city’s waterfront in the closing sequence, ironically connoting the triumph of the post-industrial city: Old Liverpool has been completely removed from the urban surface to achieve that resurrection, sacrificing its architectural and social heritage in the process. Of Time and the City shows the destructive consequences of a socio-economic process that is also described in Roger & Me, and its lyrical approach reminds us that urban renewal policies do not consider the preservation of the city’s historical working-class identity: Liverpool’s waterfront has become a banal landscape, an autistic cityscape that can be reproduced everywhere in the world because it promotes architectural features to sell the city on the global market.45

• 46 The concepts of ‘hometown’ and ‘home’ are understood here as geographical and cultural plac (...)

30My Winnipeg (2007) is a docu-fantasy on Guy Maddin’s hometown, which expresses the filmmaker’s emotional, nostalgic experience in the face of urban change. Instead of Roger & Me’s political commitment and Of Time and the City’s social conscience, My Winnipeg builds a whole imaginary cityscape of Winnipeg, thus characterizing the relationship of the residents with their city through the irrational ties that bind them to their hometown.46 This relationship also includes a supernatural dimension that certainly comes from Maddin’s tendency towards fantasy, a clear transgression of the discourse of sobriety that nevertheless serves to provide the city with a whole urban mythology.

• 47 Winnipeg is located hundreds of miles away from any other major city, and it has below-zero (...)

31The isolation imposed by Winnipeg’s geographical location and its severe climate has indirectly fuelled Maddin’s film activity.47 The filmmaker has completed eight feature films and over twenty short films before making his own autobiographical cycle, which is composed of Cowards Bend the Knee (2003), Brand upon the Brain! (2006) and My Winnipeg, three silent parodies of family dramas starring a fictional double of the author. Maddin’s film portrait of Winnipeg is based on his personal experience of the city, blending facts and fiction by introducing fictional characters in real locations: the beauty shop is associated with his real mother while the Winnipeg Arena is identified as his real father’s workplace. The trilogy also explores the filmmaker’s childhood and adolescence through fictional accounts that convey personal memories.

• 48 K. Halfyard, op. cit..
• 49 See Covadonga G. Lahera, “My Winnipeg. El cineasta que surgió del frío,” Blogs & Docs, Apri (...)

32When Guy Maddin was commissioned to shoot a documentary on Winnipeg, he realized that he had to unveil himself first in order to depict his Winnipeg.48 The narrative thereby combines three superimposed levels: Winnipeg’s local history, Maddin’s family portrait and a series of surreal episodes that belong to the realm of imagination.49 Fantasy and subjectivity are constantly used to present the city’s features and events, introducing a city-character instead of its real referent. However, according to Barry Keith Grant:

• 51 Dave Saunders, Documentary, London, New York: Routledge, 2010, 153.

33Following this line of argument, Dave Saunders defines the film as “a work more immersed in the truth of the city and its psychological effects than any by-the-book chronicle.”51 This imaginary Winnipeg is built through the counterfactual logic of “what if?” which invites us to consider all those futures that the city never developed.

• 53 Violeta Kovacsics, “Entrevista Guy Maddin. La lógica de los sueños,” Cahiers du Cinéma. Es (...)

36The narrative systematically twists and trivializes all the stories about Winnipeg’s past, making it impossible to distinguish truth from fake. Maddin continuously re-enacts news items from the local archives: the narrator relates the story of race horses that drowned in a frozen lake, using black and white animation to depict their flight as a legend. The frozen heads turn into visual shapes that stick up from the snow covered landscape, providing a macabre landscape where Winnipeg’s couples wander. The voice-over presents the anecdote as history whereas the black and white film testifies to its authenticity by simulating the visual aspect of old archival footage.53 Furthermore, Maddin lies when he seems to speak the truth: he claims he will try to recover his childhood memories by renting his old house and hiring professional actors to play all his relatives except his mother who will play herself; but the re-enactments were actually shot in a studio set and the role of his mother was played by Ann Savage, the leading actress of Detour (Edgar G. Ulmer, 1945). Real materials, such as old pictures and home movies, generate a sense of confusion.

• 55 The expression “heartsick architecture” appears in a title card introducing a sequence on t (...)
• 56 Maddin himself calls the demolition of Eaton’s and the old Winnipeg Arena “architectural (...)

41The imagination of the filmmaker prevails over the real cityscape: Maddin depicts its landmarks as a “heartsick architecture”,55 focusing on two real and recent architectural tragedies that epitomize the tensions between destruction and reconstruction in post-industrial Winnipeg.56 He first evokes Eaton’s, the main department store, which was replaced by a new sports arena, the MTS Centre. Maddin juxtaposes images of Eaton’s demolition with a contemporary view of the MTS Centre: the same framing emphasizes the visual effect produced by the new building. Maddin ironically mentions that the construction was an architectural mistake when relating that the local hockey team, the Jets, moved to Phoenix shortly after the centre opened. He even finds an explicit pun in the real cityscape: the S of the new arena’s neon sign did not work when Maddin filmed the façade, reading MT Centre (“empty centre”).

• 57 W. Beard, op. cit., 342.

42The construction was used as a pretext for the demolition of the old Winnipeg Arena. Maddin’s affection for this building comes from its familiar connotations as a source of male influence: not only did Maddin’s real father work in the Winnipeg Arena when he was a child, but he also states in the film that “this building was my male parent, and everything male in my childhood I picked up right here.” However, this autobiographical connection is immediately faked when he claims to have been born in the locker room. He says goodbye by urinating in the men’s toilet and recording the act as self-expression with “qualities that are infantile (reacting to negative stimulus with an excretory event), and animal-like (marking the territory that is about to be destroyed) as well as memorial (ritually repeating an act already performed ‘a million times before’)” according to William Beard.57

• 58 The first attempt to blow up the concrete framework of the Winnipeg Arena did not s (...)

43The emotional tribute to the place is developed again as fantasy and as testimony: not only does he use the logic of “what if” to dream of an imaginary hockey team formed by Manitoba’s best players of all times, but he also includes an amazing real shot of its failed demolition with a group of nostalgic supporters shouting “go, Jets, go!” off-screen.58 Being well aware of the historical value of this shot, Maddin repeats it three times to emphasize the resistance of the building. Yet, the sequence shows a building that fits better in the imaginary city than in the real one, reinforcing the film’s supernatural atmosphere through the manipulation of real footage.

• 59 Ibidem, 336.

44Maddin’s denunciation of Winnipeg’s rejuvenation projects turns this film into another visual eulogy for the missing city, in which the demolition of Eaton’s means “the long, gradual slide downhill of a city that had not so many decades earlier been so bustling and full of promise,” quoting Beard’s words again.59 Maddin attempts to protect his beloved memories by shooting such places as the Paddle Wheel Club, which connote past experiences and emotions. He thus portrays himself as the guardian of Winnipeg’s ghosts and hidden stories: his imaginary city can only be a mindscape, preserving Winnipeg’s emotional experience from destruction and oblivion.