Body-to-Body: The Works of Donigan Cumming

Truth and lies. Documentary and fiction. Distance and obscenity. Tenderness and cruelty. Donigan Cumming moves tirelessly to and fro across the thin dividing lines between these concepts. He likes to provoke us, to keep us uncomfortable. A Prayer for Nettie, the first of his films, marks the transition from photography to video. In fact, Nettie has long been his favourite model; here he devotes an elegy to her. She was still alive when he began to film her in 1993. An ordinary still image suspends her life, making her look like a recumbent figure on a tomb. At this point the mourners, captured in their home but associated with Nettie through the editing, can come in. One of them stands out especially -Albert, who hardly knew her. In the midst of his declamations Cumming gets him to perform a parody of a detective film. Are we watching a tragedy or a comedy? The film-maker does not choose. Although the protagonists are in an ongoing performance, a strong sense of emotion is felt throughout the film. While there is no explicit link between these figures, the deed of record staged by Cumming nonetheless brings them together in a virtual community. From now on it is to the latter that he will be devoting himself, from film to film.

Bertrand Bacqué, Visions du réel, 2002 

(translation: Kevin Whiteley)

An alcoholic and potbellied fifty-year old, Pierre Lamarche has lost everything: accused of rape by Brenda, the woman he loves, he finds himself in the street after a spell in prison. Obsessed by his ex-lover, he suspects her of sleeping with the neighbours and taking up prostitution.

Confiding his misfortunes to the camera in the same way as he would submit himself to therapy, Pierre considers himself rather like the producer of a film on his life. A real ham actor, he gets into his stride and lavishes his tale with exaggerations and spicy details. For his part, Cumming directs his makeshift actors, sets the scene and provokes encounters as the master of ceremonies of what he himself describes as a lowbrow novel. Using a complex narrative technique, he juxtaposes on Pierre's tale his own remarks as well as a second, more morbid story, quite distinct from the first and told by a character who a priori has no connection with the principal drama. Here the documentary flirts clearly with fiction: each character plays his own role, including the filmmaker: shrewdly, he collects the scattered fragments of this affair rather in the same way as a detective, enters apartments and leaves after recording on the video tape miscellaneous exhibits - Brenda's knickers... - and pieces of indecent evidence. In its sordid yet humorous dimension, After Brenda reveals an elliptical and explicitly manipulated reality. Disconcerting at first sight, this film is nevertheless a mirror image of Pierre's life: an ordinary mixture of established and fantasized facts.

Sophie Guyot, Visions du réel, 2002.

Donigan Cumming calls Karaoke a "moving still". In fact, the motion in the three-minute shot that this film consists of almost comes to a halt. In close-ups, Cumming shows the face of an old man lying stiffly on a bed, his eyes closed. He swallows with great effort. The camera then moves slowly along his body to his feet, then back to his face. The man swallows again, and it is only then that the viewer notices that this second segment of the shot is the same as the first, only now running backwards. The shot has come full circle, and the back and forth motions override each other. Thus the continuously advancing filmic image reveals itself to be an optical illusion. Cumming also calls filmic representation into question in the relationship between image and sound. When the camera zooms into the open mouth, a song can be heard from off-camera as if the old man were singing karaoke, yet his lips do not move. In Karaoke, the image and sound don't allow themselves to be united, except for the point where the old man, as if in step with the music, gently moves his feet: an ironic punch-line in Cumming's complex film about filmic deception.

Elias Schafroth, Visions du réel, 2002

(translation: Douglas Heingartner)

The city is grey; it bathes in the usual muffled roar of traffic, sirens and horns. Among the bushes stiff from the cold, their branches caught in ice, the camera wanders forward. The wandering is restless. The walker will never be seen. Yet his presence is remarkable: his steps, his breathing, and his onomatopoeias reveal it in a sonic close-up. The subjective image closely examines the branches, marks brief pauses, continues on its way, and explores the alleys of this sort of labyrinth. The images in light suspension contrast with the staccato tramping of the footsteps on the frozen snow. Suddenly the walker stops. The camera sweeps over space. It is searching. The picture is slowed down, almost frozen. The stroller - undoubtedly Donigan Cumming - holds his breath. Anxiety peaks. Then the camera moves back. The search resumes, never to end. The anxiety persists, mysterious and penetrating.

Trip is a short fragment of Cumming's work but it is also a metaphor. That of a frantic and, as suggested by the title, hallucinatory search in a maze from a glacial age.

Jean Perret, Visions du réel, 2002 

(translation: Paul Belle)

An old man has been hit by a car and is now huddled in a bus shelter, where Donigan Cumming has stopped to talk to him. It's cold, and he can't move his legs. He has been married for forty-five years, has two children, fights with his wife, and believes in God's help. All this we learn from the soundtrack of Shelter. On screen we see only wavering, semi-abstract images: the asphalt floor of the bus shelter, a fragment of a hand, a fluttering scarf.

Cumming's work often provokes the viewer with its intimate, even intrusive gaze at sickness or aging. Shelter provokes in a different way, by refusing to show us anything of the encounter the film is supposedly about. A further provocation is Cumming's seeming callousness: he responds to the man's apparently real troubles as if they were a scene from a Western ("you can't shoot straight when you're like this"), and eventually just walks away.

This off-screen encounter, enigmatic at first, can be read as Cumming's critique of the role of both film-maker and audience in the conventional documentary portrayal of the disadvantaged. For a limited period of time we visit those less lucky than ourselves, turn them into characters in an imagined script, and ultimately abandon them to return to the safety of our own lives.

Marcy Goldberg, Visions du réel, 2002

Stammering in front of the lens, a man tells of a mishap. The camera records his story, framing his face from very close to, then moving slightly away, then returning to the original close-up of the opening shot. The story then seems to carry on normally. However, without any apparent cut, the scene is shown to us played backwards, then the right way round once again. The loop is repeated in this way three consecutive times, finally giving rise to a false sequence shot lasting three minutes. At the same time, the sound rapidly dissociates itself from the picture. Although at first the monologue carries on normally when the scene is shown backwards, it is subsequently also played backwards or superimposed on the direct sound. This obsessional loop finally ends with the picture suddenly freezing on the character as he closes his eyes, while the sound, completely distorted, has become inaudible. Wrap is a film that stutters. Donigan Cumming amuses himself adapting the language of cinema to his subject in an extreme way. The multiple repetitions give an unexpected dimension to the recorded document. Taking advantage of the usual codes of documentary realism, the film-maker envelops this fragment of reality with a new perspective.

Christian Bovey, Visions du réel, 2002

(translation: Angela Bennet)

In A Short Lesson, a one-minute film, two sound sequences in off are superimposed on the picture: first of all a dialogue from Sullivan's Travels, in which a film director hears himself being reproached for his naïveté as well as for a certain voyeurism in wanting to make a film on "the poor". There follows an anecdote concerning James Agee, the well known film critic: drunk most of the time, he fell asleep in the cinema and wrote his articles for Time Magazine on the basis of summaries provided by a friend and colleague. During this time, the camera parades its pitiless eye on the face of an old man, examines the roots of his (sparse) hair, the (greasy) lens of his spectacles, his nose studded with blackheads, the lips edged with pimples, before coming to a stop on the mouth. Detached from their natural context, these organs acquire a special status: they become individual entities, seem to possess a life of their own and bear witness by their appearance to their own decrepitude. Forced as he is to thus scrutinize this ravaged face, the spectator quickly experiences an all too understandable uneasiness. This unease, premeditated by Cumming, echoes the conversation at the beginning of the film and also seems like a riposte at those who accuse him of voyeurism. Scathingly ironic, this "short lesson" should be taken as the beginning of a discussion on the responsibility of the filmmaker, as well as on the rôle of the spectator and the critic. 

Sophie Guyot, Visions du réel, 2002 (translation: Angela Bennet)

In his newest film Culture, Donigan Cumming searches the apartment of one of his regular characters, Nelson, who is in the hospital. Filming with one hand and rummaging through drawers with the other, Cumming finds much evidence of the passage of time. Dust, dirt, and rotten food infested with insects testify to Nelson's absence from home, while pictures and memorabilia hint at episodes from his life. From behind the camera we hear Cumming's spontaneous reactions to what he finds. They range from disgust at the mess to emotion at the signs of his friend's aging and illness, and frustration at not being able to find Nelson's chequebook, which is what he is supposedly searching for.

Cumming also uncovers evidence of his role in the other man's life: many of the photos he finds are his own, and show Nelson and other recurring figures over a period of twenty years. From Cumming's off-screen comments (and his other films) we understand that many of the people in the photos are already dead. The pictures act as a kind of flashback to previous times, as well as foreshadowing Nelson's own death. Thus, Culture becomes an elegy in advance for the dying Nelson. But it wouldn't be a classic Cumming work if it weren't also a commentary on the activity of capturing other people in still and moving images. The multiple meanings of the film's title - anthropological, aesthetic and scientific-biological - hint at the multifaceted nature of the impulse to document other people's lives. 

Marcy Goldberg, Visions du réel, 2002

With Cold Harbor, Donigan Cumming uses a minimum of elements to create a powerful anti-war message. At first, the video seems enigmatic, almost abstract. An amateur Handycam moves tentatively around a hospital room, panning and zooming from the view out the window to the dark-skinned old man lying on the bed. The image is shaky, blurred, often out of focus. Off-screen, a radio or television blares the news. On the soundtrack we also hear Cumming's own voice quoting from a general's memoirs: "I've always regretted that the last assault at Cold Harbor was ever made." Even without knowing that the text read by Cumming is from Ulysses S. Grant's American Civil War memoirs, the carnage it describes seems senseless enough. The general's description of the battle's catastrophic outcome is soon matched by the news announcer's account of a more recent, familiar conflict. By the time we hear the words "Taliban," "Al-Qaida" and "U.S. air strikes have killed..." Cumming's critical stance becomes clear. Meanwhile, the camera moves around the old man's body as if he were an object, peering up his nose and zooming in so close that his skin becomes a pattern of pixels. Is he a war veteran? Is he even still alive? By focusing on the frailty of one man's body, Cumming reminds us that the orders generals give always take their toll in human flesh.

Marcy Goldberg, Visions du réel, 2002

Fountain is a film that artfully disrupts itself during its chaotic unravelling.The tired faces, the exhausted bodies, the worn voices that Donigan Cumming brings together like an entomologist exhibiting the finest items of his collection, are an insult to decorum. The damned side of societies that wallow in clean-cut aesthetics and the smooth beauty of consensual advertisement images is at the root of the film-maker's political provocations. His films tell a quite different story. But Cumming's work is also fuelled by the pleasure he draws from a certain playfulness, as he strives to become the organizer of a type of family film (his present film features characters that appear in earlier work). He takes an obvious pleasure in directing them, and including himself in the process. Facing the camera, he wishes for times that would be simultaneously both quieter and more eventful: the ideal conditions for the making of a film? Close-ups play an important role within the process, haunting the spectator with their stigmatised decay. Toothless, drooling, laughing, and stunned faces are the pieces of a human puzzle that overflow from the filmmaker's world like gushing water from a fountain. These abandoned men and women haunt his images: resorting to visual violence to express his disenchanted and fascinated vision of beings on the verge of death is the core of Donigan Cumming's moral dimension.

Jean Perret, Visions du réel, 2005

(Translation: Lia Lambert)

Monument stages the violent death and ceremonial burial of a symbolic object. Three pallbearers are the ghosts in a cruel machine. Mangy parrots, they mourn the death of a man they never knew.

Obsession, fascination and confusion in a world of objects that refuse to disappear.

Memory in three acts. A boy opens his presents. Two men open a suitcase stuffed with photographs. An aging actress opens her heart to lost love and ancient rivalries.

Tender memories of a first gay embrace, of shock and exhilaration-and disavowal-animated against the waves of a deep blue lake. This animated biography tells the story of the artists' first encounter with another boy. This was not the way his life was planned, and he hoped that this feeling would eventually pass. He waited years until he finally met someone who would change his life forever.