Similarly collagist, Pieter-Jan De Pue's The Land of Enlightened is a doc about Afghanistan that mixes staged and observed material to try to draw together divergent elements of a nation that remains very much in flux. The film's conclusion - loss can be overcome and limitations can become strengths - is both deeply inspiring and far from specific to blindness. Much of Hull's insights are phenomenal, his language achieving that uncanny sensation of having your own thoughts verbalized in a manner so eloquent you feel you understand them better, as well as opening you to new possibilities and intellectual positions, and the ways in which Middleton and Spinney find ways to visualize and dramatize this testimony are consistently creative. Additionally, Spinney and Middleton use five channels (the original audio diaries, the family's own personal home recordings, interviews staged just ahead of John's death in 2015, and then actuality recordings and Foley) of sound to create a layered mesh of aural documentary elements to go over the film's fictive visual constructs. Its central device has actors (Dan Renton Skinner, Simone Kirby) lip-synching along to the recorded voices of John and his wife Marilyn - a technique employed by Clio Barnard in her 2010 film The Arbor. Notes on Blindness is as much about sound as it is about image. A film about loss - specifically of vision, but also in a wider sense - Notes on Blindness uses the audio diaries of blind theologist John Hull to make a sensory collage on what it means to see, and then to not. Peter Middleton and James Spinney's Notes on Blindness is a particularly striking example of hybridization in documentary, mixing aesthetic styles and formal techniques to explore the cinematic medium's ability to translate thoughts and concepts into images. The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival's 51st edition, held last month, showcased several documentaries that could be defined as hybrids and that evinced both the opportunities and the difficulties in embracing this style. There is something about a documentary where the lines, intent and methodology are somehow unclear or elusive that draws the viewer in. Still, something about the term "hybrid" remains alluring, as do the films to which it can be applied. Look to Dan Sullivan's timeline of the hybrid, and you can see examples from Eadweard Muybridge, Thomas Edison and the Lumière brothers onwards - films that mix and match, slip between or elude distinct classification and invite deconstruction. Hybridization and heterodoxy have been a part of documentary filmmaking from the outset. To what does this compounding or cross-pollinating of elements refer? As writer Luke Moody wrote in 11Polaroids, the hybrid could also mean moving between "observation and instigation, life and art, the actual and possible, translation and interpretation, presence and performance, construction and deconstruction, evidence and heresay, authorship and plagiarism, meaning and abstraction." The hybrid is defined by the in-between, and as a result is it not always clear what we mean when we use it as a classifier. At the most simplistic level, this means the blending of elements and techniques associated with narrative fiction with traditional documentary filmmaking. The hybrid, then, refers to a documentary that moves between two modes. Yet, it's often helpful to apply labels, to bow to a natural tendency to compartmentalize and divide in order to make something more comprehensible and approachable. All fiction films contain aspects of documentary, and no documentary is devoid of fiction. When used as a catch-all term for formally ambitious documentary filmmaking, "hybrid" hardly suffices.
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