ATIKH RASHID

“…Animation can show things that lie outside the reach of photography… This mode of filmmaking can bear vibrant witness to things that cameras might not, or could not, or perhaps should not, record on the spot”: David Bordwell

Documentary filmmaking has traditionally been associated with live-action images that capture and depict ‘reality’. The animated documentary challenges this assumption by combining factual narratives with animated representation, expanding the possibilities of how reality can be documented and communicated.

As David Bordwell suggests, animation enables filmmakers to bear witness to subjects that cameras cannot reach, whether because they belong to the past, exist only in memory, or involve spaces and experiences that cannot be visually recorded.

This subject has generated significant debate about the relationship between documentary truth and artistic reconstruction. While critics have questioned whether animation compromises the documentary’s claim to reality, supporters argue that it offers unique ways of representing subjective experiences and hidden histories. Films dealing with trauma, memory, incarceration, war, and personal testimony have particularly benefited from the medium’s ability to visualize the unseen and the unrecorded.

One of the films from this genre that I found quite interesting was Just A Guy (2020) by Shoko Hara. It’s a 14-minutes animated documentary exploring the relationship three young women had with the Richard Remirez, the notorious American serial killer known as the ‘Night Stalker’, when he was lodged in a prison on death row. They corresponded with him through letters, with one of them paying him several visits in the prison and also receiving a proposal from Remirez to marry him.

It’s also a personal story for the director Shoko Hara as she is one of three women whose relationship with Remirez is depicted in the film, though she never met him in person. The film employs a mix of animation styles, including stop-motion, claymation, collage and also uses mixed-media to achieve a raw and immersive aesthetic

Shoko said in an interview that she chose to animate the memories of these girls using dirty pink clay and other materials that are available in prison, like plastic, paper or garbage to convey the idea of exploitative, toxic love which was at play in the Ramirez affair. She said that she decided to use animation for the film as one of the two other women wanted to remain anonymous. She used their facial features, especially eyes while making their animations because she felt that audience would want to know how they look or looked.

Talking about the young girls who were fascinated by Remirez – often called ‘groupies’ in the popular culture – Shoko says, “I realised that their relationship with Remirez wasn’t very different than other real relationships. It was about jealousy, toxic but also nice”.

For me, however, the film also raises the question that critics of ‘animated documentary format’ have been raising (mentioned in David Bordwells post ‘Showing what can’t be filmed’). The critics doubt animation’s ability – given that it involves great amount of human intervention involved like in other arts such as painting or architecture – to capture the flow of real time and space like photography does (in Andre Bazin’s words).

You see a lot of choices made by the filmmaker in the depiction of visuals that go with the testimonies of the Remirez’s female admirers. This adds a great degree of subjectivity to the film that would be undesirable for a documentary’s claims to factuality.

For instance, as Eve, one of the girls, describes her first meeting with Remirez in the prison, she remarks that he looked much bigger in reality than he seemed in photos or on television. The visuals, however, exaggerate this impression considerably making the images too subjective to the point of seeming unreal.

The animation makes him look like a giant, which may put in question the faith in factual presentation that the audience would take for granted in a documentary. The audience, from henceforth, may shift the comprehension strategy to accommodate the subjectivity, which may harm the claims to authenticity desired in a ‘conventional’ documentary.

In another sequence in the beginning of the film, a drawing of a semi-naked woman from one of the letters by Remirez is dismembered in a sequence images. Did Remirez draw the dismemberment or was it the filmmaker who dismembered the drawing to symbolically convey his violent past?

Similarly, in another sequence, Eve shares that during some of her visits to Remirez he had flashed his sexual organ to her. This accompanies the visual of a giant, serpent like phallus trying to violate the woman. This, most likely, is a latter interpretation of the visit as during her visits she was a consensual participant in the affair and may not have felt the encounter as grotesque or violating as shown in the animated sequence. This adding another layer of subjectivity to the visual narration.

However, it’s more than clear that the film was an impossibility to make in live-action format as two of the three girls were not comfortable with showing their faces as they have moved on and there’s no recording of the prison visits by the girls. Shoko has cited the need for a partial or full anonymity requested by the young women as the primary reason to choose animated format for the film.