Singing Subjectivity: on Documentary, Performance and Authenticity

Singing politicians: in any circumstance an uncommon sight, let alone in a documentary film. Yet, Dutch film director Robert Oey chose ‘song’ as a means of representation in his documentary film “De Leugen” (2010), which focuses on a political affair concerning Member of Parliament Ayaan Hirsi Ali. Oey’s approach results in several surprisingly personal and credible performances from politicians who were involved in this affair, most notably the performance by former Minister of Immigration Rita Verdonk, in the Dutch media also known as ‘Iron Rita’. Apart from offering a memorable cinematic experience, this method of ‘representing reality’ brings interesting issues to the surface regarding the problematic relationship between performance and authenticity in documentary film. For how can something so completely and overtly staged as a vocal performance be considered ‘authentic’ or let alone ‘truthful’ in a documentary film? This research aims to map the conditions under which Verdonk’s vocal performance can be understood, experienced and theorized as documentary practice. Drawing on concepts from performance studies, film phenomenology and documentary studies, it will be argued that ‘performance’ and ‘documentary’ are not as incompatible as the dominant take in documentary studies on ‘authentic representation’ might indicate. Rather, the dominant conceptual models of ‘performance’ and ‘documentary’ within documentary studies conflict. To reconfigure these conceptual models from representation to performative offers possibilities to provide a coherent understanding of how documentary and performance (both as types of human activity) relate to each other, in Verdonk’s case perhaps even enforce each other, and how they can both be made to perform socio-historical reality authentically. So, instead of approaching the cinematic image of Verdonk performing as a text to be read as authentic, the cinematic image of Verdonk is taken as an authentic performative act in its own right, within a documentary film that is essentially a performative utterance.