The Water is Wide - Intimacy, Secrets and Translation in Documentary Filmmaking

Abstract

This PhD by Practice explores the nature, function, and possibilities of translating emotional worlds within authored documentary filmmaking. It looks at the similarities in roles between that of a documentary director and that of a translator and examines how cultural and philosophical theories of translation can provide a useful framework from which to think about issues of emotional intimacy, performance, ethics, authorship, and secrets within documentary filmmaking practice. I will explore how what occurs in the emotional space between myself as a filmmaker and those I am filming is visually expressed within the film and the processes and power dynamics this act of translation entails. My methodological approach to this research is twofold: through making The Water is Wide, which serves the overarching research question as a method of exploration, and through writing this critical reflection which explores how I approached the film project and what methods informed my thinking and creative practice.

The Water is Wide is a film about my relationship with a woman called Zelide Cowan, who has dementia and what happens after she unexpectedly dies, and I’m left to film with her husband, who became increasingly obstructive to the filmmaking process. I shall explore how my approach to making the film is autoethnographic and, using Steiner’s work on philosophical theories of translation, I will examine what happened between myself and those I was filming with. I shall discuss how a secret - and the performance of a secret - was translated into the narrative of my film and, using Goffman’s theory about the presentation of self, I examine the struggle that followed between myself and my contributors.