In 2015, we were invited by RIDM (Montreal International Documentary Festival) to curate a series of films at the intersection of still and moving images. Since we work in both film and photography, finding cinema made out of a similar impulse proved to be a great joy. Below is the text that accompanied the series in the RIDM catalogue.

A PHOTOGRAPHER’S EYE: PHOTOGRAPHY & THE POETIC DOCUMENTARY

The sister disciplines of photography and documentary film have different relationships with reality, in particular because the first transforms it into still images while the second works with motion and duration. Nevertheless, the two art forms converge in certain documentaries, in which artists demonstrate a photographic sensibility in their creation of moving images. The films in question are shot and edited with a photographer’s eye: whether it is in the attention to composition, the apparent or real static nature of shots, or the relationships established between images to create meaning and emotion, these films retain something of the aesthetics of photography. In this program, two guest programmers for the 18th RIDM, the filmmakers and photographers Brian M. Cassidy and Melanie Shatzky (The Patron Saints, Francine), present several of these works by cine-photographers.

Infused with a deep sense of poetry and a visceral relationship with reality, the selection includes, first, documentaries made by well-known photographers. These include films by the Americans Helen Levitt, William Wegman and Roger Ballen, the French photographer William Klein, British photographer Richard Billingham, the Netherlands’ Ed van der Elsken and Sweden’s JH Engström, as well as Quebecers Donigan Cumming, Michel Lamothe and Guy Borremans (whose legendary work La Femme Image, an entirely fictional surrealist poem, stands as an exception in the otherwise all-documentary program). Other works, mainly by artists who have divided their careers between photography and film, illustrate the photographic sensibility in film (Johan van der Keuken, Chris Marker, Agnès Varda, Arthur Lipsett, Jem Cohen, Ulrich Seidl and Khalik Allah). Lastly, the films of Harun Farocki, Lisa Steele, Miroslav Janek, Karsten Krause and Philip Widmann open further avenues for reflecting on the act, itself, of photographing.

The short-film programs highlight certain recurring themes: family, love and loss, filmed with almost brutal realism (Culture, Fishtank, Bertil & Maggan); the observed woman who in turn observes (Birthday Suit with Scars and Defects, An Image, The Photographer’s Wife); and the strange worlds – either imposed upon or inhabited by – people living on the fringes (Roger Ballen’s Outland, Death in the Port Jackson Hotel, The Unseen).