Me, a performer?

“How relevant is documentary cinema when we’ve all become nonfiction performance artists?”

That is the key note for this year’s seminar at The European Film College for the Danish documentary “business” in August.

Alas, I might not be able to attend (for the first time in more than 16 years) but the question is never the less relevant. Personally, I work more and more with blurred lines (probably due to my somewhat blurred vision of life), and I have found in myself a sort of fatigue when it comes to well-meaning and therefore often didactic documentaries. Even in films by directors who would rather have a root canal fixed than being accused of being didactic.

It may have something to do with changes and challenges in our society and the way we conduct ourselves in especially online debates: We seem to simply be afraid of being in doubt. We NEED to have a fixed opinion and the result is, that before you know it you will be called anything from a nazi to a naïve or even fifth column “halal-hippie”. And to avoid that, we crouch even lower in our own trenches while shouting louder, with more perseverance, and maybe also with less room to artistic endeavor?

And somehow, it’s reflected in many documentaries, isn’t it? The documentary cinema used to be more essayistic, didn’t it?

Being a “nonfiction performance artist” means – to me, at this point in time and space – a wider range of means of expression. And that is why you here on this page are exposed to something like this (as a reminder to all the douchebags out there re. posting non-consent nudie pics of others - and to the chickens who advocate for less puritanism online posting pictures of somebody other than themselves):

Mikkel Stolt: "Etagevask" (2016, lipstick on digital photo).

(Vaskeklud i økologisk bomuld fundet hos EcoEgo i Nørre Farigmagsgade)

You're welcome to share, though... haha... (jeez)