Post-research of The Duel
Master of Film semester 1: Subjectivity
In a research workshop, Floris Paalman asked of us to bring a previous work we hadn’t looked at for a while. My work in question was ‘The Duel – where’s your honor, man?’ (2012).
He then asked us to review and represent the work from a memory of its structure. As this particular work was in itself an exercise in structure for me when I was making it, and the structure is articulated in the piece, it wasn’t so far buried in my memory.
The last bit proved the most interesting to me. Floris asked us to make a number of lists of how a thematic or conceptual metaphor of the work could be seen from different scopes and finally extracting five keywords.
I wrote:
Burden of individualism (vs. ‘group-ism’)
Confusion of masculinity
Refusal of shame
(Self) understanding through alienation
Vindicating one’s worth
Floris remarked that it occured to him that these keywords might just as well have been extracted from Murderer on a White Horse, the first work I brought to this workshop. This was a shocker to me. An interesting insight that leads me to contemplate if I have an ulterior circle of motifs that I need to interrogate.
Reviewing this work and the process of making it is also yet another reminder that in a number of the documentary works* that I have directed myself would have benefited from a more direct presence of me and my subjectivity. The fights that I had with my colleague/host/protagonist Mikkel Frey Damgaard over what about the dueling phenomenon each of us thought was reasonable and justifiable to interrogate revealed a huge difference in temperament and scope between us that would sometimes show during our mutual research interviews with experts and characters in the final piece. I wanted to go in the deep end of the pool; he wanted to remain soundly critical of the meaningless deaths of young men during hundreds of years. The way I see it he had reasonable moral objections to my idea that maybe we’re lacking an institution in place of the duel in the society and time we’re now inhabiting. This was the idea I was entertaining as the purpose of making a thing about duelling.
In any case, I would have liked to have our loud disagreements on camera and to have used them in the film as they had a nerve that would have lifted the film from a playful pretend-examination of a piece of cultural history to a critical review of masculinity, honor and getting by in middleclass Denmark today which is what I was hoping for. I just saw it too late.