1968, USA, 16mm, colour, sound, 11 min.
Naturalness wilfully corrupted by inevitable self-consciousness, unwittingly corrupted by unavoidable naturalness, a role played with incredible nuance and complexity by Maurine Connor.
Mark Toscano
Just as The Director and His Actor... (made also in 1968), Documentary Footage deals film process, but as the title indicates, it refers to documentary film and not narrative fiction. A single continuous shot of 11 minutes (a 400 foot roll of 16mm, the measure of many of Fisher’s films) in which a naked woman turns on a tape recorder and reads a series of written questions, then rewinds the tape and proceeds to answer to the questions she previously read, all of which concern her body. Documentary Footage reveals the impact of the film process on the woman who is the subject of the film, showing the changes in her manner when she first reads the questions and when she answers them.