Canadian documentary film-maker, Katerina Cizek, speaks to Joel Cohen about her current project, Highrise, and her latest ‘webdoc’ offering, Out My Window. She unpicks her ideas about modern urban life and explains her directing style.

Out My Window is effectively a global search for community in individualistic times. As my interview with her has shown, by investigating ‘the towers in the world, the world in the towers’ Katerina Cizek has hoped to uncover the clandestine communities driven to the peripheries by an increasingly shrunken public sphere. The mass society, it seems, is giving way to the atomised one.

Her question is an interesting one: Does the concrete jungle actually shut us off from one-another? By visually splitting the world up into its public and private spheres, Cizek has drawn a wedge between the two despite the dominance of the private – she talks much of our homes as the ‘hyper-privatisation of space’. The fact that I interviewed her from the privacy of my own home prehaps proves her right in some regards: I have ‘reached out’. While Out My Window seems to affirm the postmodern rhetoric of alienation and isolation we are all familiar with, it is worth asking if Cizek’s account of postmodern life actually fits this description. By visually uniting these social realms in the webdoc’s physical presentation she has cleverly interrogated the reality of the perceived split. For the most part, she reminds us that we do participate in the two worlds simultaneously most of the time.

In portraying the world through this lens, the role of the author is alive and well in the telling of this story no matter how degraded the authorial role may be. This, I would argue, is the postmodernism of the film, and not simply its rhetoric.

In my opinion, the extensive use of ‘experience’ in Out My Window creates a weakness in Cizek’s ability to challenge the world that she is describing: documentary, it seems, is only a voyeuristic window to reality. The over-emphasis on the experiences of those whose private spaces are exposed in Out My Window casts a shadow on the more revealing aspects of their lives and undermines instances where they participate in, or challenge, the urban public/private divide. In this sense, we are encouraged to assess them deterministically by the environments they live in, rather than what they do in them.

Likewise, from the perspective of the audience, the ‘user experience’ is to find and explore the story, rather than have it told to you. The result, however, is more of an intellectual tickle than the smack in the face I think Cizek was aiming for. Although to her credit, the drab concrete walls of tower blocks will certainly seem prettier for having watched Cizek’s interrogation of them.

For sure, I would be the first to argue that documentaries should not be instrumental to political agendas and she would certainly reply that I am creating a false dichotomy in directorial style. But by leaving a ‘user’s experience’ of Out My Window to such open interpretation Cizek seems to me to have missed a potentially powerful director’s trick. 

Out My Window is a part of the Highrise Project produced by the National Film Board of Canada and can be viewed online.