Reclaiming the Feminine Narrative in Found Footage
There is no more affecting way to construct a personal narrative through film than with the illusion of found footage. The found footage sub-genre employs what is designed to be perceived as raw, unedited images, whether they come in the form of surveillance film, a first-person camera, or mockumentary. The very principle of found footage filmmaking is that it is unfiltered, and therefore cannot lie. Why, then, does the film change so drastically based on who is holding the camera?
This question is raised in Lake Mungo (2008), Joel Anderson’s faux-documentary which observes the aftermath of the drowning of sixteen-year-old Alice Palmer (Talia Zucker). Alice’s story is constructed through clips recorded by a disparate cast of characters, and becomes a muddled mosaic of conflicting perspectives on one girl’s story. Thus, Alice’s story is contaminated. However, what appears at first to be a film about people attempting to decode a perplexing death eventually becomes one about a girl seeking to reclaim her own narrative.
From the outset, Lake Mungo is framed as a ghost story. Members of Alice’s family claim to feel a mysterious presence lingering in their house following her death. Alice’s brother Mathew (Martin Sharpe), hoping to document his sister’s ghost,sets up a number of cameras.. In oneshot, Alice appears in the family’s backyard, standing in front of the fence. In another, she lingers ominously behind the dam she drowned in.
Unable to make sense of Alice’s presence in their home, the Palmers solicit the expertise of psychic Ray Kemeny (Steve Jodrell). Ray is unable to comprehend the sightings either, adding confusion and complexity to Alice’s story. By reaching out to Ray, the Palmers invited a person from outside the family into their lives in the hopes that he would neatly package the story of their daughter’s death and return it to them.. But, of course, death is not nearly as simple as that.
Things get significantly more complicated when Mathew reveals that he was actually staging the photos of Alice to help his mother find closure. And so the narrative of Alice’s death remains firmly out of her control. Her brother has clasped his hands around her image, and warped it significantly so as to curate it for his own benefit.
Mathew’s ghost stagings end up confusing, rather than clarifying, his sister’s narrative in another way. In addition to tampering with her post-death image, Mathew’s footage unearths one of Alice’s secrets. In the background of one of his videos, we see the Palmers’s neighbor, Brett Toohey (Scott Terrill), searching Alice’s bedroom. Upon seeing this footage, the Palmers decide that Alice must be hiding something incriminating, so they look through her things and find a video of her engaging in a threesome with Brett and his wife Marissa Toohey (Tamara Donnellan).
Though this video seems, at first, like a significant find, it quickly points to something more sinister about the events surrounding Alice’s death. Her death was an unfortunate incident, but it had not been a mystery. Mathew’s videos create something to investigate. And even those are eventually given a rational explanation. So what does that leave? Morbid curiosity.
And because of this, Alice’s personal archive is needlessly invaded and exposed to the world, as the video itself becomes a part of Lake Mungo. Her privacy is breached, and she is subsequently shamed for her sexuality. Because of this relationship no one knew she had – nor did they need to know – Alice’s death becomes shrouded in mystery, but in a way that is not relevant to her death itself.
And so by making this inquiry into her personal archive, Alice’s sexuality and her death are needlessly equated. For a brief moment, it seems as though Lake Mungo has fallen into the disappointing category of a woman’s death – or abuse – gratuitously becoming sexual. It is not uncommon for horror films to extend a woman’s trauma into the realms of the sexual: see Straw Dogs (1971), The Evil Dead (1981), and Irréversible (2002), to name a few. The fact that this occurs in a found footage movie, too, makes the affair worse, as her sexuality is captured rather than editorialized.
On the other handhorror can reclaim the trope of sexual female violence, for example I Spit on Your Grave (1978), The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011), and Elle (2016).While these films do include explicit scenes involving violence against women, they also make a point to subvert this trope by enacting a cathartic story of bold femininity and subsequent revenge.
In many ways, this subversion also happens in Lake Mungo. After the tapes of Alice and Brett are unearthed, Ray tells the Palmers that Alice had visited him before her accident and told him that she suspected she was going to die. More than halfway through the film, we hear from Alice herself for the first time. In the recording of her visit, she sits at a table with Ray and tells him about the strange dreams and premonitions she’s been having. It is her turn to be interviewed for the documentary. The footage itself is clear and unobstructed and undoubtedly is not fabricated. For the first time, we are getting Alice’s story, in her own words.
In that moment, there is a polar shift in Lake Mungo. It has transformed from a story about people attempting to piece together Alice’s story and perhaps reprimand her or others for something that might have caused her death, into a story about a girl reclaiming the narrative of her death. Before she died, Alice took a trip to Lake Mungo. When her parents find footage of her burying something on the shore, they travel to the lake to find out what she was hiding. When they do, they find her cellphone. On it is a video taken by her of a figure that looks like her cadaver. So far, this is the first clip of found footage in the film that is filmed by Alice.
In found footage films, it tends to be a man who records the footage in a female-centered story. In Paranormal Activity (2007), one of the staples of the sub-genre, Katie (Katie Featherston) has been haunted by an unknown entity since she was eight years old. But it is her boyfriend, Micah (Micah Sloat), who buys a camera and films the paranormal activity, and subsequently crafts Katie’s narrative for her. Similarly, in Rec (2007), reporter Ángela Vidal is the center of the action when a group of people are quarantined amidst a potential zombie outbreak. But cameraman Pablo (Pablo Rosso) chooses what elements of her story are seen.
So when, in Lake Mungo, we are finally shown photos of Alice lingering in her home after her death, we know that, at last, it is the truth. It turns out that she was haunting the Palmer home, but on her own terms – not on Mathew’s. Indeed, the images that come at the end of Lake Mungo are the same images that Mathew had fabricated, only this time with Alice appearing in places we had not previously thought to look. Alice has reclaimed the narrative of her death, and now we can finally see her as she wants to be seen.
Aurora Amidon is a contributor and columnist at Film School Rejects. Her column Great Expectations is published three times a week. Aurora lives in the part of upstate New York where it made sense to her when she once saw someone riding a horse to CVS. Right now, she’s probably somewhere watching the trailer for The Social Network.
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