Telling Documentary Truth
Over two decades ago, I sat in a hot, crowded restaurant in Saint Louis
inelegantly learning to eat crawfish “Louisiana-style” while I was interviewed
for a job in video production. The job involved working as a segment
producer for a weekly newsmagazine television program. Though I only had
some radio experience and a three-month internship in television, the
interview went well and I was hired. Within a few weeks I began producing
my first “mini-documentary,” an eight-minute piece that would make up one
part of an upcoming program. My assigned topic was “Islamic art,”
something I knew almost nothing about, but I was instantly hooked by the
experience of documentary production.
To my eye, something remarkable was happening.
No doubt part of the excitement was the rush of power—the
journalist’s warrant to pry, to scrutinize, to gaze at the world and breathe it
in, then speak it as my own word. But even from within the restraints of
media convention, the program’s standards of journalistic rules and
gentlemanly objectivity, I could also feel the wild contingency of the genre,
its intoxicating elasticity. Even then I would have admitted the seemingly
impossible paradox sustaining the segment I produced: Islamic art was what
my documentary segment said it was, but also something accessible in a
world of experience prior to my text, a phenomenon with dimensions
seemingly imperturbable by the particularities of my discourse.
That dialectic—the radically polyvalent potency of discourse on the one
hand, and on the other hand the hard, resistant kernel of the Real (Žižek,
1989, p. 47), the recalcitrance of historical-material events (Burke, 1984)—is
the productive magic of documentary. Documentary creativity unfolds in the
discipline of telling found stories. Like the rhyme and meter of poetry, the
restraint of telling documentary stories, that is, using materials often
“gathered” in the context of largely uncontrollable circumstances, forces
creativity. Articulations are made, webs of meaning constructed, new
possibilities called forth.
That was—and is—a central allure for me as a filmmaker.
Documentary allows me to tap into the unpredictable disciplinary power of
seemingly randomly intersecting lines of discourse and use the inherent
productivity of their interaction to usurp what masquerades as “what is.”
Pushing together things that do not come together on their own can
create an enormously productive tension. Symbols that do not fit expectedly
re-interpret one another in surprising ways, unfolding the world as a vast,
open source of novelty and possibility. It is a phenomenon thrilling in the
energy of its chaos—challenging, even menacing, basic presumptions and
because of that imparting a sense of deep provisionality, even as one works
to impose narrative order. Kenneth Burke calls such symbolic configurations
“gargoyles” (1984), and their inherent instability can evoke a kind of a
reverential humility about the ability of narrative to speak a “truth” that can
make and do, yet leaves experience radically open to re-tellings of “truth.”
Situations can be engaged and explored, yet remain open to re-framings, or
what Burke (1969a) would identify as a change in circumference, a redrawing
of the boundaries that seem to define a situation and shape the relationships
constituting the narrative (events, circumstances, those involved and so
forth).
My experience of making documentaries is not that of a passive
observer or an impassionate mid-wife to some kind of reality or pre-formed
unit of the real. The reality of my objects and the pressing facts of the
subject matter are certainly present and persistent. Yet I make choices, I
shape a product, I am part of a way of making statements and revealing
facts and demonstrating significances and impressing an audience, and
perhaps above all, creating a product that has integrity yet power—the power
to engage and the power to transform.
I have talked with many other documentary directors and listened to
interviews with countless more. They almost always believe they have
revealed a truth, or many truths, and they all see themselves as makers of a
film that uses technique to communicate and impress these truths among an
audience. Common among documentary filmmakers, I believe, is the sense
of a personal transformation in which they themselves have engaged,
learned, and “told” these truths, whether about a collection of facts, or about
powerful historical, political or even spiritual truths. A documentarian may be
a revealer, a story-teller, a witness, an advocate, a detective, an explorer, or
an agent of cultural diplomacy, but she is never absent from the process and
she is always a filmmaker, someone who attends to the creation and
production of a message for an audience. The difference between
documentarians and other filmmakers is that to make a documentary one
implicitly and explicitly claims to have found or been told a truth, and in turn
to be telling or revealing the truth to those who will listen.
Objectivity and Evidence
All who are familiar with thoughtful discussions about documentary
film will recognize that lurking in and hovering about these realizations are
contentious issues about the “objectivity” of documentary film. The
relationship between “story” and “objectivity” in documentary films has often
been the pivot point for innovation in approaches to the genre. From the
early films of Flaherty, whose Nanook of the North (1922) included staged
events to show the “reality” of the lives of native Inuit people, to the “fly-
onthe-wall” observation style of films like Wiseman’s High School (1968) to
Errol Morris’ filmic presentation of a multifaceted, multiperspectival “truth”
behind the crime and prosecution of Randal Adams in Thin Blue Line (1988),
the history of documentary is a history of varying approaches to this balance
between the “truth” of art and the “truth” of facts, and the role of objectivity
in documentary. One of the earliest definitions of the genre, by pioneer
documentarian John Grierson is “the creative treatment of actuality” (1932,
p. 8).
Philosophically, critically, and methodologically, some of the most
vibrant and irresolvable issues of the last century have to do with the goals
and possibility of objectivity, our abilities to know and to convey “truth,” and
the ontological and epistemological frailties of language to represent what is
real without the distortion of ideology and bias. Just as the truth claims of
philosophy, science, history, critical scholarship, and journalism have been
respectively and repeatedly assailed, re-evaluated, qualified, and dismissed,
the idealistic ethos of documentary as a source of objective truth or as a
medium of truth-telling has placed the genre in the midst of such
controversies.
Perhaps partly due to the fascinating nest of theoretical issues it raises,
documentary film, though once largely ignored in film and media studies, is
now an active area of interdisciplinary study. There is a vibrant, emerging
body of scholarship accompanying the profusion of documentary and
documentary forms in popular media texts. Much of this work is heavily
shaped by the cultural studies tradition and remains focused by these
important questions that the genre evokes about “reality,” “truth,” and the
operation of power (Beattie, 2004; Corner, 1996, 2001, 2002; Cowie, 1999,
2011; Gaines, 1999; Gaines & Renov, 1999; Holmlund & Fuchs, 1997;
Kilborn & Izod, 1997; Klotmam & Cutler, 2000; Minh-ha, 1990, 1991, 1992,
1993; Rabinowitz, 1994; Renov, 2004, 1993b; Ruby, 1992, 2000; Ward,
2005; Winston, 1995, 2000, 2006). And along with the burgeoning academic
literature on documentary there is now a refereed journal (Studies in
Documentary Film) and an annual conference on documentary scholarship.
Much of this critical engagement with documentary is heavily informed by Bill
Nichols’ (1991) application of insights from cultural studies to documentary
theory. Nichols and critics who follow have attended to important and
fundamental theoretical questions at the heart of audio-visual media
representations in general.
As a communication scholar, I join a small but perhaps growing
number of scholars who believe such issues about documentary are best
approached with the point of view of rhetorical communication (Benson,
1980; Benson & Anderson, 2002; Benson & Snee, 2008; Borda, 2008; Dow,
2004; Foss, 1983; Gronbeck, 1977; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 2008;
Plantinga, 1991, 1997, 2002, 2005; Rosteck & Frentz, 2009; Spence &
Navarro, 2011; Winters, 1966). That is, documentary can be conceived as a
form of rhetoric—messages designed to persuade—and issues concerning the
objectivity, truth status, and representational fidelity of documentary film can
be productively addressed by considering that documentaries are statements
about what is true, and are messages designed to get audiences to
experience them as true.
For most rhetoric scholars such a framework might be obvious, yet the
traditional ethos of documentary as objective yet resists, perhaps even feigns
shock, at such claims. Documentary film depictions look and sound very
much like the sights and sounds of direct experience, and can be thought of
as allowing a privileged access to—and responsibility for—those objects and
events. But as I will elaborate, contemporary criticism of documentary that
relies on the language of “representation” risks framing discussions of
documentary, at least implicitly, as questions about whether the reality in the
film is a faithful or unfaithful representation of the reality outside the film.
This framing can eclipse attention to the ways documentary as “produced
message” works to get audiences to experience its depictions as “true.”
Perhaps one of the reasons a rhetorical frame is overlooked by some
scholars is the general impression that to call something “rhetoric” is to
automatically claim that it is not nor can be the “truth”—but this is only the
case if you hold to an idealistic objectivity that holds that “truth” is a
completely incorruptible perception of reality, a foundation upon which
scientific objectivity may rest. This might be interesting or important for the
foundations of science, but no one who thinks carefully about documentary
can realistically expect this foundationally pristine perception from
documentary film.
Preachers, politicians, scientists, artists, educators, and virtually
everyone else create rhetorical messages that claim to present the truth and
attempt to get audiences to experience their claims as true. In this,
documentaries are no different. Yet the ways that filmmakers, scholars, and
audience members construct or frame documentary film is with an ethos that
it is a special way of telling the truth, with special obligations and properties
of truth-telling built into its practices. In this, documentary is like the
discourses of science and journalism.
Documentary as Rhetoric
In the study that follows, I will argue that the distinctive feature of
documentary film as a kind of rhetoric is in how these films work to situate
their depictions in “reality.” Documentary films establish the common world
of experience as their “scene,” and they convey this scene as an experience
to create evidence for their claims to present a true version of reality. In
other words, in the critical examples I present throughout the study, I seek
to identify a persistent rhetoric of evidence that positions the situations they
depict as of the “real” world, and do this in ways that are designed to
explicitly correspond to and evoke the ordinary sense making people do in
the “real” world of everyday, social and embodied existence.
In sum, looking at documentary as rhetorical may yield many insights
about its nature as produced and perceived, and I will not exhaust those in
this dissertation. Looking at how the special properties of documentary
provide evidence of its truthfulness or fidelity is, I believe, a very productive
line of analysis. It is also at the intersection of the concerns I first identified
as a documentary practitioner.
In other words, my interest is in documentary as rhetoric. As Burke
(1969b) observes, “Wherever there is persuasion, there is rhetoric. And
wherever there is 'meaning' there is persuasion” (p. 172). “Rhetoric”
describes more than “style” and more than intentional acts of discursive
power (an agent intervenes in the social to achieve specific goals). Rhetoric
also operates more subtly in the cultural presumptions and motivational
choices constituted via the working of symbols. For Burke, the very
resources of social cooperation are found in the ways symbols work to invoke
rhetorical transactions and transformations. Rhetoric is what symbols do,
and it is this “doing” which structures the possibilities of social experience;
rhetoric is about symbolic action that solicits cooperation.
Payne describes Burke’s notion of rhetoric as “a compass for dramatic
action” (1997, p. 265). That is, Burke (1969a) proposes that people use
language and symbols according to the terms of drama, and further, that
following the work of the dramatistic terms by which they do this offers
insight into how motives are operating. Burke identifies a pentad of “five key
terms of dramatism” (scene, agent, act, agency and purpose) for
understanding “what people do and why they are doing it” (1969a, p. xv).
While it is not my goal to offer a strict “pentadic analysis” of the films I study,
I am guided by Burke’s insight into the dramatic structure of language and
symbols as I critically engage the films I analyze. Thus the real-world
“scenes” that documentaries evoke are important for what those scenes do:
they relate with other factors in the film to create a kind of experiential
evidence for audiences.
The forms and conventions of documentary production are proliferating
in popular media, and there is a steady increase in the entertainment appeal
and marketability of non-fiction audio-visual media. Documentary appears as
argument and social engagement across media forms from grass-roots,
micro-budget programming distributed on YouTube to its growing presence as
a staple on pay networks like HBO and Showtime.
The use of film and video to influence others is at work in Facebook
expressions of identity, cable news network reportage, and a multitude of
political interventions from Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911 to U.S.
presidential campaign films (Morreale, 1993; Parry-Giles & Parry-Giles, 1993,
2008).
Rhetoric and Representation
As noted, contemporary criticism of documentary often locates the
specialness of documentary in its mode of representation, that is, in the
verisimilitude of filmic images to the materially situated events they portray.
The “special” qualities of documentary representation are often discussed in
the literature as though documentary necessarily carries with it an implicit
promise of objectivity that the film is obliged to fulfill—either by adopting
practices of objectivity, which are ultimately doomed to failure (Ruby, 1992,
2000)—or by explicitly disavowing that it will attempt such objectivity, often
by adopting a reflexive and sometimes very personal authorial stance.
In this study I will show that a rhetorical approach to documentary
makes possible a shift in focus from the presumption that documentary
depictions get their power and obligations for accountability from their
“objective” representational fidelity to the material world, and instead
examine how those images work as evidence. Indeed, the power of
documentary images is often connected to their evocation of material reality,
but documentary texts invite audiences to engage those images in the
context of a rhetorical purpose—sometimes as examples illustrating and
advancing a direct argument, sometimes as a narrative (the story is told),
sometimes as dramatization (generating conflict, drama, interest), but nearly
always with a pragmatic rationale for generating audience interest, appeal,
and effect. A critical focus on the relationship between image and reality
does not help describe and understand these important elements. When the
“real” is presented or re-presented it is as evidence of some explicit or
implicit truth claim or desired interpretation. Rhetoric is a well-suited and
productive way to analyze the expression of motives, and I will show that
attending to how motives are established in the ways “reality” works as
evidence is a particularly apt and productive avenue for critically engaging
documentary film and video. This rhetoric of evidence I describe is an
extension and elaboration of the existing work by rhetorical scholars.
In Chapter One of this study I will develop the theoretical and
methodological context for this approach to documentary. I will examine the
current documentary scholarship that leads me to consider rhetoric as an
especially appropriate method of documentary criticism, and I will consider
the work by scholars of rhetoric as they look at documentary. Building on
this foundation, I will sketch the general shape of a rhetoric of evidence, then
explain the theoretical and methodological basis of my approach, which flows
from the theories of Kenneth Burke. Finally, I will propose a limited use of
Burke’s pentad, which will show in following chapters how a focus on scene
reveals how “reality” is used in these dramatic and rhetorical ways. I offer a
critical approach that shows the sometimes extremely subtle ways that
documentaries wield the influence of truth, but also offers filmmakers an
understanding of how evidence might be deployed more deliberately to
present a social world that is open for transformation.
Chapter One:
Documentary Theory and a Rhetoric of Evidence
Contemporary Documentary Theory
Much of the scholarship in contemporary documentary theory is
preoccupied with issues of representational fidelity and the ethical quandaries
that arise from those concerns. Documentary is a genre that defines itself as
a portrayal of “real” events in the common world of human experience. A
documentary is a documentary because it trades on its value as a connection
to those events: it purports to “document” the reality of the situations and
events it portrays. Yet it is mediated and constructed; like other texts it can
only re-present this reality. And this is how we use the word
“representation;” one thing stands for something else and evokes its
meaning.
Perhaps for this reason, most of the major questions of documentary
scholarship arise in this framework. Are events portrayed truthfully? Are
people depicted fairly? What can we know about the people, situations and
cultures depicted? What do filmmakers include, what do they leave out, and
what does that tell us about both the filmmakers and the filmmaking in its
forms, practices and relationships to power?
Contemporary documentary theory is therefore largely conducted with
this understanding of these films and videos as a mode of representation
(Corner, 2002; Cowie, 1999; Gaines, 1999; Minh-ha, 1990, 1993; B. Nichols,
1991, 2001, 2008; Renov, 2004, 1993b; Ruby, 1992, 2000; Wells, 1999;
Winston, 1995, 2000, 2006).
For Bill Nichols (1991) this is the distinguishing mark of documentary
film and video as a category; he groups documentary with science as a
“discourse of sobriety” (p. 3). Nichols’ Representing Reality (1991) is
referenced in nearly all contemporary documentary film literature and is
described by Michael Renov (1999) as “the single most significant and
influential book on documentary film” (p. 314). The work is a pragmatic
shotgun blast of theoretical engagement with the genre, with a vast, credible
taxonomy linking issues circulating in cultural studies and postmodern theory
to characteristic examples of documentary, its forms and techniques. For
Nichols, documentary, across various modes, is explicitly articulated with the
“historical lifeworld,” as distinct from so-called “narrative” films depicting
imaginary worlds. For Nichols and theorists such as Renov (1986, 1993a,
2004), Gaines (1991, 1999), Cowie (1999, 2011) and Winston (1995, 2000),
the gap created by an implied but doomed representational promise of
fidelity to the profilmic events that occurred in front of the camera is a crucial
permanent condition of the genre,
It is important to recall that documentary is the cinematic idiom
that most actively promotes the illusion of immediacy insofar as
it forswears “realism” in favor of direct, ontological claim to the
real. Every documentary issues a “truth claim” of a sort,
positing a relationship to history which exceeds the analogical
status of its fictional counterpart. (Renov, 1986, pp. 71-72)
Bruzzi summarizes this approach:
Repeatedly invoked by documentary theory is the idealized notion, on
the one hand, of the pure documentary in which the relationship between
the image and the real is straightforward and, on the other, the very
impossibility of this aspiration. Nichols sees this problem: filmic
representation can seem to provide an access to its referents that blurs the
distinction between observing them and observing footage of them—and
therein portray its images as transparently real and “true.” Such an illusion
of “transparency” would hide the work of language that is always structuring
“reality” in specific ways; appearance cloaks itself with reality, erasing its
insufficiency, allowing the inflections of this version of “reality” to pass as
reality as such and erase a representation’s work to produce subjectivity (B.
Nichols, 1991, p. 93).
Nonetheless, Nichols is unwilling to give up on a direct material link
between documentary representation and the life world because he sees that
link as what constitutes documentary’s function as documentary. He posits
both the inescapable enveloping of all human experience in language, and
insists on ready access to a dimension of materiality that somehow has a
capacity to constitute a difference between documentary representation and
the representations of fictional films;
The world is where, at the extreme, issues of life and death are
always at hand. History kills. Though our entry into the world is
through webs of signification like language, cultural practices,
social rituals, political and economic systems, our relation to the
world can also be direct and immediate…not simply linguistic
imperatives but preludes to action that carry life and death
consequences for our physical selves. Material practices occur
that are not entirely or totally discursive, even if their meanings
and social value are [emphasis in original] (B. Nichols, 1991, p.
109).
Yet the matter of theorizing a connection between documentary
representation and this “extra-symbolic” communication remains. Nichols
makes the connection by theorizing the operation of “excess” (141-149). He
borrows the term from Bordwell (1985), who uses it to describe the
staggering profusion of detail in any particular film (think of the detail in any
one frame of film) that necessitates some of the image as extra semantic—
“formal qualities” that “fail to add up…that which remains ungovernable with
a textual regime preside over by narrative” (B. Nichols, 1991, p. 141). For
Nichols, excess is evoked to the extent that a documentary represents excess
as excess in a kind of mystifying evocation of reality as such (B.
Nichols, 1991, p. 144).
While the profusion of photographic and sonic detail in film images
may surely work to evoke a “real world” feel, the ontological approach
embedded in Nichols approach sponsors a range of controversies about
“truth,” and this had a deep, and often productive impact on documentary
scholarship. As Butchart (2006) points out, much of contemporary
documentary discourse is embroiled in controversies around “truth,” that is to
say, predicated on (at least implicitly) a comparison of documentary
representation to a broad range of extra-textual measures of verification. For
example, Ruby describes a series of difficulties around participant consent
given circumstances such as unequal power relations between filmmakers
and subjects, and the radical control filmmakers have over the way an
interview subject’s words and images are edited into a finished film (Ruby,
2000). Winston highlights similar problems to insist on a responsibility by
filmmakers to fairly represent those they portray (2000).
While these are crucial considerations that filmmakers should take seriously, I
argue that shifting attention to how documentary films structure a
relationship between filmmakers, films and audiences offers an important and
different perspective on the responsibilities of filmmakers as they construct
their appeals to “reality”—a shift from what that “reality” is to what that
reality does.
Rhetorical Criticism of Documentary
Karlyn Kohrs Campbell describes rhetoric as “persuasive discourse,
written and oral, encountered face-to-face or through the electronic print
media, that seeks to affect attitudes and actions” (1997, p. 3). In the
context of documentary, filmmakers strive to strategically influence audiences
through the arrangements of words, images, and sounds to create a kind of
audio-visual rhetoric.
Put another way, films do not assemble themselves. They are the
product of choices ranging from topic selection and camera placement to the
particular juxtaposition of words, images and music. As a filmmaker I
assemble my film to reflect my understanding of the events I depict. Though
much of what I shoot is often not under my direct control, my choices are
always strategic and meant to engage audiences with the ideas, emotions
and sensibilities that are part of my own encounter with the events I film.
And as I edit together the material I have gathered, I make another series of
choices, many of them intentional, and others governed or shaped by habits
of thought, feeling and convention. And I do this for a reason; my films are
meant to invite an audience to share my perspective and motives. At their
best, these films do this in a way that suggests that the people, things and
events they depict exceed my perspective and they invite audiences to
consider a truth that is expansive, contingent, and open. Thus my choices as
a filmmaker reflect my own active sense making of the events I depict.
A rhetorical perspective calls attention to messages as composed, as a
set of stylistic choices that are made in order to affect an audience’s
perceptions and beliefs. Rhetorical criticism therefore attempts to
understand the rationale and logic, or what is sometimes called “psychologic”
behind those choices, with the assumption that they are made in order to
persuade. Traditional rhetoric viewed style as reducible to a set of formulas
or tropes, “commonplaces,” available to speakers and writers as a means to
embellish their messages and steer the emotions and beliefs of the audience.
Contemporary rhetoric—and language study generally—takes seriously the
idea that the tropes and formulas of discourse are trainings and conditionings
of audiences, much like a grammar, and the critique of these common
metaphors and reductions can help to expose the ideological templates by
which we navigate and interpret our social truths.
In spite of the presumed goal of objectivity, it seems impossible that
makers and audiences for documentary are in some way immune from these
common features of discourse. To shoot documentary is often to survey
events on the fly, always embedded in convention and circumstances, always
evolving, always provisional, but always structured as motive.
Interpretations and reinterpretations can emerge and shift in the flow of
events, with change possible even at the deepest level. The suppleness and
dynamism of drama is a central resource for documentary filmmakers.
Drama obviously does more than provide a window on reality: it presents
situated action, it communicates motives and consequences of action, and as
Burke labors to demonstrate, it ultimately embodies a grammar of
transformation (Burke, 1969a) where people and actions and scenes emerge
transformed by the putative forces of the physical, human, and metaphysical
worlds. Burke’s approach to rhetoric in a theory of dramatism is therefore
helpful to capturing these elements of how documentary must work in the
strategies and structures of film and with an audience trained, and immersed,
in those formulas of mediated experience.
It is in this sense that I locate this research project as “rhetoric.”
Documentaries are media constructions that are created to affect an
audience and to do so they employ the conventions of narrative, drama, and
film, as well as the traditional rhetorical elements of argument and evidence.
I analyze the texts I study as a practicing rhetor/filmmaker in order to better
understand the resources for making “truths” that are more generous, more
compelling and more tentative. Rhetoric locates me within an academic
tradition that allows me to follow the work of film texts, but also to seek
ways to make more ethically sensitive films.
Although Blakesley (2003) notes that the “substantial body” of
rhetorical film analysis is “scattered across a wide range of disciplinary
thought” and so “has remained on the periphery, especially in film studies
proper” (p. 3), there is a growing body of insightful and productive rhetorical
analyses of documentary films tracing the way these films work to form and
color audience attitudes and perceptions.
Often this work to influence is clear enough and no less obvious to
casual observers than documentary “representation.” Many documentary
films and videos are unabashed efforts to shape the values and ideas of their
viewers, and the impulse to use the tools of rhetoric to critically engage these
films has long appealed to rhetorical scholars. Winters (1966) approached
Pare Lorentz’s The River (1938) using Burke’s pentad of terms to analyze the
production of the film as an instance of rhetoric, with the making of the film
explored as the “act,” the filmmakers analyzed as “agent,” and so forth
(Winters, 1966, pp. 33-35). In considering the “agency” of the film, Winters
used Burke’s notion of identification to describe the impact of an announcer
incanting a list of the many geographic locations the Mississippi River passes
through, suggesting this worked to spark audience recognition and engender
a sense of familiarity and identification with those affected by the river
(Winters, 1966, pp. 69-72). Gronbeck (1977) also recognized documentary
as inherently rhetorical in an essay proposing categories for organizing and
analyzing documentary by type. Gronbeck’s categories see the informational
content of given documentaries in tension with the formal and stylistic
elements usually associated with rhetoric—thus envisioning a kind of
rhetorical spectrum from highly informative to outright propagandistic. Foss
(1983) argued for the usefulness of documentary as a way to teach rhetorical
theory, describing a course outline that paired various documentary films
with then-current books and articles in rhetorical theory. And Aguayo (2005)
analyzes activist documentary as a rhetoric of social change, and finds that in
some instances documentary helps to nurture collective identity and establish
rhetorical sites for negotiating and defining ideological positions, but that
documentaries can also short-circuit activism by evoking a “spectator
audience identity” (p. 7).
The most sustained work of rhetorical criticism of documentary is by
Thomas Benson, later with Carolyn Anderson, in examining the films of
Frederick Wiseman (Anderson & Benson, 1991; Benson, 1980; Benson &
Anderson, 2002). They explicitly characterize their approach as rhetorical,
which they observe:
has come to be used as a way to refer to what Kenneth Burke has
called ‘symbolic inducement,” that is, to the ways in which
humans make meanings out of the forms they construct and
perceive in the world (Benson & Anderson, 2002, p. 2).
In their analyses of Wiseman’s films this plays out as attending to “how the
details of the film relate to each other to form a structure, and to offer an
account of how the structure may invite a rhetorical response” (2002, p.
110).
For example, in Wiseman’s High School (1968), they trace the
rhetorical work of the film at two levels: the film’s structure and the structure
of the social interactions depicted in the film. So for example, Benson and
Anderson describe the way the initial shots in the film frame what will follow.
There are shots of trucks with signs for “Penn Maid Products” and in the first
images of the school “it looks like a factory” (2002, pp. 110-111)—a framing
they note Wiseman described as intentional. At the heart of their analysis of
the film, Benson and Anderson identify the film as evoking for viewers a
double-bind (2002, p. 118). Benson and Anderson give several examples of
ways the film enacts the dynamic they describe,
Teachers and administrators invoke contradictory commonplaces
to gain momentary advantage, remove words from their proper
signification, reduce poetry to technique, and just plain miss the
point of their own sanctimonious homilies
(2002, p. 119).
They go on to trace how this double-bind functions around issues of power
and sexuality in the school as rhetoric, that is, in a way crafted to elicit a
response from audiences: “The film is not simply the repository of meanings;
it is an instrument for the evocation of those meanings, as rhetorical
experiences, in the audience” (2002, p. 122). And it does this largely
through inviting and then immersing the audience in the same impossible
position of trying to make sense of demands for self-restraint and appeals to
sexual allure, or lip-service appeals to creativity in an atmosphere of crushing
discipline and uniformity.
In terms of scope, the extensive work of Benson and Anderson,
attending to the body of documentary films directed by Frederick Wiseman is
the exception rather than the rule in the rhetorical criticism of documentary.
Most recent rhetorical criticism is rather the analysis of one or another
particular film. For example, Benson, together with Snee (2008), edited a
collection of essays about recent political documentaries. The most
wellknown film covered in the collection is Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, 2004), a
film that Parry-Giles and Parry-Giles (2008) position as an awkward mix of
deliberative rhetoric and campaign rhetoric that engages audiences more at
the level of symbolic satisfaction than political empowerment:
The film moves the true believers into the theater to live the moments
vicariously more than it repels them into the political spaces as a collectivity
to debate the issues (p. 47). Borda (2008) offers a similar critique of the
“preaching to the choir” documentaries made in response to Moore’s films,
which she analyzes as purely spectacle-driven emotional appeals, where
“documentary” images are evidence in the confirming sense of a cliché.
Interestingly, her critique of the films, like the others in the collection, rests
largely on the inadequacies of the films as political rhetoric. That is, the films
are held to account by these scholars for the way they interact with the
expectations of responsible democratic debate; while they are faulted for a
misuse of the power of film to work as an emotionally gratifying but
otherwise superficial spectacle, the films are not taken to task for
representational failure.
Overtly political documentaries, perhaps as unabashed instances of
persuasion, seem to especially draw the attention of rhetorical scholars.
Rosteck and Frentz (2009) examine An Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim,
2006) as an example of a “mythic frame,” with the viewer invited to identify
with Al Gore’s personal transformation into a mythic hero of environmental
responsibility. Rostek and Frentz describe the film’s portrayal of Gore “dying”
to his old ways of carbon-impact ignorance, then battling against the odds to
confront corporate and establishment deniers. Objective science is
“evidence” for the crisis that has called forth a hero who tells his personal
story in a way the audience is expected to identify with.
…this documentary text claims a privileged link to a historical
situation and its scientific data; it uses our experience of
understanding and decoding narrative; it engages our foreknowledge
of the signifying power of myth (Rosteck &
Frentz, 2009, p. 15)
An interesting contrast to this rich sense of rhetoric is the more limited
conception of rhetoric in Nichols’ Representing Reality (B. Nichols, 1991).
Interestingly, Blakesley (2003) identifies Nichols as a chief example of film
scholarship with a “strong rhetorical emphasis” (p. 3) and it is true that he
pays special attention to documentary as rhetoric. But Nichols borrows his
framework for this from David Bordwell (1985). Following Bordwell, Nichols
views rhetoric as addressing (1) the representational structure of
documentary images suggesting themselves as real, (2) the logical structure
of a documentary’s claims, (3) intertextual and extratextual appeals and the
(4) formal structure of the documentary—both its own arrangement and the
relationship of its arrangement to expectations for its genre. This is
productive as far as it goes, yet, this is rhetoric in a traditional, Aristotelian
sense that leaves behind important 20th century insights. Within Bordwell’s
(1985) “cognitive film theory” frame, the structural formulas that function
rhetorically are seen as manifestations of human cognitive processes (as
formed by cultural patterns, and themselves in turn shaped by [aggregate
manifestations of] brain function).
By locating the work of symbols in brain structure, attention shifts
from the function of symbols to the function of neurons, and motive shrinks
from the linguistically structured richness of a full dramatic context to
cognitive function, with rhetoric more or less well serving the physiologically
constituted phenomena of the brain. For Nichols use, this notion of rhetoric
helps in exploring what is said, but rhetorical theory as such gets left behind
in order to get to the more subtle, less obvious ways that the texts and
processes of documentary manifest power and are deployed as (and within)
cultural forces. Blakesly (2003) writes that Bordwell’s approach “uses
rhetoric in the dismissive and popular sense (as biased, motivated,
disingenuous, or empty phraseology)” (p. 3). Nonetheless, Nichols (1991)
notes the persistent work of documentaries to present evidence as a filmic
documentation of the historical life world, and in this context characterizes
documentary as fundamentally rhetorical (26, 134-141, 195-197, 231).
Plantinga, (1991, 1997, 2002, 2005) and Carroll (Bordwell & Carroll,
1996; 1983, 1996) also approach documentary as rhetoric, but also do so
working from the perspective of cognitive film theory, a science-linked
empiricist approach that generally rejects much of contemporary film theory
in favor of attention to cognitive patterns and structures as they shape film
texts (Bordwell, 1989; Carroll, 1996). Carl Plantinga’s Rhetoric and
Representation in Nonfiction Film (1997) in particular, is a sustained
examination of documentary as rhetoric.
For Plantinga, documentary is a genre of argument and its “rhetoric” is
constituted in the ways filmmakers appeal to viewer’s expectations about
veracity and meaning based on their sense of genre. Rhetorical force is
enhanced to the degree to which images match viewer’s expectations about
documentary and its representational conventions and suggest a direct
correspondence to things in the world of immediate visual observation.
Another example of a rhetorical analysis of documentary that considers
the impact of the genre on text is Dow’s (2004), study of the 1970 ABC News
documentary Women’s Liberation. Her work traces the way the
documentary’s conventions adhere to the expected forms for what Nichols
calls “expository documentary” (1991, p. 35). Dow (2004) highlights the
impact of the sub-genre’s rhetorical frame of “objectivity” and “authority” as
significant for understanding the rhetorical significance of the documentary,
noting the shift in tone in news coverage about feminism toward a new
seriousness evoked by a 1970s documentary frame (p. 61).
A final example of work that might be grouped with contemporary
rhetorical approaches to documentary is Spence and Navarro’s Crafting Truth
(2011). They observe,
All representations of actuality must choose which aspects to
include and which to leave out. Decisions are made to emphasize
one element and to downplay others, to assert some truths and
to ignore others… what is at issue is not so much “Is it true or
untrue?” but rather “How is actuality treated in order to
sanction the documentary’s claims to be telling the truth” (p.
2).
They attend to the “staging” of truth (p. 25), and the role of evidence in
documentary; “It is how evidence is used in the flow of information that gives
it cogency” (p. 40). For Spence and Navarro understanding documentary
evidence is a matter of attending to the style of its deployment, that is,
asking about the manner in which evidence is presented
(straightforwardly as “fact,” as testimony, with an ironic or suspicious tone,
and so forth). In other words, for Spence and Navarro tracing the function of
evidence in documentary is largely a matter of gauging the epistemological
status the film itself seeks to impart to the words and images it explicitly
deploys to make arguments.
Tracing these various approaches by rhetorical scholars, some common
themes recur. One is the role of audience identification (which I will discuss
in more detail below). Most of these rhetoric scholars who study
documentary do so with Burke’s rehabilitated view of rhetoric as
identification, and are informed by Burke’s general theory of dramatism.
Consistent, too, with Burke’s approach is the central theme that the
documenting that these films do is more than just a matter of data imprint.
Documentary depictions do things with symbols, that is, documentary
depictions become evidence that make arguments, verify claims, move
audiences emotionally, and work to characterize and shape attitudes. And
they do this by locating the messages and meanings of films in the “real
world” of common experience—what I will call documentary “scene.” I also
draw this insight about the important rhetorical role of scene from the work
of Kenneth Burke and likewise rely on Burke’s understanding of rhetoric as
drama as I analyze this evidentiary work in the films I study.
Documentary Images as Evidence
Theory and criticism of documentary as a form of representation, as I
have observed, often concerns itself with whether events are being
“represented” accurately, and with this comes an implied ideal of pure
representation—the notion of a window-like access to things as they are.
Even when this is acknowledged as impossible, the ideal remains to haunt
documentary by its absence. As Cowie explains about documentary,
…because it is extracted from ongoing reality, it thereby distorts by
becoming exemplary, standing in for but also excluding—as unrecorded—
other views and other people (2011, p. 21).
My central argument is that documentary depictions do not so much
work as windows through which we view reality, but as arguments that a
point of view, implicit or explicit claims, and characterizations about people,
objects and actions are truthful. Although they may strive to be ethical and
noble rhetors, filmmakers are persuaders nonetheless: they make sense of
those situations—discern the “truth” then tell it. In the mere act of
representing the world, documentarians make selections about what is
important to see and how to frame it as a true state of affairs. Or in terms of
Burke’s famous formulation about language generally, in language we seek a
faithful reflection of reality, but in so doing we make selections from reality,
and in making those selections we necessarily construct a deflection of reality
(Burke, 1969a, p. 59). Burke’s theory that “drama” is the most productive
framework for seeing these essentially rhetorical operations is especially
appropriate for characterizing the rhetoric of documentary: the filmmaker is
not just representing that this situation exists, she is dramatizing that it
means this and such, or does this and such, within the context of the state of
affairs she is revealing to us! The reality a film presents is not simply a
referential world outside the medium. When documentary shows us the
world, points to situations and events, and tells us “this is the situation,” it is
acting as a rhetorical voice that is documenting a claim or argument—at
times one that is even explicitly voiced by a person or even narrator.
Documentary films present evidence that some state of human affairs exists
and should be attended to—often for moral, legal, ethical, humane, emotional
reasons that we can’t help but experience as we witness this truth. None of
this is to deny the important appeal of documentary to the material character
of its depictions as part of that evidence.
The use of documentary images as a kind of vicarious material
evidence happens across the genre. For example, to generate opposition to
whaling, The Cove (Psihoyos, 2009) structures uncovering the slaughter of
dolphins and whales in the classic form of an adventure story, but uses
appalling images of panicked dolphins and bloody water as material evidence.
In less obviously rhetorical examples, Every Little Step (Stern & Del Deo,
2009) uses audio recordings of dancers talking about their experiences and
videotape of dance rehearsals as evidence of the “authenticity” of both Bob
Fosse’s Broadway hit A Chorus Line and its own storytelling. Man on Wire
(Marsh, 2008), a film I will discuss later in this study, uses footage of the
preparations for Philippe Petit’s high-wire walk between Twin Towers in 1974
(along with photos of the walk) as evidence of the real difficulty and material
danger of the story being told. A very compelling heist story of Petit and his
crew gaining access to the towers is lent credibility and historical actuality
through its impressions of now absent monuments—cultural icons
nostalgically accessible, despite their traumatic absence, through a physical
trace on film, working like the bones of a saint at a shrine.
Indeed, contemporary documentary scholars meet annually in an
academic conference called “Visible Evidence” and there is a 22 volume
Visible Evidence series of scholarly books edited by Gaines, Ginsburg and
Renov, which includes as volume 6 Collecting Visible Evidence (Gaines &
Renov, 1999). In the series, the status of documentary images as evidence
is often questioned on the basis of representational failure. The series
description notes
Public confidence in the "real" is everywhere in decline. The
Visible Evidence series offers a forum for the in-depth
consideration of the representation of the real, with books that
engage issues bearing upon questions of cultural and historical
representation, and that forward the work of challenging prevailing
notions of the "documentary tradition" and of nonfiction culture
more generally.
In other words, what is at stake is the renegotiation of what sort of
evidence is constituted by documentary, but through the lens of
representation. Gaines notes in her introduction to volume 6 that the essays
struggle with “the impossible claim to indexicality, giving us a compendium of
cases in which the special indexical relation is in question” (1999, p. 6). The
articles in the edited work (Gaines & Renov, 1999), as is common in the
literature of documentary theory, note the multitude of ways that
documentary works are inadequate to the “truths” of the spatio-temporal
events they record, as well as being inadequate to the incalculable levels of
socio-cultural meanings and power relationships embedded in human events.
Hence the “special-ness” of indexical relation collapses, as Gaines noted.
In a more recent example of documentary “evidence” cast as representation,
Bill Nichols considers issues of authenticity surrounding reenactment in
documentary films, claiming that “when the distinction between reenactment
and enactment goes unnoticed or unrecognized, the question of deceit arises”
(B. Nichols, 2008, p. 73) because “the reenactment forfeits its indexical bond
to the original event” (B. Nichols, 2008, p. 74). What is interesting here is
that unacknowledged reenactment is condemned not so much for the rupture
of the social rules that audiences expect honored as part of their expectations
for the genre (the production practices that are commonly understood to
constitute documentary), but it is condemned instead for its epistio-ontic
rupture through spacio-temporal distortion; “truth” is positioned as
dependent to the material correspondence between this event in a particular
time and place and images that are physically generated by it. Nichols goes
on to note ways filmic depictions of actual historical events can work to
disrupt narrative simplifications—for example, he observes that attempts by
the characters in Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003) to re-story past
events in later interviews are revealed for what they are in the obvious
contrast and temporal dislocation between adult selves speaking while
images of very different seeming child-selves are portrayed from home
movies. This sort of actual footage is contrasted by Nichols with reenactment
footage which works, in his words, as “rhetorical tropes” that often “enhance
or amplify” as pathos or logos (B. Nichols, 2008,
p. 88). Nichols seems to be insightfully claiming special consequences
flowing from the resistances to narrative flexibility in observational footage of
events. But he also seems to find a special onto-epistemic evidentiary status
in this resistance. That is, the “truth” of the images lies not in their function,
but in their ontic status.
The Rhetoric of Evidence
Nonetheless, Nichols also, elsewhere, goes far in treating the
ontological and epistemological status of documentary images as evidence
from a rhetorical perspective, building his discussion in part by noting
Aristotle’s treatment of the “artistic” and “inartistic” proofs of rhetoric:
artistic proofs are those created by the speaker, such as building one’s ethos
and moving the audience with pathos, and inartistic proofs are those found
and used by the speaker, such as witness testimony and statistics. Nichols
notes that although inartistic proofs are not created by the filmmaker/rhetor,
the interpretation of this factual evidence may be very much in dispute…
These types of evidence lie outside the reach of the orator or filmmaker’s
artistic power to create, although very much within her power to evaluate or
interpret (2001, p. 50).
While Nichols goes on then to explain various ways documentary images can
be incorporated “artistically,” it is clear that he considers documentary
evidence as yet part of the “inartistic” category, and the proof it offers as
being provided by the logic and science of the outside world. In considering
the rhetoric of evidence in documentary, I would want to push Nichols
position yet farther: When a filmmaker presents “witness testimony,” how
much of that proof can be said to be “found?” Through question selection,
interpersonal interaction, identity performance and so forth, interviews entail
the co-creation of meanings by the interviewer, the interview subject, specific
contexts, situated social meanings, and particular ideas and messages
(Denzin, 2003; Holstein & Gubrium, 1995; Jorgenson, 1991). There is no
aspect of a documentary interview free of construction. And further,
filmmakers use close-up shots on the face of the interviewee—or perhaps
instead more “objective” feeling medium shots. Interviews are edited, and
interposed with footage of other things, the testimony of other interviewees,
or even narration. Further, that edited interview is presented at a certain
point in an ongoing and constructed narrative/argument for a certain
dramatic/rhetorical effect, and the testimony thereby interprets images that
have already been presented or frames images that will be presented.
In asserting a rhetoric of evidence for documentary film, I am arguing
that there are a set of rhetorical choices and strategies that contextualize the
presentation of what is usually considered objective and material “data” from
the “real” world. This is not only true of elicited interviews as testimony, but
also legal documents, scientific data, and photographically real material
objects and situations. When they are presented as “proof,” it is within the
ongoing rhetorical rationale and master strategy of the film: sometimes that
is an explicit argument or political cause, sometimes that is an implicit or
disguised agenda, or as with other forms of rhetoric, sometimes the
filmmaker may not even be aware of her biases in the constructions and
selections she makes. When a documentary film says “this is true” or offers
an image and says “this is real,” it offers it as proof of something that is at
issue or open to interpretation: I argue that there is a rhetoric in
documentary style that constructs these events and images as evidence to be
used in forming impressions and judgments by an audience.
Yet for an audience, documentary “proof” is more than an ontically
certified re-presentation of words or images. The images, sounds, and
testimonies that are depicted are done so as part of a created message and
as a kind of mediated experience that has been shaped with a tremendous
amount of control in both its creation and its experience by the viewer. How
a viewer experiences the “proof” of a documentary image is shaped by the
power of photographic realism, the incredible technological control over how
the image is created and presented found in film, by all of the conditioning
and training of audience members in narrative and cinematic codes, and by
the special (although sometimes specious) status of documentary film as an
art-form devoted to revealing “truth.” In this sense I am arguing that there
is implicit “rhetoric of evidence” in documentary that I seek to investigate.
At the most basic level, I am suggesting that documentary operates
more like a narrative or drama than it does a speech, legal or scientific tract,
or journalistic report. The evidence of the real, material world that is
presented functions as proof of this or that claim or premise in an ongoing
narrative and dramatic structure—whether it is the claims of the
documentarian, witnesses, authorities, or the rhetorical argument and
agenda that the documentary as a whole might embody (such as climate
change is dangerous, bullying is unacceptable, the war is wrong, bankers
caused the economic crisis, and so forth). As Walter Fisher (1984) argues,
when dealing with the rhetoric of narrative form, we have to abandon what
he calls the “rational world” paradigm that imputes logical, scientific
rationality to users and audiences of narrative. People, he argues, judge the
truth of a narrative on the basis of “probability” and “fidelity: Is what the
story presents likely? Does it ring true? In other words, even when
experiencing fictional narratives, audience members seek certain kinds of
truths, especially ethical truth, and their criteria for judging the truths of
narratives are not drawn from scientific or logical training, but from narrative
training: Does this make sense in the context of the story that is being told
and does this square with my larger stories about how the world is? Fisher
notes that his proposal for a “narrative paradigm” for rhetorical studies is
grounded in Burke’s master critique of language and his dramatistic
perspective. For documentary studies, it seems a very easy argument to
make that documentaries are more like drama than any other kind of
narrative structure, and that documentaries implicitly and explicitly employ
the resources of drama, and by extension cinema, in how they tell a story,
make an argument, and organize themselves for effect. That is, evidence
becomes meaningful in the context of its use, in the way it shapes how a
situation is understood. Documentary depictions, in and of themselves, could
never be expected to “mean” the unvarnished complete reality of the
situations they represent because film experience and embodied experience
are different. The filmic context already alters the rhetorical situation of the
film in comparison with pro-filmic events. Every edit further alters the
relationship of the film to pro-filmic events. The function of documentary
images as evidence takes place in the new rhetorical situation constituted by
an encounter with the text.
So images can evoke a connection to the material, and make appeal to
that connection as offering evidence, all the while staying firmly within the
field of argument/ persuasion/ rhetorical engagement. Further, casting a
documentary as representation can itself be a rhetorical move raising the
stakes of documentary from argument to good or evil (arguments may be
analyzed and refuted, but not so easily condemned with the force and
satisfaction of the moral certainty available with the ethical transgression the
frame of representation makes possible). In the case then, for example, of
Nichols’ (2008) analysis of the film Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003),
the ways he believes the temporal dislocations of footage from different
periods work to attest to the murkiness of truth can be understood instead to
function rhetorically as structuring a film that wavers back and forth between
the innocence and guilt of its subjects, therein marking the “objective” voice
of the film and its filmmakers.14
It is never just a documentary’s “indexical” status or promise of
representation that executes its rhetorical work to evoke the real. As I have
argued, we make meaning dramatistically. An image works as evidence of
the real when it is used in a way that evokes the real world of our
experience, and as Heidegger would remind us, experience of the world and
its things—our perception—is always received in a context of meaning and
intention. So while our reception of filmic sound or image as indexical
(Peirce, 1931-58), or its evocative homology with embodied perceptual
experience (Sobchack, 1992) is important for documentary, it is also a staple
of Hollywood entertainment that these same factors can work in obviously
fictional ways. Documentary film becomes evidence when it helps us make
sense of its depictions as real situations. The central argument of this study
is that we better understand the function of documentary depictions as
evidence when we observe how they meaningfully structure what they depict
14 See below, Chapter 4, for an example of how film Jesus Camp (Ewing & Grady,
2006) is an example scene structuring evidence of a film’s “objectivity.”
in terms of real-world motivation. While this evidence relies on the audio and
visual verisimilitude of film sounds and images to our everyday embodied
experience, they must become dramatistically meaningful. And in terms of
dramatistic structure, the visual evidence of documentary is deployed
through scene.
What emerges then is an invitation to trace the various rhetorical
forms by which documentary uses its scenic depictions to structure and
execute the truth claims of films (as evidence). In some cases, this is indeed
conveyed according to a rhetoric of representation by framing the
representation as one of “here is the reality.” In other cases, however, and
often enough dramatically so, the film implicitly or explicitly points and says
“here is the proof!” These kinds of arguments are apparent when a Michael
Moore or a Spike Lee or a Werner Herzog cut from an interview to show us a
picture—“here is evidence this person has lied”, or, sometimes, has “told the
truth!” My attention then is focused on how documentary films constitute
their depictions as “true” or “real,” in what context and to what effect, and
following what patterns. The relationship of documentary film depictions to
things and events in the “real” world of everyday experience begs questions
of how truth is constituted as truth and how film texts position their
depictions as real. In short, documentary film does not just re-present the
world, it creates documents about what its objects mean and thereby argues
cases about why they matter.
A Burkean Approach to Documentary
As with virtually all the rhetoric scholars who study documentary, I find
the critical insights and vocabulary of Kenneth Burke particularly helpful to
my project examining documentary film. Burke’s rehabilitation of rhetoric
within the context of a more general theory of communication—symbolic
interaction—allows me to treat documentary very broadly as both produced
by filmmakers and interpreted by audiences, and enables me to trace the
ways sense-making is at work in film, but also contemporary culture more
generally. That is, in order to make meaning and carve a sensible order out
of the materials of documentary, a filmmaker and audience member must
somehow share a common language of human events and significant
experience, and it is in that basic communicational necessity that Burke
builds his theories of rhetoric as dramatism.
Burke’s development of dramatism as a method of critique evolved
across 60 years and a dozen or so books. Basically, Burke explores the vast
anthropological terrain he calls “symbolic action” examining the foibles and
pitfalls of the “symbol using animal” (1966, p. 3) One of the chief
contributions of Burke’s huge corpus of critical work and theorizing is the
critical vocabulary he forges to describe the intricate rhetorical workings of
everything from poetry, drama, literature, psychology, philosophy, scientific
and political tracts. There are three basic concepts central to the dramatistic
method that I would like to treat in more detail here, as they help to
illustrate how and why this method can be useful to the critique of
documentary film: the “dramatistic” frame, rhetoric as identification, and
motivated action.
Dramatism
Dramatistic method advances drama as the central metaphor of this
critical system. In short, Burke’s (1969a) criticism argues that all language
use, or “symbolic action,” can be looked at as drama. About this, Burke is
quite literal: we literally dramatize the items, relationships and events of our
lives in communicating them to others. By reading texts and social events as
drama, we employ a basic and common interpretive frame that reveals the
human and basically rhetorical qualities of communication. In other words,
looking at symbol use as drama attends to the meanings the speakers or
authors are trying to advance, and the kinds of results or changes they
expect as a result. Central to drama, Burke (1969a) argues, is the idea of
transformational language. We dramatize with a transformational
purposiveness, with a language of action intended to transform the character
of situations, items and events in our world, and with the expectation that
things can indeed be rhetorically transformed. Given this anthropological
context for symbol use, it seems impossible to conceive that film audiences
can experience filmic images without the experience and expectation that
their views of the world will be dramatically transformed, regardless of the
objectivity of the filmmaker or photographic veracity of the image itself.
Dramatistic method, therefore, involves tracking the transformational
qualities of the symbolic acts within a text, with an eye toward discerning
what effects are intended and what effects are likely to result from featuring
this kind of situation or action or another. Clearly this way of characterizing
the rhetoric of a text is appropriate and productive for documentary; even if
a documentary seeks to reveal an objective truth, its materials are selected
and presented with a goal of dramatizing the content. Or as Paul Rotha
(1952) describes, echoing Grierson, documentary is the “creative
dramatisation of actuality” (p. 105). The basic grammar and rhetoric of
documentary works then to transform meanings, perceptions, and even
actions as a result of the depictions it structures. To whatever extent
documentary waivers from purely neutral and objective observation and
recording—and in both camera choices and the selection and ordering of
materials it must—we are in the presence of a functional dramatism, and
thereby also rhetoric. In short, the transformational grammar of drama itself
dictates that the material is organized and presented as a series of such
transformational moments, however implicit or semi-conscious such a
scheme may be.
Identification
Burke’s theory of transformational language and his dramatistic
approach led him to reconsider the traditional art of rhetoric (1969b). Burke’s
critique moves the traditional Aristotelian concept of rhetoric from a rhetoric
of persuasion as a kind of soft logic to a “rhetoric of identification.” In short,
the implicit rhetorical agenda of appeal, Burke argues, is to invite the
audience member to identify with the ideas, character, or purposes of the
rhetor/author, and to participate in the drama she is creating in her language
choices. Burke’s shift from the cognitive and logical operations assumed by
the “rational world paradigm” to the audience driven psychological and
sociological assumptions of identification revolutionized the study of rhetoric
in the communication field from the 1950s forward (M. H. Nichols, 1952).
Burke’s expansion of rhetoric to include poetic and narrative genres is part of
the impetus to see rhetoric outside the traditional bounds of public and
political talk, and thereby founded the interest of rhetoric scholars in
documentary and other forms of film and literature.
For Burke the transformational language and imagery of our dramas
and dramatisms, including literature, film, scientific tracts, philosophical
arguments, and so forth, proceed via “identification.” That is, the appeal of
such texts operates by asking a viewer to identify her or his concerns,
character and motivations, with those of the speakers or actors in a text—
just as a hero of a stage play, novel or film solicits the basic identification of
the audience member to share in the same motives and heroic actions, even
if only while engaging the text. “Factual” works, no less than other texts,
also solicit alignment with the “motives” expressed in the text. Again, in
Wiseman’s High School, Benson argues that we come to understand the
oppression of the school and of the administrators through our identification
with the students’ alienation and repression. In Lee’s Four Little Girls (1997),
we understand a father’s testimony about his daughter in an identification
with his pain and anguish. And less obviously, we are invited by the design
of the text to participate in Lee’s own revulsion at the racism of a
businessman, and share in Lee’s horror at the images of black men being
hanged by Klansmen. None of these scripts, images, or scenes are in the
text by accident; they all act on us, and identification as a concept of rhetoric
says that they work by getting us to respond with the basic motivations as
they are constructed, depicted, and played out in the drama. Put another
way, the text structures a subject position for us according to the same terms
by which we organize the other social identifications of our lives. A
documentarian solicits and directs the identifications of viewers (or constructs
them in making sense of the field footage as it is gathered and edited) via
symbols structured as dramatic action.
In short, when looking for the basic or elemental rhetorical agenda in
any work, Burke’s theory suggests that the dramatic structure of a text
implicitly works to seek the identification of the audience, and so the text will
be rhetorically organized to achieve this. Identification means potentially
more than just “relating” to a topic or claim or person, but seeing one’s
identity—especially as a moral agent—bound up with the conflict of the
drama, its goods and evils, and its outcomes. When arguing, as I have, that
the organization and composition of documentary film must be implicitly
rhetorical, this assumption helps make the point that documentaries do, like
drama, solicit the identification and motivational participation of audience
members. The critical examples I offer in this dissertation are only some of
the endless examples.
Motivated Action
According to Burke (1969a), the basic unit of dramatistic analysis, or
drama itself for that matter, is “motivated action.” Acts, as humans interpret
them (most apparently in drama), are motivated. People act with purposes
and expect results, and we understand human actions in terms of their
motives. Drama, in Burke’s analysis, is therefore a semiotic of motivated
actions, wherein a coherent message is forged and understood by the
development—and transformation—of motives across the episode.
Burke’s theories of “motive” are complex and often confusing, but
comprise the heart of his work in A Grammar of Motives (1969a) and A
Rhetoric of Motives (1969b), The difficulty of his theory is in a great part due
to our commonplace concept of motives as psychological intentions or
contents of individual purposes. For Burke, “motives” are inherently
linguistic, verbal, symbolic constructs; again, we are looking at motivated
action as the basic unit of a dramatic text or script. In a drama, what is
depicted is “action,” and the rhetoric comes in how we are asked to interpret
or read the motive for that action, that is, how we identify positively or
negatively with that motive as depicted.
For my own purposes, I wish to avoid the entire set of complexities
and confusions about reading “motive” and imputing them to actors or
agents. My own interest here is in recognizing that the text of a
documentary contains the elements of a drama, and that in a drama,
everything is “active” in promoting the interpretation the drama is advancing
and in inviting the identification of the audience to align with that
interpretation. Importantly for my purposes, this includes the “scene” that
the drama presents as the physical, environmental, and/or historical-social
context for the action. A “scene” in a drama is not a reality outside the
drama, it is a construction that functions as part of the drama; The
dramatistic scene is itself “motivated action.” In looking at documentary
rhetoric and its uses of “reality,” I am saying we must look at what the scenic
depictions do. I am asking how the scene acts to accomplish the dramatic
goals and rhetorical identifications of the documentary.
The relevance of this for reading or producing a documentary is
considering what situation is presented, or to present, at a particular point in
the script. It is with the sense that this scenic image or content does
something to the viewer’s perceptions or ability to understand the next event
of the documentary, whether that be another situation that juxtaposes
content, a comment from a witness or expert, or a depiction of someone
doing something. When Pare Lorentz shows us The River (1938), the river is
the scene for the film, but it acts, working with a verbal script and a series of
depictions that together dramatize a set of meanings with a point of view and
expected persuasive results. As Benson (1980) shows, in Frederick
Wiseman’s High School (1968), the scene of the high school and the actions
of the administrators and the effects on the students are intended to be
interpreted with the basic motives of alienation and repression.
Hence, within the context of drama, even purely scenic, visual content,
does something. It becomes context that shapes audience perceptions and is
motivated action that the viewer must interpret. Furthermore, the “scene”
does transformative work across the events and interpretive interactions of a
drama or documentary: The “River” we end up with isn’t the same “river” we
start with; the “High School” as experienced as a cauldron of alienation and
repression isn’t the same “high school” we are shown in the beginning.
Scenes of a drama are active in the meanings and interpretations that are
made, and they themselves are transformed by the actions and events shown
to take place in them and in relation to them.
In the dissertation that follows, I propose to use the idea of an active,
dramatistic “scene” in a very limited way in order to demonstrate some of the
facets of what I am calling the rhetoric of evidence in documentary film.
Burke famously proposed a “pentad” of dramatic action: within a given
drama, motivated action derives from five common elements or characters:
the scene, the agent, the actions themselves, the purpose (or why of it), and
the agency (the how of what is done). Together these five elements and
their combinations or movements (from scene to act, from agent to act, etc.)
constitute the basic grammar of transformations possible in a dramatic text.
While the decades of critical uses and abuses of this scheme in rhetorical
analysis are interesting, and the issues about this scheme are many, for my
purposes these key elements of drama are simply convenient ways of making
the point that the “scene” as depicted in a documentary acts to execute the
rhetorical purposes and choices of the text. It seems uncontroversial that
these elements are basic to drama, and they have been likened to the
parallel elements of the journalistic story: Who, What, Where, When, and
How (and Why?). In the critical work that follows, I will argue that
documentary scene evokes realistic and objectivist connections to the “real
world,” real events and material reality, yet within the dramatic action of the
documentary itself, scene is an active and even dominating element of the
drama, serving to structure the other elements, foster identification, and
work as evidence to “prove” the truth of the documentary claims. In
particular, I will show that “scene” is crucial for the work that documentaries
do as documentaries. Scene is the work that documentaries do to set the
“real world” as their context. And the notion of transformation is essential
here. Documentary scene interacts with the other elements of a film’s
drama—the acts it depicts, its characters, the methods that accomplish the
act, the reasons we are shown—to shape an audiences experiences. Put
simply, the criteria of a film’s value do not reside in the fidelity of its
representations to external profilmic events, but are relocated to the film’s
impact on its audience, and hinge instead on its credibility as a drama, or
story. So a documentary is “true” when it solicits cooperation and constructs
a credible course of action as an option within a larger field of possibility.
That is, it is true when it constructs space for a range of alternatives as valid
options and imagines power relations as open. Compare this with
right/wrong moralizing rhetoric, which tends to insist on a binary construction
of power. This rhetorical ethic then sketches a proscription and a
prescription: avoid masking rhetoric as fact, and invite identification.
In the chapters that follow, I propose to examine documentaries in
order to demonstrate the basic point that the real world of events and
material objects can be considered the “scene” of the dramatic action in
documentary films, and in the examples I have chosen, the importance of
scene is such that it overwhelms or dominates the other elements of the
drama and leads us to certain kinds of interpretations and experiences. To
make this point, I use Burke’s pentad of dramatic elements—again as a
matter of convenience rather than analysis—to show that in particular
documentaries, scene can be shown to dominate and affect “act,” for
instance, or “agent,” or “agency,” or “purpose.” The following chapters
explore documentaries that are interesting cases of rhetoric. In each case, I
will argue that exposing that rhetoric and the particular “rhetoric of evidence”
used there can be accomplished by showing the special uses of scene on the
other major dramatic elements.
Chapter Overview
In Chapter Two I examine the ways scene shapes documentaries that
feature action. Social environments, relationships and bodies all become
evidence that characterize acts ranging from walking a high wire to eating
fast food, but I focus on the recent film Bully (Hirsch, 2011) to highlight the
use of vivid portrayals of acts of abuse to foster a complex identification that
works to disrupt difference as an excuse for the act of bullying.
In Chapter Three I discuss the impact of scene on character-driven (or
“agent”-driven) films ranging from back-stage certifications of celebrity
authenticity to the scene depicting of George W. Bush as an inept leader in
front of schoolchildren in the face of terrorist attacks in Fahrenheit 9/11
(Moore, 2004). Then I analyze an unusual Australian documentary, Naked on
the Inside (Farrant, 2007), as an example of the intricate ways scene can
work as evidence of “character” that is both defined by and exceeds bodies
working as “scene.”
In Chapter Four I turn to the ways scene functions within films that
emphasize ways of doing things (agencies) to show how scene works as
evidence that colors audience perceptions of processes that range from
climate change to methods for educating poor children. I trace the use of
scene in the film Jesus Camp (Ewing & Grady, 2006), to characterize the
“evangelization” or religious indoctrination of children along two divergent
paths sponsored by its scene of “culture war:” an authentic response to a
divine imperative or a shocking manipulations of emotionally vulnerable
children.
And in Chapter Five I attend to the operation of scene in films that
specially feature purpose. Of necessity, this chapter veers most squarely into
the complications of Burke’s discussion of his pentad of terms; purpose is
perhaps the most ephemeral and least clear of his terms, and always at least
hints at a telos, or ultimate purpose. Nonetheless, the impact of scene
becomes fascinating in films that make this move toward ultimate purpose.
In this chapter I give primary focus to a film about monks, Into Great Silence
(Gröning, 2005), as an example of an all consuming depiction of material
“scene” that destabilizes its own limits and invites contemplation of
transcendence.
In the conclusion I reach back to some of the goals outlined in this
introduction and seek some preliminary implications of a rhetorical,
dramatistic approach to documentary for its ethical production.
While considering documentary films in categories that correspond to
Burke’s pentad of terms is just one of many possible ways of organizing
various types of documentaries, I believe it offers insights into how
documentary films develop their appeals to “reality” in order to create for
viewers an experience of their claims as evidence.
Given the goals of my study, I have chosen to focus my fullest
attention on film texts that highlight documentation as their central rhetorical
strategy, that is, texts which 1) position themselves as “factual,” “fair” or
“objective” depictions of events in the common world of everyday experience
and 2) explicitly foreground their documentation of events and persons, for
example by eschewing “voice of god” author-announcer voice-over. In other
words, my primary analyses seek out documentaries that are clearly and
primarily positioned as social documentation. This is not to suggest that
reflexive documentaries or announcer (or on-camera host) documentaries do
not also use depictions structured as documentation in interesting and
important ways. Indeed, I consider may of these films throughout my study.
But I have chosen the four primary films I feature for their explicit appeal to
documentation as a primary frame.
Further, I am interested in films that use “scene” in rhetorically
complicated or unusual ways. Once traced, the influence of the “real-world”
scene of documentaries on the way audiences understand a film’s actions,
characters, processes or purposes is in some cases quite straightforward.
But scene can work in much less obvious ways that can hide rhetorical
impacts on the one hand, or make the work of the film more rich and
complex on the other. So I have I have sought out films that help me follow
some of these sleights of hand and subtleties. I believe these lessons are
valuable for filmmakers, for example, in considering how “objectivity” can
structure “us-them” audience divisions in a film like Jesus Camp or how
rhetorical techniques like those in Into Great Silence can generate a “scene”
that actively works to exceed itself. As with the concentration on
“documentation” described above, I am not attempting to define a stable
subgenre, but limit the scope of the study to films most likely to fit with the
research goals of this project.
Finally, I am primarily interested in attending to films over the last ten
years or so, from the year 2000 through 2012. Studying recent films chiefly
characterized by their predominate focus on documentation is interesting in
part because these films would seem to be anachronisms given ways the
“modes” or types of documentary are often described, positioning the
documentaries studied here as the style of earlier eras (Barnouw, 1993;
Barsam, 1992; B. Nichols, 1991, 2001).
Most of my attention is given to films that are also included among the
top 100 grossing documentary films. Gross box-office receipts remain an
important industry measure for measuring the “success” of a film, and those
receipts help structure the funding possibilities of future similar projects.
Nonetheless, there has been a profusion of documentary forms on television,
and the support for documentary production by premium pay channels like
Showtime and HBO (both in terms of broadcast time and funding), surely
points to the importance of made-for-television documentaries. So I also
include a few examples of these films. Yet in the end, the four films I treat
are rhetorical choices; they are chosen because I find them to reflect my own
experience of the complications and possibilities that arise as documentaries
feature “real-world” evidence in compelling stories and dramatic structures.
Chapter Two:
Documentary Scene and the Evidence of Acts
It is a bright sunny day and bright sunny things are bound to happen.
Or if they do not, the irony of the misfit will make those events seem all the
more striking.
The seemingly banal observation that we interpret the actions we see
in light of the setting where they take place can belie the profound and
complex ways that scene shapes the meanings of films, particularly in the
case of documentaries, where the scene can seem a given, a happenstance,
a matter-of-fact part of the events a camera happened to observe. Yet, as I
have claimed, these, “given,” “real world” settings of documentaries are
crucial to their status as documentaries. They are part of the special work
documentaries do.
The key questions in this chapter then are: How do documentary ways
of depicting/relating “scene” influence our ways of viewing acts? How is this a
notable form of rhetoric? and What difference does it make to observe this?
I have argued that the rhetorical logic and character of documentary
films can be traced by understanding that they must work as dramas. The
dramatistic approach pursues the basic insight that the pragmatics of
message construction, and thereby the rhetorical choices made, work to
create audience identification with and participation in the meaning making
(via enactments) of the text.
In this study I have limited my focus to the ways that constructions
and choices made about dramatic “scene” work in special ways to enable the
particular powers of documentary realism to point the audience toward
“reality” and real world facticity as the evidence of the truth of what is being
depicted. This generates the many kinds of issues of representation, reality,
and objectivity that are the preoccupations of documentary criticism.
As an organizational convenience in such a huge and conflicted subject
matter, I have proposed to use the pentad of dramatic elements (scene, act,
agent, agency, and purpose) to demonstrate that documentary powers of
scenic construction are central to its rhetorical workings. My method is to
show that the element of “scene” in documentary depiction comes to
dominate and enable the other dramatistic elements.
In this chapter I turn my attention to the way documentaries use
scenic evidence to redefine the quality and character of act. As far as drama
and dramatistic analysis go, the link between scene and act is without doubt
the most basic and obvious relationship, and most easily revealed. Simply
put, we understand acts and their qualities, motives, and meanings by asking
what the situation is that inspired the action (Bitzer, 1968). This is true when
we explain ourselves, when we make legal and ethical judgments about
actions, when corporations and politicians seek to explain their “mistakes,”
and any time we try to assess what causes people to do what they do. Burke
describes the scene as the “container” of the action, just as a stage contains
the action that takes place on it, and actions only make sense, or make
meaning, within the context of the scene that contains it (Burke, 1969a).
There is little doubt that the relationship of scene to act, therefore, is
the most observed and studied of all the dramatic ratios, simply because it is
the most obvious and basic reflex with which to make sense of the world: by
defining the situation as one way or another, we justify past acts and
persuade toward future acts; by getting audience members to identify with
certain acts, we get them to accept “common ground” or a common sense
that they are in the same situation.
Documentary Scene Structuring Action as Evidence
My focus, again, is on how the special abilities of documentary
dramatism to depict scene are used to redefine or intensify our
interpretations of certain kinds of actions. As the most basic relationship in
drama, these uses are the most obvious, and most explicitly rhetorical
examples of documentary. Frederick Wiseman, an unabashed and
unrepentant practitioner of documentary rhetoric, seems to make “scene” his
fixed trope, as he investigates high schools, prisons, shelters, and zoos for
evidence of human abuse, corruption, and malfeasance (Benson & Anderson,
2002).
Therefore, we may say that documentary powers to bring visual
experience—and evidence—of the scene is a mainstay of documentary
rhetoric, and one of the chief rhetorical projects to be found in documentaries
is to modify our experience and perceptions of various actions, and perhaps
even induce us to action. This is most apparently true when the rhetorical
purposes of the documentary are most obvious. One familiar example of this
is Hearts and Minds (Davis, 1974), a documentary used in the Vietnam era
anti-war movement. Here the documentary shows us footage of planes
strafing villages with napalm bombs while pilots, in tears, confess that they
didn’t realize what they were doing, and are filled with remorse and horror.
We hear the infamous General Westmoreland, commander of our troops, now
in civilian garb, explain that “Orientals” do not “value human life” in the same
way as we Westerners, while the documentary shows us a mother
uncontrollably wailing at her son’s grave. The film is a powerful reframing of
the Vietnam War, and was actively used in the anti-war movement.
Another example is Morgan Spurlock’s Supersize Me (2004). While
Spurlock himself is the subject of the film, its rhetorical task is to influence
the way we understand eating fast food. The film argues using statistics and
figures related to the fast food industry and obesity, but its primary focus is
to show us the impact on Spurlock of eating all his meals at McDonald’s
restaurants every day for a month. More particularly, Spurlock’s body
becomes evidence for the impact of eating at McDonald’s everyday. Before
and during his experiment we see him, in just underwear, step on a scale to
be weighed. We see him undergo everything from blood tests to rectal
exams as his body and its processes become evidence showing the impact of
his McDonald’s diet. That is to say, Spurlock’s growing, chemically changed
body, and reports of his own embodied experience (he describes depression
and anxiety, and his girlfriend describes reduced sexual function), is the
scenic evidence that proves the central claim of the film.
Again, the boundaries of Burke’s five terms of drama, and their
interactions, or “ratios,” are dynamic; as Hart and Payne note, ratios
sometimes reconfigure throughout a text (1997, p. 279). Spurlock as a
character, or “agent” is important because his likeability helps the audience
identify with his project, but in the end we come to understand eating fast
food in the context of the concrete, embodied manifestations portrayed by
the film. Spurlock’s body is the “scene” that reshapes the act of eating fast
food as not merely nutritionally poor, but as nutritionally dangerous and
debilitating. And our own bodies become uncomfortable as we watch
Spurlock swell and sicken, and in our identification with this situatedness is
the key to the rhetorical appeal. The evidence for the claims is not
Spurlock’s expertise nor even the testimony of the doctors. What becomes
evident to the viewer through this scenic identification are her own feelings of
repulsion at Spurlock’s transformation and fearfulness of what could happen
to her and others.
Another example of the interaction of the dramatistic terms and the
impact of scene on “act” is Man on Wire (Marsh, 2008). The film uses a
character sketch of Philippe Petit, who we come to understand as a quirky,
adventurous and charismatic guy who attracts an interesting cadre of people
around himself. Petit is obsessed with the aesthetic beauty, and the physical
and personal challenge of tight-rope walking. We watch home-movie footage
of him doggedly practicing on the wire for entire days in the bucolic isolation
of the French countryside, and continuing this over the course of years. And
the force of his personality draws others into his obsession.
Petit’s personality interacts with what he does to define the act of
walking on a wire strung between the twin towers of the World Trade Center
in August of 1974 as a story of persistence and overcoming obstacles. So
who Petit is as an agent, or main character, helps structure the act central to
the film. But the story is told as documentary. The film repeatedly pulls
viewers to scene, whether through the banality of everyday interactions
among Petit’s troupe, or shots emphasizing the enormous height of the World
Trade Center towers, or the daunting distance between the two towers or the
unpredictable and shifting winds. The act—walking across a wire strung
between the two buildings—is structured by the “real” danger evoked by its
scene. We feel vertigo as shots look down from the roof of the towers, or up
from the ground to a tiny speck of a person invisibly suspended between the
towers. We feel Petit’s fragility in shots from the top of one of the buildings
revealing the other – imposing, even sublime as it towers over a faint and
misted New York cityscape. By contrast, Petit is a delicate, silhouetted
miniature against this backdrop, only big enough to evoke the idea of a
person, and standing on a wire we can barely see. For the viewer, it
becomes proof that the flowering of human persistence is a work of art
capable of triumph over the very real dangers of our shared world of fragile
embodied experience.
Scene Structuring Action in Bully
The recent film Bully (Hirsch, 2011), is an interesting example of how
documentary can be used rhetorically to redefine and intensify how we
regard certain actions by showing them to us in scenic context. In this case,
the context of action is provided by selecting and focusing on scenes that
give rise to, and color, our feelings about “bullying.” I treat this film in an
extended analysis here for several reasons: first, it is a recent and
controversial documentary because of its rhetorical content—it quite
obviously courts and creates audience identification to move us; second, the
ways in which Bully shows us scenic context are more subtle and nuanced,
including the embodiment of the characters themselves; and third, the film
helps to point up the contrast between a rhetorical analysis and a
representational analysis, and helps to intervene in some of the controversies
the film has generated about documentary rhetoric.
In Bully, Hirsch follows the daily experience of three adolescent
“victims” of bullying and also tells the story of two more boys who have
committed suicide. Fourteen year-old Alex is an awkward boy who does not
fit in at his school in Sioux City, Iowa. We watch a steady, eventually
exhausting string of taunts, physical harassment and humiliations at the
hands of his peers while well-meaning school administrators awkwardly fail to
intervene in any constructive way. (Alex is the target of most of the bullying
we directly observe in the film because of the access Hirsch had to Alex’s
school.) Kelby is a lesbian high-school student in a small town in
Oklahoma. As part of her story, Kelby’s father describes the social isolation
imposed on the family by former friends who now refuse to even wave hello
to the family since she has come out as gay. Ja’Meya is a 14 year-old African
American girl who faced 45 felony charges after she pulled a gun on a school
bus in what she describes as a response to years of regular bullying that she
just couldn’t take anymore. And Hirsch follows the families of 17 year-old
Tyler Long and 11 year-old Ty Smalley, who both took their lives in what the
film portrays as a response to being bullied. Both families describe their
anguish and we see both families become active in the anti-bullying
movement.
There has been praise for the film, in line with the 2012 U.S.
antibullying zietgiest. The Time magazine review is entitled, “Bully: A
Punishing Movie Your Kids Must See” (Corliss, 2012). The Entertainment
Weekly review describes the film as “an urgent and moral movie”
(Gleiberman,
2012). Scott writes in the New York Times’ review of the film that it
“powerfully illuminates the bullying crisis” (2012).
Indeed, the film occurs in the wake of several-years of public attention
to the issue following press coverage of, and popular response to, a spate of
adolescent suicides purportedly related to bullying. The stories range from
amped-up cyber bullying by girls,18 to a series of several adolescent boys
(largely white) killing themselves after reports of streams of regular and
virulent anti-gay verbal assault by peers.19 Notable responses ranged from a
18 See as an example the story of Phoebe Prince http://www.nytimes.
com/2010/04/02/us/02bully.html?pagewanted=all.
19 2010 seemed to be the watershed year for publicity about these suicides.
Examples of coverage of suicide-linked bullying included stories about Seth Walsh,
Presidential summit20 on the topic to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better Project”
with its hundreds of self-made video testimonials that a life filled with
adolescent anti-gay bullying will get better.21
Reviewers praise the ability of Bully to convey the withering
experience of a persistent atmosphere of verbal debasement and lingering
threats of violence. Time describes it as “a documentary as vivid as any
horror film, as heartbreaking as any Oscar-worthy drama” (Corliss, 2012).
The Los Angeles Times review also locates the force of the film in its
emotional force, “‘Bully’ has an emotional impact that must be viewed to be
understood” (Turan, 2012). Hirsch himself makes clear in an interview that
the film isn’t really meant to instruct, it’s meant to have emotional impact,
To make it have the power the film has, I think it’s so critical to see it… It’s
like, this is wrong, this is crazy, like, you feel it. You walk in their shoes.
And by the end of that experience you’re like, how do I do something (Kim,
2012).
From this perspective, the value of the film is its role as the documentation of
“real” events in the common world of experience. In terms of the drama of
the film, scene evokes the “reality” frame as such—these images are about
the world the audience shares with the filmmaker. This is a frame that
always lingers in documentary, but in Bully is brought to the foreground as
“scene” to help generate and support the emotional urgency the reviews
Billy Lucas, and Tyler Clemente. See
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/us/04suicide.html.
20 See http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2011/03/10/president-obama-first-
ladywhite-house-conference-bullying-prevention.
21 See http://www.itgetsbetter.org/.
describe. Scene becomes evidence and is used to argue that the often verbal
and social (and therefore seemingly ephemeral) character of the problem
nonetheless has decidedly non-ethereal consequences—physical
consequences.
I will return to the popular criticism and issues surrounding this film
later in this chapter, as they help to point up the contrast between a
rhetorical approach and a representational approach to these uses of
documentary. My analysis of Bully is that scenic depiction is used to solicit
audience identification and to inflame our passions about the kinds and
qualities of acts that are being treated. The situations as depicted here
define what “bullying” is, a definition occurring not in a language of
psychology, sociology, political, or legal objectivity, but in the audience’s
identification and felt judgment about the situations as presented.
I see four primary ways that the filmmaker uses scenic context and
depiction to redefine and intensify audience understanding and perception of
what is “bullying.” First, the film contextualizes these victimized children in
their families. We, the audience, are made to feel parental about the kids;
the kids are made our kids. By putting the audience member in the position
of the parent whose child is suffering these kinds of abuses, our feelings
about them are transformed. The situation of the parent is different than the
situation of someone reading the newspaper or seeing a report on television
of children being bullied—it is a situation of compassion and heartbreak.
Second, the film locates the act of bullying in verbal abuse. We see it
and we feel it. The enactment of this abuse makes it real for us, not a
theoretic or academic description, but a physical and emotional violation,
harrowing in its impact.
Third, we come to experience school bullying as nested in an
atmosphere of institutional impersonalism. Administrators describe bullying
in ways that depersonalize the act and situate it as an institutional
phenomenon—a shocking under-evaluation of our experience of the acts as
Hirsch has depicted them for us. This works to secure bullying as something
that cannot be reduced to an abstraction. It is a name for experiences that
are real and particular, and to the point, hurt real particular people like us.
Fourth, I argue that the depiction of the children’s physical
appearance, emotional distress, and embodied difference is itself a kind of
hyper-scenic rhetoric, wherein audience identification is brought to a sublime
kind of tension. We are invited into a special kind of identification that holds
“like me” and “not like me” together and works to short circuit our inclination
to understand difference as a warrant to disidentification, or accept acts of
cruelty that are understandable when they happen to “them,” but inhumane
when they happen to “us.” What if we looked this way? What if our bodies
suffered in this fashion? As I will discuss later in this dissertation, the use of
documentary to show embodiment, physical appearances, and almost
hyperreal focus on surfaces is a special property of this scenic rhetoric and its
manipulation of “evidence.”
Finally, I consider the coverage of Bully in the popular press as an
example of how too exclusive a focus on the representational fidelity of the
events it portrays, risks overlooking the experience of the film, how it works
to influence its viewers.
Much of the rhetorical work of Bully hinges on the movements of the
film to enjoin its audiences’ identification. And the most powerful evocation
of identification in the film is via the parents of the children it features. Bully
begins with David Long. As the Los Angeles Times review describes, … as
difficult as it is to watch children being bullied, it is just as hard to
experience the look of unfathomable despair on the face of David Long of
Murray County, Georgia, whose 17-year-old son Tyler hung himself in a
closet in the family home (Turan,
2012).
The film starts with an agenda that is structured not by observable facts, but
by relationships. Before we see the children featured in the film, we are
asked to understand that they are loved. We are asked to measure the value
of these children through the anguish their suffering brings to their parents.
The Longs are depicted as grieving parents. This is the frame that governs
the rest of the film and invites us to see Alex, Kelby, Ja’Meya, Ty and Tyler as
our children too.
One way of helping to maintain this frame of parental love and aguish
for viewers is by continuing to return to interview footage of the parents in
each section. But again, it matters that the film is a documentary. Bully
continually orients viewers toward the “scene” of parenting. As we first get
to know Alex his awkwardness, physically and socially, take the foreground.
We seen him bullied, yet it is a case of the “other” being bullied. We watch
his parents awkwardly try to encourage and protect him. Some of what they
say seems off key, other moments they are insightful and kind. We have a
sense of bullying as a social phenomenon. Then Hirsch uses interviews with
the parents to take us back to Alex’s premature birth. We see pictures of the
fragile premature baby that doctors did not expected to live—prenatal, yet
out of the womb; impossibly tiny with tissue-thin skin showing wisps of veins
below and tubes taped into his mouth pushing air into lungs not ready to
breathe. Through Alex’s parents we see the miracle of his survival and a boy
who was/is a fragile newborn in need of protection. We feel the vulnerability
of the child, and the subsequent footage of Alex being bullied is now more
than the ugly awkward child receiving the sad but expected social response
of his peers. The fragile, vulnerable child, the miracle child, is being
savaged, and so together with his parents we long to see him protected. We
see Alex as more than a subject, more than the form of his ungainly physical
features. We see him literally as flesh and blood, depicted embodied and
therein real in a way that goes beyond the merely observable. The
observable, again, codes more than its surfaces. It works to evoke the
psychological terror of bullying by appeal to the "reality" of the embodiment
of the characters, by portraying material bodies as bodies. The message is
"notice that this person isn't just a character, but is someone with a fragile,
vulnerable material existence.” Even the bullied individual has a “scene,” in
this case a life history that only a parent—but now the audience—would know
and use to understand the torment and injustice of his treatment.
We are drawn into this scene, the fragility of embodiment, throughout
the film. For example we look inside a plain, mostly empty clothes closet as
Tyler’s mother talks about his body hanging there. And there is vivid
attention paid to physical objects that surround bodies—and have the
potential to rupture and hurt them on account of that physicality. Again, the
images of Alex as a newborn is a clear example of this work. The shots
linger. A standard two to five second shot would code "vulnerable preemie.”
Lingering on the photo invites us to relate to the reality of the body we see,
its physicality, and puts us into a visual confrontation with him.
Lévinas (1979) describes our existential encounter with the “face” of
another as forcing us to take account of the presence of another “I” and
thrusting us into a kind of visceral ethical obligation. Film already removes
us one step from the immediate presence of the other and passing over a
powerful encounter with the other can be even easier when someone is
depicted as a character, when we are invited to relate to them as just an
agent in a drama. But when the camera highlights scene in Bully we are
being urged to set aside other elements of the situation to notice that the
person we see relates to this situation as embodied. As a viewer, I am
relating to the character in a way that focuses attention on what she has
most unmistakably in common with me: my raw physical existence.
The appeal to scene structured this way can tap into a very primal fear
rooted in our day-to-day existential vulnerability, and the vulnerability of
those we care about. Alex's social vulnerability is linked to and organized by
the physical vulnerability of his newborn self, and the misshapen adolescent—
awkwardly and unappealingly embodied—that grows from that newborn. The
symbolic logic is that the fragility of Alex is an alter physical manifestation of
my own terrifying and fragile embodiment, which can easily collapse or
become mutilated. But there is no safe "it's just a story" frame to recover
equilibrium or logic of justice to assure that the order of the world will be set
right by the status quo. Alex will go back to school in the fall. Our fragility
will be out in the world, limping down the halls, subject to the whims of
bullies unless we do what some of the parents do, and work to stop
"bullying," an act which has become a shape-shifting force that transforms
13 year-old bullies into monsters, and feels like physical danger and
emotional isolation. It is powerful because we too are vulnerable.
Again, the film begins with and consistently enforces a relational
context, one that invites and seduces the viewer into a special relationship
with the children, and one capable of evoking tremendous emotion. The
actions we are to understand, personally and emotionally, as bullying are
therefore presented in this context—how we are supposed to feel about them
and their human consequences has already been shown. The scenes that are
bullying, as presented in this film, are those of verbal abuse.
For Hirsch, the social scene of bullying is not found in demographics or
large cultural categories. The real world evidentiary status of Bully’s images
works to link verbal abuse and social isolation to its situational context and
consequences—its scene—rhetorically transforming the viewer’s experience
from one of objective distance to immediacy and identification. Viewers are
invited to identify with the embodied experience of social abuse in concrete
manifestations that play out in social categories of inclusion and exclusion.
The verbal brutality we see is bracing. At one point an older boy who rides
on the bus every day with Alex tells him, “I will fucking end you, and stuff a
broomstick up your ass.”
As Alex’s parents question him after hearing that he was harassed and
threatened on the school bus, we can’t help but identify with the incredulity
of his parents when Alex describes his tormentors as his friends, but we have
also felt the isolation of the “good” moments at school when Alex is not being
bullied and walking alone down the hallway—or worse yet, walking through a
bustling, chattering group of classmates as though he were invisible. We
both know, but can’t believe that the isolation is worse than the abuse we
have experienced with him. The result is that the audience is drawn to
understand “bullying” with an emotional logic that leaves rational argument
as secondary.
A.O. Scott observes in his New York Times review,
At times I found myself craving more analysis, a more explicit
discussion of how the problem of bullying is connected to the
broader issues of homophobia, education and violence in
American life. But those issues are embedded in every story the
film has to tell. Its primary intent is to stir feelings rather than to
construct theories or make arguments (2012).
Indeed, the film makes little effort to address the intellect. There are almost
no statistics provided. We get little sense of the demographic scope of the
problem. There is no expert testimony explaining the dynamics of bullying
with its causes and treatments. The film works hard then to discard
objectivity as a lens to view bullying. The bullying that we see on-screen
takes place in the context of having gotten to know and identify with Alex,
and while there may well be stories to the lives of those doing the bullying
that would make the tragedy we see more deep and complex, standing with
Alex and his parents in their perspective feels like where we should be.
A third scenic element further intensifies our sense of injustice and
identification with the alienation of the abused children—the impersonality
and non-empathic responses of the school administrators who are dealing
with this problem. The scene of abuse widens to include the insensitivity of
our institutions to understand and respond in human ways—the ways the
audience has been encouraged to feel. We hear the school administrators in
Sioux City explaining to a traumatized Alex that he should be willing to shake
hands with one of his tormentors who seems emotionally untroubled by what
he has done and easily apologizes. We hear the logic of the school
administrators in Georgia who casually explain “boys will be boys” and “Buses
are notoriously bad places for lots of kids.” In light of what Hirsch has shown
us, the attitudes of administrators, ranging from exasperation to detachment,
seem inexcusable in their best moments and casually inhumane in their
worst. Again and again we hear administrators describing the situation in
terms of the institution. Stacked up together and put in the context of our
identification with the bullied children and their parents, this cool, detached
point of view brings to mind the depictions of administrators and faculty in
Wiseman’s High School (1968), which starts with images of factories to evoke
a dehumanizing school-as-factory image. As in High School, those in charge
in Bully come across as well-meaning at times. But even in these moments
their responses are sad in light of the abuse that we have come to see as all-
too-real.
Yet, at one level, the identification Bully achieves is very subtle and
sophisticated given the particular characters it features. The film implicitly
reacts to the notion that people are enabled to bully through their capacity to
see people as “other.” A work on bullying that leads the audience to identify,
for example, with someone easy to shift from form one of “them” to one of
“us” would miss the point. Instead Bully gets us to identify with kids who are
hard to see as one of “us.”
Again, the unwarranted acts of cruelty in the film become emotionally
engaging and shape our sense of what bullying is to the extent we identify
with those being attacked. Yet, these are not beautiful children measured by
the norms of popular U.S. culture. Students at Alex’s school call him “fish
face.” He is lanky, moves awkwardly, and has a narrow face with protruding
eyes and mouth. Likewise, Kelby does not fit standards for feminine beauty,
although she is more appealing physically, and, therefore not surprisingly,
she is less isolated from peers. While the story of her abuse is harsh, for
example signs on her locker at school that read “Faggots aren’t welcome
here,” we see her together with a small cadre of loyal friends who offer her
support and companionship, something Alex and Ja’Meya do not have.
Ja’Meya is a dark skinned girl with a face covered in freckles and awkward
features, who, like Alex, reads as physically unappealing. The material
manifestation of each of these children is in various ways code-able as
“other.”
My final point about the way scene transforms the acts of bullying
concerns these physical representations of the children themselves. Children
are bullied because of their differences, and often those differences are
physical. The phrase “a face only a mother could love,” however unfortunate,
gets at the way that these acts of bullying have been storied for us as
viewers.
The physical characteristics of Alex and Ja’Maya lend a certain
credibility to the film. The mediascape’s (Appadurai, 1990) logic of beauty
demands rewards for those who fit its standards and expects a price be paid
from those who do not. That children in the film can read these standards of
beauty and act accordingly becomes an unspoken, yet no less unsettling
specter haunting the film. The bodies of the children do matter. Missshaped
people can be expected to act in miss-shaped ways. A “blame-thevictim”
rupture hovers over the film.
Bully urges us to push aside the visual logic of beauty and nonetheless
identify with Alex and Ja’Meya through the identifications of parenting, and
through the visceral impact of watching abuse scenically marked as “real”
and set in relief as real by those who would turn it into an abstraction. But
the same scenic work that locates the “reality” of bullying for us—and invites
our identification with the parents—also pushes the physical appearance of
the children into our sense of the situation. An explanation of the bullying as
a response to the oddity of the children hangs in the background, ever
present as rhetorical move not made. So Hirsch invites us to experience
difference as something we must set aside when considering bullying.
Representing Bullying
Most reviewers engaged Bully for its rhetorical work and discuss its
emotional appeal to audiences—to this end the film was heralded as
advancing social justice and reform surrounding the social problem of
bullying. I choose the film because its rhetorical purposes and potentials
seem undeniable and unambiguous. The ways in which Bully achieves these
effects, however, raise the kinds of issues that preoccupy scholarly criticism
of documentary film. Scholars and critics concerned with the special privilege
and objectivity of documentary film are typically concerned with how
faithfully or accurately documentary represents its subjects and objects, and
Bully inspired this kind of criticism in the popular press as well. Bully affords
us the opportunity to contrast the two points of view.
The representational frame was also present in the coverage of the
film in the popular press. A good example of this kind of critique is a review
of the film by Slate. The subheading of the Slate article is “The new
documentary dangerously oversimplifies the connection between bullying and
suicide” (Bazelon, 2012). The “danger” is attributed to the concern of a
suicide prevention specialist who fears that making too tight a connection
between bullying and suicide invites a linkage of the two in the minds of
adolescents, possibly leading young people to see suicide as an appropriate
response. Bazelon quotes the suicide prevention specialist as saying that
since the two suicide situations portrayed in the film (together with the
stories of several other still-living bullying victims) are framed almost entirely
by bullying, the psychologist fears the diminishment of the “mental illness”
frame as the “cause” of the suicides,
Young people who feel bullied could harken back to the movie,
and it could be a powerful draw to suicide for them. If Tyler had
been accurately portrayed as a kid with mental health challenges
that were very hard for him to manage, he wouldn’t seem so
attractive (Bazelon, 2012).
And so the film is evaluated by the author of the Slate review for the
“truth” of its portrayal of Tyler’s suicide. Bazelon catalogues possible reasons
for the suicide including mental illness and pressure for grades from his
parents, and goes through the written records documenting Tyler’s alleged
experiences as the target of bullying to find the not-surprising presence of
alternative accounts of events by those accused of doing the bullying. She
also notes that bullying is not mentioned in Tyler’s suicide note. In the end,
Bazelon makes a valuable point,
But given the larger set of facts about the death of Tyler Long, does
Bully portray it responsibly? There are real people on the receiving
end of these blame campaigns” (2012).
But Bazelon’s bottom line returns us to the terra infirma of faulting a
representation for failing to do what it cannot do,
By taking the parents’ side so completely, and leaving out all the
information that doesn’t fit his narrative, Hirsch oversimplifies
and distorts. His film is supposed to be a teaching tool, yet it
offers some serious misimpressions about the connection
between bullying and suicide, misimpressions that could have
real effects on young viewers (2012).
While only a straw man defends oversimplification and distortion, and the
substance of Bazelon’s critique is a valuable contribution to understanding
the film, I argue that the rhetorical work of Hirsch’s documentary is more
subtle and credible than the Slate review suggests. The documentary asserts
its “truth” as pathos, not logos. It wants us to feel the act of bullying as real.
It doesn’t want us to see bullying objectively but rather as a cultural
phenomenon. It wants us to see bullying as something real happening to
kids we come to care about.
Conclusion
In following Burke (1969a) and attending to how “scene” modifies the
central acts presented in documentaries, it is clear that at minimum scene
works like a gravitational force, grounding the actions portrayed in the “real”
world of our experience, but it often goes further to impart a specific
character on actions to help solicit audience identification and intensify their
impact on audiences.
More specifically, my focus on Bully (Hirsch, 2011) shows important
ways that a documentary can accomplish this identification and
intensification. Bully uses images to shape what it means “to bully” as
something more than a social problem or unfortunate event. By drawing us
into a powerful identification with the parents of the children it features, the
film invites viewers to frame the actions they see through the perspective of
parental care and attachment. This profoundly personal sense is enhanced
by locating the scene of bullying in the midst of the power of social
isolation—a scene capable of making Alex excuse his tormentors rather than
think of himself as friendless. Through this intimate perspective, the context
of the film is set up to resist any pull toward abstraction or “objective”
distance by Hirsch’s depiction of the detached, institutional perspective of
school administrators. And our identification with the young people featured
in the film is made both more complex and more powerful by the work the
film does to eschew any easy identification with the children themselves. We
are invited to identify with characters that the film marks as different. Bully
invites us to a place farther away than the predictable sympathy for the
mistreatment of someone a lot like me. We are invited to become an “other,”
and therein see the bullying of someone different as also profoundly wrong
and profoundly in need of remedy.
This is Hirsch’s purpose, to immerse us in the anguish of those being
bullied and their families, and to see any discussions about what to do about
it from their perspective. It is doubtlessly important to challenge the film for
what it is not. However, the very statistical, demographic, “objective” frame
that sponsors some of the critiques of Bully is also part of the implicit concern
of the film; too much stress on the value of seeing bullying “objectively,” as
an abstract phenomenon, risks minimizing what he shows as the central
importance of the pain of these children and their families. Bully shows the
situations and bodies it depicts as every bit as real a properly balanced
statistical correlation between bullying and suicide rates, or the probable
circumstances that help account for the actions of the bullies or school
administrators.
Chapter Three:
Documentary Scene Building Character
In Chapter Two I argued that the work documentaries do to influence
viewers often relies on the way a film’s scene structures its action. I
examined examples of documentaries that depict social environments,
human relationships, and even bodies in ways that emphasize the status of
these scenic elements as real, therein helping to shape our understanding of
actions ranging from eating fast food to bullying. In these films “scene” is
key to the way they work as documentaries, that is, the ways they position
their sounds and images as evidence for arguments the film is making and
impressions it is managing. Because of film’s flow of sounds and images,
these scenic elements are felt as “experience” by the audience.
In this chapter, I examine films that can be said to feature a different
core element of dramatism, that of agent. While all of the dramatistic
elements are present or implied in any given drama, some dramas, as well as
other kinds of dramatic texts, seem to focus on and pivot around the motives
and tensions of central characters. For example, there are many movies
about the holocaust, but Schindler’s List (Spielberg, 1993) tells the story by
focusing on the drama of one particular agent. Hamlet features agent: his
situation, his agency, his sense of purpose, and so forth are all present as
factors, and arguably “to be or not to be” puts “who Hamlet is” and “how to
be that” forward as central questions and pivotal motives for his actions.
My use of these standard pentadic elements and formulas is to help
focus attention on the particular rhetorical power of documentary to depict
“scene” and to point the audience toward the scene at crucial moments of
evidence—always with the implicit claim or authority that “this is the real,
material world” that is being depicted. In this chapter, I focus on how these
scenic powers have special consequences and potentials for dramas that
highlight agents. Often documentary films that foreground “agent” feature
the inner-world, or essential character of those they portray, but convey this
interiority by appeal to scenic evidence so that when scene interacts with
agent, the setting tells us something about how to understand a character.
Documenting Character
Celebrity identity documentaries are almost too-obvious as examples
of films using scene to structure our perception of character—Madonna: Truth
or Dare (Keshishian, 1991) perhaps standing as a prototype. “Real” behind-
the-scene footage serves as evidence of the real person behind the famous
façade, in this case an auteur at the creative center of an entourage in her
1990 Blond Ambition tour. She is an artist whose passion for her craft and
willingness to transgress boundaries are verified and seen as infusing her
every moment, including those off-stage moments which are ironically now
on-stage in the film. In other words, these films tend to work on behalf of
the “authenticity” of celebrities by assuring us that the façade squares with
the real person (Tolson, 2001).
The spate of biopics that have emerged in the last few decades
illustrate the dramatism of the scene-act relationship. While most
documentarians would not classify these as documentary films, the people
are real and presumably the enlarged “scene” of their backgrounds and
biographies is meant also to be perceived as such. The difference is not in
their rhetoric or their purpose to document, but only in their permission to
fictionalize and dramatize. Such films take real agents with whom the
audience has media-intimate relations, and provides the backstage drama of
their life as the ‘scene’ of their ascension to celebrity status. And it is not
always celebrities who are revealed as agent in the backdrop of a
documented scene: Werner Herzog’s body of documentaries seems especially
to focus on individual characters, their interiority and their motives, but
always with reference to the power and reality of their situations. We thus
experience the unreality of the imagined identity of Grizzly Man (Herzog,
2005), confronted by the stark reality of the situation into which he put
himself.
Another example of the how character can be modified and
transformed by the documentary power of scene occurs in the Academy
Award nominated documentary Spellbound (Blitz, 2002), about the drama of
a national spelling bee competition. A New York Times review called the film
“nail-biting suspense to put all the thrill-mongering screenwriters in
Hollywood to shame” (Scott, 2003).
On one level, the shape of the drama is between agent and the act
that forms the focus of the film: getting to know the children who compete,
their quirkiness, their intensity, their passion, restructures the “action” of the
spelling bee. We “get to know the children” because the documentary
reveals their backgrounds, showing us a range of situations from privilege to
new-immigrants striving for success. We come to see the extraordinary
commitment they and their families devote to this competition in terms of
time, money, and personal and family sacrifice. We come to understand
spelling bees as more than a sterile academic oddity; the film structures its
story in parallel with a basic situation we’ve seen before in almost any athlete
profile. The film is compelling in part because we know the “thrill of victory,
agony of defeat” arc it’s following, with its promise that all things can be bent
under the force of human will. We are given a new, unusual example that
extends the promise of success-by-hard-work-and-dedication to a group of
egghead misfits that might otherwise seem to escape the eternal truth of the
competitive glories promised by the great sports metaphor.
This of course could be told as a fictional account. So what difference
does documentary make on the level of what the film does? We are
continually re-immersed in “scene”—the details of the children’s lives and
their physical surroundings. On one level, this constant scenic reference is
just a simple framing technique, a repeated, general note to the viewer, “hey,
remember… this stuff is real.” More fundamentally, the scene works to verify
the promise of the film and the cultural narrative it plays into. Fully giving
oneself over to the competitive spirit, and approaching challenge with
unrelenting passion in the face of great obstacles, is at the apex of what
makes us human: our ability to bend circumstance to our own will. And, see,
it really works, in real life!
A story can help us imagine something as possible, but a “true” story
promises that something is possible. In rhetorical terms, the story becomes
evidence. Mad Hot Ballroom (Argrelo, 2005), which shows the unlikely
transformation of mostly-minority elementary school children into ballroom
dancing champions, is another example of the commonness and appeal of
this reality-success narrative. The lesson here is that the physical world will
yield to those with enough passion and perseverance. The only higher
grossing documentary in 2005 was March of the Penguins (Jacquet, 2005),
where arguably the same powers were at work: we have the expansive,
dramatic and breathtaking scene of the penguins’ “natural” behaviors, yet
what emerges from the dramatization is a heroic character. It is a narrative
of agenthood and agency, as the interpretation ascribes anthropomorphic
motives to these beings, a common trope of nature documentary.
Character can be reduced, dissolved or contextualized by scene—but
scene can also be used to build the identity of the agents and ascribe
character to them. Here character is not built by what the agents say, but
what is shown in scenic depiction of their “acts.” An interesting moment in
dramatistic logic is had. Because we identify with the “acts” of the birds, we
create their anthropomorphic “agent” motivations, since in human terms only
agents commit such acts. On the other hand, a strict materialist, physicalist
or behaviorist logic would have the birds and other animals simply “moving”
through their world as part of nature.
Character as Scene
A very interesting case of how documentary technique can render
agent as the scene, with powerful rhetorical consequences, can be had in
Michael Moore’s famous depiction of George W. Bush in the film Fahrenheit
9/11 (2004), which is the top grossing documentary of all time. Moore is the
on-camera rhetor in the film. He directly and often humorously argues his
case against the competency of the Bush administration, the folly of the war
on terrorism and its corollary military occupation of Iraq. Yet the most
powerful moment of the film—more crucial to the drama and rhetoric of the
film than anything Moore could verbalize—is an extended shot of Bush in the
minutes after receiving the news that a second plane hit the twin towers of
the World Trade Center in New York on September 11, 2001. For seven
minutes we watch the President seated and squirming, panic and uncertainty
in his eyes, periodically biting his lip while holding the copy of My Pet Goat,
which he had just been reading to second-grade school children in Florida.
The film had already established the frame of special access to “behind-
thescenes reality,” by showing us people preparing for television interviews,
with shots that obviously were never meant to be viewed by the public
(ParryGiles & Parry-Giles, 2008, p. 37). This helps establish the authority
and
power of Fahrenheit 9/11. It reveals the “real” scene behind the television
performances and the staging of politics in general, a kind of “emperor’s new
clothes” ethos for which Moore is trademark. The extended, seven-minute,
almost torturous close up on Bush’s situation when he received the news,
imbues a character to his presidency, and I argue, for the purposes of
Moore’s dramatization, becomes the very scene of the 9/11 attack.
The inaction of the scene with Bush conjures the missing act of
springing to the country’s defense, but the evocation of scene itself is
devastating. We see the President’s aide whisper in his ear and then watch
the static shot of the seated, inactive President. The scene continues, minute
after minute, and viewers are left to wonder at the image of “Father,” sitting
in front of children, remaining inactive and failing to respond to an alert of
danger. As the time progresses, the miss-match of scene and the effect we
expect it to call forth from the agent becomes excruciating. We are given no
hint that there might be a plausible explanation to account for what we
see/don't see.
The extended duration of the shot eventually exhausts the semantic
interplay of the visuals and calls attention to the shot as shot. The viewer’s
attention is drawn from content to form. The implicit process of gathering this
footage is left to bubble up; this videotape rolled and a camera focused on
this particular scene for seven uninterrupted minutes, and he just sat there.
Scene is evoked as scene, and it invites the audience to interpret President
Bush in light of evidence that seems inexplicable as anything other than a
staggering vacuum of leadership.
This one scene, more than anything that could be said or proven with
other kinds of documentation, can be experienced by the audience as the
context of the story of our reactions to 9/11 as a country and our subsequent
involvement in Iraq. What gets said and done in the documenting of Bush
administration rhetoric—from bold speeches and threats to the enemy, to
declarations of “mission accomplished”—is narratively experienced in the
context of a certain kind of character which has been revealed by this
scene—a scene and revelation that we did not actually experience in “real
history.” In short, I argue, the rhetoric of this film, its explicit and implicit
argumentation, is accomplished to an overwhelming degree by this
transformation of the “scene” of 9/11. The story told by administration
rhetoric, progressively used to justify a definition of ourselves “at war” with
terrorism and at war in Iraq as part of that effort, depicts the scene of 9/11
as an America at peace pursuing our freedom, with innocent women and
children being brutally and senselessly attacked in an act of terror. Moore
does not (and does not have to) “argue” with that context or declare it
untrue: what he gives us, instead, is an alternative scene of the entire post
9/11 political history of anti-terrorism and Iraqi warfare; it began in the
drama of the Bush presidency, where a weak and ineffectual President was
reading to school children and unable to act to respond to this horrific
incident. The dramatistic scene of Moore’s narrative, therefore, is Bush’s
character as revealed in this real situation, and the story that follows is a
response to and development of that basic situation.
Naked on the Inside: The Surface of the Self
A very interesting, albeit extraordinary and possibly extreme example
of documentary’s dramatistic power to fashion the scene for agents occurs in
Kim Farrant’s Showtime channel documentary Naked on the Inside (2007).
Here, the bodies of six people become, under the filmmaker’s scrutiny, both
bare matter-of-fact surfaces and complex and overdetermined sites for social
expectations and the negotiation of self.
As with Bully (Hirsch, 2011), Naked on the Inside is structured in large
part by rhetorical appeal to embodiment as the form of its evidentiary status.
As each character in the film is introduced, her or his body is quickly
positioned as definitional: David Toole, a dancer born without legs;
supermodel Carré Otis; Marcus, a transgender religion teacher in Taiwan; fat
activist Shirley Sheffield; former gang member Jose Aleman; and Rick Stray,
an artist with breast cancer.
Farrant locates what Burke (1969a) calls the “ratio” between scene and
agent within the drama of each person’s life. That is, each of them struggles
for identity, acceptance, normality, and the kinds of things we all wish to
have for ourselves. Yet for each, the audience directly and materially
experiences the disconnect between those expectations, or that desired self,
and the reality of their physical bodies. In this way, each “agent” here is a
dramatic story, and the scene for that story, as revealed and reinforced in the
visual telling of the documentary, is their individual body and its particular
exceptionality.
Again, Farrant depicts the bodies of each of these six people as a
scene, and as a context that literally shapes and reveals each person’s
identity. The film invites viewers to understand that these men and women
are who they are in the form of a particular body that defines them in
particular ways. This in turn is shaped and presented (through exercise, diet,
interaction, gesture, clothing and so forth) in line with the inner hopes, fears
and desires the six express verbally. In other words, Naked on the Inside
uses depictions of the bodies of the six featured people to explain to us who
they “really are” by inviting viewers to see those bodies simultaneously as
formative of self-identities, reflective of self-identities, and insufficient to
(and exceeded by) those self-identities.
Through this appeal to the existential situation of embodiment, viewers
are drawn to identify with the characters of the film and experience their own
bodies as the location of a complicated series of relationships between self,
culture and physical limitation—and drawn to question “common sense”
assumptions about what bodies must mean. The rhetorical agenda of Naked
on the Inside is to induce a similar awareness of disconnect between our
idealized senses of who we are (or seek to be) and the material reality of our
bodies—a sense of body-self tension that Farrant describes as inspiration for
the film. Naked on the Inside plunges viewers into situations that make it
impossible to not feel the paradox of embodiment: our bodies both are who
we are yet are not us. It does this by getting us to identify with the people it
presents. Their interviews pull us in. They talk about pain, struggles and
feelings of inadequacy, and we are on common ground with them. We see
their bodies, which are meaningful to us because we know how society codes
them. And thus as these people express themselves, we too feel the
disjuncture.
Some of this dynamic of connection and disconnection has to do with
Farrant’s approach. The film begins with lock-down shots and the stark, flat
“unlit” style of documentation that will continue through the film. We are
observing; the body is evoked as material surface.
The first sequence Farrant presents after the film’s introduction
features Dave Tool. While the introductory scenes and its title have cued
viewers to be aware of bodies as a theme for what will follow, we are first
introduced to Dave through a title locating him in a particular real-world
place, “Leeds UK,” and a shot of an urban street scene.
We don’t know yet that he has no legs.
The film cuts to a shot from a camera positioned extremely low and we
see Dave, wearing a black T-Shirt and laying on the ground, reaching forward
directly toward us with his arms, which then start pulling him quickly toward
the camera. He comes right to the lens. We see part of his face, distorted
by proximity to the lens, break in to a smile. Meanwhile, we hear in voice-
over, “How would I describe my body? Now there’s a very good question.
Interesting.”
The shot cuts to Dave on camera, again, simply lit, with no obvious
back-light and a plain white wall behind him—a subtle visual cue that this is
not a formal interview with standard “professional” lighting and set-up.
Dave’s head seems unusually low on his torso, and his shoulder looks
pinched in. We can see there is something unusual about his appearance,
but we’re not quite sure what it is yet. Dave continues, “I like my eyes. I
like my hands. Um… my arms are okay, and then I start running out of
options so… [he has now looked up at the interviewer and is smiling] I don’t
think about it too much.” Farrant cuts to another title screen, “Dave Tool:
Dancer,” and we are set up to understand the film will be about body and
identity.
The next image, which we now can view in terms of “dance,” is a
lingering lockdown shot showing Dave apparently walking along the beach
from screen right to screen left, wearing the same black shirt we just saw
him in. His torso seems hunched a bit, and he seems to be holding another
human torso spilling out from the area of his stomach. The second torso is
reaching forward with its hands onto the beach, and walking along on hands.
The familiarity of the calm waters lapping against a flat, plain, sandy beach,
while someone slowly walks through the screen, becomes confusing
interposed with the image of one set of legs and two upper-bodies. The
scene is impossible given the standard expectations we have for bodies. We
are in a documentary, and we see an image that seems impossible for
documentary. A title comes on-screen, “The Cost of Living: DV8 Physical
Theater,” and the seemingly impossible spectacle of the image is held at bay
a bit, bracketed as theater. Farrant refuses us yet the recognizable, clearcut
categories of “handicapped” or “disabled” and instead frames our experience
of Dave’s body for us as confusing.
In the next scene we see black and white photos of a younger Dave
that include a hint of what might be a wheelchair, and our uncertainty is
heightened. Over these images we hear a female voice begin to ask, “Do
you see yourself as sexy?” Dave responds,
I think I give out an attractive persona. I’m quite good looking,
I’m quite humorous, but sexy just suggests something, it’s
almost like another level to attractive and I’m not ready to accept
that yet. I’m attractive reaching up to sexy at the moment.
He smiles and gestures up with his arm and finishes the point, then pauses a
bit uncomfortably, “I’ve moved up from dull.”
In the next shot, we are in a dance studio and the camera is again
very low. Once more we see Dave in the foreground, dragging himself along
the floor and moving toward us on his hands, swinging back and forth, left to
right. We see shorts with no legs. What we finally see is the visual evidence
that explains what we have seen: Dave has no legs at all.
His movements are synchronized with the same movement of the
people behind him, dressed similarly and moving in the same way. But the
others have legs extending behind them. Because of the choreography and
movement, Dave seems to move freely and the others seem to be dragging
their legs behind them as a burden. Then once again, “The Cost of Living:
DV8 Physical Theater” comes up as a title on the screen.
In this opening sequence Farrant introduces us to David Tool in a way
that begins on the common ground of embodiment and personal identity.
David Tool has a body, like we do, and he stands in relationship to his own
body. He evaluates it, uses it as a means of self-expression, and feels its
limits. He describes a kind of embodiment the audience knows: the
matterof-fact, primarily under the threshold of awareness, and largely
overlooked ever-present given-ness of physically situated experience. By the
time the audience realizes that Dave is quite different from them, he has
been defined with the at-first-glance paradoxical identity of legless dancer.
Viewers have been led into a depiction of body-identity relationship that
makes sense of what we’ve seen, and also fails to make sense of it. Yet the
scenic, bodily reality now governs our understanding of Dave Tool. It forms
the context of everything that will follow.
Later in the film, when focus shifts back again from the other
characters to Dave, we hear him talk about the ways his life is whole, the
ways he has figured out how to “get by,” to live a life composed of ordinary
everyday activities the film’s audience is likely to recognize: getting things
down from high places, navigating past obstacles to his wheelchair, and so
forth. We are seemingly in the familiar narrative terrain of the disabled
person who lives a “whole” life just like everyone else. This is the
inspirational and self-affirming story of the value of “ordinary” life, certified in
its value by the heroic efforts of a person achieving it through extraordinary
effort.
Farrant instead leads us more deeply into Dave Tool’s vision of himself
as whole and dramatizes this dynamic for us. The film shows Dave Tool
talking about his girlfriend. We hear and understand his need to think of
himself in these terms that echo the moment at the start of the film where
he struggles to describe himself as sexy. As a person, he needs to feel he
can be sexy, and we identify with this. Being a sexual person is part of being
a person. Through countless films, songs, novels and television we are
soaked in the cultural presumption that a romantic relationship is the very
meaning of life. To have that excluded from possibility is literally
dehumanizing.
Yet we are also wary of society’s verdict on the sexy question for Dave
Tool. Farrant’s camera is unflinching. We are not allowed to forget that he is
a man with no legs, or overlook the hunched, pinched shoulders that make
physical sense when we see him walk on his hands, but twists him from the
contours of the social norms of beauty as we have come to expect them to be
portrayed.
We also hear his mother talk about Dave not “finding someone” as her
biggest fear, and we hear her delight at his girlfriend. We seem to be being
led down a path toward the cliché that there is someone for everyone—until
we hear him tell us about not being with his girlfriend anymore. Meanwhile,
Farrant shows us, and lingers on, his legless body. We know why there is no
girlfriend, at least in part. We feel the betrayal of his body. Dave Tool’s body
has become the context for understanding him, and we know how it defines
him. And we feel the capriciousness of the likely exclusion of this kind,
vulnerable, and resilient man via the cultural codes according to which bodies
are sexy or not.
Ironically, the character whom Naked on the Inside introduces to us
next establishes a kind of reverse of this scenic relationship. We remain in
the context of body-as-scene, but the drama for Caré Otis is her struggle to
control her body, the work of an agent to shape and modify the meaning of
her bodily scene. The segment that introduces Caré begins with her
exercising by jogging in a hilly countryside “nature” scene labeled for us by
the film as Marin County California. Against this setting, Caré tells us,
What goes into the one snapshot that people go, “body beautiful” was hell,
total hell… and that was my life, complete obsession to achieve body
beautiful that I never even recognized for a glimpse of the moment.
The film cuts to modeling shots of her, and in contrast to David Tool,
Caré Otis’ body appears nearly perfectly aligned with idealized cultural
standards of beauty.
She continues, “I felt like I was the biggest fucking con artist in the
world.”
As Caré continues, she describes the regime of exercise and dieting
that went into maintaining this body, the cutting criticisms of her for being
“fat” after gaining just a few pounds, and a constant worry about her body
being to fat. She describes a well of anxiety that she tells us made her crave
reassurance about her appearance, eventually through sex. But the images
we see of Caré Otis do not align with her words. The modeling images
portray Caré according to the expectations of the genre. We can easily read
these images of a confident, alluring woman—a flawless object of desire
depicted in an advertising world of harmony and material fulfillment. We can
see how these images correlate to Caré, and how they are images of her. Yet
Farrant’s camera does very different work. In this sense, the “nakedness”
portrayed in the film becomes powerful as it reveals Caré’s body.
Farrant’s camera shifts attention to the surfaces of her body in
matterof-fact detail. We are immersed in a raw physical presence that
becomes so banal that the swirl of semiotic pretense seems to fall away, even
if just for a moment. So when we see Caré Ottis’ naked body, the details we
have heard from her about the constant struggle to make that body conform
to the disciplines of the fashion industry seem oddly inappropriate to the
banality that Farrant’s camera finds. The film pulls off what the early Russian
documentarian Dziga Vertov (1984) called ostranenie, a making of the
familiar unfamiliar—an idea he borrowed from Viktor Shklovsky. Ottis’
physical beauty is meaningful too as belonging the body we see. Still, we’ve
been so drawn into the matter-of-fact physical presence of her body, that
while we “get” that “beauty” and all the freight that it brings, we can also see
that beauty as arbitrary, not of that “materiality.” It is something else.
The film invites us into the body as a physical surface, and into a
consideration of the constructed-ness of the symbolic meanings that pass
themselves off as material truth: fat is ugly; disabled is just sad and
swaddled in limitation; gender is fixed. The film works to collapse these in
two ways: first by inviting us into an experience of the tyranny of these social
meanings for real people, and second by closely interrogating the surfaces
that often carry the meanings. The social presumptions we casually attribute
to bodies dissolve away under an intense scrutiny of those bodies as just
matter-or-fact surface.
There is an interesting correlation then between the body, which
oscillates continuously between given fact and profound social symbol, and
the film image that is literally formed by an interaction with the physical
surfaces of what it depicts. This is what Peirce (1931-58) calls indexical
representation—images caused by light waves bouncing off material surfaces
and chemically interacting with film or generating a reaction in digital pixels.
Yet like the physical body, this physically shaped filmic image is capable of
radical recontextualization—often simultaneously appearing as both particular
and generalizable. Farrant’s project is echoed in the form of the medium.
Literally giving form to the self, she explores the way our finite bodies are
profoundly malleable while inescapable in their givenness and are always
determined in a social world of meaning. Farrant’s film strips its characters in
each sense.
Naked on the Inside shows Caré Otis’ success at transforming her body
but depicts the cost of that as a distortion of her “self,” a self not plastic
enough to hold that body in place without in turn being contorted by it.
Naked on the Inside then uses body-scene to show a tortured relationship
between self and culture, and it uses that scene to transform our
understanding of those bodies.
The others portrayed in the film also dramatize this tension between
body-scene and self. For example, in the film’s depiction of Shirley Sheffield,
our understanding of her relationship to her body is modified through a
reconfiguring of our understanding of her body as scene. In other words, in
this segment the mode of disjuncture between body-scene and self is
revealed through a transformation.
Shirley, a woman who is shown as very fat, talks about herself as
being beautiful despite her description of years of derision from others, often
being cast with the backhanded compliment, “but you have such a pretty
face.” We understand the experiences she describes about being taunted as
disgusting and fat, and being pushed away by others. We know this is how
our culture reads fat bodies. But we also identify with the plaintive tone in
her voice as she describes herself as beautiful. We have heard her tell us
about years of trying to get thin—and failing.
Over the footage of Shirley talking about being fat, Farrant shows us
improbable footage of Shirley doing synchronized swimming with a group of
other obese women. On one level, this footage is culturally recognizable as
ridiculous—synchronized swimming is like ballet, done by beautiful (thin)
women moving their bodies in beautiful ways. These women are fat! But we
also see the languid elegance and shifting patterns of color of the swimming
suits against the blue water. The scene becomes an experience of gracefully
morphing shapes when seen from a distance. These bodies are making
something beautiful; they can be seen expressing beauty. In other words,
the film reframes the body-scene from fat and unappealing to beautiful by
shift in perspective. As we move through this segment of the film, we come
to feel both the relentless symbolizing of bodies coded as fat, and the
disjuncture of those meanings with the embodied self we encounter in
Shirley. We come to feel the unfair provisionality of the symbol.
The film helps us explicitly experience the often presumed or hidden
symbolic work our bodies do. It invites us instead to resist those
presumptions and thoughtfully embrace paradox.
The other characters in the film feature the same dramatic tension in
similar ways.
Rick Stray exists in a rupture between a self that wants to create and
express a passion for her life as a mother and artist, and a body being made
frail by metastasizing breast cancer. We watch body and self diverge as she
tries in vain to talk away, hope away, and paint away an embodied situation
that will not submit. In the end, neither body nor soul yield; she dies, but to
her last refuses the definition of a dying body herself.
Jose Guzman’s portrayal in the introduction of the film parallels the
depiction of him that will be extended later. We see him sitting on a bed in a
cheap hotel room, wearing shorts but no shirt, body facing away from the
lens, his right forearm across himself protectively. We hear Farrant’s soft
voice off camera, “So… how do you feel about being filmed completely
naked?”
Jose says, “Right Now?”
Farrant responds, “Whenever you’re ready,” And Jose looks away for a
moment.
After a long pause, Jose says: “Can I get under the covers? And just
stay there naked?” Jose’s body—a body he later describes as inflicting
death—is marked as awkward and fragile, the intimate surface of a self that
is also an unprotected gateway standing between that self and the onrush of
social scrutiny, judgment and expectation. But for Jose, perhaps as a man,
the signifying of his body is awkward when he confronts it directly.
While the gendered cultural standards of embodied meaning and
beauty can be seen a bit more directly at work in Farrant’s portrayal of both
Shirley Sheffield and Caré Otis, the link between gender and embodiment
comes into full focus as the film tells the story of Marcus Van. Marcus, a
black trans man teaching religion in Taiwan, is the most obviously conflicted
of Farrant’s characters about revealing his body, and never does completely
expose the breasts that he usually binds, unwilling to expose the physical
evidence that is both self and betrayal of self. His awkwardness about
undressing becomes in the end almost frantic. Again, scene reveals and
omits. Marcus’ voice, facial hair, clothes and demeanor all code for male, yet
we learn that Marcus’ experience as a young woman felt unsustainable to him
in the context of his masculine-marked body. For him, his body codes for
male except in the physical details that cruelly are the most privileged
markers of gender. His body betrays his inner self and Marcus cannot bring
himself to completely reveal it to the camera. For Marcus, the camera’s
scrutiny threatens to change the status of his body; it threatens to refeminize
him.
In one sense, the documentary is a meditation on the gendered gaze,
relentlessly structuring self and social meaning according to the contours of
divergent codes for the meanings of physical embodiment. For example, in
the opening scene, the women all directly engage the camera, explicitly
acknowledging the “looking” of the camera (Mulvey, 1999). Other than
Marcus, the men do not. For the women and Marcus, we see a direct
consciousness and self-monitoring of the attention of the camera on their
physical selves and the active symbolizing of their bodies—the expected
gendered engagement of women as self-consciously displayed for the look of
the other, the male gaze of the camera.
Yet here, because the nakedness has neither the clinical close focus of
the fetishistic particularity of porn, or the idealized formalism of “art” and
commodified female form, it instead is linked to a very matter-of-fact
looking, we are not invited to encounter these bodies as objects of pleasure.
Their surfaces become dis-articulated from erotic symbol and become instead
a surface. The images of the male bodies remain a bit bracketed. We’re not
sure what to make of their inclusion.
But the address of the camera is the address of both subjects and
objects. As audience, we are invited to identify with the predicament of
embodiment as a little-controlled semantic imposition. We are drawn into
these characters because we are, like them, living in bodies we do not choose
and interacting in a world that imposes meaning on us based on the resistant
surfaces of our physicality. Their anguish, their outrage at the radically
random circumstantial character of the primary social symbol of their self-
identity becomes ours. This move snatches away bodies as the expected
containers for the emotion we are invited into. Instead of a distancing pity
for the predicament of the individual who draws the bad cards of physical
embodiment, affective energy has nowhere to settle but as frustration with
the categories of social meaning that so rigorously determine the meanings
of bodily appearance.
As a result, the signification of the body is opened up for critical
analysis and discussion, and our emotional encounter with the embodiment
becomes an argument about the assumptions we make about bodies and
meaning. The emperor is wearing no clothes.
Conclusion
As I have indicated, to document something is to account for its
existence in a context. One of the ways that documentaries shape our
perceptions and attitudes is by placing characters in a context, a “scene” that
defines them. Often our keenest questions about a situation are about
people and their setting, which often are central to making dramatic sense of
them. Our interest in others is a key part of what makes stories compelling
because their similarity or difference to us helps define our relationship to the
story. To the extent these documentaries are working as documentaries,
they use scene to draw us toward identification with characters and cast
these identifications with an evidentiary aura. But as we have seen, scene
can also work to destabilize our expectations about agents.
Naked on the Inside makes for an affecting and compelling narrative,
and does this through the generative capacity of the documentary’s
portrayals. The text structures itself as an invitation to think about and
discuss the ways race, gender, national culture, violence and beauty intersect
in bodies—and the way bodies become the material point for negotiating self
in and through culture. Farrant’s documentary invites consideration of the
ways the given circumstances of embodiment shape who we are, and the
forces of convention that push us to shape our bodies to fit our social world
and its expectations.
Kim Farrant says in her interview on the DVD release of Naked on the
Inside,
I felt like I had a discomfort within my own skin. A separation
between who I was and what my body was. And my body kind of
defined me in a way, and I wanted to know if other people
felt like that.
In the interview Farrant described a disconnection between her intellectual
desire to accept her body and her deep personal feelings of discomfort.
Farrant saw the raw fact of the body as perhaps a way to explore this:
It was this discomfort with being naked, in that when I’m naked
it’s not just that you can see my skin or my flesh or my curves
or my flaws or whatever, it’s that I felt I couldn’t hide what was
in here, what was my interior self, my vulnerabilities, my longing
my hurt my love my desire… so nakedness, I suddenly realized,
was like an access into something beyond words to a state that
was I suppose like a deeper truth.
This existential foundation of body and “deeper” self as mutually
implicated, yet alien parts, lures viewers into a nest of questions about the
ways race, gender, national culture, violence and beauty intersect in bodies—
and the way bodies become the material point for negotiating self in and
through culture.
The film invites us to enter into the interplay of “body” and “soul” as a
lived experience, and ultimately does this in a way that destabilizes the very
connection it relies on. The impossible equivalency of “material” bodies and
the “immaterial” psychological experience of self-identity both ruptures and
holds, and a film with no explicit philosophical pretense leaves us with a kind
of reflexive, Heideggerian sense of our own selves as existing in and relating
to the world as embodied, social beings.
Chapter Four:
Documentary Agency
My central argument has been that the ways in which documentary
depicts and refers to the “reality” outside of the film is a special vehicle for
the doing of filmic rhetoric, and has special implications for how we assess
the objectivity or representational fidelity of documentary. To explore these
relationships, I have proposed borrowing the basic elements of dramatistic
analysis to observe that the scenic element of documentary drama tends to
be amplified, and serves to anchor the other dramatic elements of act, agent,
agency, and purpose.
In Chapters Two and Three, I looked at the ways in which documentary
does “act” and “agent” through a special emphasis and use of
“scene.” Burke calls these “the big three” as concerns the pentadic elements
(1969a, p. 274), and this makes sense: character (agent) and plot (action)
are the two traditional Aristotelian components of drama, whereas “scene”
simply, as Burke notes, is always there “containing” or framing them in a
logically proportionate way. This leaves “agency and purpose,” by inference,
as the “little two.” As Burke notes somewhat cryptically, these two have a
special relationship to each other and to dramatism itself, as agency and
purpose represent the “means and ends” by and toward which the
characters, and the drama’s plot itself, move (Burke, 1969a, p. 161).
Dramatistically our attention is easily drawn to the common ethical concerns
implicit in means/ends relationships as our ends justify our means, and our
means only make sense in relation to the ends we seek.
The central questions of this and the next chapter are therefore, “How
does scene operate where documentary films feature agency?” and “How
does scene operate where documentary films feature purpose?” In general, I
have sought to avoid engaging any of the intricacies or complications of
“pentadic analysis,” which are both plentiful and interesting in Burke’s
(1969a) explorations and other scholars’ use of these terms. Rather, I have
used these elements primarily to demonstrate that documentary, considered
as rhetoric, uses dramatic logic, and that considered as drama, documentary
uses scene in predominant and special ways.
The How of Documentaries
In looking at particular documentary films and how these factors
characterize their rhetorical rationales, it seems almost impossible to avoid
some of the complexities of the relationship between agency and purpose. As
we will see the special connection between means and ends is also reflected
in their dramatism. That is, documentaries can treat rather concretely and
specifically where something takes place, who the agent is, and what they
did: to document someone’s purpose, however, relies on interpreting what
they say and do; to document someone’s agency relies on a conception of
what their purpose is. The dramatic logic is simple: to explain how someone
committed murder, you must first accept that they had the purpose of doing
so.
A further complexity emerges when we consider “How does
documentary film feature agency?” This complexity is relevant to the basic
rationale of this study. As part of its rhetoric, documentary is constantly
calling attention to its own “means” of acquiring and discerning reality and
thus is infused explicitly with its “purpose” to discover and reveal “reality.”
There are, then, at least two clear ways that documentary films feature scene
as it relates to agency: one way is within in the film’s portrayals, the story it
tells, its diegesis. The other way taps directly into the documentary
filmmaking process itself; the filmmaking process interacts directly or
indirectly with the story of the film to shape its meaning. In short,
documentaries present themselves as agencies of revealing the truth, they
therefore are possessed of an idealistic purpose (and by the logic of
dramatism, documentarians become agents, either explicitly in many cases,
or implicitly in ways that must be discovered).
Depictions of Agency
In the first case, a documentary works to arrange its images to help
audiences focus on the means by which the depicted actions come about.
The major rhetorical moves of the film call attention to how something is
done as central to what a situation means. For example, Al Gore’s An
Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) is about the threat of global climate
change, but the way modern economies power themselves, through the
unbridled use of carbon-based energy sources, is raised as the key to
understanding the situation—and addressing an immanent threat to the
planet. The “how” of the problem laid out in the film is mirrored by a “how”
to respond called for from viewers. Rosteck and Frentz (2009) suggest that
the role of the Al Gore’s narrative of personal transformation in the film
invites the audience to take on take on the environment as their own quest,
Al Gore himself provides a touchstone for our own desired reactions to the
natural world imperiled by our actions. So, by the end, to move to protect
the environment is to act as Gore has already acted—to be courageous (p.
16).
The rhetorical character of Gore’s documentary is quite apparent—in its
subject matter as well as the tone of urgency it imports—and in classical
rhetorical fashion these warrants fall on forming a belief in the “inconvenient
truth” of climate change. Also apparent is the second way agency can be
featured in documentary rhetoric: a crucial element is how Gore is able to
depict and reveal this truth about our material world, from visible footage of
the signs of global warming to the somewhat laughable cherry picker crane in
which he traverses a giant line graph that depicts climatic trends. The
rhetoric of evidence is explicit here, and is of course central to the hotly
contested truth claims of the documentary (and also, one notes, justified by
the extraordinary “purpose” the documentary undertakes).
Agency might be seen featured as key in any of the tens of thousands
of “how to” films that populate various forms of education, news, commerce,
and public information. At some basic level, the importance of
documentary’s ability to reference “scene” is explicitly there, for example
when instructing on how to install a ceiling fan or automobile part. Being
able to visually depict and show these elements and their context makes the
film work in ways verbal instruction does not. More interesting, however, are
the ways that “cause-effect” explanations feature “how,” and the kinds of
forensic-like uses toward which these explanations are put: “How did 9/11
happen?” “How does fracking pollute the groundwater?” “How did the
derivatives market sink the world economy?”
Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (Gibney, 2005) also features
profiles (a focus on agent), but uses these to highlight a series of business
practices that make all the difference in structuring the collapse of the firm.
These practices, the “how” of the situation, are shown as the corrupt means
that twist business leaders and companies into a serious problem for the U.S.
economy and seriously hurt very real people. The recent Inside Job
(Ferguson, 2010) exposes the reasons for the 2008 financial crisis, winning
multiple awards for best documentary, including the Oscar, yet explicitly
arguing causes, consequences, and blame for “how” this could happen. King
Corn (Woolf, 2007), shown throughout the educational system and public
broadcasting, shows us the “how” of corn production and how its use in our
society leads to a complex set of economic and social situations with health
consequences. The film won a Peabody award.
“Agency” also comes into play in important ways in a wide variety of
films that feature “act” or “agent” more prominently, but which nonetheless
rely on the way an act is achieved as an important part of the cluster of
associations that define their motive. For example, while I argued in Chapter
Three that Spellbound (Blitz, 2002) primarily uses scene to shape our
understanding of act and agency—students participating in a spelling bee—
the persistence and dedication that go into the study regimes the students
use to prepare for the competition are also a crucial ingredient in shaping the
way audiences experience the film. Agency matters for the film. And
Supersize Me (Spurlock, 2004) demonstrates the effects of fast food in the
physical transformation of the agent, Morgan Spurlock, but implicitly the
“how” of these effects are shown both in his eating habits and medical
examinations as we monitor that transformation.
Agency is a direct focus for Waiting for “Superman” (Guggenheim,
2010), which follows the stories of several students trying to get accepted
into charter schools that they hope will give them opportunities they are
unlikely to find in the public schools they otherwise will have to attend. The
film was given the Sundance Festival award for “best documentary feature”
and sparked a great deal of discussion and controversy in the popular press.
The film was widely criticized by those in education for not looking at the “full
picture,” and also eventually criticized for staging an after-thefact scene of a
mother touring a charter school. A Washington Post columnist lauded the
absence of Waiting for “Superman” among the year’s
Academy Award nominations,
The snub to Davis Guggenheim’s tendentious film was welldeserved,
given that classic documentaries are factual and straightforward, and
don’t, as did "Superman," fake scenes for emotional impact (Strauss,
2011).
Strauss’s characterization of documentary aside, the film certainly
failed to consider important aspects of how the education system works in
the United States. What the film did do was dramatize the situation and
stakes involved in the way parents and students must navigate that system,
and their means for getting an education that might offer a way out of
poverty. This is the scene for this drama: the dangerous, often hopeless
neighborhoods that many children in the United States live in. Waiting for
“Superman” shows us where the students live, and we hear about their
worries and struggles, we hear and see statistics that mark their success as
unlikely. And we hear Geoffrey Canada, an educational reformer featured in
the film, describe the context of his own personal experience of growing up in
poverty,
One of the saddest days of my life was when my mother told me
“Superman” did not exist. She thought I was crying because it’s like
Santa Claus is not real. I was crying because no one was coming
with enough power to save us.
In Waiting for “Superman” that power to save is the charter schools the film
has portrayed for us as a way out, a place where even students from the
poorest backgrounds can learn, grow, catch-up and succeed. The drama of
accessing this “power to save” comes to life most compellingly as the film
shows the families’ stress and anxiety while they wait to find out if their
children beat the odds of a lottery that will grant them entry into this
salvation—one of the students is one of 792 hoping for only 40 openings at a
high quality school in Harlem.
The scene is powerful. We have come to know these children and care
about them. We have come to know the challenges they face, and we feel
their desperation. So a system of education that pins their futures on this
kind of thin chance is infuriating. Scene, along with the identification we’ve
established with these characters, works to invite the audience to understand
the means of educating children as profoundly inadequate. But it is
important to note here that the means of educating these children also
implies and helps validate their education as a goal; the great attention and
emotional weight given to finding a way to provide these children with the
opportunity for a good education simultaneously establishes the importance
of that as a purpose.
Documentaries as Agency
I have mentioned a second sense in which “agency” has a powerful,
but often less obvious influence in documentary. Documentary films can
draw attention to the means and processes of their own production, putting
the profilmic “scene” or situation that is presented in a kind of dialogue with
the filmmaking process. Documentaries that explicitly tell their stories as an
account of their own production are a good example of this.
Roger and Me (Moore, 1989) documents Michael Moore’s efforts to
interview then General Motors CEO Roger Smith to account for the
devastation that GM plant closings had on Michigan communities. Moore’s
dogged pursuit of Smith—and more to the point, Smith’s elusiveness and
resistance to accounting for the actions of the company—reveals and
characterizes the theme of Moore’s film: a larger evasion of responsibility by
GM officials for the communities that rose up around their factories, and then
were left to collapse into poverty when the plants were closed. The
devastation Moore shows in Flint, Michigan, and his reminiscences about the
town and life there as it once was, pulls viewers into the place and situation
that motivates what we see him doing with the film we are watching—a filmic
quest to articulate why this happened. We understand the filmmaking we
watch as an expression of the meaning of the rundown and jobless world of
Flint. In other words, Moore’s personal, heroic, and daunted efforts to make
the film Roger and Me are central to the drama of the documentary itself, as
he and his dogged quest are part of the proof of the politics he seeks to
expose. This becomes a central formula in all of his efforts, as his ethos, and
character and the means of getting to the truth—including the film crew and
cameras—are all part of the story in Bowling for Columbine (2002), Sicko
(2007), Capitalism a Love Story (2009), and to a great extent Farenheit 9/11
(2004). A similar transparency and reflexivity about the means (and as with
Moore, the accompanying purpose) of documentary making is now widely
used, especially in the work of Werner Herzog, Spike Lee, Ben Stein, Morgan
Spurlock and other celebrity documentarians.
This dual sense of “agency” in documentary helps to clarify and
advance the central thesis of this dissertation. I have argued that a special
character of documentary rhetoric is the way in which it invokes the “reality”
outside the documentary; that is, the way that scene operates both within
the drama that is being composed, but with a continual gesture or assurance
that despite all the devices and drama of the film-as-film, what is being
revealed is a true and real “scene” outside the documentary. Whereas
documentaries are full of transparent rhetorical purposes, political agendas,
social causes, hypothetical interpretations, and even metaphysical portents,
these obviously non-factual elements are acceptable so long as the larger
frame of documentary fidelity is maintained. Where individuals take issue
with these truths, such as global warming, 9/11, intelligent design, etc., at
issue is film’s capacity to sustain this frame for the viewer. Part of that
documentary frame, it’s relationship to the “real” scene beyond the film, is
created and validated by telling the story that the documentary is itself a
means, an agency, with a purpose—documentary is a way of telling or
revealing the “truth.”
Scene Shaping Agency in Jesus Camp
An interesting and multilayered example of how documentary can
feature “agency” (and ultimately purpose) through the powers of scenic
depiction can be found in the film Jesus Camp (Ewing & Grady, 2006), which
also features “agency” in both the ways I have described. Jesus Camp is
about a camp that inculcates religious belief in children. Within the internal
structure of the film’s diegesis, preaching is a “method” for accomplishing the
rhetorical goals of religion. The scenic elements of the film, the cultural
location and context of the camp, work to structure the audience’s
interpretation of the “evangelization,” or effort to induce religious conversion.
The second sense, of documentary itself as agency, is more subtle and
interesting than the previous examples. An implied invocation of
documentary practice works in conjunction with scene to certify the film’s
reliability—the documentary sets up the filmmakers as “objective” by
structuring two implied audiences. In other words, the film’s text structures
two possible answers to the question, “What is this film about?” Both
answers are anchored in the viewers’ understanding of how an act
(evangelization) is achieved.
Jesus Camp focuses on the “Kids on Fire” Evangelical Christian summer
camp in Devil’s Lake,34 North Dakota led by children’s pastor Becky Fischer.
Fischer agreed to participate in the film after seeing the filmmakers’ work on
Boys of Baraka (2005), about at-risk boys from inner-city Baltimore sent to a
wilderness boarding school in Kenya. Boys of Baraka included
footage of a boy who seemed to have a remarkable religious fervor and
aspirations to become a fundamentalist preacher. Heidi Ewing and Rachel
Grady ascribe their curiosity over his combination of religious zeal and
childhood innocence as a key motivation for their 2006 film Jesus Camp
(International Documentary Association, 2006). Fischer facilitated
wideranging access for cameras to follow her work and helped secure the
cooperation of the families of the three children featured in the film. Jesus
Camp was nominated for a 2007 Academy Award for “best documentary,”
losing to An Inconvenient Truth.
The beginning of the Jesus Camp firmly establishes the scene of the
film within contemporary “culture wars” political discourse. In the first few
spoken words, President George W. Bush is heard announcing over the radio
the resignation of Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor. The program
will end with a radio announcement of the nomination of Samuel Alito as
O’Connor’s replacement, bookending the program with a political context and
an allusion to abortion politics. The next radio audio is of conservative
Christian talk show host Dr. James Kennedy. Bush and James Kennedy are
heard against the visual backdrop of a “God Bless America” sign, the United
Sates’ flag, images of rural mid-America countryside, and iconic images of
America like the golden arches of McDonalds, automobiles traveling down
highways, and gas stations. Kennedy declares the country in a state of
“culture war” and expresses the need to “reclaim America for Christ.” The
juxtaposition of words and images locate culture war as an integral part of
the American landscape—literally. Patriotism and religion are linked – a
connection audiences see continue throughout the film.
As Jesus Camp unfolds the filmmakers present footage gathered at the
summer camp, the homes of participants, and recruiting events for the camp.
Religious rituals, preaching, home life and casual interaction, are all brought
together with interviews with the camp director, Becky Fischer, and various
other participants. We see a world where church and state are woven into
every dimension of life, as when a cardboard cut-out of then president Bush
is brought into the sanctuary to make the same link explicit for the children.
And the emotional intensity of the preaching and elaborate effort that goes
into the staging of the presentations for the children makes it is clear that the
adults in Jesus Camp work very hard to pass on their vision of God and
country to their children.
Two Dramas, Two Audiences
That parents would want to pass on their values and beliefs to their
children is surely neither surprising nor controversial to viewers. But Ewing
and Grady feature how faith is passed on, and this is meant to play out in
two different ways. The “culture war” scene of the film structures two
different viewing positions. For an evangelical Christian audience, scenic
depictions mark the way the children are “evangelized” as in line with a deep,
and commendable fervor that is authentic to the all-encompassing demands
of fidelity to religious faith. For an evangelical Christian, the “how” makes
sense according to purpose: the salvation of the children and their capacity
to eventually structure their world (“Christian America”) in line with their
understanding of Christian principles. Interviews with the children’s parents
and Becky Fisher revisit this purpose as a context throughout the film and as
a response to what they perceive as a lack of Christian values in the rest of
U.S. culture. In other words, because of the context, the ends literally justify
the means. So we see Fischer explain to the children that the seemingly
innocuous Harry Potter novels are actually an example of demonic forces
deceiving them, an example of the devil himself luring them in under the
guise of innocent entertainment. The Harry Potter novels and films put their
eternal destiny at risk. Fischer literally believes the stakes are heaven and
hell, and this purpose warrants her seemingly extreme position.
For non-evangelical Christians, the “how” of the evangelization is
structured differently. Without a buy-in to the logic of evangelical theology
(purpose), the scenic elements work in juxtaposition to the commonplaces of
childhood innocence and vulnerability to reveal the “agency” of the camp and
the preaching as alarming.
For either audience, the way evangelical Christian beliefs and values
are imparted to children caries the primary dramatic energy of the film. The
text structures two possible answers to the question, “what is this film
about?” Both answers are anchored in the viewers’ understanding of how an
act (evangelization) is achieved. Agency is therefore featured as a major
drama here: the children are either an agency of God’s work to purify us of
evil or the children are an agency of a religious group that is using them for
its own ideological ends. Both of these possible anchorings of agency are felt
by the way the scene (the material context for the acts toward and by the
children) is depicted.
One particular event in the film illustrates the possible watershed of
audience experience and interpretations. The children are shown in an
ecstatic religious moment of fervor. Their faces are turned upward, angelic,
yet weeping, as the preaching and music and group experience has brought
them to this moment. How is an audience member to regard or experience
this? Is this the divine agency working through children in a moment of
rapture, purity, and beauty, where our collective sins of secular dissipation
are, for a moment, vanquished in the sheer and pure commitment of these
children’s innocent souls to this truth? Or is this a shocking and maddening
abuse of these children, sweeping their trustful innocence into a warped
political and ideological cause? Something is acting here, but the children of
the camp are its agency; and both scenic contexts for these interpretations
have been woven by the dual story-telling of the film.
The first scene of Jesus Camp after the “culture wars” introduction
takes us to a performance inside a contemporary looking church. We see a
group of children performing, some wearing military camouflage pants and
some even wearing camouflage face paint. Most of the children who perform
are wielding sticks. They dance, striking the sticks together and swinging
them like swords, and they march in place as they dance—all to the sound of
ethereal but energetic and emotionally charged Christian rock music. As the
performance unfolds as a kind of militaristic ballet, Ewing and Grady cut in
shots of the enthralled faces of the audience. At first there are both adults
and children, and some people are obviously moved to tears. But the
filmmakers feature the children, and they focus especially on Levi, who we
will get to know as the film progresses. We see the presentation is having an
impact. Thus the scene is drawn in terms of two elements that seem to
conflict: childhood innocence and military violence, more specifically the
children themselves being cast as soldiers.
Becky Fischer takes the stage and she is a warm and engaging speaker
by any measure. And she is passionate. Still, the focus never stays long on
her. The film continually returns to audience cut-away shots, and
increasingly these are almost exclusively shots of children. It is clear that
the point is not just what Fischer says, but the effect she is having on the
audience.
In the midst of a series of extreme close ups of children, Fisher says to
them, “How many of you know that this is a sick old world?” She pauses to
look around the room at the children and continues. “This is a sick old world.
Well then let’s just fix it! Somebody get your tools out and let’s just fix this
old world.”
We see another extreme close-up, this time with a child who appears
no more than five years old, looking improbably still. We see evidence of
Fischer’s impact, evidence that her method of evangelization is connecting
with these children. Fischer continues,
Kids you got to change things. We got too many Christian grown-ups
that are fat and lazy. Do you know Muslims train their children from
the time they are five years old, to fast during the month of
Ramadan? Listen, we hold the keys, we can change the world.
Fischer’s entire presentation is punctuated with dramatic pauses, but
now she pauses longer and voices a question for herself, “Boys and girls can
change the world?”
She looks steadily at the audience, keeping them waiting for her
answer: “Absolutely. [The audience breaks into applause and cheers]
Absolutely.” In other words, Fischer has dramatistically led her audience to
her purpose: her goal is to empower these children, to save the world, to
make them soldiers for Christ.
Again, Fischer is a compelling speaker by any standard. She works her
audience like a “pro,” and if not her message, her certitude, passion and self-
effacing warmth at least are inviting to any audience. Those watching the
film are invited to identify with the captivated children and feel her draw.
The children have been told they are powerful, that they can change the
world. We see in their faces that they believe it, and the juxtaposition of
Fischer’s skill and the children’s vulnerability is arresting. We feel the lure of
Fischer’s method, and are either thrilled or shocked.
The Agency of Jesus Camp
It is in this sense that the film itself engages the viewer with its own
agency. At the heart of Ewing and Grady’s representation of the people
involved with the “Kid’s on Fire” camp—and they intend their depiction as a
“truthful” representation—is their “objective” approach to the filming and
editing of the documentary. They rely on a bank of commonplaces, or stock
symbols, that seem intended to function differently for two different
audiences. Oppositional audiences are constructed and viewed from the
vantage point of a third position—the filmmakers’ location of “objectivity.”
Ewing and Grady create a film that strongly positions evangelical
Christianity as different. The difference plays on-screen as dramatic
deviations in language and behavior from the characters that typically
populate the contemporary mediascape (Appadurai, 1990)—particularly
commonplace understandings of children. This difference, though, functions
in two very different ways.
A binary is structured by both the us-them oppositional construction
used throughout Jesus Camp by those portrayed, and images of Pentecostal
religious practices which are rarely seen in popular media representations of
sympathetic characters. The film constructs its own audience on either side
of the “culture war.” As the film plays out, one is sorted to either the
conservative Christian side of the equation, or the non-conservative-Christian
side. That is to say, the film is operating to shape its depictions as authentic.
If opposing stances toward the film are generated and the various depictions
of evangelical Christianity fit either frame, the implicit reasoning goes, the
film is assured as objective, authentic, and true, verifiable from either
position.
The way this two-audience strategy plays out is in relation to the
formative fiction of “normal.” This consensus image of “normal,” or
“ordinary” works as a prototype (Entman & Rojecki, 2001).
Nonfundamentalist Christian U.S. audiences are expected to identify with
some aspects of the characters portrayed which are vividly marked as
“ordinary,” yet reject other, dissonant markers belonging to the other side of
the axis— and made all the more alarming for the juxtaposition.
This is an extension and development of the theme established earlier
in the film: either “normal” children are being pulled away from the sinful
mainstream and powerfully shaped into the cadre of faithful believers God
desires, or these normal children are being exposed to indoctrination that
seems so forceful and manipulative as to be abusive—and noticeably twisted
by the experience. Either way, the opposing perspective is necessary for and
built into both the viewing positions the film offers. Evangelical Christian
fidelity is marked as authentic by its difference from the sinful mainstream,
and non-evangelical Christian viewers see that the evangelical Christians
portrayed see the camp and its preaching as fully appropriate, indeed
virtuous.
The Dynamic of Oppositional Rhetoric
As noted previously, the scene of the film remains crucial. The culture
war binary established in Jesus Camp is reinforced structurally by the
decision of Ewing and Grady, late in the editing process, to insert throughout
the program footage of radio host Mike Papantonio, who identifies as
Christian but speaks against fundamentalist Christianity being enmeshed with
politics. In the commentary track on DVD copies of Jesus Camp, Ewing and
Grady describe the decision to add Papantonio as a way to add “dramatic
tension.” The Papantonio radio program excerpts function to highlight the
oppositions of the film by periodically resurfacing to highlight a political contrast
and serve as a counterpoint to the rhetoric of the film’s primary characters.
The audience is repeatedly drawn back into the culture war scene. Despite the
late-hour decision to incorporate the footage, it is no mere afterthought; the
final words of the introduction, followed by a pregnant pause and the visual
surfacing of the title, are Papantonio’s: “There’s this entanglement of politics
with religion. What kind of lesson is that for our children.” The images of
evangelical fervor that soon follow are given the context of their impact on
larger United States politics. Yet all the while, space is made for an alternative
reading. Lundberg (2007) describes fundamentalism as an identity practice
articulated to other identities and belief practices, an investment in a doctrine
of otherness which frames the status of and way of relating to others…the
specificity of others is not as important as the role that “they” are assigned in
the fundamentalist fantasy (p. 106).
Culture war discourse creates and sustains both evangelical Christianity and
its opposition in a dynamic of power. Both sides together use a mutually
dependent discourse—constituted in a wide variety of particular
manifestations—to produce identity, make sense of the “other,” police group
behavior, generate voting practices, and so forth (Foucault, 1990, pp. 9395).
For those who do not fit the category of conservative Christian, the
film constructs its characters as complex. The film works hard to position
them as ordinary, something important for audience identification but also
for the credibility of the film. Cowie (1999) observes The “believability” of
the documentary’s world—its verisimilitude—is produced when that world
and its people appear recognizable, familiar, and thus—in some sense—as
the same as what we already know. The documentary film therefore
presents the knowable world, not only or necessarily in order to enable us
to know the world as new, but also—and perhaps more often—to know
the world as familiar, to find again our known objects (p. 30).
The three children depicted as main characters in Jesus Camp are
imaged as both ordinary and not-ordinary. The filmmakers themselves
describe the dynamic in terms of “familiar” and “unfamiliar” in their DVD
commentary track. For the three children who are focused on as main
characters, identity is played out repeatedly, almost continuously, within the
tension between two markers: ordinary behavior and images whose subject
is “any child,” and behaviors which are unmistakably extraordinary for the
agent “any child” (Tolson, 2001, pp. 448-449). For example, nine year old
Rachel is seen spending time at a bowling alley with friends, then approaches
a stranger to hand out a religious tract and discuss salvation because “God
told me to.” Ten year old Tory is “hanging out” in her room surrounded by
pastel colors and dolls discussing her love of music and dancing, then goes
on to say, “I have to make sure that that’s [dancing] for God … because
people can tell when I’m just dancing for the flesh.” We see a small group of
students beginning their day of homeschooling with the pledge of allegiance,
“I pledge allegiance, to the Christian flag, to the savior…” These children are
coded again and again as “ordinary”—any child doing the sorts of things any
child might do—with images of domesticity and examples of language
emphasizing their earnestness, vulnerability and good-natured likeability. As
a result, their intense devotion to an evangelical worldview is positioned that
much more outside the “ordinary” when the talk moves, in a very concrete
way, to the children dying to promote their beliefs.
What is non-ordinary, even troubling for one kind of audience member,
seems intended by the film’s binary structure of culture war to code just as
easily as ordinary for the other. The Papantonio discourse of contrast is
always presented as self-contained, discrete sections of the film—never
mixed as direct critique or commentary on the primary characters in the film.
Papantonio’s discourse helps to establish conservative Christian identity
according to the familiar patterns inherent to fundamentalist Christian
rhetoric. Again, Lundberg (2007) notes that oppositional discourse that
seeks to undermine fundamentalist rhetoric is nonetheless essential to the
very construction of that rhetoric, and may well serve as a source of
sustained vitality.
So what functions for one side of the filmmakers’ constructed audience
as non-ordinary, is ordinary enough for the other; the children are coded for
that audience as “any conservative Christian child.” This construction of the
film to function as reinforcing for both the audiences it posits, works to locate
the film as “objective.” Ewing and Grady reveal in their DVD commentary
that both the children and their families, and Becky Fischer, the children’s
pastor, were pleased with their portrayals.
To the extent that a two-audience structure in the film Jesus Camp
helps to certify the “truth” of the filmmakers’ “representations,” it serves to
color the evangelization we see as real. Becky Fischer’s preaching, from one
side, can easily be seen as empowering—the children are given responsibility
for literally changing the world, and told they can do it. The children are told
they can alter history, change culture and transform the nation. This scene
of culture war, images of the children’s innocence and seeming purity,
reaction shots showing the effectiveness of the preaching—all point to the
sanctified purpose of evangelical faith, and its mission to resist sin and
transform the world for Christ.
Yet for non-evangelicals the images, dogmas and emotional drama of
Becky’s preaching is both “other” and manipulative. Given that the preaching
is directed to an audience of children, susceptibility to manipulation suffuses
the images. Yet Becky also has an obvious affection for the children, and is
repeatedly humanized as she interacts one-on-one with the children, or for
example, as she primps in front of the mirror.
It is in this sense that Becky’s and the children’s portrayals most
powerfully situate conservative Christianity as disconcerting for its
nonconservative Christian audience. They are situated within the markers of
everyday-ness, in a series of images that particularize them. We get to know
the children as children, yet using the language and images of militarism to
express their belief, or we see these young people we have observed playing,
now sob and express their frustration that they do not believe more fervently.
We see what this evangelization, this way of passing on beliefs and values
has wrought.
In this case purpose recedes. The eschatological vision of evangelical
Christianity is not the purpose justified by scene; instead it becomes another
scenic element coloring Becky Fischer’s preaching and the experience of the
Jesus Camp as “other.” It defines those methods as a shocking manipulation
of the innocence of the children. The ends do not justify the means; they are
instead evidence of their danger.
Conclusion
The conjunction between ends and means that I have described points
to the next chapter of this study: a consideration of documentary films that
highlight purpose. It also points to the often multi-layered ways that the
drama of documentary situations unfolds. Each of the dramatistic terms
Burke outlines, scene, act, agent, agency and purpose are present in any
fully dramatized situation.
The films discussed in this chapter point to “agency” functioning within
the documentary story elements, but also at times functioning through an
invocation of the filmmaking process itself. For example, at the level of the
scene depicted within the film, An Inconvenient Truth uses the facts and
images of a changing planet to show how climate change is happening, and
does this as a way to show how to reverse it. Enron: The Smartest Guys in
the Room shows how corporate corruption happens. In Waiting for
“Superman,” poverty and the desire to shape the way audiences understand
how education works for the poor are presented to invite change: a new
“how.”
In documentaries like Roger and Me, films invoke their own production
process to structure the way we understand the evidence they reveal. The
filmmaking process shows an encounter with “observable” material surfaces
and cultural artifacts that mark the “real” status of their depictions. So lost
jobs, lost homes and lost dreams in Flint, Michigan justify a quest for
answers. The film itself becomes a symbolic explanation of the reason why,
and a refusal to account for the human suffering that General Motors’
corporate choices have created.
Finally, Jesus Camp shows the “scene” of U.S. culture wars—a climate
of divergent, conflicting moral readings of culture in the United States—as, in
light of Evangelical theology, generating an extreme evangelization of
children. The film itself forms an “agency” but this time through a self-aware
“both-sides” storytelling that links the filmmaking of Jesus Camp with tropes
of journalistic “objectivity.” This works to raise up two viewing positions that
sponsor two corresponding avenues for rhetorically engaging the film. One
approach is from a perspective that embraces Evangelical theology as a
justifying purpose. In this case, the scene of “culture war” helps warrant an
intense, no-holds-barred indoctrination of children where the ends justify the
means. The other perspective, with no comparable justifying purpose,
positions the methods of evangelization to receive the full intensity of the
emotions and impact of the film’s depictions, inviting an understanding of the
preaching and interactions at the camp as a troubling emotional abuse of
childhood innocence.
Chapter Five:
Documenting Purpose
As noted in the previous chapter, the focus of this chapter is the way
scene operates where documentary films feature the dramatistic element of
purpose. As with the other elements, I wish to avoid too much involvement
with the intricacies of the pentad and its rationale, and simply use these
elements as a way of demonstrating that the scenic qualities of documentary
tend to dominate the ways that documentaries make rhetorical statements
through dramatic constructions.
In the case of “purpose,” it is necessary to consider this element unto
itself because it is almost surely the least obvious and most confusing of the
dramatistic categories. The reasons for this are interesting, and are
especially interesting when considering the “purpose” of documentaries
themselves.
Purpose and Mysticism
As one of the five key elements of drama, Burke argues, “purpose” is
not merely reducible to the motives or explicit reasons why someone does
something (Burke, 1969a). This is one source of confusion in the category,
as the pentad itself is a way of identifying “motives” for action, and some
motives come under the heading of “purpose.” Purpose, rather, refers to a
sense of purpose or overall purpose—an ultimate justification—or answer to
the question “why?” As noted in the previous chapter, the “little two” of
agency and purpose go hand in hand as the means of doing things and the
ends we seek: purpose refers to those ends, those ultimate outcomes that
we hope inspire not only actions but events in this world. Just as the pentad
has been associated with the “who, what, where, when, and why” of
journalistic reporting, it has also been associated with Aristotle’s “four
causes.” Purpose, accordingly, is somewhat like Aristotle’s final cause, or
telos—it is the reason for things as we might believe such reasons “move”
people and events toward their ultimate outcomes. It is for this reason that
Burke sees a focus on purpose as corresponding to mysticism: the mystic
sees such ultimate purpose as infusing and moving all of the actions and
events in the world.
Intriguing as all of this is, one can fairly ask what mysticism and a
belief in some ultimate purpose has to do with documentaries, which, on the
face of things, are supposed to be factual, literal, and not at all metaphysical.
In drama, such purposes and metaphysical or mystical motives abound for
actions or outcomes—such as fate or the healing forces of nature—but in
documentary? The most basic answer is that insofar as documentaries
document human action and motivation, they must also depict these senses
of purpose and mystifications that people have for what they do. When
Werner Herzog presents us with the overwhelmingly evident “sense of
purpose” that Grizzly Man (Herzog, 2005) bespeaks when he talks about why
he does what he does and its ultimate value to nature, Herzog features
purpose and thus accordingly grounds it by taking us into the very scene—
indeed the ultimate scene—of those words. When Herzog later takes us deep
inside the Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Herzog, 2010) for the first revealed
footage of the oldest cave drawings ever discovered, he immerses us in the
scenic experience of seeing these drawings as one might in the cave (for this
reason, justifying 3D photography), yet his own commentary becomes quite
mystical as he contemplates the ultimate “why” of these drawings and what
they tell us about universal human experience.
As we observed in treating “agency,” means and “ends” almost always
imply each other, even though one or the other may be the featured member.
In Jesus Camp (Ewing & Grady, 2006) methods of evangelization depicted in
the film—the heavy-handed emotionality, the use of fear, and so forth—is
aligned to make sense to an evangelical Christian audience because of the
ultimate stakes of its purpose: no less than God’s will. Evangelical Christians,
no doubt, see the agency of Jesus Camp and the children’s indoctrination as
a fulfillment of an ultimate, mystical purpose. Purpose becomes an all-
encompassing anchor for meaning, while on the other hand non-evangelical
or non-fundamentalist Christian audiences are presented a style of preaching
and evangelization that positions those in the film as "other"—thus
complicating their identification with the children and shifting the dramatistic
focus from ends to means. Since the spiritual ends are not accepted on the
same terms, the means, or agency takes center-stage. Rather than
intensifying purpose to warrant the means of the evangelicals, the culture
war frame of the film colors the evangelization of the children as just using
them to perpetuate a largely political divide that separates them from
mainstream U.S. culture.
In a similar way, documentaries that primarily rely on the interaction of
scene and “purpose” as the goals associated with the action in the film tend
to, at least implicitly, also bring “agency,” or the how of their drama, into the
film. We will see this connection between means and ends throughout this
chapter.
Purpose as Evidence
Another reason purpose is a complicated and interesting term of
dramatic motivation in documentary is the odd disjuncture between scene
and purpose.
As I argued in Chapter One, to the extent “scene” is a special
characteristic of documentary, it is so because it highlights the aspects of a
situation that accomplish what documentary portends to do: it shows the
situation, it offers context as an identifiable ingredient for sense making, and
does so in a way that makes it depictions seem evident. And this holds true
broadly. As Sobchack (1992) describes, the sensory experience of film is
homologous to the way we experience our immersion in lived experience.
The sights and sounds of filmic experience offer the same sorts of context
cues about time and place we use more generally to orient ourselves. But
even the social dimensions of scene are often accessed observationally. At
the level of everyday experience, social status, important cultural symbols,
and so forth are often deduced from direct observation. To the extent we
observe these cues for ourselves and participated in the meaning making by
assembling them and drawing conclusions, they work as evidence—barring
any disruption that re-frames them as illusion or fiction. Yet while purpose
may be evidenced in the observable, it is precisely something that is not
accessible by direct observation. It takes us to the limit of language and
symbols, and offers no sure access into another person’s consciousness. So
any purpose other than my own is not directly observable; it is something
wholly other than what might be displayed. This is true of every dimension
of motive, but the other terms of dramatistic sense making anchor
themselves more surely in the cultural commonplace. Purpose presumes an
“other” that like us, is good at deception. In other words, there is always
gap, always room for mutation built into the way purpose works—and this
locates the rhetorical function of purpose in documentary inherently
complicated.
As Burke notes (1969a), to invoke purpose is to step toward
mystification because it always opens the door to ultimate purpose—as the
child discovers when she responds to each successive answer she receives
with another “Why?” There is always another possible level until some
ultimate purpose is offered. That is, purpose is susceptible to mystification
because it is susceptible to the ultimate. Burke writes that mysticism
“develops an ideal of contemplation in which the distinctions of individuality
disappear and the finite spirit achieves utter union or identity . . . a oneness
with the universe" (Burke, 1969a, p. 287).
In this chapter I will briefly consider a few examples of documentary
films that feature reasonably clear examples of scene structuring purpose. I
will highlight where appropriate the mutual relationship of purpose and
agency, and then finally discuss examples of some especially fascinating
instances of the relationship between scene and purpose. In particular, I will
focus in an extended way on the film Into Great Silence (Gröning, 2005),
which showcases the capacity of documentary scene to reveal purpose
precisely in the gap between the observable, tangible dimensions of scene
and the more ephemeral, intangible realm of ultimate purpose.
Scene Structuring Purpose
In a straightforward way, The Corporation (Achbar & Abbott, 2004)
wants us understand that “corporations” are the product of changeable legal
and cultural structures with destructive consequences that are not inevitable.
The facts, descriptions, interviews, stories and images of this documentary
film all revolve around that purpose—in fact there is little else but the
persistence of that agenda that gives coherence to the film.
The documentary Waste Land (Walker, Jardim, & Harley, 2010), which
was nominated for an Academy Award in 2010, shows the work by Brazilian
artist Vik Muniz to portray overlooked poor people as richly textured human
beings. The film itself echoes Muniz’s purpose as both a fact of his work and
something to be documented. Waste Land uses “scene,” the garbage-strewn
world of the “pickers” who comb through the mountains of debris in Rio de
Janeiro’s colossal Jardim Gramacho landfill to earn their livings by finding
recyclables—and the stories of the desperation that have led them to the
dump—to validate and explain the artist’s goal. We are drawn into the
reason Muniz is creating his portraits of these people, and that reason offers
us the chance to see these Brazilian garbage pickers through Muniz’s eyes as
complex, dignified and beautiful. Interestingly though, Muniz’s art—the
means by which he invites us into his vision of these people—is crucial to the
rhetorical action of the film.
We watch Muniz “begin” his portraits not with a brush or a camera, but
by listening and observing. We see how the process of getting to know his
subjects and asking them to tell their stories, then involving them in the
creation of the art and using the substance that defines their world—
garbage—as the material to form the portraits, leads to beautiful images that
reflect those stories. So scene shapes purpose, but purpose also interacts
with agency. The story told here is about the ends of his art and the means
of achieving them, reflecting again why these two elements exist in a special
and necessary relationship. Near the end, the film includes interviews with
those featured in the portraits Muniz creates. These people describe a
newfound sense of their own beauty, value and potential to inspire others
around the world.
The documentary film Confessions of An Eco-Terrorist (Brown, 2010),
like its reality television counterpart Whale Wars, is another clear, and
perhaps also typically complex example of how scene shapes purpose in
documentary. The film features the work of Sea Shepherd Conservation
Society founder Captain Paul Watson and those who work with him, often
volunteers, as they use ships and their own physical presence to interfere
with whaling operations around the world. Nearly every act we see in the
film is explicitly framed by purpose: saving whales who are precious because
of their rarity. They have been hunted near extinction, but they also are
portrayed as beautiful, and sentient. The rhetorical purpose of the film is
also clear: to invite viewers into common cause with the characters featured
in the film.
The title of the film itself is an ironic appropriation of the
characterization of the work of the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society by
their opponents—that the work of Watson and Sea Shepherd is “terrorism.”
The film never really directly “argues” with that characterization. Instead it
lays out the situations that constitute their work, the actions they perform on
behalf of the whales from the perspective of their goal of saving whales. The
filmmaker identifies his own connection and commitment to the Sea
Shepherd cause. Confessions of An Eco-Terrorist works to dramatize the work
of Sea Shepherd as appropriate, indeed morally necessary given that
purpose.
Watson’s crews are an odd collection of misfits and nerds, but the film
and TV series play into the dorky-but-smart-and-capable commonplace staple
of U.S. media seen in everything from the alter egos of superheroes like
Spiderman to characters in TV programs like Big Bang Theory. Even if the
audience has reasons to disagree with the crew’s interventions with whaling
operations or the audacity of their methods, we get to know them too well to
see their motives as anything other than well-meaning. At a minimum, we
are invited to identify with their deep commitment and goodnatured optimism
as we observe them working together, teasing each other, and so forth.
But in the end it is scene that shapes everything. The film dramatizes
both the constant danger of the sea and the social danger of standing in
opposition to government opposition and inaction, moneyed interests and
whaling cultures. Images and descriptions highlight the physical vulnerability
of the crew to arctic cold and exhaustion, and the vulnerability of their ships
to storms and the sublime vastness of the ocean and its ice flows. Shots
from below show the Sea Shepherd ships as huge compared to people, then
in overhead shots the same ships become tiny against the ocean of ice below.
Or the sound of massive waves thundering against the hull of the ship and
the roiling camera perspective of shots from the deck of the ship as its bow
plunges into a massive wave set the scene. We see shivering crew members
on deck with frost on their eyebrows. We see governments and news
reporters from places that support whaling like Japan and the Faroe Islands
characterize what Watson and the Sea Shepherd crew do as terrorism. But
this doesn’t square with the characters we’ve gotten to know, and it doesn’t
align with the scene the situation the film presents: we see the blood of
whales coloring the sea red, and those calling the Sea Shepherd crew
terrorists beating small pilot whales to death.
The crew is willing to put itself at risk and do risky things for the sake
of the whales. The almost comic stereotype of quixotic hippies holding up
“save the whales” posters becomes transformed to the story of courageous
true believers willing to put life and limb in harms way for a righteous cause.
The methods that the crew uses—for example positioning their ship
along a collision course with whaling ships or in front of the guns of a
Norwegian Navy vessel, or riding in small inflatable boats alongside of and
harassing massive Japanese “research” factory ships that process whale
meat—are the pivot point around which the rhetoric of the film succeeds or
fails. As in the case of Jesus Camp, the film offers two viewing positions, but
in this case the alternative is a straw man; either the all-consuming physical
intervention to stop whaling, marked by heroism in the face of death,
certifies the value of saving whales, or one must abandon the purpose of the
seemingly sane-but-daring characters as incomprehensible or crazy. Here
scene works as evidence for the seriousness and importance of stopping
whaling. And the danger of human death is crucial here. It sets up the
equation that defines the purpose of Confessions of An Eco-Terrorist: the
value of the lives of the whales, who (in the film’s context not “which”) are in
all cases treated by the Sea Shepherd crew with reverence.
Scene, Purpose and Mystification
One particularly interesting way that purpose can be seen at work in
documentary is through a kind of implicit presence in absence. Documentary
films can focus almost entirely on scene to the exclusion of the other terms
we ordinarily use as we make sense of situations. When a filmmaker shows
only scene, audiences might make sense of this through an implied act,
agent, agency or purpose, but if this is not possible, if the audience is
abandoned to only scene with no other accessible purpose, only ultimate
purpose, or “mystery” remains as an explanation for the scene; we are
invited in to a kind of mystification. On the level of ordinary experience,
standing still at the shore in front of the ocean, or quietly siting and listening
in the woods might be an example of this dramatistic collapse of scene into
purpose. Another example might be the notion of “sacramentality” that
undergirds the Roman Catholic notion of bread and wine as a substance for
divinity, or that becomes extended in the theology of Teilhard de Chardin
(1959, 1960) to characterize all of the material world as an unfolding
according to divine purpose and fulfillment in divine mystery.
Godfrey Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (1982) and Ron Fricke’s Baraka (1993)
are examples of this playing out in documentary. Neither film attempts to
tell a story, or introduce characters or dialogue. They are rather made up of
montages of images that provoke sensory and experiential stimulation and
invite meditation. In Baraka, Fricke arranges his images thematically—
viewers are immersed in nature scenes, pictures of holy places, scenes of
pollution and destruction, but never with the directness of language. The
New York Times review of the film observes,
The essential message that the film conveys is really a question: How
is it that in the face of a collective spiritual aspiration that inspired so much
exalted art can humanity still be embarked on a path that seems perilously
self-destructive (Holden, 1993)? There is no real answer, and even this
casting of the question is just one take on a profoundly open text. There is
only an invitation to enter into the scene and engage its images as
meaningful—and the effect is mystification. The meaning of mystification
here is not in the sense of an expressible theological agenda, but rather as
an invocation of the sublime via the unanswerable question. A compelling
hour and a half of film experience must have a motive, and absent
alternatives evokes for itself ultimate motive, purpose as such, to fill the
void. Koyannisqatsi uses film technology to show us a physical world, absent
words or verbal arguments, that is impacted by human society and its
technology. Scene becomes active here; the agent is humankind’s “out of
balance” society, namely technology as agent, agency and purpose. But
what it forces by giving us “pure scene” (albeit enhanced) is a contemplation
of purpose: the mysticism of native American pantheism— to be in balance
with nature—which is contrasted with the technological telos of modern
western society, and therein is the rhetorical statement of the film.
Another example of a documentarian’s goal to capture the mystical
purpose of a people can be found in Alan Ereira’s The Heart of the World
(1990), produced for BBC television and discussed in two subsequent books
(Ereira, 1993, 2009). Ereira’s specific goal was to bring to modern
westerners the message from the “older brothers,” a tribe of pre-Columbian
Indians living in self-enforced isolation high in the mountains of Columbia,
which is perhaps one of the last remaining intact examples of the indigenous
cultures that existed before Western invasion. The “older brothers” had
decided to break their isolation and make contact, allowing in Ereira so that
he might deliver the message to modern society that they were destroying
the natural world. Ereira’s use of the documentary to communicate the
mystic world view of these people—a philosophy wherein the natural world is
infused with a purpose which human society must conform to and advance if
it is to thrive (the forces of nature and human society and acts become the
means which are sanctioned and governed by this end). The remarkable
thing about Ereira’s film is how well it communicates this world view, so alien
to modern life, and allows the viewer to understand its truths as complex and
deeply mystical by immersing us in the scene of that society and its
practices.
Ironically then, documentary becomes a particularly effective means
for invoking the invisible and ultimate, precisely through its capacity to focus
an audience’s attention on scene.
Pure Scene, Ultimate Purpose
In another example of “pure scene” giving rise to “ultimate purpose,”
Philip Gröning’s (2005) film Die Große Stille, released in English as Into Great
Silence, documents the experience of Carthusian monks as they seek
“transcendence” through tending to the details of daily life according to
statutes laid out by St. Bruno of Cologne in the ninth century. The film has
no traditional plot and no real organizing set of ideas. Instead it uses a study
of surface and detail, stretching the conventions of the genre to their limit,
pushing photographic depiction to its edge to suggest more. A. O. Scott’s
review in The New York Times observed,
At first, as your mind adjusts to the film’s contemplative pace, you
may experience impatience. Where is the story? Who are these
people? But you surrender to “Into Great Silence.” . . . by the
end, what you have learned is impossible to sum up, but your
sense of the world is nonetheless perceptibly altered
(2007).
The work of Gröning’s film parallels the spiritual mechanisms of the monastic
life it depicts. Unadorned, mundane physical existence suggests something
non-physical; the “material” stands as simultaneously incommensurable with
and evocative of the immaterial in an oscillation between presence and
absence.
In other words, purpose looms large in Into Great Silence. With no
real “acts” to consider, stripped of any real attention to character, and with no
clear process being depicted, the audience is presented only with scene. In
the absence of any immediate reasons for the scenic images we see, we are
left to experience that scene under the influence of the monks’ ultimate
answer to the question, “Why?” The physical and material experience of this
environment as brought to us by the purely sensory experience of the
mountains, monastery, and the monk’s attempt to merge with its silence,
attempts to communicate the mystical purpose these monks themselves
must have: it uses the technology of film to invite the viewer into this
experience. The total immersion in scene itself insists on an answer to
questions about the experience: Does the natural, physical world itself have a
purpose? Is spiritual purity itself to be had in merging with this purpose,
entering the “great silence?” The mysticism of the monks is thus
documented in a way that necessarily features scene-as-purpose itself.
Carthusians are noted, even among other monks, for the austerity of
their life and Gröning’s film offers a rare glimpse into their highly cloistered
world. It is a world marked by severe simplicity, silence and isolation. The
monks eschew the distractions of ornamentation and material abundance.
The Grand Chartreuse, the “mother house” of the order nestled in a remote
area of the French Alpes near Grenoble, is shown in Gröning’s film as a place
of plain, grey stone walls and spare monastic cells with simple wood
furnishings—no soaring gothic arches, no swirling frescoed depictions of
heaven, no images from the great and vast tradition of Christian art evoking
divinity. Two minutes into the film, in white sans-serif font on a black
background, Gröning cites text from the story in the Hebrew scriptures of the
prophet Elijah seeking God:
The Lord passed by. Then a great wind tore the mountains apart
and shattered the rocks before the Lord, but He was not in the
wind. After that, there was an earthquake, but the Lord was not
in the earthquake. After that came a fire, but the Lord was not
in the fire. After the fire came a gentle whisper.
Mountains reduced to a whisper, time unadorned with distraction, place
without the elaboration of imagination—we are positioned to understand that
for the monks these point to the limit of materiality and temporality. Gröning
lays out for us the spiritual presumption that governs the experience of
asceticism. We are directed to the border of the spiritual; an absence is
exposed that signifies an ineffable presence. One can only press up against
the surface and imagine what lies beyond in faith.
In 1984, as a twenty five year old filmmaker interested in “radical”
explorations of “truth” (Sample, 2006), Gröning sent a letter to the
monastery asking for access to film. He heard back from the monks sixteen
years later. The austerity of that time-frame inflects the film; Gröning’s
audio-visual documentation of the monks matches their asceticism. He strips
filmmaking to its barest forms. The film does not use voice-over or music
other than the plainchant of the monks at liturgy. Gröning shot the film
using available light and mostly from fixed camera positions, except for some
8 mm film used sparingly as a counterpoint to the rest of the work, which is
shot with the starkly “present” feel of high definition video. We are invited to
linger over the images we see, exploring their contours, contemplating their
form and wondering about their significance.
Physical Presence as Scene
I have described documentary as a genre especially attuned to scene,
and often especially attentive to the physical presence, the “materiality” of its
depictions. Surface and facticity, the realm of the observable and verifiable,
is crucial to the authenticity that documentary filmmaking claims for itself (B.
Nichols, 1991, pp. 3-4). This is the case even when it does so to self-
consciously persuade, and even when it works to trouble its own depictions
as enmeshed in perspective and construction. Emotion and the dramatic
force of good narrative are also integral to the genre, but as is the case with
film in general, these things must be evoked through surfaces, captured light
reflected from the outside, and the visible edge of things.
Surface is called upon to convey the immaterial; the medium collapses if
both the observable and the ephemeral meanings it evokes are not
narratively intelligible. In the case of Into Great Silence, unelaborated scene
is called upon to evoke transcendence.
Gröning’s film uses the conventions of realist documentary filmmaking
but stretches them to establish a sense of presence so accentuated as to
suggest absence, and then by further extension, “pure presence”. For
example, the first minute of the film is a still shot of the dimly-lit face of a
monk at prayer. For one minute, there is nothing else. There is no
noteworthy movement, just a subtle shift of facial muscles—the barest hint
that we are not watching a photograph. There is no music, no speech. There
are no far off sounds in the background, only room tone—the ambient noise
of the room, raising every creek or rustle to awareness. There is no cut-
away shot to salve impatience. The film depicts utter stillness, nothingness,
as the face of a monk—shot as pure surface. We don’t know this man, only
the muted contours of his face and his stillness. There is no music to cue our
emotion; there is no context clue to explain what we see (or don’t see), just
one minute of quiet slowly ticking by, one second after another, sixty times—
relentlessly ambiguous, both absence and presence. Periodically
throughout Into Great Silence, Gröning also presents short interludes of the
almost clinically lit, full-on, close-up face of monks looking frankly at the
camera. Since we only hear directly from one monk (near the end of the
film) and all other words spoken by the monks are the words of the liturgy
(and one brief discussion that does not reveal the identity of the speakers),
these moments are our only hint at intersubjective access to
these people who we observe for the nearly three hours of the film. The
monks’ expressions are blank, reminiscent of Lev Kulesov’s famous film
experiment in the early twentieth century showing the capacity of context
editing to bestow deep meaning on blank expressions—except without the
context. We see the faces, for a full 20 seconds each, in groups of threes,
with each shot separated from others by a dip to black. The effect, like the
film itself, is both disconcerting and profound. The still, blank faces are not
really blank at all. With nothing else to attribute meaning for us, the subtlest
facial movement or look of the eye seems intense. The raw physical
presence of the individual faces of the monks is stark—it is simultaneously
powerfully particularizing and thoroughly anonymous. Men are reduced to
faces, and because of the frankness and duration of the shots, the reduction
draws attention to itself as such. Because the images fail to signify, the only
meaning left for the presence we experience is unknown purpose, or
mystery—and in the monastic context, this ultimate purpose transforms
absence into transcendent presence.
Here absence is figured through presence (scene) because the
monastic experience we see, bereft of other avenues of meaning, collapses
into pure scene. Put another way, the film collapses into pure mystery; it
figures an absent-presence that obliterates the nothingness of the void and
replaces it with something—a something that means nothing, an
incomprehensible void that is pure mystery resolvable only in pure meaning:
an ultimate purpose.
Evoking an Experience of Purpose
The documentary frame also is important here. Scene is working not
simply as an abstraction, but in specific ways by approaching mystery
experientially. For example, the changing seasons that help establish the
rhythms of life at the monastery are depicted in successive reiterations of an
establishing shot of the grounds of the monastery—the same view revisited
several times to note differences of the seasons throughout the film. Yet the
shots hold longer than the ten seconds or so that convention would dictate.
The scenes draw attention to themselves and fix themselves as particular
moments passing at the pace of daily life. The continuity editing that can be
used to naturalize filmic time compression is absent. Instead, extended “real
time” shots are juxtaposed with time-lapse shots and same-perspective
montages to suggest the cycle of seasons in a visceral way. A cyclical sense
of time as “eternal circle” is evoked in the time of the present moment, under
the scrutiny of silence and awareness. At about three hours, the
timeexperience of the film also works to disrupt cinematic expectations.
At times Gröning uses continuity editing to construct traditional
Hollywood style realist sequences: a long establishing shot of a scene
followed by a succession of closer shots to direct viewers’ attention as
desired by the filmmaker and to compress the temporality of the scene. Yet
more often, the film defies these conventions and distends the temporal
standards for shots; the camera stays put for a minute or longer. Rather
than sharing the freedom of an omniscient camera roaming across the scene,
we are fixed in place as unmoving observers, quietly watching, as still as the
monks themselves. Gröning tends to frame these shots through doorways or
looking past walls. We are positioned outside the room, peeking in,
unobserved ourselves. As viewers, our sense of being located outside the
space we are observing works with the conventions of the genre to position
our situation as “authentic” and “objective”—the logic is that if we are
unseen, the one observed must be unaffected by our presence and so is
behaving “naturally.” Yet, the temporal distention also breaks apart realist
conventions and their pull toward identification. Instead, the frame of the
film is broken to enhance a sense of observation. We are not located by the
film within its scene, but reflexively positioned as viewers of a film, quietly
observing the filmic depictions of a real place. The elements that make up
the scene we witness are “cited” as something real, but also to conjure an
emptiness pointing to more. Again, we are left only with scene, and in the
unfulfilled desire for meaning led inexorably, experientially, to mystification
and ultimate purpose.
In this sense, the filmic depiction of monastic austerity found in Into
Great Silence might be said to offer a kind of hint at the insights of monastic
practice. The stark limits of bodily experience, the life of ascetic deprivation,
prayer, silence and isolation, the monks’ path to the edge of transcendence,
is shown as particular and real. And Gröning’s film offers an experience of
what it depicts; film becomes perhaps a performative shortcut to some
measure of the contemplative’s experience. Audiences too are invited deep
into the grey stone walls of the monastery, to their edges, and then into a
gap of meaning that cries to heaven to be filled with transcendence. We
don't have to believe what the monks believe to feel the hunger for a
ultimate purpose to fill the gap that Gröning opens for us.
Conclusion
The role of purpose in documentary can be both straightforward and
also slippery because purpose is tangled up with agency, and ends are
directly related to means. Further, purpose is susceptible to extension, as all
the terms are—scene act, agent, and agency too. The scope of a scene can
be drawn in terms of the soldier, the battle or the war. This inherent
ambiguity is a key reason the resources of drama are so rich, flexible and
capable of transformation. But purpose is also susceptible to mystification.
Burke refers to this expansion of scope as a change in circumference, and
purpose readily expands to become ultimate purpose, an ultimate ground
that offers certainty in its all-inclusiveness. It absorbs all further questions
into a cloud of mystery, the unknowability excused by its sublime character.
Yet, at the most basic level “purpose” operates in a very clear way
when documentaries are unambiguous about their own rhetorical purpose.
Thus The Corporation arranges its facts and images to shape our
understanding of how we think of U.S. corporate structure and convinces us
that that understanding must change. Waste Land wants us to see garbage
in a new way to help us see poor people in a new way—as profoundly
beautiful and suffused with dignity, even in their weakness. Confessions of
an Eco-Terrorist tries to draw us into its own all-consuming purpose of saving
whales. And some documentaries like Koyaanisqatsi, Baraka, and Into Great
Silence lead us to purpose through a wholesale immersion in scene,
arranging images to invite us to receive them as meaningful. However, they
offer no acts, no characters, no processes to help us make sense of the
context we see. They leave us adrift until the only explanation left is our own
answer to the final “why”—an awareness of ultimate meaning, that is, an
absence of meaning—a mystery-shrouded hope that can be left undefined or
described as divine, according to one’s own inclinations.
These cases explore this kind of ultimate level: when scene is
considered unto itself, by itself, does it not emerge as a kind of mystical
purpose itself? In pantheistic philosophy, or in the expansive spirituality of
someone like de Chardin, we see something like this happening. In
documentary’s technological power to present the “scene,” and in its zeal to
document the “real,” is there also lurking a kind of implicit mysticism? In the
previous chapter, I explored the feature where documentaries often become
transparent or explicit about their own “agencies,” and the documentary itself
can become part of the film drama as an agency of finding and revealing the
truth. The “means-ends” relationship, as the purpose of documentary, while
seldom explicitly announced, is always implicitly there: documentary is
documentary only when its means are used to find and tell the truth, to
“show” us the real world of human experience, and provide the “evidence”
for correct judgment about that world. It is, in that regard, an idealistic
rhetoric that claims power and control over the material real. When
documentary fails to embrace and pursue these ideals, when its “purpose”
becomes tainted by politics, propaganda, commerce, or emotional
ingratiation, the purists of documentary cry “foul” and invoke the ideal
means-ends ethical position of documentary. It is perhaps for this reason
that documentary has been so little explored as “rhetorical,” despite the
obvious infusion of rhetorical purpose throughout the many uses toward
which it is put. This brings us to where we began this exploration, and to the
conclusions that we may draw.
Chapter Six:
Conclusion
At the most basic level, the need to address the “rhetoric of
documentary” has never been greater or more obvious. The five-year period
from 2007–2012 accounts for 37 of the top 100 grossing documentaries of all
time at the box office, and the top 12 grossing documentaries are all from
2004 or later. While documentary film has exploded in theaters, Reality TV,
documentaries produced for cable channels, and documentaries distributed
online, added together with wide-spread, low-cost access to highquality
cameras and editing software bespeak a virtual explosion in our exposure to
materials using documentary forms and techniques. Quite simply,
“documentary” as a voice in our culture has never been more prominent, it’s
basic language and grammar more used, and its influence more felt. As part
and product of this presence, its rhetorical uses are more pronounced.
Through documentary Spike Lee raises our consciousness of race and its
history, Michael Moore is heroic for liberals and vilified by conservatives, Al
Gore seeks to save the world, and Ben Stein seeks out
Moore’s rhetorical techniques to counter the “exclusion” of religious belief.
As I write this in a busy political season, I recently heard a political pundit
opine that republicans are remiss in not producing “documentaries” the way
the democrats have—this, at the same time the film 2016: Obama’s America
(D'Souza & Sullivan, 2012) received nationwide release in theatres and
became the biggest-earning documentary of the year, followed distantly by
Bully, (Hirsch, 2011). The film 2016 Obama’s America is itself a documentary
with a political cause (an anti-Obama film written and codirected by Dinesh
D'Souza, a famous culture war speaker and author, not a documentary
filmmaker).
The special status of documentary as a form of media that presents
“reality” and documents “the truth,” no doubt has everything to do with its
power and prominence as a rhetorical voice. Understanding documentary
film as a constructed rhetoric, and observing that among rhetorical voices
and media it has a special ethos and special ways of invoking evidence for a
truth revealed, would be a worthy contribution of my work.
My own interest in these issues and what has drawn me to considering
documentary as rhetoric has much more to do with my experience and
practices as a documentary filmmaker. As a documentarian, my voice is not
as a propagandist, but as a storyteller. What is revealed to me, and I hope
to my audience, as I work is not so much an explicitly political truth, but a
special awareness of how this art weaves together the strands of real images,
information, and events with the fibers of our consciousness, our emotions,
our connections to the world. As much as the genre may be thought of as
providing a window to the real world, my experience of making documentary
has been of something simultaneously smaller and more interesting: partial
truths and very human stories, yet all the while no less true and no less real.
Kenneth Burke describes literature as “equipment for living” (Burke,
1974), that is, we tell stories because they are a kind of preparation for life;
they offer patterns for understanding and responding to the things and
events we encounter in the world around us. Likewise, we make and watch
documentaries, at least in part, because they help us make sense of and
interact with the world we experience. While most stories promise this at
least implicitly, that they will eventually get around to a valuable perspective,
documentaries promise a more direct route to relevance because they
portray objects and events unmistakably located in the “real” world of our
experience.
Considering documentaries from this perspective, in their functions as
documentaries, invites a criticism that pays special attention to how that
context, that “real” world of common experience is depicted. In this study I
have borrowed Burke’s notion of “scene” as a way to watch what films do as
they use this “realness,” that is, I have tried to follow the way the context of
a situation (time, space, objects and relationships all happening within a
social world) determines the ways documentary films invite us to understand
what they depict as true.
I have argued that documentaries, when they work as documentary,
establish and verify their depictions as evidence by drawing on the elements
of their scene, and that we can trace the rhetorical work of this evidence, its
rhetoric, by following what these scenic elements do as they shape the way
we experience a film text. Burke suggests that scene is one of the key terms
at work when we use language and symbols to make sense of the world as
drama, that is, as a meaningful human situation, and that these terms,
scene, act, agent (character), agency (the means by which things are done)
and purpose, work together in combinations to form and transform the way
we make sense of that situation. So I have borrowed these other terms, act,
agent, agency and purpose, to organize my analysis of the evidentiary work
of “scene” in documentary, the work these films do to show us that the
perspectives they offer—the people they focus on, their portrayal of events or
processes or reasons—can be trusted and should be merged with our own
perspective.
Or from the perspective of the filmmaker, when I make a documentary,
I make a film that invites you to see the world of your experience from a
vantage point that I show you is “real” according to the physical and social
markers by which you understand something as “real” in your ordinary lived
experience. This is more than a physicalist “indexical” correspondence that
says “look, this film shows that this object really existed with the observable
colors and shapes that you yourself can now observe.” That material
indexicality offers “reality” to us only when it becomes an element helping to
constitute a situation as meaningfully real. In other words, reference to the
material existence of a thing is only one of the markers for “real.” The
verisimilitude of a filmic image or sound and objects we see in our immediate
experience becomes relevant and persuasive in documentary when it helps
constitute an event that corresponds to the socially constituted world of our
experience. Documentary depictions take their force when they are
rhetorically constituted as evidence.
The Rhetoric of Evidence
Life is full of the unexpected and hard to explain. The difficulty of
establishing sure truth as a guarantor of claims is of course a perennial
problem of deep cultural consequence, fueling a desire for one or several
unshakable foundations. The promise of sure truth is as alluring and elusive
in film as anywhere else. But photorealism itself does not accomplish this in
documentary.
Hollywood filmmaking in general, and its world of special effects more
specifically, has long and ever more convincingly used the photorealism of
film as a way of enhancing storytelling with the parlor trick of “real
appearance.” That images are often transformed using Photoshop and its
video equivalents is not only widely known, it is widely appreciated for its
virtuosity. We readily frame our experience of a Hollywood films as just
story; the “scene” adjusts to “fiction” and we easily engage “realism” as
“fantasy.” Photo-indexicality, the physical relationship of images to the
profimic relationships they depict, does not alone constitute images as
evidence. They only become evidence of the real when a text convincingly
establishes “real” as the image’s “scene.” This study has shown that
filmmakers have a broad range of tools to use to help set “real” as their
context.
The general verisimilitude of audio-visual film experience to everyday
embodied experience is certainly one very effective tool. Documentary
conventions are another tool. Hand-held camera shots, fly-on-the-wall
observational camera placement, the use of interviews and testimonies, and
so forth are easily read by viewers as marking off a genre associated with
making truth claims. Filmmakers also commonly depict the scenes they
show us to resonate with commonplace notions of “everyday” or “typical,” or
by matching their storytelling to the expectations of the world as they are
shaped by. And moment-by-moment, according to the unfolding of a
filmmaker’s purposes, filmmakers can easily shift our attention from other
story elements to the photorealism of a scene by attending to material
surfaces. Through these rhetorical techniques, documentary truth is no
longer a matter of the correspondence of a match between filmic and
profilmic events. The film has become a story, its rhetoric unfolds
dramatistically and it’s truth is established on narrative terms: its coherence
and flow as a story, its fidelity to lived experience, and so forth (Fisher,
1984).
In this study then, I have described a documentary rhetoric of
evidence. In the films I have analyzed we indeed see documentary “scene”
interacting at key moments to locate the events of films in the “real world.”
But we have seen that “scene” also does other rhetorical work. That is,
documentary images are not just evidence that something is real, they are
evidence that something is real in ways that become meaningful for
particular arguments and rhetorical moves.
So in Supersize Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock’s changing body becomes
the scene of the film that colors our understanding of the risks of eating fast
food; we can see it makes you sick. In Man on Wire (Marsh, 2008), the
scene shows us that there is real, physical risk to Phillipe Petit as he walks on
a wire strung between the twin towers of the New York Trade Center, but the
scene also works as evidence of the heroism of the act. In Bully (Hirsch,
2011), scene characterizes the seriousness of bullying as an act, but also
structures and intensifies the way we identify with the characters who are
bullied, and defines bullying in a way that works to deactivate the kind of
emotional distancing through difference that often underwrites our capacity
to accept the mistreatment of people.
When documentaries chiefly operate by referring to the inner world of
characters, again, the films often anchor viewers in the “real” scene of a
situation, positioning their images as real, but again this evidence also works
in more complex ways. Celebrity identity documentaries draw on
“behindthe-scene” footage to use “real” backstage selves as guarantors of
the
“authenticity” of front stage celebrity. Spellbound (Blitz, 2002) and Mad Hot
Ballroom (Argrelo, 2005) use the real images of children immersed in an
allconsuming preparation for a competitive event as evidence for the
American myth that hard work guarantees success: race, class and personal
circumstances all appear to be of little consequence in these “real” examples.
Fahrenheit 9/11 (Moore, 2004) shows us “real” extended footage of George
W. Bush siting, frozen, in front of school children instead of reacting
decisively to the attacks on the World Trade Center towers, which within the
film evidences Bush’s lack of leadership as real, and serve as an explanation
for the subsequent problems of his presidency. And in Naked on the Inside
(Farrant, 2007), bodies become scenic evidence for selves, but do this in a
way that reveals the fissures of the self-body relationship and become
instead evidence that the social meanings of bodies and the impacts of those
meanings, do not sustain; bodies become real evidence that cannot be
trusted as representations of selves.
Another way documentary films work as evidence is to structure the
way we understand the method by which something occurs. So An
Inconvenient Truth (Guggenheim, 2006) establishes a scene of rising carbon
dioxide levels and looming catastrophic climate change as evidence that the
unbridled use of carbon-based energy is a recipe for doom, and Waiting for
Superman (Guggenheim, 2010) shows concrete manifestations of poverty,
and uses the stories of real poor children as evidence of the cruel way U.S.
schools fail the young people who turn to them for hope. Roger and Me
(Moore, 1989) shows the devastated landscape of Flint, Michigan to
characterize General Motors’ business decisions as inhumane, but also uses
the story of its own production (and the challenge of getting access to CEO
Roger Smith) as evidence of the remoteness and disregard of GM for the
consequences of those business practices. Likewise, the film Jesus Camp
(Ewing & Grady, 2006) uses the scenic portrayal of the Evangelical Christian
evangelization of children to characterize that indoctrination as powerfully
intense, but the scene also gives evidence to the production process itself
within the film through a palpable “both sides of the story” structure that
helps intensify the images as evidence, since the portrayals are thereby
“objective.” In this way, the same scene becomes understandable as working
rhetorically in two ways at the same time for two different audiences (either
shaping the evangelization as troubling, or reinforcing the importance of a
legitimate theological purpose that justifies the methods we see in the film).
The dual operation helps intensify either perspective.
Finally, documentary scene can be “real” evidence that structures and
supports an abstract purpose. So in a direct way, the film The Corporation
(Achbar & Abbott, 2004) uses factual information, testimony and stories as a
“scene” that certifies the validity and relevance of its arguments about the
recent genesis of corporate structures that we tend to take as unchangeable
and “given.” And the film Waste Land (Walker et al., 2010) achieves its
purpose, the audience’s appreciation for the value and beauty of the poor
Brazilian garbage pickers it shows, by using documentary scene to depict
these people as real by intensifying our understanding of the severity and
gravitational force of that poverty—therein intensifying our sense of that
value and beauty in an ironic contrast to the ugliness of their situation.
Confessions of An Eco-Terrorist (Brown, 2010) uses the “scene” of ocean, ice
and governmental bureaucracy to color the work of the Sea Shepherd
“ecoterrorists” it depicts as a heroic, and in a life or death struggle against
whaling that is shown as worth the sacrifices and dangers it entails. But for
films like Koyaanisqatsi, (Reggio, 1982), Baraka (Fricke, 1993), and Into
Great Silence (Gröning, 2005), scene itself can become so intense that it
leaves no room for any clear motivation, and in that mystifying absence of
motive, scene becomes “evidence” of a kind of ultimate, or transcendental
meaning. In the case of Into Great Silence, scene becomes so present to
audiences that it oscillates between the presence of the surfaces it features
as surface, and leaves that void of meaning as a vacuum that insists on being
filled. The result is scene becoming evidence of the necessity of its own
transcendence—an invitation into the monk’s experience of ultimate purpose.
Important in all of these cases though is that the rhetorical force is not
just at the level of idea; it is not only a matter of these scenes being framed
as “real” but that that “realness” does things: it encourages and intensifies
our identification, it transforms the way we understand things, and it involves
us emotionally, even bodily in the films we see. We are offered patterns for
understanding (and responding to) our encounters with the situations we
experience in that same, common, material and social world.
And for all the social change a documentarian might hope to bring,
documentary film texts generally show a keen awareness of the self-selection
of documentary audiences members. Indeed, as we saw with the film Jesus
Camp (Ewing & Grady, 2006), the rhetorical structure of a film can be finely
tuned to the sensibilities of its intended audiences. But even when these
films aim toward broad “general” audiences, they “work” to the extent that
they show us what we want, or need, to see, although perhaps in unexpected
ways. The “real” elements of a documentary, its scene, characters, events,
methods and expressed reasons, must be plausible given its audiences’ direct
and mediated experiences of similar situations. Only then can a film play off
these understandings, often to merely reinscribe existing social scripts and
reinforce and deepen them with new examples, but sometimes a film can
also offer an explanation for a yet-inadequate understanding of something
(the slippage we feel in our grasp of a situation), or they can expand the way
we understand a situation.
So March of the Penguins (Jacquet, 2005) assures audiences that the
cultural imperative for stable heterosexual pairing and child-rearing is
echoed, verified and dramatized in a close observation of nature itself. Or
Naked on the Inside gives “real-world” examples of a self-body disjuncture
that audience members likely experience but don’t often (if ever) see
dramatized. Or Bully works to reinforce our sense of outrage at bullying, but
also stretches our understanding of what bullying is by stretching our outrage
to overthrow the ways we might diffuse its impact. Or Fahrenheit 9/11 offers
its likely viewers an explanation that gives form to their own need for
compelling narratives explaining the mistakes of the Bush administration.
George W. Bush’s inaction and collapse of leadership in the wake of the
second 9/11 twin tower attack becomes what Burke calls a “representative
anecdote” (1969a) that can stand for and give meaning to his presidency.
Put another way, documentaries invite audiences to salve all manner of
psychological incoherences and resolve them symbolically. And there are two
risks here: symbolic needs can facilitate and sanction remedies and
structures that involve real physical suffering—For example, Burke offers an
insightful analysis of the dynamics of scapegoating (1969a, 1984); and on
the other hand, a dramatized experience can introduce a sense of resolution
that dissolves the urgency of action—I can go to see An Inconvenient Truth
to show symbolic concern for climate change, then not bother doing anything
else once I have resolved the problem symbolically. And this is just one way
in which approaching documentary from the perspective of rhetoric raises the
issue of ethics.
Documentary Ethics
I began this study by explaining that it was prompted for me by my
own experience of making documentaries. In that context, a questions
remains: What difference does this understanding of a dramatistic, scenic
“rhetoric of evidence” make for filmmaking? One important answer is that a
fuller sense of the resources in the rhetorical toolbox gives filmmakers more
options for their work. Filmmakers might make better use of these resources
to offer new visions of the possible; our avenues for expanding imaginations
and challenging the status quo might be enriched. But this points to more
questions, to ethical questions that I have so far largely sidestepped.
Put in terms of the way documentary films work as “equipment for
living,” if I am to make or show documentary films, propose them to others
as an invitation to shared perspective and possibly shared action, I am
proposing to influence others, and so ethical questions begin to emerge.
Does the rhetorical perspective I offer in this study have any answer to
questions about how one might responsibly make documentary films,
especially given the centrality of ethical questions for so much of
contemporary documentary scholarship? While a full answer to this question
is beyond the scope of this study, a preliminary sketch indicating resources
available for a rhetorical approach to documentary seems in order.
I don’t propose these considerations to point to a “rhetorical ethics of
documentary” as the ethical approach for documentary filmmakers or critics.
The important questions raised by explicitly tracing the work of power in
documentary films is crucial, and I in no way offer what I present here as a
refutation or replacement. I offer these considerations rather as an
indication that approaching documentary as rhetoric does not necessarily
require silence about the ethical responsibilities of filmmakers, and indeed,
may offer some very practical insights for documentary practice. Indeed, I
believe a rhetorical approach to documentary may offer an alternative to the
seemingly unresolvable and potentially paralyzing ethical quandaries that
seem to consistently emerge from perspectives governed by approaches to
documentary through the lens of “representation.”
Contemporary Documentary Ethics
A perhaps inescapable problem with any ethical framework is the
extreme elasticity by which we can understand a situation. As we have seen,
the pentad of terms that Burke outlines show the possibilities for ascribing
the human meaning of a situation according to a broad array of perspectives.
That is, one might identify and apply a fixed set of ethical principles in widely
divergent ways because, as I have argued, the complexity of events always
exceeds the capacity of language, and the terms we use to understand
situations are themselves highly elastic. Words and symbols leave things out
and focus on some things rather than others according to the structure of
language, not events; since there is no direct match between events and the
ethical language that structures them, applying ethical principles is
necessarily interpretive, human, and structured by language and motive.
One particular set of problems that emerges in many discussions about
documentary flows from the presumptions embedded in the notion of
representation, and which lead to a framing of the discussion in terms of the
accuracy, or “truth” of those “representations.”
Butchart (2006) identifies “three central and related problems” shaping
the ethical debates in recent documentary literature: “participant consent,
the right to know, and the claims of objectivity” (p. 428). In his analysis,
each problem is a matter of conflicting individual rights, yet also is structured
by notions of truth. For example, participant consent is concerned with a
“true” correspondence between the way documentary subjects understand
their participation and the subsequent film and filmmaking process. Ethical
debate takes shape around the issue of avoiding the manipulation and
victimization of people by the filmmaker who is in turn exercising her rights
of artistic expression. The structuring role of “truth” emerges perhaps more
clearly around objectivity—the insistence that filmic representation not distort
what it records. This objectivity problematically presumes a scene has a
“true essence,” which should remain untrammeled by bias or distortion.
While approaches vary, many of the most prominent discussions of
documentary theory (such as B. Nichols, 1991; Ruby, 2000; Winston, 2000)
become embroiled in sorting through the tangles of rights and responsibilities
engendered by morality-based ethics (Butchart, 2006,
pp. 428-429). Butchart notes the insight of major psychoanalytical theorists
such as Badiou, Mouffe and Žižek that ethics based on rights and duties are
structured around presumptions of right and wrong and good and evil. In
Butchart’s analysis, right and wrong, good and evil, expand the focus of
concern beyond a concern with ethics (what to do) to morality. There is a
twofold consequence of grounding ethics in consensual moral opinion (an
opinion that defines human being as Western or as potential victim of evil.)
First, the quasitheological basis of the moral imperative to respect all
difference—‘‘Do unto others as you would have done unto you’’—can lead to
the dead-end of identity politics (‘‘No one is more other, more alien, more
deserving than me!’’). Second, the role of Western values in securing moral
consensus—“God is on our side, evil is not’’—can lead to violence morally
legitimated in the name of a singular, ideological difference
(‘‘Live free or die!’’) (Butchart, 2006, p. 438).
If Butchart’s analysis is correct in its characterization of contemporary
critical documentary theory as structured around issues of “truth,” the ethical
alternative his article offers seeks to escape the linking of truth to moral
absolutes structuring existing debates. Butchart’s proposal invites the
consideration of a documentary truth not anchored in moral absolutes. The
shift is from evaluating the degree to which a film is “true” to discovering
how the truth of film might guide what we should do in light of Badiou’s
notion of truth, “The truth is what holds together a specific set of elements in
a given context and configures them in a particular way” (p. 433). To find
this singular truth, Butchart turns to Sobchack’s phenomenology of film
experience as significantly similar to ordinary subjective experience. This
characteristic of film, its self-structuring as an experience of perceiving
agency, becomes in Butchart’s analysis the hidden, invariant truth that might
serve as the foundation for a an ethic of documentary truth (Butchart, 2006).
On the practical level of making ethical documentaries, locating the
truth of documentary in its homology with visual perception leads Butchart to
reflexivity. We are encouraged to raise the perceptual operation of film to
visibility, to “double” that visibility “via footage of participants looking directly
into or in some way addressing the address of camera” (p. 439). The task is
to unmask documentary “as a receiver, a kind of witness whose capacity is
not simply to mirror appearances but rather to reconstruct, recreate, or
reconstitute an image of what first gives itself to the visual field” (p. 439).
Locating the Truth of Documentary
While I am not as concerned in this context with the theoretical details
of Butchart’s proposed alternative singular “truth” of documentary, resistance
to documentary depictions as “mirror of appearance” and the salience of his
analysis of the problem with many of the ethics-based critiques in recent
documentary scholarship seems on target. But the ethical quandaries of
documentary run deep.
Indeed, there is no “ethics” of documentary based on moral absolutes,
nor can there be, that is anything more than a rhetorical strategy for
containing rhetorical strategies. Ethics based on moral absolutes are
necessarily themselves exercises in the discursive coercions they see in
documentary—efforts to modify the actions of others. Although ethical
frameworks seek to limit power, they exercise it in ways that are necessarily
crude because universal principles engage particular situations reductively.
The point is not to deride the value of such ethical critique or principles, but
rather to suggest that the reach of such ethics exceeds its grasp (and ceases
to be “ethical”) as soon it attempts to do more than trace the work of power.
There remains no easy way out of ethical ambiguity. The elastic
possibilities of language in naming or “identifying” a situation (Burke, 1969b)
put ethical stability out of reach. More specifically in terms of reflexivity, It
seems that Butchart’s (2006) proposed focus on doubling vision risks
oversimplifying the ethical demands and issues of a situation. For example, a
standard documentary interview is marked as a performance by its
adherence to the convention of the genre. But does “doubling,” in the very
earnestness of its self-revelation, impart an aura of “honesty” that misleads—
an integrity that is necessarily false in that all symbols are necessarily
exceeded by what they are meant to represent?
In other words, while reflexivity is laudable to the degree it positions
knowledge as contingent and situational, it may also position a profoundly
social text (any documentary shown to others is a social intervention, and
therein rhetorical) outside of social critique (the authorial claim: “what do
you mean, my perspective is “wrong” or “not helpful”… it’s truly my
perspective”).
What is needed perhaps is an acknowledgement of the constructedness
of truth, and an insistence that this does not weaken its value, but enhances
it. A fact never speaks for itself, but always enters into a conversation.
While an addiction to the stabilizing and comforting reliefs of authority might
tempt us into imputing to facts such as “photographic indexicality” a kind of
sovereignty (even when we know better), it is perhaps a better bet to live
tentatively with our best assessment of the evidence, always ready to re-
evaluate. And when we present the evidences of our arguments or
perspectives with this same, old-fashioned humility, we are in the realm of a
Burkean conversation. We cannot hammer with the truth, but we can still
solicit cooperation with the considerable resources of language and symbols.
And when we embrace the rhetorical character of truth, we are not set adrift
with the false choice of an unyielding faith that refuses contrary evidence, or
radical uncertainty. Instead we are consigned to the hard work of weighing
evidence on the slippery terms by which it is constructed. In this,
documentary film evidence, like other kinds of “facts” will not, of their own
accord or inherent properties, do the work of truth for us. We must (and do)
use them according to our purposes. Neither does this strip from us the
possibility of confronting un-truth, and the strategies of domination.
A Rhetorical Ethics of Documentary
From the vantage point of rhetoric, the key strategies for ethical
documentary production may have to do with configuring scenes in ways that
point to a world that exceeds its depiction, and making those depictions explicit
as contingent manifestations of rhetorical intent. If there is a singular
constitutive constant of documentary it is that it performs and enacts symbolic
reality about the world of experience. And to the extent we depict something
as a real situation, it has a symbolically meaningful social context, therefore
the one given is sociality itself; to use symbols is to be ethically engaged in a
social context. Without this a situation is prerhetorical and arguably pre-
symbolic. Once they enter the world of symbolmaking, situations are rhetorical
and we are thrown into a world of social relationship. We enter into the realm
of the other “I;” the other as a self who must be encountered a self, and who
positions us in ethical obligation via what Lévinas describes as the “face” of the
Other: “The face opens the primordial discourse whose first word is obligation”
(1979, p. 201). And Lévinas insists on the ethical integrity of human subjects
as exceeding any possible depiction; “… the face [the other] is present in its
refusal to be contained” (1979, p. 194), that is, “The face resists possession,
resists my powers” (p. 197).
In this context, the ethical question for documentary shifts from how
to make an honest factual presentation of reality to how to make responsible
claims about social truth, and the ethical focus is reflexivity, not so much in
terms of the subject position and power agendas of it’s author, although that
may be an important move, but reflexive in terms of the film’s position as a
rhetorical act: the filmmaker makes explicit its rhetorical intention. We are
perhaps led here, ironically, to valorize artistry that draws attention to itself
as artistry, style that shows itself as style—the exact opposite of what would
be considered good rhetoric in the traditional Aristotelian approach to
rhetoric. If an entity is portrayed in a way that makes it clear that it exceeds
the possibilities of the film, a univocal engagement of the world is resisted
and space is opened for transformation. Absence of the truth does not
preclude a truth.
Put in rhetorical terms, filmmakers are free to use symbols to engage
others and invite them into transient coalitions of cooperation and solidarity;
space is made for change and tools become available so that that space can
be more than just a theoretical gap. This is an ethical stance that seeks to
expand the possibilities of the status quo, and structure situations as
expansive, rather than contained.
Given this perspective, documentary is on more sure ethical—and
epistemological—ground when it presents itself as rhetoric, rather than
according to a logic of representation. When, as a filmmaker, I depict a
scene as partial, or show it for its role in the presentation of an argument, or
feature it for its capacity to evoke a feeling or idea, when the scene I depict
is also evidence that the limits of discourse or cultural presupposition are
more elastic than previously thought, when my depiction avoids presenting
itself as complete, definitive, or final, I am aligning my filmmaking with the
implications of an ethics built on rhetoric. So when Jesus Camp invites us to
consider the evangelization of children from one of just two vantage points,
the problem is not that the film is limiting or narrowing its focus on the
phenomenon. The problem is instead that the film presents itself as
objective representation, as though these two positions are the possible
positions for understanding the phenomena. If these positions were instead
each evoked as a kind of obvious metonymy, as two key distillations of the
range of possible viewpoints, the filmmakers would lose their simple,
shorthand reference to objectivity (the “both sides” trope), but the universe
of the film would more clearly reflect its own rhetorical character. On the
other hand when the film Bully allows the off-putting quirkiness of the
“victims” it features to show through and interrupt the facility of its own
arguments, taking the more difficult and complicated route to earn our
identification, the director invites us into a complex world that is
acknowledged as such, and bullying is a allowed its complexity even as its
real-world consequences are felt with a kind of brutal clarity. The persuasive
work is harder, and demands more of the audience, yet is perhaps more
compelling. It remains capable of working as coherent evidence of the real,
and can seem more faithful to the vicissitudes of everyday experience.
We are on an ethical ground that is powerfully focused on a capacity to
stretch the disciplinary hold of the status quo and leave room for resistance
and social change.
African novelist Chimamand Adichie warns of the dangers of a single
story, that is, of narratives that only re-inscribe existing ways of
understanding a culture or situation. In her example she describes
extraAfrican characterizations of African poverty, lack of education and tribal
life that simply miss the broad and deep richness of the continent, ignoring
middle class professionals, universities, literature and so forth. And this
same insight is perhaps the moral lesson of dramatistic criticism.
Throughout his body of work Burke is always interested in dialectic,
… any development (in organisms, works of art, stages of history)
got by the interplay of various factors that mutually modify one
another, and may be thought of as voices in a dialogue or roles in a
play… (p. 403).
There is a sense here of the interaction of perspectives working together to
help us lessen the danger of a viewpoint governed by the limits of its own
“psychosis,” or elevation of its own perspective to an essential and controlling
“truth.” Dramatism points to the plastic, multi-dimensional character of
“truth.” For Burke, however one understands the metaphysics of knowledge,
it is always symbolic once humans engage it. So the bad news is that the
cultural and material circumstances we encounter are formed— and limited—
according to the way symbols work. But this is also the good news. Symbol
making has an amazing capacity to shift, deepen and offer completely
alternative views of situations.
It is interesting to note that in Burke’s description of “master tropes,”
or linguistic strategies for approaching “truth” (metaphor, metonymy,
synecdoche and irony), he aligns “perspective” with “metaphor,”
“representation” with “synecdoche” (the part stands for the whole) and
“dialectic” with “irony” (Burke, 1969a, pp. 503, 507). For Burke,
“perspective” and “representation” both risk a relativistic reduction when a
situation is defined by either in absolute terms. On the other hand,
“dialectic” offers a “perspective of perspectives” where none of the
participating “sub-perspectives” can be treated as either
precisely right or precisely wrong. They’re all voices, or
personalities, or positions, integrally affecting one another
(Burke, 1969a, p. 512).
No documentary film can adequately represent the situations it depicts. The
choices made by the filmmaker—from what to shoot and where to place the
camera, to what to edit out and how to juxtapose words and images—are
always rhetorical; they always imply claims about reality.
In summary, there are perhaps two central, related ethical questions
for filmmakers that flow from a rhetorical approach to documentary ethics.
First, does my film portray its message as complete and definitional, or
does it allow itself as one possible way of understanding the situation—albeit
the one I am advocating for your consideration. Sometimes this may happen
through the incorporation of a kind of reflexivity that positions the film as my
subjective vision, or doubles back and reveals the filmmaking process itself,
its own production methods of choice-making. Other times this might
happen narratively, with a film destabilizing its own depictions and
entertaining the plausibility of other interpretations, or offering many voices
or interpretations of events.
The second question: is the primary work of my film the re-inscription
of existing, dominant ways of understanding situations; am I just re-telling a
single story, or do I instead foster a vision of the situation I portray as richer,
more complex than the audience may have ever thought. This is not to set
filmmakers to the impossible task of telling stories that audiences don’t want
to hear. Indeed, documentary films probably self-select their own audiences;
they must tell their stories in ways that link with the existing world-views and
expectations of their audiences. Yet within this broad horizon of common
understanding is a multitude of possibilities for telling stories about reality,
truths that reveal themselves as partial and constructed, yet no less true.
