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What is a Documentary
Film:
Discussion of the Genre.
Student:
Roberta Sapino
University of Turin
Coordinator:
Prof. Dr. Michael Hoenisch
Freie Universität, Berlin
Intensive Program – Coming Together or Coming Apart?
Europe and the United States in the Sixties
Intensive Seminar in Berlin, September 12-24, 2011
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“I’m an eye. A mechanical eye.
I, the machine, show you a world
the way only I can see it.
I free myself for today and forever
from human immobility.
(…) Freed from the boundaries of time and space,
I co-ordinate any and all points of the universe,
wherever I want them to be.
My way leads toward the creation
of a fresh perception of the world.
Thus I explain in a new way
the world unknown to you.”1
INTRODUCTION
Documentary film, a fuzzy concept.
As Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski remarked in 1998,
There is, at present, an intense interest in documentary, an interest
perhaps unmatched since the 1930s. The Rodney King video and news
coverage of events such as the Gulf War and the O.J. Simpson “slow
speed chase” and trial have given documentary a renewed position of
importance in daily life.2
In the recent years, the progressive diffusion of affordable technology, along with a frustration
with traditional media, the pressure of an audience eager for information and political
discussion, and the works of outstanding (and often controversial) filmmakers such as Errol
Morris or Michael Moore, have led documentary film to go mainstream. As Bill Nichols
suggests3, it is sufficient to consider the movies that have been awarded an Oscar from the
mid-eighties on to realize to what extent documentary has risen as a compelling form, and
how much interest it has aroused in both scholars and the general public. On the Internet,
amateur and professional movies proliferate, dealing with new topics and pushing the
boundaries of the form as never before. 1Dziga Vertov, “Manifesto Kinoks Revolution”, 1923, quoted in John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Penguin Books Ltd, 1972), 10. 2 Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998), 19. 3 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010), 2.
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However, if it is true that contemporary filmmakers are showing an exceptional vitality, it is
not to forget that innovation is peculiar to documentary itself: already in the 1950s, Basil
Wright observed that
Some thirty years ago, the documentary thesis offered, apart from
anything else, a chance of freedom from the irons of the commercial
cinema. Because documentary was concerned with a new use of film
(…), it provided immense opportunities for experiment with the film
medium.4
Thus, as Nichols observes, it would be impossible to formulate a definitive set of constraints
that a movie has to fit in in order to belong to the genre. Even after the 1930s, when the term
“documentary” began to indicate a filmmaking practice which was actually born with the
Lumières brothers’ first recordings of everyday life scenes, but on which no critical analysis
had been produced, documentary has always been, “a practice without boundaries”5, “a fuzzy
concept”6. As Nichols explains, the notion of documentary changes in space and time,
according to the idea that individual filmmakers and collective institutions have of the works
they are producing.
Therefore, apparently contradictory statements such as Grierson’s
I am convinced that the surest way to apprenticeship in documentary
is a good degree in political science or economics.7
and Jon Bang Carlsen’s
I see documentary filmmaking as an art form.8
should not be considered as prescriptive rules, but as different poles of attraction in an
ongoing dialectic, whose complexity constitutes the richness of documentary as a genre.
John Grierson first used the term “documentary” in relation to cinema in his review of Robert
Flaherty’s Moana, which was published in The New York Sun on February 8, 1926. In the
article, he simply affirmed that the movie had documentary value because it was a visual
account of the everyday life of a Polynesian youth; however, some years later he provided the
following definition:
4Basil Wright, “The Documentary Dilemma”, Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 5, no. 4 (Summer 1951): 321, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209611. 5 Bill Nichols, foreword to Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary…, cit., 12. 6 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, cit. (2001), 20. 7John Grierson, “Postwar Patterns”. Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1946): 160, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209557. 8 Jon Bang Carlsen, “How to Invent Reality: extracts from a forthcoming book”, A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 16 (December 2003): 96, http://pov.imv.au.dk/pdf/pov16.pdf.
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The documentary is the branch of film production which goes to the
actual, and photographs it and edits it and shapes it. It attempts to give
form and pattern to the complex of direct observation.9
This statement, which dates 1946, already contained all the issues which would prove crucial
in the realization and reception of documentary films of all periods, and which still lie at the
basis of most critical discussion.
According to Grierson, the roots of documentary are in what can be called “reality”. However,
actuality is submitted to the creativity of the filmmaker, who manipulates it through more or
less deliberate processes of selection and association, in order to go beyond the boundaries of
direct observation, and to give it a precise, often politically-oriented meaning.
As William Rothman10 observes, in his commentary to Flaherty’s film Grierson moved the
term “documentary” from its modern meaning of factual and authentic record, or of primary,
evidentiary and official source of information, back to its Latin etymological root docere, “to
teach”. Thus, the educational purpose, which has been fundamental in all Grierson’s activity,
is intrinsically related to the notion of documentary: through the application of refined
rhetorical devices to images drawn from the actual, documentary film imposes itself as an
authoritative voice, and at the same time it gives the illusion to serve as a window open on the
world.
It is precisely this connotation of persuasiveness that makes it necessary to approach
documentary film from a broader point of view, focusing not only on its technical
peculiarities, but also on issues related to its reception. Moreover, the fuzzy borders of the
genre and the problematic issues that it raises require to be observed through a non-
prescriptive, exclusively descriptive approach.
Thus, the aim of this paper will be to discuss the main questions that arouse when trying to
define documentary film, not with the ambition to provide any definitive solution, but with
the purpose to gain a better understanding of the processes that have determined the
development of contemporary documentary forms.
In this view, the main dynamics that affect both the creation and the reception of documentary
film will first be considered, in order to explore the context in which formal features are put
into practice. Consequently, documentary filmmaking will be approached from a technical
point of view, with a particular attention to the similarities and differences that the genre
entertains with its natural antagonist, fiction film. The final section will be focused on the
9 John Grierson, “Postwar Patterns”, cit., 159 10 William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 4.
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developments that the genre has undergone in the last sixty years, and on the new forms
which have emerged.
1. CULTURAL CONTEXT AND QUESTIONS OF RECEPTION
As Jonathan Kahana observes,
Since the late 1920s and early 1930s, when filmmakers and critics in
the United States, England and other Western industrial nations began
regularly to use the term “documentary” to refer to a discrete practice
of filmmaking, it has been understood as a form of democratic and
social pedagogy.11
Grierson’s faith in documentary as a form of social political communication, aimed at
promoting education and eventually mechanisms of social reform, is confirmed not only by
his assertions, but also by his founding of what has been called the “documentary film
movement”.
Moreover, in the classification of documentary film typologies theorized by Eric Barnouw12, a
role of great importance is attributed to explicitly educational modes, such as the “chronicler”
and “compilation” film , which are supposed to transmit knowledge on historical events and
other fields of formation, or as the “advocate” mode, whose purpose is to draw the attention
of the audience on those aspects of reality that are neglected or misrepresented by the main
media, and to promote social involvement.
But the educational purpose of documentary reveals fundamental ambiguities that should be
acknowledged and understood.
On the one hand, as argued by Kahana, documentary can be seen as a “democratic” form of
culture, as it represents “real” people (often belonging to the lower part of society), raises
social discussion, addresses a public belonging to all spheres, and imposes itself as “a form of
mass communication”13.
11, Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008): 1. 12 Erik Barnouw, Documentary: a History of the Non-fiction Film (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974). 13 David Chaney, Fictions of Collective Life: Public Drama in Late Modern Culture ( New York: Routledge, 1993), 128.
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But on the other hand, any educative process is based on a hierarchical relation, in which one
part assumes an authoritative role and is given the right to instruct, or to inform, the other
part. According to Paul Swann, since its origin documentary film has made no exception:
John Grierson Believed in the individual fulfilling his or her social
obligations. He thought, very much in a nineteenth-century liberal
way, that ruling élites had a commitment to inform and educate those
over whom they held “stewardship”.14
Consequently to these considerations, the aim of this section will be to bring out, and discuss,
the main social processes that are involved in the realization and in the reception of
documentary film.
A collective discourse.
An overview of some of the main critical works on documentary makes us realize to what
extent the notion of collectivity is pervasive in discourse on documentary film.
According to Kahana,
Documentary has always leveled distinctions, challenging traditional
oppositions between official and vernacular speech, between high art
and mass culture, and between academic knowledge, folk traditions,
and popular belief. (…) Documentary is an essentially transitional
medium: it carries fragments of social reality from one place or one
group or one time to another, and in transporting them, translates them
from a local dialect to a lingua franca.15
Therefore, the power of documentary film would depend on its capacity to create emotional
and intellectual bounds, to such an extent that this would be its most distinctive feature, as
Chaney confirms while stating that
The audience is engaged as members of a collective who have some
right to feel responsible for or involved with the individuals whose
story is being told. It is this presumption of the public relevance of
individual circumstance that gives documentary its distinctiveness as a
genre.16
14 Paul Swann, The British Documentary Film Movement, 1926-1946 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. 15 Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work…, cit., 1. 16 David Chaney, Fictions of Collective Life…, cit., 128.
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Bounds are established among the members of the audience, who are pushed to feel engaged
in a community, as well as between the public and the subjects on screen, also according to
the dynamic that the sociologist Luc Boltanski17 has labeled “distant suffering”, and which
consists in the capacity of films to induce emotional effects in the viewers corresponding to
the physical struggle that they depict. No need to tell, common understanding and common
feeling are meant to provoke common practice.
A strong feeling of belonging to a community is also shared by documentary making
practitioners, who, as pointed out by Dunne18, have defined their own identity in radical
opposition to entertainment filmmakers. Despite differences in their aesthetic and technical
approach, as well as competition for finding subvention and distribution, documentary
filmmakers share a common sense of purpose, and their tendency toward innovation is always
in dialogue with an acknowledged tradition.
Moreover, the process of documentary shooting involves a high degree of cooperation among
the members of the crew, as well as between them and the people in front of the camera:
Following the tradition of explorers, missionaries, colonialists,
tourists, travelers, and ethnographers,19
documentarists may choose to live among the people whom they are filming or not, but their
activity depends on the founding of a community in which all members can participate to
bring to the film “their diverse perceptions and experiences of their different realities.”20
However, it must be remarked that the parallelism which is established by Grant and
Sloniowski is far from being innocent: just like explorers, missionaries, or colonialists,
filmmakers investigate the world from their own perspective, and consequently tend to
present their vision as “facts and truth”: the authoritative and official status of documentary
allows them to
Represent what they discover, and believe, and want others to
discover and believe as a result of their own representations.21
17 Quoted in Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work…, cit., 5. 18 Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood”. Hollywood Quarterly, vol. 1, no. 2 (January 1946): 167, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1209558. 19 Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary …, cit.,12. 20David Wingate, “Confessions of a Documentary Teacher”, A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 16 (December 2003): 103, http://pov.imv.au.dk/pdf/pov16.pdf. 21 Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary …, cit.,12.
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A discourse of authority.
As Aitken22 reminds us, Grierson’s “Documentary Film Movement” became first established
within two government film units (the Empire marketing Board Film Unit, from 1927 to
1933, and the General Post Office Film Unit, from 1933 to 1939), and it was consequently
integrated into the British Ministry of Information. During the Second World War, it
produced propaganda in favor of the military effort, and in peacetime it serviced a wide
campaign to promote political and cultural reform.
Since its very beginning, thus, documentary has been perceived as one of the most appropriate
ways for spreading ideas and ideologies, either for or against the mainstream position. This is
mainly due to the assumptions that characterize the public’s reception of the genre: as
Nichols23 argues, even when we acknowledge the creative activity that informed the movie,
we still tend to consider single shots and sounds as pure documents of a reality that we could
have observed ourselves. This oscillation between trust and distrust depends on the close
kinship that documentary holds with those nonfictional systems that can be called “discourses
of sobriety”24. Nichols also points out that systems such as science, economics, politics,
education or religion are based on the assumption that they have instrumental power, and that
their discourse should effect action and entail consequences in the real world:
Discourses of sobriety are sobering because they regard their relation
to the real as direct, immediate, transparent. Through them power
exerts itself. Through them, things are made to happen. They are
vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowledge, desire
and will.25
Even if its image-based nature makes it impossible for documentary to be accepted as the
equal partner of such discourses, it can still be considered as their very close partner because
of its determination to intervene in the historical world by shaping our perception and our
understanding of it, as well as our way to act within it.
Most of the power of documentary is a consequence of its double status of source of pleasure
and of information. The pleasure that it engenders is not only due to its aesthetic and artistic
features, but also to its educational purpose: documentary is appealing because of its capacity
22 Ian Aitken, Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement (London: Routledge, 1990), 1. 23 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, cit., (2001), 38. 24 Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), 3. 25 Ibidem, 4.
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to generate what Nichols calls “epistephilia”26, the pleasure of knowledge. Documentary
establishes a process which involves an authoritative agency that possesses knowledge, an
artistically refined text that transmits it, and an audience eager to receive it:
Knowledge, as much or more than the imaginary identification
between viewer and fictional character, promises the viewer a sense of
plenitude or self-sufficiency. Knowledge (…) becomes a source of
pleasure that is far from innocent. Who are we that we may know
something? Of what does knowledge consist?27
Awareness of the power relations and of the sociological and psychological processes which
determine the reception of documentary is fundamental for the establishment of an active
audience. However, such an awareness is not possible to achieve without some understanding
of the rhetorical strategies and formal features according to which documentary is made.
2. A FORMAL APPROACH
In the introduction to their book Documenting the Documentary, Grant and Sloniowski
complain that
Much of the critical writing on documentary- both the old and the new-
ignores or undervalues the significance of aesthetic pleasure and complexity
that distinguish many documentaries.28
However, they argue, the increasingly crucial role that the visual media play in our
understanding of reality requires us to be deeply aware of the textual strategies which lie at
the basis of documentary filmmaking.
Considering the impossibility to draw a list of the fixed criteria that would qualify a given
film as a documentary, and bearing in mind Nichols’ statement that
the definition of “documentary” is always relational or comparative,
the most natural way to approach documentary as a genre is to compare it to fiction.
26 Ibidem, 31. 27 Ivi. 28 Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary…, cit., 20.
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Fiction and non-fiction: an unbridgeable gap?
The most relevant difference between documentary and fictional film, from which all its
formal characteristics derive, is to be observed in the very origin of these two modes of
representation.
In aesthetic terms,
The fictional feature film is an extension of nineteenth-century artistic
forms: the novel, drama and photography. The documentary mode
appeared, was invented in a sense, to meet new artistic and
communication needs arising in the twentieth century.29
According to Rothman, documentary is less closely linked to photography than one would
expect: free from the boundaries of tradition, it constitutes a completely new tradition of its
own. This affirmation, which may sound excessively radical in its attempt to separate
documentary from all the pre-existing modes of representation, becomes much more eloquent
when reformulated as such:
Documentary is purposive; it is intended to achieve something in
addition to entertaining audiences and making money.30
The two modes originated from radically different needs, and they were conceived as means
to attain different purposes, that of documentary being the diffusion of an idea.
As a consequence, many differences can be observed between fiction and non-fiction film
features.
First, unlike fiction movies, the logic of documentaries relies more on the rhetorical treatment
of a central argument than on the narrative organization around a character. For this reason,
documentary filmmakers tend not to use continuity editing, which establishes time and space
relations in a narration, but they prefer what is called evidentiary editing: places, people,
objects and voices are brought forward according to a precise rhetorical construction, whose
aim is to organize the logic of the argument. The informing logic is also sustained by the
intervention of a narrating voice (the so-called “voice of God”), which has been one of the
most characteristic features of documentary at least until the 1960s, and which is generally
absent, or only marginal, in fiction movies.
The typical documentary is filmed in a natural setting, and it stages nonprofessional
performers, whom Nichols defines “social actors”31. As a consequence, production
arrangements show a high degree of simplicity: the shooting is done by a small crew, using
29 William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics, cit., 4. 30 Ivi. 31 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, cit. (2010), 14.
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not very elaborate –but light and very practical- equipment to record people whose acting
ability is often far less crucial than the importance of their testimony.
The conditions under which documentaries are made implicate a wider space for
improvisation and invention in the field than there is in fiction shooting: a huge amount of
footage is produced following usually simple scripts, and it is the editor’s duty to select and to
arrange it so that it manages to express the writer’s idea. However, unlike in Hollywood,
where a sharp differentiation of functions between highly specialized craftsmen is at the basis
of the realization of a good product, in the documentary field the overstepping of crafts lines
and a high degree of cooperation are the norm.
Finally, important differences can be observed in the distribution and reception of the final
product. As a rule of thumb, the distribution of the documentary aims at reaching relatively
small group audiences, who often share social or political positions, while fictional movies
are generally addressed to mass audiences (outstanding exceptions such as Michael Moore’s
movies will be discussed later). Moreover, the purposive intent of the documentary
determines the criteria on which the audience judgment is based: by the general public as well
as by scholars,
Documentaries tend to be discussed as documentaries rather than
closely read as rich work of cinema32,
and their reception tends to be influenced more by persuasiveness than by aesthetic
fascination.
Fiction and non-fiction: two sides of the same coin.
Despite all the features that seem to collocate documentary and fiction in radical opposition,
the two genres are not so far from each other as one could think. In fact, documentary and
fiction rely on the same rules, which are those of filmmaking in general.
To begin with, Dunne remarks that since both documentary and entertainment film are
conceived so as to arouse the interest of the public, they both follow a very simple rule:
The audience must be for one thing, against something else.33
To achieve this goal, Dunne continues, good documentaries make wide use of light and shade
effects, suspense and dramatic motivation just as entertaining films do.
Juel observes that
32 Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary, cit., 20. 33Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood…”, cit., 171.
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As a rule of thumb, a film is hardly a film without camera works, cuts
or editing, and it is neither a fiction nor a documentary if it is nothing
more than a “re-presentation” of what happened to be in front of a lens
and a microphone.34
From this perspective, the discussion is not focused on the close relation that documentary is
supposed to entertain with actuality, but on the creative activity through which the material is
shaped into
A willed presentation of something made by someone in a specific
way and for someone.35
To make a further step, one could argue with Nichols that
Every film is a documentary. Even the most whimsical of fictions gives evidence of
the culture that produced it and reproduces the likenesses of the people who perform
within it.36
Thus, every film has a documentary value, not because it is a mirror of “reality”, but because
it witnesses of the culture which selected, artistically manipulated and gave meaning to the
images that inform it.
In an article dating 1946, Philip Dunne remarked that “the gap between the two media”,
fiction and documentary, “is not so wide that it cannot be bridged”37, and he affirmed that
wider exchange between practitioners of the two modes would lead to interesting
developments in filmmaking. Even if signs of a certain tendency toward genre overlapping
can be observed in most of the filmmaking tradition, never as in the last fifty years has this
tendency been so evident, as an expression of the cultural changes that will make the object of
the next section.
3. NEW TENDENCIES
After the end of the Second World War, a new tendency developed in contemporary culture
as a reaction to the modernist confidence in objective, scientific observation of reality as a
means of progress. Concepts like objective truth and factual reality were put under radical
34Henrik Juel, “Defining Documentary Film”. A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 22 (December 2006) :8, http://pov.imv.au.dk/pdf/pov22.pdf. 35 Ivi. 36 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, cit. (2001), 1. 37 Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood”, cit., 166.
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questioning, while others, such as relativity, plurality and subjectivity emerged as the only
principles through which the world could be approached.
As Roscoe and Hight pointed out, the collapse of the “real” in postmodernist discourse has
involved ambivalent outcomes:
As well as undermining some of the foundational discourses that
documentary draws upon, postmodernist critiques have yielded certain
possibilities for documentary. One of the consequences of the critique
of “truth” and “reality” has been the blurring of traditional boundaries
between documentary and drama, and between fact and fiction.38
Although the elements that contributed to the emergence of new, and often difficult to label,
forms of documentary filmmaking would certainly require further investigation, an overview
of the main perspectives that have aroused in western culture from the 1960s on will provide a
useful context to our understanding of the changes that affected documentary filmmaking.
From “reality” to “realities”.
The spread of new media, like the television, lies at the basis of what has been defined as the
contemporary “image culture”39. The assumption that the only way to experience reality is
through the lenses of subjective perception, necessarily implies that every attempt to give an
objective and encompassing representation of the world is nothing but an ontological
impossibility. Reality reveals itself as an abstract concept, fragmented into the infinite number
of relative and constantly changing mental images that every person generates, and which are
the only possible referent of all attempts of representation.
As Linda Williams remarks, the moving picture is no longer a mirror of reality: in fact, the
only thing that it can represent is another mirror, the one that reflects an individual and
subjective vision of the world.
However, the proliferation of images that characterizes postmodernity can also be regarded as
the sign of a remarkable eagerness for some kind of documentary representation of the real:
The contradictions are rich: on the one hand the postmodern deluge of
images seems to suggest that there can be no a priori truth of the
referent to which the image refers; on the other hand, in the same
38 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking it: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 29. 39 Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary“, in New Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner (Manchester : Manchester University Press, 2005), 59.
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deluge, it is still the moving image that has the power to move
audiences to a new appreciation of previously unknown truth.40
In response to these ambivalent tendencies, the aim of contemporary filmmakers is to seek the
“reverberations and repetitions” that reveal multiple and contingent “truths”, rather than
trying to express the unitary, unproblematic “Truth”. 41
Despite some relevant differences in their technical and aesthetical features, as well as in their
intent, the new modes of documentary representation that will make the object of the next
section rely on the same principle: the blurring of borders between documentary and fiction.
Fiction or non-fiction? New modes of representation.
It’s a fine line between the real and the fake, and what is of far more
interest to documentarists at the moment it seems to me is the
complexity and productiveness of the relationship between the two.42
Conscious of the fact that “objectivity is a bad excuse for manipulation”43, contemporary
approaches to documentary filmmaking have led to an increasing rehabilitation of two
features which are usually associated with fiction: subjectivity and storytelling.
In a very interesting article entitled “Narrative Journalism: subjectivity, no longer a dirty
word”, Nancy Graham Holm explains that in the so-called Information Age people are so
much surrounded by voices, images and information that it is becoming increasingly difficult
to get and keep their attention.
Once the heart is engaged, however, more information will be
sought. Identification is the solution to apathy, and comes
naturally if stories are told in ways that reinforce our mutual
humanity.44
Thus, the focus is moved from “epistephelia” to “identification”, from intellectual to
emotional satisfaction. Storytelling acquires a role of great importance in non-fiction film, not
only as a medium to arouse interest and emotions, but also, if not mainly, as the only
legitimate way to hold a discourse on reality, without misleadingly pretending to be
“objective”:
40Ibidem, 60. 41Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski, Documenting the Documentary…, cit., 22. 42 Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (New York: Routledge, 2000), 5-6. 43 Jon Bang Carlsen, “How to Invent Reality…”, cit., 96. 44 Nancy Garham Holm, “Narrative Journalism: Subjectivity, No longer a Dirty Word”, A Danish Journal of Film Studies, no. 22 (December 2006): 53, http://pov.imv.au.dk/pdf/pov22.pdf.
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Whether you work with fiction or documentaries, you’re telling
stories because that is the only way we can approach the world: to
fantasize about this mutual stage of ours as it reinvents itself in the
sphere between the actual physical world and the way your soul
reflects its back onto the world.45
The shaping activity of the eye of the filmmaker is explicitly recognized, to such an extent
that it can become one of the objects of the movie itself. Sometimes, it can represent the main
issue of the film: it is the case of the so-called meta-movies, which, developing a discourse
introduced by Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch, reflect on the very act and conventions of
filmmaking.
Processes of parody, irony and satire lie at the basis of a continuum of texts, whose main
characteristic is a systematical blurring of the line between fact and fiction, and whose
common purpose is to challenge all normative discourses on documentary conventions.
As Roscoe and Hight explain, reflexive documentaries are constructed from images that hold
“a direct relationship to the real”46, but they overtly acknowledge the filmmaker’s presence,
perspective and selectivity. An outstanding example is represented by Errol Morris’ The Thin
Blue Line (1988). This movie, which contains many re-enactment scenes that have been built
carefully from witnesses’ statements, depicts the story of Randall Dale Adams, a man who
was convicted and sentenced to die because of a murder that he did not commit, and who was
eventually exonerated, also thanks to the pressure that the release of the movie exerted for a
further analysis of the case. As an able fiction filmmaker, “Morris gives us some truths and
withholds others”47, and even when he inserts an audio interview in which the real murderer
almost confesses his crime, the truth that he captures is recognized as such only
in the context of a film that is manifestly staged and temporally
manipulated by the docu-auteur48.
Unlike reflexive documentaries, the so-called drama-documentaries are based on an invented
dramatic diegesis staging fictional characters. Despite their refusal to use original footage,
these movies are positioned as close to the discourse of factuality because of their ambition to
establish metaphors that would enable them to represent “absolute truths inaccessible through
45 Jon Bang Carlsen, “How to Invent Reality…”, cit., 97. 46 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking it: Mock-documentary and the Subversion of Factuality (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2001), 33. 47 Linda Williams, “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New Documentary“. In New Challenges for Documentary, edited by Alan Rosenthal and John Corner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005), 64. 48 Ivi.
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traditional documentary methods”49. An example is provided by Steven Spielberg’s
Schindler’s List (1993), the black-and-white movie based on a novel by Thomas Keneally, in
which the only flash of color is represented by the red coat of a little girl, metaphor of all the
innocent victims of the holocaust.
A further step toward entertainment filmmaking conventions has been made recently by
Michael Moore, whom Steven Mintz50 identifies as the central promoter of the rise of the so-
called docutainment, a new hybrid genre based on the treatment of non-fiction topics through
all the formal means which are normally applied to high production feature film. However,
Moore’s intentions go far beyond simple entertainment: with a movie such as Farenheit 9/11
(2004), he placed himself and his work within a tradition of explicitly opinionated and
rhetorically refined documentaries, aimed at convincing an audience and at leading to political
action.
Finally, a genre of cultural relevance is mockumentary. This genre adopts documentary codes
and conventions and applies them on completely fictional images. As Roscoe and Hight point
out,
Mock-documentary’s point of departure is an audience which is
not only familiar with the expectations and assumptions
associated with factual codes and conventions, but is ready to
explore a much more complex relationship with factual
discourse itself.51
Paradoxically, the more mockumentaries insist in their using of documentary conventions, the
more effective their subversive and deconstructive action is.
The audience is given a great role in determining what is true, and its action can go so far as
to engender realities that did not exist before the making of the movie, as it happened
consequently to the release of Bob Reiner’s This is Spinal Tap (1984). This movie, which
“documented” and satirized the life of a fictional hard rock music band called Spinal Tap, was
so successful that a real rock band called Spinal Tap was founded, which sold albums and
conducted a tour in the America. Ten years after the release of the film, a sequel was made, in
which a real revival concert was held by another fictional band:
49 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking it…, cit., 45. 50 Steven Mintz, “Michael Moore and the Re-Birth of the Documentary”, Film& History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies, no. 35.2 (Spring 2005): 11, http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/film_and_history/v035/35.2mintz.html. 51 Jane Roscoe and Craig Hight, Faking it…, cit., 21.
17
The audience, both within and outside the text, are encouraged
to enjoy this contradiction, as part of a parodic stance toward
cultural practices of which both they and the band are part.52
52 Ibidem, 69.
18
CONCLUSIONS
In an interview that he gave in connection with the Encounters Documentary Festival in Cape
Town in 2000, documentary maker Paul Watson claimed that “documentaries should be
subversive”.53 At the end of this brief survey, it does not seem inappropriate to observe that a
certain tendency to subversion intrinsically belongs to the very nature of the genre.
First, documentary escapes all attempts to encompass it in a concise, fixed definition, on the
contrary, its constant movement toward innovation engenders
an ongoing dialogue that draws on common characteristics that take
on new and distinct form, like an ever-changing chameleon54.
Moreover, it is subversive in its origins, since it is a form of art which emerged more as a
response to a need for social action than as a form of aesthetic deployment, as well as in its
formal development, because
by its very nature the documentary is experimental and inventive55.
By its being used as an instrument for more or less explicit propaganda, on a large scale
documentary filmmaking plays the subversive function of keeping political and social
discussion alive, and by its working within and onto the social imaginary, it enhances “a
common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of
legitimacy”, since
the function of social imaginary is not limited to the creation of
consensus, but may also animate criticism and change56.
Finally, documentary has proved subversive for its ability to reinvent itself when the cultural
changes that took place in the contemporary era challenged its very existence, and for its
capacity to push its own limits to such an extent as to converge toward fiction, in order to find
new ways to represent not “the Reality”, but the problematic plurality of the perceptions of it .
As a conclusion, one can argue with Ellis and McLane that the vitality,
“the power of documentary and its uniqueness lay exactly in its fusion
of social purpose with artistic form”57.
53 Cited in David Wingate, Confessions of a Documentary Teacher, cit., 99. 54 Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary, cit., 6. 55 Philip Dunne, “The Documentary and Hollywood”, cit., 167. 56 Jonathan Kahana, Intelligence Work, cit., 1-2. 57
Jack C Ellis and and Betsy A. McLane, A New History of Documentary Film (New York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2005), 154.
19
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ON-LINE RESOURCES
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