Cox Documentary Essay Rev4

Several Notes Toward a Re-definition of Documentary

by

Michael Cox

An Essay for Exploring Arts for Social Change: Communities in Action

Dr. Lynn Fels and Dr. Judith Marcuse

© Michael Cox SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY

Fall 2010

All rights reserved. However, in accordance with the Copyright Act of Canada, this work may be reproduced, without authorization, under the conditions for Fair Dealing.

Therefore, limited reproduction of this work for the purposes of private study, research, criticism, review and news reporting is likely to be in accordance with the law,

particularly if cited appropriately.

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary Michael Cox

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Introduction

For truly beautiful is the statement of the man who, in response to the question of

what we have in common with the gods, answered: the ability to do good…and truth.

Werner Herzog1

From Robert Flaherty’s 1922 silent Nanook of the North,2 which first exposed

general audiences to the ways of a culture, to Errol Morris’s 1988 feature The Thin Blue

Line, which, upon its release, saw a man unjustly accused of murdering a policemen freed

from prison, to Nettie Wild’s 2002 feature video FIX: the Story of an Addicted City,

which prompted a request for a follow-up training video for street nurses, the

1 Werner Herzog. “On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth.” Text of speech given at Milan, Italy after a screening of his film “Lessons of Darkness,” later published in ARION 17:3 (Winter 2010). http://www.bu.edu/arion/on-the-absolute-the-sublime-and-ecstatic-truth/ (accessed Nov.9, 2010) 2 Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Nanook_of_the_North&oldid=395186346 (accessed 16/11/2010).The complete Nanook can be viewed on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaDVovGjNOc


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documentary “conscience” has played an active role in promoting socio-political action,

by building momentum around an awareness of a situation, and, less commonly, in

actuating a change in legal, medical, environmental, ethical or other practices and

policies. Documentary films are an expression of curiosity, outrage, disenfranchisement,

marginalization; they respond to a desire to show others how things were, or are; they can

be angry and serious, light-hearted and ironic, objective or subjective, balanced or

slanted, or contain aspects of all of these qualities. For better or worse, documentaries

have been informing—and misleading—us for the last one hundred fifteen years (since

the Lumiere brothers began shooting short “actualities” in 1895).

There is also to be acknowledged nonfiction cinema’s less altruistic side:

propaganda, advertising, indoctrination, and much of what passes for “infotainment” on

television. The documentary filmmaker must bear a disproportionate share of

responsibility for the claims this genre makes, but as I shall make clear—at least, I hope

to make clear—further on, the viewer of documentary is, in essence, its realisatur.

There is a minor or major crisis in the field of documentary studies, its seriousness a

matter of contention, with academics weighing on the side of “major” and filmmakers

more likely to consider it a tempest in a teapot. It was not a crisis of distribution, because

there were more documentaries being aired and shown theatrically than ever before; nor

was it a crisis in the eyes of the general public, who flocked to Roger and Me, March of

the Penguins, An Inconvenient Truth, Winged Migration, Mad Hot Ballroom, Hoop


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Dreams, The Fog of War, Born Into Brothels, The Corporation, Grizzly Man, The Wild

Parrots of Telegraph Hill, Crumb, Man on Wire, to name but a baker’s dozen3.

Prompted by self-reflexive films and by crossover films that were part fiction, part

fact, written about from linguistic, semiotic, film, theatrical, ethnographic, sociological,

political and philosophic perspectives, the crisis was one of identification. What is a

documentary and how can it be a record of reality? is, in essence, the critical question.

Sparked by ethnographic films which were shot and edited into narratives which may or

may not have represented the profilmic (pre-filmed) state of their subjects, and by

filmmakers who were the “cross-dressers” of docufiction, whose films were fiction

posing as nonfiction, or nonfictional accounts of fictional situations, these new cinematic

forms blurred whatever was left of the already thin line between fiction and nonfiction.

(More about this in sections 2 and 6.) The crisis gained traction in academia, as papers

began swirling around the black hole of definition, several of which will be cited here,

and more noted in the bibliography.

From its inception in the late 19th century documentary had, by the mid-20th,

positioned itself as a record of historical reality. Documentary film and photography

didn’t lie—until Stalin’s elimination of undesirables included Trotsky’s emulsive

removal from a photograph taken on May 5, 19204. As of the second decade of the 21st,

we see films combining live action with computer-generated images (CGI); records of

reality which have been manipulated to correct perspective, colour, sound; digital video

which can be manipulated on laptop computers at home to extents only possible in

3 Presented in order of box office receipts, but missing several films in-between these titles. Source: BoxOfficeMojo. http://boxofficemojo.com/genres/chart/?id=documentary.htm 4 Leslie Mullen. Truth in Photography: Perception, Myth and Reality in the Postmodern World. Dissertation (University of Florida, 1998): 12; Google Scholar search.


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Hollywood a decade ago. To come to an agreed definition of what a documentary is, the

literature suggests it may be easier to define it by what it is not.5

This essay springs from my personal interest in film: twenty-odd years working on

feature films in various capacities; directing two short dramatic films; and now

producing, shooting and editing two documentary films.6

What I soon realized as I began filming, was that in addition to having to define

“public” and “art” and “public art” (which, I realized, is not synonymous with “art in

public spaces),” I also had to redefine “documentary,” specifically because the film was

an MA thesis requiring more academic rigour than simply grabbing a camera and

shooting some art. Making a film was what Lynn Fels told me was essentially a

performative inquiry, which she defines as “a research methodology that uses the arts as a

process or medium of research.”7

This essay, first written for a course Fels and Judith Marcuse taught on arts for social

change,8 is an investigation into the nature of documentary. It was also in this class that I

learned of David Appelbaum’s concept of the Stop, and from Salverson (et al),

Witnessing.9

5 See, for instance: Eitzen 1995; Godmilow 1997; Williams 1993; Nolley 2005. 6 Public Art-Private Views is my MA thesis film for Simon Fraser University, Graduate Liberal Studies; Gordon Smith: Painting is a biographical film. Both are works-in-progress in 2010. 7 Lynn Fels. Performative Inquiry: Arresting the Villains in Jack and the Beanstalk. Journal for Learning Through the Arts 4:1 (2008): 7 8 Judith Marcuse and Lynn Fels. Exploring Arts for Social Change: Communities in Action was a combined credit and non-credit course offered by Simon Fraser University’s Education department and the International Centre of Arts for Social Change (ICASC), Fall 2010. 9 Julie Salverson. Witnessing Subjects: a Fools Help, in Jan Cohen_Cruz and Mady Schutzman, A Boal companion: dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. (New York: Routledge, 2006) 146:155


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The Stop, Fels writes, “is a moment that calls us to attention. A stop signals a new

awarenss of possibility,”11 which can be any event which causes us to pause: the sudden

recognition: this is important.

In terms of filmmaking, “the stop” is simultaneously a static moment and a dynamic

process, because, ordinarily, we cannot stop the film as we watch it (or rather, we can, on

dvd, but that is not the normal viewing experience). And this “stop” is what every

filmmaker hopes to attain through the juxtaposition of one shot with another, and scene

with succeeding scene.

Witnessing as a performative methodology, Salverson writes, is used to “make

explicit the implicated nature of all involved” in a performance.12 While I would not

claim to be employing any form of witnessing in my documentaries, given the “soft”

nature of the topic, I agree with Salverson that “as a witness I announce myself publicly,

and I commit myself to the consequence of response.”13

10 Michael Zheng. “The Stop.” Vancouver Biennale. Photo by Clayton Perry Photoworks. 11 Fels: 5 12 Julie Salverson. Performing Testimony:Ethics, Pedagogy,and a Theatre Beyond Injury. Phd Thesis. University of Toronto, 2001. 66-67 13 Julie Salverson. “Witnessing Subjects: a Fools Help,” in Jan Cohen_Cruz and Mady Schutzman, A Boal companion: dialogues on theatre and cultural politics. (New York: Routledge, 2006): 146-155


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This paper begins with a brief review of the genre (section 1), followed by a

discussion of cinematic truth (2) and several ethical conundrums facing documentary (3).

A brief digression on narrative (4) and music (5) is necessary before I talk about the

“mockumentary” (6) and realism in ethnographic film (7). I then look at how

documentaries can be an agent for social change (8), and conclude (9) with a re-definition

of documentary, a definition which I hope can encompass the traditional form while

acknowledging and accepting the newer styles of nonfiction film.

My goal in this exploration—and it is a personal exploration, rather than a

comprehensive survey of the literature, or a theoretical discourse—is to move toward an

ethos and methodology which I can hold as a workably useful explanation and

rationalization of what it is I am doing as I make my documentaries. In other words, I

need to know where my evolving method fits within the broad category of nonfiction

filmmaking.14

Let me first state a prejudice: I do not believe any documentary film can be an

objective depiction of reality. Photographs and films, literature and art cannot tell THE

TRUTH, as if it were an unvarying Platonic ideal. We can certainly locate aspects of

reality in those arts, and films can portray emotional truth, and something approaching

truth, within both fiction and documentary.

14 Throughout this paper, and in much of the cited literature, the word “film” is used to describe documentaries shot on film or video, unless the term is specifically designating the medium itself, as in “16mm film.” There still exists a prejudice among filmmakers, myself included, toward calling whatever medium we are working in “film” rather than “video,” which arose from the early days of ½-inch video and its “non-professional” look. We are now coming to accept that high-definition video not only approaches but in some cases exceeds the resolution of film. That said, I will continue to be a “filmmaker” rather than a “videographer.”


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1. What is a documentary film?

In roughly the year 1895, two kinds of films were made, two modes of what cinema could be seemed to emerge: cinema as the transcription of real unstaged life (the Lumiére brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Méliès). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the transcription of the most banal reality—the Lumiére brothers filming The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station—was a fantastic experience. Cinema began in wonder, the wonder that reality can be transcribed with such immediacy. All of cinema is an attempt to perpetuate and to reinvent that sense of wonder.15

The “second earliest” cinematic representation of reality, La Sortie des usines

Lumière à Lyon (1896), was a forty-five-second shot of workers leaving the Lumiere

factory near Lyon, filmed by Louis Lumiere.16 Two large doors open and the workers,

most of them women, exit left and right of the camera. It is obvious from the crush that

they had been instructed to gather behind the doors—and furthermore to avoid looking at

the camera, although some glance toward us as they stream out. This could arguably be

the beginning of documentary—a single shot, recording a mundane actuality—but note,

this is not one shot, nor one recorded reality: there are three versions of this film,

meaning either the workers were rehearsed, and shot leaving, three times, or (less likely),

the shot was repeated on three days, or, another possibility, it was shot with more than

one camera.

We didn’t use the appellation “documentary” until 1926, when John Grierson,

reviewing a movie, Moana, in the New York Sun New York Sun, 8 February 1926, wrote:

15 Susan Sontag. “The Decay of Cinema.” New York Times, Feb.25, 1996. http://www.nytimes.com/books/00/03/12/specials/sontag-cinema.html 16 Several takes of the factory workers exiting the Lumiere plant can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LnVwgLORy2Y


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"Of course Moana, being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth

and his family, has documentary value"17 (my emphasis).

It was Grierson, the first director of Canada’s National Film Board, who called

documentary “the creative treatment of actuality.” In what would be his last interview,

recorded shortly before his death in 1972, John Grierson gives a capsule history of the

genre:

The first chapter is of course the travelogue, that is, the discovery that the camera can go about: it’s peripatetic. The second chapter is the discovery by Flaherty that you can make a film of people on the spot, that is, you can get an insight of a dramatic sort,…with living people…The third chapter…is the discovery of the working people,…the drama on the doorstep, the drama of the ordinary….[And the] fourth chapter…in which people began to talk not about making films about people but films with people.18

In his First Principles of Documentary19 (1932-34), Grierson wanted a new kind of

film, a film in which we would observe and select from life itself, utilizing the “original

(or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene.” He felt that nature—reality—was a

far more effective and real material (“in the philosophic sense”) than anything built or

acted.

Why watch a documentary?

Nick Fraser believes they are “the best account—sometimes, indeed, the only one—

of the world still to be found…”20 although television, up to this decade the main

17 Wikipedia contributors, “John Grierson,” Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=John_Grierson&oldid=393443317 (accessed November 3, 2010) 18 E. Sussex and John Grierson. “Grierson on Documentary: the Last Interview.” Film Quarterly: 26:1 (1972): 30 19 Download a scan of Grierson’s First Principles at: http://artsites.ucsc.edu/faculty/gustafson/FILM 161.F08/readings/griersonprinciples.pdf 20 Nick Fraser. "In Praise of Documentaries." Critical Quarterly 43, no. 3 (2001): 57-64.


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disseminator of nonfiction programming, has tainted not only documentary’s reputation

but its own, government-mandated “balanced” journalism with so-called “reality”

programs, which are to documentary as the Weekly World News is to the Globe and

Mail. “The new orthodoxy of the market,” Fraser wrote in 2001, “is very persuasive. In

Britain documentaries are now made almost exclusively to be shaped by TV slots. The

subjects are narrower and narrower each year” to a few risable topics”…because it can be

guaranteed that they will get the right numbers.”21

We have no problem knowing a documentary film when we see one; they’re easily

found in the local library or video rental store, clearly labelled on shelves set aside for the

serious stuff. So, where do we file a film like The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris. Mirimax,

1988), with its recreated scenes of a murder? Confusing our concept further are

docudramas, such as United 93 (Paul Greengrass. Universal, 2006), dramatising the

rebellion of passengers aboard a hijacked aircraft, where several of the people portrayed

in the film are played by the actual people who took part in the event—notably the FAA

National Operations Manager, Ben Sliney.22 In Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922),

arguably the first documentary feature, we find re-enactments, “Eskimos” playing

characters who are, but are not, themselves. For instance, Nanook’s real name was

Allakariallak, and the people called themselves Inuit. These and other facts did not get in

Flaherty’s way of telling his story through them.23 Cinema is, if nothing else, one lie after

21 Fraser: 63. 22 Internet Movie Database. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0475276/fullcredits#cast (accessed 19/11 2010) 23 Jill Godmilow. “Kill the Documentary as We Know It.” Journal of Film and Video 54:2/3 (Summer/Fall 2002): 7


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another, inverting Godard’s claim that [if] photography was truth, cinema was truth, 24

times per second.24

Trin T. Minh-ha, a feminist scholar and filmmaker, claims “there is no such thing as

documentary—whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach,

or a set of techniques. This assertion—as old and as fundamental as the antagonism

between names and reality—needs incessantly to be restated, despite the very visible

existence of a documentary tradition25.” Cinema, she continues, “is often reified into a

corpus of traditions,” which are convenient for cataloguing, but inaccurate. While we can

admit a film as a personal (eg.filmmaker’s) subjective interpretation, we simultaneously

accept that a film labelled documentary is, in fact, fact; that what we are seeing, however

cut up in time, is something which would have happened whether or not the camera was

present.

What is presented as evidence remains evidence, whether the observing eye qualifies itself as being subjective or objective. At the core of such a rationale dwells, untouched, the Cartesian division between subject and object that perpetuates a dualistic inside-versus-outside, mind-against-matter view of the world.26

Where, in the tradition of cinematic presentation, is the line between what is real and

what is made up, between an event and the event-as-filmed? And does this wavering line

mean anything? Perhaps we’ve been peering through the wrong end of the lens: for film

editor Dai Vaughn, documentary is not defined by what it is, rather it is understood only

in the context of our response to the material.

Stated at its simplest: the documentary response is one in which the image is perceived as signifying what it appears to record; a documentary film is one which

24 Jean-Luc Godard. Le Petit Soldat, screenplay, 1960, as quoted in Wikiquote http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Film (accessed 18/11/2010) 25 Trin T. Minh-ha. “Documentary Is/Not a Name,” October Vol.52 (Spring 1990) 26 Minh-Ha, ibid.


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seeks, by whatever means, to elicit this response; and the documentary movement is the history of the strategies which have been adopted to this end.27

Any film can be “documentary” if that is how we perceive it. And since it is a genre

wholly dependent on the viewer’s perception to define it, “any suggestion of

intepretations being ‘forced on us’ represents an abdication of responsibility by the

viewer.”28 Watching a documentary is a pact between viewer and the filmmaker, wherein

each agrees the material is not fictive. Choosing to perceive a film as documentary,

Vaughn writes, is not so much a matter of rejecting a fictive option for a known

nonfiction as it is a fully aware mode of apprehension, a choice we make “in full

knowledge of our own ignorance.”29

A.O.Scott, the New York Times film reviewer, states that “the most sustained and

systematic attempt to formulate a set of rules was the cinéma vérité movement of the

1960s and ’70s….Vérité took advantage of technological advances…and the spirit of the

times…to produce movies that were immersive and in the moment, descriptive rather

than analytical.”30 Verité, and its North American cousin direct cinema, empowered

filmmakers with its self-defined status as an unadorned and somewhat unmediated look at

the world, even if it clearly was a judiciously edited view. However, that view is

changing, has been changing for the past two decades, becoming something else again,

even as documentary and many of its practitioners continue to avow their resolute

adherence to a model of cinematic, if not actual, truth-telling.

27 Dai Vaughn. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. (University of California, 1999): 58 28 ibid: 78 29 ibid: 79 30 A.O.Scott. “Documentaries (in Name Only) of Every Stripe.” New York Times, October 13,2010


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In a published conversation Godmilow, who admits her films are “way out on the

fringe of documentary filmmaking,” wants to find a new, inclusive term for nonfiction

films which can encompass such a wide range of possibilities. She demands her students

call them “films of edification” or “edifiers,” lumbering, academy-speak terms. The

common trait of these films is their “claim not so much to educate, but to edify.”31 By

using this label she avoids, at least in the received understanding of the older term,

“documentary” and its root, “document,” the notion of truth, of a film which claims to be

the truth or at least a truth.

Godmilow claims that the traditional documentary is a “dumbed-down mask of the

world,” a product of a post-imperialist, post-colonial world which still divides societies

into “us and them.”32 The traditional documentary is a product which allows us to feel

good about ourselves and—even if it is not the conscious intent of the filmmaker or

commissioning agent—our exploitation of others.

Nettie Wild could not be accused of racism, or of dumbing down her subjects, in her

film A Place Called Chiapas, which attempts to show several sides of a complex socio-

political issue in Mexico. There is no sense here of the convenient narrative label

“underdeveloped.” Even so, this is a film; Wild has to be engaged by a character who has

a compelling story before she’ll begin a project. In other words, her interest is not

initially sparked by a political imperative.

What pulls me into making a movie, is that I run into people who are living extraordinary lives, and their stories are just incredible…the drama of people trying to gain control over their lives and what they had run up against. Those are the people who I find very intriguing. At that point when I get a really profound sense

31 Jill Godmilow and Ann-Louise Shapiro. “How Real is the Reality in Documentary Film?” History and Theory 36:4 (Dec.1997): 81 32 Godmilow 2002: 7


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that the audience is going to be blown away by this story [sic]….All I know is, until I find them, I’m not interested in making a movie.33

Wild finds a narrative within the relationships between compelling characters—the

word is hers; she does not impose a narrative, but she must find a way to simplify the

story: how else can one present, in 90 minutes, the complexities of a multi-year struggle

that claimed thousands of lives?

When the OED defines documentary as “factual, realistic; applied esp. to a film or

literary work, etc., based on real events or circumstances, and intended primarily for

instruction or record purposes,” I see a tautology: a documentary documents; documented

evidence is the basis for a documentary. In defining its own verity—if it is called a

documentary, it must be “the truth” about something—this circularity releases

filmmakers from an obligation to assert and prove its claims, which therefore, by an

audience’s aquiescence, absolves documentary from having to provide proof. We

assume, based on advertising, and by the film’s broadcast in a documentary series or

presentation in a festival or an academic setting, that this is a film about “what it is” and

not “what it is not.”

The trouble with this easy acceptance of “if it is a documentary then it must be true,”

is that dramatic films—and television programs and advertising—have adopted many of

the conventions of documentary cinema, from the handheld camera to people—actors, in

this case—addressing and acknowledging the camera, to the outright faking of a

dramatised story as a documentary, so that there is no longer any discernable difference,

visually, aurally, or contextually, between a film or video which is a recording of an

33 Mark Harris and Claudia Medina. Wild at Heart: the Films of Nettie Wild. (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2009): 25


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unstaged event and one which is about real actors in a fictionalised presentation of a

scripted or unscripted event34.

For example, The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick, Eduardo Sanchez, 1999) was

a fictional film made to look like a badly shot actuality of film students encountering

something other-worldly; it was particularly powerful because the filmmakers also wove

concocted backstories into a website, and made the release of the film a news event.35

Another recent example of this type of crossover fiction is Ten by Iranian filmmaker

Abbas Kiarastomi (2002), which takes place entirely within a car, shot with two locked-

down cameras, one aimed at the driver (Iranian actress Mani Akbari), the other at a

succession of passengers. How much was scripted? Are these, in facts, actors at all, or

people playing themselves? Kiarostami explains:

This film was created without being made as such. Even so, it isn’t a documentary. Neither a documentary nor a purely fabricated film. Mid-way between the two perhaps... A scene occurs and I decide that it suits me…what happens in front of the camera isn’t documentary because it’s guided and controlled in a way. The person in front of the camera manages to forget its presence, it vanishes for him.36

The existence and current popularity of crossover films like these are unsettling for

the documentary filmmaker, forcing as they do the necessity to visually “prove” the

veracity of each shot—or at least to have backup evidence, including signed documents,

attesting to the “realness” of the film. Of course, proving truth on-camera is next to

impossible, even if there was another camera recording the camera recording the event or

34 For instance, the HBO series Curb Your Enthusiasm (1999-2011), in which writer/producer Larry David plays himself. Episode storylines are loosely scripted, but the actors improvise the scenes and dialogue. 35 See Blair Witch Mythology (their site), http://www.blairwitch.com/mythology.html, and Telotte, J.P. The Blair Witch Project: Film and the Internet. Film Quarterly, 54:3 (spring 2001), pp32-39 36 Zeitgeist Films press kit, 2002. http://www.zeitgeistfilms.com/film.php?directoryname=ten


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interview, because who is to say that that second observer was not part of a scripted plot?

(In Francois Truffaut’s La nuit américaine (1973), the behind-the-scenes documentary is

fictional, as is the feature within the fictional documentary.) In the end it comes down to

our willingness to accept the word of the filmmaker, while from a broadcaster’s legal

culpability in airing a fiction but assuming (and naming) it documentary, Errors and

Omissions Insurance covers the broadcaster’s liability, if not the filmmaker’s.

Even using the term nonfiction is troubling. Godmilow calls it “tainted,”37 because it

is constructed of what it is not, rather than what it is. Not-fiction. It is a term associated

with the New Journalism movement of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Norman Mailer and

others writing in the late 1960’s onward, and the self-reflexive pracitioners today: Jon

Krakauer, William Langewiesche, Susan Orlean, and others38.

If documentary were merely record, then editors would not be needed to order it, since to grant significance to the order in which records are presented is to impute to it a linguistic nature; yet if documentary were language pure and simple, editors would not be needed to manipulate it, since there would be no meanings generated other than those commonly available—to film crew and viewers alike.39

Of documentary’s avowed raison d’etre, being the true record of actualities, truth is

not merely problematic, it is an impossibility.

37 Godmilow 1997: 81 38 The New New Journalism, http://www.newnewjournalism.com/about.htm 39 Dai Vaughn: 79


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2. Truth

Truth is relative and ephemeral. Truth is absolute and eternal. I’m not a philosopher,

but I know both these statements to be, well, true. My truth is not your truth: were I to be

put on the witness stand and asked to tell the whole truth, I would have to admit that I

could only tell the truth to the best of my ability, but it would not be, and could not ever

be, the “whole truth.” And truth is Platonic, perfect, an ideal we strive toward; as we

understand it, truth had to exist before we gave a name to it, before we were we. Before

the concept of truth.

As direct cinema and cinema verité became more self-reflexive in the 80’s (cf.

Michael Moore, Nick Broomfield, Werner Herzog), we were also being confounded by

quantum physics and the now commonplace realization that no matter how controlled the

experiment, the outcome is affected by the observation, no matter how distant the

observation from the experiment.

Documentary films are posited as true records of reality, but they are not truth, as I

stated in my introduction; they can, however, contain a version of a truth. This is all we

can trust and all we should expect of documentary. “What is presented as evidence

remains evidence,” Trinh T. Minh-ha asserts, “whether the observing eye qualifies itself

as being subjective or objective.”40 Dualism, which we in the west have stuck ourselves

with since Plato41, and certainly since Descartes declared the mind separate from the

body in his Meditations (1641), has hamstrung attempts to synthesize a holistic approach 40 Trinh T. Minh-ha. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning.” When the Moon Waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1991): 95 41 Howard Robinson, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/


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to sensory perception and cognition. Thus, Trinh continues, “the emphasis is again laid

on the power of film to capture reality ‘out there’ for us ‘in here,’” which burdens the

film itself with an authority it may not warrant nor want.42

What are we seeing we look at a documentary?

Within the rectangular frame, a slice, a narrow angle, temporally and spatially

disconnected, of reality. John Grierson claims that film’s “arbitrary rectangle specially

reveals movement; it gives it maximum pattern in space and time,”43 which is certainly

true for camera operators, where the frame is a compositional device; looking through the

viewfinder for any length of time gives one the feeling of a more ordered reality, in

which a balance exists between elements (and removing one’s eye, returning to messy

reality, often disappoints). As a director, however, I consider the camera’s frame less a

selector (of what is in front of it) than a device to obscure or eliminate that which

distracts, to clean up that which does not conform to the particular focus (both

aesthetically and psychologically) of the shot. Nonfiction films “always were forms of re-

presentation [sic], never clear windows onto ‘reality;’”44 the screen’s black border is

simultaneously window and frame.

What is going on around and beyond the edges of the frame is as important as what

is shown at the edges of the frame, never more so than in documentary, because whether

we choose to show this peripheral activity or not forms part of the argument for an ethical

debate about subjectivity and the negation of circumstance.

42 Trinh. 96ff. 43 Grierson says film’s “abritrary rectangle specially reveals movement; it gives it maximum pattern in space and time.” The current rage for 16:9, which used to be known, in film, as 1.85:1, is only one of several aspect ratios. Early cinema and television had a 4:3 ratio. Video artists such as Fiona Tan turn the frame sideways, creating a portrait-orientation rather than the familiar landscape ratio. 44 Bill Nichols. “The Voice of Documentary.” Film Quarterly vol.36, no.3 (spring 1983): 18


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If the background, or areas to either side of the frame, contains, for example,

information about the situation which weakens the point the image is making, should it

be acknowledged? Or included? And if so, how much should be included? Is everything

around the camera relevant to the situation being filmed simply because it was there?

We’re familiar with riot scenes45 which, shot

from another, wider, angle, consist of a few

dozen protestors clashing with police. Given

only as much information as the framing allows,

shot after shot, scene by scene, the documentary

camera’s selective view allows, at any one time, one point of view, and that is the

subjective POV of the camera operator and/or director.

If objectivity is a myth,46 an impossible condition imposed (by editors and by us) on

a journalist, an impossible goal, what then can we expect of documentary truth?

I haven’t run across a study which empirically measures “diminished public

confidence in documentary films” but I do not doubt that this is a concern for the 21st

century documentarian. For Lucia Ricciardelli, truth is a relic of the Enlightenment, an

empiricist fallacy we continue, at our peril, to believe is possible to attain or discover if

only we look hard, and long, enough.47 Filmmaker Errol Morris (The Thin Blue Line

45 David Hoffman. Poll Tax Riot. 2009. http://hoffman.photoshelter.com/gallery-image/hand-coloured/G0000KgJhNedyTUw/I0000QRhCh47gBRE; this website documents several egregious cases of misrepresentation in Reuters news photos: http://zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/; see also National Press Photographers Association. http://www.nppa.org/professional_development/self-training_resources/eadp_report/digital_manipulation.html 46 Richard F. Taflinger, “The Myth of Objective Journalism,” Washington State University school of journalism. (Accessed Nov. 24, 2010) http://www.wsu.edu/~taflinge/mythobj.html 47 Lucia Ricciardelli, “Documentary filmmaking in the post-modern age: Errol Morris & the fog of truth.” Studies in Documentary Film vol.4 no.1: 36; I am attempting to obtain her dissertation, “Visual culture & the crisis of history: American documentary practice in the postmodern era.”


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(1988); The Fog of War (2003)) “encourages multiple interpetrations…whose

signification becomes open to the spectator’s contingent reading position….the process

of finding the truth of historical occurrences is always the result of personal analysis

rather than straightforward and ‘objective’ as traditional historical enquiry pretends it to

be.”48 Morris uses a rigorous investigative approach in his interviews. He claims to have

invented what he calls the anti-verité style, in which we can

…imagine all of the stylistic requirements of verite and…do the exact opposite; instead of being unobtrusive,…be as obtrusive as possible. Put people right in front of the camera, looking directly into the lens or close to it. Light everything. Add reenacted material, or constructed material of one kind or another. The naive idea is that because this is so much different than verite, that it's less truthful. But that's only because of the spurious claim that verite makes in the first place.49 Morris’s solution is to interrogate his subjects by projecting his image into a

Teleprompter, a half-silvered mirror which is placed in front of the camera lens; the

subject answers Morris by looking directly into the lens. This approach is anathema to

Albert Maysles, one of the great Direct Cinema filmmakers, still working and mentoring

in his 80’s. Eye to eye contact is critical to his interviews: the relationship between

interviewer (himself) and subject ought to be close—not necessarily friends, but with the

respect which can only be gained by intimacy. In the unpublished version of an interview

with film scholar Sharon Zuber, Maysles calls Morris’s technique “a bundle of

nonsense;” that his (Maysles’) subjects are “better off…because that person is actually

looking at a person.”50

48 ibid, 42 49 The Believer, April 2004. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris 50 Sharon Zuber. Albert Maysles Interview—unpublished version from author. Interview Aug 5,2002; accessed via email from author Nov.4 2010.


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In the interviews I’m conducting for Public Art, I sit to one side of the camera, as

close to the lens as possible, but only a meter or two from the subject, which means that

their eyeline (where they are looking) appears to be well off to one side. Maysles gets

around this optical illusion by positioning himself seven feet away or more, which brings

their eyeline closer, in angle, to the lens, so that it looks as if the subject is speaking to the

camera. (Due to the particularities of the camera I am operating51, I need to sit to the left

of the lens, so most of my subjects are reacting and talking to me screen left. I can

imagine being questioned on the political interpretations of having most subjects look

left, when mechanically, it is simply awkward to run the camera from the other side.)

Recently I reviewed two of Nettie Wild’s films: A Place Called Chiapas (Zeitgeist

Films, 1998); and FIX: the Story of an Addicted City (Canada Wild Productions, 2002).

The earlier film was shot on 16mm film, the latter on video; in an interview published as

part of a Pacific Cinématheque monograph52, Wild compares an earlier film, A Rustling

of Leaves, for which she shot 64,000 feet of 16mm film (twenty-seven hours), to the

three-hundred hours shot on video for FIX. The critical point about these numbers is not

only the extra work it takes to view and make decisions in the editing room, but in how

one goes about financing a documentary.

Each 400-foot roll of 16mm negative (running 10 minutes) costs $200 for the raw

stock; developing, printing and transferring to videotape

doubles or triples this cost, whereas one miniDV tape (64

minutes) costs between $12-$20. In the latest cameras utilizing solid-state media, one can

51 Sony HVR-Z5U miniDV tape camera, one of the last of the tape-based HDV cameras. 52 Mark Harris and Claudia Medina. Wild at Heart: the Films of Nettie Wild. (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2009)


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record for several hours onto a single SD card. Video frees the filmmaker from having to

choose moments in which to record the subject.

Albert Maysles is quoted in Millimeter magazine as saying, of video cameras:

I can hold the camera just below my eye level, so I'm looking at the picture that I'm getting, but I'm also looking at the wider view of what I could be getting at any moment. I have a much broader range of possibilities in my selection because of this little camera just being below my eye level. Also, it works the other way around too. When these people look back at me as I'm filming, they see my eyes accepting what they're doing, rather than just a hunk of [16mm film] apparatus on my shoulder, which is kind of an impediment to that rapport.53

Why am I going on about these technicalities—framing, interview techniques, video

vs. film, in a chapter on truth-telling? Because video allows for spontaneity, which is

more difficult, although not impossible, to achieve in shooting with film. The direct

cinema of the Maysles brothers, Fred Wiseman and others was only possible with

budgets which could accomodate purchasing, developing, printing and reprinting

thousands of feet of film, whereas virtually anyone today can shoot hours of video. Video

cameras are given to non-filmmakers, even to the subjects of a documentary: in Thailand,

after the 2004 tsunami, “professional photographers and filmmakers…trained 120

students, 10-15 years old, to use cameras, write scripts and cut and edit film. Learning

new skills boosted the children's confidence while helping them heal by expressing their

feelings through different media.”54 The relatively low cost of video and digital storage

frees the filmmaker from constantly running a cost-benefit analysis in her head as she

shoots: is this scene worth it? Can I get the shot I want before the magazine runs out?

53 Darroch Greer. “Fade to Black.” Millimeter Magazine, June 1,2002. http://digitalcontentproducer.com/mag/video_fade_black_11/index.html; see also Web of Stories No.96, http://www.webofstories.com/play/52611 (accessed Nov.21, 2010) 54 Plan International. “Tsunami, 5 years after.” http://plan-international.org/tsunamirecovery/thailand/childs-lens.php (accessed Nov.27, 2010) includes videos of the children’s films.


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(Nothing is more dispiriting in filmmaking than being in the middle of a scene, only to

have the camera run out of film, a sound every film camera operator knows and dreads.)

The downside of video is that one ends up with an enormous amount of material to view;

a not inconsiderable cost if one is paying an editor. But, as in my case, many filmmakers

learn to edit, however roughly, their own films on home computers, which are powerful

enough, and have enough storage, to edit a feature film.

Truth is gained through trust, but it also comes about in unguarded moments,

moments when the subject is relaxed, comfortable with the filmmaker’s presence, with

filming or taping: the more one shoots, the more likely one gets those moments.

The epistemic value of documentary is not conveyed by a rigorous cataloguing of

verifiable evidence, although that may (and should) be present in the research behind the

film. Rather it is “by offering a thought-provoking, illuminating perspective on a topic or

problem, especially one of abiding if not universal concern,”55 a value carried through the

viewing into the reflective period after the film/video has ended.

How do we read a documentary for truth?

On the surface of it, this question would apparently have been answered by now in

innumerable essays and books, however the complexity of the issue has increased with

the advent of reality television programs which purport to show real people in real, if

contrived, situations. These are, for the unsophisticated viewer, real; they are

documentary in that they are recorded without the intervention of a script—or so we are

led to believe. Conflict arises from posed situations and from the carefully chosen cast,

who, the producers know from the auditions, are unlikely to get along. 55 Trevor Ponech, “Non-Fictional Cinematic Artworks and Knowledge,” in Thomas Wartenberg and Angela Curran, eds. The Philosophy of Film (Blackwell, 2005): 85


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In the traditional documentary film, a subject is followed through a series of events,

presumably in chronological order, while narration lends authority to the film—whether

it is by a well-known actor or a professional within the field. More recently, as embedded

tv reporters breathlessly ran alongside soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, their

“objectivity” was sorely tried by their need (and desire) to fit in, to be one of the guys.

The aware viewer had to constantly remind herself that all war footage is suspect,

especially that provided by the military—who can forget those horrifying, yet

hypnotically compelling, point of view shots from missiles as they tracked and destroyed

targets?56

A famous particle vs.wave experiment with light shows that although light is both

wave and particle, it can only be observed as either wave or particle, depending on the

observation: if we look for particles, we see particles; look for waves, that’s what you

see…

56 Al Jazeera has become, in many commentators eyes, the more reliable tv news network for coverage of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. See Tim Cavanaugh, “Image Conscious” Reason Magazine, March 24, 2003. http://reason.com/archives/2003/03/24/image-conscious


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If the physicist looks for a particle (uses particle detectors), then a particle is found. If the physicist looks for a wave (uses a wave detector), then a wave pattern is found. A quantum entity has a dual potential nature, but its actual (observed) nature is one or the other57.

Likewise, in making a documentary we cannot observe and record any event, person,

or even the natural world without affecting what we observe, except perhaps by installing

a remotely-controlled camera in a camouflaged box, to be triggered by an animal

breaking an infrared beam. Even this assumes the animal is unaware of the existence of

the box and its camera; and the very existence of the recording of the animal’s movement

is not an interference in its (otherwise un-interfered) existence.

“I think truth in documentary may be a red herring,” filmmaker Adam Kossoff

responds in a panel discussion. “What happens in documentary centres on the

relationship between the film-maker...and the people that they [sic] are making the film

about….As soon as you point the camera at someone or some object they become the

‘other,’ therefore documentary is that relationship between subject and object.”58

One could argue that all film—fiction and documentary—is a record of a particular

time. Take a feature which is set in another period: actor’s hairstyles, choice of costume,

even the screenplay’s dialogue, reflects the ethos and aesthetics of the period in which it

was shot. It becomes at one and the same time entertainment and documentation. Who

has not seen an historical drama in which we notice sideburns on Odyssean warriors?

Vaughn gives the example of a Laurel and Hardy short, in which the two are door-to-

door salesman, and in the course of an escalating argument with a householder they

destroy a house. We learn, in a documentary, that the film crew had chosen the wrong

57 http://abyss.uoregon.edu/~js/cosmo/lectures/lec08.htm 58 Adam Kossoff, quoted in Pearce, Art and Documentary: 42


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house; thus this erstwhile comedy also becomes the documentation of an expensive

mistake.59

Another way to apprehend “truth” in documentary is espoused by filmmaker Werner

Herzog, who believes in an “ecstatic truth,” or something which poetically is real, even if

it is arguably fictive or at least non-objective: a “deeper stratum of truth—a poetic,

ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it

through vision, style, and craft.” Reality, Herzog asks:

…how important is it, really? And: how important, really, is the Factual? Of course, we can’t disregard the factual; it has normative power. But it can never give us the kind of illumination, the ecstatic flash, from which Truth emerges. If only the factual, upon which the so-called cinéma vérité fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vérité—the truth—at its most concentrated must reside in the telephone book—in its hundreds of thousands of entries that are all factually correct and, so, correspond to reality.60

As for truth, “the ‘real’ cannot be reduced to the visible, the tangible or the material,”

claims Trinh T. Minh-ha. “Fact is not truth. Accumulating facts does not necessarily lead

to truth, and just as one gathers them to prove, one can also use them to falsify, negate, or

disprove. The politics of interpretation is always at work.”61

If cinematic truth is not absolute, if it is un-portrayable in film, it is our ethical

approach to filmmaking which must be our defence against propaganda and the misuse of

our medium.

59 Vaughn: 84 60 Herzog, Werner. On the Absolute, the Sublime, and Ecstatic Truth. Arion 17:3 (winter 2010). See also http://www.wernerherzog.com/52.html 61 Trinh T.Minh-ha, quoted in Pearce: 113


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3. Ethics

And what of the filmmaker’s moral responsibility to her subject(s)? If the villagers in

Wild’s Chiapas film, who openly express their concern over persecution by the vigilante

“Truth and Justice” group, are unafraid of the consequences of being identified in the

film, is it because they feel protected by the relative distance between a Canadian-made

film and their social mileu? Are they courageous, or naïve? Where does a filmmaker’s

ethical obligation to her subjects end: as she leaves the village? On the editing table? At

the film’s premiere?

“If the participant is fully aware of possible consequences,” Brian Winston writes62

“and sees co-operation as a coherent political strategy, then the burden of the ethical

dilemna has been lifted from the film-maker by the participant for his or her own

ideological reasons.”

I don’t see how one can make a documentary film if the threat of repression,

violence, loss of career, or personal embarrassment to the subject holds the filmmaker

back from creating a fully-fledged portrait in which the subject is a direct participant. If

my first objective (or obligation) is to make a strong film—which most directors would

agree is their goal—the tears, the opinionated statement, the gaffe, remains, no matter

how distressing to the subject. Whereas if I were to consider the subject’s voluntary

participation in the process, and my relationship with them, I might want to invite them to

view the rough cut, and only if they approved it would these scenes remain in the film.

62 Winston, B. Ethics. In Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner. New Challenges for the Documentary. 181-193


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Director Gary Marcuse recommends never allowing the subject into the editing suite

to review the footage.63 Opposing this top-down approach was the philosophical basis of

the NFB’s Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle program (1967-1980), in which the

point of each film was to engage their subjects by showing it within the community; on

several projects the subjects were invited to view rushes prior to editing.64

How does an obligation to the subject, to present them as they would wish to be

presented (not that we necessarily follow through), weigh against the obligation to make

a compelling film? Because, lest it be forgotten in this theorising, filmmaking—aside

from community-based projects—is about exposure: theatrical, broadcast, internet, dvd

sales and rentals. The subject has good reason to appear in the film--their agenda; the

filmmaker has an agenda, which may or may not coincide with that of the subject(s); and

the distributor or broadcaster has as its agenda earning income or approbation. The

filmmaker’s agenda necessarily must acknowledge the goal of creating something which

is, at the very least, watchable.

The activist filmmaker, however, finds herself in a different ethical dilemna, in that

she gives voice to the dispossessed. She may be seen by the subject as a co-conspirator,

by people on both sides of the issue. In Wild’s case in Chiapas, she was very clear that

she would would not betray one side to the other.65 Chapman asserts that “…despite

positive representation, there is usually still an imbalance in the relative power between

the filmmaker and the people being filmed because the former retains control over the

production of the images whereas the latter tend to be dependent on the goodwill of the

63 “Exploring Arts for Social Change: Communities in Action,” SFU, Oct.20, 2010 64 Waugh, et al, eds. Challenge for Change: activist documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal: McGill, 2010): see Hénaut, 24-33; Dansereau, 34-37; and others. 65 Medina interview in Harris and Medina: 33, 52-57, 73-75


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production crew.” A relationship like this, typical in so many films, “can be exacerbated

if the agenda...and likely outcomes of the project are not the same for the

producer/director as they are for the social actors.”66 Further on, she writes that “the

ability to secure cooperation for participation is part of professional competence,” by

which relationship we can consider to have “informed consent.”67

How is it possible to assess whether a participant is truly ‘informed’? It can be difficult to know what exactly has been agreed to. Filming can start with goodwill and cooperation, but descend into bad feeling because of misunderstandings and recriminations. Even the most detailed contract can’t include everything, and usually filmmakers can’t know in advance what the finished film is going to end up like, for this depends on the material gathered and the evolution of ideas…68

When I record an interview, I give the subjects space around their answers, allowing

them, if they wish, to expand, retract, or restate their opinions. But one cannot allow

interviews to be played in their entirety, as Errol Morris explains:

I acknowledge that there may even be, within a statement, contradictions which the subject wishes to clarify. However, my dilemna, the dilemna of all documentary filmmakers, is that I cannot show each interview as a whole, or the film would run thirty or so hours. In cutting to the part of their answer which builds, or counters, the storyline or argument, I am putting myself in a position of power. In effect, I can make them look good, or foolish, agreeable or disagreeable, in favour of or against whatever the proposition may be. 69

We on the back side of the camera control the image, the sound, what is seen and left

unseen, what is heard and left unheard, while the subject’s control is limited to what is

revealed.

Kate Nash expresses the concern that this power relationship between filmmaker and

subject is both political and ethical, since “the relationship between documentary

66 Jane Chapman. Issues in Contemporary Documentary. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009): 160 67 ibid: 164 68 Chapman: 165 69 The Believer, April 2004. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris


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filmmaker and participant is critiqued as one in which power resides entirely with the

former. The powerlessness of the participant constitutes a political problem since what is

at stake is the ‘status, meaning, interpretation, and perhaps even control of history and its

narratives’.”70 Documenting the disenfranchised is an ethical problem since informed

consent is undermined.71

There is a new power imbalance, not between subject and camera, but between the

independent documentary filmmaker and the larger world of corporate and government

media, which is applying documentary technique and aesthetic toward their ends. Fair

enough, but when corporations or governments produce their “documentaries,” they

compete with the low-to-no budget filmmaker. “It’s not just that the personal is political,”

Loretta Todd writes, it’s that

…the personal has been so completely colonized by the forces of state capital, the powers-that-be, late capitalism–-whatever you want to call it–-that the realm of the real and the very attributes of documentary (that is, truth and hope) are easily manipulated. Public life has become “cultural” – and us “culturals,” radicals and even liberals, can see the very tools of our voice used against us.72

To be on guard against such abuse requires vigilance, not only to identify the use of

documentary technique as propaganda, but even within our own cultural community, as

snippets of one’s film can be appropriated for a variety of purposes.

70 Kate Nash. “Exploring Power and Trust in Documentary: A study of Tom Zubrycki’s Molly and Mobarak.” Studies in Documentary Film Vol.4 No.1 71 Cited in Nash: Rabinowitz, P.They Must Be Represented: Gender and the Rhetoric of History in American Political Documentaries. (London: Verso, 1994):7; and Winston, B. Damn Lies and Documentaries. (London: BFI, 2000):146. 72 Todd, Loretta. Curator, DOXA Festival, (Vancouver 2007). Introduction to DOXA 2007 catalogue.


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4. Narrative

Narrative is the art closest to the ordinary daily operation of the human mind. People find the meaning of their lives in the idea of sequence, in conflict, in metaphor and in moral. …Anyone, at any age, is able to tell the story of his or her life with authority. The narrative mode of thought comes universally to people….Everyone all the time is in the act of composition, our experience is an ongoing narrative within each of us.73

Our earliest experiential data are confirmed by parental storytelling. We begin to

make sense of the world with the simplest of stories: if this, then that: premise and

conclusion. It is the basis of all reasoning. Narrative, Bruner explains, has been the basis

for our concept of reality since the Enlightenment.74

Nothing wrong with narrative, then: it’s a useful tool for making sense of the world,

and we construct ourselves daily, as well as over our lifetime, by inventing narratives.

Does it belong in documentary film? How else would we tell a story—as a disconnected

series of shots? As one continuous shot, without preamble, without explanation? With a

dispassionate, academic voice-over explaining each action and event on-screen?

Story, the mode of comprehension we are most comfortable with (or trained in) from

childhood on—which, incidentally, has been argued75 is actually in-built, much as

Chomsky believes we have, prenatally, a predisposition toward grammatical

73 E.L.Doctorow, New York Times Book Review 8/25/1985: 1 74 Jerome Bruner. “The Narrative Construction of Reality.” Critical Inquiry, vol.18, no.1 (autumn 1991): 1-21ff. 75 These two articles describe current theories of language acquisition in infancy: Mehler, J, M Nespor, and M Peña. "What Infants Know and What They Have to Learn About Language." European Review 16, no. 04 (2008); and Bates, E. "Language and the Infant Brain." Journal of communication disorders 32, no. 4 (1999): 195-205.


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thought/sentence construction76—builds sense in a film through the successive capture

and release of dramatic tension.

Classic “fly on the wall” documentaries such as those produced by Fred Wiseman

have an almost random aesthetic. Wiseman portrays reality within the boundaries of an

institutional structure (a mental hospital; a police station; a ballet company; a Marine

boot camp): his films appear as if they are “a day in the life of” several characters,

without making clear how many days have passed. As Bill Nichols notes, “Wiseman’s

style does not function strictly within a narrative context. The whole is not organized as a

narrative but more poetically, as a mosaic; only the parts have a diegetic

unity….sequences follow each other consecutively but without a clearly marked temporal

relationship.” 77

The narrative in the two video documentaries I am currently producing will become

evident only in the editing process. In both Public Art and Gordon Smith, the narrative is

unknown as I shoot them, although I have several temporal strands I am following. To

conform to what Vaughn calls a pro-filmic reality would be absurd: if I were to edit to a

temporal structure which has its basis in how the video was shot—over months, as people

and events and my own work allowed, the films would be a jumble of disconnected

76 A comprehensive entry by Fiona Cowie in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/innateness-language/index.html#WhaDoChiLeaWheTheLeaLan) states, in section 2.1: “…most 20th century theorists followed Chomsky in holding that language acquisition could not occur unless much of the knowledge eventually attained were innate or inborn. The gap between what speaker-hearers know about language (its grammar, among other things) and the data they have access to during learning…is just too broad to be bridged by any process of learning alone. It follows that since children patently do learn language, they are not linguistic ‘blank slates.’ Instead, Chomsky and his followers maintained, human children are born knowing the ‘Universal Grammar’ or ‘UG,’ a theory describing the most fundamental properties of all natural languages….” 77 Bill Nichols, “Fred Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure.” Film Quarterly vol.31, no.3 (spring 1978): 17, both quotes.


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scenes; if the films are not to be simply one record abutting another record, a structure

must be arrived at, organically, arising from the coincident processes of discovery

(reviewing the shots) and creative rumination (the editorial process). Whatever results

from this process, it will be only one possibility out of hundreds which I have considered.

Not all documentaries conform to this narrative model, of course—as discussed

below, in section 7, on ethnographic records—but even within these apparently

straightforward films we can often find a story, because it is a convenient way to build

structure in order to make sense of something. An industrial process, for instance, or a

series of steps in a healthcare regime aimed at street nurses, must follow logically one

after the other. Even this, however prosaic, is story. Stories begin somewhere at

sometime, and end somewhere else at some other time.


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5. Music

If a nonfiction film represents (as best it can, with all the caveats we’ve discussed)

real life…why is there music? Was the music indigenous, was it being played at the time

of filming, or playing in the background, or has it been added by a composer after

editing, from indigenous source recordings or from other (non-indigenous) recordings, to

complement, enhance, bridge, cover, create atmosphere, or provide subtextual meaning

or an emotional response?

Nettie Wild has music in A Place Called Chiapas. Some of it is sourced

indigenously: local musicians at a town festival. Some of it is added later, and may be

“internally sourced” or music found or composed for the film. Similarly, Werner Herzog

has music in Encounters At the End of the World, some of it played by the scientists,

engineers and support staff at Ross Station in the Antarctic, and some of it orchestrated

and recorded at other times; he also employs sound effects as a score: seals

communicating under the ice become the soundtrack for the opening sequence.

Within the vérité ethos, music was anathema, as Corner points out, where “…what

we might call journalistic rationalism and observational minimalism have acted to keep

many producers…concerned about the risk of a musical ingredient somehow subverting

programme integrity.”78 Purists would disdain music as a manipulation, the imposition of

a subtle emotive trigger. Often it is a commercial consideration: the perception of

producers and distributors, which may well be valid, is that a film which does not employ

a score would not be as successful.

78 John Corner. “Sounds real: music and documentary.” Popular Music vol.21 no.3 (2002): 358.


35

A score can be wonderfully appropriate in certain documentaries. Herzog’s haunting

use of Grieg, Mahler, Prokofiev, and other composers in his Lessons of Darkness, an

elegy on the fires of post-war Kuwait, works to amplify the poetic documentation in a

film almost devoid of commentary.

In contrast to Herzog’s Darkness, Canadian filmmaker Peter Mettler presents

Petropolis, a 45-minute HD video about the Alberta tar sands, shot mostly from a

helicopter, in which oddly beautiful and unsettling images of the ravaged landscape are

accompanied by a clicking, buzzing soundscape.79 The Sunday Times calls the film a

“tone poem,” its “godlike perspective…castigates all humanity, and pities it too.”80

A manual on sound design gives little time to documentaries, other than to note how

sound effects can influence music:

In a documentary on coal workers in Brazil [uncredited by author], their shoveling of the coal created a distinct sssh—weeek noise. The director requested that the music track be based on the folk music of the region, which includes a gourd shaker with seeds inside that has a very similar timbre to the shoveling sound. With these two sampled sounds, an integration can be made with the visual theme…81

The question is, does music push the documentary further down the slope toward

fiction?

79 composed by Roland Schlimme and Peter Mettler, with original music by Gabriel Scotti and Vincent Hänni. Greenpeace website for Petropolis. Accessed 11/ 24/2010. http://www.petropolis-film.com/#/credits/ 80 Maher, Kevin. The Times, May 14, 2010. http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/film/film_reviews/article7125221.ece 81 David Sonnenschein. Sound design: the expressive power of music and sound effects in cinema. Michael Wiese Productions, 2001: 44


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6. Document—or mockument?

“Every representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the sense that it is an

artificial construct, a highly contrived and selective view of the world…,” writes Dirk

Eitzen in Cinema Journal82. The camera deceives: so what of it? Our eyes deceive us all

the time. Our vision is selective, prejudiced, at times attentive and wide-angled, at other

times narrowing to almost a point, when we are unaware (until made aware) of things just

outside our intense focus.

There are situational clues83 which allow us to frame a film as documentary or non-

documentary: for instance, the introduction or narration by a well-known host (Richard

Attenborough or David Suzuki); or the film’s inclusion in a nonfiction festival (HotDocs

in Toronto; DOXA in Vancouver); or its airing on a documentary series (NOVA) or

channel (Discovery; National Geographic; Newsworld); or its descriptive copy in TV

Guide or advertising.

A less overt signal, but still recognized as documentary-like, is the use of the

handheld camera. The invention (by Jean-Pierre Beauviala) of the lightweight 16mm

Eclair (1963-1985) and Aaton cameras (1973-today), developed in close collaboration

with the leading documentary filmmakers of the day—Jean Rouch, William Pennebaker,

the Maysles brothers, Barbara Kopple, as well as French and British public television

documentary units,84 freed camera operators from tripods, which allowed for faster

82 Eitzen, D. When is a Documentary? Documentary as a Mode of Reception. Cinema Journal, Vol.35 No.1 (Autumn 1995): 81-102 83 ibid: 95 84 Aaton Camera. http://www.aaton.com/about/history.php


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reactions to unpredictable situations, and gave a tv-news-like immediacy to documentary.

It was appropriated by fiction cinematographers, becoming known in the business as

“shaky-cam,” used originally to replicate combat footage (e.g.the Normandy landing in

Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998)). Godard operated his own camera, often

walking or running with the actors.85 The wobbly handheld camera, with on-screen re-

focusing and zooming, became a trope for “reality,” in some cases a tiresome, overused

signifier.86

Faking reality is nothing new: Orson Welles famously deluded hundreds of radio

listeners with his Martian landings broadcast live on radio in 1938, and shot “newsreel”

footage for Citizen Kane (1941). Woody Allen’s Zelig (1983) raised the bar with the

actor’s seamless inclusion in actual historic footage.

This type of fictional documentary, known as the mockumentary87, may be

positioned as fiction, or if not, the inclusion of well-known actors should clue in most

moviegoers. Mockumentaries, Bayer writes, “present a return to the original motivation

behind early film making, that is, they once again take the mundane as their central

topic,…in the sense that [they] focus on the peripheral discourses and often [rely] on

unscripted dialogue.” By combining fictive characters within a documentary style, the

filmmakers “contribute, inadvertently or not, to the discussion about the status of

85 For more on “shaky-cam,” see: David Cox. Speed Ramping. Internet, accessed 11/24/2010. http://www.othercinema.com/otherzine/otherzine5/speedramp.html; and Ohad Landesman, 2008. 86 That said, I have elected to shoot much of Public Art handheld as it is less intrusive, drawing less attention than a camera on a tripod. It does not work as well for lengthy interviews. 87 see Thomas Doherty, “The Sincerest Form of Flattery: a Brief History of the Mockumentary.” Cineaste Vol.28, No.4 (Fall 2003):22-24; and Gary D. Rhodes, ed. Docufictions: essays on the intersection of documentary and fictional filmmaking. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company: 2006.


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documentary,”88 to which the audience is party, given that they are complicit in the

subversion of a familiar genre.

There is, writes Bayer, a delicious simultaneous duality of response when viewing a

mockumentary: we know it is fake, but we respond to it as if it were real; or, if we are

truly fooled, believing it to be documentation of a real event, we are simultaneously a

credulous audience and the subjects of a hoax. I return to this later because it bears on the

central concern of this essay: to define a documentary, we must agree that what we’re

seeing is a documentary.

We come to a film with certain expectations, chief among them that we will be

entertained and/or informed. What I find curious is that an audience will express outrage

if they watch a film which has been labelled nonfiction, only to find out, at its conclusion,

that it is fiction: “We’ve been cheated!” they cry. Oprah is indignant.89 Why the anger? Is

it that we are embarrassed to be taken in?

Perhaps it is an issue of trust: the viewer (or reader) is led to believe one thing, and

finds out, later, that it was another. What intrigues me about these revelations is that the

immediate emotional response to the material is genuine, whether the viewer expects

reality or fiction. Is that not what she was looking for? The viewer, disoriented, reviews

her emotional response—frustrated by the revelation of a cheat, she is uncertain if her

responses were real or manipulated. What she doesn’t realize is that whether the

presentation was documentary or fiction, her responses were always going to be

manipulated!

88 Bayer, Gerd. Artifice and Artificiality in Mockumentaries, in Rhodes: 174-75. 89 Oprah.com, January 26,2006, accessed Nov.24, 2010. http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Oprahs-Questions-for-James


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I would be happily surprised to find myself tricked, but perhaps this is a minority

position. To my way of thinking, real life is performance, whether we are in front of a

lens or not. It seems to me that if our expectation of entertainment has been realized, then

a film has not lied: that was its purpose, and it delivered.

“Real begets fake,” writes Doherty. As film technology, particularly in post-

production, advanced in the late 20th century to the seamless integration of animated

characters, where the real world of actors is combined with svirtual world—think of the

Lord of the Rings trilogy—we have “a true revolution in motion-picture perception,

giving forgers the means to replicate, with a fidelity undetectable to the naked eye, the

look of the archival…[which has overthrown] the privileged status of 35mm photography

as a reliable reflection of a preexistent metaphysical reality.”90 There is no reliable clue as

to whether a shot is one-hundred-percent real, or partly real and partly faked. Therefore,

the term documentary is close to irrelevance; documentary is an attenuated, antiquated

genre.

The ethos of journalism and factual arguments do not exclude the use of narrative, symbolic and rhetorical features, also known from purely fictional forms. Specific aesthetic and stylistic forms cannot in any simple way be connected with either fiction or non-fiction, but the range of freedom in documentaries is of course much more limited91.

I have always wanted to try an experiment: present a ten-minute domestic scene to

an audience divided into three groups, in three separate showings. Those in theatre A

would be told they were watching an unedited rough cut of a drama; those in theatre B

90 Doherty: 22-24 91 Bondebjerg, I. The Social and the Subjective Look: Documentaries and reflexive modernity Paper presented at the Australian International Documentary Conference, February 2003.Google Scholar: Modinet. http://www.modinet.dk/pdf/WorkingPapers/The_Social_and_the_Subjective_Look.pdf (accessed Nov.10,2010).


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would be told they were watching unedited footage of a documentary, while those in

theatre C would not be given any prior information about the scene. How would the

audience responses to the scene differ, based on their prior information (or lack of it)?

My hypothesis is that we approach cinema (and theatre, and literature) with a prejudicial

expectation, and tailor our responses to fit the expectation.

Documentary is a state of mind.

I recently returned to Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten.92 One of the

simplest movies ever made, on the face of it: he mounted two digital cameras on the

dashboard of a car, one facing the passenger, the other facing the driver. A woman,

played by Iranian artist Mania Akbari, drives around Tehran, picks up friends, argues

with her son, and talks freely about politics and life as a woman in Iran—which she could

never do outside of the protection offered by glass and steel. It feels like a documentary.

But it isn’t. And in the companion film on the dvd—which is a documentary—about the

making of Ten,93 called 10 on Ten, Kiarostami gives a short course in filmmaking, which

one might call “constructed reality”—he sets up the frame (real and performative) for a

scene, but the actors improvise.

In French, there are several words for a filmmaker and Kiarostami has said that, in referring to his own activity, he feels close neither to the term metteur en scène, someone who puts order into a scene, nor to the word réalisateur, someone who realizes or makes something. The word that comes closest to describing what he does is “recorder” and recording a slice of life is just what he has done in Ten. Kiarostami noted that: “I immediately understood that, thanks to the digital camera, I could erase my presence. I didn’t have to use the word ‘cut!’”94

92 Kiarostami, Abbas. Ten. Zeitgeist Films 2002. 94 mins. In Farsi with English subtitles. 93 See appendix, A.O.Scott review: Ten 94 Shafto, Sally. "Brave New World: Some Reflections on the Digital Revolution in General and Digital Cinema in Particular.” Abbas Kiarostami quoted in Cahiers du Cinéma, September 2002: 13


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John Cassavettes pioneered this approach to drama in cinema in the 70’s with

Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and so on, which had brutally

raw performances which felt as if they were real—and they were real, in the sense that

the actors were expressing real emotions—but his films were scripted; it was allowing

actors their freedom in their interpretation, along with his intimate cinematography,

which gave the impression of a series of unrehearsed “real” moments.95 My point here is

to suggest that at the core of any cinematic experience, our (audience’s) emotive

participation in the film is identical whether we are watching documentary or fiction.

The visual and aural clues we have come to expect of documentary are now a

familiar appropriation in fiction; we are no longer surprised by conflations of historical

footage with that shot on a sound stage; re-enactments are becoming an accepted

documentary practice: is there any point in continuing the debate about what is and what

is not documentary? Perhaps, instead, we need to focus on a documentary code, along the

lines of Dogme ’95, the cinematic manifesto96 promulgated by Lars von Trier and

Thomas Vinterberg—that is to say, to simplify and make it “real.” If documentary

filmmakers were to similarly codify a set of ethical boundaries, within which the

filmmaker would still have great freedom, something useful might be drawn from the

debate. 97

95 Tim Applegate, “Retrospective: John Cassavettes.” The Film Journal online (2002). http://www.thefilmjournal.com/issue7/cassavetes.html 96 A complete list of Dogma ’95 rules: Wikipedia contributors, "Dogme 95," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Dogme_95&oldid=390950951 (accessed November 10, 2010). 97 Bill Nichols has asked this question in “What to Do About Documentary Distortion? Toward a Code of Ethics.” Published on International Documentary Association, http://www.documentary.org/content/what-do-about-documentary-distortion-toward-code-ethics-0


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7. Realism and ethnographic film

It is perhaps nowhere more crucial for a film or video to be as transparent (as

opposed to objective) as possible as in ethnography, and nowhere is it more likely to be

obvious that viewing a culture through a lens is a problematic exercise at best.

An ethnographic record of a NW Coast Kwaikutl98 dance, shot in one continuous

take, from one angle, may be considered as real as it gets, unless, of course, it is later

revealed that this aboriginal group never performed that dance in front of strangers, or

that it was an ancient dance resurrected for the film. In fact, as Winston makes clear,

Edward Curtis’s films of Kwaikutl dances were staged with elaborate costumes, whereas

Franz Boas, following Curtis, recorded the men dancing “in jeans and European shirts.”99

And yet even these are suspect…

McDougall stresses there is a difference between ethnographic footage and film, the

former having no expectations of structure for presentation, but are comparable to field

notes: he calls it record footage.100 He gives, as example, John Marshall’s shooting over

half a million feet of 16mm film on the Kalahari Bushmen in the 1950’s “producing what

remains the most comprehensive [as of the the article’s writing, late 1970’s] visual

ethnography of any traditional preliterate society.”101 But this impressive record is not

without controversy. One of Marshall’s films on the !Kung tribe, The Hunters, is a

98 See this 1951 short documentary, Dances of the Kwaikutl, by William Heick. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p5NSKRc07Fo 99 Brian Winston. Claiming the Real II. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. (British Film Institute, 2008): 172-173. However, even this is suspect, Winston argues, quoting Walens (1978), because by the time Boas was shooting, the culture had been too altered; these too were re-enactments.176 100 D. MacDougall. “Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise” Annual Review of Anthropology 1978: 405-425. 101 Ibid: 409


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narrative about a giraffe hunt, but is compiled from several different hunts, and, even

more problematic, the !Kung were primarily gatherers, and hunting, therefore, is

accorded an attention and priority in this film that does not mirror their daily activity.102

Transparency, therefore, is crucial: the ethnographic filmmaker must make clear the

situation in which the film was shot, changes to the temporal ordering of events, and

other variations from a straightforward A to B to C filming. But how? Within the film

itself, or in an accompanying paper—which would only be read by other anthropologists?

The many compromises to reality which are a necessity in filmmaking are an

impediment, or a potential impediment, to an accurate filmic representation of a culture.

The reason I say that compromises are a necessity is that no film or video, however

careful the filmmaker is to record an event without missing any detail, will be able to

record the event in its encompassing totality. As Winston notes, “the introduction of the

film-maker as a sentient observer between the event and the audience therefore undercuts

the scientism of the ‘rules of the game,’” and the only way to claim transparency is to

admit these films are “objective evidence of the subjective experience of the film-

maker.”103

Making a film for public consumption means making it accessible, with a dramatic

narrative, which compromises its usefulness as an ethnographic research tool.104

However, some ethnographic filmmakers stick to science: Timothy Asch, working with

the anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon among the Yanomamo people of the Venezualan

102 Winston 2008: 173 103 ibid: 164 104 ibid


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Amazon, shot over 50 film sequences—not to create a feature film documentary, but as

research footage of specific events among the people.

Dai Vaughn gives an example105 of a cinematic treatment of ethnographic film early

in The Tribe That Hides From Men (Adrian Cowell, UK: 1970), which portrays the

anthropologist brothers Orlando and Claudio Villas Boas’s attempts to make contact with

a tribe deep in the Amazon, prior to their being exposed to the world by the then

imminent invasion of industrial man into their land. In one sequence, dark eyes in a

painted face peer at us through leaves, suggesting someone hiding. The image defocuses,

shifts, zooms in on Boas, lying on a hammock. If we were to watch this without the

voiceover, we’d still understand the connection between the two shots: someone in the

forest, is watching someone else, who is perhaps unaware he is being watched.

A voice-over informs us that the anthropologists waited weeks for a representative of

this tribe to come forth. The sequence described above is either a re-enactment of initial

contact, or it is two “real” shots, taken without direction, which have been cut together to

underscore the waiting of the anthropologists for the shy people to come forth. Do these

two shots negate the ethnographic veracity of the film? Not according to Turner, himself

an anthropologist: “…having myself carried out extensive research among the

Txukahamae-Kayapo,…I found no important ethnographic faults with either the

photography…or its interpretation.”106

Contrast this approach with David MacDougall’s, who employs an “unprivileged

camera style,”107 favouring the single long take, with no use of intercutting to shorten

105 Vaughn: 43-44 106 Turner: 491 107 David MacDougall. “Unprivileged Camera Style.” Rain no.50 (June 1982): 8-10


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time or to create a narrative not present in the original event. This is a style which has

been used for years in art films, such as “Ruhr” by James Benning (2009), a two-hour

high definition video consisting of just seven shots taken along the Ruhr Valley in

Germany.108

The difficulty of non-discriminatory representation points to a discrepency between

our perception of what an ethnographic documentary is, and what we expect it to be—

namely, a depiction of real life, unmediated by the filmmaker—and the making of a film

(any film), which is that numerous shots from different times and days and locations are

edited into sequences to make sense of the material. The audience may or may not intuit

this, but to assume that an ethnographic film is an objective record is to mislead ourselves

toward a slippery slope of post-colonial, patronizing familiarity.

Is a guard watching a security monitor the closest we get to an unmediated

experience of real life on-screen? Whereas a documentary film has a beginning, middle

and end, and requires editing, the decisive and necessarily subjective elision of

intermediary scenes is required to choose what is important to make sense of the scene,

and to eliminate that which is distracting.

108 James Benning. “Ruhr.” DOXA 2010 catalogue: 173; and Andréa Picard. “2010 Films.” Toronto International Film Festival online catalogue (2010). http://tiff.net/filmsandschedules/tiff/2010/ruhr/


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8. Documentaries as Agents of Social Change

The National Film Board created a community-oriented program of film and video

for social activism called Challenge for Change (known in Quebec as Société nouvelle).

The project ran from 1967 to 1980, resulting in 145 films and videos produced in

English, and over 60 produced in French.109 A brief flowering of idealist filmmaking, in

which the medium was subservient to the needs of the community, where filmmakers

worked with local people, often alongside “social animators,” to utilize film and video for

specific, local ends. Artistry was to be avoided. Traditional documentary technique, such

as narration, or intercutting one person’s opinion or witness (word) with another, was

subsumed or eliminated; for instance, Colin Low made what he called “vertical edits”

which kept one subject to one film, often a short film—ten, fifteen minutes long. These

were projected in community halls, church basements, schools, to stimulate conversation

and communal activism110.

CFC/SN’s repercussions were felt long after the last film was released. Its alumni—

English, French, Aboriginal—continue making films; it sparked other grassroots media

projects; and of the corpus, the catalogue lists about 30 English and 45 French films

available on dvd.

George Stoney, an American filmmaker and teacher who was appointed executive

producer of the program in 1968, was interviewed by Alan Rosenthal:

109 Waugh, Thomas, Ezra Winton, and Michael Brendan Baker. Challenge for Change: Activist Documentary at the National Film Board of Canada. (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2010): introduction. For a playlist: http://nfb.ca/playlist/challenge-for-change 110 ibid


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We wanted to film ordinary people and get them to state their position. Then we wanted them to re-examine their positions as they play the films back, strengthening their arguments for subsequent meetings with officials. It gives officials a clearer view of what people think and what people experience that they would get from the usual official visit.111 When Stoney left the NFB to teach in New York, he was one of the initiators of local

cable access for the community:

Our fundamental tenet was that people do their own recording. In effect they become the filmmakers…which is the opposite of always doing films for people….This gave us a chance to see what it was like when people took a major hand in production. I’ve since tempered that a bit. I see now it doesn’t matter so much who’s handling the camera if the people in front of the camera are controlling the content and feel they’re controlling the content.112

When asked about the responsibilities of the filmmaker, Stoney felt that their duty

was to help people “realize the possibilities of changing their own lives,” by allowing

them to get involved in the media process. The danger for the individual filmmaker who

is not allowing those filmed to have access to the means to respond to and alter their on-

screen portrayal is the “exploitation of the individual. They perceive it in one way and the

viewers perceive it in another way.”113 This can result in embarrassment, estrangement

from the community, even violence.

One of the most cited films which illustrates this unintended consequence of a

filmmaker’s good intentions is Things I Cannot Change (Tanya Ballantine Tree, National

Film Board, 1967), which portrays a very poor family with nine, and soon to be ten,

children, and an alcoholic father. The first time the family saw themselves on screen was

when the film was broadcast on CBC television nationally; their neighbours mocked

111 Rosenthal, as quoted in Waugh: 172. 112 Ibid:175 113 Ibid:176


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them, the children were teased, they felt betrayed by the filmmaker, and the family soon

moved to another city.

There is a fundamental conflict or necessary shift in values for the filmmaker or

social activist/media facilitator who wishes to engage a community, with the end result

being socio-political action of positive value to the community, versus the filmmaker

who wishes to make a film which explores, or exposes, an issue or event, for public

viewing and for possible advancement of an agenda. The former is using media as a tool

within a practice of art for social engagement, where the community takes an active role

in the production of the media tool(s), and for which the final “product,” to use an odious

Hollywood term, may be useful only within the community; while the latter is a personal

quest which may engage the community in order to gain its cooperation, but which is,

primarily, initiated and controlled by the filmmaker, and for which the end use is national

or international dissemination. I am not priortizing one over the other as being more

genuinely useful for social change; both approaches can work well, or fail miserably,

depending on the skill with which they are produced.

After Nettie Wild completed FIX: the Story of an Addicted City, she was approached

by the B.C. Centre for Disease Control’s Outreach/Street Nurse Program to co-produce

an instructional, interactive DVD aimed at professionals working with addicts114. Co-

produced by Betsy Carson and the NFB, Bevel Up: Drugs, Users and Outreach Nursing

includes a 45-minute documentary, three and a half hours of interactive menus and

additional interviews, and a 100-page teaching manual115.

114 Harris: 46-47, 59 115 National Film Board. http://www.onf-nfb.gc.ca/eng/collection/film/?id=55345


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The Left may be asking too much of documentaries, Nichols maintains: while they

“proclaim as alive and well the voices of dissent,” they are dismissed by critics for their

lack of objectivity. While documentary filmmakers are not bound to the same standards

as the press for objectivity (a standard which has been eroded to insensibility with Fox

News), this freedom “has also served as an Achilles heel.”116

He has a second concern, which is that films documenting social injustice, “do not

arise from and do not speak to any form of concerted, organized movement. They often

embody the impassioned views of individuals dedicated to principles of social

justice,…but these voices and views, however widely shared, lack a common political

base,” and are thus rendered ineffective as socio-political motivators or generators of

action. That said, “it is not the primary task of such films to build a Left movement in

America,” Nichols concludes. “That responsibility lies elsewhere.”117

It is the indistinct line between “us and them,” between subject and object, which

makes documentary and docufiction, as I define it in the following section, exciting,

challenging, and useful tools for social activism, as well as an outlet for incurable

“epistemophilia.”

116 Bill Nichols. “What Current Documentaries Do and Can’t Do,” The Velvet Light Trap, No. 60 (Fall 2007), University of Texas Press: 85-87. 117 ibid


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9. Documentary Redefined

Epistophilia118 is not in the OED, neither is epistemophilia, but let’s invent it

anyway: Michael Renov claims the word is used in documentary studies, where it denotes

an intellectual curiosity, a desire for knowledge—perhaps, although he does not state it,

the “philia” indicating a manic need to acquire ever more knowledge (I suspect I may

have the condition). Western culture seems to be “epistemophiliac” with the popularity of

reality tv programs, documentary channels, and the aforementioned high-profile features.

We speak of “reading a film” which is not true, not true at all. As I write these

thoughts, they are translated by precise finger movements—positions on the keyboard my

hands have memorized—into a code, represented by familiar letters onscreen. Later, it

will be transmitted again as code to a printer and onto paper, or transmitted via telephone

lines to your computer. We cannot read a film by looking at the reel of film itself—

unspool it and we see a succession of still images with a squiggly line for a soundtrack;

an examination of magnetic tape is even more opaque, while an optical disc does not

even give one the clue that there is a linear progression of anything on it. Nor is it the

screen upon which the film is projected which we “read.” When we view a film or video,

the image is reflected or projected directly onto the back of our eyes. Unmediated by

code, what we see is what the filmmaker/videographer saw (or imagined, if it has been

created digitally). We decipher or interpret a film. Intensity of reaction is affected by

how it is shown—as a projected image, on a monitor, or on an iPod. Reviewing several

118 Michael Renov. “Collaborations and Technologies.” in Gail Pearce and Cahal McLaughlin, eds. Truth or Dare: art and documentary. (Chicago: Intellect, 2007): 76


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articles on film and emotion, none of them make mention of the variable states of

response with regard to the size of the image,119 but compare, for example, Walter

Ruttman’s 1927 Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis120 viewed on a laptop with its

projection onto the 30-foot screen at the Pacific Cinémathèque.

We don’t read a film, we dream it.

Nor are we in control of time: although with dvd and even live television (TIVO,

etc.) we can now pause, replay, freeze, we do not gain much by freezing a frame of

picture, whereas a written word may send us to the footnotes, index, bibliography,

dictionary, thesaurus, or suitably hyperlinked, into the world-wide web.

Who has not been immersed in a similar dream state, reading a compelling novel,

unaware of the passing of time? We do not consider how the words were arrived at, nor

how long it took for the author to create and revise them, nor are we concerned with the

editing, printing, and distribution of the written text.121 In many modern documentaries,

references to the filmmaker’s presence, through overt actions such as handheld work or

leaving in shots in which the crew is apparent, ensure our intermittent return to

awareness.122

Watching a documentary, as Dai Vaughn points out, is “a constant interrogation of

the status of the film unit, both technical/aesthetic and social, which inhibits the semantic

closure to which realism constantly tends. And it does this, furthermore, in a way which

119 In essays by Carroll; Walton; Neill; Gaut; Knight; in Carroll and Choi: 211-280. 120 Ruttman, Walter. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt. 1927. YouTube. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OYKu5zegpfc 121 Wilson, in Wartenberg: 198 ff. 122 My filmic experience is less opaque; as a former film crew technician and director, I tend to be aware of the technicalities of a film as I am watching it.


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can have no precise equivalent in fiction.”123 The same argument which he applies to

fiction vs.non, applies to reading text vs.viewing film. In a fiction film the very nature of

the experience of voluntary immersion in a story subsumes an interrogative stance, to the

point where we forget that there is a narrator (screenwriter/director) or even that this is

fiction. This effect is more intense in a darkened theatre, watching a large screen; perhaps

the popularity of larger, flat-panel televisions for home use will allow us the same

immersion formerly attainable only in the cinemas. The unpunctuated experience of

viewing a film or tv program allows us no time to reflect, or to “re-read” a passage (of

course video viewing can be paused, even a live telecast, and replayed); mostly,

reflection comes after the film has ended.

Charlotte Govaert notes how dissatisfied she became with the supposed objectivity

of the films she was editing, which could have been re-cut, with the existing material, to

give an entirely different reading. She suggests that the currently popular “reflexive”

mode, in which the filmmaker acknowledges his or her presence, allows the message to

be presented as a proposition, rather than an assertion.124 “The reflexive documentary not

only talks about the historical world, it also talks about how it talks about the historical

world,” she writes. Filmmakers, especially those making ethnographic documentaries,

should “refrain from perpetuating the myth of an existing ethnographic reality.”125

The filmmaking process is a code:

The dominant code in documentary film is the mimetic code, which instructs the viewer to understand the message as an unmediated slice of reality. An alternative code is reflexivity. An expressive documentary, for instance, is reflexive when the

123 Vaughn: 77 124 Charlotte Govaert. “How reflexive documentaries engage audiences in issues of representation: apologia for a reception study.” Studies in Documentary Film vol.1 no.3 (2007): 247 125 ibid


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author reflects on their persona, or personal experience, and how both translate into their film-making (Babcock 1975: 40). In that case, the documentary employs the expressive function in the reflexive mode. A documentary that employs the referential function in the reflexive mode problematizes the relationship between film and reality.126

A documentary camera may document something, but the documentary film, which

comprises a logical (to the filmmaker) selection of shots, is not the same documentation;

it is a re-ordered representation of a disorderly reality, perilously close to fiction. Were

we to agree upon a new definition of nonfiction film which admits that the Griersonian

and post-Griersonian (eg. cinéma verité; direct cinema; reflexive) documentary is, in fact,

presenting real life within a theatrical, narrative envelope (in the sense of an Aristotlean

arc, with a beginning, middle and end), we might reduce the confusion over our

expectation of the genre.

I propose replacing documentary, when it refers to a film or video purporting to

represent non-actors in an unscripted series of scenes, with the term docufiction, or its

hyphenated variant, docu-fiction (no doubt the latter version will give way to the former

with its acceptance). The term has been used and is defined online in various sources,127

but not, notably, in either the cdrom or online versions of the OED (as of November 12,

2010), as the progeny of documentary and fiction storytelling, much as literary nonfiction

is the child of the reflexive New Journalism movement128. Note that docudrama is not the

126 Govaert: 250-251 127 see, for instance, Wikipedia contributors, "Docufiction," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Docufiction&oldid=395526206 (accessed November 12, 2010). However, this and other definitions restrict the term to those films which openly admit to a conflation of fictive and nonfictive elements. My point is that all documentary now be labelled and thought of as docufiction. 128 New Journalism was used as the title of a collection of essays by Truman Capote, Hunter S. Thompson, Norman Mailer and others, edited by Tom Wolfe, published by Harper and Row in 1973. Wikipedia contributors, "The New Journalism," Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia,


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same thing: a docudrama is a dramatic recreation of an actual event that took place

sometime in the past129.

Docufiction, on the other hand, makes it clear that what we are about to view is not

reality unmediated by technique, narrative structure, commercial and practical

considerations; nor is it untainted by subjectivity; rather, it is an interpretation of real life,

with all the caveats that interpretation brings to the fore. Thus warned, we approach

docufiction with more caution, a more critical response (which we should be doing

anyway), and the expectation that reality is not to be captured simply, accurately, and

objectively.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=The_New_Journalism&oldid=393765097 (accessed November 12, 2010). 129 The OED online defines docudrama as: A dramatized film (usu. for television) which is based on a semi-‐fictional interpretation of real events; a documentary drama, its first recorded uses: 1961 Britannica Bk. of Year 537/2 Docudrama, a documentary drama. 1975 Toronto Star 12 July G1/1 CBC producer Ralph Thomas and director Peter Pearson were completing under wraps the most controversial of the network's five new hour-‐long ‘docu-‐dramas’ series…


55

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