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
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Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary
Michael Cox
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 goodand truth. Werner Herzog1
From Robert Flahertys 1922 silent Nanook of the North,2 which first exposed general audiences to the ways of a culture, to Errol Morriss 1988 feature The Thin Blue Line, which, upon its release, saw a man unjustly accused of murdering a policemen freed from prison, to Nettie Wilds 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 informingand misleadingus for the last one hundred fifteen years (since the Lumiere brothers began shooting short actualities in 1895). There is also to be acknowledged nonfiction cinemas 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 clearat least, I hope to make clearfurther 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
Michael Cox
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 bakers 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 didnt lieuntil Stalins elimination of undesirables included Trotskys 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 Appelbaums 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 Universitys 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 11
Michael Zheng. The Stop. Vancouver Biennale. Photo by Clayton Perry Photoworks. 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
Michael Cox
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 explorationand it is a personal exploration, rather than a comprehensive survey of the literature, or a theoretical discourseis 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 -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.
Michael Cox
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 Lumire brothers) and cinema as invention, artifice, illusion, fantasy (Mlis). But this is not a true opposition. The whole point is that, for those first audiences, the transcription of the most banal reality the Lumire brothers filming The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Stationwas 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 Lumire 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 doorsand furthermore to avoid looking at the camera, although some glance toward us as they stream out. This could arguably be the beginning of documentarya single shot, recording a mundane actualitybut 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 didnt 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
Michael Cox
"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 Canadas 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: its 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 peopleThe third chapteris the discovery of the working people,the drama on the doorstep, the drama of the ordinary.[And the] fourth chapterin 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 naturerealitywas 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 accountsometimes, indeed, the only one of the world still to be found20 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 Griersons 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 documentarys 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 topicsbecause it can be guaranteed that they will get the right numbers.21 We have no problem knowing a documentary film when we see one; theyre 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 eventnotably the FAA National Operations Manager, Ben Sliney.22 In Flahertys 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, Nanooks real name was Allakariallak, and the people called themselves Inuit. These and other facts did not get in Flahertys way of telling his story through them.23 Cinema is, if nothing else, one lie after

21 22
Fraser: 63. 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 Godards 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 documentarywhether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques. This assertionas old and as fundamental as the antagonism between names and realityneeds 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.filmmakers) 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 weve 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 viewers 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 cinma vrit movement of the 1960s and 70s.Vrit took advantage of technological advancesand the spirit of the timesto produce movies that were immersive and in the moment, descriptive rather than analytical.30 Verit, 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 28
Dai Vaughn. For Documentary: Twelve Essays. (University of California, 1999): 58 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 andeven if it is not the conscious intent of the filmmaker or commissioning agentour 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 sociopolitical 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 shell 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 incrediblethe 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, Im not interested in making a movie.33 Wild finds a narrative within the relationships between compelling charactersthe 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 verityif it is called a documentary, it must be the truth about somethingthis circularity releases filmmakers from an obligation to assert and prove its claims, which therefore, by an audiences aquiescence, absolves documentary from having to provide proof. We assume, based on advertising, and by the films 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 filmsand television programs and advertisinghave adopted many of the conventions of documentary cinema, from the handheld camera to peopleactors, in this caseaddressing 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 lockeddown 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 isnt 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 mewhat happens in front of the camera isnt documentary because its 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 shotor 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 Truffauts La nuit amricaine (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 broadcasters legal culpability in airing a fiction but assuming (and naming) it documentary, Errors and Omissions Insurance covers the broadcasters liability, if not the filmmakers. 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 1960s 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 availableto film crew and viewers alike.39 Of documentarys avowed raison detre, being the true record of actualities, truth is not merely problematic, it is an impossibility.

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

38 The
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2. Truth
Truth is relative and ephemeral. Truth is absolute and eternal. Im 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 verit became more self-reflexive in the 80s (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 films 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 ones eye, returning to messy reality, often disappoints). As a director, however, I consider the cameras 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 representation [sic], never clear windows onto reality;44 the screens 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. says films 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
43 Grierson
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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? Were 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 cameras 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 havent 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/handcoloured/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/selftraining_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 interpetrationswhose signification becomes open to the spectators 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-verit style, in which we can imagine all of the stylistic requirements of verite anddo 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 Morriss 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 80s. Eye to eye contact is critical to his interviews: the relationship between interviewer (himself) and subject ought to be closenot 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 Morriss technique a bundle of nonsense; that his (Maysles) subjects are better offbecause that person is actually looking at a person.50

48
ibid, 42 Believer, April 2004. http://www.believermag.com/issues/200404/?read=interview_morris 50 Sharon Zuber. Albert Maysles Interviewunpublished version from author. Interview Aug 5,2002; accessed via email from author Nov.4 2010.
49 The
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In the interviews Im 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 Wilds 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 Cinmatheque 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. Harris and Claudia Medina. Wild at Heart: the Films of Nettie Wild. (Vancouver: Anvil Press, 2009)
52 Mark
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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 technicalitiesframing, 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 filmmakerstrained 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://planinternational.org/tsunamirecovery/thailand/childs-lens.php (accessed Nov.27, 2010) includes videos of the childrens 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 filmmakers 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 scriptor 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 filmwhether 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 militarywho 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, thats 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 animals 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 filmfiction and documentaryis a record of a particular time. Take a feature which is set in another period: actors hairstyles, choice of costume, even the screenplays 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-todoor 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 trutha 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 cant 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 cinma vrit fixates, were of significance, then one could argue that the vritthe truthat its most concentrated must reside in the telephone bookin 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 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
60 Herzog,
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3. Ethics
And what of the filmmakers moral responsibility to her subject(s)? If the villagers in Wilds 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 nave? Where does a filmmakers ethical obligation to her subjects end: as she leaves the village? On the editing table? At the films 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 dont 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 filmwhich most directors would agree is their goalthe tears, the opinionated statement, the gaffe, remains, no matter how distressing to the subject. Whereas if I were to consider the subjects 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 NFBs Challenge for Change/Socit 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, filmmakingaside from community-based projectsis 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 filmmakers 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 Wilds 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 64
Exploring Arts for Social Change: Communities in Action, SFU, Oct.20, 2010 Waugh, et al, eds. Challenge for Change: activist documentary at the National Film Board of Canada (Montreal: McGill, 2010): see Hnaut, 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 cant include everything, and usually filmmakers cant know in advance what the finished film is going to end up like, for this depends on the material gathered and the evolution of ideas68 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 subjects 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 67
Jane Chapman. Issues in Contemporary Documentary. (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2009): 160 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. Its not just that the personal is political, Loretta Todd writes, its 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 ones film can be appropriated for a variety of purposes.
70 Kate Nash. Exploring Power and Trust in Documentary: A study of Tom Zubryckis 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: its 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 storyas 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 onwhich, incidentally, has been argued75 is actually in-built, much as Chomsky believes we have, prenatally, a predisposition toward grammatical

73 74
E.L.Doctorow, New York Times Book Review 8/25/1985: 1 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 Pea. "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 construction76builds 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, Wisemans 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 shotover 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 learningis 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 Wisemans 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 courseas discussed below, in section 7, on ethnographic recordsbut 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 weve discussed) real lifewhy 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 vrit ethos, music was anathema, as Corner points out, where what we might call journalistic rationalism and observational minimalism have acted to keep many producersconcerned 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.
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A score can be wonderfully appropriate in certain documentaries. Herzogs 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 Herzogs 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 perspectivecastigates 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 ssshweeek 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 theme81 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 Hnni. Greenpeace website for Petropolis. Accessed 11/ 24/2010. http://www.petropolisfilm.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. Documentor 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 nondocumentary: for instance, the introduction or narration by a well-known host (Richard Attenborough or David Suzuki); or the films 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 dayJean 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 Spielbergs Saving Private Ryan (1998)). Godard operated his own camera, often walking or running with the actors.85 The wobbly handheld camera, with on-screen refocusing 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 Allens Zelig (1983) raised the bar with the actors 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 were 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: Weve 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 responsefrustrated by the revelation of a cheat, she is uncertain if her responses were real or manipulated. What she doesnt 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 postproduction, advanced in the late 20th century to the seamless integration of animated characters, where the real world of actors is combined with svirtual worldthink of the Lord of the Rings trilogywe 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 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).
91 Bondebjerg,
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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 Kiarostamis 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 Iranwhich she could never do outside of the protection offered by glass and steel. It feels like a documentary. But it isnt. And in the companion film on the dvdwhich is a documentaryabout the making of Ten,93 called 10 on Ten, Kiarostami gives a short course in filmmaking, which one might call constructed realityhe 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 scne, someone who puts order into a scene, nor to the word ralisateur, 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 didnt 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 Cinma, September 2002: 13
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John Cassavettes pioneered this approach to drama in cinema in the 70s with Husbands (1970), A Woman Under the Influence (1974) and so on, which had brutally raw performances which felt as if they were realand they were real, in the sense that the actors were expressing real emotionsbut 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 (audiences) 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 Vinterbergthat 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 Curtiss 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 Marshalls shooting over half a million feet of 16mm film on the Kalahari Bushmen in the 1950s producing what remains the most comprehensive [as of the the articles writing, late 1970s] visual ethnography of any traditional preliterate society.101 But this impressive record is not without controversy. One of Marshalls 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 paperwhich 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 filmmaker.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

102 103
Winston 2008: 173 ibid: 164 104 ibid
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Amazon, shot over 50 film sequencesnot 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 Boass 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, wed 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 photographyor its interpretation.106 Contrast this approach with David MacDougalls, who employs an unprivileged camera style,107 favouring the single long take, with no use of intercutting to shorten
105 106
Vaughn: 43-44 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 filmmakerand 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 Andra 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 Socit 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 persons 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 filmten, fifteen minutes long. These were projected in community halls, church basements, schools, to stimulate conversation and communal activism110. CFC/SNs repercussions were felt long after the last film was released. Its alumni English, French, Aboriginalcontinue 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 filmmakerswhich 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. Ive since tempered that a bit. I see now it doesnt matter so much whos handling the camera if the people in front of the camera are controlling the content and feel theyre 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 onscreen 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 filmmakers 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.

112 113
Ibid:175 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 Controls Outreach/Street Nurse Program to co-produce an instructional, interactive DVD aimed at professionals working with addicts114. Coproduced 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 Cant 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 lets invent it anyway: Michael Renov claims the word is used in documentary studies, where it denotes an intellectual curiosity, a desire for knowledgeperhaps, 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 movementspositions on the keyboard my hands have memorizedinto 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 shownas 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 Ruttmans 1927 Berlin, Symphony of a Metropolis120 viewed on a laptop with its projection onto the 30-foot screen at the Pacific Cinmathque. We dont 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 filmmakers 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
120
In essays by Carroll; Walton; Neill; Gaut; Knight; in Carroll and Choi: 211-280. Ruttman, Walter. Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Grostadt. 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
123 124
Vaughn: 77 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. cinma verit; 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
127
Govaert: 250-251 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
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Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary Kiarostami, Abbas. Ten. DVD. Zeitgeist Films 2002. 94 mins.
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Landesman, O. "In and Out of This World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary." Studies in Documentary Film 2, no. 1 (2008): doi:10.1386/sdf.2.1.33/1. Langer, S K. "On Artistic Sensibility." Daedalus 89, no. 1 (1960): 242-244. Levin, C M, and A R Cruz. "Behind the Scenes of a Visual Ethnography: A Dialogue Between Anthropology and Film." Journal of Film and Video 60, no. 2 (2008): doi:10.1353/jfv.0.0004. Linton, J M. "The Moral Dimension in Documentary." Journal of the University Film Association (1976). Maccarone, E M. "Ethical Responsibilities to Subjects and Documentary Filmmaking." Journal of Mass Media Ethics 25, no. 3 (2010): doi:10.1080/08900523.2010.497025. MacDonald, S. "Up Close and Political: Three Short Ruminations on Ideology in the Nature Film." Film Quarterly 59, no. 3 (2006): 4-21. MacDougall, D. "Ethnographic Film: Failure and Promise." Annual Review of Anthropology 7 (1978): 405-425. . "Unprivileged Camera Style." RAIN (1982): 8-10. . "When Less Is Less: The Long Take in Documentary." Film Quarterly 46, no. 2 (1992): 36-46. McWilliams, D E. "Frederick Wiseman." Film Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1970): 17-26. Mehler, J, M Nespor, and M Pea. "What Infants Know and What They Have to Learn About Language." European Review 16, no. 04 (2008): doi:10.1017/S1062798708000392. Minh-Ha, T T. "Documentary Is/Not a Name." October 52 (1990): 77-98. . "The Totalizing Quest of Meaning."." Theorizing Documentary (1993): 90-107. Mullen, Leslie. Truth in Photography: Perception, Myth and Reality in the Postmodern World. (Dissertation: University of Florida, 1998):12. Accessed via Google Scholar, Nov. 20, 2010. Nash, K. "Exploring Power and Trust in Documentary: A Study of Tom Zubrycki's Molly and Mobarak." Studies in Documentary Film 4, no. 1 (2010): doi:10.1386/sdf.4.1.21_1. Nichols, B. "Fred Wiseman's Documentaries: Theory and Structure." Film Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1978): 15-28. . "The Voice of Documentary." Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (1983): 17-30. . "History, Myth, and Narrative in Documentary." Film Quarterly (1987): 9-20. . "What Current Documentaries Do and Can't Do." The Velvet Light Trap 60, no. 1 (2007): doi:10.1353/vlt.2007.0022.
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Nolley, K. "Fahrenheit 9/11: Documentary, Truth-Telling, and Politics." Film & History: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Film and Television Studies 35, no. 2 (2005): doi:10.1353/flm.2005.0052. Oppenheim, Yair. The Functions of Film Music. Score Monthly, an online resource. http://filmscoremonthly.com/features/functions.asp, accessed Nov. 14, 2010. Orvell, M. "Documentary Film and the Power of Interrogation:" American Dream" &" Roger and Me"." Film Quarterly 48, no. 2 (1994): 10-18. Paglia, C. "The Magic of Images: Word and Picture in a Media Age." Arion 11, no. 3 (2004): 1-22. Pearce, Gail, and Cahal McLaughlin. Truth or Dare: Art & Documentary. Bristol: Intellect, 2007. Prins, J. "Expressing Anthropological Knowledge in Documentary Film." Anthropology Today 9, no. 2 (1993): 23-24. Rabinowitz, P. "Wreckage Upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory." History and Theory 32, no. 2 (1993): 119-137. Rhodes, Gary Don, and John Parris Springer. Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking. (University of Michigan, 2006). Rhu, L F. "Home Movies and Personal Documentaries: An Interview with Ross Mcelwee." CINEASTE. 29, no. 3 (2004): 6-17. Ricciardelli, L. "'Documentary Filmmaking in the Postmodern Age: Errol Morris & the Fog of Truth'." Studies in Documentary Film 4, no. 1 (2010): doi:10.1386/sdf.4.1. Rich, B R. "Documentary Disciplines: An Introduction." Cinema Journal 46, no. 1 (2007): doi:10.1353/cj.2007.0004. Rose, R. and Stacy Wood. Paradox and the Consumption of Authenticity Through Reality Television. Journal of Consumer Research, vol.32 (Sept.2005): 284-296 Rosenthal, Alan. Writing, Directing, and Producing Documentary Films and Videos. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2007. Rosenthal, Alan, and John Corner. New Challenges for Documentary. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005. Ruby, J. "Speaking For, Speaking About, Speaking With, or Speaking AlongsideAn Anthropological and Documentary Dilemma." Visual Anthropology Review 7, no. 2 (1991): 50-67. Salverson, J. Performing Emergency: Witnessing, Popular Theatre, and the Lie of the Literal. Theatre Topics 6, no.2 (1996): 181-191. . Performing Testimony: Ethics, Pedagogy, and a Theatre Beyond Injury. PhD diss., University of Toronto, 2001.
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Wild, Nettie. Fix, the Story of An Addicted City. DVD, Vancouver: Canada Wild Productions, 2002. Wild, Nettie, Kirk Tougas, and Betsy Carson. A Place Called Chiapas. DVD, Montreal: National Film Board of Canada, 1998. Winston, B. "Documentary: How the Myth Was Deconstructed." Wide Angle 21, no. 2 (1999): 71-86 . "'A Riddle Wrapped in a Mystery Inside An Enigma': Wiseman and Public Television." Studies in Documentary Film 3, no. 2 (2009): doi:10.1386/sdf.3.2.95/1. . Ethics, in Rosenthal, Alan and John Corner: 181-193 . Claiming the Real II. Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. (British Film Institute, 2008). Zuber, S. "The Force of Reality in Direct Cinema: An Interview with Albert Maysles." Post Script 26, no. 3 (2007): 6. . Unpublished interview transcript with Albert Maysles, via author email.

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Several Notes Toward a Re-definition of Documentary

Michael Cox SIMON FRASER UNIVERSITY Fall 2010

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

1. What is a documentary film?

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

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

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Adam Kossoff, quoted in Pearce, Art and Documentary: 42

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Oprah.com, January 26,2006, accessed Nov.24, 2010. http://www.oprah.com/oprahshow/Oprahs-Questions-for-James

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

7. Realism and ethnographic film

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Winston 2008: 173 ibid: 164 104 ibid

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

8. Documentaries as Agents of Social Change

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

111 Rosenthal, as quoted in Waugh: 172.

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary

Several Notes Toward a Redefinition of Documentary