New Documentary

Stella Bruzzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134172931
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Películas y vídeos

Praise for New Documentary:

'It's refreshing to find a book that cuts through the tired old debates that have surrounded documentary film and television. It heralds a welcome new approach.'

Sight and Sound

'Documentary practice changes so fast that books on the subject are often out of date before they are published. Bruzzi's achievement is to have understood the genre as an activity based on performance rather than observation. This is a fresh perspective which illuminates the fundamental shifts that will continue to take place in the genre as it enters its second century.'

John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London New Documentary provides a contemporary look at documentary and fresh and challenging ways of theorising the non-fiction film. As engaging as the original, this second edition features thorough updates to the existing chapters, as well as a brand new chapter on contemporary cinema release documentaries.

This new edition includes:

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• Contemporary films such as Capturing the Friedmans, Être et avoir, Farenheit 9/11, The Fog of War and Touching the Void as well as more canonical texts such as Hoop Dreams and Shoah

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• Additional interviews with influential practitioners, such as director Michael Apted and producer Stephen Lambert
  
  

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• A comprehensively revised discussion of modern observational documentary, including docusoaps, reality television and formatted documentaries

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• The work of documentary filmmakers such as Nicholas Barker, Errol Morris, Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen and Michael Moore and the work of Avant-Garde filmmakers such as Chris Marker and Patrick Keiller

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• Gender identity, queer theory, performance, race and spectatorship.

Bruzzi shows how theories of documentary filmmaking can be applied to contemporary texts and genres, and discusses the relationship between recent, innovative examples of the genre and the more established canon of documentary.

Part I Ground rules

To initiate an analysis of documentary as a perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation (that is, to propose that the two remain distinct but interactive) this opening section will juxtapose the notion of film as record with the use of voice-over. This is not an arbitrary selection, but a decision to establish this book's underlying thesis that documentary does not perceive its ultimate aim to be the authentic representation of the real through an examination of (a) the component of documentary that uniquely exemplifies the ideal of a non-fictional image's ‘purity’ (film as record), and (b) the component that most overtly illustrates the intrusion of bias, subjectivity and conscious structuring of those ‘pure’ events (narration). In 1971 the German documentary dramatist Peter Weiss offered a definition of documentary theatre that is pertinent to this argument. In ‘The Materials and the Models’, Weiss argues that, whilst documentary theatre ‘refrains from all invention; it takes authentic material and puts it on the stage, unaltered in content, edited in form’ (Weiss P. 1971: 41), it also ‘presents facts for examination’ and ‘takes sides’ (p. 42). Weiss manifestly does not automatically perceive the imposition of a structure (whether through editing or other means) to mean the loss of objectivity, instead he advocates documentary theatre rooted in dialectical analysis, the principal components of which are the raw material and the theatrical model. His intention in a play such as The Investigation – as he intimates later in ‘The Materials and the Models’ – is to extract from the material ‘universal truths’, to supply ‘an historical context’ and to draw attention to ‘other possible consequences’ (p. 43) of the events encompassed by the play. The raw material is incapable of drawing out or articulating the truths, motives or underlying causes it both contains and implies, so it falls to the writer to extract this general framework. Weiss's notes towards a definition of documentary theatre suggest that documentary is born of a negotiation between two potentially conflicting factors: the real and its representation; but rather than perceive this to be a problem that must be surmounted – as it is perceived in much documentary film theory – Weiss accepts this propensity towards a dialectical understanding of the factual world to be an asset and a virtue.

The intention here is to examine documentary film along the lines that Weiss uses to examine documentary theatre. Although theoretical orthodoxy stipulates that the ultimate aim of documentary is to find the perfect way of representing the real so that the distinction between the two becomes invisible, this is not what one finds within the history of documentary filmmaking. Part of the intention behind these opening paragraphs is thereby to reconsider the documentary ‘canon’ as it has been laid out by reinstating some of the influential figures who have not conformed to the history imposed by much documentary theory, and who have adopted an attitude to their filmmaking comparable to that of Weiss towards the creation of documentary theatre. Both the discussion of film as record and the discussion of voice-over conclude by suggesting that the dialectical relationship between the event and its representation is the backbone of documentary filmmaking.

1 The event

Archive and newsreel

DOI: 10.4324/9780203967386-2

Documentary is persistently treated as a representational mode of filmmaking, although at its core is the notion of film as record. In its examination of documentary's purported struggle for objectivity, this opening chapter will be concerned with the relationship between film as record and as representation, centred on the idea – or ideal – of an original unadulterated truth; although many of the films to be cited also contain a voice-over, this analysis will focus on the use of newsreel and other raw or accidental footage and archive. The material to be considered will be the Zapruder footage of the assassination of President Kennedy, the compilation films of Emile de Antonio and The Atomic Café.

The crux of the problem when considering the potential differences between film as record and as representation, is the relationship between the human and the mechanical eye. Dziga Vertov posited a relationship between the eye and the kino-eye (the latter he referred to as the ‘factory of facts’ [Michelson 1984: 59]), espousing the idea that cinema's primary function was to show what the human eye could see but not record:

In fact, the film is only the sum of the facts recorded on film, or, if you like, not merely the sum, but the product, a ‘higher mathematics’ of facts. Each item of each factor is a separate little document, the documents have been joined with one another so that, on the one hand, the film would consist only of those linkages between signifying pieces that coincide with the visual linkages and so that, on the other hand, these linkages would not require intertitles; the final sum of all these linkages represents, therefore, an organic whole.

(Michelson 1984: 84)

For a compiler of images and a recorder of life, such as Vertov, the recording procedure is always subservient to the facts being committed to film; the mechanical eye is simply capable of showing and clarifying for its audience that which initially stands before the naked eye. The act of filming concretises rather than distorts and is in itself a way of comprehending the world. Later the French documentarist and theorist Jean-Louis Comolli returns to the relationship between the human eye and its mechanical counterpart, but reaches very different conclusions, believing that, through the advent of photography

the human eye loses its immemorial privilege; the mechanical eye of the photographic machine now sees in its place, and in certain aspects with more sureness. The photograph stands as at once the triumph and the grave of the eye.

(Comolli 1980: 122–3)

Comolli, from a perspective that acknowledges the ambivalence of the mechanical eye, argues that Bazin, for one, is naïve to think that, because the camera records a real event, ‘it provides us with an objective and impartial image of that reality’ as ‘The represented is seen via a representation which, necessarily, transforms it’ (p. 135).

The underpinning issue is whether or not the intervention of the filmmaker and, therefore, the human eye renders irretrievable the original meaning of the events being recorded. Linda Williams, like many other recent writers on documentary, detects a loss of faith ‘in the ability of the camera to reflect objective truths of some fundamental social referent’, a loss which she goes on to say ‘seems to point, nihilistically … to the brute and cynical disregard of ultimate truths’ (Williams 1993: 10). Later Williams comments that ‘It has become an axiom of the new documentary that films cannot reveal the truth of events, but only the ideologies and consciousness that construct competing truths – the fictional master narratives by which we make sense of events’ (p. 13), so doubting entirely that the image-document itself can mean anything without accompanying narrativisation and contextualisation. The problem with Williams' analysis is that it expediently singles out examples (such as The Thin Blue Line and Shoah) rooted in memory and eye-witness testimony, films that intentionally lack or exclude images of the events under scrutiny, thus making a plausible case for a ‘final truth’ (p. 15) to be dislodged in favour of a series of subjective truths.

Whilst not advocating the collapse of reality and representation, what this chapter will attempt is an analysis of film as record from an alternative perspective, namely that documentary has always implicitly acknowledged that the ‘document’ at its heart is open to reassessment, reappropriation and even manipulation without these processes necessarily obscuring or rendering irretrievable the document's original meaning, context or content. This relationship between form, the spectator and the document is crucial. Dai Vaughan argues that:

The photograph – once we are sure that it is a photograph – cannot lie. But it can be falsely labelled … If we accept that documentary is best defined as a way of perceiving images, we cannot evade the implication that it is blind to the falsity of labels. Documentary will be consequent upon what it appears to show, rather than upon what it necessarily does show; and the relationship between the two is a matter for the filmmakers' ethics, inaccessible to the viewer. Yet the assumptions which the viewer makes about this relationship, on the basis of signals intended or unintended, will inform his perception of the film. To make a documentary is therefore to persuade the viewer that what appears to be is.

(Vaughan 1999: 59)

The document (here Vaughan's document is a photograph) is not empty of meaning, although it can be devoid of interpretation; and interpretation, within a documentary, is the filmmaker's most significant explanatory tool and one which, according to Vaughan, is used to inform the way in which a document is in turn interpreted or understood by the viewer.

The fundamental issue of documentary film is the way in which we are invited to access the ‘document’ or ‘record’ through representation or interpretation, to the extent that a piece of archive material becomes a mutable rather than a fixed point of reference. Talking about a television documentary that allegedly used footage of one event to represent another event for which no cine footage exists, Vaughan asks ‘How ought we to designate such a sequence?’ (Vaughan 1999: 85). Vaughan argues that if the footage's ‘true provenance’ is not given (footage allegedly of the Warsaw ghetto uprising of April 1943 was actually of the rising of August–October 1944) then ‘we must surely say that its use was documentary but mendacious’. If, conversely, its provenance had been acknowledged then, Vaughan concludes, ‘I would defend it as a legitimate fictive usage’ (p. 85), for as he had argued earlier: ‘What makes a film “documentary” is the way we look at it … To see a film as documentary is to see its meaning as pertinent to the events and objects which passed before the camera: to see it, in a word, as signifying what it appears to record’ (pp. 84–5). A filmmaker such as Emile de Antonio does not disregard the documentary source of his films, nor are his films mere formalist exercises that tread the post-modern path of disputing the distinction between the historical/factual and the ‘fake’ or fictive. The provenance of his archive is not in doubt, even if he invites his viewers to look at the archive in a particular, guided way. Rather his films and those, such as Atomic Café, which have been overtly influenced by his ‘collage junk’ method, play on the complexity of the relationship between historical referent and interpretation; they enact a fundamental doubt concerning the purity of their original source material and its ability to reveal a truth that is valid, lasting and cogent. De Antonio's films do not simply deny or suppress the existence of an independent truth contained within the raw footage they re-edit and comment upon, and it is perhaps this sort of equivocation that problematises the perception of archive's role in documentary.

Film as accidental record: ‘the Zapruder film'

To test some of the assumptions about film as record and its transmutation into archive it seems appropriate to turn to the most notorious piece of accidental footage: Abraham Zapruder's 22 seconds of 8-mm film showing the assassination of President Kennedy, 22 November 1963, in Dallas, Texas. Several factors make ‘the Zapruder film’, as it is commonly known, an interesting example. The film is the work of a very amateur cameraman, a classic piece of home movie footage that Zapruder simply intended as a family record of the President's visit. The discrepancy between quality and magnitude of content and the Zapruder film's accidental nature make it particularly compelling. The home movie fragment almost did not happen as Abraham Zapruder, a local women's clothing manufacturer, had left his Bell and Howell camera at home on the morning of 22 November because of the rain, but had been persuaded by his secretary to go back and fetch it; it also almost looked quite different, as Zapruder found his position on the concrete block just in front of the ‘Grassy Knoll’¹ at the last minute. Additionally, as illustrated in the film itself, it is evident that this position gave Zapruder a view of the motorcade that was partially obscured by a large road sign, tantalisingly blotting out certain details of the assassination. In keeping with this accidental quality is Zapruder's own tentativeness when discussing the film before the Warren Commission, commenting humbly, ‘I knew I had something, I figured it might be of some help – I didn't know what’ (quoted in Wasson 1995: 7). Similarly important is Zapruder's lack of expertise as a camera operator. The silent film jolts in response to the shots and Zapruder finds it difficult to keep Kennedy centre frame: at the crucial moment when the fatal head shot hits him, the President has been allowed to almost slide out of view, leaving the most famous frames of amateur film dominated, almost engulfed, by the lush green grass on the other side of Elm Street. ‘Zapruder’ became shorthand in American film schools in the years following the assassination for a piece of film of extremely low technical quality whose content was nevertheless of the utmost significance.² For Bazin, the apotheosis of the photograph is the similarly artless family snapshot whose documentary equivalent would be the home movie. So it was that students and others sought to emulate the style of the Zapruder footage; as Patricia Zimmerman comments with reference to home movies, ‘the American avant-garde has appropriated home-movie style as a formal manifestation of a spontaneous, untampered form of filmmaking’ (Zimmerman 1995: 146). The home movie is, virtually by definition, the documentation of the trivial, the personal and the inconsequential, events of interest only to the family group involved. What makes Zapruder's home movie exceptional is that it happens to capture an event that is not private and trivial but public and of huge importance. Footage that by accident rather than design captures material this monumental transgresses the boundaries between the official and unofficial uses of broadcast film, offering an alternative point of view, a perspective that is partly predicated upon the absenting of the film auteur, the conscious creator of the images. Zapruder's accidental home movie, like George Holliday's similarly spontaneous video recording of the beating of Rodney King by members of the LAPD in March 1991, became the official text of the events it recorded.

Why is this combination of the accidental, the amateur and the historically significant event so engaging? If one were to devise a method for classifying archive material in accordance with its purity or level of distortion, the Zapruder film would be at the top of the scale. Paul Arthur comments on the ‘mutual agreement’ between film theorists such as Siegfried Kracauer and Bela Balazs that ‘newsreels and documentary reportage in general are “innocent” or “artless” due to their lack of aesthetic reconstruction’ (Arthur 1997:2); he goes on to quote Kracauer when positing that ‘it is precisely the snap-shot quality of the pictures that makes them appear as authentic documents’ (p. 3), concluding that ‘the absence of “beauty” yields a greater quotient of “truth”’ (p. 3), thereby establishing an inverse ratio between documentary purity and aesthetic value. The Zapruder film, by these criteria, is exemplary in its rawness, innocence and credibility as a piece of non-fiction evidence or documentation. Zapruder, unlike those who copied him, is not consciously manipulating his amateur status, and it is this naïveté that audiences still find compelling, as exemplified by the preponderance of ‘the accidental video witnessing of spectacular events’ (Ouellette 1995: 41) that dominates the American series I Witness Video. Andrew Britton mentions, as if it is a foregone conclusion, that ‘there can be no such thing as a representation of the world which does not embody a set of values’, so ensuring that the documentary's ‘greatest strength is its availability for the purpose of analysis and ideological critique’ (Britton 1992: 28). There is no space in this claim for non-fiction images such as the Zapruder film, accidental footage that is not filmed with a conscious or unconscious set of determining values – ‘value’, in Britton's estimation, being automatically attached to the author/filmmaker as opposed to a film's content. Yet historical documentaries are made up of such non-critical fragments as the Zapruder footage. Within such a context, the film's ‘value’ is presumed to be that, because of the singular lack of premeditation, intention and authorship, it is able, unproblematically to yield the truth contained within its blurry, hurried images; but therein lies its problem and the factual film's burden of proof.

The Zapruder footage very quickly became an object of fetishistic fascination. As film that shows the moment of Kennedy's death, its ‘imagery operating as the equivalent of the snuff film’, the Zapruder frames bear uneasy comparison with the pornographic ideal of ‘going all the way’ to the moment of death (Simon 1996: 67). However, the fact that for 12 years the images were only known as single frames published in the Warren Commission Report³ into the assassination or Life magazine, which secured the rights to the Zapruder film on the night of the assassination for $150,000, inev...