Theorizing Documentary

Michael Renov, Michael Renov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135213091
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

A key collection of essays that looks at the specific issues related to the documentary form. Questions addressed include `What is documentary?' and `How fictional is nonfiction?'

1 Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction

Michael Renov

DOI: 10.4324/9780203873083-1

In the realm of the cinema, all nonnarrative genres—the documentary, the technical film, etc.—have become marginal provinces, border regions so to speak, while the feature-length film of novelistic fiction, which is simply called a “film,”—the usage is significant—has traced more and more clearly the king’s highway of filmic expression.

Christian Metz

“Some Points in the Semiotics of the Cinema”¹

Once one has distinguished, as does the entire philosophical tradition, between truth and reality, it immediately follows that the truth “declares itself in a structure of fiction.” Lacan insists a great deal on the opposition truth/reality, which he advances as a paradox. This opposition, which is as orthodox as can be, facilitates the passage of the truth through fiction: common sense always will have made the division between reality and fiction.

Jacques Derrida

“Le Facteur de la Vérit锲

The detour signs are up on the king’s highway of filmic expression. In critical circles, royalism has been deposed anyway; the assumption that dominant cultural forms or theoretical approaches should enjoy the intellectual right of way has been challenged. A new consensus is building. Attention is being directed toward reality-driven representations from an ever-wider array of sources: journalistic, literary, anthropological. It may well be that the marginalization of the documentary film as a subject of serious inquiry is at an end. After all, the key questions which arise in the study of nonfiction film and video—the ontological status of the image, the epistemological stakes of representation, the potentialities of historical discourse on film—are just as pressing for an understanding of fictional representation.

As we are reminded by Ana M. López in her essay in this volume (Chapter 8), one crucial gesture of postcolonial discourse has been its radicalizing of notions of core and periphery, frequently resulting in the discovery of the margin at the center’s core. Taking at face value Metz’s pronouncement that the documentary is a “marginal province,” this collection makes a contribution toward a new valuation of the core and periphery of film and television studies—or, better yet, offers a deconstructive appraisal in which the terms of the hierarchy, fiction/nonfiction, are first reversed then displaced.

For, in a number of ways, fictional and nonfictional forms are enmeshed in one another—particularly regarding semiotics, narrativity, and questions of performance. At the level of the sign, it is the differing historical status of the referent that distinguishes documentary from its fictional counterpart not the formal relations among signifier, signified, and referent.³ Is the referent a piece of the world, drawn from the domain of lived experience, or, instead, do the people and objects placed before the camera yield to the demands of a creative vision?⁴ Narrativity, sometimes assumed to be the sole province of fictional forms, is an expository option for the documentary film that has at times been forcefully exercised: the suspense-inducing structure of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North; the day-in-the-life framework of the city symphonies such as Man With a Movie Camera, Berlin: Symphony of a Great City, and A Propos de Nice; the “crisis structure” of the Drew Associates’ films. How do we begin to distinguish the documentary performance-for-the-camera of a musician, actor, or politician (Don’t Look Back, Jane, Primary) from that of a fictional counterpart (The Doors, On Golden Pond, The Candidate)?⁵ The ironies and cross-identifications these examples invoke ought to suggest the extent to which fictional and nonfictional categories share key conceptual and discursive characteristics.⁶

Indeed, nonfiction contains any number of “fictive” elements, moments at which a presumably objective representation of the world encounters the necessity of creative intervention. Among these Active ingredients we may include the construction of character (with Nanook as a first example) emerging through recourse to ideal and imagined categories of hero or genius, the use of poetic language, narration, or musical accompaniment to heighten emotional impact or the creation of suspense via the agency of embedded narratives (e.g., tales told by interview subjects) or various dramatic arcs (here, the “crisis structure” comes to mind). Many more examples could be offered: the use of high or low camera angles (whose effects have been conventionalized in fiction film and television), close-ups which trade emotional resonance for spatial integrity, the use of telephoto or wide-angle lenses which squeeze or distort space, the use of editing to make time contract, expand, or become rhythmic. In every case, elements of style, structure, and expositional strategy draw upon preexistent constructs, or schemas, to establish meanings and effects for audiences. What I am arguing is that documentary shares the status of all discursive forms with regard to its tropic or figurative character and that it employs many of the methods and devices of its fictional counterpart. The label of “nonfiction,” while a meaningful categorization, may, in fact, lead us to discount its (necessarily) fictive elements. It would be unwise to assume that only fiction films appeal to the viewer’s Imaginary, that psychic domain of idealized forms, fantasy, identification, reversible time, and alternative logics. A view of documentary which assumes too great a sobriety for nonfiction discourse will fail to comprehend the sources of nonfiction’s deep-seated appeal.⁷

With regard to the complex relations between fiction and documentary, it might be said that the two domains inhabit one another. Philip Rosen examines that co-habitation (described by him as “a generally undiscussed kinship between mainstream cinema and the original documentary tradition”) in his essay, “Document and Documentary: On the Persistence of Historical Concepts.” Rosen argues that meaning arises through a process of sequentiation which is constitutive of historical discourse; it is also a key ingredient of documentary theory and practice since Grierson. For Rosen, narrativity emerges as a fundamental condition that binds together all three representational practices—history, documentary, and the fiction film.

Ana M. López writes about a Brazilian television mini-series, “America,” which offers a view of the United States that eschews the authoritative, constructing its object from “a distinctly in-between position: in between cultures and nations, the political and the poetic, the past and the present, the documentary and the fictional.” López’s focus on the deployment of specific aesthetic strategies within “America” places the series within the context of postmodernist discourse. Scholars have rarely enlisted such art-based paradigms for their discussions of work derived from the historical world, regardless of the degree of artfulness. Susan Scheibler’s discussion of Wim Wenders’ Lightning Over Water draws on ordinary language philosophy to describe the film’s complex weave of constative and performative elements as Wenders tracks the actions and pronouncements of filmmaker Nicholas Ray during his final days. That analysis helps to explain the border status that the film cultivates for itself—between life and death, documentary and fiction, homage and exploitation. The work of Rosen, López, and Scheibler demonstrates that the common bonds between fiction and nonfiction may be illuminated with concepts drawn from historiography, postmodernist theory, and philosophy.

Brian Winston finds that the discourse of science has repeatedly been called upon to legitimate the documentary film and to set a standard for the fiction film. According to Winston, the early and public claims for photography’s status as scientific evidence were based on the sense that the photochemically produced image was a fully indexical sign, one that bore the indelible imprint of the real. Photography’s social utility followed from its ability to take the measure of things with verifiable fidelity; it could thus be likened to other scientific instruments such as the thermometer or hygrometer.⁸ A comparable claim, now more metaphysical than scientific, was made by Andre Bazin more than a century later: “Photography does not create eternity, as art does, it embalms time, rescuing it simply from its proper corruption.⁹

Paul Arthur’s “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments)” takes as given a “tangled reciprocity” between documentary practice and the Hollywood narrative, then focuses on the special status of the documentary achieved through its claims to discursive authority. Such claims, triumphantly mounted at particular moments (the late thirties, the late sixties, the late eighties), are, to be sure, historically conditioned and responsive to particular situations. Yet, all of these peak moments of the American documentary film share a defining oppositional relation to Hollywood that shapes the very contours of documentary authenticity. Bill Horrigan’s commentary on various AIDS-related documentary practices offers a mix of meditation and historical insight, most specifically toward the ways in which the field of independent media has been challenged and transformed by the AIDS crisis. Horrigan finds in the artists’ response to the epidemic a “renewed credibilit…. [for] the importance of people owning and being able to determine the terms of how they are visually represented,” with the legacy of feminist film practices figuring strongly. As a curator and critic, Horrigan has helped to organize and make public the richly variable outpouring of AIDS-related work since the mid-1980s; here, he offers a measure of tribute to that work while reflecting upon the discursive and political contingencies that have shaped it.

This focus on historical matters in a book entitled Theorizing Documentary should come as no surprise; an historical consciousness is essential for an analysis of the conceptual foundations of documentary film and video.¹⁰ Such an analysis must place the domain of nonfiction texts and practices within a century of cinematic forms as well as their photographic precursors. Indeed, the roots of cinema are co-terminus with documentary’s own: Muybridge, Marey, the Lumieres. In the commercial cinema, however, the camera’s preservational powers soon were devoted largely to the recording of dramatic performances, then star turns, and their infinite reduplication for the entertainment of mass audiences.¹¹ This by-now shopworn account of the development of the narrative film’s hegemony demands to be reframed, given the increasingly dominant position of nonfiction television in the current marketplace.¹² It is all the more ironic that, even while televised nonfiction forms multiply exponentially, the documentary film continues to struggle for its public identity and financial viability. PBS’s summertime series “P.O.V.,” one of the few existing outlets for independent work, continues to be the target of conservative reaction; it has been termed “provocative with a liberal tilt,” due in no small measure to its broadcast of such work as Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied and ACT-UP’s activist video, Stop the Church.¹³

Struggles over documentary have taken many forms; I have already alluded to those of the academy (e.g., the critical marginalization qua Metz) and the marketplace. An economically rooted aversion to the documentary form finds expression in some unexpected discursive arenas. To wit: controversy has surrounded the documentary nominations from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in recent years, the claim being that the most popular or ground-breaking documentary films such as The Thin Blue Line, Roger and Me, Truth or Dare, and Paris is Burning have failed to receive Academy recognition. Some have suggested that a kind of double standard for documentary remains in effect whereby success by any measure, financial or aesthetic, goes unrewarded. One suggested solution, issuing from Miramax Films (distributers of several of the films in question), addresses the very name “documentary.” In an open letter to the Academy’s executive director, Miramax suggested that the category become “best nonfiction film” so that the “negative connotations” of “documentary” could be jettisoned.¹⁴ This stigma demands to be read symptomatically.

While Brecht’s call for “pleasurable learning” would seem to resonate with documentary’s etymological roots (the Latin docere meaning “to teach”), for many, Brecht’s concept remains an oxymoron. In psychoanalytic terms, one component of the spectator’s cinematic pleasure involves the play of projection and identification with idealized others who inhabit the filmed world. Can expository forms designed to foreground issues and to propose solutions (with varying degrees of self-consciousness) ever hope to mobilize the forces of desire available through exclusively story forms? The notion of an explicit “documentary desire,” a desire-to-know aligned with the drive for an enabling mastery of the lived environs, is one which is explored in my essay, “Toward a Poetics of Documentary.” As I am at pains to demonstrate, however, the cognitive requirements to which documentary discourse responds in no way exhausts its functional domain. The expressive capabilities of nonfiction forms, too frequently overlooked, account for an aesthetic dimension which is—on historical as well as conceptual grounds—constitutive.

One of the chief concerns of recent film scholarship has been that of psychoanalysis. Only rarely has nonfiction been the subject of psychoanalytic criticism, due, perhaps, to assumptions of a baseline of rationality and conscious inquiry which govern the making and reception of documentary film in contradistinction to the unconscious (Imaginary) substrate which cuts across and enlivens fictions.¹⁵ I cannot offer here any more than a preliminary indication of documentary’s claims to the turf of psychoanalytic criticism.¹⁶ It is important to note, nonetheless, that the pleasures of nonfiction are every bit as complex as those which have been attributed to fictional forms and far less understood. And, historically, it has been psychoanalysis which has addressed itself most decisively to questions of pleasure. Recent work such as that undertaken by Judith Butler has begun to suggest, however, that, with regard to the body and its representations, psychoanalytic approaches have installed a kind of cerebral detour from the corporeal.¹⁷ Documentations of the body, as performative, analytic, or meditative vehicles, have been one sector of nonfiction practice since Muybridge. Bill Nichols’ essay in this book (Chapter 10) suggests that recent documentary films have begun to activate new conceptions of the body as the subject of cinematic representation. His attention to the inscription of an embodied, corporeal history in this work points to a lively current of resistance against the Griersonian model “in which the corporeal I who speaks dissolves itself into a disembodied, depersonalized, institutional discourse of power and knowledge.”

Of course, it is unwise to generalize any uniform laws of construction for nonfiction film and video and the essays contained in these pages have refrained from doing so. The recourse to history demonstrates that the documentary has availed itself of nearly every constructive device known to fiction (of course, the reverse is equally true) and has employed virtually every register of cinematic syntax in the process.¹⁸ Documentary filmmakers since the days of Flaherty’s Nanook have frequently chosen to build stories around the heroics of larger-than-life figures plucked from their “real” environs—in short, to narrativize the real. To return to the Derrida quotation with which we began, there is the sense that truth, as understood within the Western philosophical tradition, demands the detour through fictive constructs. The truth of aesthetic forms in the classical mode has been rendered through a kind of “crucible effect” in which reality is subjected to the heat and pressure of the creative imagination—the passage of truth through fiction. According to Derrida, Lacanian psychoanalysis—and the philosophical tradition which it supports—represents truth through two indissociable paradigms: as adequation or as veiling/unveiling. In either case, truth is co-implicated with speech (“present,” “full,” and “authentic” speech).¹⁹ Derrida, for his part, disengages “truth” from “reality”: “What is neither true nor false is reality.” For if “truth” entails speech, it also implies a speaking subject. Derrida, in his critique of “truth’s” logocentric roots, thus draws attention to its constructed (and propositional) character and in so doing is able to distinguish it from “reality,” which, though cognitively constructed, entails no necessary assertion or claim. Reality simply “is.” (The distinction between the “true” and the “r...