Approximation

Documentary, History and the Staging of Reality

Stella Bruzzi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780415688321
• eBook ISBN: 9781136473043
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Film & Video
• Index: Social Sciences

In our era of 'fake news', Stella Bruzzi examines the dynamism that results from reusing and reconfiguring raw documentary data (documents, archive, news etc.) in creative ways.

Through a series of individual case studies, this book offers an innovative framework for understanding how, in our century, film and media texts frequently represent reality and negotiate the instabilities of 'truth' by 'approximating' factual events rather than merely representing them, through juxtaposing disparate, often colliding, perspectives of history and factual events. Covering areas such as true crime, politics and media, the book analyses the fluidity and instability of truth, arguing that 'approximation' is more prevalent now in our digital age, and that its conception is a result of viewers' accidental or unconscious connections and interventions.

Original and thought-provoking, Approximation provides students and researchers of media, film and cultural studies a deeper insight into our understanding and acceptance of what truth really means today.

1
Archive and the power of actuality

In The Missing Picture Rithy Panh recounts the history of the Cambodian War and the destruction of his family using clay figurines. For a few minutes, the idyll of his pre-war life – relatives coming to visit bearing guava and jack fruit, children enjoying their lessons – survives. ‘I remember how sweet life was’, muses the voiceover, as the pulsing of helicopter blades encroaches on the sweet strains of a Cambodian song, before the image catches up and cuts to black and white archival montage of a blazing palm forest, soldiers rounding up villagers, a woman pleading for her life and people weeping over a line of bodies in body bags on stretchers. Over the last of these, the voiceover muses: ‘so many pictures that go by again and again in the world. We think we own them because we’ve seen them’; these, he concludes, are the memories ‘that are not missing’.

Using only archive and clay figurines, Panh’s re-enactment of the crimes perpetrated by the Khmer Rouge between 1975 and 1979 is an ‘approximation’, the juxtaposition with its factual basis – the war – enacted explicitly in the sequence that follows as red-scarfed puppets of Khmer soldiers cluster in front of a background of monochrome archive of bombings and military violence. As Sontag writes, ‘real wars are not metaphors’; ‘A picture, as everyone knows, is worth a thousand words. We will relive the event’ (2007: 119). In The Missing Picture this is both true and not: the ‘reality’ of the Cambodian War intrudes upon and destroys the pastoral serenity of the opening minutes, but Panh’s idiosyncratic retelling of the war extends, complicates and goes beyond the thousand-word picture as multiple personal and temporal perspectives converge, collide and inform each other. Very often tracing the paths of an ‘approximation’ and its potentially endless referents opens up the central ‘picture’ to such an extent that we find ourselves a long way from it and its familiar, tangible reality. So, every picture tells and does not tell a story.

For many documentary filmmakers, the archival image is an incontrovertible, verifiable record of and link to a no longer present moment. Emile de Antonio’s anti-Vietnam collage documentary, In the Year of the Pig (1969) contains a piece of archive from the French colonialist era of two Frenchmen in white hats and suits being pulled in rickshaws by Vietnamese servants, who are then summarily shooed away when they tentatively request payment for having delivered the men to a café. De Antonio maintained that this 1930s scene ‘encapsulates the whole colonial empire’ and is ‘the equivalent of a couple of chapters of dense writing about the means of colonialism’ (Crowdus and Georgakas, 1988: 167). A single piece of archive might lack nuance and detail, but it bears the direct imprint of reality; although de Antonio overextends archive’s capabilities, he nevertheless touches on what marks it out from other documentary elements, namely the emotive potency of its indexicality. If (as, after Foucault, I argue in Chapter 6) re-enactment is the ‘model’ ‘approximation’, the one that defines this project intellectually, the archive-based compilation film is its practical embodiment. The recycling and juxtaposition of archival images are key components of ‘approximation’, acts of yoking together that bring different representations into constructive collision, alongside alternative perspectives, temporal planes and arguments. Archive is also contained within another ‘approximate’ space: the archive, the ever-growing repository, whether physical or virtual, wherein sits the ‘grubby, infinite heap of things’ a researcher will wade through knowing they will not finish (Steedman, 2001: 18).

Archive has the allure of imperfect, incomplete authenticity; it rings with the resonance of having been there, of having borne witness to a moment that is now passed. For all its limitations (and one of the characteristics of archive is its perpetually unfinished state, its residual inability to offer a full interpretation of the event it represents) the archival fragment brings back a moment of raw reality with which, as Emile de Antonio suggests, no written word can ever quite compete. Intensely familiar images – footage of the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945 by the Red Army, Nick Ut’s photo of North Vietnamese children fleeing a US napalm attack in 1972, the second plane striking the World Trade Center in 2001 – can seemingly cut through or condense layers of amassed information and knowledge, but they also possess an unexpected frailty, vulnerable to misinterpretation or manipulation, as occurred with the video footage of Rodney King being beaten by members of the LAPD in 1991. The ‘thereness’ of actuality footage is therefore compelling and immediate, but archive is also unstable, not merely because it embodies temporal dissonance as it re-evokes the presentness of when it came into being, but through the fact that it is, by its very nature, an expression of reflectiveness and historicity. In archival form the event is always something returned to and so, although it was once ‘there’, it, the image, is no longer actuality. The collage or compilation film is inherently dialectical, it constructs through the juxtaposition of eclectic fragments (a process of collisions, not sutures) a multiplication of presents, it can interrogate, reflect on, oppose as well as simply show.

The use of archive material is a crucial act of ‘approximation’. Archival material embodies and connotes a sense of discovery and appropriation, as well as the ‘foundness’ pastiched in found footage films; but it also resonates with the idea of temporal distance, of a past that was once the present and is now one in a multiplicity of presents – the present of the original archive, the present of the new film into which the archive has been re-appropriated and then the ‘present’ in which the archive is watched at different moments. ‘Archive’ is frequently identified as both authentic and authenticating, as both illustrative and evidentiary, which is how library and stock images are often used in the traditional archive-based documentary. Spence and Navarro, for example, under the sub-heading ‘Uses of Evidence’, discuss Alain Resnais’s juxtaposition of ‘archival footage and contemporary shots’ in his 1955 documentary Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog) as helping ‘to give meaning to the evidential material by suggesting we compare the past with the present’ (2010: 40; my italics). The archive of the Nazi camp atrocities is characterised as ‘raw’, the most basic form of documentary ‘evidence’, as somehow unadulterated or pure, although the naïve idealism of this belief in ‘evidence’ is swiftly signalled by Spence and Navarro with references to the not so incontrovertible ‘evidence’ of King’s beating or the inconclusiveness of the Zapruder footage of Kennedy’s assassination. As will be discussed in greater detail when it comes to documentary trials in Chapter 4, the entire issue of the still or moving photographic image as ‘evidence’ that can trump other forms of recollection about an event (personal testimony, artists’ impressions, letters) is intrinsically problematic. Archive does not (or cannot) lie, but it can remain unreadable. Likewise, the documenting camera does not necessarily know what it is looking at; it might be blank and anonymous, or it might be wielded selectively. Of course, it is not the apparatus, the inanimate camera, that possesses intention, but rather the people behind it, and that intention alters as the archive is generated, used, edited, recycled and reedited.

So, a single segment of archive footage, though constitutively simple, is inherently stratified, and the act of watching even an isolated piece of archive or actuality comparably layered. The archival fragment perennially carries with it the strength of its potent link to the events it records, as well as the flimsier vestiges of what has been irretrievably lost in that transfer from original event to its representation (a tacit recognition that the act of ‘being there’ can be echoed but never wholly reproduced). In watching archive, we notice its aesthetic qualities and what these speak to (its age, its format, its deterioration, or whether it is shot on film or video), what it is about, what responses it might set off (emotional, psychological, intellectual, nostalgic), how it interconnects with other formal elements such as narration, music or fictionalisation, and where it leads us or what it prompts us to think about. The fragment of archive never just is; it is powerfully indexical, which lends it a sense of permanence, although it is also perversely incomplete, as it needs other elements, narratives and contexts to make fuller sense of it. It is of its time and timeless. Each time a piece of footage is reused, altered or created anew. So, archive is both stable and remarkably insecure.

And this is only to really consider the original audiovisual fragments. Other elements of the repackaging or recycling of archive also confirm its approximate status and modify or compromise the way it is viewed and understood: voiceover or on-screen text can indicate how the archive is to be understood; narrative can impose linearity on an otherwise fragmented world; editing can dictate and reconfigure intellectual responses; music and non-diegetic sound can add sentiment, emotion, perspective. Archive film and video can also be modified through, for instance, the multi-planing of photographs as in Brett Morgen’s The Kid Stays in the Picture (2002) or the animation of a still image in James Marsh’s Man on Wire. All these guide, compromise or circumscribe spectator responses to the original archive in its raw state. Alongside the multiple textual relations, there is also the relationship of the image to the implied off-screen space, most importantly that between what is caught on camera or microphone and what happened either side of those images and sounds. The outtake is classically appealing to compilation filmmakers such as Adam Curtis, for it captures the moment of delicate negotiation and selection that creates more official or archived archival footage. Most commonly, the cross-camera dialogue is excised, which makes such marginalised fragments especially allegorically pregnant, but also eloquent on the subject of archive’s malleable and mutable fragility; that it is as much defined by what is not there as by what is.

Part of this split status stems from an acknowledgement that archive footage in a documentary carries with it the connotation of having been edited. All film and television is edit-based, an edit – a cut, a splice – is always a fissure, a rift, a filmic moment of rupture that is both imperceptible and definite, that marks the transition from one image to another while not always drawing attention to itself or altering meaning. The re-use of archival material is linked directly to the dialectical core of any historical inquiry (fiction- or documentary-based), and the cutting together of recycled images that were not intended to go together entails the construction of new meanings and consequently invites their content to be viewed and questioned afresh. The edit is a primary means of putting ‘approximation’ into action, of ensuring it becomes more than an intellectual idea about the unfinished or un-finite nature of history and factual enquiry.

In Experimental Ethnography, Catherine Russell describes ‘Found-footage filmmaking, otherwise known as collage, montage or archival film practice’ as ‘an aesthetic of ruins’, for its ‘intertextuality is always also an allegory of history, a montage of memory traces, by which the filmmaker engages with the past through recall, retrieval, and recycling’ (Russell, 1999: 238). ‘Archive’ as a term probably conjures up imperfect monochrome stock footage depicting a more often than not grim past inserted into earnest historical documentaries – films such Esfir Shub’s The Fall of the Romanovs (1927), for which she pillaged the Romanov archives and newsreel footage, Resnais’ Nuit et Brouillard, made to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camps or maybe Atomic Café (Rafferty, Loader and Rafferty, 1982), a film made at the height of the Reagan-era Cold War about the nuclear build-up of the 1950s. Thinking of UK television for a moment and the rise of popular factual television (of which ‘documentary’ is only one, now small, component), it certainly seems as if ‘archive’ is out of favour; the archive-based historical documentary of a filmmaker such as Laurence Rees has waned in popularity, giving way to ‘constructed reality’, introduced as a BAFTA (British Academy of Film and Television Arts) category in 2012 to honour shows, such as The Only Way is Essex and Made in Chelsea, in which participants are ‘put into environments or formats, then observed interacting in situations devised by the producers’ (BBC News, 2011). As television audiences and executives (at least in Britain) have turned against imperfect newsreel and actuality footage, has the inexorable rise of scripted reality concomitantly made us distrustful of anything – such as found footage – that might lay claim to greater authenticity, to having witnessed an unrehearsed event as it actually happened? In fact, the very different uses of archive in the examples examined below are not necessarily about trust or distrust, as they exemplify ‘approximation’ by juxtaposing textual elements that embody the schisms and tensions not just of historical representation but of 21st century fact-based entertainment. But what to call the primary element of this particular ‘approximation’? I have already used two terms – ‘archive’ and ‘found footage’ (although the latter has been appropriated by Russell and others and also carries the quite distinct definition of film or video presented as if it has been discovered, as in The Blair Witch Project [1999] or Cloverfield [2008]) – but there are others. Jay Leyda, for example, prefers the term ‘compilation’, Emile de Antonio ‘collage junk’, Jaimie Baron ‘appropriation’, while ‘found footage’ is commonly reserved for art films.¹

To return to Russell’s ‘aesthetic of ruins’: the archive-based film salvages and reassembles; out of the ruins can come narrative, causality or logic. The archival film is resonant with temporal disjuncture and formal ‘approximation’; it is a kaleidoscopic piecing together of unfinished bits of ‘pa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Archive and the power of actuality
• 2 ‘9/11’ as ‘Not 9/11’: United 93 and Man on Wire
• 3 Mad Men and the incidental events of the 1960s
• 4 Documentary and the law: true crime and observation
• 5 Political mimicry: from mimesis to alternate history
• 6 Documentary re-enactment: the ‘model’ approximation
• Bibliography
• Index