Documentary Media

History, Theory, Practice

Broderick Fox

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138677555
• eBook ISBN: 9781317195184
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

In a digital moment where both the democratizing and totalitarian possibilities of media are unprecedented, the need for complex, ethical, and imaginative documentary media—for you, the reader of this book to think, question, and create—is vital. Whether you are an aspiring or seasoned practitioner, an activist or community leader, a student or scholar, or simply a curious audience member, author Broderick Fox opens up documentary media, its changing forms, and diversifying social functions to readers in a manner that is at once rigorous, absorbing, and practical. This new edition updates and further explores the various histories, ideas, and cultural debates that surround and shape documentary practice today. Each chapter engages readers by challenging traditional assumptions, posing critical and creative questions, and offering up innovative historical and contemporary examples. Additionally, each chapter closes with an "Into Practice" section that provides analysis and development exercises and hands-on projects that will assist you in generating a full project prospectus, promotional trailer, and web presence for your own documentary.

Chapter 1

Reimagining Documentary

Chances are that many of you come to this book with strong convictions about what a documentary looks and sounds like, what it can be about, and the role of documentary media in society. This opening chapter is designed to explode your preconceptions of documentary and to reframe the possibilities and responsibilities that come with watching and making documentaries. This involves isolating some core concepts, which far too frequently go unexamined in our daily viewing of media that make claims to the real, lived world around us. We will subject the following assumed “norms” in spectatorship and production to fresh scrutiny:

• Reality, Objectivity, and Truth: We’ll explore these monolithic concepts so frequently attributed to documentary, revealing their socially constructed nature and exploring the representational burdens we place upon documentary media both as audience members and makers.
• Subject, Form, and Function: Often documentary is defined by negation, termed nonfiction or nonnarrative. Through specific historical and contemporary examples, we’ll expand our notions of what subjects are worth representing, the forms documentary media can take, and the roles documentaries can serve in society.
• Power and the Public Sphere: We often hear about media existing in a public sphere—a space of collective spectatorship and debate. What are the boundaries of this space, and is access to it really as democratic as we’d like to think? What is the line between such a forum and the private sphere that comprises each of our individual lives? Where do the forces of government and corporate control enter into the mix? We’ll address a third, often-forgotten sphere of public authority, which controls much of the media that shapes our sense of reality and ask what place and purpose independent documentary holds in the mix.

This first chapter will at times be conceptual and theoretical. Without a shared critical foundation and basic terminology, we won’t be able to watch and analyze existing works fully. Nor will we be equipped to develop and make complex, challenging documentaries of our own that surprise and energize audiences out of complacency and into active spectatorship and citizenship.

Reimagining documentary is by no means a process of breaking fully from the past. In our quest for newness we are often too quick to overlook both prior successes and other innovations that may have come before their time. As the specific examples in this chapter and those that follow will prove, history offers a wealth of renegade strategies and approaches to representing reality just waiting to be revitalized in our digital age.

This chapter is designed to be critically and conceptually freeing, opening up possibilities for pleasure, experimentation, and audacity rarely associated with documentary media production. Clear your mind of presumptions, and let us expand documentary’s social, political, and representational possibilities.

Reality?

André Bazin was a French critic who wrote extensively on film and culture after World War II, co-founding the seminal journal Cahiers du Cinéma in 1951. His strong opinions, though often contested, continue to serve as touchstones in media debates today. Though Bazin wrote primarily on fiction film, his collected writings What Is Cinema? (Volumes 1 and 2), published in 1958 and 1959, have much to do with documentary, particularly in the ways that Bazin weaves his opinions and definitions of reality, objectivity, and truth. In his essay “The Ontology of the Photographic Image,” Bazin writes:

Originality in photography as distinct from originality in painting lies in the essentially objective character of photography. … For the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the instrumentality of a nonliving agent. For the first time an image of the world is formed automatically, without the creative intervention of man. The personality of the photographer enters into the proceedings only in his selection of the object to be photographed and by way of the purpose he has in mind.

(vol. 1: 13)

In plain terms, an ontology refers to a state or status of being, and as this excerpt attests, Bazin is making a strong claim for the status of images produced through the lens of a camera over those rendered by the human hand alone. He claims a particular indexicality—a direct, one-to-one link between real-world subject and resultant image—that gives the photograph a claim to reality greater than that of other representational strategies, bestowing upon that image a sign of “objectivity” or “truth.”

Writing in a predigital age, Bazin’s argument may already seem quaint to us now. We live in an era of photo-processing software and computer-generated imagery, where the authenticity of recorded audio and photographic evidence is continually toyed with or called into question. The idea of photographs, film, and video frames somehow possessing single, absolute meanings has been starkly challenged through highly politicized examples.

In 1991, Rodney King, an African American, was pulled over by Los Angeles police after leading them on a high-speed chase. Claiming that King resisted arrest, the four officers exerted excessive force—tasering King and beating him with their batons. Local resident George Holliday captured the officers’ assault on video. The tape spread around the world on the next news cycle, igniting a bonfire of latent racial tensions in Los Angeles and across the country.

For most, the twelve minutes of Holliday’s video presented clear evidence of the four white police officers using excessive force. But after a judge replacement and a venue change to the predominately white suburb of Simi Valley, in April 1992, three of the four officers were fully acquitted by a jury of thirteen whites, one Hispanic, and one Asian. The decision sparked a week of race riots in Los Angeles that left over fifty people dead and resulted in close to a billion dollars in property damage. For many, the rulings delivered an unambiguous message about the reality of racism and classism in American society: that the “reality” of the photographic image is rigged against the socially disenfranchised. The King verdict and its message about the malleability of photographic evidence fostered deep, painful community rifts and a distrust of both law enforcement and the judicial system that only continue to be compounded in our own digital moment.

The Rodney King tape is but one example of our postmodern condition. By postmodern I refer to a cultural state since World War II when simple notions of modern social progress (everything can be explained and improved through technology, science, and logic) unraveled in the wake of the European Holocaust and the atomic bomb. Such a world view was replaced by a far more amorphous, fragmented, and relativistic experience of reality. In our postmodern, digital, and globalized culture, the sheer amount of imagery and audiovisual accounts now representing “reality”—print journalism, network and cable news, online journalism, independent documentary, viral videos, blogs, social media platforms, expert interviews, surveillance cameras, amateur video, firsthand testimony and witnessing, reenactments, fictionalized renditions, intentionally “fake” news, etc.—are so great that many argue the ontology of the photographic image has been forever compromised.

Figure 1.1 George Holliday’s amateur video captures Rodney King being beaten by police.

Rather than throwing up our hands and declaring the representation of reality an impossibility, we all should seize upon this as an opportunity to break out of our traditional roles as passive viewers. Instead, we can actively seek out and synthesize meaning from a range of media forms for ourselves, taking greater accountability not only in our spectatorial practices but also in how we produce and insert new imagery and media into the conversation. Since Rodney King, the frequency with which we encounter videos of excessive police force against U.S. citizens, particularly African American males, has increased exponentially. This is certainly due in part to developments in “official” recording practices—the use of bodycams as part of police protocol and the increased video surveillance of public spaces—and activists’ demands to have such material made public. But such visibility is also a result of the proliferation of audiovisual recording devices on our mobile technologies and our individual capacities to distribute such material online.

In July 2014, on a Staten Island street corner, it was the decision of witness Ramsey Orta to use his phone to record and then post video of Eric Garner suffocating at the hands of excessive police force that rocketed the case into real-time popular consciousness, quickly transforming his repeated refrain of “I can’t breathe” into an enduring protest call and a globally recognized #ICantBreathe hashtag. Two years later, in July 2016, the traffic stop for a broken tail light that ended in the fatal St. Paul, Minnesota police shooting of Philando Castile was not only archived to video but livestreamed to Facebook, narrated in real time by girlfriend Diamond Reynolds to the world through her phone. The ubiquity of such seemingly incriminating audiovisual material has not yet led to what most would consider to be appropriate legal justice, accountability, policy changes, or cultural shifts around systemic racism. What has indisputably changed, however, is individuals’ increased self-identification and empowerment as media producers.

In Chapter 2, we will historicize video and underscore that consumer analog camcorders were still prohibitively expensive for most in 1991, when Holliday recorded Rodney King’s beating. The power to produce the contextualizing ontology of that video was controlled by only a handful of corporate television stations and cable conglomerates. Digital-age access to the means of production and distribution has been profoundly democratized. And as we’ll revisit at the end of this chapter in our discussion of a public sphere, the current potential for our individual media acts to impact mainstream media narratives, policy debates and legislation, and broader cultural conversations is unprecedented. Notions of what a documentary should look and sound like, the sorts of issues it should address, and who can call themselves a “maker” are in a present state of flux that you can actively participate in shaping. We can also each acknowledge and never take for granted our privilege and responsibility as media producers—using whatever technologies are at our disposal to offer our own claims to reality.

Objectivity?

The notion of objectivity long associated with documentary media is a myth. Contrary to Bazin’s assertions, the camera is not an apparatus operating independently from human intervention. The choice of what to frame always means turning one’s back on something else, and the syntax of editing and sound design profoundly shape the meaning of a shot. The documentaries we often see on television—news magazine programs, nature documentaries, or historical biographies—are often termed expository documentaries (to be explored further in Chapter 2) as they are guided by a disembodied voice-of-God narrator providing exposition and supplemented with images or interview sound bites subordinate to this narration. The function of such documentaries can usually be described as informational, with rarely any further challenge, call to action, or methods of engagement suggested as the end credits roll. Most often, viewers come away with no sense of the identity of the filmmakers behind the camera or the politics governing the documentary’s creation.

Such an approach is similar to the methodology long used to write “official” accounts of history. If you think back to a history textbook from high school or even college, chances are you were supplied with a chronological order of events, neatly relating to one another through causality (A led to B and because of that C). The writing was likely a series of declarative statements, with few questions posed, and certainly never a use of the first person—the historian’s own identity obscured behind a proper, academic “voice.” There is much that is attractive about such approaches to documentary and history. For the viewer or reader, details and events seem clear, linear, straightforward, and factual. And yet a false logic can occur: the absence of any contradiction and the invisibility of the writer or maker often lead us to confer unquestioned objectivity, truth, and facticity to the account.

In 1991, an experimental video by Japanese American filmmaker Rea Tajiri achieved the rare feat of making three distinct groups—historians, documentary practitioners, and media scholars—all come together in shared fascination of her documentary video History and Memory (1991). The video explores the rarely addressed history of internment camps on America’s west coast during World War II, where over 100,000 Japanese Americans, stripped of property, possessions, and civil liberties, were relocated and incarcerated for the duration of the war.

The U.S. government’s War Relocation Authority filmed documentary images of internment, creating newsreel films aimed at legitimizing and downplaying internment in popular consciousness. These works of propaganda, along with a series of photos by Dorothea Lange and a handful of Hollywood fiction films, have, for all intents and purposes, come to constitute the “reality” of Japanese American internment in American popular memory.

Scholar Marita Sturken warns, “The camera image produces memories, yet in offering itself as a material fragment of the past it can also produce a kind of forgetting. As such camera images can be seen as ‘screen memories’” (1). Sturken’s recruitment of screen memory references a psychoanalytic concept coined by Sigmund Freud to describe substitute memories one might construct in order to mask traumatic memories. Extending the mechanism of screen memory to media’s role in constructing popular memory in our contemporary screen culture provides compelling and disturbing double meaning to the word screen. We risk the “official” War Relocation Authority propaganda films, or Hollywood films depicting World War II and offering false closure as the end credits roll, becoming our nation’s “screen memories” of internment—remembered as a necessary wartime evil, smoothed over by a ceremonial apology in 1988 and then relegated to the history books.

In Tajiri’s case, this hole in popular memory was accompanied by a hole in her own private memory. She tells us in voice-over:

I began searching for a history—my own history. Because I had known all along that the stories I’d heard were not true and that parts had been left out. I remember having this feeling as I was growing up that I was haunted by something, that I was living within a family full of ghosts. There was this place that they knew about. I had never been there, yet I had a memory for it. I could remember a time of great sadness before I was born. We had been moved; uprooted. We had lived with a lot of pain. I had no idea where these memories came from, yet I knew the place.

How does a documentary maker represent a historical event still largely outside popular memory, or a family history comprised of fragmented stories told in snatches by various relatives, for which there are, for the most part, no documen...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Reimagining Documentary
• 2 A Brief History of Documentary: Movements and Modes
• 3 Content, Rhetoric, Structure
• 4 Style: Audiovisualizing the Documentary
• 5 Documentary Ethics: Focusing Your Professional Gaze
• 6 Capturing Reality: Production Strategies
• 7 Shaping Reality: The Postproduction Process
• 8 From Media to Movement: Distribution, Outreach, and Engagement
• Appendices
• Index