What Is Non-fiction Cinema?

Trevor Ponech

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000010060
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

Trevor Ponech has written a serious and pathbreaking study of how to define non-fiction cinema. Working from the position that no cinematic representation is wholly factual, Ponech argues that what determines whether a film is fiction or non-fiction is the filmmakers intention. Persuasively defending this unique position, the author provides a philosophically rigorous analysis of the communicative practices of filmmakers. In What Is Non-Fiction Cinema? Trevor Ponech has written a serious and pathbreaking study of how to define non-fiction cinema. Working from the position that no cinematic representation is wholly factual, Ponech argues that what determines whether a film is fiction or non-fiction is the filmmakers intention. Persuasively defending this unique position, the author provides a philosophically rigorous analysis of the communicative practices of filmmakers. In making his case, Ponech cogently presents the other major theoretical positions regarding documentary cinema and shows why each is incomplete. The result is a cutting-edge philosophical inquiry into purposiveness in film.

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What Is Non-Fiction Cinema?

DOI: 10.4324/9780429267499-2

Some of the most cognitively and practically important questions we can ask of a motion picture concern whether it is a work of fiction or non-fiction, and why it is one rather than the other. These questions pertain to the kinds of effects that filmmakers seek to have on us, and to the sorts of assumptions they wish us to make about the relation between their movies and parts of extra-cinematic reality, including their own states of mind. Yet in place of cogent insights into the documentary’s difference, scholarship for the most part has sown conceptual confusion. Although it could never banish all ambiguity and error from our thinking about this topic, a pragmatic account of what it is that causes a movie to be non-fiction is the best available theoretical option for anyone committed to reducing the confusion.

A wholly non-fictional motion picture need not be wholly factual. It need not contain a single, purely objective, unmanipulated representation or statement. It need not be on any particular kind of subject matter; nor need that which it depicts really exist, more or less as depicted, “out there” in off-screen reality. Nor is documentary, in my account, defined by the particular conventions or norms—pertaining to form, style, content, truth, or objectivity—according to which it is produced, classified, and/or interpreted. All of these paths to understanding the nature of non-fiction film, crisscrossing their way through the literature, lead to dead ends. A cinematic work is non-fiction if and only if its maker so makes it. A documentary motion picture, then, is simply one that results from the filmmaker having been directly guided by a particular purpose, namely, an intention to produce non-fiction.

The Meaning of Non-Fiction

I begin by lifting what I take to be one of the biggest barriers to a sensible, sound definition of the standard work of non-fiction cinema. This obstacle is the aboutness condition, be it an implicit or explicit component of one’s understanding of the nature of this cinematic mega-genre.

The specificity of cinematic non-fiction is often sought at least partly in terms of its being, or trying to be, about actual or factual objects in extra-cinematic reality. John Grierson, a founder and proponent of the documentary film movement, characterized non-fiction movies in general as “plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural material” and the sub-genre of documentary as “creative shapings” of subjects drawn from life.¹ A standard film studies textbook definition maintains that “unlike most fiction films, documentaries deal with facts—real people, places, and events rather than invented ones.”² Richard Meran Barsam defines non-fiction film as “the art of re-presentation, the act of presenting actual physical reality in a form that strives creatively to record and interpret the world and be faithful to actuality.”³ Even those who dismiss the very idea of a resolutely non-fictional motion picture do so with the ontological criterion in mind. Jean-Louis Comolli holds that as an “automatic consequence of all the manipulations which would mould the film-document” a sort of “fictional aura attaches itself to the filmed events and facts,” thereby adding to or subtracting from their “initial reality.”⁴ One could also refer to Bill Nichols’s influential work on non-fiction, which is predicated on the thesis that such representations “aim at” actual historical realities irreducible to discursive constructs, although they nonetheless bear the stamp of fiction. Rather than portraying the world as it truly is, they only present “a view of the world,” the content of which is not a felicitous copy of reality but, to a significant degree, the reflection of the ideological imperatives and gender- (or race-, or class-) specific desires animating the filmmaker.⁵

Although it seems safe to say that cinematic non-fictions must be about something, and that they are either more or less true when understood to be about a given referent, reference to reality is the wrong filter on admissibility to this genre. In fact, it is no filter at all, unless one is willing to countenance confused, impoverished, or unrepresentative samples of truly non-fictional works. No doubt, documentarians typically attempt to record situations and events within actual historical reality. Yet while filming Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993), everything that Spielberg and his colleagues deliberately aimed their recording devices at—latex dinosaurs, sets, scenery, excessively paid actors uttering bad dialogue while pretending to be chased by T-Rex—belonged within the actual historical world, too. If one supposes (correctly, I reckon) that Roger Patterson’s 16-millimetre footage of Bigfoot is a hoax, then this film would fall well short of the standard, despite its maker’s fervent desire that it not be regarded as fiction. George Holliday’s famous video-tape of the Rodney King incident might also be filtered out, since it is not immediately obvious from the video itself what reality it shows—savage mob aggression or police officers lawfully subduing a threatening suspect? And insofar as a movie can be erroneous or only partially accurate, misleading or downright deceptive, making non-fictional status contingent on a positive epistemic relation between the image and the actual world merely facilitates the skeptic’s hasty rejection of the possibility of an unequivocal, distinctly non-fictional class of movies.

In rejecting the aboutness condition, and the epistemic constraints often allied with it, I also want to make a dear distinction between non-fictional communication and the phenomenon of natural meaning. The thermometer’s mercury level means that it is −21°C. That man’s rolling gait means that he is a sailor.⁶ These photos mean that there are glaciers in Antarctica. In each case, one object or situation is factually indicative of the condition of some other part of reality by virtue of how it is objectively related to that other state of affairs, due to the nomic and necessary constraints on their relationship.⁷ If the man’s rolling gait naturally indicates that he is a seaman, his gait depends on his being a seaman, but not on his or anyone else’s belief that he is a sailor or on an intention to show that he has this occupation. Moreover, a natural sign’s meaning or, if you prefer, the natural meaning of an item or state of affairs, is purely factual. For X to be a natural sign of Y, Y must really be the case. The mercury does not mean that it is −21°C if a demon makes the thermometer read ten degrees colder than the actual ambient temperature. And the photographs do not naturally mean that antarctic glaciers look just so if, lacking snapshots, I show you ones of Swiss glaciers instead, expecting you to be oblivious to the difference.

Natural meaning, being objective and informational, is untrammeled by intention, imagination, make-believe, connotation, fantasy, subjectivity, expressivity, figuration, infelicity, insincerity, and all that might lead to or converge with fiction. Since movies, unlike drawings or paintings, have this property, why not make it the grounds for identifying non-fiction cinema? We could, for instance, say that a documentary is any unit of photographically produced movie imagery having only or preponderantly natural meaning, leaving it to documentarians and theorists to devise norms of proportionality. We might even want to claim that every movie is, under one description, literally not fictional, insofar as its pictures are naturally meaningful with respect to how things stand in extra-cinematic reality.

To be sure, there is no trace of fiction in natural meaning. But defining cinematic non-fiction or stipulating its prototype on the basis of a-rational, mind-independent indicator relations does not really capture the actual conditions under which even surveillance camera footage becomes a work of non-fiction, versus a natural sign the function of which is more like a thermometer than a documentary. Nor does it explain why there is a description under which Jurassic Park is not a documentary. By the same token, it would exclude legions from the realm of genuine non-fiction, due to interpretive, rhetorical, figurative, and sometimes misrepresentative properties that result from their having been molded by an organizing consciousness. If film theory has taught us one lesson, it is that documentary is no more mind-independent a mode of representation than linguistic discourse.

I argue that the core of non-fiction consists not of an objective indicator relation, but of an action of indication, that is, somebody deliberately and openly indicating something to somebody else. Here the definition of non-fiction makes decisive reference to the nature of filmmakers’ intentions. Documentaries acquire their status as such because they are conceived, created, shown, and used with certain definitive communicative purposes in mind. They are cinematic assertions; and naturally meaningful images are among the elements frequently employed by the communicator toward assertive ends.

From now on, I will say that in producing non-fiction, a communicator uses some unit of motion picture footage in an effort to assert that something is (or was, or will be, or could be) the case. Hence:

To perform a cinematic assertion is to employ a motion picture medium, typically consisting of both visual and audio tracks, with the expressed intention that the viewer form or continue to hold the attitude of belief toward certain states of affairs, objects, situations, events, propositions, and so forth, where the relevant states of affairs and so on need not actually exist.

This definition fits a large number of ordinary non-fictions. However, I do not think that it covers every possible instance of the genre.

Let’s look at Trance and Dance in Bali (1952), produced as part of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead’s classic anthropological study of character formation in Balinese culture.⁸ This short film, silent except for a non-synchronous music track, depicts the Tjalonarang (witch) play and consists of footage shot between 1936 and 1939 at numerous village dance club performances. The movie begins with a series of titles noting the time and place of the recordings, identifying the makers and their scholarly affiliations, and giving a synopsis of the theatrical’s action. As the depiction unfolds, we observe a masked witch ward off the attacks of the dragon’s followers, each armed with a long, sinuous dagger or kris. Sent into a trance by the witch, the attackers’ ballet maneuvers give way to violent posturing: Bending backward, throwing their hips forward, and holding their arms straight out and above their chests, the dancers repeatedly mimic the action of thrusting their krisses into their own chests.

In offering these images, it seems appropriate to say that the authors’ objective is to assert that this ritual performance has the aforementioned features. In other words, they would have us recognize their intention that we adopt certain beliefs concerning the Tjalonarang and how it is enacted. This attribution of assertive intent makes sense, insofar as it is consistent with what we know about their anthropological interests in culture, the circumstances under which the film was made, and their efforts to make it available as an empirical research tool. The attribution of assertive intent coheres better with what we know than, say, the assumption that the authors wish us to imagine that the movie depicts a ritual, or to make-believe that a given ritual occurred as portrayed. And it makes more sense to attribute to the authors an assertive intent than to assume their goal was to retell the Tjalonarang fiction primarily for the sake of encouraging their viewers to enjoy imagining the events of that narrative.

Many considerations have no direct, proximal bearing on whether or not Trance and Dance in Bali is non-fiction. Two among these are its accuracy and its objectivity. Seized by the imp of the perverse, Bateson and Mead could have somehow indicated that the Tjalonarang commemorates the arrival of extra-terrestrial astronauts—a ludicrous falsehood, but not the kind of thing that could cause the film to be fictional. It just so happens that the ethnographers, lacking a record of women dancing with krisses, once asked a troupe to break with their customary performance of this play by including female kris dancers, an innovation that became the norm by 1939!⁹ Having altered their subject matter, their work’s objectivity is likely to be questioned; maybe its content has more to do with the filmmakers’ ethically questionable, lifeworld-distorting desires than with the facts about Balinese culture. But from the perspective of communicative pragmatics, the act of cinematic assertion need not by definition be innocent of either bias or hegemony.

My general point is that the yoking of non-fiction status to idealized standards of objectivity and accuracy should be avoided. The sorts of agents who we can expect to find behind the camera have but limited rationality, their capacities for veridical beliefs and effective communication being facilitated as well as restricted by their finite cognitive abilities, powerful non-epistemic motivations, and the structures of the physical and social environments in which they are located. Theorists who demand that genuine non-fictions exhibit total accuracy of representation, or absence of mediation, manipulation, and artifice, are understanding the documentary in such a way that none could possibly exist. In virtue of being a highly selective perspective on some segment of physical space, and a two-dimensional rendering of three-dimensional objects, the normal photographic movie cannot aspire to being a literal re-presentation of the world. Why demand the impossible of non-fictions when their difference from fiction need only require they serve entirely feasible assertive ends?

We could note that Trance and Dance in Bali seems to have been made according to a crusty old ethnographic norm against self-referential depictions of the depictors. Perhaps a work’s embodiment of, or classification by, some representational convention is one, if not the only, determinant of its non-fictional status. It’s important to bear in mind that a convention is not an autonomous, self-generating property or regularity immanent to the work itself. Rather, it contributes to the effective realization of a goal, such as making a movie, only insofar as it coheres with the reasons guiding some person’s relevant actions. A convention plays a mediating role: The agent adapts her work to a convention when she expects that doing so will help to bring about her aesthetic, professional, or communicative ends, like guiding her audience toward a certain conclusion. An author’s selective adherence to the standards, rules, or “codes” associated with this or that variety of documentary—black-and-white photography, jerky...