Preamble
This collection of essays is the first major study to explore the intersection between cognitive theory and documentary film studies. As such, it offers a vital interpretation not only of how we perceive reality through documentary, but also of how we perceive it because of documentary. Western audiences live in a mass-mediated culture that filters reality through the prism of factual media; hence, their emotional and cognitive comprehension of the world is, to a significant extent, informed and consolidated by documentary film. The essays in this volume seek to illuminate the production, exhibition and reception of documentaries, exploring intratextuality (in which filmmakers employ narrative and aesthetic strategies to achieve particular audience responses and effects) and extratextuality (whereby filmmaking practices and sociocultural traditions negotiate the indexical link between representations and their real-life counterparts). The interplay between these levels means that documentaries have a greater potential than fiction films to impact our attitudes towards and interaction with the world, helping construct our social, cultural and individual identities. This collection aims to demonstrate that cognitive theory represents an invaluable tool for film scholars and practitioners, allowing them to comprehend the range of documentary’s implications within a wider context than that of just filmmaking or film scholarship.
Although these essays are not concerned with the definition or historicity of the concepts (or disciplines) of “cognitive theory” and “documentary” (arguably, this could turn into a philosophical minefield, providing little insight into documentary spectatorship), it may be helpful to offer a brief explanation of the rationale behind the choice of title, particularly as it highlights the contributions’ common denominators and provides a loose demarcation for the collection as a whole. Cognitive theory encompasses a variety of theoretical strands that span several disciplines, including film studies, neuroscience and social psychology. Broadly speaking, there have been three historical waves of cognitive (fiction) film analysis.1 The first regarded film as a text to be deciphered using predominantly neoformalist and constructivist methods (e.g. Bordwell 1985; Branigan 1992). The second shifted the focus from film-as-text to film-as-reception, initially building on linguistic and computational models of cognition (e.g. Anderson 1998; Buckland 2000) but eventually moving towards multimodal approaches that transcend Cartesian mind–body dualism to consider embodied responses in addition to cognitive processes (e.g. Smith 1995; Tan 1996; Plantinga 2009a; Grodal 2009). The third and latest wave has theoretically and empirically explored cognition as grounded in the human body and its interaction with the environment (e.g. Hasson et al. 2008; Gallese and Guerra 2012; Smith 2013; Coëgnarts and Kravanja 2015a), and has tentatively begun to use contextual paradigms, such as spectators’ individual differences and sociocultural settings (e.g. Barratt 2014; Tan and Bálint 2017; Bondebjerg 2017). This wide-reaching cumulative trajectory has solidified cognitivism into what Gregory Currie (2004, p. 106) calls a “programme” rather than a specific theory, encouraging the interdisciplinary deployment of various theories, adapted to the case study at hand. When applied to documentary, this paradigm enables the analysis of a multitude of spectatorship dimensions, such as sensory perception, narrative comprehension, character empathy and the evaluation of realism, as well as the examination of various dimensions of authorship, including creativity, ethics, reflexivity and activism.
Documentary is an equally multilayered term that has also undergone several modifications since its inception. These can be traced in a historical arc that reaches from John Grierson’s (1966, pp. 147–148) early definition of documentary as the “creative treatment of actuality” to John Corner’s (2000, p. 688) coinage of the term “post-documentary,” which he describes as the “result of the widespread dispersal (and, in part, perhaps dissipation) of documentarist energies and appeals across a much larger area of audio-visual culture.” Corner, however, is prudent to mention that the prefix “post” does not suggest the collapse of the concept of documentary into postmodern doubt; rather, the term refers to the fact that the concept has shifted from a rhetorical and didactic concern with generic requirements to a recognition of documentary’s cultural and commercial popularity as mediated through a greatly expanded range of formats and new modes of realist-factual entertainment. Corner alludes to the heterogeneous array of popular and democratic audiovisual nonfiction genres consumed (but also to a large degree produced) by a mass society. This is the umbrella under which the documentary dimension of this book operates.
The collection, however, is not intended as a parochial counterpoint to the plethora of cognitive studies of fiction film; on the contrary, it aims to expand the very notion of film and highlight the permeable boundary between fiction and documentary. Indeed, the long-established divide between documentary and fiction is counterproductive when studying particular documentary forms. Nevertheless, on a methodological level, the book’s focus on documentary (in its widest possible sense) and its exclusion of traditional fiction forms (which have been extensively covered elsewhere) is designed to expand scholarly research into uncharted territories. It addresses, on the one hand, the lacuna in cognitive film studies in relation to documentary analysis, and on the other, the omission of cognitive models in documentary studies. In terms of cognitive scholarship, our hope as editors of this volume is that the study of nonfiction film gains a momentum that propels it to the status that fiction film enjoys as an area of academic interest.
This focus on documentary is also intended to challenge archaic notions of the genre and encourage the reconfiguration and expansion of research frameworks to encompass a wide spectrum of nonfiction audiovisual media, including classical as well as contemporary documentary forms that deviate from the doctrine of factuality. In terms of its form and conception, documentary is far more prone than fiction to a bricolage approach, constantly intermixing different aesthetics, authorial interventions and modes of spectatorial address. Furthermore, the disciplinary or institutional contexts and extratextual functions that surround documentary production and reception often overlap, blurring the boundaries between, for example, reportage, ethnographic film, drama, educational film, promotional video and avant-garde film. Hence, documentary, as a malleable and rather elusive concept, provides the scholar with a flexibility that eschews the determinism and constraints found in other audiovisual genres. Essentially, our aim is to demonstrate that the synergy between cognitive and documentary studies yields rigorous yet pragmatic methodologies for mapping Corner’s “post-documentaries,” including such diverse formats as web videos, reality TV, essay films, performative documentaries, docudramas and animated documentaries.
The Intersection of Cognitive Theory and Documentary Studies
Far from wishing to categorize scholars as belonging to strictly demarcated disciplines or fields of inquiry, this collection in fact aims to bypass such perceived disciplinary boundaries. Yet, it may be helpful here to briefly map the possible reasons for the relatively ossified divisions that have historically inhibited a substantially evolving convergence between documentary and cognitive film studies, and to highlight the few scholarly works that have transcended these divisions.
Documentary scholars, on the one hand, generally deem cognitive models too limited: they lament these models’ reliance on normative scientific paradigms that, firstly, only account for a universalized audience reception, neglecting sociocultural and historical framings (e.g. Smaill 2010, p. 8), and secondly, limit the scope of spectatorship to knowledge acquisition through rationalist inquiry (e.g. Renov 2004, p. 149). A glance at the existing body of work that uses cognitive models for film analysis appears to justify the first argument as, despite occasional theoretical acknowledgments of social, cultural, political and historical contexts (e.g. Peterson 1996; Plantinga 2009b; Bondebjerg 2017), applied studies have been scarce at best.2 This is one of the gaps this collection attempts to address. In terms of the second assertion, cognitive film theory’s evolution towards embracing non-rationalist approaches that account for affective and subjective viewer experience has had little exposure or acknowledgement outside the discipline itself. As a consequence, fossilized views about the stagnant nature of (classical) cognitive theory are still pervasive among non-cognitive film scholars.
On the other hand, cognitive film scholars have largely favored the analysis of fiction film over documentary—and nonfiction in general. This can be attributed to four factors. Firstly, cognitive film theory was established in the 1990s, arguably as an antithesis to the poststructuralist, Marxist, psychoanalytic and semiotic Screen tradition (Bordwell and Carroll 1996; Tan 1996; Plantinga and Smith 1999). Since the Screen scholars focused mainly on fiction, it was logical that the cognitivists would offer their alternative theories in the same territory. Secondly, the public popularity of mainstream fiction is believed to overshadow that of documentary, despite Corner’s observation that documentary has increasingly moved towards the mainstream. As one of the cognitivists’ declared aims is to understand our most common ...