HOW CAN WE DEFINE DOCUMENTARY FILM?
From Bill Nichols' Introduction to Documentary, 2nd edition (pgs 1 - 41). Please purchase this textbook as soon as possible. John Grierson, a Britsh documentary filmmaker from the 1930s defined documentary as "the creative treatment of actuality."
A documentary is neither a fictional invention nor a factual reproduction - a documentary lies somewhere in the middle. It draws on and refers to historical reality while representing it from a distinct perspective
A documentary is a representation of the historical world. In general, documentaries seek to make a rhetorical argument. They are constructed to convince, persuade, or predispose the spectator to a particular view of the historical world.
Three Divisions of Rhetoric
1. Source arguments - Some of the film's arguments will rely on what are taken to be reliable sources of information. The film may present firsthand accounts of experts, or people assumed to be knowledgeable on the subject.
2. Subject-centered arguments - Sometimes the film appeals to common beliefs about their subject. The filmmaker will use examples to support its point, and will back up its arguments by exploiting familiar, easily accepted, argumentative patterns.
3. Viewer-centered arguments - The film may make an argument that appeals to the emotions of the viewer. Three Commonsense Assumptions about Documentary:
1) Documentaries are about reality; they're about something that actually happened Many fiction films also attempt to address something that actually happened. Instead, Nichols suggests, "Documentary films speak about actual situations or events and honor known facts; they do not introduce new, unverifiable ones. They speak directly about the historical world rather than allegorically" (7) Documentaries refer to the historical world. What does this mean? Images, sounds, etc stem from the historical world. Feature people from the historical world as well.
2) Documentaries are about real people "Documentaries are about real people who do not play or perform roles (8). Is anything in front of a camera a performance? People modify their behavior as the situation evolves
3) Documentaries tell stories about what happens in the real world Whose story is it? "Based on a true story" is often associated with fiction films too.
Documentary is not a reproduction of reality, it is a representation of the world we already occupy (Nichols 13).
Documentary film speaks about situations and events involving real people (social actors) who present themselves to us as themselves in stories that convey a plausible proposal about, or perspective on, the lives, situations, and events portrayed. The distinct point of view of the filmmaker shapes this story into a way of seeing the historical world directly rather than into a fictional allegory (Nichols 14).
Bill Nichols identifies six different modes of documentary representation.
1. Poetic
2. Expository
3. Observational
4. Participatory
5. Reflexive
6. Performative
NOTE: These six documentary modes are not mutually exclusive and there is often significant overlapping between modalities within individual documentary features. It is inaccurate to think of modes as historical punctuation marks in an evolution towards an ultimate accepted documentary style.
Documentary definitions and practices are not fixed and are constantly changing and evolving based on the following four arenas:
1) Institutions that support documentary production and reception
2) The creative efforts of filmmakers
3) The lasting influence of specific films
4) The expectations of audiences
"Documentaries are what the organizations and institutions that produce them make" (16) Documentary has never been only one thing and we must constantly adapt, challenge and modify conventions associated with documentary. We must also think critically about powerful assumptions and constructs such as "truth" and "reality."
Memory
Films often become a source of "popular memory," giving us a vivid sense of how something happened in a particular time and space (91).
3 important ways in which the term realism applies to documentary film:
1) Physical or empirical realism. Photographic realism - the way the world appears to the eye
2) Psychological Realism - inner states that cannot necessarily be represented through photographic realism
3) Emotional Realism - expressive, narrative techniques Documentary relies heavily on an "empirical realism." Remember, this is NOT Reality, but a representation of reality.
Documentary Quotes
All great fiction films tend towards documentary, just as all great documentaries tend toward fiction.
--Jean-Luc Godard
Every cut is a lie. It's never that way. Those two shots were never next to each other in time that way. But you're telling a lie in order to tell the truth.
--Wolf Koenig
But I'll make every effort to tell the truth...but what I tell will be the truth as best as I know. What is documentary but one divine accident after another? I mean, reality is a force outside of ourselves that we play just a small part of.
-- Albert Maysles
Reality changes; in order to represent it, modes of representation must change.
--Bertolt Brecht
We realized that the important thing was not the film itself but that which the film provoked.
--Fernando Solanas ("Cinema as Gun")
Above all, documentary must reflect the problems and realities of the present. It cannot regret the past; it is dangerous to prophesy the future. It can, and does, draw on the past in its use of existing heritages but it only does so to give point to a modern argument. In no sense is documentary a historical reconstruction and attempts to make it so are destined to failure. Rather it is contemporary fact and event expressed in relation to human associations.
--Paul Rotha (1935)
We believe that the cinema's capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself can be exploited in a new and vital art form"
--John Grierson, First Principles of Documentary
We believe that the materials and the stories taken from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article.
--John Grierson
In documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the interpretation which is profound
--John Grierson
I am eye. I am a mechanical eye. I, a machine, am showing you a world, the likes of which only I can see.
--Dziga Vertov, Kinoglas
My road is towards the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you.
--Dziga Vertov, Kinoks-Revolution
I don't know what truth is. Truth is something unattainable. We can't think we're creating truth with a camera. But what we can do, is reveal something to viewers that allows them to discover their own truth.
--Michel Brault
Every cut is a lie. It's never that way. Those two shots were never next to each other in time that way. But you're telling a lie in order to tell the truth.
--Wolf Koenig
My obsession has been - and is still - the feeling of being there. Not of finding out this and analyzing this or performing some virtuous social act or something. Just what's it like to be there"
--Richard Leacock
We are really only successful in finding out anything when we are filming somebody who is more concerned with what he is doing that with the fact that we care filming him.
--Richard Leacock
Of course there's conscious manipulation! Everything about a movie is manipulation ... If you like it, it's an interpretation. If you don't like it, it's a lie - but everything about these movies is a distortion."
--Frederick Wiseman
I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagandist.
--John Grierson
If you want to tell the untold stories, if you want to give voice to the voiceless, you've got to find a language. Which goes for film as well as prose, for documentary as well as autobiography. Use the wrong language, and you're dumb and blind.
-- Salman Rushdie
The word documentary is problematic for me. Everybody thinks they know what they mean by it but I don't. It's a term that masks or clouds the realities of film experience, seeming to deny that fiction can tell useful sober truths and affirming that documentary can do nothing but. When I teach documentary, I use a substitute term, "films of edification," because I think the best way to describe this group of films is by their stance. All non-fiction films claim to edify. (Whether they do or not is another matter.)
--Jill Godmilow
All art is a kind of exploring ...To discover and reveal is the way every artist sets about his business.
--Robert Flaherty
Sometimes you have to lie to tell the truth.
--Robert Flaherty
To the documentary director the appearance of things and people is only superficial. It is the meaning behind the thing and the significance underlying the person that occupy his attention...
Documentary approach to cinema differs from that of story-film not in its disregard for craftsman-ship, but in the purpose to which that craftsmanship is put. Documentary is a trade just as carpentry or pot-making. The pot-maker makes pots, and the documentarian
documentaries.
--Paul Rotha
Give us adequate images. We lack adequate images. Our civilization does not have adequate images. And I think a civilization is doomed or is going to die out like dinosaurs if it doesn't develop an adequate language for adequate images.