crafting

truth
 crafting
truth
Documentary Form and Meaning

louise spence
and vinicius navarro

rutgers university press

new brunswick, new jersey, and london
 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Spence, Louise.
Crafting truth : documentary form and meaning / Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–0–8135–4902–6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978–0–8135–4903–3 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Documentary films—History and criticism. 2. Documentary films—Production and direction.
I. Navarro, Vinicius, 1967–II. Title.
PN1995.9.D6S5955 2010
070.1’8—dc22
2010008406

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2011 by Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro

Chapter 10 Copyright © 2011 by Louise Spence, Vinicius Navarro, and Carl Lewis

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechani-
cal, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher.
Please contact Rutgers University Press, 100 Joyce Kilmer Avenue, Piscataway, NJ 08854–8099. The
only exception to this prohibition is “fair use” as defined by U.S. copyright law.
Visit our Web site: http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Manufactured in the United States of America
 Para Afonso e Lourdes,
and for Regina and Milton,
our first teachers
 Contents

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction 1

Part One. General Concepts

1. Authenticity 11
2. Evidence 36
3. Authority 59
4. Responsibility 83

Part Two. Structural Organization

5. Argument 113
6. Dramatic Stories, Poetic and Essay Documentaries 135

Part Three. Formal Techniques

7. Editing 161
8. Camerawork 187
9. The Profilmic 213
10. Sounds (Coauthored with Carl Lewis) 239

Index 265
 Acknowledgments

Writing acknowledgements is a most pleasurable, yet difficult, task. The thanks

we owe to the people who assisted, encouraged, and endured us during the five
years we were working on this project are enormous. It is clear that this book was
built on the wisdom and generosity of many people, especially Karen Backstein,
Lemi Baruh, Melis Behlil, Julie Par Cadenhead, Dino Capone, Yunsun Chae, Mi-
chael Chanan, Elizabeth Corbett, Alfredo Dias D’Almeida, Martin Duncan, Jayne
Fargnoli, Joseph Goldberg, Frances Grodzinsky, Ahmet Gürata, Roger Hallas,
Roald Hoffmann, Jeffrey Howlett, John L. Jackson Jr., Lynne Jackson, Aslı Kota-
man, Alisa Lebow, Michael Nitsche, Augusta Palmer, Robert Sklar, Qi Wang, and
Mark Wyers.
We are especially grateful to Hardy Griffin, whose keen interest in our project
and insightful reading of the manuscript are unsurpassed, Doğa Aytuna (Mac ex-
pert extraordinaire), who facilitated the photos, and Carl Lewis, who came to our
rescue with his attentive ear for music.
And we must also thank a slew of film and video makers who loaned us works
and answered questions, among them Kamal Aljafari, Magnus Bärtås, Alan Ber-
liner, Jean Carlomusto, Kavery Dutta, Connie Field, Richard Fung, Louis Massiah,
Abraham Ravett, Larissa Sansour, and Jalal Toufic, and a whole mess of librar-
ians who helped us to find material we were looking for, especially Didem Önal
and Sachi Spohn. Thanks as well to Videofilmes, Zeitgeist Films, Documentary
x acknowledgments

Educational Resources, and Magnolia Pictures for granting us access to some of

their titles.
At Rutgers University Press, we are obliged to Leslie Mitchner and her staff for
a sensitive handling of both our proposal and our manuscript.
A warm thanks to those who have gone before us, who have taught us, and
who have inspired our interest in documentary, especially Bill Nichols, Michael
Renov, Brian Winston, Paul Arthur, and Erik Barnouw. We are also grateful for
funding support from Kadir Has University. And we thank the Journal of Popu-
lar Culture for permission to reprint sections of “Working Class Hero: Michael
Moore’s Authorial Voice and Persona” (43.2, Spring 2010).
As always, Louise Spence must thank David Curtis for years of moral support
and for helping her find her way as a writer. Vinicius Navarro would like to thank
La Frances Hui for her patience and support at various stages of this project.
And most of all, we are indebted to our students. Their enthusiasms and resis-
tances have forced us to shape and reshape many of our theories and much of our
language. Without them, these words would never have been written.
crafting
truth
 Introduction

O n the fifteenth of November, 1897, at the opening of the Empire

Palace Theatre on Dame Street, citizens of Dublin were treated to
a program of films that Alexandre Promio, an itinerant cameraman and promoter
for the Lumière brothers’ Cinématographe, took and developed just days before.
Arriving in Ireland from Liverpool, Promio filmed the Belfast docks, the Belfast
Fire Brigade, Castle Place, and Queen’s Bridge. He traveled to Dublin by train
and filmed various places, ten scenes in all, along the way. Once in Dublin, as was
his habit, he used the device to film ordinary people in the streets, his intended
audience, in the morning, inviting them to come and see themselves on screen
the next day. In Dublin he shot the Carlisle Bridge, Sackville Street, and a dis-
play by the Dublin Fire Brigade in Saint Stephen’s Green with cheering onlookers.
Promio and other Lumière operators demonstrated the triple-purpose apparatus
(capable of filming, developing, and projecting) in more than thirty present-day
countries, taking films of Belfast and Dublin; the new beach in Schwerin, Ger-
many; St. Petersburg and Moscow, including the coronation of Tsar Nikolai II
in May 1896; the waterfalls in Avesta, Sweden; a tennis game on the grass courts
of Saltsjöbaden, the seaside resort near Stockholm; footage taken from a gon-
dola in Venice; views of Berlin, Amsterdam, Warsaw, New York City, Chicago,
Mexico City, Constantinople, Bombay, Sydney, Jerusalem . . . and exhibiting
them throughout the world. By the end of 1897, after two years of promoting the
Cinématographe abroad, the Lumière catalogue had swollen to 750 films, the
1
2 Introduction

great majority of them nonfiction subjects (Leyda 17–23; National Library of Ire-
land; O’Brien 21–24).
This desire to capture lived reality on film has animated the spirit of cinema
since its earliest years. Although the term documentary was not standard back then,
recording actual occurrences was a common practice in the medium’s beginning,
when nonfictional films outnumbered fictional narratives. Nowadays, of course,
we think of documentaries not as simple records of reality but as complex and so-
phisticated pieces, which may inform, provoke, and even entertain the audience.
But how can we characterize a “documentary”? What are its most prominent
features? How does it differ from a fiction film? It has always been easier to recog-
nize a documentary than to define the term. John Grierson, a Scottish filmmaker,
producer, and theorist, famously described documentary as the “creative treat-
ment of actuality.” If we follow his thinking, documentary would be distinguished
from fiction by the requirement that it work with the real—“actuality.” Yet, as Dirk
Eitzen points out, it is not always easy to determine what constitutes “actuality”
(82). “Actuality” is infinite and can never be wholly represented. Any representa-
tion is a selective view of the world. All representations of actuality must choose
which aspects to include and which to leave out. Decisions are made to emphasize
one element and to downplay others, to assert some truths and to ignore others.
First the documentary maker has to determine what actuality is worth explor-
ing. Then there are other questions. Which aspects are considered important and
which are considered unnecessary? Whose viewpoint on that actuality will we be
getting? What means will be used to express that viewpoint? This book will be ar-
guing that because there is no value-neutral treatment of actuality, it is important
for viewers and scholars to analyze how a documentarian, to paraphrase Hayden
White, translates knowing into telling (1).
Therefore, what is at issue is not so much “Is it true or untrue?” but rather “How
is actuality treated in order to sanction the documentary’s claims to be telling the
truth?” And “How does the need to tell an effective story or make an argument
encourage one kind of treatment over another?” Yes, documentaries direct us to
the world. But they are also texts. And as texts, they are constructions—the docu-
mentary maker’s construction of reality. It might be better to think of documen-
taries, as scholar Stella Bruzzi has noted, as a “negotiation between filmmaker and
reality” (186).
This book looks at the means by which those “constructions” take shape, how
documentaries help us make sense of the world. We examine both the overall
structures of the films and their specific visual and aural aspects—what the im-
ages “tell” us, how they are put together, the significance of a particular sound
 Introduction 3

track, and so on. We also discuss some of the common expectations surrounding
nonfiction filmmaking, such as the desire for authentic and ethical representa-
tions, or, from the documentarian’s point of view, the need to speak with author-
ity about the world represented. How do documentaries proclaim themselves
authentic? How can you responsibly represent someone whose culture is far re-
moved from your own? What formal devices help secure the authority and cred-
ibility of nonfiction films?
To deal with the formal aspects of nonfiction filmmaking is, of course, to ad-
dress the issue of documentary aesthetics. Central as it is to nonfiction cinema,
this issue has often proved somewhat elusive, in part because of conventional
assumptions regarding the role of documentary representation. We do not nor-
mally look for artistic virtuosity when we watch a documentary but focus instead
on the subject matter. As John Corner has put it, “An apparent absence of style . . .
constitutes at least part of the conventional grounds of trust and credibility” (96).
This particular view of nonfiction filmmaking can easily obstruct the discussion
of form in documentary, or at least relegate it to a somewhat marginal corner in
nonfiction film scholarship.
Contrary to this argument, this book shows that there is no intrinsic conflict
between aesthetics and nonfictional representation. In fact, what we get to know
about the world is directly connected to the way that world appears on the screen.
The book also proposes that there is no inherent divide between aesthetics and
politics in nonfiction filmmaking. Following Michael Renov, we suggest that at-
tention to “rhetorical device and formal strategy” does not assume “disregard for
historical or ideological determinants” (19). Every time a documentary takes a
stance or puts forward an argument about a particular subject matter, it does so
through the formal procedures available to the filmmaker. Moreover, as we will
have opportunity to show later on, aesthetic innovation in documentary often
serves a clear political purpose as it introduces an unfamiliar or unconventional
way of looking at the world. This overall approach to nonfiction filmmaking in-
spires and underlies each individual chapter in this book, starting with the discus-
sion of how filmmakers strive to secure a sense of authenticity in their films.
The contingency and unreliability of “the real” and the profusion of imagina-
tive works “based on a true story” cause us to be wary of such easy distinctions
as “true” and “untrue.” Still, with some exceptions (The Blair Witch Project, for ex-
ample) and despite the fact that nonfiction comes in many varieties—from video
news releases by commercial businesses, community organizing groups, and non-
governmental organizations, to entertaining feature-length films—we seem to
know when we are watching a nonfiction work. And we bring some expectations
4 Introduction

to that experience. One of those expectations is that it be credible. We want to be-

lieve it accurately reflects the sociohistorical world—even when we know that it
must be contrived. Whether it is the story of a public official’s unfortunate indict-
ment or of wild animals greedy for human prey, a documentary is presumed to be
truthful (Eitzen 88). Our first chapter, “Authenticity,” looks at how and why this
is so. What textual factors kindle the presumption of truth? What social and cul-
tural factors? The chapter introduces many of the themes of the book, such as the
concept of representation, authenticity, and the relationship of the photographic
image to sociohistorical reality. It also introduces some of the basic concepts of
semiotics, the study of signs, as it relates to nonfiction film and video.
We certainly are not arguing that we should believe documentaries, or that they
do tell the truth. Nor are we saying that they lie, or even that questions of percep-
tual or cognitive honesty are essential to our understanding of nonfiction. But it
is important to examine the expectations that we bring to the documentary view-
ing experience. What do we want from and look forward to in a nonfiction work?
What distinguishes the frames of reference that we bring to watching documen-
taries? As viewers, we are affected by documentaries’ claims of truth but seldom
notice it. Many spectators enter the theater with a naïve concept of “truth” and
“reality.” They see documentaries as innocent sources of information. But is truth
or reality readily available, easily acquired, or undisputed? Or do documentaries
construct their own “reality”? We are asking you to think more about how they
urge us to believe these constructions.
When we watch a documentary, we are frequently drawing inferences from
data, observations, or other evidence. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves, “How is
it that we know what we know?” Sometimes a documentary’s evidence seems so
persuasive that we are unaware of the gaps in available information. Other times
we seem to be asked to tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty. Documentaries have
the power to impose a sense of order, purpose, and interconnectedness amidst the
chaos of data, calling some “evidence” and relegating others to oblivion. Chapter 2
examines the notion of evidence and the aural and visual proof that documenta-
ries offer to support their claims of truth.
The third chapter introduces the idea of authority. The notion of authority is
relevant not only because it draws attention to the way documentaries make their
truth claims but also because it ties those claims to a specific point of view. Any-
one who speaks with authority does so from a particular perspective, and it is that
perspective that tends to prevail when the documentary succeeds in convincing
us of the truthfulness of its representations. This chapter maps out the ways docu-
mentaries speak to us, how they exert authority over their audiences, and how, in
 Introduction 5

some cases, the documentary maker’s authority can be decentered. It addresses

questions such as: Where does the authority of a documentary come from? How
does it help shape the world represented on screen? How can authority be shared?
Some of these questions are difficult to pin down, but it is important to consider
them carefully when we think about what documentary film and video makers do
in order to make their “voices” heard.
Chapter 4 elaborates on the responsibilities that documentarians face. Docu-
mentary makers are not mere purveyors of evidence. Evidence only hints at the
story. It doesn’t tell it. It is up to the documentarian to examine the evidence criti-
cally and imaginatively. Since what emerges from this scrutiny can never be the
absolute and total truth, the documentary maker faces many ethical concerns.
Each decision has the possibility to affect the subject of the work, as well as the
spectator. As Jerome Bruner asks, why is it that we consider how stories influence
our lives only when we think we have been given the wrong story (9)? Even when
we get “the right story,” even when the film or video maker’s vision of the truth
coincides with our own, our lives can be influenced. Because making and view-
ing documentaries are social practices, a focus on ethics is a focus on the various
conditions of production, representation, and reception.
These first four chapters constitute the first part of the book. It acquaints the
reader with many of the basic theoretical issues that influence our understanding
of documentary aesthetics.
The second part of the book, chapters 5 and 6, explains how documentaries
build coherence. Documentary makers don’t simply record life as they see it;
they determinedly transform it with the conscious aim of giving it a structure and
often a resonance that it lacks in reality. They take “facts” or available evidence
and weave them into a coherent whole. Whether it is an argument, a dramatic
narrative, or a looser associative form, such as a poetic meditation, that structure
repairs the “directionlessness” (if you will pardon the inelegant term) of the un-
controlled sociohistorical world.
Documentaries repair not only the directionlessness of that world but also
its apparent moral neutrality. Different aspects of the world are magnified or re-
duced, emphasized or diminished, newly examined, and reordered in order to
maximize the effect on viewers. This process takes place primarily through the re-
cording of historical reality and arrangement of the recorded materials. Chapter 5
examines the rhetorical power, logical coherence, and psychological effectiveness
of a documentary’s argument; chapter 6 concentrates on the dramatic and poetic
aspects of a documentary’s construction, as well as on how new digital media can
expand the way we think about the structure of nonfiction works.
6 Introduction

The third part of the book analyzes the micro-construction, exactly how sounds
and images are recorded and put together, the formal design (both aural and
visual) of the documentary. A different camera angle presents a different truth
about the subject matter. How a film or video is edited can determine its pace, and
the sequence in which the shots are arranged guides us in our understanding of
the information. Music is capable of establishing a mood or affective associations.
So, too, with the setting, its lighting, and décor. We could go on. These, and many
others, are all important aspects of the “creative treatment” Grierson was talking
about. In deciding how to depict the referential world, documentary makers have
a wide range of formal choices. The final four chapters of the book look at those
choices and how they affect the viewing experience.
We begin with the most cinematic: editing and camerawork. Chapter 7 ex-
plores editing. In early nonfiction films, each shot was a scene unto itself. But
soon shots were combined. The way that one shot is joined to the next and the
rhythm and order in which we experience them have significant impact on the
way a spectator will understand the subject matter. Chapter 8 discusses the role of
the camerawork in a documentary’s assessment of the historical world. The cam-
era does not simply record what passes before its lens. It helps give shape to that
reality. A static shot, for instance, may enhance the formality or seriousness of the
event recorded, while a fast moving camera can suggest a strong sense of imme-
diacy. Because we see only what the camera sees, the camera forges a relationship
between the spectator and that which is on the screen.
Chapter 9, “The Profilmic,” turns in a more sustained manner to how perfor-
mance and setting contribute to the production of meaning. When considering
the grammar of representation and its significance, we often overlook the most
obvious, that which we see so often in the social world. But that part of the refer-
ential world that is in front of the camera, whether posed as exposition or obser-
vation, is a vital component in the creative process.
Chapter 10 considers the many sounds that documentaries use. Images in
themselves seldom have much explanatory power. Frequently sound, especially
speech, but also music and noise, can help to tie down the meaning of those im-
ages. This concluding chapter of the book argues that sound, although not always
as literal as the screen image, is an important part of a documentary’s meaning-
making system.
Many of the means that documentaries use to tell their stories and make their
arguments will be familiar to contemporary audiences. Much of what now counts
as nonfictional representation includes some form of stylization and artifice,
as is the case, for instance, with reality television shows, where individual and
 Introduction 7

collective experiences overlap with the theatricalization of ordinary life. Similarly,

some forms of autobiographical discourse that circulate on the Internet make use
of the observational fixed-frame long take and involve a high degree of often self-
conscious performance. Other expository forms share stylistic features with, for
example, television documentaries. All this suggests an interesting dialogue be-
tween documentary and other types of nonfiction, although sustained analysis of
this dialogue exceeds the scope and contours of this book.
Throughout the book we will also be referring to exchanges between docu-
mentaries and fictional works. The boundaries between fact and fiction are of-
ten unraveled by the means a film or video employs. Filmmakers sometimes use
nonfiction conventions in fiction films. The “News on the March” sequence in
Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane (1941), for example, appears indistinguishable from
legitimate newsreel footage, except that Charles Foster Kane, the subject featured
in the report, never really existed. What appears as a record of real events turns
out to be little more than an ingenious fabrication. And, as we shall see, many of
the techniques and forms of fiction film and television are employed by docu-
mentaries as well.
While they occasionally come up in our examples, we are not taking up mock-
umentaries. Nor are we focusing on actuality-based television entertainment
programming or the recent TV genre of “docusoaps.” Even if documentaries are
entertaining, the implication of pleasurable learning seems stronger than in these
other examples. Nor are we investigating films or television shows “based on” or
“inspired by” a “true story.” Or films that employ both fiction and documentary
(such as Carlos Reygadas’s Battle in Heaven, Michel Khleifi’s Canticle of the Stones,
or Márta Mészáros’s diary films). All these other potentially rewarding projects
plainly, albeit unfortunately, could not be part of our project here.
Finally, a word on our selection of documentaries: documentary is a historical
phenomenon, a practice with a past. We are cognizant of that past, even though
we don’t survey it in this book. The sheer range and volume of documentary prac-
tice would offer a challenge for anyone who wishes to be comprehensive. We have
aimed instead for some variety and have mostly chosen examples that vividly il-
lustrate the points we wanted to make. Some of the works we discuss are associ-
ated with propaganda, others with muckraking, still others with more personal
concerns such as motherhood or illness. Overall, the term documentary cinema,
as we use it in this book, encompasses these various practices.
The year we give for each film or video is, to the best of our knowledge, the year
of release, the dates they were first shown at a public screening. In some cases, Ab-
bas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa, for instance, the date may be a year or two before the
8 Introduction

work’s general international release. When we write about a release in a specific

venue, such as The Bombing of Osage Avenue’s appearance on public television, the
date we give is of that debut.
Lastly, let us say that our selection of films is meant to be provocative rather
than exhaustive. Many famous films, many popular films, many brilliant films,
and many important films are missing. But if you would like to think more about
the issues we raise in a chapter and want suggestions on films you might screen,
we include an additional filmography at the end of each chapter. And whether
you are a fan of documentaries, a scholar, or an aspiring documentary maker, we
invite you to come up with more examples from your own viewing experiences.
Crafting Truth was written not just for those well versed in film studies but also for
those who have enjoyed documentaries in the past and want to understand more
about them.

Works Cited and Further Reading

Bruner, Jerome. Making Stories: Law, Literature, Life. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 2002.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006.
Corner, John. “Television, Documentary and the Category of the Aesthetic.”
Screen 44.1 (Spring 2003).
Eitzen, Dirk. “When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Recep-
tion.” Cinema Journal 35.1 (Fall 1995).
Grierson, John. “The First Principles of Documentary.” In Grierson on Documen-
tary, ed. Forsyth Hardy. London: Collins, 1966.
Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. New York: Macmillan,
1960.
National Library of Ireland. “The Angry Hedgehog.” September 17, 2008.
http://theangryhedgehog.com/2008/09/17/national-library-of-
ireland-upcoming-events/.
O’Brien, Harvey. The Real Ireland: The Evolution of Ireland in Documentary Film.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004.
Renov, Michael. “Toward a Poetics of Documentary.” In Theorizing Documentary,
ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
White, Hayden. The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical
Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990.
 Part One
General Concepts
 1
Authenticity

W e begin with an assertion: All representation is transformation.

And that transformation is always partial—in both senses of the
word. Stories are never lifted from life intact (they are constantly sifting out the
superfluous), and we can never know something separate from our way of think-
ing. It is important to emphasize this early in our discussion because, as the title
of this book suggests, some theorists, filmmakers, and spectators associate docu-
mentaries with “truth.”
Because of the camera’s ability to capture things as they happen, the photo-
graphic media are frequently considered to provide an authentic record of what
was in front of the camera’s lens when the scene was recorded, the “profilmic real-
ity.” Art critic John Berger, for example, in a 1968 essay, “Understanding a Photo-
graph,” describes the still photograph as an “automatic record” of things seen.
“There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus”
(181). And theorist Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida that a photograph is
“never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)” (5).
With the discovery that silver halides were sensitive to light and the invention
of the photographic process in the early nineteenth century, the innovation was
visualized as a tool of scientific investigation, a means to register the action of
light on chemically prepared surfaces. It was claimed that the camera would join
the thermometer, barometer, hygrometer, and the telescope as the latest scientific

11
12 chapter one

instrument—a precision instrument for advancing knowledge (Winston, Claim-

ing the Real II 133). By the 1870s still photography was already emerging as a tool
for collecting scientific data about subjects in motion. Photographer Eadweard
Muybridge constructed a special apparatus, a bank of twenty-four still cameras
lined up horizontally twenty-one inches apart, in order to provide visual confir-
mation that a galloping horse at some point has all four hooves off the ground.
Later, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge recorded
human locomotion in studies that were used for medical research. Étienne-Jules
Marey, a French physiologist, devised the “chronophotographe,” a camera that
could record successive images of a subject in motion on a single surface. Physi-
cian Félix-Louis Regnault and his colleague Charles Comte used a chronophoto-
graphe to document West African villagers in an 1895 ethnographic exposition
on the Champs de Mars in Paris.
This legacy, the idea of the scientific and pedagogical value of photographic
images, was carried over to early cinema. One of the very first of the Lumière
brothers’ films recorded still photographers arriving at a scientific convention.
And before their famous 1895 public showing of films at the Grand Café in Paris,
the Lumières showed their films at scientific gatherings.
Certainly a documentary, which takes place over time, in which time can be
manipulated, and which often includes a sound track, is not the same as a still
photograph. Yet there is a residual sense of that ontological authority. Ethnogra-
pher and filmmaker Jean Rouch put it succinctly: “The camera eye is more perspi-
cacious and more accurate than the human eye. The camera eye has an infallible
memory” (quoted in Levin 135). We know what happened and how it happened
because the camera was there to record it. The moving image recording media
have the ability to preserve a time gone by. Like still photography, documentaries
bear witness to a presence that is no longer there.
Consider, for instance, a very simple film, a view of a Wolpi snake dance taken
in a single shot by a camera operator for the Edison Manufacturing Company in
1901. Shot on location in Arizona, the images were taken by a static camera posi-
tioned on a parapet looking down on the dancers. Unlike a painting, which orga-
nizes the pictorial field into a staged tableau, this film has the look of contingency,
as if the world were a field of potential scenes and the filmmaker came across this
one and caught it for us, registering it and preserving it forever. The inclusion of
an audience in the image suggests that the scene was not created for the cam-
era, that the subject preexisted the arrival of the filmmaker. And the dance would
have taken place even if the camera had not been there. It was observed, not re-
constructed, and the camera placement is “the best view possible of the action”
 Authenticity 13

(Gunning 15). The camera was a witness to the occurrence—a sort of internal
or surrogate audience. The filming and the dance coexisted at the same time and
place, so there seems to be an “existential bond” between the representation and
the event, that is, between the image and the sociohistorical world. All this con-
tributes to the film’s claims of truth. In any nonfiction film, “the real” is the one
basic referent.
Although the Wolpi snake dance was shot at a time when the concept of docu-
mentary (as we know it today) did not yet exist, the Edison film—like many other
examples of early cinema—already tells us something about why we are fasci-
nated by documentaries. While documentaries and fiction films can share certain
techniques, aesthetic qualities, and narrative structures, documentaries seem to
depend less on the imagination of their makers than on the situations recorded
by the filmmaking apparatus.
Most critics would agree that documentaries are what they are because they
make particular claims about the sociohistorical world. As film scholar Carl Plant-
inga has put it, they “assert a belief that given objects, entities, states of affairs,
events, or situations actually occur(red) or exist(ed) in the actual world as por-
trayed” (Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film 18). Whereas fiction films
may allude to actual events, documentaries usually claim that those events did
take place in such and such a way, and that the images and sounds on the screen
are accurate and reliable. They speak about actualities and show us people who in
some sense share—or once shared—the world we live in.
It is not surprising, therefore, that people tend to associate documentaries
with truth. One of the reasons why we watch nonfiction films and videos is in-
deed to learn something about the world. And this would hardly be the case if
we could not trust what we see and hear. At the same time, some documentaries
suggest that there are different ways of presenting the truth about a particular
event. Others openly dispute the idea that the world can ever be represented in
a truthful and complete manner. And others go even further and question the
very notion of truth as a philosophical concept. But most documentaries—if not
all of them—have something to say about the world and, in one way or another,
they want to be trusted by their audience. Nonfiction films and videos that have
no concern for matters of truth and authenticity end up risking their own status
as documentaries.
The tricky question, then, might be not whether documentaries are committed
to telling the truth but what gives legitimacy to their truth claims—what makes
a particular film or video worthy of our trust. The question can be more compli-
cated than it seems because documentaries are not replicas of lived reality. They
14 chapter one

are, as we noted above, representations. The prefix “re” in the word “representation”
implies an absence, presenting anew that which is no longer present. And when-
ever we present something anew, transformation is implied.

The Photographic Image and the Real

One of the basic aspects of the photographic media (compared, for example, with
linguistic communication) is that they have iconic features; they resemble the so-
ciohistorical world. A written account can evoke. But the photographic media are
supposed to have such a strong resemblance that they can in fact show; they can
demonstrate.
To this iconic aspect, we can add the physical dependence on the phenomenal
world. A photograph only exists because light bounces off the scene in front of
the lens and leaves an impression on the back of the camera. Therefore, we have
not only an iconic resemblance but also an indexical relationship with the world,
the trace of a presence that is no longer there but has left its imprint. Because the
camera record certifies a presence, it is perceived to speak the truth—even if it is
simply the truth that Grandpa really did attend that birthday party. This is one of
the paradoxes of photography: although we know that photographic images can
be tampered with or altered, we also believe them as records of events, a record
of a particular moment in time. As Susan Sontag put it: “The picture may distort;
but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is
like what’s in the picture” (On Photography 5). Roland Barthes writes of having
received a picture of himself that he did not remember being taken. He inspects
everything in the photo to try to figure out where and when it was taken, but can-
not. “And yet, because it was a photograph I could not deny that I had been there
(even if I did not know where)” (85; emphasis in original). Neither writing nor
painting can give us this certainty.
The terms “iconic” and “indexical” come from the writings of the late-
nineteenth-century philosopher and semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce. Peirce
used these terms to describe differing relationships or orders of meaning between
the sign—a unit of signification—and that which it signifies. Icons, which have a
relationship of similarity or close resemblance, offer the most direct communica-
tion. The desktop icon on a computer screen, for example, resembles the real ob-
ject in such a way that we hardly need to explain what the picture means. Indexes,
by contrast, might not look so similar to the object they refer us to. But they bear
a relationship of causality or proximity to the object they represent. A cough or a
 Authenticity 15

sneeze would serve as indexical signs for a cold, just as footprints would indicate
the trail followed by someone walking in the woods.
It is the iconic resemblance with the physical world, of course, that allows us to
recognize and relate to the situations represented in a documentary. Yet when we
look at nonfictional footage, we often expect more than an image that resembles
the sociohistorical world. We expect a record of what was actually there. We expect
documentaries to be indexically bound to the subject represented. The camera
and its subject were there at the same time. As film critic André Bazin noted over
half a century ago, the photographic image “shares, by virtue of the very process of
its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction” (14).
We could extend this argument to the way documentaries use sound. The first
nonfiction films had no recorded sound at all. And the term documentary itself
was coined at a time when cinema was still silent. But sound technology intro-
duced a new range of possibilities to documentary filmmakers. Just as the motion
picture brought the photographic image one step closer to the world of lived ex-
perience, the sound track enhanced the similarity between the documentary film
and the subject represented. Better yet, sound films could potentially preserve
aural traces of the phenomenal world, thus reinforcing the sense of presence that
is so compelling in documentaries. In part, we believe what we hear because of
the microphone’s ability to capture sounds as they occur in real life.
In Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason (1967), for example, the direct record of
the protagonist’s uninterrupted speech serves as a way of enforcing the integrity
of the profilmic situation. The film uses lengthy takes in an effort to match screen
time and actual experience. At different moments in the recording process, how-
ever, the camera runs out of film, and the cinematographer has to stop shooting
and change magazines. Rather than interrupt the “scene,” the filmmaker chooses
to continue recording sound. While there is no image of the subject, we can still
hear his voice over black leader. The image is abruptly cut; the sound is not. In
different circumstances, the absence of visual record could imply that the subject
before the camera is no longer there, or that the profilmic event itself has been
disrupted. In Portrait of Jason, though, it produces the opposite effect, suggesting
that life goes on even if the camera is not there to record it.
All this supports the notion that documentaries offer authentic representations
of sociohistorical reality. Even if we know that those representations are incom-
plete, the closeness to the phenomenal world that is imparted seems to ground
their truth claims.
This may be changing, of course, if documentaries rely more on digital simu-
lations. Seeing Forrest Gump with President John F. Kennedy is clearly iconic,
16 chapter one

but not at all indexical. It resembles a real visit, but there was no concurrence of
time and place. This kind of toying with history is fairly harmless, although not
without meaning, in a fictional fantasy such as Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis,
1994). Yet in nonfiction film these manipulations can be more disorienting. One
can think, for example, of a documentary created with stock sounds and images
stored in a computer, or, better yet, made entirely of computer-generated images.
While these images are becoming increasingly common in documentaries, they
lack the kind of indexical bond with the world that we expect from photographic
representations. Computer-generated images (CGI) are simulations, not “direct”
records of lived reality.
Still, in appearance at least, these images can be virtually indistinguishable
from photographic records, and that is one reason why they deserve further atten-
tion. The BBC documentary series Walking with Dinosaurs (1999), for instance,
uses computer-generated images of prehistoric animals to (re)create the physical
world as it might have existed millions of years ago. The makers of the series were
not trying to fool the audience into believing that they could offer a photographic
record of the actual creatures. But the strong photorealism of the images suggests
that this kind of artifact could potentially replace the live action shots that we
expect to see in a documentary. As new media theorist Lev Manovich has noted,
“Filming physical reality is but one possibility” available for contemporary film-
makers (294).
Can we still talk about authenticity when the image, realistic as it may be, is
not physically connected to a referent in the phenomenal world? Because of its
relative autonomy from the physical world, digital imaging is likely to affect not
only the making of documentaries but also the way we understand the relationship
between representation and reality. Computer images remind us that documen-
taries are not mere traces of reality. They are conventionally accepted procedures
that purport to offer credible representations of lived experience. By observing
documentary conventions, filmmakers may claim legitimacy for the reality port-
rayed even if no photographic record is available. We will examine the conven-
tional nature of documentary representations shortly. But first let’s look at the
way documentaries explore their indexical bond with the events represented.

The Real as Referent

In Robert Gardner’s ethnographic film Dead Birds (1964), there is a sequence of

an elaborate ritual for a child who died offscreen. We learn from the voiceover
 Authenticity 17

commentary that the boy was killed by an enemy tribe. The commentary cov-
ers over the missing sequence of the child’s death. The death in The Death of
Mr. Lazarescu/Moartea domnului Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), a Romanian fic-
tion film shot in a documentary style, is announced in the title, but it happens after
the two-and-a-half-hour film is over. But even if the character’s death were shown
on screen, we would assume that the performer who plays Mr. Lazarescu would
survive his fictional death, that his demise is merely represented. The young boy’s
death in Dead Birds, on the other hand, was not confined to the realm of represen-
tation. Documentary space is of a different order than imaginary space, and our
viewing experience is different as well. We bring extratextual cultural knowledge
and judgment to documentary viewing. As film scholar Vivian Sobchack puts it,
“There is an existential . . . bond between documentary space and the space in-
habited by the viewer” (294). This is one of the reasons why certain documentary
subjects are so difficult to watch.
We all know of films that have affected us so much that we wanted to flee the
auditorium or classroom. Silverlake Life: The View from Here (1993) may be one of
them. Silverlake Life is a video diary that chronicles the dying of the filmmaker and
film teacher Tom Joslin from AIDS-related illnesses (edited after his death by one
of his former students, Peter Friedman, and transferred to film for distribution).
Like the event hidden from sight in Robert Gardner’s film, this death was real; it
existed beyond the realm of representation. Unlike what happens in Dead Birds,
though, it is also visible on screen. Silverlake Life combines a relatively unadorned
shooting style with a very personal approach to the documentary process, us-
ing both strategies as a means of authenticating the experiences represented in
the film.
The documentary opens with an image of Mark Massi, Tom’s lover of twenty-
two years, lying in bed. The camera turns to the right and we see a monitor with
a video valentine from Tom (“I love you Mark”) and hear Mark’s voiceover com-
mentary, “What I remember most about Tom. . . .” The past tense is clearly es-
tablished here. The precredit sequence continues with the camera on Mark as
he talks of Tom’s death: “It was very scary to look at him after he died. It’s very
strange to see a dead person staring.” He recalls how he had tried to close Tom’s
eyelids properly, as they do in the movies, but they popped back open! “I apolo-
gized [to Tom] that life wasn’t like in the movies.” The opening of the film tells us
what we will see: the death of Tom Joslin. Then we go back to witness it. What
we see is what happened when the camera and microphone were recording, and
much of it appears to be what would have happened even if the camera and mi-
crophone were not recording. (Indeed, it is clear that Tom would have died even
18 chapter one

if the film had not been made and there is nothing that we could have done to
prevent it.)
In many documentaries, major information comes from the sound track via
voiceover commentary or interviews. But in Silverlake Life much of the informa-
tion also derives from changes in the physical appearance of both Tom and Mark,
who is waging his own battle with AIDS. The primary mode appears more de-
scriptive than interpretative, a rendering visible of the observable. Made with a
video camera, usually handheld but sometimes on a stand when Tom is shoot-
ing himself, the documentary tends to efface “style” and “suspense,” so that it ap-
pears that the sounds and images speak for themselves. What stands out is the
indexical presence of the documentary subject, the impression that we are di-
rectly connected to what we see and hear. In Silverlake Life, this “presence” serves
as an authenticating tool, a way of indicating to the spectator that the events on
the screen did happen, and that they happened the way we see and hear them in
the film.
This sense of immediacy is reinforced by the ordinariness of the actions in-
cluded in the documentary. While the film’s underlying subject is by no means
trivial, there are several scenes that focus on simple tasks and uneventful situ-
ations. “You haven’t told me where we are yet,” Mark asks from offscreen. “We
are at Hard Times Pizza,” Tom answers, looking at the camera. The shot adds no
significant information to the story that unfolds while we watch Silverlake Life.
But it helps situate the viewer in relation to the subjects in the film. It marks the
presence of the documentary’s protagonists in a particular place, at a particular
moment—the here and now of the shoot, which we are invited to revisit in the
screening room.
More than a witness to a specific event, the recording apparatus is a sort of
accomplice to the video makers, a tool that makes their presence available to the
audience. Seeing health care providers, performing chores around their neigh-
borhood (the Silverlake section of Los Angeles), visiting Tom’s family in New
Hampshire for Christmas, or enjoying a short vacation in the desert, the two men
are at ease in front of the camera, frequently camping it up. “Here we are on our
fabulous European ocean cruise,” Mark says from behind the camera as he shoots
Tom bundled up on a balcony behind their home. In this case, we cannot claim
that what happened would have happened even if the camera had not been there.
But neither should we assume that the camera “embellishes” the material it re-
cords. The opposite, in fact, seems to be true, as the recording apparatus becomes
a channel through which Tom and Mark share their thoughts and emotions with
the audience—or simply comment on their daily lives.
 Authenticity 19

This complicity with the camera and

its microphone seems particularly strik-
ing in a scene in which Tom is waiting
for Mark in the car. At one point, Tom
gazes down at the camera (which seems
to be resting on the car’s steering wheel)
and expresses his frustration. He is ex-
hausted after a visit to an herbalist and
a few errands. His voice cracks; his an-
ger is clear. Then, acting this out, he
clenches his teeth and says, “You try to
1.1. “I hate being a nice guy!” From Silverlake Life: The View from
be helpful [and end up] getting screwed Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, 1993).
time and time again. I hate being a nice
guy!” Both confiding in the camera—
and thus in his audience—and performing his irritation and resentment, he then,
in a melodramatic gesture, turns his face away. Since there is no one else around,
we can justly claim that Tom is talking to us, letting us know how he feels and how
he wants us to perceive his frustration.
The moments when the camera is acknowledged become, then, another way
of confirming the authenticity of what we see and hear. They ground the shooting
process itself in real, lived experience. In some cases, it is in fact hard to separate
the act of shooting from the incidents documented in Silverlake Life, the camera
serving as a sort of catalyst for the situations represented in the film. Later in the
documentary, as Tom’s condition worsens, Mark uses the recording apparatus as
a means of prompting him to talk about his health. “OK, tell the camera how you
feel,” he urges from behind the video camera.
Documentaries are frequently associated with the style of realism. In the real-
ist mode of representation, the complex means by which the world is denoted
are repressed. The means of representation are so naturalized that there appears
to be an identity between sign and referent, a direct correlation between the text
and the sociohistorical world. In Silverlake Life, this assumption is encouraged
by the artlessness of the shots through which Tom and Mark document their
daily lives—the illusion of presence that seems to overwhelm our knowledge of
the representational process. As the examples above suggest, however, some of
the documentary’s most convincing shots are those in which we are aware of the
shooting. Because the making of the video was part of Tom’s and Mark’s daily rou-
tines, we do not see the intervention of the camera as strange to their lives. Our
awareness of the mediation broadens our knowledge of the world represented in
 20 chapter one

the documentary. Not only do we have access to Mark’s and Tom’s everyday life,
we also know something about how they interacted with the camera, how they
felt about the video diary, how they wanted it to be perceived by the audience.
The image of Tom’s corpse toward the end, even though we are expecting it,
comes as a shock. Surely it is Mark’s love and grief that are most moving; however,
the image of the dead body, the transformation of that lively, feisty subject into
an inanimate object, seems not only premature but an unjustifiable violation of
his life and our feelings. The dead body
is too reminiscent of that man who has
been onscreen for the past hour and a
half. It is a token of his absence. This
man has been. Vivian Sobchack notes
that a corpse “engages our sympathy as
an object which is an index of a subject
who was” (288; emphasis in original).
But this moment is not a freeze frame.
The camera is once again where we
have experienced it many times before,
at Tom’s bedside. Because the close
1.2. “Oooh! This is the first of July and Tommy’s just died . . .” From shot of Tom’s face is trembling, and we
Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Joslin and Peter Friedman, hear Mark’s sobs, we know that Mark is
1993).
behind the camera. So, in a way, we are
watching Mark watching Tom’s corpse,
and the silence that we expect to accompany death is mediated by Mark’s anguish.
Mark’s relation to Tom and to the death, the nature of his mourning, the way he
inhabits his sadness, are clear and poignant. Although shot in Los Angeles, this is
certainly not a Hollywood film.
This shot is also a powerful example of the way Silverlake Life entwines a
first-person approach to documentary with the codes of realistic representa-
tion. The impact of Tom’s death, conveyed by the close-up of his face, is magni-
fied by Mark’s reaction, registered through the unsteadiness of the frame. We do
not see Mark, but his presence in the shot is unmistakable. Here the camera is
not only the instrument but also the signifier that makes grief visible on screen.
Silverlake Life brings us close to the experience of struggling with illness, of car-
ing for those who are ill, and mourning the loss of a loved one. And because we
see these experiences as grounded in the world we once shared with Mark and
Tom, we find them touching. Video activist and archivist Catherine Saalfield de-
scribes the documentary as a “devastatingly real chronicle” (in Juhasz, AIDS TV
 Authenticity 21

291). The “authenticity” of the sounds and images is an important part of the
film’s power.

Different Notions of Truth

We have established the appeal of truth. But what do we mean by truth? Defining
truth is not an easy task. Philosophers have been talking about it since antiquity
and have approached it from various perspectives. More importantly, the mean-
ing and status of truth can vary from one sphere of human activity to another.
For both documentary filmmakers and spectators, truthfulness seems to in-
volve an effort to establish an unequivocal correspondence between the repre-
sentation and its referent. Although we know that nonfiction films can never be
fully equated with the events they represent, we frequently expect some form of
correlation between one and the other. In fact, knowing that the former cannot
duplicate the latter only makes the question of correspondence more significant.
We ask ourselves whether a certain documentary represents the world accurately.
And if it fails to do so, we dismiss it as false, biased, or unreliable. Dirk Eitzen has
written a carefully argued essay in which he notes that the question “Might it be
lying?” can actually be what distinguishes nonfiction from fiction.
Seen this way, truth can be defined simply as agreement with the facts. We
assume that a certain reality exists prior to the filmmaking process, and that the
role of the documentarian is to honor that reality. Documentaries like Silverlake
Life, which convey a strong sense of immediacy, are powerful in part because they
make this correspondence seem direct and unproblematic.
In practice, though, truth can be a more complex matter. Agreement with the
facts presumes that the facts themselves preexist the making of the film and that
they are somehow accessible to the documentarian. But neither assumption is
entirely correct. Inference can play an important part in the way a documentary
makes its claims about the historical world, especially when there is no available
evidence to support those claims. And there are cases in which the events recorded
by the camera simply do not exist prior to the making of the film. Instead, they
are part of the filming experience itself, as happens in Silverlake Life when Mark
provokes Tom to talk about his worsening health condition. Here the question of
whether the representation corresponds to the facts becomes inappropriate since
one does not precede the other.
Matters of truth can get even more complicated when we consider the values
involved in making and watching documentaries. Different people or different
22 chapter one

groups of people might look at the same event and see different things. As a result,
what is perceived as truthful, either by the filmmaker or the audience, can also
vary depending on who is looking at the facts, in what circumstances, and with
what purposes. This is not the same as saying that all documentaries are biased.
Neither is it arguing that all claims to truth are equally valid. But there might be
different ideas of truth, different types of truth, which deserve further scrutiny.
Legal scholar Richard K. Sherwin distinguishes three kinds of truth: factual
truth, a higher truth, and symbolic truth (49–50). Factual truth is observable
truth. It is what we usually look for when we watch a documentary, since it pre-
sumes some form of agreement with the facts. In O. J. Simpson’s highly publicized
1995 trial for the murder of his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend
Ronald Goldman, a bloody glove found at the scene of the crime was introduced
by the prosecution as evidence to establish the identity of the murderer, to estab-
lish factual truth. The question was whether or not it fit the man on trial.
But this is not the only truth that counts. There is also what Sherwin sees as a
higher truth, a more abstract truth such as every individual has the right to due
process. These principles supersede particular facts. For example, the bloody
glove could not be considered evidence if it had been unlawfully obtained and
violated an individual’s rights.
And there is also a kind of truth that is more symbolic—national myths, arche-
typal stories, popular plot lines, and character types—our common knowledge
and social values, that which we all know to be true, the conventional stories that
we use to make sense of the world. In his defense of O. J. Simpson, attorney John-
nie Cochran told the jury to do the right thing and keep their eyes on the prize.
These references to the Spike Lee film (1989) and the Public Broadcasting Service
series on the civil rights movement (Henry Hampton, 1987–1990) told people
that the issue is not the troublesome details of a glove that fits or not. The truth
here is a long history that Cochran assumed the jurors knew about: the police do
not treat black people well at all. These major truths—the shared knowledge we
use to live our lives—can preempt the search for factual truths, and sometimes
even those higher truths, the abstract principles that we all supposedly hold in
common. These symbolic truths are also part of the way that we understand new
material; they are part of the way we make sense of new information. We arrange
this material into knowable stories—stories we can believe (Sherwin 24).
Let’s return to Silverlake Life in the context of these three kinds of truth. There
is a scene in the documentary in which Mark tells us that he has been asked to
keep his shirt on while in a desert resort’s pool so as not to “freak out” the other
guests. Seated by the pool in a T-shirt and bathing suit, he explains the request
 Authenticity 23

and how he feels about it to us. Then we see Mark from the waist up, without his
shirt, sitting on the edge of the hot tub. His torso is covered with Kaposi’s sarcoma
(KS) lesions, a sign of his deteriorating health. As he smiles, then turns his back to
the camera, we hear Tom ask from offscreen, “What are you doing? Flashing me
your KS?” Mark replies, “I’m being political.”
The factual truth is that Mark’s condition is worsening. The higher truth, the
abstract principle American culture holds dear, that is activated in this scene is the
dignity that should be accorded to all individuals. But the symbolic truth, which
may be even stronger, is that in a culture where sexuality, pleasure, and the body
are strictly regulated, gay men and AIDS are coded with morality and lurid meta-
phors. All kinds of feelings have contributed to making gay sex secret, mysterious,
and horrifying—something to hide.
If we understand “truth” in its complexity, it helps us to see what kind of story
is being told. Seen in this light, Silverlake Life may be making a political argument
after all.

The Conventional Nature of

Documentary Representations

We can usually recognize a documentary when we see one, and that’s because
of conventional procedures and techniques that distinguish it from other types
of films. Documentaries rely on specific codes, understandings, and expectations
that are shared by a specific community—the makers and viewers of nonfiction
films and videos. In fact, their claims to truth often depend on the effectiveness
of these conventionalized codes and procedures. Like the documentary’s iconic
and indexical qualities, these conventions help establish the authenticity of non-
fictional representations.
To understand how they function, we might once again find inspiration in the
work of Charles Sanders Peirce. In addition to icons and indexes, Peirce’s study
of signs includes a category that presumes neither resemblance nor physical con-
nection to the referential world. This type, the symbol, is a sign in which these re-
lationships are arbitrary or conventionally established. This is the case with most
written and spoken languages, as well as more figurative kinds of representation
such as maps and charts. Symbols offer the least direct communication; it is by
convention that we call a tree a “tree” and not a “blick.” The words you are reading
draw their meanings from conventions that are shared and accepted by users of the
English language. (Even onomatopoeia is somewhat conventionalized. Roosters
24 chapter one

crow “cock-a-doodle-doo” in the United States, “cocorico” in France, “kiki-riki-

kiiii” in Mexico, and “kukrookoo” in the Himalayas.) Such conventionalized
visual analogies as maps and charts also have a symbolic relation to that which
they represent.
Even photographic footage is often dealt with in conventional ways. Docu-
mentary interviews, for example, tend to follow well-established methods and
predictable patterns, which reinforce the seriousness that is typical of the genre.
The camera, in these cases, is normally static and self-effacing, positioned slightly
to the right or left of its subject. The interviewees, in turn, speak in a somewhat
formal tone but without addressing the audience directly. The result is a scene
that looks sober and worthy of attention, and, at the same time, because we are
used to seeing this in documentaries, authentic.
More generally, we can say that there is a conventional “contract” that binds
nonfiction filmmakers to their audiences. Think for a minute about an interview
with a college professor. We can hope that the spectators will pick up clues from
her or his clothes, speech, and demeanor. Nothing in the image or sound, how-
ever, can assure the spectators that what they see and hear is not fake—that what
we have is a scholar, and not, say, a professional actor posing as a scholar. What
assures the viewer that the identity of the person interviewed is authentic is a sort
of tacit agreement whereby documentarians are expected to earn the trust of the
audience by offering truthful information about their subjects.
Breaking this agreement usually tests the limits of documentary representa-
tion. What happens, for instance, when public information is both compelling
and untrustworthy? When a social document casts doubt on its own referential-
ity? When a documentary points us to the malleability of proof and truth? Ruth
Ozeki Lounsbury’s Halving the Bones (1995) does precisely this.
The film looks at three generations of women in the filmmaker’s family. After
her maternal grandmother, with whom she had little contact, died, Ruth Ozeki
Lounsbury traveled to Japan for the funeral and came back with some of her
grandmother’s bones for her mother. She tells us the story of her mother’s par-
ents, Japanese immigrants in Hawaii at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Based on her grandmother’s autobiography and her grandfather’s home movies,
we see beautiful images of Hawaiian flora, a waterfall, and her grandmother as a
young woman bathing in an idyllic setting. An accented voiceover commentary
tells us what it was like arriving in Hilo, Hawaii, as a young bride to meet a hus-
band whom she only knew through a photograph.
But then, twenty minutes into the seventy-minute film, as Ruth is finally going
to deliver the bones to her mother in Connecticut, we get a surprising confession:
 Authenticity 25

“Up until now, I haven’t been 100% accurate. There are a couple of things that I
made up. Like my grandmother’s autobiography, for example. She never really
wrote one, so I made it up from real family stories I heard from her and also from
my other relatives. I did sort of the same thing with the home movies. I’ve seen
a photo of my grandfather holding a movie camera, so I know he really made
movies. But his cameras and films were all confiscated after Pearl Harbor.” Using
staged material is not uncommon in documentaries, as we shall see in a moment.
But playing with the viewer’s expectations puts at risk the “contract” between
the filmmaker and the spectator. With Lounsbury’s brazen acknowledgment of
manipulation, certainties slip through our fingers.
Yet it would seem that the admission of wrongdoing makes us trust the rest
of the film all the more. In Halving the Bones, the bond that ties documentarians
to their audiences is broken by the filmmaker’s mischief, but then seemingly re-
instated by the confession. It is almost as if speaking the prohibition—a docu-
mentary that lies—inoculates the film against further transgressions. Also, the
images that follow, images of her mother greeting her, the presentation of her
grandmother’s possessions and bones that Ruth brought back from Japan, seem
to be sincere. Perhaps these later images seem so genuine because they are con-
ventional talking heads, exactly what we expect to see in a nonfiction film. Toward
the end of the film we see a silhouette of Ruth on a cliff in Hawaii, apparently
heeding her mother’s instructions, after her death, to throw both the mother’s and
the grandmother’s bones into the ocean. How devilishly unexpected, then, to find
out in the end credits that Ruth’s mother is alive and well, living in Connecticut!
At one level the film does observe the conventions of documentary cinema:
it uses voiceover commentary, interview setups, archival footage, and so on. At
another, though, it upsets the overarching social contract that gives legitimacy to
these procedures. But more importantly, it highlights the relevance of the agree-
ment that makes us think of documentaries as credible sources of information—
how a documentary proposes: “Believe me!”

Staging Truth

Filmmakers have fabricated sequences since the beginning of film exhibition. Re-
constructing major events in the Boxer Rebellion in China was commonplace,
as were reconstructions of the Spanish-American War. A U.S. film of the sinking
of the battleship Maine in Havana harbor was made by blowing cigarette smoke
over model ships in a bathtub. Jay Leyda tells of an 1898 film of the Dreyfus affair
26 chapter one

cobbled together from footage of “a French army parade led by a captain, [a street
scene] in Paris showing a large building, a shot of a Finnish tug [boat] going out
to meet a barge, and a scene of the Delta of the Nile.” “With a little help from
the commentator, and with a great deal of help from the audience’s imagination,”
these scenes told the story of “Dreyfus before his arrest, the Palais de Justice where
Dreyfus was court-martialed, Dreyfus being taken to the battleship, and Devil’s
Island where he was imprisoned” (23). And as documentary theorist Brian Win-
ston points out, these news film re-creations were not even reconstructions of
what the filmmakers had witnessed, but were based on journalistic accounts they
read (Lies, Damn Lies 136).
Re-creation, however, does not necessarily mean falsification. It is sometimes
a legitimately accepted procedure in nonfictional representation. In later chapters
we discuss dramatic reenactments in Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), as
well as staging in Lin Tay-jou’s The Secret in the Satchel/Shubao li de mimi (2007)
and Mindy Faber’s Delirium (1993). Here, let us look at The Road to Guantánamo
(Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, 2006), which tells the story of
three British Muslims, young men from Tipton, who traveled to Pakistan for a
wedding, then crossed the border into Afghanistan in October 2001 as the U.S.
military campaign in retaliation for the 9/11 attacks started. The three were cap-
tured in Afghanistan by the Northern Alliance forces, handed over to U.S. au-
thorities, and later transferred to the American military prison in Guantánamo
Bay, Cuba, where they were held for two years and eventually released without
charges. The Road to Guantánamo uses interviews with the actual detainees after
they were released, interspersed with occasional pieces of news footage. Most of
what we see and hear, however, are re-creations of the events that led the young
men from Pakistan to Guantánamo, enacted sequences that are clearly enacted
and not meant to be misleading (what Winston calls “sincere and justifiable re-
construction” [Claiming the Real II 128]). The re-creations add dramatic inten-
sity to the story. They also widen the gap between the actual events and what we
watch in The Road to Guantánamo. But they do not impair the veracity of the film’s
truth claims.
While we know that this is not footage of the actual events, we still think of the
reenactments as part of the story the film is trying to tell us. This disjunction may
be similar to the reverberations in the spectator’s experience of historical films
that Jean-Louis Comolli writes about, in which a recognizable performer (such
as Pierre Renoir) plays a well-known historical figure (such as Louis XVI). We
never forget that Pierre Renoir is not Louis XVI, yet, at the same time, we want
to believe in the truth of the representation. Perhaps there is a similar oscillation
 Authenticity 27

in our experience when we see these plainly enacted scenes. Because of this, the
staged material can function as an extension or illustration of the testimonies doc-
umented by the filmmaker, a filmic rendition of events that are firmly grounded
in lived reality.
The filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard once said, “Realism . . . is never exactly the
same as reality, and in the cinema it is of necessity faked” (Godard on Godard
185). And filmmakers use specific cinematic means to fake it. Peter Watkins’s
filmed simulation of a nuclear attack on Great Britain, The War Game (1966),
used cinematic means that made it look so much like news reporting that the
British Broadcasting Corporation banned it from television. It looked too real.
(The BBC said the film would be too horrifying to viewers.) There were many, of
course, who debated if this was really the reason why the BBC suppressed the film
or if it was the fact that the film destabilized civil authority. But for our purposes,
we should consider what made the film appear so authentic and how this func-
tioned in Watkins’s strategy for effectiveness.
The War Game was based on extensive research on thermonuclear war, the
North Atlantic Treaty Organization guidelines for intervention, British civil
defense policies, the consequences of the atomic bombings in Japan, and the
firestorms in Hamburg and Dresden during World War II, projected onto an
imaginary incident in the future, an out-
break of war between NATO and Rus-
sia. This thoroughness was prompted
by a perception of urgency and poten-
tially imminent events: the escalation
of the arms race threatened full-scale
nuclear war. The film begins with a set
of maps, then postulates a fictional crisis
and provocations, and proceeds to show
the effects and aftermath of the ensuing
nuclear attack. The voiceover and the
interviews with officials are loaded with
facts on thermonuclear war and, quot- 1.3. “Do you know what Strontium 90 is and what it does?” “No, I
ing from the manual of the Home Office, feel I don’t.” From The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1966).
information on evacuation, feeding, and
shelter plans. Watkins used scripted interviews with nonprofessional actors play-
ing both authorities and ordinary citizens. He also included unscripted interviews
with locals playing people on the street. A performer playing a reporter asks some
residents of Kent, members of the cast, “Do you know what Strontium 90 is?”
28 chapter one

Person after person depicted gives an opinion, in a close shot with a puzzled look
on his or her face, either thoughtfully admitting not to know, or offering a wildly
incorrect answer. This combination of scripted and unscripted material coexists
without undercutting the film’s authority.
In a classical Hollywood fiction film, we see and hear only what is needed to
further the narrative. The story is made manageable by the reduction of infor-
mation. In philosopher Noël Carroll’s words, “The flow of action approaches an
ideal of uncluttered clarity” (180). In Hollywood films, even those based on a
“true story,” we do not see, for example, people taking out the garbage unless they
are going to get mugged or kidnapped. The Hollywood fiction film is much more
economical than daily life, where not all of later events are related to, or make
sense in the context of, earlier events. In daily life, some actions—taking out the
garbage, perhaps—seem to happen with little effect. And certainly some actions
and events seem less clear, more cluttered, sometimes even fragmented.
But what about documentaries? The degree of control that documentary film-
makers have over profilmic events varies. Sometimes the sounds overlap and may
not be fully audible. There may be some hesitations and stumbling over words.
Occasionally someone walks between the camera and what it is shooting. Or
there may be a lens flare. Documentaries are certainly more structured than daily
life. But they may not seem as clear or uncluttered as a Hollywood narrative.
The War Game employs this lack of clarity as an aesthetic strategy for the se-
quences of the aftermath of the nuclear strike. The fantasy of the future is built
with newsreel-like techniques. (It is shot with grainy black-and-white film stock,
synchronized sound, available light, zooms, rapid panning, quickly changing
focus, and an intrusive, participating reporter’s handheld first-person camera.)
Some of the dialogue is deliberately unintelligible. Performers were handed scripts
complete with stammering and pauses. People look at the camera as they pass.
Someone bumps into the camera operator and says, “Excuse me.” At one point
the camera is waved away by a soldier; at another it is given a gesture of defiance
by a rioter. (The blocking was prearranged, as was the camera movement, but it
comes across as spontaneous and unorganized.) The film uses this documentary
mode (associated with truth and reality) to portray an unreal event.
Watkins also uses scripted interviews based on statements from authority fig-
ures about policies of the day: Civil Defense personnel, an Anglican bishop, a
scientist, a doctor, and a psychiatrist. In contrast with the cluttered look of the
futuristic scenario, the present-day interviews are shot with a straight-on look
at the calm, complacent, well-groomed expert, nicely framed with his books,
blackboard, and statistics, well-lit, well-miked, and the camera stable on a tripod.
 Authenticity 29

Paradoxically, the present tense is rendered with the control one would expect in
a Hollywood fiction film.
The War Game makes use of the future conditional tense, what might be (e.g.,
“It’s more than possible that . . .” “Such scenes as these would be almost inevi-
table”). The future as Peter Watkins imagines it seems probable. What seem im-
probable are the current civil defense and military policies. The future conditional
seems plausible and the present tense emerges as a strange flight of the imagina-
tion. It seems appropriate, then, that it was condemned for being too realistic, not
for being untrue.

Falsification and Documentary

Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, 1995), an archival footage re-creation of the

“Philippine” village at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair, is also based on elaborate
research. Words uttered by Markod, a fictional Bontoc warrior who is supposedly
the narrator’s grandfather, were originally an English transcription of an inter-
view conducted with a Chief Famaoley while he was in a traveling show perform-
ing in Coney Island two years after the closing of the fair. Passages were selected
from this document, translated back into old Bontoc, and read by a Bontoc elder,
Fermina Bagwan, based in Southern California. Some of the archival footage
comes from a faked film of the Spanish-American War, a reconstruction of the
Battle of Manila Bay. In Fuentes’s own words, Bontoc Eulogy “straddles fact and
fiction, mixing imagination and interior dialogue with history” (in Juhasz and
Lerner 116).
Watching Bontoc Eulogy, according to Fuentes, is like watching “an Indone-
sian shadow puppet performance (wayang kulit), where one can watch on either
side of the screen. Watching the puppeteer’s side shows the movements of the
craftsperson.” Watching from the other side, it is easier to become involved in
the story (118). Bontoc Eulogy presents the narrator’s search for evidence of his
“grandfather’s” history and Markod’s first-person reflections on the tragedy of
his ordeal. But at times, the narrator’s voice and Markod’s voice become inter-
changeable. Fuentes has said that he wanted the film’s seams and sutures to show.
He wanted viewers to realize that they were viewing an “optical illusion.” And he
wanted them to be aware of their process of perception “at the very moment of
perception,” what he calls the “bidirectionality of the act of observing” (118–119).
For Marlon Fuentes, authenticity can be anti-illusionist. The filmmaker intends
to engage the viewer with the process of storytelling.
 30 chapter one

Other forms of falsification can be more insidious, misleading the audience

both about the events represented and the nature of their filmic representation.
Rather than allow “the seams and sutures to show,” these films mimic the conven-
tions of documentary cinema in such a way that we can hardly tell fictional from
nonfictional material. This is the case with David Holzman’s Diary, a 1968 fiction
film by Jim McBride. Although staged, David Holzman’s Diary scrupulously cop-
ies the sound and camerawork of a direct cinema diary. The film portrays a young
man, David Holzman, in July 1967, having just been declared A1 (draftable), mak-
ing a 16mm film that he believes will tell him some truth about his life. Like The
War Game, the film uses a specific means of representation in an attempt to make
it seem more realistic. Because it looks unrehearsed, because much of it is awk-
wardly framed and unevenly lit, and because all the sound is direct and some of
the musings are mumbled, we associate it with lived reality.
At the beginning of the film, David Holzman (played by Kit Carson) directly
addresses the camera and introduces us to his equipment. Quoting Godard, he
rhapsodizes on its ability to evoke “truth 24 times a second.” The film is an ode to
his Nagra portable tape recorder, unrivaled at the time for its ability to document
sound under local conditions, and to his Éclair camera, with its ability to shoot for
long durations and in low luminosity, unshackled by lights, tripods, and cables,
and hence more mobile and flexible—as if these attributes of cinematic technol-
ogy could induce people into uttering a truth that they would not reveal in ordi-
nary situations; as if this unobtrusive, lightweight portable equipment could show
us aspects of actuality that otherwise
would have been obscured from view.
David Holzman’s flight of fancy, his
attempt to faithfully preserve “the real”
on celluloid, suggests a higher aspira-
tion, a self-indulgent, sentimental effort
to transcend his life via this equipment.
Yet, as several scholars have noted, tech-
nology grows out of a particular ideol-
ogy. The image-making technologies
that Holzman celebrated grew out of,
as visual anthropologist Jay Ruby once
said of all Western image-making tech-
1.4. “The noted French wit Jean-Luc Godard said, ‘What is film?
Film is truth 24 times a second.’” From David Holzman’s Diary
nologies, “a profound need to have an
( Jim McBride, 1968). irrefutable witness—to control reality
 Authenticity 31

by capturing it on film” (219). Imagine how much “purer,” unfettered and easier,
this must seem with the new compact digital cameras!
It is not until the credit sequence at the end of the film that audience mem-
bers are cued that the film is a fictional enactment. Discovering that the film is
a fabrication, we understand the text to be a lie. David Holzman’s Diary playfully
suspends the contract that binds documentary filmmakers to their audiences, but
the abrogation of that contract has consequences. After all, we process fiction and
nonfiction differently. The existence or absence of the sociohistorical referent, the
real world and characters that exist in it, fundamentally alters our mode of reading
the text and changes our position toward it. Unlike The Road to Guantánamo or
The War Game, David Holzman’s Diary uses staged material not to render visible
an experience that is unavailable for the camera but to upset our faith in docu-
mentary representation and the presumptions that are often associated with non-
fiction cinema.
If Kit Carson and Jim McBride saw David Holzman’s Diary as, in Brian Win-
ston’s words, a “slap against the new documentary’s truth-telling pretensions”
(Claiming the Real II 202), Marlon Fuentes must see his film as striking a blow
at ethnographic and historical films, films that offer smoothed-over surfaces and
embedded truth claims that purport to be unambiguous and consistent, and
where all the actions and evidence serve the anthropologist’s or historian’s argu-
ment. Fuentes respects gaps and ellipses, as well as the fragility and fallibility of
memory, which “are just as important as the materials we have in our hands. If
they are missing for certain reasons, whether by accident or force of omission,
perhaps these irregularities force us to reflect on the nature and origins of our own
situation” (120).

Markers of Authenticity in Fiction Films

Some of the major reasons why we take David Holzman’s Diary to be nonfiction
are the direct address to the camera, the wandering narrative, the visual and aural
disorder (muddy sound and blurred focus), and the compulsive use of dates to
describe that day’s shooting (even when it is clear that some of the footage was
taken on days too cold to be July in New York City). These are formal conven-
tions that normally function as markers of authenticity. They tell the spectators
that what they are watching is a documentary, a nonfictional representation of the
sociohistorical world.
32 chapter one

Other fiction filmmakers, too, are aware of the conventional character of docu-
mentary discourse and have used similar markers of authenticity to enhance the
realism of their narratives. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu’s long takes, flat lighting, and
handheld camera all contribute to its documentary look and to the moral outrage
that the film aims to rouse about the character’s treatment by the public health
system. The Battle of Algiers (Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966), a fictional reconstruction
of some events in the Algerian war for independence, uses no documentary foot-
age but gives the impression that we are watching historical events as they oc-
curred in real life. The action seems unscripted and spontaneous, and the camera-
work conveys a sense of immediacy that is easily associated with documentary
filmmaking. Even more interestingly, the Cuban film The Other Francisco/El otro
Francisco (Sergio Giral, 1975) contrasts documentary and fictional conventions
to represent different aspects of Cuban society in the nineteenth century. It uses
a documentary shooting style (a handheld, whirling camera) to throw us into the
action of a slave rebellion and a more melodramatic style (with a stable camera on
a tripod) in the scenes that depict the slave owners.
These days we think of handheld camera, obscured views, and overlapping
sound as markers of documentary truth. And a general “messiness” (the word
is Todd Gitlin’s), unbalanced compositions, and an aesthetic of visual and aural
clutter are easily read as signifiers of immediacy, instantaneity, and authenticity.
They seem to evoke the unpredictability of experience. Yet these different mark-
ers, and realism as a style, have changed over time. Voiceovers were particularly
popular after World War II; T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947), Boomerang (Elia Ka-
zan, 1947), and Naked City ( Jules Dassin, 1948) are fiction films that come to
mind. But today, their commentaries seem contrived. Look at an episode of the
television show Dragnet (1952–1959), with its travelogue opening and voiceover
commentary. Then compare it with the opening of another TV police procedural,
Hill Street Blues (1981–1987), with its quick pacing, nervous camera, overpopu-
lated cast list, multiple storylines, lack of resolutions, and overall density of sound
and image. As documentary scholar Bill Nichols points out, the “comfortably ac-
cepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next. New strategies
must constantly be fabricated to re-present ‘things as they are’” (“The Voice of
Documentary” 17).
These fiction films and television shows employ the conventions of documen-
tary filming and sound recording (as they were practiced in their day) to play
off the spectator’s expectations of a documentary’s authenticity. “Documentary”
has become a style or an aesthetic that evokes “the real.” But when we go to see a
 Authenticity 33

documentary, we generally know beforehand that it is not fiction. And we make

certain assumptions about authenticity based on that. Hence Eitzen’s “Might It
Be Lying?” But we must not forget that when documentaries assert “This hap-
pened,” they do so through formal cinematic conventions. We explore these in
more depth in the rest of the book.

Additional Filmography
One Way or Another/De cierta manera (Sara Gómez, 1974/77)
Killer of Sheep (Charles Burnett, 1977)
The Learning Path (Loretta Todd, 1991)
Imagining Indians (Victor Masayesva Jr., 1992)
The Blair Witch Project (Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez, 1999)
The 3 Rooms of Melancholia/Melancholian 3 huonetta (Pirjo Honkasalo, 2004)
Death of a President (Gabriel Range, 2006)
Lakshmi and Me (Nishtha Jain, 2007)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Aristotle. Introductory Readings. Trans. Terence Irwin and Gail Fine. Indianapo-
lis: Hackett, 1996.
Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and
Wang, 1981.
Bazin, André. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” In What Is Cinema?,
vol. 1. Trans. Hugh Gray. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967.
Berger, John. “Understanding a Photograph.” In The Look of Things. New York:
Viking, 1974.
Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies of Contemporary Film Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Carson, L. M. Kit. David Holzman’s Diary: A Screenplay by L. M. Kit Carson, from
a Film by Jim McBride. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1970.
Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986.
Comolli, Jean-Louis. “Historical Fiction: A Body Too Much.” Screen 19.2 (Sum-
mer 1978).
Eitzen, Dirk. “When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Recep-
tion.” Cinema Journal 35.1 (Fall 1995).
Fuentes, Marlon. “Extracts from an Imaginary Interview: Questions and
34 chapter one

Answers about Bontoc Eulogy.” In F is for Phony: Fake Documentaries and

Truth’s Undoing, ed. Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner. Minneapolis: Uni-
versity of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Gardner, Robert. The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker. New York:
Other Press, 2006.
Gitlin, Todd. “Hill Street Blues: Make it Look ‘Messy.’” In Inside Prime Time. New
York: Pantheon Books, 1983.
Godard, Jean-Luc. Godard on Godard. Ed. Jean Narboni and Tom Milne. New
York: Viking, 1972.
Gunning, Tom. “Before Documentary: Early Nonfiction Films and the ‘View’
Aesthetic.” In Uncharted Territory: Essays on Early Nonfiction Film, ed.
Daan Hertogs and Nico de Klerk. Amsterdam: Stichting Nederlands
Filmmuseum, 1997.
Juhasz, Alexandra. AIDS TV: Identity, Community, and Alternative Video. Dur-
ham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995.
Juhasz, Alexandra, and Jesse Lerner, eds. F Is for Phony: Fake Documentaries and
Truth’s Undoing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Levin, G. Roy. Documentary Explorations: Fifteen Interviews with Filmmakers.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. New York: Collier,
1960.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2001.
Nichols, Bill. Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and
Other Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
———. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991.
———. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2001.
———. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary,
2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005.
Peirce, Charles Sanders. “Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs.” In Philosophi-
cal Writings, ed. Justus Buchler. New York: Dover, 1955.
Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997.
———. “What a Documentary Is, After All.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criti-
cism 63.2 (Spring 2005).
 Authenticity 35

Rony, Fatimah Tobing. The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethnographic Spectacle.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.
Rosenthal, Alan. “The War Game: An Interview with Peter Watkins.” In New
Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Ruby, Jay. “The Ethics of Image Making.” In New Challenges for Documentary,
2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005.
Sherwin, Richard K. When Law Goes Pop: The Vanishing Line Between Law and
Popular Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000.
Sobchack, Vivian. “Inscribing Ethical Space: Ten Propositions on Death, Repre-
sentations, and Documentary.” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 9.4 (1984).
Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: Anchor Books, 1977.
———. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2004.
Vogel, Amos. “Grim Death.” Film Comment 16.2 (March-April 1980).
Watkins, Peter. “Watkins Discusses His Suppressed Nuclear Film, THE WAR
GAME, with James Blue and Michael Gill.” Film Comment 3.4 (1965).
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
———. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. London: British Film Institute,
2000.
 2
Evidence

D ocumentary films and videos do not simply represent sociohisto-

rical experience; they have to convince us that what we see on
screen did happen. How do they do this? What kinds of evidence do they use
to persuade us to accept them as truthful and accurate? Why do we believe this
evidence? These are easy and important questions to pose but tough ones to
answer.
Jehane Noujaim’s 2004 documentary Control Room offers a powerful attempt
to engage these questions. It looks at the way the American-led invasion of Iraq
was represented by al-Jazeera, the Qatar-based satellite channel. The war itself
serves as the underlying context of the documentary. But the real subject of the
film is the media battle that was fought alongside the military conflict. In March
2003, just before the war started, the filmmakers began following television re-
porters and producers from al-Jazeera. As the military campaign unfolds on the
screen, we see the journalists working and watch their reactions to the bombing
of Iraq. Control Room makes us think about the way the news media handle infor-
mation, how evidence is used by media producers, and what consequences their
choices may have. It asks us to compare factual information presented by the Arab
news channel with material gathered by Western TV channels. Watching the film,
we realize that “evidence” of the same event can have significantly different mean-
ings when seen from dissimilar sides of the political spectrum.
Noujaim’s documentary, too, involves an effort to gather and present evidence,
36
 Evidence 37

and it, too, uses that evidence to support a particular point of view, a more
positive opinion of al-Jazeera than Western audiences might have expected
in 2004.
Control Room questions managers, producers, and reporters (including in-
depth interviews with senior producer Samir Khader and correspondent Has-
san Ibrahim) about what al-Jazeera’s journalistic goals are. We also see and hear
correspondents from major U.S. news outlets, a member of the U.S. State De-
partment, and even a U.S. marine spokesperson expressing respect for al-Jazeera.
But most importantly, we see and hear some of al-Jazeera’s footage from the war,
much of which contradicts the information we get from press conferences with
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and General Vincent Brooks. For in-
stance, Noujaim shows us images of hospitalized bloodied children inserted in
the middle of a speech in which Rumsfeld states that “al-Jazeera has a pattern of
playing propaganda over and over and over again. . . . When there is a bomb that
goes down, they grab some children and women and pretend that the bomb hit
women and children. . . . We are dealing with people who are perfectly willing to
lie to the world to attempt to further their case.” The sequence asks us to question
what we may have come to take for granted: the information conveyed by top
U.S. officials in charge of the war. It also asks us to question why some evidence
does not appear in the U.S. media, and if that omission is not taking a position on
the war.
Some of the most potent evidence is the photographic substantiation of an
event that the filmmakers could not have anticipated. The morning of April 8, U.S.
missiles fired on the Baghdad office of al-Jazeera, killing a correspondent, Tarek
Ayyoub, on the rooftop of the building. We hear Samir Khader explaining that he
had received a call from Baghdad saying that there was air fire near their office.
Next we see Ayyoub with a helmet on his head, dressed in a bulletproof vest, hud-
dled by the sandbagged perimeter of the roof. Soon we hear and see a plane flying
nose down, in attack formation, followed by missiles falling from the fuselage into
the sky. A CNN correspondent reports on the day’s events: the strike against al-
Jazeera, one against Abu Dhabi Television, and a shot fired at the Palestine Hotel
where many journalists were housed. Later that day, at a press conference, we hear
Ayyoub’s wife via telephone, emotionally telling the audience, “My husband died
trying to bring the truth to the world,” entreating them to give an honest account
of the incident. And we see the tears of the journalists assembled.
Whether they present a well-reasoned argument or offer enduring complexities
over which to puzzle, all documentaries take “facts” or “actuality” and weave them
into a coherent whole. The difference between a point of view that is questionable
38 chapter two

or tendentious and one that is credibly documented is frequently the effectiveness

of the available evidence and the way it is presented to the audience. Evidence, as
we see in this chapter, helps authenticate the reality represented. If films such as
Control Room are able to exert substantial influence, it is because they garner per-
suasive evidence and arrange it in a convincing manner.
As Aristotle taught us, the work of persuasion involves both the art of rhetori-
cal inventiveness and the use of resources that are “there at the outset,” such as
witnesses, written records, and so on (Rhetoric 7). Evidence gives credibility to
a particular argument or assertion. It offers ground for belief. Fingerprints, for
example, can be used as evidence of someone’s identity. A signed contract might
serve as proof that a commercial transaction was agreed upon. And love letters
might be called upon to verify an illicit relationship. Each example seems mean-
ingful on its own. In practice, however, evidence hardly ever appears by itself and
never has much significance until it is used for a particular purpose.
This pursuit of credibility makes documentaries close to legal discourses. In
their most conventional forms, legal discourses assume that we can prove the truth-
fulness of a particular assertion based on the availability of credible evidence. Tra-
ditional documentaries follow a similar pattern. They seek out evidence to justify
their claims. But documentaries deal with evidence in ways that are both more ac-
cessible and more complicated. Think of how Jehane Noujaim took photographic
images of injured children and edited them into Donald Rumsfeld’s speech in or-
der to criticize his account of al-Jazeera’s “misinformation.” Through the power of
the visual record and the magic of editing, she opposed two conflicting realities
and managed to discredit what we hear from the secretary of defense.

Evidence and the Photographic Image

Every time we aim the camera, we are deciding that some things should and some
things should not appear in our picture. George Stoney and Jim Brown show how
political this can be in “Man of Aran”: How the Myth Was Made (1978), when they
turn their camera and disclose the lush, fertile fields owned by large landholders
that Robert Flaherty ignored in 1932–33 when he shot his romantic story of the
inhospitable, rocky terrain that the impoverished Aran islanders struggle to plant.
Even the footage from an apparently neutral and apolitical bank surveillance
camera, which we often think of as pure record or unadulterated truth, is taken
with a camera that is aimed in a certain direction and eliminates what is above,
below, and behind the camera.
 Evidence 39

Despite these limitations, however, the photographic image has been histori-
cally considered evidential. Already in the second half of the nineteenth century,
still photography was being used as a criminological tool. By the 1860s, the photo-
graphic documentation of prisoners was common. In the first ten years of collect-
ing, the Identification Bureau of the Paris police archived more than 100,000. The
Paris police also used photographs of communards at the barricades to make ar-
rests. Similarly, medical authorities at the time turned to photography as a means
of recording and documenting their patients. The Royal Society of Medicine in
Great Britain holds prints from an album entitled Portraits of Insanity taken by
Dr. Hugh Welch Diamond of some of the female inmates of his asylum in Surrey
in the mid-1850s. And the nineteenth-century French neurologist Jean-Martin
Charcot opened a Photographic Department at the Salpêtrière asylum in an ef-
fort to make manifest the hysteria in his patients. Photography was also used to
verify paranormal phenomena and to provide empirical evidence of a spiritual
realm—that which even the eye cannot see. As photography historian John Tagg
has demonstrated, this coupling of evidence and photography was not neutral or
given, but was bound up with the emergence of new disciplinary institutions and
new practices of surveillance and recordkeeping (5). The use of the camera as a
tool of precision and measurement was also related to the notion of the photo-
graphic image as a direct transcription of the real. The photograph, according to
photographer and critic Allan Sekula, “operated as the image of scientific truth”
(40). To reiterate the semiotic terms employed in the last chapter, the signifier
seemed so transparent that the referent appeared to present itself. Elements of
production such as framing were frequently discussed as professional procedures
and as measures taken to guarantee accuracy.
We mention these nineteenth-century uses of the camera not as technological
precursors to cinema but as an introduction to the idea of the photographic im-
age as proof. Photos functioned as tools to analytically record life and sources of
visual evidence. When film and video were introduced as recording devices, this
role was enhanced by the incorporation of movement and sound to the visual
record. Those early uses of photographic images, however, already anticipated our
faith in documentary evidence. In fact, this fascination with the ability to photo-
graphically record events occurring over time permeates most of the history of
nonfiction film and video. The footage of Rodney King’s beating at the hands
of Los Angeles policemen in 1991 is a good example. And soon after, the Black
Planet Productions collective amassed many more amateur videos of police bru-
tality around the country.
At issue, however, is not simply the reliability of the film or video but, as we
40 chapter two

suggested earlier, their status as representations. We all know that photographs

and videos can be retouched or digitally processed to make a double chin disap-
pear, to hide an embarrassing detail from a particular scene, or to make the sky in
Los Angeles appear blue. We also know that computer-generated images are now
increasingly common in documentaries. “The camera’s capacity to capture the
real [has not been] erased,” but contemporary image-making technologies require
“a far greater sophistication on the part of the audience” (Winston 9). This, how-
ever, is not new. Manipulating photographs in order to make a point was already a
familiar practice in the nineteenth century. And it continues. O. J. Simpson’s mug
shot was darkened on the cover of a national magazine. More modern technology
has made it possible to digitally suture someone else’s lips into the only known
film footage of Hank Williams singing so that he appears to be crooning “Tears in
My Beer” instead of “Hey, Good Looking” (Winston 8). We know that we can’t
always trust what we see and hear, and, in order to establish the credibility of a
documentary, we cannot “rely solely,” in Brian Winston’s words, “on some innate
quality of the image” (9). That’s why it is important to understand the different
types of evidence available to documentarians, the ways film and video makers
use evidence in their documentaries, and the ways viewers process the evidence
so that they feel that they are justified in believing it.

Uses of Evidence

As we saw in Control Room, when it appears in a documentary, evidence has al-

ready been interpreted by the documentarian and arranged in a particular way;
its impact is usually the result of this kind of arrangement. In other words, the
relevance of even the most established facts may vary with the use they are put to.
It is how evidence is used in the flow of information that gives it cogency.
Let’s look briefly at Night and Fog/Nuit et brouillard (Alain Resnais, 1955). The
film alternates black and white archival photographs and some moving images of
World War II Nazi extermination camps with color tracking shots of the camps
in the present day, images of emptiness and loneliness, images of almost lyrical
beauty. Throughout the film, this juxtaposition of archival footage and contem-
porary shots helps give meaning to the evidential material by suggesting that we
compare the past with the present, or by inviting us to examine the present in
light of historical events. Night and Fog uses a voiceover commentary that also
contributes to this dialogue between past and present. The commentary, written
by poet Jean Cayrol, himself a survivor of the camps, interrogates the beauty of the
 Evidence 41

color footage and questions if we have learned anything from those death camps.
Written after the revelations of French use of torture during the Algerian war for
independence, the film’s commentary ends in the present tense: “Nine million
dead haunt this landscape. . . . Who
among us is on the lookout from this
strange tower to warn of new execu-
tioners. . . . We who want to believe
it happened but once, in one country;
we who refuse to look around us; we
who do not hear the endless cry.” The
voiceover commentary and the very
structure of the film, the alternation
of past with present, the alternation
of evidence of unspeakable devasta-
tion with evidence of material re-
mains, asks viewers to question how 2.1. “Then who is responsible?” From Night and Fog/Nuit et brouillard
they should relate to contemporary (Alain Resnais, 1955).
quandaries. When we ask ourselves
how we know what we know, we need to take into account those sounds and im-
ages. It is not only the commentary that persuades and engages us, but also the
way the evidence is structured in the film.
Returning to the bank surveillance camera, what do we make of this raw foot-
age? It takes on meaning when it becomes part of a story, part of an interpretation,
or part of an argument. But is the story about inadequate security? Or robbery
as the last resort of the downtrodden? Even the most untainted footage can be
used for different scenarios, as we know from the video of Rodney King’s beating
by members of the Los Angeles Police Department. Ironically, “incontrovertible”
evidence can be inconclusive. It can be used to tell many different stories. Only
rarely is archival footage seen by itself, as the prosaic example of the bank sur-
veillance camera or the more notorious footage of President John F. Kennedy’s
assassination indicates. Still, here as well, the archival evidence continues to call
for interpretation; it asks for a “narrative” that will help us make sense of what we
see and hear.
This is what the makers of Point of Order (1963) had in mind when they put
together their documentary about the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Drawing
from 188 hours of footage from the CBS coverage of the events, Emile De Anto-
nio and Daniel Talbot compiled a ninety-seven-minute film that portrays one of
the most controversial political figures in American history, Joseph McCarthy,
42 chapter two

the junior U.S. senator from Wisconsin. The hearings, which were broadcast
live from April to June of 1954, involved charges that the senator had sought
privileges for one of his assistants, Private G. David Schine. McCarthy counter-
attacked, saying that his accusers were trying to prevent investigation of commu-
nist infiltration in the U.S. Army. Point of Order is made up entirely of this archival
material. But the filmmakers arranged the footage in a specific way, thus inviting
us to interpret it from their perspective. While the film does give us an overall
idea of what the hearings were about, it ends up privileging the dramatic story of
McCarthy’s fall, serving as an indictment of the senator and the political views he
embraced. With no voiceover commentary—except for a brief initial introduc-
tion over black leader—Point of Order goes beyond the original footage, adding
a particular slant to events that were well known at the time and demanding that
we make a clear distinction between the 1954 television kinescopes and the 1963
documentary.
Some other films combine existing footage with material shot specifically for
the documentary, creating a sort of “conversation” between various kinds of evi-
dence. They juxtapose archival footage to witness testimonies, for example, and
allow us to weigh one type of evidence against the other. Or they rely on differ-
ent media: photographs, sound recordings, newspaper clippings, or the like. In
these examples, too, the use of factual material exists in conjunction with an effort
to present evidence in a compelling manner. We explore the way documentaries
arrange evidence to build up arguments in chapter 5. For now, we look at how
diverse types of evidence may affect our documentary experiences.

Different Types of Evidence

One inspiring example of the way different kinds of evidence can be used in docu-
mentary cinema is The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980), a
film about women’s experiences in the workforce during World War II. In this film,
the testimony of five women who worked in war industries is interwoven with the
“facts” in wartime government newsreels and shorts. Two types of evidence are
used here: firsthand testimony of those who worked in the defense plants and
archival footage compiled by the filmmaker. As they appear in the documentary,
these different materials contradict each other. The testimonies of the women in-
terviewed do not correspond, in content or style of delivery, with the official ver-
sion of their story presented in the newsreels and shorts. Instead, their memories
lead us into a world that seems to have been overlooked or deliberately omitted.
 Evidence 43

Connie Field’s film uses this discrepancy in order to validate a history that had
until then received scant or insufficient attention.
In the United States, the late 1960s and 1970s were marked by a serious scru-
tiny of the assumptions and methods of mainstream history writing, and a re-
evaluation of the contributions of marginalized peoples to history. There was a
general move among progressives to rethink the way that history had been written
and understood and to reconsider the values and criteria that have gone into it.
This reevaluation was influenced by the Black Power and the Women’s Liberation
movements. One area of focus was the acknowledgment that blacks and women
have been makers of history even though they had been left out of standardized
historical narratives.
In order to explore experience in all its diversity and complexity, these libera-
tion movements set out to uncover, identify, and interpret the reality missing
from the historical record. By documenting the lives of those omitted or over-
looked in most accounts of the past, they brought unseen experiences out of the
shadows and rendered significant what had hitherto been neglected. One of the
means used was oral histories of “ordinary” people—people who have not gener-
ally been thought of as movers and shakers. These experiences produced a wealth
of new evidence previously ignored and drew attention to dimensions of life and
activities usually deemed unworthy of mention.
In The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, common experiences of working-class
women are recognized as evidence and given credibility because, once contrasted
to the slick and bombastic newsreels, they provide an alternative account of the
past. As heard through the film’s interviews, these experiences constitute the bed-
rock of data on which our understanding of the subject is built. That these wit-
nesses are women, and three of the five are African American women, suggests
that history (or her/story) can contain multiple perspectives, indeed differing
perspectives.
Personal history interviews can be valuable not only because they tell us about
events that do not usually get into written records but also because they tell us
of the meanings that those events have to the people who recount them. Inter-
views looking back on people’s lives can explore unknown events or new aspects
of known events. But perhaps even more important, they are vital sources of the
speaker’s subjective feelings, beliefs, and values. Such interviews can reveal not
just what people did but what they wanted to do, what they believed they were
doing, what they feel about having done it. As historian Alessandro Portelli has
pointed out, subjectivity is as much a part of history as the more visible facts
(100). What someone believes or believes happened, and what they felt about
44 chapter two

it, are indeed important. They may tell us quite a bit about imagination, needs,
hopes, and aspirations. “Errors” can be very revealing. Faulty memory may tell
us how people wished they had lived their lives. And self-promotion may tell us a
great deal about one’s desires.
Since it is inevitable that we know something and describe it through our own
system of feelings, beliefs, and values, such interviews should be seen as evidence
of those feelings, beliefs, and values—as well as a means of opening new possibili-
ties for exploring how individuals connect with larger-scale historical processes.
If we simply see memory as an impressionistic source that needs to be confirmed
by scholars and independent sources, we neglect to recognize how indispensable
the evidence of memory is, as historian Michael Frisch points out, for observ-
ing those pesky moral, political, and emotional questions of contemporary con-
sciousness that complicate the study of history.
Two distinct, albeit related, issues come to mind when we look at the way The
Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter treats the women’s testimonies. The first has to
do with the fact that documentarians might—and often do—privilege one type
of evidence over others. Some materials seem more worthy of attention and are
therefore called upon to give us a sense of the way things “really” are. In the case
of Rosie the Riveter, it is the recounting of firsthand experience that makes the
film believable. The other issue relates to the way the various pieces of evidence
“talk” to each other, how they are situated within the overall design of the docu-
mentary. Oftentimes, it is this specific arrangement that determines what kind of
evidence should be considered relevant and worthy of attention. The testimonies
in the film stand out precisely because they are made to contradict the archival
footage.
“Facts” are all around us all the time. Faced with the chaos of information,
someone must decide that a person’s memory of an event or some aspect of so-
ciohistorical reality might be relevant to an argument or to a story and declare it
evidence. Everything that happens is not equally worthy of being included in a
particular story. When we declare some experiences “evidence,” others, by impli-
cation, are deemed “irrelevant.” Facts become evidence in response to particular
questions or as needed by a particular argument or mode of storytelling. As Bill
Nichols explains, facts, events, and testimony convert to evidence when taken up
by the documentary’s interpretive discourses (“The Question of Evidence” 31).
This attitude toward facts and history sees the past—or even the present—as
a series of somewhat random occurrences that are given a retroactive coherence
by the history writer, documentarian, or storyteller. Some facts are presented and
 Evidence 45

others are withheld. And the decisions about what to include are calculated and
tactical. Facts may seem to have a natural organization once the documentary
maker has chosen a subject and a story. But it is important to remember that it is
the documentarian’s job to fashion that organization.
For a film that puts so much emphasis on the way evidence is used in non-
fictional representations, however, Rosie the Riveter says remarkably little about
evidence itself and its relationship with lived reality. Instead, it seems content to
substitute one type of evidential material for another. As a polemical thesis, The
Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter respects archival documents as period “facts,”
even while they are contradicted by the more multifaceted evidence of women’s
experience. The film offers a new version of “Rosie,” a new truth, contrary to the
one suggested in the wartime propaganda. (It is implied, of course, that this new
Rosie is representative of others.) The film seems to assume that the facts of ex-
perience are logically self-evident and speak for themselves. But do they? Or do
they speak through the individual subjectivities of the women interviewed and
then, ultimately, through the eyes, ears, and opinions of Connie Field, director-
producer-coeditor? It is she who makes the experience accessible to all—and it
is she who determines the salience of certain things and not others. As she put it
in a symposium, “Although Rosie was not scripted, it was carefully planned before
shooting. I outlined the history, all the issues. The women I had chosen for the
film—five of them—I had interviewed quite extensively before filming, and then,
in filming, I asked specific questions which would elicit certain stories I knew
they could talk about” (in Zheutlin 157).
Other films go beyond the revisionist impulse that motivates Field’s project,
offering a more radical challenge to normative history and an even greater en-
largement of the picture. Documentaries such as The Ties That Bind (Su Friedrich,
1984), Handsworth Songs ( John Akomfrah, 1986), and Delirium (Mindy Faber,
1993), discussed below, presume that history can contain irreconcilable perspec-
tives, none of which is complete or completely “true.” They make us reflect not
only on the legitimacy of documentary evidence but also on the way cinema—
and other forms of nonfictional representation—uses memory and experience to
create personal and historical narratives. After all, just as framing always involves
excluding, remembering also always involves forgetfulness.
Su Friedrich’s The Ties That Bind (1984) treats evidence both as partial (in both
senses of the word partial) and contingent. In this film Friedrich interviews her
mother about her life in Germany during the rise of Hitler, during World War II,
during the American occupation after the war, and, later, after settling in the
 46 chapter two

United States, participating in antiwar protests and demonstrations. Importantly,

she not only asks her mother questions but also responds and reacts. Rather than
seeming detached and supposedly impartial, the filmmaker is clearly part of the
picture—as the daughter of the woman who tells her history, as someone who in-
stigates the stories that her mother tells, as the person who ponders, assesses, and
appraises the evidence (her mother’s testimony), and as the person responsible
for choosing the images, arranging them, and combining them with the sounds.
The interdependence of the filmmaker and her subject, on the one hand, and the
act of interpretation, on the other, are palpable. In fact, the hand of interpretation
is evident throughout the documentary (the filmmaker’s hand, literally, as a fre-
quent image in the film, and figuratively, as the person responsible for making the
film), so we cannot ignore Friedrich’s role as interpreter of, and as contributor to,
her mother’s story.
Testimony is always conditioned by circumstances: personal history and ma-
terial life, for instance, and the organization of power and control over the social
relations in the filmmaking process. In The Ties That Bind, Su Friedrich exposes
many of those conditions by including moments that other filmmakers might
have omitted. At one point in the film, we hear the mother sobbing over black
leader, after discussing the mistreatment
of old people during the occupation and
imagining what would have happened
to her parents had they still been alive.
At another, she is playing the piano and
chides her daughter for recording her
music. Friedrich also uses intertitles
scratched into the film’s emulsion to tell
us about her own motivations, to pose
questions for her mother to answer, and
to convey her incredulity. Appearing
slowly, word by word, as if to mimic her
2.2. Su Friedrich comments on her mother’s testimony in The Ties thought process, these titles talk back
That Bind (Su Friedrich, 1984).
to the testimony, weighing and evaluat-
ing it, even questioning its veracity. We
hear, for example, her mother’s voice insisting, over images of barbed wire and
concentration camps: “It was the main leaders of the countries that knew. But the
people did not know. And I will say this to the end of my day, we did not know the
Jews were gassed or killed. They were put into concentration camps; that is all
 Evidence 47

we knew.” Then a title asks: “So you did know about the camps?” The voice con-
tinues: “We, our family, knew of one camp and that was Dachau. And at Dachau,
according to the investigation, only at the very end of the war were there killings.”
The titles return with vehemence, in capitals and larger than usual: “NO.” Then
they read: “from 1933 to 1945, 30,000 people were either shot, killed in medical
experiments, or worked to death.” The image that follows is the most convention-
ally framed shot in the film, a five-second portrait of her mother from the waist
up, a two-thirds profile leaning on her fist in silence.
By allowing her mother to tell her story from her memories (and by including
footage of dubious accuracy), The Ties That Bind acknowledges recollections as
subjective and sees memories, like values and beliefs, as conditioned by circum-
stances, points of view, and ways of thinking. That is, testimony provides data for
analysis, not a simple conclusion. The point is not that her mother’s life is fraught
with ambiguities and contradictions, but the evidence of her life is. The openness
of this film’s representation and the titles invite us to reappraise what that evidence
entails in terms of how the witness has experienced her reality, psychically as well
as politically. The film doesn’t promise completeness—it doesn’t smooth over in-
consistency, incoherences, or loose ends. The Ties That Bind never wraps up.
Compared to a film like The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, Friedrich’s docu-
mentary seems rather unconventional. It treats witness testimony with a wariness
that is absent from Connie Field’s work, revealing the filmmaker’s own interven-
tion in the process through which evidence is solicited, gathered, and made avail-
able to the audience. Field’s documentary, by contrast, allows us no insight into
this process. Connie Field auditioned seven hundred Rosies over the phone. Two
hundred were audiotaped in person, thirty-five were videotaped, and only five
were selected to appear in the film. The filmmaker also edited and abridged the
interviews according to her needs. Those that she selected had stories that ex-
pressed Field’s point of view about what was typical of the times (Zheutlin 160).
This does not mean that Field’s project is less worthy than Friedrich’s—or that
the truth claims in Rosie the Riveter are less legitimate. Given the choice between
presenting straightforward testimonies and questioning their motivations on the
screen, most filmmakers would probably opt for the former. What The Ties That
Bind offers us, though, is a chance to look beyond the referential value of the ma-
terial presented on the screen. We have access not only to the mother’s memories
but also to the way the filmmaker approached the material, from framing to edit-
ing. Throughout the film, we learn something about the filmmaking process itself
and, by extension, about documentary cinema in general.
48 chapter two

Evidence as Subject Matter

Several documentaries made in the last three decades take a similarly self-critical
approach to the way evidence is used by nonfiction film and video makers, histo-
rians, reporters, and even lawyers. While their main subject might be external to
the process of representation—racial disturbances, for example—the problems
they examine often involve the authenticity of the evidential material itself. What
types of evidence should be considered acceptable in a documentary film or
video? What are the consequences of including or omitting a particular piece of
evidence? And what interests do these choices serve? These questions are familiar
to most, if not all, documentary makers, but we do not necessarily expect to see
them included in the films themselves. When this happens, evidence becomes a
documentary subject in its own right, a topic worthy of attention.
Several of these documentaries expose what they see as fraudulent or biased
interpretations of evidential material. Some suggest that the management of in-
formation is a privilege of government and corporate public relations and are
happy to counter the “official evidence” with independent judgments. Others ac-
knowledge the impossibility of so-called objective reporting to get at anything
close to the truth. It is not simply that documentary makers are driven by their
own ideology; they often feel that the longer form gives them leeway to analyze,
explain, and put things into contexts, helping to guide viewers through the tide
of information.
Handsworth Songs (1986), a British documentary by the Black Audio Film
Collective, exemplifies this approach to nonfiction filmmaking by contrasting
different types of evidential material and interrogating the traditional goals of
nonfictional representation. While the underlying theme in the film is the 1985
racial disturbances in Handsworth, Birmingham, Handsworth Songs also makes
us think about the way the media handle information, what they do with exist-
ing evidence, and what consequences their choices may have. More interestingly,
even though the film uses criticism of mainstream journalism as a structuring de-
vice, it does not merely present a new version of the racial disturbances. Rather,
Handsworth Songs “challenge[s] the assumption that you can ever tell it like it is,”
as director John Akomfrah put it (Fusco, “An Interview with Black Audio Film
Collective” 50–53). Instead of “correcting” television news reports or filling in
the holes they willingly leave empty, Handsworth Songs took as its agenda “to re-
open the questions.”
Regardless of the fact that more white people than blacks were arrested in ear-
lier unrest, a popular image grew of a black threat with the black male youth as
 Evidence 49

the archetypal instigator. By the time of the 1985 disturbances in Handsworth,

there was an already established, limited aural and visual vocabulary about blacks
in Britain—what Coco Fusco calls a “riot iconography.” And the image of the an-
tagonisms between black male youth and the police was a consistent and primary
factor in the formation of this riot iconography (“A Black Avant-Garde” 10–18).
Handsworth Songs undercuts this iconography and unseats the authenticity of
this evidence by bringing forward the experiences of black families and black
male youth. Besides images of the disturbances (TV footage shot from behind
the protection of police lines, as well as footage shot from the point of view of
those being born down upon by the troops), we are introduced to evidence of
happier times: wedding photos, archival footage of interracial dances, of settlers
arriving on ships, and of toddlers in multiracial childcare. But the film presents
this new evidence without direct explanation, not as if it were monolithic, time-
less, unitary, or fixed evidence but as part of a dialogue, a lyrical, intimate struggle
between different voices.
The contrast between these different types of evidential material is rendered
obvious at various moments in the film. An old newsreel of a labor unionist as-
suring viewers that West Indian workers want social integration is followed by an
overturned car on fire. Footage from the 1950s of Luther Thomas, a bus driver
trainee, kissing his wife goodbye is juxtaposed to a traveling shot of the destruc-
tion of shops and businesses. And the death of an Afro-Caribbean woman (de-
scribed in a radio interview with her daughter over an image of a cold, gray hous-
ing project) as a result of a police raid on her home precedes an excerpt from
a vintage documentary showing fresh-faced young women at work in a factory
and a folk song about fine young women on the sound track. In each of these
examples, the “new” evidence coexists and competes with the images of violence,
although it never really disputes the fact of the disturbances.
This thought-provoking use of evidential material also differs from the view
of colonial history proposed by accredited sources. Handsworth Songs shows,
for instance, an excerpt from an unadorned address by Prime Minister Margaret
Thatcher, sitting calmly in a wing chair, stating, “People are really rather afraid that
this country might be rather swamped by people of a different culture. And you
know, the British character has done so much for democracy, for law, and done so
much throughout the world. But if there is any fear that it might be swamped, peo-
ple are going to react and be rather hostile. . . . The moment the minority threatens
to become a big one, people get frightened.” Thatcher’s statement seems shock-
ing not solely because of its moral shallowness but also because it lacks credibil-
ity. As the history of the riots shows, the complex reality of British society in the
50 chapter two

1980s cannot be subsumed under the idea of a cultural threat to what she calls the
“British character.” Thatcher’s comments reflect the blind patriotism of a nation
besieged and reinforce long established prejudices against cultural diversity, the
same prejudices that are discredited by the documentary’s use of different types
of evidential material. Not accidentally, Handsworth Songs follows the television
address with slowed down footage of nearly a dozen police chasing, capturing,
and subduing a lone dreadlocked young man.
Handsworth Songs confronts the problems of trying to re-present the complex
and sometimes contradictory meanings and experiences of diaspora culture and
identity—the culture and identity of peoples far from their homeland, often liv-
ing in an environment that no longer welcomes them. It is both a reflection on
racial disturbances and an indictment of the inadequacy of television news and
other dominant institutions to represent racial violence. By exposing evidence as
conditional and often precariously constructed, the film renders doubtful as well
the values that keep the mainstream media in power as the provider of informa-
tion. If the evidence on television aims toward definitive understandings of the
events, the evidence in Handsworth Songs destabilizes not only those understand-
ings but also what “Britishness” meant as a national and cultural identity in the
mid-1980s.
In Handsworth Songs, there is some archival footage of Lord Kitchener, the
calypso king, singing “London Is the Place for Me” to reporters, from the ship’s
deck upon his arrival in England. As it is used in Handsworth Songs, this sequence
seems clearly ironic. After seeing so much violence, it is not possible to take this
footage at face value. The same footage is used in an American film celebrating
calypso, One Hand Don’t Clap (Kavery Dutta, 1989). In this case, though, the
meaning and effects of the evidential material are without irony. In One Hand
Don’t Clap, the footage follows an interview with Lord Kitchener talking about
how he grew to enjoy London and became accustomed to the cold. There is not a
hint of either hostility or thwarted dreams. The same footage thus operates as evi-
dence in two separate films, but is employed for different purposes and takes on
different meanings in each case. The dissonance between the said and the unsaid
invites skepticism in Handsworth Songs. In One Hand Don’t Clap, the context and
consequences of the choice of evidence, its social and political aims, do not invite
the same epistemological dialogue with the viewer. The footage speaks with little
ambiguity.
Documentaries that examine the nature and function of evidence do more
than simply represent a particular aspect of the sociohistorical world. They serve
as critical texts as well. Like Handsworth Songs, they offer insight into problems
 Evidence 51

that are commonly discussed by film critics but not necessarily addressed by doc-
umentary filmmakers. In their own way, they contribute to debates that find reso-
nance in books like the one you are reading. At their most ambitious, these films
tend to implicate their own strategies of representation in their critique of the
documentary process, drawing attention to their particular interests and expos-
ing the nature of their intervention in the world of lived experience. Rather than
simply criticize someone else’s work, the filmmakers here show what lies behind
their efforts to gather and present evidence in a coherent and persuasive manner.

Evidence and Reflexivity

Film scholars have used the adjective reflexive to characterize this type of docu-
mentary, suggesting that the finished work reflects upon its own “constructedness.”
A reflexive documentary lets us know how it was made and what was involved
in its making, turning the process by which the documentary produces meaning
into part of the film. While the “outside world” continues to be a relevant subject,
the way that subject is transposed to the screen can be just as important. Reflexive
documentaries trouble the relationship between the film and what it represents,
rendering opaque what other works might have tried to present as transparent.
Since much of the credibility of nonfiction films depends on the authority of their
evidential sources, these documentaries can draw considerable attention to the
way evidence is made available to the audience.
At the center of most reflexive documentaries is thus the awareness, fore-
grounded in the work itself, that nonfictional representations are artificial con-
structs, not natural or unchangeable revelations. They are the result of a laborious
process that involves particular material and technological conditions, institu-
tional obligations, and specific interests. Any one of these factors can potentially
determine the way evidence is gathered and presented to the audience, or influ-
ence the decision to omit or reveal a particular piece of information. While other
films might suppress knowledge of this artificial quality, providing access only to
a finished product that conceals its history, reflexive documentaries invite us to
look at this process from the inside. Perhaps for this reason, reflexive documen-
taries have earned the reputation of being intellectually demanding and mistrust-
ful of nonfictional representation in general. Seen from a different perspective,
though, documentaries that are self-referential can also be compelling, thought-
ful, and stimulating.
This is the case with Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988), which can be
 52 chapter two

described as a reflexive documentary precisely because of the way it deals with its
evidential material. While the filmmaker himself is never present on the screen—
and the filmmaking process remains hidden “backstage”—the struggle over the
legitimacy of evidentiary sources is a central topic in the film. The Thin Blue Line
exposes a series of faults in the trial of Randall Adams, a man convicted of mur-
dering a Dallas police officer in November 1976, roughly one decade before the
shooting of the documentary. Much of the film revolves around the effort to show
the uncertainty of the evidence that put Adams on death row—the doubtful tes-
timonies by witnesses, the questionable interests of the prosecution, and so on.
Parallel to this effort is Morris’s reflexive approach to his own film: how it deals
with conflicting evidence, what it can do to denounce the oversights in Adams’s
trial, and how it can represent an event that took place years earlier. The Thin Blue
Line combines a critique of the judicial system with an assessment of the difficul-
ties and impasses that surround the documentary itself.
Morris’s task seems particularly interesting because there was no visual record
of the crime and only the most conventional secondary material (mug shots,
newspaper articles, road signs, maps, court drawings). Nor were there reliable
witnesses. Adams’s accuser, a young man named David Harris, who was allegedly
in the car with Adams at the moment of the shooting, was himself involved in a
series of crimes and was incarcerated at the time the film was made. Other wit-
nesses failed to provide a convincing account of the event or, even worse, offered
conflicting or contradictory testimonies. Morris illustrates the various accounts
of the murder with reenactments that correspond to what the witnesses claimed
to have seen. But because the testimonies do not necessarily coincide with each
other, we end up watching different versions of the same event, the discrepancies
underscoring the uncertainty of the case. Additionally, the highly stylized reen-
actments, drenched in cold film-noirish light and accompanied by Philip Glass’s
languid, repetitive score, detract
attention from the crime, as if to
suggest that everything had been re-
duced to images that could no lon-
ger point toward any consequential
revelation.
To our surprise, however, The Thin
Blue Line does offer a final statement
about the Randall Adams case. At
the end of the film, Morris rewards
2.3. One of the final shots in The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988). our thirst for credible evidence by
 Evidence 53

disclosing a piece of information that had been withheld until then. The closing
shots of The Thin Blue Line show a tape recorder playing a confession in which
Harris, the accuser, all but admits that he, not Adams, committed the crime. First
we hear him say that he is sure Adams was innocent. When the filmmaker asks
him how he can be sure, Harris replies: “‘Cause I’m the one that knows.” Lacking
visual material to go with the confession, Morris leaves the camera on the tape
recorder, cutting to closer shots of the tape as Harris reveals his secret. The last
image in the sequence is an extreme close-up of the recorder, whose size on the
screen matches the importance of Harris’s declaration.
As film scholar Linda Williams has noted, the effort to establish some form
of truth while simultaneously interrogating the nature and use of documentary
evidence is probably the most provocative quality in Morris’s film (62–67).
By drawing attention to his own manipulative strategies—the stylized reenact-
ments and the juxtaposition of contradictory statements, for example—Morris
reminds us of the distance that separates the mediating process from the actual
event. Yet, despite this suspicion, he also seems to believe that documentary film-
makers have an obligation to confront lies and falsehood. And his efforts were
not without consequences. One year after the film opened, Adams was released
from jail.
Because they address problems that pertain to the filmmaking process, reflex-
ive documentaries like The Thin Blue Line often appear more honest, and there-
fore more credible, than many other films. As anthropologist Jay Ruby has ar-
gued, these works connect product, process, and producer, offering insight into
the hows and whys of nonfiction cinema. “Being reflexive means that the producer
deliberately and intentionally reveals to his audience the underlying epistemo-
logical assumptions that caused him to formulate a set of questions in a particular
way, to seek answers to those questions in a particular way, and finally to present
his findings in a particular way” (35). This equation between reflexivity and cred-
ibility, however, can also be misleading, not to say deceptive. Reflexive strategies
can tell us something about the making of a documentary and its intervention in
the world of lived experience. But there is no guarantee that they will provide a
reliable or satisfactory account of sociohistorical reality. Even if a documentary
does expose the choices and motivations that underlie the production process,
nothing can assure us that this reflexive impulse is not in itself an attempt to ma-
nipulate the audience. As our discussion of David Holzman’s Diary demonstrates,
there is no simple correlation between sincerity and reflexivity. Indeed, at the end
of the film, we find out that David Holzman’s Diary is not even a documentary.
Similarly, we should be cautious about rushing to equate reflexivity and
54 chapter two

progressive thinking. There is a venerable tradition that relates reflexive strate-

gies to liberal and leftist politics, as well as to avant-garde aesthetics. The idea in
this case is that by exposing the means through which documentary films—or
fictional representations, for that matter—reconstruct reality, we can encourage
a critical attitude on the part of the spectator. Reflexive strategies confront and
demystify the cinematic illusions that enable filmmakers, writers, and artists to
conceal their particular biases. But these assumptions, too, need to be assessed
carefully, or discussed on a case-by-case basis. Film scholar Robert Stam astutely
notes that reflexivity “does not come equipped with an a priori political valence”
(153). While some reflexive documentaries do call upon us to scrutinize the pro-
cess of representation, others might simply veer toward narcissism, obscuring
whatever progressive value they might have had. To stick with a familiar example,
it is this narcissistic attitude that is satirized in David Holzman’s Diary, in which
the filmmaker appears enamored both of himself and the filmmaking apparatus.
What reflexive documentaries can offer, however, is an opportunity for dia-
logue between filmmakers and their audiences. By foregrounding their “construct-
edness,” they allow the documentarian to address the spectator more directly and
make it easier for the audience to respond to the filmmaker’s provocations. “The
reflexive mode of representation gives emphasis to the encounter between the
filmmaker and the viewer” (Nichols, Representing Reality 60). A similar “conver-
sational dynamic” seems to exist between the filmmaking process and evidence
from lived experience. What stands out in a reflexive documentary is not the al-
leged autonomy that separates one from the other but their interdependence. The
act of representation is incorporated into the sociohistorical world and vice-versa.
Perhaps for this reason, reflexive strategies are more common in documentaries
that combine individual and collective experiences with personal and political
aspirations. By overlapping the filmmaking process with the world of lived experi-
ence, the documentarian personifies the act of filming with evidence from his or
her concrete situation.
Mindy Faber’s Delirium, a 1993 video that looks at the history of female hyste-
ria, is one of those works that use reflexive strategies to connect the personal and
the political. The documentary is an autobiographical piece in which the artist
looks at her mother’s psychiatric history and comments on how it affected her
own personality. However, as soon as we start watching Delirium, we realize that
the mother’s story is only part of Faber’s project. It serves as a catalyst to a more
ambitious discussion that also includes the experiences of other women and the
ways madness has been represented in both popular culture and medical literature.
 Evidence 55

Faber combines individual memory and collective history, asking us to look at her
mother’s troubles not only as a medical condition but as a social problem as well,
a consequence of female domesticity and passivity in a male-dominated society.
Importantly, she does this by interrogating the so-called evidence of mental ill-
ness. And by doing so, she also invites us to wonder about what is implied in tra-
ditional uses of evidential material by documentary film and video makers.
What allows Faber to entertain this ambitious project is her reflexive interven-
tion in the “scenes” recorded by the camera. Faber’s presence in the video is obvi-
ous from the very beginning. Already in the first minutes of Delirium, we hear her
voice, speaking in the first-person singular, over a set of family photographs that
evoke memories of a deceptively normal childhood. “Two years after I was born,”
she comments, “my mom had a traumatic nervous breakdown. I never really knew
exactly what had happened. But while I was growing up, it was always there.”
Slowly, Delirium lets us into a world of repressed anger, fear, and frustration, from
which the mother emerges as emotionally and mentally unstable. Rather than
reinforce this impression, though, Faber tries to undo received notions of female
hysteria. She insists, for example, that the mother’s illness was directly related to
the imprisonment of domestic life, the constraints that normally come with tradi-
tional gender roles: “Is hysteria truly mental illness, or is it simply a sane reaction
for having been born female and powerless in an oppressive world?” Faber’s argu-
ment lacks the kind of evidence that we associate with scientific discourse. Yet it
does not fail to convince us because we see it as growing out of lived reality. By
bringing together life and art, Faber ends up granting to the second the evidential
authority that we normally attribute to the first.
One of the video’s intriguing aspects is the use of movie excerpts, both medi-
cal footage and fictional material, as representations of women’s mental illness.
As noted at the outset of this chapter, female hysteria has been visually docu-
mented since the nineteenth century. Fictional cinema, too, has contributed
its share of images to our collective understanding of the subject. In her video,
Faber uses both types of material, suggesting a sort of incongruous—but highly
provocative—parallel between fictional and nonfictional representations. Like
the fictional selections, the nonfiction footage conforms to preconceived ideas
about women’s mental instability. These are the very ideas that Faber tries to dis-
pute in her work. Delirium never goes as far as saying that there are no differences
between fictional and nonfictional representations. But it makes us question the
motives behind the use of evidential material by Charcot in the nineteenth cen-
tury as well as by documentarians.
56 chapter two

At one point in the video, the mother, who has already discussed her own feel-
ings about her breakdown in a closely framed interview, voices historical explana-
tions of madness: “The uterus is the controlling organ of the female body” and
“They used to think that if a woman used her brain too much, she wouldn’t be
able to have babies.” Then, in a more ambiguous tone: “It’s true. It’s really true.”
Later, dressed up as a medical doctor in glasses, white coat, and tie, Patricia Jane
Faber speaks what certainly seems to be scripted dialogue, but what is probably
not untrue, questioning some of the motives behind Freud’s work.
This playfulness, of course, is not inconsequential. By using her mother as both
informant and actor, Faber is confounding our perceptions of what is true and
untrue. Along with offering an incisive critique of the way medical doctors in
general and psychiatrists in particular have used evidence to diagnose women’s
mental illnesses, Faber upsets the equation that links evidence to truth. The video
insists that much of what we attribute to evidential material is in fact a function
of the context and circumstances in which that material is produced and used.
Like Handsworth Songs, Delirium sees representation as a political arena and sees
evidence as a means of intervening in this particular arena.
Faber’s candidness about the questionable nature of evidence is never as clear
as it is in a sequence in which she exchanges roles with her mother, becoming
herself the subject of the camera’s curiosity. Toward the end of the video, we hear
Mrs. Faber contradict her daughter’s childhood memories of her mother’s ag-
gressive behavior: “Oh, Mindy, I don’t remember that!” Then Mrs. Faber asks for
the camera and points it toward her daughter, claiming for herself the authority
that we normally attribute to documentary film and video makers. As the camera
changes hands, Mindy looks a little uncomfortable, almost vulnerable, having be-
come the subject of someone else’s scrutinizing gaze. The sequence doesn’t really
undo the general argument presented in the video. Neither does it make Faber
look less credible than before. But it reminds us that documentarians, too, have to
struggle for their own truth.

Additional Filmography
Mondo Cane/It’s a Dog’s World (Paolo Cavara, Gualtiero Jacopetti, and Franco
Prosperi, 1962)
Union Maids ( James Klein, Miles Mogulescu, and Julia Reichert, 1976)
Selbe (Safi Faye, 1983)
The Good Fight: The Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish Civil War (Noel
Buckner, Mary Dore, and Sam Sills, 1984)
 Evidence 57

Work in Progress (Luis Valdovino, 1990)

I is a Long Memoried Woman (Frances-Anne Solomon, 1990)
Lumumba: Death of a Prophet (Raoul Peck, 1992)
Fixer: The Taking of Ajmal Naqshbandi (Ian Olds, 2009)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004.
Auguiste, Reece. “Handsworth Songs, Some Background Notes.” Framework 35
(1988).
Bates, Peter. “Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris.” Cineaste
17.1 (1989).
Corner, John. “Handsworth Songs.” In The Art of Record: A Critical Introduction
to Documentary. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy. “Documenting the Ineffable: Terror and Memory in
Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close
Readings of Documentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jean-
nette Sloniowski. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.
Frisch, Michael. A Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and
Public History. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990.
Fusco, Coco. “A Black Avant-Garde?” In Young British and Black. Buffalo, N.Y.:
Hallways/Contemporary Arts Center, 1988.
———. “An Interview with Black Audio Film Collective: John Akomfrah, Lina
Gopaul, Avril Johnson and Reece Auguiste.” In Young British and Black.
Buffalo, N.Y.: Hallways/Contemporary Arts Center, 1988.
Gilroy, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack. London: Hutchinson, 1987.
Hall, Stuart. “New Ethnicities.” In Black Film/British Cinema. London: Institute
of Contemporary Arts, 1988.
Mercer, Kobena. “Recoding Narratives of Race and Nation.” In Black Film/Brit-
ish Cinema. London: Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1988.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
———. “The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary
Film.” In Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, ed.
Thomas Austin and Wilma de Jong. Maidenhead: Open University Press,
2008.
Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1997.
58 chapter two

Portelli, Alessandro. “The Peculiarities of Oral History.” History Workshop 12

(Autumn 1981).
Ruby, Jay. “The Image Mirrored: Reflexivity and the Documentary Film.” In New
Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Sekula, Allan. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39 (1986).
Sheldon, James L., and Jock Reynolds. Motion and Document Sequence and Time:
Eadweard Muybridge and Contemporary American Photography. Andover,
Mass.: Addison Gallery of American Art, 1991.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2004.
Stam, Robert. Film Theory: An Introduction. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2000.
———. Reflexivity in Film and Literature: From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Tagg, John. The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories.
Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988.
Williams, Linda. “Mirrors Without Memories: Truth, History, and the New
Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan
Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University Press,
2005.
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Zheutlin, Barbara. “The Politics of Documentary: A Symposium.” In New Chal-
lenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
 3
Authority

D ocumentaries are authored. They also generally speak with author-

ity. And sometimes authorities give testimony on screen. Author-
ity thus forms part of the complicated ways by which documentaries represent
nonfictional reality. In fact, it is because documentaries speak to us with authority
that we trust what they have to say. But where does that authority come from?
And how can we recognize it?
It is easy to answer these questions when we look at documentaries that rely
on voiceover narrations or when the documentarian appears in the film. Author-
ity, in these cases, seems to emanate from a specific place; it can be associated
either with the disembodied voice of an unseen narrator or with a visible entity. In
Bowling for Columbine (2002), for example, Michael Moore does both things: he
adds his own voiceover narration to the images and appears on the screen, playing
the role of reporter and commentator. Moore’s voiceover narration complements
what we see and, every so often, provides information that is otherwise unavail-
able. Above all, it guides us through the film, helping us make sense of what we are
watching. His screen appearances extend this presence to the visual track, creat-
ing a sense of rapport between the spectator and the filmmaker. They also situate
the documentarian vis-à-vis the material recorded. We know where Moore stands
in relation to his subjects. And we know what he does and how he does it.
But not all documentaries use voiceover narrations. And even fewer include
the filmmaker’s screen appearance. The sources of authority, in these other cases,
59
60 chapter three

seem more diffuse. What allows the films to “speak” authoritatively is usually a
variety of things. As we saw in the previous chapter, evidence adds credibility to
a film’s truth claims, which in turn gives authority to the documentary. The same
thing can be said about expert interviews, although these are clearly different in
nature. Documentarians habitually call upon the knowledge of experts to back up
their claims, or they combine interviews with evidential sources. Even seemingly
unrelated material, such as fictional footage, can be used to illustrate or boost a
particular point. Michael Moore knows this as well. In Bowling for Columbine, he
draws not only on the power of his larger-than-life screen presence but also on
various source materials that range from home movies to television news footage,
from vintage commercials to fiction films, and from witness testimonies to inter-
views with authority figures.
In general, it is the combination of these different elements that gives author-
ity to documentaries. Isolated sources can tell us a great deal about a particular
subject, and they can reveal something about the way filmmakers approach the
historical world. When we watch a documentary, though, we usually look at each
source in relation to the others. It is the overall arrangement of the materials, the
“dialogue” between them, that makes them meaningful.
More is involved in the concept of authority, however, than credibility. To say
that a documentary “speaks” with authority is usually to assume that it provides
a clear perspective on historical reality. Evidence is commonly deployed to sub-
stantiate a specific point of view. So are expert testimonies or any other source
used by a documentary maker. There is no authority that is completely neutral.
The question to keep in mind, then, may be not simply what documentaries can
do to secure their authority but how that authority compels us to look at the ref-
erential world in a particular way. Who “speaks” to us, with what purpose, and to
what effect?
Making an authoritative documentary may look like an easy task. The docu-
mentary maker finds source material that validates a certain point of view, then
constructs commentary that conveys that viewpoint. The unity and coherence
of the documentary’s perspective should seem beyond all doubt. It should com-
municate information in a forceful and unambiguous manner, so as to leave little
room for conflicting opinions.
While this kind of authoritative documentary is still made, contemporary film-
makers sometimes take a more nuanced approach to the historical world, acknowl-
edging diverging points of view, refraining from making definitive statements, or
letting it be known that what we are seeing and hearing are the personal views
of the filmmaker. Some films explore the very nature of authority in nonfiction
 Authority 61

cinema, disclosing the means by which a documentary defines its perspective and
inviting the spectator to assess the role of the filmmaker in this process. (Reflex-
ive documentaries of the kind examined in the preceding chapter commonly do
this.) Still others go beyond the effort to demystify the process of representation
and, as we shall see shortly, extend the documentarian’s authority to the people
in front of the camera, allowing documentary subjects some measure of control
over their representations. The idea of authority has not gone unchallenged in
recent years.
These last two categories suggest a modern approach to nonfiction cinema,
as documentary makers appear increasingly aware of their prerogatives and re-
sponsibilities. But these distinctions are not always clear-cut, and any given docu-
mentary might incorporate more than one approach. Michael Moore’s films, for
example, seem to expose the mechanisms by which the filmmaker frames the his-
torical world for his audience. His authority, nonetheless, remains uncontested
and his films hardly allow for diverging points of view.
This chapter looks at the way documentaries make authoritative statements
about the historical world and how the effort to create credible representations
contributes to relaying a film’s outlook on reality. It also examines different at-
titudes toward authority in nonfiction cinema. And it explores the notion of
authorship in documentary and the means by which documentary makers may
share their authorial voice with the subjects documented.

Distinguishing Sources of Authority

One way of giving credibility to a particular representation is by using reliable

sources. Documentarians draw from a vast array of materials. They can, however,
function differently. Historians frequently distinguish between primary and sec-
ondary sources. By primary sources, they mean original documents and archi-
val material contemporary with the subject being studied. The term secondary
source, on the other hand, refers to later discussions of that same subject. A letter
from an American Civil War soldier, for instance, would be considered primary
material, while the ideas of a Civil War scholar reflecting on that letter or other
aspects of the war would serve as a secondary source.
Documentaries, of course, are different from history books. Historians tend to
privilege written sources, while documentary makers rely mostly on sound and
image. For that reason, documentaries are more likely to give the impression that
history is not constructed but merely recorded by the filmmaker. Documentaries
62 chapter three

are also more constrained by budget restrictions and exhibition patterns. And
while they might have a more direct impact on the audience, they seldom enjoy
the complexity of written accounts (Rosenstone).
Yet, for all these differences, the concepts of primary and secondary sources
can be useful for us too. While documentaries do not generally quote extensively
from written sources, they may use original footage, material shot by a witness
contemporaneous with the events being explored. In this case, the footage plays
a role analogous to that of the letter written by the soldier in the example above.
Conversely, interviews with authority figures and expert opinions, which are
standard in many types of documentary, remind us of what historians call sec-
ondary sources. A film scholar might be called upon to talk about the early days
of cinema. And an astrophysicist might be invited to explain the birth of the
universe.
These distinctions are meaningful because we tend to treat primary and sec-
ondary sources differently. Primary sources are closer to the subject under scru-
tiny and are, therefore, frequently perceived as more reliable. That is the case, as
we saw in the preceding chapter, with most types of evidential material, which
seem to bear an immediate relationship with the events represented. Documen-
taries that make extensive use of original footage draw their authority from this
perceived closeness. By contrast, secondary sources have no direct connection to
their subjects. Their authority has less to do with spatial or temporal proximity
than with knowledge sanctioned by legitimate and publicly recognized institu-
tions such as universities, research organizations, the publishing industry, and
so forth.
In practice, documentaries tend to utilize both kinds of material. Expert testi-
mony alone can be tiring and, depending on the circumstances, might also seem
questionable. Documentary makers avoid these risks by supporting interviews
with visual evidence, sometimes with the voice of the expert talking over the im-
ages. The primary source (the evidential material) is used, then, to illustrate, en-
dorse, or uphold a secondary source. On the other hand, expert testimonies can
help legitimize primary source information by explaining it and submitting it to
the authority of a particular discipline or institution. They can also add eloquence
to evidence that might otherwise appear inarticulate or incomprehensible.
The Panama Deception (Barbara Trent, 1992) relies on multiple sources to
draw a picture of the 1989 U.S. invasion of Panama. One of the aims of the docu-
mentary is to discredit mainstream media reports that overlooked the military
campaign’s harm to the Panamanian civilian population and focused instead on
strategic issues. To support her claims, Trent resorts to footage that had not been
 Authority 63

seen on U.S. network television. She also interviews American government of-
ficials, talks to Panamanian politicians, hears from scholars and activists, and re-
cords emotional testimonies from ordinary citizens. Much of the material comes
from people who witnessed or participated in the events, although not all sources
concur with one another. We watch a U.S. government spokesperson claiming
that the operation was successful in minimizing damage to property and, more
importantly, in minimizing casualties. Then the filmmaker shows us a Panama-
nian woman crying over the death of her daughter. Both sources were involved in
the events—one as a representative of the government that planned and executed
the campaign, the other as victim of the strikes that hit the civilian inhabitants.
Yet they offer entirely different testimonies.
The effort to provide a counter-representation of the attacks benefits as well
from the voices of experts who comment on the motives and consequences of
the military campaign. We hear, for example, from authors and university profes-
sors who criticize the complicity between the media and the government and
dispute the notion that the invasion was prompted by the need to protect Ameri-
can lives in Panama. We also watch human rights advocates denouncing the kill-
ing of thousands of civilians. In general, these authority figures were not directly
involved in the events of 1989. They offer not evidential testimonies but carefully
thought out arguments, legitimized by their status as writers, academics, or activ-
ists. To employ the same terminology, they function as secondary sources. But
their voices are just as relevant.
The importance assigned to secondary sources in The Panama Deception re-
minds us that expert opinions enjoy a kind of cachet that evidential material or
personal testimony by itself might lack. Distance from the events can produce a
more reasoned or carefully pondered response to historical reality. Additionally,
when we think about expert opinion, we assume that the material under consider-
ation has been endorsed by established research criteria. Experts embody a type
of social and cultural eminence that might elude the practical differences between
primary and secondary sources.
Ultimately, the notion of cultural status demands that we look at credibility
and authority from a different angle. As methodological and analytical concepts,
primary and secondary sources suggest a sort of kinship between documentary
filmmaking and history writing, but they hardly exhaust the discussion of what
makes a source reliable. When the authority of expert opinion prevails over the
voices of ordinary people, for instance, it is often because of socially established
hierarchical distinctions that connect expert testimony to “legitimate” forms of
knowledge. In fact, the documentary genre itself benefits from this association
 64 chapter three

with authorized knowledge—otherwise we would not be drawing comparisons

between documentary filmmaking and historical writing.
This is not to say, of course, that documentaries cannot reverse these hierar-
chies. Pelin Esmer’s The Play/Oyun (2005), for example, deliberately locates the
source of authority amongst “less prestigious voices,” relying on the personal tes-
timonies of peasant women in order to portray patriarchal society in rural Turkey.
Shot in the village of Arslanköy, the documentary focuses on a group of women
working with a local school principal to put together a play based on their life
experiences. Most of them are agricultural workers, unfamiliar with the conven-
tions of theatrical writing. And none have formal training as actors. Yet they all
contribute to the making of the play, first by sharing their life stories with the
principal and later by performing roles based on those stories. Esmer’s documen-
tary captures both the development of this process and the voices of those who
participate in it.
In an early sequence, we watch a meeting between the school principal and
the women whose stories are to provide the basic material for the play. One
woman talks about the difficulties of
giving birth alone; another complains
of having to work in the fields while
her husband sleeps at home. Despite
their particularities, the stories revolve
around the same themes: marriage,
mothers-in-law, children, and work.
Esmer documents these conversations
and uses them not only as a record of
the creative process but also as a way of
getting to know the women in the vil-
lage. She also interviews them outside
3.1. Village women discussing what should appear in their play, from the school: at home with their fami-
the documentary The Play/Oyun (Pelin Esmer, 2005). lies, in the orchards, and in the fields.
These interviews, together with the
development of the play, end up being the main—if not the only—entry point to
the sociohistorical world.
In another sequence, a young hairdresser recalls being forced out of secondary
school by a father who expected her to get married. Unwilling to marry, she was
given as a foster child to a family in Ankara but eventually decided to come back
to the village. She now dreams of finishing high school and taking the university
exam. The scene, shot while the hairdresser is applying makeup on a customer,
 Authority 65

underlines the significance of the personal, emotional stories shared by the docu-
mentary subjects. It also suggests a parallel between the making of the play—
appropriately called The Outcries of Women—and the shooting of the documen-
tary. Both the film and the play empower the village women by letting them speak
for themselves.
The process of putting together The Outcries of Women helped the participants
to understand their needs and analyze their desire for—and resistance to—
change. Toward the end of the film, one of the women mentions that her thirteen-
year-old son has been complaining that he has been neglected. The episode is
part of an informal conversation that takes place in the home of one of the per-
formers and involves several women from the play. As the mother expresses her
guilt about not being able to fulfill her family responsibilities, one of her friends
replies: “Make [your son] love the theater, and when he loves it as much as you
do he’ll hold on to it with enthusiasm. He won’t ask you to cook for him anymore;
he’ll do it himself.” “You favor him because he’s a boy,” she adds a little later, “that’s
what you saw your parents do. You’re oppressed and can’t get rid of it.” Although
we don’t see them talking about the making of the documentary, the film does
provide a public forum for understanding how the play has affected their daily
lives. “You’ve been oppressed until now,” the friend says, “but now you [have]
started taking your freedom.”

“The Voice of Documentary”

When all these testimonies are organized into a coherent whole, what we have
is not just the record of individual experiences; it is a broader and more ambi-
tious statement about those experiences. Like the women themselves, the
documentary seems to “speak” in a distinctive way and from a particular point
of view.
Bill Nichols has used the phrase “the voice of documentary” to designate the
way nonfiction films “speak” to us, how they arrange different materials in order to
address the historical world. The term “voice,” of course, is not used literally (as,
for example, in voiceover commentary). Rather, it refers to all “that which con-
veys to us a sense of the text’s social point of view, of how it is speaking to us and
how it is organizing the materials it is presenting to us.” It involves the “interaction
of all a film’s codes” (18–19). In The Play, each testimony contributes decisively to
the representation of the women’s experiences. But it is the orchestration of these
voices within the film that defines the way the documentary speaks to us.
66 chapter three

Nichols’s formulation is useful because it helps us think about the relationship

between the source material and the documentary as a whole. It allows us to see
how a film treats its different sources, whether or not it contains or controls their
authority, and how it can play one source against the other. Sometimes different
sources complement and support one another. In other occasions, they produce
divergence and discrepancy. In The Panama Deception, the disagreement between
sources creates a tension that defines the dominant perspective in the documen-
tary. The juxtaposition of conflicting testimonies serves to expose the breaches in
the U.S. government’s official accounts of the military intervention, which in turn
helps to shape the way the film speaks to us.
Rather than create contradictory statements, the use of conflicting sources can
reveal the complexity of the subject under scrutiny. Nichols himself seems to fa-
vor documentaries that offer different entry points to the sociohistorical world.
“History,” he writes, “is not a monolith, its density and outline given from the
outset” (“The Voice of Documentary” 26). Instead, it is a multifaceted process
that involves diverse and, now and again, opposite points of view.
In some instances, though, the use of diverging source material can imperil the
authority of the film as a whole. Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Friedmans (2003)
tells the story of a family from Long Island, New York, that was torn apart by
charges of child molestation involving Arnold Friedman, his son Jesse, and youths
from their hometown. The charges against the Friedmans seemed questionable
from the beginning, and the documentary highlights the uncertainties of the case
by using sources that contradict each other. Testimonies from law enforcement
officials, attorneys, alleged victims, and family members both reinforce and dis-
credit the charges. As a result, the spectator’s desire to find out what really hap-
pened is never fully rewarded. Both Arnold and Jesse were sentenced to jail. But
for those in the audience the case remains open.
What makes Capturing the Friedmans different from other documentaries that
rely on conflicting sources is the absence of an overarching statement about the
case. While we can talk about the existence of a “governing voice” in documenta-
ries like The Panama Deception or Rosie the Riveter (in which not all sources agree
with each other), in Capturing the Friedmans the dominant perspective seems to
shift along with the materials used by the filmmaker. Jarecki never fully answers the
questions raised in the film. On the contrary, he encourages us to think that truth
claims can be ambiguous and are often contingent upon specific circumstances.
Like the reflexive documentaries discussed in chapter 2, Capturing the Friedmans
offers an opportunity to mull over the nature of nonfictional representation itself.
 Authority 67

On the one hand, the film calls upon the spectators to fill in the blanks and come
up with their own verdict. On the other, it runs the risk of suggesting that all tes-
timonies are equally valid—or equally doubtful.

The Suspicion of Authority

When the film’s point of view stands out, we may perceive the representational
process as skewed and, sometimes, personal. By contrast, when documentaries
refrain from making authoritative statements about the world, we are encour-
aged to believe that it is the world itself that speaks to us. The authority of the
filmmaker seems overwhelmed by the events captured by the camera. While in
practice nonfiction films always involve a particular point of view, the idea that
documentaries might simply record the world as it is—rather than present a par-
tial account of lived reality—has frequently served as a source of legitimacy for
the representational process. To some documentary makers and critics, it is the
purported absence of an authoritative perspective that gives credibility to nonfic-
tional representations.
This suspicion of authority provided the basis for a powerful documentary film
movement in the United States during the 1960s. The idea then was to document
the historical world with minimal interference, so as to let things be what they
would normally be like if the camera and microphone were not there to record
them. To achieve these goals, direct cinema filmmakers—as they would even-
tually be known—used little, if any, voiceover narration (which could have ap-
peared as an imposition on the subject matter), refrained from directing action,
and avoided interviews and other types of interaction with their subjects. They
merely “observed,” like a “fly on the wall,” as they said back then.
Whether or not we accept the idealism of this agenda, direct cinema films do
teach us something about authority in documentary. For the sixties filmmakers,
authority appeared as a way of distancing representation from reality, a means of
distorting or, even worse, of corrupting lived experience. Gone from their films
was, in theory, the gesture that submitted reality to a particular point of view. As
theorist and critic Paul Arthur has noted, the noninterventionist ideal amounted
to “a textual crisis of authority” (118). Direct cinema presumably removed the
documentary record from conventional mechanisms of representation and
turned the filmmaking process into an effort to simply make the world available
to the audience.
68 chapter three

Frederick Wiseman’s Titicut Follies (1967) is typical of this aesthetic and ideo-
logical stance. It evokes direct cinema’s philosophy to create a seemingly sponta-
neous portrait of everyday life in the Massachusetts Correctional Institution at
Bridgewater, a hospital for the criminally insane. Like other direct cinema docu-
mentaries, it conveys a strong sense of immediacy, which in turn overshadows the
existence of a perspective on the events represented. None of the scenes in the
film seems to have been staged. Instead, what stands out in Titicut Follies is the im-
pression of looking upon people who appear oblivious to the presence of the
camera and, by extension, to the spectators as well. What happens at Bridgewater
State, we are led to believe, has nothing to do with the making of the film. It is
presumably what would have taken place even if Wiseman had not shown up with
his crew.
Several sequences in Titicut Follies reinforce the notion that we are observing
a world unaffected by the mediating process. Early in the film, for example, we
watch a conversation between a psychiatrist and his patient, in which the latter
is asked to talk about the sexual activities that led to his incarceration. The close
shots of the conversation allow for a strong, almost intimate, connection between
the viewer and the subjects. And yet at no moment do the people in front of the
camera acknowledge the fact that they are being filmed.
It is surprising, then, to find one sequence in Titicut Follies in which the film-
maker’s intervention seems both clear and purposeful. It happens when a patient
who has been refusing to eat is force-fed by the staff in the hospital. As we watch
the painful ritual unfold “in the present,” Wiseman cuts to images shot later on,
after the patient’s death. The shot of the man being fed through a tube is intercut
with the image of a corpse, which we recognize to be the body of the same patient.
This flash-forward diverges from the dominant pattern in the documentary. Not
only does it expose the possibilities afforded by the techniques of film editing, it
also highlights the role of the filmmaker as a creative agent, an authority capable
and willing to make a statement about the reality documented.
The sequence is also important because it foregrounds what had until then
been an implicit assumption in the film: Titicut Follies provides a critique of the
living conditions in the psychiatric hospital. It assesses the world from a particu-
lar point of view. As Bill Nichols has remarked, the sequence “[works] to make
an editorial point . . . rather than allow events to unfold according to their own
rhythm” (Representing Reality 41). Although we might occasionally forget, Titicut
Follies does have an author, someone whose informed view of reality and whose
voice of authority help give shape to what we see and hear.
 Authority 69

3.2. Force-feeding a patient in Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967). 3.3. Preparing the corpse for burial in Titicut Follies
(Frederick Wiseman, 1967).

The Documentarian as Author

What is a documentary author? When critics talk about filmmakers as authors,

it is usually to point out the distinctive attributes of the work of a certain art-
ist or, more commonly, to highlight the significance of personal vision in a spe-
cific film. Authorship appears as synonymous with artistic originality, creativity,
or inventiveness. It is easy to see why this can pose difficult questions for docu-
mentary makers. To documentarians, the emphasis on authorship might suggest
a departure from the genre’s commitment to representing reality, a shift toward
individual expression. Instead of conferring prestige to a particular documentary,
as happens when we talk about fictional cinema, authorial intervention could in
theory endanger the credibility of the representational process.
Yet artistic vision is not alien to documentary; nor is the notion of author-
ship antithetical to nonfictional representation. Triumph of the Will/Triumph des
Willens (Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), for instance, uses noticeably stylized camera-
work to represent Hitler’s visit to Nuremberg during the 1934 Congress of the
National Socialist Party. Think of the sequence, toward the beginning of the film,
in which we see Hitler standing on a moving vehicle as it rides past an enthusiastic
crowd. The shots are taken from near the subject, who has his back turned to the
camera. Standing in the foreground, isolated in the frame, Hitler ends up taking
most of the screen space and appears as a sort of demiurgic figure. By contrast,
the crowd that greets the passing motorcade is usually seen from afar, often in
high angle shots that highlight the people’s submissiveness to their leader. This
contrast helps define the way we see the events in the documentary. Aesthetics
70 chapter three

and politics come together to create a film that is both impressive and well suited
to Nazi ideology.
Other documentaries might not stand out as models of artistic expression, but
they, too, can reveal the existence of a distinctive authorial voice. Frederick Wise-
man’s work, to return to a familiar filmmaker, is both personal and consistent,
even though in this instance the author appears to “hide” behind a seemingly
impersonal, noninterventionist mode of filmmaking. His interest in document-
ing the workings of institutions like hospitals and schools, and more recently the
American Ballet Theater and Central Park, together with specific stylistic features
(self-effacing camerawork, lengthy shots with synchronous sound, loosely struc-
tured narratives), add an easily recognizable authorial quality to his films.
So does the recognition of an authorial style threaten or boost the authority
of documentary representations? Authorship need not distract us from the refer-
ential world. The contrary, in fact, is often the case. Distinctively authorial voices
can, for example, expand our understanding of historical reality by suggesting new
ways of looking at events with which we might already be familiar. Compare the
authorial treatment of racial tension and urban violence that we have in Hands-
worth Songs with what we normally find in news reportage. The film stands out,
in part, because it offers an uncommon view of the world and a highly stylized ac-
count of incidents known to the British public through ordinary media coverage.
Handsworth Songs allows us to perceive the conflicts between the police and the
people in Handsworth in a way that would hardly have been possible through of-
ficial media channels. In this case, an authorial perspective is also likely to be seen
as uncompromised by journalistic interests and demands, and therefore as more
reliable. Instead of giving us less—because it fails to conform to standard notions
of balance and objectivity—documentaries with a clear authorial perspective can
give us more, by supplying unique insight into the subject explored.
Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1989) is another good example of how a strong
authorial voice can expand our appraisal of social reality. The film offers a poignant
response to the impact of the AIDS epidemic on African American gay men, and
its power as a documentary has as much to do with the seriousness of the subject
matter as with Riggs’s, at times, intensely personal and poetic approach to it. De-
parting both from the conventions of observational filmmaking and investigative
reportage, it uses verse, music, and dance as representational tools, and explores
sentiments such as sadness, anger, and outrage. Like many other documentaries,
Tongues Untied relies on various individual testimonies to deliver its message. But
here the testimonies become moments of self-dramatization that add intensity
to the film. Similarly, the voiceover narrations in Tongues Untied provide more
 Authority 71

than commentary or explanation for what we see on the screen. They serve as
expressive devices that draw on inflection and rhyme to articulate the film’s mes-
sage. Finally, Riggs’s use of rhythmic editing and slow-motion photography also
differs from documentary cinema’s traditional ways of recording and organizing
information.
As a result, Tongues Untied’s look at the lives of African American gay men
seems both fresh and provocative. Rather than portray its subjects simply as vic-
tims of HIV and social discrimination, it shows them as progressive, creative, and
active agents (starting with Riggs himself, the author, who also appears in the
film). Tongues Untied eschews impersonal and seemingly objective approaches to
the AIDS crisis and substitutes them with a text that is simultaneously solemn
and sensuous, serious and exhilarating. In doing this, the film ends up speaking
not of helplessness but of strength. And it solicits not pity but solidarity.
A documentary’s authorial voice can be closely related to its subject matter,
as happens when a film focuses on the personal experiences of the filmmaker.
In these occasions, the author stands out not only as an agent capable of shap-
ing the documentary material but also as someone who has privileged access to
the reality documented, a sort of insider whose knowledge is based on concrete,
lived experience. These are films with a strong autobiographical component, in
which subjectivity poses no danger to authenticity but serves instead, as theorist
Michael Renov nicely put it, as “the filter through which the real enters discourse”
(176).
To be sure, documentarians never completely control the subject matter in
their films. Nor is any one person the sole creator of a documentary. In fact, both
film and literary theorists have taught us that authorship in general involves not
one but many voices, all of which contribute to the construction of meaning. How-
ever unique or innovative it might be, the creative gesture usually presumes some
form of “dialogue” between the creator and the social world, and the creator and
the spectator. This is particularly true of documentaries, in which the filmmaker
records and represents the thoughts and opinions of others. We can think of a film
like The Play, with its self-effacing authorial presence and strong emphasis on the
voices of ordinary women. We can also think of Tongues Untied, in which Marlon
Riggs aligns his assertive voice with those of other African American gay men.
One interesting manifestation of authorial expression in documentary is the
presence of the film or video maker on the screen, acting as participant, performer,
or provocateur. In general, we do not need to see or hear the documentarian to
associate authorial expression with lived experience. Nor does the visible or aural
presence of the documentary maker necessarily suggest any direct involvement
72 chapter three

in the events documented. (We sometimes hear the voice of an offscreen inter-
viewer without identifying who is talking.) But being able to recognize the docu-
mentarian as “actor” in a particular situation does make it easier for us to connect
authority and authorship in nonfictional representation.
Think again of Michael Moore’s documentaries. Or, more specifically, think
about the role played by the filmmaker in those documentaries. Michael Moore,
the everyman, the ordinary guy in the gravy-stained T-shirt whose job it is to look
after our interests, seems to be the authority that is no better than we are but who
has more guts. Smart but appearing to be unschooled, he performs an act that
says as much about his role as filmmaker, polemicist, and populist advocate of lib-
eral causes as it does about the historical world. And the act itself adds credibility
to his films. Moore’s documentaries depend on his screen persona to convince us
of the veracity of his claims.
Moore’s screen act can be self-mocking at times, but it is ultimately reassur-
ing. In Roger and Me (1989), his first feature-length documentary, he uses his
working-class background and his apparent lack of sophistication to forge an al-
liance with the average citizen, who is both a subject in his film and, in theory at
least, a member of the audience. The documentary examines the consequences of
the layoffs of thousands of workers from General Motors in the 1980s. It is also a
sort of autobiographical film, set in Flint, Michigan, Moore’s hometown. Insofar
as he sides with the unemployed workers of Flint, Moore reveals a deep suspi-
cion of established authorities like General Motors CEO Roger Smith, whom he
chases in the film. This suspicion, in turn, helps establish Moore’s own authority
as documentary filmmaker. Good humored but always defiant, he works hard to
be “one of us.” Moore wants us to believe that he knows what it is like to be out
of work.
The on-camera presence of the filmmaker suggests that the film is actually
about the gathering of information. Even though much of what we see is mani-
festly staged, it may also seem to emphasize a local and situated knowledge, avail-
able through the filmmaker’s contact with other people in the documentary. Un-
derlying this encounter with the world, however, is a more complex source of
authority: the self that is performed for the camera. To a large extent, it is this con-
structed, “enacted” self that secures the bond with the referential world and lends
a particular voice to the documentary. Michael Moore has few probing on-camera
interviews. Rather than introduce new information or produce suitable evidence,
the interviews serve to illustrate Moore’s audacity and superiority and make us
aware of the contingencies of the moment. In Christopher Sharrett and William
Luhr’s words, he’s “a simple guy looking for answers to a few simple questions”
 Authority 73

(254). His interviews are frequently impertinent (he hurls ridicule at politicians
and gets under the skin of celebrities) and hold very little authority in the film’s
argument. They do, however, buttress the author’s persona. Moore’s persona, in
a way, functions as the voice-of-God commentary did in days of old. Despite the
persona’s limited understanding, it gives the appearance of authoritative certainty
and frequently seems to be extremely informational and, therefore, believable.
An ongoing contrivance in the film is Moore running up against a retinue of
security guards and public relations personnel in an attempt to meet with Roger
Smith. As Richard Schickel has noted, Moore the journalist certainly knows that
getting in to see movers and shakers without an appointment is nearly impossible
(77). But Moore’s persona needs the encounters to fortify its own identity and
illustrate his own authority. Interviewing Tom Kay, a spokesman and lobbyist for
General Motors, who seems to be trying to dispel difficult questions with vacuous
optimism whenever we meet him, Moore, suffering through Kay’s glib assertion
that there are still opportunities in Flint, hurls a useless question at him, “Do you
mean that?” All Kay can answer is, “Yes, I do.” In lieu of offering an appropriate
response, Moore chooses to share with the viewer the energy of his delinquency.
His interviews are sources not of authority but, like fiction films, of character. Yet
his persona feeds off the glow of the authority it condemns.
Roger and Me lets us see what other nonfiction films tend to conceal: the role
of the filmmaker as author and authority in the documentary process. Moore, the
author, plays himself as documentary filmmaker. And it is the documentarian, the
author of the film, whom we choose to believe, more so than the film itself. As
Stella Bruzzi points out in another context, there would be no film without the
filmmaker’s interventions (207).

Shared Authority

In most other documentaries, the roles of documentary maker and documentary

subject remain clearly distinct. Moreover, the relationship between one and the
other has traditionally assumed an unequal distribution of authority, with the
documentary maker enjoying the greater share. For this reason, documentary
subjects have been demanding a more direct role in the filmmaking process. Those
who have regularly been the subject of representation—non-Western people,
ethnic and sexual minorities, women, the poor, and so on—have become more
and more involved in production. In some cases, they have successfully taken up
the roles of film and video makers. But even when they haven’t turned themselves
74 chapter three

into documentarians, some have challenged conventional models of representa-

tion in which the maker and the subject occupy separate positions.
A common way of sharing authority is the documentary interview. In addition
to being a useful source of information, interviews can help foster a genuine dia-
logue between documentary makers and their subjects. They create opportunities
for spontaneous exchanges that can, in turn, help shape the documentary. That is
the case with The Play, as we saw earlier. Instead of offering quick sound bites, The
Play revolves around lengthy conversations that capture the interviewees’ mood,
opinions, and attitude toward the world, as well as their relationship with the film-
ing process. The documentary subjects become participants in the making of the
film, even if they do not have direct access to the filmmaking apparatus.
Apart from the interview format, nonfictional subjects can also participate in
the filming process by acting out their lives. An interview is a sort of performance,
an act staged for the camera. But it is not the only type of performance available
to nonfictional subjects. Documentary reenactments, for example, serve a similar
purpose. They involve staged events, which call for some form of acting on the part
of the documentary subject. Here the subjects are asked to play themselves—or
even other people—as if they were reliving a particular event or situation. And
the acting determines, in part, how that event or situation will be represented.
We will have an opportunity to discuss the idea of nonfictional performance
at length in a subsequent chapter about the profilmic. Here we look at a film in
which the subject’s screen act serves to expose the power relations that normally
connect the documentary maker and the person in front of the camera.
In Kazuo Hara’s Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974/Gokushiteki erosu: Renka
1974 (1974), the documentary subject and her performance literally usurp the
authority that we normally expect from the filmmaker. The film starts out as an
autobiographical piece, the young Hara’s effort to reconnect with his estranged
girlfriend after their break-up. The woman in this case is Miyuki Takeda, a strong-
willed independent feminist with whom he lived for three years. Some time af-
ter their break-up, Takeda left for Okinawa and took their baby son with her. As
the film begins, we hear Hara’s voice over a series of still photographs showing
Takeda, the couple, and their child: “One day she told me she was going to Oki-
nawa. I got really upset and agitated because if she went to Okinawa I would not
be able to deal with feelings I still had for her. I felt I had to do something. . . .
The only way to stay connected with her was to make this film.” What follows,
however, has less to do with Hara’s emotions than with Takeda’s daily life, her
personal feelings toward him, and her relationships with people she has met in
Okinawa. We watch her as she looks after the baby, interacts with new romantic
 Authority 75

partners, expresses her opinions about

men, and intermingles with the women
who work in bars frequented by Ameri-
can GIs stationed in Okinawa. We also
see and hear her resentment toward
Hara. Present in virtually every scene,
Takeda is the main subject in his au-
tobiographical film. She is also a sort
of “collaborator” in the documentary,
deciding—through her speeches as
well as her actions—what we should
3.4. “I don’t want to do this if you’re getting upset.” From Extreme
know about her and how we should Private Eros: Love Song 1974/Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974 (Kazuo
know it. Takeda’s response to the pres- Hara, 1974).
ence of the camera is a lot more explicit
than in many such observational films.
In his first visit to Okinawa, Hara finds out that Takeda and her son had been
living with a woman named Sugako and her infant. The nature of the women’s
relationship, we hear in his voiceover commentary, remains unclear to the film-
maker. But the footage recorded establishes a general pattern for the film. What
we watch concerns not Hara’s desire to continue his relationship with Takeda but
Takeda herself and her new circumstances. The sequence opens with an argu-
ment between the two women. His name is never mentioned, his presence never
acknowledged. Hara does not intervene or participate in the argument, and his
role is limited to a few explanatory voiceover comments toward the end of the
sequence, suggesting that his visit was the cause of their fight.
Eventually, the two women separate, and Hara’s second visit finds Takeda living
with Paul, an African American GI, who will also leave her after a few weeks. The
brief sequence in which we see Paul and Takeda together suggests a more studied
posture on her part, Takeda now self-consciously playing herself for the camera.
At this point, we also know that she is two months pregnant, but the identity of
the father seems to be of little importance to her. The sequence ends with what
turns out to be the only open confrontation between her and the filmmaker. Yell-
ing from offscreen, obviously furious with jealousy, Hara questions the motives
of her relationship with Paul. But here, too, her presence eclipses the forcefulness
of his voice. Before the sequence is over, we see Hara crying, microphone still in
hand, shot in profile in one of the few times in which he appears on camera.
The most explicit manifestation of hostility toward him comes a few minutes
later, when we are shown footage from his third visit to Okinawa. This time he
76 chapter three

shows up with Sachiko Kobayashi, a new lover, who becomes his sound recorder
and producer for the documentary. Uncomfortable with her presence, Takeda
uses the opportunity to humiliate Hara: “I don’t trust him,” she says nonchalantly.
“He’s good with words. That’s why I don’t trust him. . . . He just wants to have
sex. You [Kobayashi] were an easy target for this guy.” Takeda also questions
his integrity as a documentarian: “If he is not trustworthy, how can the film be
any good?”
Less apparent than her speeches but equally important are the actions she per-
forms in the film. Much of Hara’s job consists of recording what Takeda does.
We watch her, for example, as she runs a nursery for the children of bar girls in
Okinawa. Later, when she decides to adopt a bar girl’s son, we follow Takeda in
her unsuccessful search for the boy and his mother. Finally, just before returning
to Tokyo, she takes us on a mission to educate the bar girls about their relation-
ships with the GIs. Disappointed by her own experience with Paul, she writes a
pamphlet—“from a woman of the mainland to women of Okinawa”—and dis-
tributes them in the bars and streets. In these scenes, the film becomes a sort of
mouthpiece for her conscience, a way of recording and promoting her actions, a
means for her to express her interests and concerns.
Takeda’s authority finds an especially striking illustration in the scene in which
she gives birth to her second child. Early in the film, she had told Hara that she
wanted to get pregnant, travel to Central Asia, and have a child all by herself.
Moreover, she wanted Hara to record it on film. Eventually Takeda does give birth
to a baby girl by herself, with Hara shooting and Kobayashi holding the mike. The
scene, however, takes place not in Central Asia but in Hara’s Tokyo apartment. We
first see her going into labor and preparing to deliver the child. Takeda lays out
newspapers, plastic, and towels. Then comes a frontal image, a lengthy, uncom-
promising shot aimed between her legs, somewhat blurred, that shows the baby
being born. Takeda does it without anyone’s intervention, as Hara watches from
behind the camera. (“I was so nervous. I was sweating so much, and I didn’t know
the picture was out of focus.”) Later on, she recalls her feat with pride, turning the
birth scene into yet another instance through which she asserts herself both as a
woman and a documentary subject.
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974 is particularly noteworthy in its approach
to authority because it combines two distinct, albeit interconnected, forms of
power relations: the exchanges between the documentarian and his subject, on
the one hand, and the relationships between men and women, on the other. Nei-
ther the traditional codes of documentary filmmaking nor the conventions of pa-
triarchal society seem to be on Takeda’s side. But she manages to confront these
 Authority 77

rules by playing a part that contradicts standard expectations. Takeda uses the
documentary in order to tell her own story, addressing issues that are relevant
to women’s role in society and settling unresolved problems with Hara. It is the
nature of her act, the way she rises as an authority figure in the film, that makes
Extreme Private Eros such a compelling documentary.

The Subject as Author

At its most ambitious, sharing authority with the documentary subject can turn
the person in front of the camera into a sort of coauthor whose role might in-
clude other aspects of filmmaking as well. What if, for example, the subjects could
make decisions regarding the structure of the documentary? Or if they could take
the camera in their own hands? Several documentaries have tried to answer these
questions by extending the tools of film and, more often, video making to the
documentary subject.
These issues have concerned thoughtful documentary makers, especially since
the introduction of portable video equipment in the 1960s, with its potential
for more democratic participation in the communication process. In 1966, the
National Film Board of Canada inaugurated Challenge for Change/Société nou-
velle, a production incentive that was meant to address social problems, spur dy-
namic social change, and, increasingly, put cameras and production decisions in
the hands of community members. One of their works, Mort Ransen’s 1969 You
Are on Indian Land, addressed current events from the Mohawk viewpoint. Tribal
members served on the crew, and Mike Mitchell, a member of the community,
spoke the narration in the first person plural. In recent years, this kind of project
has been facilitated by the availability of technology that is not only more afford-
able but also easier to operate. It is now relatively common to see documentarians
sharing the camera with their subjects and teaching them how to use it. Docu-
mentary subjects also participate in the editing of their works, thus extending
their input to the videos’ organizational structures. The making of the documen-
tary ends up involving much more than an effort to represent the sociohistorical
world. It becomes a pedagogical and communal project, the result of which can
be a multi-authored account of a particular experience.
Any list of documentaries in which the subjects become the authors or coau-
thors of their representations would be incomplete, but it’s worth mentioning a
few examples from the past couple of decades. Spencer Nakasako worked in a
San Francisco youth center with Southeast Asian teens, giving them the means
78 chapter three

to represent themselves. The Mirror Project in Somerville, Massachusetts, later

relocated to Atlanta, Georgia, under Roberto Arévalo’s supervision, also gave
video cameras to inner-city teens to record their community. From 2004 to 2007,
the Scribe Video Center coupled community groups in the greater Philadelphia
area with humanities scholars and filmmakers for four months of video training
and research, culminating in forty-two short, community-made videos that give
voice to local residents to tell the world about their neighborhoods. In China, Wu
Wenguang has been handing small digital video recorders over to farmers to make
their own documentaries. In the Philippines, Kidlat Tahimak has been instruct-
ing Ifugao hill tribes on the use of video. The traditional people ethnographers
usually study—such as the Aboriginals in Australia and the indigenous people
of the Amazon forest—are now producers of studies themselves. And even when
they do not have total control over the means of representation, many indigenous
groups can dictate how they are represented and what aspects of their culture can
be represented, restricting access to certain ceremonies and information. Groups
attempting to establish and maintain a sense of community and to assert their so-
cial and political claims to the larger world are challenging the right of established
institutions to control the representation of their lives.
Taking Aim (Monica Frota, 1993) documents one of these efforts to share
video technology with indigenous groups. In 1985 Frota, an independent film and
video maker, and anthropologists Renato Pereira and Luis Rios started teaching
the Kayapo in the Brazilian Amazon how to use video cameras. Having been the
subject of documentary films and television reportage, the Kayapo understood
the nature of the recording technology and were familiar with its results. But the
new project, known as Mekaron Opoi D’joi (He Who Creates Images), aimed
at giving them access to the means of production and therefore power over how
they would be represented. The first Kayapo group with which the documentar-
ians worked, the Metuktire, responded enthusiastically to the idea and soon be-
gan learning how to use the video equipment. They also recognized the political
significance of video recording. Frota recalls in an article about Mekaron Opoi
D’joi that during a malaria crisis in 1985, while the Metuktire were waiting for
government assistance, one of the leaders asked for visual documentation of what
was happening in his village, in order to, in the words of Frota, “demonstrate and
denounce the negligence of the authorities” (266). In Taking Aim, we hear the
Metuktire explain that making videos is a way of appropriating the white man’s
tools. We also see them recording everyday events and watch images shot by the
Kayapo themselves. Frota incorporates their footage into Taking Aim and credits
them at the end of the documentary.
 Authority 79

This association between “primitive” cultures and video technology has sur-
prised those accustomed to traditional ethnographic images of indigenous peo-
ple. But the indigenous groups themselves have been quick to find uses for the
new tool. In The Spirit of TV/O Espírito da TV (Vincent Carelli, 1990) we see the
Waiãpi, another indigenous group in the Brazilian rainforest, discussing the use-
fulness of video recording both to preserve the essential practices of their culture
and to convince others, especially the gold miners in the region, of their ability to
defend the communal possession of their land. Their agenda is both cultural and
political. “After I have died,” one man contemplates in a close shot, “my grand-
children will still see me on TV. . . . Now the young can see their elders and learn
from them.” They also comment on other indigenous groups they have seen on
TV, including the Kayapo. And they debate if it is useful to be recorded drunk:
“I don’t want people to see us drunk, especially the gold miners. . . . When you
show these pictures, tell them: ‘These people are dangerous. They are killers when
they’re drunk.’” And they definitely do not want the camera to show that there are
few of them left in the village.
The Waiãpi have noticed that documentaries (in the case of The Spirit of TV,
made through Vincent Carelli’s Video in the Villages/Vídeo nas Aldeias project
of the Centro de Trabalho Indigenista) can be a useful tool for negotiating iden-
tity and cultural self-preservation. This is especially important in locales where
the dominant, mass-produced media have penetrated. Videos can also be a useful
tool to speak to whites about the indigenous people’s struggle for survival in the
fight against land dispossession and genocide. This is vital in areas where gold
miners, loggers, road builders, ranchers, and other nonindigenous groups have
brought in industry, animals, arms, and disease.
But technology is more than simply hardware. And some from within the com-
munities, as well as some from outside, are worried that the use of video technol-
ogy by indigenous people might supplant traditional modes of communication
by making them seem insufficient and obsolete (Ginsburg “Indigenous Media”).
Others, however, see indigenous knowledge systems in the videos themselves.
Although The Spirit of TV does not use footage shot by the Waiãpi, the Video in
the Villages project provides technical assistance to Indians in making their own
videos. Carelli sees a different aesthetic in the videos made by the Indians. For
example, he notes that they tend to eschew the kind of editing he uses and have
more respect for the duration and repetitive aspects of ceremonies and rituals
(cited in Aufderheide 91).
The use of video cameras by indigenous peoples recalls a common pattern in
the history of recording technologies. While technological innovations alone do
80 chapter three

not change the politics of documentary, they can make it possible for documen-
tarians to redefine the way authority is distributed in nonfictional works. Frota
admits, for instance, that the economic advantages afforded by portable video
technology and the capacity to instantly play the recorded material were key to
the success of Mekaron Opoi D’joi (259–260). In the past two decades, this re-
distribution of authority found renewed impetus with the availability of digital
recording equipment and the advent of novel forms of exhibition. Digital cam-
eras and cell phones with video capabilities allow individuals with virtually no
professional training to create their own representations of sociohistorical reality.
And the Internet has enabled nonprofessionals to make their works widely acces-
sible for public consumption. It has also encouraged more interactive forms of
exchange between documentary makers and users.
As the promises of these technologies begin to be fulfilled, more and more
people will have authority over nonfictional material. And more and more
people will take responsibility for the images and sounds that represent their
world.

Additional Filmography
Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur Elton, 1935)
Operation Snow Ball/Opération boule de neige (Bonnie Sherr Klein, 1969)
Two Laws (Carolyn Strachan, Alessandro Cavadini, and the Borroloola Tribal
Council, 1982)
Children of Shatila (Mai Masri, 1998)
Maquilapolis: City of Factories (Vicky Funari and Sergio De La Torre, 2006)
We Struggle But We Eat Fruit/A gente luta mas come fruta (Bebito Piãko and Isaac
Piãko, 2006)
Stranger Comes to Town ( Jacqueline Goss, 2007)
I’ve Already Become an Image/Já me transformei em imagem (Zezinho Yube,
2008)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” In Theoriz-
ing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Aufderheide, Patricia. “The Video in the Villages Project: Videomaking with and
by Brazilian Indians.” Visual Anthropology Review 11.2 (Fall 1995).
Berry, Chris. “Wu Wenguang: An Introduction.” Cinema Journal 46.1 (Fall 2006).
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Burnett, Ron. “Video: The Politics of Culture and Community.” In Resolutions:
 Authority 81

Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderburg.

Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Frota, Monica. “Taking Aim: The Video Technology of Cultural Resistance.” In
Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika
Suderburg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996.
Ginsburg, Faye. “Aboriginal Media and the Australian Imaginary.” Public Culture
5.2 (1993).
———. “Indigenous Media: Faustian Contract or Global Village?” Cultural
Anthropology 6.1 (1991). Reprinted in Rereading Cultural Anthropology,
ed. George E. Marcus. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1992.
———. “The Parallax Effect: The Impact of Indigenous Media on Ethnographic
Film.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
———. “Shooting Back: From Ethnographic Film to Indigenous Production/
Ethnography of Media.” In Companion to Film Theory, ed. Toby Miller and
Robert Stam. Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2004.
Grant, Barry Keith. “Ethnography in the First Person: Frederick Wiseman’s
Titicut Follies.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Docu-
mentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. History in Practice. London: Arnold, 2000.
MacDougall, David. Transcultural Cinema. Ed. Lucien Taylor. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton University Press, 1998.
Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documen-
tary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1973.
Nichols, Bill. “Frederick Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure.”
In Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other
Media. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
———. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991.
———. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed.,
ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005.
Renov, Michael. “New Subjectivities: Documentary and Self-Representation in
the Post-verité Age.” In The Subject of Documentary. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History, Memory, Documentary: A Critique of The
Good Fight.” Cineaste 17.1 (1989).
82 chapter three

Ruby, Jay. “Speaking for, Speaking about, Speaking with, or Speaking Alongside.”
In Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000.
Schickel, Richard. “Imposing on Reality.” Time, January 8, 1990.
Sharrett, Christopher, and William Luhr. “Bowling for Columbine: A Review.”
In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John
Corner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
 4
Responsibility

D ocumentary makers bear responsibility for what they represent.

Their films and videos can help us understand the world we live in,
shape our perception of historical events, and influence our opinions about cur-
rent issues. They can also affect the lives of the people represented. Documenta-
ries turn private matters into public affairs, exposing their subjects to the scrutiny
and judgment of an audience. More than simply asking if what we see and hear is
credible or authentic, we should think about what interests a documentary serves,
what impact it might have on the spectators, and whether or not it takes into ac-
count the welfare of the people represented.
In an often-mentioned scene from Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), the film-
maker asks a survivor from a Nazi extermination camp to recount his experience
as a barber in Treblinka. The interview takes place halfway into the nine-and-a-
half-hour film, demonstrating with remarkable clarity why responsibility is such
an important issue in documentary filmmaking. Abraham Bomba, trimming a
man’s hair in a Tel Aviv barbershop, recalls that he was forced to cut the hair of
women right before they were put to death in Treblinka’s gas chamber. With un-
yielding determination, he explains in detail how the women came into the room,
what they were like, and how long it took to cut their hair. He also demonstrates
with gestures how much hair was taken off. Most of the time, Bomba speaks with-
out looking at the camera, framed in a medium shot that allows us to see a little

83
84 chapter four

bit of the barbershop, as well as his image reflected in a mirror. He responds to

Lanzmann’s questions in a monotone voice that reveals no hint of emotion. Then,
all of sudden, as he starts telling the story of a friend, a barber like himself, whose
wife and sister came into the gas chamber, Bomba’s voice begins to falter. He stops
talking, the camera zooms into his face, and he wipes his tears with a piece of
cloth. There is a long moment of silence, eventually broken by Lanzmann’s off-
screen command: “Go on, Abe.” Bomba resists: “It’s too horrible.” The filmmaker,
however, continues shooting and insists that the barber finish his story. In the
four minutes that follow, we see Bomba struggling with his emotions while the
filmmaker waits for an answer. Lanzmann seems determined to get the story on
record, no matter how painful that might be for the subject in the film.
The scene is unsettling not only because it deals with heinous crimes but also
because it forces the interviewee to relive the events that took place nearly four
decades earlier. It is as if, in order for the audience to learn about those atrocities,
a man should suffer them again. Had Lanzmann chosen to spare the barber from
reliving his experience, the interview would not produce the same effect on the
audience. Neither would it convey the horror of a Nazi extermination camp with
the same intensity. It is the undying pain in Bomba’s voice and tears that makes it
so gripping. Yet Lanzmann’s choices raise complicated questions about the eth-
ics of documentary filmmaking and viewing. It is important to inform the public
about the death camps. But at what cost? Is it ethical to evoke this painful recol-
lection knowing that it will cause more sorrow? Does the public’s right to know
justify causing harm? When the filmmaker arouses Bomba’s tears, he is not only
bringing the barber’s suffering to light; he is bringing distress to the audience as
well by inviting us to have empathy, compassion, or benevolent concern for his
pain. Whether it is anxiety, anger, sadness, or resentment, the scene calls for a
response.
Bomba’s tears are also disconcerting because they bring to mind the potency of
the desires that viewers bring to a film. We want chilling evidence, heart-warming
evidence, even sensational evidence. We want the “I was there.” We want the wit-
ness to remember and to be here now to tell the tale (Hartman 69–70). Looking
at Abraham Bomba in a Tel Aviv barbershop, we see a compelling individual and
infer humanizing abstractions. And because this is a documentary, we also want to
believe that he was performing his usual actions, in his natural environment, and
recalling the incident for us. In actual fact, Bomba had emigrated to the United
States after the war and settled in New York City, working as a barber in a shop
beneath Pennsylvania Station. Lanzmann had spoken to him in his cottage in the
Catskill Mountains. Now retired, Bomba had recently immigrated to Israel. The
 Responsibility 85

filmmaker rented that Tel Aviv barbershop and posed him in it for the interview
(“Seminar with Claude Lanzmann” 95–96).
Lanzmann has criticized some films of the Holocaust for their unflinching gaze
on the unimaginable, for offering a means of access to the radically inaccessible.
His own film offers no archival images and no re-creations, no visual represen-
tations of the past. Instead, Shoah is built out of shots of the Polish landscape
(a “deceptively peaceful” landscape, to
quote the literary scholar Geoffrey H.
Hartman) and many encounters with
survivors, bystanders, perpetrators,
and even a historian, leaving the viewer
to imagine the impossible. Lanzmann
draws on the testimony of a number of
people like Abraham Bomba. At one
point, he interviews friendly Polish peas-
ants, somewhat complicit witnesses,
some voicing antisemitic fantasies, while
a Jewish man who survived the camp in
their hometown stands among them. 4.1. Inside the van parked outside Walter Stier’s house recording
“Lanzmann seduces, lures, and cajoles his interview. From Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985).
the protagonists,” writes Gertrud Koch,
“into doing and saying things that would otherwise have remained silenced and
hidden” (130). And he also interviews with a hidden camera and microphone
people who did not wish to be on record. The film employs methods that some
might consider troubling. But others, the documentary maker Marcel Ophüls,
for example, feel that one cannot be a “gentleman” and be a documentary film-
maker (83).
Making a documentary calls for consideration of not only truthfulness but also
obligation. There are always judgments involved. Filmmakers need to weigh their
actions to see if they cause damage to the subject or the audience. The public does
as well.
This chapter looks at the circumstances of documentary film and video pro-
duction, representation, and reception as social acts—and as acts that have ethi-
cal consequences. Here we borrow from Raymond Williams, who suggests that
we look “not for the components of a product but for the conditions of a practice”
(48). He recommends that when we look at a work, we pay attention to the nature
of the social practices that produce and receive the work. Whether we are talking
about conditions of production, conditions of representation, or conditions of
86 chapter four

reception, documentaries are traversed by social relationships. Think of the re-

lationship between filmmakers and their funders, between filmmakers and their
subjects, and between filmmakers and spectators. These relationships are fre-
quently unequal. It is because of this inequality that responsibility is an important
issue.
In matters of production, we might want to ask ourselves, as in the previous
chapter, if there is a way to make the relationship between the filmmaker and the
participating subject more equitable, or to make the creative process more bal-
anced. What kinds of production interventions take place? And are they ethical?
In matters of representation, we should think about who controls the choice of
subject matter, the selection of what aspects to show and how to show them. In
matters of reception, the filmmaker’s choices affect how and by what means the
audience members make sense of the documentary.
In any social relationship, issues of power are inevitable. Therefore it is useful
to think of documentaries as exercises of power and examine the political and so-
cial consequences of this power. Michel Foucault has argued that it is a mistake to
describe social power as simply a negative force that operates through refusals, re-
pression, and prohibitions. The relations of power are productive. “In fact, power
produces; it produces reality; it produces . . . rituals of truth” (Discipline and Punish
194). What counts as truth depends on the conceptual systems—or discourses—
in operation, our ways of knowing, ordering, and describing the world. For Fou-
cault, power is associated not with particular institutions (the State, the police),
but with practices, techniques, and procedures. And the exercise of power creates
new knowledge, new forms of discourse, and new bodies of information.

The Case of “Harvest of Shame”:

Making Choices, Acting Responsibly

Production, representation, and reception are artificial separations, of course.

When watching a documentary we do not experience three separate stages. But
these separations are helpful to the analytical process. “Harvest of Shame,” an epi-
sode of CBS Reports, a prestigious, hour-long U.S. television documentary series,
is a good place to start our inquiry. Broadcast on November 25, 1960, “Harvest
of Shame” explores a concrete situation in a specific time and place: the immis-
eration of migrant farm labor in the United States in a time of unprecedented
prosperity. And it asks its audience to imagine themselves as able to remedy the
situation.
 Responsibility 87

If we use the terminology familiar from the preceding chapter, this is a docu-
mentary that does not disavow its authority. Nor do host Edward R. Murrow and
producer David Lowe hide their presence. They appear on screen questioning
migrant farm workers, farmers, and officials. Murrow speaks directly to the cam-
era, addressing the audience. He also expresses his point of view on the plight
of migrant workers fervently in the commentary. Confident and authoritative
narration such as this seems to be the result of empirically accurate observation.
Documentarians do research, learn facts and details, find supporting evidence,
and share their information and insights with the audience.
But what happens when this godlike authority is used to describe people with
little authority of their own? What responsibilities do filmmakers have when they
speak on behalf of those who are seldom given a voice or presence in the public
arena? In “Harvest of Shame” the journalists speak for those whom they perceive
as having no voice, and they delineate the manner in which those people are to
be understood. David Lowe squats down next to Aylene King in the field, micro-
phone in hand, and asks, “How much did you earn [today]?” Looking at Lowe,
not the audience, she replies, “One dollar.” “How much will your food cost you
today?” “About two dollars.” He continues, “Aylene, how old are you?” “Twenty-
nine.” “How many children do you have?” “Fourteen.” Aylene King’s self-awareness
and self-understanding are not part of the way we get to know her. Lowe has both
defined her and confined her. And he has defined and confined her by her hard-
ships and deprivations. The setting is limited to adversity and neediness.
This way of framing the subject has a long tradition in American documentary
expression. William Stott, commenting on documentary work in the 1930s, points
out how little we see of these people: “They come to us only in images meant to
break our heart. They come helpless, guiltless as children and, though helpless,
yet still unvanquished by the implacable wrath of nature—flood, drought—and
the indifference of their society. . . . Never are they vicious, never depraved, never
responsible for their misery. And this [approach], of course, was intentional” (58).
The camera in Aylene King’s cabin shows us the rat holes in the mattress. Lowe in-
terviews her nine-year-old son, Jerome, at home tending his three younger sisters,
and asks him if there is any food for lunch. Jerome answers “yes” and the film cuts
to an image of a pot with a small amount of beans in it.
Lowe and Murrow may have been acting in good faith by trying to raise con-
sciousness about the migrant workers’ living conditions. But by doing so, they
decided how Aylene King and her family would be presented and they sketched
a portrait of frail, suffering, injured parties. This is an image of victimhood that is
far removed from the lucid agency we are presented with in a documentary such
88 chapter four

as The Nation Erupts (Not Channel Zero, 1992), in which people in Los Angeles
are interviewed about the racial disturbances after the verdict in the Rodney King
beating. A man in South Central, for example, commenting on the television im-
ages of parents and children looting together, points out a biting paradox: “I can
explain . . . to my kids why poor people steal. But I can’t explain racism to my kids.”
Here “the person on the street” analyzes his own situation, rather than simply
responding to the host’s agenda.
“Harvest of Shame” is a clear editorial statement. The program is as much the
story of Edward R. Murrow’s moral indignation about the problems of seasonal
farm workers as it is the story of migrant labor. Murrow was, at the time, a celebrity,
a celebrity made by the media. He had reported from London on the radio during
World War II and since 1951 had appeared regularly in American living rooms on
television hosting The CBS Evening News, See It Now, Person to Person, and Small
World. One thing that makes “Harvest of Shame” different from documentaries
shown as shorts in movie theaters is the appearance of people with whom view-
ers were acquainted, people who had entered their homes before, voicing their
opinions and interacting with the subjects. It is important to recognize the power
in Murrow’s persona and how forcefully that might have been received in Ameri-
can living rooms that Friday after Thanksgiving. “The people you have seen have
the strength to harvest your fruit and vegetables. They do not have the strength
to influence legislation. Maybe we do.” When Murrow slips easily into the first-
person plural, when he looks directly into the camera and asks the viewers to
write to their legislators, he calls on the viewers’ good intentions and compassion,
their empathy, by touching their feelings of harmony and commonality, not with
Aylene King and her family, but with the liberal views of the reporter and narrator.
And rather than implicating them in the problem, the onscreen anchor beseeches
viewers to take action and see themselves as part of the solution.
Questions of responsibility were also part of the way the documentary was re-
ceived. Some viewers objected to the fact that the show took such a strong stance.
Television journalists, however, defended it vigorously. Richard Salant (the head
of CBS News at the time), in a 1961 speech to the affiliate stations, remarked: “The
price of avoiding angry letters is blandness; the price of blandness . . . is public in-
difference.” Reuven Frank, then an NBC News producer, also defended “Harvest
of Shame” in an interview in Television Quarterly in the fall of 1962: “Selection al-
ways creates a point of view. The question is not one of objectivity—but responsi-
bility. Objectivity is a screen we hide behind. It’s just a word. These programs can-
not be done by computer. They have to be done by people. . . . [We] are looking . . .
 Responsibility 89

for people who are sufficiently disciplined to approach a subject responsibly. ‘Fair-
ness’ is not an objective criterion” (both quoted in Bluem 105–106).
“Harvest of Shame” shows us that documentarians have to make decisions
about how they approach the subjects in their works, and these decisions help
define both the representations and the effects that the documentary may have on
audiences. Because the camera and microphone do not simply deliver an unme-
diated trace of some preexisting truth, and because truth is neither unproblematic
nor easily accessible, the issue for scholars is how we can analyze the decisions
film and video makers make and their consequences on both the subjects of the
documentary and the spectators. More relevant than “Is it the truth?” is “Whose
truth are we getting? What ideological forces are in operation?”
The filmmaker brings myriad expectations, feelings, interests, and desires into
this process, filtering everything through his or her own values and interpretive
schema, as do the subjects of the documentary and its viewers. Many of these are
shared concerns about not only representation, but politics, ethics, and historical
relevance. But there can also be potential contradictions in the interests of me-
dia makers, their subjects, funders, and viewers. (“Harvest of Shame” was spon-
sored by R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, and, indeed, tobacco-growing areas are sparsely
documented in the program.) We explore these questions in the rest of the
chapter.

Questions of Production

We begin by asking where the documentarian is situated. Who is he or she? How

is she or he defined in relation to those she or he is studying, recording, and rep-
resenting? How is he or she defined in relation to the intended audience? What
effects does she or he anticipate the documentary may have? In Chronicle of a
Summer/Chronique d’un été (1961), an early synchronized-sound documentary,
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin, an anthropologist and sociologist, respectively, set
out to register the attitudes of some Parisians in the summer of 1960—Frenchmen
studying the French. The film begins with generic shots of Paris in the summer-
time and a voice commenting that we will be seeing men and women who are not
actors, who are devoting their time to a new experience in cinema truth, “cinéma
vérité.” Then we are presented with Rouch and Morin talking to Marceline, one
of their helpers, about the possibility of getting sincere replies from interviewees,
people speaking in a relaxed and natural manner. When Marceline says that she
90 chapter four

thinks she would be intimidated by the filmmaking process, they assure her that
anything she objects to can be edited out. The film shows clearly the role of the
filmmakers in the production and post-production process: their concern for
their subjects and how they arbitrate the recording and editing. The relations of
production are evident.
Marceline and another helper go out to question passersby on the street: “Are
you happy?” Then, more successfully, delving deeper, the filmmakers interview
people who had agreed to participate in the film: a couple of artists, a worker in
a factory, an Italian immigrant, a West African student, Marceline’s ex-boyfriend,
and so on. They introduce the factory worker to the African student; they take
a bunch of them on vacation to Saint Tropez; and they film Marceline, who had
been interned in a German concentration camp during World War II, talking to
her departed father about her experiences while walking through a Paris street.
Then they project an edited workprint for the participants and film their re-
sponses. This scene is worth looking at more closely because, once again, Rouch
and Morin are seen setting the agenda for discussion, and cinema truth is part
of that agenda. The group debates the honesty of the revelations. “When I was
speaking, I forgot the camera was there. . . .” Was Marceline acting when she talked
about her deportation? It becomes clear that the participants realize that the film,
while representing reality, has become a reality of its own, and that reality is what
is being debated. At the end of the film, we see Rouch and Morin walking the halls
of the Musée de l’Homme, musing about the reactions of the participants to the
screening (“We were criticized for not being real enough and we were reproached
for being too real”) and debating what effect their film might have.
This is a very different approach toward their subjects from what we saw in
“Harvest of Shame.” Chronicle of a Summer was, according to Morin, an “experi-
ment in cinematographic interrogation” (6). But we might also see it as an ex-
periment in “shared anthropology” (“anthropologie partagée,” in Rouch’s words)
where a learned and sensitive authorial presence, and insistent probing, provokes
some interesting ruminations on the possibility of happiness and fulfillment. The
filmmakers’ attitude toward their subjects is neither patronizing nor condescend-
ing. Without being deferential, they have faith in their subjects’ intelligence and
judgment, inviting their contributions to the making of the documentary.
This is not to say, however, that the filmmakers no longer control the produc-
tion process. Rouch and Morin gave up some of the social scientist’s monological
authority. Yet, in Brian Winston’s words, they continue to “manipulate and condi-
tion the film at every turn . . . by insisting that the topics they think significant are
dealt with by the other participants” (185). They set the program and influence
 Responsibility 91

the answers merely by posing the questions. No matter how magnanimous (or
acutely politically aware) a filmmaker is, power in the filmmaking encounter is
shared only partly, with much caution, and, as filmmaker Trinh T. Minh-hà ob-
serves, generally on the condition that the share, or the voice, is given, not taken
(“Outside In Inside Out” 134).
Chronicle of a Summer demonstrates that production is not a neutral practice.
The intervention of the filmmakers and the filmmaking process always inflects
the production itself. Rouch acknowledges the intervention and celebrates the
presence of the filmmaking apparatus as a psychological stimulant, a catalyst en-
couraging people to do things they might not ordinarily do, or reveal things that
they might ordinarily keep hidden. Describing the scene in Chronicle of a Summer
where Marceline is walking through the streets of Paris and talking about being
deported, Rouch said in an interview: “It’s false—no one walks along talking out
loud. But I suddenly discovered that this released a series of confessions that Mar-
celine had never made during a direct, face-to-face interview, simply because she
was suddenly in a totally different element. . . . [The filmmaking process] stimu-
lated something she would never have said without it” (Levin 137).
But sometimes the camera’s intrusion does seem more problematic, counter-
productive, and occasionally even irresponsible. In Titicut Follies it is possible that
the camera’s presence incited some of the behavior we see. While they never ac-
knowledge the presence of the crew, the men handling the patients at times seem
to be showing off for the camera. What is disturbing is that it appears that some of
the cruelty we witness may have been provoked by the filmmaking situation.
The film also makes us wonder about whether the subjects were properly in-
formed when they gave their consent to be documented. If the administration and
caretakers really understood what the documentary was going to be about, would
they have consented to being filmed? What are the ramifications of aiming a cam-
era at someone? Or at someone’s personal life and then showing it to the populace
at large? “People don’t immediately realize what it means to speak to the camera,”
director João Moreira Salles reminds us. “They believe they are talking to a friend,
but when they speak to the camera they are speaking to an audience, to perfect
strangers” (Dieleke and Nouzeilles 144). In Jean Rouch’s words, “Every time a film
is shot, privacy is violated” (quoted in Winston 187). Do documentary subjects
realize that later generations will be looking at them? How do the sons and daugh-
ters, grandsons and granddaughters, of those criminally insane inmates in Titicut
Follies feel about seeing their family members abused—or naked—on film?
It is important to recognize that the ethical implications of documentary
production also include the aftermath of the public exhibition of a work. When
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people consent to being recorded, do they understand the implications and con-
sequences of becoming public figures? To put it bluntly, something happens when
you turn someone into a movie star. There are side effects to celebrity. A person’s
world cannot be business as usual after that person is transformed into a charac-
ter in a documentary. No matter how willing an individual was to be a subject of
the documentary, no matter whether the person is famous or obscure, the reality
of that person’s life changed simply by having been photographed and included
in a public event. Producer Craig Gilbert disclosed the Loud family’s anger after
the broadcast of his observational twelve-episode series An American Family (Na-
tional Educational Television, 1973). The daily lives of the family members had
been recorded by Susan and Alan Raymond and Joan Churchill over a period of
seven months. After the series was televised, people responded to what they saw
by commenting not so much on how they perceived the documentary, but how
they perceived the Louds themselves. The act of documenting has the ability to
turn what might have been ignored into something more significant, worthy of at-
tention, appreciation, or investigation. As Gilbert retrospectively acknowledged,
the filmmakers were “using human beings to make a point. To invoke the harsh but
accurate word, we [were] ‘exploiting’ them to make our films, and no matter how
sensitive, caring, or understanding we may be, the fact [was] that our incomes
and our careers often depend[ed] on our ability to conceal the truth of this ex-
ploitation from our subjects” (44; emphasis in original).
A great deal of power—and accountability—lies in the hands of the filmmaker.
Reconciling the trust the subjects give the filmmaker with his or her power to use
and interpret their image, words, and actions is a complex task that often calls for
sensitivity, humility, and forethought.

Questions of Representation: Representing Ourselves

Traditionally, it is the filmmaker who takes responsibility for the representational

process. But what happens when the person making the film is also a subject of the
documentary? In other words, what kind of ethical issues are involved in the act
of representing oneself? One reason why documentary subjects have demanded
authority over their representations is the need to take responsibility for the way
they appear before others. Sometimes this includes a conscious attempt to “cor-
rect” existing images of a particular social group, especially when that group has
been denied access to contemporary means of representation. At other times,
though, self-representation can turn into a more ambitious project, an effort to
 Responsibility 93

question the very hierarchies that had created the exclusion in the first place. Each
approach has specific implications for the discussion of responsibility in nonfic-
tion film and video.
Consider the early feminist film Joyce at 34, by Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill
(1972). The representation of women had been a concern for the American femi-
nist movement since the mid-1960s. There were many stereotypes of women as
beautiful, sexy, highly emotional, weak, dependent, deficient in intellectual abil-
ity, and capable of little more than domestic service. The women’s movement
had been represented in the popular media as a bunch of angry, middle-class bra
burners. At the time, many feminists were working toward getting more jobs for
women in filmmaking and television, hoping that putting them in positions of
power or creativity would affect the (mis)representations of women. It is useful
to see Joyce at 34 in this particular historical moment, as a reaction to the mass
media’s representation of the so-called liberated woman, and as an effort to deal
with some issues that the filmmakers felt were important.
The film’s methods and commitments appear superficially straightforward: a
small, intimate film, a portrait that begins at the later stages of the filmmaker Joyce
Chopra’s first pregnancy and includes the birth of her daughter and some of the
events of the following year. It looks confidently and directly into her world as if
gazing through a window at reality. Chopra and Weill counter the stereotypical
view of the liberated woman with an excruciatingly honest depiction of family
life. They are frank and candid in the way they represent Chopra’s personal ex-
perience, even when it is unflattering. Joyce confesses to the camera that raising
a child has been difficult and she doesn’t think she will be having a second. Her
husband looks at the camera and tells how he resents having to shop for food
when he needs to work on a screenplay.
Chopra and Weill counter stereotypical images of femininity. By representing
both Joyce’s mothering and her commitment to her work, they also undercut the
idea of an essential femininity. The complexity of Chopra’s daily struggles between
job and family suggests a different view of “reality” and “experience” than that
of the mainstream media. Yet, in trying to “correct” a misrepresentation, Chopra
and Weill also took reality for granted. Much like The Life and Times of Rosie the
Riveter, another early feminist documentary, the film assumes truth can speak for
itself. Joyce at 34 seems to be a transparent portrait of the “real world” of a modern
feminist filmmaker. After seeing the film, viewers might feel that they know Joyce.
But, of course, they only know what Chopra and Weill present. The character
“Joyce” is constructed by mechanisms of representation.
In the desire to seize authority, to define oneself and to express oneself,
94 chapter four

documentary makers sometimes substitute a new vision of the real for the in-
adequate one. Representing oneself may be a valuable practice, but it is not nec-
essarily a “solution” to the problem of authorial hierarchy because sometimes it
serves to reverse the hierarchies without destroying them. In these cases, indeed
in most cases, documentarians make use of all the persuasive devices at their dis-
posal to convince the viewers of the veracity of their image of the world. But as
Jay Ruby put it, “So long as our images of the world continue to be sold to others
as the image of the world, we are being unethical” (“The Ethics of Image Making”
211; emphasis in original). Even when dealing with our own lives or the lives of
those with whom we feel closely aligned, we have ethical and political responsi-
bilities toward showing that our representations result from a particular point of
view. A view of the world looks quite different depending on where and when one
locates oneself.
Rather than simply celebrate what had theretofore been deemed marginal,
some documentaries attempt to deconstruct and undermine the authority that
distinguishes between centrality and marginality. In video maker Pratibha Par-
mar’s words, they “expose the tyranny of the so-called center” (“That Moment
of Emergence” 4). Parmar’s Sari Red is an interesting contrast to Joyce at 34. The
1988 video is a short memorial piece for a young woman who was the victim
of a racial murder in England three years earlier. It explores certain concerns of
later feminists, particularly concerns about what means of representation are used
and how they may contribute to a more radical viewing experience. Sari Red also
questions the possibility of ever being able to re-present “reality” and “experi-
ence” unambiguously.
The video doesn’t see reality as unproblematic. And it suggests that experience
is not so easily re-presented. In fact the video implies that Asian women living in
England experience a multiplicity of identities and the reality of these identities
may involve contradictions, ambiguities, and even confusions. For those women,
identity formation is a multifaceted experience partially because of the way that
Asian women have generally been depicted in Western film and television: dis-
advantaged people represented as objects—objects of pity—and as “a problem.”
The video, then, can be seen as a site where aesthetics retain their complexity in
order to engage the audience in the process of signification. Images of children
playing in the street and images of women walking on the sidewalk appear to be
captured at random. Yet there are also images that are clearly carefully arranged
for the camera. The video works most sharply, however, by repetition and accu-
mulation. The phrase “blood against the wall” reoccurs on the sound track, and
 Responsibility 95

red liquid splashed on a brick wall reiterates as an image. These are not nature’s
consoling repetitions. They are cold, piercing warnings. At times images overlie
each other, reducing simplicity and complicating reality. And at times voices tum-
ble, echoing, vibrating, suggesting various perspectives on the awful event.
The complexity of the aesthetics, including the visual superimpositions and
overlapping of sounds, in addition to the poetic, repetitive quality of both the
images and the voiceover commentary, makes us aware of representation as rep-
resentation. The vision of the world we see in Sari Red is clearly contingent on the
where and when of the video’s maker. As if she were following Ruby’s directive,
Pratibha Parmar gives her images of the world in such a way that we understand
them to be dependent on her political and social situation, as well as her intel-
lectual and aesthetic mission. Born in the resistance and opposition to singular
views of lived experience, the video is part of a larger social movement to query
the construction and proliferation of one-dimensional views of cultural identity.
Both Joyce at 34 and Sari Red are works that have a double agenda: they are
at once a critique of the mainstream media’s representation of women and an at-
tempt to take charge of one’s own image, to represent the complexity of women’s
experience. Yet the two works are notably different. Each of them is representa-
tive of concerns of feminist filmmaking in their time. Joyce at 34 is from the early
1970s and is indicative of certain trends of the period, such as attempting to cor-
rect misrepresentations of women. Sari Red, a video from the late 1980s, explores
concerns of poststructuralist feminists, particularly concerns about the signifying
process and the politics of representation. In Joyce at 34, the ready-made subject,
“Joyce,” appears to be easily knowable. And Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill have
brought her to us. Not so in Sari Red. The subject is not given but is produced
historically through discourses. And identity is a social construct, always in the
process of becoming.
On the one hand, Sari Red is a reply to the dominant media; and, on the other, it
constitutes an alternative understanding. But what means of representation does
this alternative understanding use? How do you portray the many-sided aesthetic
and political meanings of the culture of people removed from their homeland?
In Sari Red, we see and hear a contrapuntal interweaving of tellings. Unlike tra-
ditional storytelling, this is not a monophonic performance. The visual and aural
means used—the fragmentation of the image track, the poetic voiceover com-
mentary, and the repetition of certain sounds and images—evoke a multiplicity
of tellings and a variety of interpretations. For political reasons, Parmar avoids
closure. Considering that the video is about a death—probably the ultimate of all
 96 chapter four

closures—it is amazingly open-ended. Rather than sweeping us up in a story and

moving us toward the murder of the woman, the openness of the ending creates
space for critical reflection—and anger.
The video stresses agency—in particular, resistance—along with victim-
ization: “For her dignity and pride, she shouted back. For her self-respect, she
shouted back. For such violation in public, she shouted back.” The inclusion
of images of demonstrations by a group of women called the “Sari Squad”
shows the collective history and vibrancy of that agency and resistance. And
the video reclaims the nature of the sari, from clothing that marks difference
and that can incite harassment to an article of both sensuous beauty and affir-
mation. This is a self-conscious effort to use a language different from TV news
reports. The news claims to bring us the truth, a coherent unified “story.” Sari
Red, in contrast, is not a single coherent whole. Indeed, the video questions
whether we live in a coherent world. Or perhaps the video works against the illu-
sion that we live in a coherent world. A mere reworking or reversal of television’s
discursive characteristics in order
to tell the “real story” would remain
locked within the same terms it aims
to shatter. In Audre Lorde’s words,
“The master’s tools will never disman-
tle the master’s house.” Sari Red seeks
to introduce us to a totally different
experience.
The choice of aesthetic means
is a calculated act—and an ethi-
cal act. Calvin Pryluck puts it well:
4.2. Sensuous superimposition from Sari Red (Pratibha Parmar, “More than morality is involved;
1988). Photo courtesy of Women Make Movies.
ethical assumptions have aesthetic
consequences, and aesthetic as-
sumptions have ethical consequences” (195). What Pratibha Parmar gives
us is clearly only one view of reality and a clearly partial view. The video ques-
tions whether there is a single explanation for racism. Eschewing an essen-
tialist realism, Parmar’s representation of this racist murder uses aesthetic
means that point to how we construct categories and how we produce under-
standings. And because she does not present us with a unified corpus of sym-
bols awaiting interpretation, we, like her, cannot pretend to know the whole
truth.
 Responsibility 97

Questions of Representation: Representing Others

Anthropologist James Clifford reminds us that culture is not an “object” to be de-

scribed. “Culture, and our views of ‘it,’ are produced historically, and are actively
contested” (18). Likewise, no one can describe others as if they were discrete or
seamless objects, or as if one could see the whole picture from any one point.
In the cases of Joyce at 34 and Sari Red, the documentary makers were con-
sciously or self-consciously representing a culture with which they were intimate.
Their representations of difference and their representation of self are firmly
grounded in the politics and history of lived experience. But sometimes difference
(racial, ethnic, class, sexual, gender . . . difference) is transformed into “Otherness”
and exploited, or treated with disdain. When one culture represents another, es-
pecially when an explorer or an anthropologist represents a so-called exotic cul-
ture, the result often tells us as much about the representer as the represented.
We frequently learn as much about the values, prejudices, ideology, culture, and
self-image of the explorer or anthropologist as about the culture they are filming.
And sometimes, of course, Europeans or Euro-Americans reinforce their identity
through the construction of a serviceable primitive Other—or the serviceable
primitive as their Other. The term “serviceable” is from novelist Toni Morrison’s
collection of essays Playing in the Dark. She discusses how whites construct blacks
as the kind of people that whites require them to be in order for whites to have
the identity they themselves desire. Likewise, literary theorist Edward Said has
found that Westerners have imagined Orientals in a fashion that serves them well.
The Orient has been “textualized” in ways that allow the Western observer to see
without being seen. The Western observer is coded as the invisible “norm,” the
universal against which “deviance” or “Otherness” is measured.
In documentary, this production of identity through difference is a discursive
dynamic for securing sovereign subject status for the observer. Objectifying the
other, displacing desirable or undesirable traits on to another, or, borrowing from
Albert Memmi, assigning values to “real or imaginary differences,” benefits those
doing the representing by justifying their own power and privileges (186). But it
also damages those who are demeaned or exoticized by influencing how they see
themselves. In Pratibha Parmar’s words, “Images play a crucial role in defining and
controlling the political and social power to which both individuals and marginal-
ized groups have access. The deeply ideological nature of imagery determines not
only how other people think about us but how we think about ourselves” (quoted
in hooks 5).
98 chapter four

In anthropology, white scientists no longer portray nonwhite peoples with

unchallenged authority. And new positions of knowledge have been constructed
through careful negotiations between the self and the Other. Elizabeth Bird com-
pares ethnographic research seen as “an objective scientific exercise” with a more
modern approach. Research here is seen as “an interpretative, humanistic enter-
prise, in which the subjectivity of the researcher is crucial in both fieldwork and
writing, and in which the ethnographer’s claim to speak in the name of the other
is increasingly brought into question” (252). The same modern approach can be
employed with ethnographic filmmaking and documentaries made about other
cultures. But much documentary filmmaking, consciously or not, rests on a dis-
tinction between subject and object, generally a hierarchical distinction, record-
ing and analyzing from a critical distance.
As we have seen, most documentaries are concerned with trying to capture
or preserve the authentic. And to do this they often attempt to (or pretend to)
eliminate subjectivity, “a stance in which one stands at a distance from one’s own
experience and from one’s own emotions” (Gabriel 78). But Edward R. Murrow
did not do so when he expressed his dismay at the plight of migrant farm workers.
Nor were Rouch and Morin disengaged or detached from the process of mak-
ing Chronicle of a Summer. And Pratibha Parmar certainly does not attempt to
describe objectively. Can we ever eliminate subjectivity? Can we ever step out-
side our skins, the mental habits with which we do our thinking? For Trinh T.
Minh-hà, the separation of the knowing subject from the object known is never
possible. We always know things through our particular point of view because
“the subject filmed and the subject filming are so interrelated that one cannot
separate them” (Penley and Ross 96). The notions of subjectivity and objectivity
are more useful when they are viewed not in terms of dualities or conflicts but in
terms of degrees and movements within the same concept, as always coexisting
and interrelating (“Of Other Peoples” 140). There is necessarily a subjectivity in
every objectivity, and the acknowledgment of that subjectivity is part of her effort
to create ethical representations of other cultures.
Trinh T. Minh-hà wrestles openly with the ethical questions raised by filming
another culture in her 1982 documentary on rural women in Senegal, Reassem-
blage: From the Firelight to the Screen. The film offers a critique of the so-called ob-
jectivity of documentaries and, as Constance Penley and Andrew Ross point out,
suggests that ethnography might be more a matter of “unacknowledged voyeur-
ism than it is scientific fact-finding” (87). Rather than a transcendent observer,
Trinh is self-consciously partial and committed.
In Sari Red and many other postmodern documentaries, the ground from
 Responsibility 99

which filmmakers have securely represented others has been dislodged. There
is no longer a place from which to affect an overview. By revealing the moving
ground on which they stand, these filmmakers do not suggest giving up facts or
accurate reporting. They acknowledge, however, that representation is historical,
contingent, and contestable. In Reassemblage, Trinh takes it even further. She uses
strategies of deliberate frustration, digression, and incompleteness. She uses ellip-
sis, concealment, and limited disclosure in order to undermine the normally her-
metic surface of an ethnographic account. She gives us gaps, a series of fragments.
Trinh admits that some shots are too short in duration, or too close, or too far
for the viewer to take full possession of the content (Penley and Ross 90). Some
are out of focus. One is taken through a water-spotted lens. Some of the camera’s
pans are “unfinished,” movements that travel without clear departure points or
end points. (Cinematography manuals suggest the camera rest for a brief moment
on a preselected point of interest before beginning the panning movement and,
at the end, after the movement is completed, come to rest again on a point of
interest.)
Trinh employs a similar strategy in the way she edits sounds. The film begins
with nearly a minute of Joola percussion music and natural location sounds over
black leader. Then there is silence, as we see close shots and medium-close shots,
some barely recognizable, of people performing daily chores. Then all of a sud-
den, as the images continue, a first-person voiceover narration begins, followed
by a slight jump in the image track as the narration ends and the music returns. In
other places there is untranslated talking over black leader. The music sometimes
provides continuity; but it also sometimes disrupts continuity.
Absolute silence comes as a shock when we are used to synchronized sound.
In an interview, the filmmaker talks about her use of silence not as the negation of
speech but as a sound itself (“Questions of Images and Politics” 22). In another,
she says that her sound editing is often “an acknowledgement of the filmmaker’s
manipulations, a play on factualism and authenticity” (Penley and Ross 91). At
one point in Reassemblage there is a playful illusion of synchronized sound as we
see a woman pounding maize and hear a drum beating. But in most of the film, re-
corded natural sounds, people talking, percussive music, voiceover commentary,
and silence are cut together with no attention to corresponding with the images.
By frustrating expectations and reveling in digression, Trinh makes it difficult
for the audience, like the filmmaker herself, to possess sure knowledge of the sub-
ject on the screen. The Other is not easily available to us; Trinh lets us know less
than we might have wanted. This might seem like a high price to pay; however, it
is what enables the filmmaker to establish a less authoritative relationship with
100 chapter four

her subject and her audience. She is very careful not to impose meaning on a
people, not to define them. Trinh T. Minh-hà is not the sympathetic, authoritative
observer telling us all about the Sereer or the Peul or the Bassari. Rather than an
all-knowing voice of authority, an objective voice of knowledge, her first-person
commentary acknowledges the filmmaker’s presence on the spot, her active role
in bringing the village women of Senegal to us, and some of the dilemmas she
encountered in the filming.
Trinh’s storytelling is fluid, storytelling that constructs not truth but, admit-
tedly, situated, conditional experiences. Because of this, spectators often have to
draw connections themselves. But there is no point where they can see the whole
picture since it is constantly emerging, being challenged and renewed. “My ap-
proach,” she notes, “is one that avoids any sureness of signification” (Penley and
Ross 93). Although she relates anecdotes from the adventures of a Peace Corps
volunteer and an ethnographer, she does not attempt to draw conclusions from
them. This is an inherently imperfect model of storytelling. As she points out in
the outset of the film, she does not intend to speak “about,” just “nearby.”
Yes, Reassemblage looks at some of the local women of rural Senegal. However,
as Penley and Ross suggest, the film might just as well be about the act of look-
ing at the Senegalese village women as it is about their lives (Penley and Ross
87). And importantly, Trinh divulges that these women of rural Senegal were also
looking at her. Unlike the gaze of the spectator, her look is returned. Toward the
end of the film, the filmmaker tells us that her appearance in a large hat made the
Senegalese laugh. This use of the first person in the commentary is not uncom-
mon in anthropological or expedition films. What makes Trinh T. Minh-hà’s com-
mentary unusual is that it questions itself.
More traditional ethnographic and expedition films take a completely different
route, relying on a hierarchical distinction between us and them to produce knowl-
edge that seems deceptively simple and complete. The 1961 Academy Award–
winning documentary The Sky Above, the Mud Below/Le Ciel et la boue provides
a poignant instance. The film follows French filmmaker Pierre-Dominique Gais-
seau’s seven-month adventure among the indigenous people on the island of New
Guinea. The expedition is narrated in the first person. “I am determined not only
to succeed but to film the whole story as we go.” It begins on an airplane, introduc-
ing the participants, and finishes as they reach their destination: “We made it! The
impossible!” The film recognizes the observers’ presence, both affecting and af-
fected by the incidents and lives they are exploring. But it is also a spectacle of the
so-called primitive. This is a story that strongly positions the spectator as the “we”
in a we/they, self/other opposition. “We are off. To insecurity, uncertainty, and
 Responsibility 101

adventure.” “We are just here as observers and, if they will let us be, as friends.”
And the “they” are introduced to the audience as “bizarre,” “terrifying,” “terrible,”
and “cruel.” There is, for example, an image of a crowd of native people turning
the bend in several long, dugout canoes calling out in untranslated language, as
the commentator exclaims, “I could hardly believe it was possible. Real savages . . .
proud, free, and dangerous.” Later, we see the preparation for a peace-making rit-
ual, and the voiceover narrator whispers, as if hiding this information from the na-
tive participants, “We must be the first strangers to witness such a ceremony.” The
voiceover commentary anchors the meaning of the images, fixing them with the
words of the author. It also aligns the spectator with the authority of that author.
As in The Sky Above, the Mud Below, in many ethnographic films it is often
the voiceover commentary that expresses the scientists’ fundamental urge to fix
meaning. The voiceover in Robert Gardner’s ethnographic film Dead Birds, for
example, explains what we are seeing and the meaning of what we are seeing. It
even goes so far as to describe what people we see are thinking.
Some ethnographic filmmakers have dispensed with voiceover narration and
substituted subtitled dialogue of native-language speakers filmed synchronously
with the actions being observed. The decision to subtitle or to dub, even not to
translate, is a tricky one, loaded with ethical connotations. For some it is respect
for sounds. For some it is respect for local inflections. Others prefer to provide a
voiceover translation (sometimes aurally superimposing the translation over the
sounds of the native speaker), paraphrase, or summary, justifying that it makes in-
formation more accessible to the spectators. But the decision is ultimately based
on the documentary’s agenda. It is frequently determined by political and ideo-
logical criteria. In Reassemblage the words of the local women are not translated.
Everyday language is treated more like music. The untranslated conversations,
according to Trinh, are “one way of bringing out the music in the language and
challenging the tendency to consume language exclusively as meaning” (Penley
and Ross 90).
But is this necessarily a more responsible position? Some may feel that by ne-
glecting the meaning of their words, Trinh objectifies the Sereer, the Peul, and the
Bassari. This is not collective filmmaking; she did not ask her subjects what they
wanted translated, or even what they wanted to have filmed. Nor did she ask them
how they would like to be filmed, how they wanted to be represented. She did not
give the cameras to her subjects. How and when should a documentary maker
yield control? What are the potentials and quandaries of collective filmmaking?
Does sharing authority, as we saw in some of the films in the previous chapter,
indicate a more responsible involvement on the part of the filmmaker?
 102 chapter four

Some filmmakers show rushes to the people in their films. Who Says It’s Fate!/
Von wegen Schicksal!, Helga Reidemeister’s 1979 film, shows the mother of the
family at a flatbed editing table viewing footage of her daughters talking about her
marriage. And we see and hear her reactions. But just showing rushes does not
necessarily give subjects precise ideas of how they will be seen when the film is
completed. It is usually the way the film is edited, the final sequencing and juxta-
position of shots, that defines how a particular subject will be seen. Thus George
Stoney shows some stage of edited workprints to the people in his films and tries
to incorporate their thoughts and insights on them (Pryluck 203). Lin Tay-jou
as well showed edited work to his subjects in The Secret in the Satchel. Wanting to
protect the identity of the students whose personal lives formed the basis of his
video, he told their turbulent stories through re-creations and animations. And
when he was finished, he interviewed the students on camera about the accu-
racy of his portrayals, obscuring or framing out their facial features to assure their
anonymity. We saw, too, how Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin showed footage from
Chronicle of a Summer to their participants and recorded their responses. But as
we have also seen, there are real limits to how much Rouch and Morin shared
their authority.
A more ambitious way of incorporating the subjects’ input, as we mentioned
in the preceding chapter, is to get them involved in the production process itself.
A.K.A. Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny, 1995) is an autobiographi-
cal video made by a Cambodian high
school student in Spencer Nakasako’s
San Francisco youth program. The
video is a powerful example of a work in
which the subject has the means to rep-
resent himself. Sokly “Don Bonus” Ny
sets up the camera and looks into it to
tell us his personal thoughts. He gives a
strong account of his family’s life, their
aspirations and their anguish. We see
his home filled with family members
and their dreams. We see individuals
4.3. “Sometimes I wish that . . . why can’t I have another family . . .” weighed down by the social service and
From A.K.A. Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako and Sokly Ny, 1995).
legal systems, but also struggling to take
charge of their own lives by making dif-
ficult choices. We see the divisiveness of racial antagonisms in their housing proj-
ect. We hear of his father giving himself up to the Khmer Rouge in hopes of saving
 Responsibility 103

his family. And the family, fifteen years later, not haunted by his mute presence
but having forgotten him. We also hear the teen sobbing and telling us about how
much he misses his recently married older brother, as he aims the camera, not at
himself, but out the car’s windshield.
When we turn the camera on ourselves, the subject is an active voice decid-
ing how he or she will be presented to the world. But we must be careful not to
assume that when a subject portrays him or herself the questions of responsi-
bility are automatically resolved. Or that the “reality” represented is necessarily
generic to others of that race, class, profession, age, gender, or ethnicity. Differ-
ences exist not only between cultures but also between individuals. What makes
A.K.A. Don Bonus so compelling is not simply the fact that the “native” is present-
ing his point of view, an insider speaking with authority about his own culture,
but also the fact that the video does not represent Cambodians as a homogenous
group.
Neither does the video oversimplify the individual. Just as a culture is seldom
consistent or uniform, there are multiple facets to any individual and one’s iden-
tity is always in the process of being reshaped, remade. The contradictions, the
uncertainty, the confusions the video maker expresses, along with his hopes and
desires, offer a complexity that is rarely seen when a filmmaker is observing an-
other culture. Some aspects of the video may be culturally specific and therefore
not accessible to everyone in the audience. And some audience members may
view his uncertainty as weak storytelling. But this complexity is exactly what
makes A.K.A. Don Bonus so rich.

Questions of Reception

So far we have talked about documentaries made by and about certain people. But
we have spoken less about whom they are made for, and what people might make
of them. When we watch a documentary, if we watch critically, there is always a
tug of war—in Roland Barthes’s words, an “infinite dialogue”—between the re-
ceiver and the work (xii). Spectators strive to make some sort of coherent inter-
pretation of what they see and hear. We saw what people made out of the Louds’
lives. And we can imagine the reaction to Abraham Bomba’s tears. More often
than not, documentary filmmakers strive to sway the audience in certain ways.
John Grierson, back in the late 1920s, aspired to public education, to influence
people through film by transmitting an assemblage of facts and opinions. What
Grierson—and many other filmmakers at the time—had in mind was the idea
104 chapter four

that documentaries might serve as a medium of persuasion and an agent of public

transformation.
Another way documentaries can affect the public is by serving as an instru-
ment of community, helping foster affiliation among people who have little physi-
cal contact. An important goal of the Video in the Villages project discussed in
chapter 3 was the documentation of rituals and customs so that the younger
generation will have a record after their elders are gone. A second ambition was
to communicate with nonindigenous groups. A third objective of the works was
intertribal relations, to introduce one isolated Tupi-speaking group to another,
so that they can see and hear about common experiences. And as we saw in The
Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, the wartime experiences of the “Rosies” served
an integrating function, joining the five individuals interviewed in the film (five
individuals from diverse racial, regional, social, and work backgrounds who most
likely did not know each other at all) and potentially some of the audience as well.
Seeing and hearing the experiences of women in the past, women in the present
may recognize something of themselves in their foremothers. Elizabeth Corbett,
a retired librarian, who heard that this book would be dealing with The Life and
Times of Rosie the Riveter, talked about the occasion when she had first seen the
film and declared enthusiastically, “I was a Rosie! Did you know?” Representa-
tions can be strong unifying forces in social life, a basis for social bonds.
Joyce at 34 seems to have been motivated as much by the idea of bringing
women together in fellowship and commonality as by the desire to send a mes-
sage. There are two group scenes in the film that might be seen in this light: a
scene of a consciousness-raising session, in which several women discuss both
mothering and their relations to their own mothers, and a reunion of some teach-
ers, Joyce’s mother included, talking about their working lives and reconciling
work with their household and family responsibilities.
In this last scene, the teachers share their feelings of guilt over not being at home
with their children and their feelings of guilt over being bored when they are at
home with their children. For some in the audience who have these same feelings,
the scene might be making clear what they had been taking for granted. Some
experiences can become so commonplace that we no longer recognize them. See-
ing commonalities can be moving, but, perhaps even more importantly, it can
cause us to think about what these experiences portend. A documentary such as
Joyce at 34 can force these experiences into the foreground for consideration. Af-
ter her first viewing of the film, Julie Par Cadenhead, at the time a New York City
college student with a preteen daughter, almost involuntarily blurted out, “It’s
like that!”
 Responsibility 105

This type of identification with the subject matter can be stronger than our
awareness of the fact that what we are looking at is a representation. As Bill Nich-
ols points out, bonds of identity transcend the “constructedness” of the text (Rep-
resenting Reality 172). Although we may understand a text as a fabrication, an arti-
ficial construct, feelings of empathy can triumph. These bonds tend to be seen as
indications of common problems, emotions, and situations, even when time and
social differences may seem to separate us.
At best, identification can be a way to resist the simplistic logic of a we/they
opposition. But it can also be patronizing, as sometimes happens when filmmak-
ers tempt their audiences to feel sorry for a person or situation portrayed. Shared
experience turns into pity. Or even worse, condescension. The communal bond is
reduced to stooping to the level of the suffering subject.
Not having faith in an audience’s ability to engage with intricate narratives,
psychological complexity, or aesthetically challenging work can be equally pater-
nalistic. Yet many film and video makers not only have respect for their viewers,
they see them as able to process information and use it to effect transformations.
While not reducing expression to political or social work, some media activists
do think of their documentaries as social and political agitation. Connie Field,
for example, said that, when considering a subject, she thinks about whether the
film could be used as an organizing tool and if there are groups that would actu-
ally use it (Zheutlin 164). Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say No to
Cosmo ( Jean Carlomusto and Maria Maggenti, 1988), a documentary with useful
medical information about the transmission of HIV, also imagines its audience
members not merely as receivers of that information but as agents of change.
In practice things can work somewhat differently since there is no guarantee
that the public will turn their newly acquired knowledge into action. Awareness
does not necessarily lead to social change, just as proposing a solution to an exist-
ing problem is not the same as solving the problem. In recent years several docu-
mentarians have tried to inform the public about the dangers of climate change
and have offered convincing arguments about the need for environmentally
responsible consumer habits. But if we really expect to see effective action, we
might need to do more than simply alert the public about the impending risks
of environmentally related disasters. Jay Ruby notes that there is little “empirical
verification” of the impact that documentaries have on their audiences (“Speak-
ing” 199). The assumption that watching documentaries about problems, or even
subsequent indignation, will motivate spectators to action (and the concurrent
fantasy that social problems can be changed by making documentaries about
them) is comfortable for the makers as they move the responsibility for change to
106 chapter four

the audience. It is also a way of making the populous feel not unsettled, but satis-
fied. They are made to feel powerful.
But what if you combined the screening of the documentary with face-to-
face social activism? New digital imaging systems, camcorders, and cell phones
make documentary production more accessible, and experimental, grassroots,
politically engaged, or oppositional works more vitally possible. Even before
these innovations, however, some film and video makers saw themselves using
documentary as an insurgent form of communication in order to make informa-
tion available either as a public service or as a part of their political activism. Be-
fore cable, or Internet distribution, these works were carried by their makers and
shown at rallies, demonstrations, and union meetings. The Hour of the Furnaces/
La hora de los hornos (Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino, 1968) was made in
sections so it could be conveniently stopped for discussions at clandestine meet-
ings and assemblies during Argentina’s military dictatorship. In Cuba, trucks with
generators projected newsreels and documentaries in the countryside soon after
the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista in 1959 in order to engage rural people in the
ongoing revolution. Even a later work such as Doctors, Liars, and Women, in addi-
tion to being aired on the Gay Men’s Health Crisis’s public access cable program
Living with AIDS, was screened by its makers at universities, conferences, bars,
social clubs, schools, and libraries. These events were meant to urge debate, a
sort of forced entry into “the master’s house,” to use Audre Lorde’s metaphor one
more time.
Doctors, Liars, and Women aims not only at AIDS advocacy but also at group
empowerment. Women are seen discussing the issues, deciding what is impor-
tant, making posters, marching and reacting at the demonstration, and confront-
ing not only the police but a television talk show host as well. Then they are seen
talking about it afterward, reviewing, rehashing, and reaffirming the validity of
their actions. This is a video of solidarity for more than the women in the video. It
is a video of solidarity for those in the audience as well.
In its responsibility to the audience, Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists
Say No to Cosmo is a return to the Griersonian ideal: socially useful documenta-
ries. But it is also an attempt to build alliances, reminding us of the common root
of the words “communication” and “community.”

Additional Filmography
The Hunters ( John Marshall, 1958)
“Hunger in America,” CBS Reports (Martin Carr, 1968)
 Responsibility 107

The Wedding Camels ( Judith and David MacDougall, 1980)

Forest of Bliss (Robert Gardner, 1985)
A Kiss on the Mouth/Beijo na boca ( Jacira Melo, 1987)
Joe Leahy’s Neighbours (Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson, 1988)
DiAna’s Hair Ego: AIDS Info Upfront (Ellen Spiro, 1989)
The Five Obstructions ( Jørgen Leth and Lars von Trier, 2003)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Anderson, Carolyn, and Thomas W. Benson. “Direct Cinema and the Myth of
Informed Consent: The Case of Titicut Follies.” In Image Ethics: The Moral
Right of Subjects in Photography, Film, and Television, ed. Larry Gross, John
Stuart Katz, and Jay Ruby. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.
Barthes, Roland. Critical Essays. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press,
1972.
Bird, Elizabeth. “Travels in Nowhere Land: Ethnography and the ‘Impossible’
Audience.” Critical Studies in Mass Communication 9 (1992).
Bluem, A. William. “News Documentary: The Ongoing Crisis.” In Documentary
in American Television: Form-Function-Method. New York: Hastings House,
1965.
Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cam-
bridge University Press, 1999.
Clifford, James. “Introduction: Partial Truths.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986.
Corbett, Elizabeth, conversation with Louise Spence, December 27, 2004.
Dieleke, Edgardo, and Gabriela Nouzeilles. “The Spiral of the Snail: Searching
for the Documentary, an Interview with João Moreira Salles.” Journal of
Latin American Cultural Studies 17.2 (August 2008).
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. New York: Vin-
tage, 1995.
———. Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977.
New York: Pantheon, 1980.
Gabriel, Teshome H. “The Intolerable Gift: Residues and Traces of a Journey.”
In Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place, ed. Hamid
Naficy. New York: Routledge, 1999.
Gilbert, Craig. “Reflection on An American Family.” Studies in Visual Communi-
cation 8.1 (Winter 1982).
108 chapter four

Hartman, Geoffrey H. “The Cinema Animal.” In Spielberg’s Holocaust: Critical

Perspectives on “Schindler’s List,” ed. Yosefa Loshitzky. Bloomington: Indi-
ana University Press, 1997.
hooks, bell. Black Looks: Race and Representation. Boston: South End Press, 1992.
Kaplan, E. Ann. “Theories and Strategies of the Feminist Documentary.” In New
Challenges for Documentary, ed. Alan Rosenthal. Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1988.
Koch, Gertrud. “The Aestheic Transformation of the Image of the Unimagi-
nable.” In Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”: Key Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman. New
York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Lanzmann, Claude. “Seminar with Claude Lanzmann, 11 April 1990.” Yale
French Studies 79 (1991).
———. “Why Spielberg Has Distorted the Truth.” Guardian Weekly, April 3,
1994.
Lesage, Julia. “Political Aesthetics of the Feminist Documentary Film.” In Film
for Women, ed. Charlotte Brunsdon. London: BFI Publishing, 1986.
Levin, G. Roy. Documentary Explorations: Fifteen Interviews with Filmmakers.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
Lorde, Audre. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Sister
Outsider: Essays and Speeches. New York: Crossing Press, 1984.
Memmi, Albert. Dominated Man. Boston: Beacon Press, 1968.
Morin, Edgar. “Chronicle of a Film.” Studies in Visual Communication 11.1 (1985).
Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. New
York: Vintage Press, 1993.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
———. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed.,
ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005.
Ophüls, Marcel. “Closely Watched Trains.” In Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”: Key
Essays, ed. Stuart Liebman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Parmar, Pratibha. “That Moment of Emergence.” In Queer Looks: Perspectives
on Lesbian and Gay Film and Video, ed. Martha Gever, John Greyson, and
Pratibha Parmar. New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. “Woman, Native, Other: Interview with Trinh T. Minh-hà.” Feminist
Review 36 (Autumn 1990).
Penley, Constance, and Andrew Ross. “Interview with Trinh T. Minh-hà.” Cam-
era Obscura 13–14 (Spring-Summer 1985).
 Responsibility 109

Pryluck, Calvin. “Ultimately We Are All Outsiders: The Ethics of Documentary

Filming.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal
and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
Rowbotham, Sheila. Hidden from History. London: Pluto Press, 1974.
Ruby, Jay. “The Ethics of Image Making.” In New Challenges for Documentary,
2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005.
———. “Speaking for, Speaking about, Speaking with, or Speaking Alongside.”
In Picturing Culture: Explorations of Film and Anthropology. Chicago: Uni-
versity of Chicago Press, 2000.
Ruoff, Jeffrey K. “‘A Bastard Union of Several Forms’: Style and Narrative in An
American Family.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Docu-
mentary Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski.
Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1998.
Said, Edward. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978.
Snyder, Robert L. Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. Norman: University of
Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Stott, William. Documentary Expression and Thirties America. Chicago: Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1986.
Trinh T. Minh-hà. “Documentary Is/Not a Name.” October 52 (Summer 1990).
———. “Of Other Peoples: Beyond the ‘Salvage Paradigm.’” Transcription of a
discussion in the Dia Art Foundation’s Discussions of Contemporary Culture,
ed. Hal Foster. Seattle: Bay Press, 1987.
———. “Outside In Inside Out.” In Questions of Third Cinema, ed. Jim Pines and
Paul Willemen. London, BFI, 1989.
———. “Reassemblage: Sketch of a Sound Track.” Camera Obscura 13–14
(Spring-Summer 1985).
———. “Questions of Images and Politics.” The Independent (Film & Video
Monthly), May 1987.
Trinh T. Minh-hà, and Harriet A. Hirshorn. “Interview.” Heresies 22 6.2 (1987).
Williams, Raymond. “Base and Superstructure in Marxist Cultural Theory.” In
Problems in Materialism and Culture. London: Verso, 1980.
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
Zheutlin, Barbara. “The Politics of Documentary: A Symposium.” In New Chal-
lenges for Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner.
Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2005.
 Part Two
Structural Organization
 5
Argument

D ocumentaries are cohesive units, not unstructured bits of informa-

tion. Most follow a characteristic and somewhat predictable or-
ganizational pattern. They order different events, assign importance to specific
subjects, and propose answers to posed problems. (In Poetics, Aristotle called this
organization of events “plot.”) Documentaries, in other words, have an overall
structure that helps determine the way the sociohistorical world is transposed to
the screen. And it is because of this structure that we understand the “messages”
in the film.
This is not, however, the way we experience real-life situations. The real world
is messy and undisciplined, and oft times maddeningly contradictory. We strug-
gle to recognize relationships between specific events. Different subjects compete
for our attention. And linear progression is undermined by the apparent random-
ness of our lived experiences. Compared to this, most documentaries appear ar-
tificially neat. Information about the world is amassed, arranged, and presented
to an audience in an articulate and efficient manner, with each new sequence af-
fecting the way we understand previous and future sequences. Whereas real-life
situations might lack a definite course, documentaries create specific structures of
meaning. They organize knowledge and give shape to what might have otherwise
lacked a specific plan or design.
It is easy to overlook the importance of a documentary’s overall structure be-
cause what usually stands out in nonfiction films are their referential aspects, their
113
114 chapter five

special relation to the real. Many people would choose to watch a documentary
based on their affinity with its subject matter—not its narrative virtuosity. Yet a
documentary’s ability to say something about the historical world depends largely
on the effectiveness of its structure. When we fail to understand the events in a
particular film, it is usually because the structure itself is complex or confusing.
The opposite is true when a documentary communicates its message easily and
effectively.
Another way of looking at this, of course, would be to acknowledge that there
are different ways of telling a story. While the subject matter might be the same, the
manner in which the events that make up the film are presented can vary greatly.
And, consequently, how we look at those events will also change. As with other
types of nonfictional representation—television news or historical narratives, for
example—there is nothing natural about the structure of a documentary. On the
contrary, even when filmmakers claim to follow an organizational pattern that al-
ready exists in real life, theirs is a new design, a form of intervention in the world
of lived experience. Documentarians are not free to reinvent the world as they
please; however, any given set of events that actually occurred can be arranged in
any number of ways. And like their counterparts in the entertainment industry,
documentary makers rely on different strategies to arrange the various materials
in their films.
This chapter examines how these strategies help filmmakers put forward their
arguments about the sociohistorical world. It treats the overall structure of a film
not only as a tool for reporting but also as a means of persuasion. The problem
that these filmmakers face is how to fashion the social world into a form that might
incline the public to reach a desired opinion. The form they choose, the way they
assemble their argument, far from being neutral or innocent, entails choices with
distinct ideological and even specifically political implications. We saw in chap-
ter 2 that facts seem to have a natural organization once the filmmaker arranges
them into a story or an argument. The documentarian’s task consists precisely in
discovering that organization. Indeed, as in all art and much science, a documen-
tary is a blend of detailed observation and imaginative reach.
Think about a documentary such as Prelude to War (Frank Capra, 1942). It
is a World War II propaganda film—the first part of the Why We Fight series—
produced by the U.S. government to teach their soldiers, defense workers, and
the general public why they were at war (prints were distributed free of charge to
movie theaters). Propaganda films are partial and unbalanced representations of
the sociohistorical world. They are committed to promoting a specific agenda and
are likely to offer an exceedingly limited perspective on the events they represent.
 Argument 115

Yet in many ways they also fulfill documentary cinema’s noblest purposes. Propa-
ganda films serve not only to inform but also to educate. And like most activist
documentaries, they are expected to have immediate and significant impact on
their audiences. Rather than dismiss them as biased—and therefore unworthy—
accounts of lived experience, we should try to understand how they represent the
world and, more important, what they can teach us about nonfiction cinema in
general.
Propaganda films usually arrange their materials carefully so as to avoid am-
biguous or confusing messages. The argument tries to influence the audience to
accept the film’s propositions on the basis of the reasons offered. It is a carefully
crafted case for a conclusion. In these films, the work of persuasion is seldom
subtle or self-effacing. Prelude to War is not built on hints and whispers. On the
contrary, the film renders obvious what other documentaries might try to dis-
guise: the role of rhetoric in the process of nonfictional representation. As impor-
tant as the subject matter is the way it is treated. And the treatment, in this case,
involves an argument that puts the overall structure of the film at the service of a
particular point of view. Propaganda films have an attitude, and that is one reason
why they might upset some people. They are generally less restrained than most
documentaries. Overall, though, they are not as exceptional as they might ap-
pear. While the emphasis on persuasion might set them apart from other films,
their argumentative strategies end up showing us some of the mechanisms that
are available to all documentary filmmakers.

Comparisons and Contrasts

Let’s look at the way Prelude to War builds its argument. The film is organized
around the contrasts between the “free world” and the “slave world,” and much
of the effect of the documentary depends on this structural pattern. The people
of the “free world” are almost always shown as individuals, a single person in the
frame, and usually working people, the little man, John Q. Public. There is, for
instance, a nearly one-minute montage sequence from public opinion interviews
in 1939 Pathé newsreels that shows fourteen individual Americans, alone in the
shot, giving their opinion on the American entry into the war. Most are recogniz-
able as working men and women, some shown with the equipment of their trade
(a carpenter and a gas station attendant, a butcher, a cab driver). As in his fiction
films, the director, Frank Capra, seems to be saying, “God loves you little man.
Hang in there!”
 116 chapter five

5.1. “If war breaks out in Europe, I think that this country should heed the advice of the first president and avoid all foreign
entanglements.” From Prelude to War (Frank Capra, 1942). 5.2. Prelude to War’s “human herds.”

Those in the “slave world,” on the other hand, are generally represented by
masses of people, the “human herds.” The Germans, Italians, and Japanese are
described as having “given up their rights as human beings” and are almost always
shown on the screen as a group, in huge numbers. We see, for example, extreme
long shots of crowds of Japanese bowing and cheering, and we hear the com-
mentator, Walter Huston, in a tranquil, cool voice saying, “Yes, in these lands,
the people surrendered their liberties and threw away their human dignity.” In
the background, the assembly shouts, “Bansai, Bansai!” We see similar shots of
a crowd of Germans (“Sieg Heil! Sieg Heil!”) and a throng of Italians (“Duce!
Duce!”), while the commentary continues. Later the enemy is referred to as
“deadly serious, . . . out for world conquest, . . . 70 million Japanese, 45 million
Italians, and 80 million Germans, all hopped up with the same idea.” The leaders
are practically the only enemy shown as individuals, and are constantly referred
to in a disparaging manner. Benito Mussolini is described as “an ambitious rabble
rouser,” Adolf Hitler as a “gangster,” sinister and cunning, and the Japanese war-
lords as “honorary Aryans” and “buck-toothed pals.” The film’s treatment of the
Axis leaders is best illustrated by a collage of Hitler, Mussolini, and Hirohito. It
begins with newsreel footage of Hitler making a speech, then the camera pulling
back to reveal the threesome as the commentator warns, “Take a good close look
at this trio. Remember these faces. Remember them well. If you ever meet them,
don’t hesitate. . . .”
The message is, of course, powerful and easily understood: the enemy repre-
sents an evil force and therefore needs to be stopped. But what makes it partic-
ularly effective is not simply its contemptuous view of the Axis powers, nor its
unambiguous treatment of the conflict. Rather, it is the way it turns supposedly
 Argument 117

conflicting values into structural opposites that makes Prelude to War such a
good example of propaganda cinema. The simplicities of the polarities we see in
Prelude to War are based on suppressing uncertainty and weaving seemingly un-
related data into a coherent whole. The message itself depends on this particu-
lar organizational principle, a pattern that turns out to be as compelling as it is
predictable.
In addition to contrasting individual American working people with hordes of
fascists, Prelude to War uses this structural pattern to address other subjects. The
children of the “free world,” for example, are also contrasted with the children
of the “slave world.” A sequence of a boys’ choir shows a quick long shot of the
group, then changes significantly to a tracking shot, passing each individual child’s
shining face as he sings “Onward Christian Soldiers.” The children of the “slave
world,” however, are shown in masses, training and playing war games with dirge-
like hymns or drum beats in the background. The most spectacular treatment of
the subject is a long montage sequence—four minutes (almost 8 percent of the
film)—showing groups of enemy children marching, first tiny children in uni-
form, then older, and still older, all marching to the same rhythm. The sequence
is introduced with Huston’s almost paternal delivery in the voiceover commen-
tary: “Yes, take children from the faith of their fathers and teach them the state
is the only church, and the head of the state is the voice of God.” The rest of the
sequence has no voiceover, just martial music with a heavy drumbeat.
This is a film that needed to make an impact on its audience, to convince both
the military and civilian populations of its argument. On August 12, 1941, just a
few months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. House of Representatives
voted on whether the draft army instituted the year before should be extended.
The tally was 203 for and 202 against, demonstrating a clear reluctance for in-
ternational commitment. The “draftees” themselves were hardly at fighting pitch.
Time magazine in August 1941 described uniformed troops in a Mississippi camp
“booing newsreels of President Roosevelt and General Marshall and cheering a
speech by isolationist Senator Hiram Johnson” (Bohn 93). It was also reported
that the word “OHIO” (Over the Hill in October, the month the draft was sup-
posed to have ended) was scrawled on barracks walls. It was because of this oppo-
sition that the film needed to explain what the war meant to the American people
and why the country was fighting.
At every new set of events, with every new opposition, Prelude to War seems to
insist: We are not like them, we are better than they are, and therefore we must win
this war. Contrast is used as both a rhetorical figure of speech and a structuring
device to organize the narrative. It is what allows us to understand the particular
118 chapter five

scenario presented in the film, the way Prelude to War makes its argument about
the sociohistorical world, the way the film answers the question, “Why are we
fighting?” A documentary that portrayed the enemy in a strongly negative light
without resorting to the oppositions used by Capra could, of course, have di-
rected our sympathy toward the Allies. But it would lack the power to explain, or
justify, the war as a conflict between the virtues of the “free world” and the dehu-
manizing values of the “slave world.” Even worse, it could fail to promote the idea
that the Allies were destined to win the war because “good” was on their side. The
war would have been the same, and the principles embraced by the film, too. Yet
the message would have been different.
The way a documentary is structured regulates what will be shown, what will
not, and in what order things appear on screen. In Prelude to War, the placement
of information is an important influence on how we understand the events lead-
ing up to World War II and an important aspect of the film’s persuasive work. For
instance, the fact that the United States had never joined the League of Nations
(the precursor to the United Nations) is included as one of “our mistakes”—along
with Prohibition—following “Beautiful Dreamer” on the sound track. Imagine
how different the message would have been if that had been mentioned in the
sequence where the Japanese walk out of the League of Nations, followed by the
sound of gunfire on the sound track! Prelude to War is a compilation film. About
eighty percent of it consists of archival footage. But what was made of the archival
footage has little relation to its original usage or meaning.
The beginning of Prelude to War quotes the first sentence of a famous 1942
speech by Vice President Henry A. Wallace: “This is a fight between a slave world
and a free world.” But there are significant differences in the message: Wallace’s
speech (given just six months after Pearl Harbor) used the contrast of the free
world and the slave world to point out the necessity to liberate the slave world.
“We shall not rest until all the victims under the Nazi yoke are free” and “the peace
must mean a better standard of living for the common man not merely in the
United States and England, but also in India, Russia, China and Latin America—
not merely in the United Nations, but also in Germany and Italy and Japan.” Wal-
lace believed that the United States failed in its job after World War I: “We did not
build a peace treaty on the fundamental doctrine of the people’s revolution. . . .
We can not perpetuate economic warfare without planting the seeds of military
warfare.” And: “Our duty is to build peace—just, charitable, and enduring.” For
Wallace, trying to inspire the people to the war effort meant stressing the pros-
pect of a peace that would unify common people everywhere (quoted in Blum
 Argument 119

635–640; the speech became known as “The Century of the Common Man,”
a reference to and rejection of Henry Luce’s “American Century”).
Prelude to War had the same objectives; however, the film used an argument
that stressed contrast in order to establish a presumed threat to the American
way of life. If we lose the war, “we lose everything, our homes, the jobs we want
to come back to, the books we read, the very food we eat.” The organizational
system that Frank Capra used contrasted “their” way of life with “ours,” and ex-
plained why the United States needed to fight by emphasizing what it was fighting
against—not what it was fighting for.
Prelude to War is never subtle about its particular worldview. Like Michael
Moore’s documentaries—to use more recent examples—it has a point to make,
and it makes it forcefully. Most documentaries, however, tend to avoid such bi-
ased accounts of the world for fear of losing their credibility. When people refer
to a documentary as “pure propaganda,” it is usually to question its legitimacy, not
to praise its achievements. But even if they manage to escape the charge of pro-
paganda, documentaries, whether dogmatic or enigmatic, can only offer partial
representations of the world, as we argued in the beginning of this book. More
interestingly, many rely on structural patterns that are similar to those used in
Prelude to War.
Comparisons and contrasts are popular rhetorical strategies. But the “we/
they” contrast we saw in Prelude to War is just one kind of opposition. Contrasts
can also be employed to shape a story by altering tone. Consider, for instance, Par-
adox, Leandro Katz’s 2001 video. Unlike Prelude to War, whose powerful voice-
over commentary tells you how you are supposed to think about these contrasts,
Paradox has no verbal commentary at all. But the wash of industrial sounds and
the feverish activity of the workers in the sequences of banana harvesting and
processing, juxtaposed to the quiet, contemplative tone of the natural sounds of
the jungle and lengthy static shots of Mayan altars and local people, tell quite a
bit about contemporary Latin American life. The components of film language
(camerawork, editing, sound design, and so on) become building blocks for the
larger pattern of contrast.
In Paradox, conflicting blocks alternate and it is implied that the distinctions
between these blocks are significant. Contrast creates a conscious and deliberate
incongruity and, in doing so, begs us to compare the two terms. The intentional
dissonance affected by such juxtapositions evokes mental pictures or perspec-
tives that reach beyond the immediate sounds and images. And most importantly,
whether the connections are inherent or more artificial, such contrasts function
120 chapter five

to create a distance between the associated terms, sharpening distinctions. It is

sounds and images of serene tropical forest life that make commercial banana
production seem so intense and inhumane. The factors being contrasted must be
similar enough for viewers to appreciate the association, but it is the dissimilari-
ties that are in the spotlight. In Prelude to War, it is because Americans are shown
as individuals that the enemy “hordes” seem so repulsive.
The two works we have looked at use contrast as a rhetorical device to persuade
spectators of their particular point of view. That rhetoric should be of interest to
documentarians becomes clear when we recall that documentaries do not sim-
ply provide information; they also have to convince us that their information is
truthful and legitimate. As Bill Nichols puts it, documentaries seem “destined to
bear propositions” (Representing Reality 114). This is where the use of rhetorical
strategies comes into the picture. Rhetoric, as we will see, helps us find the most
efficient way of presenting our arguments.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. It does not belong to one particular branch of
knowledge or “class of subjects” but serves, instead, as a tool that can be applied
to almost any subject (Aristotle, Rhetoric 6–7). Political rhetoric might be dif-
ferent, say, from forensic rhetoric, but both rely on similar principles to achieve
their goals. Rhetoric serves as an aid to present an issue effectively and to make
a case convincingly. It is less concerned with the message itself than with the ef-
fects that the message might have on the audience. For a long time, rhetoricians
were interested primarily in the use of speech as a means of persuasion, since this
was how most arguments were presented. For us, though, the realm of rhetorical
argumentation seems much vaster. It includes not only speech but also images,
as well as music and sound effects. And it involves different media, genres, and
formats. There is rhetoric in television commercials, news reports, editorials, and,
of course, in many documentaries.
Because they usually serve to prove or disprove something, rhetorical strate-
gies are familiar tools both to lawyers and politicians. But rhetoric is also part of
ordinary communication, and we end up using it whenever we need to support a
particular position. Take an adage such as “Wisdom is a privilege of age.” It seems
reasonable, but it is not a self-evident claim. One way to establish its legitimacy is
to find evidence that substantiates it: instances in which elderly people have acted
wisely or, conversely, those in which young ones have behaved foolishly. Another
 Argument 121

way to convince our audience would be to present a series of statements that logi-
cally lead to a desirable conclusion, as classical rhetoric has taught us. In lieu of
resorting to particular examples, we could present our case as follows: Wisdom
is a natural result of one’s capacity to accumulate experience. Young people have
not had the time or opportunity to accumulate such experience, and therefore
wisdom remains a privilege of age. No examples were used here, and yet by using
a set of logically coordinated propositions we were able to present our case in a
clear and convincing manner.
Presenting an argument in a documentary can be a little more complicated, but
documentarians have used both strategies extensively. Prelude to War, to reference
Capra’s film one more time, combines carefully orchestrated ideas with examples
that illustrate the documentary’s central proposition. If the Axis powers win the
war, the documentary postulates, American freedom and democracy will be in
danger. Therefore, the United States has to stop them. The film reinforces this
point with examples that demonstrate how the leaders of the “slave world” had
banished freedom from their countries. And if they did it at home, we conclude,
they would certainly do the same in the rest of the world. The examples here serve
to set up the contrasts that justify the explanation for the American involvement
in World War II.
Documentaries strive to prove that things are as they say they are. And they
use different means to achieve this objective. Sometimes, however, they build up
arguments not by demonstrating a particular point but by disputing an existing
claim. They prove their proposition by disproving a widely held one. In Aristo-
telian parlance, they use a refutative argument. In this case, it is a good idea to
start our presentation by revisiting the proposition we want to dispute. First we
restate our opponents’ claims. Then we expose the flaws in their claims and go
on to introduce an argument of our own. More than simply an effort to assert
one’s rightfulness, what we have here is an attempt to show what is wrong with
someone else’s approach to a given subject. To put it differently, we prove the
legitimacy of our case by opposing something that we believe to be wrong, inac-
curate, or illegitimate. This strategy is particularly useful when our argument goes
against a well-established proposition. The more flawed one proposition appears,
the stronger the other will become.
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, discussed in chapter 2, is a good example
of this form of argument. The film shows us how women’s experiences working
in war plants during World War II differed from official government propaganda
about their motivations and working conditions. The use of the government foot-
age introduces a number of themes (such as child care) that serve to put forth
 122 chapter five

5.3. “Why did I take a defense job? That’s a funny question. . . . We’re in a jam, aren’t we?” From The Life and Times of Rosie the
Riveter (Connie Field, 1980). 5.4. “You’d think you make more in a day than you used to make all week. . . . I was buying fox
furs!” From The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980).

a view on the lives of these working women. But these “facts” are undermined
by the testimonies of the former workers interviewed by the filmmaker. When
one of the “Rosies” looks back and remembers something dissimilar from the
government footage that punctuates the film, she provides a subversive undercur-
rent to the official story of glorious patriotic duty, inviting the viewers to take an
ironic distance from the historical material. Its main rhetorical strategy depends
on the juxtaposition of contrasting elements in order to refute the one that is dis-
puted. Here each particular element is only fully realized when it is juxtaposed to
a second—and ideologically opposed—“building block” of information. We are
presented with disparate views of the same historical moment.
As we will see in our discussion of editing, Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds
(1974) is another potent example of how this method can be used by nonfiction
filmmakers. The film makes a strong case against the American intervention in
Vietnam and disputes official accounts of the conflict. Davis begins his documen-
tary by presenting a standard view of the reasons that led the United States to get
involved in Vietnam: the fear that communism would spread all over Southeast
Asia and the Pacific, the alleged obligation to support the fight for “freedom” in the
region, and so on. Little by little, these arguments begin to crumble, making room
for a different view of the conflict. Contradicting the notion that the United States
could secure freedom in the region, Davis offers testimonies from Vietnamese
men and women in which they argue that the American presence in Vietnam rep-
resented a threat to their own independence. Davis also disputes the idea that the
intervention was justified, showing us the tragic effects of the bombing on Viet-
namese villages. And he confronts typical notions of patriotic duty with images of
service men whose lives were literally crippled by the combat experience.
 Argument 123

Both demonstrative and refutative arguments tend to rely on generalizations.

They draw broad scenarios out of particular situations and turn individual sto-
ries into expressions of collective experience. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riv-
eter’s argument about women’s experience during World War II is particularly
compelling because the case is based on concrete examples. Yet the examples
themselves—the testimonies of five women—only have a significant impact be-
cause we see them as exemplary of a collective past. Similarly, a film such as Joyce
at 34, examined in the preceding chapter, would be little more than a chronicle
of the filmmaker’s approach to motherhood if we failed to make some form of
generalization. Because we see the protagonist’s experience as representative
of a larger experience, however, the documentary ends up also speaking about
other women’s struggle to balance career opportunities and family life in the early
1970s. Generalizations thus appear as a common tactic for different documenta-
ries, regardless of their style or subject matter.
While documentaries might occupy a niche of their own, they share a number
of features with cultural practices that, at first sight, may have little in common,
such as political speeches, scientific papers, and economic reports. Bill Nichols
refers to these practices as “discourses of sobriety,” since they are “seldom re-
ceptive to ‘make-believe’” (Representing Reality 3). Like many TV commercials,
though, documentaries also appeal to our senses in a way that seems reminiscent
of fantasy and entertainment. Even if they rely on data, facts, and statistics to pre-
sent their cases, they use sounds and images as well in order to convey their mes-
sages, resources that may be only marginally available, say, to a scientific report.
Moreover, these sounds and images are organized in a manner that can alternately
move, infuriate, excite, and even entertain us. Often what we find most compel-
ling in a documentary—the very core of our experience—is precisely what pro-
duces the strongest emotion.
Emotions are key to different types
of persuasive communication and can
be particularly relevant to documenta-
ries. Because audiovisual media in gen-
eral combine rational and emotional
stimuli, and because our thoughts and
feelings are tightly interwoven, docu-
mentarians can never neglect the role
of the latter in the work of persuasion.
5.5. “Mr. Heston, please don’t leave. Mr. Heston, please! Take a
Michael Moore’s films, for example, look at her. This is the girl.” From Bowling for Columbine (Michael
are less notable for the artistry of their Moore, 2002).
124 chapter five

arguments than for the passions they arouse. Bowling for Columbine might not
provide a definitive answer to the question that prompts the filmmaker’s investi-
gations (Why is there so much gun violence in the United States?), but it never
fails to produce a strong emotional impact on the audience. The nearly nine-
minute sequence toward the end of the film, in which Moore visits actor Charlton
Heston, then head of the National Rifle Association, in his Beverly Hills home
is a noteworthy instance. While the interview itself adds little to the ideas al-
ready articulated in the film, it contains one of the documentary’s most powerful
moments. Holding the photograph of a six-year-old girl who had been shot by a
classmate a year earlier, Moore asks the chief of the NRA to take a look at the pic-
ture. Heston refuses, leaving it up to the audience to respond to the filmmaker’s
appeal.
Even when they seem subdued or impartial, documentaries tend to capitalize
on this affective connection with the spectator. They turn what might have other-
wise looked like straightforward data into opportunities to explore the audience’s
emotional involvement with the material documented. Frederick Wiseman’s Titi-
cut Follies has none of the excesses that we seem to find in Moore’s documentaries.
Like other films by Wiseman, it offers a meticulous and seemingly detached study
of the subject represented. Yet no one who sees the film will fail to recognize its
emotional appeal. When Titicut Follies captures the everyday routines of the pa-
tients and personnel in a Massachusetts psychiatric hospital and exposes the dis-
mal conditions to which society subjects the criminally insane, we feel sorry for
the inmates, horrified by the kind of treatment they receive, and angry at the insti-
tutional apparatus that subjects them to this kind of life. Significantly, it is because
the documentary can stir up these emotions that it commands such an intense
response. Rather than see reason and feeling as opposite and mutually exclusive
states of mind, we should then see them as working in tandem as instruments of
understanding.
There is one more form of persuasion that contributes to the work of rhetoric,
although it has less to do with the way information is presented than with the
source of that information. Besides reasoning and emotional appeal, rhetorical
discourse, as Aristotle saw it, relies on moral character, the trustworthiness of the
speaker (Rhetoric 7–8, 59–60). This may be less apparent in nonfiction films than
it is in ordinary speech, but it is not without relevance in documentaries. We saw
in chapter 4, for instance, how Edward R. Murrow’s character and reputation as a
war correspondent boosted the credibility of “Harvest of Shame.” His role as re-
porter and commentator, as well as his on-camera appearances, helped establish
the legitimacy of the documentary by adding moral weight to it.
 Argument 125

While it is possible to single out one specific feature in documentary

rhetoric—Edward R. Murrow’s goodwill, for example, or the emotional appeal
that we find in Titicut Follies—nonfiction films are likely to rely on more than one
form of persuasion. And as we will see shortly in our discussion of The River, they
can employ different aesthetic means to achieve the desired results.

The Movement toward a Solution

Although Titicut Follies appeals to our emotions when it points to terrible condi-
tions that need to be changed, it does not offer a resolution to the problem. But
some documentaries investigate a predicament or difficult situation in order to try
to sell us a solution. The River, a 1937 film by Pare Lorentz, for instance, carefully
poses a problem, examines its historical origins, and then proposes a solution to
the dilemma. Like Prelude to War and Paradox, it uses comparisons and contrasts.
But the paramount organizing principle, a common one, is this problem/solution
argument. All the reasons put forth as the cause of the predicament provide evi-
dence that make credible the solution the film proposes. The film is meant to be a
vehicle of persuasion; therefore the data support the conclusion offered.
Made by the U.S. government’s Farm Security Administration during the Great
Depression, The River tells the story of the flooding of the Mississippi River. The
film is arranged, plotted, in four main sections. The first three are trips down the
river, from the source in Minnesota to the delta. We begin with a glorious cele-
bration of the native resources. The tributaries of the Mississippi and the towns
and the trees on its banks are enumerated, almost catalogued, with an obvious
relish for not only the richness of the resources but also the “Americanness” of
the names. One is reminded of Walt Whitman’s delight in the word Monon-
gahela, as if it were the real America hidden behind the diction of superficial
culture: “Monongahela—it rolls with venison richness upon the palate.” (See
F. O. Matthiessen’s discussion of Whitman’s language experiments, American
Renaissance 519.)
Then in a parallel structure, we go down the river again. But this time the abun-
dance of natural resources is joined by an enthusiasm for the lumber industry,
mining, and steel production. The third time, we see the results of this enthu-
siasm, the ecological devastation caused by the harvesting of lumber and other
industrialization: the flooding that was destroying the Mississippi delta. In the
final section, the fourth, the film offers a solution to the problem: progressive
government action, the Tennessee Valley Authority (one of the Farm Security
 126 chapter five

Administration’s main initiatives at the time) with its locks and dams, new homes
on the reclaimed lands, and rural electrification.
It would be helpful to consider the documentary’s rhetorical strategies more
carefully. When The River takes us down the Mississippi three times, it underlines
the changes, not only the changing buildings and activities on the river’s banks
but also the physical change of the rising river. The second and third time we see
those banks, the contrasts modify the meaning of previous sequence(s). We ret-
roactively understand that the fervor for industrial production has ravished and
destroyed those very resources the film had passionately greeted earlier. Order
has been disrupted. The causality does not need to be stated directly; it is clearly
implied that the changes on the banks have brought forth the changes of the river.
These changes, in turn, call for some kind of action, which should lead to the
resolution of the problem.
The changes in the river are also articulated aurally through the film’s use of
repetition, and then a variation, in both the music and the voiceover commentary.
These point us to the problem (sometimes in a decidedly emotional manner) and
build momentum that leads us to the solution. On the first trip down the river,
for example, the music begins with a trumpet fanfare, and the narrator describes
the Mississippi River from its sources,
its tributaries, down 2,500 miles to the
Gulf, “carrying every drop of water that
flows down two-thirds the continent.”
The second trip down the river begins
again with the trumpet fanfare, and the
narrator lists, “Black spruce and Nor-
way pine, / Douglas fir and Red cedar, /
Scarlet oak and shag bark hickory,” in-
toned with pride, evoking majesty. We
see close shots of bark and axes and
more distant shots of trees falling. At
5.6. “We left the mountains and hills slashed and burned—and the end of the second trip, the narrator
moved on.” From The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937). says, “We built a hundred cities and a
thousand towns.” St. Paul, Minneapolis,
Davenport, Moline, Cincinnati, St. Louis. . . . Then later, on our third trip, nar-
rator Thomas Chalmers repeats the line and adds to it, “We built a hundred cit-
ies and a thousand towns—but at what a cost.” His delivery this time is slower,
more deliberate, almost somber. Going down the river this time, we hear many
of the same words as before, but at a different pace and with an intonation that
 Argument 127

is measured, unhurried, almost mournful. And then, “We cut the top off the Al-
leghenies / and sent it down the river. / We cut the top off Minnesota / and sent
it down the river. / We cut the top off Wisconsin / and sent it down the river. /
We left the mountains and hills slashed and burned—and moved on.” The images
here are unbalanced compositions, acute angles full of stumps silhouetted against
a light grey sky. The music is the trumpet again, but the fanfare turns into pierc-
ing, dissonant chords, unstable and jarring. This final time going down the river
the list of tributaries is also reiterated; however, this time the narration is ponder-
ous, the image is full of rushing waters, and the score is heavy with tympani and
foghorns.
These repetitions function almost like a river, as an indication of the possibil-
ity of continuity and the potential for union even while ever changing. And the
variations, the changes of wording, the changing music and instrumentation, the
changing graphics, and the changing buildings and activities on the banks, are not
only catalogues of diversity; they, too, are unified by rhythm and cadence, and by
the echo of words and phrases.
Much of the lyric quality of the film’s voiceover commentary derives from these
uses of repetition, especially at the beginning of lines. “We made cotton king / We
rolled a million bales down the river for Liverpool and Leeds. . . . / Rolled them
off Alabama / Rolled them off Mississippi / Rolled them off Louisiana / Rolled
them down the River.” (In poetry this is called “epanaphora”; it is used extensively
by Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass.) The sonorous baritone delivery of Thomas
Chalmers has the recitative quality of oratory: “Down the Yellowstone, the Milk,
the White and Cheyenne, / The Cannonball, the Mussekshell, the James and the
Sioux, / Down the Judith, the Grand, the Osage, and the Platte. . . .” Then, “Down
from the Cumberland Gap, / Over from Georgia and South Carolina, / Over
from the tidewaters, / Over from the old cotton lands west of the big river, / West
of the steamboat highway, / Down the highway to the sea, / Corn and oats, /
Down the Missouri, / Tobacco and whisky, / Down the Ohio, / Down from Pitts-
burgh, / Down from St. Louis, / Hemp and potatoes, pork and flour / We sent
our commerce to the sea.”
The images frequently move from small to large, from a single tree being felled
at the beginning of a sequence to a frame full of logs at the end, from a melting ici-
cle’s drop of water to rushing floods. Words, place names, and images rhythmically
accumulate, “mounting,” in William Alexander’s words, “to an awe-inspiring sense
of the movement down a continent of America’s great and powerful river” (138).
The music, composed by Virgil Thomson, often employs the raw energy of
American popular idioms, especially the melodies of familiar hymns and folk
128 chapter five

songs. Only a small proportion of the music is original, some of which uses the
banjo and pentatonic folk-like melodies. All the music is meant to establish an
American sound that comments on the subject pictured, frequently drawing out
distinctions. For example, in logging sequences, as log after log course down the
river, the music is a sprightly, energetic rendition of “Hot Time in the Old Town
Tonight.” Then the music in the next segment, accompanying the steel mill scenes,
is full of cacophonous, dissonant tone clusters. The music, like the voiceover com-
mentary, helps to express the predicament and lead the viewers toward the idea
that the Mississippi is a national resource, a broken national resource, that must
be fixed.
The film works to forge a community of caring viewers, challenging that com-
munity to solve the community’s problems. Notice the film’s use of the first-
person plural, the comradely “we.” “We built a hundred cities and a thousand
towns.” “We mined the soil for cotton until it would yield no more.” “We built
new machinery and cleared new land in the West.” The first person plural of the
narration summons us to that union, perhaps even to a shared identity as Ameri-
cans, uniting us under the wing of the New Deal. It is inclusive. The emphasis on
the Mississippi’s tributaries carrying “every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,” and
“all the rivers that run down two-thirds the continent,” lets us know that this is an
American problem, “our” problem. The river flowing from north to south, from a
drop of melting ice to the swells of the delta, unifies the North and South, as well.
Flooding is the responsibility of all Americans (not a regional problem as it might
have seemed).
Like Walt Whitman, Willard Van Dyke, one of The River’s camera operators,
also experienced sensuous pleasure in place names, Anglo names, Native Ameri-
can names. While on location in Arkansas he wrote home to his wife, Mary,
“Today I have been studying maps, and the names I have seen—names my father
knew and loved—have assumed a new meaning for me. American names, rich
with the color of hard men and patient women who built a country. Names they
took from their daily lives and the Indians who lived around them—Broken Pine,
Rolling Fork, Little Red River, Coal Creek . . . , Ouachita, Wabbeseka, Winona,
Okolona. . . . Long rolling names for the great plains and wild sweet rivers” (54).
We hear this, too, in the commentary written by Lorentz after the film was edited,
“The Cannonball, the Mussekshell, the James and the Sioux.” The familiarity and
Americanness of the musical score, cadences rich with both joy and melancholy,
also function in a similar way: to rejoice in the vitality and the range of tones and
nuances of American folkways—as envisioned by the filmmakers.
 Argument 129

This affective dimension, of course, contributes to the film’s persuasive force.

It permeates the overriding thrust toward resolution, which serves as a structur-
ing principle in The River. Ordinarily a film like this might offer a statement of the
problem, the explication of what brought it about, and the proposal of a solu-
tion. Although The River does follow this strategy, it also, significantly, changes
the pattern. It begins not with the problem, but with the celebration of what the
nation had. And the solution proposed does not imply the restoration of the vir-
gin state, the celebrated state, but something new, a remedy. Rather than shrill pa-
triotic bombast or a bleak view of the ecological malaise of modern society, Pare
Lorentz paints an elegiac and optimistic view, a full savoring of both the bounty
of American life and the possibility of progress, progress that leads to a reasonable
resolution, the projects of the Tennessee Valley Authority. Order is restored. Our
expectations are satisfied.
Through its narrative structure, its plotting, The River invokes an inevitability.
This is how it was; this is what we did to it; this is what happened; this is what we
can do to fix it. We can solve the problem. “We had the power to take the valley
apart—we have the power to put it together again.”
The solution to the problems in The River, the renewal that is the promise of
the future, may be a utopian ending, a utopianism haunted by a sense of social
entropy and social need. But it is also a utopian ending that follows logically from
the argument. It is a utopian ending that resolves the mounting disequilibrium of
the first three parts. And, as Brian Winston points out, the ending is the culmina-
tion of the previously seen history of the river (78). The historical analysis in the
rest of the film leads us to the specific social solution.
In many ways, the footage is fairly abstract. Pare Lorentz’s camera teams
brought him shots of water, trees, clouds, cotton, floodwaters, power lines. . . .
Early in the shooting, Van Dyke wrote, “I haven’t gotten the feeling of a pic-
ture yet, and of course I didn’t expect to have one, but somehow I feel that in
the back of Lorentz’s mind, there is far more structure than appears on the sur-
face” (42). The story was built—structured—in the editing room. The film is a
Whitmanesque celebration of the value of multitude. With his innovative use of
free verse, the brash independence of his poetic voice, but, most importantly, his
use of repetition and variation, Pare Lorentz carefully regulated aural and image
patterns and rhythms with the aim of producing an organic vision of decay and
resurrection.
The River is not simply a representation of reality; it is a rhetorical operation
on reality.
130 chapter five

Irony

We saw an occasional hint of irony in The River. Every once in a while the film
invites us to infer meaning different from the literal meaning. Think, for instance,
of the way the alarm blasts for the flood mimic the factory whistles. Or the time
we hear the roll call of trees and see the denuded hills. Or, in the sequence just
before the utopian solution, when the narrator describes a generation, “Grow-
ing up without proper food, medical care, or schooling, / Ill-clad, ill-housed, and
ill-fed—/ And in the greatest river valley in the world.”
But irony is sometimes used less as tone or an indication of attitude than as
a structuring device. In the remainder of this chapter, we will examine Strange
Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948) and Avenge But One of My Two Eyes/Nekam achat
mishtey eynay (Avi Mograbi, 2005), two works that use the rhetorical device of
irony—the intentional use of an idea, words, or an image in such a way to convey
meaning opposite to the literal meaning—in a strategic manner to create cogni-
tive dissonance that calls into question the “reality” portrayed. Both documenta-
ries employ irony as a tool for enhancing critical consciousness.
In Strange Victory, irony creates a double-voiced discourse on “victory,” so that
two senses of victory coexist simultaneously. Instead of posing a problem and
suggesting a solution, the film presents us with the United States’ successful de-
feat of the fascist enemy in World War II and then asks if this is really a victory.
Like Prelude to War and The River, Strange Victory contains statistics and an au-
thoritative voiceover. It, too, summarizes a period of American history. But this
film was not made by the federal government; in fact, it was made by a group of
people who were questioning government policy and social attitudes and yearned
for better times.
The documentary begins with the defeat of the Nazis and a view of what life
looked like after the war. Then, halfway through the seventy-two-minute film,
it performs a magical feat. The technology of reverse motion brings us back to
the war, reconstructing what was just demolished. We watch the rise of the Na-
zis and are confronted with the question “Remember how it was?” By running
the sequence in reverse, the film literally deconstructs the allied “victory.” Strange
Victory also shows us images of gaunt corpses, amassed dentures, hair, and eye-
glasses from the concentration camps, which are interwoven with images of post-
war American infants—Italian babies, Jewish babies, black babies—in their cribs
and basinets. And we see posters, placards, and graffiti about “Pope-lovers” and
“niggers,” or declaring “No Jews,” as well as signs for restricted housing develop-
ments and whites-only entrances. “A strange victory, with the ideas of the losers
 Argument 131

still active in the land of the winner.” This ironic parallel between World War II
atrocities and postwar prejudice strongly condemns the incongruous triumph of
racial discrimination in U.S. social life, the same attitudes toward others that gave
rise to Nazism.
Strange Victory uses irony to explore a second layer of meanings. The heard and
seen (with their explicit meanings) and the unheard and unseen (the meanings
that are being implied) exist side by side, or, as in the case where Hitler’s face is
superimposed on the image of ordinary Americans going to work, one atop the
other, inviting the audience to infer the relationship between the two (Hutcheon
12–13; 39; 64). Made just three years after the end of World War II, Strange Vic-
tory and its voiceover’s recurring refrain, “Remember?” must have spoken strongly
to audiences at the time.
There is a short enacted scene of an African American—or “Negro,” as they
were called in polite circles at the time—flyer returning from the war, trying to se-
cure a job as a commercial pilot and being turned away. “On the airlines of postwar
America, there are no Negro pilots, no co-pilots, no navigators. Only a thousand
Negroes flew in the war against Nazi Germany. We only let a thousand fly. But the
old job mopping the floor in the men’s room is still open.” Then, over the faces of
individual African Americans, eyes uplifted: “A Negro flyer, a million soldiers, a
people of fourteen million who are still waiting for their share of the victory, still
living out the old statistics. Of twenty thousand architects in the United States,
less than one hundred are Negro; of eighty thousand civil engineers, less than one
hundred are Negro; . . . the Germans put a yellow star on the Jew. But we keep the
yellow star hidden in quotas for Negroes, for Jews, for Italians.”
The enacted scene functions as an allegory for all those Americans who are
“still waiting for their share of the victory.” As a rhetorical operation, allegory em-
ploys people, things, and events to make larger “moral, ideological, or even cos-
mological statements,” in James Clifford’s words (98). Allegory has a “continuous
double structure” (101) that allows the particular, as Jonathan Kahana (arguing
from Clifford) puts it, “to retain its specificity . . . while serving as the medium for
a lesson of general significance for others” (7). Strange Victory has a clear moral
message: the promise of an abundant future is not available to all.
Aristotle itemizes three forms of persuasion, “appeals” to the audience: ethos,
pathos, and logos (Rhetoric 7–8). Ethos uses the authority invested in the speak-
er’s character to appeal to the audience; pathos engages the emotions of audience
members; and logos persuades by employing logic and reasoning to make argu-
ments. Strange Victory, like many other persuasive documentaries, employs all
three. They are used to build a special relationship with spectators, turning them
 132 chapter five

into confederates who understand the intricacies of the irony being explored. Of
course, there is no guarantee that a viewer will interpret the irony the way the
filmmakers intended. But the film uses those “appeals” to try to mold that spe-
cial intimacy. It crafts an argument that petitions our emotions, as well as our
reason and respect for convincing research and information. Using the indirec-
tion and critical edge of irony (in both the film’s language and its form) as a tacti-
cal weapon, the documentary calls on our sympathies, feelings, judgment, and
common sense, as it points out the ironic discrepancy between what Americans
fought for abroad and their social practices at home.
The word “rhetoric” may seem like an old-fashioned term. And the kind of
tightly argued narrative that we see in Strange Victory, The River, and Prelude to
War may also seem a thing of the past. Indeed, much of the persuasive power of
these films lies in their use of omniscient voiceover commentary, which is not very
popular anymore. Yet, as we noted earlier, and as Paradox demonstrates so vividly,
rhetorical strategies can soundly
structure a work even without voice-
over commentary. Take another
recent documentary, Avi Mograbi’s
Avenge But One of My Two Eyes. The
video uses the ethical force of the
irony to drive home its message. It
looks at the Israeli celebration of sac-
rifice in the Masada myth (960 Jew-
ish zealots killed themselves rather
5.7. A Palestinian citizen appeals to an Israeli soldier at one of the than submit to Roman capture) and
checkpoint watchtowers in Avenge But One of My Two Eyes/Nekam Samson’s biblical suicide (martyred
achat mishtey eynay (Avi Mograbi, 2005).
to deliver the Israelites from the
Philistines, saving the tribe of Judea
from extinction), then juxtaposes these bloody stories’ use as legends of nation
building and national freedom with how modern-day Israelis treat Palestinians
in the occupied territories. Avenge But One of My Two Eyes shows the watchtow-
ers where the Roman soldiers stood guard, alongside the checkpoint towers and
tanks from which Israeli soldiers bully Palestinian citizens. Although aggressive
acts of Palestinian rebellion are only alluded to, the spirit of resistance is revealed
to be part of daily life.
The opening titles appear over a circling helicopter shot of the remains of the
walled fortress on Mount Masada, and an hour and a half later the documentary
closes with images of uniformed school children behind a fence and gate, needing
 Argument 133

to cross the “closed military zone” to return home. Their parents and Mograbi
entreat the soldiers to let the youngsters through. In between, we had frequently
heard Palestinians declaring that it is better to be dead than to live under these
conditions. And there were regular telephone calls to the documentary maker
from a Palestinian friend describing the curfew, daily life during the occupation,
and his preoccupation with death. “Believe me,” he says just before we see the
schoolchildren, “I don’t mind if I die. My problem is how to live.” The episode
of the barricaded schoolchildren quotes quotidian reality. But the documentary
never shows the children reunited with their families. Instead, the final shot is a
guide at Masada pointing out that now an Israeli flag “proudly waves” at the site
of one of the greatest defeats of the Jewish people, and the Romans, people who
came to murder and rob, are relegated to history books. This is followed by a
title dedicating the work to Mograbi’s son and his friends, “who refuse to learn
to kill.”
The dark absurdity of contemporary political realities is brought into stark re-
lief not so much by contrast, as in Paradox, as by correspondence. Although the
narrative structures of Avenge But One of My Two Eyes or Paradox may not seem
as goal-obsessed as Strange Victory, The River, or Prelude to War, their arguments
are equally moving and effective. They, too, are carefully constructed cases for the
conclusion they want their audiences to accept.

Additional Filmography
Land without Bread/Las Hurdes (Luis Buñuel, 1933)
The Battle of Midway ( John Ford, 1942)
Listen to Britain (Humphrey Jennings, 1942)
Indonesia Calling ( Joris Ivens, 1946)
You and Many a Comrade/Du und Mancher Kamerad (Andrew and Annelie
Thorndike, 1955)
The Battle of Chile/La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas (Patricio
Guzmán, 1975)
Isle of Flowers/Ilha das Flores ( Jorge Furtado, 1989)
Africa Rising (Paula Heredia, 2009)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Alexander, William. Film on the Left: American Documentary Film from 1931 to
1942. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1981.
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Classics, 1996.
———. Rhetoric. Trans. W. Rhys Roberts. Mineola, N.Y.: Dover, 2004.
134 chapter five

Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” In Theoriz-

ing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
Blum, John Morton, ed. The Price of Vision: The Diary of Henry A. Wallace. New
York: Houghton Mifflin, 1973.
Bohn, Thomas William. An Historical and Descriptive Analysis of the “Why We
Fight” Series. New York: Arno Press, 1977.
Clifford, James. “On Ethnographic Allegory.” In Writing Culture: The Poetics and
Politics of Ethnography, ed. James Clifford and George E. Marcus. Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986.
Hutcheon, Linda. Irony’s Edge: The Theory and Politics of Irony. New York: Rout-
ledge, 1994.
Kahana, Jonathan. Intelligence Work: The Politics of American Documentary. New
York: Columbia University Press, 2008.
Lerner, Neil. “Damming Virgil Thompson’s Music for The River.” In Collecting
Visible Evidence, ed. Jane Gaines and Michael Renov. Minneapolis: Univer-
sity of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Matthiessen, F. O. “Only a Language Experiment.” In American Renaissance:
Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1968.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
———. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed.,
ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005.
Plantinga, Carl. “Roger and History and Irony and Me.” Michigan Academician
24 (1992).
Snyder, Robert L. “The River.” In Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Van Dyke, Willard. “Letters from ‘The River.’” Film Comment 3.2 (Spring 1965).
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
 6
Dramatic Stories, Poetic and
Essay Documentaries

A n argument is only one way to organize a documentary. Some non-

fiction films rely on dramatic conventions familiar from fiction
storytelling, focusing on the events that surround a particular individual and the
actions taken by that individual to accomplish a specific goal. Others use less
conventional structures and arrange information in a personal or poetic manner.
Both types differ from the films we discussed earlier but are no less compelling.
In this chapter we look at these two types of films. As we exemplify shortly,
they span the entire history of documentary cinema, from the silent era to the
present. First we discuss documentaries that use dramatic conventions to tell their
stories, building narratives that are rich in character and action. Then we examine
nonfiction films that aim at developing experimental or poetic ways of arranging
story information. At the end of the chapter, we also see how new digital media
have expanded the possibilities of documentary experimentation through data-
base formats. The form each work takes involves a particular manner of treating
nonfictional reality and offers a distinctive way of exploring the historical world.

Telling Stories

As we saw in the previous chapter, many documentaries start off from a specific is-
sue that the filmmaker feels the need to investigate or explain. The investigation is
135
 136 chapter six

likely to go on all the way to the end of the film, when a statement or verdict must
be offered, lest the case proposed by the filmmaker lose some of its persuasive-
ness. These documentaries tend to play with our expectations, raising questions
and putting off answers, forestalling closure, so that the last minutes in the film
will coincide with the resolution of a particular issue or problem. Another way to
create a forward thrust is to treat the documen-
tary as a kind of dramatic narrative in which
an event or series of events progresses toward
a conclusion. Think of the Lumière brothers’
1895 film, The Demolition of a Wall/Démoli-
tion d’un mur. We begin with the wall standing
perpendicular, slightly to the left of the frame.
The workers push from the far side of the wall;
the wall begins to crumble; it falls in the center
of the frame; and we see a screen full of dust
as it is demolished. The one-shot film has a
beginning (that establishes the state of affairs
as it existed), a middle (in which that state is
disrupted, the wall is struck and falls), and an
end (the conclusion, the wall is no longer; we
see the space where it had been). Demolition of
a Wall predates the use of the term “documen-
tary.” But even such a simple record of a specific
event reveals the attractiveness of storytelling
for nonfiction filmmakers. The film is “ordered”
by a coherent system of causality. And as audi-
ence members, we, too, relate to the dramatic
developments and respond accordingly to the
prospects raised by the film.
From this perspective, documentaries do
seem to share a great deal with fictional sto-
ries. Both introduce a series of causally related
events and seek a conclusion for their develop-
ments, offering a teleological trajectory (from
the Greek telos, meaning finality) that motivates
and justifies many of the filmmaker’s choices.
6.1–6.3. The narrative form of The Demolition of a Wall/
The storytelling itself, the plotting, proceeds
Démolition d’un mur (Lumière brothers, 1895). toward this finality. Those films that are about
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 137

competitions, for example, thrust us in the direction of the inevitable moment

when someone wins. Think of Spellbound ( Jeffrey Blitz, 2002), a film about a na-
tional spelling bee, or Mad Hot Ballroom (Marilyn Agrelo, 2005), which follows
New York City public school kids as they prepare for and participate in a ballroom
dancing contest.
But even films that center on an individual who is not in competition can in-
dulge in a narrative resolution. In The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill ( Judy Irving,
2004), the protagonist, Mark Bittner, is obliged to leave his cottage on Telegraph
Hill and thus abandon the wild parrots. The documentary, however, concludes
with Mark finding a new interest in birds indigenous to San Francisco, and also
happily informs the audience of Mark’s romance with the filmmaker: “And Mark
and I became a pair.”
Another common structuring device involves the use of a quest to organize
story information, with a payoff at the end of the pursuit. In Another Road Home
(2004), Danae Elon takes us on a search to find an elderly man she called Moussa,
a gentle, nurturing Palestinian who took care of this Israeli woman throughout
her childhood and young adulthood in East Jerusalem. Early in the film, she lo-
cates Moussa’s sons in Paterson, New Jersey, and interviews them about their fa-
ther. We learn about Moussa’s dedication to his children as well as his devotion
to the Elon family. We also hear the grown-up sons speak of homeland and exile,
personal relationships and political conflicts. As we watch Another Road Home,
we grow increasingly curious about the man at the center of these conversations.
And our curiosity is rewarded in the second half of the film, after Moussa takes a
long and difficult trip from his Israeli-occupied village to meet with his children
and the filmmaker in the United States.
Touching on such wide-ranging subjects as the conflict between Israelis and
Palestinians, Another Road Home does involve more than a personal quest for
one’s history. It offers a unique entry point to the social fabric that connects Jews
and Muslims in the Middle East. But it is that quest, Elon’s effort to reconnect
with Moussa, that provides a structuring principle for the documentary and, ulti-
mately, helps us understand the social and political issues that permeate the film-
maker’s family history.
Relying on effective dramatic conventions can prove particularly useful when
the events represented are already familiar to the audience. Bus 174/Ônibus 174
( José Padilha, 2002) tells the story of a young man who hijacked a bus in Rio
de Janeiro and held eleven passengers captive for several hours. The ill-fated epi-
sode, which ended with the death of the hijacker and one of his hostages, was
well known to Brazilian spectators, who had seen it live on television. But the
138 chapter six

filmmaker managed to retain the attractiveness of the account by creating a dra-

matic narrative that turns increasingly suspenseful as we approach its tragic con-
clusion. Toward the end of the film, Padilha intercuts television footage of the
bus with testimonies from police officers, the hijacker’s family members, and the
surviving victims. More than simply broadening our understanding of the event,
the testimonies delay its closure, increasing our interest in the story’s develop-
ments. Even though we may foresee what will happen in the end, we continue to
watch the film with growing anticipation.
Documentaries that utilize dramatic conventions do not necessarily eschew
the rhetorical strategies that we find in films such as The River and Prelude to War.
But those strategies are less noticeable here, or are overshadowed by the line of ac-
tion that constitutes the backbone of the film. For this reason, documentaries that
are rich in dramatic elements often seem less manipulative than those that openly
force an argument on the spectator. They can, however, be more insidious, since
the particular worldview they embrace—the message in the film—is eclipsed by
the seemingly natural quality of the plotting.
Many of these documentaries wrap the complexities of the sociohistorical
world in a series of conflicts involving one or more subjects. As happens in most
fiction films, individual characters have a major role in these narratives and are
portrayed as agents capable of altering a certain state of affairs. Early on, we find
a general characterization of the individual, the obstacles he or she is likely to
face, and the situation that serves as the basis for the narrative. What follows is,
normally, a development of the initial conflicts, with the action pushing us further
and further toward a conclusion. Along the way, there are frequently insights and
sometimes revelations. And in the climactic moments, increasing dramatic ten-
sion and a great sense of urgency dominate, culminating with the resolution of
the conflicts outlined earlier.
Man on Wire ( James Marsh, 2008) turns Philippe Petit’s 1974 tightrope walk
between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City into what the
director has described as a “heist movie.” The story, which involves the clandes-
tine use of the towers as a stage for Petit’s stunt, was widely reported at the time.
In Marsh’s hands, it reemerges as a thrilling documentary that owes as much to the
venerable narrative conventions used in the film, including the picturing of Petit as
an ambitious individual, as it does to the uniqueness of the event. We hear about
his determination to perform what looks like an impossible feat; we watch footage
of his preparations; we hear testimonies about the difficulties involved in the proj-
ect. All along, we get a close look at Petit’s personality and motivations. As with
Bus 174, the outcome of the episode might have been familiar to some viewers.
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 139

But the way the story is presented—a suspenseful succession of events centered
on the goals of a main character—makes it hard for us to lose interest in the film.
There are, of course, important differences between a documentary and a fic-
tion film narrative. Documentaries are not scripted the same way fiction films
are and the people onscreen usually appear as themselves. Even when nonfiction
films rely on prefabricated scenarios, a certain measure of spontaneity and unpre-
dictability tends to distinguish them from their fictional counterparts. Moreover,
the narrative expectations that characterize a fiction film might be only partly
fulfilled in a documentary. A particular line of action might remain incomplete,
for example, or a certain conflict might yield a resolution that is less than satisfy-
ing. (Take, for instance, the issue of Mark’s eviction from his home in The Wild
Parrots of Telegraph Hill.) None of these differences, though, can undo the fact
that dramatic documentaries owe part of their “attractiveness” to the audience’s
familiarity with a formula common to many fictional narratives, in particular to
Hollywood films.

Life as Drama

Nonfiction filmmakers have sometimes argued that the dramatic quality of their
films is not solely the product of artistic design but can also be found in real life.
It is up to the filmmaker to discover it. Rather than call upon existing formulae,
one should look for those moments in which drama is likely to arise naturally,
situations that already involve a potential for discord and emotional intensity, as
happens in the competition documentaries we mentioned above. In this case, the
notion of “discovered drama” replaces the concept of dramatic artifice, and the
aesthetic treatment of the narrative events follows a pattern already defined in
real life.
But filmmakers do not merely come across the subject of their films. They pur-
sue them actively and choose to present them in a certain way. Even if one is right
to assume that drama is already part of ordinary life, the dramatic structures that
we see in some documentaries are a product of the creative choices made by the
filmmakers. Just as the events captured by the camera are built into a series of de-
velopments with a certain order, rhythm, and finality, this act of discovery is also
an act of re-creation. Situations that exist in the sociohistorical world are given a
definite shape.
Robert Flaherty, a sort of father figure in the history of nonfiction film, intro-
duced many of the existing ideas about real-life drama. Back in the silent period,
140 chapter six

when documentary cinema was not yet a clearly defined concept, he set out to
record the lives of people living in “remote” parts of the world. And for that, Fla-
herty chose not the detached attitude that one might have found in the travel-
ogues and nature films made at the time but rather the emotional approach that
one tends to detect in a fiction film. Drama appeared, then, as a key to lived expe-
rience. Flaherty believed that life already contained dramatic moments, and that
the filmmaker should “carve” them out of the raw material of the historical world
(Calder-Marshall, quoted in Mamber 11).
His first film already exemplified this interest in drama. Nanook of the North
(1922) was shot in the semi-arctic region of northern Ungava (on the northeast-
ern border of the Hudson Bay), Canada, and captured the life of an Inuit hunter
whose “adventures” constitute the heart of the film. The idea was to document
traditional aspects of Inuit life that were disappearing or had already vanished.
Yet rather than simply focus on the general features of the landscape and the
people—an indistinct account of his subject—Flaherty filmed the experiences
of one particular individual, a hero so to speak, to whom our attention is directed
throughout the film. Thanks to the man Flaherty named “Nanook,” we do learn
something about Inuit life. But we also rejoice at the dramatic opportunities of-
fered by his screen appearances. We empathize with Nanook as he struggles to
survive, share moments of tenderness with him and his family, and laugh at the
antics of his children. Unlike a cold exposé of Inuit life and culture, Nanook of the
North has many of the ingredients that contribute to the making of a good dra-
matic film: pathos, humor, and even suspense.
That these qualities were largely a product of the filmmaking process is revealed
by Flaherty’s own shooting methods. Several of the scenes in Nanook were staged
for the camera, produced specifically to fit the purposes of the film. The subjects
and the setting are genuine, but the events were re-created at the moment of shoot-
ing. Flaherty also makes a deliberate effort to present his subjects in a way that
matches the overall narrative concept of the film, attributing to them features that
are common to dramatic characters. Early in the film, for example, an intertitle
describes Nanook as “Chief of the ‘Itivimuits’” and “a great hunter famous through
all Ungava.” The idea is later reiterated by the various actions recorded by the
camera, with Nanook playing the role announced earlier. The promise of real-life
drama—when it exists—is thus fulfilled by the filmmaker’s “artistic” intervention,
his effort to match what he saw as authentic experience with conventional forms
that are generally recognizable to film audiences. Needless to say, it is the specific
design that results from this intervention that gives shape to the film’s compelling
message and, to a great extent, accounts for its lasting power.
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 141

The motor of the narrative in Nanook of the North is the clash between the indi-
vidual and the environment. We find no real villains in the film, but in the absence
of a human antagonist, Nanook’s inhospitable surroundings provide the neces-
sary obstacles for the development of narrative momentum. As William Rothman
has noted, Nanook of the North is the story of “a man’s heroic efforts to keep his
family alive in a harsh natural environment” (25). Much of what we see in the film
grows out of this initial conflict. As with many dramatic narratives, here we have
a protagonist, a goal, and the difficulties that are likely to stand between him and
his objectives. Will Nanook overcome the challenges imposed by the unforgiving
landscape of the North? Will he be able to feed his family? These are the ques-
tions that drive the narrative forward. And it is our desire to know the answers
that keeps us involved in the story events.
The film’s overall pattern is established early on. Nanook of the North does not
have one central plot line, which the spectator is expected to follow all the way to
the end. Instead, Flaherty’s film is divided into various episodes, all of which have
a somewhat autonomous line of action, with a specific subject matter and the
developments and complications that pertain to it. One of the early scenes in the
film is introduced by an intertitle that reads: “A wandering ice field drifts in from
[the] sea and locks up a hundred miles of coast. Though Nanook’s band, already
on the thin edge of starvation, is unable to move, Nanook, great hunter that he is,
saves the day.” The title is followed by images of Nanook in his kayak, trying to
find his way through various ice blocks. Later, he walks on the large white field
and looks for a place to fish. Using two pieces of ivory in lieu of bait, he man-
ages to bring home a large catch and, as Flaherty had announced, saves the day.
The scene is simple, almost predictable. But it fulfills the film’s dramatic prom-
ise. Brave and ingenious, Nanook takes up the challenge facing him and proves,
already toward the beginning of the documentary, that he can prevail over the
obstacles that come his way.
This pattern repeats itself over and over again, as Flaherty presents different
situations in the life of Nanook and his family. Whether Nanook is facing the ad-
versities of the weather or involved in hunting exploits, the dramatic treatment of
the story events remains basically the same. An initial challenge sets the action in
motion, leading to a struggle against a specific “enemy.” Once the struggle is over,
Nanook emerges victorious, the prize being his own survival. With each episode,
we have a provisional resolution, which in turn gives way to a new challenge and
a new set of complications.
The most spectacular rendition of this pattern is a walrus hunt in which Nanook
is joined by a few of his fellow Inuit men. Shortly after the fishing scene, an
 142 chapter six

intertitle announces: “For days there is no food. Then one of Nanook’s look-outs
comes in with news of walrus on a far off island.” What follows is a suspenseful
sequence comparable to many found in fiction films. Flaherty shows us the Inuit
near the shore, then a herd of walruses
lying on the beach, followed by a shot
of Nanook and his companions walking
toward their prey. As the men approach
surreptitiously, the action is held still for
several seconds. Then, all of a sudden, it
changes into a fast-paced battle. Aware
of imminent danger, the walruses rush
to the water, but one of them ends up
being hit by a harpoon. From then on,
we see what is probably the film’s most
literal representation of the struggle be-
6.4. “Rolling the dead quarry from the undertow.” From Nanook of tween man and nature. On one end of
the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922).
the line, the walrus swims for its life; on
the other, the men struggle to drag it out
of the water, their own lives at risk if they lose the battle. In the end, the hunters
win the fight, the confrontation now rewarded as they cut open the walrus and
share the prize.
This sequence also demonstrates with unusual clarity how narrative conven-
tions help shape our perception of the world depicted by Flaherty. All the central
ideas in Nanook are condensed in this dramatic confrontation: the fascination
with a generally inhospitable environment, the bravery of the Inuit men, and the
struggle for survival are all underlined by these images. Perhaps most importantly,
the battle scene draws attention to the distance that sets the “primitive” world of
the Inuit apart from the white man’s “civilization.” Every trace of the industrial
world has been deliberately avoided in this scene, as the hunters revive an ancient
ritual that was no longer in place when Flaherty made the film. Hunting with
harpoons instead of rifles was a traditional practice that put the lives of the Inuit
“performers” at greater risk. To do otherwise, though, would be to compromise
the pristine world evoked by Flaherty’s camera. Instead, the walrus hunt scene
preserves that ideal, as it puts dramatic intensity at the service of what Flaherty
sees as the authentic Inuit way of life.
Flaherty’s vision of the Inuit world is, of course, a romantic looking back, and
for that he has been much criticized. Rather than show us how Nanook’s people
lived at the time he made the film, he chose to represent a world that might have
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 143

existed before white explorers arrived in the land of the Itivimuits. In this sense,
Nanook of the North cultivates a certain fascination with the primitive, one that
is itself reminiscent of the white man’s colonial imagination. As Fatimah Tobing
Rony puts it, the film’s “appeal was the myth of authentic first man” (103). What
is striking for us here is the way this particular vision fits the dramatic concept of
the film and how that concept seems to mold the reality we see on the screen. Had
Flaherty chosen a different approach, or structured his film in a different way, his
idealized vision of Inuit life might have been lost. As it is, the film projects and
celebrates that vision. It honors the nobility of the “primitive,” exalts their bravery,
and adds a sensational quality to the real-life drama of survival.
Flaherty’s influence in general and Nanook’s legacy in particular are immeasur-
able, but one of their obvious contributions is precisely this emphasis on drama as
a way of approaching nonfictional reality. Many years after the making of Nanook,
the idea of “discovered drama” continued to reverberate among documentary
makers who claimed to find in real life the structures that we often attribute to
a fiction film. In the early 1960s, for example, a group of American filmmakers,
soon to be associated with the label of direct cinema, embraced an attitude to-
ward nonfiction that recalled Flaherty’s interest in capturing dramatic situations.
Robert Drew, who produced some of these films, explains: “Dramatic logic works
because the viewer is seeing for himself and there is suspense. The viewer can be-
come interested in characters. Characters develop. Things happen” (282).
Not surprisingly, several of the documentaries made at that time focused on
contests or crisis situations. The idea was that either of these would call for dra-
matic action, which in turn would provide material for the film. The “crisis model,”
as it was eventually described, offered a “natural” structure for the documentary.
It defined a conflict, established a line of action, and asked for a resolution. Drama
was expected to occur effortlessly (Mamber 115–140).
In practice, things did not work exactly this way, for while direct cinema did
locate drama in real life, the process of transposing it to the screen was never ef-
fortless or transparent. These were clearly delimited narratives in which the prom-
ise of resolution also helped define the “message.” And the films were, of course,
the expression of a particular point of view, even though the filmmakers tried to
minimize their own role as mediators in the process of representation.
The “constructedness” of the documentaries is apparent in one particular simi-
larity to the plotting of Hollywood narratives. Most Hollywood films rely on a
classical dramatic structure that organizes the story events in three acts, the first
serving as a presentation of the narrative’s main conflict, the second correspond-
ing to the development of that conflict (a forward march and complications), and
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the third bringing in the conflict’s resolution. Although the crisis documentaries
were not designed the same way Hollywood movies are, they, too, seemed to ben-
efit from this narrative structure. Drama, as it existed in real life, was expected to
fit into a prefabricated model.
More than simply provide a structuring model for direct cinema, however, the
crisis formula actually favored a particular worldview. It submitted the contin-
gency of social reality to a relatively simple plot, in which courage or individual
determination served as an engine for real-life events and the protagonists were
supposed to meet the obstacles they faced. Even if triumph was less than certain,
the value of individual resolve was never questioned.
One of the documentaries that did embrace this formula was revealingly called
Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment. Produced by Drew Associates in 1963
for ABC television, Crisis thrives on the promise of dramatic conflict and yields
to the need for narrative resolution. The record of an especially tense situation, it
has clearly defined characters, a goal that must be accomplished, and difficulties
that are likely to delay the achievement of that goal. It also shows us how the clas-
sical three-act structure can be used to fulfill the promises of documentary cin-
ema. Much of what we learn from the film depends, of course, on this particular
arrangement.
Crisis focuses on a provocative subject matter: the admission of two African
American students, Vivian Malone and James Hood, to the University of Ala-
bama. The scenario is easily recognizable to those familiar with the history of the
period. On June 11, 1963, Governor George Wallace, a notorious segregationist,
tried to stop the two students from entering the university. His gesture defied a
federal court order and put the Kennedy administration in a difficult spot. The
film follows the efforts of Attorney General Robert Kennedy and his deputy
Nicholas Katzenbach as they try to ensure that Hood and Malone are permitted
to register. It also shows us Wallace’s strategies to resist the pressures from the
federal government and prevent integration at the university.
Crisis opens with an introduction to the main characters and locales and a brief
explanation of the overall situation. With the aid of voiceover commentary—a
device later dismissed by direct cinema filmmakers as a sign of the documentar-
ian’s interference—it describes the dispute that we are about to witness and an-
ticipates the dramatic events that will guide the narrative. This quick presentation
is followed by a few sequences that concur to make up the first act of the film.
We watch Robert Kennedy having breakfast with his family at home in a Virginia
suburb and then, in a parallel structure, we see Wallace in the governor’s mansion,
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 145

holding his toddler daughter in his arms. Introducing a pattern that will prove ef-
fective throughout the film, the sequence establishes a similarity between the two
men while also revealing their differences (Wallace is seen praising Civil War he-
roes whose portraits hang on the mansion’s walls, for example). Later the camera
follows both men to work. In his office, Kennedy tries to devise a plan for dealing
with the governor. Wallace, meanwhile, prepares a strategy for a possible show-
down with the federal government. Here, too, the film’s parallel structure allows
us to connect two separate situations, thus anticipating the eventual confronta-
tion between the opposing camps.
Although a similar amount of screen time is assigned to each of the main “ac-
tors,” one of the sides seems to gain prominence in these sequences. From rela-
tively early on, the Kennedy camp takes up a role analogous to that of the protago-
nist in a fictional narrative. We watch the attorney general and his staff as they try
to accomplish a specific goal and tend to see Wallace’s gesture merely as a form of
resistance to the efforts from the other camp—an obstacle that is at the basis of
the dramatic conflict in the film. Kennedy is, in other words, identified with the
narrative action itself, while Wallace is given the role of antagonist.
What seals this identification between the Kennedy camp and the film’s main
line of action is a meeting with President John F. Kennedy, from which the attor-
ney general emerges as the main figure in the effort to desegregate the University
of Alabama. Shortly after the first scene in his office, we see Robert Kennedy ar-
rive at the White House, pass the gate, and leave the car, the camera tracking him
closely as he enters the building. For a few minutes he confers with the president
and several staff members about a speech on civil rights, to be delivered by the
president himself. Nothing conclusive seems to come out of the meeting. Yet the
visit to the White House produces a comforting sense of direction. Toward the end
of the sequence, as we see the attorney general walk away from the camera, the
voiceover commentary returns: “The president is relying on Robert Kennedy to
plan a strategy for gaining the admission of the two students.”
This sequence constitutes what theorists and practitioners call a turning point:
a development that establishes a new course for the narrative action and, in doing
so, announces a shift from one of the three acts to another. Robert Kennedy’s visit
to the president serves this very purpose. Even if no definitive statement can be
drawn from the meeting, the idea that the attorney general is now in charge func-
tions as a sort of marker in the narrative, one that brings the first act to an end and
points the way to subsequent developments. We already know the characters and
the controversy that binds them. We must now find out how that conflict will be
146 chapter six

played out, what will happen with the students, and how the federal government
will deal with Wallace. The aforementioned voiceover commentary gives us a clue
as to how these questions will be answered.
Second acts are usually rich in dramatic developments, and the middle portion
of Crisis is no exception. Here the complications that arise from the initial conflict
are expected to test the protagonist’s will and determination, eventually proving
that all obstacles were hard fought and all achievements—when they do come—
well deserved. In the sequences after the White House meeting, the attorney gen-
eral consults with his staff, discusses possible strategies for the confrontation, and
gives a television interview. Wallace, too, speaks with the media. And so do the
African American students, whose voices are now heard for the first time in the
film. As the deadline approaches—the moment when both plan to enroll in
the university—the tension between the opposing camps also rises, calling for an
effective response from the actors involved. Crisis does a good job of preserving
the sense of spontaneity that we expect from a critical situation. But the fact that
this material is neatly packed in the middle portion of the film reveals an appre-
ciation of narrative conventions that precede the events captured by the camera.
What is exceptional about Crisis is the fact that, when the confrontation at the
university does take place, it is not Robert Kennedy but his deputy Katzenbach
who faces their opponent. Kennedy sends Katzenbach to Alabama to secure the
students’ admission. To our surprise, Governor Wallace does not bend, and what
looked like the final confrontation in the film turns out to be yet another dramatic
development, the students walking off to their dormitories with no resolution
emerging from the showdown.
A denouement does come, however, a few minutes later, when National Guard
troops are sent to the university. This time, the governor has to leave, his pride
crushed by a federal order. In the film’s final moments, we see separate shots of
the students as they walk peacefully on campus. And we witness a last phone call
from the attorney general to President Kennedy. For anyone expecting a climactic
ending, this might be a somewhat tepid final act. But the sense of closure that it
brings to the conflict is indisputable. The Alabama State University system has
been desegregated. As would generally be the case in mainstream fiction, here the
third act restores an order that was disrupted early on and puts an end to the de-
velopments that made up the narrative. Judging from the overall tone of the film,
this was, certainly, a happy ending.
Thanks to this particular narrative structure, Crisis makes it easy for us to un-
derstand the situations portrayed in the film, demonstrating how the crisis for-
mula can serve as a powerful tool in the hands of documentary filmmakers. Yet
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 147

there are disadvantages, too. Because they use individuated characters and dra-
matic form as a means of approaching larger issues, crisis films in general and this
one in particular tend to limit the scope of worthy documentary subjects. They
also reduce the vastness and complexity of those topics to a unidirectional, not to
say narrow, set of developments. Compelling as they are, these narratives can thus
restrict our perspective on the events represented.

Poetic Experiments

So far, we have been considering documentaries that employ argumentation or

dramatic structure to tell their stories. In many ways, these works have been in-
fluenced by journalism. They have content they wish to communicate. There are,
however, other approaches that are less a communicative act than a poetic form of
engagement with the sociohistorical world. Some documentarians use the film-
making process as a tool to explore personal concerns or aspects of life we often
take for granted. They opt for a different kind of formal arrangement in order
to provide new insights into the events, situations, or subjects represented. The
more unconventional that arrangement appears, the greater the potential to look
at the world from a fresh perspective.
These documentaries manage to skirt both narrative and rhetorical conven-
tions by organizing their material around freer associations, sometimes arranging
that material in formal patterns, often incorporating aesthetic experimentation
and the filmmaker’s personal perceptions. In these cases, the record of lived real-
ity exists in dialogue with the desire to explore aesthetic concerns. Poetic con-
structions prevail over the prosaic quality of storytelling, and formal associations
take precedence over well-crafted argumentation.
The use of experimental forms to represent lived reality also goes back to the
period of silent cinema. A number of films made at that time combined the im-
pulse to document the historical world with an original approach to the cine-
matic medium. The so-called “city symphony” films, for example, captured slices
of everyday life in modern metropolises, but did so in ways that transformed
or enhanced our perception of ordinary reality, usually through nontraditional
structures, an inventive editing style, and ingenious cinematography. The result
was an image of modernity that had as much to do with the experiences afforded
by the film medium as with the referential world.
In Berlin, Symphony of a Great City/Berlin, die Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walther
Ruttmann, 1927), this concept of modernity is conveyed through a series of
148 chapter six

segments that captures various facets of a large European city in the 1920s. At first
sight, the film does seem to follow a predictable pattern, offering a “day in the life”
sort of narrative bracketed by early morning and late night events. In the begin-
ning, we see shots of a roadside taken from a moving train headed to the German
capital. Ruttmann then shows us Berlin’s empty streets, which slowly fill up with
people as the city prepares for an ordinary workday. From the streets, he takes us
to factories, and then to shopping districts, parks, offices, train stations, hotels,
restaurants, and so on. In the film’s final segment, he focuses on Berlin’s nightlife:
movie theaters, sports events, music halls, and nightclubs. The passing of time
serves as a structuring device in Ruttmann’s film. And yet this seemingly neat ar-
rangement turns out to be misleading since each of the film’s five segments has a
life of its own. Furthermore, the relationship between one segment and others
is established less by a sense of narrative development than by the repetition of
motifs such as industrial technology, modern means of transportation, and pub-
lic spaces. The recurrence of these motifs, rather than simply the trajectory from
morning to evening, is what allows Ruttmann to create his poetic portrait of a
modern metropolis.
A similarly evocative representation of urban life appears in Joris Ivens’s Rain/
Regen (1929), made a couple of years later. At twelve minutes, Rain is less than a
quarter the length of Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. But like Ruttmann’s film,
it submits the referential aspirations of nonfiction filmmaking to a unique and
aesthetically ambitious experience. Here the promise of narrative development
is even fainter, the central subject in the film—a rain shower in Amsterdam—
offering little more than a pretext for the filmmaker’s lyrical impressions of the
city. Ivens seems less interested in large events than in the details that make up
the fabric of everyday life. Soon after the beginning of the film, the first raindrops
start falling on water surfaces, and we begin to observe the changes that a sud-
den shower brings to an ordinary day. People dash for shelter, open their umbrel-
las, and cover themselves. Water accumulates on the streets and on the windows
of streetcars. All these minor occurrences are, of course, connected to the main
topic in the film. But there are no apparent causal relations between the images.
While the rain shower itself seems to have a beginning and an end, the experi-
ence afforded by Rain can never be reduced to a desire for narrative closure. In
its loose orchestration of images, the film highlights the significance of each in-
dividual shot, each impression left on the filmmaker’s eye. As one might expect,
Rain turned out to be not the record of a single event but, as Ivens himself wrote,
the result of footage shot over the course of four months (37).
To be sure, Rain does have a formal structure, but it is a structure shaped by
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 149

6.5–6.6. Legs of horses in step with legs of pedestrians through a graphic match, in Rain/Regen ( Joris Ivens, 1929).

poetic associations. Ivens frequently connects separate events by exploring simi-

lar visual patterns, producing what David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson call
a “graphic match” (221). The view of a flock of birds, for example, is joined to a
shot of leaves blown off the ground. There is no narrative correlation between the
two occurrences. But the size of the birds and the trajectory of their flight find a
visual counterpart in the image of leaves fluttering up. In another occasion, we see
an opening umbrella followed by the shot of a closing window. The juxtaposition
creates a parallel between the two actions. It also highlights their differences—
opening and closing. And it calls to mind the underlying theme in the film, the
rainfall, without suggesting any sense of causality between one shot and another.
Both Rain and Berlin, Symphony of a Great City bear a close relationship to
the avant-garde film movements of the first half of the twentieth century. Avant-
garde filmmakers saw cinema as an art form in its own right, and their work often
pushed the boundaries of film aesthetics beyond the confines of mainstream, nar-
rative filmmaking. When this emphasis on innovation met with documentary’s
referential aspirations, they ended up with a potentially original perspective both
on the film medium and the historical world.

Documentary Essays

In some ways, the meeting between nonfictional representation and experimental

aesthetics finds even more complex scenarios in contemporary cinema. Consider
the example of ethnographic filmmaking. While traditional ethnographic works
tend to perpetuate the cultural hierarchies that separate the filmmaker—usually
a white, Western male—from the subjects represented—often non-Western
150 chapter six

people or minority groups—some experimental films try to do exactly the op-

posite. They use aesthetic innovation as a means of questioning those same hi-
erarchies. As Catherine Russell has noted, “experimental ethnography” tries “to
overcome the binary oppositions of us and them, self and other, along with the
tension between the profilmic and the textual operations of aesthetic form” (19).
Trinh T. Minh-hà’s Reassemblage, examined in chapter 4, is one of those works
in which aesthetic experimentation helps to redefine the idea of ethnographic rep-
resentation. When asked which genre her work was, experimental or documen-
tary, Trinh replied that she doesn’t see them as separate entities at all (Trinh and
Hirshorn 15). Reassemblage focuses mainly on rural Senegalese women, subjects
whom we might have encountered in more conventional types of ethnographic
filmmaking. Trinh, however, refuses to see the women as typical ethnographic
subjects or to sanction the traditional role of the ethnographic filmmaker, opt-
ing instead for a kind of documentary that opposes hierarchical distinctions. This
refusal is perhaps most apparent in the way the documentary materials are
organized—the overall structure of the film. Reassemblage captures some of the
daily activities of the Senegalese women but does not try to contain or explain
them. We see the women as they work, prepare food, and attend to their children.
Yet these events seem to follow no logical pattern and are best appreciated as
distinct occurrences. Fittingly, Trinh also refrains from offering conclusive state-
ments about the subjects in her film, their way of living, or their culture. Reas-
semblage ends somewhat abruptly, the same way it starts. What stands out is our
momentary engagement with the documentary subjects.
By challenging established aesthetic conventions and filmmaking practices,
Reassemblage redefines the filmmaker’s relationship with the documentary sub-
ject and, consequently, our understanding of that subject as well.
Such experimental films reveal yet another facet in the filmmaker’s relationship
with the referential world. They remind us that this engagement can be personal
and artistic without lacking credibility. A more traditional approach to nonfictional
representation may fault this kind of cinema for its emphasis on the documentar-
ian’s subjective viewpoint. But these films can contradict the suspicion that the
convergence of experimental aesthetics and nonfiction cinema threatens the ref-
erential quality of documentary filmmaking. They show, instead, that this subjec-
tive approach to nonfictional representation involves dialogue with the historical
world, a productive exchange between the filmmakers and their subject matter.
Both formally and ideologically, this scenario finds an inspiring equivalent
in the concept of the filmic essay. As a form of composition, the essay assumes
a comparable dialogue between the subjectivity of the essayist and the themes
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 151

discussed. This interaction creates fragmented and multilayered texts, resulting

in knowledge that often seems “speculative” and “provisional.” Essays thrive not
on certainty but on “indeterminacy” (Renov 70). In fact, the term “essay” itself
is etymologically related to the idea of tentativeness. In French, the verb essayer
means to attempt, test, or try. It suggests “an open-ended, evaluative, and specula-
tive search” (Alter 18).
How useful is this notion for the discussion of documentary cinema? How can
it help us understand the use of poetic or experimental forms in nonfiction film?
And what does it say about the way some documentaries arrange and organize
factual material? Although it is sometimes hard to pinpoint what constitutes an
essay film, there are certain features that can help us work out a definition. We
may be able, for instance, to use the notion of the essay to describe documentaries
whose structures are dispersed and exploratory, rather than precise and “neatly”
arranged. These are films that embrace “digression” in lieu of carefully constructed
arguments or well-organized narratives. Rather than declaring their essence at the
outset, they tend to draw the spectator in gradually and disclose their direction
over the course of the documentary.
By calling some documentaries “essays” we are then thinking not only about
their subjective or poetic qualities but also about the impact of these qualities
on the epistemological expectations associated with nonfiction cinema. The es-
say film contradicts, for example, the assumption that the world can be known
in a definitive way. It shifts the focus from the end product of the investigative
effort to the process by which knowledge is created. To speak metaphorically, it
is the movement, not the destination, that matters the most. Documentaries that
embrace this model often suggest important inquiries, but they do not strive to
provide comprehensive answers.
Let’s look one more time at Joris Ivens’s Rain. Ivens’s response to the situa-
tions that unfold in front of his camera encompasses a multiplicity of views,
none of which is expected to represent the setting and situation—the city, the
sudden downpour—in their entirety. The purpose is to explore the world rather
than settle for one perspective or another. Moreover, the film’s lyrical qualities
situate the encounter between the filmmaker’s artistic sensitivities and the sur-
rounding environment at the center of the representational process. Finally, while
Rain does seem to follow a particular event from beginning to end, the apparently
centrifugal nature of its design calls to mind the essay’s penchant for speculation
and digression, as well as its affinity with open-ended structures. Reassemblage,
too, is open-ended, “headless and bottomless storytelling,” in Trinh’s own words
(Woman, Native, Other 43).
152 chapter six

In Chris Marker’s Sunless/Sans soleil (1982), the filmmaker’s response to so-

ciohistorical reality goes hand-in-hand with his discontinuous organization of
factual material. More exploratory than assertive, Sunless is in some ways a travel
journal that reflects on the fragmentary nature of memory. It combines footage
shot in various locations—Iceland, Japan, Cape Verde, and Guinea Bissau, among
others—without pursuing any direct connection between them. Instead, the film
offers insights on different ways of living by recording the filmmaker’s reactions
to these places. The tone is personal, and the way of presenting information defies
conventional anticipations.
Already in the first minute of the film we get a sense of the way Marker’s evoca-
tive impressions will shape the overall structure of his film. Over black leader,
we hear a woman’s voice saying: “The first image he told me about was of three
children on the road in Iceland in 1965. He said that for him it was the image of
happiness and also that he had tried several times to link it to other images, but it
never worked. He wrote me, ‘One day I’ll have to put it all alone in the beginning
of a film, with a long piece of black leader.’” Soon after the narration starts, Marker
cuts to a shot of three blond girls timidly glancing at the camera as they walk by
an open field. We realize then that the film being referred to by the narrator is
precisely the one we are watching. The shot is followed by yet another piece of
black leader, which separates it from the rest of the documentary. When Marker
finally shows us a new image, an unexpected view of military aircraft, it is only to
underscore the singularity of the first one, the impossibility of coherently linking
the three girls to any other sight. No specific theme or subject matter is intro-
duced here. Rather, as the narrator explains, the shot exists on its own, as a sliver
of memory that embodies a certain ideal of happiness. Sunless, we will soon find
out, is a film made out of fragmented stories, personal impulses pulled together
by the filmmaker’s poetic sensibility.
The opening of Sunless brings forth the fragmentary nature of the film in yet
another way. It establishes a conversational dynamic with an absent male writer
whose letters provide the basis for the documentary’s voiceover narration. Here
as elsewhere in the film, we hear the narrator introduce a new shot by saying, “He
said,” “He told me,” or “He wrote me that. . . .” And we assume that the opinions
and observations gathered in the film belong to another person. The narration
itself does not provide a cohesive, unified design for the documentary but refers
instead to the scattered impressions of that absent author. Each letter can poten-
tially take us in a different direction, introduce a new subject, or offer an oppor-
tunity for dispersal. As Nora Alter writes in her study of Marker’s work, there is a
historical affinity between the epistolary genre and the essay format, which goes
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 153

back to antiquity and is grounded in the desire for dialogue between the essay-
ist and the world (26). Sunless explores this affinity by turning the letters into a
structuring device for the documentary.
The letters allow Marker to move swiftly from one continent to another with-
out concern for causal or thematic relations. Early in the film, for example, he cuts
from a bar in Japan to a pier on the island of Fogo, in Cape Verde. No transitional
device is provided. As we begin to look at the shots taken on the island, we are
encouraged to believe that what we see is actually a visual rendition of one of the
letters read in the film: “He told me about the jetty in Fogo, in the Cape Verde
Islands,” says the narrator over images of a crowd gathered along a pier. “How
long have they been there waiting for the boat, patient as pebbles but ready to
jump?”
This is not the first time Marker uses letters to compose his essays. He does the
same thing, for example, in Letter from Siberia/Lettre de Sibérie, from 1957. But
Sunless is peculiar in its engagement with the epistolary form. Sándor Krasna, the
author of the letters, is a fictional character, an invention that seems to complicate
the distinctions between fiction and nonfiction in the film.
Besides drawing on such genres as the travel journal and the epistolary film,
Sunless might be seen as an ethnographic documentary (Russell 301–311). Part
of its mission is to explore the cultural richness of societies that are foreign to the
filmmaker. For example, Marker travels through the streets of Japan, visits depart-
ment stores, attends ceremonies, and documents the country’s fascination with
video games. He even invites us to watch Japanese television. All this seems to
underscore Sunless’s ethnographic aspirations. Yet the film’s emphasis on loosely
structured impressions works against the notion of a traditional ethnographic
documentary. Moreover, like some of the experimental works we have been ex-
amining, Marker’s poetic film draws attention not only to the reality it documents
but also to the subjectivity of the documentary maker, even if that subjectivity
often manifests itself through the voice of a fictional character.
The best way to appreciate the relationship between this subjective quality and
the essay form may be simply to examine the use of memory as a motif in the film.
Memory is a recurrent concern in Marker’s oeuvre, a topic addressed in several
of his works. Here he uses it in order to mull over the subject of documentary
filmmaking itself. “I remember that month of January in Tokyo,” says the narra-
tor toward the end of the film. “Or rather, I remember the images I filmed of the
month of January in Tokyo. They have substituted themselves for my memory.
They are my memory.” It is not only the mnemonic role of the photographic im-
age, however, that is evoked in the film. Marker’s interest in memory recalls the
154 chapter six

very nature of the essay form—and, in this case, the epistolary genre as well.
Memories are personal, fragmentary, and, depending on how we look at them,
elusive. Like the essay film, they depend on noncausal associations and tend to
escape the necessity for linearity or completion. By choosing the essay form to
represent lived reality, Marker offers a parallel between his cinema and the act of
remembering.
The analogy seems especially provocative when we contrast the contingent
character of memory with the requirements that impinge on official historical
accounts. Or when we confront the essay film with documentaries that follow
predictable narrative patterns. A film like Sunless reminds us that memory can
offer an alternative path to past events, just as poetic essays can provide differ-
ent ways of knowing the historical world. It is not so much that Marker fully dis-
misses the possibilities of historical narratives. Rather, he turns to the film essay
form, with its promises of “dispersion” and “digression,” in order to interrogate the
limitations of those narratives. As Jonathan Kear puts it, Marker’s “questioning of
the limits of historical perception reflects less a negation of history as a form of
knowledge than a critique of rationalist and teleological versions of history” (58).
In Sunless, the filmmaker opts for a format that encourages us not so much to find
answers as entertain questions.

Database Documentaries

Some recent documentaries take the aspirations of the filmic essay one step fur-
ther by combining nonfictional representation with the tools afforded by new
digital media. What has become known as database documentaries, for example,
provide multiple entry points to the historical world without following the logic
of linear development or privileging exposition. Here nonfictional material is dis-
played as individual pieces that can be accessed somewhat randomly on a com-
puter screen.
Lev Manovich describes databases as “collections of items on which the user
can perform various operations—view, navigate, search” (219). Structurally, they
are closer, say, to a deck of cards than to mainstream films. We engage in the logic
of a database whenever we use a CD-ROM, turn to the menu of a DVD, or click
on the links of a web site. None of these experiences are comparable to reading a
traditional novel or viewing a documentary from beginning to end. While data-
bases may be used to tell stories, or to advance a point of view, they rely on formal
principles of their own.
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 155

It is not surprising, then, that the database form appears particularly well suited
for aesthetic experimentation. Because they avoid the imperative of linear pro-
gression, database documentaries do not lead to a conclusion or resolution. There
is no teleological trajectory here. There is also no single starting point from which
to begin viewing the material, nor any “center.” Each fragment is part of the over-
all design of the documentary, but there is no predetermined order in which to
watch those pieces. The selection and combination, the shuffling, so to speak, is
up to the user.
When compared to traditional nonfiction films, database documentaries seem
inherently incomplete. The users can replay a segment that has already been shown,
or they can end the experience at any given point. As was the case with some of
the experimental works examined earlier, this incompleteness can make it diffi-
cult to establish a single viewpoint on the world. Instead, it encourages the user to
explore different angles, make associations, and draw comparisons between sub-
jects. Certain topics and situations seem particularly fit for this kind of documen-
tary. Local histories, for instance, can be documented with material that might be
easily arranged as “collections of items,” with each new window augmenting our
knowledge of the subject without “wrapping up” the issue in one way or another.
We can imagine including maps, birth certificates, family photos, school portraits,
transit routes, home movies, oral histories, garden plans, and minutes from com-
munity meetings. (Rosemary Comella’s 2005 Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to
Redevelopment, produced by The Labyrinth Project at the University of Southern
California, is an interesting illustration of database format local history.) Other
themes, such as the ones explored in some of the experimental films discussed in
this chapter, can also reveal an affinity with the database format: life in a big city,
the effects of a sudden downpour, a series of letters.
Yet even topics that are traditionally associated with narrative progression can
find new incarnations in database documentaries. The life of an individual subject,
for example, can provide material for a documentary biography in which facts are
organized in a cause-effect relationship that implies some form of finality. On the
other hand, we can also represent that person’s life by giving relative autonomy to
specific aspects or segments, treating them as discrete items that are thematically
related to one another. Who Is . . . ? (Magnus Bärtås and Agence TOPO, 2005) is
a nonfictional work about five artists of different nationalities that started as text
work, was reconfigured as installation, and was eventually adapted for the web.
Bärtås compiled biographical facts about his subjects but did not line them up to
create a unidirectional narrative. Instead, the project invites the user to dwell on
each item separately or combine them somewhat arbitrarily.
156 chapter six

The first thing we see when we enter Who Is . . . ? on the computer screen are
artfully abbreviated still images of the five artists, sided by their names. Clicking
on one, we are transported to another page where we have the option of accessing
information under the categories: factual, formal, unexpected, and experienced.
Each category is linked to four to seven small windows that in turn load still or
moving images of the artist, accompanied by a child’s voiceover commentary
and a moving print version, visualizing what she says. We watch short clips (less
than a minute long) or stills of the subject engaged in prosaic activities and hear
somewhat unpredictable comments relating to the artist’s life: “He has a dark blue
Mercedes that he drives at death-defying speeds,” “He was at the front in the war
against the Serbs in 1994,” “When she lost her travel funds in southern France,
she moved to Greece to earn a living picking oranges,” and “He says he some-
times sits by himself and laughs.” The result is closer to a series of partial portraits
than to conventional biographies. We do learn a great deal about situations in the
subjects’ lives, but there is no suggestion that those lives are constrained by nar-
rative conventions. The fragmentary nature of Who Is. . . . ? and the title question’s
intentional ambiguity provoke consideration of both how we can describe some-
one and what elements contribute to someone’s identity. What is it that defines
a person?
Eschewing predefined sequential patterns also suggests that database docu-
mentaries can present information in a nonhierarchical fashion, each “item” being
in theory as important as the others. Who Is. . . . ?, for instance, does not privilege
any specific subject or make distinctions between the various aspects of the art-
ists’ lives. Rather, it leaves it up to the user to make those distinctions. The “mes-
sage,” as well as any presumption of certainty, will vary according to the patterns
that emerge when we access and watch the documentary. Seen this way, database
documentaries may afford us an experience that is more open and democratic
than what is available in most other types of nonfictional work. Like many new
media artifacts, database documentaries are interactive. They depend on direct
input from the users.
There is a danger, however, in celebrating this input uncritically, since we can
end up overlooking the limitations of the database form. We may want to think
that database documentaries provide a potentially infinite pool of information,
or that meaning can be in “a constant process of accumulation” (Hudson 90).
Most of the time, though, the experience of watching a work of this type is clearly
limited by the amount of material recorded and made available for consumption.
There are only so many clips available in a documentary like Who Is . . . ? And there
 Dramatic, Poetic, and Essay Documentaries 157

are only so many windows open at any given moment. The notion of a bound-
less experience is partly deceptive. The interactive design of database works does
assign a new role for the documentary spectator. But as cultural critic Marsha
Kinder has argued, “All interactivity is also an illusion because the rules estab-
lished by the designers of the text necessarily limit the user’s options” (4). The
data we have at our disposal are limited by the designers of the text as well. If we
wish to know more about why “he sometimes sits by himself and laughs,” or how
“she lost her travel funds,” we would have to find it elsewhere. It is not part of the
information available in this work.
Still, by drawing attention to the way information is arranged and presented to
the user, databases can help us think about the choices involved in the structur-
ing of a documentary. And if there are limitations to the promises of interactivity,
there is also the fact that users participate more directly in the process by which
that information is communicated. They are, to some degree, coeditors of the
documentary. We are faced, once again, with an issue that underlies this entire
chapter: different ways of arranging documentary materials allow for different
ways of knowing the world.

Additional Filmography
Only the Hours/Rien que les heures (Alberto Cavalcanti, 1926)
On the Subject of Nice/À propos de Nice ( Jean Vigo, 1930)
Photo Wallahs ( Judith and David MacDougall, 1992)
From the East/D’Est (Chantal Akerman, 1993)
Television and Me/La televisión y yo (Andrés Di Tella, 2002)
The City Beautiful (Rahul Roy, 2003)
The LoveStoryProject (Florian Thalhofer and Mahmoud Hamdy, 2003 and
ongoing)
Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, 2008)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Alter, Nora M. Chris Marker. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006.
Bordwell, David. Narration in the Fiction Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 1986.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Calder-Marshall, Arthur. The Innocent Eye: The Life of Robert J. Flaherty. New
York: Harcourt, Brace and World, 1963.
158 chapter six

Drew, Robert L. “An Independent with the Networks.” In New Challenges for
Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
Hudson, Dale. “Undisclosed Recipients: Database Documentaries and the Inter-
net.” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (2008).
Ivens, Joris. The Camera and I. 1969. Reprint, New York: International Publish-
ers, 1974.
Kear, Jonathan. “The Clothing of Clio: Chris Marker’s Poetics and the Politics of
Representing History.” Film Studies 6 (Summer 2005).
Kinder, Marsha. “Hot Spots, Avatars, and Narrative Fields Forever: Buñuel’s
Legacy for New Digital Media and Interactive Database Narrative.” Film
Quarterly 55.4 (Summer 2002).
Mamber, Stephen. Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documen-
tary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974.
Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press,
2001.
Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary. Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2001.
O’Connel, P. J. Robert Drew and the Development of Cinema Verite in America.
Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.
Renov, Michael. “Lost, Lost, Lost: Mekas as Essayist.” In The Subject of Documen-
tary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Rony, Fatimah Tobing. “Taxidermy and Romantic Ethnography: Robert Fla-
herty’s Nanook of the North.” In The Third Eye: Race, Cinema, and Ethno-
graphic Spectacle. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.
Rothman, William. “The Filmmaker as Hunter: Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the
North.” In Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary
Film and Video, ed. Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski. Detroit:
Wayne State University Press, 1998.
Russell, Catherine. Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of
Video. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1999.
Trinh T. Minh-hà. Woman, Native, Other: Writing, Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.
Trinh T. Minh-hà and Harriet A. Hirshorn. “Interview.” Heresies 22 6.2 (1987).
 Part Three
Formal Techniques
 7
Editing

W hat do we mean when we say a book is “cinematic”? What is it

that reminds us of the movies? Sometimes it might be the vivid-
ness of the descriptions. And sometimes it might be the amount of action. But
often what we have in mind is the positioning of one part of the narrative next
to another, the arrangement of story information, what we would call in film and
video making “editing.” Alfred Hitchcock once noted: “Cinema is simply pieces of
film put together in a manner that creates ideas and emotions” (quoted in Samu-
els 232). This relates to nonfiction film as well. It is this “putting together of pieces
of film” that we discuss in this chapter. The second section of the book already
looked at the macro level of these designs, the overall structure of the documen-
tary, the arrangement of information in order to make an argument, forge a dra-
matic story, or sensuously experiment with form to explore a topic or category. In
those chapters, we considered concerns for rhetoric, or dramatic and poetic form,
in the sequencing of information. Here we concentrate on the micro level: the
placement of one shot or one sequence next to another.
In one sense, editing is simply the joining together of related shots to make
a sequence, and the joining together of related sequences to build the film. But
editing also reshapes and manipulates material. And when the material is nonfic-
tion, editing can redefine sociohistorical reality. A filmmaker begins by shooting
something concrete, a portion of the physical world. That footage, the raw mate-
rial, takes on a specific meaning when it is placed in a sequence, as it becomes part
161
162 chapter seven

of a flow of sounds and images. Filmmaker Chantal Akerman comments on this

process: “How much time should we take to show this street so that what’s hap-
pening is something other than a mere piece of information? So that we go from
the concrete to the abstract and come back to the concrete” (quoted in Rosen
125). For her, there are innumerable decisions to make as she turns abstract foot-
age into a specific story.
Frederick Wiseman calls editing a “private debate.” And he talks about how
meaning is created as footage is edited into a story. He contrasts documentary
filmmaking with fiction production. With fiction, the writing of the script nor-
mally precedes the shooting of the film. In a documentary, however, it is only after
editing that the documentarian finds his “script.” For Wiseman, the sequences in
a documentary are “found” during the shooting process, but he has no idea at the
time what shots will make it into the film or what the themes or point of view
will be (Wiseman xi). Wiseman calls his films “reality fictions.” “The events . . .
are all true,” he told John Graham, but “they have no meaning except insofar as
you impose a form on them, and that form is imposed in large measure, of course,
in the editing.” “A cut is a judgment . . . the only public trace of a private debate”
(quoted in Miller 226). In his first film, Titicut Follies, Wiseman spent nearly a
month shooting, followed by almost a year of editing. One hundred and fifty
thousand feet of film were compressed into little more than three thousand feet
for the eighty-four-minute film. In later films, he employed a similar ratio, gener-
ally using less than five percent of what he shoots. Yet, when those shots are edited
into the final film, they appear as “if no other order were possible” (Wiseman xii).
Even editors who work on other people’s films claim to have control over content.
Sam Pollard, who cut Spike Lee’s 4 Little Girls (1997), told MovieMaker Magazine
about his early days as a documentary editor: “I was given the responsibility to
really direct the material . . . [the producer and director] leave it to you to . . . help
build the concept, find the direction, and find the story.”
There are some exceptions, of course. Historical documentaries frequently be-
gin with the story they want to tell. The documentarian then looks for evidence
and corroboration of that story. As director Jon Else points out, these types of
documentary are more popular with funding sources for exactly this reason. The
funders “know what they are going to get” (Bernard 281). Prelude to War, a film
that provides the history of some of the events that led the United States into
World War II, began with the story they wanted to tell. They then sought the foot-
age that would support that story. But we have also seen an example of a historical
film that was created in the editing room. While making The River, Pare Lorentz’s
camera operators brought back the kinds of shots he wanted (some footage of
 Editing 163

clouds, of sky, of water, of trees, and so on). It was in the editing that he fashioned
these shots into the story of the ecological destruction of the Mississippi River
delta. This film, too, gives a historical account. It was scripted, though, in the edit-
ing process (Van Dyke 38–56; Snyder 50–78).
Early nonfiction films were generally limited to only one shot. Each shot rep-
resented a view that took place in a continuous time and place. But early film
companies also sometimes sold different views of the same event separately, sug-
gesting that exhibitors show them one after the other. Historian Stephen Botto-
more tells of the Warwick Trading Company’s 1897–98 catalogue, which offered
eleven views of a Madrid bullfight: “When joined and shown consecutively . . .
[they] constitute a thrilling exhibition of 10 minutes duration.” He also tells about
firms that offered views of the 1897 procession honoring the Jubilee of Queen
Victoria taken at various points along the route. Buyers were recommended to
purchase several of them, and show them one after the other, combining them in a
designated order. Travel films, too, were often sold with an implied sequence. And
some producers actually divided a view into several shots. The Edison Manufac-
turing Company’s Shoot the Chutes (1899) consisted of three shots of an amuse-
ment park ride. By partitioning the scene into multiple shots, the camera operator
selected specific points of view to give the audience a better idea of the ride than
they would have gotten in a single shot (Bottomore 201–202). While we may not
say that these shots were actually edited, some of the principles and functions of
the editing process were already present then.
Editing is simply the putting together of pieces of film. But, as we have stated
in earlier chapters and explore in more depth here, the sequencing of interdepen-
dent shots is part of a film’s meaning-making system. We saw this clearly in our
discussion of Emile De Antonio and Daniel Talbot’s Point of Order, the documen-
tary about the 1954 Army-McCarthy hearings. Compiled from television footage
of the hearings, the film was edited in a way that impacted the meaning of that
footage.
Some documentaries do try to minimize editing, using shots of long duration,
sometimes shots that are whole scenes like those in the early films we mentioned
above. What we see and hear in these scenes seems closer to our experience of
ordinary life, since the passing of time in the film coincides with the passing of
time in the physical world. Lunch with Fela, Abraham Ravett’s 2005 documentary,
is a good example. Shooting as he was interacting with his elderly mother in her
nursing home, Ravett set up a camera and then joined his mother in the shot.
Or he took the camera and recorded the funeral director itemizing the costs of
her burial. Or he set up the camera and walked around his mother’s apartment
164 chapter seven

enumerating the things he needed to do to empty it out. The camera observes,

dutifully, motionless, much like, say, an attendant at the nursing home might ob-
serve. And in each shot there is a continuity of time and space.
This is not to say, of course, that the film is free of editorial intervention. But
this intervention has more to do with the selection and sequencing of material
than the cutting and arranging of shots within a particular scene. In fact, much
of the footage never made it into the final cut. Ravett, who was editor as well as
director, producer, and camera operator, dispensed with approximately twenty
times what he included in his documentary. Whereas the fiction film editor gen-
erally discards all but the best of multiple takes, a documentary editor eliminates
superfluous footage, footage that is not needed to tell the best story. In Lunch with
Fela, Abraham Ravett carefully selected and sequenced the material to control
the transmission and flow of story information to the viewer, producing a docu-
mentary that is at once intimate and unsentimental. “Tomorrow is your mother’s
birthday,” a woman’s voice says toward the beginning. “She’d be 92 this year.” The
use of the past conditional tense clearly establishes Fela’s passing. The next image,
though, is Fela in the nursing home, a tiny, gray-haired woman eating lunch, with
Abraham discussing health insurance matters.
There are six scenes in the nursing facility, each representing time the two
spent together. Between them, Ravett edits in carefully framed images of some
of Fela’s possessions: buttons, a hat pin, change purses, the card of a Brooklyn
car service, a scrap of paper with a painter’s name and phone number on it, the
humble particulars of everyday life. Later, he edits in a Polaroid of Fela in the Mas-
sachusetts nursing home; then a hand placing the Polaroid of Fela into the shot.
Ravett includes some sequences that were shot earlier as well: Fela standing by
the window of her apartment combing her long brown hair, and seated in a park
explaining how the Nazis rounded up all the Jewish children of her hometown
in 1944. There is also an artist’s rendition of the same scene. The filmmaker edits
in some still images from Walbrzych, Poland, the town where Fela gave birth to
Abraham after the war. He edits in the sounds of people reciting numbers in vari-
ous Eastern European languages. He edits in a Yiddish language radio broadcast
with a running English translation over a black screen. And in the middle of the
fifty-nine-minute documentary, he edits in a voice asking some of the questions
the viewer might have been asking: How is the camera set up on your shoot?
What were you thinking about in the scene when your mother was eating and
you were staring off ? What are those people saying? Is that your father sitting next
to your mother? Some more questions are included again near the end. But no
 Editing 165

answers are given. Information is left out, and information is vague. Nor is there
a simple chronology.
By inference, however, the spectator is able to piece together perhaps not a
life but certainly the relationship of the filmmaker to his mother—a woman of
multiple languages and many displacements—during the final days of her life.
Abraham Ravett edits Lunch with Fela in ways that engage the spectator’s imagi-
nation. The information in each shot, the duration of the shots, and the order in
which they are sequenced elucidate and emphasize certain aspects of Abraham’s
and Fela’s lives—and they elicit a certain type of spectatorship. The viewer is ac-
tively engaged in conferring meaning and making sense of Ravett’s shots.
All documentaries control the order in which information is given, usually
through editing sequences together. And a certain degree of inference is a part
of any filmgoing experience. But in its avoidance of intra-scene editing, Lunch
with Fela is unusual. Piecing film together produces cinematic time and space,
frequently the illusion of continuous time and contiguous space. Piecing film to-
gether can also function to modify or clarify meaning. And piecing film together
affects the pace and dramatic tension of a documentary as well. Therefore it is
important to understand how editing functions in nonfiction film and video mak-
ing. In the rest of the chapter, we look more closely at this process. We begin by
briefly discussing different ways that shots are joined, and then we elaborate spe-
cific strategies for putting sequences together.

Editing to Create Continuity

Each view that the camera takes has spatial and temporal continuity. But putting
together different shots also creates cinematic space and time. In Hollywood-style
fiction film, “continuity editing” crafts narrative coherence by creating the illusion
of continuous time and contiguous space. Say we have a conversation between
the leading man and leading woman. The scene would probably begin with an
establishing shot, showing the two of them in their setting. Then it would move
in closer to a medium or medium close shot of the two leads. Next it would go
to an even closer shot of the one who is speaking. Let’s pretend it is the man who
gets the first word. The subsequent shot would be of the woman reacting (per-
haps replying), then the man reacting, and so on. This pattern of the shot of the
speaker and then the reverse shot of the other speaker is repeated throughout the
conversation. Every once in a while there may be a reestablishing shot to remind
 166 chapter seven

us where we are. Although these different shots break time and space into sepa-
rate units, we have the impression that the images cohere into a smooth flow. That
is because the filmmaker utilizes techniques that make the cuts “invisible.” For
example, while the woman is talking, she is also looking at someone outside the
frame. The next image reveals the person she was looking at. And the direction of
her gaze connects one shot to the other. By ob-
serving such simple strategies, the filmmaker is
able to create the illusion of continuity (Bord-
well and Thompson 231–238).
Continuity can be an important part of non-
fiction storytelling as well, although we tend to
think of documentary as a less controlled rep-
resentation of the sociohistorical world. And
to create continuity, documentaries often em-
ploy many of the same storytelling devices and
techniques as fiction filmmaking. Take Titicut
Follies, for instance. In chapter 3 we described
a scene early in the film of a conversation be-
tween a psychiatrist and his patient. The scene
was recorded with one camera and then edited
so that closer shots of the two speakers seem-
ingly reacting were intercut in shot-reverse-
shot formation—similar to our hypothetical
fictional example. This is one of the ways that
the film is able to create an intimate connection
between the characters and the viewer. The ed-
iting pattern repeats itself later, when another
patient tries to convince the review panel that
he should be released from the institution. We
see the patient speaking and two shots of some
of the panelists reacting are inserted. Later, af-
ter the patient is escorted out of the room, we
see a series of tight close shots of the panelists
giving their opinions on the case and seemingly
reacting to each other.
Wiseman uses straight cuts to join shots
7.1–7.3. A conversation edited in a shot-reverse-shot for-
in Titicut Follies, as does Chantal Akerman in
mation. From Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967). News from Home (1976). Her images of New
 Editing 167

York City change instantaneously. We are in one shot, say of the interior of a
subway car, then, with no fanfare at all (and little regard for continuity), we are
in a new shot, in a new space and time. We may not be able to anticipate when
the cut will happen. Or what the next shot will be. Yet we know the next transi-
tion, whenever it is, will once again be a cut. (We revisit this film in chapters 9
and 10.) The cut is the most common way documentaries move from one shot to
the next. (In contrast, the transitions in Lunch with Fela are mainly fades. The im-
age gradually appears and disappears. And, as we shall see, some documentaries
will occasionally employ dissolves, superimposing one image atop the next one
for a moment.)
“Harvest of Shame,” too, employs straight cuts. And in “Harvest of Shame”
these cuts often construct a space and time that simulates the view of the reporter.
When we talked about responsibility, in chapter 4, we looked at a scene in which
there is a sort of “eye-line match”: David Lowe interviews young Jerome while he
is home from school taking care of his three little sisters, and asks him if he has any
food to feed them for lunch. After Jerome replies, “Yes,” the film, as if mimicking
Lowe’s visual point of view, shows us a close shot of a pot of beans. The shot of the
beans may have been taken three or four hours later, or even earlier, and the pot
may have been in the cabin next door; however, the coordination of the two shots
in the editing makes the beans seem like a response to Lowe’s question. Each of
the shots represents a bit of screen time, space, and information. By coordinating
the two, time seems to be continuous, and the space seems to be contiguous. This
style of editing also helps to put the viewer in Lowe’s place. It is as if the viewer
sees as Lowe sees and learns as he learns. Earlier in that scene, Lowe asks Jerome
his sisters’ names. As Jerome lists them, the documentary cuts in closer to his face.
And as he says “Lois,” it cuts to a shot of Lois, then one of Cathy and Beulah, as
he says their names. When Lowe asks, “What happened to your foot, Jerome?”
it cuts to a close shot of his foot with a wound on it. The editing has a clear nar-
rational motivation.
In Moscow, in the early 1920s during the foreign blockade of the new Soviet
Union, Lev Kuleshov’s students learned by experimenting with narrational edit-
ing of a different kind. With little new stock, they reedited old films to change
their effect, and they created synthetic people and places by editing together parts
of different people and different locations taken at different times. They also com-
bined shots from different sources to construct the appearance of causality. By
suppressing establishing shots in favor of close shots, they were able to produce
the impression of continuity.
Documentaries’ adherence to the “unauthored” representation of the referential
 168 chapter seven

world makes this kind of synthetic continuity rare. Yet it is not unheard of. At the
end of the second section of Dziga Vertov’s tripartite film, Three Songs of Lenin/
Tri pesni o Lenine (1934), commissioned for the tenth anniversary of Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin’s death, the sounds and images of ceremonial cannon blasts and rifle
shots from around the country, while Lenin lay in state prior to the funeral, are
intercut with images of mourners from different regions of the Soviet Union. Di-
verse shots from different locales are cut together to form an assortment of people
and objects that all seem to stop in their tracks, in awe, at the sound of the salvoes.
A woman carrying wood on her back pauses mid-frame. A speeding train halts in
a freeze frame. A sleigh seems frozen in place. Machines come to a standstill. Soon
there is a close shot of a young woman in a headscarf. A few seconds later, we see
an old man in sand drifts as he stands listening. Vertov and his editor, Elizaveta
Svilova, by combining unrelated shots (differing profilmic realities) have shaped
an artificial continuity and portrayed a nation united in respect and sorrow.
In this case, the centrality of editing is tangible. As Vertov explained in a 1935
essay about “[his] latest, many-sided experiment,” Three Songs of Lenin: “For
fifteen years I studied writing in film. To be able to write with a camera and not
with a pen. Hindered by the lack of a film alphabet, I attempted to create that
alphabet. . . . I learned that at an editing table” (132). V. I. Pudovkin, writing in
the early years of the Soviet Union, put it more romantically: “Editing is the basic
creative force, by power of which the soulless photographs . . . are engineered
into living cinematographic form” (quoted in Bordwell and Thompson 249). For
Pudovkin, editing is the essence of cinematic art.
More commonly, however, what we get in nonfiction filmmaking might be
closer to the construction of the cinematic space and time that we saw in “Harvest

7.4–7.5. Editing creates the illusion of a citizen listening to the ceremonial cannon blasts, Three Songs of Lenin/Tri pesni o Lenine
(Dziga Vertov, 1934).
 Editing 169

of Shame,” an overall pattern that forms a coherent narrative world. One more
example from “Harvest of Shame” might illustrate this. Toward the end of the
television program, Lowe asks Christine Shack, a teacher in a New Jersey school,
whether she believes her migrant students will succeed in their occupational
dreams. As she gives her opinion on Laura’s and Harriet’s ability to enhance their
education, a medium close shot of each little girl is inserted. Then, as she dis-
cusses the compassion we should have for those who find themselves in such a
situation, we again get individual shots of Laura and Otis, another child who, like
Laura, had been interviewed previously about his plans for the future. We assume
the children are in the same classroom at the same time that the teacher is speak-
ing about them. (The only establishing shot is of the exterior of the school.) But
that spatial and temporal connection has been created by the editing. It might be
better to say that the editing cues the viewer to infer that the children exist in the
same space and time as the teacher and the interviewer.
The cuts to Laura, Harriet, and Otis also animate offscreen space. The film
frame is finite. Editing, however, can create an expanded space, a space outside
the frame, and produce the semblance that that space is continuous with what
was in the preceding and subsequent frames.
In “Harvest of Shame,” we hear the questions David Lowe asks Laura, Har-
riet, Otis, Mrs. Shack, and Jerome. In some other documentaries the questions
are edited out. In The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, for example, we do not
hear the questions. Nor do we see the interviewer. It appears as if Connie Field’s
informants happen to be thinking about the issues that she was interested in. This
might be a slight exaggeration. Still, the choice of whether or not and how to in-
clude the questions posed to informants can be affected not only by ethical con-
cerns (how much you want the audience to know about the filmmaking process)
but also by continuity issues (how much you feel you need to generate the ap-
pearance of uninterrupted testimony).
Sometimes the testimony we see and hear is a combination of answers to sev-
eral questions posed at different times. If there is a slight lapse in image, this is
frequently covered over by the insertion of a “cutaway,” an image from a library of
shots the filmmaker collects for exactly this purpose. It may be an image of a stack
of books on a windowsill, when the interviewee is a professor, for example. The
cutaway may be only tangentially related. Or it may be a significant detail of the
speaker, her hands, for instance. A cutaway can help maintain the illusion of clear
and continuous action. In fiction film, a cut to a stack of books on a windowsill
would likely forecast some future narrative action involving either the books or
the window. It would have some relevance to the story’s “uncluttered clarity,” to
170 chapter seven

use Noël Carroll’s words once again. In documentaries, cutaways can be a nones-
sential digression.

Editing for Graphics, Tempo, and Rhythm

The style of editing that we have been describing creates a continuity of space
and time. But sometimes space and time, and sometimes graphics and rhythm,
are employed for associations other than those based on spatial and temporal
continuity. In the previous chapter, we saw how parts of Joris Ivens’s Rain were
edited based on graphic patterns. Continuities and discontinuities—similarities
and contrasts—of light, texture, shape, movement, tone, and direction bind one
shot to the next. And the duration of shots is often determined not simply by the
amount of information contained in it but by the rhythmic possibilities. (We pay
more attention to how music structures the rhythm and pacing of editing in the
final chapter of the book.)
Important as pictorial and rhythmic elements are to poetic films, their power
has not been ignored in documentaries that are more concerned with an argu-
ment or a dramatic story. The River, for example, as we saw, builds its argument
with aesthetic and formal patterns. A closer look at some of the editing can
demonstrate how the film employs graphic similarities, contrasts, and conflicts,
as well as rhythm and tempo in order to project its point of view.
The logging sequence, for instance, starts with a close shot of axes chipping
away at timber and the voiceover commentary extolling the plenitude of lumber
available for the expansion westward. Then, as the commentary stops, there is a
long shot of a single tree falling from the left edge of the frame through the diago-
nal into the right of the frame, then two shots of trees falling in dense forest from
the opposite direction, along the other diagonal, from right to left. Then a long
shot of a tree again falling from left to right into the river, and the crash of cym-
bals as it hits the water. A lively rendition of the popular American minstrel tune
“Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight” begins, and we see a chute of water and logs
flowing down the river away from the viewer from the lower left to upper right of
the frame. In the next shot we are closer to the chute. A single log travels along a
diagonal from the opposite direction, lower right to upper left. Clearly cut with
attention to graphic dynamics, the ensuing shot is much closer, showing a single
log once again racing down the chute along a diagonal, this time from the lower
right to upper left of the frame. The camera pulls back slightly to show that the
single log is followed by many other logs surging down the chute and dropping
 Editing 171

7.6–7.7. Graphic contrast in The River (Pare Lorentz, 1937).

into the rushing river. As the music picks up speed, the cutting pace increases,
and the pattern continues for five more shots, with more and more logs, each time
alternating the direction of the diagonal, culminating in a wide shot of the river
so full of logs that they are barely moving. The celebration of logging is expressed
not only by the lively music but also by the energy created by the tempo of the ed-
iting and by joining shots with attention to the graphic conflicts within the frame.
The transitions are cuts throughout, punctuating the rhythm with their abrupt
breaks. The sequence begins with trees and escalates to several shots of the screen
filled with logs, and then three extremely close shots of logs passing through a saw
mill, alternating, the first from left to right, the second from right to left, and the
third from left to right once again.
Later, as the soil erodes and the musical theme returns with the muted horn,
we see water slowly dripping from three small melting icicles and hear the pierc-
ing, dissonant chords we spoke about in chapter 5. Then many shots of water
coming downhill from the treeless slopes, each shot showing more and more wa-
ter, as the narrator itemizes the years of flooding: 1903, 1907, 1913, 1916, 1922 . . .
until we have the frame overflowing with water. From small to large, from a trickle
to a flood, the image is augmented; tension builds, until we feel the force of the
deluge, again through the sensitive editing of graphic similarities and dissimilari-
ties. Shots of swollen rivers follow. Once more the editing pattern alternates op-
posing directions of movement. The images progress to greater and greater ruin.
The transitions are cuts, quickly changing the images so that they accumulate
and feelings mount. By contrast, in a slower section of the film, after the lumber-
ing, we see a series of sad, somber images: slow panoramic shots over black tree
stumps. The narrator once again itemizes the names of the trees, “Black spruce
and Norway pine . . . Scarlet oak and shag bark hickory. . . .” Unlike the previous
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shots, these images are mainly connected by dissolves, their mournfulness being
both echoed and created by the starkness of the visuals and the languid overlaps.
Throughout these sequences, space and time are subordinated to composi-
tional considerations. By the joining of different locales and occasions, The River
disrupts continuity. Yet the emotional and logical relationships become clearer
for that very reason. By violating the continuity of time and space, The River in-
vites audiences to form emotional and logical connections, making it easier for
them to accept the solution to come: the Tennessee Valley Authority’s remedial
programs.

Editing for Development

Life may sometimes seem like a meaningless string of random incidents going
nowhere. Not so in a documentary. Time may be fragmented and reorganized.
In fact it usually is. But generally the journey we take moves forward and devel-
ops. We have, of course, the film or video’s ineluctable movement through time.
And we have incidents that are organized to create a sense of forward momentum
toward an implied destination. From the time we first get an inkling of what the
story is, to the time when the story terminates, we are involved in a chain of events
and are prepared to make sense of their unfolding.
Many documentaries plot their events in a linear manner. Night Mail (Harry
Watt and Basil Wright, 1936), for instance, follows the postal train from its eve-
ning departure from Euston Station in London to its morning arrival in Scotland,
picking up mail along the way, sorting it, and dropping it off at its destination.
Generally historical films such as Prelude to War, The River, as well as Hearts and
Minds, to which we return shortly, also proceed chronologically.
Some stories necessitate entwining two (or more) lines of action that prog-
ress in a linear fashion and happen simultaneously. In Crisis: Behind a Presidential
Commitment, for example, the story of the presidential decision winds around
the story of the events taking place in Alabama. Both stories are filmed chrono-
logically from beginning to end and are edited together to alternately present one,
then the other. This is a common way to point out parallel happenings.
If Lunch with Fela does not develop chronologically, it is for a particular pur-
pose. Ravett organized his documentary in ways that avoid fixed meaning, forcing
viewers to create their own spatial and temporal coherence. Fela’s displacements
find reverberations in the spatial and temporal dimensions of the documentary.
Imagine how different the viewing experience would have been if Abraham Ravett
 Editing 173

had ordered his scenes so that they culminated in Fela’s death. Such a linear dispo-
sition of the information would be easy to follow, drawing the viewer in with the
progression from beginning to end. And, in the case of Lunch with Fela, this would
forge different kinds of intellectual and emotional involvements.
Danae Elon’s Another Road Home, on the other hand, progresses in a decidedly
linear manner. The relation of one sequence to the next is not at all arbitrary. One
incident is connected to another such that each incident seems to throw some
light on what we have learned so far and what is to come.
The documentary begins with the filmmaker telling us about and introduc-
ing us to (via some 1991 footage) “Moussa,” the Palestinian man who helped to
raise this Israeli woman. She then introduces us to each of her parents, in their
new home in northern Italy, and they each speak about Moussa, his role in her
upbringing, and their memories of Moussa’s arrival in their home. Her mother,
interviewed while cooking and in a manner that is seemingly quite spontaneous,
admits that she would have never entrusted her infant daughter to her husband
as she did to Moussa. Her father, Amos Elon, a well-known writer on political
subjects, displays more experience with and skepticism about the interview pro-
cess, as well as some discomfort over being interviewed by his own daughter. He
is very careful with his words, correcting himself a few times. The documentary
also shows Amos and Danae quarreling about whether he should be interviewed
while walking through the streets. He would prefer his study.
After her mother mentions that Moussa spent much more time with Danae
than with his own children, Danae begins to look for those children. With the
money he had earned, Moussa sent his eight sons to the United States to be edu-
cated and to keep them from being involved in anti-Israeli violence. In New York
City, calling information, Danae tries to find a telephone number for the Abdullah
family in Paterson, New Jersey. Unable to find the number, but nowise daunted,
she sets out to inquire about them in the Palestinian community in Paterson. As
the voiceover tells us some of the history of Paterson, we see images from the
point of view of an automobile going over the George Washington Bridge and
then general, almost travelogue, footage of Paterson. And as she tells us that Pater-
son is now the “home of one of the largest Palestinian communities in the United
States,” we see store signs in Arabic, a license plate reading “Lifta,” and the spot of
two clocks on a store’s wall, one reading “U.S.A.” and the other reading “Home.”
Tellingly, the clock in the second spot is absent. Later, after the suggestion from
one of Moussa’s sons, Naser, a pharmacist, that she may have had the wrong
name, a shot is inserted of his nameplate with the correct spelling. This image
both gives us new information and retroactively helps us to understand previous
174 chapter seven

information, and is essential to the development of her story. The nameplate tells
us his surname is Obeidallah, not Abdullah. (Earlier we had also learned from
another son that Moussa’s given name was Mahmoud. His father went by the
name of Moussa while working for the Elon family because he thought it would
be easier for Israelis to pronounce.) There is no explanation of why Danae did not
know his surname. Yet her decision to include this in the documentary speaks
poignantly about Israeli-Palestinian relations—and perhaps also about mistress-
servant relations. The story builds and so does our understanding of the paradox
of her quest.
After Obeidallah arrives in the United States and we see the mutual affection
he and Danae have for each other, Another Road Home ends with Danae accom-
panying Obeidallah in his return to the occupied village of Battir, bringing an end
to the major part of the narrative. There remains only an epilogue with Danae’s
parents, now living in New York City, her father no longer seeming to object to
the idea of being filmed while walking, wandering along a beach with her mother
and ruminating on the idea of “home.”
The film starts with a question: What kind of fathering did Danae have? It
passes through attempts to answer that question and concludes with the question
answered. Each new sequence modifies the meaning of the previous sequences
and influences the meaning of later sequences. In this process, our understanding
of what Elon is going through in her quest gets progressively fuller. Another Road
Home is edited so that the forward trajectory of narrative information parallels the
cinematic movement forward. The documentary’s occurrences are arranged in a
linear and causal fashion. The quest—Danae’s ongoing struggle—tugs the plot
forward.

Contrast and Contradiction

Contrast and contradiction can also serve as a basis for documentary editing.
They are sometimes used to provide different opinions on a subject or both sides
of an argument, so that the documentary appears to be impartial. But simply
giving different sides of an argument does not mean that both sides are received
equally. As we have already seen in The Panama Deception, the order in which in-
formation is given can influence our understanding of it. John Akomfrah’s Hands-
worth Songs returns frequently to the racial disturbances, so that we read the in-
stances of optimistic immigrants through the lens of disappointment, disillusion,
and worry. By sequencing the information in this way, Akomfrah makes a strong
 Editing 175

political statement. In The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter the contrasts between
the archival footage from World War II and the testimony of the workers in the
war plants reveal contradictions between public history and private memories.
By combining the two, the documentary deals a forceful blow to the U.S. gov-
ernment’s version of the home front. We have spoken above of cutaways that are
mere digressions. But cutaways, too, can be used to comment on or undermine
the authority of an interview, offering information that contradicts what we hear
from the interviewee.
Charles Ferguson’s No End in Sight (2007) does something slightly different. It
uses lengthy interviews with respected informants, and then conflicting excerpts
from press conferences held by people in power in the Bush administration, un-
dercutting the authority and dignity of the administration’s officials. The precredit
sequence opens with a medium close shot of Donald Rumsfeld commending
President George W. Bush for his leadership in the “complex” and “little under-
stood” war in Iraq, the “first war of the twenty-first century.” After the credits, the
film takes us to Baghdad in 2006, showing the damages of war, and proceeds with
an editing pattern that is, in the words of critic Stuart Klawans, “almost rhythmic
in its regularity.” Over location shots from Iraq, the cool voiceover commentary
read by actor Campbell Scott describes the chronology of what has taken place:
“On May 1st, 2003, President George W. Bush declared an end to major combat
operations in Iraq. . . .” Scott’s description of Bush’s speech is followed by images,
often split-screen, of absolute devastation. We get quiet anger from informants
(close and medium shots of talking heads), sober statistics from Scott over brutal
footage of wreckage and desolation in Iraq, casket after casket, then, to borrow
again from Klawans, “a punch line of utter obliviousness” from Bush’s foreign pol-
icy inner circle: Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, and Condoleezza Rice
in press conferences. For instance, after Marc Garlasco, senior Iraq analyst for the
Defense Intelligence Agency, testifies that his group could find no relationship
between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, we see Cheney standing before several
American flags announcing: “[Saddam’s] regime aids and protects terrorists, in-
cluding members of al-Qaeda.” After a number of government officials, a marine
lieutenant, and several journalists talk about the Pentagon’s lack of planning and
refusal to declare martial law after the fall of Baghdad (so that nothing was being
done to stop the looting and large-scale destruction, which quickly transformed
into violent lawlessness), we see Rumsfeld saying, “Stuff happens.” Ferguson
and editors Chad Beck and Cindy Lee have cut the film in an order that empha-
sizes the contradictions, inviting the spectator to judge the validity of what has
been said.
176 chapter seven

Toward the beginning of 4 Little Girls, a film about the 1963 murder of four
children when a bomb blasted “the Sunday School quiet” of a church basement in
Birmingham, Alabama (see Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow 31), Circuit
Judge Arthur Hanes Jr., a white man, looks back and pronounces Birmingham
in the 1950s a wonderful place to live and raise a family. Then after vintage foot-
age of lynchings, Ku Klux Klan parades, and water fountains marked “white” and
“colored,” Queen Nunn, a neighbor of Denise McNair, one of the little girls killed,
remembers having to tell her seven-year-old son that he was not allowed to drink
from the “white” fountain: “It was an awful time. It was an awful time for young
people to grow up in this city.” The disagreement is never stated directly. The con-
tradiction is meant to be understood ironically. It is an oblique way to say this
white man has a limited view of Birmingham. Here, too, the contrasts and contra-
dictions provoke the spectator to interpret—and to form an opinion.
Peter Davis’s Hearts and Minds (1974) offers a more sustained use of this edit-
ing strategy. Any documentary dealing with history is faced with too much data
and needs to be selective in choosing material to use (Rosenstone 13). Hearts and
Minds is no different. It introduces us to compelling individuals who are able to
give the audience firsthand accounts of the U.S. war against the Vietnamese peo-
ple and occasionally employs archival footage to illustrate their words. But one
noteworthy thing that this feature-length documentary does is to comment on
the opinions expressed in the interviews via the way the film is edited. By taking
advantage of the fact that each new segment affects the way we understand previ-
ous and future segments, Hearts and Minds is able to lead the viewer’s impression
of the material presented.
The film never pretends to be objective. Like 4 Little Girls and No End in Sight,
Hearts and Minds frankly and clearly acknowledges its perspective. And the film
demonstrates that editing is never a transparent or neutral carrier of meaning. The
documentary treats the structure of a film not only as a tool for reporting but also
as a means of persuasion. The problem that Peter Davis—or his editors, Lynzee
Klingman and Susan Martin—faced was how to fashion the social world into a
form that might incline the public to reach the filmmakers’ desired opinion, to
accept the documentary’s well-informed engagement with pressing issues. It is
worth pausing here for a moment to look at some specific sequences that illus-
trate how the film does this.
Hearts and Minds begins with Vietnamese music over a shot of a horse-drawn
cart, children running with book satchels, then several shots of peasants in what
a title tells us is Hung Dihn Village Northwest of Saigon. The village seems to be
living a fairly bucolic existence. Then a long shot of women working in a field is
 Editing 177

jarred by a soldier walking across the foreground carrying an assault rifle. Then
another shot of several more soldiers with weapons slung over their shoulders.
The camera moves slightly and we see, once again, the soldiers’ proximity to the
women in the field. After another long shot of the women stopping for a break,
the camera pulls back, the music fades, and we cut to a medium shot of Clark Clif-
ford (identified in the title as “Aide to President Truman, 1946–50”) seated in the
quiet refinement of a Georgian interior, presumably in the United States, talking
about U.S. political and military power after World War II.
The film begins by setting up three clear and affecting contrasts: Vietnamese
pastoral life, the war, and the distinguished diplomat knowledgeable about U.S.
dominance. The relation of one to another is indicated by the sequencing of the
information. We cannot help but understand Clark Clifford’s setting and the in-
formation he gives us through the context of the previous images of Vietnamese
village life and the war.
This kind of editing is not uncommon. More unusual is the way the film takes
advantage of the possibility that a sequence can affect how we understand new
material in order to radically call into question testimony as we are hearing it. The
documentary has damning evidence. But how can it present it so that it instills
outrage in its viewers? Hearts and Minds does this aggressively. With no voiceover
commentary at all, it uses editing to guide the viewer’s interpretation so that rage
can be coupled with the pleasure of knowing. In a strongly articulated and sincere,
principled stance, the film condemns the war. And it does so by using contradic-
tion to point to the ethical consequences of the hostilities. Toward the end of the
film, for example, there is a scene in which a rural North Vietnamese man talks
about his losses. “Talks about” is not strong enough. The man is devastated. He
points to where his mother and three-year-old son died, and to where his young
daughter was killed. “She was feeding the pigs. She was so sweet.” “No targets
here. Only rice fields and houses.” “I’ll give you my daughter’s beautiful shirt. Take
it back to the United States. Tell them what happened here. My daughter is dead.
She will never wear the shirt again. Throw this shirt in [President] Nixon’s face.
Tell him she was only a little schoolgirl.” The film then cuts to a sequence in the
South Vietnamese National Cemetery, in which we see a woman so overcome
with emotion that she tries to climb into the grave. We also watch a small boy
dressed in ceremonial white, sobbing at the picture of his father atop a mound.
Then there is a shot of General William Westmoreland, calmly sitting under a
tree by a pond, seemingly in a thoughtful mood, slowly nodding his head in the
affirmative, explaining that “the Oriental does not put the same high price on life
as the Westerner. Life is plentiful; life is cheap. . . . As the philosophy of the Orient
178 chapter seven

expresses it, life is not important.” This is followed by a handheld shot of bombing
and the sound of a low-flying plane.
Because the editors place Westmoreland’s testimony after the scenes of dis-
traught Vietnamese—the heartbroken father who mourns his daughter, the
woman who tries to join her loved one in the grave, and the boy who wails at the
loss of his father—we watch and listen to him with our knowledge of evidence to
the contrary. The meaning of all these sequences must be inferred by the specta-
tors, but their inferences are guided by the editing. Such an ironic frame may seem
imprecise and ambiguous. Yet the arrangement of the material, the juxtaposition
of Westmoreland’s pious certainties with contrary evidence, and the concomitant
implication that attitudes such as this are responsible for the bombing destruc-
tion of Vietnamese life lead concerned viewers to a searing indictment. It may
inflame pro-war viewers, too, but not so much at the absurdity of Westmoreland’s
remarks as at the “unfairness” of the editing.
Remember Bill Nichols’s concept of “the voice of documentary,” which came
up in chapter 3? “We may think that we hear history or reality speaking to us
through a film, but what we actually hear is the voice of the text, even when that
voice tries to efface itself ” (21). The voice of this documentary shares our stan-
dards of judgment. Undeniably, Peter Davis is critical of what General Westmore-
land says; but more than that, the voice of the text points out the moral stupidity
of what Westmoreland says by first letting the spectators share scenes of mourn-
ing, so they become critical of what comes next. In Hearts and Minds, the voice
of the documentary is apparent even though we don’t see and seldom hear an
author. It is the controlling voice, the voice that gives us images of all-American
cheerleaders just before we see GIs with Vietnamese prostitutes. It is the voice
of the text that shows Colonel George S. Patton III describing the look of both
determination and reverence on the faces of the GIs at a memorial service for four
fallen comrades (“my feeling for America just soared”) and, with a smile, praising
those soldiers as “a bloody good bunch of killers,” then follows it with a football
team’s prayer service and scenes from a game. It is the voice of the text that gives
us images of Vietnamese schoolchildren while an ex-GI talks about the thrill you
get seeing a bomb explode. It is the voice of the text that follows a Concord, Mas-
sachusetts, father discussing with pride the death of his eldest son (a pilot who
died in Vietnam) as a worthwhile sacrifice with a Saigon father’s grief as he points
to the tiny coffins he is hammering together and says, “Many have died here.” He
himself lost seven children. “But it is nothing like in the countryside.” And he
details the effect of the planes’ daily spraying of the defoliant Agent Orange on
rural children.
 Editing 179

The voice of this text, its “social point of view,” to quote Nichols again, makes its
message understandable; it answers its own questions. And it does this through
the editing of its material. Some films—Marker’s Sunless, for example—overflow
with meanings. Not so with Hearts and Minds. It is a beautifully complicated work.
Its meanings, however, are quite clear. In its own way, it is a very didactic film.

Editing for Clarification

There are times when a documentary needs to illustrate or clarify what is said.
Inserting a shot or two can help to do this. In Halving the Bones, the filmmaker’s
mother looks into the tea tin containing her mother’s bones and smiles with sur-
prise at their beauty. As she comments that they look as if they had been painted, a
close shot of the pink and white bones appears, supplementing her description. In
this case, the quick shot of the bones helps the audience to know what the woman
is talking about. Here the connection between shots is fairly obvious. It seems
quite natural to look inside the tin as she does. In other examples, however, mak-
ing the connection requires more effort on the part of the spectator. And there
are instances in which making the connections between shots reminds us that a
filmmaker is responsible for creating the sequence.
Let’s return to the unusual example of editing in Titicut Follies that we discussed
in chapter 3: the flash-forward from the force-feeding of a patient to the mortician
preparing the body for burial. In the midst of the scene, images from a different
time and space are edited in. Gradually, perhaps drawing on our experience out-
side the film, we come to understand the causal relations of the flash-forward to
the “present” event. By violating the continuity of time and space, this sequence
of Titicut Follies, like some in The River and Hearts and Minds, invites audiences
to make emotional and logical connections. Joining the two sequences in this
way may weaken spatiotemporal continuity but clarify meaning. (See figures 3.2
and 3.3.)
This clarification, of course, requires a certain amount of work from the specta-
tor. Documentary film and video makers often ask us to make associations that
might not be as direct as what we saw in Halving the Bones. When Alan Berliner
edits in footage of a house falling off its foundation into the teeming waters while
we hear his father discussing his divorce from Alan’s mother (Nobody’s Business,
1996), he is employing a sort of symbolic displacement. He is implying a compar-
ison. We see the image of one tragedy and are supposed to connect it to another,
which is not pictured. The house is metaphoric for something the filmmaker does
180 chapter seven

not depict. He also uses shots of a boxing ring as a metaphor to make clear how
he felt when his father and his mother fought—or later, during the filming of the
documentary, when he and his father argued. And we know that it is the film-
maker, Alan Berliner, not his father, who is making that symbolic displacement. It
can be seen as a distinctly authorial intervention.
In order to allude to that which is not visible or audible, documentary makers
often make use of figures of speech, rhetorical tropes. Berliner’s editing sets up
unexpected similarities. His metaphors are rhetorical tactics to elucidate mean-
ing. We can also describe them as hyperbole, an exaggeration to emphasize a
point. This is a kind of extravagance we do not expect from the sober stance of
most documentaries.
Yet hyperbole is an essential part of most verbal communication, as is metaphor.
Hyperbole is an overstatement that is meant to make a strong impression. Meta-
phor draws upon a familiar set of meanings to explain another set of meanings
that are less familiar—or less tangible. Neither is intended to be taken literally.
In documentaries, too, they are not intended to be taken literally. Documenta-
ries present concrete sounds and concrete images. Many expect viewers to infer
more abstract concepts. Berliner, for example, magically reunited his parents by
editing in the sound of his mother singing “The Nearness of You” over the sound
and image of his father singing the same song. In the case of this miraculous duet,
or the shot of the house washed off its foundation, or the image of the boxing ring,
the filmmaker is asking spectators to imagine what his parents’ broken marriage
meant to him. Those feelings may not be possible to picture or even to articulate
directly. Instead, by editing in these sounds and images, he uses rhetorical tropes
to illustrate them. These tropes disrupt any spatial or temporal continuity the film
might have had. But they symbolically express a deeper or larger reality that is
more difficult to portray.
Documentaries can use metonymy as well. An attribute is substituted for the
thing itself. How often have you seen an inserted image of the White House when
the documentary was discussing the U.S. presidency? Or the Capitol building
for the U.S. federal government? And any documentary is in itself synecdochical.
Since they can only re-present a fragment of the sociohistorical world, all docu-
mentaries are a part that stands in for the absent whole that cannot be re-created.
When we first spoke of The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, we noted that it was
implied that the five “Rosies” interviewed stood in for the experiences of many
more women—three million, some say. Seen this way, “Lola” embodies—or
portrays—both that feisty woman from Brooklyn who worked as a welder and
dreamed of making an ornamental gate, and other women who worked in the
 Editing 181

war industries and also had dreams. The stories she tells, then, can take on other
meanings, transcendent meanings, as they point to broader associations. In fact,
showing the subject in all its partiality can enhance the documentary’s value, per-
haps even its aura of “realness.” That fragment becomes special because it repre-
sents the larger world.

Montage

The word montage comes from the French word monter, “to assemble.” In many
ways, any edited film or video is a montage. Indeed, the word is sometimes used
as a synonym for editing. The French call a film editor a “monteur.” In Spanish and
Portuguese the film editor is a “montador” or, frequently, a “montadora.” And the
Italians use the word “montaggio” for film editing. But such a broad definition is
not too useful for us here. We limit our discussion of montage to documentaries
or sequences in documentaries in which archival footage is cut up and reassem-
bled; time and space are fractured and then sutured together to create different
connotations. Images, once removed from their historical setting, are reactivated
by their inclusion in a montage with other images.
We have already discussed Point of Order, a film composed entirely of a mon-
tage made from existing sources. This kind of compilation film has a long and
luminous history. In 1927, for the tenth anniversary of the Russian Revolution,
Esfir Shub created The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty/Padenie dinastii Romanovykh,
a film made out of both archival footage and the Romanov family’s home movies.
And the form remains popular. In 1995, with the help of selected songs, prayers,
poems, legends, and added background sounds, Vincent Monnikendam turned
silent footage shot by colonial officials of the Dutch East Indies from 1912 to 1933
into Mother Dao—the Turtlelike/Moeder Dao—de schildpadgelijkende, a story of
the colonization and exploitation of the people we now know as Indonesians.
Thom Andersen’s Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003) dismantles nearly two hundred
films to show how LA has appeared as background, character, subject, and sym-
bol in Hollywood movies. By reframing existing material, these filmmakers aston-
ish us with new meanings.
Santiago Álvarez made numerous compilation films as head of the newsreel and
short film departments at the Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Cinematográ-
ficos/Cuban Institute of Cinematographic Art and Industry, a state-run agency
created within months of the 1959 Revolution taking power. With a mandate to
keep the Cuban populace informed about current events at home and abroad,
 182 chapter seven

his work was meant for local consumption. His 1968 film LBJ is a sharp attack on
U.S. president Lyndon Baines Johnson. Built from found footage and still photo-
graphs, the seventeen-minute satire is accompanied by evocative music, including
Miriam Makeba, Nina Simone, Carl Orff, Leo Brouwer, circus music, and beer
hall ditties. The film animates photo-
graphs of Luci Baines Johnson’s wed-
ding, images from Playboy magazine,
cartoons, newspaper clippings, and
collages. It also excerpts moving im-
ages from newsreels, as well as Holly-
wood gangster films, war films, and
westerns. Some images of President
Kennedy in the Dallas motorcade are
followed by a “reverse shot,” a clip
from a Hollywood film of a knight
7.8. Lyndon Baines Johnson in the documentary LBJ (Santiago aiming a crossbow from behind a tree.
Álvarez, 1968). Then there is a movement in on a set
of crosshairs superimposed on an im-
age of the back of Kennedy’s head, then the knight firing the weapon, some quick
cutting, and a still image of LBJ taking the oath of office. In another sequence,
footage of riot police in helmets, soldiers in helmets, and a Hollywood epic of
medieval knights in helmets, as well as a collage of LBJ in a knight’s helmet, are
intercut to the music of Orff ’s Carmina Burana.
Álvarez employs no voiceover commentary. The only voices in the film come
from footage of Stokely Carmichael, over a minute long, calling for black Ameri-
cans to come together in solidarity and charging white America with brutality
and racism, and from Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, interrupted
by footage of rifles firing. The film ends with a series of images of LBJ amusing his
young grandson. Playing on the sound track is Pablo Milanés’s “Yo vi la sangre de
un niño brotar” (I saw the blood of a child flowing) about napalm and children
dying. The final image is well-known footage of a Vietnamese child on fire. Álva-
rez’s dynamic montage of images, music, and sound effects presents a stringent
and emotional condemnation of Johnson and his “cowboy” foreign and domestic
policy.
Alan Berliner’s The Family Album (1986) is a montage of unidentified 16mm
silent black-and-white home movies he purchased and borrowed from sev-
eral sources. They picture infants, babies walking, birthday parties, parades,
 Editing 183

graduations, weddings, pets, outings to the beach, vacations . . . , happy moments

from the mid-1920s through the late 1940s that people treasured. The images are
organized from birth to old age. The sound track is partially from found sources,
home recordings, people playing with tape recorders, oral histories, and inter-
views with members of his own family. Interestingly, much of the audio montage
contradicts the joyful times pictured in the image track. According to Berliner,
the sound track “is a subversion of the implicit lie of home movies—that life
is all leisure and no struggle.” He wanted to reveal the realities hidden beneath
the surface of the movies by progressively introducing such factors as alcohol-
ism, arguments, suicide, and divorce. In Berliner’s words, “As the anonymous
characters grow older, the issues the film introduces grow more complicated”
(MacDonald 165).
By and large, though, montage is used for short sequences in larger films that
are made from a variety of materials. And as such, it performs a special service:
a series of shots are edited into a sequence, condensing filmic time and space,
for a heightened expressive effect. Whereas most film and video makers subor-
dinate their editing strategies to a tight rhetorical or dramatic logic, in montage
sequences they can enjoy increased editorial freedom. Other elements, such as
the sensuous play of light and dark, or graphic similarities, can come into promi-
nence, an explicit rupture with the realist traditions of much documentation.
These shots are generally bound together by the music, a voiceover commentary,
and/or tempo and rhythm. Optical effects like dissolves and other means of lay-
ering images sometimes form the transitions. From time to time documentaries
even use spatial montage within the frame, as we saw in No End in Sight. In these,
split screens, back projections, electronic keying or mixing, or digital compos-
ites allow different images to coexist in the same frame simultaneously, creating a
dense visual space. Separate realities become a part of a single image.
Montage sequences are often employed in documentaries to give a quick his-
tory of the subject under investigation. The title of 4 Little Girls is white letters over
a black-and-white traveling shot of a cemetery. Then after a long dissolve, a pattern
of alternation begins: a montage of vintage black-and-white images, both moving
and still, of civil rights demonstrations in the U.S. South during the late 1950s and
early 1960s, and color shots, both moving and static, of a cemetery and individual
gravestones with keyed portraits of the little girl buried there. Throughout the se-
quence Joan Baez sings Richard Farina’s “Birmingham Sunday,” with the repeated
refrain “and the choir kept singing of freedom.” Later, when the filmmaker wants
to draw our attention to the history of race relations in Birmingham, he, or editor
184 chapter seven

Sam Pollard, composes a montage of still photos of lynchings and other aggres-
sions. Howell Raines, a journalist for the New York Times, is interviewed. Raines
explains that Birmingham was a blue-collar town where belligerence against
union members and other workers was condoned by police and industry: “You
have a tradition of violence flowing out of an industrial setting, with the overlay
of rural racism coming in from the countryside, traditional Old South racism.”
As he says this, his image changes to the montage. The same logic that allows the
character “Lola” in The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter to represent both herself,
a particular woman, and a whole class of other women allows still images from a
lynching to represent the particular tortured and murdered individual as well as
racial violence in the southern United States. It is this generalizability that allows
such images to be used without identification in documentary montages.
But montage sequences in documentaries are seldom like the kind of close,
rapidly edited sequences cut to music that you see in today’s fiction films. Such
editing obliges the viewer, in order to experience the exhilaration of the action, to
assemble discrete pieces of visual detail. That kind of fast cutting of images taken
from many angles, where shots are sometimes only a few frames long, are more
unusual in nonfiction film precisely because they are aimed more toward visual
and aural excitement than toward conveying information.
Whereas interviews and testimony are familiar forms (from courtrooms and
conversations, for example), montage sequences are supremely cinematic. Tak-
ing place over time, yet compressing time and space in expressive ways, montage
sequences—and, according to some, editing in general—are unique to cinema.
In that same 1935 text on Three Songs of Lenin, Vertov complained, “Some are still
unaware of what it means to write a full-length film in film shots. They still con-
fuse films translated from the theatrical and literary language with film-originals,
with work by a film author” (137). Film differs from theater and literature in its
editing and the way its incidents and events are recorded by the camera. We turn
to camerawork next.

Additional Filmography
Victory at Sea (M. Clay Adams, 1952–1953)
Now! (Santiago Álvarez, 1965)
Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970)
Oración/Prayer for Marilyn Monroe (Miriam Talavera and Marisol Trujillo, 1984)
Introduction to the End of an Argument ( Jayce Salloum and Elia Suleiman, 1990)
The Gringo in Mañanaland (DeeDee Halleck, 1995)
 Editing 185

Artist (Tracey Moffatt, 2000)

Iraqi Short Films (Mauro Andrizzi, 2008)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Arthur, Paul. “The Moving Picture Cure: Self-Therapy Documentaries.” Psycho-
analytic Review 94.6 (2007).
Bernard, Sheila Curran. Documentary Storytelling, 2nd ed. Burlington, Mass.:
Focal Press, 2007.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction, 8th ed. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Bottomore, Stephen. “Shots in the Dark: The Real Origins of Film Editing.” Sight
and Sound 57.3 (Summer 1988).
Carroll, Noël. Mystifying Movies: Fads and Fallacies in Contemporary Film Theory.
New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.
Chanan, Michael. “The Revolution in the Documentary.” In Cuban Cinema.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Dancyger, Ken. The Technique of Film and Video Editing, 4th ed. Woburn, Mass.:
Focal Press, 2006.
Graham, John. “‘There Are No Simple Solutions’: Wiseman on Film Making and
Viewing.” In Frederick Wiseman, ed. Thomas Atkins. New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1976.
Klawans, Stuart. Review of No End in Sight. The Nation, August 13/20, 2007.
Kuleshov, Lev. Kuleshov on Film. Trans. and ed. Ronald Levaco. Berkeley: Uni-
versity of California Press, 1974.
Levin, G. Roy. Documentary Explorations: Fifteen Interviews with Filmmakers.
Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1971.
Leyda, Jay. Kino: A History of the Russian and Soviet Film. London: Allen and
Unwin, 1960.
MacDonald, Scott. “Interview with Alan Berliner.” In A Critical Cinema 5. Berke-
ley: University of California Press, 2006.
Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow. New York: Penguin, 1983.
Miller, Toby. Technologies of Truth: Cultural Citizenship and the Popular Media.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998.
Musser, Charles. “The Travel Genre in 1903–1904: Moving Towards Fictional
Narrative.” In Early Cinema: Space, Frame, Narrative, ed. Thomas Elsaesser.
London: BFI: 1990.
Nichols, Bill. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary,
186 chapter seven

2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2005.
Pudovkin, V. I. Film Technique and Film Acting. Trans. and ed. Ivor Montagu.
New York: Grove Press, 1978.
Reisz, Karel, and Gavin Miller. The Technique of Film Editing. 1969. Reprint, Wo-
burn, Mass.: Focal Press, 2002.
Rosen, Miriam. “In Her Own Time.” Interview with Chantal Akerman. Artforum
(April 2004).
Rosenstone, Robert A. “History, Memory, Documentary: A Critique of The
Good Fight.” Cineaste 17.1 (1989).
Samuels, Charles Thomas. “Interview with Alfred Hitchcock, 2/28/72.” In En-
countering Directors. New York: Capricorn, 1972.
Snyder, Robert L. “The River.” In Pare Lorentz and the Documentary Film. Nor-
man: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968.
Van Dyke, Willard. “Letters from ‘The River.’” Film Comment 3.2 (Spring 1965).
Vertov, Dziga. “My Latest Experiment.” In Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov,
ed. Annette Michelson, trans. Kevin O’Brien. Berkeley: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 1984.
Wiseman, Frederick. “Foreword.” In Five Films by Frederick Wiseman, by Barry
Keith Grant. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006.
Wood, Jennifer M. “Life With Spike: Moviemaker Sam Pollard Puts His Money
Where His Mouth Is.” MovieMaker Magazine. http://www.moviemaker
.com/articles/item/life_with_spike_2689. Accessed October 3, 2007.
 8
Camerawork

I n the first minutes of Born into Brothels (Ross Kauffman and Zana
Briski, 2004), we hear a voiceover saying: “It’s almost impossible to
photograph in the red light district. Everyone is terrified of the camera. They are
frightened of being found out. Everything is illegal.” The comments play over
black-and-white still photographs of prostitutes in north Calcutta, India. And the
voice we hear is that of photographer Zana Briski, who managed to earn the trust
of the sex workers in order to take their pictures. In these opening lines, Briski
reminds us of the problems that sometimes arise when we try to document the
lives of others, a predicament that is familiar from some of the documentaries
already discussed in this book. She also acknowledges a more widely understood
sentiment. We all seem to attribute a special power to the camera. We know that,
when the subject documented is actuality, the photographic image has the capac-
ity to reveal as well as condemn aspects of the sociohistorical world that might
otherwise remain unremarked. And, indeed, Born into Brothels exposes—and
denounces—the miserable conditions in that red light district of north Calcutta.
When you first try to recall a particular scene in a documentary, or any film for
that matter, it is a visual memory that often comes to mind. It is the authority of
the moving image that leaves the first and, sometimes, most lasting impression
on us. Surely sound, too, plays a key role in the process through which documen-
taries represent sociohistorical reality. In fact, as we will have a chance to discuss
in the final chapter, the use of sound in nonfiction films can anchor or alter the
187
188 chapter eight

meaning of any given image. But even if we know that the visuals can never fully
account for the “message” in the film, we seem to find comfort in the apparent im-
mediacy of the photographic record. Born into Brothels is a film that might impress
us in many ways. Chief amongst them is the power of the still and moving images
used in the documentary.
This chapter focuses on the role of camerawork in the process of nonfictional
representation. It examines the way documentary makers and camera operators
look at lived reality, the options they have when they point their cameras toward a
particular subject, and how their view influences the spectator’s. More generally,
it asks: How does camerawork “translate” lived reality into documentary images?
Film theorist Siegfried Kracauer might have been contemplating this ques-
tion when he wrote about the documentary Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey
and Arthur Elton, 1935) five decades ago. “Cinematically,” he noted, “this report
is anything but exciting, for it confines itself to photographic statements which
could not be plainer.” There is, according to Kracauer, a general lack of aesthetic
ambition in the film’s visual treatment of reality. As he sees them, however, these
modest “statements” do not really constitute a problem since the documentary’s
“plainness is in harmony with the whole character of the film. . . . The thing that
matters is veracity; and it is precisely the snapshot quality of the pictures which
makes them appear as authentic documents” (202). As he discusses the role of
the camerawork in Housing Problems, Kracauer looks not for virtuosity but for a
self-effacing quality that legitimizes the documentary record.
This argument relies on a simple and familiar equation. It aligns documentary
authenticity with aesthetic restraint. But is the “plainness” of the image all we look
for when we think of the camerawork in a documentary? And more importantly,
is this really what most documentaries have to offer? Attractive as it may appear,
the equation that connects visual restraint and authenticity can only provide a
limited assessment of the options available for nonfiction filmmakers. Many doc-
umentaries rely on stylistic choices that depart from the stoic realism of Housing
Problems. They use the camera imaginatively in order to inform or persuade, move
or entertain their audiences—and to establish the veracity that Kracauer saw in
Housing Problems.

Framing

We see what the camera sees. But we also see what the camera operator wants us
to see. Objects or people can go in and out of focus for dramatic emphasis. Or
 camerawork 189

they can be framed in a particular way to make a point. In the field, the selection
process begins when the camera operator decides how to look at something. This
is important because the way the cameraperson pictures the subject helps deter-
mine how the audience perceives that subject. It also defines what is and is not
relevant, what should be excluded from the screen space, how much of the world
the documentary may reveal, and what aspects of reality need to be accentuated.
While the choices available to documentary filmmakers are similar to those
that we find in fiction films, their use and implications tend to be different when
we think of visual recording in nonfiction cinema. We can start with the size of
the subject within the frame. Scale is associated with the distance between the
camera and what it photographs. The smaller the subject, the farther away the
camera seems to be. In long shots, for instance, the camera appears to be at con-
siderable distance from the subject and we get a general sense of the setting with-
out privileging any particular detail. Close shots, by contrast, are likely to isolate
a specific subject and assign importance to it. They can also indicate familiarity
with and proximity to that subject; or they may suggest curiosity and even in-
trusiveness, depending on the context in which the shot is included. In nonfic-
tion cinema these decisions about where to place the camera usually follow con-
ventionalized procedures that are typical of the documentary form. Consider a
common example: the documentary interview. Most interviews shot in a studio
use medium close shots, a polite distance that allows us a good look at the in-
terviewee’s face, without taking us too close to the subject. We should be able
to recognize the interviewee and even notice significant facial expressions. We
should also feel somewhat comfortable with the person in front of the camera, as
if we had been granted privileged access to a worthy informant. Studio interviews
in general, however, are formal occasions. And the camera usually observes this
formality by maintaining a certain remove from the subject. We normally see the
interviewee’s face and upper body, as if we were watching from a couple of feet
away. Any significant change in the frame or scale of the subject is likely to alter
that sense of formality and create a different rapport between the audience and
the interviewee.
This happens, for example, in Mindy Faber’s Delirium. The camera seems at
times too close to the person in front of it, producing an unexpected sense of
intimacy with the interviewee. The first thing we notice when the interview starts
is the framing itself. The interviewee’s face fills up the entire screen. Delirium ex-
plores women’s mental illnesses, and the subject interviewed is the video mak-
er’s mother, a woman with a history of nervous breakdowns. The conventional
medium close-up of the interview subject might have been an effective way of
 190 chapter eight

introducing Patricia Jane Faber to the audience. The video maker, however, opts
for a shot that seems tighter than usual. Given the nature of the subject matter—
Mrs. Faber is talking about her first ner-
vous breakdown—the tight close-up
can make us feel slightly uncomfortable.
Yet it is helpful as a means of underlin-
ing the personal implications of the
mother’s story. It also works as an indi-
cator of the closeness and trust between
daughter and mother.
Because they look so unconventional,
extreme close-ups can be a compelling
tool of communication. Remember the
shots of the tape recorder in the final
8.1. Close shot of Patricia Jane Faber: “My mind just froze; it was moments of The Thin Blue Line? As the
just paralyzed.” From Delirium (Mindy Faber, 1993).
testimony recorded in the tape begins
to disclose evidence about the murder
case examined in the film, the shots become increasingly tighter. (See figure 2.3.)
The extreme close-ups correlate the size of the object photographed with the im-
portance of the information we hear from the tape recorder.
Between an extreme long shot and an extreme close-up, there is a vast range of
options that determine the scale of the subject matter within the frame. Choos-
ing one or another is a decision often based on how much information one wants
to include in the shot, what piece of information should be privileged, and what
kind of rapport with the viewer one wants to pursue.
Besides the scale of the subject photographed, other factors contribute to our
perception of what we see in the frame. The camera angle, for example, helps de-
fine the position of the subject within the shot as well as the way that subject
appears to the viewer. Do we look straight at it? Do we see it from above or from
below? And what kind of image results from these different angles? Film aesthetic
textbooks normally point out that the angle and height of the camera are not nec-
essarily related. A camera may stand above the subject without looking down at it.
Or it can sit below and face it straight on, privileging the lower part of the subject.
Most of the time, though, height and angle are correlated concepts, as the techni-
cal terminology already suggests. We call it a high angle, for instance, when the
camera captures the subject from above, looking down at it.
Colloquially speaking, the words “angle” and “perspective” are used inter-
changeably, implying that choosing an angle is equal to taking a particular point
 camerawork 191

of view. The same is true when we talk about camerawork. More so than decisions
about scale, the angle brings forth the idea that the camera offers a situated per-
spective on reality. Filmmakers normally place their cameras at a height and angle
that emulate our ordinary viewing experiences, as if to suggest that we are looking
straight at the subject. “Eye-level shots,” as they are sometimes called, seem natu-
ral and inconspicuous; for that reason, they also encourage the belief in the trans-
parency of the filming process. Stylized angles, by contrast, can create dramatic
effects and function as markers of authorial intervention, especially since the op-
tical properties of the lens tend to distort the natural shape of things. Anyone who
has used a still camera may remember that high angle shots produce an image in
which the subject photographed appears smaller than usual. The opposite hap-
pens when the camera looks up at the subject, from a low angle position, as is
the case in Leni Riefenstahl’s Olympia/Olympiad about the 1936 Berlin Olympic
Games. In the beginning of the film, we see a series of shots that feature a discus
thrower framed from below. The low angle magnifies the stature of his body and
highlights the ideal of physical “perfection” endorsed by the documentary.
Sometimes it is the nature of the event documented that determines the choice
of a conspicuous or dramatic angle. There is a shot in Primary (Drew Associates,
1960) in which the cameraperson follows John F. Kennedy, then a young senator
from Massachusetts, as he enters a crowded building in Milwaukee. The camera
is placed above Kennedy’s head, literally looking down at the scene. Rather than
simply lowering the stature of the documentary subject, though, this high angle
shot is meant to create a broader and richer perspective than would have been
possible if the camera were looking straight at the senator. We see not only Ken-
nedy but also the multitude of supporters gathered around him. Framing from
above turned out to be the most effective way of giving the viewer a general sense
of the enormity of the event. We will come back to this shot shortly.
The height and angle of the camera can also establish spatial relations by con-
necting distinct points of view. In the previous chapter, we talked about how edit-
ing is capable of creating continuity between different spaces. And we noted that
one way to do this is through point-of-view shots. In mainstream fiction films,
this procedure can produce tightly knit spatial arrangements, which reinforce
the apparent autonomy of the fictional world. Documentaries seldom give this
impression. Still, by associating the camera angle with a specific point of view,
nonfiction filmmakers are able to situate one subject in relation to another. Think,
for example, of the way concert performances are commonly rendered. When
recording these performances, documentary makers employ several cameras,
capturing images both of the stage and the audience. The shots of the audience
192 chapter eight

are conventionally taken from above in a high angle, whereas the performer is
normally photographed from below, with the camera looking up. The edited film
alternates between the stage and the audience, and the placement of the camera
helps us figure out where one stands with respect to the other.

Camera and Lens Movement

The frame normally changes every time there is a new shot. The second image
is either a reframing of the same subject or shows us something different. Yet we
need not have editing in order to alter the frame. Camera movements can serve a
similar purpose. They can expand or reduce the area covered by the frame, shift
the perspective on the subject photographed, or direct our attention to a new
subject.
Oftentimes, a movement is motivated by an occurrence within or around the
profilmic space. For example, if the main subject starts to move, the camera most
likely follows, keeping that subject in focus while changing the view of the sur-
rounding environment. Camera movements can also be prompted by a sudden
disclosure of relevant information or a need to draw attention to a specific detail
within the frame. Imagine a shot in which we see two people having a conversa-
tion. If a third party starts to contribute from outside the frame, the cameraperson
will probably adjust the visual field to include that new speaker.
In Alain Resnais’s All the Memory in the World/Toute la mémoire du monde
(1956), the camera does not follow any particular subject. Neither does it respond
spontaneously to unpredictable events. Instead, it travels through the rooms
and corridors of the National Library in Paris. Ghislain Cloquet, the cinema-
tographer, uses a series of tracking shots, smooth movements for which the cam-
era is normally mounted on a dolly, in order to explore the building’s interior. He
also moves the camera around a fixed axis in long sinuous pans that turn from
one side to another, or diagonally. And he tilts the camera up and down. Unlike
what happens in the situations described above, the movements in this film are
clearly premeditated and carefully executed. The idea is not so much to react im-
mediately to an unknown event but to investigate a setting that seems remarkable
to the filmmaker. All the Memory in the World shows the vastness of the spaces in
the National Library and the massive number of books and documents housed in
the building. As a means of gathering information, the camera movements help
establish the nature and scale of the subject represented. Had the filmmaker de-
cided to change the frame by cutting from one space to another, he might still
 camerawork 193

have been able to compose a convincing picture of the library’s interior. But we
would have missed the sense of magnitude that the uninterrupted movements
manage to convey.
Deciding on whether to plan shots carefully or react on the spot to a particu-
lar situation frequently goes hand in hand with the type of subject represented
and the film’s attitude toward it. Both options can prove useful; however, they
are likely to suggest different stances regarding the historical world. Likewise, the
decision to employ a static camera or a moving shot may communicate a specific
attitude toward the profilmic situation. Kamal Aljafari’s The Roof/Alsateh (2006)
tells the story of his Palestinian family’s dwelling. Displaced when their home be-
came part of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and resettled in the unfinished
quarters of a family who had fled, they resist completing the top floor of “some-
thing that doesn’t belong to us.” Our understanding of the “physical and psychic”
terrain in which the family is living is greatly influenced by Aljafari’s selection of a
static camera to shoot the interiors of the home and traveling shots to survey the
ruins of the Palestinian neighborhood (“First Person Films”).
Practical concerns can also determine the nature of the camera movements.
Tracking shots demand some preparation and offer less flexibility than may be re-
quired from the makers of a film. For that reason, documentarians might choose,
instead, to carry the cameras in their hands. While not as elegant as tracking
shots, handheld movements can provide a more effective response to unplanned
events. And because they are determined less by premeditated design than by the
contingencies of the situations documented, they can also help to authenticate
the process of representation. In fact, there is such strong association between
handheld movements and documentary aesthetics that fiction filmmakers have
sometimes used them just to add a realistic quality to their images. For instance,
handheld shots help to give a “documentary look” to The Battle of Algiers, a film
that was entirely staged, even though it was based on actual historical events.
Abrupt zooms give a similar impression, underscoring the priority of the sub-
ject matter and the spontaneous nature of the shooting process. A zoom is not re-
ally a camera movement but a modification in the scale of the subject through the
gradual change of lens focal length. The camera itself does not move, although we
may experience a greater sense of closeness or distance. Zooming in, for example,
can quickly single out a certain detail or capture a sudden change in the profilmic
space. The cameraperson does not need to approach the documentary subject;
instead, that subject is enlarged for the viewer.
To the untrained eye, a zoom can sometimes appear like a tracking shot. Yet
there are both functional and formal differences between them. When recording
194 chapter eight

unstaged material, zooms might be more convenient than camera movements.

They are also, on the other hand, a little mechanical, less graceful. A zoom flattens
space, never really exploring its depth, and therefore tends to imply a less direct
assessment of the space photographed.
But there can be other reasons besides convenience to use a zoom. In Claude
Lanzmann’s Shoah, the camera is mounted on a train locomotive, traveling toward
the entrance gate of Auschwitz. Then, as we are about to enter the gate, there is a
cut to an interview with a survivor from the concentration camp. When we return
to Auschwitz, the shot of the gate changes to a zoom, bringing us closer, allowing
us to visually cross the threshold, without going in. The filmmaker has made a
moral choice not to enter that space. In Fred Camper’s words, because of Lanz-
mann’s “profound respect” for the dead, he holds back, never moving physically
through the gates, acknowledging that neither he nor the audience members can
ever “recover lost time,” come close to understanding what the inmates experi-
enced, or “live their loss” (106).
Camerawork may cast an expressive and openly opinionated look at the subject
matter in the film. Or it may suggest a more self-effacing attitude toward historical
reality. In the next two sections, we discuss these different approaches.

Observing and Interpreting

Observing reality is part of the effort to document the sociohistorical world.

All camera operators must observe what they shoot. And yet, when we refer to
a documentary as “observational,” we usually have something more precise in
mind. An observational film is not simply a film that involves an effort to look
attentively at a particular subject. Most often, the term is used to designate a type
of documentary filmmaking. Bill Nichols describes observational documentaries
as those that “[stress] the nonintervention of the filmmaker,” and which are ex-
pected to “cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera more
than any other mode [of documentary]” (Representing Reality 38). Observational
filmmakers, in other words, try not to interfere in what they see. They play the role
of onlooker or bystander, rather than the part of provocateur or participant in the
profilmic situation.
Historically, the term observational documentary also has a specific meaning;
it refers to a particular set of developments in the history and technology of non-
fiction film, when the availability of lightweight filming equipment, refined by
the military during World War II, became more easily available. Combined with
 camerawork 195

portable synchronized sound equipment, powered by batteries, the apparatus

could be operated by a smaller crew, enabling documentaries to be made quicker
(and at lower cost) with increased flexibility. This also allowed documentary film-
makers to shoot less conspicuously. As a result, when we watch an observational
film, we may get the impression we are looking closely at the documentary sub-
jects without being noticed by them. In the United States, the concept of observa-
tional documentary is generally associated with the term direct cinema, which we
examined briefly when we discussed authority and in more depth in our discus-
sion of dramatic structure. Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment is an example
of observational filmmaking.
What first stands out when we talk about observational documentaries is thus
a certain attitude toward the documentary subject, a particular sense of ethics. To
observe reality—rather than, say, to impose the filmmaker’s will on the situations
in front of the camera—is to define a particular set of protocols, to determine
what can or cannot be done to the documentary subject. It is also to establish
some form of relationship with the audience, a rapport through which the film-
maker assures the spectator that the world documented was not altered to meet
the needs of the film. Just as important as these ethical attributes, however, are
the aesthetic implications of the observational format. Here the idea of watch-
ing attentively finds a formal equivalent in the appearance of the film. Since what
counts is the subject observed, the camerawork should be inconspicuous or sub-
dued, much as it is in the example used by Kracauer. Additionally, the shots can
be unusually lengthy, as if the camera were waiting for something to occur. Even if
not very much happens, this prolonged view allows for a strong sense of intimacy
with the material documented. And that, along with the ethical principles that
give support to observational film, serves as a way of authenticating the represen-
tational process.
Titicut Follies, for instance, has a number of scenes in which the camera pa-
tiently watches the events in front of it without making much of a statement about
them. The film, as you may recall, explores the daily events in a psychiatric hos-
pital for incarcerated criminals in Massachusetts. Frederick Wiseman, the film-
maker, examines the lives of different inmates, hoping to put together a portrait
of the institution. At one moment, we see an elderly man in the hospital’s exercise
yard, giving a lengthy and frantic speech about war and politics. The camera lin-
gers on the subject well past the moment in which the idea of his insanity registers
in the viewer’s mind. As an attentive observer, the camera refuses to move away
or interrupt the subject. We end up thinking that it is not the filmmaker but the
event that determines the length and nature of the shot.
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Yet observational camerawork need not be artless. In fact, one of the advan-
tages of shooting with lightweight equipment was the increased mobility en-
joyed by the cameraperson, which sometimes resulted in very elaborate shots.
Enhanced mobility expands the visual field. But at the same time it can make the
camerawork appear more conspicuous. While the subject matter may still anchor
the act of filming, the virtuosity of the camerawork clearly molds the experience
made available by the film.
One of the celebrated images in direct cinema is, indeed, Albert Maysles’s
handheld “tracking” shot of JFK, discussed briefly above. Primary is one of the
films that set the standards for observational documentaries in the United States,
and it combines imaginative shooting with an effort to create the impression of
witnessing events as they happened. Made for television, the film documents the
1960 Democratic presidential primary elections in Wisconsin, with Kennedy
running against Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota. Like other observa-
tional films, it offers ample opportunity to scrutinize the documentary subjects.
But few images create such a strong feeling of proximity vis-à-vis the profilmic
event or reveal such ingenious camerawork as Maysles’s “tracking” shot of JFK’s
entrance.
The shot, which lasts over one minute, starts as Kennedy is moving through a
throng of bystanders inside the building. Maysles follows him closely as he shakes
hands with people on both sides, walks up a set of stairs, and enters the audi-
torium where he is to deliver a speech.
For the most part, the camera is placed
behind and above the subject’s head, in
a high angle that allows us to see both
the senator and the people around him.
Kennedy moves steadily through the
crowd, looking alternately toward his
left and right. The camera trails right
behind him, only briefly panning away
from the senator in order to give us a
wider view of the enthusiastic support-
ers gathered in the building. We, of
8.2. Albert Maysles’s shot of John F. Kennedy entering a campaign course, move along as well, sharing the
rally. From Primary (Drew Associates, 1960). experience of being there, in the mo-
ment of shooting.
Adding to the sense of immediacy is the wobbliness of the handheld move-
ment. Instead of a smooth shot, what we see is an image that trembles a bit on
 camerawork 197

the edges. As Maysles walks behind the senator, the camera shakes slightly, giving
us the impression that the camerawork itself is spontaneous, crafted on the spot.
In a different context, this shakiness might indicate lack of technical polish. But
here it suggests a different scenario, implying that the camera, too, is caught in the
middle of the event. Like the senator, Maysles is struggling to get through, the
unsteadiness of the image functioning as an indexical sign of his presence amidst
the mob. The cameraman is responding directly to a situation that is not really
scripted, even if it follows a somewhat predictable protocol.
One way to look at this shot is thus to think about how it meets the aspirations
of observational cinema. Because the camera seems to connect us closely to the
event on the screen, the role of the mediating apparatus recedes, paradoxically, to
the background. We have the feeling, once again, that the camera does not control
the event documented. And we are tempted to accept the transparency of the im-
age, as if we, too, were there, witnessing the situation firsthand.
There is, however, another way to make sense of this image. Although it does
invite us to focus on the “immediacy” of the event, the handheld shot can just as
easily be read as an artificial construct. In this case, the shakiness of the camera
brings to light the nature of the mediating process, drawing attention to the fact
that what we are watching is a photographic record of a given occurrence, not the
occurrence itself. When we look at the shot more closely, we discover still other
signs of artifice. The image of Kennedy’s back, for example, corresponds to no
one’s point of view. Rather, it reveals the lens’s unique perspective on the event
recorded. Moreover, in this shot Maysles uses a wide-angle lens that augments the
visual field. Wide-angle lenses normally expand the area covered by the camera
from one side of the frame to the other. As a result, and even though Maysles
remains close to Kennedy, we are able to see not only the senator but also the sur-
rounding context, the admiring supporters.
What the shot offers, then, is not simply the feeling of being one with the crowd
but the experience of looking at the scene as a privileged observer. The camera
can see more than any of the “participants” in the event. And we, by virtue of shar-
ing its point of view, are allowed to do the same. By choosing to shoot the scene
as he did, Maysles did convey the impression of being there. But he also drew upon
specific cinematic tools—lens and camera angle—to produce an experience that
“enhanced” our perspective on the actual situation.
Choosing what to shoot and how to shoot involves, of course, production is-
sues such as budget, available equipment, access to the documentary subject, and
so on. In fact, documentary filmmaking manuals frequently suggest that filmmak-
ers plan their shoots carefully, so they can minimize production risks and also take
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advantage of spontaneous occurrences when these happen to arise. Besides these

practical considerations, and perhaps more significantly, filmmakers and cinema-
tographers make their choices based on their interpretation of the material they
intend to shoot. Even when they try to minimize the impact of preconceived ideas
on the making of their films, a certain level of interpretation is part of the shooting
process. As Willard Van Dyke explains: “In the course of making a documentary
film, a cameraman must be eternally alert to grasp the significance of some bit of
unplanned action and decide whether it is important to the basic script plan; if it
is, he must capture it on film” (407). Responding on the spot to ongoing action
thus already implies that a decision must be made regarding what to film and how
to film it. Van Dyke wrote these notes more than a decade prior to the advent of
direct cinema. But the idea was not lost to the observational documentarists of
the sixties, as Robert Drew reminds us: “There is a tremendous effort that goes
into being in the right place at the right time—understanding what’s about to
happen, understanding what we have to get as it happens, and being ready and
sensitive to get it at the time of happening” (Mekas 15).
Let’s go back to Primary. In the sequence that follows the lengthy handheld
shot described above, we find an image that exemplifies how interpreting factual
material contributes to the shooting process. It is a close-up of a pair of hands in
white gloves, a small detail in what seems otherwise like an important event. After
Kennedy moves past the crowd, he enters a packed auditorium and takes a place
next to his wife on the stage. We then see a series of relatively brief shots that alter-
nately show the candidate and his wife on one side and the audience singing and
cheering on the other. Then comes the shot of that pair of gloved hands against
what seems to be a woman’s back, and the sound of a woman speaking. The white
gloves contrast sharply with the dark attire she is wearing. But it is the movement
of her fingers that really catches our eye. Touching at the tips, the fingers keep
fidgeting, suggesting a little bit of nervousness. The frame remains steady for ap-
proximately ten seconds. Then the camera tilts up to reveal the back of a woman’s
head, a cut to her profile in front of a microphone, and it is confirmed: the hands
we are looking at are those of Jacqueline Kennedy as she delivers a brief speech to
her husband’s supporters.
This minute detail might not add much to the event in the auditorium. By
choosing to frame it, though, the camera operator switches the focus from Jackie
Kennedy’s public image to her private emotions. This choice involves a certain
interpretation of the event documented, which in turn is likely to affect the way
we perceive the overall situation.
 camerawork 199

The Camera as an Expressive Tool

The shot of Jackie Kennedy’s hands is meaningful in yet another way. It demon-
strates that, even when recording factual material, the camera has an expressive
potential. It may single out a particular occurrence, direct our attention toward a
given object, or give visual configuration to a certain idea. It can also express an
emotional state related to the subject matter, the filmmaker, or the act of filming
itself.
Think, for instance, of the way Nathaniel Kahn’s My Architect (2003) intro-
duces us to the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, California. The
building is one of the best-known pieces by the world-famous architect Louis
Kahn, the filmmaker’s late father. Nathaniel visits the place with a mixture of cu-
riosity, admiration, and filial devotion, as if he were trying to invoke the father’s
presence through his work. All this is conveyed through the camerawork, which
highlights the imposing and, at the same time, serene and spacious features of the
building complex.
My Architect is in part an autobiographical documentary. When Louis Kahn
died, Nathaniel was only eleven years old and had known his father in somewhat
unusual circumstances. Louis was married to another woman when he met the
filmmaker’s mother and remained so until his death. Nathaniel, who never lived
with his father, recalls seeing him only once a week. To the young son, the re-
nowned architect remained a somewhat mysterious figure. The film tries to un-
ravel the mystery through a series of in-
terviews with people who knew Louis
Kahn personally and professionally.
But it is in the shots of the buildings
that Nathaniel’s feelings find their most
vivid manifestation.
In the sequence at the Salk Institute,
we see the building complex as a sort
of ceremonial plaza. Kahn starts the se-
quence with a smooth tracking shot that
leads to an open area, sided by buildings 8.3. The Salk Institute’s stately plaza in My Architect (Nathaniel
Kahn, 2003).
on the right and left. Then there is a cut
to a long shot that reveals the entire
space, with structures on both sides and the horizon in the background. Framed
in a low angle, the Salk Institute appears grand, solemn, almost otherworldly.
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Later in the sequence, Kahn notes in a voiceover narration: “There is something

spiritual about this space. For the first time since he died, I felt that I was getting
closer to my father.” Spirituality is not a concrete attribute. And it may therefore
be hard to translate it into images. But that’s exactly what this shot communicates.
The static frame, with all the structures pointing toward the horizon, makes the
space look ethereal.
A similarly majestic and reverential atmosphere characterizes some of the
closer shots of the Salk Institute. Following the beginning of the sequence, we
see specific details of the façade, as the
camera moves slowly over the walls and
windows. One of these shots, taken
from a steep low angle, magnifies the
height of the building so as to make it
look like a tower. Other shots give the
structure a totemic quality, with the
buildings, framed once again from a
low angle, contrasting with the blue sky
above the Pacific Ocean. At a certain
8.4. Low-angle shot of Louis Kahn’s Salk Institute in My Architect point, Kahn returns to that initial view
(Nathaniel Kahn, 2003). of the Salk Institute, the open plaza with
the horizon in the background. On this
occasion, through time-lapse photography, he also captures the passing of time.
As the clouds move by and day turns into night, the framing remains unchanged.
So does the space, a perennial site that is expected to “stand the test of time,” as we
heard earlier from the architect I. M. Pei, one of the interviewees in the film.
There is a distinctly personal feeling in the shots of Louis Kahn’s buildings. It is
not only the architect’s work that stands out but the artistry of the cinematography
as well. Compared to the plainness of the images described by Kracauer in the
quote we used earlier, in which “veracity” is the only thing that matters, these
shots do look studied and meticulously designed. It is, however, precisely this
aesthetic treatment of reality that secures the film’s veracity. Its stylized cinema-
tography expresses a particular kind of sentiment, which in turn authenticates the
autobiographical nature of the documentary.
Documentary filmmakers who use the camera as an expressive tool encour-
age us to see the world anew. Their images may portray familiar subjects from
unusual angles or magnify certain attributes. In doing so, they can both broaden
and deepen our understanding of reality: a certain degree of stylization can help
 camerawork 201

filmmakers retrieve or preserve an aspect of the world that could otherwise be

lost in the process of representation.
Werner Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness/Lektionen in Finsternis (1992) does ex-
actly that. It shows how visuals can help us to reach a more profound awareness of
historical reality. Shot in Kuwait, the film focuses on the devastation that resulted
from what is now referred to as the First Gulf War. It has little of the rhetoric
that we expect from traditional documentaries, very few interviews, and a solemn
but parsimonious voiceover narration. It does not have a conventional structure,
either. Instead, Herzog arranges his shots within thematic blocks that have titles
such as “Satan’s National Park,” “And a Smoke Arose Like the Smoke from a Fur-
nace,” and “Protuberances.” In each block, it is the images—shots of burning oil
fields, damaged buildings, and debris—that tell us the tale of destruction.
How can we turn into images the colossal damage caused by the war, in par-
ticular the damage caused to the natural environment? And what kind of cam-
erawork may endow those images with the weight and intensity suitable to the
subject matter in the film? Herzog answers these questions with dramatic track-
ing shots in which he scans the desolate postwar landscape. In one of these shots,
he takes us on the road to show the rubble accumulated along a vast stretch
of land. The shot is captured from a moving vehicle, with the camera pointing
to the roadside. Against a pale, sandy landscape, we see the carcasses of aban-
doned cars and trucks, the most noticeable vestige of human existence passing
before the camera’s eye. The shot continues for over one minute, but the land-
scape does not change. The farther the camera goes, the more wreckage there is
to film. In postwar Kuwait, Herzog seems to be telling us, there is no end to the
destruction.
Other shots are taken from an aircraft and allow us to see even vaster stretches
of devastation. “This was once a forest,” he says in voiceover commentary, “before
it was covered with oil.” We see dark reflecting surfaces that could be mistaken
for a series of lakes. Everything that looks like water, however, is in fact oil. “The
oil,” Herzog continues, “is trying to disguise itself as water.” Flying low, the cam-
era now passes by half-flooded, crumbling buildings that echo the devastation we
saw along the road. Later the aircraft travels over burning oil fields. One after the
other, fires indicate that the destruction continues even after the war has ended.
At one moment, we are able to make out a few workers trying to put out flames.
But what stands out is the fire itself. Lessons of Darkness opens with a disturb-
ing epigraph: “The collapse of the stellar universe will occur like creation—in
grandiose splendor.” The shots of the burning fields bring to mind the power of
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this opening line. Herzog’s alarming prophecy materializes on the screen as dark
clouds of smoke envelop the land.
The film’s treatment of historical reality can be overwhelming sometimes. But
the eloquence of the camerawork never betrays the mandate of documentary cin-
ema. As with My Architect, the images lend emotional intensity to the documen-
tary, and that intensity helps shape our “path” to the historical world.
This notion that the camera can provide a unique perspective on reality is
not, of course, unique to contemporary documentaries. We can trace its roots
to the scientific spirit that inspired the invention of motion picture photography
in the 1800s. We can also think of the fascination that the medium exerted over
the artistic avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century. Filmmakers at
the time explored the idea that the camera’s eye can exceed the constraints of
ordinary vision by expanding our perception of the physical world. Early experi-
mental documentaries like Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin, Symphony of a Great City,
discussed in chapter 6, transposed this belief to the realm of nonfiction filmmak-
ing. In Ruttmann’s film, the camera travels on trains and in airplanes, observes the
city from above and below, and watches ordinary people from afar and nearby.
The numerous shots, the variety of angles, and the expressiveness of the camera
movements create a portrait of the city that finds no precise equivalent in the
perception of an ordinary observer.
Within the context of early avant-garde filmmaking, the documentary that
best exemplifies the camera’s capacity to reveal the world anew is probably Dziga
Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s kino-apparatom (1929). Like Rutt-
mann’s city symphony, Man with a Movie Camera captures some of the every-
day occurrences in a metropolis. And here, too, the virtuosity of the camerawork
helps characterize the film as an experiment in documentary cinema. Mikhail
Kaufman, the chief cameraman, uses dynamic shots and inventive compositions
to sweep through multiple sites and events, bringing about a startling, sometimes
exhilarating vision of modern life.
Importantly, this ability to generate a variety of perspectives on the referential
world also appears as a theme in Man with a Movie Camera. Vertov’s film con-
sciously analyzes the power of the camera as a recording apparatus. It shows us
not only the results of the filming process but also the process itself. We see, for
instance, a shot of a train speeding toward us. A few seconds later, we watch the
train from below, as if it were passing above our heads. This last shot is special; it
offers a point of view virtually impossible to achieve under ordinary conditions.
We may wonder how the cameraman produced such an image. Vertov chooses
to satisfy our curiosity toward the end of the sequence, when we see a hole dug
 camerawork 203

under the tracks. We assume now that the camera was placed in the hole, point-
ing up at the moving train. Disclosing information about the filming process is
a pattern that repeats itself throughout the film; first the resulting image, as film
scholar Annette Michelson has observed, then the means by which that result has
been achieved.
Vertov himself wrote enthusiastically about the promises of what he called
“kino-eye”—the eye of cinema. In a tone that seems reminiscent of a political
manifesto, he proclaimed: “Kino-eye is understood as ‘that which the eye doesn’t
see,’ as the microscope and telescope of time, . . . as the possibility of seeing with-
out limits and distances, as the remote control of movie cameras, as tele-eye, as
X-ray eye, as ‘life caught unawares,’ etc., etc.” (41). As he saw them, these techni-
cal capacities were directly associated with the social purpose of nonfiction film-
making. Vertov’s cinema was an intellectual cinema, a cinema aimed at creating
awareness and helping audiences “understand the phenomena of life around
them” (49). In Man with a Movie Camera, this awareness involved a more acute
knowledge of daily reality as well as an understanding of how that knowledge was
created through the film medium.
While not the only tool that stands out in Vertov’s work, the camera clearly
plays a key role in this effort to help us see the world “without limits and dis-
tances.” The mechanical eye seems capable of being in all places at any time—
not only underneath but also on top of moving trains, planted on sidewalks and
standing between cable cars, panning from one side to the other, tilting up and
down, moving diagonally, and so on. Indeed, the film may be justly described
as “visual pyrotechnics,” as it places the supple artistry of the camerawork at the
center of the documentary process. We also see superimposition of images, slow
and fast motion photography, and freeze frames.
Ironically, Vertov repeatedly spoke against dramatic uses of the film medium
and believed that artistic excess compromised the mission of the filmmaker. Man
with a Movie Camera, however, is infinitely rich in aesthetic qualities. And it is its
ambitious visual aesthetics that grants us multiple viewpoints on the historical
world.

Point of View

We have already explored the correlation between the camerawork and the way
a documentary looks at lived reality. The notion of point of view, nonetheless,
deserves closer attention. Overall, this is a concept that exceeds the domain of
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camerawork. In fiction cinema, it intersects with the process by which the plot
communicates story information—the film’s narration, as David Bordwell and
Kristin Thompson put it. While analyzing the plot of a narrative film, we may
ask, for example, if it offers an omniscient point of view on the story events or if
we have access only to what one particular character knows about those events.
Does the film grant us the position of an all-knowing spectator or does it restrict
our perspective? We may also think about whether that point of view is objective
or subjective, that is to say, whether or not it reflects anyone’s opinions, attitude,
or sentiments (88–94). These questions pertain to documentary cinema as well,
although they take on a more specific form in the context of nonfiction filmmak-
ing. Let’s turn one last time to Bill Nichols’s notion of the “voice of documentary,”
the way a documentary “speaks” or “how it [organizes] the materials it [presents]
to us” (“Voice of Documentary” 18–19). Implicit in a documentary’s voice, as
we noted earlier, is a given perspective on the historical world. Films like Prelude
to War, for instance, arrange their materials in a way that suggests an omniscient
standpoint. Even if we recognize its biases, we cannot connect its “voice” with a
specific “speaking” agency. Rather, it appears to us as if the world could “speak”
for itself in a decisive and absolute manner. Other documentaries, such as De-
lirium, allow for a more limited and subjective view. We recognize the voice of the
video maker—a young, feminist artist. What we learn from the video—and how
we learn it—results from her individual perspective.
To be sure, the idea that a documentary can ever delineate an all-encompassing
point of view on any event or situation is as questionable as the often-criticized
presumption of documentary objectivity. When we watch a nonfiction film, we
already know that the historical world exceeds the parameters of what we see and
hear. In a fictional work, as filmmaker and scholar Michael Chanan has argued,
“nothing that is not contained within the film, directly or by allusion, has any rele-
vance. . . . In documentary [however] there is in principle no such self-enclosure”
(109). This does not mean, of course, that we should plainly dismiss the aspira-
tions of films like Prelude to War. Understanding how a documentary establishes
a point of view can tell us a great deal about its role as a nonfictional text and the
way it addresses its audience. Prelude to War is a propaganda film. Lest it loses its
efficacy or fails to serve its purpose, it must, at least in theory, present a seemingly
unanimous, totalizing view of reality.
A number of elements, other than the overall design of the film, can help to
shape a documentary’s point of view. Voiceover narrations, for example, may es-
tablish or direct a documentary’s approach to its subject matter. (Think of the dif-
ferences between the disembodied commentary in Prelude to War and the video
 camerawork 205

maker’s voice in Delirium.) The arrangement of the shots, too, can guide our at-
tention to a particular piece of information or even support the development of
an argument, as we saw in our discussion of editing. It is the camera, though, that
provides the most direct translation for the concept of point of view because it
organizes the visual field in a way that implies a standpoint on reality. We literally
share the experience of viewing the world from a particular angle or perspective.
An instructive example of how the camera establishes a point of view for the spec-
tator would be the shot of Jackie Kennedy’s hands.
Film theorists use the term “point-of-view shot” to designate an image in which
the framing coincides with what is viewed by someone within the film. A charac-
ter looks down from a window and then we cut to a high angle shot of what he or
she sees, say, a busy street framed from above. The second image is interpreted as
being equivalent to the viewing experience of the character in the first shot. Point-
of-view shots, however, only partly explain the role of the camera as a means of
organizing information. Furthermore, they are relatively rare in documentaries.
Most of the time, we identify not with the viewpoint of an individual within the
screen but with what the camera sees in general, the perspective brought forward
by the frame at any given moment in the film.
In The Roof, the camera quietly watches what happens or passes before it. It
records a few conversations with Aljafari’s family members, captures quotidian
events in the family’s home, and travels through the landscape in Ramle and Jaffa,
old Palestinian cities that are now part of Israel. The sober, restrained quality of
the camerawork results in a contemplative mood that sometimes recalls the aes-
thetics of observational cinema. The Roof, however, is deeply affective and clearly
partial in its account of reality. And the camera does more than simply amass vi-
sual information; it forges a close connection with its subjects and offers a distinc-
tively personal viewpoint on what it documents.
The title of the documentary evokes the history of the house to which the film-
maker’s family moved after the displacement of the Palestinian population as a
consequence of the Arab-Israeli war. “The people who remained,” explains the
director in voiceover, “were forced to live in one neighborhood, and they were
given the houses of other Palestinians.” In 1948 the owners of what became his
father’s family home in Ramle were still building the second floor. “Today the
house is still the same: my parents live on the first floor and the past lives above
them.” As a leitmotif in the film, the roof symbolizes this history of displacement.
The camerawork, accordingly, helps bring forth the meanings that concepts such
as home and homeland have for the Arab population living in Israel.
Not surprisingly, several of the sequences in The Roof focus on domestic spaces.
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In one of them, we look at the interior of the filmmaker’s family house and see a
quiet, modestly furnished room captured with a wide-angle lens. We notice his
father sitting on a couch, smoking and watching TV. Then, in a shot taken from
a different angle, we glimpse one of his sisters and their mother as they prepare
food, with the television on. Next,
from still another angle, we observe
the family gathered around the din-
ing table, sharing a meal, the TV in
the background. The shots are gen-
erally uneventful; the scenes seem
predictably ordinary; and the cam-
erawork by Diego Martínez Vignatti
strikes us as austere and unremark-
able. The simplicity of these images
8.5. The father of the family watching television. From The Roof/ could almost be read as a sign of in-
Alsateh (Kamal Aljafari, 2006).
difference. In fact, the opposite turns
out to be true. The camerawork cre-
ates a strong connection with the room, representing it as a hospitable and famil-
iar environment. The stillness of the frame (there is only one camera movement
in this sequence) and the relatively long duration of the shots keep our eyes fixed
on the domestic space as we slowly become accustomed to the things and people
in it. It is not distance but intimacy that is communicated by these images.
The same impression crops up in the close shots of objects in the house: a
clock hanging on the wall; bottles of perfume, nail polish, and cosmetics on top
of a dresser; draped windows; a bird cage. The camera also shows a series of fam-
ily pictures, snapshots and portraits, which connect us to the people in the house
even before we see them gathered at the dining table. Later, when the filmmaker

8.6. Objects on the dresser in the house in Ramle. From The Roof/Alsateh (Kamal Aljafari, 2006). 8.7. Family photos in the
house in Ramle. From The Roof/Alsateh (Kamal Aljafari, 2006).
 camerawork 207

visits his uncle’s place in Jaffa, we are introduced to yet another set of photos.
These are close, static shots as well, which give us a glimpse of the family’s past
and its different generations. In all these images, the framing functions as an in-
formed but partial guide to the referential world, putting into effect the notion
that the history to which the documentary refers has deeply impacted the lives of
the people in the film.
By contrast, many of the exterior shots are fluid, moving shots that do not
follow any particular subject but, instead, affectionately inspect the landscape
of crumbling walls, remains of buildings, weeds and broken fragments in decay,
anonymous barrenness. Several images are accompanied by natural location
sound—near silence. But in one, toward the beginning of the film, soon after a
passage from Anton Shammas (“And you know perfectly well that we don’t ever
leave home, we simply drag it behind us wherever we go, walls, roof and all”), the
camera tracks along empty shells of dwellings and we hear a 1942 Egyptian love
song, a tango of longing, Asmahan’s “Ya Habibi Taala.” A traveling shot always
erases its past. Most importantly, like the other tracking shots that haunt The Roof,
this shot conveys a sense of the presence of an absence, an absence located out-
side the time and space of the image, an absence that cannot be represented con-
cretely. While recording the actual, the tracking shot arouses our wonder for the
potential, the endless world that exists beyond the borders of the frame, beyond
the borders of its historical limits.
All documentaries present us with a point of view from which we are invited to
enter the historical world. The Roof turns that point of view into one of the film’s
most significant features. It is because we can look into the private world of the
filmmaker’s family (as they are today, as they were, as they might have been), be-
cause of the film’s personal interpretation of history, that the documentary leaves
such a strong impression.

Digital Technology and the Documentary Image

One key factor in the shaping of this type of personal documentary has been the
development of recording technologies that have simplified the shooting process.
Smaller, lighter, and more affordable cameras have made it easier for individuals
to work on their own and create documentaries that focus on their lived experi-
ences. Michael Renov has argued that the advent of portable video equipment,
with its embedded promise of instant replay, has been particularly fitting to con-
fessional modes of documentary. “It is the systematic solipsism and ‘immediacy’
208 chapter eight

of video . . . that suit it so well to the confessional impulse. No technician need see
or hear the secrets confided to tape” (198). We can apply a similar argument even
to videos in which the video maker and the individual in front of the camera are
not the same person. In Delirium the intimacy conveyed by the visual treatment
of the subject derives partly from the nature of the medium.
This is not to say, of course, that technology is fate. Changes in cultural and so-
cial attitude have also greatly contributed to the development of novel approaches
to nonfiction. Personal documentaries find support, for instance, in the idea that
private lives constitute a legitimate locus of interpretation for public history. This
was the case with several nonfiction films made in the 1970s, as we noted in the
second chapter, especially those that dealt with minority subjects. Individual cir-
cumstances, too, play an important role. And so does the nature of the subject
represented.
Even so, new technology does enable documentary makers to explore different
shooting methods, which in turn have influenced the objectives and aesthetics
of their work. Consider what digital technology has done for documentaries in
recent years. Because digital equipment is usually less expensive than traditional
film equipment, access to the means of production is more easily available, too.
Digital cameras also affect the production process by encouraging closer and
seemingly more immediate scrutiny of the documentary subject. In some ways,
digital recording recalls the “revolution” ushered in by the introduction of por-
table film equipment after World War II, when technological innovations helped
launch the movements known as direct cinema and cinéma vérité. In other ways,
it benefits from some of the features already found in earlier video making, such
as instant viewing of the material recorded. Digital video, however, has the ad-
vantage of meeting the standards of theatrical exhibition more easily, opening a
traditionally independent mode of production to mainstream audiences.
Abbas Kiarostami’s ABC Africa (2001), a documentary that looks at the im-
pact of AIDS on the lives of children in Uganda, was shot entirely with digital
cameras. Kiarostami first brought two small cameras to Africa in order to take
“pictorial notes” that could serve as the basis for a future film. The idea was to
return later and shoot with 35mm equipment. When he looked at the original
material, though, he realized that much of the spontaneity contained in it would
be lost in a film shot with heavier, more cumbersome equipment. The “pictorial
notes” became, then, the documentary that we know as ABC Africa (explained
in Abbas Kiarostami’s 10 on Ten, 2004). The spontaneous quality that impressed
Kiarostami can be detected both in the shooting style and in the actions recorded.
 camerawork 209

The camera moves freely among the documentary subjects, changing angles and
location effortlessly. The orphaned children, too, react comfortably to the act of
being filmed, often treating the camera as a playful object rather than an intimi-
dating technology. They dance for the cameras, smile, wave, clap hands, jump up
and down, hop, and make funny faces, and then crowd around to look at them-
selves in the camera’s LCD screen.
But shooting with digital cameras is only part of the way new technologies
have impacted documentary filmmaking. Sometimes, when we talk about digital
images, we are referring not to images recorded by the camera but to those gener-
ated by a computer. The focus shifts from production to postproduction—and
from the profilmic event to the artifice of the technological process. This adds an
interesting twist to the discussion of documentary cinema because, as we noted
in chapter 1, the technology compromises the indexicality of the representation.
An image generated by a computer does not constitute a record of an actual event.
Do we still believe in what we see when we know that it has been produced—or
at least manipulated—by a computer?
We can begin to answer this question by reminding ourselves once again that,
in fact, every aspect in the documentary process involves some degree of arti-
ficiality. The photographic image itself is artificially created, even if it retains an
indexical relationship to that which is photographed. Computer images exacer-
bate this artificial quality. And because they can sever the indexical bond with the
historical world, they force us to think of trustworthiness in different terms.
One area in which computer graphics have proved particularly useful is docu-
mentary animation. Although it is conventionally associated with fantasy and
entertainment, animation has a long tradition in the history of nonfictional rep-
resentation. Winsor McCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania (1918), for example, al-
ready showed “how an animated work can be used to visualize an historic episode”
(Strøm 49). Documentaries that rely entirely on animated images may be some-
what rare, but the use of animation in individual sequences is not. We can think
about how the Disney-made animated maps function as visual aids in Prelude to
War, or about the way animated diagrams can serve a similarly didactic purpose.
Because it successfully evades the documentary’s commitment to the indexi-
cality of the image, the use of animation seems like a perfect fit for experiences of
which there is no historical record. Animated sequences work as a sort of recon-
struction, the re-creation of events that are no longer available for documentation.
Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008), for instance, uses animation as an alterna-
tive to live action footage and as a means of reflecting on the nature of memory.
210 chapter eight

The film collects various testimonies from individuals who were involved in
Israel’s 1982 military offensive against Lebanon. Folman chooses to animate the
stories in a dreamlike way that represents the subjective character of the recollec-
tions and phantasmagoric dimension of the war experience. Diary Film—I was 12
in ’56/Naplófilm—12 voltam 56’-ban (Boglárka Edvy, animator, and Sándor Silló,
2006) layers images from a twelve-year-old boy’s diary begun during the Hungar-
ian uprising of 1956 with archival footage, reconstructions, children’s drawings,
and animation in order to evoke both the gravity of the events and the fact that
the story is told from a child’s point of view. And we saw how Lin Tay-jou used
animation along with enacted live action scenes in The Secret in the Satchel in order
to safeguard the identity of his informants.
Compared to traditional animation, computer graphics can appear particu-
larly realistic, providing remarkably compelling simulations of the physical world.
There are different techniques that normally fall under the category of digital ani-
mation. Some involve the manipulation of photographic images for which there
exists an actual referent in the physical world. We still see the record of an actual
situation, although that situation no longer appears in its original form. Others
generate wholly artificial realities, pure simulations, which may allude to actual
places, objects, lives, or events without bearing any indexical relation to them. As
Craig Hight writes, “At one pole of a continuum of techniques is the computer
mediation of images (CMI), which positions elements of the indexical and pho-
tographic within animation and morphing sequences during post-production. At
the other pole are entirely computer-generated images (CGI), derived from the
many advances towards synthetic realism achieved in fictional film-making” (3).
Animation in general and computer graphics in particular contradict the no-
tion that a documentary can only fulfill its purpose when the camera records a
profilmic reality. As an alternative or a complement to the photographic record,
animation draws attention to aesthetic codes; the formal aspects stand out since
what we see unequivocally presumes some form of fabrication. Interestingly,
though, even when we look at live action, the profilmic event is never entirely free
of aesthetic considerations. Animation may render those aesthetic considerations
more obvious, but the profilmic reality is also part of the process by which docu-
mentary films give form to the world. We look at the contribution of the profilmic
to the aesthetics of documentary in our next chapter.

Additional Filmography
A Happy Mother’s Day ( Joyce Chopra and Richard Leacock, 1963)
Hatsu Yume (First Dream) (Bill Viola, 1981)
 camerawork 211

Koyaanisqatsi (Godfrey Reggio, 1983)

The Gleaners and I/Les Glaneurs et la glaneuse (Agnés Varda, 2000)
Swivel (Oliver Husain, 2003–05)
13 Lakes ( James Benning, 2004)
Fifty Minutes of Women/Nüren wushi fenzhong (Shi Tou, 2005)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Beattie, Keith. Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfiction Film and Video.
London: Wallflower Press, 2008.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Camper, Fred. “Shoah’s Absence.” In Claude Lanzmann’s “Shoah”: Key Essays, ed.
Stuart Liebman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.
Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. London: British Film Institute,
2007.
“First Person Films/Birinci Sahis Filmleri.” Symposium, May 29–31, 2009,
Istanbul Modern, Istanbul, Turkey, Program Notes.
Hight, Craig. “Primetime Digital Documentary Animation: The Photographic
and the Graphic within Play.” Studies in Documentary Film 2.1 (February
2008).
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. 1960.
Reprint, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978.
Landesman, Ohad. “In and Out of This World: Digital Video and the Aesthetics
of Realism in the New Hybrid Documentary.” Studies in Documentary Film
2.1 (February 2008).
Mamber, Stephen. “Primary.” In Cinema Verite in America: Studies in Uncontrolled
Documentary. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1974.
Mekas, Jonas. “The Frontiers of Realist Cinema: The Work of Ricky Leacock
(from an Interview conducted by Gideon Bachmann).” Film Culture, nos.
22–23 (Summer 1961).
Michelson, Annette. “From Magician to Epistemologist: Vertov’s The Man with
a Movie Camera.” In The Essential Cinema, vol. 1, 2nd ed., ed. P. Adams
Sitney. New York: Film Culture and Anthology Film Archives, 1989.
Moran, James M. “A Bone of Contention: Documenting the Prehistoric Sub-
ject.” In Collecting Visible Evidence, ed. Jane M. Gaines and Michael Renov.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.
Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1991.
212 chapter eight

———. “The Voice of Documentary.” In New Challenges for Documentary, 2nd ed.,
ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2005.
Renov, Michael. “Video Confessions.” In The Subject of Documentary. Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004.
Strøm, Gunnar. “The Animated Documentary.” Animation Journal 11 (2003).
Vertov, Dziga. Kino-eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Ed. Annette Michelson.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984.
Van Dyke, Willard. “The Interpretive Camera in Documentary Films.” Holly-
wood Quarterly 1.4 ( July 1946).
 9
The Profilmic

W e have already explored the ways filmmakers position fragments

of lived reality through editing. And we know that camerawork
can add to or subtract from the events or situations documented. But we haven’t
discussed how the profilmic environment—that which the camera records—
contributes to the making of a documentary. Nonfiction filmmakers often draw
on settings and lighting to communicate information and characterize specific
situations. They also commonly enlist the “collaboration” of people in front of the
camera in order to further their stories or arguments. While we may be tempted to
draw a line between the act of filming and the material recorded, that line is usu-
ally fuzzy. The profilmic is in fact an integral part of the re-presentation process.
The handling of the profilmic environment is generally known as the mise-en-
scène. The term comes from theater. A literal translation from the French would
be “put into the scene.” Because it is associated with theatricality and fiction,
mise-en-scène seems to contradict the very notion of documentary. It implies that
the situations captured on film are arranged for the camera. And it assumes a large
measure of creative control over the profilmic material. In nonfiction cinema, as
Bill Nichols notes, “[the profilmic] and the historical referent are taken to be con-
gruent with one another.” We presume that what is recorded “remains identical to
the actual event that we could have ourselves witnessed in the historical world”
(Representing Reality 25). Interfering in what happens in front of the camera could
seemingly upset this equation.
213
214 chapter nine

In practice, the treatment of the profilmic in nonfiction cinema involves a more

complicated scenario. Documentary makers frequently intercede in the events re-
corded. The subjects in the films, too, participate in this process by responding to
the presence of the camera, taking up a role comparable to that of an actor. They
are performers of some sort. As we shall see, however, neither situation necessar-
ily poses a threat to the authenticity of the historical referent. Rather, they are part
of the conventions of documentary cinema.
The difficulties posed by the concept of mise-en-scène may be partly under-
stood as reluctance to embrace the idea of aesthetics in nonfiction filmmaking.
As we noted in the book’s introduction, absence of style in documentary often
imparts a greater sense of credibility (Corner 96). Aesthetic “flourishes,” by con-
trast, might appear to distort the material available for documentation or even
distract us from the subject in the film. While this attitude can guide our apprecia-
tion of all aspects in the documentary process, it is the profilmic that seems most
resistant to aesthetic consideration. From the profilmic we expect not form but
content.
The problem with this argument is that it confines documentary filmmaking
to a very limited set of procedures. It also overlooks the exchanges that take place
between the documentarian and the referential world, and it diminishes the sig-
nificance of the mise-en-scène as a means of addressing historical reality. As Keith
Beattie has recently argued, critics have repeatedly neglected the power of what
he calls “visual display” in nonfiction cinema, despite evidence that documenta-
ries rely heavily on visual aesthetics to produce knowledge (3–5). The creative
treatment of profilmic reality is one important way in which visual display can
be used in order to generate meaning. Only within certain film movements or
historical contexts—the direct cinema documentaries that we discussed in
the last chapter, for example—have filmmakers openly resisted creative inter-
vention in the profilmic. But even in these cases the suggestion that the docu-
mentary can record completely uncontrolled events has come under critical
scrutiny.
Documentary filmmakers intervene creatively in the profilmic not only by
staging events but also by assigning meaning to situations or settings that already
exist in the historical world. That is to say, they select and organize the material
available for shooting, including the subjects who appear in their films. This chap-
ter focuses on the way documentarians treat profilmic reality. More specifically, it
discusses how settings can be used in documentaries, and how nonfictional per-
formers, now and then the documentary makers themselves, contribute to the
documentary’s meanings.
 The Profilmic 215

Reenactments

One way to start this discussion is to revisit the notion of reenactment in docu-
mentaries. A reenactment is the repetition of an action—or series of actions—
that has already taken place. It is a staged event, not an “original” occurrence.
A documentary about the American Revolutionary War, for example, can rely on
various forms of evidence as well as on expert testimonies to examine the history
of the period. But because there is no cinematic record of it, the filmmaker would
have to resort to a reenactment in order to represent any specific action. Reenact-
ments can provide reliable representations of the historical world. Yet they never
coincide with the earlier event. They are “[copies] of what has already happened
once and for all” (Nichols, “‘Getting to Know You’” 176). And, as we have seen
in previous chapters, imagination may be a part of the reenactment. So what we
notice is the artificial character of the scene.
It is precisely because reenactments are staged events, however, that they can
inspire us to think about how documentary makers in general approach mise-
en-scène. While many documentaries conceal the intervention of the filmmaker in
the sociohistorical world, those that employ reenactments foreground the means
by which lived reality is translated into what we see onscreen. Documentaries al-
ways involve some form of planning, even when they eschew elaborately staged
action. But we frequently fail to notice these strategies. Looking at documentary
reenactments is a way of bringing them to the surface.
Reenactments were fairly common in the pre–World War II era, in part because
of technical limitations that made the filming process comparatively cumbersome
and laborious. Before lightweight equipment became standard in nonfiction film-
making, the recording apparatus allowed only for limited mobility. Documentary
filmmakers, as a result, had to plan their scenes meticulously, staging even ordi-
nary or habitual actions.
Night Mail’s train cars, for example, were constructed on a set. The original
postal carriages were too small and dark for the 1930s cameras to shoot in. More-
over, the train’s movement caused some blurry shots. In order to simulate the
sway inside the car, some objects were manipulated by hand from offscreen. The
real mail sorters performed their usual activities in a mock-up carriage in the stu-
dio (Winston 129). Their actions were intercut with location footage of the real
train as it sped through the countryside, passed through stations, and dropped off
mailbags. Spontaneity was in part compromised by the technical requirements of
the medium, but the staging itself was not looked upon with suspicion. Instead, it
was accepted as a legitimate convention of nonfiction filmmaking.
216 chapter nine

Some contemporary film and video makers, however, treat reenactments not
as substitutes for actual events but rather as incursions into the nature of nonfic-
tional representation. They look at the staged scenes less as a means “to authenti-
cate the past than [a way] to stress the variability of its interpretation” (Nichols,
“‘Getting to Know You’” 178). Reenacting prior events becomes an occasion to
reflect on the relationship between the representation and the represented; more
specifically, it allows us to think about how documentaries creatively use cine-
matic codes that we normally place under the rubric of mise-en-scène.
Take Jill Godmilow’s Far from Poland (1984), for example. Because the reen-
acted scenes in this work do not exactly “fill in” for past events, they highlight
the way the filmmaker utilizes acting and décor to represent the historical world.
The situations look more contrived than they normally would in traditional docu-
mentaries. But these same scenes also expand our understanding of nonfictional
representation by emphasizing a distinctively creative and clearly interpretive
dimension in the filmmaking process. As Godmilow herself has noted, Far from
Poland is a “post-realist nonfiction film” that frees the documentarian from the
obligation to “shoot the ‘real thing’ as it’s happening” (quoted in MacDonald
132–133).
The film opens with a brief prelude in which the filmmaker appears on camera
to explain how the project came about. Godmilow happened to be in Poland in
the late summer of 1980, when the workers at the Lenin shipyards, in the port
city of Gdansk, went on strike demanding a series of reforms from the govern-
ment as well as the right to organize independent trade unions. In a few weeks,
the workers’ actions gave birth to the Solidarity movement. Godmilow rushed
back to the United States, raised money to make a documentary about Solidarity,
and bought a plane ticket to Warsaw, only to find out that the Polish government
had denied her a visa to enter the country. Barred from making the documentary
she had planned, she followed what was happening in Poland through the nightly
broadcasts on American television.
What looked like an insurmountable obstacle, though, turned out to be a
catalyst for a provocative experiment in documentary filmmaking. Several of
the scenes in the film are reenactments of situations that took place in Poland, to
which the filmmaker had no direct access. In one of them, Godmilow stages an
interview with a crane operator named Anna Walentynowicz, who was a pivotal
figure in the process that led to the formation of Solidarity. The reenactment was
based on an actual interview with Walentynowicz. But what we watch in the film
is an actress, Ruth Maleczech, playing the role of the crane operator. Godmilow
also re-creates the office space in which the original interview took place, using a
 The Profilmic 217

sparsely furnished setting decorated with a Solidarity banner on the wall to rep-
resent the Polish location. We understand that this is not the original site, just as
we know that Maleczech is not Walentynowicz. Yet it is not this discrepancy that
stands out but the emotional impact of the scene, especially the affective quality
of the performance delivered by Maleczech, which invites sympathy and emo-
tional identification with the interviewee. Her calm and modulated speech, her
calculated pauses, and the sudden changes in the intensity of her voice, all con-
tribute to the way we perceive the original event.
By reenacting the interview, Godmilow adds her voice to the experiences
represented in the film and draws attention to her role as mediator between the
spectator and the historical world. While the documentary does show us foot-
age shipped from Poland—some of which was shot by members of the Solidarity
movement—it is through the staged scenes that the film speaks most eloquently
about the events of 1980.
Other documentaries resort to even less orthodox techniques in order to re-
create lived reality. We saw in the previous chapter how Ari Folman’s Waltz with
Bashir deploys animation to re-create memories of Israel’s 1982 military offensive
against Lebanon. Jessica Yu’s Protagonist (2006) relies on similarly inventive pro-
cedures. It uses puppet theater in its reenactments, forfeiting not only the indexi-
cal bond with the original events but also the traditional aesthetics of documen-
tary cinema.
The film focuses on the lives of four men whose stories involve different forms
of “obsession”: a former terrorist, a bank robber turned journalist, a gay man who
used his religious ministry to preach against homosexuality, and a writer whose
fixation with martial arts helped define his adolescent identity. Yu interviews all
four at length and has them talk about their childhoods, the motivations that led
them to live unconventional lives, and how they eventually “escaped” their par-
ticular obsessions. Much of the information we receive comes from these inter-
views. Records of the situations described by the documentary subjects are also
used in the film. But some of the key events—a bank robbery, a church sermon
in Malaysia—can only be represented through reenactments. The puppets illus-
trate what we hear in the testimonies. More importantly, because of the apparent
incongruity between the puppet show and the conventional format of the testi-
monies, the reenactments also highlight the distance that separates the documen-
tary interviews from the events to which they refer. As Robert Rosenstone points
out, for certain events in the past, “literalism” may evoke “a feeling of normality,”
whereas the true feelings we wish to convey “might call out for ‘facts’ delivered
through an expressionist or surrealist mode of presentation” (836).
218 chapter nine

The use of puppets in Protagonist deserves attention for yet another reason.
While the puppets are made to look like the actual documentary subjects, they
are not dressed in contemporary costumes but appear instead as characters from
ancient Greek theater. Yu’s initial motivation for the documentary was the work
of Euripides, the Greek tragedian from the fifth century b.c.e., known for hav-
ing introduced psychological complexity and personal motivation to the classical
stage. The reenactments in the film draw on this legacy. Not only does Yu dress the
puppets as ancient characters, she also intersperses the various episodes narrated
by the documentary subjects with titles such as “turning point,” “catharsis,” and
“reversal,” suggesting a strong parallel between life and theater, and reminding us
that documentaries as well employ dramatic forms to communicate information.
More than simply flaunt the artifice of their reenactments, films like Far from
Poland and Protagonist raise fundamental questions about documentary in gen-
eral. They shed light on the way other documentarians, too, rely on representa-
tional strategies that can include premeditated use of settings, expressive perfor-
mances, artificial lighting, and so on.
Our task in the rest of the chapter is to look more closely at the ways the docu-
mentary maker treats the profilmic event. We will start by discussing the settings
and how they are used in documentaries. What do filmmakers do with the spaces,
sites, or locations where the actions and events represented in their documenta-
ries take place?

Settings

Settings can be simple and subdued, like the studio backdrops commonly used
in documentary interviews. Or they can be complex and rich in information, as
when people are interviewed in their homes, surrounded by their belongings. In
each case, the setting does not just materialize in front of the camera; it is part
of decision-making processes that enable documentary filmmakers—and some-
times their subjects—to “speak about” the world. A studio backdrop may not pro-
vide much information, but it can create a sober atmosphere. Actual locations, in
turn, may offer not only atmosphere but also insight into the interviewees’ rela-
tionship with their immediate environment.
The term “location shooting” normally refers to filming that happens in an ac-
tual locale, as opposed to shooting that takes place in a studio. Chris Marker’s
Sunless, for example, was shot on location in several countries, including Japan,
Cape Verde, and Guinea-Bissau. The buildings and streets that we see were not
 The Profilmic 219

created for the film; they existed prior to the making of the documentary. But lo-
cation shooting does not always imply that the filming occurred in the exact place
“where the story is set” (Pramaggiore and Wallis 91). Some of the scenes in Far
from Poland were shot on location in the United States, while the situations they
depict took place in Europe. In this case, there is no direct connection between
the shots in the film and the setting of the original event.
There is good reason, though, for nonfiction filmmakers to shoot at the ex-
act location in which events occur. Observing the integrity of the relationship
with the original context usually lends credibility to the documentary because it
strengthens the indexical bond with the actual occurrence. While we may accept
the settings in Far from Poland as analogous to the original locations, we know all
along that we are not looking at the “real thing.” Shooting at the place “where the
story is set” nourishes our desire for immediacy and encourages the belief, illu-
sory as it may be, that documentaries can provide direct access to “the real.”
Constructed sets do exactly the opposite. They widen the gap between the film
and the original locale. A constructed set in a documentary implies that even the
physical aspects of the historical world may be subject to manipulation. The film-
maker’s choices are more apparent; so are the stylistic qualities of the scenes. As
a result, the effort to authenticate the process of representation can also become
more complicated, requiring that we look beyond the indexicality of the situa-
tions represented.
As we have seen, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line turns this apparent difficulty
into an asset as it substitutes actual locations with fabricated environments. Mor-
ris understands that drawing attention to the artificial character of the settings
goes against the yearning to capture the immediate presence of the referential
world. Yet in The Thin Blue Line he manages to use this artifice to develop a specific
point. Because some of the settings in the film look highly stylized and noticeably
fake, the desire for an indexical bond with the actual event never arises. Instead,
we become aware of its absence, conscious of the impossibility of witnessing the
scene of the crime that stands at the center of the story. The deliberately artificial
settings, in other words, call upon us to take into consideration the uncertainties
that permeate the murder case examined in the film.

The Setting as a Source of Meaning

Settings, as David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson note, “need not be only a con-
tainer for human events but can dynamically enter the narrative action” (115).
 220 chapter nine

The statement refers primarily to fiction films. But it can be legitimately applied
to nonfictional narratives as well. Documentary settings provide information.
They can also function to organize that information in a manner that guides the
viewer’s interpretation of the world represented. In Up the Yangtze (Yung Chang,
2007), for example, the vanishing landscape along the Yangtze River allows
the filmmaker to issue a poignant statement about contemporary life in China.
Here the setting simultaneously establishes a context for the events in the docu-
mentary and helps us understand how those events relate to Chinese society in
general.
The longest river in Asia, the Yangtze is the site of an ambitious and controver-
sial engineering project: the Three Gorges Dam. By the time it is completed, in
2011, the dam will have forced approximately two million people, many of them
peasants living on the riverbanks, out of their homes. Chang’s documentary cap-
tures these developments as it follows two Chinese youths employed on a luxury
cruise ship up the Yangtze: Chen Bo Yu, a blustering young man who dreams of
becoming rich, and Yu Shui, a peasant girl whose family’s modest farmhouse is
swallowed by the rising waters of the Yangtze during the shooting of the film.
Contrasting with the humble peasant dwellings are the showy, rapidly developing
cities along the Yangtze, which are also used as settings in the documentary. Yung
Chang explores this contrast in order to represent the dramatic changes that have
spread over various parts of China in the past few decades. Not everyone has ben-
efited equally from the country’s impressive economic development, he reminds
us. And the locations used in the film are there to demonstrate it.
Up the Yangtze treats the sites along the river as metonymic extensions of Chi-
na’s social problems. What we see are
specific places on the riverbanks. But
their role in the film exceeds their literal
meaning. Chang uses location shoot-
ing to articulate a particular view of the
world.
Documentary settings can also moti-
vate the situations that take place in front
of the camera. In Nanook of the North,
the arctic landscape both encompasses
and prompts the events represented,
functioning not simply as backdrop for
9.1. “Nanook’s harsh environment.” From Nanook of the North the situations depicted by Flaherty but
(Robert Flaherty, 1922). also as a living force within the story.
 The Profilmic 221

Nanook’s efforts to secure the survival of his family coincide with his struggle
against the elements of his environment. Will he win over the indomitable forces
of nature or will he be overpowered by them? Flaherty shows us a snowy land-
scape that looks at once treacherous and majestic, and locates in that setting the
very obstacles that motivate Nanook’s actions. Walking through vast ice fields,
Nanook seems diminutive by comparison, his figure contrasting with the immen-
sity of the arctic scenery.
Nanook of the North also illustrates how documentary settings may be utilized
to characterize individual subjects. Throughout the film, Nanook is seen as in-
trepid, inventive, and resourceful, and it is his relationship with the natural ele-
ments that creates this impression. We think of him as ingenious when we watch
him build an igloo; we acknowledge his tenacity when we see his tug of war with
an arctic seal; and we admire his bravery when we follow him and his comrades
on a walrus hunt. Each scene integrates setting and action in order to portray a
subject whose distinctive attributes overlap, not by accident, with Flaherty’s ro-
mantic view of the Inuit people.
Even though few documentaries draw so emphatically on the relationship be-
tween the subject and the landscape, the association of settings and individuals is
not uncommon in nonfiction cinema. In fact, settings often serve as an eloquent
indicator of a person’s characteristic attributes. They may establish the subjects’
ethnic backgrounds, social status, and professional affiliations, or even character-
ize their individual personalities. Think, for example, of the settings convention-
ally used in documentary interviews. Writers are habitually framed alongside
bookshelves; farmers, standing in a field; teachers, in front of a blackboard. While
the content of the interviews may bear no direct relation to the visual elements in
the frame, the use of recognizable settings helps distinguish the interviewee from
other subjects in the film. It functions much like the caption that normally identi-
fies the person on camera.
More unusual, but equally significant, is the use of nonfictional settings as a
way of defining the filmmaker’s authorial position. If certain documentaries at-
tempt to associate the “characters” represented with the surrounding world, oth-
ers highlight the relationship between the filmmaker and the sites or locations de-
picted. This response to nonfictional settings is at the center of Chantal Akerman’s
News from Home, a film that has a strong autobiographical component. News from
Home is composed of lengthy, uneventful shots that show anonymous subjects
and nondescript locations in New York City. In some of them we watch empty
streets without being able to recognize the sites; in others we see people gather
on sidewalks or stand in subway cars, occasionally acknowledging the presence
 222 chapter nine

of the camera. The simplicity of the images suggests a realistic style that is typical
of documentary filmmaking. Yet, even at its most subdued, the use of location
shooting strikes us as deeply personal. The general impression is one of loneliness
and disconnection from the world on the screen. Akerman’s compositions privi-
lege no individual object or profilmic element, no details in the cityscape, and no
outstanding event. As a result, we find it difficult to engage with the places that we
see. We look at the city without knowing what to look for.
One shot displays the interior of a deserted diner. The camera stays put and the
composition never changes. Nor does any part of the setting solicit our attention.
We observe the counter and stools; we scan the scene hoping to find something
of interest. But our gaze is met with in-
difference. In its lifeless appearance,
Akerman’s interior communicates a
sense of detachment that prevents us
from ever connecting with the space on
the screen. The next shot, not surpris-
ingly, produces a similar impression. We
now see the exterior of a donut shop,
framed in a long shot that includes the
street in the foreground. The brightness
of the shop window stands out from the
rest of the setting, but the shop itself re-
9.2. Interior of a diner in News from Home (Chantal Akerman, mains distant, a flashy but stubbornly
1976). remote site that we will never know very
well. Like the cars passing in front, it
never speaks to us. And even when it
holds our attention, it cannot reveal any-
thing other than its impersonal façade,
drenched in bright light and adorned
with neon signs.
This apparent distance from the sur-
rounding world is certainly not acciden-
tal. The overarching theme in this film
is the experience of displacement, the
condition of being away from home.
Born in Belgium, Akerman lived in
9.3. Exterior of a donut shop in News from Home (Chantal Aker-
New York City in the early seventies.
man, 1976). Every store and street corner in her film
 The Profilmic 223

becomes the embodiment of her separation from home and family. Reinforcing
this overall impression is a voiceover narration in which the filmmaker reads let-
ters from her mother. At first, the narration seems unrelated to the settings. But
we soon realize that they refer to the same experience; they both evoke the feeling
of being a foreigner.
Akerman’s views of New York recall Siegfried Kracauer’s notion of the street
as “a center of fleeting impressions,” “a region where the accidental prevails over
the providential” (62). The locations in News from Home are such places: they
are sites of chance occurrences and haphazard events. Akerman depicts them as
they are, and the authenticity of the settings gives credibility to her representation
of the referential world. But Akerman also shows us that settings are more than
physical spaces, and that acknowledging their material existence does not fully
account for their role in the process of representation. By exploring their banal-
ity, their lack of distinctiveness, Akerman manages, paradoxically, to endow them
with a unique expressive quality.

Lighting

Like the setting, lighting may help characterize the profilmic situation by literally
giving shape to the world depicted in the film. Moreover, the differences between
actual sites and constructed sets find parallels in the distinctions between natural
and artificial lighting. Because natural lighting seems to escape the control of the
filmmaker, we tend to overlook its significance in the filming process. Controlled
or artificial lighting, on the other hand, indicates that a particular environment
has been altered or created specifically for the purposes of the film. Much like a
constructed set, it underscores the filmmaker’s intervention in the world of lived
experience.
The analogy between nonfictional settings and the way lighting is used in
documentaries, of course, has some limitations. Artificial sources sometimes
simulate natural conditions. And that, in turn, can make it hard for viewers to tell
whether or not they are looking at a controlled environment. Even though we can
make a similar argument in relation to constructed sets—which may stand for an
actual location—the implications are different in each case. Because the setting
is normally perceived as part of the documentary’s subject matter, mistaking a
constructed set for an actual site can jeopardize the credibility of the film. This
is less likely to happen when we confuse artificial and natural sources of lighting,
since neither has an ontological status comparable to that of nonfictional settings.
224 chapter nine

Overall, though, the choice of lighting says a great deal about the way filmmakers
use their settings.
Documentary makers may combine different types of lighting for technical
reasons. Having abundant natural light at one’s disposal, for instance, does not ex-
clude the use of artificial sources, which can simplify the shooting process by mak-
ing the profilmic situation more predictable. And a certain level of control over
the lighting conditions may in fact be necessary in order to create a “natural” look.
An otherwise important object, for example, can lose its distinctiveness against
a background that offers little contrast, as Rudolf Arnheim taught us over half a
century ago (15–16). When this happens, filmmakers may use artificial lighting
precisely to render the object photographed more easily recognizable. Because an
image is never really a replica of the real thing, relying on natural sources alone
does not automatically secure the verisimilitude of the representation.
Lighting can affect our perception of the profilmic event in myriad ways. It may
underline the role of a particular element in the setting or, conversely, downplay
its relevance. It can also define the mood of a scene or give character to a particu-
lar locale. Documentaries regularly juxtapose images shot in unrelated sites, and
the way the settings are lit helps distinguish one from another. In The 11th Hour
(Leila Conners Petersen and Nadia Conners, 2007), for instance, the filmmakers
interview writers, journalists, and activists about current threats against the en-
vironment. The interviews are conducted in a studio and have an orderly, almost
ceremonial quality. Appropriately, the lighting—the conventional three-point
technique that many fiction films use, contouring the figure and separating it from
the background—matches the overall formality of the situation, differentiating it
from the environmental catastrophes depicted elsewhere in the film.
Similarly, in Man on Wire changes in lighting technique and style help sepa-
rate reenactments from original events. The documentary relies on a variety of
materials—interviews, still photographs, footage shot by other filmmakers—in
order to revisit Philippe Petit’s 1974 high-wire walk between New York’s Twin
Towers. But the reenactments of the clandestine preparations inside one of the
buildings stand out from the rest. Director James Marsh opts for a kind of lighting
that accentuates the contrast between bright and dark areas within the frame, a
stylistic choice that is further emphasized by the use of black-and-white photo-
graphy. The resulting scenes look eerily contrived, unlike other situations included
in Man on Wire. Lighting functions as a way of encoding a specific message. In this
context, it informs us about the nature of the scenes we are watching.
Marsh’s lighting style serves yet another purpose in these scenes. It produces
an ambience that boosts our interest in the story events. Man on Wire is a sort of
 The Profilmic 225

heist movie, as the filmmaker himself has claimed publicly, and the peculiar, un-
natural atmosphere of the reenactments brings a suspenseful and at times comical
note to Petit’s adventure. Marsh gives us only a partial rendition of Petit’s prepara-
tions, the action itself often alluded to but not always depicted in the film. To a
large extent, it is the atmosphere created by the contrasts between dark and bright
areas that secures the dramatic effect produced here. In the absence of a full reen-
actment, the lighting style seems to make up for what we cannot see.
The other settings in the film are lit in a clearly different manner, and the re-
sult also differs from what we find in the reenacted scenes. Exterior shots, often
taken from footage of Petit and his entourage shot earlier, tend to rely on natural
sources, which, as expected, encourage us to believe that we are looking at un-
controlled environments. The film’s studio interviews, by contrast, appear studied
and artificial, with soft shadows that add volume to the interviewees’ faces and
produce a calm ambience reminiscent of a formal portrait. Even though the in-
terviews utilize artificial sources of light, they never aim at creating the dramatic
impact of the reenactments.

Nonfictional Performances

Man on Wire impresses not only because of its reenactments but also thanks to the
lively, intense testimonies recorded by the filmmaker. The people in the profilmic
space share with us both their experiences and their perspective on the events
that took place in 1974. These responses to the filming process are different from
the acts performed in the reconstructed scenes, but they are no less relevant as
examples of performance in documentary.
Performance is a notoriously complicated issue for documentary scholarship
because the idea of acting is often associated with artifice and pretense, attributes
that seem more suitable to fantasy and entertainment genres than to serious repre-
sentations of the historical world. Performing, however, is by no means foreign to
nonfictional representation. In fact, it has a long history in documentary cinema.
Nanook of the North, for example, includes deliberate acts from its protagonist,
who literally collaborated with Flaherty in (re)creating the situations depicted in
the film. Reenacted scenes in Night Mail and other documentaries from the first
half of the twentieth century also involve performances from the people in front
of the camera. And the rich exchanges between the filmmakers and the documen-
tary subjects in a film like Chronicle of a Summer, discussed in chapter 4, can be
described as performances as well. The idea that the subject might be putting on
226 chapter nine

an act for the camera does seem to contradict the promise of unobtrusive shoot-
ing taken up by direct cinema filmmakers in the 1960s. But that attitude has had
limited reverberations beyond its specific context. Moreover, as we shall see in
our discussion of Don’t Look Back (a prominent direct cinema documentary),
nonfictional subjects may be performing even when they do not explicitly address
the camera. Every time they respond to the filming process, the subjects engage
in some kind of performance, even if all that is involved in this performance is the
act of “playing oneself ” (Waugh 66–74).
Bill Nichols has used the term “social actors” to designate the subjects who
appear as themselves in documentary films (“The Documentary Film and Prin-
ciples of Exposition” 184). Social actors are players who, by virtue of their exis-
tence in the historical world, permit some form of access to the events and situ-
ations represented. The mail sorters in Night Mail are social actors. They portray
themselves performing their real job. More than just providing “material” for the
documentary, social actors participate in the filming process, as their lives overlap
in part with the making of the film.
Some filmmakers take a less orthodox approach to documentary acting. They
cast performers—professional or not—to play roles that are unrelated, or only
partly related, to their actual lives. This is often the case with films that depend
heavily on staged material, as we saw in Far from Poland. It is also the case in films
such as Jaguar (1954–1967) and I, a Black Man/ Moi, un noir (1958), both made
by Jean Rouch, in which the players assume semi-fictional roles in order to ad-
dress general aspects of ordinary life in western Africa during the 1950s. Because
the overlap between the players’ lives and their roles is not as obvious in these
examples, the connection with the historical world may also take a more subtle,
oblique, or complicated form.
Most documentaries discussed in this book, however, feature individual sub-
jects who play themselves—people who lend not only their faces and bodies but
also their histories, opinions, and experiences to the making of nonfiction films.
The dual status of these subjects, at the same time actual referents and discur-
sive agents, is what makes them worthy of attention. Here we shall refer to them
not only as social actors—borrowing Nichols’s term—but also as “nonfictional
performers.” And we use the phrase “nonfictional performance” to identify their
contribution to the making of the film.
In João Moreira Salles’s Santiago (2007), an elderly man plays himself for
the camera and agrees to answer a series of questions posed by the filmmaker.
Interviewed in his small apartment in Rio de Janeiro, Santiago Badariotti Merlo,
the colorful subject after whom the film is named, speaks eloquently about his
 The Profilmic 227

life in Argentina, Italy, and Brazil, about the time when he worked as a butler for
the filmmaker’s family, and, above all, about his lasting devotion to researching
the history of the world’s nobility. A fascinatingly complicated character, he is an
ideal subject for a portrait film. But it is his active engagement with the camera—
his performance—that accounts for the power of his screen presence. Santiago
seems to understand both the nature of the filming process and his role in it.
In still another respect the documentary stands out as a character study and
an example of the significance of nonfictional performance. While interviewing
Santiago, Salles tries not just to delve into the “character’s” personality but also
to explore the relationship between the filmmaker and the subject in front of the
camera. As the director put it, this is “a film about an encounter, my encounter
with a character” (in Dieleke and Nouzeilles 143).
Salles shot the interviews in the early 1990s, but the film was only completed
more than a decade later, a few years after Santiago’s death. The finished docu-
mentary provokes the audience to reflect upon Salles’s dialogue with his former
servant, to mull over the filmmaker’s directorial interventions, and to examine
Santiago’s part in the film. We can hear it, for example, when Salles asks Santiago
to repeat his stories and deliver the same lines again and again. What might have
elsewhere looked like a “clean” and straightforward interview appears here as a
laborious negotiation between filmmaker and performer. As a result, we take San-
tiago’s screen appearance for what it is: a conscious act staged for the camera. And
we think of the shooting process as a series of exchanges in which we hear the
voices of both the filmmaker and his subject.
Not all performances look like Santiago’s, though. Interviews and personal
testimonies offer recognizable examples of nonfictional performance because we
quickly understand that the documentary subject is responding to the presence
of the filmmaker and the camera. But oftentimes this interaction is veiled by the
performance style itself. Nonfictional subjects may consent to being filmed with-
out overtly acknowledging the camera. When this happens, the action recorded
appears as if it had nothing to do with the making of the documentary. That’s what
the phrase “acting naturally” usually implies.
Thomas Waugh has drawn on the notions of “presentational” and “representa-
tional” performances to distinguish between these two types of response to the
filming process (68). Presentational performances are those in which the interac-
tions between the subject and the filmmaker are apparent in the subject’s poses,
gestures, or speeches. As Waugh explains, the subjects reveal their awareness of
the camera. This is evident with Santiago, but also happens in more traditional
documentary interviews. Representational performances, on the other hand,
 228 chapter nine

tend to give the impression that the subject is oblivious to the filmmaker’s pres-
ence, or that the camera did not interfere in life’s ordinary events. In Nanook of
the North, the subjects rarely address the camera directly. Yet we know that their
actions were planned and executed for the sake of the film. Representational per-
formances invite us to believe that we are looking at a world untouched by the
filmmaker, when that is not the case at
all. They emulate both the casualness
of ordinary life and the codes of fiction
cinema. And the “message” seems to be
conveyed effortlessly, as if no one were
trying to impose it on the audience.
Representational performances de-
pend less on the promise of assertive-
ness than on the impression of slack-
ened control, of spontaneity.
A useful example of the differences
between presentational and represen-
9.4. Bob Dylan displays an awareness of the camera in the pre-title tational performances can be found
sequence of Don’t Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967). in D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back
(1967), a documentary filmed during
Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of the United Kingdom. In the pre-title segment,
a single shot of over two minutes, we see the singer in an alley holding up hand-
written cards displaying the lyrics of the song “Subterranean Homesick Blues,”
which is playing on the sound track. Dylan stands at the right of the frame, in
a medium long shot, and alternates
between glancing at the camera and
looking at the cards, which he drops
one by one as the song continues. We
know that Dylan is putting on an act
because of his presentational style. The
segment, which was his own idea, self-
consciously and playfully mocks his
reputation for unintelligible lyrics in
his concert and record performances.
In most other scenes, however,
the camera seems to observe him un-
9.5. Representational performance style in Don’t Look Back
noticed. We watch Dylan sing and
(D. A. Pennebaker, 1967). play guitar in his hotel room, read the
 The Profilmic 229

newspaper and use a typewriter, argue with a journalist and chat with various
interlocutors. The focus is on ordinary actions that may have little significance by
themselves but which together give us insight into the behavior and personality
of the documentary subject. Pennebaker’s observational approach would seem to
favor these unstudied moments. Yet, even in these ostensibly spontaneous situa-
tions, the closeness between Dylan and the camera—in cars, backstage, or hotel
rooms—makes it hard for us to believe that he is not directly engaging in the film-
ing process. Furthermore, Dylan’s behavior in these private moments conforms to
his public image in such a way that we wonder if he is not inspired by the camera.
Dylan seems to be playing a role, enacting his persona through much of the film.
But in lieu of the presentational assertiveness we saw in the pre-title segment, we
have the apparent spontaneity of a representational performance.

Interviews and Performance

Interviews often appear as ritualized, artificial “events.” Most are staged proceed-
ings with a clearly defined presentational quality, in which the filmmaker solicits
responses from a performing subject and, to a certain extent, directs the scene
that takes place in front of the camera. Documentary makers, not surprisingly,
tend to choose their interviewees based not only on their representativeness and
credibility but also on their charm, their capacity to perform. We saw the care that
Connie Field took in casting The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter.
At their most formal, interviews do seem stylistically predictable and aestheti-
cally repetitive. The exchanges between the filmmakers and their subjects are
molded into easily recognizable patterns that privilege the screen presence of the
interviewees (frequently alone in the frame) but limit their performances to es-
tablished norms. In these cases, the subject’s talk follows a conventional model
and the pose struck for the camera is restrained by the specifics of the interview
situation. As Nichols explains, “The common interview normally requires sub-
jects to provide a frontal view of themselves and generally discipline their bodies
to oblige the camera’s requirements regarding depth of field and angle of view”
(Representing Reality 53). In addition to simply meeting a technical obligation,
this traditional format serves in fact to reinforce the seriousness of nonfiction film
discourse, thus helping legitimize the interviewee’s testimony.
There are examples, however, in which the interview can be more than a tool
for gathering information or recording testimonies from authorized informants.
In Eduardo Coutinho’s The End and the Beginning/O fim e o princípio (2005), the
230 chapter nine

predictability of the encounter described above gives way to exchanges that exceed
the normative function of the documentary interview and contradict the custom-
ary stiffness of the subject in front of the camera. Most of the subjects in The End
and the Beginning are senior citizens from a rural community in the sertão, the arid
lands in the northeast of Brazil, who speak generously about their past, their fami-
lies, and their feelings for each other. More conversational than inquisitorial, the
filmmaker and his crew, including Rosa, a young woman from the area who acts
as a liaison, spent a few weeks visiting the community: sitting on the veranda of a
house with multiple generations chatting about their way of life; talking with an
elderly woman in a rocking chair who flings her arms around, gestures wildly, and
yells at Coutinho when he doesn’t understand her; or listening to a bare-chested
man with few teeth who leans out a window and covers half his face with his el-
egant, worn, long-fingered hands. There are sometimes several people in the shot,
talking, listening, and reacting to what is being said. But sometimes the inter-
viewee is alone, the younger generation having left the sertão. We observe Coutinho
consulting with Rosa; we observe the still photographer wandering around in the
background; we observe informants acknowledging the camera and filmmakers;
and we observe Rosa explaining what they are doing. The interviewees interact
freely with the crew and with each other. And the dialogical nature of these en-
counters is key to how the documentary communicates with the audience.
Because of this conversational approach to the interview process, The End
and the Beginning offers an opportunity to look not only at the interviewee’s lives
but also at their social and cultural milieu. Many of the interactions between the
filmmaker and his subjects seem to go on for “too long,” stretching the temporal
boundaries of the interview format and allowing us time for a close look at the
world surrounding the interviewees. Coutinho shot all his scenes on location.
More precisely, he chose to meet his subjects in their homes and ranches, inter-
rupting them in their daily activities, showing us both where they live and how
they live. Even though class and cultural background are not always addressed
in these conversations, the lengthy exchanges with the camera clearly reveal that
these are people of modest means, accustomed to hardship, and attached to their
traditional culture and religion. As an entry point to the sociohistorical world, the
interviews end up connecting setting and performance, helping to define a collec-
tive identity for these profilmic subjects.
Giving the interviewees a chance to speak their minds freely also increases
their contribution to the making of the documentary. It expands the significance
of their performances, allowing them greater control over their screen acts. This
is important because their credibility and status in the film depend partly on how
 The Profilmic 231

they appear before the audience. Documentary subjects can use the interview sit-
uation as a means of fashioning their public images. Most commonly, they rely on
speech and behavior to do that. But self-presentation can also include elements
that we normally associate with fictional mise-en-scène, such as the way the sub-
jects have dressed and coiffed themselves, and perhaps even applied makeup.
Let’s look again at Shirley Clarke’s 1967 Portrait of Jason, a documentary in
which the act of self-presentation helps establish both the player’s identity and
his contribution to the making of the film. Focusing on one single subject, an Af-
rican American gay man who calls himself Jason Holiday, Clarke’s documentary
has little to show other than the encounter between that subject and the camera.
Jason sees the profilmic space as a sort of stage from where he can address an
imaginary audience, using the film as an opportunity to interfere in the way he
might be perceived by the public.
Already in the first minutes of the film, we realize that Jason is indeed putting
on an act. Dressed in a dark jacket and a light shirt that befit Clarke’s black-and-
white photography, and wearing a pair of horn-rimmed glasses that give him a
vaguely studious appearance, he delivers a performance that combines anecdotes,
personal recollections, and role-playing—all in a conversational tone that strikes
us as reminiscent of standup comedy. We hear about his bohemian life style,
his stints as a houseboy and prostitute, and his troubled relationships with his
friends. We also learn something about class differences, race relations, and sexual
discrimination in 1960s America. Throughout the film, Jason comes across as ad-
venturous, unconventional, and carefree. Moreover, he appears articulate, witty,
and acutely aware of his status as a minority subject. All this is, of course, con-
veyed to us through his performance: his flamboyant demeanor, his lengthy and
humorous speeches, his ironic comments, his histrionic gestures, and so on. In his
interactions with the camera, Jason manages to (re)invent himself as a character,
thus determining, in part at least, how we should get to know him.
The prominence of Jason’s performance is explicitly acknowledged toward the
end of the film, when Clarke tries to look beyond the surface of his act. It is as if,
at that point, she had decided that his performance compromised the credibility
of her documentary. “Did you ever do anything really bad?” she asks offscreen,
suggesting that Jason may be hiding one secret or two. Clarke’s intervention is
soon followed by questions from a second offscreen interlocutor, who appears
just as determined to lift Jason’s “mask.” For a brief moment, they seem to succeed
as Jason’s attitude changes from self-confident to emotionally distraught. Clearly
upset, he breaks into tears, his transfigured face captured in a lengthy and merci-
less close-up.
232 chapter nine

This episode recalls the suspicion that acting is anathema to documentary rep-
resentation. Can we trust Jason’s previous act? Judging from this particular scene,
the answer might be no. There is more to this brief exchange, though, than a move
to secure the authenticity of the profilmic situation. Behind the attempt to strip
Jason of his performance is an effort to take charge of what happens in front of the
camera, a shift toward redefining the terms by which the documentary subject
appears on the screen. As Lauren Rabinovitz asks, is it Clarke or Holiday who
controls the profilmic (137)?
Dismissing the notion of performance as a threat to documentary authenticity
may be a frustrating project because we cannot always draw a clear line between
performance and ordinary behavior. Jason himself never fully disengages from
the filming process and seems to connect with the camera even in his most vul-
nerable moments. But the most compelling reason to embrace the role of social
actors may simply be that nonfictional players can wrest some of the authority
normally held by the filmmaker. This was the case with Miyuki Takeda in Extreme
Private Eros: Love Song 1974, as we saw in chapter 3. It is one of Jason Holiday’s
most remarkable achievements as well. Clarke’s encounter with her subject does
recall the popular belief that acting is synonymous with pretense. But ultimately
her film takes us beyond this faulty equation, placing the notions of performance
and self-presentation at the center of the exchanges between the documentary
subject and the filmmaker.

The Filmmaker as Performer

What happens, though, when the performance staged for the camera overlaps
with the act of filming, or when the documentarians themselves appear as per-
formers? How do we relate to documentaries in which the filmmakers play them-
selves to the audience? And how does that change our understanding of the
profilmic situation?
One way a filmmaker-performer can intercede in the protocols of documen-
tary filmmaking is by drawing attention to the subjective and partial nature of
that process. Think, for example, of the role played by Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury in
Halving the Bones, which we discussed in the first chapter. The granddaughter of
Japanese immigrants, Lounsbury uses her film as an opportunity to revisit her
family’s history. Yet Halving the Bones is no ordinary family album. The focus here
is as much on her ancestors as on the filmmaker herself. We see Lounsbury on the
screen and listen to her voiceover narration as she examines family photographs,
 The Profilmic 233

interviews her mother, or reminisces about her grandmother’s personality. Be-

ing part of the family, Lounsbury is, of course, a natural subject for her film. But
it is her role as storyteller and filmmaker that stands out in Halving the Bones.
Lounsbury reminds us that filmmakers are individuals with particular histories,
interests, and aspirations, and that the making of a documentary may involve not
only material evidence but also personal relationships.
Because they expose the role of the filmmaker—the agent who normally hides
behind the camera or sound apparatus—documentaries that feature filmmaker-
performers tend to have a strong reflexive component. But this is a particular kind
of reflexive film. We watch the filmmakers as they enact the very process by which
knowledge is acquired and made available to the audience. Because of that, we
also perceive that knowledge to be contingent upon a particular set of circum-
stances. Omniscience gives way to a more limited perspective on reality, which
finds validation not in the promise of objectivity but in the filmmaker’s personal
relationship with the subject matter in the film. As Nichols has put it, knowledge
is represented as situated rather than omniscient: the “local [takes precedence]
over the global, the specific over the general, the concrete over the abstract”
(“Embodied Knowledge” 6).
Another way to approach the filmmaker’s screen act is to look at how it can
revitalize existing documentary techniques. In this case, the outcome of the per-
formance will have less to do with reflexivity and demystification than with the
reinvention of nonfiction film conventions. Let’s return one last time to another
familiar example, the screen performances of filmmaker Michael Moore. In Roger
and Me, Moore relies on a number of recognizable techniques in order to make
his case against the corporate policies that left thousands of workers unemployed
in Flint, Michigan. These techniques, however, are so overpowered by his act that
we can easily miss the lineage that connects them to traditional documentary
practices. As happens in other documentaries, his voiceover narration does serve
clearly as an explanatory device. But in Roger and Me it also works as a means
of constructing a character and enlisting support for the filmmaker’s mission:
his campaign against General Motors and his efforts to interview the company’s
then CEO, Roger Smith. “As soon as I could,” we hear Moore say while we watch
him walk toward the GM building, “I headed down to Detroit, to Roger’s office,
where I was determined this time to get onto the fourteenth floor.” When we can
trace their source to a character, as happens in this film, voiceover commentaries
sound less official and intimidating than the detached godlike voice of classical
documentary.
Similarly, Moore’s interviews routinely bypass standard protocols and are best
234 chapter nine

described as interactions in which the filmmaker’s role is no less important than

the interviewee’s. In his conversations with the woman who makes a living selling
rabbits for pets or meat, the usual procedure gives way to a seemingly unstruc-
tured situation that does as much to build Moore’s character as provide informa-
tion about rabbit raising. “Now you know what I’m talkin’ about,” she tells him,
assuring the viewer that Moore has experience with her kind of situation.
By incorporating recognizable conventions to his performance, the filmmaker
breathes new life into familiar practices. This, in turn, accounts for the freshness
of his films. To paraphrase Paul Arthur, Moore subjects documentary’s conven-
tionalized procedures to the appearance of spontaneity and immediacy that we
expect from observational films like Don’t Look Back (128).
The impression of looking at an artless, innocent, spontaneous act is, of course,
misleading. Documentary makers work hard at creating their screen roles, and
those roles function as mediators between the audience and the sociohistorical
world. We may see filmmaker-performers as diligent investigative reporters and
committed social activists. Or we may look at them simply as plain ordinary peo-
ple. Oftentimes these roles coalesce to create a sort of persona, a public image that
stands for the maker of the film, in the case of Moore, a slightly overweight fellow
in a baseball or trucker cap who couples anti-intellectualism and disrespect for
authority with innate wisdom and moral fiber. It is to this image as a pugnacious
and populist adventurer, rather than the actual individual behind the making of
the documentary, that we normally relate as spectators.
Michael Moore’s films may offer the most recognizable example of how a film-
maker’s public image can contribute to the process of representation. But Moore
is hardly alone in his effort to create a distinctive persona. Nick Broomfield’s doc-
umentaries of the past two decades, for instance, are similarly centered on the
filmmaker’s enacted self. As Stella Bruzzi has written, “Nick Broomfield the docu-
mentary filmmaker is not synonymous with ‘Nick Broomfield’ the charming man
with Mickey Mouse earphones and boom who extracts information from [the
people in his films]” (208). It is, however, this beguiling and apparently imper-
turbable fellow—Broomfield’s enacted self—who helps define the way we look at
the subjects and events in his documentaries. In Tracking Down Maggie (1994),
for example, his persona acts as a foil for the film’s elusive subject, former British
prime minister Margaret Thatcher. Broomfield follows Thatcher tirelessly from
Britain to the United States but never manages to talk to her. As happens in Roger
and Me, the focus quickly shifts from the film’s presumed subject—the prime
minister—to the filmmaker’s performance, his theatrical efforts to interview her.
Broomfield comes across as a well-meaning, earnest, and politically conscious
 The Profilmic 235

(if also somewhat naïve) individual, while Thatcher appears as an arrogant,

coldhearted, and untrustworthy politician.
The presence of the filmmaker as public figure, performer, or entertainer has
become common enough to suggest the emergence of subgenre in contemporary
nonfiction cinema. Michael Chanan speaks about “a mode of political reportage
in which the filmmaker’s personality invades the film,” usually adopting “a satirical
and ironic stance.” Some of these films seem to parody the figure of the television
reporter, offering an alternative to mainstream news presentation (12–13). But
even at its most satirical or self-deprecating, the screen presence of the filmmaker
continues to lure us with a promise of reassurance. While they make no claims to
objectivity, these films satisfy our desire for certainty by giving us, in lieu of care-
fully constructed arguments, the familiar presence of legitimate and trustworthy
characters.
In this context, a documentary like Tony Buba’s Lightning Over Braddock: A
Rust Bowl Fantasy (1988) stands out precisely because it challenges this promise
of reassurance. Lightning Over Braddock couples the interest in forging a screen
persona with a more reflexive attitude on the part of the filmmaker. Like Michael
Moore, Buba comes from a working-class family. And like Roger and Me, Lightning
Over Braddock deals with the unemployment caused by plant closings in the film-
maker’s hometown (Braddock, Pennsylvania), as well as the unresponsiveness of
large corporations to the lives of the workers. Buba’s humor, like Moore’s, engages
the viewer. But Buba also encourages us to reflect upon the nature and supposi-
tions of documentary representation. His character’s critical wariness calls into
question the stability of the filmmaker’s persona and interrogates the adequacy of
documentary’s potential to capture lived reality.
Lightning Over Braddock is a more complex film than the examples discussed
earlier as it combines seemingly disparate materials such as footage of Braddock’s
abandoned steel mills, testimonies of steelworkers, television news, comic fan-
tasy scenes, and clips from Buba’s earlier independent shorts. At the center of
this multifaceted approach to the historical world is, once again, the filmmaker’s
performance. Buba’s screen act reveals a disarmingly complicated character. He
plays himself not only as a local celebrity but also as a self-doubting independent
filmmaker. He mentions, for example, that he has made his mark chronicling the
demise of Braddock’s steel industry: “[A]s Braddock . . . declined, my fortunes
increased. Dying mill towns are a hot media subject. My exposure on TV was
directly proportional to the number of layoffs.” He wonders if his films are do-
ing any good; he worries about offending potential funders at a party; and when
Sweet Sal, a small-time hoodlum who appeared in several of Buba’s previous
236 chapter nine

works, quits with the film only three-quarters finished, Buba admits that not only
does he no longer have a lead, with several more sequences left to film, but he is
also out of grant money. Finally, in one of Lightning Over Braddock’s most memo-
rable scenes, Buba appears before a fake priest and, in a mock confession, admits
that he doesn’t want to make social documentaries anymore. Instead, he wants to
make a Hollywood musical.
In lieu of a reassuring performance, what we have is an act that fails to create
a fully coherent or unambiguous subject. Even if that act invites parallels with
the performances of celebrity documentarians like Michael Moore, Buba’s per-
sona calls for a different kind of relationship with the audience. Like other reflex-
ive documentaries, Lightning Over Braddock uses the filmmaker’s voiceover and
screen appearance as a way of interrogating both the filmmaker’s status and the
role of documentary cinema in general. Whereas Michael Moore relies on humor
and irony to make fun of authority, never questioning his own, Tony Buba’s more
distanced and sardonic approach takes apart and examines the issue of authority,
where its power comes from, and how it is related to the viewing audience.
Different as they may be, these screen acts underline some of the key points
in this chapter. They help us think of what happens in front of the camera as part
of the processes through which nonfiction films speak to us. In the next chapter,
we continue to examine the means by which documentaries speak to their au-
diences, this time (quite literally) by discussing the use of sound in nonfiction
filmmaking.

Additional Filmography
Farrebique (Georges Rouquier, 1946)
The Sorrow and the Pity/Le chagrin et la pitié (Marcel Ophüls, 1970)
Sherman’s March (Ross McElwee, 1986)
Broken Noses (Bruce Weber, 1987)
Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock, 2003)
The Blonds/Los rubios (Albertina Carri, 2003)
Tarnation ( Jonathan Caouette, 2003)
Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Arnheim, Rudolf. Film as Art. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1957.
Arthur, Paul. “Jargons of Authenticity (Three American Moments).” In Theoriz-
ing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
 The Profilmic 237

Beattie, Keith. Documentary Display: Re-viewing Nonfiction Film and Video. Lon-
don: Wallflower, 2008.
Bordwell, David, and Kristin Thompson. Film Art: An Introduction. 8th ed. New
York: McGraw-Hill, 2008.
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. London: British Film Institute,
2007.
Corner, John. “Television, Documentary and the Category of the Aesthetic.”
Screen 44.1 (Spring 2003).
Dieleke, Edgardo, and Gabriela Nouzeilles. “The Spiral of the Snail: Searching
for the Documentary, an Interview with João Moreira Salles.” Journal of
Latin American Cultural Studies 17.2 (August 2008).
Kracauer, Siegfried. Theory of Film: The Redemption of Physical Reality. Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1960.
Leacock, Richard. “For an Uncontrolled Cinema.” Film Culture 22–23 (Summer
1961).
MacDonald, Scott. “Jill Godmilow (and Harun Farocki).” In A Critical Cinema 4:
Interviews with Independent Filmmakers. Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2005.
Margulies, Ivone. Nothing Happens: Chantal Akerman’s Hyperrealist Everyday.
Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1996.
Nichols, Bill. “The Documentary Film and Principles of Exposition.” In Ideology
and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema and Other Media. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1981.
———. “Embodied Knowledge and the Politics of Location: An Evocation.” In
Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloom-
ington: Indiana University Press, 1994.
———. “‘Getting to Know You . . .’: Knowledge, Power, and the Body.” In Theo-
rizing Documentary, ed. Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993.
———. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1991.
Pramaggiore, Maria, and Tom Wallis. Film: A Critical Introduction. 2nd ed. Bos-
ton: Pearson, 2008.
Rabinovitz, Lauren. “Shirley Clarke and the Expansion of American Independent
Cinema.” In Points of Resistance: Women, Power, and Politics in the New York
Avant-garde Cinema, 1943–71. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991.
Rosenstone, Robert A. “Revisioning History: Contemporary Filmmakers and
238 chapter nine

the Construction of the Past.” Comparative Studies in Society and History

32.4 (October 1990).
Waugh, Thomas. “‘Acting to Play Oneself ’: Notes on Performance in Documen-
tary.” In Making Visible the Invisible: An Anthology of Original Essays on Film
Acting, ed. Carole Zucker. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1990.
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
 10
Sounds
Coauthored with Carl Lewis

S ound! We have looked at several films made in the silent period. Few
of them, of course, were shown without sound; some early films were
presented by lecturers and many were accompanied by live music. But for a long
time now recorded sound has been a major part of documentaries—especially
the information conveyed through voiceover commentary and interviews. Words
often link together the images and carry much of the argument. Speech, however,
is only part of the way that documentaries use sound. They also frequently use
music, effects, and ambient sound (the background noises that emanate from the
world pictured). Think again of The River. The voiceover commentary imposes a
particular form of organization on seemingly scattered visual material. The music
does, too. And so does the sound of the factory whistles and the flood warning
horns. It is the combination of visual, verbal, and sonic discourses that shapes the
film into the story about the Mississippi.
We have already discussed how Night Mail’s carriage interiors were built on a
set for adequate space and light, with workers re-creating their nightly routines.
As in The River, the crew also had to shoot silent and add the sound afterward. But
this was not a disadvantage. In fact, under Alberto Cavalcanti’s sound direction,
the simple story of an overnight postal train is crafted into a complex assemblage
of speech, music, noises, and poetry.
Over brief opening credits, trumpet fanfares jolt the viewer to attention. The
short musical excerpt quickly establishes what is to come. Agitated, repeated
239
240 chapter ten

ascending notes suggest a forward, climbing and repetitive motion. And indeed,
much of the film illustrates movement, speed, and urgency with shots of the train
wheels churning round and round, the sound of train whistles, rattling tracks, hiss-
ing steam, the clang of metal, the thump of leather mail pouches, and the whoosh
of the wind created by the train’s velocity.
The musical score quickly disappears from the film, not returning until the
closing sequence. A voiceover, an invisible male voice with a carefully constructed
nondescript professional quality, speaking in short sentences, explains the techni-
cal aspects of the traveling post office, its route, functions, and mechanisms. Some-
times it gives details of what is in the images; at other times it gives information
that is not available visually. There are also snatches of overheard conversations.
Conversations of the English and Scottish workers were recorded separately and
then carefully matched with the location shooting. And then at the end, we hear a
poem written for the film by W. H. Auden together with music composed for the
film by Benjamin Britten. It is only after the story has been told—when we have
learned everything the filmmakers want us to learn about the night mail delivery
system—that we are escorted back into the world of “artificial” sound. As we see
a long shot of the train traveling through the Scottish countryside, the rhythmic
percussive sound, almost a repetition of the rumbling and clanging we have heard
at other points in the film, commences. The recitation also begins rhythmically,
with a strong 4/4 meter:

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,

Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient’s against her, but she’s on time.

The poem is not sung or spoken, but intoned on a single vocal note. It doubly
emphasizes the strong meter of this part of the score, the voice functioning as the
lead instrument over the orchestra, a vocal punctuation to the beat that the or-
chestra is accentuating. The voice then drops out for another repetition of the re-
lentless orchestral rhythm, reentering with a slightly more insistent tonal quality
as the poem honoring—almost eulogizing—the night mail service continues.
Suddenly, the mood of the music changes, and trumpets, like the ones heard at
the start of the film, are heard again in a similar fanfare. Wind instruments reintro-
duce the agitated music previously played and aurally paint a rushing sensation.
 sounds 241

There is a slight ethereal quality to this short section of the score, and the words of
the text seem to take on more importance than the meter previously established.
The rhythm then returns to prominence, and as the train finally begins to reduce
speed and pull into the station that is its final destination, the trumpet fanfare
sounds five times before the rhythm slows, simultaneously recalling our attention
and signifying that the journey is ending. The final sequence of the film does not
serve to advance the “story” as much as it canonizes the story already told. The
carefully explicated account of how the mail is transported is now virtually en-
shrined as a ritual important to us all.
Night Mail uses a variety of sounds: words, music, and effects. This complex
arrangement of sounds plays a role that exceeds the need to simply record and
transmit information aurally. Like all other formal aspects in a documentary,
sound helps shape the spectator’s experience. Night Mail does not merely teach
us about the British postal service; it exalts its efficacy as a public service. It does
so by exploring rhythmic elements that, as we noted earlier, evoke the notions of
speed and recurrence. Even a seemingly straightforward feature such as a voice-
over narration, which is common to many other documentaries, deserves atten-
tion beyond the strict level of content information. (We may think, for example,
of the timbre of the voice, the volume and rhythm of the speech, as well as its
accents and inflections.)
In this final chapter, we are concerned with how sound serves as a resource for
documentary film and video makers. And we will be discussing not only voice-
overs but also speech in interviews, the role of music in nonfiction films, and,
briefly, the way documentaries deal with ambient noises and sound effects.

Direct and Prerecorded Sound

Before we pay closer attention to these different forms of sound, though, we

need to consider an important distinction. As happens in any other kind of film,
the sound in a documentary can be directly recorded on location or edited into
the film after the shooting. Sound recorded on location normally carries a spe-
cial type of authority. We think of it as evidential material, a trace of the physical
world captured by the microphone. What we hear is what was there to be heard at
the moment of recording. Sound that comes from a different source, on the other
hand, is indicative of the creative intervention of the filmmaker. It draws our at-
tention not to the event recorded but to the way that event is shaped through the
filmmaking process.
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In practice, this distinction can get fuzzy since sound recorded on location can
be easily manipulated, and sound added later can be matched so that it appears
to come from the documentary space. But the distinction has both historical and
critical relevance, and it allows us to better understand different approaches to
documentary filmmaking.
The recording technologies available to Cavalcanti in 1936 did not hinder
Night Mail’s creativity or expression. But the apparatus was cumbersome. This
changed soon after World War II, with the popularization of the new recording
technology—lightweight 16mm cameras capable of shooting in synchronization
with portable tape recorders—that we read about in chapter 8. With the tech-
nological means for synchronous sound recording on location, filmmakers were
excited about the idea that this less intrusive type of filmmaking would make
it possible to observe things as they were happening. With no need for staging
or re-creation, or post-dubbing, which were common in 35mm films like Night
Mail, the new equipment seemed to ensure a greater fidelity to the aural pande-
monium of the real world, even if the less than optimal conditions that sometimes
come with minimal control over the profilmic produced a certain lack of clarity
on the sound track. Keeping with the idea of “pure observation,” many of the
films made in the United States in the early 1960s use little explanatory voiceover
commentary or added music, but exude a lavish mixture of everyday sounds—
especially talk. Observational filmmakers felt that to record speech live was to
discover something about the way people really were. Richard Leacock, one of
the camera operators on Drew Associates’ 1963 Crisis: Behind a Presidential Com-
mitment, stated in an interview soon after the film was made, “The only way you
can [capture life as it really is] with human beings is to record the way they com-
municate, that is, talking” (246). People have their own manners of expressing
themselves. Indeed, we hear a wide diversity of idioms and inflections in Crisis, as
well as in the conversational passages of Frederick Wiseman’s 1967 Titicut Follies,
another film recorded with synchronized sound. We also hear differing volumes,
tones, and pitches. Conversations trail off or digress. People interrupt each other
and speak at the same time. The sound is sometimes muddled. This is spoken
language in all its richness, recorded as it happens.
This same type of equipment, lightweight camera and synchronous sound re-
cording, allowed National Film Board of Canada directors Wolf Koenig and Ro-
man Kroitor to follow Canadian teen idol Paul Anka on a tour of New York and
New Jersey. Lonely Boy (1962) begins with traveling shots of roadside billboards
announcing Anka’s Atlantic City Steel Pier concerts. The song “Lonely Boy” plays
as background music on the track. The end of the song coincides with a cut to
 sounds 243

Anka finishing the ballad on stage. The film includes many of the singer’s most
popular tunes, both performed in concert and overlaying other scenes. But, more
than his music, it is really the vocal interactions between Anka and his fans, his
manager, his support personnel, and a nightclub owner that most interest Koenig
and Kroitor.
In contrast with the principles of U.S. observational cinema that we read about
in chapter 3, some of these interactions also involve the crew. The filmmakers are
not really unobtrusive and certainly not invisible. At one point, for example, Anka
enters his dressing room, briefly glances at the camera, and comments, “Oh fel-
lows, of all days to do this. . . .” Shortly afterward, when a still photographer asks
if he is in the way, the singer tells him not to pay attention to the men and their
equipment: “Just forget they are even there.” In a nightclub, the crew is asked if
they would like to have the waiters circulate a bit. Later, Anka holds up a portrait
of himself so the camera can record it. And an offscreen voice asks for a kiss to be
repeated because the camera moved during the first one. All this is included in
the release print. It is as if the fact that the filmmakers are not inconspicuous was
an important part of the truth-telling process. They do listen in on Anka’s seem-
ingly unrehearsed exchanges with Irvin Feld, his manager, and with Jules Podell,
owner of the Copacabana. Most importantly, they record apparently spur-of-the-
moment exchanges with his unnamed young female fans. But they also ask Anka
and his manager questions and document their answers.
Although these vocal interactions seem more revealing than the concerts, there
is one performance in which the use of sound is noteworthy. Toward the end of
the film, at Freedomland Amusement Park, in the middle of “Put Your Head
on My Shoulder,” we hear Paul Anka crooning and we see close shots of teens
screaming. But we do not hear their shrieks. This tangling of action and stillness,
this soundlessness, comes as a surprise in a film that has celebrated the possibil-
ity of live sound recording. When the sound of the teens drops out, the silence
deafens into a roar. The very lack of sound accentuates their rapture. Wolf Koenig,
Roman Kroitor, and their sound editor Kathleen Shannon seem to be calling our
attention to the interrelation of stardom and fandom. Just as Anka is performing
his contractual role for the concert audiences—and the filmmakers—these ador-
ing teens are performing their expected roles as well. The passage suggests that the
ecstasy and desire of teenage girls, their admiration and their need to be heard, are
not only the performance of femininity, the grand and pleasurable reenactment
of stereotypical behavior, as Jane Gaines (arguing from Linda Williams) claims,
but also the basis of Paul Anka’s stardom (116). And this suggestion is largely ac-
complished through the manipulation of location recording.
244 chapter ten

Some documentaries use direct recording to emphasize not speech but ambi-
ent sound. Ertuğrul Karslıoğlu’s Sweat and Felt/Keçenin teri (1988), a documen-
tary on felt rug makers in Şanlıurfa, Turkey, makes good use, for example, of the
pounding and grunting of the master and his apprentice as they “cook” the folded
felt with their chests in a steam room and beat the nearly finished rug with their
hands and feet. We also hear the extraneous noises that fill their world as they
pray, lunch, play dominos, release their pigeons, and watch the manufacture of
machine-pounded felt. Talking, too, is treated as ambient sound. There are no
interviews or voiceover commentary—until the very end of the twenty-four-
minute film, when an anonymous voice tells us that the sixty-two-year-old master
felt maker now produces his felt by machine and his young aide works in an office.
One of the men depicted, however, was still making felt by traditional methods.
In Karslıoğlu’s portrait of the rug makers, while the men go about their ordinary
activities, the microphone, like the camera, observes the supple pulse of daily
life. But by limiting the sounds, the filmmaker and his sound team—Erol Yazıcı,
Ömer Demirci, Ali Komser, and Yılmaz Karadoğan—amplify them, making audi-
ence members aware of their cadences and reverberations, endowing them with
special resonance and importance.
Even with the capability to record sound on location, however, documentary
makers may choose, instead, to use sound effects. Jalal Toufic’s Saving Face (2003),
taped during the 2000 parliamentary campaign in Lebanon, is a series of head
shots, posters of candidates; first huge faces on buildings, then smaller, life-sized
ones on walls, then faces being removed from walls, peeled off with a small metal
scraper, and finally faces piled up as paper scraps, with one of the men who did the
scraping sitting proudly on the heap in front of the near-naked wall. The sound de-
sign, by Nadim Mishlawi, includes no music or dialogue. The first sounds we hear
seem like natural street noises. Later, as the visuals change to still images of the
pentimento of partially peeled faces, the street noises and the sounds of the metal
implement and tearing paper turn into an abstract symphony of effects. Noises
that sound like the slow click of a single lens reflex camera, then ripping sounds,
then voices, laughing, breaking glass, airport noises, crushed cigarette packets,
then seemingly ambient street noises again, but this time clearly manipulated,
form a waterfall of noise. Cut to the rhythm of the changing images, the lush blend
of sounds builds on itself to convey a sense of both familiarity and excess.
Nobody’s Business also employs an abundance of sound effects. In this case,
however, they are used to underscore the meaning of many scenes. Like the
documentary’s metaphorical images, some of these noises are key elements of
the film’s humorous hyperbole. Toward the beginning, as it visually counts down
 sounds 245

from 8, we hear the ticking of a kitchen timer. When we would have seen “0,” in-
stead, we hear the “bing” of the timer as the seconds expire. When the filmmaker,
Alan Berliner, and his father argue (and this is frequent), we hear the bell from a
boxing ring.
The sound design of Alan Berliner’s at once comic and sad portrait of his fa-
ther is generally consistent: one track, either the sound or image, continues when
the other changes. And some changes, frequently when both sound and image
change, are signaled by sound effects. Over the image of the numbers mentioned
earlier, we hear Oscar Berliner’s “testing, one, two, three, testing, one, two, three,”
then, “How long do you think this is going to take, Alan?” and Alan’s reply, “About
an hour.” At the sound of the bing of the kitchen timer, the image changes to a still
photo of Oscar as a young man standing behind a microphone.
Alan Berliner, who worked for several years as a sound editor and archivist,
constructs intricate sound and image relationships in Nobody’s Business. There is a
certain amount of disassociation between them, with sounds frequently overlap-
ping images that might not, at first, seem related. But we become accustomed to
hearing a sound that we recognize, be it Mr. Berliner’s voice, Alan’s, ticking, or the
“bing” of the kitchen timer, over an image that does not generate that sound. In
the sequence when Alan is trying to interest his father in his forebears, Alan reads
(in voiceover) a letter his great-grandfather had written to his son, Oscar’s father.
The images are different scenes from archival footage of turn-of-the-century East-
ern European children, then footage of water. At the end of the letter, Alan reads,
“You, son of mine, who had been destined to be a great rabbi, was now about to
seek his fate in America.” Just before he pronounces the word “now,” we hear a
gong and the image changes from a muted shot of water to a close, low angle shot
of the Statue of Liberty in vivid color. The transitions in Nobody’s Business are
smooth, precisely because there is so little synchronization of sound and image.
In contrast, the four opening sequences of Jean-Marie Teno’s 1992 Africa, I
Will Fleece You/Afrique, je te plumerai employ four entirely different sound designs
with shocking sound juxtapositions as transitions. The film uses speech, ambi-
ent sounds, and music to establish the narrative voice of the documentary and to
characterize three different time periods. It opens with a long shot, panning over
the rooftops of Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon. The voiceover commentary,
spoken softly, almost nostalgically, in Teno’s voice, begins practically immediately,
“Yaoundé, cruel city! You stuffed our heads with your official lies. . . . You respond
with machine gun fire at your children who shout ‘liberty’!” “Yaoundé, cruel city,
you inspire shame.” The film then changes to a drastically new sequence, and dras-
tically new sounds, the sounds of the violent clash of civilians and the military.
246 chapter ten

The voiceover stops for a moment. Instead, we hear synchronous sounds, sounds
emanating from the visuals, the ambient sound of brutal bloodshed. There is half
a minute of grainy color images of fighting taken with a handheld camera and
sync sound, and then the voiceover returns, reciting the names of young people
killed. Then, again, a new sequence, and once again a dramatic change in historical
black-and-white footage of celebrations of the so-called independence of Camer-
oon in 1960, with upbeat and cheerful pop music from the period, the first mu-
sic we have heard so far. Children march; adults applaud. “They believed things
were changing for the better.” But this euphoria is short lived: the commentary,
no longer spoken so softly and certainly not nostalgically, introduces Ahmadou
Ahidjo, “Father of the Nation,” and his long rule of darkness. The fourth segment
has no music at all: turmoil again, and again synchronous sounds from the nar-
rative world of violence. We watch color images of more fighting, taken with a
handheld camera, and hear the sounds of gunfire, as the voiceover tells us about
the reign of Paul Biya, Ahidjo’s prime minister for fifteen years: “The apprentice
was to surpass the mentor.” Then we see and hear a press conference with Biya
pronouncing democracy inappropriate for Cameroon, followed by shots of a man
killed in a street skirmish. Fade to black. The dedication, “For all those who have
died for freedom.” And finally the title: Africa, I Will Fleece You.
By opening his film with such jarringly different sounds, the filmmaker calls
attention to not only the different epochs in Cameroon’s history but also to his
own interpretation, his own understanding, of that history. His subjective voice-
over commentary (far from the “nondescript professional quality” we heard in
Night Mail) and the ambient sounds of the explosions of social unrest let us know
how Jean-Marie Teno feels about the way the people of his country have been
exploited, and, as he puts it, about “the soldier’s uniform [that] is soiled with chil-
dren’s blood.”
From these seven examples you can see that documentaries use a variety of
soundscapes, mingling ambient sounds, words, sound effects, music—and often
silences. Sometimes documentaries “speak” most eloquently by exploring mo-
ments of silence. We have already considered Trinh T. Minh-hà’s use of silence as
a sound in Reassemblage. And we have already considered Lonely Boy’s reflexive
descent into silence. We have also discussed socially imposed silences, the silence
of those who have been excluded, denied a voice. And we can imagine silence
as a willing refusal to speak. But sometimes silence is more than the absence of
sounds. It can be an anxious moment, or quiet moment, not an omission, but an
active space, a space for feeling. In Four Little Girls, Denise McNair’s father relates
a painful incident when his young daughter, while shopping at Kress’s department
 sounds 247

store, wanted a sandwich at their lunch

counter. He had to explain to her that she
could not eat there because she was black.
When asked how the child reacted, Chris-
topher McNair replies firmly, in an extreme
close-up, “As if the whole world of betrayal
had fallen on her. . . .” The soft background
music fades and the camera holds on the fa-
ther’s face for four seconds of unbroken si-
lence. The film does not query Mr. McNair
about how he felt about having to make this
10.1. Christopher McNair silently remembering his daughter
clear to Denise. What is not said might be, at Denise. From 4 Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997).
times, more expressive than what is.

Speech

No matter how ingeniously documentaries use silence, ambient sounds, effects,

and music, speech is generally the most important way they get their message
across. A documentary’s words, in interviews and voiceover commentary, can in
fact be stronger than the images. In these cases, the images seem to illustrate the
verbal argument. Voiceovers, such as those in The River, Night Mail, Africa, I Will
Fleece You, or Sweat and Felt, commonly serve didactic purposes. They commu-
nicate information, introduce new concepts, and explain the nature of particular
events. But more than simply descriptive or explanatory, voiceover commen-
taries are assertive. They are formal devices that allow documentary makers to
exert authority over the material represented and, concomitantly, over their audi-
ences too.
But how can we describe that authority? Various documentaries use different
types of voiceover commentary, different modes of control over information,
and have differing relations with the images. Magnus Bärtås and Agence TOPO
chose young girls to read the biographical commentary in Who Is . . . ?, implicitly
calling our attention to the “normal,” detached, adult male voice, and the author-
ity, superior knowledge, and dominance that we generally attribute to it. Some
documentaries take a more explicitly reflexive approach, acknowledging the fact
that the narration is presenting information to the audience. Mindy Faber’s first-
person voiceover in Delirium is an example. It is self-consciously authored, expos-
ing its own constructed nature. By commenting on her own struggles and her
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own choices, Faber helps us to see that, for her, there can be no real separation
between the private, the political, and the historical. The audience is aware that
they are getting a well-researched yet personal point of view. Some voiceovers
speak with authority about the story’s telling, seeming to share inside informa-
tion. Take Tony Buba’s commentary in Lightning Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl
Fantasy. Highly communicative, friendly, and folksy, it enlightens the spectators
about the motivations of the filmmaker and about the progress of the story, every
once in a while even seeming to give away secrets. At one point, Buba’s voiceover
questions the morality of paying $15,000 (three times the average per capita in-
come of a Braddock resident) for the rights to one of the songs he had wanted to
include in the film.
Other voiceover commentaries are more omniscient—and often very au-
thoritative. The voiceover in Prelude to War, for example, is a disembodied voice,
an anonymous third-person voice that appears knowledgeable about the informa-
tion it presents. Audience members are supposed to take it as instructive com-
mentary, unquestionably reliable and trustworthy. And some voiceovers promul-
gate authority and subjectify the disembodied voice with the use of a narrator
who is a recognized and identifiable authority. Stella Bruzzi points out that the
decision to use Harvey Fierstein, a well-known gay writer and actor, with his
distinctive gravelly voice, to narrate The Times of Harvey Milk (Robert Epstein,
1984), a documentary about the murder of San Francisco’s first openly gay man
to be voted into office, “immediately makes the film into a statement about gay
politics” (53).
If we ponder a variety of documentaries and the way that the voiceover com-
mentary controls the transmission and flow of information in relation to both
the story and the audience, it is clear that these approaches are not mutually ex-
clusive. A voiceover can be reflexive about its information, forthcoming about
sharing it with the audience, and also seemingly very knowledgeable about what
it is commenting on. Sometimes the commentary changes, being tentative at the
outset, for instance, and becoming less so as the documentary continues. But
most voiceovers, whether personal or impersonal, are written speech, recorded
in the studio, closely miked in order to reduce reverberations, intelligible and
clear.
In most fiction films, the sound seems to be produced by—and is usually syn-
chronized with—the image. This hierarchy is normally reversed in documentaries
with voiceover commentary. The image is frequently subservient to the sound.
Sometimes it seems merely a visual accompaniment to the information on the
sound track. And sometimes a voiceover is all we have to explain the meaning
 sounds 249

of the images. We saw it in Chantal Akerman’s News from Home, that series of
nameless images of New York City streets, sidewalks, storefronts, and subways
recorded in long takes. On the sound track over the ambient sounds, Akerman
reads letters she received from her mother in Belgium describing the family’s daily
events, along with how much they miss her and regret not hearing from her. The
voiceover commentary imposes a certain amount of significance to seemingly
uneventful visual material. The intimacy of the letters from home (“My dearest
little girl, I am very surprised not to have had any news from you. Your last letter
was ten days ago. . . . My darling we think of you a lot and know that all’s going
well. We only ask one thing, that you don’t forget us. Write. Your loving mother.”)
and Akerman’s delivery, blandly read in a detached tone with accented English,
or, in the French version, racing through the reading, in near monotone, some-
times drowned out by traffic noises, help us associate the unidentified shots of
the streets and subways with the filmmaker’s experience as a stranger in New York
City. The sentiments of the letters combined with the anonymous images produce
a tension between the ardent closeness of family life and the aloof observation.
From time to time, a voiceover vies with the images or contradicts them. Half-
way through My Mother’s Place, Richard Fung’s 1990 documentary video, we see
a home movie shot a few decades earlier. The grainy 8mm footage shows a prepu-
bescent boy (the video maker himself)
hopping from one side of the frame
to the other, agitating his arms and
legs, and sticking his tongue out at the
camera. At first sight, it looks like any
other home movie—unpretentious
and amateurish. But the way it is pre-
sented adds a provocative note to the
video maker’s reminiscences. As we
watch the images of Fung’s boyhood,
we hear a voiceover commentary that
states: “Well, you can see from these
pictures mom took of me that I was 10.2. Richard Fung as a child. “I was just an ordinary boy doing or-
just an ordinary boy doing ordinary dinary boy things.” From My Mother’s Place (Richard Fung, 1990).
boy things.” Fung, of course, was not
an ordinary boy. His self-conscious attitude toward the camera, the flamboyance
of his gestures, and his openly girlish behavior say otherwise. Against what we
see on the screen, Fung’s commentary comes through as implausible and ironic.
While My Mother’s Place focuses mostly on his family’s experiences as Chinese
250 chapter ten

immigrants in Trinidad, this sequence “speaks” about Fung himself precisely by

creating an incongruous relation between the visual record and the voiceover.
This “disalignment” of image and sound is, as José Muñoz notes, “a deviation
from traditional documentary, which is chiefly concerned with sound and image
marching together as a tool of authorization” (92–93).
More common, as Muñoz reminds us, is a voiceover that reinforces—or even
augments—the information in the image, a “marching together” of sounds and im-
ages. This is true in most third-person omniscient commentary. Even first-person
voiceovers, such as Danae Elon’s in Another Road Home, frequently enhance the
image track by giving us the filmmaker’s perspective, her inner thoughts, and by
explaining what we are seeing, guiding our interpretation. Take, for instance, the
scene after Elon meets up with one of Moussa’s sons. Her voice, over images of
the entrance to his home, admits, “I realized that I knew so little about Khalid and
his family. Yet through all of the years growing up, our lives ran parallel.” Similarly,
in Joyce at 34, Chopra muses in voiceover as she picks up her bags at the airport,
takes a cab into town, and enters the Block School where she is making a film: “It’s
too hard taking Sarah with me. I . . . I just got to take this job seriously. And as long
as she is with me, all I’ll think about is her. And if I don’t have her with me, then
I can be a person again.”
Alberto Cavalcanti, the sound director of Night Mail, lamented this hand-in-
glove correlation of sound and image, preferring instead a more confrontational or
contrapuntal relation (37–38). Interestingly, Night Mail has both forms, the voice
of omniscience, control, and certainty of the conventional, professional-sounding
voiceover, and the more contrapuntal power of Auden’s poem. Richard Fung’s
voiceover is more destabilizing, reveling in inconsistencies and ambiguities. The
distance between the ostensible subject and the ironic tone of Fung’s words is
pronounced, the potential for secondary, connotative meanings unbound.
In addition to voiceovers, speech in interviews plays a crucial role in communi-
cating information to the audience. And in many nonfictional works, it can be the
fundamental driving force. The Bombing of Osage Avenue (Louis Massiah, 1987)
is a good example. The commentary, by Toni Cade Bambara, provides some
fresh information. But while television documentaries are often led by the voice-
over commentary, in The Bombing of Osage Avenue the commentary frequently
expands upon what has already been said by people in the neighborhood, a riff
on the words of community members, bouncing off the interviews and spinning
back around them again.
The precredit sequence begins, after a brief visual overview of the vicinity, with
people from the Cobbs Creek community speaking about their West Philadelphia
 sounds 251

neighborhood. “We may not run in and out of everyone’s house, but we all neigh-
bors and we know each other,” says Eddie Herring, who lives in the 6200 block
of Pine Street. A teenage boy, Baba Renfrow, exclaims, “Like you would come
past 58th and Walnut and you come past Sayre Junior High and you say, ‘I know
where I’m at now!’” Later, Marian C. Morris tells us, “When I moved out here in
this neighborhood where I am at, it was mostly black, so I was more involved with
my own people than I was where I was living before. Because I was with my own
people. And I got to know so many people.”
From these interviews, along with images of police in the streets, barricades,
packing cars, then smoke, fire, and the sounds of rifles and machine guns, we learn
of the tragedy that began on Mother’s Day in 1985, when the Philadelphia police
department tried to evict the organization known as MOVE from a residential
neighborhood. And we learn how individuals felt about MOVE and their collec-
tive home nearby. Streetwise, sensible, poignant, and complex renditions of re-
cent history, these interviews are the heart of the documentary. The interviewees,
clearly intelligent and sensitive, speak in the vernacular and display their smiles
when they talk about what Cobbs Creek means to them. They show their rage
when they talk of the police invasion. And their vocal inflections alter as their
feelings change. “Sunday morning we knew something was going to happen be-
cause they said we were going to have to vacate,” one woman retrospectively re-
members. The documentary also uses archival footage. “Why you gotta hurt ’em?
There’s kids in there. You’re talking about children in there, all day, all night. Why
you gotta hurt the kids? Think about the children! Think about the children!”
shouts a woman on the street to news personnel the day of the attack.
The apparent spontaneity of the interviewees’ speech contrasts sharply with
Bambara’s soft-spoken and clearly enunciated narration. “When you are part of
a community, at home in the rhythms and rituals of a place, you don’t imagine
you are living on the edge of hell.” Obviously written in advance with care and
registered under optimal conditions in the studio, her speech was not recorded
in the same space or time as the pictures; it is asynchronous. The voices from
the community are direct speech, recorded on location, presumably unrehearsed,
with background noise, regional accents, and variable velocity and pronuncia-
tion. There are stumbles, “you knows,” “uhms,” and “ahs,” pauses and hesitations
that can indicate an attitude toward the situation, now and then an attitude that
the speaker might not have been able (or willing) to express otherwise. This can
be an unconscious way of making a point—or avoiding an issue. It is a form of de-
livery that one seldom hears in the standard English of broadcasters or voiceover
commentaries. It is the sound of community members speaking for themselves,
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in their own vibrant voices. These voices are not only the expression of creative
power, but also, in the words of bell hooks, “a political gesture that challenges the
politics of domination that would render us nameless and voiceless”—an act of
resistance (126).
Shortly after the first interviews, Bambara’s commentary elaborates on the tes-
timonies: “What industry is this, your home a blazing smokestack belching up
your prize possessions, neighborhood a free-fire zone and people killed?” Bamba-
ra’s commentary—poetic, sharp, yet tender—never claims to be from that com-
munity. But neither is it entirely separate. Bambara’s is another voice passing on
stories, a sensuous, studied voice, in a timbre more often associated with bedtime
stories than with voiceover commentary. “The dismemberment of a community,
the relation of a people to a place, ruptured.” Later we see TV news footage and
still photos of an earlier attack on MOVE: “August 8th, 1978, the assault. An of-
ficer is killed. The building is bulldozed. Massive arrests. Nine members draw
30 to 100 year sentences.” By minimizing subjects and verbs, and by employing
the passive voice, Bambara cajoles language into a mode that is authoritative with-
out appearing either personal or omniscient.
Six and a half minutes into the documentary, the title appears over footage of
the blaze and the sound of Joe Zawinul’s synthesizer: The Bombing of Osage Avenue.
Backlit by the raging fire, a helmeted of-
ficial crosses the frame. Although osten-
sibly about Philadelphia’s police depart-
ment’s bombing of the MOVE family’s
house and the 6200 block surrounding
Osage Avenue, the documentary, more
importantly, tells us what the catas-
trophe of eleven individuals dead and
sixty-one homes burned down meant
to the people of the West Philly neigh-
borhood: “And the whole building was
on fire. . . . It burned; it burned. Nobody
10.3. “So I told them, ‘Wait one minute. This is Mother’s Day and
did anything.” “My heart is very heavy.
I’m not going anyplace.’” From The Bombing of Osage Avenue (Louis I feel for those people.” “You think
Massiah, 1987).
you are just so helpless. . . . It was . . .
[pause] like war.” Because it also tells
us of what the neighborhood meant to the people, the video forges commonali-
ties and connections between those witnesses and the audience. Built on circles
and recurrence, the story gets told again and again: the bomb drops and explodes
 sounds 253

another time, more gunfire, more people screaming, shouting, and reacting to
what they see, spiraling around and around, until the agony seeps deep.
When experience is related to us through the interviewees’ oral testimonies,
sound is privileged and the visual is often put to its service, more illustration than
new information, sometimes only supporting the sound with generic images. The
reproduction, transmission, and communication of knowledge are gained mainly
through the aural experience. In a way, the multiplicity of meanings inherent in
those images and in the photographic image in general (its polysemy) are, to use
Roland Barthes’s term, “anchored” by the verbal specificity in the interviews, by
the language and the passion of those voices. Linguistic elements can serve to
clarify—perhaps even constrain—the multivalence of the visuals. This applies,
as we have seen, to voiceovers as well. In Chris Marker’s Letter from Siberia the
same footage of a street scene is played four times, over each a different com-
mentary, each time conferring different associations to the images. The images
themselves are open to interpretation. But Marker’s commentaries guide us to
different understandings.
The power of the verbal in documentaries suggests that we should pay atten-
tion to word choice. This could fill a textbook in itself. For now, think of the differ-
ent connotations in the following terminology: illegal aliens and undocumented
workers; immigrants and settlers; emigrating and relocating; riots and uprisings;
mob and crowd; global warming and climate change. . . . The term “illegal aliens,”
for instance, implies that these people are not valuable members of society. Crim-
inals. The term “undocumented workers” implies that they are important to the
workforce, productive members of society who do not have the proper documen-
tation to enjoy all the fruits of our social order. Although two terms might turn up
in a thesaurus as interchangeable, different nuances can change what is implied.
Think of Toni Cade Bambara’s (and our) repeated use of the word “community”
and its connotations of communalism and kinship that words such as “popula-
tion” or “public” or “society” do not have.

Music

But it is not only speech that can anchor the meaning of polysemic images.
Michael Chanan writes insightfully about Santiago Álvarez’s 1966 film Cerro
Pelado (the name of the boat that brought Cuban athletes to the Central Ameri-
can and Caribbean Games in Puerto Rico). In the film, footage of a training camp
of counterrevolutionaries is accompanied by a band arrangement of Rossini’s
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“William Tell Overture,” familiar to Cuban and American audiences as the theme
music of the television series The Lone Ranger (1949–1957). By adding well-
known music from the western show, Álvarez presents the counterrevolutionaries
as “imitation cowboys.” The music, in this case, “both satiric and deflating,” offers
explicit commentary, like speech, conveying meaning to the images (197).
Most of the time, though, music is used in more subtle ways, as a means of
creating or enhancing a certain atmosphere—or as an aesthetic device aimed at
provoking a specific emotion. We are often aware of the way music helps set up
the mood for a scene in a fiction film but tend to overlook its importance as a re-
source for documentary makers. In addition to creating atmosphere, a particular
piece of music can be associated with a person or event. Or it may help designate
the feeling of a time period, an era. The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, for ex-
ample, uses a catchy 1942 swing tune sung by the Four Sergeants, both to bring to
mind the epoch and as a signature theme playing over the introduction of the five
participants and the title, reoccurring at a couple of points during the film, and
returning for the closing credits. As the theme, the song has become emblematic
of the film itself.
Film scholars commonly differentiate between diegetic and nondiegetic mu-
sic. (The word “diegesis” means narrative in Greek.) We call it diegetic when the
music is part of the world within the film, music that the people on the screen
can potentially hear. Nondiegetic music, by contrast, is added to the sound track
as a stylistic feature. While it has impact on the audience, it does not belong in
the world represented in the film. In documentaries, diegetic music is likely to be
related to the actual events and situations depicted, whereas nondiegetic music
tends to provide commentary, atmosphere, or information that is not contained
in the material documented. The music Chanan describes in Cerro Pelado is non-
diegetic. He suggests it has been grafted on to conjure up the associations he men-
tions. But a documentary’s music can also be the natural sound coming from the
world that appears in the film. There might be music playing on the jukebox while
someone is being interviewed in a bar, for example. Or, more widely, music or
performers are the subjects of documentaries.
We have already come upon this in Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s film
about Bob Dylan’s 1965 concert tour of the United Kingdom, and in Roman
Kroitor and Wolf Koenig’s film about Paul Anka, Lonely Boy. There are also con-
cert documentaries, such as Julian Schnabel’s multiple-camera film of Lou Reed’s
2006 performance of “Berlin” at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn (Berlin, 2007).
And there are documentaries about music: Mani Kaul’s Dhrupad (1982) on an
 sounds 255

ancient style of Hindustani classical music, for instance, or Tony Gatlif ’s Latcho
Drom (1993) on Romani music.
There is, as well, at least one documentary about a single song. Humphrey Jen-
nings’s The True Story of Lili Marlene (1944), a British Crown film unit wartime
documentary, parses the journey of “Lili Marlene,” a tune about a sentry and a girl
waiting under the lamplight. It documents the composition of the poem in 1923
Hamburg, its setting to music by Norbert Schultze in 1938, the song’s recording
by Lale Andersen, the record being played over Radio Belgrade in Nazi-occupied
Yugoslavia, its enormous popularity with soldiers in the North African desert,
and its eventual appropriation and transformation by British forces, who sent the
song back to Germany, the same tune with different lyrics (“Oh, could we only
meet once more / Our country free of shame and war . . .”).
“Lili Marlene” is the sole music on the sound track. The film includes many
different renditions of the song, such as an opera solo and a men’s chorus, culmi-
nating in a projection into the future with it being played with no words at all on
a player piano on the docks of London on a Saturday night, “when the blackout is
lifted.” The voiceover tells us that “the famous tune of ‘Lili Marlene’ will linger in
the hearts of the Eighth Army as a trophy of victory and memory of the last war,
to remind us all to sweep fascism off the face of the earth and make it really the last
war.” The final image is a tombstone for a warrior of unknown name and rank.
The True Story of Lili Marlene begins with an onscreen narrator explaining that
“Lili Marlene” is the name of a song and “a modern fairy story.” That voiceover
seems to generate the images: of soldiers marching, soldiers listening, soldiers
singing. . . . The music itself runs parallel to the images, with frequent points of
rhythmic coincidence, so that the sound track helps establish the pace of the film.
It is the melody, a fairly simple march-like rhythm that dominates the lyrics and
the film.
From the very beginning of documentary during the “silent” years, music, be-
sides drowning out the noise of the projector, was used to set emotional tones,
to establish a mood or affective associations. And this has continued with mu-
sic that is on the sound track, whether composed for the documentary or taken
from existing sources. This type of music plays a role different from what we have
in The True Story of Lili Marlene. Nondiegetic music, sometimes called “mood
music” or “background music,” is often less noticeable, more implicit. But it can
subtly aid in constructing a more specific social environment, contributing to the
argument and/or political concerns of the documentary. In Leni Riefenstahl’s
Olympia (1938), for instance, Herbert Windt’s score is influential in conveying
256 chapter ten

the political thrust of the film. The bulk of the documentary shows athletes per-
forming in competition. But before we see any of the Olympic games, there is a
striking sequence in which Riefenstahl introduces and prepares the audience for
her ennobling and worshipful view of physical excellence: the prologue to the
“Festival of Nations.”
The ritual of the Olympic torch relay was introduced in the 1936 games in Ber-
lin. Riefenstahl restaged it for the film, and it is German music that accompanies
the torch’s journey. This sequence begins with imagery from ancient Greece, ac-
cented by fog, clouds, chiaroscuro lighting, dramatic compositions, and acute
camera angles. The human form is introduced as Myron’s classical marble Disko-
bolos magically transforms into a silhouette of a live action discus thrower. Later
the Olympic torch is passed onward by graceful, lithe, well-muscled, and near-
naked runners from the archaeological site in Olympia to Bulgaria, Yugoslavia,
Hungary, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and then to Germany.
Throughout this sequence, however, we never hear sounds reminiscent of mu-
sic that might be found in any of these other countries, nothing that might sug-
gest, for instance, a local folk idiom. The score is firmly grounded in the sprawling
orchestral sounds of nineteenth-century German romanticism. In the beginning,
a deep and earthy string sound, performed by cello and bass, plays under images
of Greek ruins absent of human activity, evoking a long-buried tradition that will
now be awakened from an extended sleep. The camera mostly pans slowly, and
shots are connected by languid dissolves. The music too gives the impression of
slow, archaic movement. Audience members versed in Western classical music
can immediately recognize the strong influence of Richard Wagner, and perhaps
Anton Bruckner and Johannes Brahms, as the sequence progresses. Although
the film does not emphasize German athletes (indeed, it is the American track
star Jesse Owens who draws the most attention), the music heard with its broad
gestures, exalted emotions, and heavy orchestrations is in the German romantic
style, and, one might argue, by connecting all the countries in the torch’s journey,
puts forth the idea of a pan-Germanic Eastern Europe (anticipating the Third Re-
ich’s expansion into that territory in their quest for “Lebensraum”).
The lushly romantic music is an important part of Olympia’s rapturous idealiza-
tion of the grace, poise, and vigor of the athletic physique. The music in Werner
Herzog’s Lessons of Darkness, a film discussed in chapter 8, also contributes to
the veneration of its subject matter, in this case the landscape of postwar Kuwait.
But here the filmmaker has chosen existing music—selections from the works
of Edvard Grieg, Gustav Mahler, Arvo Pärt, Sergei Prokofiev, Franz Schubert,
 sounds 257

Giuseppe Verdi, and Richard Wagner—and matched it to the atmosphere of

stateliness and horror he is trying to evoke with his cinematography and voice-
over narration.
A closer consideration of the film’s opening illustrates how Herzog creates this
synchronicity. As the brief credits run, Lessons of Darkness begins with a deep,
attenuated bass tone, then a tone one-fifth higher joins the first, slowly repeating
itself. These are the only sounds heard as the credits end and the disquieting pre-
diction about the collapse of the universe appears. The tones continue as the nar-
rator (Herzog himself in the English-language version), slowly and with little feel-
ing, practically incants, “A planet in our solar system . . .” and we see a static shot of
what looks like an otherworldly set of modern smokestacks or alien landing pads
against an orange background. Then, as the image changes, we hear individual
instruments (bass, wind, and brass) begin to fix the contours of the sounding ma-
jor chord. These tones are repeated slowly, gracefully, neither deviating nor in-
troducing any note that might alter the
pure harmonic structure of that chord.
There are no dissonances to be heard,
no passing tones, only the repetitive
description of this one open-sounding
chord that allows nothing but its own
perfection. Before long we have a new
image, the view being described by the
voiceover narration: “white mountain
ranges, clouds, the land shrouded in 10.4. Deep, elongated tones of wind and brass over an image of
mist.” Accommodating the expanse of “alien landing pads.” From Lessons of Darkness/Lektionen in Finster-
wide vistas and majestic topography, the nis (Werner Herzog, 1992).
camera here is distanced while panning
to the right, taking in the grandeur of a mountainous landscape, and the extended
string and brass notes in the music emphasize the imposing nature of what the
camera is capturing. The camera pan is deliberate and unhurried, as is the music,
and both image and sound seem to urge us to look and react without haste, and
also perhaps to honor what we are seeing. Shortly, there is a cut to a man in a fire-
proof suit, silhouetted in front of a structure that is not immediately identifiable,
backlit by what seems to be smoke, not mist. As the camera pans left, we eventu-
ally realize that the background is a rampant inferno. The man signals, stamps, and
gestures at the camera as the music continues and the narrator informs us that
“the first creature we encountered tried to communicate something to us.” The
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music drowns out the noise of the fire and any sounds the “creature” may have
been making, in a sense, muting the image. Already by the third shot, the viewer
begins to feel the dislocation associated with postwar trauma. We are given little
opportunity to orient ourselves in this cryptic and shadowy environment.
Soon we are seeing an unidentified “Capital City” from an aerial view as the
aircraft from which the footage was taken moves forward, and the voice on the
sound track tells us of the war that this city would soon undergo. Nothing in im-
age or sound readily lets us know which city this is or where it is (it is actually
Kuwait City, but it is possible to see the entire film without knowing this), and
our dislocation increases. As the camera continues to track the city from above,
moving steadily over the expanse of urban life, we hear a piece of what might be
described as music of mourning, a simple, sad, insistent tune, sumptuously but
quietly and simply orchestrated for strings. It seems to stretch out in our ears, as
the city stretches out before our eyes, and again the feeling that seems intended is
one of leisurely, perhaps elegiac, contemplation, observation, and remembrance.
The music continues as we begin to watch low definition black-and-white archival
footage of an air attack and an emergency warning siren abrasively sounds. This
sequence ends in the middle of a musical phrase, almost a sonic question mark.
The voiceover commentary is sparse. Throughout the film, there is barely any dia-
logue, and little ambient sound that is anything other than loud, crushing noise.
Herzog lets the music carry the emotion.
Time and again in Lessons of Darkness, the music selected and excerpted con-
tributes to a sense of disconnection, in large part because much of it insists on
its own aural beauty while we are looking at exquisitely composed and austerely
photographed images of devastation. We see parched land, oil-drenched terrain,
dead vegetation, burning oil fields, scorched buildings, fields of bones, all to the
accompaniment of precise, deliberate, grand, and lugubrious music. Herzog
gives us the ideals of beauty, grandiosity, and excellence to listen to, and ugliness,
destruction, and death to see. In addition to selecting acknowledged Western
masterworks for his sound track, he excerpts pieces that are either explicitly sa-
cred in nature, such as Verdi’s Requiem, Mahler’s Resurrection, and Pärt’s Stabat
Mater, or are taken from work where the mythological, supernatural, or godlike
is part of the composer’s chosen subject, such as the orchestral selections from
Wagner’s operas Das Rheingold, Götterdämmerung, and Parsifal. From Das Rhein-
gold, we hear the music of the gods’ triumphant entrance into Valhalla as we view
a burnt landscape that will likely never again support life. The Götterdämmerung
excerpt, which in the opera signifies the oncoming of either a terrible vengeance
or the just retribution of a former goddess against ultimate evil, is heard here over
 sounds 259

images of flames, smoke, manmade disaster, chaos, and darkness. Herzog has ef-
fectively created his own post-apocalyptic science fiction film by associating un-
identified images from the trauma of what is now referred to as the First Gulf War
and its aftermath with European classical compositions that at least some of his
viewers will knowingly link to preexisting ideas of war and peace, good and evil,
mythology and religiosity, and creation and destruction. Together they create
what Herzog has called “an epic, ecstatic truth,” which he contrasts with “accoun-
tants’ truth,” the fifteen-second clips of fires in Kuwait seen hundreds of times on
television news (Basoli 35).
Whereas much of the visual material in Olympia and Lessons of Darkness are cut
to the rhythm of the music, in Rembrandt, Painter of Mankind/Rembrandt, Schil-
der van de Mens (Bert Haanstra, 1957) music often provides continuity, easing
changes of images by bridging transitions. The film consists entirely of images of
Rembrandt’s paintings, primarily portraits and groups of figures. It is structured
by a linear chronology. A voiceover tells us about his life and his artistic vision.
The music smoothes over transitions to reinforce chronology; it continues as the
images change, even when the voice stops. It starts up again after a fade, awaiting
the next image and the next segment of Rembrandt’s story.
The score for Rembrandt, Painter of Mankind, composed especially for the film
by Jan Mul, strongly supports and enhances the images. Firmly entrenched in
Western classical tradition, although not at all in the style of Rembrandt’s time,
the score is identifiable as generically “Western,” “classical,” and “cultured” music.
We have seen in Africa, I Will Fleece You and The Life and Times of Rosie the Riv-
eter how music can be used to designate an era. Here, however, the music befits
a reverent film about the paintings of one of the world’s most famous exponents
of Western culture, a figure who has transcended his time. And in keeping with a
more focused and intimate view of one person, the score is written for a chamber
ensemble, employing a smaller group of instruments and leaner sound than Olym-
pia’s symphony orchestra. In Rembrandt, Painter of Mankind, it is possible to pick
out the individual instruments in possession of a melodic fragment, and listeners
can discern them when heard in the group. We can also track the use of motifs, a
musical trope long embedded in Western classical music. For example, we hear the
combination of harp and flute whenever the voiceover refers to Rembrandt’s wife.
This instrumental combination also appears at points when the narrator is telling
about religious subjects in Rembrandt’s painting, thereby equating marital love
and religious devotion with the same open, airy and somewhat reverential sound.
In Lessons of Darkness, music frequently replaced the natural sound, render-
ing the images “silent.” In Rembrandt, Painter of Mankind the music provides the
260 chapter ten

sounds for the naturally silent images. When we see the painting of the marching
company of burghers, The Night Watch, for example, we hear twenty seconds of
a military march, a rolling drum that keeps precision time with a piping piccolo.
The music mimics the painting’s imagined action, bringing the burghers and the
drummer in the foreground to life.
The music also facilitates transitions by anticipating changes. Upon the an-
nouncement of Rembrandt’s marriage to Saskia, the voiceover says, “They marry.
He is successful! [Now louder and quite excited] Life is gay!” The flutes take a
more prominent role, sounding florid arpeggios, continuing after the voice stops,
as a brass fanfare joins in. After Saskia dies, even before the voiceover tells us
that Rembrandt and his son Titus were not alone for long, the music predicts
the happy news of a new wife by reintroducing the harp and flute combination,
now with an added cello, in a three-quarter meter with an accelerated tempo.
Like the other background music we have been considering, the use of music—
harmonies, melodies, rhythm, orchestration, and construction—is both thematic
and formal.
In F for Fake/Vérités et mensonges (Orson Welles, 1974), music takes a more
aggressive role, contributing to the trickery of the documentary. The score, by
Michel Legrand, is playful, at times deliberately commanding our attention when
a phrase or musical quote is inserted to purposefully attract the ear (a recurring
violin at “dramatic” moments in the story being told); at other times enhancing
a mood already implied by images and/or narration (a jazzy waltz pattern with
vibes first heard during a “girl-watching” sequence); and still at other times, being
used as one of the many tricks that are in the arsenal of the filmmaker—and are
part of the subject of the documentary.
The film begins with Orson Welles’s easily recognizable voice over black leader,
then over an image of a train in a European station. (In contrast to filmmaker Her-
zog’s flatly spoken commentary, Welles’s presentation is self-consciously theatri-
cal.) His image finally appears, mid-body in flowing black cape and white gloves;
he calls a small child “sir,” suggests he hold a key ten feet over his head, and warns
the boy to watch out for the slightest hint of hanky-panky. We see a shot of a film
crew in the station. But we cannot see what they are shooting. There is a cut to a
woman in furs in the train window watching. But we do not know who she is. “Be-
fore our very eyes,” a key is transformed into a coin. Finally the camera tilts up and
we see Orson Welles’s face, trim gray beard, and huge black hat. And the little boy
finds his key back in his pocket. Welles boasts of being “a charlatan.” But he insists
that the key was not symbolic of anything. “This isn’t that kind of movie.”
What kind of movie is it? The ostensible subject is the art forger Elmyr de Hory,
 sounds 261

who, over many years, painted in the styles of several well-known artists and suc-
cessfully passed off his work as original to dealers, connoisseurs, and world-class
art museums. We get the story of de Hory and his forgeries as well as the story
of his eventual exposure and celebrity in the book Fake! by another figure, who
later turned out to be a different sort of forger, Clifford Irving. But the film itself
is also in the business of perpetrating some conscious tricks of its own. “Plot-
lines” aren’t always relayed sequentially; new narratives appear at points in the
film where the already present ones have not yet been resolved; frames freeze in
mid-action; editing constructs time and space that may not be real; and the music
confuses viewers about its purpose and source. These elements of trickery, like a
pack of cards, are frequently shuffled and redealt in different configurations and
it’s very possible that, in this particular deck, the cards may be stacked. The film
employs a battery of techniques to seduce the viewer into its story (or stories):
quick cutting, shattered chronology, visual chaos, the truncation and redirection
of narrative threads, and aural confusion.
That beginning is a few minutes of hocus-pocus. Welles performs magic tricks
for the small boy, who is trying to follow his motions. But, unlike the child, the
film spectators know that that magic can be performed with a simple edit. And
the camera is so close to some of the tricks that there is no hiding where the coins
come from. The boy and the audience are presented to Welles’s “partner” Fran-
çois Reichenbach, who peers out from behind the camera and chirps, “Hello.”
(Reichenbach, who was the co-producer of this film, but not credited with cam-
erawork, shot earlier footage for a documentary about de Hory, much of which
was incorporated by Welles into F for Fake.) On the sound track we hear what we
might call “tune-up” music, suggesting a sort of pre-performance period, the dis-
ordered sounds a group of musicians makes before a conductor appears to unite
them into a single orchestral entity. And this is appropriate, because this sequence
is actually a prelude to the body of the film. The filmmaker tells us that some sort
of possible reality-bending is either going to be explored or exploited in this film:
“Now it’s time for an introduction. . . . this is a film about trickery—and fraud—
about [dramatic pause] lies. . . . Almost any story is almost certainly some kind
of lie. But not this time. No; this is a promise. During the next hour, everything
you hear from us is really true and based on solid facts.” This statement contains
not only the filmmaker’s proclamation of the subject of F for Fake but also a dec-
laration of a commitment to both veracity and the aforementioned trickery. The
running time of the film, however, is eighty-five minutes, not an hour. Are the last
twenty-some minutes “really true”? Based on available facts? “Fake! Fake! Fake!”
fills the screen while cascading violin music carries us away.
262 chapter ten

F for Fake plays tricks on the audience, both as an entertainment device and to
enhance its observations on the moral ironies of illusionism, inducing us to think
further about the subject. One of the tricks is the music itself. It is not always ap-
parent whether the music is diegetic or nondiegetic, and this vagary contributes
to the teasing nature in which the narrative unfolds. An example is a fragment of
music, a violin played at breakneck speed, used several times in the film, first ap-
pearing as the “Fake! Fake! Fake!” covers the screen, just before Elmyr de Hory
is introduced. The notes are many and quick. There is a rather jovial quality to
the melody line, enhanced by the speed of the phrasing, but also an uncomfort-
able, grating, aural quality as the bow scrapes against two or more of the violin’s
strings, creating dissonance, like nails on a blackboard. It is highly kinetic music,
and it matches in tone much of the similarly kinetic feel of the film’s editing. It is
heard at various moments in the film, usually when some aspect of a “character’s”
narration, or the film’s narrative, may be questionable, or when a “character” in
the film is straightforwardly espousing general or specific thoughts on the nature
of forgery, authenticity, revelation or concealment, the music reminding us that
some form of deception may be in play. One example of this is when Welles, com-
menting on the sound track, says that “Elmyr himself is a fake faker”; the fiddling
reappears and jumps into action, and this time the split-second speed and tempo
are coupled with a short sequence of fast-motion that depicts “the true Paganini
of the palette” creating a painting. The shakes and screeches created by the music
correspond with the rapid movements of Elmyr’s brushwork.
Part of the deceptive feeling of the music is that we can’t immediately tell if
the “characters” in the film hear it or not. Pieces of filmed interviews with vari-
ous subjects are sometimes quickly cut together as the music continues over the
shots, or over freeze frames, giving the impression that this music was added to
the sound track after the film was edited. But at other moments, some of these
cuts seem to take place in a space (perhaps de Hory’s home?) with many people
present, drinking and laughing, as if at a party where music is playing in the back-
ground. In these sequences, it is possible to conclude that the music originates
from within the film space.
Welles’s film confounds the notion that trustworthy information can be gleaned
from a documentary. And in doing so, the film explores many of the questions
that have occupied us throughout the book, questions about authenticity, au-
thority, evidence, ethics, and the creative tools that documentary film and video
makers use to reshape reality into something worthy of notice. The story of a few
fakers is wrought into an amusingly jaded, and wry, meditation about art and forg-
ery, the factual and the confabulated, aesthetic value and commerce, sleight of
 sounds 263

hand, expertise, and the alternately revealing or concealing ways in which cine-
matic stories are told, including the apparently “true” stories we expect to find in
documentaries.
F for Fake is consistent with the contract it sets up with its audience in the
first few minutes of the film. The sounds and images in this film, and, indeed,
the sounds and images in most documentaries, are attempts to impose order on
the discontinuity and otherness of the sociohistorical world. But the order Welles
imposes is clearly not meant to provide easy answers or reassuring affirmations,
as much as to provoke new disquieting questions. Whether they are extensively
researched and lavishly photographed and scored historical epics, such as Ken
Burns’s documentaries, or more intimate and personal ruminations, such as F for
Fake, these creative treatments of actuality, to evoke Grierson once again, take
complex ideas and express them in visual and aural form, fashioning the docu-
mentary’s reality and crafting its truths.

Additional Filmography
The Song of Ceylon (Basil Wright, 1934)
A Stravinsky Portrait (Richard Leacock, 1966)
Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970)
Gotta Make This Journey: Sweet Honey in the Rock (Michelle Parkinson, 1985)
Buena Vista Social Club (Wim Wenders, 1999)
Crossing the Bridge: The Sounds of Istanbul/İstanbul Hatırası (Fatih Akin, 2005)
Shine a Light (Martin Scorsese, 2008)

Works Cited and Further Reading

Anthony, Scott. Night Mail: BFI Film Classics. London: British Film Institute,
2007.
Barthes, Roland. “Rhetoric of the Image.” In Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans.
Stephen Heath. New York: Hill and Wang, 1977.
Basoli, A. G. “The Wrath of Klaus Kinski: An Interview with Werner Herzog.”
Cineaste 33 (1999).
Bruzzi, Stella. New Documentary. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge, 2006.
Bukatman, Scott, “Incompletion, Simulation and the Refusal of the Real: The
Last Films of Orson Welles.” Persistence of Vision 7 (1989).
Cavalcanti, Alberto. “Sound in Film.” Films: A Quarterly of Discussion and Analy-
sis 1.1 (November 1939).
Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. London: British Film Institute,
2007.
264 chapter ten

Corner, John. “Sounds Real: Music and Documentary.” In New Challenges for
Documentary, 2nd ed., ed. Alan Rosenthal and John Corner. Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2005.
Doane, Mary Ann. “The Voice in the Cinema: Articulation of the Body and the
Space.” Yale French Studies 60 (1980).
Gaines, Jane M. “Lonely Boy and the Vérité of Sexuality.” Canadian Journal of Film
Studies 8.1 (Spring 1999).
hooks, bell. “Talking Back.” Discourse 8 (Fall/Winter 1986/87).
Leacock, Richard. “The Deep Well: Richard Leacock, Interviewed by Louis
Marcorelles.” Contrast 3 (Autumn 1964).
Muñoz, José, “The Autoethnographic Performance: Reading Richard Fung’s
Queer Hybridity.” Screen 36.2 (Summer 1995).
Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real II: Documentary: Grierson and Beyond. Lon-
don: British Film Institute; New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008.
 Index

4 Little Girls (Spike Lee, 1997), 162, 176, 183, African Americans, 43, 70–71, 75, 131, 144,
247 146, 231
10 on Ten (Abbas Kiarostami, 2004), 208 Afro-Caribbean, 49
11th Hour, The (Leila Conners Petersen and Agence TOPO, 155, 247
Nadia Conners, 2007), 224 Agent Orange, 178
16mm. See camerawork Agrelo, Marilyn, 137
35mm. See camerawork Ahidjo, Ahmadou, 246
AIDS, 17–18, 20, 23, 70–71, 106, 208
ABC Africa (Abbas Kiarostami, 2001), 7, 208 A.K.A. Don Bonus (Spencer Nakasako and
ABC Television, 144 Sokly Ny, 1995), 102–103
Abu Dhabi Television, 37 Akerman, Chantal, 162, 166, 221–223, 249
Academy Awards, 100 Akomfrah, John, 45, 48, 174
actors, 56, 72, 89, 145–146; “social actors,” Alexander, William, 127
226, 232 Aljafari, Kamal, 193, 205, 206
actuality, 2, 6–7, 11, 23, 30, 37, 60, 70, 72, All the Memory in the World/Toute la mémoire
147, 150, 168, 187, 202, 207, 210, 214, 219, du monde (Alain Resnais, 1956), 192
223, 263 Álvarez, Santiago, 181–182, 253–254
Adams, Randall, 52–53 ambient sound. See sound
aesthetic conventions. See conventions American Ballet Theater, 70
aesthetics, 3, 5, 69, 94–95, 205, 208, 210, American Civil War, 61
214; avant-garde, 54; documentary, 3, American culture. See culture
193, 217; experimental, 149–150; visual, American Family, An (National Educational
203, 214 Television, 1973), 92
Africa, I Will Fleece You/Afrique, je te plumerai American history. See history
( Jean-Marie Teno, 1992), 245–247, 259 American Revolutionary War, 215
266 Index

Andersen, Lale, 255 Avenge But One of My Two Eyes/Nekam

Andersen, Thom, 181 achat mishtey eynay (Avi Mograbi, 2005),
animation, 102, 209–210, 217 130–133
Anka, Paul, 242–243, 254
Another Road Home (Danae Elon, 2004), background music. See music
137, 173–174, 250 Badariotti Merlo, Santiago, 226
Anstey, Edgar, 188 Baez, Joan, 183
antagonists, 141, 145 Baghdad, Iraq, 37, 175
anthropologie partagée. See anthropology, Bagwan, Fermina, 29
shared Bambara, Toni Cade, 250–253
anthropology, 98; shared, 90 Bärtås, Magnus, 155, 247
Arab-Israeli war, 205 Barthes, Roland, 11, 14, 103, 253
archival footage, 25, 29, 40–42, 44, 49–50, Batista, Fulgencio, 106
85, 118, 175–176, 181, 210, 245, 251, 258 Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas,
archival images. See archival footage 2005), 7
archival photographs. See photographs Battle of Algiers, The (Gillo Pontecorvo,
Arévalo, Roberto, 78 1966), 32, 193
argumentation, 120, 147 Bazin, André, 15
Aristotle, 38, 113, 120–121, 124, 131 Beck, Chad, 175
Arslanköy, Turkey, 64 Berger, John, 11
Arthur, Paul, 67, 234 Berlin, 1, 148; 1936 Olympic Games, 191,
artifice, 6, 32, 139, 197, 209, 218–219, 225 256
artificial lighting. See lighting Berlin ( Julian Schnabel, 2007), 254
Auden, W. H., 240, 250 Berlin, Symphony of a Great City/Berlin, die
Aufderheide, Patricia, 79 Sinfonie der Grosstadt (Walther Ruttmann,
Auschwitz, 194 1927), 147–149, 202
authenticity, 3–4, 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 23, 29, Berliner, Alan, 179–180, 182–183, 245
31–33, 48–49, 71, 99, 188, 214, 223, 232, Berliner, Oscar, 245
262 Bernard, Sheila Curran, 162
authentic representation. See representation Bird, Elizabeth, 98
author, 69–73; authorial intervention, 69, Birmingham, Alabama, 176, 183–184
180, 191; authorial voice, 61, 70–71. See Bittner, Mark, 137
also presence; style Biya, Paul, 246
authority, 3, 4–5, 28, 56, 59–67, 80, 87, 90, Black Audio Film Collective, 48
100, 103, 131, 175, 187, 195, 232–234, black leader, 15, 42, 46, 99, 152, 260
236, 241, 247–248, 262; and authorship, Black Planet Productions, 39
69–73, 101; civil, 27; evidential, 51, 55; Black Power, 43
figures of, 28; godlike, 87; ontological, 12; black-and-white cinematography, 28,
and representation, 92–94, 98; shared, 182–183, 187, 224, 234, 246, 258. See also
73–77, 101–102; suspicion of, 67–68 camerawork
autobiography, 24–25, 54, 71–72, 74–75, Blair Witch Project, The (Daniel Myrick and
102, 199–200, 221; autobiographical Eduardo Sánchez, 1999), 3
discourse, 7 Blitz, Jeffrey, 137
available light. See lighting Blum, John Morton, 118
avant-garde, 202; avant-garde film move- blurred focus. See “messy” style
ments, 149 Bomba, Abraham, 83–85, 103
 Index 267

Bombing of Osage Avenue, The (Louis Mas- 188, 192, 198; framing, 39, 45, 47, 102,
siah, 1987), 8, 250, 252 188–192, 200, 205, 207; high angle shot,
Bontoc Eulogy (Marlon Fuentes, 1995), 29 60, 190–192, 196, 205; long take, 7, 32,
Boomerang (Elia Kazan, 1947), 32 249; low angle shot, 191, 199–200, 245;
Bordwell, David, 149, 166, 168, 204, 219 pan, 28, 99, 192, 196, 203, 245, 256, 257;
Born into Brothels (Ross Kauffman and Zana point-of-view shot, 49, 167, 173, 191, 197,
Briski, 2004), 187–188 202–205; static shot, 6, 12, 24, 119, 183,
Bottomore, Stephen, 163 193, 200, 207, 257; tilt, 192, 198, 203,
Bowling for Columbine (Michael Moore, 260; tracking shot, 40, 117, 145, 192, 193,
2002), 59–60, 123, 124 196, 199, 201, 207; traveling shot, 49,
Braddock, Pennsylvania, 235, 248 183, 193, 194, 207, 242; tripod, 28, 30,
Brahms, Johannes, 256 32; zoom, 28, 84, 193–194. See also black
Bridgewater, Massachusetts, 68 leader; black-and-white cinematography;
Briski, Zana, 187 color cinematography; scale
British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 27 Canticle of the Stones (Michel Khleifi, 1990),
British Crown film unit, 255 7
Britishness, 50 Capra, Frank, 114–115, 116, 118–119, 121
Britten, Benjamin, 240 Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki,
Broomfield, Nick, 234 2003), 66
Brouwer, Leo, 182 Carelli, Vincent, 79
Brown, Jim, 38 Carlomusto, Jean, 105
Brown Simpson, Nicole, 22 Carmichael, Stokely, 182
Bruckner, Anton, 256 Carroll, Noël, 28, 170
Bruner, Jerome, 5 Carson, Kit, 30–31
Bruzzi, Stella, 2, 73, 234, 248 Cavalcanti, Alberto, 239, 242, 250
Buba, Tony, 235–236, 248 Cayrol, Jean, 40
Bus 174/Ônibus 174 ( José Padilha, 2002), CBS News, 41, 88
137–138 CBS Reports (TV series), 86
Bush, George W., 175 celebrity, 88, 92, 235–236, 261
cell phones, 80, 106
Cadenhead, Julie Par, 104 Central Park, New York City, 70
Calcutta, India, 187 Centro de Trabalho Indigenista, 79
Calder-Marshall, Arthur, 140 Cerro Pelado (Santiago Álvarez, 1966),
camera: digital, 31, 78, 80, 208–209; hand- 253–254
held, 18, 28, 32, 178, 193, 196–198, 246; CGI. See computer-generated images
hidden, 85; lightweight, 30, 194, 196, Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle, 77
215, 242; reflex, 244; surveillance, 38, 41; Chalmers, Thomas, 126–127
video, 78–79. See also recording apparatus Chanan, Michael, 204, 235, 253–254
camera angle. See camerawork Chang Yung, 220
camera movement. See camerawork Charcot, Jean-Martin, 39, 55
camerawork, 187–210; 16mm, 30, 182, Cheney, Dick, 175
242; 35mm, 208, 242; camera angle, 6, chiaroscuro lighting. See lighting
190–191, 197, 256; camera movement, Chopra, Joyce, 93, 95, 250
28, 177, 192–194, 200, 202, 206, 209, Chronicle of a Summer/Chronique d’un été
243; depth of field, 229; dolly, 192; ( Jean Rouch, 1961), 89–91, 98, 102, 225
eye-level shots, 192; focus, 28, 76, 99, chronophotographe, 12
268 Index

Churchill, Joan, 92 construction, 2, 4–6, 147; of cinematic space

cinematic conventions. See conventions and time, 168; of identity, 95; of mean-
Cinématographe, 1 ing, 71; musical, 260; of the Other, 97; of
cinematography. See camerawork reality, 2
cinéma vérité, 89, 208 continuity, 99, 127, 165–169, 172, 259; of
Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), 7 time and space, 164–165, 172, 179–180,
civil authority. See authority 191
Clarke, Shirley, 15, 231–232 continuity editing. See editing
class difference. See social difference continuity of space. See continuity
Clifford, Clark, 177 continuity of time. See continuity
Clifford, James, 97, 131 contract, 24–25
Cloquet, Ghislain, 192 contrast. See lighting
close shot. See scale Control Room ( Jehane Noujaim, 2004),
closing credits, 25, 78, 254 36–38, 40
clutter. See “messy” style controlled lighting. See lighting
Cobbs Creek, Pennsylvania, 250–251 conventions, 70, 234; aesthetic, 150;
Cochran, Johnnie, 22 cinematic, 33; documentary, 16, 23, 25,
coherence, 5, 44, 60; narrative, 165; tempo- 30–32, 214–215, 234; dramatic, 135,
ral, 172 137–138; narrative, 138, 142, 146–147,
collaboration, 213. See also authority: shared 156; nonfiction, 7, 32, 233; theatrical
collective experience. See experience writing, 64
collective history. See history Corbett, Elizabeth, 104
color cinematography, 40–41, 183, 245–246. Corner, John, 3, 214
See also camerawork counter-representation. See representation
Comella, Rosemary, 155 Coutinho, Eduardo, 229–230
commentary, 40–41, 60, 71, 87, 116, 204, creative agent, 68
252–254, 260; first-person, 100; “voice- “creative treatment of actuality,” 2, 6, 214, 263
of-God,” 73; voiceover, 17–18, 24–25, credibility, 3, 38, 40, 43, 49, 51, 53, 60, 61,
32, 40–42, 65, 75, 95, 99, 101, 117, 119, 63, 67, 69, 72, 119, 124, 150, 214, 219, 223,
126–128, 132, 144–146, 156, 170, 175, 229, 230, 231
177, 180, 183, 201, 239, 242, 244–250, Crisis: Behind a Presidential Commitment
258. See also narrator (Drew Associates, 1963), 144, 146, 172,
commentator, 26, 59, 101, 116, 124. See also 195, 242
narrator Cuba, 26, 32, 106, 181, 253–254
commercials, 60, 120, 123 Cultivating Pasadena: From Roses to Redevel-
Comolli, Jean-Louis, 26 opment (Rosemary Comella, 2005), 155
compilation film, 118, 181 cultural diversity, 50
computer-generated images (CGI), 16, 40, cultural status, 63
210. See also digital imaging culture, 3, 49–50, 78–79, 95, 97–98, 103,
computer mediation of images (CMI), 210 125, 150, 230; American, 23; Inuit, 140;
Comte, Charles, 12 popular, 54; “primitive,” 79; Western, 250
concentration camps, 40–41, 46–47, 83–85, cutaways. See editing
90, 130, 194 cutting. See editing
Conners, Nadia, 224
Conners Petersen, Leila, 224 Dachau, 47
constructedness, 51, 54, 105, 143 Dassin, Jules, 32
 Index 269

database documentaries. See documentary 205, 234, 243; poetic, 135, 147–149,
David Holzman’s Diary ( Jim McBride, 1968), 151–154; postmodern, 98; reflexive,
30–31, 53–54 51–55, 61, 66, 233, 235–236, 247
Davis, Peter, 122, 176, 178 documentary aesthetics. See aesthetics
Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1964), 16–17, documentary conventions. See conventions
101 documentary discourse, 32
De Antonio, Emile, 41, 163 documentary essays. See documentary
Death of Mr. Lazarescu, The/Moartea domnu- documentary representation. See
lui Lăzărescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005), 17, 32 representation
décor. See settings documentary subject. See subject
Defense Intelligence Agency, 175 docusoaps, 7
de Hory, Elmyr, 260–262 dolly. See camerawork
Delirium (Mindy Faber, 1993), 26, 45, Don’t Look Back (D. A. Pennebaker, 1967),
54–56, 189, 190, 204–205, 208, 247 226, 228, 228, 234, 254
Demirci, Ömer, 244 Dragnet (TV series, 1952–1959), 32
Demolition of a Wall, The/Démolition d’un drama, 139–144; discovered drama, 139, 143
mur (Lumière brothers, 1895), 136 dramatic construction. See construction
Depression. See Great Depression dramatic conventions. See conventions
depth of field. See camerawork dramatic narrative. See narrative
descriptive: mode, 18; commentary, 247 Drew, Robert, 143, 198
Dhrupad (Mani Kaul, 1982), 254 Drew Associates, 144, 191, 196, 242
dialogue. See sound Dutch East Indies, 181
Diamond, Hugh Welch, 39 Dutta, Kavery, 50
diary, 7, 17, 20, 210
Diary Film—I was 12 in ’56/Naplófilm—12 Edison Manufacturing Company, 12–13, 163
voltam 56’-ban (Boglárka Edvy and Sán- editing, 161–184; continuity, 165–168;
dor Silló, 2006), 210 cut, 15, 53, 68, 87, 152–153, 162, 164,
diegesis, 254 166–171, 175–184 passim, 192, 194,
diegetic music. See music 198–199, 205, 242, 244, 257–262 passim;
Dieleke, Edgardo, 91, 227 cutaway, 169–170, 175; dissolve, 167, 172,
digital camera. See camera 183, 256; establishing shot, 165, 167, 160;
digital composites. See digital imaging eye-line match, 167; fade, 167, 246, 259;
digital imaging, 16, 106, 183. See also fast cutting, 184; intercut, 68, 138, 166,
computer-generated images 182, 215; graphic editing, 170–171, 183;
direct cinema, 30, 67–68, 143–144, 195–196, graphic match, 149; montage, 181–184;
198, 208, 214, 226 montage sequence, 115, 117; overlap, 172;
discovered drama. See drama reestablishing shot, 165; reverse shot,
disembodied voice. See voice 165–166, 182; rhythmic editing, 71, 170,
dissolves. See editing 175; split screens, 175, 183
diversity, cultural, 50 Edvy, Boglárka, 210
Do the Right Thing (Spike Lee, 1989), 22 Eitzen, Dirk, 2, 4, 21, 33
Doctors, Liars, and Women: AIDS Activists Say Elon, Amos, 173
No to Cosmo ( Jean Carlomusto and Maria Elon, Danae, 137, 173–174, 250
Maggenti, 1988), 105–106 Elton, Arthur, 188
documentary: database, 154–157; essay, enacted scene, 27, 131, 210
149–154; observational, 75, 92, 194–198, enacted self, 72, 234
270 Index

enacted sequence, 26 fabrication, 7, 31, 105, 210

End and the Beginning, The/O fim e o princípio fact, 5, 21–23, 27, 37, 42–45, 87, 99, 103,
(Eduardo Coutinho, 2005), 229–230 122–123, 155–156, 217, 261–262
end credits. See closing credits factual truth. See truth
Epstein, Robert, 248 fade. See editing
Esmer, Pelin, 64 fairness, 89
essay documentaries. See documentary Fall of the Romanov Dynasty, The/Padenie
establishing shot. See editing dinastii Romanovykh (Esfir Shub, 1927),
ethical representation. See representation 181
ethnic difference. See social difference falsification, 29
ethnographer. See ethnography Family Album, The (Alan Berliner, 1986), 182
ethnographic film. See ethnography family photographs. See photographs
ethnographic images. See ethnography Far from Poland ( Jill Godmilow, 1984),
ethnographic research. See ethnography 216–219, 226
ethnography, 98–101, 153; ethnographer, 12, Farina, Richard, 183
78, 98; ethnographic film, 16, 31, 98, 101, Farm Security Administration, 125
149–150, 153; ethnographic images, 79; fast cutting. See editing
ethnographic research, 98; experimental, Feld, Irvin, 243
150 feminism, 74, 94
Euripides, 218 feminist film, 93, 95
evidence, 4–5, 21–22, 29, 36–56, 60, 62–63, Ferguson, Charles, 175
72, 84, 87, 120, 125, 162, 177–178, 190, F for Fake/Vérités et mensonges (Orson
215, 233, 241, 262 Welles, 1974), 260–263
evidential authority. See authority fictional material, 55
experience, 16, 19–20, 31–32, 36, 42–45, fictional narrative. See narrative
49–54 passim, 65–67 passim, 71, 77, fictional representation. See representation
83–84, 93–100 passim, 104–105, 113–115, fiction film, 2, 7, 13, 17, 28–32 passim, 60, 73,
121–123, 140, 179–180, 196–197, 207, 115, 138–143, 164–166, 169, 184, 189, 191,
209–210, 217, 222–226 passim, 234, 249, 220, 224, 248, 254
253; collective, 7, 54; viewing, 4, 6, 8, 15, Field, Connie, 42–47 passim, 105, 122, 169,
17, 26, 42, 86, 147–148, 154–157, 165, 229
172, 191, 205, 241 Fierstein, Harvey, 248
expert interviews. See interviews figures of authority. See authority
expert testimony. See testimony filmic essay, 150, 154
extreme close-up. See scale filmmaking apparatus. See recording
Extreme Private Eros: Love Song 1974/ apparatus
Gokushiteki erosu: Renka 1974 (Kazuo filmmaking process, 21, 46–47, 52–54, 67,
Hara, 1974), 74–77, 232 73, 90–91, 140, 147, 169, 216, 241
eye-level shot. See camerawork firsthand testimony. See testimony
eye-line match. See editing first-person: approach, 20; camera, 28; com-
Eyes on the Prize (Henry Hampton, 1987– mentary, 100; reflections, 29; speaking,
1990), 22 55; voiceover, 99, 250
flash-forward, 68, 179
Faber, Mindy, 26, 45, 54–56, 189, 190, flat lighting. See lighting
247–248 Flint, Michigan, 72–73, 233
Faber, Patricia Jane, 190 “fly on the wall,” 67
 Index 271

focus. See camerawork Haanstra, Bert, 259

Folman, Ari, 209–210, 217 Halving the Bones (Ruth Ozeki Lounsbury,
Forrest Gump (Robert Zemeckis, 1994), 1995), 24–25, 179, 232–233
15–16 Hampton, Henry, 22
Foucault, Michel, 86 handheld camera. See camera
found footage, 182 Handsworth Songs ( John Akomfrah, 1986),
Four Sergeants (singing group), 254 45, 48–50, 56, 70, 174
framing. See camerawork Hanes, Arthur Jr., 176
freeze frame, 20, 168, 203, 262 Hara, Kazuo, 74–77
Freud, Sigmund, 56 Harris, David, 52–53
Friedman, Arnold, 66 Harvest of Shame (CBS Reports, 1960),
Friedman, Jesse, 66 86–90, 124, 167–169
Friedman, Peter, 17, 19, 20 Hearts and Minds (Peter Davis, 1974), 122,
Friedrich, Su, 45–47 172, 176–179
Frisch, Michael, 44 Herring, Eddie, 251
Frota, Monica, 78, 80 Heston, Charlton, 123, 124
Fuentes, Marlon, 29, 31 hidden camera. See camera
Fung, Richard, 249–250 high angle shot. See camerawork
Fusco, Coco, 48–49 higher truth. See truth
Hight, Craig, 210
Gabriel, Teshome H., 98 Hill Street Blues (TV series, 1981–1987), 32
Gaines, Jane, 243 Hirohito, emperor of Japan, 116
Gaisseau, Pierre-Dominique, 100 Hirshorn, Harriet A., 150
Gardner, Robert, 16–17, 101 historical narrative. See narrative
Garlasco, Marc, 175 history, 16, 22, 29, 43–46, 49, 51, 61, 66, 129,
Gatlif, Tony, 255 133, 154–155, 162, 173, 176, 178, 183, 205,
Gay Men’s Health Crisis, 106 207–208, 227, 251; American, 41, 130,
Gdansk, Poland, 216 144, 215; of Cameroon, 246; collective,
gender difference. See social difference 54, 55, 96, 175; colonial, 49; of documen-
General Motors, 72–73, 233 tary, 39, 135, 194, 225; personal, 46, 54,
Getino, Octavio, 106 97, 137, 189, 232; of recording technolo-
Gilbert, Craig, 92 gies, 79
Ginsburg, Faye, 79 history writing, 43, 44, 63
Giral, Sergio, 32 Hitchcock, Alfred, 161
Gitlin, Todd, 32 Hitler, Adolf, 45, 69, 116, 131
Glass, Philip, 52 Holiday, Jason, 231–232
Godard, Jean-Luc, 27, 30 Hollywood films, 20, 28–29, 139, 143–144,
godlike authority. See authority 165, 181, 182, 236. See also style
Godmilow, Jill, 216–217 Hood, James, 144
Goldman, Ronald, 22 hooks, bell, 97, 252
graphic match. See editing Hour of the Furnaces, The/La hora de los
Great Depression, 125 hornos (Fernando Solanas and Octavio
Greek theater, 218 Getino, 1968), 106
Grieg, Edvard, 256 Housing Problems (Edgar Anstey and Arthur
Grierson, John, 2, 6, 103, 106, 263 Elton, 1935), 188
Gunning, Tom, 13 Hudson, Dale, 156
272 Index

humor, 140, 231, 235–236, 244 Jaguar ( Jean Rouch, 1954–1967), 226
Hurwitz, Leo, 130 Jarecki, Andrew, 66
Hussein, Saddam, 175 Jazeera, al-, 36–38
Huston, Walter, 116–117 Jennings, Humphrey, 255
Hutcheon, Linda, 131 Johnson, Hiram, 117
hyperbole, 180, 244 Johnson, Luci Baines, 182
Johnson, Lyndon Baines, 182
I, a Black Man/Moi, un noir ( Jean Rouch, Joslin, Tom, 17, 19, 20
1958), 226 Joyce at 34 ( Joyce Chopra and Claudia Weill,
iconic sign, 14–15, 23 1972), 93–95, 97, 104, 123, 250
iconography, 49 Juhasz, Alexandra, 20, 29
identification, 105, 145, 184, 217 juxtaposition, 40, 53, 66, 102, 119, 122, 149,
identity, 50, 79, 94, 95, 97, 102–103, 105, 178, 245
128, 156, 217, 230, 231
ideology, 30, 48, 70, 97 Kahn, Louis, 199–200
immediacy, 6, 18, 21, 32, 68, 188, 196–197, Kahn, Nathaniel, 199–200
207, 219, 234 Karadoğan, Yılmaz, 244
indexical sign, 14–16, 18, 23, 197, 209–210, Karslıoğlu, Ertuğrul, 244
217 Katz, Leandro, 119
instantaneity, 32 Katzenbach, Nicholas, 144, 146
Instituto Cubano del Arte e Industria Kauffman, Ross, 187
Cinematográficos/Cuban Institute of Kaufman, Mikhail, 202
Cinematographic Art and Industry, 181 Kaul, Mani, 254
intercutting. See editing Kay, Tom, 73
interpretation, 18, 98 Kayapo, 78–79
intervention, 19, 47, 51, 53, 55, 68–69, 73, 76, Kazan, Elia, 32
86, 91, 114, 140, 164, 180, 193, 214–215, Kennedy, Jacqueline, 198–199, 205
223, 227, 231, 241; military, 27, 66, 122 Kennedy, John F., 15, 41, 145–146, 182, 191,
interviews, 18, 24–29, 37, 43–50 passim, 56, 196–198
60, 62–64, 67, 72–74, 83–91 passim, 99, Kennedy, Robert, 144–146
102, 104, 122, 124, 137, 167, 169, 173–176 Kennedy administration, 144
passim, 180, 183–184, 189, 194, 199–201, Khleifi, Michel, 7
226–227, 233–234, 239, 241, 242, 244, Khmer Rouge, 102
247, 250–254, 262; expert, 60, 62; and Kiarostami, Abbas, 7, 208
performance, 229–232; public opinion, Kinder, Marsha, 157
115; setting for, 216–218, 221, 224, 224– King, Aylene, 87–88
225; television, 146. See also testimony King, Martin Luther Jr., 182
Inuit, 140–142, 221 King, Rodney, 39, 41, 88
Inuit culture. See culture “kino-eye,” 203
Iraq, 36, 175 Kitchener, Lord, 50
irony, 50, 130–132 Klawans, Stuart, 175
Irving, Clifford, 261 Klingman, Lynzee, 176
Irving, Judy, 137 Koch, Gertrud, 85
Israel, 84, 193, 205, 210, 217 Koenig, Wolf, 242–243, 254
Israelis, 132–133, 137, 173–174 Komser, Ali, 244
Ivens, Joris, 148–149, 151, 170 Kracauer, Siegfried, 188, 195, 200, 223
 Index 273

Kroitor, Roman, 242–243, 254 Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen,
Ku Klux Klan, 176 2003), 181
Kuleshov, Lev, 167 Los Angeles Police Department, 41
Kuwait, 201, 256, 258–259 Louis XVI, king of France, 26
Lounsbury, Ruth Ozeki, 24–25, 232–233
Labyrinth Project, 155 low angle shot. See camerawork
Lanzmann, Claude, 83–85, 194 Lowe, David, 87, 167, 169
Latcho Drom (Tony Gatlif, 1993), 255 Luce, Henry, 119
LBJ (Santiago Álvarez, 1968), 182 Luhr, William, 72
League of Nations, 118 Lumière brothers, 1, 12, 136
Lee, Cindy, 175 Lunch with Fela (Abraham Ravett, 2005),
Lee, Spike, 22, 162, 247 163–165, 167, 172–173
legitimacy, 13, 16, 25, 45, 52, 67, 119, 121, 124
Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 168 MacDonald, Scott, 183, 216
Lerner, Jesse, 29 Mad Hot Ballroom (Marilyn Agrelo, 2005),
Lessons of Darkness/Lektionen in Finsternis 137
(Werner Herzog, 1992), 201, 256–259 Maggenti, Maria, 105
Letter from Siberia/Lettre de Sibérie (Chris Mahler, Gustav, 256, 258
Marker, 1957), 153, 253 mainstream media, 50, 62, 93, 95
Levin, G. Roy, 12, 91 Makeba, Miriam, 182
Leyda, Jay, 2, 25 Maleczech, Ruth, 216–217
Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter, The (Con- Malone, Vivian, 144
nie Field, 1980), 42–45, 47, 66, 93, 104, Mamber, Stephen, 140, 143
121–123, 169, 175, 180, 184, 254, 259 Mann, Anthony, 32
lighting, 6, 213, 223–225; artificial, 218, 223, “Man of Aran”: How the Myth Was Made
224; available, 28; chiaroscuro, 256; (George Stoney and Jim Brown, 1978), 38
contrast, 224–225; controlled, 223; flat, Manovich, Lev, 16, 154
32; natural, 223; three-point, 224. See also Man on Wire ( James Marsh, 2008), 138,
mise-en-scène 224–225
Lightning Over Braddock: A Rust Bowl Fan- Man with a Movie Camera/Chelovek s
tasy (Tony Buba, 1988), 235–236, 248 kino-apparatom (Dziga Vertov, 1929),
lightweight camera. See camera 202–203
“Lili Marlene” (song), 255 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 12
Lin Tay-jou, 26, 102, 210 Marker, Chris, 152–154, 179, 218, 253
Living with AIDS (cable TV series), 106 Marsh, James, 138, 224–225
location shooting. See settings Marshall, George, 117
location sound. See sound Marshall, Paule, 176
Lonely Boy (Wolf Koenig and Roman Martin, Susan, 176
Kroitor, 1962), 242, 246, 254 Martínez Vignatti, Diego, 206
Lone Ranger, The (TV series, 1949–1957), Masada, Israel, 132–133
254 Massi, Mark, 17
long shot. See scale Massiah, Louis, 250, 252
long take. See camerawork Matthiessen, F. O., 125
Lorde, Audre, 96, 106 Maysles, Albert, 196–197
Lorentz, Pare, 125, 126, 128–129, 162, 171 McBride, Jim, 30–31
Los Angeles, 18, 20, 39–40, 88 McCarthy, Joseph, 41–42, 163
274 Index

McCay, Winsor, 209 MOVE, 251–252

McNair, Christopher, 247 MovieMaker Magazine, 162
McNair, Denise, 176, 246 moving images, 156, 182, 187–188
medical footage, 55 muddy sound. See “messy” style
medium shot. See scale multiple storylines, 32
medium close shot. See scale Muñoz, José, 250
Mekaron Opoi D’joi (He Who Creates Im- Murrow, Edward R., 87–88, 98, 124–125
ages), 78, 80 Musée de l’Homme, Paris, 90
melodramatic style, 32 music, 6, 70, 99, 101, 117, 120, 126–128,
Memmi, Albert, 97 170–171, 176–177, 182–184, 239–247
memory, 12, 31, 44–45, 55, 152–154, 187, passim, 253–262; background, 242, 247,
209, 255 255, 260, 262; diegetic, 254, 262; mood,
mental illness, 55–56, 189 255; nondiegetic, 254, 255, 262; rhythm,
“messy” style: blurred focus, 31, 76, 99, 215; 240, 241, 244, 255, 259, 260; score, 52,
muddy sound, 31; unbalanced composi- 127–128, 240–241, 255–256, 259, 260.
tion, 32, 127 See also sound
Mészáros, Márta, 7 Mussolini, Benito, 116
metaphor, 23, 106, 151, 179–180, 244 Muybridge, Eadweard, 12
metonymy, 180 My Architect (Nathaniel Kahn, 2003), 199,
Michelson, Annette, 203 200, 202
microphone. See recording apparatus My Mother’s Place (Richard Fung, 1990), 249
Milanés, Pablo, 182
mise-en-scène, 213–236; fictional, 216. See Nakasako, Spencer, 77, 102
also lighting; performance; settings Naked City ( Jules Dassin, 1948), 32
Mishlawi, Nadim, 244 Nanook of the North (Robert Flaherty, 1922),
misinformation, 38 140–143, 220–221, 225, 228
Mississippi River, 125–128, 163, 239 narrative, 31, 41, 117, 132, 135, 138–149, 151,
Mitchell, Mike, 77 154–156, 161, 174, 262; dramatic, 5, 136,
mockumentaries, 7 138; fictional, 2, 32, 139, 145; historical,
Mograbi, Avi, 130, 132–133 43, 45, 114, 154; intricate, 105; loosely
Mohawk, 77 structured, 70
Moi, un noir/I, a Black Man ( Jean Rouch, narrative coherence. See coherence
1958), 226 narrative construction. See construction
Monnikendam, Vincent, 181 narrative conventions. See conventions
montage. See editing narrator, 29, 59, 88, 101, 126, 130, 152–153,
montage sequence. See editing 171, 248, 255, 257. See also commentator
mood music. See music National Educational Television, 92
Moore, Michael, 59–61, 72–73, 119, National Film Board of Canada, 77, 242
123–124, 233–236 National Guard, 146
Morin, Edgar, 89–90, 98, 102 National Library of Ireland, 2
Morris, Errol, 26, 51–53, 219 National Library (Paris), 192
Morris, Marian C., 251 National Rifle Association, 124
Morrison, Toni, 97 National Socialist Party (Nazi Party), 69
Mother Dao—the Turtlelike/Moeder Nation Erupts, The (Not Channel Zero,
Dao—de schildpadgelijkende (Vincent 1992), 88
Monnikendam, 1995), 181 natural lighting. See lighting
 Index 275

NBC News, 88 O’Brien, Harvey, 2

neutrality, 5 observation, 4, 6, 87, 114, 152, 242, 249, 258,
New Deal, 128 262
New Guinea, 100 observational documentary. See
new media, 16, 156 documentary
news footage, 7, 26, 60, 116 offscreen interviewer, 72, 231
News from Home (Chantal Akerman, 1976), offscreen space, 16, 18, 169, 215
166, 221–223, 249, 252 offscreen voice. See voice
“News on the March,” 7 Okinawa, Japan, 74–76
newspaper clippings, 42, 182 Olympia/Olympiad (Leni Riefenstahl, 1936),
newsreels, 7, 28, 42–43, 49, 106, 115–117, 191, 255–256, 259
181–182 One Hand Don’t Clap (Kavery Dutta, 1989),
New York City, 1, 31, 84, 104, 137, 138, 50
173–174, 221–223, 224, 249 ontological authority. See authority
New York Times, 184 opening credits, 175, 239, 257
Nichols, Bill, 32, 44, 54, 65–66, 68, 105, 120, Ophüls, Marcel, 85
123, 178–179, 194, 204, 213, 215–216, optical illusion, 29
226, 229, 233 oral history, 43, 155, 183
Night and Fog/Nuit et brouillard (Alain oral testimony. See testimony
Resnais, 1955), 40–41 Orff, Carl, 182
Night Mail (Harry Watt and Basil Wright, Orientalism, 97, 177
1936), 172, 215, 225–226, 239–242, 246, Other Francisco, The/El otro Francisco (Sergio
247, 250 Giral, 1975), 32
Nobody’s Business (Alan Berliner, 1996), 179, otherness, 97
244–245 overlap. See editing
No End in Sight (Charles Ferguson, 2007), overlapping sound. See sound
175, 176, 183 Owens, Jesse, 256
noise. See sound
nondiegetic music. See music pacing, 32, 170
nonfictional conventions. See conventions Padilha, José, 137–138
nonfictional performance. See performance Palestinians, 132–133, 137, 173–174, 193, 205
nonfictional performers, 214, 226 pan. See camerawork
nonfictional representation. See Panama, 62–63
representation Panama Deception, The (Barbara Trent,
nonprofessional actors. See performance 1992), 62–63, 66, 174
North Atlantic Treaty Organization Paradox (Leandro Katz, 2001), 119, 125,
(NATO), 27 132–133
Noujaim, Jehane, 36–38 parallel structure. See structure
Nouzeilles, Gabriela, 91, 227 Parmar, Pratibha, 94–98
Nunn, Queen, 176 Pärt, Arvo, 256
Nuremberg, Germany, 69 pathos, 131, 140
Ny, Sokly, 102 patriarchal society, 64, 76
Patton, George S. III, 178
object, 14, 20, 94, 97–98, 168, 188, 190, 199, Pearl Harbor, 25, 117–118
206, 209, 210, 215, 222, 224 Pei, I. M., 200
objectivity, 70, 88, 98, 204, 233, 235 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 14, 23
276 Index

Penley, Constance, 98–101 postmodern documentaries. See

Pennebaker, D. A., 228–229, 254 documentary
Pentagon, 175 postproduction, 209
perception, 27, 29, 56, 83, 142, 147, 154, 190, precredit sequence, 17, 175, 250
202, 224 Prelude to War (Frank Capra, 1942), 114–121,
Pereira, Renato, 78 125, 130, 132–133, 138, 162, 172, 204,
performance, 6, 74, 95, 191, 217–218, 228– 209, 248
235, 243, 254; nonfictional, 74, 225–229; prerecorded sound. See sound
nonprofessional actors, 27, 64; presenta- presence, 12, 14–15, 18–20, 75–76, 87, 100,
tional, 227; professional actors, 24, 214; 103, 199, 207, 219, 227, 229; authorial, 18,
puppet, 29; representational, 227–229; 20, 55, 59–60, 71–72, 90–91, 100, 197,
self-conscious, 7; style of delivery, 42, 251 227–228, 235 (see also author); camera,
Person to Person (TV series, 1953–1961), 88 68, 75, 91, 214, 221; military, 122
personal history. See history presentational performance. See performance
personal history interviews. See testimony: Primary (Drew Associates, 1960), 191, 196,
personal 198
personal testimony. See testimony primary sources, 61–63
Petit, Philippe, 138, 224–225 “primitive” culture. See culture
phenomenal world. See physical world professional actors. See performance
photographic footage. See photographs profilmic reality. See actuality
photographic image. See photographs Prokofiev, Sergei, 256
photographs, 11–12, 14–16, 24, 39–42; archi- Promio, Alexandre, 1
val, 40; family, 55, 155, 206, 232; photo- propaganda, 7, 37, 45, 114–115, 117, 119, 121,
graphic footage, 24; photographic image, 204
4, 12, 14–15, 38–39, 153, 187, 209–210, protagonist, 15, 18, 85, 123, 137, 141,
253; still image, 156, 164, 182, 184, 244 144–146, 225
physical world, 15, 16, 161, 163, 202, 210, 241 Protagonist ( Jessica Yu, 2006), 217–218
Plantinga, Carl, 13 Public Broadcasting Service, 22
Play, The/Oyun (Pelin Esmer, 2005), 64 public opinion interviews. See interviews
Playboy magazine, 182 public television, 8
plot, 113, 125, 136, 138, 141, 143–144, 172, Pudovkin, V. I., 168
204, 261 Puiu, Cristi, 17
Podell, Jules, 243 puppet theater, 29, 217–218
poetic documentaries. See documentary
Point of Order (Emile De Antonio and Daniel Qaeda, al-, 175
Talbot, 1963), 41–42, 163, 181
point-of-view shot. See camerawork Rabinovitz, Lauren, 232
police procedural, 32 racial difference. See social difference
Pollard, Sam, 162, 184 Radio Belgrade, 255
Pontecorvo, Gillo, 32 Rain/Regen ( Joris Ivens, 1929), 148, 149
popular culture. See culture Raines, Howell, 184
portable synchronized sound equipment. See Ransen, Mort, 77
recording apparatus Ravett, Abraham, 163–165, 172
Portelli, Alessandro, 43 Raymond, Alan, 92
Portrait of Jason (Shirley Clarke, 1967), 15, 231 Raymond, Susan, 92
post-dubbing. See sound realism, 19, 27, 32, 96, 188, 210
 Index 277

reality television, 6 Resnais, Alain, 40, 41

Reassemblage: From the Firelight to the Screen responsibility, 80, 83, 86, 88, 92–93, 103,
(Trinh T. Minh-hà, 1982), 98–101, 105–106
150–151, 246 reverse shot. See editing
reception, 5, 85–86, 103 Reygadas, Carlos, 7
reconstructions, 25–26, 29, 32, 209–210 rhetoric, 5, 38, 120, 124, 129, 130, 147, 180,
recorded sound. See sound 183; rhetorical device, 3, 117, 120, 130;
recording apparatus, 18–19, 202, 215; film- rhetorical strategies, 119–120, 122, 126,
making apparatus, 13, 54, 74, 91; micro- 132, 138
phone, 15, 17, 19, 67, 85, 87, 89, 198, 241, rhetorical device. See rhetoric
244, 245; portable synchronized sound rhetorical strategies. See rhetoric
equipment, 195; sound apparatus, 233; rhythm. See sound
tape recorder, 30, 53, 183, 190, 242. See rhythmic editing. See editing
also camera; sound; voice Rice, Condoleezza, 175
re-creation, 26, 29, 85, 102, 139, 140, 180, Riefenstahl, Leni, 69, 191, 255–256
209, 216, 217, 239, 242 Riggs, Marlon, 70–71
reenactment, 26, 52, 53, 74, 215–218, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 137, 226
224–225 Rios, Luis, 78
reestablishing shot. See editing ritual, 16, 68, 79, 86, 101, 104, 142, 229, 241,
referent, 11, 13, 16, 19, 21, 31, 39, 210, 251, 256
213–214, 226 River, The (Pare Lorentz, 1937), 125–133,
referential world. See actuality 138, 162, 170–172, 179, 239, 247
reflex camera. See camera R. J. Reynolds Tobacco, 89
reflexive documentary. See documentary Road to Guantánamo, The (Michael Winter-
reflexivity, 51, 53–54, 233 bottom and Mat Whitecross, 2006),
refutative argument. See rhetoric 26, 31
Regnault, Félix-Louis, 12 Roger and Me (Michael Moore, 1989),
Reichenbach, François, 261 72–73, 233–235
Rembrandt van Rijn, 259–260 Rony, Fatimah Tobing, 143
Rembrandt, Painter of Mankind/Rembrandt, Roof, The/Alsateh (Kamal Aljafari, 2006),
Schilder van de Mens (Bert Haanstra, 193, 205–207
1957), 259–260 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 117
Renfrow, Baba, 251 Rosen, Miriam, 162
Renoir, Pierre, 26 Rosenstone, Robert A., 62, 176, 217
Renov, Michael, 3, 71, 151, 207 Ross, Andrew, 98–101
reporter, 27–28, 36–37, 48, 50, 59, 88, 124, Rossini, Gioachino, 253
167, 234–235 Rouch, Jean, 12, 89–91, 98, 102, 226
representation: authentic, 15; counter-, 63; Ruby, Jay, 30, 53, 94–95, 105
documentary, 3, 16, 23–26, 31, 70, 232, Rumsfeld, Donald, 37–38, 175
235; ethical, 3, 98; fictional, 54; nonfic- Russell, Catherine, 150, 153
tional, 3, 6, 23, 26, 31, 45, 48, 51, 66–67, Russian Revolution, 181
69, 72, 114–115, 149–150, 154, 188, Ruttmann, Walther, 147–148, 202
209, 216, 225; of others, 97–102; of self,
92–96, 102–103 Saalfield, Catherine, 20
representational performance. See Said, Edward, 97
performance Salant, Richard, 88
278 Index

Salk Institute for Biological Studies, 199–200 Sherwin, Richard K., 22

Salles, João Moreira, 91, 226 Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985), 83–85,
Salpêtrière asylum, France, 39 194
Samuels, Charles Thomas, 161 Shoot the Chutes (Edison Manufacturing
San Francisco, 77, 102, 137, 139, 248 Company, 1899), 163
Sans soleil/Sunless (Chris Marker, 1982), shorts, 42, 88, 235
152–154, 179, 218 Shub, Esfir, 181
Santiago ( João Moreira Salles, 2007), sign. See semiotics
226–227 silence. See sound
Sari Red (Pratibha Parmar, 1988), 94–98 Silló, Sándor, 210
Saving Face ( Jalal Toufic, 2003), 244 Silverlake Life: The View from Here (Tom Jos-
scale: close shot, 20, 28, 68, 79, 99, 126, 166, lin and Peter Friedman, 1993), 17–23
167, 168, 170, 175, 179, 189, 190, 206, 207, Simone, Nina, 182
243; extreme close shot, 171; medium Simpson, O. J., 22, 40
close shot, 99, 126, 165, 169, 175, 189; Sinking of the Lusitania, The (Winsor McCay,
medium long shot, 228; medium shot, 83, 1918), 209
165, 177. See also camerawork Sky Above, the Mud Below, The/Le Ciel et la
Schickel, Richard, 73 boue (Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau, 1961),
Schine, G. David, 42 100–101
Schnabel, Julian, 254 slow-motion photography, 71
Schubert, Franz, 256 Small World (TV series, 1958–1960), 88
Schultze, Norbert, 255 Smith, Roger, 72–73, 233
score. See music Snyder, Robert L., 163
Scott, Campbell, 175 Sobchack, Vivian, 17, 20
screen persona, 72, 235 “social actors.” See actors
screen space, 69, 189 social difference, 96–97, 103, 105, 231
Scribe Video Center, 78 sociohistorical world, 4–5, 13–15, 19, 31, 50,
script, 27–28, 45, 56, 139, 162–163, 197–198 53, 64, 66, 77, 113–114, 118, 138–139, 147,
secondary sources, 61–63 166, 180, 187, 194, 215, 230, 234, 263
Secret in the Satchel, The/Shubao li de mimi Solanas, Fernando, 106
(Lin Tay-jou, 2007), 26, 102, 210 Solidarity, 216–217
See It Now (TV series, 1951–1958), 88 Sontag, Susan, 14
Sekula, Allan, 39 sound, 6, 10, 13, 15, 21, 24, 30, 32, 39, 41, 46,
self-conscious performance. See performance 61, 80, 95, 99, 101, 119–120, 123, 128, 162,
self-representation. See representation 164, 168, 178, 180, 187, 198, 239–263;
semiotics, 4, 14–15, 19, 23, 39 ambient, 239, 258; dialogue, 28, 56, 101,
Senegal, 98, 100, 150 227, 244, 258; location, 207, 241–247;
settings, 218–223; décor, 6, 216; location noise, 6, 239, 241, 244, 249, 251, 258;
shooting, 12, 128, 152, 175, 215, 218–220, overlapping, 28, 32, 95; post-dubbing,
222, 223, 230, 240. See also mise-en-scène 242; prerecorded, 241–247; recorded,
sexual difference. See social difference 15, 239; silence, 20, 47, 84, 99, 207, 243,
Shack, Christine, 169 246–247; sound effects, 182, 241; sound
Shannon, Kathleen, 243 track, 2, 12, 15, 18, 49, 94, 118, 182–183,
shared anthropology. See anthropology 228, 255, 258, 262; speech, 6, 15, 24, 38,
shared authority. See authority 75–76, 99, 120, 124, 217, 227, 231, 239,
Sharrett, Christopher, 72 241–242, 244–245, 247–254; stock, 16;
 Index 279

superimposition of, 101; synchronized, surveillance camera. See camera

28, 70, 89, 99. See also music suspense, 18, 138–140, 142–143, 225
sound apparatus. See recording apparatus suspicion of authority. See authority
sound effects. See sound Svilova, Elizaveta, 168
sound recordings, 32, 42 Sweat and Felt/Keçenin teri (Ertuğrul
sound superimposition. See sound Karslıoğlu, 1988), 244, 247
sound track. See sound symbolic truth. See truth
source material, 60, 66 synchronized sound. See sound
South Vietnamese National Cemetery, 177 synecdoche, 180
Soviet Union, 167–168
speech. See sound Tagg, John, 39
Spellbound ( Jeffrey Blitz, 2002), 137 Tahimak, Kidlat, 78
split screens. See editing Takeda, Miyuki, 74–76, 232
Spirit of TV, The/O Espírito da TV (Vincent Taking Aim (Monica Frota, 1993), 78
Carelli, 1990), 79 Talbot, Daniel, 41, 163
Stam, Robert, 54 tape recorder. See recording apparatus
static shot. See camerawork television interviews. See interviews
Statue of Liberty, 245 television news, 48, 50, 60, 114, 235, 259
still image. See photographs Television Quarterly, 88
stock sounds. See sound telos, 136
Stoney, George, 38, 102 temporal coherence. See coherence
storytelling, 29, 44, 95, 100, 103, 135–136, Tennessee Valley Authority, 125, 129, 172
147, 151, 166 Teno, Jean-Marie, 245–246
Stott, William, 87 testimony, 42, 44, 46–47, 59, 65, 85, 169,
Strange Victory (Leo Hurwitz, 1948), 175, 177–178, 184, 190, 229; expert, 60,
130–133 62–63, 215; firsthand, 42; oral, 253; per-
structure, 2, 5, 13, 28, 41, 70, 77, 113–115, sonal, 43, 63; witness, 42, 47, 60. See also
118, 129–133 passim, 143–153 passim, 176, interviews; sound
201; dramatic, 139, 143, 147, 195; narra- Thatcher, Margaret, 49–50, 234–235
tive, 13, 129, 133, 144, 146; parallel, 125, Thin Blue Line, The (Errol Morris, 1988), 26,
144–145 51–53, 190, 219
style, 17–19, 32, 123, 147, 167, 170, 208, Third Reich, 256
222, 224–225, 227–228, 256, 259, 261; Thomas, Luther, 49
absence of, 3, 214; authorial, 70; docu- Thompson, Kristin, 149, 166, 168, 204, 219
mentary, 17, 32; Hollywood, 165. See also Thomson, Virgil, 127
“messy” style; stylization Three Gorges Dam, China, 220
style of delivery. See performance three-point lighting. See lighting
stylization, 6, 200 Three Songs of Lenin/Tri pesni o Lenine (Dziga
subject: as author, 77–80; documentary, 18, Vertov, 1934), 168, 184
48, 61, 65, 147, 191, 193, 195–197, 208– Ties That Bind, The (Su Friedrich, 1984),
209, 217–218, 225, 227, 229, 231–232 45–47
subject as author. See subject tilt. See camerawork
subjectivity, 43, 45, 71, 98, 150, 153 Time magazine, 117
“Subterranean Homesick Blues” (song), 228 time-lapse photography, 200
Sunless/Sans soleil (Chris Marker, 1982), Times of Harvey Milk, The (Robert Epstein,
152–154, 179, 218 1984), 248
280 Index

Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967), 241–253, 258–260; disembodied, 59,

68, 69, 91, 124–125, 162, 166, 179, 195, 204, 248; of documentary, 178–179, 204,
242 233; governing, 66; pitch, 242; timbre,
T-Men (Anthony Mann, 1947), 32 241, 252; tone, 242; offscreen voice, 23,
Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989), 70–71 75, 235, 243. See also author; commen-
Toufic, Jalal, 244 tary; first-person: voiceover
Tracking Down Maggie (Nick Broomfield, “voice-of-God” commentary. See
1994), 234 commentary
tracking shot. See camerawork voice pitch. See voice
traveling shot. See camerawork voice tone. See voice
travelogue, 32, 140, 173 voiceover. See commentary
Treblinka, 83
Trent, Barbara, 62 Wagner, Richard, 256–258
Trinh T. Minh-hà, 91, 98–101, 150–151, 246 Waiãpi, 79
tripod. See camerawork Walentynowicz, Anna, 216–217
Triumph of the Will/Triumph des Willens Walking with Dinosaurs (BBC, 1999), 16
(Leni Riefenstahl, 1935), 69 Wallace, George, 144–146
true story, 3, 7, 28 Wallace, Henry A., 118
True Story of Lili Marlene, The (Humphrey Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, 2008), 209,
Jennings, 1944), 255 217
trust, 3, 13, 24, 25, 40, 59, 92, 187, 190, 209, War Game, The (Peter Watkins, 1966),
232 27–31
truth: cinema, 89–90; factual, 22–23; higher, Warwick Trading Company, 163
22–23; symbolic, 22; truthfulness, 4, 21, Watkins, Peter, 27–29
38, 85 Watt, Harry, 172
truthfulness. See truth Waugh, Thomas, 227
Weill, Claudia, 93, 95
unbalanced composition. See “messy” style Welles, Orson, 7, 260–263
unfairness, 178 Western culture. See culture
United Nations, 118 Westmoreland, William, 177–178
University of Alabama, 144–146 White, Hayden, 2
University of Southern California, 155 Whitecross, Mat, 26
Up the Yangtze (Yung Chang, 2007), 220 White House, 145–146, 180
U.S. House of Representatives, 117 Whitman, Walt, 125–129 passim
Who Is . . . ? (Magnus Bärtås and Agence
Van Dyke, Willard, 128–129, 163, 198 TOPO, 2005), 155–156, 247
Verdi, Giuseppe, 257, 258 Who Says It’s Fate!/Von wegen Schicksal!
Vertov, Dziga, 168, 184, 202–203 (Helga Reidemeister, 1979), 102
video camera. See camera Why We Fight series (Frank Capra et al.,
Video in the Villages/Vídeo nas Aldeias, 79, 1942–1945), 114
104 Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill, The ( Judy
Vietnam, 122, 176–178, 182 Irving, 2004), 137, 139
viewing experience. See experience Williams, Hank, 40
voice, 5, 15, 19, 29, 46–47, 49, 55, 62, 64–68, Williams, Linda, 53, 243
71–72, 75, 78, 84, 87, 89, 91, 95, 103, 129, Williams, Raymond, 85
146, 152–153, 164, 182, 187, 205, 217, 227, Windt, Herbert, 255
 Index 281

Winston, Brian, 12, 26, 31, 40, 90, 91, 129, Wright, Basil, 172
215 Wu Wenguang, 78
Winterbottom, Michael, 26
Wiseman, Frederick, 68–70, 124, 162, 166, Yangtze River, 220
195, 242 Yaoundé, 245
witness testimony. See testimony Yazıcı, Erol, 244
Wolfowitz, Paul, 175 You Are on Indian Land (Mort Ransen,
Women’s Liberation, 43 1969), 77
working class, 43, 72, 235 Yu, Jessica, 217–218
World Trade Center, New York City, 138
World War I, 118 Zawinul, Joe, 252
World War II, 27, 32, 40, 42, 45, 88, 90, 114, Zemeckis, Robert, 16
118, 121, 123, 130–131, 162, 175, 177, 194, Zheutlin, Barbara, 45, 47, 105
208, 215, 242 zoom. See camerawork
 About the Authors

Louise Spence, professor of cinema studies at Kadir Has Univer-

sity in Istanbul, has published more than twenty articles in vari-
ous journals and anthologies. She is also the author of Watching
Daytime Soap Operas: The Power of Pleasure and coauthor (with
Pearl Bowser) of the award-winning Writing Himself into History:
Oscar Micheaux, His Silent Films, and His Audiences.

Vinicius Navarro is assistant professor of film studies at the

Georgia Institute of Technology. He has written on documen-
tary and experimental cinemas and on global television formats.
He is currently working on an anthology on recent Latin Ameri-
can documentaries.