Soul of the Documentary: Framing, Expression, Ethics (original) (raw)
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THE DOCUMENTARY FILM GENRE: ISSUES OF TRUTH AND PROPAGANDA
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Abstract The documentary film genre has established itself as a credible cinematic form over the years. It has grown to become a useful tool for driving social change, engaging people, mobilising groups as well as pushing for institutional transformations. Even though the documentary film is regarded as a presentation of truth in real life situations and circumstances, the influence of a director, cinematic techniques and technology, have been implicated as agents that may affect the concept of truth in documentaries. If a filmmaker has the liberty to apply creativity in the treatment of real-life conflicts in the documentary film process, the question to answer therefore is, to what extent does the creativity of the director and other influences allow the truth to remain untouched in the documentary film? This article adds to the debate on the issue of fact in documentary films as an art form. It attempts an assessment of some positions for and against the place of truth in the documentary film. It concludes that the documentary film, even though engineered initially to project the fact equally, has become a tool that could be used for purposes that may compromise truth. Key Words: Documentary Film, Truth, Ethics
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what are documentary ethics? How are they constitued and realised in the struggle for form and function; of ethics and aesthetics; artistic freedom and responsibility to individual contributors in the creation of film from actuality? Using reflexive and practice-based examples the author surveys the shifting mores of dcoumentary practice as it shifts between broadcast and gallery contexts in documentary's new decade
The Message It Is Not: The Work of the Medium Known as Documentary
The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry, 2020
This article is a brief discussion of Pooja Rangan’s book Immediations, highlighting her argument for the need to analyze carefully the audiovisual materialities and ideological assumptions of documentary as a medium.
Feminism, documentary film and visual anthropology are the three domains that this study connects. The multifaceted relation between these three fields can be summarised as revolving around the debates on reality, truth, representation of the Other, knowledge production and power. Domitilla Olivieri’s dissertation explores such intricate interrelations through the analysis of three films: Kim Longinotto’s Sisters in Law (2005), Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Reassemblage (1982) and Ursula Biemann’s Europlex (2003). To different extents, and in multiple and overlapping ways, these films address the issue of representation(s) of non-Western, and especially female subjects, the relation between sign and reality and the power dynamics implicit in documentary filmmaking. The dissertation shows that the relation between reality and the documentary sign can be understood as one of ‘haunting’. Haunting here refers to the specific indexical quality of the relation between sign and object, the manner in which the object affects or determines the sign (Peirce 1958, 8.177), or the way in which “the world presses on” the cinematic sign (Comolli 1999, 40). Borrowing and expanding upon Mary Ann Doane’s definition of the indexical sign as one that is “haunted by its object” (Doane 2007b, 134), Olivieri presents several examples in which the filmed reality inhabits, intrudes upon, and makes itself continually present in the filmic documentary sign. As the particular focus of this research is on anthropological feminist documentaries, Olivieri considers them as films haunted by reality and regarding feminist issues to do with the politics of the Other and processes of Othering. These films are, to borrow Trinh’s concept, “inappropriate/d” (Trinh 1986, 9). They cross labels and categorisation; explore and perform borders; let themselves be haunted by reality without falling flat into the hegemonic pitfalls of realism; they imagine and represent invisible realities while pointing attention to the power of vision and visuality; they escape rigid definitions while providing the space to redefine meanings and realities; and while these films are determined by the social world, they can also be “transformative of that same world” (Gaines 2007, 19). These are the potential effects of such “inappropriate/d” films, as well as the possibilities opened by a critical perspective that inhabits the space between feminist theories, documentary studies and visual anthropology. Ultimately this is what this research investigates and performs. Exploring the interconnections between the politics and aesthetics of documentary, this study emphasises what audio-visual representations can do, highlights the links between documentary practices and the processes of knowledge production and, finally, the critical and transformative promise that resides in the encounters between feminism and documentary.
Much documentary making which follows in the Griersonian tradition is still predicated on the ongoing binary axis of the testimony of victim 1 and filmmaker as voice-giver. 2 In the production of documentary projects about social issues, an unspoken contract between maker and participant is established, where in return for the participation, the filmmakers make an artefact with will bear witness to their stories, experiences and trauma. However, often the pressure to provide convincing evidence through affective and persuasive means from testimony can burden the participant and the participatory relationship. The reliance on first-person accounts of people in crisis also presents the problem of sustained listening in both the filmmaking process as well as the finished film. New ecologies of documentary making have seen shifts in this traditional paradigm with movements towards participatory and collaborative filmmaking practices that include processes that diverge from producing conventional artefacts through heritage processes. This has been an attempt to recast power differentials, and allow for more open-ended and multivalent conceptions of knowledge, non-didactic meanings and multiple voices to be included. Often these projects exist in forms that include not only the linear but also the non or multi-linear, web-based, interactive or mobile. These forms allow for a more rhizomatic 3 spread through documentary spaces and destabilise traditional binary relationships more prevalent in documentary industries. According to Paula Rabinowitz, documentary's " purpose is to speak and confer value on the objects it speaks about " 4. This observation acknowledges Nichols's concept of " documentary voice " 5 and how it frames the world and speaks through the text in its address to the audience. In addition to the stylistic elements and aspects of authorship, documentary voice is also composed of the verbal participation, often through interviews. And through these interviews, valued is conferred on the world through articulated experience. This foregrounds the linguistic as the dominant mode of constructing knowledge. This article proposes a lateral shift in participatory documentary practice and theory that allows for a vital-materialist focus on the ecology of place, material and other non-linguistic modes of participation. I will discuss my documentary work-in-progress, The Park, which focuses on the sudden eviction of long-term residents at an outer suburban caravan park in Melbourne. These residents are predominantly elderly, disabled or unemployed and many have been living in the park for up to thirty years. The eviction of these residents has caused much trauma through displacement, significant loss of finances and illness and death. Drawing on JaneBennett's Vibrant Matter (2010), I claim that decentralising the role of first person accounts and situating the human voice among a range of other conceptualisations of participation through training the camera and microphone towards the other evidence of the documentary world can ease the burden of the affective labour of first-person accounts of trauma. This shift towards the material landscape and environment as participatory pro-filmic elements, which convey
World Records Vol 5, 2021
A response to Alexandra Juhasz and Alisa Lebow's “Beyond Story: A Community-Based Manifesto,” this article provides a historical perspective on how the feminist assertion "the personal is political" shaped the valorization of "story" in radical documentary film practice in the 1970s and the subsequent development of neoliberal practices within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex that has served as the economic infrastructure for documentary film in the US for decades. This, I argue, is the context out of which documentary film begins to be dominated by the logic of the market that finds its chief expression in documentary films that focus on individuals and depict experience within "three-act" narrative structures. Conceptualizing documentary as a terrain of political and economic struggle -- the article supplements Juhasz and Lebow's aesthetic critique of "story" with an explicit call to connect the need to transform the infrastructures for film funding, production, and circulation with other calls and movements to dismantle and replace the structures of racial capitalism.
Documentary as Critical and Creative Research
Much of the attraction of and debates and controversies around the documentary genre derives from it being a hybrid form, straddling both conflicting paradigms within the traditional social sciences on the one hand and the aesthetic dimensions of art and entertainment on the other. Mixed in with these cross-currents, the question of the political or ideological nature of documentary as research, its ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ nature vis-à-vis dominant institutions, power relations, commonsense frameworks of explanation, interpretation and embedded cultural assumptions, are never far away. This essay is about this trinity of terms as they pertain to the documentary: critical, creative, research. It asks what it means to discuss documentary as a mode of research, i.e. to what extent this audio-visual based genre overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences; what it means to discuss some documentary films as critical practices, i.e. to define what ‘critical’ might mean for the media generally in the present contemporary context of unleashed global capitalism and how it might best be related to documentary; and this essay asks what it means to discuss documentary as a ‘creative’ practice, i.e. one in which aesthetics plays a key role in its production and consumption. Finally this essay explores the relationships between the critical, creative/aesthetic and research aspects of documentary.