Representing Reality , livre ebook

Representing Reality

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1991 by Bill Nichols
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Nichols, Bill.
Representing reality : issues and concepts in documentary / Bill Nichols.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-253-34060-3 (alk. paper). - ISBN 978-0-253-20681-7
(pbk. : alk. paper).
11 12 13 12
Dedicated to the memory of
Emile de Antonio (1920-1989 )
and Joris Ivens (1898-1989 )
CONTENTS
PREFACE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Axes of Orientation
I. The Domain of Documentary
II. Documentary Modes of Representation
III. Axiographics: Ethical Space in Documentary Film
Documentary: A Fiction (Un)Like Any Other
IV. Telling Stories with Evidence and Arguments
V. Sticking to Reality: Rhetoric and What Exceeds It
VI. The Fact of Realism and the Fiction of Objectivity
Documentary Representation and the Historical World
VII. Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power
Christian Hansen, Catherine Needham, Bill Nichols
VIII. Representing the Body: Questions of Meaning and Magnitude
NOTES
FILMOGRAPHY
DISTRIBUTORS
INDEX
PREFACE
The pleasure and appeal of documentary film lies in its ability to make us see timely issues in need of attention, literally. We see views of the world, and what they put before us are social issues and cultural values, current problems and possible solutions, actual situations and specific ways of representing them. The linkage between documentary and the historical world is the most distinctive feature of this tradition. Utilizing the capacities of sound recording and cinematography to reproduce the physical appearance of things, documentary film contributes to the formation of popular memory. It proposes perspectives on and interpretations of historic issues, processes, and events.
Representing Reality examines the styles, strategies, and structures of documentary film. It does not offer a general survey of documentary film history so much as a conceptual overview of the form itself: what qualities of cinema underpin it, what institutional structures sustain it, what rhetorical operations inform it, what interpretive perspectives encompass it. How these questions arrange themselves into recurrent patterns and preoccupations will be the central focus. A comparable work does not yet exist in the field of documentary film although there are many such works for fiction film. I have drawn heavily from work done on narrative, rhetoric, and realism, and on ideology, power, and knowledge as it applies to documentary film.
Remarkably, the last wave of single-author books on documentary film occurred fifteen years ago. 1 Films made since the early 1970s address new issues and adopt new approaches in form. Observational styles of filmmaking no longer dominate. Interview-based histories, reflexive, experimental, and personal documentaries, often with strong elements of narrative structure, have established themselves as viable subgenres. New topics and issues such as the women s movement; gay and lesbian rights; the environment; ethnicity, race, class, and nationality; multinational corporations; AIDS; homelessness; and conflicts in Central America, southern Africa, and the Middle East are the subject of numerous documentaries and special television reports. The documentary representation of these issues deserves critical attention as well. The absence of a book-length study of documentary film form remains a glaring omission in the fields of journalism, film, media, and cultural studies.
The status of documentary film as evidence from the world legitimates its usage as a source of knowledge. The visible evidence it provides underpins its value for social advocacy and news reporting. Documentaries show us situations and events that are recognizably part of a realm of shared experience: the historical world as we know and encounter it, or as we believe others to encounter it. Documentaries provoke or encourage response, shape attitudes and assumptions. When documentary films are at their best, a sense of urgency brushes aside our efforts to contemplate form or analyze rhetoric. Such films and their derivatives (television news and advertising, political campaign messages, propaganda and pornography) have a powerful, pervasive impact.
The status of documentary as discourse about the world draws less widespread attention. Documentaries offer pleasure and appeal while their own structure remains virtually invisible, their own rhetorical strategies and stylistic choices largely unnoticed. A good documentary stimulates discussion about its subject, not itself. This serves as many a documentarist s motto, but it neglects to indicate how crucial rhetoric and form are to the realization of this goal. Despite such a motto, documentary films raise a rich array of historiographic, legal, philosophic, ethical, political, and aesthetic issues. It is the patterns and preoccupations surrounding these issues that Representing Reality addresses.
Questions of structure and style alter and evolve, shift and adapt to changing social conditions, to the quasi-autonomous history of the documentary film genre, as well as to the immediate contingencies posed during the act of filming itself. It is the choices available for representing any given situation or event-choices involving commentary and interviews, observation and editing, the contextualization and juxtaposition of scenes-that raise historiographic, ethical, and aesthetic issues in forms that are distinct to documentary. What relationship between knowledge and pleasure does documentary film propose that differs from narrative fiction? How shall oral histories or expert testimony be used? What criteria should be brought to bear to govern objectivity, the selection and arrangement of facts, voices of authentication, and interpretive procedure? What are the responsibilities of filmmakers to their audience and their subjects? How should they account for their own presence and effect, not only behind the camera but also in front of other people, as they build confidences that might be subsequently betrayed?
The absence of a substantial body of work engaged with these issues strikes me as remarkable. Despite the significant degree of commitment to a cinema of political contestation and social transformation among both filmmakers and critics since the late 1960s, the most explicitly political film form, documentary, has received negligible attention compared to the enormous outpouring of work on narrative fiction. The rise of academic film studies within the context of literature and the humanities rather than sociology and the social sciences has considerable bearing, but so does the popular disposition to associate movies with feature fiction films and to associate feature fiction with questions of art, entertainment, and its effects. (A moment in Robert Aldrich s The Legend of Lylah Claire when the producer played by Ernest Borgnine rails against a reference to the films he has made captures this disposition perfectly: Films! Films! Whatever the hell happened to movies!? . . . Remember I make movies, not films ! )
This leaves the study of contemporary documentary film something of a terra incognita in film criticism, especially in conceptual or theoretical terms. (Several have helped begin charting this terrain in recent articles and anthologies, among them Julianne Burton, Stuart Cunningham, E. Ann Kaplan, Julia Lesage, Eileen McGarry, David MacDougall, Peter Morris, Joyce Nelson, Michael Renov, Alan Rosenthal, Jay Ruby, Vivian Sobchack, Tom Waugh, and Brian Winston. 2 Far too often we assume that documentary is simply a disguised fiction, a form of narrative, like written histories, that makes special claims for its authority by minimizing its fictive aspects. All too frequently, the categories and criteria adopted for narrative film analysis are assumed to be readily transferable to documentary, with, perhaps, some minor adjustments. The pathologies of scopophilia (voyeurism, fetishism, narcissism, etc.) may not organize the representation of women quite so relentlessly as in the work of Hitchcock, but the camera s gaze can still be treated as gendered and fully implicated in questions of desire as well as control. Little, though, has been done to spell out how this might be so or in what ways a documentary gaze may raise questions quite distinct from those of a fictional one.
For this reason Representing Reality does not go as far as I originally planned in discussing specific films, in examining the full range of issues taken up by recent, more reflexive documentaries, in comparing and contrasting documentary work from different countries and regions of the globe, or in tracing the development of particular filmmakers, styles, techniques, or rhetorical strategies. What loomed as more urgent, and fundamental, was gaining purchase on documentary filmmaking as a distinct form of cinema (or the movies), with problems and pleasures of its own. Terms and tools of analysis did not lie readily at hand. Truth; reality; objectivity; uncont