Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993), edited by Michael Renov, is a valuable anthology of critical essays with a good bibliography and filmography. In a piece on the poetics of documentary, Renov proposes four basic tendencies for the genre:
• To record, reveal, or preserve
• To persuade or promote
• To analyze or interrogate
• To express
Brian Winston, whose innate iconoclasm is entertaining and sometimes brilliant, argues in “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription” (in Theorizing Docu-mentary) that the credibility of documentary evidence, sustained thus far on a highly questionable “naturalistic illusion,” is deeply at risk now that technology hands filmmakers ever more control over imagery. Winston has published a body of work questioning assumptions about media realism and documentary ortho-doxy, as well as a critical biography of the poet of the British documentary move-ment, Humphrey Jennings.1
Philip Rosen, in examining what a documentary is or is not, places Grierson in the stormy waters of historiographical debate and demonstrates how
docu-1 Brian Winston’s books: Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentary (London: British Film Institute, 2000), Media Technology and Society: A History from the Telegraph to the Internet (London: Routledge, 1998), Technologies of Seeing: Photography, Cinematography, and Television (London: British Film Institute, 1997), Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and Its Legitimations (London: British Film Institute, 1995), and on Jennings, Fires Were Started (London: BFI Film Clas-sics, 2000).
mentary representation, in trying to control mass perception of truth, is really a bid for political influence. He argues that the notion of “an organizing gaze as exterior to its objects” is an untenable idea. Trinh T. Minh-ha, in a review of stunning breadth and penetration, covers the arena of documentary assumptions and shows how inadequate, contradictory, or downright colonial most of them are, including the “scientific” ones dear to anthropology. Paul Arthur discusses how documentarians’ claims to truth have not fundamentally changed in spite of postmodernism and new technology. Ana M. López argues that in the Brazilian series, America, it is the Brazilian outsiders whose “methods of post-modernism itself—pastiche, simulacra, images, gloss, and nostalgia” produce a critique that becomes a “fetishization of the image . . . [which] ultimately reduces the his-torical past invoked to a collection, the equivalent of a vast multimedia photo album with witty captions. And the affect produced is . . . curiously flat while simultaneously aesthetically sublime.” Bill Nichols’ essay on history, representa-tion, and claims for truth is an authoritative survey of the boggy foundations on which so much of documentary’s claim to representation rests. He suggests that “disembodied knowledge and abstract conceptualization” are inherently less trustworthy because they do not bring “the power of the universal, of the mythic and fetishistic, down to the level of immediate experience and individual subjectivity.”
None of these writers makes easy reading, though Nichols, widely consid-ered the guru of documentary theory, is more accessible here than elsewhere. His Representing Reality (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991) is con-sidered the theorist’s bible, and his Introduction to Documentary (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2001) summarizes the earlier book’s ideas in a more accessible style. Both books are analytical and philosophical and not prescriptive.
There are many anthologies that focus on a particular film, filmmaker, issue, or historical movement. Alan Rosenthal is a filmmaker whose production experience, clear writing, and long and scholarly commitment to documentary make his anthologies especially valuable. His mission has been to interview key critics and filmmakers. The New Documentary in Action (1971), The Documentary Conscience (1980), and New Challenges for Documentary (1988)—all published by the University of California Press—add up to a superb compendium of thought and documentary experience. New Challenges for Documentary is the most stimulating and provocative collection imaginable for anyone engaged in production. In upward of 600 pages its 35 writers grapple with an encyclopedia of documentary issues. The classifications here are my own.
Rights, Violations, and Veracity
• Protecting one’s subjects from themselves
• Documentary ethics, the right of privacy, the prevalence of victimhood, and “using human beings to make a point”
• Truth claims based on arguments and evidence; vérité and the public’s right to know
Politics and Control
• Women and minorities: raising consciousness; feminist documentary’s theories and strategies; gay issues
• How impassioned, politically motivated films can fail through poor craft
• Political myths: how life and “politics” are inseparable
• How “the western world created image-producing technologies . . . to control reality by capturing it on film”
Issues of Form
• Legitimacy of drama documentaries; the dispute about how material is presented
• Traps and troubles in making the controversial series, An American Family
• Poetic documentary as opposed to talking-head loquacity
• Ethnographic filmmaking practices
• Exploitative cinéma vérité and audience voyeurism
• Documentary conventions that need to be abandoned Issues of Authorship
• Reflexivity as “created, structured articulations of the filmmaker and not authentic, truthful, objective records”
• The filmmaker’s own voice, and presenting one’s own opinions rather than being a conduit for that of others
• The technologically produced image as a construct “of someone who has a culture, and often a conscious point of view”
• The conflict between the actuality of lives and the aesthetic needs of the portraying artist
• Wiseman as an analyst of American society
• Ivens and filming the Chinese cultural revolution Institutional Issues
• TV: its “balance” within established structures, legitimizing prevailing interests and neutralizing conflict; its inability to provide context and passion in covering war
• Television’s power to imply that a subject is guilty and then manipu-late the viewer for entertainment purposes
• The Canadian Film Board Documentary and History
• The compilation film and leftist history
• McCarthyism, censorship, and blacklisting
• Documentary, history, and the need to entertain; how “changes in documentary strategy bear a complex relation to history”
• Media research
Filmmakers, film theorists, critics, and historians have together acknowledged that intractable and possibly unanswerable questions lie at the heart of docu-mentary practice:
• What constitutes true documentary, during its history and now?
• What work is the documentary meant to do?
• Are documentary’s means (intrusions on and exploitation of ordinary people) justified by its ends (doing good, making a difference, etc.)?
• What is the underlying relationship between filmmakers and those on whose behalf we make our films?
• Under what circumstances can a filmmaker truthfully represent another person or group?
• On what grounds do we make truth claims?
If you reread the list substituting the words religion for documentary and priest for filmmaker, you can see what large parts ideology and belief play in docu-mentary consciousness. The history of religion, and its handmaiden, colonialism, shows how the beliefs of those holding power tend to insulate them from grass-roots reality and produce action that is neither moral nor just. For beginning filmmakers the fear of making “mistakes” or repeating history can be paralyz-ing. This is a pity, because the world badly needs the voice of passionate princi-ple. Critics are important, but committed artists are more so. To become one means at first drawing on the traditions that best serve your needs as a vehicle for expression.
It is better in the end to be clumsily energetic than exquisitely correct—which is to say, silent. To verify and consolidate your commitment, you have only to start making a few short documentaries. Once you have a personal stake in the form, its history and present-day issues will come alive as the context to your own work. Make short films and then see what kind of dilemmas your fore-runners faced and how they rationalized solving them.