public speech, including not only stylistic choices (such as lighting and shot angles,
among others), here redefined as rhetorical moves, but also the ways in which the films are packaged and sold prior to distribution, as exemplified above by The War’s movie poster.
The DTH case argues that documentary films have become instrumental in
creating and affirming such spaces of public memory, but that instrumentality needs to be redefined in the context of documentary clusters. That instrumentality will be defined as put forth by rhetoric scholars Bowers, Ochs, and Jensen, whose seminal text, The
Rhetoric of Agitation and Control, defines it as the characteristic of a message or speech
act that, “contributes to the production of another message or act.”30 Importantly, they
define instrumentality as it relates to the efficacy of messages used towards the aims of social movements, and their adversaries, but I propose to use it here as it relates to public memory, as well. That is to say, even while all documentary films are not explicitly trying to further institutional reform, many generally intervene in political and social discourse(s) around their subject, and thus alter the way we remember that historical event and/or subject. Thus I conceive the instrumentality of documentary films to be
30 John W. Bowers, Donovan J. Ochs, and Richard J. Jensen, The Rhetoric of Agitation and Control,
inherent in the technical and persuasive framing of their filmic representations (or speech acts), as historical, political, and ideological arguments that contribute and communicate with other documentary discourses and public(s) to engender larger shifts in public memory and hegemonic discourse.
That form of instrumentality has overall not been taken up by documentary film studies, a field of study that has only recently been established in the academy, as we shall see in the first two chapters of the study. That branch of film studies is quickly taking root, but largely has not engaged perspectives from rhetoric and language studies scholars, and it is precisely at that intersection from which this project begins in asking about how media might claim such instrumentality: multi-media documents (sound + video + text), how do documentary films function in the public sphere persuasively, like more traditionally conceived acts of public speech or rhetoric, or like feature films?
A new definition of instrumentality in the public sphere that will apply to documentary film will thus have to take the following issues into consideration.
• The influence of the political and historical context of documentary production. • The rhetorical function of the aesthetic and technical choices made by
documentary filmmakers to frame the story within the political and social views of the filmmaker.
• The way in which the point of view of the filmmaker becomes inscribed in public memory as text, becoming an instrument of or a transgression against hegemonic ideology.
• Considerations for the notion that documentary texts are thought of by the public as being “neutral” or “objective,” which can account for how this truth-framing buttresses the filmmakers claims to historical, social, and political truths.
• How the newest technological advancements of our era, facilitate communication between newer audiences or documentary public(s), documentary texts,
documentary discourses and public memory.
• More specifically, in this new era marked by a video-centric culture, how has the internet has become the new town hall for documentary text(s) to be codified as public speech (in online venues for viewing documentary films as well as the film websites and related boards/listservs).
• Finally, the ways in which these new digital venues facilitate public(s) to contest issues of memory in documentary films.
These issues point to several kinds of direct challenges to the models of instrumentality in documentary film theory that I will discuss in the first part of the dissertation project. Some of these questions point to issues of agency and control within the public sphere, beyond the notion of instrumentality. They also, however, point to new limits emerging for a basic assumption about truth and representation in
documentary films -- an overall epistemological question. Today's scholars cannot affirm that “the world [of the documentary] supposedly tells itself without any ideological intervention from its authors.”31 Nor will they ever affirm the early twentieth-century
31 Jill Godmilow, “Kill the Documentary as We Know It,” Journal of Film and Video 54.2, Summer/Fall
claim that “science as an ideology of knowledge lends its authority to the camera as an instrument of objective observation.”32 Similarly, film aesthetics also speak in a
rhetorical voice in a new way: intertextuality takes on new forms and new meanings in community talk backs like that of DTH.
Overall, then, the present project will stress three issues largely unaddressed in theories of documentary film, both stemming from the tradition of understanding documentary as an arbiter of (historical) truth(s): first, the documentary's role as a text characterized by instrumentality in the public sphere (its function rhetorically); second, documentary's function as a persuasive text that can authorize and legitimize certain histories as "truth" by its persistent presence in the public sphere (its function
epistemologically); and third, the role of more general cinematic conventions in making
its public statements seem more like "truth" for various audiences.
Let us now turn to the history of documentary, to see part of the origins of a situation like that of The War.