In Praise of Nothing (2017)
A satirical documentary parable about Nothing, in which Nothing, tired of being misunderstood, runs away from home and comes to address us for the first and the last time. Shot over eight years in 70 countries by 62 cinematographers who were all told to attempt to film “nothing”, the visuals seem real but the narration is a yarn being spun. Is it fiction or is it documentary? It doesn’t matter.
Documentary
John Grierson
Father of Documentary films & coined the term
“First Principles of Documentary”
cinema’s capacity for observing life could be a new art form,
materials “taken from the raw” can be more real than acted fiction and the “original” actor and “original” scene are better lens for interpreting the modern world than their fiction counterparts.
Observational Documentary
(a form of direct cinema, in which what is happening is being recorded
with little filmic involvement)
Open-ended view of events
Showing the events and allowing the audience themselves to reach their own conclusions
Participatory Documentary
(with talking head interviews and ‘Voice of God’ narrative)
Voice over narrative = manipulative and patronizing
Filmmaker themselves going out into the field to integrate among those involved in their documentary, and either speak about or represent what they are experiencing.
element of truth in the form of encounter
Personal involvement as researcher / investigator
allowing for a varying degree of ‘creative treatment’ to actual events at the whim of the director. ⤸
"Creative treatment of actuality”
Representation of a subject
their relation to narrative, rhetorical, categorical, or associative form
taking a certain attitude or belief toward relevant content
Modernist avant-garde
"My road is toward the creation of a fresh perception of the world. Thus, I decipher in a new way the world unknown to you” — Dziga Vertov
Fragmentation & defamiliarization
relativity, disillusionment
overall exclusion of representative realism
all of which slowly integrate themselves into acts of documentary filmmaking
favoured a more ambiguous and open resolution
the concept of time and space, of which did
less to resolve any real issues, but instead was used to challenge the very definition of a specified issue
imaginatively reconstructed the look of the world
Images themselves altered the very perception of our ordinary world
recognisable images and transforming them.
“encompass a perspectives and voices, attitudes and subjectivities, positions and values that exceed the universal subject of an idealized nation-state” — Bill Nichols
Popova, M. (n.d.) ‘Grierson: A Documentary About the Filmmaker Who Coined “Documentary”’, Brain Pickings, Available at: https://www.brainpickings.org/2011/12/28/grierson-documetary-roger-blais/
Sweeney, C. ‘Is the documentary film, as stated by John Grierson the creative treatment of actuality’, University College Dublin, Available at: https://www.academia.edu/36218651/Is_the_documentary_film_as_stated_by_John_Grierson_the_creative_treatment_of_actuality.pdf
When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception
Documentary
Distinction between fact and fiction
"a dramatized presentation of man's relation to his institutional life"
"film with a message"
"the communication, not of imagined things, but of real things only"
"the creative treatment of actuality" — John Grierson
Every representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the sense that it is an artificial construct
a highly contrived and selective view of the world, produced for some purpose and therefore unavoidably reflecting a given subjectivity or point of view.
Even our "brute" perceptions of the world are inescapably tainted by our beliefs, assumptions, goals, and desires.
even if there is a concrete, material reality upon which our existence depends (something very few actually doubt) we can only apprehend it through mental representations that at best resemble reality and that are in large part socially created.
Film theorists: documentary is actually no more than a kind of fiction that is constituted to cover over or "disavow" its own fictionality
Visual perception = a kind of fiction that just seems particularly real.
"Genre is what we collectively believe it to be." — Andrew Tudor
Representing Realities (Bill Nichols)
The key factor that defines the community of practitioners,
"a common, self-chosen mandate to represent the historical world rather than imaginary ones." — Bill Nichols
The corpus of texts is defined by an "informing logic" that involves "a representation, case, or argument about the historical world."
The constituency of viewers is defined by two common assumptions:
"the images we see (and many of the sounds we hear) had their origin in the historical world"
documentaries do not merely portray the historical world but make some sort of "argument" about it.
relationship to "the historical world." - make "arguments" about it.
Documentary is not the representation of an imaginary reality; it is an imaginative representation of an actual historical reality.
documentary is no more than a kind of fiction that denies its fictional status.
Our perceptions of and ideas about historical (i.e., actual) reality can only be communicated to others in conventional ways.
the use of conventional means to refer to, represent, or make claims about historical reality
Nicholas Wolterstorff
all representational works, including both documentaries and fiction films, "project a world."
Someone’s imagination of reality
Carl Platinga
"Assertive stance" - make claims
"To take up the fictive stance toward some state of affairs [...] to invite us to consider a state of affairs."
Documentary asserts that a projected state of affairs is true in the real world.
Truth Claim
assumption that the film is telling the truth also serves to validate their emotional responses to the scene
Photographs
➜ Supposed to record historical actualities
➜ Pictures constitute a "reality" of their own.
⬥ they "project a world."
● editing, movement, dialogue, verbal propositions and music
➜ What makes a photograph or any other picture "lie"
⬥ not something in a picture but something extrinsic to it.
⬥ readers' assumption that photographs in journalistic publications are not contrived or faked.
⬥ False caption or label-an express verbal statement
● leads one to draw false conclusions
★ "to work like" a documentary vs to be a documentary
★ no such thing as a text that is intrinsically and necessarily a documentary.
★ It is a particular kind of reading frame that makes a text a documentary.
Eitzen, D. (1995) ‘When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception’, Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1, pp. 81-102, Available at: http://www.columbia.edu/itc/film/gaines/documentary_tradition/Eitzen.pdf
Between Documentary, Fiction and Appropriation Art: A Case Report on the “Language-game” Public Hearing (2012)
Public Hearing (2012) James N. Kienitz Wilkins
“I think “reality fictions” is a better description of what I am doing than documentary” — James N. Kienitz Wilkins
Postmodern conditions (Jean-François Lyotard)
The concept of representation has been especially besieged: is no representation possible without a cost of some sort, “a taxation”? — William J. Thomas Mitchell
human attempt to represent reality fundamentally partial and distorted, thus “fictional” or at least “fictive”
implies a series of subjective choices made by the maker
Documentary film practices
Bill Nichols
documentary is argumentative rather than narrative
argues about the historical world and informs the audience about real-life situations perceived as problematic or controversial
we expect that “what occurred in front of the camera has undergone little or no modification in order to be recorded on film” ⤸
Fictional storytelling practices
“Reenactment” / “Representation”
alludes to the fidelity to reality and signals the distance between a past event and its recreation ex post
Verfremdungseffekten [alientation devices]
addressing spectators in order to frustrate every claim of transparency and authenticity.
Public hearing declares itself a fictional filmic representation, so that doubt is cast on the effectiveness of public hearings as procedures of political representation.
⬇ ⬇ ⬇
Appropriation art practices
turn the mundane into something relevant
Ostranenie [making strange of the familiar]
artist meets the everyday routine and turns the banal into Art
giving it a title and putting it in a different context
✖ re-presentation of “reality as it is”
I think “reality fictions” is a better description of what I am doing than documentary. For Primate [1974] I filmed events that existed in so-called real life, but structured them in a way that has no relationship to the order or time in which they actually occurred – and created a form that is totally fictional. So from a structural point of view, my films are more related to fictional technique than to documentary technique.
filmic representation as its subject matter and appropriating
observational documentary devices within a dramatic reconstruction of reality
inevitably slips into the realm of “reflexive documentary”
Guarneri, M. (2013) ‘Between Documentary, Fiction and Appropriation Art: A Case Report on the “Language-game” Public Hearing (2012)’, Photogénie, November 25. Available at: https://cinea.be/c-between-documentary-fiction-and-appropriation-art-a-case-report-on-the-language-game-public-hearing-2012/
The Aesthetics of Documentary
is not an information medium / an educational form, a tool of the teacher / anthropologist. (only secondarily so)
Primarily, it is an artform.
it directs reality
by and responsive to events in the real world.
Its socio-aesthetic palette is therefore, particularly intriguing.
Cousins, M. (2006) ‘The aesthetics of documentary’, TATE, January 1. Available at: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-6-spring-2006/aesthetics-documentary
Other References:
Bergan, R. (2009) ‘Isn't it time we dropped the term 'documentary' for good?’, The Guardian, March 31. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/filmblog/2009/mar/31/documentary-fiction
Cole, B. (2012) ‘SUBJECTIVE OBJECTIVITY’, OMNIA, August 28. Available at: https://omnia.sas.upenn.edu/story/subjective-objectivity
Corbin, L. (2015) ‘PERSEPOLIS AND SUBJECTIVE DOCUMENTARY’, June 1. Available at: http://lukecorbin.org/tag/subjective-documentary/
Phillips, C. (2018) ‘Observational films are outshone by a blend of fact and fiction’, The Guardian, April 29. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/apr/29/observational-documentaries-outshone-blend-fact-fiction
Moots, E. (2015) ‘MOOTS: do documentaries have a responsibility to be objective?’, The Daily Free Press, September 8. Available at: https://dailyfreepress.com/blog/2015/09/08/moots-do-documentaries-have-a-responsibility-to-be-objective/
Scott, A.O. (2010) ‘How Real Does It Feel?’, The New York Times Magazine, December 9. Available at: https://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/magazine/12Reality-t.html
Walley, J. (2011) ‘Lessons of Documentary: Reality, Representation, and Cinematic Expressivity’, American Society for Aesthetics, Available at: https://aesthetics-online.org/page/WalleyDocumentary
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