practical film theory
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THERE IS NOTHING MORE PRACTICAL THAN A GOOD FILM
THEORY
By Henry BreitroseDepartment of Communication
Stanford University
USEFULL THEORIES FOR TEACHING DOCUMENTARY FILMMAKERS
Im interested in useful theories for teaching the practice of
documentary film making. Perhaps the most important word in that
first sentence is useful because the arts and humanities in general,
film in particular, and documentary film specifically, have not been
deprived of theory. While film theory has provided considerable
academic employment for humanists, which on the whole I take to be
a social good, I believe that production students have been grievously
misled by theories that are not only useless, for practical purposes,
but frequently toxic to their ability to clearly see. The social
psychologist Kurt Lewin said that there is nothing so challenging as a
practical problem. He also said that there is nothing so practical as a
good theory. While there is a plethora of theories about theory, we
lack helpful theories about practical problems.
In teaching documentary film and video making in a professional
graduate program, I meet superbly well-qualified students who have
been educated at some of the best universities in the world. While
we insist that our students are well-educated and have some
experience, we dont insist on an undergraduate film or media-
studies degree. On the contrary, we are deeply suspicious of
applicants who have studied film as undergraduates, because too
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frequently there is a need to de-toxify their imagination. They can
tell us all about the gaze and the gays, and invoke Gledhill,
Foucault, DeMan, Derrida, Deleuze, and proclaim that the very act of
photographing an other is a statement of political oppression or
that the very act of photographing an other is intrinsically
transgressive, and thus an act of courage, or that the very act of
photographing an other pushes the envelope too far because it is
intrusive, or not far enough because it is not overtly reflexive, or
that it invades personal space, or that it deconstructs the myth of
autonomy, or that it constitutes symbolic assault.
None of this strikes me as particularly useful in getting ideas on thescreen with clarity, precision, and economy, which, perhaps
somewhat naively, I take to be the basic requirements of
documentary, much as George Orwell took them to be the essential
elements of the non-fiction essay.
How could this have happened? In America, I think that this is the
result of the rise of Cinema Studies as a distinct discipline,
different from its antecedent, the plain-vanilla, slightly outlaw, and
not quite academically respectable Film, which, compared with Art
and Drama was the new kid on the creative arts block. It was
signaled by the invention of the Society of Cinematologists, latterly
known as the Society for Cinema Studies, whose founding actually
preceded what a colleague refers The French Disease, the
importation of the trendy, the transient, and the poorly translated
latest news from the deep thinkers of the rive gauche.. I was present
at the birth of the SCS, at the Museum of Modern Art in New York
sometime around 1960, when Robert Gessner, who taught film at
NYU, made the case that in order for film to be accepted as
legitimate in academia, it must establish its scholarly credentials by
forming a professional society that looked just like the older ones.
Thus the origins of the great Anglo-Saxon schism, because being
academically traditional meant that the new organization would not
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deal with the actual making of film, as did the existing University
Film Association, many of whose members actually made films, but
rather that it be about film. (It reminds me of the line in Beyond The
Fringe, a popular English comedy review of the 1960s that spawned
Dudley Moore, Peter Cook, Jonathan Miller, and Alan Bennett. Miller
asks Bennett Do you know algebra? Bennett replies Certainly not,
but I know about algebra. That Professor Gessner proposed that the
constitution of the new group be modeled on that of the American
Metaphysical Society was neither a shock nor a surprise. That the
delegates from USC, who actually taught students how to make films,
fled the meeting in horror was no surprise either.)
But surely, the Theory and Practice dichotomy wasnt invented by
Professor Gessner, nor was it uniquely about film. It was about ways
of thinking about the world.
In her paper Theory and Praxis in Aristotle and Heideggeri, Catriona
Hanley notes that for Aristotle, Theora meant the activity of
contemplation of necessary objects. Actual production, the making
of things, consisted of praxis and posis, and unlike Theoria, which
required only the necessary object for contemplation, it required
knowledge of contingent objects, those objects and events
necessary and sufficient for the existence of the object of
contemplation. In film language, rawstock, laboratories, cameras,
lenses, are examples of the stuff on which the film, the object of
contemplation, is contingent. Theoria need deal with only the
finished film, the necessary object of contemplation, stripped of
praxis and posis.
Posis aims at a goal, as distinct from the process of achieving the
goal. It is the intention, the target audience, the purpose of the
proposed film, while praxis is the process of attaining the goal. For
Aristotle, theoria, the contemplation of the necessary object, and
the posis and praxis which enabled its production, were two sides
of the same drachma.
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For many of our students, very phrase theory and practice is
associated with Karl Marx. Istvn Mszros gives us an interesting
interpretation of this distinction in his discussion of Marxs Theory ofAlienation in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Marx, ever the dialectician, needed two categories for a proper
dialectic (it wont work with three) so he combined Poeisis with
Praxis as the action components, and he put them in opposition to
Theoria, or as he put it in German, Theorie.
Mszros tells us that Marx was greatly concerned about the
separation of theorie and praxis in philosophy. Theorie, Marx
argued, had somehow become divorced from practice, and functions
as a domain unto itself, proclaiming independent and universal
powers. He describes Marxs critique of theorie without praxis:
Thus instead of being a universal dimension of
all activity, integrated in practice and in its
various reflections, it functions as an independent(verselbstndigt) alienated universality,
displaying the absurdity of this whole system of
alienations by the fact that this fictitious
universality is realised as the most esoteric of
all esoteric specialities, strictly reserved for the
alienated high priests (the Eingeweihten) of
this intellectual trade.
the abstractly contemplative character of
philosophy expresses the radical divorce of theory
and practice in its alienated universality. ii
Examining Marxs 1844 ideas reminds us of how prescient the great
man was about certain aspects of the world to come, even if his theories
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about political and economic organization didn't work out very well in
praxis. In 1844 Marx anticipated the contemporary academic theory
industry, in which alienated high priests of the intellectual trade would
make assertions of the universality of their theories, independent from
practice. Those of us who have seen semiotics, structuralism, critical
theory, deconstruction, post-modernism, and other esoteric specialities
claim universality, and then fall out of fashion, will be tempted to a nod or
perhaps even a smile of recognition. The problem is not that these werent
good ideas, as much as it was that they became orthodoxies that
pronounced Fatwa and declared intellectual Jihad on other theories.
There are theories about why the very idea of documentary isimpossible, why objectivity is impossible, why Photoshop has made
documentary untenable, why everything pretending to be factual or
fictional is but a discourse and all discourses are equally privileged, why all
discourses are fictions, and all reality is social construction. These are not
useful theories. Indeed, they are profoundly unhelpful. They dont do a very
good job of helping the film maker think deeply about what he or she is
doing, which I take to be one of the more valuable aspects of theoreticalwork in other disciplines. Most film theories are not particularly useful as
predictors, nor do they spawn useful ways for documentary film makers to
make sense of the world. In my view, making sense of the world is what
were really about when we teach documentary film making.
Let me put aside the very useful physical theories of photography,
optics and acoustics with which all film makers should be acquainted, and
let us agree that the film theories of Kuleshov, Eisenstein, Pudokvin, even
Dziga Vertov and Mitry, all informed by practice, can be useful to all film
students. As a teacher, Im interested in theory that gives the young
documentary-maker some confidence in the non-fiction enterprise, and
theory that helps him or her craft a work that is honest and that succeeds in
engaging the audience, and presenting the the really true story in ways that
are clear, instructive, and edifying. I like the word edifying because of
its precise derivation, from Late Latin aedificare, to instruct or improve
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spiritually. I think that understanding a complex aspect of the real world is
literally edifying. An elegantly crafted work that helps us make sense of an
aspect of our world gives us pleasure and lifts the spirit.
In useful modern theory, I think that the Cognitive Theorists whowork mainly in psychology have a great deal to say about how we make
sense of the world. Torben Grodal notes that while romantic and
psychoanalytic theories of film, mainly imported from the academic study of
literature, plumb the unconscious for the true context, cognitive
psychology provides rather more satisfying results. iii The cognitivists tell us
that by virtue of evolution and physiology, humans have developed certain
ways of dealing with information. Some aspects of the world are moresalient to us than are others, and emotions have developed to represent our
strongest interests and goals. Simply stated, we feel strongly about those
things we are interested in: a romantic partner, the World Cup, social
justice, protection of the environment, globalization, religion, for example.
Our emotions are strong motivating forces that control our attention and
action. Our cognitive skills enable us to analyze situations that are
interesting to us, in ways that help us achieve our goals. Thus, depending onthe subject and the audience, we can expect that documentaries will be
attended to in very different ways, and we can use theory to think about
how the structure of the documentary ought to mediate between the
content and the presumed audience.
These analytic aspects of our cognitive skills are of great interest,
because we share a strong tendency to analyze by inventing narrative in
order to make sense of things that might otherwise be random objects and
events. Dorrit Cohn gives us a useful definition of narrative as a series of
statements that deal with a causally related sequence of events that
concern human (or human-like) beings.iv David Bordwell and Kristin
Thompson point out that audience postulate causal connections between
the most disparate images, and even random montage attains narrative
status. vAll useful theoretical perspectives.
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From the intensely practical outlook of documentary production,
much of this translates to the observation that people tend to structure
objects and events as narrative, composed of chains of cause-effect, in
chronological time
. The narratives are ways of analyzing persons, objects and events
that are of interest, in ways that are consistent with furthering the
achievement of their goals. (We meet posis in the strangest places. Here,
it arises among the cognitive theorists. )
Since cognitivists demonstrate that no matter what, narrative
happens, then a useful theory would be one that helps our students
understand narrative structure. There are several. Some prefer Bakhtin,
others Propp, but my nominations for very useful theories are Aristotles
Poetics, and Kenneth Burkes Grammar of Motives as a reasonable neo-
Aristotelian alternative. Aristotle, in his Poetics, tells us about how to tell
stories, and alerts us to the structural elements of exposition, complication,
conflict, climax, and resolution. In short, he describes the narrative arc, or
in documentary terms, a through-line.
Burke elaborates this scheme and re-frames it. In his pentad of terms he
tells us about structure and about the necessary elements of a narrative arc
when we try to explain why something happened.
We shall use five terms as generating principle of our
investigation. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, Purpose. In
a rounded statement about motives, you must have some word
that names the act (names what took place, in thought or
deed), and another that names the scene (the background of
the act, the situation in which it occurred); also, you must
indicate what person or kind of person (agent) performed the
act, what means or instruments he used (agency), and the
purpose. Men may violently disagree about the purposes
behind a given act, or about the character of the person who
did it, or how he did it, or in what kind of situation he acted;
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or they may even insist upon totally different words to name
the act itself. But be that as it may, any complete statement
about motives will offer some kind of answers to these five
questions: what was done (act), when or where it was done
(scene), who did it (agent), how he did it (agency), and why
(purpose)' vi
Aristotle and Burke, among others, are helpful with story telling, but
if a documentary is, as I contend, a really true story, how do we help our
students understand the idea of really true.
Epistemology, together with aesthetics and ethics, is the tripod on
which classical philosophy rests. It is a recurring concern in the discussion of
documentary, and to borrow a phrase from Bordwell, et al, these days
pretty well post-theory in that it is a discipline suspicious of sweeping
claims of universality, and relies on logic and rationality.viiThe most useful
contemporary theory is Critical Realism. Two important proponents are John
Searle, who is a logician and linguistic philosopher, and Nol Carroll, who isan aesthetician and film scholar and whose home, unlike most writers on
the aesthetics of film, is in an actual department of philosophy. They both
deal with critical realism.
In an article entitled "Literary Theory and its Discontents," John
Searleviii argues that there are three different theoretical approaches to
questions concerning the meaning of texts. Here, Searle appears to refer
specifically to literary texts and literary theory, but to separate his
argument from film is to create a distinction without making a difference.
The three approaches are those of Stanley Fish, who believes that
meaning resides solely in the response of the reader; Stephen Knapp and
Walter Michaels, who assert that that meaning is entirely a matter of the
authors intention; and Jacques Derrida, whose position seems to be that
that meanings are undecidable and have relative indeterminacy'or
not. Searle illustrates by quoting Derridas statement that , there is
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rather the free play of signifiers and the grafting of texts onto texts within
the textuality and intertextuality of the text. ix
Ironically, Derridarians and other post-modernists are very concerned
about clearly drawn categorical distinctions, such as the distinction betweenfiction and fact. This may well be the residue of the French encyclopedistes,
who specialized in the manufacture of exquisite intellectual pigeon holes
and clearly mutually exclusive categories.
Curiously, Critical Realism, which derives from the rigorous British
tradition of analytic philosophy (Searle was a student of Ludwig
Wittgensteins student, Peter Strawson, at Oxford) is comfortable with the
absence of precisely drawn boundaries, and accepts that philosophical
distinctions inevitably have imprecise edges that allow for rough more or
less kinds of distinctions. That is to say, while there may be certain
similarities between two objects and events, we recognize that they are
more-or-less different from one another.
The relevance for the documentary maker is that the categorical
distinction between fictional and factual, or literal and metaphorical, oreven true and false are valid even if they are not sharply exclusive. In my
view, thats why Chris Marker and Robert Flaherty and Frederic Wiseman,
and Dziga Vertov and Michael Apted all are appropriately described as
documentary film makers. In a nutshell, something may be different from
something else even if it is more or less different, and not absolutely
different. Even a rough distinction is a difference, if there is general
acceptance. Derrida and the Derridarians dont agree, and his that unlessthere is a sharply drawn dichotomous distinction, there is no difference at
all.
In the introduction to his anthology Theorizing Documentary, a
deceptive title for an un-useful book, Michael Renov essentially
attacks the fundamental and underlying premise of documentary,
which is that there is a difference between fact and fiction.x He
basis this on the claim that all discursive forms use similar methods
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and rhetorical figures. He quotes Hayden White, who argues that
there are no objects, only social constructions, that all discourse
constitutes the objects which it pretends only to describe realistically
and to analyze objectively.xiRenov argues that the techniques used
in fiction films, like cross-cutting and flashbacks are used in films
that represent themselves as nonfiction, and that techniques
associated with non-fiction films, such as handheld camera are used
in fiction films.
Nol Carroll points out that the distinction between fiction and
nonfiction is not one of formal technique, and the extent to which
one uses formal methods associated with the other is of no particularrelevance.
Carroll argues that audiences generally are able to determine
whether a film is fiction or nonfiction by virtue of the film coming to the
audience with its factual or fictional status inherently visible. As he and
Carl Plantinga put it, it arrives indexed. Audiences are generally pretty
smart about distinguishing between fictional and non-fictional films, and
film makers who index fiction as non-fiction inevitably reveal the fictional
nature as part of the plot structure of the film, usually through some absurd
assertion. One need only think of Zelig or This is Spinal Tap to get this idea.
Searle, a philosopher, clarifies the situation of the documentary film
maker, who by the very act of making a film imposes a narrative structure
on a set of sounds and images. In the same manner as Renov, one might
argue, and many do, that the use of narrative is what fiction film makers
do, and therefore there is no fundamental categorical distinction between
fiction and so-called factual or non-fiction or documentary film makers. But,
even roughly speaking, there is an immense difference, a veritable chasm,
between drawing sounds and images from the imagination and using the
artistic imagination to make sense of the sounds and images that one finds
in the real world.
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Brian Winston recognized that even so obviously reconstructed a film
as Humphrey Jennings Fires Were Started was properly a documentaryxii.
Winston drastically revised his previous position,xiii in which he seemed to
negate the very possibility of documentary. Writing about Griersons
famously elusive definition of documentary, the creative treatment of
actuality, Winston wrote Surely, no actuality (that is, evidence and
witness) can remain after all this brilliant interventionist creative
treatment (that is, artistic and dramatic structuring) has gone on.
Griersons enterprise was too self-contradictory to sustain any claims on the
real, and renders the term documentary meaningless.
While the truth claims of Fires Were Started differ radically from the
observational fly-on-the-wall or reflexive fly-in-the-soup direct cinema
paradigms, it is certainly is a documentary. As Grierson rather modestly put
it in the original coinage, when describing Robert Flahertys Moana, it has
a certain documentary quality. The documentary quality, I believe, derives
from the correspondence between the subject matter on the screen and
what we know of the world, but even more importantly, from the ways in
which Jennings organized images and sounds drawn from the real world to
create a credible model of the world on the screen.
Searles theoretical ideas are useful in several other ways. Ever since Jean
Rouch brought his clair camera and Perfectone tape recorder to Ghana and
made Le Maitre Fou, observational film makers have avoided expending very
much energy to helping their audiences understand what they were seeing
on the screen. The usual explanation often invoked purity, or
objectivity, or protecting against bias, and many audiences were
suitably confounded.
Implicit interpretation, by means of the selection of subject, structure,
frame, usable takes, sounds, and the other means of film making was
accepted as pure, or ethically superior to overt explanation narration,
because words somehow interfered with the proper allegedly unbiased
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apprehension of the film. The standard Frederick Wiseman-model
documentary makers response to a puzzled audiences was that the film
speaks for itself.
Searle helpfully points out that meanings, concepts, and
intentionality by themselves are never sufficient to determine the full
import of what is said or thought because they only function within a
Network of other intentionality and against a Background of capacities that
are not and could not be included in literal meaning, concepts, or
intentional states.xiv In other words, the meaning of a communication, a
shot, a sequence, a film, relies on the understanding of a rich bed of
contexts in which the communication itself resides.
The student documentary maker would be well advised to consider
his or her intentions and the intentional systems of the audience, as well as
the background of knowledge and abilities that the audience brings to the
screen. In plain language, it is useful for the student to deeply consider his
intentions and goals in the film (poesis, yet again) and give thought to the
predispositions, and the degree of knowledge and concern that both film
maker and audience bring to the documentary transaction. It is useful for
the audience to understand whats on the screen, and for the film maker to
understand that if the audience doesnt get it then it is a film makers
problem and not the problem of the audience.
In his book The Construction of Social Reality, xv Searle addresses the issue
of socially constructed reality. The title of his book is a sly word-play, by re-
ordering social construction to read construction of social " much the
same way as Marx re-ordered the title of Proudhons book Philosophy of
Poverty to entitle his book The Poverty of Philosophy. Like Marxs
response to Proudhon, it Searle gives a critique of the view that reality is a
social construct and exists only as it is subjectively perceived. For Prudhon,
poverty was a social construct. For Marx is was an objective fact. The
recognition of objective facts, people, objects and events that exist in the
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world whether or not we see them, is a most useful conjoining of theory and
practice for documentary film makers, The confounding of subjective
perception with what Noel Carroll, describes as post-modern skepticism
about whether the world exists apart from ourselves is endemic among
students, especially non-scientists, but for the documentary student, the
existence of an objective world is a fundamental concern, because it lies
directly on the cleavage plane between objective fact and subjectively
imagined fiction.
Searle helps students understand that there is indeed a real world out
there, that it is comprised of facts, and that the facts are of two types:
some facts are "brute facts" that they exist independently of what humans
think, and others are social facts, which depend for their existence on
human thought. The first sort are mental facts, such as that one is in pain,
and the physical facts that Mount Everest has snow and ice at its summit,
and hydrogen atoms have one electron.xvi
Examples of social facts, are that this piece of paper is a five dollar bill,
that he is a citizen of the U. S., and that the New York Giants won the 1991
Superbowl. Social facts exist as a layer superimposed on physical facts.
Thus, the physical fact of particular ink inscribed on specific paper in a
unique way is a physical fact. The social fact is that its a dollar bill, is
incontestably objective, too. If the ink and the paper and the inscription are
not correct, then we may argue about whether or not it is counterfeit, but
this can be objectively determined.
As a logician and a philosopher of language, Searle observes that At least
one of the functions of language is to communicate meanings from speakers
to hearers, and sometimes those meanings enable the communication to
refer to objects and states of affairs in the world that exist independently
of language.xvii Although film and video are not precisely languages, but are
language-like, the formulation still makes sense for documentary. We make
documentaries to communicate meanings from film makers to audience
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members, and sometimes those meanings enable the documentary to refer
to objects and states of the world that exist independently of language. The
process of acquiring and displaying images enables us to replace the verbal
description of objects and states of affairs in the real world with more
direct and less abstracted representations than words. The goal, not always
realized, is for the film maker and the audience member to share the same
thought about a reality independent of either.
What, then, is a useful way of helping students struggle with the idea of
truth in documentary? The correspondence theory in epistemology, which is
a pretty useful theory, states that truth is whether the things in the world
really are the way we say they are. In philosophical language, a statement is
true if and only if the statement corresponds with the facts. One of the
functions of language, and I would argue one of the functions of
documentary, is to truthfully represent how things are in the world by
ensuring that statements correspond to facts.
Nol Carrol asks whether the non-fiction film delivers truth? Does it
or can it represent the world in objective ways? The argument goes like this:
After all, the acts of framing and editorial choice are acts of selection, and
selectivity is necessarily biased. The problem is built into the very apparatus
of cinema. Since cinema is, by its very nature, selective, it is by its very
nature biased, and incapable of objectivity.xviiiBut is there something in the
preceding argument that makes nonfiction film any more incapable of
objectivity than, say, a sociological treatise? Does selectivity guarantee
bias? If thats the case, we may as well abandon the documentary
enterprise, and sociology, and science, all of which are based on the twin
ideas of selectivity and objectivity.
Carroll argues that selectivity isnt particularly unique to film. Every
mode of inquiry is selective, whether it be physics or history or journalism.
But if we dont consider that the selectively accumulated facts of history or
physics or economics or chemistry are exiled from objectivity in
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Carrolls words, why should we assume that nonfiction films can never, a
priori, be objective?
The Nia, Pinta, and Santa Maria, the boiling point of water at sea
level, the value of the Euro in U.S. dollars, sodium chloride are selectedfacts, but objective facts nevertheless. Searle suggests that if you dont
accept this, take your car to the post-modernist garage and listen to the
post-modernist theorist tell you that theres nothing wrong with your
carburetor, because after all, the carburetor is a selective social
construction.
Does selectivity necessarily entail bias? Carroll points out that
selectivity certainly invites bias, but it does not guarantee bias. Neither
does the non-fiction nature of documentary guarantee objectivity, but it
certainly allows it.
Protection against bias. and need to ensure of the objectivity of any
statement is not unique to film. All manner of discourses have protocols
that work to diminish the opportunity for bias. Do they work all the time?
Certainly not, but they work much, perhaps most, of the time. For thestudent, I would argue the most important protocol, the most important
protection against bias and assurance of truth, is self-awareness. Being
aware of what one is doing is a powerful way of encouraging self-regulation.
In documentary, the normative assumption is that the film maker tells the
truth, and bias or untruth is open to determination by colleagues and critics
in the public forum. After all, documentary film is not a private art.
As an example of how this works, consider the case of Michael
Moore and his film about the ethical failings of General Motors, Roger
and Me. To a great extent, the film, like many films, bases its
argument and analysis on causal connections and chronological
narrative. The argument is roughly that General Motors did something
in its self-interest, which caused bad things to happen to its workers.
In this more of argument, when the historical facts and causal
connections are distorted because of bias, the film maker is put in
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the uncomfortable position of defending a falsified argument, usually
on grounds that some higher truth justifies playing fast and loose
with facts and chronology. The film critic Pauline Kaels criticized
Roger and Me because events were presented out of chronological
order and the implied chain of causation was incorrect. A newspaper
reporter described Moores reaction as follows: Moore has heard
this criticism a lot lately. Yes, events are presented out of order in
his film, he says. ``So what? I'm tired of it. It avoids talking about the
politics of the story. Your story is not gonna be in the sequential
order you reported it in. So what's the accusation, that I'm a
journalist?xix
Essentially Moore is saying that the altering of chronology to
make causal connections for his noble purposes is well within the
canons of journalism, what one might describe as the history will
absolve me defense. Journalists frequently lose their jobs for that
sort of logic. Thus, the protocol of film criticism serves to guard
against bias.
But what is allowable? How much may the documentarian
creatively treat actuality? In my view, the appropriate standards of
objectivity depend on the context. Take, for example, the films of
the Canadian/Australian film maker Michael Rubbo. My favorite is
probably Daisy, which uses the objective events of Daisy de
Bellefeuilles, face-lift as an armature around which to construct a
meditation on the idea of physical beauty.
Daisy is a colleague of Rubbos at the National Film Board of
Canada.. Rubbo uses the tropes of observational documentary to
record the objective reality of Daisys facelift, but as he does in
many of his films, he introduces a deeply reflexive accompanying
through-line, which is his clearly personal, biased and somewhat
idiosyncratic meditation on the idea of beauty. Does the bias matter?
Hardly, because in the context of the film, he presents what Searle
would recognize as objects and states of the world that exist
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independently of language, and one side of a conversation into which
the audience member is invited to participate, on the meaning of the
face lift as a social fact.
There are other useful theories for documentary practice, butlittle time in which to discuss them in detail. I think that cognitive
theory is rich mine of ideas, especially as documentary intersects
with digital technologies and non-linear modes of presentation.
Knowing how human beings organize their perceptual and conceptual
worlds cannot but be useful.
In my own thinking, Ive been influenced by two books, that
are actually and specifically about documentary film, each deeply
influenced by Critical Realism, and intelligently in tune with the
interests and concerns of documentary film makers. Carl Plantingas
Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Filmxxand the somewhat
less well known What is Non-Fiction Cinema?xxiby Trevor Ponech, are
chock full of interesting and challenging ideas for students of
documentary production, and I recommend them with enthusiasm, as
ways to help our students learn how to tell really true stories.
iPresented at the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, in Boston, Massachusetts from
August 10-15, 1998. Available on-line at http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Acti/ActiHanl.htmiiIstvn Mszros, Marxs Theory of Alienation, New York:1972, Harper Torchbooks, p. 103
iiiTorben Grodal. Emotions, Cognitions and Narrative Patterns in Film in Carl Plantinga and
Greg M. Smith, Passionate Views, Baltimore and London: 1998, Johns Hopkins UniversityPress, p. 127iv
Dorrit Cohn , The Distinction of Fiction, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p.12v
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film As Art, 3rd
. ed. New York: McGraw Hill, 1990. p.
55viBurke, Kenneth.. A Grammar of Motives. Berkeley: Univ. of California 1945p.XV
viiDavid Bordwell and Nol Carroll (eds), Post-theory : Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison,
University of Wisconsin Press, 1996.viii
John R. Searle, Literary Theory and its Discontents, New Literary History, 1994, 25:637667ix
Searle, (1994) p. 7x
Michael Renov, Introduction: The Truth About Non-Fiction in Theorizing Documentary,(ed.) Michael Renov. NY:Routledge, 1993, p. 3xi
ibid. p.7xii
Brian Winston, Fires Were Started, London: British Film Institute, 1999. 79p.xiii
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real, London : British Film Institute, 1995.xiv
Searle (1994) p. 6xv John R. Searle, The Construction of Social Reality, New York: Free Press, 1995xvi
Searle, 1995, p.35
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http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Acti/ActiHanl.htmhttp://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://jenson.stanford.edu:9081/pls/sirwebdad/su_in_get?key_action=fsearch&inrowid=19578&sid=4087&pgcnt=2&lnum=1&authid=http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Acti/ActiHanl.htm -
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xvii
John R. Searle. Rationality and Realism, What is at Stake Daedalus, Fall, 1993, p. 61xviii
Nol Carrol, Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism, in David Bordwell and NoelCarroll (eds.) Post-theory : Reconstructing Film Studies, Madison : University of WisconsinPress, 1996, p.283xix
Sheryl James, A hometown film maker's drama in Wheel Life // Film drives home a point
about GM and the fall of Flint, Mich., St. Petersburg Times; St. Petersburg; Jan 21, 1990;xxCarl R. Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-Fiction Film, Cambridge ; New York
: Cambridge University Press, 1997.xxi
Trevor Ponech, What is Non-Fiction Cinema On the Very Idea of Motion PictureCommunication, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1999.
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