Documentary: The Margins Of Reality

We shall begin by looking at the central tension that constitutes all debates about documentary: the relationship between reality and artifice. John Grierson’s famous dictum, ‘the creative interpretation of actuality’, was one of the first encapsulations of this tension, and has been quoted, misquoted and rephrased many times over the years. John Corner refers to the ‘art of record’ (1996); Brian Winston sums it up as ‘claiming the real’ (1995). In all of these attempts to adequately capture the meaning of documentary, there is the same dilemma: how to deal with and understand something that quite clearly is attempting to represent reality (or some part of reality), but as it does so, uses specific aesthetic devices. A commonsense suggestion is that the aesthetics somehow distort or change the reality being represented. This central issue has troubled documentary filmmakers and theorists (the latter more than the former, it has to be said) and has arguably had a debilitating effect on understanding documentaries.

Secondly, questions of documentary history and the development of the form will be examined. The tendency towards a ‘canonical’ understanding of documentary, and what Stella Bruzzi (2000) has pointed out is an overly ‘genealogical’ notion of its development, are things that have (again) held back our understanding. Elsewhere in the book we shall consider types of documentary work that might be deemed to be ‘marginal’, but the suggestion here is that we need a more complex typology of modes of documentary, and how they interact, if we are to fully grasp the depth and breadth of the field. In this sense, the material focused upon in the rest of the book should be seen as where new and dynamic understandings of the term documentary reside, as different modes will change how we understand the term. It is one of the overarching aims of this book to not merely champion the ‘marginal’ and make a case for certain ‘neglected’ films, but rather to shift the emphasis onto viewing all documentary practice in a wider context. As we shall see, the notions of ‘marginal’ and ‘central’ are subject to change and re-definition, depending on context and usage.

So, what is a ‘documentary’? A good starting point is to examine the relationship between the categories ‘nonfiction’ and ‘documentary’. As we shall see, these terms are intimately related (and sometimes used interchangeably) and anyone looking to understand what ‘documentary’ might mean needs to think about the category ‘nonfiction’. (Clearly, this also suggests that we need to think about the relationship to ‘fiction’ as a category – this is something looked at in some detail in chapter two). A nonfiction film or programme is one in which the people and events depicted are known to have (or are asserted to have) a real-world existence. Unlike the fictional mode, where places and characters may be completely fabricated, the nonfictional is a realm where there is a basis in the world of actuality. This seems straightforward enough – fiction is ‘made up’, nonfiction is ‘real’ – and yet there are countless nuances and points on a spectrum that suggest that this relationship is more fraught than it first appears.

All documentary films are nonfictional, but not all nonfictional films are documentaries. Added to this is the complication of what happens when films that are agreed to be documentaries use techniques and conventions more readily associated with fictional storytelling. As we shall see, there is nothing inherently ‘fictional’ about narrative structure and the editing styles that have developed to tell stories. The key distinction is never one of form or style, but rather of purpose and context. As mock-documentaries prove, we can have fictional, completely fabricated films that mimic the textures and ebb and flow of certain types of documentary. Likewise, there are documentary films that use dramatic structure, reconstructions and the like in order to add to their impact. And there are fictional films that use a certain shooting style and dialogue which evokes ‘documentariness’ in order to bolster their claims to authenticity.

At its most basic, a nonfictional film might involve the simple recording of an event. The early actualities of the Lumière Brothers – trains arriving, workers leaving – are of course nonfictional. The Zapruder footage of the assassination of JFK is nonfictional. The video footage of Rodney King being beaten, shot by George Holliday, is nonfictional. These films have a clear indexical link to a profilmic world – a world that ‘happens’ irrespective of whether or not the camera is present – and they appear to simply ‘show’ or record the events they depict. One of the reasons the Zapruder and Holliday films have had such impact is precisely because they capture, seemingly unawares, momentous events. Their status as images stems from their ‘unstaged’ basis. The Lumière films are slightly different in the sense that they do show some signs of rudimentary staging. As the workers leave the factory, we sense that they just perhaps are ‘performing’ this exit for the benefit of the camera. Does this matter?

This notion of ‘staging’ material, to then film it as if it happened there and then, unprompted, in front of the camera – basically, to present the staged as if it were unstaged – is one of the great red herrings of documentary. A common assumption appears to be that if any staging of any kind has taken place that this somehow invalidates the documentary status of what we are looking at. The hugely influential US ‘direct cinema’ practitioners, for example, made it one of their ‘rules’ to never stage anything for the cameras – they had a belief that truth could only be represented via the literal unfolding of events, captured as if the camera and crew were not present.

However, the contention here is that staging is an unavoidable part of the filmmaking process – as unavoidable as pointing the camera at something, editing, using sound¹ – and it is not staging (or dramatic (re)construction) per se that is the problem, but our attitudes towards it. These attitudes are often based on an untenable essentialist notion of what documentary ‘is’ and bizarrely seem to see documentary as an apparently unchanging mode of filmmaking. The only unchanging thing about documentary is that it is a form that makes assertions or truth claims about the real world or real people in that world (including the real world of history); how it does this is something that is subject to change. In this respect, films and programmes as diverse as Man with a Movie Camera, Coalface, The War Game (Peter Watkins, 1965, UK), Salesman (Albert and David Maysles and Charlotte Zwerin, 1969, US), Sans Soleil (Chris Marker, 1982, Fr.), The Battle of Orgreave (Mike Figgis, 2001, UK) and the Animated Minds (Andy Glynne, 2003, UK) series of films can all arguably be termed documentaries. They all use very different techniques and styles, and represent very different aspects of the world. Even with The War Game, which represents a possible future world, the intention is clearly that of a documentary (like Watkins’ Culloden (1964, UK) from the previous year, which reconstructed a historical past). The Animated Minds films use animation, and therefore do not have that indexical visual link with the actuality they depict. Nevertheless, the techniques used are with a view to assert something about a real actual person: the result is therefore a form of ‘documentary’. We shall return to some of these examples in more detail in subsequent chapters, particularly this notion of staging and reconstructing, and how it impacts on the ‘documentary status’ of certain films. For the moment let us concentrate on some of the basic positions on documentary as a form.

Although John Grierson was not really the very first person to coin the phrase ‘documentary’, and there have been some disputes over his status as the ‘father’ of the documentary movement (see, for example, Pronay 1989), it is certainly the case that his interventions and pronouncements on the subject have been hugely influential. Grierson had no problem with the use of the ‘dramatic’ in the ‘documentary’ context. Indeed, it was the injection of ‘drama’, an underlying dramatic organising principle, that distinguished documentary films proper from what Grierson called the ‘lower categories’ of nonfiction film such as newsreel or lecture films (1966: 145). Though the latter also had as their basis ‘natural material’, what they lacked was the organisation that defined documentary. As Grierson says about the so-called ‘lecture films’:

The distinction that Grierson draws here is one that we can still arguably see in the bifurcation between what is understood as ‘documentary proper’ and ‘investigative journalism’, now almost exclusively the preserve of broadcasters. As Grierson puts it, once one moves beyond the lower categories, ‘we pass from the plain (or fancy) descriptions of natural material, to arrangements, rearrangements and creative shapings of it’ (ibid.). Here we almost have the now-famous dictum ‘the creative interpretation of actuality’.² The important thing here is that Grierson makes no bones about using creative ‘shaping’ – indeed, this is what defines and distinguishes documentary proper. This flies in the face of the still-prevailing orthodoxy in the wake of direct cinema: that documentary should not only consist of ‘natural material’, but that this should appear to viewers as objectively, transparently and ‘undoctored’ as possible.

These notions of objectivity and transparency resonate through the history of documentary and other forms of nonfictional/factual programming. Certainly with regard to television documentary output, with its strong links to broadcast journalism and current affairs, there seems to be a distrust of anything that deviates from a ‘fair and balanced’ position. As we shall see in chapter three, this position is problematic to say the least, but has everything to do with the dominance of one specific kind of documentary practice (direct cinema and its variants), combined with the foregrounding of professional journalistic techniques and conventions, where ‘balance’ and ‘impartiality’ are key elements.

The problem was – and still is – that there is a perceived problem in balancing what appears to be diametrically opposed tendencies: the capturing of natural material on the one hand, and the creative shaping or interpretation of it on the other. As Brian Winston puts it: ‘The supposition that any "actuality" is left after "creative treatment" can now be seen as being at best naive and at worst a mark of duplicity’ (1995: 11). The problem with such a position is, as Stella Bruzzi points out, that it renders virtually impossible any form of documentary. The assumption seems to be that a proper documentary aims to render actuality purely, accurately and objectively, and that the imposition of any ‘creative treatment’ inevitably gets in the way of this project. However, this is not the aim of documentary, and nor should it be. As Bruzzi puts it, much documentary criticism and theory seems based on a ‘simple but erroneous’ claim, ‘that the minute an individual becomes involved in the representation of reality, the integrity of that reality is irretrievably lost’ (2000: 4). Of course there are issues to be debated here – to do with the nature and extent of use of reconstruction and re-enactment, the types of intervention or ‘treatment’ that different filmmakers use, the role of actual people in (semi-)dramatised situations, and so on – but we have to begin by agreeing that it is possible for documentary to be both a recording and a treatment. Bruzzi therefore appears correct when she notes that documentary, if it is anything, is a ‘perpetual negotiation between the real event and its representation … the two remain distinct but interactive’ (2000: 9). As the term ‘negotiation’ suggests, the roles of the documentarists and the spectators are a crucial part of this process of understanding, so the discourses surrounding documentary – the different ways in which they are understood and categorised – are also crucial.

Rather than seeing documentaries, as a general category, as an inevitably failed attempt to render experience or certain situations directly, we should therefore recognise that the aesthetic choices made are merely the formal dimension and have no necessary say in whether or not something is a ‘documentary’. What makes a documentary a documentary resides somewhere else, in the complex interaction between text, context, producer and spectator. As Noël Carroll puts it, in objecting to what he sees as a misguided focus by some critics and theorists on a formal distinction between fiction and nonfiction:

In other words, one cannot point to so-called ‘fictional’ devices (narrative trajectory, cross-cutting) in a documentary and state that these devices, in and of themselves, invalidate that film’s documentary status. Likewise, one cannot point to handheld camerawork or certain types of voiceover in a fiction film and state that these devices alter the film’s fictional status. This is not to say that the use and abuse of specific conventions and, indeed, how such conventions come to be associated with certain types of filmmaking (and levels of ability to make meaningful statements about the real world) is not a fascinating and useful question to ask. In many respects these issues are what this book sets out to deal with. But it needs emphasising that the use of certain conventions and techniques is not the basis of a text’s status vis-à-vis the real world. If it were, then The Office (BBC, series one – 2001; series two – 2003, UK) would be a documentary; The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988, US) would be a fiction film. This is clearly not the case, so their status as documentary or fiction must stem from something else. If we compare The Office to Someone to Watch Over Me (BBC, 2004, UK), a docu-soap about social services in Bristol, there are clear similarities in terms of form. The open-ended, ongoing, narrative; the emphasis on workplace; a similar shooting style. Someone to Watch Over Me uses voiceover narration at certain points, whilst The Office does not, and one can occasionally hear an off-camera question in the social services docu-soap, asking one of the characters for clarification. The Office, on the other hand, uses the convention of the straight-to-camera individual interview. The fact is, though, that despite the clear similarities in style and form, one of these programmes is recognised (or ‘indexed’, a term returned to below) as a fiction (albeit a fictional rendering of a recognisably docu-soap-like world: a mock-docu-soap or parody), whilst the other is recognised as a documentary.

One of the apparent problems is that it is difficult to come up with a generalisable set of criteria that all documentaries exhibit. If a film or programme uses certain techniques (reconstruction for example) it is accused of ‘fictionalising’ the material. Yet, as Carroll says, ‘the distinction between nonfiction and fiction is a distinction between the commitments of the texts, not between the surface structures of the texts’ (1996: 287). One of the problems of much so-called Grand Theory is that it attempts to ‘explain’ how things like film spectatorship ‘work’ in a way that flattens out and disavows any potential and useful differences between individual spectators, or the social groups to which they belong (see Austin 2005a). One simply cannot come up with a model of documentary that explains all documentary texts and their variants, precisely because it is an ‘open concept’ with ‘fuzzy’ boundaries. However, the work of classifying and categorising should not be abandoned because of this. First of all, the existing categories, though far from perfect, do point to certain key similarities and enable us to talk about how documentaries work. Also, the existing categories bring to bear a material force on documentary practice in the sense that practitioners and audiences understand (or misunderstand) any documentary they watch by referring to categories of documentary. If a student is trying to explain what kind of documentary they are going to make, then they might use terms such as ‘observational’, ‘fly-on-the-wall’, ‘Broomfield-esque’ or ‘mock-documentary’. We may have slightly different ideas of what these terms mean, but it is only by referring to them as a starting point that we can have any meaningful dialogue, and there is, in any case, a general consensus about what terms like this might mean. Furthermore, it is in the dialectical progression and hybridising of these categories – where a purely observational style meets a more interview-heavy, reflexive style for instance – that innovations are made. Thinking about how we understand and classify such a wide range of material is therefore of vital importance and should continue to remain central to any ongoing documentary studies project.

Bill Nichols has proposed a number of documentary modes and these typologies are extremely useful as a starting point in the spirit noted above. In Representing Reality (1991) he outlines a typology of: expository, observational, interactive and reflexive modes. More recently, in Blurred Boundaries (1994) Nichols expanded the typology to include what he terms the ‘performative’ mode of documentary. More recently still, in his Introduction to Documentary (2001) the notion of the ‘interactive’ mode appears to have been replaced by the term ‘participatory’ to cover much of the same sorts of documentary (though ‘participatory’ is a broader category, so perhaps it is more accurate to say that the participatory has subsumed the interactive). In both of these later works, there is also more recognition of what is termed the ‘poetic’ mode in documentary.

Expository documentaries are deemed to be those that address the spectator in a more or less direct manner, using supposedly ‘didactic’ conventions such as ‘voice of God’ narration on the soundtrack. A number – though by no means all – of the Griersonian documentaries made in the UK in the 1930s and 1940s might be termed expository in that they set out to tell the audience about something, ‘how it is’. For Nichols, the strength of the expository mode is also its main weakness: it is too didactic, too sure of itself, and (in some discourses) too privileging of a certain way of looking at the world.

Conversely, observational documentary practice favours an aesthetic that aims for (apparent) neutrality – the proverbial ‘fly-on-the-wall’ that merely looks on and does not in any way interfere, intervene or (again, supposedly) creatively shape the material that unfolds. Direct cinema practitioners such as Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, D. A. Pennebaker, and the Maysles Brothers, as well as Fred Wiseman (who has made many films about American institutions, such as High School (1968, US) and Hospital (1970, US)) are all observational filmmakers. The developments in portable cameras and sound recording equipment, in the late 1950s, led to a documentary practice that was much more able to exploit the immediacy and ‘behind-the-scenes’ feel of social events and situations. One of the problems with this category of documentary is that it is often referred to in a shorthand way as cinéma vérité or, simply, vérité filmmaking. As the discussion of Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin’s approach to documentary demonstrates (see below) however, cinéma vérité in its truest sense relies much more on filmmaker intervention (and interaction with their subjects) than does direct cinema. The confusion stems from the way that the term ‘cinema vérité’ has been used to describe what are actually very different approaches to documentary filmmaking. As Kevin MacDonald and Mark Cousins point out, vérité has now become a debased term, used to describe the ‘look’ of the film or programme ‘rather than any genuine aspirations the filmmakers may have. As so often, what started as a revolution, has ended up a style choice’ (1996: 251).

The poetic mode is one that eschews an explicit rhetorical or argumentative structure and favours associations of mood, tone, texture. Nichols states that ‘the poetic mode sacrifices the conventions of continuity editing and the sense of a specific location in time and place that follows from it to explore [such] associations’ (2001: 102). It has to be said that ‘continuity editing’ is hardly a feature of many documentaries, so it is unclear why it is used here as the ‘norm’ against which the poetic documentary is measured. However, it is certainly true that poetic documentaries may not have the rooted ‘specificity’ of other documentaries that use (for example) expository or observational approaches. Poetic documentaries have clear links to modernist and avant-garde movements in the ways that they foreground the often ephemeral and fragmented nature of subjectivity; rather than the apparent ‘certainties’ of expository and observational films, there is often an emphasis on the ambiguities of experience, and this can be seen as a form of commentary on the epistemological bases of documentary as a whole. The key to the poetic mode is that it is the aesthetic expression of aspects of the real that becomes the main focus, rather than the real perse. So, a ‘city symphony’ such as Walter Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927, Ger.) uses images of that particular location within a framework of expressionist, rhythmic editing. Similarly, more recent films by Godfrey Reggio (for example Koyaanisqatsi (1983, US), Powaqqatsi (1988, US)) adopt a mesmeric montage style in order to construct a poetic, contemplative framework for images of the world.

The notion of the ‘interactive’ documentary privileges the interactions and relations between the filmmaker and that which they are filming. Instead of the ‘neutral’ detachment of the observational mode, or the didacticism of the expository mode (which is also ‘detached’, in its own way), we find active engagement and foregrounded exchange between people. Thus, the interactive documentary

A key example here is the cinéma vérité of Rouch and Morin. In Chronique d’un Ete (Chronicle of a Summer, 1960, Fr.), Rouch and Morin develop a specific style that plays upon their role as filmmakers, and their ability to have an effect upon and shape the material they are filming. As some critics have made clear, this marks them out as very different from the American vérité practitioners (such as Leacock et al., who should more accurately be described as direct cinema practitioners), because of the way Rouch and Morin view interaction between filmmaker and filmed as an intrinsically positive and productive thing.

Instead of a belief in filming events and people and the ‘truth’ of what is being filmed somehow emerging organically – something that the direct cinema practitioners professed to believe in – those who believe in a more ‘interactive’ style demonstrate that it is the filmmaker’s input and ‘manipulation’ that is key.³ This is not to suggest that this is more important than the actions of the ‘subjects’ – that would be to go too far the other way, and be equally wrong in its attempt to assert that one side of a dichotomy is ‘more important’ – what is vital is that we recognise the dialectical interrelationship (that is, interaction) between what is filmed and who is doing the filming, the very processes of filming. A commonplace assertion about filming real people is that they will not ‘be themselves’; that they will play up to the presence of the cameras. A key point is that this ‘playing up’ to the camera is not only unavoidable but should be actively embraced by filmmakers and critics. It is central to the notion of the ‘performative’ in documentary (see below) and should not be underestimated as a way of discovering truths about a specific situation or set of people.

In Mark Isaacs’ short film Lift (2001, UK), for example, we can see a somewhat unconventional interview technique – a strange form of ‘participant observation’. Isaacs spent one month in a tower block in the East End of London, where he would spend most of each day standing in the lift, holding a camera directed at the lift doors, filming whoever comes in to use the lift. Remaining silent at first, and not responding to the frankly bemused (and sometimes suspicious) responses of the inhabitants of the block, but instead ‘merely’ filming them, the documentary gradually develops into a more interview-based film. After deliberately not engaging with the people, Isaacs begins to ask questions, often out of the blue, such as ‘What do you remember from your childhood?’, ‘Have you ever been in love?’ Over the course of the 24-minute film, whilst we are clearly seeing a highly compressed and ‘partial’ view of (some of) these inhabitants, it builds up to give an original and strangely touching picture of these people and the place where they live. As a documentary, it is formally very interesting too, in the sense that it eschews any sense of showing the entirety of the environment – the wilful focusing on the interior of the lift magnifies the small talk, silences, sidelong glances of this most interstitial of spaces. As Isaacs himself puts it: ‘A lift is neither here nor there, people are waiting to get home or go out, and the longer I spent there the more able I was to ask the right questions.’⁴

While far from being a conventional documentary, Lift offers an intriguing insight into the world and the people it depicts. There are several wry jokes about a ‘fly on the wall’, when Isaacs cuts to a close up of a fly crawling up the wall of the lift; at the end of the film, the fly is shown expiring on the floor. The film therefore exhibits a humorous knowledge of viewer expectations about specific documentaries – one of the standard ways of presenting such ‘social’ material (the inhabitants of council estates, housing problems) would be in a fly-on-the-wall/observational style, and yet this film subverts that expectation. When the film begins, Isaacs assumes the role of detached observational filmmaker, there to simply film the comings and goings of various people in a particular milieu. Of course, the cramped, tiny space and his obvious presence militate against any such detached relationship with his subjects. This can be read as a deliberate ploy on Isaacs’ part, to draw out with no little humour and irony some of the more outlandish claims to neutrality and objectivity made by the direct cinema practitioners. They (often explicitly) claimed to film things as they happen and literally capture the truth of the matter; Isaacs starts out trying to do this, and it quickly becomes apparent that it is a sham, as people do respond and react to his presence, and this is something that needs to be addressed. Of course, the space of the lift is used as a microcosm (with the emphasis on ‘micro’) of society, where people come and go, interacting with one another according to set rules. One day, a man with a movie camera happens to be there. Some people gamely try and ignore his presence – almost as if they have read a direct cinema ‘rule book’: ‘just act naturally, and that means ignoring the camera!’ But others gradually see this as a project in which they are partners (though not, perhaps, equal ones).

Some of the interactions with Isaacs are unprompted and seemingly a propos of nothing in particular. For example, one man turns and smiles at Isaacs/the camera hesitantly a few times before saying ‘We’ve got a Jacuzzi in our flat.’ When Isaacs says, off screen, ‘I beg your pardon?’ the man repeats this and elaborates, ‘They’re a lot bigger than you think. The flats, I mean.’ We see the same man at various other points – cheerfully on his way out ‘on the pull’, drunkenly (but equally cheerfully) admitting he had got nowhere but had ‘had a great night’. Other people are more reticent; others still even more outgoing. One Asian man keeps visiting the lift, even when not actually using it to travel up or down the tower block, with gifts of food for Isaacs. We also learn at one point that the majority of the inhabitants used to be Jewish, but now the ‘white people’ are in the minority. Such offhand comments could be construed as borderline racist (and perhaps the speakers are), but this is less a documentary that develops and explores these issues in any depth than one that recognises that they are important issues for many ordinary people out there; the sense of a changing social fabric, and people’s differing attitudes towards it, are what is important here. Isaacs’ somewhat eccentric style draws out these details in a way that would not happen in a more ‘conventional’ documentary. In many ways, the subject matter of Lift is how certain documentary conventions (and pretensions) might actually obscure the more interesting social truths about a situation. Isaacs begins the film a certain way, but then changes direction as his subjects do.⁵

This discussion of Lift has drawn attention to the fact that it is never easy to clearly and definitively state which single category a particular documentary might belong to (whilst nonetheless recognising that what one is watching is a documentary of some kind). Many documentaries use a range of techniques and strategies as suits their purpose. Even though the analysis here has tended to discuss Lift in terms of its ‘interactive’ or ‘participatory’ features, and especially the way that Isaacs playfully sends up these strategies, one could just as easily discuss the film in terms of its ‘reflexivity’, as it does (to an extent) reveal that it is a construction. The question of reflexivity in filmmaking is highly problematic. Generally speaking, it refers to the ways in which a filmmaker might somehow reveal the filmmaking process itself, as the text unfolds. As such a manoeuvre can (indeed, should, if it is working properly) unsettle the spectator’s expectations and assumptions, it can be an interesting political strategy. To be reflexive in any medium is to engage in a metacommentary, or a commentary on the processes of representation themselves. As Nichols puts it, while ‘most documentary production concerns itself with talking about the historical world, the reflexive mode addresses the question of how we talk about the historical world’ (1991: 56–7, emphasis in original). (This is an important issue and forms the basis of the discussion of The Battle of Orgreave in chapter three). One of the problems here is that notions of reflexivity are often misunderstood to merely be formal and stylistic in nature – to do with surface features of the text. In my teaching of documentary practice I have often found that students will assume that merely by showing someone holding a camera or other item of kit, ‘behind the scenes’ (for example the Broomfield-esque boom microphone), they are somehow ‘being reflexive’. The assumption seems to be that by showing (to any extent) that what we are watching has been filmed and constructed, the viewer will magically understand the importance of this fact. As Nichols goes on to point out though, ‘reflexive texts are self-conscious not only about form and style … but also about strategy, structure, conventions, expectations and effects’ (ibid.). In other words, proper reflexivity involves an understanding of the social implications and consequences of revealing that something is a construction; anything less than this runs the risk of a self-regarding solipsism.

The main problem with reflexivity is that first of all it is often simplistically entangled with questions of (scepticism about) objectivity, and secondly it seems assumed that reflexivity will magically guarantee a deeper truthfulness and profundity. This explains why some student productions sprinkle ‘reflexive’ tropes over their documentary like so much seasoning: they have misunderstood the purpose and the reasons for reflexivity in the first place. As Noel Carroll has argued, this entanglement of reflexivity with questioning objectivity is an inevitable consequence of certain stances on nonfiction texts. If a film does not use reflexive strategies it is upbraided for ‘denying’ the fact that it is a construction, and this, in turn, means that suspicion is cast on any claims it might make to say something about the real world. As Carroll asks ‘[does] not calling attention to such construction processes amount to denying the existence of those processes?’ (1996: 293, emphasis in original). He thinks not: ‘Denial, so to say, is its own speech act. In denying something, one generally has to do something. It doesn’t simply happen that I deny my heritage if I ask someone to pass me the pepper without telling them I’m Irish’ (ibid.). In short, the only way to deny that a specific documentary is a constructed artefact would be to state in some shape or form during the course of the documentary ‘This is not a constructed artefact’. But – in the same way as Magritte’s The Betrayal of Images, an image of a pipe with the legend ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ [‘This is not a pipe’] – such denial does nothing more than draw attention to the process of representation it seeks to deny; it is, in effect, a reflexive strategy.

The way out of this conundrum is simply to recognise that much of the scepticism about the ‘fictiveness’ of documentary, or the problems of (non-)reflexivity, is a red herring. People can and do routinely recognise that what they are watching is ‘fictional’, ‘nonfictional’ or some kind of hybrid. The fact that there are a vast number of differently inflected hybrids – from drama-documentaries, to ‘based on’/true-life stories, to reality TV, standard expository documentaries, re-enactments of some shape or form – does not mean that people cannot at least attempt to discern where a specific text ‘fits’. There are admittedly some cases where what one is viewing is indeterminate – the film No Lies (Mitchell Block, 1973, US), for example, or The Day Britain Stopped (Gabriel Range, 2003, UK) – but it is the indeterminacy that is part of the point of such examples. As such, it is an intrinsic ‘talking point’ about them. For example, virtually every newspaper article, review or radio discussion of The Day Britain Stopped referred explicitly to its frighteningly accurate simulation of broadcast news reports and its piecing together of what appears to be a standard contemporary history documentary. The idea that any viewers were really, truly duped into thinking that these events had actually happened is an urban myth; a myth that raises all sorts of interesting debating points about documentary representation, ethics and the role of fabrication – but a myth all the same. We need a more sophisticated notion of how spectators engage with documentary texts of varying kinds, as all too often it appears that the viewer is posited as someone who has not a clue about the world they inhabit, nor the standard modes of representation that they routinely encounter. We shall return to some of these issues of documentary spectatorship.

The notion of the ‘performative’ documentary is a very complex area, and is something discussed in more detail in the next chapter, when documentaries where real people ‘play themselves’ are examined, as well as the representational problems raised by different ‘versions’ of the ‘same’ story (the main example being the Aileen Wuornos story). For the moment, it is sufficient to say that many performative documentaries could also be discussed under the previous heading of reflexive, in the sense that they foreground the subjective and self-conscious aspects of the documentary filmmaker and/or their subjects. It is this subjective discourse that Nichols emphasises in his definition of the ‘performative mode’ (1994: 92–106). Bruzzi objects to this as too simplistic, and says that discussion of the performative documentary can and should usefully follow the linguistic theory of J. L. Austin, where ‘performative’ refers to ‘utterances that simultaneously both describe and perform an action’ (2000: 154). The central thesis of Bruzzi’s book is that ‘documentaries are a negotiation between filmmaker and reality and, at heart, a performance’ (ibid.) and she further states that documentaries that are specifically referred to as ‘performative’ are ‘the enactment of the notion that a documentary only comes into being as it is performed … although its factual basis (or document) can pre-date any recording or representation of it, the film is necessarily performative because it is given meaning by the interaction between performance and reality’ (ibid.).

As the extended glossing of his categories suggests, it appears reasonable to agree with Nichols that the proposing of modes and typologies, or attempts to categorise certain practices, is a very useful thing to do. In disagreeing with some of Nichols’ points or conclusions, some of his critics appear to go overboard and reject the categories themselves. As we shall see below, however, the discursive categories we create in order to understand what something is and how it works actually have a defining power over that something. How we talk about things impacts upon those things. Bruzzi takes issue with Nichols’ categorising and typologies, and especially what she sees as his ‘evolutionary’ or ‘genealogical’ construction of documentary history; although the categories proposed by Nichols are very useful, one can agree with Bruzzi that any suggestion of them being in a chronological relationship is misleading. Nichols has pointed out that they co-exist and do not ‘replace’ each other, but this is not precise enough and what is needed is a model where there are different modes of documentary practice, but that they are seen as dialectically inter-related. Certainly one can trace trends and tendencies, where one specific type of documentary discourse (for example the expository) might be seen to dominate a specific era or culture. But there have always been so-called ‘reflexive’ documentaries, and there continue to be ‘expository’ documentaries in the present. It is more to do with how these modes are taken up and used in specific contexts that is of interest – and this can be perceived as a type of ‘hybridity’ in documentary – rather than looking for ‘new’ modes. We have discussed Lift, for example, in a way that emphasises its ironic juxtaposition of modes: it is not so much that we can point to this film and say it is startlingly ‘new’ (though it is refreshingly eccentric and original); its strength lies in the way that Isaacs playfully deals with a well-trodden pathway, using a deliberate and self-conscious mixture of modes. As we shall see in later chapters, the most diverse of documentary practices will use a range of exposition, observation and overt ‘reflexive’ comment as suits their purposes at any particular time. It is also the case that it is people’s active engagement with these practices that actually constitute what we understand documentary to be at any particular moment. It is important therefore that we examine the range of ways in which documentary is talked about and understood, and the importance of categories, modes and types.

The main problem for those examining documentary is that it is too often thought of in essentialist terms. In other words, the assumption seems to be that there is somewhere ‘out there’, the ‘model’ or ‘typical’ documentary, against which all attempts at documentary are measured. Documentary worth is more often than not equated with an ideal of ‘transparency’ and ‘objectivity’. Such criteria clearly stem from the dominance of a specific type of documentary – the aforementioned American direct cinema of practitioners such as Pennebaker, the Maysles Brothers, Drew and Leacock. The legacy of direct cinema is such that most of the ‘commonsense’ things that are said about ‘documentary’ actually only really refer to films from the direct cinema stable. The main difficulty is the way that essentialist notions of documentary limit the development and understanding of the form: the features of a certain type of documentary come to stand for the whole of documentary, in what we could term a metonymic relationship. If someone were to suggest that all fiction films had to be musicals, or talked about musicals as if they were the only type of fiction film against which all others should be measured,⁶ then they would be dismissed as being unduly prescriptive, as holding up what is actually one type of something as if it is the only type. Or, rather, that it is the central, most important type, and all others are deviations from it. Yet this is what appears to happen routinely when discussing documentaries: certain features of some documentaries are held up as of central importance, and if a film does not contain them (or, if it deliberately flouts them), then its status as a documentary is thereby doubted.

Carl Plantinga (1997) has written usefully about documentary, suggesting that thinking in terms of ‘prototypical’ examples, and those that are less typical, is a helpful way forward. He argues that documentary is an ‘open concept’ with ‘fuzzy boundaries’, and that the full range of documentary expression can only be understood if we engage with the notion of categorisation. How we talk about and categorise things has a meaningful impact on those very things. Language and ways of understanding the world are social phenomena, subject to change, and it is this changeability that needs to be incorporated into any useful model for categorising and understanding documentary.

Plantinga writes about documentary as a form of the broader category, nonfiction, and borrows Noël Carroll’s concept of ‘indexing’ to understand how such films operate in the social sphere. While making clear that there is ‘no necessary realism or resemblance between the nonfiction work and actuality’ (1997: 18), he also argues that any fundamental distinction we make between fiction and nonfiction is based on this notion of indexing and the response of the spectator – in other words, the contextual factors. What he means by this is that a nonfiction film can diverge from a mere slavish imitation of actuality – that is, it could be ‘stylised’ in some shape or form – but will still be ‘understood’ as nonfictional by its spectators. Obviously, this is a complex area, and certain very specific types of film and television programme deliberately play upon this notion of indexing. For example, the varying kinds of ‘mock-documentary’, spoofs and the like, take the recognisable conventions of this kind of discourse, and use the spectators’ engagement to sustain their effect. So, This is Spinal Tap (Rob Reiner, 1984, US), or the BBC series The Office derive their comedic effects from our recognition of specific documentary conventions. This notion of ‘recognition’ is especially important when we come to talk about documentary canons, and works that are deemed to deviate from what is the ‘norm’ for documentary. As we shall see, such ‘deviation’ is actually what keeps the form alive and developing, but it is required that practitioners and audiences recognise it in a very specific way.

To this end, we need to think about classification and categorisation as material practices – that is, practices that have actual real-world consequences – as it is in this realm that norms, standards, conventions and deviations are (more often than not, implicitly) understood. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star (1999) have done some interesting work on classification and its consequences, and anyone thinking about documentary as a category needs to take on board some of what they say. It is precisely because documentary is a so-called ‘open concept’ that we need a flexible way of understanding how such a diverse set of texts ‘fit together’. Bowker and Star start by offering definitions of the terms ‘classification’ and ‘standards’ (1999: 10–16). They define a ‘classification’ as ‘a spatial, temporal, or spatio-temporal segmentation of the world’ further stating that ‘in an ideal, abstract sense’ a classification system is consistent, has categories that are clearly mutually exclusive, and that the system is complete or ‘provides total coverage of the world it describes’. They also acknowledge, quite correctly, that ‘no real-world working classification system … meets these "simple" requirements and we doubt that any ever could’ (1999: 11). Nevertheless, it is in the ways that we negotiate whether or not something ‘fits’ that we are constantly made to reappraise the things themselves and the categories. For example, it is commonplace when an innovation takes place in an area that some people are uncomfortable with or reject it. The recent phenomena of ‘reality TV’ and ‘docu-soaps’ are a prime example of this – they are denigrated for ‘dumbing down’ the documentary ideal, going a fabrication too far in their pursuit of zany characters and (more to the point) high ratings. These things might very well be true in certain instances (but they are not necessarily true across the board), but that is beside the point. The most important thing is that such innovations mean we have to re-think commonly-held beliefs about what ‘documentary’ is and where it might be going. To simply say, then, that a programme like Big Brother is ‘not documentary’ strikes me as facile: all anyone is saying if they state this is that Big Brother is not their idea of a documentary (and they will usually be measuring ‘documentary’ by the ‘Griersonian’ informative/educational model, or that of the ‘observational’ direct cinema model, and their variants). Big Brother might involve people playing up to the cameras, performing, pretending – but so do many other documentaries. It is far more important to discuss the reasons why some people think that certain texts are ‘not documentary’ (or ‘not proper documentary’) than it is to posit intractable, essentialist notions of what constitutes the form.

However, this raises two very important points. First of all, that categories and the norms associated with them are social constructs and are therefore only meaningful if people broadly agree on their usage. As Plantinga points out (1997: 19–20) things are often ‘named according to their conventional functions, and an unconventional use of an artifact does not require that we change its name’ – his example being if someone uses a toaster as a weapon to hit an intruder, it would still be described as a ‘toaster’, despite its unconventional usage on that particular occasion. A similar conventional usage prevents someone from simply understanding a fictional film as nonfictional (or vice versa): if we were to watch The Matrix (Andy and Larry Wachowski, 1999, US) as nonfiction we would be misunderstanding the film’s status.⁷ Secondly, the idea of a negotiated consensus on what constitutes a ‘documentary’ suggests that there are different constituencies out there in the world, contesting what this might mean. Critical discourse on ‘reality TV’ often suggests that it is a debased version of the documentary ideal. A number of reviewers of Michael Moore’s polemical films, such as Roger and Me (1989, US), Bowling for Columbine (2000, US) or Fahrenheit9/11 (2003, US), take him to task for what they perceive to be his overt manipulations and journalistic shortcomings. Such critical positions are of course predicated on some yardstick of ‘documentariness’ against which these examples come up short for those particular critics.

This brings us to the notion of ‘standards’, and how they impact upon and shape the different ‘communities of practice’. As Bowker and Star point out, a standard is ‘any set of agreed-upon rules for the production of (textual or material) objects … [it] spans more than one community of practice (or site of activity)’ (1999: 13). The problem we have with an open concept or category such as documentary is that there appears to be a number of conflicting ideas of what constitutes the field – in other words, perhaps there is no ‘standard’? This is not really the case, but in saying this we do need to emphasise the fact that supposed standards will be read differently and adapted according to context. This is not the same as saying ‘anything goes’, but rather that different documentarists will approach things in different ways to suit their purposes. To take a key example: there is no one single way of conducting and presenting an interview. To say that there is a ‘standard’ relating to interviews should not mean (in a commonsense way) that there is a ‘standard’ way of doing the interview. This is not what different documentarists will agree about. What they will agree about is that interview material (of varying types and approaches) is vitally important to documentary as a mode. In this sense, it is a ‘standard’ of documentary practice. But this should not be taken to mean, as some critics implicitly do, that there should be a ‘preferred’ way of doing interviews.⁸

One of the ways that we can understand how seemingly diverse and multi-sited people might be said to all be doing the ‘same’ thing (in this case, making documentaries) is to use Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger’s term, ‘legitimate peripheral participation’, something they talk about in relation to what they term ‘situated learning’ and ‘communities of practice’ (1991). Their perspective is one that sees learning as an intrinsically social process, rather than the simple ‘transmission’ of facts from one person to another. Legitimate peripheral participation refers to the ways that individuals learn in a ‘socially situated’ manner, and how communities of practice are sustained across a wide range of contexts and groups. Interaction and engagement is not a static thing or a simple ‘exchange’ but is something that is in flux and any learning and communication that occurs is ‘socially situated’:

In other words, people will orient themselves to specific knowledges by relating what they do and think to what others – perceived to be ‘already there’, ‘in the know’ – do and think. In terms of documentary practice, there is a clear correlation in the sense that people will make films and programmes that follow specific conventional structures, or they will endeavour to subvert these, or create interesting hybrids, and so on. The docu-soap, the mock-documentary, the video diary – all of these are types of documentary that borrow from and bend the rules of specific sets of conventions, and they first appeared as innovations in form – or ‘peripheral’ or ‘marginal’ to what was then ‘mainstream’ documentary. They have gradually moved to become more central, such that the docu-soap format, for example, is now seen as a highly orthodox part of the television schedules. It is this dynamic relationship between the perceived centre and the perceived margins that we shall now explore via a discussion of documentary canons.

As noted above, Bruzzi identifies a tendency in the work of Bill Nichols – what she refers to as his ‘family tree’ of documentary modes. It is certainly true that suggesting that the development of documentary is in any way a tidy, chronological ‘evolution’ is highly problematic. However, this does not totally invalidate the usefulness of the categories or modes that Nichols suggests. We can point out, as Bruzzi does, that the expository mode was not superseded by the interactive or reflexive modes, that it still exists today, or that many early documentaries were imaginatively reflexive and far from the didacticism associated with the expository mode (see, for example, Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera). Nevertheless, as this overview implies, the modes that Nichols proposes are broadly useful, especially when used in conjunction with Bruzzi’s suggestion that all documentaries must be seen as a dialectical relationship between the events depicted and their mode of depiction.

Another most useful issue that Bruzzi addresses is that of a ‘canon’ of documentary films which are held up as exemplary. Of course, the only way we can propose an argument about documentary is by recourse to examples, but the problem has tended to be that certain types of documentary have become so dominant that it skews things so that we end up with the metonymic relationship mentioned earlier. Thus, the ‘Griersonian’ social documentary of the 1930s, direct cinema in the US in the 1950 and 1960s and more recently – and more contentiously – notions of ‘reality TV’ and docu-soaps are all held up as models of ‘documentariness’, ones that capture the spirit of a particular moment. The problem with a canon is that it implies ‘norms’ in the sense that the films in the canon exhibit certain features and tendencies; any that do not measure up to these yardsticks are placed ‘outside’ the canon. This is not a wilful attempt to shed light on obscure or completely overlooked documentaries but rather to suggest, as Plantinga does, that we need to think carefully about the whole spectrum of documentary activity. As the category work done by Bowker and Star (or George Lakoff’s prototype theory, to which Plantinga alludes) suggests, categorising is an apparently unavoidable way that humans make sense of the world. At the same time, though, we should remember that categories are potentially mobile in the way suggested by Lave and Wenger’s work on ‘communities of practice’. A documentary’s meaningfulness might alter depending on who is watching it, in what context, and for what purpose. For example, a 1930s information film can be the source of much unintended amusement for a twenty-first-century audience, due to the stilted re-enactments, and dated social graces. This brings us full circle to the notion of the meaning of a documentary being a process of negotiation between the film, the filmmaker, their audience(s) and the social and viewing context. The importance of spectatorship for documentary studies cannot be overstated, and is increasingly recognised; we can therefore conclude this chapter by introducing some of the central issues in this area, as they will inform discussion in subsequent chapters.

The role of the viewer in deciphering, interpreting and categorising different types of documentary is now central to any convincing critical framework on the subject. As the points above on communities of practice, standards and canons intimate, there is a constant discursive dimension to anyone’s understanding of documentary output. With the increased ‘hybridisation’ of the form – so much so that arguably the term ‘documentary’ has lost much of its descriptive power in any case – the interpretative activity of the audience is paramount. There are clear instances where the spectator is placed in a position that highlights the very act of spectating, and all the claims to knowledgeability that this implies. For example, many ‘reflexive’ documentaries will draw attention to the uncertainties and gaps in their discourse, and foreground the processes of meaning construction; the point of such strategies is arguably to make the viewer critically reflect on their role in interpreting the material. In Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003, US), for instance, the role of the viewer is vitally important for the filmmaker’s techniques to work (see Austin 2005b). The film does not ‘give us the truth’ of what happened, but asks us to think about and evaluate what we are told. There is an explicit emphasis on the importance of the film’s spectators (this is stated a number of times in interviews with Jarecki and post-screening audience discussions, included on the DVD release of the film).

Such emphasis on the viewer’s (inevitably) subjective interpretation of what a documentary is ‘about’ does have its limits, however. As Plantinga makes clear, the logical conclusion of ‘subjectivist’ theories of film is a strange state of affairs where ‘the viewer actually defines and constructs the text within the process of viewing’ (2000: 133). While this can be seen as a corrective to theories that suggest that some kind of ‘ideal’ spectator is constructed and positioned by the text, the truth of the matter is somewhere in between. As the discussion above of ‘conventional usage’ suggested, it is not in the power of individual spectators to decide whether what they are watching is ‘fiction’ or ‘nonfiction’; this is something that is socially negotiated. As will be argued in subsequent chapters, the changing form and function of texts that appear to have some documentary intention (and here we can include things like mock-documentaries, or films that consist of entirely dramatised reconstructions or re-enactments) mean that the burden of active viewing is placed on the spectator. Now, more than ever, it seems that we are repeatedly being asked to make decisions as to the ontological basis of what we are watching – that is, ask ourselves ‘is this a documentary?

Dai Vaughan talks of the ‘documentary response’ from the spectator in relation to certain material; ‘documentary’ as a term describes ‘not a style or method or a genre of filmmaking but a mode of response to film material’ (1999: 58). In short, viewers will respond to material in a way that recognises its direct relationship to actuality. Such a response does not mean that viewers will watch something and take it as a direct record of some aspect of actuality, but that they will recognise and understand that the film or programme in question is attempting to make assertions about that actuality. This is why viewers can have a legitimate ‘documentary response’ to animated documentaries or dramatised reconstructions: whilst problematic if viewed as direct, indexically-linked recordings of actuality, such films ask the viewer to respond in a certain manner, and it is this that gives them their documentary status. In the next chapter, we shall examine the relationship between drama and documentary, with a view to clarifying what happens when these modes meet.