Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentaries”

Chapter II In and Out of This World: Digital Video and the Construction of Nonfiction Aesthetics in the New Hybrid Documentary

“Some artists turn from documentary to fiction because they feel it lets them come closer to the truth, their truth. Some, it would appear, turn to documentary because it can make deception more plausible.”

Erik Barnouw (1993: 349)

“I’m sorry, if we’re going to use words we should be accurate in our use of them. It isn’t a question of technique, it is a question of the material. If the material is actual, then it is documentary. If the material is invented, then it is not documentary … if you get so muddled up in your use of the term, stop using it. Just talk about films. Anyway, very often when we use these terms, they only give us an opportunity to avoid really discussing the film.”

Lindsay Anderson (qtd. in Levin 1971: 66).

“Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.”

Oscar Wilde

In 1995, Brian Winston concluded his book-length rewriting of documentary’s history

Claiming the Real with an urgent call to abandon the Griersonian project in its entirety, and drop any pretensions for “superior representations of reality” (254). In a “Post-

Griersonian” era, Winston envisioned, documentaries should be liberated from the implications of actuality and the burdens of authenticity, and move away from their traditional place in cinema as a “discourse of sobriety,” if they ever wish to break free of their history as marginalized texts, an ‘after-thought’ on film practice. (Winston 255-

258). Following up on this prophecy thirteen years later in a Visible Evidence conference, Winston mourns the contemporary falling from grace of the purely observational mode, and praises those documentary attempts which further mediate

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 2 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” between the representation and the object, give up any aspirations for absolute evidential referentiality, and transcend the ever fluctuating boundaries of the documentary project1.

For the past few years documentaries have been venturing into the commercial mainstream of cinema, concomitantly reclaiming a prestigious place within critical circles. Documentary’s unprecedented success at the box office carries it a distance away from its historical “perennial unattractiveness”, and into a new and promising future, cushioned well near its well-established fictional counterpart. (Winston, 254) When a genre that still struggles to situate itself between the irreconcilable poles of art and entertainment enjoys such an exceptional success, it becomes imperative to seek explanations for the motivation behind and effect of any significant innovations within it.

The array of reasons for this surprising renaissance is yet to be fully theorized, but at least one important feature of documentaries today, which corresponds directly with Winston’s prophetic remarks, may provide a rich platform from which we can further account for this interesting phenomena: the increasing blending between fact and fiction; namely, the introduction and implementation of strategies of fiction and the stylistics of fiction genres into the documentary scheme, and the ongoing tendency to press hard, perhaps even harder than ever, on the existing categorical boundaries which make up a presumed definition of what constitutes a film as a documentary or a work of fiction.

Indeed, the notions of ‘truth’, ‘real’, or the ‘authentic’ have always been elusive terms standing for the essentially unreachable aspirations to motivate the documentary project. While a traditional scholarly thinking about documentary used to praise it for its impersonal and unbiased capacity to mirror the profilmic with no fictional artifice in its

1 Thoughts paraphrased from Brian Winston’s concluding remarks at VE 2008 conference, held in Lincoln, England. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 3 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” early naïve days of the purely observational2, it has long been adjusting to reflect on a genre going through significant formal changes, gradually abandoning the efforts to emphasize an impression of objectivity, and unloading its heavy historical burden of capturing authenticity. Admittedly, within the practice and theory of contemporary non- fiction cinema one can easily recognize the ambiguities and complexities of a new

‘documentary truth’ freed from obsolete standards of objectivity. Unwilling to so naïvely invest trust in the veracity of an image seven decades past the Griersonian period, a viewer of documentary nowadays has learned that “the empirical is not always what it seems”, and is often encouraged to trace elements of fiction contained by more complicated tactics and strategies of documentation (Chanan 23). Nonfiction films today very rarely masquerade as transparent imitations of objective recordings, and often manifest their processes of fabrication not only to acknowledge their subjective and manipulative nature, but also to emphasize the ability to bear informative and evidential value, and to engage in a more contingent pursuit of truth. Whether employing a firm narrative structure, a playful performative arrangement, or satirical mockumenting aspirations, the new documentary has been constantly renewing interest in the rhetorical tropes of subjectivity and fiction, entertaining arguments based on uncertainties and incompleteness rather than prioritizing disembodied knowledge and facts3.

To be sure, there is nothing essentially groundbreaking here, considering that reality and fiction has long been intermingling within the documentary project (e.g., the

2 See, for example, Grierson, John. “First Principles of Documentary” Grierson on Documentary. Ed. Forsyth Hardy. London: Faber and Faber, 1966. 199-211. 3 There are countless examples for the current inclination of documentary to stage reality with fictional inserts, or to emphasize the fact/fiction blur as the centerpiece of the document. A few well known cases include Michael Moore’s performative rhetoric in his political agit-props, Errol Morris’s innovative strategies of reenactment, or Abbas Kiarostami’s complex interplay between the factual and the staged.

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 4 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” narrative structure in a Fred Wiseman, or the constructed staging within a moment of reality in a Robert Flaherty, are all quite early classic illustrations for this inseparability of elements.) “Every documentary representation,” as Michael Renov clearly points out,

“depends upon its own detour from the real, through the defiles of the audio-visual signifier.” (Renov 1993: 7) However, the degree to which fiction and documentary are having their way with each other nowadays is quite alarming, inviting further discussion on this formal and thematic blending. Admittedly, contemporary documentaries only keep revisiting and revising their primordial assumptions, bouncing on the thin line between fiction and fact in an ongoing effort to redefine the genre’s aesthetic and ethical doctrines.

Surely, the flip side of this interdependency is mirrored in fiction films today.

When fast-paced editing in tightly scripted big-budget blockbusters becomes the norm, an alternative nostalgic longing for the real crystallizes the two everlasting aspirations in cinema: the utopia of authenticity against the antidote of falsification. Indeed, no genre in cinema maintains a stronger obsession with the real and the authentic than documentary, whose recent revival can be seen as “a reaction against the fantasy worlds which have increasingly come to dominate commercial cinema.” (Chanan 7) Respectively, the counter-attack against the ‘loss’ of the real in cinema is not only to be found “at the margins in a restoration of documentary”, as Chanan points out, but also dissimilates into the arena of the fiction film. Surely, this aesthetic junction has always defined a central synthesis in film history, when most of the idioms of documentary, as Dai Vaughan well reminds us, have been at some point appropriated by the fiction film, in which context becoming ‘an arbitrary signifier of realism.’ (Vaughan 1999: 64). Nonetheless, one Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 5 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” cannot pay no heed to this particular moment in film, when fiction cinema, perhaps more urgently than ever, wholeheartedly embraces non-fiction aesthetics, and moves towards simplifying its film language. Consequently, many independently produced fiction films seek to abandon the more traditional illusionistic aspirations and avoid from artifice by obeying a strong documentary impulse.4

“What we have seen in recent years,” observes Dai Vaughn, “has been a narrowing of the gap between the languages of documentary and fiction.” (64) It is here, at this contemporary moment of convergence between different cinematic genres, modes of address and terms of engagement, that my own interest in the newly emerging form of

“hybrid documentaries”5 should be placed, a curiosity with films which systematically obscure the boundaries between their fictional elements and their documentary counterparts to invite an ongoing spectatorial intervention in the attempt of classification.

In these films, truth and fiction are intermingled, compossible from the beginning, while their modes of address for asserting such inseparability are respectively innovative, self- consciously playing with form to produce an uncertainty of indexing. Viewers are encouraged to repeatedly shift their attention from the external correspondence of these texts with the factual world to their internal coherence as a fictional structure. To be sure,

4 There are many historical examples for fiction films which aspire towards the documentary, of course, but the current renaissance for manufacturing the ‘Real’ cannot be simply overlooked. Worth mentioning are Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne’s minimalist social documents The Son (2003) or l’Enfant (2006), Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s hyper-naturalist experiments in storytelling Blissfully Yours (2002) and Tropical Malady (2004), Chris Kentis’s real-time scare Open Water (2004), or Matt Reeves’s blockbuster disaster horror Cloverfield (2008). 5 I coin the term “hybrid documentary” here as a reference to those films which strategically avoid easy categorizations or definitions, and camouflage a clear distinction between their documentary and fictional constituents. The concept should not be confused with other types of hybridity detected in new documentaries, such as the hybridity between modes of production or exhibition. It should also be distinguished from Gilles Deleuze’s theoretical notion of “hybrid cinema”, informing, as Laura Marks describes, the idea of experimental diasporan cinema: “Theories of hybrid cinema, in which autobiography mediates a mixture of documentary, fiction, and experimental genres, characterizes the film production of people in transition and cultures in the process of creating identities (Marks 245).

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 6 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” the ambiguity produced between fiction and nonfiction in these films makes difficult a distinction “between the commitments of the texts”, and not just “between the surface structures of the texts,” to paraphrase Noël Carroll’s worries about the ongoing scepticism towards nonfiction. (1996: 287) In other words, the uncertainty I will refer to in this chapter is not merely stylistic, but also the function of ambiguous intentions of the filmmakers and contradicting expectations from the audience.

Nonetheless, I will attempt to distinguish this group of films from other newly emerging subgenres of fiction-infused documentaries (e.g., mockumentaries, fake- documentaries or docu-dramas), and argue for the inseparability between their conflicting structural elements and divergent stylistic strategies as a distinctive rhetorical quality of these texts. More specifically, I will focus on the contribution of digital video technologies to the construction of a documentary mode of engagement inherently ascribed to their ways of addressing a spectator. What functions do practices of digital video play within these new strategies of hybridity in documentaries? The spotlight put on new technologies here is not meant to suggest any notion of deterministic evolution in documentary or reduce the phenomena discussed to a filmic trend made possible by technical means only. Surely, as Martin Heidegger is famous for arguing, “the essence of technology is by no means anything technological,” and therefore cannot be taken as neutral. (4) Consistent with the methodology used throughout the dissertation, the role of digital video within the hybrid documentary structure will be placed inside a complex web of other historical, economic and ideological factors, among which the evolutionary trajectory of the genre itself is of major importance. Consequently, other issues in documentary theory and practice will be addressed in this discussion, such as the notion Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 7 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” of ‘camcorder aesthetics’ (the psychology of medium variations), the role of the spectator in recognizing a documentary text (complicating the textual ways for defining a documentary), the rhetorical function of documentary reflexivity, and the status of documentary ‘truth’ within newly emerging practices in nonfiction filmmaking.

The Contribution of Digital Technology to Formulating a Fact/Fiction Hybridity

The numerical structure of the digital image with its potential for audio/visual manipulability unlimited by any fixed origin in the profilmic could have expectedly entailed, as I have tried to show in chapter one, a final break with the real. The current digital revolution in film, however, has been implicated for a while now in a developing effort to reproduce nondigital image configurations and imitate old photographic forms6.

This ongoing aspiration to digitally replicate the look of film reflects upon a need to counter-balance the dominant efforts to view the current digital revolution as a point of rupture, an effort which has materialized, among elsewhere, in several digital documentary practices discussed within this dissertation. As David Rodowick writes in bewilderment in his new work on digital cinema: “If the digital is such a revolutionary process of image making, why is its technological and aesthetic goal to become perceptually indiscernible from an earlier mode of image production?” (Rodowick 11)7

Admittedly, digital cinema has taken for that mimicry purpose two distinct, though not unrelated, aesthetic paths: a big-budgeted effort which relies on integrating digital special effects (CGI) to create a seamless illusion within the mimesis of mainstream Hollywood

6 On the trend of using digital processes to reproduce older ‘cinematic’ visual styles, a dominant habit which she terms as “technostalgia”, see Deborah Tudor’s The Eye of the Frog (2008, 91-94). 7 This ongoing attempt to reproduce nondigital image configurations with digital imagery has culminated recently with the advent of the Red Hi-Res HD camera, the first digital movie camera to match the detail and richness of analogue film. See, on that matter: Behar, Michael. “Analog Meets Its Match in Red Digital Cinema's Ultrahigh-Res Camera”, Wired 16:9. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 8 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” cinema, and an alternative tendency which favours intimacy and immediacy achieved by digital cameras. Discussing such experimental digital projects as Mike Figgis’s Time

Code (2000), Richard Linklater’s Tape (2001), or Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark

(2002), Nicholas Rombes writes:

“Despite the fact that digital technologies are used in the service of ever greater special effects and fantasies that twist reality into impossible escapades, there is an alternative tendency to use digital video cameras not to transform the raw material of reality into some elaborate special effect, but rather to depict it more humbly.” (2005)

To be sure, both aesthetic trends, one based on iconic fabrication and the other on indexical representation, are mostly focused on reactivating certain realistic impulses, while the digital format can allow for many more possibilities of manipulation that can actually escape determination by the real8. Ironically, then, the same digital technology that is notoriously known for complicating evidential claims about the representation of the world is also the one which satisfies our appetite for the real by contributing to the construction (or fabrication) of realism in cinema. In fact, as Biressi and Nunn point out in their discussion of digital fakery on television, “despite the increasing recognition that new media technologies can manipulate and distort the real, they are also looked to as a conduit into other people’s real worlds.” (34). In spite of the dominant scepticism regarding digital fakery in cinema, as I will try to exemplify in this chapter, audiences and filmmakers have not widely rejected realist modes of representation. In fact, digital technology has been playing a significant role lately in formulating new aesthetic grounds for hybridizing fact and fiction in film, doing so by cultivating a new style of ‘DV

8 The digital, perhaps, is going through a transformation of practice not dissimilar to the one which video has gone through. Jon Dovey (2003) reminds us how the first video practices during the late 1970s and early 1980s relied heavily on postproduction, bricolage, collage and distinctive video montage, while by the beginning of the 1990s “the cycle of production possibilities had moved on and we can observe video texts returning to optically based practices, to the production of work that was based in pointing a camera at a ‘referent’ in the real world.” This, according to Dovey, signified a need to find meaning in “first person, viscerally indexical representations.” (Dovey 562-563) Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 9 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” realism,’9 predicated upon renewed possibilities for creating immediacy and intimacy between filmmaker and subject, and utilizing the digital look in its various connotations of authenticity and credibility. While it was Bill Nichols who argued that in documentary

“realism underpins rationalism more than an aesthetic,” my discussion of this style within the specific realm of documentaries will oppose this view, presupposing that when we experience a conflation between fiction and documentary’s modes of address, realism in nonfiction demands an appraisal in aesthetic terms more than ever before. (166)

Surely, any privilege put on fidelity to the profilmic invites a rethinking of digital cinema, particularly the dominant scholarly discourse which has been focused on forming a sensational rhetoric about the visual challenge that digital is presenting for indexically- based notions of photographic realism. How do we read, in light of new DV practices in film, the conceptual and theoretical utopias which have been repeatedly proposed regarding digital visual representations, delineating the new age as “a historic break in the nature of media and representation”, exclusively emphasizing a referential ‘crisis’ which leads to unprecedented capacities for visual manipulability? (Rosen 302)10 Admittedly, when digital video is introduced to the contemporary blend of fiction and documentary, it relies on our traditional and unsevered faith in the indexical power of images. It seriously challenges our ability to negotiate clearly between real and fictional origins of the profilmic (or the afilmic) by triggering our convictions with a bag full of aesthetic and cultural connotations that it carries as a handheld cinematographic technology.

9 The term “DV Realism” was first coined, as far as I am aware of, by Lev Manovich (2000), referring to a recent aesthetic emphasis put on the authenticity of actors’ performances by independent filmmakers such as Mike Figgis or the Dogme 95 group. These filmmakers, according to Manovich, provide an alternative to digital special effects by embracing a documentary style with handheld DV cameras. 10 For a more exhaustive and comprehensive discussion of the literature in visual arts which supports this notion of a ‘radical break’ between digitality and older technologies, see chapter one of this dissertation. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 10 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

In fact, digital cinematography has been contributing to the formulation of the challenging interplay in film between representation and artifice for almost a decade.

Perhaps the most well known digital hybrid forerunner is Myrick and Sanchez’s The

Blair Witch Project (1999), a mockumentary which compiles a pseudo video footage of three film students set out into the Black Hills Forest to make a documentary on the legendary Blair Witch. In a strategically artificial fusion between art and life, the filmmakers of The Blair Witch set out to achieve a “reality effect” by putting forward challenging shooting conditions reminiscent of contemporary Reality TV shows11.

Foregrounding the amateurish technology utilized for the documenting efforts as an object of study in itself, the film mainly explores how the properties of the Hi8 camcorder

(the ‘shaky cam’) can foster a documentary mode of engagement, and exploits its aesthetics through carefully calculated marketing strategies12. The spectator watching The

Blair Witch is invited to perform an ongoing process of indexing which relies heavily on what the aesthetics of the camcorder stand for: the shaky frame, the movement in and out of focus, the inability to keep the subject within the frame borders, and the camera’s visible portability, all give the viewer the impression that he is watching an amateurish video diary which unfolds in an almost unmediated way. Arguably, these stylistic techniques draw upon the famous cinema vérité tradition, valuing immediacy and intimacy according to a non-professional aesthetic that has become today, as Hopgood

11 Among these methods, as Hopgood observes, were the crew’s efforts to train the three actors to use the cameras in a specific way, send them into the woods for eight days of nonstop shooting, encourage them to improvise their dialogue according to plot lines given to them along the way, and even shadow the cast and scare them at night with strange noises after reducing their daily food portions. (Hopgood, 243-244) 12 On the unique marketing efforts to present The Blair Witch Project as a document of a real incident, using the internet to further the back story behind the footage, see J.P. Telotte’s “The Blair Witch Project Project: Film and the Internet.” (2004) and Fincia Hopgood’s “Before Big Brother There was Blair Witch: The Selling of ‘Reality’”. (2006) Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 11 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” observes, “more of a style than a movement.” (244)13 Within a media culture where “the jerk of a video camera or the crackle of a scratchy vinyl record has come to stand in for the truer reality behind the process,” this familiar grammar of filmmaking invites the spectator to embrace a documentary mode of engagement. (Leland, et al. 44)

On top of employing a minimalist purity of naturalism which seems to be eminently suitable for the phenomenology of horror14, The Blair Witch also places itself officially within the nonfiction subgenre of the mockumentary, mocking the documentary form and its claims for truth. As such, it appears to the viewer as a formal conundrum placed at the meeting point of fiction and documentary, blurring fact and fabrication not without a twist of irony and parody. Any mockumentary, for that matter, ridicules its own fictional efforts to document a non-existing subject in order to make fun of the very feasibility of delineating clear boundaries for the documentary category; or, as Alisa

Lebow suggests, to sneer at the genre’s “continued, head-on quest to pass itself off as the forthright gaze onto the Real.” (235) Mockumentaries seek to challenge the ‘sober’ discourse in classic documentaries, and in particular wish to make fun of “the beliefs in science (and scientific experts), and in the essential integrity of the referential image”, long associated with an unquestioned evidential status (Roscoe and Hight 8). Moreover, a mockumentary, to be distinguished from ‘hoax’ or ‘fake’ documentary, does not only

13 As Kevin Macdonald and Mark Cousins observe, cinema vérité has become “a vague term which is used to describe the look of feature or documentary film—grainy, hand-held camera, real locations—rather than any genuine aspirations the filmmakers may have. As so often, what started as a revolution, has ended up as a style choice.” (251) In The Blair Witch, cinema vérité becomes a familiar marker for realism. 14 Following The Blair Witch Project, many horror films started to venture into digital filmmaking, generating a feeling of presence with a handheld equipment while commenting specifically on the video and electronic culture at stake in a self-reflexive manner; see, for example, Takashi Miike’s Audition (1999), Gore Verbinskis’s The Ring (2002) or Matt Reeves’s Cloverfield (2008). As Peg Aloi observes in her account of this new horror aesthetic, “now audiences have become inured (if reluctantly) to hand-held camerawork in horror films.” (191)

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 12 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” operate through parody, critique and deconstruction; in a ‘contract’ set up between a producer and audience it assumes that the latter participates in the playfulness of the form, and “requires the audience to watch it as if at a documentary presentation, but in the full knowledge of an actual fictional status.” (Roscoe and Hight 17). Despite The

Blair Witch’s remarkable efforts to ‘look’ like a documentary, I argue, one should not overestimate the likelihood of it becoming one in the eyes of a reasonable spectator. In other words, and for whatever this distinction might be worth, The Blair Witch utilizes the properties of a handheld camera to accompany its mockumeting, rather than faking, aspirations.

The role which technology plays within this mockumenting strategy is of interest to me as a starting point in discussing fact/fiction hybridity. Admittedly, many mockumentaries self-reflexively manifest their artifice, exposing the production process and cinematic apparatus to deconstruct their effect on the viewer15. They seek to question our pregiven markers of realism and the ways in which those are mediated through the rapidly changing “technologies of truth telling.” (Juhasz and Lerner 165) In what follows,

I will show how several recent experimental blends of document and story shot on digital video raise similar questions and concerns about the manufacturing of truth via technological means. However, an important distinction should be made here: mockumentaries are first and foremost fictional texts which make concerted efforts to mimic and exhaust documentary codes and conventions, requiring us to subsume a mode of engagement in which we disavow momentarily their fictional fakeness. Hybrid documentaries, on the other hand, exemplify how technologically-oriented aesthetic

15 For an illuminating analysis of the ways in which camcorder aesthetics construct and deconstruct the authority of the ‘documentary look’ in André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog (1992) in order to encourage audience to enter into a documentary mode of engagement, see Roscoe (2006). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 13 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” variations become signifiers of an artificial distinction between genres without surrendering entirely to the mockumentary mode. The spectator watching these films can appreciate the levels of self-reference and manipulation at play, and is invited to welcome and embrace the aesthetic hybridity as a formal strategy meant not so much to dupe, mislead, or mock, but to offer a different documenting tactic which exists along a fact- fictional continuum. While in mockumentaries an emphasis is given to the incontrovertible fabrications of truth, while the documentary facet seems to be sacrificed to the fictional, hybrid documentaries displace that scepticism by foregrounding epistemological values and giving evidential weight even to a constructed narrative.

Trying to draw a line of difference between reflexive documentaries and mock- documentaries, Hight and Roscoe propose that “reflexive documentaries deconstruct the genre from within, while-mock-documentaries operate from outside of the genre.” (33) In other words, the element of parody, so essential to the critique levelled by mock- documentaries, can only be utilized within a fictional structure, that which severs the indexical link to the ‘real’ (requiring us to speak of the ‘profilmic’, not the ‘afilmic’ in these films). Respectively, and for my own purposes, I propose a similar differentiation between mockumentaries and hybrid documentaries, suggesting that the latter expand our work-in-progress definition of the genre not by means of parody or pure fakery which might chop off the ties of indexicality, but by forming a troubled relationship with the real within the documentary mode itself, a strategy which still enables us to recognize and discuss an afilmic dimension in the texts. In other words, the films I am looking at here do not undermine their textual status as documents. On the contrary, they invite us for an ongoing process of reworking familiar definitions which expands our understanding of Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 14 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” what a documentary truly is, thus making a claim for a more complex notion of truth to be asserted in nonfiction. They are, first and foremost, essentially documentaries.

Winterbottom and Kiarostami: Digitally Reimagining the Cross Zone Between Fiction and Documentary

Michael Winterbottom’s immigrants road trip In This World (2002), Abbas Kiarostami’s claustrophobic car journey Ten (2002), or Lars von Trier’s study of outsiderness The

Idiots (1998) are films which invite us to openly question their structure and form, and work hard to obscure the boundaries between fiction and documentary. They make a case for the constructedness and artificiality of this distinction, and for the difficulty in discriminating between the discursive methods or aesthetic conventions in both forms.

These hybrids are neither simply fake documentaries, even if they quite similarly embrace a documentary style as a strategy to bestow an impression of authenticity on their controlled fictional parts; nor they are a clear case of mockumentaries, having no real expectations that an audience will know how to clearly distinguish between their factual and fictional tenets. They move across a twilight zone of cinematic categories and rigid definitions as they strive to reflect a multifaceted truth rather than engage in a well- concealed lie. Respectively, these films ask viewers to grant them with a status of trustworthiness by complicating their understanding of what a documentary film might be, or alternatively, how a documentary mode can be ‘acted out’. I will try to map the means for this construction in each, specifically focusing on the contribution of digital video to the aesthetics of hybridity.

Shot over five months on backroads, at border crossings and in refugee camps,

Winterbottom’s In This World (2002) starts out as a traditional documentary about the Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 15 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” plight of Pakistani immigrants who travel by land to London in search of a better life. An authoritative voice-over introduces the social problem of the Pakistani refugee crisis, building directly on our conditioned expectations from the documentary form: “it is estimated that 7.9 billion dollars were spent on bombing Afghanistan in 2001”, a sober male voice announces; “Spending on refugees is far less generous.” After all, the film’s subject matter is in itself a deceiving generic marker: is there any other cinematic mode of expression we are familiar with today which narrativizes the story of third-world refugee camps?

Very abruptly, though, the film changes its tone and mode of address, and transforms into what seems to be a fictionalized document which closely follows the journey of two characters, teenage refugees Jamal and Enayat, on their escape from poverty to the promised life in London. Reenacting with painstaking details the treacherous and nightmarish trip from Pakistan to London, In This World is a film which could have never been made with more conventional cumbersome equipment, and could have probably never achieved its smudgy visual look with a different technology.

Literally made on the run with a small crew and one digital video camera, In This World cleverly utilizes the technology’s immediacy and portability, shooting its protagonists in unstaged street scenes, crowds, and marketplaces. The more we become entangled with the personal human drama of the journey, the further the camerawork will remind us, by its free-floating movement from characters to real moments of local scenery, that this is not a fictitious story per-se. Circling around wandering refugees without any attempt to conceal its operation, it functions as an object of their own gaze, allowing the characters

(and subjects) to look at it directly in a gesture often forbidden in the world of fiction. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 16 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

The documentary dimension which In This World tries to flaunt invites a deeper understanding of the social problem it refers to, encouraging us to wonder whether the plight of our two main characters is indeed only part of a fictionally staged narrative.

While Winterbottom utilizes the imperfect feel and look of the DV camcorder to hint for an alternative mode of filmmaking disguised as an unmediated representation of the ‘Real’, he still chooses to strategically insert a vast range of fictional formal strategies. Animated geographical maps, suspenseful music, title cards, and a politically infused voiceover might seem, at first, elements of the well-established docudrama form

(to which the film obviously alludes)16, but their seamless integration into the document also makes an implicit argument for the limitedness and insufficiency of the traditional nonfiction film model as an intermediary to reality. Relying on the viewer’s familiarity with the conventions of both fiction and documentary, the hybridity produced signals

“the unavailability of the real unless filtered through a range of artistic choices”

(Rodriguez-Ortega 2007). The thin line drawn here between document and fiction rhymes with the delicate balance between spontaneous extemporization and scripted exactitude that a DV camera can help to achieve. The digital equipment, less intimidating in size and a more efficient and cheaper tool in shooting longer takes than the cumbersome 35mm, accommodates a natural and improvisatory performance contained within a strict synopsis, a structure which in itself connotes the freedom associated with documentary film-making17.

16 Clearly, In This World is highly influenced and inspired by Ken Loach’s 1966 BBC landmark docudrama Cathy Comes Home (1966), which innovatively put together the social realism of British documentary with fictional filmic strategies. 17 The contribution of DV to an impromptu acting style with no predetermined inhibitions was accentuated as a case study in formal experiments such as Mike Figgis’s TimeCode (2000) and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive (2000). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 17 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

When the film reaches its end, it falls back on its documentary counterpart, inserting a title card which announces the fate of the actual actor Jamal (whose character is named the same): after returning to Pakistan, he has been truly granted asylum in

London in accordance with the culmination of the fictional narrative. In an ‘art meets life’ anecdote, Winterbottom is making a reference to the life story of a real refugee documented by a camera, wedding the consistent ‘authenticated’ digital look he has maintained with his sincere commitment to represent the real plight of refugees.

No less a digital campaigner than Winterbottom, Iranian film-maker Abbas

Kiarostami, who has always been a quasi-documentarist thriving on improvisation and unstaged realism, had even gone a step further to declare his exclusive devotion to the new format after shooting ABC Africa (2001). Though both directors garnish their digital filmmaking style with an interest in urgent political matters, the use of non-actors, and the merging of fictional elements within the documentary, Kiarostami’s Ten (2002) stands out as a more purist and idealized attempt to materialize the democratic and aesthetic qualities of the new technology into an innovative cinematic form.

In fact, Iranian cinema, one of the precious darlings of contemporary film culture, has been crafting for quite some time now a similar inseparable blend between reality and fiction18. Surely, the most interesting cinematic voices of Iran—Abbas Kiarostami,

Mohsen and Samira Makhmalbaf, and Jafar Panahi, to only name a few—have been exploring the confines and contours of a crossbreed format, establishing hybridity as the artistic trademark of this bourgeoning national cinema. Some have tried to explain the

18 A groundbreaking milestone was Kamran Shirdel’s The Night When it Rained (1973), a Rashomon-like documentary manufacturing conflicting positions on a real-life event, in which a young boy heroically prevented a train disaster in Iran. The different narrative versions put together, each told from a different political perspective, undermine the very certainty that such an event has ever happened. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 18 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” appeal of this aesthetic trend as a way to overcome the limitations of censorship in Iran, reconstructing and faking what cannot be shown as reality. Today, however, much more is allowed than has been before, when a new spirit of relatively free speech in Iran lets filmmakers tackle social issues more directly. Considering the increasing use of low-cost digital cameras in Iran nowadays, is this new take on the traditional documentary project a latent desire to redefine film aesthetics for new technologies, or maybe an artistic commitment to suggest an alternative to Western cinematic practices?

10 on Ten (2002), Kiarostami’s prescriptive theoretical lecture on the promises of digital video, is an indispensable authorial confession which reiterates quite pedagogically the major issues at stake in Ten. Admittedly, the latter takes pride in its use of two DV cameras, mounted on the car’s dashboard to capture, without any directorial mediation, intense political dialogues about life in contemporary Tehran. The surveillance and voyeuristic ambience achieved by these two small cameras, alluding to a strong version of a familiar direct cinema mode and accompanied by an unscripted text delivered by non-actors, make Ten another unclassifiable hybrid which leaves us constantly wondering about its factual veracity. The technical means are of essence here, considering that Kiarostami expresses very explicitly his wish to reach a technological utopia with digital video. The technology, he is convinced, can display the ‘absolute truth’ rather than forge one. Shooting with DV is nothing less than a moral decision for him, taken for the sake of eliminating any artifice embedded in the cumbersome 35mm filmmaking process, and allowing a filmmaker to remain faithful to his natural settings.

Although the device is obviously a product of the capitalist system (manufactured by

Sony!), it can nonetheless free a filmmaker from ideological constraints when censorship Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 19 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” becomes less of an issue, and the simplicity and cheapness of shooting with it democratize the filmmaking experience19.

Ten is an experiment in minimalism, where aesthetic innovation is achieved through omission rather than excessive abundance of technical possibilities. Without much artistic direction or camera movement, Kiarostami makes use of digital video to bring cinema back to its ‘point-zero’, and fulfil the Bazinian aesthetic responsibility in its full extremity: observing life without judging it or intervening in its natural flow

(unsurprisingly, Kiarostami would later make Five: Five Long Takes Dedicated to

Yasujiro Ozu (2004), another digital experiment which consists of five long shots of nature. During the course of each shot, Kiarostami would point his video camera at the ocean or a reflection of the moon in a pond, and hold it for up to fifteen minutes).

Arguably, Kiarostami not only reroutes cinema back to its early days of unpretentious and primitive stasis (recalling early documentaries by Auguste and Louis Lumière), but also renews the dialogue between spectator and screen originally proposed by the Italian

Neo-Realists. Cesare Zavattini’s post-war theories of a democratized cinema annihilating the distance between art and life are the source of the moral responsibility to reality which is advocated here: “what we are really attempting is not to invent a story that looks like reality, but to present reality as if it were a story.” (Zavattini 103) Kiarostami avoids the use of an excessive plot or cinematic action in order to prevent the spectator from locking herself into an illusionary reality with unnecessary artifice. By abolishing completely a world of representations, and placing austere and primitive images in opposition with Western cinematic practices, Ten invites the viewer to engage with it

19 The narrator of Chris Marker’s The Last Bolshevik (1992) similarly points out to the humorous paradox inherent in the Russian cinematographer Yakov Tolchan’s kinship towards digital video cameras: “his last gesture of propaganda would have been for Sony…” Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 20 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” embracing the purely observational documentary mode; it asks her to believe that the events happening onscreen would unfold in exactly the same way had the camera not been present there.

Kiarostami’s relentless enthusiasm and excitement about the new technology, it should be noted, correlates rhetorically with many earlier forecasts to the future of mobile camera technology in film history. Jean Rouch, for example, following up on Dziga

Vertov’s early analogies between a camera and a human eye, predicted in 1973 that

“Tomorrow will be the time of completely portable color video, video editing, and instant replay (“instant feedback”). Which is to say, the time of the joint dream of Vertov and Flaherty, of a mechanical cine-eye-ear and of a camera that can so totally participate that it will automatically pass into the hands of those who, until now, have always been in front of the lens.” (Rouch 46)

Eighteen years later, Francis Ford Coppola’s famous prophecy of cinematic democratization supplied at the end of Hearts of Darkness (1991) saw the future of film in the form of ‘some little girl in Ohio,’ and imagined a new apparatus that could enable such a girl to get her vision onto the screen:

“To me the great hope is that now these little video recorders are around and people who normally wouldn’t make movies are going to be making them. And suddenly, one day, some little girl in Ohio is going to be the new Mozart and make a beautiful film with her father’s camcorder and for once, the so-called professionalism about movies will be destroyed, forever, and it will really become an art form.” (quote taken from the film).

While Kiarostami risks falling back on a similar discourse of digital utopia, surrendering again to what Philip Rosen terms as the “rhetoric of the forecast” (316)20, his prophecies about the potential of digital video cameras comprise more practical ideas grounded in his own concrete realizations than merely theoretical promises. Furthermore, his vision of

20 See chapter one for a more comprehensive discussion about the theoretical stance forming a radical break between old and new technologies, delineating the digital’s characteristics as pure futuristic ideals rather than tangible actualities. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 21 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” the future of digital filmmaking is based not so much on the economy of democratization, but mainly on proposing an innovative aesthetic framework. To be sure, Kiarostami’s recent experiments measure up towards a fascinating effort to resurrect old cinematic traditions and reinvent them with new technologies. If nothing else, Ten is an exemplary case study in how technological modifications can simply help us do what we were already doing in the past, but only easier, faster and better.

Jia Zhangke, considered by many to be the ‘father’ of Chinese DV filmmaking, similarly makes use of digital video to crossover between documentary and fiction, and articulates this strategy by adhering too to stylistic guidelines borrowed from Italian neo- realism. Unknown Pleasures (2002), his significant debut venture into digital filmmaking, focuses on the identity crisis of alienated youth in contemporary China, teenagers who religiously consume the pop and media culture which so characterizes the urban milieu in this transitioning country. The most famous scene in the film, a lingering shot of Xiao Ji riding his motorcycle sideways from the highway, jamming it inside the muddy terrain, and desperately trying to pull it out, was achieved particularly in virtue of digital video technology. In a story often recalled by Jia, difficult weather conditions of rain and thunders were signalling an end to the shooting process of that shot. However, with much less budgetary pressure experienced with digital than with film, and with significantly more creative freedom to experiment, Jia decided to stay put and continue shooting, producing a take in bad weather which was finally chosen on the editing table due to its perfect abstract quality. As with Kiarostami, the creative autonomy associated with DV unchained Jia from the necessity to work with a script, enabling him to more easily intersect fiction with document by reviving the aesthetic qualities of neo-realism. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 22 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

With no need to technically control cumbersome equipment, Jia could generate more spontaneity from his actors with a less intimidating shooting process and bring screen time closer to real time as much as possible. Nonetheless, the expression of his characters’ emotional developments is so meticulously articulated in the film, a result of tightly controlling the parameters of space, light, distance, and sound, that DV may also feel like an essential component of this calculated effect. Speaking of Jia’s collaboration with his maverick cinematographer Yu Likwai, film critic Kent Jones writes:

“for my money, Yu and Jia are the first artists to make something genuinely exciting out of digital video, in Unknown Pleasures. DV feels as apt for the present- tense narrative of Unknown Pleasures as 16mm does for Xiao Wu (whereas 35mm is perfect for the historical pageant that is Platform), but there’s so much mobility, texture, and vibrant darkness in the image that the filmmakers seem to have located a whole new source of electronically generated beauty.” (2002: 47)

The idiosyncratic camerawork of Yu Likwai continues to be an integral part of Jia’s documenting strategy in his recently released hybrid experiment 24 City (2008), a documentary about the demolition project of factory 420, a large industrial complex in the center of Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, destined to be replaced by a gargantuan and luxurious apartment complex (24 City). The DV camera, producing extremely sharp images which may feel almost hyper-real, circles around Chengdu, testifying to both the growth and evolution of the factory, and to the industrial transitioning of China itself.

The film grounds its camerawork with nine long and eloquent talking-heads monologues of retired and present generation factory employees. These interviews not only tell moving personal anecdotes on a micro level, but also delineate the axis of development in contemporary modern China on a macro scale. Four of the nine interviews, however, are faked, played out by actors and joined towards the others Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 23 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” without any clear notice given to the spectator, who find it hard to individuate them from the rest21. “As befits a filmmaker who always looked for the documentary and the fictive in his works, Jia is moving towards a place where the mature result may be an indistinguishable hybrid,” writes Daniel Kasman, “… the sense is of a work in progress, an experiment towards a naturally hybrid cinema of modern China.”22

But what may be the rationale behind the decision to mix real and fictional characters? “As far as I’m concerned,” explains Jia, “history is always a blend of facts and imagination.”23 Practically, there is more than that: inaccessibility to the real voices of those faked interviews points to the insufficiency of the traditional documentary structure in the case of this film: since otherwise they would need to be guessed at, these acted testimonials feel organic within the interview structure by being ‘reassuringly’ faked. The need to reinvent a documentary strategy of hybridity in order to fit the limitations of the document’s subject matter is of major importance here. Surely, this demands the trust we often grant any documentary text without discriminating between the sources its different parts are made of. After all, “if pure fiction is so often taken as historical testimony,” writes Dan Fainaru, “why shouldn’t half-fiction qualify for the same honors?” (2008, para. 8)

Dogme 95 and Indexicality as an Aesthetic Effort

Admittedly, within the ‘unwritten history’ of contemporary documentary hybrids, nothing serves a better illustration of the strategic construction of documentary aesthetics

21 Distinguished actresses from different periods of Chinese cinema deliver three of the faked interviews: Joan Chen (the star of Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and David Lynch’s Twin Peaks), Lu Liping and Zhao Tao. 22 Quote taken from an early review of 24 City in the “notebook” section in www.theauteur.com, published on May 21st, 2008. 23 Quote taken from the press packet of the film. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 24 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” with digital technologies than the first provocative films of the Danish Dogme 95 group.

Armed with a controversially teasing manifesto advocating both earnestly and jokingly an alternative film practice aimed to counter escapist illusion with gritty realism, Dogme filmmakers Lars von Trier, Kristen Levring and Thomas Vinterberg scribbled a taxonomy of aesthetic restrictions in hope of eliciting a new creative freedom in film. The document, famously known as “The Vow of Chastity” (1995), is an up-to-date version of the French New Wave’s fierce attack on stagnant mainstream filmmaking, a diatribe of cinematic artifice which reintroduces naturalism to cinema by providing pragmatically low-key DIY guidelines for aspirant amateurs.

Interestingly, one of the manifesto’s major limitations calls for an exclusive use of the 35mm format24. This restriction has been reinterpreted by the group’s members as referring to 35mm projection and distribution only, thus accommodating the use of handheld DV cameras as the dominant cinematographic technology utilized by the filmmakers25. In fact, Dogme 95’s legitimization of digital video technology was so widespread that it significantly boosted aspired filmmaking in places with severe financial constraints, and revitalized the status of low-budget independent cinema.

Remarkably, the Dogme group amounted to more than just a provincial effort on behalf of a number of privileged Danish filmmakers. Its initiative has been internationalized,

24 Item#9 of the vow demands that “the film format must be Academy 35mm” (for the full manifesto, see Mette Hjort and Scott MacKenzie (eds.), Purity and Provocation: Dogme 95, London: BFI Publishing. 199-200). 25 Three of the four major Dogme films produced by the core members of the group – Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen, Lars von Trier’s The Idiots, and Kristian Levring’s The King is Alive were shot on DV, followed by many more Dogme-‘certified’ films. As John Rockwell notes, the Vow of Chastity insists that the film format must be Academy 35mm, but still recognizes the aesthetic freedom and economic flexibility that video can bring to the shooting (see Rockwell 36-37). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 25 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” democratizing filmmaking in such a way that perhaps institutes it as the most radical filmmaking movement since the French New Wave”26

The first introduction to the Dogme aesthetics, Thomas Vinterberg’s The

Celebration (Festen) (1998), wisely utilizes the kinetics of a handheld DV camera, freed from any cables, tracks or tripods, producing a low-graded and grainy image after its transfer to 35mm. Festen establishes a disturbingly intimate effect of documentary realism, placing a spectator in the midst of an emotional turmoil within one tragic birthday celebration. An excessive use of shaky camerawork, natural lighting, and location shooting delivers an eerie effect of ‘being there’, which concomitantly reminds a viewer of the highly artificial nature of the fictional event he is watching. Arguably, the possibility of distilling or uncovering truth from a superficial world of artifice also serves as the main topic of the film, realized so cleverly through a corresponding aesthetic binary between naturalism and stylization.

It will only be shortly after that Lars von Trier’s The Idiots (1998), arguably “the most fully developed and compelling expression of Dogme ideology,” would cleverly exploit the look and feel of DV for producing a hybrid film which cannot be easily pigeonholed into rigid categories (Walters 40). The Idiots focuses on an anarchist group of avant-gardist pranksters whose story is told in a partly scripted partly improvised manner. Respectively, it cleverly plays out its formal nuances and aesthetic innovations in correlation with the controversial subject matter at stake. While the group’s behaviour targets the norms of the bourgeois culture and seeks to shamelessly subvert them, the

26 Some examples for the worldwide dissemination of Dogme aesthetics include Jean-Marc Barr’s Lovers (France, 1999), Harmony Korine’s Julien Donkey-Boy (USA, 1999), or Lone Scherfig’s Italian for Beginners (Denmark, 2000).

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 26 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” style of the film defies too not only traditional Hollywood filmmaking, but also the possibility of making any clear distinction between its fiction and documentary tenets. To put it differently, the act of ‘spassing’ in the film (the playful faking of mental disability) formally weds with the attempt to fake a documentary style. Nowhere is this clearer than in the opening sequence of the film, where a handheld camera evokes an impression of a direct-cinema documentary style by jittering chaotically around a group of young people picking annoyingly on diners in a small restaurant. There are no opening credits or any solid hints to the nature of what we are watching. The film simply invites us to focalize our attention on Karen, a young woman of grace and good manners, who is asked by the restaurant’s owner to take custody on the diners and guide them outside. We, much alike

Karen, are led to believe that the uncomfortable behaviour of the diners results from the fact that they are mentally disabled, an assumption we naturally make, considering the subject matter the film deals with: why would someone fake or act out the sensitive state of mental retardation? Inside the taxi, though, the rug is pulled under both Karen’s and our feet when the main spasser Stoffer bursts out laughing. We realize that the film’s characters were shockingly faking their performance, whether fictionally (played out by actors) or for real (playing themselves in a documentary).

The Idiots, however, is not a clear case of mockumentary which only cleverly conceals its fictional fakeness. In fact, it flags and centralizes its constructed hybridity between reality and fiction, challenging the viewer to repeatedly wonder about those differences. It contains self-reflexive talking heads inserts, which always occur ‘off- camera’, encouraging a viewer to speculate what portion of the film’s footage is in fact a real documentary filmed by von Trier himself about the members of his own cast Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 27 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” participating in the experiment, and how much of it is simply acted out for the purpose of creating a film-within-a-film mockumentary section. Are the talking heads documentary inserts real, or simply manufactured add-ons for enhancing the feeling of Dogme vérité?

There is a need, I believe, to further account for the film’s obvious refusal to surrender to either a clear mockumentary mode or purely constructed fiction.

Strategically, the film never really provides a definitive ‘recipe’ or a template of formal cues. Moreover, as Murray Smith reminds us, “the film eschews the most obvious, explicit markers that would define it as either fiction or non-fiction – namely, credits.”

(114) Arguably, it manufactures inconsistent and contradictory suggestions which are structured around our familiarity with filmic codes and conventions. Talking heads interviews made post-facto, shaky and sloppy handheld camerawork, loosely bordered shots which go in and out of focus, and degraded video quality, all connote a documentary mode of engagement. These aesthetic features, essentially part of the wider

Dogme 95 project, help to manufacture the real and highlight photographic presence. As

Anne Jerslev suggests, “indexicality must necessarily be performed” within the Dogme

95 tradition, and “[the] claim to realism in The Idiots produces an accentuated notion of the indexical aspect of images, the attachment to the specific visual ‘having-been-there.’”

(53). Digital video, for that reason, fabricates the illusion of presence and immediacy by manufacturing a visible emphasis on the indexically-bound image, thus treating indexicality as purely an aesthetic effort.

On the other hand, the film does not encourage us to exclusively read it as a documentary or to disavow its fictional quality. Murray Smith, for that matter, believes that the film oscillates between different modes of address, and differentiates it from Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 28 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” mockumentaries such as David Holzman’s Diary (1968) or Daughter Rite (1979) by accentuating the film’s ongoing desire to self-consciously foreground documentary techniques and strategies rather than use them for fooling the viewer. (114) The Idiots proposes an analogy between breaking social taboos by spassing and sticking to alternative aesthetic rules for enhancing creativity, and is thus also in part “about the conditions of its own making, a kind of documentary of its own genesis.” (Gaut 95)

Moreover, contrasted with the film’s provocations about its possible documentary- infused values, one should not underestimate the impact of the viewer’s familiarity and understanding of the Vow of Chastity manifesto which the film so religiously adheres to.

This playful set of rules, meant to support the production of spontaneous and non- professional fictions with a calculated effect of immediate realism (after all, the entire film is based on a rushed screenplay written by von Trier in no more than four days), invites a counter-reading of the film as a pure work of fiction. On this formal obscurity inherent to the joy of watching The Idiots writes Tim Walters:

“This is far more than the standard commonplace bewilderment of the postmodern film, wherein its status as an object is called into question in an aesthetically playful way. In the peculiar case of The Idiots, we genuinely do not (and cannot) know precisely what it is we are supposed to be watching, and this is an instability that occurs at numerous levels.” (45)

This viewing mode of instability, a lingering bafflement about the possibility to place a film within definitive categories, is the common thread which runs along all of the hybrid documentaries I have discussed so far. Admittedly, there is a documentary component in these films, whether real or constructed, and it requires us to contemplate where on the documentary axis can we place the nonfiction facet of these hybrid films. In other words, assuming that documentaries use codes, conventions and modes of address within a number of representational forms, to which of the well-known documentary Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 29 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” templates our hybrid text seeks to adhere by replicating and exhausting its conventions?

Is it the Expository, Poetic, Observational, Participatory, Performative, or Reflexive documentary mode? (see Bill Nichols 1991) Since the films discussed so far take as their goal to construct a deceiving feeling of “having-been-there” by utilizing digital equipment, and camouflage their filmmakers as neutral observers, they arguably replicate strategies of the “observational” mode of documentary as defined by Nichols. “The observational mode stresses the non-intervention of the filmmaker,” writes Nichols;

“such films cede ‘control’ over the events that occur in front of the camera more than any other mode.” (38) Direct cinema filmmakers, such as Frederick Wiseman, D.N.

Pennebaker, Richard Leacock or Robert Drew, were mostly known for claiming such a privileged grasp of reality, believing in a discrete and non-interventionist filming method which favours “revelation through situation” rather than an auteurist influence on events

(Winston 150). Direct cinema, of course, was also a documentary movement which essentially failed, becoming, as Jeanne Hall reminds us, “the subject of a devastating critique mounted by contemporary film theorists before the end of the 1970s.” (25) The ideas that ‘Truth’ may simply reveal itself if the documentary’s subjects are caught unaware, and that the barriers between reality and screen may be easily lifted, all now seem quite redundant, naïve, and out of fashion27.

Nonetheless, in their exhaustive depiction of everyday life (a treacherous immigrant trip, a familial dispute inside a car, or a case of amateurish spassing), the hybrid documentaries discussed take up such a non-interventionist method towards their subjects, and pretend their filming apparatus is granted an unmediated access to the real

27 For a brief survey of the scholarly criticism leveled against cinema vérité and direct cinema, see Jeanne Hall (1991: 24-27). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 30 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” world. After all, as Bill Nichols argues, observational cinema “conveys the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world.” (43) This effect is made possible because

“the fidelity of this mode”, as Craig Hight and Jane Roscoe observe, “relies on the notion that there is a direct relationship between the image and what it signifies, that the image has an indexical relationship with ‘reality’” (20). For that purpose, digital images taken with DV cameras ‘speak for themselves’ not only because of their content, but also due to the ways by which their framing (static claustrophobic shots in Ten), movement (jagged and raw camera kinetics in In This World or The Idiots), or other aesthetic qualities, distinctively foreground indexicality as the hallmark of credibility28. Entangled within the strategies of the observational documentary, these images encourage spectatorial belief in the real-life quality of the film’s referential dimension, and invite the viewer to experience the text, at least partially, “as a template of life as it is lived” (Nichols 43).

Nothing is supposedly staged for the camera so it can simply rush about to keep up with the action, resulting in rough, shaky, often amateur-looking footage. We are invited to entertain the proposition that the events we see onscreen would have unfolded in a similar way even had the camera not been there.

Miniaturizing the means of production with digital video has surely rejuvenated here the impulses behind the direct cinema project, utilizing the codes of the camcorder for possibly re-establishing and re-affirming what Richard Leacock has famously called the “feeling of being there.”29 It may seem inevitable to wonder, then: are we witnessing a revival for the tradition of direct cinema, accompanied by renewed faith in its original

28 DV documentaries also embrace what Nichols defines as the “interactive mode”, celebrating the direct encounter between a documentarist and his subject (Nichols 1991: 44). On the way in which DV documentaries have been also reproducing expressions of subjectivity, see chapter four of this dissertation. 29 For a comprehensive description of Leacock’s philosophy and autobiographical history, see “A Search for the Feeling of Being There” (1997) in www.richardleacock.com. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 31 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” epistemological aspirations? Not quite, I believe. This documenting strategy may yield different underlying expectations from a viewer in the films discussed than in those of the

1960s, corresponding with the changes in the public’s attitude towards direct cinema throughout the years. After an historical period of defamiliarization to the tradition in the

1970s, writes Jeanne Hall, where more reflexive and performative strategies were thought to channel the documentary better towards the unattainable real, “traits originally perceived as realistic may have become ‘automatized’ by repetition.” (Hall 44) In other words, the aesthetic qualities of direct cinema (i.e., handheld cameras, blurry and grainy images, a lack of an auteur) went gradually out of fashion, becoming so common and overused that they have eventually lost their presumably privileged bond with the real, turning into a set of conventionalized clichés. The films I am discussing here exploit our familiarity with the direct cinema paradigm, and seek to achieve not pure transparency, but a calculated effect of manufacturing the real. Before attempting to theorize further the complicated reading of such self-conscious strategy, I will first extend my discussion of hybridity and technology to other technical means besides digital video, and account for the construction of documentary aesthetics through the employment of another documenting cliché, that of cinema vérité.

The Construction of Documentary Aesthetics in Non-Digital Technologies

To be sure, my wish here is not to propose medium-specific arguments privileging the contribution of digital video to the aesthetics of hybridity, or to fall back on a methodology of technological determinism which presupposes an idealized causality between technology and aesthetics. Obviously, there are countless examples of earlier Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 32 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” attempts to utilize unobtrusive lightweight equipment for the construction of documentary-like aesthetics within a fictional framework30. In fact, the prescribed purity or utopian novelty often attributed to digital technology should be reconsidered in this context again once we place the aesthetic permutations of DV within historical crossroads and continuities. Thus, it becomes imperative to discuss hybrid documentaries which use other types of portable technologies for achieving a similar effect of obscured boundaries.

Such, for example, is the case of Ford Transit (2002). Palestinian filmmaker

Hany Abu-Assad employs a unique conceptual strategy with his use of a 16mm camera which directly confronts several theoretical issues tackled by the hybrid documentary.

Ford Transit follows Rajai, a Palestinian transit driver who transports locals between

Israeli military checkpoints inside the Occupied Territories in his battered Ford minivan.

The camera, almost never unhooked from its mount inside the van, documents brief and intense conversations between transient passengers, always keeping tensions at boiling point. The result is an intimate filmmaking style which chronicles the impossible absurdity of the area, a deadlock situation that is occasionally surreal and mostly dangerous and violent.

Ford Transit, which won the Best Documentary award at the 2003 Jerusalem

Film Festival, has been publicly ‘exposed’ as a fraud document a few months after its release, a film whose central subject is admittedly not a Palestinian driver at all, but a non-professional actor placed within staged circumstances of humiliation, violence and

30 Within the fictional realm, a few classic examples may include Jean-Luc Godard’s landmark debut Breathless (1959), shot in real locations with 16mm equipment and non-professional actors, John Cassavetes’s gritty realism achieved with this handheld technology in his domestic melodrama Faces (1968), or Woody Allen’s follow-up to the strategies of a shaky camerawork in Husband and Wives (1992). Also, many of the mock-documentaries shot on 16mm, such as Stefan Avalos’s The Last Broadcast (1998) or André Bonzel’s Man Bites Dog (1992) use the technology to obtain this aesthetic strategy. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 33 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” despair31. Abu-Assad, harshly criticized for playing with categorizations of genre in order to create a dangerous political deception about the military oppression in the area, responded to the accusations not by admitting to have employed a fake-documentary structure, but by surprisingly confessing that his distinctive filmmaking approach involves “100% fiction and 100% documentary.” (Ramsey 2003) Since Ford Transit has never been officially categorized as a documentary, neither by Abu-Assad himself nor by the festival’s committee, it would be reasonable to assume that it was critically perceived as one mainly because it employs familiar documentary-like strategies: a mobile camerawork, an amateurish visual look, and a talking-heads interviewing construction within the observational mode. If so, it is probable that the bone of contention lying at the heart of the film’s controversy is the schematically artificial distinction still made today between documentary and fiction, often applied to films which are way too complex for that purpose. Does it really matter what is staged and what is not, when “the events we’re watching may be acted out, but they are not fictitious”? (Jones 2005: 33). After all, everything that happens in the film could have easily happened on any other day in that reality; knowing that, Abu-Assad wishes not to deceive, perhaps, but to contain typical reactions and representative moments without surrendering completely to the formal limitations of either documentary or fiction. In other words, it is only within these obscured margins that his documenting strategy can truly be achieved.

No Lies (1974), Mitchell Block’s famous student experiment, is another case in point which goes even further with its aspirations. Here, the spectator’s emotional

31 About four years ago, Abu-Assad was involved in an international scandal after admitting in an exclusive interview to the Israeli daily newspaper Ha’aretz that Ford Transit is not a documentary, but a staged performance. The story made waves at every documentary film festival in which Abu-Assad participated, and reheated discussions about the limits of what is permissible in the genre. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 34 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” response is manipulated (and essentially varies) according to where on the fictio-real spectrum his belief in the events unfolding in the film lies. No Lies begins by emulating and embracing the aesthetic conventions of the vérité documentary style. We take the point of view of a young man, well hidden behind a handheld 16mm camera, intruding on a woman’s private moment while filming a casual conversation with her in a bedroom space. The innocent and friendly chat suddenly turns into a harrowing confession as the woman makes a startling claim about having been raped the night before. Is the woman telling the truth to her interviewer? Does he have the right to impose the camera on her in such a way? More specifically, are the vérité interviewing methods morally acceptable means for unravelling details of this painful personal story? Shortly after the woman’s tale culminates in pathos, generating further anxiety and confusion about its possible veracity, the final credits role over: we discover that the film is not a documentary after all, and that both man and woman are only fictional characters within this fabricated setting. A shaky handheld camerawork, unmediated proximity to the subject, and an intimately tragic confession may indeed connote a documentary mode, but are in no way guarantors of a stable categorization.

It has been argued elsewhere that No Lies suggests an implied criticism of cinema vérité by offering an analogy between the style’s obtrusive methods and a physical rape.

Vivian Sobchack writes: “Block has found an ideal metaphor for the physical act of rape in the methods and effects of cinema vérité, what we now call direct cinema … Rape becomes interchangeable with the act of cinema.” (1988: 335). According to this mode of argumentation, it is not only the woman who is raped (both literally, according to her story, and metaphorically, by the obtrusive methods of investigation), but us as viewers Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 35 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” as well; we are betrayed by the filmmaker whom we knowingly trust to provide us with images invested with truth-value, since “the very style of the film immediately authenticates its content.” (Sobchack 1998: 339) On this bond of trust between viewer and screen which No Lies both nourishes and disrupts, Bill Nichols writes: “No Lies reflexively heightens our apprehension of the dynamic of trust that documentaries invite, and of the betrayals—of subjects, and of viewers—made possible by this trust.” (60)

Whether or not we are willing to morally accept such a metaphor for describing our engagement with the film, it certainly points to the manipulative effect of the text; it reminds us how a documentary style can often function as an artificial construct which may condition us to read a film entirely differently from what it essentially is. Surely, the classification of No Lies becomes easier than previously discussed hybrids; after continuously inviting us to engage with it as a documentary, its ending credits expose the film as a fake-documentary per-se. Nonetheless, we must also remember that the veracity value of No Lies’ non-fiction facet as a fake-documentary is not to be dismissed entirely.

The indexing process we continually perform and the shattering of expectations which ultimately follows, prove, if nothing else, how the urgent need to make a sharp textual distinction between documentary and fiction may only be a futile exercise which undermines and trivializes this film and its effects. After all, the moral critique No Lies may be launching on cinema vérité filming methods could not have been so powerfully illustrated within a more traditional documentary strategy. The ending of No Lies resonates in our minds long after the film is over not only because of its deceptive power, but also because it levels an elusive truth-claim regarding the traumatic events the film so cleverly fakes. In the same way that real political tension is portrayed within a form of Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 36 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” fakery and deception in Ford Transit, an ethical standpoint on documentary’s interviewing methods finds its perfect form within this deceitful illusion of authenticity.

Documentary Reflexivity as a Rhetorical Device

All cases discussed so far involve some versions of documentary reflexivity, ruptures in the presumed illusion of authenticity within the so-called observational mode which flaunt the apparatus and invite further discussion and scrutiny (the glancing at the camera of In This World, the tongue-in-cheek talking heads structure in The Idiots, etc.) To be sure, the history and politics of documentary practice is in part also the history of shifting attitudes towards its self-reflexive mechanisms, ranging from conscious efforts to hide the production apparatus as a transparent observational window to the external world (the legacy of Rouch, Pennebaker or Leacock), to much less didactic rhetorical efforts which foreground the apparatus and make it the film’s object of study (the modernist essay- films of Farocki, Godard or Resnais)32. Theorizing self-reflexivity in documentary, I argue, has so far overemphasized an unquestioned correlation between epistemology and ontology, focusing on the concept as an apologetic ‘appeasement’ to critical attacks against the presumed objectivity of the documentary project, an imperative admission of construction that seeks to provide immunity where it might not even be needed. Bill

Nichols clarifies: “the reflexive mode emphasizes epistemological doubt.” (61)

This approach has overlooked, perhaps, the possible ways in which self- reflexivity can become a rhetorical tool to make assertions about reality rather than merely be a skeptic reaction against documentary’s naïve aspirations to emphasize

32 In The Treachery of Images, Ethan de-Seife makes a similar claim in relation to manipulation in documentaries: “A history of the manipulation of ‘truth’ in documentary film is, essentially, a history of documentary itself.” (de-Seife, 1995). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 37 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” verisimilitude. As Jay Ruby shows in his introductory discussion of the concept, documentary reflexivity has largely been “more accidental than deliberate”, since many documentary filmmakers utilize reflexive elements without truly intending to do so or thoroughly examining the implications of the strategy (44). The reason for this, according to Ruby, is that reflexivity traditionally functioned to negate any understanding of documentary as purely an authentic, truthful or objective record. Contextualized historically, it came to the rescue of documentary’s veracity during the 1970s, a point in time when nonfiction filmmaking had fallen victim to the critique of realism in light of the scholarly debates of the hour. Only those documentaries which exposed their constructed apparatus became ‘immune’ to the critical attacks. The ongoing overall tendency to shy away from this device in practice also corresponds with a historically dominant reluctance to critically understand the documentary in a non-traditional way.

However, even if this reflexivity paucity did in fact exist when Ruby wrote his article in

1977, such explanation would fall short in accounting for the revival we are experiencing today of the implementation of this cinematic technique in nonfiction filmmaking. This ever-increasing group of films, exposing their apparatus and documenting strategies for scrutiny (e.g., essay films by Chris Marker, film diaries by Alan Berliner, or the

“Interrotron” talking heads of Errol Morris) does not make any pretensions to carry an objective record of reality. On the contrary, the new reflexive documentary filters its assertions about the world through fluctuating notions of subjectivity, an understanding of truth as multifaceted, and skepticism towards prescribed conventions of documentary filmmaking. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 38 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

Respectively, I argue, hybrid documentaries too manifest their processes of fabrication and gloss over their artificiality not only to acknowledge their manipulative and deceptive facets, but also to emphasize their ability to carry informative and evidential value, and to engage with a more contingent pursuit of truth. It is here that I side myself with Carl Plantinga’s “instrumentalist approach”, voiced in his critique of post-structuralism as a key to understand a documentary. The primary distinction between fiction and nonfiction, holds Plantinga, “lies in the realm of discursive function and social contract”, where documentary’s rhetoric is not seen as a necessary deception

(as post-structuralists would argue), but as a discourse of persuasion. (1996: 311) In other words, documentaries do not hide their rhetorical goals or strategize to disguise themselves as the carriers of “truth”, but often employ manipulations and deceptions as self-reflexive strategies of assertion.

To illustrate this point further, I will refer to another example of a digital hybrid documentary which exposes its original strategy of deception to the service of making a stronger assertion. In Gary Burns and Jim Brown’s Radiant City (2006) the negotiation between fiction and documentary is achieved by a clever tactic: the film disguises itself as a traditional talking-heads documentary about the merits and flaws of American suburbia all the way until its final moments. Various experts and inhabitants of this urban sprawl lay out their thoughts and tell us about their experiences in non-urban artificial neighbourhoods. The last twenty minutes of the film, though, strike a peculiar chord when the text openly and self-reflexively exposes its deception by introducing us to the actors (who have been playing the documentary’s so called subjects, the middle-class

Moss family), and giving them a chance to explain the rationale behind the decision to Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 39 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” use that strategy. We are left to re-evaluate the truth-value of what we have learned about the suburbs from the film, oscillating desperately between the authority of the talking- heads experts of urbanism and the fictionality of the residents’ confessions.

There is a tight correspondence between form and content in Radiant City which correlates with the analogies I made earlier between the subject matter of The Idiots or

No Lies and the aesthetic choices taken to closely articulate it. Radiant City constantly seeks to expose suburbia as a faked promise, an illusion of living utopia that has often been criticized for pragmatically delivering the opposite. It is here, once more, that the hybridity between fiction and fact parallels this proposed dialectic, exposing the film’s own deceiving promise of authenticity within a flimsy structure of veracity, a formal conundrum which requires us to pick up the pieces at the end and reassess their truth- value. Again, the purpose of this fictionalizing effect is not simply to deconstruct the documentary’s modes of address by undermining its sobriety (a project of genre critique that most fake-documentaries are engaged in), but to seek alternative rhetorical strategies within the documentary schema in order to make a stronger and more convincing argumentation.

As with mockumentaries, where reflexivity “heightens the sense that what is witnessed must indeed be a genuine document, since it is not so much represented, but rather presented” (Bayer 165), the flaunting of artificiality in hybrid documentaries serves a rhetorical function leaving the spectator not with a vacuum of epistemological worth, but with a need to redefine the ways by which knowledge disseminates through both fiction and nonfiction. To better understand how this is carried on, we need to Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 40 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” further theorize the encounter between a spectator and a hybrid documentary text in respect to the viewer’s processes of reading and interpretation.

Soliciting the Viewer: Double-Viewing and the Role of the Spectator in Reading Hybrid Documentaries

The need to tag, categorize or name the object of our viewing experience is a natural cinematic desire. This spectatorial wish for well-defined boundaries, particularly encouraged by both the genre system and the auteur tradition, cannot be fulfilled by hybrid documentaries, texts whose ambiguous structure grants none of that pleasure of certainty. Furthermore, the invitation to simultaneously embrace both faith and scepticism towards the knowledge gained from an image leaves a viewer with what may seem to be a paradox in need of a resolution: is what shown needs to be trusted or suspected? Do we choose to embrace a documentary mode of engagement, or recourse to play the game of fiction?

In Double Viewing, Jan Verwoert proposes a theory of spectatorship based on alternative modes of reception developed in cultural studies: “a consumer of images can have several different, even contradictory attitudes toward the images he consumes,” she writes, recognizing that even sophisticated cinematic illusions “not only remain recognizable as illusions but also derive much of their appeal from the fact that they are understood as such.” (26-27)33. The spectacle, according to Verwoert, has no problem advertising itself as a spectacle because this is what essentially defines the pleasure of film. In the hybrid documentary, I argue, fiction openly diffuses into a document without

33 Verwoert’s understanding is based on Henry Jenkins’s idea of “double viewing” in relation to fans of television series. Jenkins has famously argued that television spectators will work out their relationship towards what they see as they see it, alternating between proximity and distance: on one level they will believe what they see, take it at face value; on the other level, they will enjoy the constructed nature of the program. (see Jenkins 1992) Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 41 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” the risk of shattering the very essence of the documentary experience. This is not to be confused, however, with the widely accepted notion of “suspension of disbelief,”34 referring to the willingness of a spectator to accept as true the premises of a work of fiction, even if these are fantastic or impossible. While in fiction a spectator may indeed know that what he is watching is unreal, but will be willing to momentarily disavow it, a hybrid documentary encourages a different kind of engagement: the pleasure of the text relies on accepting the inability to classify the nature of the object, enjoying the obscurity by trying to map out the way between an inseparable amalgamation of fictional traits and factual qualities.

Respectively, the documentary facet in the hybrid film becomes less of a clear genre indicator and more of an aesthetic strategy by which a filmmaker can choose to indicate familiar notions of authenticity, or solicit the viewer to embrace a documentary mode of engagement. This invitation is predicated on the assumption that our relationship to various cinematic objects is never textually determined a-priori, but always also dependent on our attitude towards them in respect to how familiar we are with different cinematic codes. This idea of ‘framing’ a text according to its use of familiar filmic conventions is well explained in the context of documentary by Dirk Eitzen: “the form of a text can cause viewers to ‘frame’ it in a specific way; poor lighting, a shaky camera and bad sound may suggest cinema vérité, but it doesn’t have to be!” (Eitzen 91).

Emphasizing even further the spectator’s role in the process, Vivian Sobchack provocatively holds that the term ‘documentary’ ‘designates a particular subjective relation [original emphasis] to an objective cinematic or televisual text,’ and therefore is

34 The term was originally coined by the poet, literary critic and philosopher Samuel Taylor Coleridge in his Biographia Literaria, published in 1817, in the context of the creation and reading of poetry. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 42 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” less a ‘thing’ than an ‘experience’”. (Sobchack 1999: 241) Grounding her work on an overlooked theoretical work by Belgian psychologist Jean-Pierre Meunier35, Sobchack delineates a phenomenological model for cinematic identification which differentiates among a variety of subjective spectatorial modes. Since every spectator “is an active agent in constituting what counts as memory, fiction, or document,” and carries a certain conscious attitude towards the cinematic object, fiction films and documentaries, according to Sobchack, can never to be taken as discrete objects or fixed categories; thus,

“a fiction can be experienced as a home movie or documentary, a documentary as a home movie or a fiction...” (253) Sobchack’s receptive strategy here is moving the focus away from the notion of an inherent reality found within a film text, towards an understanding of how texts are essentially read. A similar suggestion to regard a documentary as merely an invitation for trust, though from a more analytic and less phenomenological perspective, is Noël Carroll’s proposition to differentiate documentaries from fiction films by seeing the former as “films of the presumptive assertion,” in which the film- maker intends that the audience entertains the propositional content of the films as asserted (Carroll 1997: 186)36.

In other words, we may read in these attempts of documentary definition a need to shift focus from the properties of the text itself (which may very well be of either fictional or real content) towards the viewer’s engagement with it. Understanding documentary along these lines has often been described as an “idealist” explanation of

35 See Meunier, Jean-Pierre. Les Structures de l’experience filmique: L’Identification filmique. Louvain: Librarie Universitaire, 1969. 36 Carroll explains that these films are called “films of the presumptive assertion” [original emphasis] because such films may in fact lie: “That is, they are presumed to involve assertion even in cases where the filmmaker is intentionally dissimulating at the same time that he is signaling an assertoric intention.” (Carroll 1997: 187) Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 43 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” nonfiction, according to which the characteristics of documentary are constructed first and foremost by the spectator, who forms and shapes the text as a piece of discourse.37 In his attempt to define a documentary as a mode of reception, Dirk Eitzen argues: “… it is not the representational or formal aspects of a movie that determine whether viewers

‘frame’ it as a documentary, but rather a combination of what viewers want and expect from a text and what they suppose or infer about it on the basis of situational cues and textual features.” (92) Brian Winston, quoting Bill Nichols (1991) in his concluding chapter for Claiming the Real (1995), also seems to follow that rhetoric: he argues that only audiences can tell the difference between a fictional narrative and a documentary argument; “In other words, it is a question of reception. The difference is to be found in the mind of the audience.” (Winston 253) Both Winston and Eitzen, I believe, do not intend to deny a textual definition of the documentary ‘thing’, a question which Sobchack so eagerly seeks to avoid, but simply wish to get farther away from the issue of textual classification (whether the film is essentially fiction or nonfiction), and towards an appraisal of the film’s measure of veracity, its possible truth-value. Defining a documentary as a kind of “reading”, as Eitzen attempts to do, simply accounts for how and when a documentary becomes one in the eyes of a spectator, and is by no means an attempt to deny its textual properties as such (Surely, No Lies cannot be a documentary beyond our reading of it as one; textually, it is clearly a case of mock-documentary.)

37 On the “idealist” stance on documentary, see Casebier (1986). The famous amateurish Rodney Tape, shot by the bystander George Holliday, serves as a fascinating illustration of a how an historical event recorded on tape did not provide a stabilized meaning as a “visible evidence”, but actually well depended on “the psychological and ideological predispositions of the spectators/jurors” reading it. (see, on this matter, Renov 8-9).

Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 44 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

It is valuable, I argue, to theorize our engagement with hybrid documentaries with a similar appeal to spectatorial reception, as long as we do not deny the existence of a clear distinction between fiction and documentary in more easily classifiable cases. “In some cases it may even be impossible to classify a film as definitely fiction or non- fiction. But that bodes no problem to the distinction itself.” (Plantinga 1987: 50)38 In other words, I do not wish to ignore that boundaries and categories dividing fiction and documentary do in fact exist, but merely to argue that making a case for these distinctions should defy simple and fast definitions39. In the hybrid documentary, respectively, it is the viewer who ultimately determines the mode of engagement with the object at stake, sizing things up and settling the balance between fiction and reality without being able to compromise on a stable definition40.

Hybrid documentaries contest and challenge Noël Carroll’s simplistic understanding of the process of indexing in documentary as a ‘tagging’ mechanism taking place before the viewer enters the theatre: “We don’t characteristically go to films about which we must guess whether they are fiction or nonfiction,” Carroll writes, “they are generally indexed one way or another.” (1983: 24) Carroll believes in a solid ontological definition which differentiates between these two modes of exposition “based on the intended function of the text, the fictional or documentary,” a process of categorization which is guided, among other factors, by film credits, titles, reviews, publicity, press releases, etc. (Plantinga 1987: 49). Furthermore, Carroll peculiarly fears

38 One such classic example of a film which Plantinga refers to as an ambiguously indexed text, both on the part of filmmaker and audience, is Oliver Stone’s JFK (1991), a film which oscillates between the categories of documentary, fiction, and docudrama. 39 As a radical example of a polemical refusal to accept the notion of ‘a documentary’, see Trinh-Min Ha (1990): “There is no such thing as documentary—whether the term designates a category of material, a genre, an approach, or a set of techniques.” (76). 40 Such a process may require what Gerd Bayer defines in relation to the reading of mockumentaries “the necessity to know cinema”, i.g., to be aware of the cinematic traditions that are at stake (Bayer 177). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 45 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” that documentary scholars seek to “deconstruct the distinction between nonfiction and fiction” only for their own strategic academic purposes, reclaiming validity and legitimacy to their field of study by biting a piece of the well-respected pie of fiction, expressing a “desire to fight the fiction film by joining it.” (1996: 286). Carroll’s proposition is odd not only in light of the dignified niche documentary studies have dug themselves within the field of cinema studies over the years, but also due to the recent venture of documentary towards the realm of fiction. Hybrid documentaries, respectively, are never ‘tagged’ in one way or another to make a clear-cut classification possible (see the case of Ford Transit), but simply encourage the vagueness of that distinction to linger long after the viewer enters the theatre.

Camcorder Aesthetics and the Effect of Digital Video as a Reality Text

“The technology underlying stylistic technique is interpreted as such only when it differs from the interpretant’s time-based, ideologically limited conception of the technological norm. Such is the case with the adoption of ‘new’ technology by the film industry. The spectator will consider this technology significant because it differs from the norm to which he or she is accustomed.”

(Butler 1982: 288)

Any attempt to better understand the active process of a viewer trying to classify a digital hybrid documentary needs to account for the role that technology might play in the construction of documentary aesthetics. If we are indeed to dispose indexicality as the sole vantage point from which to construct a truth-invested argument about the digital image (as proposed in chapter one of this dissertation), we may want to follow Thomas

Elsaesser’s suggestion that the status of photographic authenticity “does not reside in its indexical relation at all, but is a function of the institutions in charge of its verification and dissemination.” (1998: 208) In other words, different discourses, conventions and Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 46 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” institutional claims, not merely ontological concerns, are what allow us to invest truth in various modes of visual representations. This proposition, I argue, is well taken nowadays when recent digital cinematic practices, such as the digital hybrid documentary, playfully comply with aesthetic conventions which replicate such claims.

Digital video cameras, technologically refining previously existing lightweight equipment (16mm, Hi-8, Betacam), enter here an already developed and familiar camcorder aesthetics tradition. They are used strategically to achieve a strong degree of intimacy, immediacy and weightlessness with an associated aesthetic of drabness which grants a criterion of credibility to the image. The overall effect relies on the presumptive state of a receiving subject, ready to interpret an image signifier as a reference point to the primary act of alternative film-making, the kinetics of amateurish or guerrilla camera operation. In other words, the digital video camcorder’s operation style denotes and imitates a recognizable and well-established aesthetic tradition of realism which we have come to learn and accept over the years based on our familiarity with the cinematic usage of other portable equipment. “Because of the extent to which audiences have internalized the camera’s qualities as the hallmark of credibility”, observes Scott McQuire in his account of digital cinema, “contemporary cinema no longer aims to mime ‘reality’, but

‘camera reality.’” (50)

Similarly, Trinh-Min Ha understands the pursuit of naturalism in film as essentially wedded to technology, and speaks of the different ways of achieving an

“aesthetics of objectivity” in documentary: the use of a directorial microphone, a portable tape recorder, lip-synchronous sound, and, of course, the use of a lightweight handheld camera freed a tripod. (80) It is important to remember, however, that the ‘signs of Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 47 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” presence’ which DV helps to establish (imperfect framing, superficial multi-focus, shaky camerawork, etc.) are merely pointers for a realist style, and by no means function as guarantors for a representation of an historical reality. In other words, neither DV realism in particular nor documentary realism in general may provide an evidence of the historical world, but merely an assurance of the recording of that world, an empirical notion of realism which points to the indexical bond between an image and its referent.

The only thing which documentary realism truly validates, as Bill Nichols points out, is

“the authenticity of the representation itself.” “It is an impression of authenticity,” he observes, “based on the reality of representation more than the representation of reality.”

(185). The difficulty in making a distinction between what the representation is of, whether it is of the profilmic (the actors or décor that are placed in front of the camera) or the afilmic (a documentary reality captured by the lens) remains the key strategy of ambiguity which the hybrid documentary seeks to maintain.

The recent use of digital video in cinema is indeed taking advantage of the technical differences which still distinguish it from film, inviting us to think of digital video in relation and opposed to film, that is celluloid, and to define it against the cumbersome and obsolete 35mm technology. Naturally, digital photographic practices in the hybrid film assume and utilize the presupposed established binaries, the existing differentiations of quality between analogue and digital, along with their inevitable filmic and cultural associations. Most audiences are tuned to invest a certain real-ness in DV images because the format represents an antidote aesthetic of roughness, a reaction against the perfection and polish of 35mm; or, as film critic Kent Jones puts it, “as long as DV is measured against the lush, elegant 35mm image, it makes a snug fit with Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 48 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” amateur impulses (whether feigned or real) and the casually observed reality of just- plain-folks aesthetics” (2005: 31). Stella Bruzzi, in her discussion of new documentaries, similarly observes that “the less polished the film the more credible it will be found.” (6)

Consequently, digital realism in the hybrid documentary becomes merely another construct, a simulated special effect achieved by a conceptual strategy. To put it differently, camcorder aesthetics here connote an effect of realism which taps into, and is governed by, our familiarity with different paradigms of representations. This, of course, corresponds with the way in which realism is commonly understood in film studies: “far from being the faithful depiction of reality it is assumed to be, realism, through the various forms it has taken throughout its history, shows itself to be neither window nor mirror but a set of conventions.” (Lapsley and Westlakem 1988: 158) Not limited to fiction, realism also functions as a set of norms to which every documentary holds on:

“… realism is the set of conventions and norms for visual representation which virtually every documentary text addresses, be it through adoption, modification, or contestation.”

(Winston 165) Surely, our investment with digital realism remains intertwined with a complex set of discourses, conventions, and cultural changes, which safeguard or suspend the trust we are willing to invest in a given form of representation. One such factor to account for is the contribution of the film/video binaries to the construction of DV realism.

Video and The Psychology of Medium Variations: Realism Made of the Unreal

The amateurish properties inherently associated nowadays with the DV look rhyme with and follow those attributed to analogue video cameras (surely, low gauge, lightweight Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 49 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” and easy-to-use video technologies have existed since 1964, the year in which Sony first circulated consumer-based video cameras into the domestic sphere)41. One filmmaking category where such tie between video technology and the DIY aesthetics exists more than anywhere else is the home movie. In his exhaustive study of this subgenre of documentary, James Moran proposes that the term “home video” should not be understood as merely a technology-driven genre of amateur cinema, but also as a visual textual signifier which is often inserted into fiction film narratives. In a synthesis of video and film, a hybrid schema he terms as “Video-In-The-Text”, the dialectic relationship between the two mediums provoke a complex phenomenology of viewing (Moran 163).

The taxonomies categorizing film and video, explains Moran, often construct both mediums as having different and opposite ontologies, and accommodate formal characteristics which distinguish the “Video-In-The-Text” insert from the rest of the film

(165)42. Shaky handheld camera, excessive panning and focusing, lower resolution, graininess, the presence of a viewfinder, and a frame-within-a-frame are all video’s technical specificities which facilitate aesthetic polarities and a create a ‘video look’ that differentiates itself from film. However, Moran asks, are film and video’s ontologies

“truly the effects of each technology’s unique properties, or are they more likely psychological and ideological connotations associated with each medium’s conventional practices?” (165) To choose between both mediums, admittedly, is to make a value- invested decision about the measure of truth of what you are showing, to make “a

41 For a more exhaustive discussion of the trajectory from video to digital video, see chapter one of this dissertation. 42 Some “Video-In-The-Text” inserts which Moran gives as examples include Graham’s home video collection of sexual confessions in Steven Soderbergh’s Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989), the video therapy session in Atom Egoyan’s Next of Kin (1984), and the protagonist’s self-serving video documentary in Gus Van Sant’s To Die For (1995). (Moran 167-170). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 50 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” statement about one’s imagined relation to the world,” where film stands for a mediated or distanced representation of reality, while video signifies raw and immediate access to it. (165) A couple of recent examples in cinema utilizing these medium ‘signifiers’ of realism are Garry Shandling’s The Larry Sanders Show (1992), in which fabricated late- night talk show parts are shot on video for creating an ‘on-air’ illusion, while film stock is used for ‘off-air’ time; and Steven Soderbergh’s Full Frontal (2002), in which a stylistic strategic distinction is constructed between the film-within-the-film (shot in

35mm) and the ‘real-life’ behind the scenes footage shot with a DV camera.

This particular focus put on defining medium ontology not by technical properties but through cultural associations and psychology, characterizes several other interesting efforts to theorize analogue video as well. In Looking Through Video (1996), John Belton explains that over the years the differences between film and video “resulted in a kind of codification through which each ‘look’ has come to have a different value.” (67) On the one hand, there is the ontological difference: video records a continuous flow of movement, which we see directly, with unconstrained and non-fixable images. In film, however, the brain fills in to create movement from a succession of fixable still images, and “the interval in space and time between single image frames is bridged” through transition (Spielmann 49). This distinction, according to Belton, goes towards an understanding of video’s association with immediacy and presence: “video images are always in the process of their own realization”, he explains; “their association with immediacy and presentness is partly because they are always in the process of coming into being.” (67) On the other hand, these technical variations merely afford a limited explanation than one based on what we associate to them. Much alike digital video Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 51 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

(though quite different in its ontology and image quality), the look of video could be attributed to a “psychology of the video”; rooted in both its technological and cultural bases, in its electronic continuousness and its association with live broadcasting, video has come to signify greater realism, immediacy, and presence (Belton 67-68)43.

Nonetheless, our willingness to invest these values onto the virtues of a certain medium can sometimes become intuitively paradoxical, considering some of that medium’s technical specificities. Philip Lopate, for example, discusses the Sony Portapak video camera and argues that in fact “the videotape image severely distorts reality” in its scale, depth of focus, lighting, camera movement, editing and other ways, but we learn to accept it as true to reality only because of “highly contrived (if persuasive) conventions.”

(21). Surely, this corresponds with the history of video, a technology which was first introduced to provide an alternative to mainstream broadcast television practices (with video art productions). Respectively, its practices were focused on seeking to counter illusion-making and fiction by offering a new ‘low-graded’ effort to depict the real and the authentic. In his discussion of material generated through camcorder technologies by network TV, Jon Dovey argues, for example, that “the low grade image has become the privileged form of TV ‘truth telling’, signifying authenticity and an indexical reproduction of the real world.” (557)

Quite similarly, numerically structured digital images are ontologically ‘made of the unreal’, but more than often associated with a heightened sense of realism, a duality which by now has become quite dominant in our contemporary image culture. One

43 Famously, Roland Barthes’s analysis of photographic codification relies on the same mode of argumentation. In The Rhetoric of the Image (1977) Barthes attempts to submit the image ‘to a spectral analysis of the messages it may contain.’ (33) By focusing on the advertising image, he provides an explanation for how an image produces signification. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 52 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” possible explanation for this apparent paradox might focus on the need to counter-balance the existing anxiety of a fleeting grasp of the real with practices invested in reappropriating the real in different ways. Take, for example, the recent proliferation and success of Reality-TV shows which utilize digital technologies in order to cultivate trust in their images44. Arild Fetveit discusses the simultaneous contemporary trends of photographic digital manipulation and factual television, suggesting that “…we are experiencing a strengthening and a weakening of the credibility of photographical discourses at the same time.” (787) In other words, Fetveit is pointing to the paradox evidenced between the public’s growing distrust of photographic images in the age of digital manipulation, and its counter-intuitive willingness to invest faith in reality TV images which are repeatedly taken as truthful. More famously, Linda Williams refers to a similar contradiction within the current popularity of the postmodern documentary: an increasing distrust of the photographic image, experienced in conjunction with an ever growing desire for documentary footage, evidenced by the popularity of reality TV shows such as Cops or Big Brother. Williams writes:

“The contradictions are rich: on the one hand the postmodern deluge of image seems to suggest that there can be no a priori truth of the referent to which the image refers; on the other hand, in this same deluge, it is still the moving image that has the power to move audiences to a new appreciation of previously unknown truth.” (60)

What underlies Fetveit and Williams’s arguments is their understanding that photographic practices in the post-modern era should be best defined through the contradictory relationship between their ontology and their aesthetic practices. We, as viewers, are not willing to grant our trust to an image or withhold it based only on what a

44 Around 2001 an enormous rash of television programs utilizing the aesthetics of direct cinema hit the network and cable airwaves, the so-called “reality TV” shows. These include MTV’s Real World and The Osbournes, Survivor, Big Brother, Amazing Race, The Fear Factor, The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, Joe Millionaire, The Mole, and Chains of Love. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 53 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” certain technology can or cannot do. While a digital image may technically sever the indexical tie with the real, contemporary practices will continually seek to reclaim it by alternatively exercising its restoration. This is also a psychologically-invested process, as

Biressi and Nunn explain in their discussion of Reality TV, in which the spectator compensates for losing “the direct causal relationship between photographic subject and its representation” evidenced in the pre-digital era. (32) Since we are not ready to give up on excavating truth in images altogether, reality TV is actually reinforcing the audience’s investment in new visual economies of realism and knowledge.

Respectively, different aesthetic practices in the media are coupled with different technologies. While video might have connoted a ‘liveness’ effect associated with television broadcasting, the DV image, I argue, mostly signifies the unmediated realistic scent of amateurish home movies and the recent trend of reality TV shows45. The hybridity between fact and fiction inscribed within reality TV is often similarly achieved through an aesthetically-based deception, where shaky handheld camerawork and unmediated spontaneous action create the impression of a privileged representation of authenticity inside a fictional and staged setting. This strategy is made possible in our contemporary visual culture only because amateurism in filmmaking is by now essentially coupled with a heightened sense of truthfulness more than polished and professionally made representations. Dovey argues: “When we see that ‘amateur video’ caption on broadcast news we are meant to understand amateurishness as guarantor of truth, in the sense of being ‘unmediated’ raw data, ‘captured’ outside of the usual institutional procedures of news production” (563). Also, we can relate the constructed

45 The Mechanism of surveillance inherently ascribed to reality-TV shows is essentially associated with the quality of indexical accuracy. Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 54 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary”

DV world so easily to our own because we do not only consume it in our daily reality but also create it ourselves: the texture of a DV image brings connotations of our active part in creating such images with the home-movie technology we might own. Admittedly, this relates to a wider and more significant change in our visual culture, where virtual public spheres for home-movies and amateur photography (e.g. YouTube, Flickr) reject the professionalist tenet which has been dominating the genre of documentary for so long46.

Conclusion

Digital hybrid documentaries, as I have tried to show in this chapter, formulate a hands- on counter-reaction to the recent dystopian welcome of the digital in documentary, a bourgeoning practice of digital indexicality which goes against the dominant theoretical strand fearing a dwindling of trust in the nonfiction image. Seeking to reclaim the real by manufacturing documentary aesthetics, these films exploit the contradictions intrinsic to the technological medium in which they are formed, allowing us to simultaneously adopt different attitudes and embrace distinct modes of engagement towards the unique nature of their texts, without these necessarily conflicting with each other. By way of doing so, they tap into our familiarity with contemporary paradigms of representations in both fiction and documentary and utilize that knowledge to expand and challenge any prescribed rigid understanding of a nonfiction film and its asserted truth.

Surely, there are other examples for the contribution of digital video to the formal mixed-breed of documentary and fiction, such as Khoa Do’s The Finished People (2003),

46 In her seminal study of video home movies, a discussion which could benefit an update in light of the recent proliferation of digital home clips, Patricia Zimmermann writes: “Video lost its high-art aura to become more reproducible and controllable in the private sphere; it moved from the obscurity of the art museum to the solitude of the home.” (Zimmermann 1995:156). Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 55 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” a painful look at Australian homeless people; David Flamhoc’s House of the Tiger King

(2004), an amalgamation of real footage and staged scenes chronicling the journey of an outlandish travel writer and a determined filmmaker searching for a lost Incan city inside the Peruvian jungle; or even Walid Raad’s Hostage: The Bachar Tapes (2001), a faked video testimony emulating the look and rhetorical specificities of confessional video statements of hostages made by their abductors. In each and many others, the elusiveness produced between document and fiction is mediated by technology in its many cultural associations, forming a critical strategy which redefines the documentary project. On the one hand, it seeks to engage the spectator in an active process of classification and

‘framing’, in which the dominant assumptions and codes behind the documentary are exposed for revaluation. By drawing attention to the constructed nature of documentary’s truth claims and observational myths, it deconstructs the documentary look without undermining its rhetorical edge. Borrowing Roland Barthes’s famous terminology, documentary becomes not just a text, but a ‘Writerly Text’, whose reader is no longer merely a consumer, but also the text’s own producer (Barthes 1974).

On the other hand, these films invite the viewer to accept the obscurity of the distinction between fact and fiction as an essential documenting strategy which points to a possible failure of traditional documentary tactics, and reassures the theoretical assumption many recent documentaries seem to hold; namely, that the genre cannot reveal an a-priori self-evident truth, and should therefore proclaim a more relative assertion by exercising strategies of fiction, and exploiting the grey area between story and fact. If documentary, as Linda Williams suggests, should be defined “not as an essence of truth but as a set of strategies designed to choose from among a horizon of Ohad Landesman, Ph.D Candidate, Department of Cinema Studies, NYU 56 Draft for Chapter Two in the Dissertation “Digital Video Aesthetics and the Documentary” relative and contingent truths” (9), then the hybrid documentary may simply function as the recent manifestation of such a structure, seeking to grasp a more slippery sense of truth, reaching at, but never quite touching, the longed-for Real.

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