A Brief History of Documentary: Movements and Modes

7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 27 CHAPTER 2 A Brief History of Documentary: Movements and Modes Although fictional media dominate much of popular culture today, the history of motion pictures began not with fictional scenarios but with the documentation of daily life. The early years of motion picture development saw a number of individuals around the globe inventing competing systems of photography and exhibition, including Emil and Max Skladanowsky’s Bioskop, Thomas Edison’s Kinetograph, and Louis and Auguste Lumière’s Cinématographe. The Lumière brothers are generally credited with the first public exhibition of motion picture images; in 1895, in Paris, they exhibited a program of brief shots of film including Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory/La sortie des usines Lumière (1895). Subsequent screenings included works such as Arrival of a Train at the Station/L’arrivée d’un train en gare (1896), which folklore proclaims made audiences jump from their seats as the train approached on screen. The Lumière brothers quickly trained operators and sent them around the globe to bring back works such as The Pyramids/Les pyramides (vue générale) (1897) for public screening. These short programs of actualités toured major cities, amazing audiences and cementing a collective fascination with moving images that has only grown and normalized itself into our visual culture. The history of documentary is not a linear one specific to a single nation. Rather, it is one of concurrent developments in multiple cultural contexts, all intersecting one another. This chapter does not seek to provide a comprehensive history of documentary, but rather it introduces specific technological shifts and cultural movements that have precipitated particular documentary forms, each offering potential structures and formal approaches to your projects today. Figure 2.1 Frames from three early Lumière films. From left to right: Workers Leaving the Lumière Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2017. Routledge. Copyright Factory, Arrival of a Train at the Station, and The Pyramids all transcribed real moments of the lived and natural world. Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [11 March 2019]. Created from rmit on 2019-03-11 00:32:13. 7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 28 28 2 A Brief History: Movements and Modes Scholar Bill Nichols termed these forms modes, and critical writing in the early 1990s by Nichols and by Michael Renov further expanded and refined the modes collectively recognized today. For our purposes, we will build upon the six prevailing modes—reflexive, poetic, expository, observational, participatory, and performative—and use the work of Michael Renov to add two additional modes deserving discrete status of their own: the autobiographical and the essayistic. Additionally, I’ll propose a ninth, interactive, mode becoming worthy of standalone distinction in our digital moment. Each mode, as we will see, comes with • its own practical and ideological approaches to representing reality; • a specific historical context for its creation; and • distinct power dynamics between documentary practitioner, subject, and audience. This chapter will not only define documentary modes through these lines of investigation; it will also highlight crucial technological shifts and social movements that produced them. A fluid understanding of both documentary history and modes of production is vital for you to fully analyze the documentaries you watch and to develop your own projects in a rich and responsible fashion. Robert Flaherty: Character and Story Development There is always the danger of tracing a cultural history on documentary back to a single “father figure.” Depending on where one starts, that parent could easily be one of several men: the aforementioned Lumières, John Grierson, or Robert Flaherty. An introduction to Flaherty serves as a useful point of departure, however, while also laying groundwork for our discussion of modes. His 1921 film Nanook of the North received international attention and influenced the work of several early movements that we will soon explore. The global actualités of the Lumières gave way to even longer travelogues—films recounting the particulars of a distant destination. With Nanook, the travelogue film was in turn updated. Flaherty took a page from fictional writing, creating audience identification with a specific protagonist, his family, and their arctic world. Flaherty, an American explorer/prospector turned filmmaker, was sent on mapping expeditions by the Canadian Railroad and encountered the indigenous Inuit population of the Hudson Bay region. He began filming the land and its people in an increasingly obsessive fashion, until filmmaking superseded prospecting as his primary mission. A self-critic, he was continually dissatisfied with his short filmstrips, despite public acclaim for them at home. After losing years of footage and work in a fire, he set about with a clean slate, fueled by his past frustrations, to make a compelling and coherent film about the Inuit: “But I did see that if I were to take a single character and make him typify the Eskimos as I had known them so long and well, the results would be well worth while” (Sherwood 4). The finished product, Nanook of the North, was named after a single Inuit hunter, who, along with his family, became the protagonist of Flaherty’s film. This in itself was already an Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2017. Routledge. Copyright innovation for film—creating a central character for audiences to identify with. Flaherty then adopted a year-in-the-life structure to hold various sequences together into a cohesive Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [11 March 2019]. Created from rmit on 2019-03-11 00:32:13. 7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 29 A Brief History: Movements and Modes 2 29 Figure 2.2 Frames from Nanook of the North. From left to right: Nanook in closeup, on the hunt, and spearing a walrus; Nanook’s sled dogs sit outside the igloo for the night. Flaherty’s film evidences the value of character identification and storytelling to documentary practice, but its formal transparency and narrative flow mask the degree to which the portrayal of Inuit life on screen is a construct. narrative, never before achieved in the nonfiction realm. This narrative coherence, character identification, and unique window onto an existence unseen by most Westerners made the film an immediate international success. But the film’s unity and flow effectively masked a range of practices by Flaherty that led to early forms of ethnographic documentary that have since been criticized and dissembled by critics and practitioners alike. Erik Barnouw’s research and writing on Flaherty and Nanook portray a strong collaboration between the men and a vested interest by Nanook in the cause of the film. But Flaherty had decided he wanted to chronicle not the Inuit existence of the 1920s but rather the “authentic” Inuit life style pre-contact with Westerners. He therefore instructed his subjects to live and perform in front of the lens in the manner of their ancestral traditions. One might argue this affords Nanook a preservational function, but it also put Flaherty’s subjects in unnecessary danger at times. Barnouw recounts a passage from Flaherty’s diary in which the filmmaker describes wanting to film a walrus hunt as it was done before contact with explorers introduced firearms. Nanook and his fellows agreed to hunt with harpoons for the sake of the camera and were dragged and thrown about by a harpooned walrus. Flaherty wrote, “I filmed and filmed and filmed—The men—calling me to end the struggle by rifle—so fearful were they about being pulled into the sea.” Flaherty admitted to having kept on filming, pretending he had not understood their pleas (Barnouw 37). The success of Nanook catalyzed a character-based, narrative approach to documenting reality, but it also spawned a genre of films about native cultures and their ways that evolved into a problematic tradition of ethnographic film (analyzed in Chapter 1), with distorted power dynamics between investigators and their subjects. Foregrounding Form: The Reflexive Mode In the reflexive mode, the act of making a documentary is explicitly acknowledged or referenced within the work. The producers call attention to the constructed nature of documentary media rather than trying to conceal the technical processes and their hand in shaping representations of reality. Our historicizing and analysis of this mode will reveal, however, that reflexivity can be introduced through a wide variety of formal and narrative Copyright © 2017. Routledge. All rights reserved. © 2017. Routledge. Copyright approaches, each with distinctly different representational aims. Fox, B 2017, Documentary Media : History, Theory, Practice, Routledge, Milton. Available from: ProQuest Ebook Central. [11 March 2019]. Created from rmit on 2019-03-11 00:32:13. 7195 DOCUMENTARY MEDIA PT_7.5 x 10 20/09/2017 11:42 Page 30 30 2 A Brief History: Movements and Modes Soviet Montage In the 1920s, following the Russian Revolution of 1917, Soviet filmmakers, including Sergei Eisenstein and Dziga Vertov, became international voices, proclaiming a fervent sense of cinema’s social utility and proposing distinctive formal approaches to the cinematic treatment of reality. With his notion of montage theory, Eisenstein argued for a reflexive cinema that called attention to the formal processes of filmmaking rather than trying to create a formally transparent illusion of reality on screen for the sake of escapist narratives and passive spectatorship. He argued that editing should not create continuity, but rather conflict— conflict of light, mood, rhythm, graphical properties, and ideas. Meaning in cinema did not come from the individual shots, but rather through ideas spawned by their collision.

Load more