Introduction to Documentary Door Bill Nichols

[Geschiedenis voor een breed publiek] [2011-2012] Professor: Prof. Tom Verschaffel Handboek: DE GROOT, J., Consuming History. Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2009. Gemaakt door: Andrea Bardyn (geupload, niet zelf gemaakt) Opmerkingen: PDF van de eerste editie van het boek Introduction to Documentary door Bill Nichols. Noch Project Avalon, noch het monitoraat, noch Historia of eender ander individu of instelling zijn verantwoordelijk voor de inhoud van dit document. Maak er gebruik van op eigen risico. Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page i Introduction to Documentary Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page ii Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page iii Bill Nichols Introduction to Documentary Indiana University Press | Bloomington & Indianapolis Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page iv This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2001 by Bill Nichols All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Nichols, Bill. Introduction to documentary / Bill Nichols. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. Includes filmography. ISBN 0-253-33954-5 (cl : alk. paper)— ISBN 0-253-21469-6 (pa : alk. paper) 1. Documentary films—History and criticism. I. Title. PN1995.9.D6 N539 2001 070.1'8—dc21 00-054267 12345 060504030201 Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page v For the men and women who make the films Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page vi Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page vii Contents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? 1 2. How Do Documentaries Differ from Other Types of Film? 20 3. What Gives Documentary Films a Voice of Their Own? 42 4. What Are Documentaries About? 61 5. How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started? 82 6. What Types of Documentary Are There? 99 7. How Have Documentaries Addressed Social and Political Issues? 139 8. How Can We Write Effectively about Documentary? 168 Notes on Source Material 179 Filmography 191 List of Distributors 201 Index 219 Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page viii Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page ix Acknowledgments My greatest debt of gratitude goes to the students who have studied documentary film with me over the years. Their curiosity and questions have provided the motivation for this book. I am also greatly indebted to those who have gathered at the Visible Evidence conferences since their incep- tion in 1993 to exchange ideas and pursue debates about documentary film. These conferences, initiated by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, have proven invaluable to the promotion of a lively dialogue about documentary film in the broadest possible terms. The Getty Research Institute provided generous support that facilitated the completion of this book during the 1999–2000 academic year, for which I am most grateful. Without the assistance of the filmmakers who so generously provided still images of their work, this book would be greatly impoverished. I thank them for their willingness to provide superb illustrations, often on short notice. John Mrozik researched the filmography; Michael Wilson initiated and Victoria Gamburg updated and completed the research for the list of distributors. Their assistance was timely and indispensable. Joan Catapano helped launch this project at the press, and Michael Lun- dell saw it to completion. Carol Kennedy did a thorough and felicitous job of copy editing the manuscript. Matt Williamson did the layout and design for the book and designed the cover. I am grateful to them all for helping to produce a work that exceeds my expectations. No acknowledgment is ever complete without giving thanks to those who make such work possible in the most fundamental sense of all, and from whom the time to do it is inevitably stolen—my wife, Catherine M. Soussloff, and my stepdaughter, Eugenia Clarke.Their contribution is far greater than they will ever know. ix Nichols, Intro to Documentary 8/9/01 10:18 AM Page x Introduction Organized as a series of questions about documentary film and video, In- troduction to Documentary offers an overview of this fascinating form of filmmaking. The questions involve issues of ethics, definition, content, form, types, and politics. Because documentaries address the world in which we live rather than a world imagined by the filmmaker, they differ from the var- ious genres of fiction (science fiction, horror, adventure, melodrama, and so on) in significant ways. They are made with different assumptions about purpose, they involve a different quality of relationship between filmmaker and subject, and they prompt different sorts of expectations from audiences. These differences, as we shall see, guarantee no absolute separation between fiction and documentary. Some documentaries make strong use of practices or conventions, such as scripting, staging, reenactment, re- hearsal, and performance, for example, that we often associate with fiction. Some fiction makes strong use of practices or conventions, such as loca- tion shooting, the use of non-actors, hand-held cameras, improvisation, and found footage (footage not shot by the filmmaker) that we often associate with non-fiction or documentary. Since notions about what is fitting to documentary and what is not change over time, some films spark debate about the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction. At one point Eric von Stroheim’s Greed (1925) and Sergei Eisenstein’s Strike (1925) were praised for the high degree of realism or verisimilitude they brought to their stories. At another point Roberto Rossel- lini’s Rome, Open City (1945) and John Cassavetes’s Shadows (1960) seemed to bring lived reality to the screen in ways not previously experi- enced. Reality TV shows like Cops, Real TV, and World’s Most Amazing Videos have heightened the degree to which television can exploit a sense of documentary authenticity and melodramatic spectacle simultaneously. And films such as Forrest Gump, The Truman Show, EDTV, and The Blair Witch Project build their stories around the underlying premise of documentary: we experience a distinct form of fascination for the opportunity to witness the lives of others when they seem to belong to the same historical world that we do. xi In The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) this fascination not only relies on combining documentary conventions with the gritty realism of camcorder technology to impart historical credibility to a fictional situation, it also makes full use of promotional and publicity chan- nels that surround the film proper and help prepare us for it.These included a Web site with background information about the Blair witch, expert testi- mony, and references to “actual” people and events, all designed to market the film not as fiction, and not even simply as a documentary, but as the raw footage of three filmmakers who tragically disappeared. If nothing else, The Blair Witch Project should remind us that our own idea of whether a film is or is not a documentary is highly susceptible to suggestion. (Susan Stewart’s July 10–16, 1999, TV Guide review of a Sci- Fi Channel program, “Curse of the Blair Witch,” treats it as a bad but au- thentic attempt to document the story of an actual witch rather than as a promotional tie-in to this clever fiction story.) Film, video, and now digitally based images can bear witness to what took place in front of the camera with extraordinary fidelity.Painting and drawing seem a pale imitation of reality compared to the sharp, highly defined, precise representations avail- able on film, video, or computer monitors.Yet this fidelity serves the needs of fiction filmmaking as much as it facilitates the work of medical imaging through the use of x-rays, MRIs, or CAT scans. The fidelity of the image may be as crucial to a close-up of Tom Cruise or Catherine Deneuve as it is to an x-ray of a lung, but the uses of that fidelity are vastly different. We believe what we see and what is represented about what we see at our own risk. As digital media make all too apparent, fidelity lies in the mind of the be- holder as much as it lies in the relationship between a camera and what comes before it. (With digitally produced images there may be no camera and nothing that ever comes before it, even if the resulting image bears an extraordinary fidelity to familiar people, places, and things.) Whether what we see is exactly what we would have seen had we been present along- side the camera cannot be guaranteed. Certain technologies and styles encourage us to believe in a tight, if not perfect, correspondence between image and reality, but the effects of lenses, focus, contrast, depth of field, color, high-resolution media (film with very fine grain, video displays with very many pixels) seem to guarantee the authenticity of what we see.

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