Documentary Film in Theory

Introduction to the Area of Study The aims of the course are to foster an understanding of documentary as a diverse form, with a range of styles and , to root this diversity in its various historical and social contexts, and to introduce you to some analytical tools appropriate for study of your own and other filmmakers’ work. The course has a second module for the second term, which is the practical aspect. It is not pre-requisite to take both of the sections but it is pre-requisite to take the first term’s course for the practise-based term.

Learning Outcomes – knowledge and critical understanding

By the end of the course students will be able to • Distinguish clearly between different styles and approaches to documentary and visual ethnography • Be able write about how documentary texts communicate meaning • Demonstrate a basic understanding of documentary production in its social and historical contexts and across different distribution platforms • Be conversant with some current debates about documentary ethics and aesthetics

Learning Methods

There will be weekly lectures & discussions on the readings; assigned research on filmmakers’ works.

You are required to attend lectures and participate in all seminars, which necessitates that you read the session literature and think about it before coming to the session.

Assessment Details This course is assessed by - 2 * 2000 word essays The marking criteria for essays are in general: - the extent to which the specified course learning outcomes have been achieved. - the originality, ambition, scope and relevance of the essay in terms of the topic being addressed. - the structure and form of the essay. - the presentation of the essay in terms of attention to clarity of expression, spelling, punctuation, and presentation. - An Edit analysis presentation (the requirements of this analysis will be distributed as a handout) - Weekly presentations on individual filmmakers.

COURSE PROGRAMME Session 1: The Shifting Value of Reality Introduction to the course and contentious issues around the documentary form.

Screening: Voyage to the Moon (Georges Méliès, 1902) Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory (Lumière Bros, 1895)

Required Reading: Morin, E. (2005) The Cinema or the Imaginary Man. University of Minnesota Press. (Chapter Three) Mulvey, L. (2009) Death 24x per Second. Reaktion Russell, C. (1999) Experimental Ethnography: The Work of Film in the Age of Video. Duke University Press. (Chapter Four) Suggested Viewing: Magic Bricks (Segundo de Chomon, 1908)

Session 2: Nineteenth Century Legacy and films of record The documentary impulse and the reaction against ‘constructed’ images: the first moving images: early newsreels: looking at other cultures. Nanook of the North becomes the first recognised documentary, but is it?

Screening Nanook of the North US 1922 Required Reading: Barthes R. & Howard, R. (1968) ‘The Reality Effect’ in The Rustle of Language, University of California Press Barnouw, E () Documentary : a history of the non-fiction film

Suggested Viewing: The Battle of the Somme GB 1916 Night mail: west Highland [DVD videorecording]/ Panamint Cinema. Land of promise [DVD Videorecording]: the British documentary movement

Session 3: Vertov, Grierson & the avant-garde Many influential film-makers of the early twentieth century sought to define and portray the nature of reality. The Soviet film-makers drew on Marxist dialectics and cognitive science in order to create a revolutionary cinema which through montage would reveal the reality beneath bourgeois appearance. We analyse particularly Eisenstein’s use of the ‘social mask’ – drawn from avant-garde theatre – through which he challenged the bourgeois’ notion of ‘the subject’. Italian neo-realism reacted against what they saw as the artificiality of Soviet cinema, in favour of naturalism and long takes. But in so doing, as the writings of Bazin show, it created a metaphysic of realism. This lecture discusses realism and montage as two complementary and mutually related ‘technologies of enchantment’, which emerge in times of epochal transformations and social revolutions. Screening: October: Ten Days that Shook the World (Sergei Eisenstein, 1928, 103 min.)

Seminar Questions: • What is the relationship between propaganda and avant-garde in the films discussed? • In what way can films be revolutionary? • Discuss modernism in film. Required Reading Grimshaw, A. (2001) The Ethnographer’s Eye. Ways of Seeing in Anthropology Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (Chapter Four) Michelson, A. (ed) (1984) Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov. Pluto Press. (Introduction) Suggested Viewing: Rain (Joris Ivens, 1929) The Drifters (John Grierson, 1929) Man with a Movie Camera (Dziga Vertov, 1929) Enthusiasm. Symphony of the Dombass (Dziga Vertov, 1930) Three Songs for Lenin (Dziga Vertov, 1934)

Session 4: Cinéma Véritè in France and Direct Cinema in the USA

The late 1950s and early 1960s were a watershed moment for documentary cinema. Technologies originally developed for military use were appropriated and adapted to enable filmmakers to get out of the studio and operate on the streets, and for synchronous sound to be recorded. The results were two famous documentary modes that emerged more or less at the same time: Direct Cinema in the United States, and Cinéma Véritè in France. Screening: Titicut Follies (Frederick Wiseman, 1967, 84 mins). Seminar Questions: • What are the main differences and similarities between Cinéma Véritè and Direct Cinema? • What are some of the ethical issues that might come out of Cinéma Véritè or Direct Cinema techniques? Required Reading: Nichols, B. (1978) “Frederick Wiseman’s Documentaries: Theory and Structure,” Film Quarterly, 31, no.3 (1978), 15-28. Further Reading: Benson T. W. and Anderson, C. (2002) The Films of Frederick Wiseman, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Hall, J. (1991) ‘Realism as a Style in Cinéma Véritè: A Critical Analysis of Primary,’ Cinema Journal, Vol. 30, No. 4 (Summer, 1991), pp. 24-50 Mamber, S. (1974) Cinéma Vérité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary Cambridge: MIT Press O’Connell, P.J. (2010) Robert Drew and the Development of Cinéma Véritè in America, Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press Rothberg, M. (2004) ‘The Work of Testimony in the Age of Decolonization: Chronicle of a Summer, Cinema Verité, and the Emergence of the Holocaust Survivor,’ PMLA, Vol. 119, No. 5 (Oct., 2004), pp. 1231-1246

Session 5: The body and its Home Drawing on a wide range of visual examples - from anthropology, film and visual art - the lecture considers the feminist critique to anthropology as a ‘male’ voyeuristic and pornographic enterprise. Discussing Trinh Minh-Ha’s and Riefenstahl’s uses of bodies as ‘fields of power’, the lecture proposes alternative approaches to the notions of personhood and the sensuous. Screening: Reassemblage, dir. Trinh T. Min-Ha US Seminar Questions: • Is there a specific feminist aesthetic in msking films? • What is the relationship between cinema and pleasure? • Is it true that anthropology is a form of pornography? Required Reading: Gell, A. (1998) “The distributed person” in Art and Agency. Clarendon Press, London (pp. 96-154) Minh-Ha, Trinh T. (1989) Woman, Native, Other. Writing, Postcolonialism and Feminism. John Wiley & Sons. (Chapter Two) Suggested Viewing: The Act of Seeing with one’s own Eyes (Stanley Brackhage, 1971) Living is Round (Trin-min-Ha, 1985) Tongues Untied (Marlon Riggs, 1989)

Session 6: Autobiographical films How does the injection of the personal/confessional mode affect documentary’s ‘truth claims’? Is the collapsing of the subject/author divide a way through some of documentary’s ethical and aesthetic dilemmas? Screening: Nobody’s Business, dir. Alan Berliner Seminar Questions: • Is the collapsing of the subject/author divide a way through some of documentary’s ethical and aesthetic dilemmas? • Is it really ‘nobody’s business’? Required Reading: Renov, Michael First person Lebow, Alisa First Person Jewish Suggested Viewing: Agnes Varda films Ross McElwee films

Term Break – NO CLASSES

Session 8: Archives and Archival footage. This session deals with practical and theoretical challenges presented by the archive. The seductions of the archive are not new, however the film archive in particular is now a burgeoning area of creative and scholarly endeavour. On a general level, we will have yet another go at the problem of history and its representation, taking advantage of the layers of time made manifest when watching archival film. I will show samples of archival material from Indonesia, Hawaii, and Latin America around which we might build a theory and a practice that suits the use of archival material. You are required to read the 5 pages of Derrida's Archive Fever and pages 23-26, 44-72 of Patrik Sjoberg's The World in Pieces. An optional piece, The Model Image, which is about the decay of film. For those intent on film archival work, acquaint yourself with Usai’s authoritative Burning Passions (recently republished and updated). The films and videos listed below are important examples of the re- use of archival footage. Screening: Mother Dao the Turtlelike (Vincent Monnikendam, 1995, 90 mins.) Seminar Questions: • Why go to an archive? • What do we want from history? • Is there anything special about moving images with regards to history? • What does the archaic mean? Required Reading: Rascaroli, L. Personal Camera ‘The metacritical voice(over) of the essay film: Harun Farocki, found footage and the ssayist as spectator’, London: Wallflower Press Derrida, J. Archive Fever, The University of Chicago Press (First 5 Pages) Sjöberg, P. (2001) The World in Pieces: A Study of Compilation Film Stockholm: Aura Förlag (pp.23-26 and pp.44-72)

Suggested Viewing: Cinemanesis (Arnold, Martin, 2001) Lyrical Nitrate (Delpeut, Peter, 1991) Eye Machine (Farocki, Harun, 2002) Histoire(s) du Cinema (Godard, JL, 2000) Mother Dao the Turtlelike (Monnikendam, Vincent,1995) Decasia (Morrison, Bill, 2002) The Film of Her (Morrison, Bill,1995) The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty (Shub, Esther,1927) The Clock, (Christian Marclay, 2011)

Session 9: : between Fiction and Documentary The lecture discusses the work of filmmakers who, working from an anti-colonial perspective, have developed alternative film aesthetics as a means of political liberation. Through the analysis of Third Cinema, Rocha and Pasolini we discuss post-colonial approaches to filmmaking that propose a new fusion of fiction and reality, re-enacting and rewriting colonial stories in real settings and local filmic language. Screening: Memories of Underdevelopment, (Tomas Gutierrez Alea, 1968, 97 mins.) Seminar Questions: • Are realism and fiction two opposite ways of looking at reality? • In what ways the films discussed incorporated the political debate of the time into their own aesthetic? • Can we say that cinema is intrinsically colonial?

Required Reading: Rony F .T. (1996) The Third Eye: Race, Cinema and Ethnographic Spectacle. Duke University Press (Chapter Four) Wayne, M. (2001) Political Film: The dialectics of Third Cinema. Pluto Press (Chapter Five) Suggested Viewing: The Hour of the Furnaces, dirs. Fernando Solonas and Ottavio Gettino, Argentina Handsworth Songs, dirs. Black Audio Collective, UK 1988 White God, Black Devil (Glauber Rocha , 1964) Medea (Pierpaolo Pasolini, 1969) The Battle of Chile (Patricio Guzman, 1975 -1979) How tasty it was my little Frenchman (Nelson Pereira Santos, 1971)

Session 10: How Television has used and abused Documentary Techniques.

Forty years ago, UK television was heavily dependent upon the classic documentary form. Today it is even more dependent upon a ‘factual television’ composed of a myriad of mutant forms derived from that tradition. ‘Reality TV’ is an oxymoron which yet continues to dominate the schedules. Do we know what reality means any more? Screening: 24 Hours in A&E (Channel 4, 2011) Seminar questions: • Are audiences sufficiently sophisticated to read the constructions of contemporary factual television and distinguish the facts from the form? • What does the success of shows like ‘The Only Way is Essex’ tell us about social values and aspiration? Required Reading: Lee-Wright, P. (2010) ‘Formats and reality TV’ in The Documentary Handbook, Routledge (pp.219-235) Hill, A. (2007) Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and news, documentary and reality genres Routledge (pp1-29 & 212-233)

Session 11: Truth or Dare Drawing on the work of influential artist filmmaker Maya Deren, this lecture will discuss the contemporary convergence of art, documentary and anthropology. In particular, it will discuss contemporary notions and examples of ’ethno-fictions’ - for instance in the work of Steyerl, Rivers and Farucki - and how they fit within the remit of anthropology’s own utopian vision. Screening: Ritual in Transfigured Time (Maya Deren, 1946, 15 mins.)

Seminar Questions: • Can we say that the contemporary ethnographic shift in art is new? • What are the political advantages for the blurring of the boundaries between art and documentary? • Can we say that anthropology is an artistic endeavour in itself? Required Reading: Michelson A, (1980) 'On Reading Deren's Notebook', in October. 14 Steyerl, H.( 2010) Hito Steyerl. n.b.k. Ausstellungen. Perfect Paperback (Introduction) Suggested Viewing: The Sorrow and the Pity (Marcel Ophuls, 1969)

Session 12 - 13: Guest Speakers

Bibliography Aitken, I. (1990) Film and Reform: John Grierson and the Movement, Routledge Aitken, I. (1998) The Documentary Film Movement: an Anthology, Edinburgh University Press Aitken, I. (2006) Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film, Routledge Aitken, I (2006) Realist Film Theory and Cinema: the Nineteenth-Century Lukácsian and Intuitionist Realist Traditions Manchester: Manchester University Press Aufterheide, P. (2007) Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction, Oxford University Press Austin, T. & de Jong, W. (2008) Rethinking Documentary: New Perspectives, New Practices, Open University Press Baker, M. (2006) Documentary in the Digital Age, Focal Press Barnouw, E. (1974) Documentary, Oxford UP Barsam (1974) Non-Fiction Film: A Critical History, Allen & Unwin Beattie, K. (2004) Documentary Screens, Palgrave Beattie, K. (2008) Documentary Display, Wallflower Press Berry, C, Xinyu, L. & Rofel, L. (2010) The New Chinese Documentary Film Movement, Hong Kong UP Biressi, A. & Nunn, H. (2005) Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, Wallflower Press Bruzzi, S. (2006) New Documentary: a Critical Introduction, Routledge Boon, T. (2008) Films of Fact: A History of Science in Documentary Films and Television, Wallflower Press Chanan, M. (2007) The Politics of Documentary, British Film Institute Coles, R (1997) Doing Documentary Work, Oxford University Press Corner, J (1996) The Art of Record, Manchester University Press Corner, J & Rosenthal, A (eds) (2005) New Challenges for Documentary, Manchester University Press Dovey, J (2000) Freakshow: First Person Media and Factual TV, Pluto Press Ellis, J & Mclane, B (2004) A New History of Documentary Film, Continuum Grant, B & Sloniowski, J (eds) (1998) Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film & Video, Wayne State University Press Grimshaw, A & Ravetz, A (2009) Observational Cinema: Anthropology, film, and the exploration of Social Life Bloomington, Ind. : Indiana University Press Guynn, W. (1990) A Cinema of NonFiction, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press Hight, C. & Roscoe, J. (2001) Faking It: mock-documentary and the subversion of factuality, Manchester University Press Hight, C. (2010) Television - Reflexivity, Satire and a Call to Play, Manchester University Press Hill, A. (2007) Restyling Factual TV: Audiences and News, Documentary and Reality Genres, Routledge Juhasz, A. & Lerner, J. – eds. (2006) F Is for Phony: Fake Documentary and Truth's UndoingUniversity of Minnesota Press Kilborn, R & Izod, J. (1997) An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality, Manchester University Press Lee-Wright, P. (2010) The Documentary Handbook, Routledge Leyda, J. (1964) Films Beget Films, Allen & Unwin Macdonald K & Cousins, M (1996) Imagining Reality, Faber and Faber MacDougall, D. (1998) Transcultural Cinema, Princeton University Press Mamber, S. (1974) Cinema Verité in America: Studies in Uncontrolled Documentary, MIT Press Minh-Ha, T.T. (1991) When the Moon waxes Red: Representation, Gender, and Cultural Politics, Routledge Minh-Ha, T.T. (1992) Framer Framed, Routledge Nagib, L. (2011) World Cinema and the Ethics of Realism, New York: Continuum Nichols, B. (1991) Representing Reality, Indiana University Press Nichols, B. (1994) Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture, Indiana University Press Nichols, B. (2001) Documentary, Indiana University Press Paget, D. (2008) No Other Way To Tell It: Dramadoc/ on television, Manchester University Press Plantinga, C. (1997/2010) Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, Cambridge University Press/Schuler Books Rabinowitz, P. (1994) They Must be Represented, Verso Rascaroli, L. (2009) The Personal Camera: Subjective Cinema and the Essay Film, Wallflower Press Renov, M. (ed) (1993) Theorising Documentary, Routledge Renov, M. (2004) The Subject of Documentary, University of Minnesota Press Rothman, W. (1997) Documentary Film Classics, Cambridge University Press Rouch, J (2003) Ciné-Ethnography (Edited and Translated by Steven Feld) University of Minnesota Press Russell, C. (1999) Experimental Ethnography: the Work of Film in the Age of Video, Duke University Press Saunders, D. (2007) Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties, Wallflower Press Vaughan, D. (1999) For Documentary, University of California Press Ward, P. (2005) Documentary – The Margins of Reality, Wallflower Press Warren, C. (ed) (1996) Beyond Document - Essays on Nonfiction Film, Wesleyan/New England Winston, B. (2000) Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, British Film Institute Winston, B. (2008) Claiming the Real: Documentary- Grierson and Beyond, Palgrave

SOME OF THE FILMOGRAPHY IN THE LIBRARY Control room - he 8700.9.q22 c66 3 saat – lb 3058. T9 u 2732010 ( Don’t look back ‘ bob dylan’ – ml420.d98d66 Istanbul hatirasi – m1824.t8 178 Triumphy of the will – dd 253.28.t75 Powaqqatsi – cb 478.p69 Naqoyaqatsi cb 478.n37 Koyaanisqatsi cb 478.k69 Berlin, symphony of a great city d538.5.b47 Tarnation hv 697.t37 The thin blue line hv653 .t9 t45 First person pn 1992.8.i68 f57 Fog of war pn 1997.f64 2004 Bowling for columbine hv 7439.g7 b69 Roger and me pn1997.r64. disc 1 and disc 2 pn 1993.5.g7f74 Sherman’s march pn 1995.9d6 s44 Man with a movie camera pn1997.m362 Un chien andalou pn1997.u5324 Our daily bread pn1997.09733 Maya deren collected experimental films pn1995.9.e96m39 Chronique d’un ete – dc.34.c47 Shoah d 810.j4 s 56 Reassemblage hq 1814.5.r43 Night mail, grierson da16.n54 All the Agnes Vardas and Alan Berliners in the library