Documentary Film and the Poetics of History

JMP 12 (1) pp. 3–25 © Intellect Ltd 2011 Journal of Media Practice Volume 12 Number 1 © Intellect Ltd 2011. Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/jmpr.12.1.3_1 DESMOND BELL University of Edinburgh Documentary film and the poetics of history ABSTRACT KEYWORDS How do documentary film-makers picture the past and in what ways does their documentary film approach differ from the orthodox writing of history? In this article I draw upon history my own experience as a documentary film-maker to explore a broader set of issues practice-based research concerned with the relationship between academic history and factual film-making. reflective analysis Does the history documentary as found on television involve a ‘dumbing down’ of historical understanding? Or does it, as I suggest, encourage a form of historiographic practice that is more reflexive, experimental and critically aware of its own auspices. In reflecting on a range of my own broadcast work I seek to illuminate some of the ways contemporary documentary film-makers have engaged with the past and in so doing expanded the language of documentary film and of historical narration. INTRODUCTION While documentary films addressing historical topics have always been a stable of public service broadcasting, now within the proliferating world of cable and satellite television, we have specialist channels such as History Channel exclu- sively concerned with history programming and a number of others such as Biography, Discovery and National Geographic with a substantial percentage of such programming. Historians regularly appear in front of the camera intro- ducing these programmes and act as consultants on them. But, is the historical documentary a populist form that necessarily involves the ‘dumbing down’ of academic history? Or, can the inclusion of historical documentary material 3 May 30, 2011 17:5 Intellect/JMP Page-3 JMP-12-1-Finals Desmond Bell 1 Survey data gathered in within the television schedule extend access to historical understanding to a Australia and the broader range of people than the specialist texts of academic, written history?1 United States suggests that in these societies, In this article I do not seek to provide a definitive answer to these ques- at least, 81 per cent of tions nor do I present a comprehensive review of contemporary documentary the population rated film and television as practice and its approach to the representation of history. Instead, I seek to illu- their primary source minate the issues that I think are involved by drawing upon my own work as of historical a documentary film-maker concerned with exploring Irish history. Hopefully, information, with only 53 per cent identifying my reflections on that work may enable the reader to explore some of the ways a print source. See J. that film- and programme-makers have dealt with problems of historical rep- Warren-Findlay resentation and narrative. The films discussed here are my own. They ‘do’ a (2003), ‘History in new words: Survey certain sort of history. Through a reflective analysis of my work in ‘history film’, results in the United I seek to tease out the distinctive manner in which documentary film-makers States and Australia’, Australian Cultural approach history. History, 23, pp. 43–52. METHODOLOGY Over the last number of years, in collaboration with my editors Roger Buck and more recently Simon Hipkins, I have developed an archivally based, creative documentary practice that seeks to explore aspects of Ireland’s post-Famine past, including the Irish diaspora. Rotha Mór an tSaoil/The Hard Road to Klondike (Bell, 1999) drew on a rich reservoir of early film material, both actuality and fictional in character in order to retell the classic Irish emigrant story of Micí MacGiobhan’s tramp through frontier America to the Yukon. Rebel Frontier (Bell, 2004) employed a similar archival strategy, combined now with live action re-enactment, to retell the story of the Irish and Finnish miners of Butte, Montana, and their struggle against the Anaconda Copper Mining Company during World War I. This film, narrated by actor Martin Sheen, employed the additional device of the ‘unreliable narrator’. The story of the momentous events unfolding in Butte is told from the perspective of a Pinkerton agent sent to break the miners’ strike. This might be a young Dashiel Hammet and the script draws upon Hammet’s 1926 novel Red Harvest setinButte.Tac hrán Gan Todhchaí/Child of the Dead End (Bell 2009) deals with the life and work of Donegal-born navvy poet and writer Patrick Mac Gill. It also employs a rich cor- pus of archival images alongside dramatic elements somewhat more elaborate than those found in the earlier films. These films have been heralded for their use of archive that has been rec- ognized as quite distinctive within documentary film-making in Ireland, in particular, in so far as they employ early cinema material as an expressive and storytelling resource employing the conventions of continuity editing in cut- ting this footage (Mac Conghail 1999: 25). For some time I have been seeking to make sense of my own creative documentary work and its use of archive material as both historical trace and as narrative resource exploited to engage with the past (Bell 2004). Hopefully, these reflections might illuminate the broader issues around documentary film as historiographical practice raised in this article. Needless to say my methodological approach is that of a practitioner concerned with illuminating the creative and critical auspices of my own work rather than that of a film theorist per se. Film-making is always an explo- ration and testing of ideas about the medium, its creative capacities and its mode of public address. However, any attempt to theoretically extrapolate 4 May 30, 2011 17:5 Intellect/JMP Page-4 JMP-12-1-Finals Documentary film and the poetics of history from one’s own experience of a creative project is always likely to be tenta- 2 As I have argued elsewhere (Bell 2006), tive and partial. And, of course film-makers are in the first instance primarily the author’s reflective concerned with the production of an art object rather than with a ‘research out- analysis is but one come’. That said, one of the challenges of practice-based research and indeed interpretative position with regard to a film of art as public culture is to encourage artists to engage in reflective analysis work always subject to that can be shared with an interested public. Can the film-maker/researcher the scrutiny of other render explicit the forms of tacit knowledge implicit in their practice by critical positions. engaging in a structured reflection on that practice, the process Jurgen Haber- mas (1974) calls Nachkonstruktion, a term perhaps best rendered as rational reconstruction? I would argue that one of the most useful approaches to practice-based research in the film and the media field is one that respects the autonomy of the anterior creative practice (‘making work’) but that promotes the rational reconstruction and interrogation of a body of professionally organized practice as a rich source of ‘data’ and understanding.2 As I have argued elsewhere (Bell 2006), this mode of reflective understanding may well be arrived at in a pedagogic encounter – explaining our work to others – and is perhaps best communicated to other practitioners in such a context rather than by so-called ‘research dissemination’. Those of us who work in a university environment as teachers of film in a sense contract into pursuing our creative practice within a context of critical accountability. This entails seeking to more fully know our practice by engaging in an a posteriori reconstruction of it in which we seek to tease out the rule systems that govern that practice and our understanding of it. Needless to say, this is not the model of practice-based research favoured by the research councils who seem intent on bending the creative process to the demands of a set of homogenized, pseudo-scientific research protocols (governed as much by norms of bureaucratic accountability than by epistemic concerns). It is not at all clear to me what is gained by forcing practice-based researchers – whether masters and doctoral candidates or project researchers – to adopt the alien language of ‘research questions’ and replicable ‘methodolo- gies’ in their work. The studio and production process has its own discipline and research dynamic. Practice-based research is not another generic method of research alongside, for instance, ethnographic, semiotic, historical analysis, of cultural production. Rather, it is an integral element of good arts practice. The cognitive interest is exercised through reflective analysis and the critical appropriation of a creative process that has its own expressive dynamic. We still have relatively few contemporary exemplars of practice-based research based on reflective analysis. Sue Clayton’s recent illuminating lon- gitudinal review of her film work (Clayton 2007) certainly points in the right direction, as does Gideon Koppel’s discussion of the making of his creative documentary film Sleep Furiously (2008). Unfortunately the notion of self-reflection currently employed in the cur- rent discourse of practice-based research remains unclear and often fails to distinguish clearly between reflexivity and reflection. The terms ‘reflexivity’ or ‘self-reflexive’ are much employed in cultural stud- ies and in critical discussion of experimental and documentary film practice. They seek to identify a disposition on the part of the researcher/practitioner to become aware of the researcher’s contribution to the construction of meanings throughout the research process. 5 May 30, 2011 17:5 Intellect/JMP Page-5 JMP-12-1-Finals Desmond Bell The notion of reflexivity seeks to acknowledge the impossibility of remaining ‘outside of’ one’s subject matter while con- ducting research.

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