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Copyright by Leah Michelle Ross 2012 The Dissertation Committee for Leah Michelle Ross Certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation: A Rhetoric of Instrumentality: Documentary Film in the Landscape of Public Memory Committee: Katherine Arens, Supervisor Barry Brummett, Co-Supervisor Richard Cherwitz Dana Cloud Andrew Garrison A Rhetoric of Instrumentality: Documentary Film in the Landscape of Public Memory by Leah Michelle Ross, B.A.; M.A. Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy The University of Texas at Austin December, 2012 Dedication For Chaim Silberstrom, who taught me to choose life. Acknowledgements This dissertation was conceived with insurmountable help from Dr. Katherine Arens, who has been my champion in both my academic work as well as in my personal growth and development for the last ten years. This kind of support and mentorship is rare and I can only hope to embody the same generosity when I am in the position to do so. I am forever indebted. Also to William Russell Hart, who taught me about strength in the process of recovery. I would also like to thank my dissertation committee members: Dr Barry Brummett for his patience through the years and maintaining a discipline of cool; Dr Dana Cloud for her inspiring and invaluable and tireless work on social justice issues, as well as her invaluable academic support in the early years of my graduate studies; Dr. Rick Cherwitz whose mentorship program provides practical skills and support to otherwise marginalized students is an invaluable contribution to the life of our university and world as a whole; Andrew Garrison for teaching me the craft I continue to practice and continuing to support me when I reach out with questions of my professional and creative goals; an inspiration in his ability to juggle filmmaking, teaching, and family and continued dedication to community based filmmaking programs. For my mother Merle Ross who gave me life and always taught the importance of education and perseverance, and my father Gary Ross, who provided the foundation for my interest in technology and practice of creative thinking. v A Rhetoric of Instrumentality: Documentary Film in The Landscape of Public Memory Leah Michelle Ross, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2012 Co-Supervisors: Barry Brummett and Katherine Arens We are at a particular moment in history where new technologies are changing the way films are made, distributed, and screened, as well as how audiences interact with documentary texts and discourses. This dissertation project questions documentary’s instrumentality in the public sphere in two parts. Using the response to Ken Burns’ The War, as a point of departure, it first addresses the lacuna of theory and scholarship on documentary films, owed largely to its nascent arrival in academia as a dedicated field of study. Using the films and the public response around the films, I point out the problems with how documentary has been understood in both public and academic thought, with particular emphasis on truth claims, subjectivity narratives, and audience identification, as well as production techniques as rhetoric. Secondly the project takes two cases studies to examine these issues in documentary discourse and to exemplify the ways technology is changing documentary as we know it, one a reality television show focused on teenage mothers and the other Michael Moore’s well known film Fahrenheit 9/11. Ultimately I argue that we are in a new era of documentary production that may be characterized by its interactivity between films, publics, and discourses. It is my hope that by combining my practical knowledge of documentary production for film and television with academic scholarship I will provide a valuable text for documentary theorists and rhetoricians alike. vi Table of Contents INTRODUCTION: THE INTERACTIVE FORM OF THE NEW DOCUMENTARY 1 Introducing the New Documentary Polemics: The Case of DTH..................9 Conclusions:The Problem of Truth, Instrumentality, and Aesthetics in Documentary ....................................................................................26 CHAPTER 1: DOCUMENTARY DISCOURSE:NHISTORICAL APPROACHES TO DOCUMENTARY 30 The 1920s: Grierson and Flaherty.............................................................34 The New Stylistics of Vérité: The Documentary on Television .................45 The 1960s Direct Cinema and Cinéma Vérité ............................................52 The Feminist Voice and “The Other” in Documentary...............................68 The 1980s and Beyond: The Self-Reflexive Documentary........................73 Some Conclusions: The Life and Truth of Documentary Film ..................79 CHAPTER 2: FROM HISTORY TO THEORY: RE-APPROACHING THE DOCUMENTARY FILM 84 The Origins of Documentary Theory in Film Production ...........................85 Contemporary Documentary Theory..........................................................98 Re-Approaching the Documentary: The Gaps in the Existing Literature .105 1. The subject of the documentary in its site-specific context. ........112 2. The subject of the documentary in relationship to the filmmaker.112 3. The cinematography as rhetoric...................................................113 4. How the story is put together, from the perspective of the post production..............................................................................114 5.How the story is packaged, bought and sold (marketing and distribution) ...............................................................................................115 vii 6. The public response to each film, particularly as a feedback loop115 The New Public Space of Documentary...................................................116 The case studies:.............................................................................119 CHAPTER 3: MICHAEL MOORE’S FAHRENHEIT 9/11 121 Virtual Realism and the Limits of Commodified Dissent in Fahrenheit 9/11126 1. Critique of Conspiracy and Partisan Rhetoric..............................127 2. Critique of Humor.......................................................................139 3. The Unreliability of Testimony ...................................................141 4. Irony and Infotainment in the New Documentary........................144 5. Critique of Virtual Reality...........................................................149 From Critique to Documentary Theory: Some Extrapolations.................155 CHAPTER 4: THE NEW TELEVISED DOCUMENTARY: REALITY TV AT THE NEW FRONTIER OF DOCUMENTARY 167 Popular and Scholarly Discourses on Reality TV: The Case of PDSM....171 Objectivity and the Making of Reality TV: Production Aesthetics ...........175 Theoretical Considerations: Reality Shows as.........................................205 Extended Documentary Spaces................................................................205 CONCLUSION: FROM REFLEXIVITY TO INTERACTIVITY: RETHEORIZING DOCUMENTARY INSTRUMENTALITY IN THE NASCENT AGE OF THE THIRD SCREEN 215 BIBLIOGRAPHY 229 VITA ERROR! BOOKMARK NOT DEFINED. viii INTRODUCTION: The Interactive Form of the New Documentary Just as America’s preeminent filmmaker Ken Burns was finishing post-production on his fourteen and half hour documentary series War (2007), US Latino community leaders began organizing around issues of representation in the film – specifically, for what they saw as an exclusion of Latino stories in the film’s narrative.1 Burns had been working on the film for over six years, aiming to tell a more “personal” story of World War II through the first person accounts of American veterans who lived through it. After learning about the film, University of Texas Journalism professor Maggie Rivas- Rodriguez (who had previously conducted oral histories with Latino veterans for her research) found that the film did not include the testimony of one Latino soldier (at least 500,000 Latinos are credited with US military service during WW II).2 In response Rodriguez began a public campaign to demand the inclusion of Latino veterans in the 1 The War, directed by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick (2007; Boston, MA: PBS International, 2007), DVD. 2 Paul Farhi, “Burns Won't Reedit 'War,' PBS Clarifies,” Washington Post, April 19 2007. Additionally, it is widely known that Latino demographics are difficult to estimate in size due to the history of race laws in the United States, for more information please see Evelyn Nakano Glenn, Unequal Freedom, How Race and Gender Shaped American Citizenship and Labor (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). 1 film and spearheaded a coalition of Latino and Chicano organizations, called Defend the Honor (herein, DTH). DTH’s organizing efforts put enormous public pressure on Burns, PBS (who provided funding and was scheduled to air the program), CPB, and the film’s corporate funders, to intercede and alter the course of production as it neared completion. What follows in this introduction is a closer look into the case of DTH, to highlight the elements of documentary film that my larger dissertation project will take as its focus. Specifically the case of DTH represents a larger shift in the ways documentary films and the public interact, through the creation of new public spaces - owed largely to material conditions created by recent revolutions in technology (both online and in new filmmaking technologies).