University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media Studies When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception Author(s): Dirk Eitzen Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 81-102 Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1225809 Accessed: 13/07/2010 12:39 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=texas. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. University of Texas Press and Society for Cinema & Media Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Cinema Journal. http://www.jstor.org WhenIs a Documentary?: Documentaryas a Modeof Reception by Dirk Eitzen Documentaries-orwhatever their directorscare to call them-are just not my fa- voritekind of moviewatching. The factis I don'ttrust the littlebastards. I don'ttrust the motivesof those who thinkthey are superiorto fictionfilms. I don'ttrust their claimto havecornered the marketon the truth.I don'ttrust their inordinately high, and entirelyundeserved, status of bourgeoisrespectability.' -Marcel Ophuls Ophuls's ongoing career as a maker of serious documentaries belies his claim to mistrust the form. Nonetheless, Ophuls's declaration gets to the heart of what defines documentaries ("or whatever their directors care to call them"). All documentaries-whether they are deemed, in the end, to be reliable or not- revolve around questions of trust. A documentaryis any motion picture that is sus- ceptible to the question "Might it be lying?" It has been nearly seven decades since John Grierson first applied the term "documentary"to movies. Still, the definition of the term remains a vexed and controversialissue, not just among film theorists but also among people who make and watch documentaries. Definitions of genres like the western and film noir are in the last analysisfairly academic-of more concern to film scholars than to non- professional viewers. In contrast, as is apparent from the storms of controversy that rage around "fact-based"fiction films like JFK (1991) and MalcolmX (1992), the distinction between "fact"and "fiction"is a vital and importantone to popular movie audiences. It is also probablyindispensable in making sense of many kinds of everyday discourse, from dinner-table conversation to TV commercials. It is certainly crucial in the reception of discourses that are commonly regarded to be forms of nonfiction, including documentary. The question I wish to address in this article is, What difference does it make? How does it matter to the recipients of a discourse, in practical terms, whether the discourse is considered to be fiction or nonfiction? Although I will focus chiefly on documentary here-that is, on movies that are supposed to be nonfiction2-this question pertains to other forms of nonfiction as well, such as history and journalism. Documentary has been variouslydefined through the years as "a dramatized presentation of man's relation to his institutionallife," as "film with a message," as "the communication, not of imagined things, but of real things only,"and as films DirkEitzen is an AssistantProfessor of film andmedia studies at Franklin& MarshallCol- lege andan award-winningdocumentary producer. He haspreviously published in TheVel- vet LightTrap, Post Script,and Iris, amongothers. Copyright ? 1995 by the Universityof TexasPress, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819 Cinema Journal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995 81 which give up control of the events being filmed.3 The most famous definition, and still one of the most serviceable, is John Grierson's,"the creative treatment of actuality."4None of these definitions is completely satisfactory.The first excludes characterstudies and city symphonies,the second includes allegoricalfiction films like Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), the third begs the difficult question of what part of a complex documentarylike Fred Wiseman's High School (1968) is "real" and what part "imagined,"and so on. The toughest problem for common-sense definitions of documentary, like Grierson's "the creative treatment of actuality,"is determining just what consti- tutes "actuality."Every representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the sense that it is an artificialconstruct, a highly contrived and selective view of the world, produced for some purpose and therefore unavoidablyreflecting a given subjectivityor point of view. Even our "brute"perceptions of the world are ines- capably tainted by our beliefs, assumptions,goals, and desires. So, even if there is a concrete, material reality upon which our existence depends (something very few actuallydoubt) we can only apprehend it through mental representationsthat at best resemble reality and that are in large part sociallycreated. Some film theo- rists have responded to this dilemma by claiming that documentaryis actually no more than a kind of fiction that is constituted to cover over or "disavow"its own fictionality.5 This definition of documentary,though correctly controvertinga kind of na- ive realism, fails to account for the practical,everyday differences between fiction and nonfiction-differences that we experience as real and that can have real con- sequences for how we get along in the world, even though they may be in a sense imaginary.One could use the same line of reasoning to show, for example, that visual perception is no more than a kind of fiction that just seems particularlyreal. In theory, my perception of a baseball flying at my head may be no more than an imaginaryconstruct-a fiction, if you will. Nevertheless, if it does not cause me to duck, I am liable to get quite a lump. Documentary has some of the same practical implications. A neat definition of documentaryon the basis of something like textual fea- tures or authorialintentions has proved very tricky.I suggest that, in fact, it is im- possible. It is impossible because the boundaries of documentary are fuzzy and variable in viewers' experience and in everydaydiscourse. It is possible to define "duck-billedplatypus" by saying that the term refers to a finite and distinct em- pirical category. That is not so with documentary. If you asked most people whether the reenactment of a kidnappingon the TV tabloid A Current Affair is a documentary or not, the answer would not be a neat yes or no but something the lines of "Well . And whether or not a semifictional film like Michelle along .." Citron'sDaughter Rite (1978) is a documentarydepends upon how you look at it. It would be quite feasible to set up rigorousanalytical distinctions by fiat, as genre theorists are wont to do, but to the extent that those would draw rigid boundaries on one side or the other of A CurrentAffair and Daughter Rite, as they would be bound to do, they would fail to describe the category "documentary"in the way 82 Cinema Journal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995 we ordinarilyconceive and experience it. That is what counts if we wish to under- stand and explain actual, ordinarydiscourses (like how a reenactment in A Cur- rent Affair actuallyworks on viewers in a particularsituation). The best way to define documentary,therefore, may be to say simply that it is whatever people commonly mean by the term. That is what Andrew Tudor wrote of genres twenty years ago. "Genre,"he wrote, "is what we collectively be- lieve it to be."6What saves this argument from circularity,as Tudorpointed out, is that how people use genre terms and what they mean by them is pretty strictly delimited by culture. Daughter Rite might or might not be called a documentary, depending upon how one makes sense of it. On the other hand, it would appear practicallyabsurd in ordinarycircumstances to call Rocky (1976) a documentary. Conventions change, of course. In its time, On the Waterfront(1954) was called a documentary.Today, it takes a real stretch to think of it as one. This definition begs the real question, of course. Saying that documentaries are whatever people commonly take them to be tells us nothing at all about what, specifically, people commonly do take them to be. That is the crucial question. Representing Reality. In his recent book, Representing Reality, Bill Nichols weighs in with a new definition of documentary.The adequacy of a definition, he claims, has less to do with how well it corresponds to common usage, as Tudor suggests, than with how well it "locates and addresses important [theoretical] questions."' The theoretical questions that Nichols wishes to locate and address have to do primarilywith how power circulates in documentarydiscourses. That is certainly an important question. Still, it is but one aspect of how documentaries function as discourse. Moreover,Nichols appearsto recognize that one cannot ad- equately address the question of how power circulates in a discourse without first understanding how the discourse is perceived and interpreted by its recipients.