Winston Prelims_Documentary Film Book 16/04/2013 12:36 Page i THE DOCUMENTARY FILM BOOK Edited by Brian Winston A BFI book published by Palgrave Macmillan Winston Prelims_Documentary Film Book 16/04/2013 12:36 Page ii In memory of Richard (Ricky) Leacock (1922–2011) and George Stoney (1916–2012) © British Film Institute 2013 Introduction and editorial arrangement © Brian Winston 2013 Individual essays © their respective authors 2013 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6–10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The authors have asserted their rights to be identified as the authors of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN on behalf of the BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk There’s more to discover about film and television through the BFI. Our world-renowned archive, cinemas, festivals, films, publications and learning resources are here to inspire you. Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. Cover design: Cover image: Designed by couch Set by Cambrian Typesetters, Camberley, Surrey Printed in China This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978–1–84457–341–7 (pb) ISBN 978–1–84457–342–4 (hb) Winston Prelims_Documentary Film Book 16/04/2013 12:36 Page iii Contents Acknowledgments v Notes on Contributors vi Foreword: Why Documentaries Matter NICK FRASER x Introduction: The Filmed Documentary BRIAN WINSTON 1 PART ONE: Documentary Values 1.1 The Question of Evidence, the Power of Rhetoric and Documentary Film BILL NICHOLS 33 1.2 ‘I’ll Believe It When I Trust the Source’: Documentary Images and Visual Evidence CARL PLANTINGA 40 1.3 ‘The Performance Documentary’: The Performing Film-Maker, the Acting Subject STELLA BRUZZI 48 1.4 On Truth, Objectivity and Partisanship: The Case of Michael Moore DOUGLAS KELLNER 59 1.5 CGI and the End of Photography as Evidence TAYLOR DOWNING 68 1.6 Drawn From Life: The Animated Documentary ANDY GLYNNE 73 1.7 Dramadoc? Docudrama? The Limits and Protocols of a Televisual Form DEREK PAGET 76 1.8 Ambiguous Audiences ANNETTE HILL 83 1.9 Life As Narrativised BRIAN WINSTON 89 1.10 The Dance of Documentary Ethics PRATAP RUGHANI 98 1.11 Deaths, Transfigurations and the Future JOHN CORNER 110 PART TWO: Documentary Paradigms 2.1 Problems in Historiography: The Documentary Tradition Before Nanook of the North CHARLES MUSSER 119 2.2 John Grierson and the Documentary Film Movement IAN AITKEN 129 2.3 Challenges For Change: Canada’s National Film Board THOMAS WAUGH AND EZRA WINTON 138 2.4 Grierson’s Legacies: Australia and New Zealand DEANE WILLIAMS 147 2.5 New Deal Documentary and the North Atlantic Welfare State ZOË DRUICK AND JONATHAN KAHANA 153 2.6 The Triumph of Observationalism: Direct Cinema in the USA DAVE SAUNDERS 159 2.7 Russian and Soviet Documentary: From Vertov to Sokurov IAN CHRISTIE 167 2.8 The Radical Tradition in Documentary Film-making, 1920s–50s BERT HOGENKAMP 173 2.9 Le Groupe des trente: The Poetic Tradition ELENA VON KASSEL SIAMBANI 180 2.10 Cinéma Vérité: Vertov Revisited GENEVIÈVE VAN CAUWENBERGE 189 2.11 Beyond Sobriety: Documentary Diversions CRAIG HIGHT 198 PART THREE: Documentary Horizons 3.1 Eastwards ABÉ MARK NORNES 209 3.2 Africa N. FRANK UKADIKE 217 3.3 Images From the South: Contemporary Documentary in Argentina and Brazil ANA AMADO AND MARIA DORA MOURÃO 228 3.4 ‘Roadblock’ Films, ‘Children’s Resistance’ Films and ‘Blood Relations’ Films: Israeli and Palestinian Documentary Post-Intifada II RAYA MORAG 237 3.5 Sacred, Mundane and Absurd Revelations of the Everyday – Poetic Vérité in the Eastern European Tradition SUSANNA HELKE 247 Winston Prelims_Documentary Film Book 16/04/2013 12:36 Page iv PART FOUR: Documentary Voices 4.1 First-Person Political ALISA LEBOW 257 4.2 Feminist Documentaries: Finding, Seeing and Using Them JULIA LESAGE 266 4.3 Pioneers of Black Documentary Film PEARL BOWSER 275 4.4 LGTBs’ Documentary Identity CHRISTOPHER PULLEN 283 4.5 Docusoaps: The Ordinary Voice as Popular Entertainment RICHARD KILBORN 291 4.6 Reality TV: A Sign of the Times? ANITA BIRESSI AND HEATHER NUNN 299 PART FIVE: Documentary Disciplines 5.1 Anthropology: The Evolution of Ethnographic Film PAUL HENLEY 309 5.2 Science, Society and Documentary TIM BOON 320 5.3 History Documentaries for Television ANN GRAY 328 5.4 Music, Documentary, Music Documentary MICHAEL CHANAN 337 5.5 Art, Documentary as Art MICHAEL RENOV 345 PART SIX: Documentary Futures 6.1 Documentary as Open Space HELEN DE MICHIEL AND PATRICIA R. ZIMMERMANN 355 6.2 ‘This Great Mapping of Ourselves’: New Documentary Forms Online JON DOVEY AND MANDY ROSE 366 6.3 New Platforms for ‘Docmedia’: ‘Varient of a Manifesto’ PETER WINTONICK 376 Afterword: The Unchanging Question BRIAN WINSTON 383 Index 384 Winston Part 3_Documentary Film Book 17/04/2013 15:40 Page 209 3.1 Eastwards ABÉ MARK NORNES The western urban social necessity that engendered the cinema enquiries into colonial and neo-colonial representations of in the late nineteenth century was felt everywhere as an integral non-western cultures,1 Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy element of the West’s overal cultural presence. It needed to be of History. A quote sets us on our way: negotiated and absorbed; and absorbed it quickly was to the point where it cannot be said to have a western ‘heartland’, how- World history goes from East to West: as Asia is the ever much Europe is imagined as the centre point whence is beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end. In measured the rest of the world. And this is as true of documen- world history there is an absolute East, par excellence tary as it is of all else. (whereas the geographical term ‘east’ is in itself entirely relative); for although the earth is a sphere, history makes In December 1896, François-Constant Girel journeyed to no circle around that sphere. On the contrary, it has a Asia lugging the newly invented Lumière brothers camera, definite East which is Asia. It is here that the external accompanied by August Lumière’s acquaintance Inabata physical sun comes up, to sink in the West: and for that Katsutaro. After a brief visit to South-east Asia, he made same reason it is in the West that the inner Sun of self- his way to Japan. Girel was followed by Lumière camera- consciousness rises, shedding a higher brilliance.2 man Gabriel Veyre, who backtracked Girel’s journey; he spent 1898–99 in Japan, before hopping to French Indo- Thus, a similar philosophy was initially shaping this China. Over in India, Marius Sestier conducted the first volume’s tour d’horizon, ranging over an imaginary geogra- Indian screening in a hotel in June 1896. And then, in the phy. That passage from Hegel is preceded by the strong Philippines, Spaniard Antonio Ramos showed the first image of a blind person that suddenly gains sight, and is films in Manila before moving to Shanghai when the dumbfounded at the dawn’s brilliant light; he then begins Americans took power. He was preceded by James Ricalton, to take up the objects he finds about him to construct a who probably showed the first film in China at a teahouse building (perhaps a movie theatre) by the use of his own using the Edison projector. By the turn of the century or ‘inner sun’ – and when he contemplates it in the evening, shortly thereafter, the first Asian film-makers took up the he values it higher than that first external sun. However, cameras themselves. Such is the dawn of cinema in Asia – we must reject a vision of Asian spectators being dazzled first by Europeans, with Asians waiting. by the light coming from those first cameras, that product This chapter takes on the impracticable task of repre- of European genius, and then being inspired to pick up the senting ‘The East’ in this hefty tour d’horizon, so where else machine themselves (or sometimes reverse engineer it!) to to start but at the horizon with that cinematic sun peeking build their own indigenous film cultures, local cinemas out from behind the curvature of the Earth? Yet the original they inevitably compare unfavourably to the shining positioning of the chapter itself, in the larger context of the example of Europe.