Five Modes of Documentary Representation

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Five Modes of Documentary Representation

• Reflexive and Performative Modes of Documentary
  Films

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Table of Contents

• 1) Reflexive Mode of Documentary Representation
• 2) Dziga Vertov and Man with a Movie Camera
• 3) Performative Mode of Documentary
  Representation
• 4) Chris Makers Sans soleil

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Reflexive Mode

• Reflexive documentary arose from a desire to
  make the conventions of representations
  themselves more apparent and to challenge the
  impression of reality which the other three modes
  normally conveyed unproblematically. Bill
  Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33

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Reflexive Mode

• To problematize the ways in which documentaries
  reveal the truth
• Reflexive documentaries are about documentaries,
  documentary representation and documentary film
  making.
• Meta-documentary - a documentary about
  documentary
• SELF-REFLEXIVE

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Dziga Vertov

• Dziga Vertov (1896-1954) psycho-neurologist,
  film editor, director and theorist
• Formation of the group of film makers called
  Kinok (or Kino-oki) camera eye

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Dziga Vertov

• Vertov and Kino-oki abandons fiction film for
  documentary.
• Films about film, how film functions and film
  making works.
• The camera can capture life-as-it-is which is
  missed by human eye.
• The film drama is the Opium of the people down
  with Bourgeois fairy-tale scenarios long live
  life as it is!

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Dziga Vertov

• Vertovs idea of film realism
• Belief in the primacy of movie camera over human
  eye
• - To be able to see at long distances, to film
  in slow or fast motion, etc.
• - Through editing, scenes from different times
  and places could be put together, the same scene
  viewed from several different angles, impressions
  of speed and energy enhanced by fast cutting
• Materialist truth rather than idealist truth

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Dziga Vertov

• Kinok (Kino-oki) presents a reality which only a
  movies can presents.
• The reality different from the reality the
  audience knows.
• Thus, Vertovs film poses a question Is the
  reality captured in his documentary a reality?
• His reality does not agree with our idea of it -
  lack of truth effects.

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Dziga Vertov

• Our eyes see very little and very badly so
  people dreamed up the microscope to let them see
  invisible phenomena they invented the telescope
  now they have perfected the cinecamera to
  penetrate more deeply into the visible world, to
  explore and record visual phenomena so that what
  is happening now, which will have to be taken
  account of in the future, is not
  forgotten.Provisional Instructions to Kino-Eye
  Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926

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Dziga Vertov

• Man with a Movie Camera (1929) - presents urban
  lives in Soviet cities. From dusk to dawn Soviet
  citizens are shown at work and at play.
• Also, it is about film making

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Dziga Vertov

• Showing the viewer how a film is made by way of
• - Double exposure
• - Quick motion
• - Slow motion
• - Stop motion
• - Tracking shot
• - Extreme high and low angles
• - Unusual camera movement

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Dziga Vertov
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Errol Morris

• The Thin Blue Line (1988) - a documentary about
  Randall Adams who was convicted and sentenced to
  a life imprisonment for the murder of a police
  officer.
• The film relies on the conventions of interactive
  documentary - interviews and confessions.

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Errol Morris

• Tension arises when statements contradict each
  other and this draws our attention to the
  legitimacy of testimonies and confessions
  recorded in the documentary.
• Randall Adams swears he did not kill the
  policeman but competing statements are presented.
• Despite the quest for evidence, the film
  underlies the uncertainty of what evidence there
  is.

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Legacy

• Self-reflexivity - the reflexive documentary
  shows how it is created.
• ? Films reflection on itself
• Jean-Luc Godard and other nouvelle vague
  filmmakers

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Self-reflexive Cinema

• François Truffauts La Nuit Americaine (Day for
  Night, 1973)
• Definitive film on film making
• Film within a film La Nuit Americaine is
  constructed around the production of Je vous
  presente, Pamela.
• NA excerpt

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Performative Mode

• Performative documentaries stress subjective
  aspects of a classically objective discourse
  documentaries - possible limitations loss of
  referential emphasis may relegate such films to
  the avant-garde fiction films excessive
  use of style. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries,
  p. 95

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Performative Mode

• The priority - to evoke the MOOD or ATMOSPHERE.
• Aims - to present reality in a subjective,
  expressive, stylized, evocative and visceral
  manner.

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Performative Mode

• Harry Watt and Basil Wright, Night Mail (1936)
  about the mail carried from London to Edinburgh
  in an express train
• Poems written by W.H. Auden and Music by Benjamin
  Britten

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Performative Mode

• Alain Resnaiss Nuit et Brouillard (Night and
  Fog, 1955)
• One of the first documentaries on the horror of
  the Holocaust.

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Performative Mode

• Contrast between the huge stillness of the
  abandoned camps and horrific wartime footage.
• Texts by Jean Cayrol and spoken by Michel Bouquet

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Performative Mode

• Chris Maker, Sans soleil (1983)
• Meditations on travel, memory (or forgetting),
  and time in words and images.

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Performative Mode

• An essay, collage of images literary comments and
  philosophical reflection, and creating an
  atmosphere of dream.