Documentary Manifesto

Note: My manifesto was originally entitled “Manifesto: Ten Principles for New Documentary Film,” though most (if not all) points also apply to the production of documentary works in photography and new media.

I. Primum non nocere.

Documentarists cannot know the full impact their works will have on their subjects, but they must take special pains to predict the effects of the filmmaking process and avoid any action that could reasonably be expected to cause mental or physical harm to any living being. In particular, when a subject’s ability to consent to participation is compromised, the filmmaker’s restraint – privileging a subject’s personal well-being over any filmic/dramatic concerns – is essential. For example, filmmakers exploring the memory of traumatic events through re-enactment need to consider whether their attempts to uncover repressed memories will cause their subjects serious distress. In films that reduce the human subject to guinea pig or martyr, the principle of respect between filmmaker and subject is violated. Pious claims of their value to a vague “posterity” are no justification.

II. True activist documentary names its subjects, and understands that human experience is, at its core, individual.

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag notes the tendency in documentary photography to genericize the sufferings of individuals and subsume the powerless under vast categories of injustice (in the tradition of Steichen’s Family of Man) – rendering the actual subjects anonymous, “representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights”. [1] This, she says, has the effect of engendering in the viewer a feeling that world problems are too immense to be solved. Thus, a deadening feeling of resignation ensues and any positive action is completely inhibited. Only by according victims the dignity of their individual names and circumstances – privileging concreteness over abstraction – have we any hope of achieving a genuinely activist mode of documentary.

III. In documentary film, the archive has the power to illuminate or corroborate a narrative of the past; it must not be deployed to mislead and manipulate.

Allan Sekula, in his essay “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” notes that the use of images from archives necessarily entails a certain loss of original meaning. Being “an abstraction from the complexity and richness of use, a loss of context,” the archive serves as a mere “clearing house” of meaning. [2] Writing about the use of archival footage in film, Stella Bruzzi calls attention to abuses of archival material. In contemporary historical documentaries, for example, specific recollections in voiceover are frequently accompanied by “generic” images to convey a specific mood or feeling – and the helpless audience is lulled into the assumption that the two are factually related (and that the image can be known to reflect the meaning of the scripted narrative). [3] To facilitate the viewer’s unquestioning absorption of such a problematic juxtaposition, music – that cinematic “opium”– is used liberally. (Ken Burns’ work exemplifies this technique, and, as one of the very few household-name documentarists, demonstrates its commercial potency). Without full disclosure of an image’s provenance and context, audiences are unable to perceive the gulf between original and imposed meanings. Aware of these and other ethical issues, Claude Lanzmann’s principled rejection of the archive for his work is commendable.

IV. “The problem of speaking for others” must burden, but not paralyze, the documentarist.

All too often, Western documentarists, possessing means of production accessible only to an elite few, employ a rhetoric of emancipation and inter-cultural collaboration, but they stand alone before festival or film-school audiences, garnering praise and career-advancement not extended to their ostensible “collaborators.” Linda Alcoff addresses the unforeseen consequences of speaking, from a privileged position, on behalf of groups who have been traditionally disempowered and prevented from having an independent voice. [4] However, while a sincere interrogation of one’s social location and context, as prescribed by Alcoff, is indeed necessary for privileged documentarists to understand the impact they have on groups for whom they speak, she gives few examples in which such speaking-for could, in her view, be justified. (Sontag, ideologically likeminded but more pragmatic, alludes to situations where journalistic or artistic responses to sufferings in distant communities might be worthwhile efforts in bringing needed attention to them.) Documentarists have a responsibility to listen attentively to their interlocutors, and to seek new ways to empower their subjects’ attempts at self-expression. But the result should be more equal collaboration in the production of documentary works, rather than the wholesale relinquishment of representative privileges.

V. Documentary depends as much on instinct as on intellect.

The filmmakers of the National Film Board of Canada understood this when they adopted as a model the photography of Henri Cartier-Bresson, whose book, The Decisive Moment, emphasized the discovery of subjects in spontaneous, everyday events while incorporating a keen concern for the time-sensitive moments of heightened pictorial composition existing within them. Such moments are the raw material of documentary; they are captured by the firing of a synapse, by a shot of adrenaline, as a cat seizes a bird. Hesitation, self-questioning, rationale: the bird escapes.

VI. Know your tools.

If instinct is an engine of documentary filmmaking, the director must engage physically and knowledgeably with the filmmaking apparatus. The camera and microphone must be connected by flesh to his eyes and ears. Michel Brault, the consummate cinematographer, implores the documentarist: “You must scrub the soul of your camera!” So you must; the still-photographer has always known this. It follows that the ideal work unit is the two-person crew consisting of cameraman and sound-man, conjoined twins working in intimate, fluid coordination: able to penetrate any situation as if a single being, without the drag of vestigial egos.

VII. The documentary camera must make its presence known and engage its subject; the “fly on the wall” is a mere insect, a parasite, waiting to feed! Better that the camera be a friend, coming to dinner.

The histories of documentary film note that the appearance of the hand-held camera (and synchronous sound) circa 1960 caused a forking of paths in the development of the form. On the one hand were the Americans who aspired to capture the drama of “real life” by feigning invisibility and observing their subjects without intervention. In the illustrious tradition of paparazzi, their favourite subjects were glamorous celebrities. At the other pole was Jean Rouch (and certain fellow travelers), who captured the everyday experiences of “ordinary” people with a degree of richness and intimacy not equaled by the Americans because he looked them in the eye, spoke with them, laughed with them. The registrations of the mechanical eye and ear are given life only by the human heart.

VIII. Documentary is a potent means to communicate, build awareness, incite action. It must move beyond the “niche”, appreciated by a small group of initiates. It must strive for universality.

To accomplish this, documentarists must work to overturn the assumption that their art is necessarily a “discourse of sobriety” (to use Bill Nichols’ oft-quoted characterization [5]). Chris Marker has rightly and famously accused the genre of leaving “a trail of sanctimonious boredom” in its wake. Herzog, with his ecstatic images of dreams, nightmares and wild men, has accomplished much in the cause of inebriation. Humour, subtle or overt, is a characteristic of almost all worthwhile documentary – through its ample use, Michael Moore (perhaps documentary’s most unfairly maligned practitioner) has brought an unparalleled degree of attention to issues of critical global importance.

IX. Beware the distinction between documentary and “documentary style.”

In a 1971 interview, the photographer Walker Evans characterized his art as being in a “documentary style,” and asserted that “a document has use, whereas art is really useless.” [6] As an example of a useful document, he cited a police photograph of a crime scene. Without assessing the validity of Evans’ personal rejection of the term “documentary” as applied to his work, or attempting to make an insupportable claim that art and documentary are mutually exclusive, it must be acknowledged that Evans’ comment raises an important issue for the documentarist. “Documentary style” describes a set of aesthetic conventions – in film, this may mean the shaky, grainy quality of hand-held, low-quality footage, or the alternation of talking heads with archival stills – not the function or value of the work itself. Makers must ask themselves what purpose their film serves: is it to record testimony, to advance a political position, to work through a problem? In an age where “documentary style” is deployed to enhance the illusion of reality in fictional works and advertising, filmmakers and viewers alike need to be careful not to confuse its product with genuine documentary.

X. Your work will outlive you, its meaning and value transformed anew in every pair of eyes! Even the most intellectually controlled, authorial works will furnish the future with all manner of unintended subjective experiences.

And thankfully so. For some, Duchamp’s urinal has outlived its statement – it is a nostalgic bathroom fixture, a fine specimen of old porcelain, a window into any imagined past. In the mind it may conjure the Cabaret Voltaire, or the trenches at Verdun. In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes writes of the punctum – the detail in a photograph that punctures the heart of a viewer (and which is so subjective as to vary from viewer to viewer); it is often a minor detail (or an interpretation of a detail) to which the image-maker himself was likely oblivious. The punctum is rarely, if ever, a deliberate addition of the image-maker. “I dismiss all knowledge, all culture, I refuse to inherit anything from another eye than my own,” Barthes declares. [7] The punctum’s key paradox is that “ it is what I add to the photograph and what is nonetheless already there”: the viewer locates it in an image based on his own, intensely personal and indefinable tendencies and curiosities. [8] While Barthes does not readily find puncta in cinema, I see them there: watching Chronicle of a Summer, beyond appreciating its self-reflexivity and spirit of sociological inquiry (part of its studium), I cannot help but remember (and find strange pleasure in) the innumerable tiny details passing in and out of the frame: the vague but somehow appetizing lunch of a factory worker at her machine, the full lips of an Italian immigrant. As the bliss of images resides in the personal discovery of such little things, I say to all makers and viewers: the punctum is never a misinterpretation! Happily surrender to it!

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Footnotes

[1] Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003), 79.

[2] Allan Sekula, “Photography Between Labour and Capital,” in Mining Photographs and Other Pictures, 1948-1968 (Halifax: Press of the Nova Scotia School of Art and Design, 1983), 194.

[3] Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary (Milton Park, U.K.: Routledge, 2006), 38.

[4] Linda Alcoff, “The Problem of Speaking for Others.” Cultural Critique (Winter, 1991-92), 5-32.

[5] Bill Nichols, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana UP, 1991), 3.

[6] Leslie Katz, “An Interview with Walker Evans,” in Photography in Print: Writings from 1816 to the Present, ed. Vicki Goldberg (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1981), 364-365.

[7] Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography (New York: Hill & Wang, 1981), 51.

[8] Barthes, 55.