Winston Et Al The Act of Documenting. Documentary Film in The 21st Century 2017

The Act of
Documenting
i
ii
The Act of
Documenting
Documentary Film in the
21st Century
Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone

and Wang Chi
Bloomsbury Academic
An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
N E W YO R K • LO N D O N • OX F O R D • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY
iii
Bloomsbury Academic
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First published 2017
© Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi, 2017
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0916-8

PB: 978-1-5013-0917-5
ePub: 978-1-5013-0918-2
ePDF: 978-1-5013-0919-9
Cover image: ‘Stories We Tell’, 2012 © NFB / THE KOBAL COLLECTION
Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk
iv
for
Lily and Linnea, Yuchung and Angela, Finn
v
Tous les autres films, non fictionnels (par exemple sans scénario) sont
considérés comme un reste par rapport à cette grande catégorie.
Dans ces films, considérés comme marginaux . . . .
Christian Metz
(All other films, non-fictional, for instance, those without scripts, should
be understood as odds and ends in relation to the grand category [i.e.,
narrative fictional cinema]. In these films, considered as marginal. . .)
For now, and forever, I am banishing the word documentary from

our lexicon. I am replacing it with a contemporary word, one
which reflects the future and the now. My new word is: docmedia.
Peter Wintonick
vi
Contents
Acknowledgments x
List of Figures xi
List of Stills xii
AN AGENDA 1
1. “A MUCH-HAILED TRIUMPH” 1
2. “THE SHAKIEST OF FOUNDATIONS” 5
3. THE ACT OF DOCUMENTING 8
Part 1 Digital Potentials 11
1 “A Walk in the Woods” 13

Image:
1. AUTHENTICITY 13
2. TRUST 18
3. SAVVY 28
2 “A Breath of Fresh Air for the Documentary” 35

Kit:
1. CONTRADICTION 35
2. GLOBALIZATION 43
3 “Life as Narrativized” 54
Story:
1. INTERPASSIVITY 54
2. HOMO NARRANS 69
3. SCRIPTRIX NARRANS 75
vii
Part 2 Actual Effects . . . 81
. . . on THE FILMED 83
4 “To Thine Own Self be True” 85

Performing:
1. APPEARING 85
2. BEHAVING 96
5 “Giving Voice” 103

Co-creating:
1. CONTROL 103
2. CHANGE 116
. . . on THE FILMER 125
6 “To Make Space for the Un-thought” 127

Subjectivities:
1. GENDER 127
2. EMANCIPATION 143
7 “Nous somme dans le bain”/“We are Implicated” 151

Care:
1. HARM 151
2. RIGHTS 160
. . . on THE SPECTATOR 173
8 “You Have to Make up Your Own Mind” 175

Perception:
1. EXPECTATIONS 175
2. ASSUMPTONS 184
Contents
viii
9 “When the Lights go up” 191
Reception:
1. OUTCOMES 191
2. CONDITIONS 205
MINUTES: The Act of Documenting 218

Considerations
Bibliography 223
Index 257
Contents
ix
Acknowledgments
All books are, in one way or another, collaborations and this one is no exception,
not only in an obvious sense, because it is co-authored. Many others have
contributed with insights, information, reminders, corrections and prompts:
Sarah Barrow, Gabriel Chanan, Henry Corra, Sharon Daniel, Martin Eve, Clara
Garavelli, Tony Garnett, John Gaventa, Roger Graef, Alex Graham, Chris
Hainstock, Tom Hansell, Paul Hendry, Brian Hill, Patricia Holland, John Hudson,
Annabel Leventon, Mac Dara Ó Curraidhín, Tracey Means, Mariano Mestman,
Ohad Ofaz, Roberta Pearson, Martin Stoll, Joram ten Brink, Tsing Hing, Matthew
Winston, Ilan Ziv and others in China.
It has been conditioned by more than one conversation with Pat
Aufderheide, Barbara Evans, Seth Feldman, Annette Hill, Leslie Sanders, Carolyn
Steele, Hongyun Sun, Geoff Thompson, and Tom Waugh. And central to its
development has been feedback from Nick Fraser, Sandra Guadenzi, Kate
Nash, Michael Renov, Mandy Rose, and William Uricchio and all at the Li
Xianting Film Fund.
Also thanks to Donna Cowan of the NFB for her help; to John Greyson for
heavy lifting with committee work; and to Katie Gallof at the press for not only
taking on this project but also her endless patience and good humor. The
production of this manuscript would not have been accomplished without
the aid of Katie Dorr, Kathy Elder, Stephen Young, James Smith and all at
RefineCatch. Without Sian Wright’s skills there would be no diagrams, nor
screen-grabs. Above all, gratitude to Frances Mannsaker whose usual care
extended far beyond proofing.
All inadvertent errors are, of course, the fault of the authors, not to be
blamed on any colleagues mentioned above. But more than usual does this
usual caveat apply. Significant differences of opinion did not impede the
generosity of their input. They cannot be thanked enough.
Gail Vanstone
Wang Chi
Brian Winston
Toronto and Lincoln, UK
June 2016
x
Figures
1 THE CLASS CINEMA 4
2 THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION 8
3 “The Camera Cannot Lie”—EVIDENCE 17
4 “The Creative Treatment of Actuality”—ART 22
5 THE FAMILIA NON-FICTION 23
6 FACT ➔ ➔ ➔ FICTION 24
7 “Trust the Source”—TRUTH 29
8 “Stories about THE World”—WITNESS 31
9 TRUST/DOUBT BALANCE 33
10a GLOBAL SOUTH v. GLOBAL NORTH 48
10b GLOBAL SOUTH v. GLOBAL NORTH: REBALANCING? 53
11 THE GENUS DOCUMENTARY 56
12 “Co-created stories about THE World”—PROCESS 58
13 FOUR RECIPIENTS 61
14 STRATEGIES FOR INTERACTION 65
15 ACTING ➔ ➔ ➔ BEING CONTINUUM 89
16 THE POWER CUBE 109
xi
Stills
1 “People are pretty creative with their photo software” 16
Megalodon: The New Evidence?
2 such intervention does not necessarily destroy documentary value 25
Nanook of the North
3 a richly expanded variety of directions 34
a) Animated Documentaries: Waltz with Bashar
b) Documusicals: Feltham Sings
c) Conditional Documentaries: Smallpox 2002
4 “Jam Salaya, Gulf of Kutch, India” 45
Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala/Gulf to Gulf
5 “Get out of the pool” 56
Fort McMoney
6 “Is this a good angle for me?” 85
Stories We Tell
7 “it was so, so real . . . I felt fear and I felt panic” 92
The 1940s House
8 “Morin and I only want you to answer some questions” 100
Chronique d’un été
9 “a lot of people with fascinating stories to tell” 104
Hollow
10 “What those people in North Carolina really need to know is . . .” 106
The Harlan County Tapes
11 “Je suis heureuse . . .” 128
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse
12 “something very tactile—always” 139
Measure of Distance
13 “poetry, performance, confession, and history” 144
Tongues Untied
14 “Will you allow me to be your advanced care director?” 153
Farewell to Hollywood
15 “a boatload of wild Irishmen” 160
Man of Aran
16 “this is how to do it” 165
The Act of Killing
xii
17 “The man on the left has a newspaper in his pocket” 176
Forgotten Silver
18 “Of course, some things never change—like the propaganda of
naked aggression” 181
Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy
19 “Pol Pot says: ‘Those we cannot re-educate we fight as enemies’ ” 189
The Missing Picture
20 “Never capture what you can’t control” 192
Blackfish
21 “Do you think the wind in Beijing is strong?” 211
Is Beijing’s Wind Strong?
22 “I think you filmed very well” 213
The Satiated Village
Stills
xiii
xiv
AN AGENDA
For the documentary film, at the outset of the twenty-first century, a peculiarly
potent range of factors both liberate and threaten:
The much-hailed triumph of documentary films

subsists on the shakiest of foundations . . . .
but the vitality of the documentary resides in the fact that
it thrives at a series of crossroads scarred by accidents.
(Fraser, 2013: x, xv)
1. “A MUCH-HAILED TRIUMPH”
This book is dedicated to an examination of the proposition that, during the
first years of the twenty-first century:
The power of [documentary] film to change the world has become

impossible to ignore. Through hard work and commitment of thousands
of dedicated individuals, we’ve seen it all: major artistic achievement,
radical experimentation and innovation and serious social change (Anon
[Britdoc], 2014).
How can these claims be substantiated—as a matter of aesthetics, originality,

or impact? How has documentary changed? And how changed is the world in
consequence of it?
There is much to suggest that the claims made on its behalf have substance.
Documentary is enjoying unprecedented levels of public attention on
screens large and small and has indeed become difficult (at least in some
quarters) to “ignore.” Specialist documentary channels proliferate. And
Neilsen notes that in the USA , on these channels, a top documentary can
be watched by as many as 4.5 million viewers—around half that of a hit
network drama (Anon [Nielsen] 2015). On terrestrial television, 33 million
Americans tuned-in to Ken Burn’s The Roosevelts: An Intimate History
1
(Gilbert, 2015).1 Twelve percent-plus of the UK national audience were
watching programming in the “documentary” category in 2014 (Anon [BARB ],
(b) 2015: 34). Such statistics are not hard to find—and not only in terms of
television.
The reappearance—arguably, actually the first sustained appearance—of
big screen documentary as a significant source of cinema income in the west
is, perhaps, yet more telling evidence of a new documentary age. By 2015,
Fahrenheit 9/11 (Michael Moore| USA | 2004) had taken $120m+ at the US box
office, easily an historic record. It earned another $100m+ internationally and
further revenues from its DVD /Blu-ray sales. It was among America’s 10 top-
grossing theatrical documentaries, 2000–15, which collectively generated
$610,000,000 in ticket sales (Anon [The Numbers] 2015: adjusted for inflation).
Hit documentaries, for the first time, can expect returns in millions of dollars.
Even showcasing documentaries at specialist film festivals is now itself big
business: Amsterdam, Dox, É Tudo Verdade, Hot Docs, Sunnnyside of the Doc,
Visions du réel, Yamagata, etc, etc. Over 2,000 delegates now attend Sheffield
alone giving the lie to the fashionable technicist descriptor “legacy media”—if
it is used with any connotation of morbidity—being applied to traditional
linear documentary films.2
Artistic achievement is, of course, harder to gage but, without question, the
observational tradition of direct cinema has been augmented by compelling
works exploring mentalités, seeking new modes of documentary expression.
Of radical significance since the late 1980s has been the increasing acceptance,
contrary to the dominant tradition of objectivity, of the legitimacy of subjective
expression to documentary. Potently, subjectivity has combined with a
rejection of analog cinematography as the sole way in which documentary
can be illustrated.
While the digital affords no necessary condition for this, it certainly facilitates
such developments. Its potentialities lie at the heart of the case for
documentary’s current “radical experimentation and innovation.” Visionaries,
such as the late Peter Wintonick, now conceive of a “docmedia” landscape
The Act of Documenting
1
The Roosevelts: An Intimate History| Ken Burns| USA | 2014 September 14–October 26
2
The term “legacy media” will not again be used. The vibrancy and importance of older media, and
the power of those that own them, should not be forgotten, eg the +/– $115 billion annually taken
at the cinema book-office of the world’s leading film-going nations, etc. Even Broadways takes
$1 billion a year. What Mark Twain famously said, on reading his own palpably erroneous obituary
in a newspaper, applies: “The report of my death was an exaggeration” ( Winston, 2015b).
2
dotted variously with “cyber-docs, digidocs, transmedia docs, cross-docs, cross-
media, 360 degree docs, netcast docs, interactive docs, 3D-docs, made-for-
mobile docs” ( Wintonick, 2013: 277). Some would add: “soft-,” “interactive-,”
“data-,” “dynamic-,” or “multi-linear-docs” as descriptors: “webdocs” or “i-docs”
most commonly (Soar, 2014: 170, f/n 2).3
Voices of the excluded and the marginalized all over the world are being
heard because what were once insurmountable technological barriers to
entry, thanks to complexity and expense, are no more. Old professional
equipment “standards” have been rendered achievable by ever more accessible
and cheaper kit. Now, on smartphones costing as little as $100, the “filmer” and
the “filmed” (to use John Ellis’ useful terms) morph into a hybrid (Ellis, 2011: 10).
One result is that the coverage of events is no longer a journalistic monopoly:
documentaries can be made by “the people that actually lived these [digitally
filmed] experiences” (Mehta in Zhou, 2012).
In parallel to such technologically driven empowerment of those who used
to be the filmed is the digitally enabled interventionism of those who once
were isolated as spectators. On the web, documentary projects invite audience
“interaction” at various levels far beyond the necessary traditional cognitive
work of textual deconstruction. The exploitation of narrative non-linearity is
something of a given, to the point where such platform documentaries can be
“driven . . . by the idea of combining documentary film and video games”
(Dufesne in Gaudenzi, 2013). Such developments “really re-envision the
documentary of the future” (Mehta in Zhou 2012).
Critical opinion, journalistic and scholarly, has not been immune to all this
evidence of popularity and potency. An increased measure of journalistic
attention has been matched by an expanded library of scholarship on the
documentary and a growth of dedicated academic conferences, notably the
international Visible Evidence series, now in its 23rd year. Documentary studies
is established as a sub-field of the cinema/mass communication studies
discipline.
In short, documentary itself can no longer be thought of merely as a side-
lined media category—considéré comme marginaux (as Metz had it); today it is
a significant category of the media industry’s output. That there is much talk
AN AGENDA
3
Although the “web” usage currently dominates, other platforms and possibilities are also in play,
so, arbitrarily, “web-/i-doc” and, more broadly, “docmedia” will be used in what follows (but see p. 74
for a caveat about neologisms in general).
3
now of documentary’s “power . . . to change the world” should not surprise. A
traditional focus on social engagement and documentary’s capacity to aid the
amelioration of social problems has sharpened. For the mainstream, achieving
“impact” (or successfully promising funders and commissioners that it is
achievable) is becoming an integral part of the production process,
The noted movement on all these fronts—popularity, artistry, innovation,
and impact—suggests that the documentary, as a genre—genus—must be
reconsidered and its historic subaltern position re-evaluated:
Figure 1 THE CLASS CINEMA 4
In terms of a formal taxonomy (and in the full understanding that the

certainties of such boxes can be queried—see p. 133), documentary lies within
the class “cinema” (ie moving image screen technologies) and the order
“narrative.” Although within the “narrative” familia “non-fiction,” the genus
“documentary” has so grown in de facto cultural salience it is now at a point

where it can be thought to rank with “narrative”’s other familia, “fiction.” The
4
To complete this analogy, “cinema” can be considered a class of the phylum “art” in the kingdom
“culture.”
4
documentary is no longer merely comme un reste—an afterthought—to
fiction. It is its equal.
Nothing encapsulates all this more succinctly, perhaps, than does the poll
of 340 “experts” (including critics, scholars, and documentary filmmakers)
conducted by Sight and Sound in 2014 to find “the greatest documentaries
ever.” The magazine’s editors had been (in their own word) “blindsided” when,
in 2012, a documentary, albeit one 85 years old—The Man with a Movie
Camera5—suddenly appeared in its well-established decadal “Ten Greatest
Films of All Time” poll. Documentary, the magazine concluded, now deserved
the accolade of having its own list because it “has mutated in the margins of
cinema” (Bradshaw, 2014: 22).
For all these reasons, “tous film est un film de fiction, et le cinéma en général est
happé par la fiction” no longer serves as a basis for marginalizing documentaries
(Metz, 1975: 31). They have finally, as it were, arrived
2. “THE SHAKIEST OF FOUNDATIONS”

Nevertheless, documentary’s triumph requires contextualizing on all these
fronts. The significance of even the least disputable factor—audience figures—
needs perspective.
Although the receipts for theatrical documentaries are without question
by traditional standards extraordinary, there is a rapid falling off between
the top grossers (Farenheit 9/11’s $221m worldwide or La marche de l’empereur/
March of the Penguins’6 $127m) and the rest, with a majority still not viable
as commercial propositions. A noted documentary such as The Act of
Killing (2011)7 despite its extraordinary critical reception amassed worldwide
earnings of less than three-quarters of a million dollars, not quite making back
its estimated production costs of a million.8 Without such attention, returns
5
Человек с киноаппаратом (Chelovek s kinoapparatom)/Man with a Movie Camera| Dzivga Vertov
(David Kaufman)| USSR (Ukraine)| 1929.
6
La marche de l’empereur/March of the Penguins| Luc Jaquet| France| 2005.
7
The Act of Killing| Joshua Oppenheimer| Denmark/Norway/UK | 2012.
8
$722,714: $486,919 in the USA where it ranked 221st in the documentary list (Anon [Box Office
Mojo], (b), n/d). The Wikipedia entry cites this world-wide figure attributing it to Box Office Mojo—
AN AGENDA
but Box Office Mojo has no international earnings stats and only states the lower take for the US
alone. Clearly the film, though, took some money outside of the United States, so the larger,
un-sourced figure is also given. Either way, by modern standards where takes of several million
are rare but not unknown, The Act of Killing was not a commercial documentary hit (see p. 199).
5
can amount to only a few tens of thousands, a fraction of the film’s budget.
Anyway, Fahrenheit 9/11’s $221 million, it should be remembered, represents
less than one percent of the biggest box office thus far—Avatar’s £278,400m.
Television, terrestrial and new platform, does far better than this with
popular documentary—a maximum averaging at 12–15 percent of the total
audience as opposed to a maximum of 30 percent other categories of
programming achieve. But it is rather a stretch to class most of such output as
“documentary.” Honesty is better expressed by the term “unscripted.”
“Unscripted,” for example, can yield a UK audience of 10 million for I’m a
Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here (Hamilton, 2013). So, for all that sober non-fiction
can now achieve stainable audiences, tv “documentary” likely means this
sort of formatted material, eg (at random): A Haunting (“true” stories of people
who have been haunted), Fifth Gear (“it’s about cars”), Dual Survival (“Imagine
being thrown into the wilderness”) (Anon [tv.com]: n/d). While it is certainly
important to recognize and celebrate fully realized artistic achievement in
recent works, it is critical to do so bearing in mind this corpus of less than
outstanding formatted or formulaic, titillating, and exploitive production.
This is the context in which traditional somber documentary as well as
recent significant expansions of documentary’s scope—ie: the embracing of
subjectivity—exists.
Artistic achievement there has undoubtedly been; but, even if agreement
can be reached as to what this means, it is still not so easily gaged, never mind
gaged to have increased. It has always been possible—sometimes achieved,
often not. Innovation of content, too, cannot be easily measured. The range of
documentary subjects remains largely unexpanded since direct cinema’s
advance, in the 1960s, from the social, scientific, poetic, and political domains
into the previously ignored private realm. Even on the newest of documentary
platforms, figures such as the social victim are as alive as ever. The emerging
web-/i-doc canon largely revisits the tropes of Griersonian documentary:
urbanism,9 prison conditions,10 ecology,11 Israel/Palestine,12 and other perennial
political issues. Only video “life-writing,”13 adds an overtly subjective element
and, in that, echoes the general turn to subjectivity also seen in more traditional
9
Eg High Rise| Katrina Cizek| Canada| 2009–16.
10
Eg Public Secrets| Sharon Daniel| USA | n/d | (audio documentary).
11
Eg Off-Shore| Brenda Longfellow/Glenn Richards/Helios Design Labs| Canada| 2012; Fort McMoney
|McMoney| David Dufrense| Canada| 2013.
12
Eg Gaza/Sdrot| Sussana Lotz/Joël Ronez/Alex Szalat| Israel/Palestine| 2008.
13
Eg Big Stories, Small Towns| Elijah Cavanagh/Victor Koolmatrie/Vernon Walker/Kelvin Kelly/Ken
Wells/Lam Suot/Ang Yung/Phillip Mitchell/Nick Crowther| Australia| 2008–
6
linear documentary work.14 Today’s documentary deploys the new in the
continued service of these established tropes. Despite technological
developments, innovation has been thus far as much, or perhaps more, formal
than substantive.
A similar conservatism constrains the welcome and empowering
emergence of the filmer/filmed hybrid. For one thing, the professionals have
not vacated the field. “Standards” have not been abandoned, despite the
affordances of the digital. On the contrary: that barrier is always being raised so
that professional kit still costs several thousand times as much as the cheapest
video capture devices. Nor is all new platform docmedia work itself cheap,
either. Web-/i-doc projects can be forbiddingly expensive and maintaining the
sites that house them is not cost free thereafter. A project graveyard is
developing on the web.
But more to the point about artistic achievement and innovation, giving
everyone a smart phone or digital camera and an accessible computer editing
program no more enables them to communicate effectively than giving
everyone pen and paper makes them a Tolstoy. Letting them bury the needles
that are their messages in the electronic haystack that is the World Wide Web
is not much guarantee of communicative power either. Voices are as likely
drowned out as amplified.
Nor does the innovative empowering freedom of the spectator, through
digital “interactivity,” have as much significance as is hyperbolically claimed for
it. Clicktivism can have no more substance than the apparent passivity of the
traditional audience does. The one is less empowering than claimed, the other
is more active and engaged than is assumed. Web-/i-docs do not of themselves
open the door of narrative’s cell in, to adapt a metaphor, “the prison house” of
media. Despite technicist beliefs, the digital alone does not afford an alternative
to narrative in “hyperspace’s dimensionless infinity” (Coover, 2003 [1992: 25])
and the rest of the usual technicist litany. Never mind all the “forking-path”
choices and avatar role-playing and the like that might now be involved in
docmedia, narrative—as an essential tool for sense-making—persists. Absent
the clicktivist ludic element, and all these technological innovations scarce “re-
envision the documentary.”
And what then, most importantly for the act of documenting, of “impact”—
of documentary’s now supposedly un-ignorable power? Not all documentaries
AN AGENDA
14
Eg Les Plages d’Agnès| Agnès Varda| France| 2010; Stories We Tell| Sarah Polley| Canada| 2012. See
also Lebow (2012).
7
are designed to mold opinion and/or evoke response in the form of social
action and there is a valid case that they need have no such primary objective.
Still, any blanket claim that films with those ambitions have effected “serious
social change” is unfortunately, given the general state we are in, all too easy
to “ignore.” Even making claims for impact, never mind the supposed
consequences of it, is fraught. Measuring media effects un-contentiously has
eluded social science for the better part of a century. Counting “likes,” “tweets,”
and “visits” no more tells us about either consciousness raising or responsive
social action than do box-office receipts, interviews, focus groups, and lab
experiments with electrodes measuring brain activity. But beyond all that, it is
still the case that relating evidence of influence or active engagement back to
a given specific media message is, against the background of the general noise
of the social sphere, more or less impossible to do.
Exploring the balance between documentary’s “much-hailed triumph” in
the light of the foundations of its popularity, artistry, innovation, and impact
being the “shakiest” is this book’s AGENDA.
3. THE ACT OF DOCUMENTING

The western documentary idea has been supported by three legs. . .
Figure 2 THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION
Its hegemony has depended on the scientism of objectivity and the evidential
integrity of the photographic image; the eurocentricism of its production
modes and exhibition infrastructure; and the patriarchal cast of its dominant
8
tone and narrative voice. PART 1: Digital Potentials addresses what current
changes mean for these supports.
The opening assumption here made is that each one of its legs is potentially
deeply undercut by the digital. This is not to say that documentary
developments in recent decades have been limited to technology. Yet even
the legitimation of subjectivity, which owes little or nothing to equipment
enhancements, perforce occurs in the changed digital environment. The
scientism of the photographic IMAGE in the digital era (Chapter 1) and the
eurocentric nature of the KIT (Chapter 2) are considered first. The dominant
patriarchal tone of the STORY documentary tells about the world is analysed
in Chapter 3.
PART 2: Actual Effects surveys indicative consequences of documentary’s
new environment on the linear film and contemporary “docmedia” variants of
it. A given is that the impacts of the digital are more evolutionary than
revolutionary. All parties traditionally involved in the act of documenting—the
filmed, the filmer, and the spectator—are still present and the issues each
raises are entangled in reciprocal ways difficult to isolate; but, PERFORMING
(Chapter 4) and PARTICIPATING (Chapter 5) are most concerned with the
FILMED. The implication for the FILMER of the turn towards SUBJECTIVITY
in documentary expression is examined in Chapter 6; and their multiple duties
of CARE in the changing circumstances of the twenty-first century is the
subject of Chapter 7. The expectations of the SPEC TATOR are the focus of
audience PERCEPTION (Chapter 8); and the conditions and consequences of
RECEPTION are addressed in Chapter 9. A MINUTE outlining, as it might be,
the considerations further debate and analysis might require concludes.
For nearly a century, the hegemonic strategies of mainstream documentary
film have sought—even claimed—the holy grail of representing, in some
or other privileged measure, if not “the truth,” then a truth: evidence—
witnessed, observed, or vouchsafed testament—about the real world (Nichols,
1991: 11, 126). Unlike fiction (which Bill Nichols defines as being A story
“accessing” A world), documentary is A story offering “access” to THE world
(Nichols, 1991: 109).
But today documentary’s original (especially anglophone) claim on the
real—the essence of its difference from fiction—cannot (and should not)
be maintained on its old terms. Although this threatens the established
AN AGENDA
mainstream tradition, it thereby also affords great opportunities for other

voices speaking in many different documentary languages. It is the hegemony
of the privileged white male documentarist from the global north that is
9
untenable. He can no longer command us to see and think in the way he
demands by insisting that only his expensively gathered “professional” images
both show us the world and also illustrate his art. He cannot claim that all other
modes are less legitimate forms of documentary expression. He has always
been challengeable, of course. Now, though, his dominance is unsustainable.
The potential of that liberation is the real “triumph” of documentary. That is
what is un-ignorable—and what is truly liberating for the act of documenting
in the twenty-first century.
10
PART 1
Digital Potentials
The definition of documentary has always been prone to technological

determinism. The introduction of the analog film camera itself, sound, 16mm
synch sound, and analog video have conventionally marked the stages of
documentary’s history. Now, at the crossroads of the twenty-first century, such
a technicist proclivity persists, again claiming the apparatus as documentary’s
prime determinant:
new silicon-based technology is transforming documentary

expression and nonfiction media, allowing for a full spectrum of
possibilities. Our brave, new and complicated world is filled with
change and choice.
( Wintonick, 2013: 376)
11
The documentary tradition hitherto has rested on three elements all of which are
potentially transformed by the digital: the scientistic authenticity of photographic
IMAGE it presented (Chapter 1); the eurocentrically determined means of
production, the KIT needed to make it (Chapter 2); and the dominate patriarchal
tone of the STORY it told about the world (Chapter 3). The new technology affects
all three; but to what effect?
12
1 “A Walk in the Woods”
IMAGE: The concept of the documentary is grounded in an assumption about the

AUTHENTICIT Y (1) of the photographic image as determined by an audience
Indexing (1.1) it as such. The given is that the image is Evidence (1.2) that can be so
tested. Yet, this still requires a measure of TRUST (2). Manipulation (2.1) has always
been possible. The audience is obliged to exercise Judgment (2.2). The spectator
must deploy a certain SAVVY (3) when drawing Inferences (3.1) from, and
assessing the Probability (3.2) of, documentary truth.
1. AUTHENTICITY
1.1. Indexing
A “Lazarus Taxon” is a long extinct biotic group unexpectedly discovered to be
still extant (Bottjer, 2003: 203). In 1938, 99 years after its fossil had been
identified by Louis Agassiz and dated as extinct in the Late Cretaceous
66 million years ago, a living coelacanth was fished up from the waters off the
Eastern Cape of South Africa. Agassiz also identified in the fossil record the
megalodon, a giant species of shark some 20 meters or more in length,
thought to be extinct since the end of the Pliocene 2.6 million years ago
(Gottfried et al, 1996: 55–66). In 2013, many thousands of kilometers to the
west of the site of the coelacanth recovery, evidence of a living megalodon,
another “Lazarus” was uncovered and presented to the public on August 4,
2013 in a Discovery Channel documentary: Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives.
It was the opening salvo of “television’s longest running must-see summer tv
event”: “Shark Week.”1
According to Noel Carroll “we typically ‘index’ a film as either fiction or non-
fiction” (Carroll, 1983; 1996). This
particular indexing of a film mobilizes expectations and activities on the part

of a viewer. A film indexed as non-fiction [eg a documentary] leads the
1
Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives| Douglas Glover| USA | 2013.
13
spectator to expect a discourse that makes assertions or implications about
actuality” (Plantinga, 1996: 310).
An indexing “savvy spectator,” though, will not rely on the image alone to test
such claims (Plantinga, 1996: 324). Its context too will be in play; how it is
presented to them in the first instance—in effect, how it is marketed.
Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives is thus prima facie a documentary not least
because it was on The Discovery Channel. That alone means assertions or
implications about actuality are in play as the channel was established in 1985,
by John Hendricks, exactly to be “devoted to documentaries” (Hendricks, 2013:
3). Hendricks’ shared John Grierson’s vision of documentary as a tool of public
enlightenment. Initially at least, The Discovery Channel’s entire marketing thrust
was educational. It was a decidedly up-market addition to the US cable
industry’s offer. Carroll’s concept of “indexing” thus allows for Megalodon: The
Monster Shark Lives to be received as a documentary “ahead of time” of viewing
(Carroll, 1996: 287).
Moreover, the “savvy spectator” of Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives might
also be expected to know of the coelacanth—a number now having been
fished up. This knowledge, it could be argued, “mobilizes expectations and
activities” on their part, prima facie, to accept the possibility of a prehistoric
survivor—a fish in remote waters, say, as a big as a “submarine”—and to trust
the photographic evidence of it. The film deploys all the protocols of
documentary. It has experts, forensically deconstructed images, detailed maps,
found amateur footage, witnesses carefully labeled to be credible. It cites the
odd independently verifiable event, eg a controversial Western Australian
shark cull which actually took place; and it references the impact of global
warming on animal behavior patterns. There is even end-title authentication:
None of the institutions or agencies that appear in the film is affiliated with it
in anyway, nor have they approved its contents. Though certain events and
characters in this film have been dramatized, sightings of “submarine” have
continued. Legends of great sharks persist all over the world. There is still
debate about what they may be. Produced by Pilgrim Studios for Discovery
Chanel MMXIII. Discovery Channel LLC.
“What you are witnessing are the actual events as they unfolded,” stated an
initial voice-over. “These images were filmed by a Discovery Channel crew.
Viewer discretion is advised.”
14
That “advice,” it might be thought, is an alert at the film’s outset that viewers’
cynicism might be more required than discretion. The two seconds that the
authentication end titles, which actually take 30 seconds to read, were on the
screen at the show’s end was another. Its weasel wording, a third. And, overall,
so poor were the performances and so obviously doctored virtually all the
visual “evidence,” that Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives was clearly, on its
face, a nonsense throughout.
Yet, “savvy spectators,” however savvy, felt duped enough to be aggrieved
even by a “documentary” so obviously and crudely faked as Megalodon: The
Monster Shark Lives. In this instance, no less savvy a person than the UK
Guardian’s influential lead environmental columnist, George Monbiot, was
moved to devote a 600-word blog to a serious refutation of the film’s legitimacy.
“Did Discovery Channel fake the image in its giant shark documentary?”
(Monbiot, 2014), he asked; doing so, apparently, not in the ironic spirit of an
“is-the-Pope-Catholic?” questioner. The Associated Press wire service carried a
story suggesting that “airing a ‘mockumentary’ that talks seriously about the
existence of a creature known only from its fossils compromises the network’s
reputation” (Anon [AP ], n/d). “The suspicion that The Discovery Channel had
abandoned its professed editorial standards was a powerful one,” Monbiot
suggested (Monbiot, 2014).
There are many possible reasons for the channel’s obliviousness to
reputational damage of which the most obvious is profit. Its audience
showing little sign of savvy, the channel has proceeded accordingly.
Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives “ranks as the biggest ‘Shark Week’
episode to date, reaching 4.8 million viewers and a 2.6 rating with adults
25–54” (O’Connell, 2014). One poll suggested that 71 percent of the
viewers “still believe megalodon exists after watching Discovery Channel’s
fake documentary” (Spector, 2013). Discovery.com is laughing all the way to
the bank.
Its capacity to chuckle is unbounded. 2014’s “Shark Week” follow-up,
Megalodon: The New Evidence, was, unsurprisingly, unrepentant. It contained a
disarming exchange between the “presenter” and the show’s star “expert”
about confessedly “alleged” photographic images (of which a number were
“A Walk in the Woods”
displayed). Their opinion of these stills was that: “People are pretty creative with
their photo software.”
The basis of evidence for the megalodon included an archive of these
obviously doctored (but forensically examined) stills and shark-less footage of
fishing boats under attack as well as some seconds of more compelling
15
footage supposedly taken off Western Australia by a deep-sea diver. To “prove”
that the “Australian” underwater footage was further “evidence” of the existence
of a living (baby) megalodon, the “expert” (actor Darron Meyer) conducted a
frame analysis. He highlighted extra back musculature and a point on the
swimming animal’s pectoral fins which showed, he asserted, that it could not
be a great white shark.
Still 1 “People are pretty creative with their photo software.”

Megalodon: The New Evidence| Douglas Glover| USA | 2014
Thus did this visual evidence pose a question as to what species it was.
However, the truly savvy spectator might well presume the footage of the
shark and its fins was actually the work of Adam Klein and Josh Mossotti, two
uncredited2 professional Hollywood animators and visual effects artists. The
swimming shark was not so much a living baby megalodon as it was a
previously unknown Charcharoles megalodon Kleini-Mossottii (as it were). This
beast is a virtual piscine avatar, unacknowledged as such, created to falsely
suggest a living referent which does not exist or—better in this instance—
which no longer exists.
The show-reels of the animators3 do not contain the shark footage. After
all, creating an expressionless underwater beast with a few distinguishing
muscles and fins is so far from today’s gold-standard for VFX that doing so is
scarcely of value as a professional calling card. Nor do the closing credits of the
2
Only two graphics companies are credited publically on the shows. There are no other on-screen
credits for visual effects but Klein appears as “Animator/3D Artist” and Mossotti as “visual effects
artist” in the IMDB crew list. There could be other “compositors” as well.
3
Adam Klein, Animation Reel (n/d) www.adamklein.info [accessed April 27, 2015]; Josh Mossotti,
VFX Demo 2014 (2014) https://vimeo.com/105383176 [accessed April 30, 2015].
16
megalodon films reveal their names—the savvy spectator needs to have gone
to the IMDB to find them. Nevertheless, despite its simplicity as example of
dynamic CGI , their contribution to the megalodon films speaks to another
facet of The Discovery Channel’s astuteness: such digital manipulation can be
thought to symbolize an understanding that its high-minded founding
ambition cannot—and, from their point of view, need not—survive the digital
age unchanged.
1.2. Evidence
The west developed photography (and then the documentary film) to record,
scientifically, things as they are. It was as a technology “invaluable to science”
that photography was presented to the world 175 years ago (Eder, 1972 [1932]:
238–9). The camera was situated as a species of scientific instrument. In what
would become the context for documentary, the referent was an event
observed and recorded mechanically:
Figure 3 “The Camera Cannot Lie”—EVIDENCE
The image was received by a viewer as untampered evidence “on its face,” a
“silent witness.” Hence the assertion that the camera “cannot lie” was rapidly
17
accepted as a fact. It was assumed to be, exactly, such a species of scientific
instrument like, say, the thermometer.
What [asked Roland Barthes] is the content of the photographic message?

What does the photograph transmit? By definition, the scene itself, the literal
reality. . . . Certainly the image is not the reality but it is its perfect analogon
and it is exactly this analogical perfection which to common sense, defines
the photograph (Barthes, 1977: 17).
Even in scholarly discourse in the late twentieth century was the photograph
still considered of a piece with X-rays or fingerprints (Nichols, 1994: 18).
Documentary film assumed, and depended on, audience trust that the
photograph was indeed, as Charles Peirce famously put it “physically forced to
correspond point by point to nature” in this way (Peirce, CP 2: 281).
In the light of this received understanding, to state that the photograph
is only “a weak sort of evidence” (Plantinga, 1996: 317) is curious. For the
public, photographs still evidence the real. The fact that photographic
evidence can be disputed in a court of law does not make it “weak.” It is
cross-examination—deconstruction—that weakens it, casting it into doubt;
as such a procedure does with all evidence. Evidence—“an indication, mark,
trace” (OED )—is, anyway, an element of proof, not proof itself; a basis for
judgment, not judgment. In question is photography’s status as such, an
indication prior to interrogation; and, there, it has always been powerful in
comparison to other types of documentation. Photography’s claim on the real,
its evidentiary status as document, has hitherto been culturally legitimated as
robust.
But this can no longer be accepted. The digital renders “tracing” optional;
and therefore—as The Discovery Channel, for example, appears to indicate—
the protocols underpinning its promise as evidence on its face might as well
be abandoned. This is no small matter.
2. TRUST
2.1. Manipulation
This is not to dismiss the possibility of the photograph continuing to
supply what Annette Hill calls “referential integrity”—authenticity—in the
18
digital age (Hill, 2007:139). It is not to deny its “documentary value,” to echo
Grierson (Grierson, 1981 [1926]: 26).4 However, digital’s most draconian
effect must be that the viewer cannot necessarily assume an inevitable
connection of some sort between the photographic image and a referent in
the “real” world as a fallback position. And that it never could is irrelevant
because, now, for the first time, there is no necessary camera and nothing
need be before it.
Manipulation becomes unprecedentedly traceless—there are, for example,
no negatives to reveal its presence anymore—and digital manipulative
techniques have already progressed enough for this to disable an automatic
assumption that the documentary image has not been meddled with.
Any visit to the local multiplex will not only reveal the wonders of unrealistic
special effects but also disguised will be realistic, transparent tampering.
Referential integrity, as an expression of automatic silent-witness credulity,
is clearly shattered. The shutter’s click is no longer the end of the matter for
even the casual amateur photographer. As “hoover” became a synonym in
English for vacuum cleaner in the twentieth century, so “photoshop” has
become a synonym for computer image manipulation in the twenty-first
(Moynihan, 2013).5
The photograph’s status as image must now be moved in the direction of
the symbolic on the continuum from signs “physically forced to correspond
point by point to nature” to abstract symbolic visual modes of representation.
Trust in the photographic image is not thereby being derided; only that its
increasingly unsafe basis is being warned against. This is more than enough to
occasion a radical rethinking.
Suggesting it, though, can evoke strident denial:
Those who claim that digital imaging effects signal ‘the end of the
photographic era’ exaggerate their effects. . . . Digital imaging does not
4
Received understanding has this use, in a newspaper review of Flaherty’s second film
Moana (USA , 1926), as the first occasion in English that the word was attached to a film (Ellis,
2000: 27–8). In fact, by 1914, Edward Curtis, whose pioneering In the Land of the Headhunters|
Edward Curtis| USA | 1915 influenced Flaherty’s approach to Nanook of the North ( Winston, B.,
2005: 8–9), was already writing of “documentary material” and “documentary works,”
giving a definition of the documentary film stressing authenticity (Holm and Quimby, 1980,
pp. 113–14).
5
Adobe “Photoshop” is a brand name but: “we commonly speak about ‘Photoshopping’ images
regardless of the software that we actually used to do it” (Monihan, 2013).
19
change the nature of the photograph in fundamental ways (Plantinga,
1996: 324; 2014: 44).
The authenticity of documentary is not thrown into doubt because a

couple of charlatans exhibit the ‘wherewithal’ to create fake documentaries
(Bruzzi, 2006: 5).
However—simply—it is not to exaggerate and it is so rendered doubtful.

“Charlatans” (eg The Discovery Channel?) have nothing to do with it. This is
about the audience’s ability to “index.”
The evidentiary pretensions of the documentary cannot any longer
be sustained in traditional terms and, with that, the image integrity of
mainstream documentary is diminished. It is far from “hysterical” (Bruzzi,
2006: 3) or “paranoid” (Plantinga, 1996: 320) to suggest that, long before
digital’s technological potential is fully realized, quotidian assumed veracity
of the photographic image digital imaging will, unavoidably, be eroded.
Undeniably, referent-less “virtual photographs”—corresponding at no point
to a pre-existing external reality—now exist. It cannot be unreasonable
(much less evidence of derangement) to suggest that this is critical for
documentary as its truth-claim rests on “a definition of factuality that is
all about referential integrity” (Hill, 2007: 139). It is the foundation of “[t]he
anterior truth to which documentaries in the past have appealed” ( Vaughan,
1979:2).
Despite the vigor of the attack on questioning the status quo, even those
wanting to defend a traditional claim on the real nonetheless are forced to
admit that there has been, after all, a “salient change wrought by digital
imaging.” But they seek to square the circle by calling up the past. We must
not, we are told, “forget . . . that deception has always been possible and
present in documentary photography” (Plantinga, 2014:44). The cognitive
dissonance that always enabled a belief in the integrity of the photographic
image must therefore be acknowledged. Ergo, any similar or increased
capacity for manipulation wrought by digital imaging can now be similarly
accommodated.
The problem with such a position is that it is irrelevant. It is not the
photograph but the basis of its reception that is in question. Nor is it other
than glib to suggest that warning against too easily believing the image
is, somehow, an elitist slur against the audience’s intelligence. It is not the
case that doing so “underestimates the place of trust in the audience’s
20
assent to any communication, and to documentaries in particular” (Plantinga,
2014: 44).6 Insisting on ill-founded trust as a fallback position is the slur. It is not
the importance of “assent” that is being underestimated; it is the trustworthiness
of the image.
This rhetoric is less epistemological than political. Privileging such an
assumption of trust obfuscates how the culture works to invest certain media
messages with enhanced authority (eg: broadcast news as well as documentary).
Thus does Carl Plantinga when he cites, revealingly, The New York Times as an
example of a source that maintains “standards” in such matters and so might be
trustworthy (Plantinga, 2014: 44). Cynical they might be (or worse, radicals
even), but some might think, the “standards” of that paper’s trustworthiness
(and that of all its ilk) are no more than fig-leaves covering their role as exempla
of the “Ideological State Apparatus/cramming every ‘citizen’ with daily doses of
nationalism, chauvinism, liberalism.” (Althusser, 1971: 97).
“Is it right to impart a universal ideological effect to the photograph?” asks
Plantinga (1997: 4). Is it not? Does not correspondence “point by point to
nature” have universal ideological import? Suggesting caution is not to
underestimate the intelligence of the audience.
2.2. Judgment
From cinema’s diffusion in 1896 at the latest, “the whole question of the
conflict between the image and human judgment began to bedevil the
discussion of the media;” and this has gone on ever since (Smith, 1996: 8).
The necessity of “assent” is, in fact, agreed. With the coming of the digital,
we are where we were: the determination of image integrity is in the minds
of the spectator. But, where one finds in this trust, another warns of
(encouraged) gullibility.
A species of cognitive dissonance allows the documentary to be both
scientific and artistic. Indeed documentary, as initially defined by John Grierson,
depends on this “creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson, 1933: 8). The
recording observer is acknowledged as conditioning the image so that the
line between it and the referent is broken by the creativity involved in obtaining
it. The observer becomes a creator, an artist like any other.
6
This follows Noel Carroll’s original charge that “post-modern skeptics” were elitists who claimed
the “plain people” lacked the savvy only they possessed to detect image inauthenticity (Carroll,
1996: 283–304). They did no such thing of course.
21
Figure 4 “The Creative Treatment of Actuality”—ART
Photography’s putative special capacities—the basis of its claim on the real—

is weakened. The camera can—if not lie—then necessarily, to one degree or
another, fail to guarantee “truth”. It necessarily must, to one degree or another,
distort the image’s correspondence to the referent.
But what is lost here is balanced by the re-enforcement of an assumption of
art. Far from being an automaton merely activating the recording apparatus,
the observer is a creator, an artist. And—acknowledging but undeterred by
the fraughtness of taxonomic boxing (see p. 133)— we propose that, to reflect
this dissonance, the genus “documentary,” within the familia “non-fiction,” might
therefore be divided into species “objective” and “subjective.”
For all the claims of documentary’s scientistic objectivity, artistic
subjectivity is just as legitimate. Before this century, though, this had been
largely denied in the name of “objectivity” as a scientifically truthful mode
of expression—the only one available to the documentary. That there

could be another species, “subjectivity” was, at one ideologically potent level,
resisted (especially by the anglophones) (p. 148). The cognitive dissonance
has involved claiming objectivity while also wanting to deploy artistic
subjectivity (“the creative treatment of actuality”). But now, thanks in great
part to Michael Renov, the legitimacy of subjectivity in documentary is
22
Figure 5 THE FAMILIA NON -FIC TION
being more broadly acknowledged (Renov, 2004). The documentarist is an

artist but one who constrains their imagination to processing only what is
witnessed.
Witness is a common seed from which grows the evidentiary document, in
whatever form from scientific paintings to theater of fact. But this is not simply
a question of the perceiving-recording observer experiencing the referent
directly. Between the referent and the spectator there can be, in addition to
the image (or text) creator, more than one percipient witness.7 The filmer’s
recording is presented to the spectator directly but this can involve a chain of
evidence with each witness hearing the testimony of their predecessor and
passing it on: witness as informant to witness as interviewee to cameraperson,
for example. And while each additional link in the chain weakens the claim on
the real, the form of the chain itself—the medium and its modalities—is
irrelevant to its validity. Documentary value lies less in how the testimony is
presented than in the fact of it being recorded witness; indeed, in the fact of it
being grounded in percipient witness.
But recording witness requires intervention on the part of the recorder and
intervention in a variety of everyday ways allows for “actuality” to be “creatively”
treated. This has nothing to do with rare deliberate fraud but it does imply a
continuum in production practice from fact to fiction.
7
All witnesses are here being considered percipient and the legal distinction between the
percipient and other classes of witness (eg expert) is ignored. A witness is always percipient in this
context.
23
Figure 6 FAC T ➔➔➔ FIC TION
Only the witness of the surveillance camera is produced without

immediate interventions.8 Otherwise witness and intervention co-exist. It

begins with arrangements during the pro-filmic phase, which even direct
cinema needs, despite seeing any interaction with the events thereafter
8
Surveillance footage can be found in many documentaries, but it is seldom the dominant
element. An exception would be The Bridge (p. 110).
24
being filmed as “cheating” (as Leacock called it), (in Labarthe and Marcorelles,
1963: 26).9
As for intervention during filming (aka direction), notwithstanding direct
cinema dogme, it is a given of the entire tradition from Nanook on. From direct
instructions to various parties—at a minimum to technicians10 but also to those
being filmed—most filmmakers at most times have not eschewed intervention.
They do everything from rearranging the furniture through to interviews.
Still 2 such intervention does not necessarily destroy documentary

value
Nanook of the North| Robert Flaherty| France/Canada| 1921
Yet, even in its totality—as from the outset with the enlarged sun-lit half-sided
igloo specially built to allow for filming in Nanook—such intervention does not
necessarily destroy documentary value. If it is constrained by prior witness, it is
certainly no bar to producing A story about THE world.
Ditto repetition, for the sake of, say, editing according to Hollywood norms.
This is a commonplace. And from asking the filmed to repeat an action, it is
but a small step to have them re-enact actions they did in the more distant
past—the re-enactment of history (as it might be) with actual participants. Nor
9
Even minimizing the pre-film deals was seen as aiding authenticity. In 1962, Leacock, having had
a meeting with the Prime Minster of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, to set up a portrait film, then got no
further official agreement. So he gate-crashed a reception and, in the words of his sound recordist,
Greg Shuker: “Nehru greets his guests but ignores our presence. The deal is on” (Mamber, 1974,
p. 86). (Nehru| Richard Leacock| USA | 1962).
10
Single-person operation recording synch is a very modern phenomenon.
25
is the step beyond calling for reconstruction a bar either. Neither reconstruction
nor re-enactment require the original persons involved. Providing it is grounded
in testimony, the use of actors to re-enact prior witnessed events also produces
drama-documentary, ie licet documentary expression.
Re-imagined film (as it might be called) is reconstruction or re-enactment
at its most extreme. This was possible before digitization but the weakening of
photographic image integrity now gives it a legitimacy which it previously
lacked.11 An autobiographical animated feature such as Vals im Bashir/Waltz
with Bashir,12 can be received as documentary as it centrally deals with
illustrating witness. It is a documentary, crucially, because there is now an
understanding that, in the digital era, a claim on the real does not depend
on—nor is guaranteed by—photography (Honess Roe, 2013). Such re-imaging
also can be found in the wide, and often transparent, use of CGI . This is a
common technique in, especially, television history documentaries. (These are
the waters in which the fraudulent megalodon, and the “charlatans” who
created it, frolic.)
Re-imaging extends beyond non-photographic imaging of witness to
embrace other possible ways of actualizing witness. Beyond intervention,
there are further possibilities which, unlike mockumentaries and other fictions,
are still grounded at one stage or another in witness—and therefore occupy
the “debatable lands” between documentary and fiction. Already in the 1930s,
the filming of un-witnessed but typical events was done using typical
subjects—ie a construction of the possible grounded on available evidence.13
This, though, must stand over and against the blurred boundary between
documentary and fiction: as must the rare re-enactments involving a mix of
both original participants and actors.14
If, however, the criterion of percipient witness for the creation of documentary
value is accepted, then—to take the extreme example—films of testimony
transformed into verse, performed as songs by the informants, must also be
11
Conventionally, the earliest documentary cartoon is Windsor MaCay’s The Sinking of the Lusitania|
USA | 1918.
12
Waltz with Bashar| Ari Folman |Israel |2008.
13
It is only possible to gage the degree of fictionality (ie the contribution of the filmmaker’s
imagination) by close examination of the production context. Thus, there is little beyond the
presence of non-professional players in The Savings of Bill Blewitt (and the indexing of the film as
coming from a documentary studio—the GPO ) to sustain its status as a documentary (The Savings
of Bill Blewitt| Harry Watt| UK | 1936). Fires Were Started (Humphrey Jennings| UK | 1943), on the other
hand, although it contains a fictional—yet highly possible—death is almost entirely warranted by
prior witness ( Winston, B, 1999: 26–9).
14
The True Voice of Rape| Brian Hill| UK | 2006, t/x April 19.
26
documentaries—musical documentaries (Paget & Roscoe, 2006).15 And, even
more hybridic is the conditional documentary, paradoxically dealing with events
yet to happen: “They present a fictional, predicted future not as merely possible
and fictive, but instead as historical fact . . . [in effect] blending reality with
prediction” (Mills, 2011: 88) Thus Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon (released two years
before the events it supposedly depicts) used official emergency disaster planning
documentation as a species of prior witness to legitimate the film’s conjectures.16
Patrolling a taxonomic border between such re-enactments, re-imaginings
and the more conventional reconstructions of drama-documentary on the one
hand and (as it might be) the super-realism of a fact-based fiction (such as,
classically, Cathy Come Home—Ken Loach| UK | 1966) becomes as much a
question of indexing as of substantive classification.17 Megalodon: The Monster
Shark Lives—technically a “mockumentary” and therefore firmly a fiction—is
nevertheless indexed as a documentary by virtue of being made by a
documentary studio. Cathy Come Home is a drama because it comes from a
television drama department. Paradoxically, the fiction is more truthful—
however defined—than is the documentary.
Finally, formatted documentary is another television programming
technique that sits in a transit camp on the border. Non-actors (aka “real”
people) being observationally filmed in situations contrived by the filmmakers
can be un-controversially received as documentary, should the intention of
the filmmakers be considered serious: eg Edgar Morin and Jean Rouch’s
Chronique d’un été is a documentary classic. The Rouchian technique of
stimulating response is seen as entirely legitimate. (p. 000). The documentary
value of the equally contrived Big Brother, on the other hand, is generally
dismissed as titillation made by “bastards” (to use a judgment of Paul Watson,
p. 000): indeed a “simulation,” and not documentary at all (Dovey, 2008).18
All this is before we get to the editing suite. Even if deliberate, or accidental,
misrepresentation is avoided, there is, in the nature of the case, unavoidable
15
Brian Hill made a series of such films with poet Stephen Armitage, eg Feltham Sings| UK | 2002;
Pornography: The Musical| UK | 2003; Songbird| UK | 2007.
16
Dan Percival| UK | 2002.
17
There, as Cathy’s producer, Tony Garnett explains: “the characters do not exist outside the
imaginations of the makers. . . . The work I’ve produced is based on research, that is an enquiry into
the real world, the ‘facts’ as we like to call our observations. It is then imagined, that is transformed
through everyone’s imagination into a fiction” (private communication, 4 May 2015). This can be
argued, however, as the essential element of witness (aka research) is present.
18
Dovey argues (Dovey, 2008) that this reclassification reveals the social value of programs such as
Wife-Swap (Various| UK | 2003, t/x January 1—2009, t/x December 19). This is not generally agreed
( Winston, B, 2007:307–9).
27
intervention. The direct cinema pretense of un-edited evidence was, of course,
soon abandoned. When told, in 1970, that Al Maysles said he didn’t edit his films,
Ricky Leacock laconically commented: “So David [Maysles, Al’s brother and sound
recordist] does it” (in Levin, 1971: 286). In fact, editing for the direct cinema pioneers
was actually largely women’s work, which might account for the ease with which
they dismissed its significance.19 But post-production’s re-contextualizing can
damage the solidest of reputations. At the trustworthy polar opposite from The
Discovery Channel stands the BBC ’s natural history unit. Nevertheless, briefly
presenting animals shot in a zoo as being in the wild—although there was no
suggestion that the behavior was anything but natural—was enough to send the
British press into paroxysms of faux rage at the subterfuge.
With the exception of CGI , none of the above opportunities for
contaminating the evidence require new technology; but, it is suggested, that
without digital’s loosening of the referential bond many of them would not be
considered plausible as documentaries at all. Overall, the variety of possibilities
and opportunities available to the documentarist speaks to the burgeoning
that has occurred in the last 25 years since direct cinema’s hegemony began to
be widely challenged by mainstream documentarists in the late 1980s. Now,
all that can be excluded from the documentary genre for certain is un-
witnessed intervention—the fabrications of the filmmaker’s imagination to tell
A story about A world. That is what the “fiction” familia produces—even when
it adopts, as far as it is able, documentary aesthetics, and protocols. But what is
also without question is that uncertain image integrity, un-interrogatable
witnesses, and inevitable interventions make trusting documentaries a big ask.
3. SAVVY
3.1. Inferences
“Every text,” says Umberto Eco in his Six Walks in the Fictional Woods, “is a lazy
machine asking the reader to do some of its work” (Eco, 1994: 20); and this is
true also of any walks (as it were) the spectator takes into the wood of
documentary. Work must be done to establish the “safety” of the evidence the
wood—the “woodness” of its trees—presents to the walker. The problem is that
photography’s evidentiary status is grounded in discomforting contrary beliefs:
19
Eg: Charlotte Zwerin edited Meet Marlon Brandon| Al Maysles| USA | 1966, Salesman Al Maysles|
USA | 1968, Gimme Shelter| Al Maysles| USA | 1970, and Susan Froemke edited Grey Gardens| Al
Maysles| USA | 1975.
28
trust in its integrity vis-à-vis referents while at the same time understanding the
many ways, from pro-filmic event to reception, whereby this faith can be
misplaced. And the digital deepens the complexity of this dissonance.
Claiming manipulation was always possible is, as we have said, irrelevant to
the question of reception but that does not deny that cognitive dissonance
has always been in play: “Are the appearances the camera transports a
construction, a man-made cultural artifact, or are they, like a footprint in the
sand, a trace naturally left by something that has passed? The answer is, both”
(Berger, 2013 [1982]: 82, 65, emphasis in the original). The point is that digital
makes the trace less likely than the construction but the walker in the wood is
still well able to hold this distinction in play simply because “savvy spectators
have never relied solely on the image as evidence for a text’s claims” (Plantinga,
1996: 324). “Savviness” is always a matter of judgment and validation: “I’ll believe
it when I trust the source,” (Plantinga, 2014: 40).
Although this itself begs a very large “who guards the guardians” question,
it can be readily agreed that: “[t]he place of trust in the audience’s assent to any
communication” might be compromised by the digital but it is still, as Plantinga
correctly suggests, primary. The trustworthiness of the image has always
needed to be tested outside of the frame and it still does—and can be.
Figure 7 “Trust the Source”—TRUTH
29
It is not the documentarist but the audience that, by defining documentary
value for itself, commands its own mind, thereby constraining his hegemonic
intentions. If a documentary truth is to be established, the loop—world ➔
referent ➔ creative image capture ➔ screen ➔ spectator—must be closed
by the latter’s cognition determining that the image is of the world as
they understand it actually to exist. It is a line from mind to world that must
close the loop.
However, the centrality of reception has not been fully accounted for in
defining the documentary traditionally. The documentary requires:
● a referent in the real world

●
a percipient witness of that referent
● a “documentor” of that witness (who could be one and the same, eg the
self-reflexive filmer)
● a spectator.
Only the spectator—the audience—can finally determine documentary value.

That this is downplayed is perhaps a reason why definitions of documentary
are notoriously “leaky and unstable” (Corner, 2002: 126); difficult to define—“un
object filmique mal identifié,” (Gauthier, 2011:5).
The first thing the savvy audience needs to know is, as Errol Morris put it in
1989, that: “Truth isn’t guaranteed by style or expression. It isn’t guaranteed by
anything” (Morris, 1989: 17).
Once we have accepted that there is no purely technical criterion for realism,
no gimmick of presentation which can guarantee authenticity, then we are
forced to recognize that we must rely upon the integrity of the artist for its
creation and upon the judgment of the viewer for its proof ( Vaughan, 2012:
15; emphasis added).
“Actuality,” as Robert Fairthorne (the only scientific figure in Grierson’s circle of

producers and directors) pointed out some eighty years ago, “is not a
fundamental property, but a relation between film and audience of precisely

the same order as slow motion which demands previous knowledge of natural
motion to give it its peculiar effect” (in Macpherson, 1980: 173). One must
know the speed through experience (or logically deduce it on the basis of that
experience) if one is to determine if film footage is in slow motion—or fast. The
same is true of reality and, therefore, of documentary.
30
Deconstruction of the image, to validate its authenticity requires the
spectator to draw inferences and make judgments; in short, to be Eco’s walker.
For documentary to be witness, the documentary spectator’s inferences must,
in the nature of the case, primarily be directed at testing the text’s truth-
claims—in effect, by comparing these with direct experience or intertextual
understandings (ie that which results from the consumption of other sources
of information).
Figure 8 “Stories about THE World”—WITNESS
The line from spectator back to the world calls into play what Charles Peirce
terms “collateral experience.” No determination of documentary value can be
made without it. Peirce suggested distinguishing:
between the immediate Object,—i.e., the Object as represented in the sign

[eg the documentary image]—and the Real . . . the Dynamical Object [the
referent], which, from the nature of things, the Sign cannot express, which it
can only indicate and leave the interpreter to find out by collateral experience
(Peirce, CP 8: 312).
Collateral experience—like Fairthorne’s “previous knowledge”—when recalled

on this walk through a realistic text, allows the referent in the course of such
31
perceiving to be mentally indexed as a “fact.” In this way it is “verifiable” as truly
representing “the real.”
With documentary, testing percepts against collateral knowledge is a constant
in the reception process. In effect, for Peirce, it is a species of “falsification” (Popper,
2005: 17) as it assumes an inherent possibility that the image is false and needs to
be proved true. All spectators of the documentary, never mind only the savvy
ones, necessarily proceed from doubt to trust in this way. The spectator can
dismiss an image as false, hallucinatory even, or she can check its validity with
others. Beyond these two tests, as everybody can be equally deluded there is:
a third test that can be applied; and it is far the surest of the three. Namely, I [a
spectator] may make use of my knowledge of the laws of nature (very fallible
knowledge, confessedly) to predict that if my percept has its cause in the real
world, a certain experiment must have a certain result—a result which in the
absence of that cause would be not a little surprising. I apply this test of
experiment. If the result does not occur my percept is illusory; if it does, it
receives strong confirmation (Peirce, CP 8: 179).
Peirce acknowledged that these procedures are not full proof but suggests
that “though none of them is infallible, [they] answer very well.” (At least they do so
unless the conditions of reception encourage mass hallucination as they do in
repressive regimes.) But, basically, for all its limitations, this triad of percepts—from
personal witness through corroboration to general agreement—is certainly of
more value to the savvy spectator than is Peirce’s better-known triadic taxonomy
of symbol, index, and icon.20 What the savvy spectator really cannot be without is
collateral experience, experientially grounded common sense, as a predeterminate
of these correspondences. Peirce glosses this as “knowledge of the laws of nature,”
and it is of a piece with what Nichols describes as “embodied knowledge” (Nichols,
1994: 22). Even so, with the conscious deployment of this understanding, the
20
Peirce himself initially understood that photographs were a) icons and b) were not forced into a
correspondence to nature ( Winston & Hing Tsang 2009: 460). What he says of icons applies to
photographs: “Icons are so completely substituted for their objects as hardly to be distinguished
from them (Peirce, EP 1: 226). Later, he writes: “Photographs mediate between the original and
the likeness” (Peirce, CP 1:367)—just as paintings do, just as all images do by pointing to the
referent —but that is to say they are as iconic as they are indexical. Certainly, Peirce understood
that manipulation in the composited (“art”) photographs popular in his day meant no necessary
referential integrity (Marien, 2006: 90–2). It is only in the later 1880s, perhaps significantly after the
introduction of the instantaneous Kodak, that he adopts the scientistic (and technicist) argument
about forced correspondence to source. It is in reaction to instantaneity that photographs become
“indexical” in his developed sense of the term.
32
power of photography’s cultural inheritance needs to be guarded against. Stuart
Hall warned against this as “the naturalistic illusion,” hiding the “intervention of
coding, selection or arrangement,” actually not being “grounded in nature but
producing nature as a sort of guarantee of its truth” (Hall, 1983: 75).
Fred Wiseman’s claim that with direct cinema: “you [the audience] have to
make up your own mind” is entirely reasonable (in Halberstadt, 1976: 299). This
is not, of course, in the way he meant it: with him it was a defense lawyer’s ploy
against the charge of misrepresentation, a plea for audience trust specifically
as direct cinema habitually over-claimed to represent the real. But as a
statement about the necessary basis of the spectator’s understanding of all
documentaries it is, in the context of testing percepts, unexceptional. You do
have to make up your own mind about referential integrity. But such is the
power of the naturalistic illusion this is easier said than done even before the
digital era. We are prone not to be savvy and doubt, therefore, has to be a safer
basis for “indexing” documentaries than is trust.
3.2. Probabilities
It is a question of balance of probabilities. On the one hand, analog
photography’s scientism, plus the audiences’ collateral experience, leads to
trust. On the other hand, all the possibilities for manipulation and falsification—
everyday interventions, the false light that can arise from editing, downright
mendacity—are enhanced by digital’s manipulative affordances.
Figure 9 TRUST /DOUBT BALANCE
33
The balance tips. The camera can still capture what is before it and the integrity
of the image can be tested against common sense prior experience. But ever-
greater grounds for doubt exist.
With digitalization “the place of trust in the audience’s assent to any
communication” is still crucial but the basis for it is rendered more unsafe. The
documentary filmmaker, after all, is well able to reimagine her witness of a
story of the world through a variety of techniques from reconstruction to
animation and CGI . It is up to the spectator to determine the documentary
value of the result, just as much as he comes to judgment as to the authenticity
of the realist photographic images in the first place. Megalodon: The Great Shark
Lives, watched by an enormous audience (by historical standards) for a
documentary, contained images presented as a scientific proof of the creature’s
contemporary existence. Only collateral knowledge could defeat this scientism;
but even so millions, despite the clear artificiality of the presenters and the
extreme rarity of Lazarus taxons, apparently believed the falsely referent image.
A disaster?
On the contrary, the reduction (or removal) of any automatic assumption
about the photographic image’s referential integrity opens the gates
of observationalism’s prison. Unburdened by its scientistic inheritance
photography is liberated and it, and documentary too, goes forward in a richly
expanded variety of directions.
Still 3a Animated Still 3b Documusicals Still 3c Conditional

Documentaries Feltham Sings| Brian Hill| UK | Documentaries
Waltz with Bashar| Ari Floman| 2002 Smallpox 2002| Dan Percival|
Israel| 2008 UK | 2000
34
2 “A Breath of Fresh Air for
the Documentary”
KIT: Market forces have pushed the equipment towards the limits of the human
sensorium even as its costs have fallen. A CONTRADIC TION (1) ensues. With
Digitization (1.1), cheap media production kit begins to match older professional
capacities so that the market produces equipment that, in effect, can be used to
critique it as a system. However, authority’s need to control expression also persists
in the form of Standards (1.2) of all kinds which work to contain this capacity.
GLOBALIZATION (2) exploits the new kit with a Proliferation (2.1) of production
world-wide; but in the global south and with oppositional groups in the global
north there are also in-built barriers, ideological and technical, which make the
realizing of digital’s potential still a matter of Resistance (2.2).
1. CONTRADICTION
1.1. Digitization
Much technicist hyperbole does little but invite what the radical linguist
William Labov once called (in another connection) “the withering rejoinder,” eg:
“Every 13th human on Earth is on facebook!” To which a Labov would say: “So
what?” (Labov, 1972: 360). Alternatively, technicist rhetoric can facilely ignore
inconvenient truths, eg: an estimated 125 million cell-phones are discarded
every year:
The phones are dumped into landfills and swamps, where toxic metals (e.g.
lead, cadmium, mercury) contaminate lands and water, or are burned, sending
carcinogenic dioxins and polyaromatic hydrocarbons from plastics into the air
(Hudson & Zimmermann, 2015: 132–3).
But before they are thrown away they—and the other digital devices and
infrastructures—offer documentary a truly transformative advantage: for the
first time, affordable, accessible fully-featured production equipment, and an
35
open means of distribution. Instead of the previously ring-fenced world of
mass media, the technology enables, for example, the phenomenon of video
citizen journalism. For documentary, it potentially gives voice to the
marginalized within the global northern “wired-world.” And it allows for a
proliferation of indigenous production in the global south. And this last, in
particular, encapsulates digital’s threat to the second supporting leg of the
mainstream documentary tradition: its eurocentrism. Without question, this is
of enormous importance. But technicist triumphalism needs to be contained.
Barriers and hindrances to the full realization of digital’s potentials remain.
First, though, the advantages:
More than a billion smart-phones were sold in 2014, among them, in the
last quarter, 74.5 million Apple i-Phone6s (Huddleston, 2015), a device quite
capable of producing images of a breathtaking quality once, last century, only
available on the feature film screen. Look, say, at Dancers of NYC—a 2014
montage of slow-motion balletic images taken in various Manhattan locations,
“Shot ENTIRELY on the iPhone 6, 240 FPS ”—and think The Matrix (1999).1
This iPhone film [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfrxfhtDE_0] took the
second prize for cinematography in the fifth, 2015, edition of the “i-Phone Film
Festival” in New York (Anon [iPhone], n/d). Cell-phone film festivals have been
occurring since 2003 when the “World’s Smallest Film Festival,” a commercial
initiative of a web-streaming company, premiered at a New Orleans trade fair
(Anon [BigDigit], n/d; Bardosh, n/d).
If a view is taken that the cinematic apparatus has hitherto been specifically
configured to create barriers to entry, then these proliferating celebrations
point to the reverse: ease of entry. As the website of yet another cell-phone
film festival—the Original i-Phone Film Festival—puts it:
Everybody Has a Story to Tell

No need to beg, borrow or steal. No need to rent an expensive camera and gear,
assemble a crew and hire an editor to realize your vision. Now we all have a
powerful and accessible tool with us at all times (Anon [Original i-Phone] (n/d),
italics in original).
Certainly, as dutiful consumers, having bought the “tool,” we do indeed

carry it with us at all times. Moreover, it is an article of technicist faith that such
possession is transformative of itself:
1
Tristram Pope| Dancers of New York| USA | 2015: Andy Wachowski & Lana Wachowski| The Matrix|
USA | 1999
36
Every generation of new technology revolutionizes filmmaking and our
generation’s revolutionary tech has been the Apple iPhone (as well as the iPad &
iPod Touch.) These IOS devices, combined with easy access to editing apps, has
[sic] effectively erased the barrier to entry for all filmmakers. The playing field is
leveled—we can all shoot & edit and bring our stories to life. . . . The iPhone
filmmaker represents the democratization of filmmaking: it’s truly a “film studio in
your pocket!” (Anon [Original i-Phone] (n/d), italics in original).
Hyperbolic, perhaps, but there is a certain truth here: because of digitization,

there has been a proliferation of production. It is no longer entirely in the
hands of a privileged cadre. “Professional Results with Amateur Ease,” the
promise made with the introduction of 16mm in 1923, can finally be fulfilled
(Zimmermann, 1995: 56). Even the payment test which used to be the final
determinant as to who is a professional (paid and licensed to speak) and who
is not becomes porous.
The result is that: “Like world music before it, new platform documentary
practice is alive and well and being forged in every corner of the planet: from
Indonesia to Argentina; from Guangzhou, China to Cape Town to Bangalore”
( Wintonick, 2013: 377). Although far from cheap in global terms, it cannot be
denied that the technology does very often remove a crucial impediment to
production: its expense. The i-Phone and its fellows do nothing much new but
their revolutionary potential is that they do the old stuff at a fraction of the old
stuff ’s costs and complexities. For documentary, this is not necessarily of any
automatic political consequence; but to see a process of “democratization” in
progress is nevertheless apposite.
Socially engaged media of course pre-existed the digital. The agitprop
documentary tradition dates to the 1930s but its production program has
“A Breath of Fresh Air for the Documentary”
almost always been extremely intermittent. Now the effort of making

radical material is reduced and literally hundreds of significant engagé
projects can be noted around the globe (Hudson & Zimmermann, 2015;
Nash, Hight & Summerhayes, 2014; Ratto & Boler, 2014). For community
groups in the global north, for example, emblematic of the change could
be the Scribe Video Project. It started in Philadelphia in 1982, but its
work is massively aided by new technology. It has been engaged in a
collaborative enterprise since 2005 to document the city’s communal spaces
and buildings outside of its Disney-fied historical heritage center. The result
is Precious Spaces Community History Project, a multi-platform, multi-vocal
series of micro-histories made by the people of its neighborhoods. Nineteen
37
20-minute compilation DVD s are available to date (Hudson & Zimmermann,
2015: 71–3).
The extent of change is most readily seen in the global south. In five years,
the i-Phone Film Festival in New York has had submissions from 80 countries.
At the first Asian “International Festival of Cell Phone Cinema” in India in 2008,
53 films were entered from Bhutan, Dominica, Haiti, Iran, Kazakhstan, Kenya,
Malaysia, and Nigeria. The “Ist Place Award: Reality Videos” was won by Rajeev
Ranjan’s Morning on Footpath.2
All this activity is the consequence of, essentially, one fundamental
contradiction in late capital. On the one hand is the driver to create a mass
market for ever-more sophisticated electronic consumer products (in this
instance, moving-image production equipment). Self-evidently this impulse
does not arise from an agenda of social activism. On the other hand, there
is authority’s repressive proclivities which have been willingly supported,
at least in part, by the public’s complicit taste for only expensively produced
images. The production of these can be safely left, with little overt controls,
in the hands of persons of property who are unlikely to deploy the technology
subversively when exercising “free” expression. And, hence, a basic exploitable
contradiction arises: the licet, profitable sale of cheaper equipment potentially
allows the production of illicit oppositional audio-visual messages, matching,
with unprecedented ease, mass media expectations. Digital forces the
abandonment of production cost as a control. And, moreover it also unblocks
the bottleneck that has previously constricted distribution and exhibition.
Capital’s greed for markets—this time not of hardware but of audiences—
has swept aside the costly and restrictive media industry structures and “the
user-generated generation is uploading its own docs” ( Wintonick, 2013: 377).
Moreover, it is doing so at little measurable cost to the makers. If anything, this
is even more surprising than is the provision of cheap production tools. In
2006, YouTube, then three years old, was sold to Google for $1.65 billion and: “It
is clear that since [its] launch and the penetrations of broadband we have
experienced a sudden, awesome growth of moving-image culture online”
(Dovey & Rose, 2013: 367). Three years after the sale, 101 million users were
watching a billion videos on the site (Uricchio, 2009: 27). All production from
whoever chooses to produce it from wherever they choose to work can easily
be distributed.
2
Rajeev Ranjan| Morning on Footpath| India| 2008. http://ifcpc.com/1st-international-cell-phone-
cinema-festival/ [accessed October 4, 2015].
38
This is not to suggest, William Uricchio writes, “that the text, and particularly
the professionally produced text is dead. . . . The point is rather that the
industrial era of television [a key example of eurocentric media domination] . . .
is fast changing under pressure from the disaggregation of content from
media platforms” (Uricchio, 2009: 36). Hence, billions change hands and, as a
consequence, voices demanding the demolition of the very structures that
allow such trading are heard.
Within and without the global north, the monopolies held by media
conglomerates, national broadcasters, and the space industry are still in effect
present, but, as ideological apparatuses of the state, they have always
depended most on the control of distribution. It is a key indicator of authority’s
usual stupidity that this is not realized. Throughout history, the vexatious work
of suppressing production engages the forces of repression obsessively when
all that needs be controlled is distribution. Making the cell-phone film—or,
indeed, creating “communicative objects” in any medium by any means—is,
self-evidently, socially fruitless of itself unless it is read or seen.
The yielding of control over distribution and expression is, therefore,
profound. It exponentially increases opportunities for viewing while
concomitantly making the prior regulation of production ever harder. The
internet’s huge revenue flows justify, at least for the moment, relaxed
censorship including over what has previously been seen as socially damaging
communications—eg pornography. And in a context of such (in this example,
albeit sexist) liberality even the politically outré and the socially scorned can
look to find a platform. Leave aside the debatable point as to how unregulated
a nodal network can actually be (not as much as is commonly believed); clearly
for the moment the will to control it is not there. For all its limitations, by
historical norms and in contrast to the ecology of the previous media
environment, digital is extraordinary liberated. Web distribution opens the

drawer on the unread subversive poem, as it were. It unlocks the prison
wherein oppositional audio-visual communications have long been parked. In
the global north, in the name of the market, all this is—at least for the
moment—countenanced. But countenanced is all it is.
And this is because the advantages that digital affords are being only partially
realized. The potential radicalism of digitizing documentary production does
not, clearly, lie with the scarcely oppositional consumption of the products of
late capital (made, it can be noted, in appalling Victorian conditions in the global
south). The technology of itself is no social change-maker. Barriers, after all, have
not been lowered or removed in the name of democracy but in deference to
39
the market. Eurocentric hegemony is more threatened than actually destroyed.
To achieve socially engaged production is still a matter of struggle. But for all
that, the radical hand has been significantly strengthened. It can be strengthened
yet further if, instead of technicist enthusiasm, remaining hindrances are
acknowledged and confronted: the question of “standards,” for example.
1.2. Standards
New technologies are introduced in response to social needs. The supervening
social necessity that underpins the drive to bring successive media to
market was the emergence of an industrialized society and the entertainment
needs of the literate urban mass. The responses that produced media from
photography to television were not “invented” in any eureka sense. They almost
never depended on new knowledge but are rather the product of system
engineering in reaction to supervening social necessities ( Winston, 1998); that
is, in this case, a need for information and entertainment. To facilitate diffusion
while maintaining control, the engineers (aka “inventors”) associated with their
development and design were constrained by a requirement that the radical
potential of their work for social disruption be suppressed. With the technologies
of mass media, the perceived dangers of proliferation were contained by the
complexities involved in production, underpinned by cost and re-enforced by
the limitations of the distribution and exhibition structures. Complexity was,
however, a function of deliberate design and not an inevitable consequence of
necessary techniques. It was enshrined in the imposition of “standards.”
Standards were presented as being in the public interest guaranteeing that
communicative objects would indeed communicate. They were to maintain
“quality.” But they were often set at artificially high levels beyond this basic
need for effective communication actually to ensure that meeting them would
be costly. Invoking standards produced a powerful bar to distribution and
exhibition. They were a tool marginalizing any who wished to work outside the
mainstream; a constraint, but one necessarily disguised because of the
inappropriateness of being any such thing in a “free society.”3 It can be easily
3
When George Stoney, a pioneer of participatory, socially-engaged documentary and community
video, arrived in Britain from America with Sony Portapak footage to show at the 5th Manchester
University Broadcasting Symposium in March, 1973 (a UK first), a BBC producer Mike Fentiman,
who was to go on to establish the Corporation’s Community Programme Unit, proposed screening
the material on the BBC ’s second channel. The BBC engineers declared that the tape did not meet
transmission standards; indeed, that it was un-transmittable. It was not.
40
argued that standards were, in fact, less driven by technical requirements than
this ideological need for barriers to entry.
The bourgeois democracies, having clothed themselves in liberal rhetoric,
could not easily censor except to prevent libel, obscenity, and sedition. (Even
blasphemy as an offense was falling into disquietude.) Constrained by the
concept of free expression, but nevertheless with a state’s proclivity to
control, seemingly neutral standards were a useful de facto basis upon which
to censor material. It is no accident that “technically” unsuitable material often
tended to be politically radical.4
Cost as a control does still persist, sustained, as much as anything, by an
undying desire to maintain highly profitable “professional” exclusivity, even
though the standards that unpinned it are no longer exclusive. The equipment
for electronic feature film production remains as exorbitantly expensive as
ever. Standards have reached 4K high-definition, theoretically the limit of
human visual acuity. Achieving this can be made to require a digital camera
that costs at least 1000 times as much as the cheapest audio-video capture
devices. Matching editing capacity costs many tens of thousands of dollars
more (Sudhakaran, n/d). This is still massively cheaper than 35mm or 65mm
film equipment and processes but it nevertheless requires a capital outlay in
the order $75K–$100K.5 And any digital feature film, however modest, uses
equipment of at least that cost-level to produce movies that earn multi-billions
of dollars at the world’s cinema box-office annually.
Meanwhile, web distribution in effect makes no demand for technical
quality before material can be uploaded. Standards are obsolete on
“unregulated” broadband.
Or they would be, were it not for the continued hindrance of professionalism.
The Original i-Phone Film Festival might well talk of a “level playing field”
but their rhetoric of “revolutionary tech” speaks more to the market in

consumer durables than to street barricades. Moreover, providing a paintbrush
does not a Picasso make any more than a pen (or a laptop) produces a Tolstoy.
Expect no i-Phone to create, of itself, a Flaherty or a Vertov. Or a Varda or an
Ottinger. Or a Phan.
4
For example, the BBC employed “Film Operations Managers” (FOM s) who screened all footage to
ensure technical quality. The FOM s never acted but in a spirit of scientistic neutrality. But their
“technical” objections were ready ammunition for those in the hierarchy who were more overtly
concerned about content.
5
4K is becoming cheaper but a new “standard”, 6K— which theoretically exceeds the limits of
human visual acuity is already being marketed (Radev, 2014).
41
Although, self-evidently, the monopoly of the “privileged cadre” of
documentary filmmakers is broken, nevertheless it can scarce surprise, for
instance, that the prize-winning Dancers in NYC was made by professional
photographer, Tristram Pope, and is a de facto advertisement for Apple. In the
same 2015 i-Phone Film Festival as Dancers in NYC, less glossy but still in
pictorialist mode, was a bio-film on the composer, Bohuslav Marintů, Martinů’s
Muse. It won the documentary category. Jason Warner Smith’s personal account
of a month-long motor-bike ride through America, Leaning to Fly, came second.6
Both are conventional. Martinů’s Muse, a straightforward art-documentary, was
made by Hong-Kong-based Kees van Es who runs a video production house
there. Warner Smith is an Atlanta-based actor and his film echoes the approach
of Sherman’s March (1985), the prototype of the personal journey documentary.7
At the rival Original i-Phone Film Festival of this same year, noted non-fiction
titles included the pictorialist Faith, a sequence of exquisitely shot extreme
close-ups of insects (cf Cheese Mites, 1903);8 and a report from Donetks, War in
My Back Yard (cf. any current affairs television program). Faith was by Mythravarun
Vepakomma, a CGF /X specialist in Bollywood; and Ansis Papols, who made the
journalistic War in the Back Yard, is a Ukrainian journalist.9 In other words, as the
new day dawns, the first cell-phone films in the public domain—the prize-
winning ones, at least—are likely as not to be made by members of the “cadre”
or by others close to it in communications or the arts. And, unsurprisingly, for all
the affordances of “Professional Results with Amateur Ease,” all these filmers
speak the old professional film language.
The audience was, and is, able to hear and appreciate the professionals, but,
quite literally, it is (still largely) in effect infans ie: non-speakers—infants: an
infantry, serried ranks of spectators. Controlling who speaks via the exclusionary
processes of professionalization constituted an effective restriction on
expression. Like the imposition of “standards,” “professionalism” avoids other-
wise unacceptable overt censorship structures. Thus women, for instance,
could not, by and large, speak—as film directors, say—because they were not
professionals; and they could not become professionals (ie gain membership
6
Martinů’s Muse| Kees van Es| Hong Kong| 2014 http://www.iphoneff.com/video/martinus-muse/
[accessed October 4, 2015]; Learning to Fly | Jason Warner Smith| USA | 2014. http://www.iphoneff.
com/video/winner-2nd-place-learning-to-fly/ [accessed October 4, 2015].
7
Ross McElwee| USA | 1986.
8
Charles Urban| UK | 1903.
9
Faith| Mythravarun Vepakomma| India| 2014. http://iphonefilmmaker.com/our-videos [accessed
October 4, 2015]; War in the Back Yard| Ansis Papols| Ukraine| 2014| http://iphonefilmmaker.com/
our-videos/war-in-the-backyard-non-fiction/ [accessed October 4, 2015].
42
of validating organizations) because, as women, they were simply refused
entry. Authorities otherwise inhibited from overt censorship and other
regulation accepted the concept of the “professional” as a disguised control
over mass media. Professional mass media communicators are de facto
licensed by a system that required of them—in a variety of ways through
formal accreditation to mechanisms of consumer judgment—an ability to
meet “standards”: to “speak” the medium’s “language” of communication. These
impositions are as welcome to practitioners, of course, as a way of keeping out
competitors as they are to states ever ready to inhibit speech.
Modern professionalism grows from the complexities of an industrialized
society which required specialized skills; in this instance, both technical
competence and an aptitude for creating “new media objects” (Manovich,
2001: 55–6). Professional status transforms (or seeks to transform) its members
into adepts, practitioners of a mystery.
Today, with the removal of the difference between pro and amateur at the
level of equipment, amateurs can duplicate “professional” standards “with
amateur ease.” But the communicative objects they produce, whether with
new media or not, if they are to meet audience expectations will be in a
cinematic language that is professional. Audience intolerance of departures
from the norms of cinematic discourse remains a hindrance suppressing
the full radical potential of the technology. Validation for one’s status as a bona-
fide documentary filmmaker is still sought, for instance by attendance at
documentary film festival fora and pitching sessions. Tens and hundreds
declare themselves de facto professionals with their registration fees.
2. GLOBALIZATION
2.1. Proliferation
The impediment of production cost is gone. Impediments to distribution are
removed—and, despite its persistence, the ease with which the technology
can be used means that the grip of professionalism is also threatened. The
impediment of standards is weakened. No longer can amateurs, or marginalized
oppositional filmmakers, or documentarists from the global south, be
prevented from entering what they have produced into the public domain as
once only professionals could. This is, without question, a new situation.
“As a platform, online is a new site where all kinds of media material
including documentary can be uploaded and potentially seen” (Dovey and
43
Rose, 2013: 266, emphasis added). But this “potential” indicates that there is yet
another considerable hindrance. Whether or not we all have stories worthy of
the attention of others is an open question. It could be that all of this
consumption merely demonstrates that Henry Thoreau’s aperçu is still as valid
as ever: “The mass of men [sic] lead lives of quiet desperation” ( Thoreau, 1854:
10)—only now they have i-Phones.
For all that it is elitist to suggest any sort of control, nevertheless unfettered
distribution creates a bottleneck at the point of reception not unlike, in effect,
the nineteenth century’s bottleneck at the point of production—ie the
massively expensive steam-driven rotary press. Instead of leaving the cost of
entry to control access, barriers of any kind have been, more or less, entirely
removed but instead a cacophony of myriad voices—competing with each
other, drowning each other out—remains. Authority (at least in the north) has
learned a new trick. In effect, an electronic haystack has been put in place
wherein the world is invited to bury messages, electronic needles.
The media environment is such an electronic haystack or, better: not so
much marketplace of ideas as an enormous hypermarket of decontextualized
globalized data. Communicative objects crowd its shelves in such proliferation
that distinguishing them can potentially become as meaningless as the choice
between one brand or another of instant coffee (p. 217). Women and men are
all “by themselves” in this paradoxical prison house of digital “freedom”—
“interpellated as a (free) subject in order that he shall . . . (freely) accept his
subjection” (Althusser, 1970, italics and gendering in original). All can speak and
all can ignore them.
Moreover, the proliferation of the sites of production is also not quite as
global as is claimed. For all the truth of Peter Wintonick’s view that docmedia
are being forged everywhere, it is still the global north which predominately
facilitates production and distribution. The potential rebalancing in favor of the
global south at the expense of traditional eurocentrism is hindered by this.
Of course, it should be acknowledged that noting the global north has a
continuing presence in global media production is without prejudice to the
value of “world documentary.” It is certainly not to doubt the integrity and
good intentions of western facilitators, creators, and co-creators at work in the

global south. And, second, equally without question, excluded or marginalized
voices in the global north itself are being given opportunity to speak at an
unprecedented scale. But at least where social engagement is the objective
(which, of course, it need not be) eurocentrism persists. Engagé work in, or
close to, the mainstream of production, eg: the world of “independent”
44
documentary, which currently enjoys significant levels of mainstream media
and specialized major film festival exposure, still remains tilted north.
The Britdoc Foundation, for instance, listed a selection of independent films
made between 2005 and 2015/6 deemed to be of notable political significance
and/or of value as campaigning tools (eg: Anon [Britdoc Foundation] (b) n/d).
The exercise revealed the vast majority to be co-productions, if territories
outside the global north merit any IMDB listing in connection with them at all.
The Britdocs’ “Activist” and “Political” subject categories, some 30-odd titles,
yielded only Iraq, Syria, Columbia, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of
the Congo as partnership countries of origin. And only two non-European
directors, Kasim Adib (Life After the Fall)10 and Djo Tunda Wa Munga, (A
Norwegian Crime in Congo) were accorded solo directing credits. This is
unsurprising, perhaps, but the same breakdown is true of the new docmedia
platforms to which Peter Wintonick points.
Consider the 132 “transnational” and “locative” projects surveyed by Hudson
& Zimmermann (2015).11 Some 13 of these came from 10 countries beyond the
global north—that is without any acknowledged co-production with the
“wired-world”: China (PR ), India, Indonesia, Mexico, Palestine, Nigeria, Singapore,
Taiwan, Uruguay, and Venezuela. In addition, one other, Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala/
Gulf to Gulf (2013), was directed by the Indians Shaina Anand and Ashok
Sukumaran on the shipping of the western Indian Ocean and the Persian Gulf.
Still 4 “Jam Salaya, Gulf of Kutch, India”

Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala/Gulf to Gulf |Shaina Anand/Ashok Sukumaran et al|
India etc| 2013
10
Life After the Fall| Kasim Adib| Iraq| 2008.
11
That is, of the web-based titles in this thorough tour d’horizon identified with “(place of origin,
date)” and excluding the electronic games and live performance projects they cite.
45
They incorporated footage taken by some 20 cinematographers, the merchant
sailors themselves on cell-phones which they provided. Such radical innovation
appears to have confused the IMDB into listing the UAE , Yemen, Somalia,
Qatar, Kenya, Iraq, as well as India not as locations but as originating sites to be
noted under “Country.”12 Four further projects are labeled “Palestine/Israel.” The
sense that work is being “forged in every corner of the planet” independently
of external support arises, then, from only some 14 percent (18) of the works
surveyed.
The country list also identified web-/i-doc activity as occurring in China,
Columbia, Egypt, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Indonesia Iran, Iraq, Jordan and
Palestine, Pakistan, South Africa, South Korea, Syria, and Uganda—a further
22 projects. All these, however, were the result of US cooperation or support
and/or other credited co-producing northern countries. The global north,
therefore, remains crucial, with no less than 92 of the 132 projects surveyed—
70 percent—originating, without acknowledged partnership at the producer
level; and of these 55 involved the US .
Moreover, the persistence of global north in the making of work without
local production partners outside its sphere is also well represented in the
70 percent. So, (to take at random) Disappearance of Tuvalu (Christopher Horner
& Gilliane Le Gallic| 2006) is a Franco/US co-production; Afghan War Diary
(Matthieu Cherubini| 2010) is a Swiss production; and Sky of Dubai (Ann Spalter|
2012) is American—and so on.
Let us be clear about this: of course, an artist such as Ann Spalter must be
free to choose her subjects and the locations where she films: in this instance,
it was a three minute gallery video loop shot from an helicopter reflecting her
interest in desert cities round the world. And a Hollywood art-director such as
Christopher Horner is as entitled as anybody to be engaged with the issue of
global warming and focus attention on the threat of rising seas as he and his
co-director, cinematographer Gilliane Le Gallic, do in The Disappearance of
Tuvalu. What we here draw attention to are the dangers of overstating the
implications that documentaries are being “forged”—that is originated,
funded, and filmed—independently when in fact they are still largely being
shot everywhere, as they have been since the birth of cinema, with external aid
and/or by alien westerners.
The assumption is this matters as those who pay the piper—even if
they do nothing more—always have the power to call the tune. It mattered
12
Hudson & Zimmerman add to this list Pakistan, Oman, Kuwait and Iran.
46
that Triumph of the Will was funded by the National Socialist Party of Germany;
it mattered that the +/− $1 million budget for Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth
on global warming, for example, came from liberal Hollywood insiders such as
Lawrence Binder, Quentin Tarantino’s producer (Anon [Grist], 2007).13 Of course,
the danger of undue influence, although implicit, can be—and, indeed, in the
majority of projects is—overcome; but, nevertheless, the savvy spectator will
need to know the sources of funding.
On the other hand, crude listing of the projects’ funders can disguise the
degree of cooperation indicated by co-production credits. At one end of
the spectrum is North-South-East-West 1.0 (Graham Thompson, 2004). This
involved the integration of participant footage (cf: Gulf to Gulf) and it is credited
to “Canada/Metis Nation,” acknowledging First People involvement (Hudson &
Zimmermann, 2015: 65–6). At the other end, some co-productions—for
example, the highly regarded 5 Broken Cameras (Emad Burnat & Guy Davidi|
Palestine/Israel/France/Netherlands| 2011) speak to little more than funding
from the Europeans. (In this context, the complexities of Israeli involvement
are, of course, another matter.)
But if production independence is a criterion, other projects do stand
on shakier ground, being made, as they always have been, by (in practice
quasi-journalistic) “visiting fireman” documentarists from the global north.
Filmmakers discover, investigate, pitch, and make projects about, rather
than in any real sense with, the filmed. (In fact, even the discover/
investigate phase can be perfunctory as journalistic norms are disdained in
the name of art (p. 182).) The ethical and political dangers of an impulse
towards the anthropological—“the eldest daughter of colonialism” as Jean
Rouch called it—are ignored (Eaton, 1979: 26). Neither are the attractions of
“exotic dirt” resisted (Ivens, 1969: 88, n.216). The consequences of this for not a
few titles can be seen on the Britdoc/film festival circuit but are also to be
found even among the Hudson/Zimmermann transnational/locative
docmedia projects.
Yet, to say again, all this is but a further hindrance. Here is, to all intents
and purposes, unregulated broadband. For all its limitations by historical
norms and in contrast to the ecology of the previous media environment,
digital media are extraordinarily liberated. And in consequence “[d]igital,
non-eurocentric, orphaned, indigenous, and ambient media dislodge and
deterritorialize eurocentric and celluloid-fetishized cinephilia” . Documentary
13
And that the film took $46m at the box office.
47
production is, for the first time, potentially a truly global phenomenon (Hudson
& Zimmermann, 2015: 173, 93). The documentary’s eurocentrism as well as its
scientism is brought into question.
The balance can be moved, although thus far this is still more hinted
at than achieved. At best, a more even playing field has been cleared, but
not too much built on. No wonder, as the technology is scarcely designed
(and marketed) to be any sort of tool for the creation of a more egalitarian
world. The contention then is, simply, that any such goal is more easily
reached if obstacles, the hindrances here noted, are acknowledged and
addressed.
2.2. Resistance
The key to securing this rebalance requires challenging a final, and perhaps
most intractable, hindrance.
Figure 10a GLOBAL SOUTH v. GLOBAL NORTH

The global north’s technology is not culturally neutral. Its products embed
a culturally determined visual mode of representation even at the level
of the apparatus, eg: the nature of the lens, the sensitivities of the recording
material. And, moreover, its design is conditioned by all the conventions
of eurocentric film “language.” It is—to use Audre Lorde’s phrase—one of
48
“the tools of the master” (Lorde, 1984: 100). It is less readily available as an
appropriate mode of oppositional and/or non-European expression than it
might seem to be.
The placing of the cinema within US models, even in the formal aspect,
in language, leads to the adoption of the ideological forms that gave rise
to precisely that language and no other. . . . The 35mm camera, 24 frames
per second, arc lights, and a commercial place of exhibition for audiences
were conceived not to gratuitously transmit any ideology, but to satisfy,
in the first place, the cultural and surplus value needs of a specific
ideology, of a specific world-view: that of US finance capital (Solanas &
Getano, 1969).
But it is more profound than that. Media do not merely reflect a

contemporary economic system. In their configuration can be seen the
consequences of a cultural determinism at work in Europe for, at least, the
millennium past.
Ancient understandings, including the grinding of quartz stones, were
refined by the theorizing of the scientists of the Arab renaissance three
centuries after the death of Muhammad. Transmitted to Europe and replicated
by some inquiring monks, by the mid thirteenth (Christian) century, such
knowledge informed the production of “reading stones” in Europe and then, by
further thinning through grinding, eye-glasses. But that process allowed for
choice and, as lens technology developed, lens grinding was determined by
the conventions of European single-point perspective painting: a perspectiva
artificialis (Alpers, 1984: 53–7).
What can be identified as lens-culture, with the camera obscura portablis,
is discernable in Europe by the mid sixteenth century as a tool of science.

It was an artist’s aid to the production of realist imaging via the tracings of
pencil and translucent paper, producing the illusion of perspective according
to European conventions. The refinement process, leading to photography
and beyond, reflected, consciously and unconsciously, innate and overt
ideological purposes—its color systems favoring white skin tones and its
focusing systems favoring close-ups on individuals. It is in the direct service of
the ideological state apparatuses of the global north which are responsible for
it. It speaks in that language. Lorde’s belief was that it was always illusionary to
claim social change-making power in such circumstances. For her the tools
“may allow us temporarily to beat [the master] at his own game, but they will
49
never enable us to bring about genuine change” (Lorde, 1984: 110; italics in the
original).
Is it right, nevertheless, to apply this conclusion to digital media? The
question is the extent to which digital equipment—still conforming to western
cultural needs and proclivities—is an exception. Are the digital impacts we are
discussing, including the rebalancing of the documentary tradition away from
its eurocentrism, actually, as she would claim, too shallow and/or temporary to
effect change?
Certainly at the time of writing, history rather unambiguously suggests that
her thinking was far from unreasonable. The failure of repeated experiments
which “gave” the apparatus to indigineous people to uncover how they “see”
the world suggests that, indeed, “the subaltern cannot speak,” as Gayatri Spivak
concludes supporting Lorde. Not with this machinery (Spivak, 1988: 104). Yet
not all agree with this negativity. Trinh T. Minh-ha argues that: “[a]ny tool of the
oppressor can be turned against the oppressor,” ( Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2005: 22).
And there are clear destabilizing affordances in the digital which could indicate
an exception that might prove Lorde wrong. But for this to be true, in contrast
to technicist rhetoric, acknowledging of the hindrances—especially this one
of culturally determined limitations as the level of the very machines involved—
must be made. The apparatus alone will not effect social change; it is too much
the creature of late capital for that.
Overcoming its inbuilt-biases requires what Ella Shohat and Robert Stam
have termed: “media jujitsu.” Presciently (they were writing two decades ago),
they gave as examples of jujitsu the deployment by analog videomakers of:
audio-visual possibilities for fracture, rupture and polyphony. . . . The centered

perspective inherited from Renaissance humanism [being] relativized. . . . All
the conventional decorum of the dominant narrative cinema [being]
superseded by proliferating polysemy (Shohat & Stam, 1994: 328–30).
With such ploys, the equipment’s biases can, after all, be overcome. The kit can
indeed be misused, as it were, against itself. And this has to be as true for digital
as for analog.
The jujitsu concept follows from a Brazilian intellectual movement of the
1920s which:
made the trope of cannibalism the basis of an insurgent aesthetic, calling for a
creative synthesis of European avant-gardism and Brazilian “cannibalism,” and
50
invoking an “anthropophagic” devouring of the techniques and information of
the super developed countries the better to struggle against domination
(Shohat & Stam, 1994: 307).
The jujitsu principle of turning an assailant’s force against him might

well apply to overcoming these deep media biases. After all, the slightest
deviations from the norms of usage can have profound effects. In the
west, struggling for this requires only disobedience to the norms. For
example, this is how “a breath of fresh air for the documentary” occurred in
the 1950s and 1960s. Post Second World War, it was thought that hand-
holdable images were only professionally acceptable in war combat
footage and the like. But some cinematographers who had the experience
of shooting in such conditions, took the matter—literally—into their own
hands. One of them, Richard (Ricky) Leacock, defiantly hand-held a 35mm
studio camera—an NC Mitchell—for some synch shots in Toby and
the Tall Corn, a tv documentary directed by Wiliard van Dyke in 1954 (Jaffe
1965: 421–2), explicitly to overcome the stultifying and constraining norms
of studio shooting. This transgressive footage was van Dyke’s “breath of
fresh air” (van Dyke, 1965: 406). But jujitsu–like, for the mainstream tradition,
it represented a hurricane, blowing away, in the name of observational
purity, documentary techniques that had been developed since Nanook (Jaffe,
1965: 421–2).14
Its consequences were the 30-year dominance of direct cinema
observational documentary: hand-held, continuous takes, available sound
and light, minimal interventions. It was Leacock’s disobedience, his refusal
to acknowledge the hindrances then in place—aesthetic as much as
technical—that started that ball rolling. Breaking rules can have broad
impacts. “Subalterns” might appear silent, then, but they can be ingesting and
repurposing. The sophistication acquired speaks to correcting the biases of
the apparatus by essentially creating a new language of expression, bending
and expanding the capacities of the technology, engaging the audience in
new forms.
14
Pat Jaffe, as well as Charlotte Zwerin, were key figures in the development of the direct cinema
style as the film editors who developed the technique of cutting the continuous takes into a fluid
analog of discontinuous shooting. The filmers—Drew, Leacock, the Maysles, Pennebaker, and
Wiseman are seen as the key pioneers—seldom referred to this crucial role. Notoriously, Al Maysles
even at one point denied his footage was edited at all (p. 42).
51
For Solanas and Getino, such media sophisticates in the global south and
among the marginalized generally need to be revolutionaries and they are
likely to be documentarists. By the 1970s:
The cinema known as documentary, with all the vastness that the concept
has today, from educational films to the reconstruction of a fact or a historical
event, is perhaps the main basis of revolutionary film-making. Every image
that documents, bears witness to, refutes or deepens the truth of a situation
is something more than a film image or purely artistic fact . . . (Solanas &
Getino, 1969).
Solanas and Getino make the crucial argument that a new language is
required. “Towards a Third Cinema” essentially demands that—and the
provision of it is the key to overcoming all hindrances which prevent the
rebalancing of documentary away from eurocentrism. The radical potential of
the new technology requires as much a change of mindset as it does the
provision of cheap kit:
[I]t remains to the film-maker to discover his [sic] own language, a

language which will arise from a militant and transforming world-view
and from the theme being dealt with. . . . Guerrilla film-making proletarianizes
the film worker and breaks down the intellectual aristocracy that the
bourgeoisie grants to its followers. In a word, it democratizes (Solanas &
Getino, 1969).
Moreover, “his” language also has to be hers, wherever she is. New
documentary modes of expression are, perhaps, a valuable perquisite for
enabling an effective alternative voice, globally. As Michelle Citron explained
when seeking an appropriate aesthetic for Daughter Rite, “[f ]leeing from
[traditional] Documentary” was a necessity (Citron, 1999: 271) (p. 154).
When Solanas and Getino were writing from the global south in the 1960s,
their vision of a new cinematic language smacked of fantasy—not only
because of its politics but also because the impediments of costs, standards,
and distribution were all very much in place. The politics might still be
utopianist and the equipment still determined by the global north, but now, at
least, the digital has removed those other difficulties of cost, standards, and
distribution. The kit still speaks a western language but all now can explore its
bounds. And new language(s) redress(es) the balance.
52
Figure 10b GLOBAL SOUTH v. GLOBAL NORTH: REBALANCING?
53
3 “Life as Narrativized”
STORY: The third aspect of digital’s potential is that it aids the spectator’s
escape from the constraints of narrative linearity and its patriarchal voice.
This, though, can be more simulated than genuine, and any interactivity
involved, as least in some opinion, can be better described as INTERPASSIVIT Y
(1). With the web-/i- doc, Navigation (1.1) becomes fluid, but how this effects
hegemonic meaning depends on the nature of the Feedback (1.2) and the
form the Intervention (1.3) takes. But the spectator cannot any longer be
assumed to be a HOMO NARRANS (2) responding to “readerly” web-/i-doc
Texts (2.1) by deconstructing the Stories (2.2) they tell. Instead the web-/i-
doc enables an un-patriarchal “writerly” SCRIPTRIX NARRANS (3) to
Challenge (3.1) textual hegemony by choosing to take different Paths (3.2)
through the text.
1. INTERPASSIVITY
1.1. Navigation
The sub-arctic Athabasca oil sands have been known to the Cree for centuries
and to Europeans for the last three. The fur-trading post they established there
was renamed Fort McMurray in 1870. The train arrived in 1921 but it was not
until unrest in the Middle East in the 1970s that the expensive business of
extracting fuel from the sands on a wide scale became profitable. In that
decade the town grew from 7,000 to 31,000; by 2011 it was a settlement nearly
ten times greater than it had been before the tar-oil boom. By the eve of the
disastrous wildfire that devastated the city in spring 2016, the population had
topped 125,000.
Ever since The Californian headlined “Gold Mine Found” on March 15, 1848,
rushes to exploit mineral wealth have been gold dust for journalists, rich
sources of sensational news. And a media spotlight on Fort McMurray, then, is
not to be wondered at, although these days reporting is likely to be more
grounded in a frame of environmental and First Nations’ concerns than in the
stereotyping coverage of boom-towns.
54
Consider Timmins, Ontario. In the 1960s, expanding mining of a variety of
minerals created a boom-town that was an international story, involving
violent union busting as well as the rest of the gold rush trope. It was covered,
for instance, for the British current affairs documentary series World in Action in
an edition (“Timmins, Ontario”) shot by D. A. Pennebaker (Goddard et al, 2007:
31; Sudol, 2014). But, whereas “Timmins, Ontario” was a 1964 terrestrial television
show (25ʹ30ʺ in duration, 955 feet of 16mm film),1 the parallel documentary in
the twenty-first century—the National Film Board of Canada (NFB )’s Fort
McMoney (2013)—takes the form of a digital site about Fort McMurray,
presented, variously, as “a web documentary and strategy video game.”2 Its
duration takes up, in real time, many hours as the viewer/player navigates Fort
McMurray in a virtual vehicle (with driver POV footage of the townscape, etc)
and, in essence, meets 55 inhabitants and others who have been interviewed
by the filmmakers.
Fort McMoney and “Timmins, Ontario” share much. Both are the product of
established media entities—the NFB , ARTE , three major newspapers in
Canada, France and Germany and an independent Canadian multi-
platform production house for the web-/i-doc; for the tv show—Granada
Television, part of the original British commercial television network. Both
cost considerable money to make. Both have credited directors: David
Dufrense for the website and Douglas Keay for the tv show. Both were shot
with handheld cameras, whether film or video, by professional crews. Both
deal, basically, with the same “Klondike” story, justified by a public interest
in social and environmental impacts. And, of course, both are time-based
but the “web-/i-doc” is presented as being radically different: so different in
fact that some would claim the term “documentary” no longer serves to
describe such work. Again reaching for the taxonomic boxes despite their
fragilities:3 let us say that Fort McMoney is an example of “docmedia”—a new
documentary species:
1
“Timmins, Ontario”: World in Action| Douglas Keay| UK | 1964, t/x May 19.
2
David Dufrense| Canada| 2013. According to Wikipedia: “Fort McMoney incorporates 60 days
of filming in more than 22 locations in the city, including 55 interviews. Research took place
“Life as Narrativized”
over 2 years, with 2,000 hours of footage shot, at a cost of C$870,000” (Anon (n/d) “Fort
McMoney,” Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_McMoney [accessed July 2, 2015].
Some 7–8 hours of this material is viewable, giving a shooting ratio of more than 250:1. The
Wikipedia statement also suggests an un-feasible 33 hours of material shot each of the 60 days
of filming. We are grateful to Kate Nash for advice on this point (private communication, 1 July
2015).
3
See p. 133/.
55
Figure 11 THE GENUS DOCUMENTARY
Fort McMoney is a melding. As The New York Times headlined its release,
it was, finally: “Where Film Marries Video Game” (Goldberg, 2013). Beyond
rupturing linearity—beyond, even, random accessibility—it invites not
mere viewing but play. It is billed as: “A groundbreaking fusion of
documentary and video game in which visitors play the detective, unravelling
the interests that lurk behind the Canadian oil industry” (Anon [IDFA
Doclab] 2013).
Still 5 “Get out of the pool”

Fort McMoney | Davide Dufresne| Canada| 2013
56
That is the game and, no longer a mere spectator, you, the user, adopt the role
of a gumshoe—Sam Spade in effect—clicking on the arrows to reveal
evidence.
The degree of presentational flexibility this requires has its antecedents,
of course. The navigable capacity of the CD -ROM has been used, sparingly,
since the 1990s to enable a measure of control by the audience offering,
in effect, “chapters” or a film plus an archive of stored materials—film/
video, stills, graphics, etc: data which can be accessed, or mined, via a
menu. But docmedia can do much more. Most noteworthy, in 2009, the
NFB and the (increasingly significant) “Op-Docs” platform of The New York
Times introduced Highrise—an international study of the modern urban living
environment. It is billed as an “immersive” web-doc project—involving five
episodes as well as multiple spin-offs. One tranche of material was entitled
“Out My Window:”
On the main screen, you see a collage-like apartment building. You can click
on each of the 13 windows. Behind them, 13 apartments in 13 different
cities around the world are lurking: Chicago, Toronto, Montreal, Havana,
São Paolo, Amsterdam, Prague, Istanbul, Beirut, Bangalore, Phnom Penh,
Tainan, and Johannesburg. There are collages to be found here as well: a
360-degree view of the apartment’s interior, including its residents and
their view of the city, composed of separate photos. The stories of their
lives can be navigated by means of various clickable objects. Occasionally
they are represented in still images with sound, at other times with real
360-degree films in which viewers can move about at their own discretion
(Anon [IDFA Doclab] 2010).
By the summer of 2015, the MIT “Open Documentary Lab” could note some
232 web-/i-doc projects along similar lines probing the interactive potential of
the technology in a variety of modes and aesthetic styles.
All these docmedia works share accessibility to what lies “behind” the
“windows.” Documentaries potentially become a process, stories about the
world co-created with the audience.
According to the Digital Cultures Research Centre (DCRC ) at the University

of the West of England:
What unites all these projects is this intersection between digital interactive
technology and documentary practice. Where these two things come
57
Figure 12 “Co-created stories about THE World”—PROCESS
together, the audience become active agents within documentary—making

the work unfold through their interaction and often contributing
content . . . (Anon [DCRC ] n/d, emphasis added).
Any project along these lines “that starts with an intention to document the
‘real’ and that does so by using digital interactive technology can be considered
an i-doc” (Anon [DCRC ] n/d, emphasis added).
Yet what this means both for the act of documenting and for the
deconstruction of the resultant work by the “active” audience is not entirely
clear. Already for this audience, Trinh T. Min-ha points out, “[r]eceptivity does
not necessarily mean passivity. Being receptive can be most active” ( Trinh T.
Min-ha, 2005: 22: b). Comprehension can never be passive: interactivity at this
level, “just happens,” Jacques Derrida claimed (Greetham, 1991:1).
All narratives [including documentaries] are in some sense interactive

in that their meanings have always grown out of a collaboration
between the idiosyncratic subjectivities of authors and audience and
the reading conventions of the respective cultures they inhabit (Kinder,
2002: 4).
58
“Interactivity” in this context though, implies more than cognitive work but
says nothing as to the scope and range of the interactive response. Hence in
current usage, for Marsha Kinder, interactivity is something of
an illusion because the rules established [for it] by the designers of the text
necessarily limit the user’s options. Interactivity thus tends to function as a
normative pleasure or demonized as a deception. (Kinder, 2002: 4)
Basically, the term does not even necessarily indicate the reciprocity
implied by the dictionary definition of the word (OED ).4 The initial response
of the reader/viewer/user can no more occasion further reactive responses
from an “interactive” text than it does from any old media one. The audience
might be “agents” who make the work “unfold” by doing more than mentally
comprehending it; but they can do so alone on their part—eg by clicking. The
unfolding need not require “collaboration” on the part of the author/creator.
Kate Nash is thus right to point out that, with many of these sites, “the implied
[interactive] relationship cannot be taken at ‘face value’ ” (Nash, 2014a: 50).
Between the mental deconstruction of traditional media and digitally
enabled haptic interactivity is a continuum. It can be suggested that fully
meaningful digital interactivity in essence turns on “the user’s ability to
directly intervene in and change the images and texts that they access” (Lister
et al, 2009: 20). The audience as “active agents” are “more closely involved . . .
contributing content,” not “often,” but always. Without acknowledgment of the
continuum from this back to traditional cognitive deconstruction, unglossed
“interactivity” it becomes illusionary (Jarrett, 2008), disdained by Slavoj Žižek,
say, as “interpassivity” (Žižek, 2002: 545). (He has a point—p. 62—but it is
overstated.)
1.2. Feedback
Avoiding technicist hyperbole requires, firstly, that the feedback operationalizing
the interactivity is defined not as in electrical engineering where it can mean
nothing more than switching a device on or off ; rather it must indicate
4
Interactivity: “v. 1839. to act reciprocally, to act on each” (OED , eg 1959 [1933]). It involves people
working together and having an influence on each other; (computing) allows information to be
passed continuously and in both directions between a computer and the person who uses it
(OED on-line). (We have used the OED without prejudice to its patriarchal biases.)
59
feedback in the cybernetic sense. In cybernetics—the science of control in
humans and machines—feedback describes the modification of the “live”
performance of a transmitter in reaction to the “live” responses of the receiver.
Think, as did Norbert Wiener who coined the term, of a boat’s helmsman (in
Greek, kubernétés/κυβερνήτης) or “helmer”—as Variety usefully de-genders
“helmsman.” The helmer is the transmitter and the boat is the user (as it were),
the actions of the one responding to the actions of the other ( Wiener, 1950:
24–5). Both are “agents” that have “an effect on each other.”
We are (hopefully) emerging from the worst of the seemingly inevitable
utopianism that heralds all new media kit as “technologies of freedom” (which
is what Ithiel de Sola Pool once called cable television) (de Sola Pool, 1983).
Nevertheless, we are still befuddled by a plethora of jargon from the technicists,
although we do not seem to mind much: “These days,” argued Peter Wintonick,
“it’s essential that documentary-makers adapt to this new lexicon, or they will
get drowned out in the digital tsunami” ( Wintonick, 2013: 376). Indeed, for
Wintonick, the “tsunami” is so overwhelming which is why he suggests that the
whole “documentary” enterprise be renamed as “docmedia.”
As the creator of docmedia embraces the digital to make a “new media
object”—the i-doc (or web-doc) as a new species of communicative object
(Chatman, 1990: 38)—the recipients of her work also morph: from the
traditional audience, active only cognitively, into persons still cognitive, but
more haptic with the power, in some instances, to alter her original. Thereby
docmedia calls into question Grierson’s original patriarchal vision of the
documentary as a “pulpit” whence to “command the mind” of the audience
(Grierson, 1979: 48). This ambition in no way allowed the audience anything
but one interpretation of the text—the one he intended. Instead, now the
audience—readers/viewers/listeners/spectators—are invited to adopt new
roles as recipients exactly to change or challenge meanings. Digital’s potential
is precisely, as Hudson and Zimmermann claim, that with the (let us agree to
term it) web-/i-doc “meaning is not fixed [or intended to be fixed] as it is on
celluloid; rather meaning is malleable, destabilizing the certainties of positivist
constructions of knowledge and opening meaning for on-going debate”
(Hudson & Zimmermann, 2015:101). The patriarchal preacher is no more. Now

his congregants can be, variously,
●
adaptive co-creators
● functional amenders
● navigational users,
60
working with the materials presented (while a fourth class of recipient
remains, as it always has, as “audience” only—as it were—cognitively
deconstructing it).5
Figure 13 FOUR RECIPIENTS
“[W]hen the user and the interactive documentary constantly change and
adapt to each other,” it can be described as being “completely open” (Gaudenzi,
2013: 70). Mark Dreuze terms this:
adaptive interactivity: every action of the user has consequences for the
content of the site [ie web-/i-doc], as the site’s programming adapts itself to
the surfing behaviour of every individual user and “remembers” users’
preferences (allowing users to upload, annotate and discuss their own
content) (Dreuze, 2003: 214).
The interactivity here involved results in a new text which had been co-created
by the originating helmer and the adaptive co-creating recipient.
Without such changes, any lesser “modification or control of a process or
system by its results or effects,” Dreuze terms as “functional interactivity.” Here,
the helmer is “live” (or “as if live”); that is to say, she does act—not necessarily
instantaneously—upon the feedback, which can arrive through various links
and a variety of modes, eg: by voting via SMS or the telephone etc as in the
5
All these roles are distinct from that of the “participant” (p. 000). Participants, so described, operate
at the pro-filmic and filmic stages of a project: not subsequent to its distribution and exhibition as
do the four recipient classes suggested here. Participation in this sense is not dependent on
technology, although it has been significantly aided by technological developments. (p. 000)
61
Eurovision Song Contest. With “functional interactivity . . . the user [a functional
“amender”] can participate to some extent in the production process of the
site by interacting with other users or the producers’ to produce additional
materials” but not to alter the original (Drueze, 2003: 214). If a documentary,
then such capacity can be described as rendering it “semi-open”; that is “the
user can participate but not change the structure” (Gaudenzi, 2013: 70). The
functional amender is more a species, really, of editor than co-author.
With “navigational interactivity . . . the user is allowed to navigate in a more
or less structured way through the site’s content (through ‘Next Page’ and ‘Back
to Top’ buttons or scrolling menu bars, for example)” (Dreuze, 2003: 214). The
consequences of these navigational interventions are not registered on the
original material. Web-/i-docs of this kind are “semi-closed” (Gaudenzi, 2013:
70) and only a simulacrum of “interactivity” (in the sense of meaningful
reciprocity) is in play. The helmer is impervious to the actions of the user and
original content remains unaltered. It is no necessary condition of interactivity
at this level that the helmer be any more “live”—that is, aware at any point of
the users’ actions—than is the author of a traditional fully-closed text. Fort
McMoney and Highrise are examples of such navigational interactivity: “the user
can browse but not change the content,” ie, exactly, “semi-closed.” It is here that
“interactivity” becomes an illusion. And, hence, some would argue, a distracting
illusion at that, dysfunctional interactivity; “interpassivity:”
This kind of activity provides the perfect example of interpassivity: of doing

things not to achieve something, but to PREVENT from something really
happening, really changing. All the frenetic humanitarian, politically correct,
etc., activity fits the formula of “Let’s go on changing something all the time so
that, globally, things will remain the same!” (Žižek, 2002: 545).
Žižek’s disdain for received technicist opinion, for all its satiric flippancy, is
seriously grounded in the Foucauldian concept of “disciplining technologies”
(Foucault, 1991:149–156). “The paradox of user control, in fact, becomes that of
the illusion of choice within which the user is offered up for a form of soft
domination” (Palmer, 2003:161, emphasis in the original).
[I]nteractivity is a technical rendering of neoliberal or advanced liberal power

and as such a disciplining technology. . . . [Its apparent surrender of control is]
the basis of self–policing practice, where a regime of free choice is normalised
and individuals become disciplined to accept and exercise their own
62
agency. . . . It is assuredly not a disciplining into regimented control such as
that effected upon and with the soldiers of Foucault’s account, but it is a
disciplining into a liberal ideal of subjectivity based around notions of
freedom, choice and activity (Jarrett, 2008).
In short, “the significance of interactive technology cannot be accounted for

merely by pointing to active subjects in the real world” (Jarrett, 2008). Navigators
are still “interpellated” in an Althusserian prison house of freedom. They are, in
fact, more spectators than adaptors or amenders. “Moreover, much navigation
of the text was possible with previous technology”, eg, as Dreuze indicates, via
the menu of a DVD , etc.
It is also possible to navigate the image, not by clicking to go behind it in
2D but as a virtual space in three dimensions. Web-/i-doc spectators, the
fourth class of recipients, can, thanks to digital technology, do this by
donning a head-mounted display system and, if available, data-gloves, etc,
etc. Without reordering or altering the original in anyway, they then experience
the reality of the referent as a virtual “telepresence.” Escaping from the
straitjacket of their POV, they walk into the space of an image, looking round
corners to explore just as “Dexter” did in Blade Runner.6 The first non-ludic
documentary applications are under way;7 but it must be noted that the
immersed spectator is otherwise still a user without the power to amend or
edit. Nevertheless, given its sci-fi associations, the capacity has been heralded
with the same technicist hyperbole that suffuses most consideration of
interactivity. Promised is:
a computer-generated, three-dimensional landscape in which all of our

wishes can be fulfilled: wishes such as experiencing an expansion of our
physical and sensory powers; getting out of the body and seeing ourselves
from the outside; adopting a new identity . . . (Ryan, 1994: 392).
Leaving aside this vision, “the rhetoric of the gurus of the technology” against
which Marie-Laure Ryan is in fact here warning, the spectators’ role is still most
usually to be engaged only deconstructing texts in the traditional way from a
fixed position.
6
Ridley Scott| USA | 1982. Harrison Ford played “Dexter”.
7
Eg newsreel coverage of the Hong Kong pro-democracy protests of 2014 shot on the affordable
and accessible Oculus Rift 3D system or The Syrian Project at the USC Immersive Media Lab (Nonny
de la Peña| USA | 2014) which uses CGI grounded in news footage.
63
More commonly, the inexactitude of the term “interactive” can mask the
navigational (semi-closed) site and maintain that it is functional (semi-open).
Fort McMoney’s interactivity is so claimed. The Fort McMoney helmer/(computer)
automatically contacts by email any who access the site. The computer is an
automaton programmed to send navigators these communications to “survey”
their opinions by posing a persistent and repeated series of “questions” upon
which they can “vote”; eg: “Fort McMoney, the survey: Should the petroleum
industry finance the new highway? Ends soon” (p. 219). This email feedback
loop is, at best, a lamentably naïf opinion survey of a self-selected sample: an
alert to the helmer who need otherwise take no real notice of it. The navigational
screen/menu and the hours of footage that it allows access to do not change—
however the user “votes.” Without prejudice to the efficacy of site navigation as
a tool to deepen audience experience of the material, the helmer responds to
the user’s navigation of the site, whatever route it takes, in only one way—
“vote,” if you will. It is a model example of “clicktivism”—the technologically-
enabled ersatz political activism which Žižek so scorns.
1.3. Intervention
The nature of the over-claims for web-/i-doc difference can be unpacked in
another way. Web-/i-docs share with documentary a certain fundamental
sequentiality. Fort McMoney’s eight hours of footage are of a piece, in this sense,
with the 25ʹ30ʺ of “Timmins, Ontario.” In both instances, a sequence of frames,
however captured and stored, are displayed to create the illusion of movement.
And these frames aggregate into a “new media object” in ways analogous to
older audio/visual communication modes. The process can be seen as still
involving:
● The frame as an image captured on film or other recording medium.

● The shot as a series of frames uninterruptedly captured on a strip of film,
or an electronic analog thereof, which lasts for seconds or minutes. (Hang
them on the hooks of an—electronic—editing bin.)
● A scene is composed of several shots unified by time and space. (Keep

these as rolls—electronic files.)
● A sequence is a series of scenes unified by time (continuous or parallel)
and space(s) unified (or cross-cut). (Store these, when cut, in cans—
electronic folders).
64
● Finally, narrative films are composed of scenes/sequence. (Spool—or
aggregate—into “new media objects”.)
Three points of entry—at the level of the frame, the shot, and the scene/
sequence—are available. These enable what Gaudenzi calls “strategies of
interaction” (Gaudenzi 2014: 129) for the recipients. For the adaptor
interventions can occur at all levels. The amender can intervene but not at the
level of the frame, nor, usually, at the level of the shot either. The navigator is
limited to reordering scenes/sequences.
Figure 14 STRATEGIES FOR INTERACTION
Digital technology is not necessary to enable interference (as it were) with

the frames, shots, scenes, and sequences of a movie-image text. Alterations—
reprocessing, editing—have always been possible in post-production.
Previously, though, closed texts have been alterable in practice only by the
subsequent interventions of privileged users. However, with digital texts,
interference—or “mashing-up”—is democratized: more so for the adaptor

than the amender, and, again, more so for the amender than for the navigator
or spectator (who cannot do it at all).
Adaptors are presented with, in effect, what are the equivalent of rushes
which they can not only edit but also augment. Adaptivity at the level of the
65
frame, however, is constrained. That is to say, although a frame can be altered
by procedures subsequent to its capture and, for example, color rendition,
luminosity, framing, etc, etc can all then be changed, the human eye/brain
function acts to limit the impact of any such change—if the alteration is to be
perceived at all. Chris Milk’s The Johnny Cash Project,8 in part allowed for single
frames to be uploaded by users to, adaptively, interact with a music video—
Cash’s Ain’t No Grave. Each of these changed frames exists but, because of the
frame-rate needed to produce the illusion of movement, they cannot be
readily perceived.
The human eye–brain system can see 10–12 discrete images per second
and the critical fusion which blurs them so they appear as continuous motion
starts at around 16 frames per second (Read & Meyer, 2000: 24). With what
consequences for vision is a matter of laboratory experiments or the non-
narrative avant-garde art cinema—from Hans Richter (Inflation, 1927, say) to
Peter Kubelka (Arnulf Rainer, 1960) through (to be less abstract) William
Burroughs The Cut Ups (1966) to Nam June Paik’s video Lake Placid, 1980. This
last was a largely frame-cut video descant on the Winter Olympics of that year
which directly prefigures The Johnny Cash Project’s aesthetic strategies.9 In
effect, any alterations of a single frame, or of any random series of altered
frames, when projected or scanned at speeds to create the illusion of
movement, will be simply imperceptible and/or indecipherable. Perception
requires the viewers of such user interactions to disrupt the new media object’s
chronological unfolding; that is, perceiving the adapted frames requires that
The Johnny Cash Project be paused. And digital affordances are not necessary
for that. The playback of Nam June Paik’s Lake Placid 2 can be halted as much
as can the playback of The Johnny Cash Project—or the projection of Arnulf
Rainer or The Cut Ups.
Perceptible adaptive interactivity also involves the manipulations of frames
in a shot; but this too is limited. The shot—a strip or its electronic analog
created at the time of shooting by the mechanical process of producing
frames—is, to all intents and purposes, also fixed at the moment of filming,
8
Chris Milk| Canada| 2010 http://www.thejohnnycashproject.com/#/about [accessed August 23,
2016].
9
Hans Richter| German| 1927 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBsW6PRYyDg [accessed
August 22, 2016]; Peter Kubelka| Austria: 1960 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oMIEzCcoHYE
[accessed August 23, 2016]: William Burroughs | USA | 1966 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=
Uq_hztHJCM4 [accessed August 23, 2016]; Nam June Paik| USA | 1980 https://vimeo.com/21112861
[accessed August 23, 2016].
66
because of the psychophysical limitations of the eye–brain system. It can be
trimmed, of course, and, indeed, this is fundamental to the editing process.
However, excising or augmenting frames within a shot disrupts the illusion of
movement. Until it became normalized in the mainstream cinema, following
Jean-Luc Godard in Breathless/A bout de soufflé,10 the ellipses produced (jump-
cuts) were a sin (as it were) against the rules of realist film grammar. Moreover,
even if the integrity of the strip is not violated, there is a further powerful
constraint on adaptive interactions: comprehension also requires that shots be
assembled, normally according to the rules of this Hollywood grammar, to give
a coherent sense of time and place to the viewer. The adaptor will be as bound
by this as is any old-media editor; but will, at that point, concomitantly exert as
great a control over meaning.
Functional interactivity does not allow for intervention at the level of frame
augmentation or shot trimming, but it does share the adaptive capacity to
rearrange shots and scenes/sequences without internal alteration of them.
Either way, this is of enormous consequence: “If linear documentary depends
on the decisions of its filmmaker (both while filming and editing), interactive
documentary does not necessarily have a clear demarcation between those
two roles” (Gaudenzi, 2014: 30). The blurring makes the web-/i-doc’s meaning
infinitely more malleable, more destabilized and open to debate than it is with
the traditional documentary.
In Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera, which she edited, Yelizaveta Svilova is
filmed by Dziga Vertov sitting at her editing bench facing a case, rolls of 35mm
film neatly laid on its labeled shelves: “Factory,” “Machines,” “Market.” We know
how they dealt with them—we have the 1,276 shots of Man with a Movie
Camera and we consider them collectively to constitute “the greatest
documentary ever” (p. 19). The adaptor and/or amender, a contemporary
Svilova, faces a finite amount of footage, stored on the electronic shelves of a
virtual cutting room. Perhaps inspired by the image of Svilova at work, video
artist Perry Banks has been involved since 2007 in making, with those who are
stimulated by her site into uploading material, a collaborative replicant of The
Man with a Movie Camera.
the idea was to design a website on which contributors could upload

individual shots corresponding to those in Vertov’s original work. The site
10
France| 1960
67
would also provide an opportunity to screen the remake in tandem with the
original. (Feldman, 2010)
The Man with a Movie Camera: The Global Remake11 is presented on a split
screen, with the Vertov playing on one side and the amalgam of replacement
shots on the other. Where none have been offered, the remake is blank. The
project exploits digital potential by algorithmically changing shots on a daily
basis if alternatives are offered. Although unchanged, the original is necessarily
re-contextualized by the juxtapositioning. The essence of the Vertovian shot’s
aesthetic is pointed up and the film’s underlying dynamics are highlighted.
Politically, though, much of its ideological thrust (in so far as this is still readily
understandable to a modern audience) is lost to the constructivist agenda of
the project.12
As Vertov perhaps better understood than do those mashing-up his
work, a shots meaning is as much a creature of its context as of its content.
As Lev Kuleshov wrote: “Montage is inextricably tied to the world-view of
the person who has the material [of the film] at his [sic] disposal” (Kuleshov,
1974 [1935]: 185). Reordering certainly matters to interactivity and the
digital does make it readily available to web-/i-doc navigators as well as
amenders and co-creators. But the significance of the digital for the web-/
i-doc lies not in navigational affordances as much as in the provision of
cybernetic feedback loops which can, in effect, alter the story—as it might
be, the narrative—a documentary relates about the world. Digital affordances
can facilitate the undercutting of the mainstream documentary’s patriarchal
voice. “The fundamental difference between a linear [mainstream traditional]
and an interactive [web-/i-] documentary,” as Sandra Gaudenzi perceptively
observes, “is not the passage from analogue to digital technology but the
passage from linear to interactive narrative” (Gaudenzi, 2013: 32, emphasis
added).
11
Perry Bard| UK /Canada| 2007—https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEykp9PsDkw [accessed
August 23, 2016].
12
In outlining the project on its website, Banks says nothing of communism or revolution and even
less of Vertov’s critique of the Leninist New Economic Policy. Lev Manovich, in reporting on a
project involving a complex computer aided analysis of the film frame by frame manages to read
only one shot as indicating any political meaning—in this case symbolizing “the communist
future” (Manovich, 2015: 221).
68
2. HOMO13 NARRANS
2.1. Texts
“Many new media objects” (including, one supposes, docmedia):
do not tell stories; they don’t have beginning or end; in fact they don’t have
any development, thematically, formally or otherwise which would organize
their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual
items, where every item has the same significance as any other. (Manovich,
1999, emphasis added)
Much of this rhetoric is readily dismissed. The “object” simply does not exist, as
is being implied, god-like, without beginning or end. After all, it is made (a
process requiring time and human agency) and watched (ditto); and both
activities have beginnings and ends.
Less obviously tendentious is the concept of “story” in play; but this is,
as Gaudenzi suggests, the crucial point. “Story” in technicist rhetoric appears
to be equated with linearity—elements which organize into a sequence;
and, in addition to investment in the significance of the haptic, technicist
argument for digital exceptionalism in this context also relies on a “story =
linearity” equivalency. But story—narrative—does not organize itself.
Believing or implying this is a source of illusion; nor do narratives, whatever
the medium, of themselves have anything. On the contrary: texts—even
“new media object” ones—are “lazy” (as Eco says, p. 42), demanding
deconstructional work on the part of the recipients so that cognition “just
happens,” as Derrida says it does.
So, contra technicist assertions,
[a] narrative voice pervades virtually every genre and medium of human
discourse, ranging from novels and television dramas to sermons, political
campaign orations, advertisements, journalistic reports, historical treatises, and
everyday conversations. (Lucaites and Condit, 1985: 90)
13
Although used scientifically as a gender-neutral descriptor, the Latin homo is undeniably
masculine, an opposite to femina. (In Latin, a man and a women are also vir and mulier.) The use of
homo in this connection is consequent. Were it not opaque to contemporary understanding vir et
mulier (or, better, vir mulierque)—or, better yet, mulier virque narrantes would be preferable to homo
narrans.
69
Even electronic games. Despite pronouncements that as “new media objects”
they lack “stories,” at the same time, they are said to be “experienced as
narratives” (Manovich, 2001: 221). In fact, though, that is what digital stories are:
narratives. Certainly, web-/i-docs, as a species of documentary, exist, as Bill
Nichols claims of their linear predecessors, “in the crease between life as lived
and life as narrativized” (Nichols, 1986:114).
What technicism ignores or downplays—even as it pretends to privilege
the active human participant—is not only the helmer’s usual narrativizing
voice but the crucial importance of narrativizing as a tool deployed by the
perceiving recipient. Walter Fisher suggested that humans can be thought of
as narrating beings and humanity can be as well described as homo [sic]
narrans as homo faber or homo sapiens. Homo narrans exhibits a fundamental
human propensity to tell and hear stories:“to give order to human experience”—
Fisher’s “narrative paradigm” (Fisher, 1985: 74). For him, stories do this “in order
to establish ways of living in common” (Fisher, 1987: 63); and thus “to make
sense of life” (Lotman, 1979: 183). Independent of the “lazy” text itself in
whatever form or medium it is presented to the recipients, they will supply, or
attempt to supply, all the elements Manovich claims to be missing from “new
media objects.” The very humanity of the users will encourage—or even in
effect force—them so to do. Homo narrans will start and stop the information
flow, make causal connections, rank data, find themes, see developments, and
formal patterns.
2.2. Stories
So: “[t]o begin,” as Dylan Thomas has it, “at the beginning.”
Documentaries cannot be dismissed as “non-narratives”, a meaningless
descriptor in the sense that Fisher (and Yurij Lotman, 1979) understood
it. Despite their acceptance of the centrality of narrative, the discourse
around docmedia has thus far (Roland Barthes, apart) eschewed the insights
of narratology and more reflects concepts drawn from computer science.
Marie-Laure Ryan, say, who is most concerned with both narrative and
the impact of new media is, for example, not positioned as central to the
technicist literature. Nor is narrative, as understood in narratology, much
denotated even by the plethora of descriptive terms for web-/i-docs that
refer to “narrative” or “story-telling,” eg: “non-linear-narrative”/“data base-
narrative”/“interactive-narrative”/“procedural narrative” and “on-line story-
telling” (Soar, 2014: 170, f/n 2). Cinematic narrative analysis has long drawn on
70
scholarship from the Russian formalists on; but this focus has been largely
ignored in documentary studies (saving Barthes). This seems to be continuing
with web-/i-doc analysis. The result is that claims for new media documentary’s
exceptionalism are made in the absence of one set of insights that might
undercut such rhetoric.
Documentary is in its essence “life as narrativized.” Documentaries are,
unsurprisingly, unavoidably “full of narratives” (Guynn, 1990: 70)—of a piece
with any text-type which totally “temporally controls its reception by the
audience” (Chatman, 1990: 7, emphasis in the original). This, too, applies to
“new media objects” including web-/i-docs. They start at the moment of
engagement by a recipient and finish when that engagement is terminated.
“Narrative,” as a term, is not here used as any sort of synonym for “fiction,”
especially in a binary opposition to “documentary.”14
Narrative can be thought of (p. 4) as one of the two orders in the class
“cinema,” the other being “non-narrative.” Both fiction and non-fiction are familia
in the “narrative” order. “Documentary” is a genus of the “narrative” familia. To
class documentary as a species of Metzian “non-narrative formal modes of
cinema” is taxonomically unhelpful because it denies that documentary’s
essential organizing principle, behind its “treatment of actuality,” is, exactly, to
create narrative (Metz, 1974: 94). If Gaudenzi is correct, the discussion of the
difference between documentary’s old linearity and its new-found capacity for
interactivity turns on narrative, and narratology, in one way or another, surely
becomes indispensable to discussing it.
A photograph can tell a story just as can a painting or, indeed, in context,
a wide variety of “objects,” symbols or, even, situations. But such denotation
does not necessarily “narrate” in the core specific sense of story. The sky denotes
the weather but it does so statis; it does not “narrate” it. Narration needs time.
In documentary narrative, therefore, temporality dominates. But Gérard
Genette warns that: “[w]e currently use the word narrative without paying
attention to, even at times without noticing, its ambiguity” (Genette, 1980:
25–6). Narrative indicates a double chronology—what Chatman calls two
14
The narrative = fiction while non-narrative = documentary distinction is widely drawn especially
in North America (eg Bordwell and Thompson, 1996: 128–65); and not just in film scholarship. At
the Tisch School of the Arts, NYU , for instance, the BA in film production offers, at sophomore
level, a division between “narrative” and “documentary” (as well as more specialized offerings in
animation, children’s television, etc, etc). To deny documentary as being “non-narrative,” though (as
we are doing here) is without prejudice as to the existence of purely abstract film/video or scientific
record-making which can, more properly be so described as familia in the other “order” (“non-
narrative”) of cinema. (See: p. 4)
71
“chrono-logics” (Chatman, 1990: 9): “The narrative entails movement through
time not only ‘externally’ (the duration of the presentation of the novel,
film, play) but also ‘internally’ (the duration of the sequence of events that
constitutes the plot)” (Chatman, 1990: 9). Christien Metz glosses the binary
in cinema as: “the time of the thing told and the time of the narrative (the
time of the signified and the time of the signifier)” (Metz, 1974: 18). And it
matters not who controls the sequencing of the internal chrono-logic—
traditional helmer or her audience navigating a DVD ’s menu or clicking
through a game; or an amender feeding back editing responses; or an adapter
co-creating a new text. Meaning might—will—change but all variations that
successfully communicate and hold attention through the two chrono-logics
will be narratives.
Internal and external chrono-logics are not the only binary of immediate
significance for narrative. There is the semantic dimension to consider,
essentially grounded in a distinction between “story” and “plot.” In a 1927
lecture (which became Aspects of the Novel), E.M. Forster famously gave as an
example of story: “The king died. Then the queen died” (Forster, 2005 [1927]:
87). Children will be speaking such stories—narrating—by age three and
doing this, some hold, is essential to the business of language acquisition in
the first place (Umiker-Seboek, 1979: 92). But this is not the end of the matter:
“It has been argued, since Aristotle, that events in narratives are radically
correlative, enchaining, entailing. Their sequencing, runs the traditional
argument, is not simply linear but causative” (Chatman, 1978: 45). Accepting
this, “narrative” implies yet more than (in Forster’s terms) a story’s accumulation
of discrete communications.
It is not enough that: “The king died. Then the queen died.” Forster offers the
further example: “The king died. Then the queen died of grief.” It is now more
than “story.” He has introduced “plot.”15 Such narrative story-telling involves
“the transformation of experience” via “a series of temporally ordered clauses
which we may call narrative clauses” (Labov, 1972: 354, 361, italics in original).16
This holds even if the control of the clauses is removed from the originator of
15
Other terms have been used to make, more or less, the same distinction: fabula (фабула)/syužet
(сюжет) Tomashevski, 1965 [1925] 61–95; Shklovsky, 1917]: 190; histoire/discors ( Todorov, 1980
[1966]: 3–36); diégèse/récit (Genette, 1980: 27); “story”/“discourse” (Sohet, 2007: 19). The story poses
questions which the plot answers (Barthes, 1991 [1973]: 17).
16
The term “clauses” is here cited, as are others from or cognate with linguistics, with a caveat: the
language of cinema is one thing but the parts of the language of cinema is another. It is tempting
to reach for linguistic analogies seeking illuminating equivalents to frame, shot, sequence but this
can raise more problems than it solves.
72
the text. It remains so, as much for Highrise and Fort McMoney as for
“Timmins, Ontario.”
Flaherty’s application of traditional casual narrative norms as the basis for
organizing the actuality material he had shot for Nanook of the North produces
what would become identified as “documentary” film. He overtly created a
classic “enchaining and entailing” effect with his ordering of the sequences
(ie the “narrative clauses”) in Nanook of the North after the inter-title “Winter . . .”
(@ 29ʹ13ʺ): hunting leads to shelter, then more hunting which exposes the
Inuit to danger in a blizzard which causes them to seek shelter. Closure. Making
a “train of events bound by . . . causality” so overt is the essence of Flaherty’s
originality.17 Unlike previous multi-sequenced actuality films which document
what might be thought of as natural Aristotelian narratives, eg a battle (The
Battle of the Somme)18 or a journey (South, on the failed Shackleton expedition
to the South Pole),19 Flaherty’s breakthrough was to construct this plot at his
editing bench out of the whole-cloth of his rushes.
However, modern narrative theory calls into question at least some of the
implications of the story/plot distinction and would implicitly thereby
downgrade the significance of Flaherty’s editing after the “Winter . . .” inter-title.
At least some elements of narrative—a “narrative voice”—can be found in the
film’s first third as well. Obviously, as long as the projector is running external
chrono-logic is in play. But internal chrono-logic is far from absent either by
this reading.
For one thing, even in this first half-hour, some sequences document trains
of events through a number of coherent discreet shots—the walrus hunt, for
example. Moreover, where shot-to-shot causality is reduced to mere shared
location (eg at the trader’s post), it is still possible to suggest, at the level of
reception, that story-telling close to plotting exists. Meir Sternberg would see
in this narrative because he holds that to be nothing more is needed for this
than “the play of suspense/curiosity/surprise between represented and
communicative time” (Sternberg, 2003: 328); that is, between internal and
external chrono-logics. Monica Fludernik “disqualifies as being central to
narrative the criteria of mere sequentiality and logical connectedness”
(Fludernik, 1996:19). Homo narrans both speaks and listens and, even if overt
17
Given the happenstance of the survival of early films, it cannot be claimed with any degree of
certainty that Flaherty was the first person to sit at an editing bench and ignore the order in which
the sequences to hand were originally shot.
18
Battle of the Somme| William Jury| UK | 1916.
19
South| Frank Hurley| UK | 1919.
73
causality is not provided by the speaking narrator, the deconstructing listener
will seek such causalities out.
This is without prejudice to the fact that a weakened reliance on causal
sequentiality can often be detected in documentary: in Jennings, say,20 or
Blank.21 And, again, for all that it is unrecognized as having documentary value,
this is also reflected in albeit attenuated sequential causality in some films by
more-observational avant-garde filmmakers, who work “at edge of abstraction”
with similar disdain for causal connections—much of Brakage, (eg Renov,
2013: 348) (p. 157). Nevertheless, these are indeed “lazy” texts and they can
demand too much from Eco’s walker. Dai Vaughan warned, in connection with
Jennings, that with his structures, causalities can be so weakened with the
result that the films, “work better in the head than on the screen” ( Vaughan,
1983:75; Winston, B., 2008: 125).
In the earliest phase of direct cinema there was a critical tendency—in
step with the misuse of “non-narrative” as a synonym for documentary
(p. 000, f/n 10)—to describe films, Wiseman’s say—as “mosaics” (Mamber,
1974: 4). Their editing was seen as a type of tessellation (Nichols, 1978: 17).
But the direct cinema classics are no more mosaics than is the opening
third of Nanook. Wiseman was far from achronic and acausal in his editing
choices:
When I’m editing [he explained to an interviewer in the 1970], I try to work out
a very elaborate theory which I set-down as I talk to myself: for example—
“Well, this fits this way” and “that fits that way”, but in the way I finally get to it I
can see that the rationalization frequently comes after the connection exists
(Graham, 1976: 43).
And his audience, sharing his culture and its assumptions, make the same
connections.
Christian Metz postulated a “film exposé” as a non-narrative record but this is,
as with the new platform narratives, to ignore that the audience are narrativizing
beings (Metz, 1974: 94). “Raw” footage captured in non-avant-garde or scientific
modes, when screened, will always invite narrativization, albeit the viewer’s
effort to find a story might well strain her attention. But, as Flaherty said: “Films
are a very simple form and a very narrow form in some ways” (Rotha, 1983: 36).
20
Eg Words for Battle |UK | 1944 (but see Winston, B., 2008: 125)
21
Eg Gap Toothed Women |USA |1987 (but see Winston, B. 2008: 126)
74
They are made by a homo narrans (of either gender) and they are presented to
an audience of homines narrantes.
3. SCRIPTRIX NARRANS
3.1. Challenge
The Flahertarian hegemonic linear documentarist seeks to lock the audience
into one particular reading of his text by overtly narrativizing—turning into
story—his materials and anything that undercuts has a potentially seismic
effect on that tradition’s authoritative voice. Digital technology exponentially
aids the liberation of documentary narrativizing from this de haut en bas,
patriarchal linearity; from its intention to “command the mind” of its audience.
This is not to deny narrative but to empower spectators to create their own
narratives in contrast to the hegemonic. Web-/i-docs thus have a potential for
“undermining authoritative (and authoritarian) communication along the way”
(Hogarth, 2006: 129). And there is authority to suggest this means that homo
narrans should necessarily be re-gendered for this journey.
There has been a “long noted” distinction, in feminist literary criticism,
“between private and public contexts” whereby, predominately, women’s
writing was “private and did not disturb a [public] male discursive hegemony”
(Lanser, 1986: 352). “Writing,” that which an author does, “has been run by a
libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy,“ claims
Hélène Cixous (Cixous, 2010: 31). Consider the experience of Québecoise
radical feminist and avant-garde writer Nicole Brossard who describes, as
arising from her opposition to patriarchy, linearity, constructions of language
and textuality that colonize and silence women, how her writing
became more fluid. . . . Questions started to flow about identity, imagination,

history and more questions came about language and the incredible fraud I
was discovering in the accumulated layers of lies told about women through
centuries of the male version of reality (Brossard, 2005: 32).
But it is also a question of reading as well as writing. Patriarchal texts

are not “fluid.” From the recipient’s position, they are—to come, finally, to
Barthes’ terminology—“readerly” (“lisible”). The patriarchal cast of linearity is
to be seen as attempting to limit, or at least significantly constrain, the
recipient’s freedom of interpretation (Barthes, 1991: 4). The lisible text implicitly
75
demands an acceptance of the helmer’s hegemonic intention. “Closed”
narratives of this kind “obsessively aim at arousing a precise response” (Eco,
1979: 5) and, unsurprisingly, they therefore formally express an aspect of
mainstream cinema’s essential phallocentricism (Mulvey, 1975). And this is as
true—or truer given the Griersonian agenda—of mainstream anglophone
documentary.
But, the imposing of constraint via linearity is far from straightforward. The
text is a “ ‘lazy’ machine asking the reader [who it must not be forgotten, is a
sense-making being—an homo narrans] to do some of its work.” Doing that
work is analogous to the original process of creation, a descant on it that can
also be described as a species of “writing;” that is, in the sense of meaning
creation. The “lazier” the “readable” text is, the more “open” it is: “writerly”—
scriptible (in Bathes’ terms). This is not to suggest an essentialist binary—itself
as Susan Lanser observes in her classic essay on feminist narratology, a
patriarchal proclivity—between lisble and scritible.22 Nor is it to reject Ryan’s
observation on this distinction that:
To the skeptical observer the accession of the reader to the role of the
writer . . . is a self-serving metaphor that presents hypertext as a magic
elixir: “Read me and you will receive the gift of literary creativity” (Ryan,
2003: 9).
Rather, it is to note nothing more than that writerly texts are possible and
are implicitly less patriarchal. To suggest this is radical enough. Patriarchal
linearity is supplanted—at least potentially—and the narrating male gives way
to a (as it might be, female) narrating, scriptible meaning-creator: Scriptrix
narrans. Pace Ryan,
[T]he writerly text is ourselves writing, before the infinite play of the world (the
world as function) is traversed, intersected, stopped, plasticized by some
singular system (Ideology, Genus, Criticism) which reduces the plurality of
entrances, the opening of networks, the infinity of languages (Barthes, 1991
[1973]: 5).
22
Although she was herself logically guilty of doing this by contrasting a feminist narratology to a
non-feminist one. The charge, though, is easily made. Perhaps, it should be agreed that, as Gerald
Prince observed in the controversy on this point, Lanser’s proposal occasioned: “binary
distinctions—on which we all depend—do not necessarily lead to the creation of hegemonics and
exclusions” (Prince, 1995: 75, emphasis in original).
76
To suggest that changes in the nature of digital narrative “opening”
it up reflect a gendered difference to patriarchal linearity presents
something of a paradox. Describing the web-/i-doc recipient in terms of
a feminized scriptrix narrans, does not readily mesh with web-/i-docs
being “married” to video games (as is claimed to have been done, for
example, with Fort McMoney). The pervasive rhetoric around digital gaming
is suffused by a moral panic about a perceived predominance of macho
violence. Even the response to gaming’s sexism is sexist, eg “pink games”
to “please or reflect female play drives.” (Konzack, 2007: 117). It seems far
from the scriptrix. But the paradox can be left aside because, simply, any
parallels are actually superficial. Games and web-/i-docs share little or
nothing at a deep level, the one being rule-driven and the other not. To see the
web-/i-doc’s interactivity is no game—as, say, Johan Huizinga understands
that term.
Play is a pursuit, as classically defined by him,
connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained from it. . . . [It
is] a voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of
time and space according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding
(Huizinga 1949 [1938]: 13, 28).
Even if understanding that certain forms of play can be seen as requiring

narrativizing (as does the deconstructing of any documentary’s meaning),
documentaries’ business remains very different. Its function is to offer the exact
opposite of play’s avoidance of “ordinary life.” It is, as Vertov first demanded:
“Show us life” Vertov 1984 [1926]): 66 Games do not do that—except in the
rhetoric of fans and even then only as metaphor.
With or without rules, the ordering at the foundation of closed narratives
can be conceived of as essentially masculine. Rendering that ordering more
open is at the heart of the digital’s challenge to documentary’s patriarchal
voice. It is not illogical to suggest that a recipient of more open texts has to be
a scriptrix.
3.2. Paths
To return to Eco’s image of the reader as a walker in the wood: she is on
her way through the text but, unlike the lack of choice offered by the path
of a linear story, this trail presents her with constant forks. The term
77
hypertext,23 inspired by a story of Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of the Forking
Paths), is widely used to describe such electronic variants of forking-path
stories.24 Hypertext certainly describes the process of navigating a web-/i-doc
but any assumption that so to do necessarily destroys narrative is unwarranted.
Thinking that clicking through causes “the removal of narrative” again ignores
homo (or scriptrix) narrans’s preference for—even addiction to—finding
narrative to “give order to human experience.” (Apperley, 2006: 19).25 The digital,
in fact, does not afford an alternative to narrative in “hyperspace’s dimensionless
infinity” (and the rest of the usual hyperbole) (Coover, 1992: 25). A forking-path
narrative is still a narrative. The click no more stills the narrative voice than does
a full stop. A “non-narrative” documentary—or web-/i-doc—is chimerical. To
misquote Hans Solo: narrative, like him, remains safe enough even after the
jump to hyperspace.
“Forking-path” narratives implicitly reflect the ancient tradition of the quest
as a narrative form. Without consciously adopting any avatar, the web-/i-doc
player/viewer is positioned, in effect, as a knight questing the grail of
understanding because “the quest, at its most abstract, has been proposed as
a universal narrative grammar” (Knutson, 1989: 10). It is a heavily gendered role
so that Susan Knutson believed that:
women’s position in quest grammar, even at its most abstract, is well-defined

and reproduces patriarchal gender . . . the grammar itself is based on the
binary opposition of hero and obstacle. Subordinating everything to the
desire of the subject, it is inherently monologic, teleological, and implicated
with patriarchal gender. Quest grammar depends on and reproduces
hierarchical power” (Knutson, 1989: 11, emphasis added).
23
The term is attributed to Ted Nelson ( Wedeles, 1965). Nelson is cited as a font of neologisms—
“transclusion,” “intertwingularity”, “teledildonics.” Hypertext is his most diffused effort.
24
It is hard to see why as hyper—“ὑ περ”—means beyond. The binary around garden (that it is not
wild) implies exactly the opposite: it is not beyond. A more apposite neologism here is ergodic (the
work of following a path—from ergon(έργον)/work and hodon(ὁ δόν)/path) (Aarseth, 1997).
Hypertext is better used to describe a species of electronic cross-referencing as envisioned by
Vannevar Bush in 1945 (Bush, 1945: 110).

25
The usefulness of the scholarship on hypertextuality is further reduced in the present context
because of the position taken by some on the “non-narrative.” Citing Gunning’s “cinema of
attractions” as a harbinger of this digitized supposedly post-narrative turn (as it were) is
unconvincing, not least because narrative voice can be seen even in the early pre-twentieth
century single-shot movies with which Gunning was concerned (Gunning, 1990: 55; Winston,
1996: 123, f/n 68). “The end of narrative as the paramount defining feature of media” can be
dismissed as mere technicist hyperbole (Apperley, 2006: 19–20).
78
Teresa de Lauretis suggests that:
In its “making sense of the world”, narrative endlessly reconstructs it as a two

character-drama in which the human person creates and recreates himself out
of an abstract or purely symbolic other . . . the drama has the movement of a
passages, a crossing, an actively experienced transformation of the human
being into—man. (de Lauretis, 1984: 121, italic in original emphasis added)
However, if the recipient can be represented as a scriptrix narrans, the third

patriarchal leg supporting traditional documentary is thereby weakened.
Alternatives to narrative linearity, allowed by digital technology, can then be
added to the undercutting of photographic integrity and the destruction of
eurocentric production hegemony. It becomes clear as to why the twenty-first
century dawns as the best and the worst of times for documentary. Worst
because the old foundations crumple. Best because not since the concept of
the documentary emerged a century ago has there been such variety in the
tools and modes of expression available for the documentarist. The promise
consequent upon the weakening of the patriarchal linear text implies therefore
something very much more than the ludic.
79
80
PART 2
Actual Effects . . .
The impacts of the digital are pre-figured. For all their profundity, they are
nevertheless developmental not innovative: evolutionary, not revolutionary.
The history of the documentary reveals that such changes as are in train have
been immanent. All parties traditionally involved in the act of documenting—
the filmed, the filmer, and the spectator—are still present at documentary’s
twenty-first century digital “crossroad.” Documentary filmmaking
at its essence [is] the same practice—unscripted, and responsive

to the world that we’re living in.
Cizek (n/d)
81
The AC TUAL EFFEC TS of the act of documenting on the filmed, filmer, and
spectator are entangled in reciprocal ways difficult to isolate; but, questions which
most concern THE FILMED —Performing (Chapter 4) and Co-creating
(Chapter 5)—are discussed first. The implication for THE FILMER of the turn to
embrace Subjectivities in documentary expression is examined in Chapter 6; and
the filmer’s multiple duties of Care in the changing circumstances of the twenty-
first century is the subject of Chapter 7. Audience Perception (Chapter 8) and the
conditions of Reception (Chapter 9) focus on the documentary SPEC TATOR .
82
. . . on THE FILMED
For the filmed, facing a digital rather than an analog camera matters little.
Being able to take the camera and begin, effortlessly, filming for oneself, on the
other hand, is of great significance. But in both situations, the issue remains:
the right to play one’s self.

Waugh (2011)
83
84
4 “To Thine Own Self be True”
PERFORMING: We have been too sophisticated for too long to think that
documentary can be “life caught unawares” in any meaningfully unmediated way
because APPEARING (1) before the documentary camera cannot normally avoid
awareness, a source of audience Distrust (1.1). Awareness confounds the distinction
between Presentational acting (1.2) and Representational being (1.3). BEHAVING
(2) is further complicated by the issue of Performativity (2.1) which re-contextualizes
not only everyday behavior but also documentary Casting (2.2).
1. APPEARING
1.1. Distrust
“What would you say this documentary is really about?” asks Mark Polley of
his sister Sarah. She is interviewing him for her 2012 film, Stories We Tell.
From behind her camera, she hesitates and he interrupts: “Am I breaking the
fourth wall here? Turn the camera around.” He then interrupts her answer
(“I suppose it’s about memory . . .”) to ask, preening slightly, “is this a good
angle for me?”
Still 6 “Is this a good angle for me?”

Stories We Tell| Sarah Polley| Canada| 2012
85
Mark Polley is an actor. His parents were actors as is his sister here interviewing
him. Her purpose is serious, nothing less than a quest to establish her own
identity; but, despite this, his is only to play teasing her and her project. To
paraphrase Anthony Powell, Mark is giving the performance of an “infinitely
accomplished actor got up to play the part that was in fact his own” (Powell,
1957: 71); and he, thereby, illuminates the paradoxes and confusion any
consideration of the authenticity of appearances in a film indexed as
“documentary”—analog or digital—presents. “Asshole,” says Sarah, in loving
sotto voce, still off-screen.
Sarah Polley is a Canadian film star, a child actor who survived the transition
to adulthood to become a feted director (of both fiction and documentary) as
well as a successful actor prominent enough in the business to serve on a
Cannes jury. She is also an active political radical in Canada. Stories We Tell,
though, is entirely personal. It investigates “the secrets kept by a family of
storytellers,” hers. It “excavates layers of myth and memory to find the elusive
truth”; the truth of her paternity (Anon [“Stories We Tell: 2013”], 2014). She has
been perplexed her whole life by the oft-noted difference in appearance
between herself and her siblings and her father, Michael. In the film, Polley
seeks an explanation for this and therefore necessarily focuses on the life of
Diane, her deceased actor mother. She documents her quest for the truth
about her parentage, using family 8mm footage as well as interviews.
8mm and amateur video figure largely in another major documentary of the
early twenty-first century. Andrew Jarecki’s Capturing the Freidmans (2003)1 uses
a home-movie archive to establish that the seemingly respectability of the
Friedman family is a sham: the father and one of the three sons, Jarecki reveals,
were actually child-pornographers. The picture of family life the footage reveals
is false, but the film’s topic is too somber to admit an interrogation of image
authenticity as a concern. It is not about “memory” but child abuse. The footage
is anyway authentic evidence of “false light,” the de facto misrepresentation of
the family’s reality; the faux respectability they presented to the world. The
authenticity of the images—that is, that they were taken by the Freidmans in
the places and at the times indicated—is not in question.
Not so with the similar footage in Stories We Tell. The referential integrity of
that film’s home-movie images becomes something of a will-o’-the-wisp. The
actual provenance of Polley’s B-Roll—the series of 8mm home movies she
uses to illustrate the testimony of her informants—cannot be discerned for
1
Andrew Jarecki| USA | 2003.
86
sure from the screen. Their appositeness is such that doubts as to their
authenticity slowly grow in the spectator’s mind.
Whether the images, supposedly taken by the father, Michael, a keen amateur
cinematographer, are what they seem to be, or whether they are reconstructed—
ie faked—by his daughter for her film is not clear; but, putting this issue aside at
the outset, the ambiguity owes nothing to the digital. The uncertainty is more a
matter of reconstruction than CGI and, therefore, is good argument for those
who would suggest that digital’s undercutting of the photographic as evidence is
no great matter as it has always been possible in such a way. On the other hand,
Stories We Tell just as well serves to bolster the view—here taken—that film as
evidence has always been doubtful. The apparently compelling authenticity of
this footage is a perfect example of why skepticism is the better fallback position.
This non-digital post-modern play with image integrity, however, is but a reflection
of a deeper, and equally time-honored, source of uncertainty—indeed of an
unsolvable dilemma for the documentary: the authenticity of performance itself.
Polley constantly raises questions about the validity of her interviewee’s
memories even as the 8mm footage illustrates their testimony. The 8mm—at
least some of it—is eventually revealed as suspect and so, by implication, is all
that she has been told. Narrated by her father Michael (who has been an actor)
and being about her, questions of the authenticity of performance and the
true presentation of self are constantly raised. The truth is elusive not least
because the family is a theatrical one. Brother Mark is the most overt in
presenting, as it were, their “good side;” and her father necessarily performs as
he reads the narration, on occasion on camera, in the recording studio. But the
fragility of the testimony of the “civilian” non-actors—other family members,
friends, etc—is also directly highlighted.
Filmmakers such as Polley, “famously stepped out in front of the camera in
1960 in Chronique d’un été . . . active provocateurs of a new kind of self-
reflexivity” (Chanan, 2008: 24). Image integrity was not then in question. In fact,
the opposite: as a pioneering work shot on the just introduced 16mm synch
equipment, its imagery was received as having a new level of evidentiary
“To Thine Own Self be True”
value. But its further claim is what is at issue here: “This film, made without
actors,” declared Jean Rouch, one of the directors in an initial voice-over,
“was played by men and women who devoted a moment of their existence
to a new experience of cinema truth”: “de cinéma vérité.”2 They were not
2
@ 0:00:40 Cet film n’est pas joué par les acteurs mais pas les hommes et les femmes qui ont donné une
moment de leur existence à une expérience nouvelle de cinéma vérité.
87
“actors”—that is to say: they learned no script. The film focuses on interviews
and conversation deliberately arranged by the filmmakers so that, arguably,
although they were well aware of the camera, they were not necessarily
pretending, as actors, inevitably at some level, must be.
Nevertheless, the other director, Edgar Morin’s conclusion as he and Rouch
walked the halls of the Musée de l’Homme on camera after filming a final
sequence of the participants (debating, in essence, the truthfulness of each
other’s on-camera appearances) was that the filmed either criticized each
other “as not being true to life . . . or they found them too true.” But what the
participants lived was not their lives but their lives when being filmed. And so,
in these terms, “our film’s a failure.”3
It is a danger that cannot be readily avoided by any documentary.
Prior to the reality tv phenomenon of late 1990s (which, again, owed little to
the digital), the question of the validity of performance in documentary had
seldom been directly raised. Big Brother and its ilk, however, occasioned “a new
take on documentary’s challenge to the viewer: spot the authentic person
behind the performance of self” (Ellis, 2005: 355). As a result, in such formatted
documentaries “the core of displayed individual behavior is in any event radically
suspect,” in John Corner’s view. It is a “performance” which “so over-determines its
character as ‘observed eventuality’ as to make it useless as any kind of indicator
of real social interaction or of specific personality” (Corner, 2002: 95).
In all human interactions, the possibility exists that the behavior witnessed
is untypical, constructed for effect; that speech is ill-informed or mendacious;
that emotions are misplaced or faked. And, moreover, in many cultures a space
exists wherein such falsities are licet and indeed privileged: the theater,
Shakespeare’s “wooden O,” for example. And it is also now the screen where
stories about “a world” unfold. The theater—realistic or not—demands that we
“on our imaginations work.” Film—realistic film—reduces that mental labor to
a question of deconstruction, testing the evidential accuracy of the image.
Gauging the authenticity of filmed performances figures centrally in the
“chain of distrust” which Annette Hill’s research has revealed heavily conditions
the minds of reality tv spectators (Hill, 2007: 144). The “chain” becomes heavier
for the spectator—the distrust greater—as it runs from news and current affairs
on to such formatted programs, adding ever weakening links as it goes. Distrust
in the authenticity of appearance, though, most occurs to the audience when
they think that the participants are, exactly, not “being” but “acting” as in a play.
3
@ 1:21:00.
88
They judge if the people on the screen are “acting up” (Hill, 2005, 2007). Spotting
this vitiates any claim on the real such programming makes and it little helps
the documentary project in general. It must never occur to the spectator of a
documentary to ask Hamlet’s question of the people filmed—“what’s Hecuba
to him, or he to Hecuba that he should weep for her.” As Morin suggests, such a
film fails as a documentary if the people in it are seen, as “actors or exhibitionists.”4
But the matter is far from being as straightforward as that.
1.2. Presentational acting

Appearances can legitimately encompass a number of variants between what
Tom Waugh terms “presentational” and “representational” performance
( Waugh, 2011[1990]: 74–9). But there is continuum here from the presentational
artificialities of even realistic acting, through to the representational authenticity
of being. Five points can be discerned:
Figure 15 ACTING ➔ ➔ ➔ BEING CONTINUUM
The start point denotes the professional business of theatrical performance

and is of no concern to us here. Professional actors must always re-enact and
are always self-aware—even when reenacting other witnessed “real” lives.
Non-professionals filmed in a documentary can also be aware of the camera

and re-enact or repeat actions in the same presentational mode. But they
can as well appear to be surveilled, apparently or actually unaware. Either way,
they are then representational enactors—merely being. The documentary
performance paradox flourishes among these ambiguities.
4
@ 1:21:00.
89
And paradox it is. As Tom Waugh points out: “Documentary film, in everyday
common-sense parlance, implies an absence of performance” ( Waugh, 2011
[1990]: 75). The performing “documentary actor” is, therefore, something of an
oxymoron. Any examination of this is especially vexed because of the confusions
of language. Specifically, English’s rich synonymity has obfuscated “everyday
common-sense parlance.”We have made a mélange of“acting,”“being,”“performing,”
“staging.” Both the words “act” and “performance” reflect what can be general: “to
carry out an action;” or specific: “the performance of plays” which involves
“simulation” (OED ). But performance or acting is fatal to documentary—or is it?
By Shakespeare’s time, to “act” (in English) had come to mean, among other
things, to appear on the stage. It was then that it thereby immediately acquired
the connotation of falsity, but paradoxically so. Actors, wrote William Hazlitt
some centuries later, are “the only honest hypocrites” (Hazlitt, 1818: 24,144). The
lie they present, at least in realistic theatrical or fictional film modes, is in the
service of truth. For the Stanislavskian actor, the work of such enactment is
finding the reflection of inner emotional truths and capturing imagined
realities behind the behavior—techniques for the “creation of the living world.”
To be able to achieve this, Constantin Stanislavski told his drama students: “you
have to reach the border of truth, cross that border and then walk back and
forth over that border” (in Smeliansky, 2008: 31).
Were the words to be spoken and the actions embodied the product not of
imagination but of the witnessed record of a past event—the re-enactment of
history—then this acting can be given documentary value. Professional re-
enacting of this sort—the second point on the acting-being continuum—
becomes the basis of drama-documentary—a justified technique when there
is “no other way to tell it” and the “it” is well enough documented elsewhere (eg
in court transcripts) (Paget, 1998: 142–51).
Professional re-enactments have become established as a legitimate
documentary technique. Rejecting direct cinema, in The Thin Blue Line (Errol
Morris| USA | 1988) the wrongly accused prisoner, Randall Adams, is interviewed
at length on camera and his testimony is illustrated by meticulous
reconstructions, shot in film noir style, in which he is played by an actor, Adam
Goldfine. Goldfine is one of eight professionals to be credited as appearing in

the film’s “re-enactments” as opposed to 18 interviewees who appear as “him-”
or “herself.” In Stories We Tell, 18 interviewees are all presented as “storytellers”
whose memories are illustrated by 19 actors in the 8mm home-movie
footage—including one actor actually playing, as himself, an actor; and,
crucially, another, Rebecca Jenkins, playing the central character in the entire
90
film, Diane Polley, Sarah’s deceased mother. The 35mm film noir footage in Thin
Blue Line seeks, forensically, to establish exactly how an event occurred, while
the faux 8mm home-movie footage in Stories We Tell makes no such claim. It
merely suggests a filmed reality of family life and relationships. Both, though,
have the same purpose—the seeking of truth through “lies.”
And, the logic of this clearly also legitimates, at a point teetering on the
edge of fiction, actors in conditional documentary playing characters to
embody potential future situations which have yet to come to pass (Mills,
2011), eg: Smallpox 2002 (see p. 27).
What Marceline Loridan, a non-professional who was then a market
researcher, does walking across the Place de la Concorde and into a deserted
Les Halles in long-shot in Chronique d’un été is exactly of a piece with what
professional actors involved in re-enacting such witnessed-based scenes for a
drama-documentary are doing. For Chronique, the filmmakers actualize her
remembered internal state of mind, her mentalité, when being deported as a
Jewish girl to Auschwitz by the Nazis. With a hidden portable tape recorder,
she walks across the Place de la Concorde recalling the traumatic events of two
decades earlier. Despite the pain of recollection which is surely in no way false,
Loridan repeatedly bends her head towards the hidden microphone each time
she speaks to ensure she is being recorded cleanly, and then raises it for the
camera when she pauses.
This bespeaks a trained thespian command. Exercising such control is,
according to Hazlitt, exactly the essence of acting, which “is not in the least of
unmediated, improvisatori kind; it is throughout elaborate and systemic instead
of being loose, off-hand and accidental” (Hazlitt, 1818: 24–5). By these lights
(which of course are not the only ones to be considered), Marceline was not only
acting; she was acting brilliantly. She was though, tragically, playing a part “that
was in fact her own”—as was Mark Polley, say—but to far more serious purpose.
Given her everyday status, Loridan’s performance is an example of the third
point on the continuum, non-professional re-enacting. The crucial difference
between her and the professionals (apart from wages) is that the thoughts she
utters—the role she is playing—are her own. To take a further extreme

example, it is the foundation of the claim on the real in Brian Hill’s documusicals.
In Feltham Sings, Hill films a teenage burglar in his cell in a young offender’s
institution, singing: “Brother did time; mother did time; uncle did time—now
it’s my turn. . . . Ain’t no picnic, ain’t no holiday, not for a kid that’s born in
Holloway” (the London women’s prison). The words reflect a biographical truth,
refracted through poet Simon Armitage’s lyrics which the boy, in effect,
91
re-enacts. Young offenders, porn film workers, convicted women murderers—
archetypical observational documentary victims—are given, literally, a voice
with which to re-enact their entire life-experience. The thread of witness from
interview—which alone could not provide such insight—to on-camera
performance binds the result to the documentary.5
Non-professional re-enactment can involve witnesses of an historical event
replaying the actions of others—eg: the miners playing evicting gendarmes in
the reconstruction of a bitter coal-field strike in Misère au Borinage (1933).6
Re-enactment can also illuminate typical events of the past with people
replaying the probable actions of unknown others. In The 1940s House (2001)7
for example, the volunteer family, the Hymers, reliving the conditions of Britain
during the Second World War, were woken in the middle of night, without
warning, by an air-raid siren set-off deliberately by the crew.
Still 7 “it was so, so real. . . I felt fear and I felt panic”
The 1940s House| Alex Graham/Simon Shaw| UK | 2001
For all its extreme formal artificiality, the sequence nevertheless showed us a
glimpse of life under the German bombs. The wife, Lynn Hymers, said that “It
was the strangest experience she had ever had.” She felt the fear and panic that
she thought women in the blitz must have suffered.
In fact, less overtly representational re-enactments are an everyday given of
documentary film. Directed repeated actions, which the filmed must know are
5
Brian Hill| Feltham Sings| UK | 2002, t/x December 17; Pornography: The Musical | UK | 2003, t/x
October 21); Songbirds| UK | 2005, t/x December. The descriptor used is “documentary musical” or
“documusical.”
6
Joris Ivens & Henri Storck| Belgium| 1933.
7
The 1940s House| Alex Graham/Simon Shaw| UK | January 1, 2001.
92
being filmed, is needed by filmmakers to obey Hollywood norms for the
creation of space and time. What might be, initially in filming, an unrehearsed
enactment becomes a re-enactment when retakes are called for. The existence
of multiple takes of, say, the Lumière workers exiting the factory—sometimes
with a horse pulling a cart, or with two horses pulling a cart or with no horses
and no carts—and with a dog sometimes on the street as the gates open,
sometimes coming out through them—does not meaningfully alter the
authenticity of the image. It is Lille; it is 1895; and the people we see represent
themselves as leaving after work. To dismiss any of these takes as mendacious
is to fail to understand that, as Bruzzi correctly says: “authentic documentary
representation” is, surveillance possibly apart (see p. 95), impossible and is
always compromised (Bruzzi, 2013: 48).8
However, this is exactly the prize direct cinema wanted to win in the 1960s:
unaware, single take, representational enactment as the only legitimate
footage which can be considered documentary. Professional actors re-
enacting any role—well attested by witness, or not—was, of course, not
tolerated. Neither did the dogme allow for non-professional re-enactment
(Loridan, the miners, Mrs Hymers). Nor, in theory, were all requests to repeat
actions “for the camera” allowed either (the Lumière workers, Allakariallak and,
it is safe to say, a majority of people filmed since). Direct cinema’s over-claiming
of the real because of non-intervention seems to have created, certainly in the
anglophone journalist mind, totally unrealistic expectations, rendering even
quotidian retakes, should they become known, illicit. Nevertheless, they are a
given and are not destructive of the validity of witness.
1.3. Presentational being

The presentational is displayed by any acknowledgments of the camera.
Allakariallak’s direct gaze in Nanook of the North as “Nanook,” for example,
standing before the static camera doing nothing, Paul Henley argues9 is the
most truthful image of the man in the film because all parties—filmed, filmer,
and spectator—are aware of the camera. Such static portrait shots did not
survive in documentary’s repertoire, except rarely.10 Awareness, whether in
8
The expectation can become farcical (see p. 28).
9
Personal communication.
10
Jean Rouch, for example, has two of those he is filming so introduce themselves in Jaguar |
France, Niger, Ghana| 1957. (Originally shot in 1954/5). Paul Henley details various versions, (Henley,
2009: 375).
93
overt or covert enactment, is not necessarily fatal to authenticity. And, so, by
extension, neither is the interview, its commonest overt form.
Mrs Hyman’s filmed behavior getting her family into their air-raid shelter was
a presentational re-enactment. She may not have acknowledged the camera
but the context suggests to the spectator that she must have known it is there.
(There was, after all, no air-raid.) But she certainly could not avoid being aware
of being recorded during the interview she gave afterwards which is quoted
above. This was, by contrast with her panicked bundling of the children into the
air-raid shelter, unambiguously a presentational performance—the fourth
point on the continuum, non-professional enactment. Although self-aware,
her words cannot be classed as a re-enactment as what she said was (the
application of Peircean percepts suggests) unscripted; and if truly so, then
logically impossible to be a re-enactment.
Interviews—de facto presentational and aware—are everywhere in
documentary. The filmed behavior is self-evidently entirely occasioned by the
process of filming. So, a potential paradox: by these lights, despite being the
most self-conscious, the most authentic appearances in the classic GPO
archive of the 1930s—those nearest to capturing “being” rather than “acting”—
are the interviews, arranged by Ruby, Grierson’s sister, in Housing Problems
(1935).11 As with Allakariallak’s portrait shot, all parties are self-aware.
But interviews, although enacted, were too self-aware for direct cinema and
were verboten according its dogme. Such presentational appearances were the
business of cinéma vérité—in effect, left to Rouch et al.12 Direct cinema’s grail,
unaware presentational enactment, presupposes a non-awareness of the
camera. Or, if the filmed are aware, spectators must not be allowed to notice it.
Anyway, direct cinema filmers worked on the assumption that the filmed are
too distracted by what they are being filmed doing to notice that they are, in
fact, being filmed. Either unawareness or distraction, whether actually in play
or not, are of great significance for audiences in “judging truth claims” (Hill,
2007: 144). The audience deduces “ ‘real’ character from the clues and the slips
provided by the on-screen performance of speech and action” (Corner, 2002:
94). If there is the slightest doubt as to the authenticity of the representation of
11
Housing Problems| Edgar Anstey/Arthur Elton| UK | 1935.
12
The distinction here suggested is by no means widely accepted. The terms direct cinema and
cinéma vérité are often seen as synonymous and were, to a certain extent, used as such by the
direct cinema pioneers. Tom Waugh gives a definitive explanation of the origins of this ( Waugh,
2011: xviii); and a clear—if somewhat ahistorical—distinction can be drawn between North
American direct cinema observationalism and French cinéma vérité intervention.
94
self, then, what Jane Roscoe has called of the “flicker of authenticity” goes out
(Roscoe, 2001: 473).
Prior to the 1960s, though, the profoundly intrusive nature of the filming
process compromised the authenticity of filmed behavior. For the pre-war
documentarist, getting the filmed through the barrier of their inhibitions required,
in the words of Harry Watt, either wheedling or bullying them “down to some
sort of naturalness” ( Watt, 1974: 83); or calling for repetition to the point where
they were too exhausted to be self-conscious, Humphrey Jennings’ preferred
technique. In Fires Were Started, he filmed his fireman, supposedly waiting for an
air-raid, singing the same song around a piano repetitively for nine hours.13 Their
Dutch contemporary, Joris Ivens, used subterfuge, by briefing the people he was
filming individually to allow for “a certain amount of unrehearsed interaction”
(Ivens, 1940: 32–40). Acting “naturally,” as Ivens called it, was the objective. Above
all, catching the direct gaze of the filmed was a taboo. The injunction was: “don’t
look at the camera,” as Harry Watt called his autobiography ( Watt, 1974).
Given that much of this was due to the intrusiveness of the then available
equipment, the techniques used to achieve representational “naturalness” were,
unsurprisingly, rendered largely redundant in the 1960s by the development
of 16mm synch sound equipment and faster film stocks. Unawareness
and/or distraction became direct cinema’s “fly-on-the-wall” givens. Self-denying
ordinances promised authenticity: “never ask a question; never ask anyone to do
anything; never ask anyone to repeat an act or phrase that you missed; never
pay anyone” (Leacock, 1975: 148). The observational norm became:
unobtrusive filmmakers . . . who attempt to fade into the background and thus
minimize the impact of their presence . . . so that, although the “actors” knew
about it, the filming was done in such a way that they “almost forgot” they
were being filmed (Gross, 1985: 6).
Whether or not this was possibe, as Larry Gross points out, “[t]he basic rule of
such filmmaking is to discourage the participants from looking at the camera
or speaking to the filmmakers, and to edit out any instances in which they do
so” (Gross, 1985: 6). And if they did, and the look was not edited out, this could
be included in the cut to indicate a measure of truthfulness, a paradoxical
guarantee of non-intervention.
13
Interview: Fred Griffith (“Johnny” in Fires Were Started) “The Heart of Britain,” Omnibus| Robert Vas|
UK | 1970, t/x September 20).
95
The end point of the continuum from acting to being lies with surveillance
images, which now so suffuse everyday life all over the world. The “flicker” of
authenticity is strongest because the actions on the screen are not affected by
the filmed’s consciousness of the camera. Leaving aside the morality of the
intrusion involved in any public use of such footage, supposition of self-
awareness on the part of the filmed is reduced or removed.
Throughout the duration of The Bridge (2005),14 we repeatedly return to
observe Gene Sprague—through an extreme telescopic lens—pace the
Golden Gate bridge until, at the climax of the film, he jumps to his death. The
filmmakers, because of this pacing behavior, know full well of his plan. But they
were in place exactly to document such “jumpers,” and the “aggie” came first.
Leave (if possible) the moral repugnance this occasions (if possible) aside. In
this context, we can note that we (and they) also know that Sprague was
unaware of being filmed for a theatrical documentary.
Outside of such circumstances, which, it may be thought, render in some
way the spectator as complicit as the filmmakers in a failure of a duty of care,
the screen never yields enough data for the spectator to be absolutely
convinced of the authenticity of the behavior of the filmed.
2. BEHAVING
2.1. Performativity
At the same time that “act” was acquiring, in English, its theatrical meaning, the
word “perform” came into the language meaning “to carry out to completion”
actions without such negative overtones as “acting” brought with it. Sprague,
then, was “performing” in the original meaning of the word the final minutes of
his real self. “Perform” came to be used as a synonym for “act,” first in the 1880s
(OED ). In 1955, the linguistic philosopher, John Austin proposed “performative”
in an Oxford lecture as a neologism to characterize certain sorts of statements
which have direct consequences in the world, eg: “I now pronounce you man
and wife”; “I name this ship . . .” (Austin, 1955); or “Shazam!”; “Speak friend and
enter”; and (in the Norman French still used ceremonially in the UK Parliament)
“la Reine le veult”15 which transforms a Bill into an Act of British law. In short, to
14
The Bridge| Eric Steele| USA | 2006.
15
“The Queen wills it,” spoken, in Norman French, by the Clerk of the Parliaments.
96
use the title of Austin’s subsequent monograph, “performative” for him initially
meant “doing things with words” (Austin, 1962).
In John Searle’s thinking, these performative utterances are declarative
illocutionary speech acts directly changing reality. They are words which
perform the acts they describe as Austin suggests: “The meeting is adjourned,”“I
divorce you” (said three times in certain cultures) (Searle, 1975: 54). Performative
utterances create “institutional facts” and so could also embrace directives
(eg commands), commissives (eg promises and oaths), assertives (eg recitation
of a creed) or expressives (eg congratulations) (Searle, 1975: 345–51).
“Performative,” it is agreed, “is that discursive practice that enacts or produces
that which it names”(Butler, 1993: 13). But Judith Butler’s formative work on the
concept takes “discursive practice” beyond speech. All “gesture, and all manner
of symbolic social sign,” not just utterance in the strictest Austinian sense, can
be performative (Butler, 1990: 270). This is a turn of considerable significance,
not least for feminism. Performativity becomes a basis for refining the distinction
between the biological “fact” of sex and the social construction of gender. In
such an instance, the concept approaches the sociologist Erving Goffman’s
general theory of role-playing in everyday life which, too, sees all behavior as
performance. For Goffman, the essential objective for any individual is to “stage
a character” (in essence, her own) successfully in the public sphere (Goffman,
1959: 29–31). The performance of gender, then, is a social performance like any
other, although its significance for the self is obviously of a particular profundity.
Goffman’s vision of the self as a construction responding to external stimulae
in the social sphere implies an element of judgment on the part of those
witnessing the performance. The role player might wish their performance to
be “successful” but cannot guarantee it will be so received. Writing in a pre-
“performative” era, Goffman is ready to allow “the possibility of an inauthentic
self responding to social awareness” as being of significance (Hughes, 2012:
241). Indeed, leaving aside mendacity, Goffman’s social actors are quite capable
of being cynical about their performance; or of teetering between “cynicism
and sincerity” (Goffman, 1959: 31). A Goffmanesque reading of social behavior
therefore readmits the possibility of “acting’s” negative overtones.

But for Austin, the speech act is in no way “acting,” at least as it is understood
in the theatrical sense. That is to say, the question of authenticity, central to the
reception of such representation, does not arise. “The meeting is adjourned”
does not require that those present must “acquire information about [the chair]
or to bring into play information about him [sic] already possessed”; ie that
which motivates social interaction in Goffman’s model (Goffman 1959: 1). The
97
committee might well be “interested in [the chair’s] general socio-economic
status.” They might be concerned with how the chair feels about them and they
will certainly have a view of her (or his) “competence” and “trustworthiness.”
However, the utterer’s presentation of self is irrelevant. She speaks and the
meeting is over. (“Speak friend” and the door opens. Shout “Shazam!” and you
are become “Captain Marvel.”) The illocutionary statement is not dialogical. It
and its speaker are as they are. So in Searle too there is no immediate mention
of authenticity or integrity either (Searle, 1975; Searle 1969).
Butler as well avoids any of the questions of integrity. Following Austin, she
specifically warns against reading performativity in her sense to reflect its
theatrical roots as performance: “the links between a theatrical and social role
are not easily drawn” (Butler, 1990: 276). She does though, gloss “gender” as “an
act that has been rehearsed much as a script survives the actors who make use
of it” (Butler, 1990: 27). Nevertheless, in sum, for her: “Gender reality is
performative which means quite simply that it is real only to the extent to
which it is performed” (Butler, 1990: 278). This can be reversed and extended:
that is to say, all performance, by the very fact of its performance, “simply” has
to be real. All “stagings” authentically, one way or another, reflect the person.
Inauthentic behavior authentically reveals him or her as effectively as sincere
behavior does. To lie or misrepresent one’s self, to fake or distort one’s identity
is still performatively valid: eg, as with the Friedmans. Their home movies
authentically stage a mendacious performance of respectability.
By receiving even inauthenticity as reflecting authentic personas, sociological
and psychological “role-theory,” and the cognate concept of “performativity,”
side-step the question of authenticity.16 More usually, for documentaries, the
confusions of performativity’s tolerance of inauthenticity are compounded. In
scholarship on the cinema it can become a virtual synonym for “performance,”
just as “performance” is a synonym for “acting.”17 The older business of acting
becomes something of a suppressed topic in documentary studies. The value
of the concept of the performative, for all its efficacy in general, is limited as a
tool for determining the integrity of performance. It is certainly not easy, for
example, to see how in a strict Austinian linguistic sense performativity’s
tolerance for falsity applies in documentaries.
16
“performance documentary” would inevitably connote films of actual performances (eg: Jazz on
a Summer’s Day| Bert Stern| USA | 1959) and “rockumentaries.”
17
There are other contexts in which “performance”/“performativity” figure. For Bill Nichols, films in
the “performative” documentary mode “stress subjective aspects of a classically objective discourse,”
privileging the film’s making (and maker) over its referents (Nichols, 1994: 95).
98
It is surely not the case that “[d]ocumentaries, like Austin’s performatives,
perform the actions they name” (Bruzzi, 2006: 155). Of course, the people in
documentaries and documentaries as a whole “name actions” but they do so
usually with quite nugatory effect. It was an ambition of Grierson’s “to command
the minds of a generation,” but it never very clearly resulted in actually doing
so. As Searle points out: “the possibility of creating institutional facts by
declaration does not hold for every institutional fact. You cannot for example
make a touchdown by saying you are making it” (Searle, 1975: 55). And this is
why broader notions of the performative which bring it into line with role-
theory are not helpful in assuaging distrust of “acting up.”
2.2. Casting
In effect, the documentarists needed the filmed, extravert or not, to be exactly
like David Garrick, the ancestor of modern English realistic stage performance,
as he is characterized in Oliver Goldsmith’s mock epitaph on him: “On stage he
was simple, natural affecting.” But a filmmaker choses to film somebody
because, like Garrick, “Twas only that, when he was off, he was acting” (as
Goldsmith adds) (Goldsmith, 1774: 12). Hence the talk of casting, retakes, and
roles which exactly reflects the processes of the stage and the fiction cinema.
Direct cinema recorded representational behavior more easily than could
be done with the paraphernalia of 35mm. But despite the stridency with which
non-interventionism was presented to the public as being an earnest of
authenticity, still often: “we will feel that the behavior we observe was somewhat
constrained by the subjects’ knowledge that they were being filmed” (Gross,
1985: 6). An extreme example: the disturbed pacing of the naked man in his cell
in solitary confinement in a prison for the criminally insane in Wiseman’s Titicut
Follies (1967) seems to lack all marks of presentation—although, even so, the
savvy spectator will know he could not be unaware of being observed by his
guards if not by the camera.18
It is entirely reasonable to hold that, even with direct cinema:
The “actors” must be presumed to be controlling their “presentation” to the

filmmakers (and thus to the viewer of the film) through choices of commission
and omission that reflect communicative intent (Gross, 1985:6).
18
Titicut Follies| Fred Wiseman| USA | 1967.
99
The savvy spectator cannot avoid this presumption; but, as “authentic
documentary representation” is impossible to achieve, as Bruzzi says, we can
settle for what our collateral experience determines is authentic and what is
not (Bruzzi, 2006: 185) Casting does not destroy documentary value.
Nor, necessarily does “acting”—or something very close to how that can be
usually understood.
In the 1950s, in addition to his more conventional ethnographic filming, Jean
Rouch began making “ethnofictions.” In these films, Jaguar or Moi, un noir19 for
example, the experience of western modernity for young men in the emerging
independent West African states is documented largely through incidents they
themselves suggest—typical but un-witnessed—and which they are then filmed
performing. From the establishment of a market stall, for example, in Jaguar to a
(possible) fantasy conclusion of an encounter with a prostitute in Moi, un noir,
Rouch’s Africans present themselves not only as they are but as they aspire to be.
Nevertheless, such techniques, however illuminating, run the danger of
crossing the line into fiction—a border Rouch did not acknowledge to exist
but which is too ideologically embedded to be so easily ignored. Filming the
enactment of previously un-witnessed events, even with non-professionals
suggesting the sequences themselves, weakens documentary legitimacy. But, if
the sequence is a re-enactment rather than an enactment, this needs not be so.
In the opening (filmed) conversation in Chronique, between Rouch, Morin, and
Marceline Loridan, she cuts a palpably nervous figure whom Rouch seeks to calm:
Still 8 “Morin and I only want you to answer some questions”

Chronique d’un été| Jean Rouch/Edgar Morin| France| 1960
19
Jaguar—see f/n 12 above.
100
“What we’re asking of you, with great trickery, Morin and I only want you
to answer our questions. And if you say anything you don’t like, there’s
always time to cut . . .”.20 After a few weeks of constant filming, however, her
presentational abilities were transformed. She explained to Joram ten Brink
how she had so quickly come by this new-found confidence. It was after she
had seen the rushes of an emotional interview with another of the participants
in the film, that she realized that: “I understood everything. I understood
how one could act oneself. I understood how one could use emotion and
look good on film” (ten Brink, 2007a: 147)—even when recalling the most
unimaginably terrible moments of one’s life.
And so, in the Place de la Concorde and Les Halles, she became the film’s
director:
During that scene I became the filmmaker. I proposed the scene to Rouch and
Morin. I told them I had to be alone and they had to be far away from me. I
took the Nagra [audio tape recorder] and put it under my coat21 with the
microphone (ten Brink, 2007a: 147).
The camera was pushed through the open roof of a Citroen 2CV and the
car was pushed by the crew with its engine off to avoid its sound being
picked up (Henley, 2009: 161). Her ad lib recollections, delivered sotto voce,
were devastating, especially as, at that time, Holocaust documentaries were
still something of a rarity.
At the film’s end, Rouch and Morin are seen on screen assessing how well
they think they have captured the truth of those they filmed, including the
acting subject, Marceline. Rouch says, “they don’t really know themselves.
Marceline said she acted the Concorde scene; but she didn’t.” Morin adds: “Or if
she did it was her most authentic side.”22
Morin was right; Rouch was wrong.
The value of Stories We Tell is that it suggests, in this new century, some
greater attention needs to be paid than hitherto to the vexed question of the
appearances of the filmed in documentary. It cannot be a matter of simple

truthfulness (it never was). No more can it accept performativy’s suggestion
that concern as to the authenticity of behavior is an irrelevance because
20
@ 0:01:41.
21
It seems likely it was in the large shopping bag she was holding.
22
@ 1:22:02.
101
behavior is always of itself authentic whatever mendacities are in train.
Nor is that the presentation of self is automatically rendered invalid if it is
self-conscious. Non-professional enactments and re-enactments, whether
presentational or representational, can all make valid claims to show us life,
(just as can professional re-enactments). And surveillance, although it might
be the best guarantor of showing nevertheless often—usually?—tells us little
or nothing of mentalité.
All that we know for certain from the screen is that Gene Sprague was
not acting.
102
5 “Giving Voice”
CO-CREATING: Beyond the authenticity of the filmeds’ personal presentation of

self on the screen lies the question of their editorial CONTROL (1) in general. Digital
facilitates the Engagement (1.1) of acting subjects and enables their Empowerment
(1.2) as hybridic filmed/filmers. Not all documentary has an overt political agenda
but if social CHANGE (2) is in view (as it often is) then the filmed/filmers’ presence
is most significant, transforming filmmakers (directors) into Facilitators (2.1)
Embedded (2.2) in the co- creation of projects.
1. CONTROL
1.1. Engagement
Journalist and filmmaker Elaine McMillion arrived in Welch, McDowell County,
West Virginia in 2011. “McDowell,” she has explained, “is frequently seen as the
worst of everything in West Virginia. . . . It’s always ‘highest teen pregnancy,’
‘highest obesity,’ ‘highest heart disease,’ ‘highest rate of drug overdose,’ and on
and on” (in Astle, 2013a). In short, it is a classic “othered place” (Cameron, 2002);
and so reporting on McDowell County’s exceptionalism meets the press’
requirement for hyperbole as a story’s essential prerequisite. It also furnishes
the social victims so central to the mainstream documentary tradition.
Moreover, the Appalachian “poverty belt” is, historically, not the safest of places
for camera-toting outsiders, thereby furnishing another journalistic plus—the
frisson of intrepidness. Nearly half a century or so earlier, 123 miles west of
McDowell over the state line in Kentucky in Letcher County, an NFB director,
Hugh O’Connor, was shot dead by a landowner on whose property he was
filming the same “exotic dirt” (as Joris Ivens had once called it). The locals
thought the killer was right to murder “the son of a bitch. . . . They oughtn’t to
make fun of mountain people. They’ve made enough fun of mountain people”
(in Trilling, 1969: 178).1
1
See also an undeservedly overlooked documentary on the O’Connor killing: Stranger with a
Camera| Elizabeth Barratt| USA | 2000. Barrett is also Appalachian-born.
103
But McMillion was born an hour’s drive north of McDowell in Logan County,
WV. So, apart from the passage of 44 years, she had this—here argued as
crucial—advantage over the Canadian O’Connor: although herself a journalist,
she was, automatically as it were, a child of Appalachia, more spokeswoman
than visiting fireman (however sympathetic). And her pitch was therefore the
reverse of the usual negatives. Her “man-bites-dog” rational was the positive
side of Appalachian life:
what I learned when I came here was that there were a lot of people with
fascinating stories to tell. . . . After I met all these amazing people, we just
thought it would be a really rich new media experience that would allow
more voices to be heard and allow a lot of participation from the community
(in Astle 2013b).
McMillion thus had something else in mind about how to let these voices
speak. Using all the current affordance of web-/i-docs she produced not
another linear documentary, however unexpectedly positive, for the archive of
films on Appalachia but, rather, a website, Hollow (hollowdocumentary.com).
Still 9 “a lot of people with fascinating stories to tell”

Hollow | Elaine McMillion/the people of McDowell County| USA | 2011–
The site offers an absorbing, elegantly designed, accessible and engaging

portrait of the community. It includes some three hours of community-focused
material, video, and audio as well as stills, Instagrams, and an on-going
Facebook discussion page; all contextualized by dynamic graphics highlighting
104
the statistics of rural decline in America generally and the coal communities in
particular. And, for all her signature on the work, she is not the only creator of
Hollow because the citizenry of McDowell were not only filmed by her; they
also shot their own video which McMillion incorporates. Here is the “acting
subject”—the filmed—taking active control of content. Hollow is a shared
enterprise; and it remains live, comments and observations being added on an
on-going basis. All this, and her bona fides as a local, mark Hollow as an early
canonical example of web-/i-doc possibilities. And, as with that canon in
general, its topic perfectly echoes the agenda of the Griersonian victim
tradition.
Filming in McDowell County carries baggage. The realpolitik of Appalachia
as a site of deprivation, a cockpit of capitalist aggression and ruthlessness
cannot be avoided; nor can the archive illuminating it, to which Hollow is
necessarily both an addition and a corrective, be ignored. McMillion does not
overlook these factors and her ambition to change at least this stereotyping
by inviting collaboration from those too long denied voice is admirable. But,
for all web-/i-docs’ new capacities, her topic sits firmly in an old—especially
anglo—documentary tradition. We have been here before, and her justification
for bringing us here again—that what we think we know is not the whole
story—is also a familiar one. It is, after all, one basis of “news” as a concept.
And, although it is by no means the only reason for making documentaries,
this particular strand of the tradition imbues documentary with a distinct
purpose—which, again, she by no means avoids:
We hope that [the people of McDowell County] use the tools we’ve given
them to help make. . . small local changes that they’ve been wanting to make
for so many years. And I think that that’s really empowering for the people
here—and exciting for us that we’ve been able to see new media actually
have an effect (in Astle, 2013b).
McMillion eschews Grierson’s ambition “to command the mind of a generation”

by letting it speak for itself; but she is not apart from current iterations of
such socially engaged documentary’s purpose: Britdocs assertion (however
hyperbolic) that documentaries are changing the world, for example. She
might not be hoping to erect revolutionary barricades but she is, hopefully,
“Giving Voice”
enabling those she filmed, like Yukong in the old Chinese legend, to move the
mountain of social problems one stone at a time. McMillion’s engagement is
thus political and, de facto, it is concerned with power.
105
So, to begin to evaluate how well it, and other contemporary work equally
addressing the tradition of the social victim as the prime documentary subject,
does this let us consider another “fascinating” and “amazing” Appalachian story.
Still 10 “What those people in North Carolina really need to know

is . . .”
The Harlan County Tapes| John Gaventa/UMW | USA | 1972
Here is Bessie Lou Cornett, of Harlan County, Kentucky. Her statement was
recorded decades before Hollow, but it also exploited a then new media
technology and it was also about power and citizenship:
What those people in North Carolina really need to know [she says] is . . .
maybe I can tell them this way: There’s been three really terrifying experiences
that I’ve had since I have been on the picket line—and I don’t really want to
call it a picket line. I want to call it protesting. But they can call it anything they
like. . . . The first thing that happened was the state police when I got out the
car at 4:30 in the morning and I’d seen the troopers lined up. . . . There would
be no violence. . . . They were there to see there was no violence and we were
not going to stop any traffic and if that was our idea we should get it out of
our heads and we could be arrested for rioting. . . . This was the first tactic they
used. I was so upset and angry. I got out of the car and the first thing I said was
“What have we here? Gestapo? I can’t believe it.” I couldn’t believe it.
106
This statement, filmed on the recently introduced Sony home-video Portapak,
testifies to Ms Cornett’s experiences during the bitter 1972/3 coal strike in
Harlan County—the next along from where O’Connor had been murdered.
The men at the Brookside Mine had voted to join the United Mine Workers but
the owners refused to sign a contract with the union. The 180 miners withdrew
their labor and the ensuing strike lasted over a year. Constant friction with the
scabs lead to the fatal shooting of one worker and endless physical abuse,
even against the strikers’ families, on the picket line.
Bessie Lou Cornett was also filmed by Barbara Kopple for her feature
documentary Harlan County, USA at the same time, about the same strike.
Although, as a New Yorker, Kopple was another stranger with a camera, her
engagement and dedication cannot be doubted. While filming, she too was
shot at by a company goon. Nor can the quality of her work be denied. The
film is moving and beautifully made and it certainly deserved the Oscar it
won in 1976. But by now the strike was long over—lost. Here, then, is the
documentarist’s unavoidable dilemma: for all Harlan County USA’s “passion” and
“good intentions” (Biskind, 1977: 4; King, 1981: 7), the outcome of the filming for
the filmed and for the filmer were unequal as they almost always are. Perhaps
this is inevitable with the mainstream documentary, however engagé; certainly
nothing more could be asked of Kopple.2
On the other hand, although no more effective in the long run, the Portapak
tapes were directly part of the struggle. They were seen then and there during
the strike—and nowhere else. Utilitarian to the point of crudity, they were
“an experiment in using an emerging communications technology to build
power among union miners”3 not merely to raise consciousness in the
audience (see p. 195). Their artlessness is irrelevant in the context of the
urgency of their purpose.
In Kopple’s film, Bessie Lou Cornett is interviewed reminiscing about her
family’s long commitment to the principles of unionization. In the tapes, the
clue to her agreeing to be filmed lies in her opening words: “What those people
in North Carolina really need to know is . . .” Violence aside, the owners had
imposed a news blackout on the stoppage, hindering the support of adjacent
2
Kopple had begun what was to be a distinguished career working with the Maysles brothers.
“Giving Voice”
Harlan County, USA is her first director’s credit. Despite her proven ability (eg the Oscar), the
Reaganite Federal arts funding agencies initially denied her support for another film about a long
strike, eventually made as American Dream (1990). It too won an Oscar.
3
Tom Hansell (Center For Appalachian Studies, Appalachian State University). Personal
communication, January 2, 2016.
107
mining communities—including those across the state line in North Carolina.
Ms Cornett was, therefore, making no general consciousness-raising media
appeal by using this new platform. The tapes were primarily to be seen by
people “who need to know” standing around a 12 inch black-and-white
monitor. Cornett’s goal was to maintain and gather support by all possible
means from those close enough to provide it. It was a purpose shared by the
man who filmed her, John Gaventa.
Gaventa was no “visiting fireman” journalist/documentarist, either. He was
engaged in the strike as a political scientist/sociologist (and Tennessean). He
had come to Harlan County in the course of researching a doctoral thesis on
power structures in Appalachia. But he was part of the struggle between the
community and the company because he was a union activist. The situation
was especially complex as the United Mine Workers leadership had been
corrupted and Gaventa was associated with the dissident radical group that
had been trying to oust it. He had brought the then brand-new technology of
the home-video camera with him from the Highlander Center in Tennessee, a
central institution since the 1930s for leadership training and education in the
labor and civil rights movements, especially in the South.
It was fresh from attending a course at Highlander that, on December 1,
1955, Rosa Parks had refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus in
Montgomery, Alabama. Her gesture of defiance marks a symbolic moment at
the start of a struggle that would eventually lead to the 1964 Civil Rights Act.4
This was the tradition of activism and change in which Gaventa was working.
So, as far the media technology went, the question being explored was: what,
in reality, was the use of a home-video camera (or any other piece of audio-
visual kit) for moving the stones of social disconnect, even one at the time?
This is a question still relevant: how can media technology, today, be “a way of
facing reality in this digital age,” as Peter Wintonick put it? ( Wintonick, 2013:376)
For Gaventa, nearly half a century ago, facing the company’s thugs and the
uncertain support of the union leadership, Sony’s machine was no more than
a new tool.5 He had begun “to wonder . . . not why rebellion occurs in a
democracy but why, in the face of massive inequalities, it does not:” in short,
issues of Power and Powerlessness/Quiescence and Rebellion, as he was to entitle

his influential thesis (Gaventa, 1980: vi). His focus was and remains on “the
4
Pub. L. 88–352, 78 Stat. 241.
5
Mass media were, of course, also part of this and the tapes Gaventa made were even used to
convince Granada Television in the UK to make a World in Action film about the strike.
108
issues of power and its links with processes of citizen engagement, participation
and deepening forms of democracy” (Gaventa, 2006:24). It led to his central
concept of the “power cube.”
Figure 16 THE POWER CUBE
The “power cube” envisages a three-dimensional approach to explain the

nature of power involving “levels,” “spaces,” and “forms.” Is the intervention
seeking to exercise power being mounted—with media or in any other way—
at global, national, or local levels? Is the forum for this intervention a space
behind closed doors, or one to which invitation from the power-holders is
possible; or does it need to be claimed or created in the face of opposition
from them? Is the form of the intervention invisible, hidden, or visible? Arranged
as a quasi-Rubric cube, these three dimensions—levels x spaces x forms—
yield 18 “tiles” which, if a change in power relations is to be effected, need to be
“Giving Voice”
appropriately aligned. The cube does not say, mechanistically, how to achieve
social impact. It offers no template that, if followed, will automatically lead to
outcomes of significance. All it does is suggest that the most sophisticated,
109
detailed analysis of any given situation is an essential prerequisite to
development of campaigns—with or without media (which has no separate
“tile”)—to rebalance power and effect change.
Despite the difference in the two situations—indeed “rebellion” in Harlan
County in the 1970s but “quiescence” in McDowell in the 2000s—the
significance of the tapes and Hollow was, for those who appear in them,
identical: empowerment. It is a banality to suggest that it is delusion to believe
media use alone will stop the goons’ bullets or get you a seat at the front of the
bus. Equally, though, it is naïf to proceed as if media alone will achieve even
“small local changes” unless augmented and focused.
1.2. Empowerment
The importance of web-/i-docs such as Hollow lies not in forging a new
agenda for engaged work, which, after all, it does not do. In common with
other noted docmedia projects thus far, it echoes the agenda of the Griersonian
victim tradition. The new technology has not uncovered new topics for
documentary to illuminate. To show us life digitally is, still, to show us life.
Nevertheless, Hollow is important because, as much as any of these other early
works, it is:
an experiment in how to get members of a community to create their own

representation of a community. . . . Elaine [McMillion]’s idea was that the
experience of being able to tell their own story empowers people to take
more control over other aspects of their lives (Hansell).
Empowerment involves more than teaching people how to use video and
then uploading the “user-generated content” they produce. (Manuals exist
explaining how this can be done “in a nutshell”; eg Lunch & Lunch, 2006). Such
effort, though, does no more than empower people to make media to speak.
And while this is no small matter, any “standard assumptions” that this alone
will be effective are misleading ( Taylor, 2014: 4). To correct this, attention must
be to paid, as is beginning to happen, to a more realistic, grounded analysis of

the value of media as a change maker (eg Milne et al, 2012)—in effect: its place
on the cube.
Whether the social power relations in McDowell changed remains a rather
open question, but McMillion certainly went about the business of
empowerment in a number of significantly different ways from those of
110
traditional filmmaking, marking Hollow as an indicator of what might be done.
For example: much was made above of the filmers’ origins with the implication
that a shared measure of identity with the filmed was a real advantage if
empowerment and anti-stereotyping were truly to be in view. McMillion had
this, as she herself is from West Virginia.
Secondly, the web-/i-doc maker will have an interest in those she films
which goes beyond curiosity, sympathy, empathy, and the shibboleth of
“giving a voice.” In 2009, McMillion had become concerned about “ ‘youth
exodus and rural brain-drain as she herself realized she couldn’t return to her
hometown and make a living in her chosen field. She also knew that there was
more to the people and problems of Appalachia than the nightly news and
harsh statistics represented” (Lin Costa, 2013). Her project, though, was more
than autobiographical. For McMillion: “Empowering individuals to tell their
own story, is something that I am . . . very passionate about” (McMillion to
Kadish, 2013).
Which involves a third factor: unlike a linear documentary, Hollow has no
immediate closure—at least one dictated by the narrative arc of the readerly
text (although, of course, each viewing would be, collaterally, narrativized by
the spectator). As the filming went forward McMillion realized that she “didn’t
see this ending with a neat little bow tied on it” (Lin Costa, 2013). So, despite
the accessibility of current technology and the ubiquity of image capture
devices, this was to involve her in training people to make and upload their
own material, to keep the project live. Finally, despite all her other bona fides,
the web-/i-doc maker still needs to come with “clean hands”—that is, with
funding that has no strings attached. And this, too, McMillion does. For Hollow,
the technology not only made cheap production viable but it also provided a
means of paying for it: Kickstarter. As she explained: “In April of 2012, we held
a Kickstarter campaign where we raised $28,000. We exceeded our goal and
were able to create hype and a community around Hollow before we headed
down for production” (Anon [Filmmaker], n/d).
Hollow presents a native instigator, a desire to empower, an open project
and independent funding. Most of these factors suffuse the traditional
documentary archive as much as they mark the contemporary web-/i-doc.
Directors have never needed to be visiting fireman and have long brought
special levels of understanding, coming from their backgrounds, to the topics
“Giving Voice”
they film. The incorporation of other’s material, amateur as well as professional—

in the archival film or the film with archival elements, has been a staple of
documentary from Esfir Shub to Péter Forgács (Leyda, 1964). The intention to
111
empower, with or without user-generated content, is a given of radical linear
filmmaking as much as it is of more open forms.6 And the search for funding
independent of the box-office has also been a condition of documentary
production from the time in the 1920s when the form was identified and, fairly
promptly, faltered as mass entertainment in the cinema.
Only the openness (“writability”) of the project relies directly on a potentiality
of the web. The digital, without question, practically and radically expands
ways of producing for, and relating to, the screen. It has affordances that can
only be duplicated in a linear documentary environment with the same degree
of accessibility and interaction in theory but not really in practice. It is, therefore,
a necessity for any co-creative work by a filmed/filmer.
This filmed/filmer hybrid has yet to be clearly identified. The concepts in
play—“collaboration,” “participation,” and “interactivity”—confuse. Leave aside
interactivity as best being reserved, with all its own ambiguities intact, to the
spectating function. If social engagement is to be a factor, then collaboration
and participation in filmmaking, it is assumed here, must mean more than
mere involvement. In this context, the degree of potential redistribution of the
filmmaker’s traditional agenda setting power is the measure of both. Just
filming—however much sympathy the filmer has with the filmed—without
surrendering editorial control invites the scorn of a Grierson who once
suggested to a visitor that they pop down to Jennings’ cutting room to watch
“Humphrey being nice to the common people” ( Vaughan, 1983: 38). To
dispatch one’s documentary film production class to discover the socially
excluded is self-evidently valuable as part of their education but it leaves the
excluded as much out in the cold as ever. In short, being knowingly filmed
does not mean, meaningfully, to participate. Above all, signing a consent form
is not so much collaboration as surrender.
Indeed, the manifestation of a consent form is a strong indication that
meaningful editorial control is not being shared. Consent forms are too much
the mainstream’s main instrument to enforce the filmeds’ subaltern position. It
is an intellectual property protection for filmmakers rather than any sort of
insurance coverage for the filmed against harms they might suffer as a
consequence of being in front of the camera (see p. 168). Moreover, any filmed/
filmer, as true co-creator, needs no such protection from herself.
6
Although Shub was scarce interested in empowering a Romanov restoration when she used the
Tsar’s own home movies.
112
The vision of a filmed/filmer hybrid has long been the ambition of a few
engagé filmmakers. As the veteran documentarist George Stoney once
observed: “People should do their own filming, or at least feel they control the
content” (in Rosenthal, 1980: 346). This was not possible, unless with
considerable effort, given the inaccessibility of the technology. But the
perquisites of the filmmaker as an artist (or journalist) in a “free” society also
limited the extent the filmed could condition any film they were in. Their
exclusion was as much a matter of mind-set as of technology. Stoney’s attitude
was exceptional; but then he, like Gaventa, had come to film as an activist. For
him documentary film was always more social tool than art.
Stoney’s concept of a filmed/filmer hybrid figure received a massive boost
with the Portapak, and then the camcorder, from the late 1960s on. He had
played no part in the direct cinema turn of the 1960s and suffered the scorn of
its practitioners.7 Chafing at the complexities and expense of filmmaking and
the implicit corruptions, as he saw them, of sponsorship, he wanted instead to
be a “very happy collaborator,” helping people make the films he felt they
should make themselves (Boyle, 1999a: 17). It was this rare approach to what
others thought of as film directing that got him appointed in 1968 executive
producer of a new production program at the National Film Board of Canada
specifically dedicated to using film as a change-making tool ( Winston, 2014c:
40, f/n 15).
The Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle project had been instigated “with
the intention of developing community and political awareness, as well as
empowering Canadians” through the use of film ( Waugh, Winton & Baker
(n/d)), but was faltering having opened what was already turning into a can of
worms. For example, a precursor, The Things I Cannot Change (Tanya Ballentyne,
1967), a biting direct cinema investigation into urban poverty had occasioned
controversy over the ethics of intrusion.8
Prior to this brouhaha, though, a series of short documentaries had been
made on Fogo Island off Newfoundland by NFB staffer Colin Low which
perhaps pointed the way to avoiding such rows and better serving both the
7
Leacock was Stoney’s almost exact contemporary but he did not admire Stoney’s work. Stoney
does not appear in the comprehensive list of players in the documentary world Leacock includes
“Giving Voice”
in his memoir (Leacock, 2011).

8
The neighbors of the documentary’s central family were supposedly so upset by the exposure of
their community that their cooperation with the filmmakers had revealed that they were forced to
move away. Brenda Longfellow believes the film’s impact on them has been exaggerated
(Longfellow, 2010: 149).
113
filmed and the public. Although a classic visiting fireman, Low had put himself
and the NFB ’s resources at the service of the islanders to an unprecedented
extent. The authorities in St John’s had determined the island was unsustainable
and planned to relocate the population but the community had other ideas—
essentially wanting help to update their fishing fleet and establish a cooperative
processing plant. They needed to be given voice in a way that would compel
the attention of their government. In a series of 26 simple films, with Low
minimizing his directorial function, the case was made, heard, and the
immediate struggle was won. The island got its cooperative, still operating
today; and the sharing of editorial control between the filmed and the filmer
has become known as the “Fogo Process.”
When Stoney took a call from a young Mohawk leader, Mike Mitchell,
alerting him to a protest underway against an illegal attempt by the Canadian
government to impose customs duties on the Mohawk crossing the US /
Canadian border,9 the Fogo precedent was at hand. A First Nations crew had
actually been trained but they were away on another project and did not make
You Are On Indian Land in consequence. (Evans, 1991: 169). Instead a gash crew
was rapidly assembled from available NFB filmmakers to cover the dispute.
They proceeded according to Low’s “Fogo Process” allowing themselves to be
virtually controlled by the protestors as to content and editing. The result was
You Are On Indian Land (1969). But the broader logic was clear: people should
be enabled to make their own material themselves.
All these incidents highlighted the need to empower the excluded; but
they likewise demonstrate the practical, serious, and real difficulties of using
16mm synch for this purpose (Brendan Baker et al, 2010: 10). This was a major
constraining factor and the Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle program
made overcoming the barrier to full participation raised by film technology a
main focus. The objective was “to eliminate the ‘middlemen’—the filmmakers—
and put the cameras directly in the hands of ordinary people” ( Todd Hénaut,
2001). And the tool to do this was the Portapak, which had come on the market
in 1967.
Distributing the technology and then, albeit supportively, standing back
made Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle less a film production program

and more a training scheme for community video users. Stoney was back in
the United States by the end of 1970 but he was determined to continue the
9
Contrary to a clause of the Jay Treaty of 1795, which allowed First Nations to ignore the US /
Canadian border.
114
work. With the help of an FCC commissioner—Nick Johnson, already a blue-
sky enthusiast for cable television—in 1972 they got the FCC to mandate that
cable television franchises had to provide public access channels (Parsons,
2008: 265).10 And at New York University he also established an Alternative
Media Center (AMC ) to train facilitators—animatrices socioculturelles/
animateurs socioculturels in the French manner—to run such channels.
The trajectory from traditional documentarist, through Challenge for
Change/Société nouvelle to the AMC and the cable initiative repositioned
Stoney. Instead of a marginalized rather (albeit honored) old-fashioned
filmmaker, by the time of his death aged 95 in 2012, Nick Johnson could write
his obituary headlining it: “George Stoney—father of YouTube?”
But this, however warranted by digital’s fulfillment of Stoney’s concept of
the filmed/filmer, is to privilege the technology. Stoney’s legacy was not
technologically determined and it certainly does not suggest “participants . . .
learning how to use video equipment,” as the DIY media activist manuals
have it. That alone is no a substitute for his sort of social activism. The
“Fogo Process” is too often limited to the idea of giving people cameras and
letting them get on with it. It is, rather, where and when and for what purpose
they are given—or better, take—editorial control that matters for effective
change-making participation. It is not about consciousness-raising, however
important—or conversely, distracting—that might be. Empowerment
produces real co-creative participation but it needs goals. After all, what was
crucial about Fogo was not giving the people cameras (the technology
prevented that). It was—crucially—to gain access to those who could prevent
resettlement and establish a co-op. They alone were the targeted change-
making audience for the films. Other audiences were not, and such
consciousness-raising as the films engendered is collateral to the main issue. It
is the targeted audience as much as the sharing of editorial control that aligned
the power cube tiles—local level, semi-public space, and visible form.
The idea was hard to grasp. Colin Low reported the extent to which Grierson
himself, in old age a professor at McGill University, profoundly failed to see its
challenge. Low screened the Fogo films for Grierson’s class and:
“What,” Dr Grierson wanted to know, “was the value of the film off Fogo Island?
Was it good for television? For the mass media? For Canada? . . . What did it say
“Giving Voice”
to the world?” (Low, 2010 [1984]: 20)
10
Notice of Proposed Rulemaking and Notice of Inquiry, Docket No. 18397, 15 FCC 2nd, 1972.
115
The questions can be reversed: what was the use—indeed, the legitimacy—of
Grierson’s sponsored, official films? What changes did they effect? The Fogo
films might not have been any “good” for television, the mass media, Canada,
or the world. But, self-evidently, they were good for Fogo—and in ways no
films of the Griersonian movement can be shown to have been good for the
people filmed; or, come to that, for television and the mass media, where their
funding as PR communicative objects rendered them instantly suspect; or for
Canada and the world, where their patriarchal tone largely marginalized them.
The Fogo films, unlike Grierson’s failed attempts at “commanding the mind of a
generation,” did not “run from social meaning.” And, as far as Fogo goes, there is
a cooperative and an inhabited island to prove it. For John Grierson, between
the documentarist and the social/cultural animator was a gap too great to be
bridged.
2. CHANGE
2.1. Facilitating
The role of the docmedia director is reduced in the presence of the digitally-
empowered filmed/filmer to that of instigator. But the last step to being
facilitators at the behest of those who “should make their own films” remains
exceptional and more a question of mind-set than of technology.
The person who really needed to make a film in McDowell County in 2011
was Elaine McMillion, not the people who lived there. She might have shared
with them a West Virginian identity, which is no small matter as it differentiated
her from the run of “strangers with a camera.” But she also shared with those
strangers a professional filmmaking identity whose raison d’être is to make
films—in whatever mode including web-/i-docs. Without prejudice to any
broader intentions, Hollow was the outcome of her agenda in ways that it was
not of the people she involved. She is a self-declared social activist but The
Huffington Post, for instance, thought Hollow was: “[t]he most magnificently
presented, web-aware journalism I’ve ever seen” (Linkins, 2013). It was her
project not, certainly initially, at all theirs.
On the other hand, John Gaventa, also an activist, had little interest in
making movies. The camera was merely a device—like a handbill, a loud-hailer
or a meeting—to be used in a power struggle with a brutal opponent. He did
not come to Harlan County primarily to make a film. He did not even come to
116
cover the strike; nor did he only come to gather data for his doctorate. He
came to help the union and the miners in their struggle. He was, as it might be,
an embedded participant in the strike as much as the strikers were participants
in the videos.
Barbara Kopple can also reasonably be said to have been embedded, living
with the strikers for months. She graciously thanked them for their hospitality
in her Oscar acceptance speech. She, like Gaventa, was lending her filmmaking
expertise (far greater than his) to their pre-existing cause. But she did not give
the miners control. She could not practically do so because of the technology,
and—unlike Low on Fogo—she did not do so editorially either. On balance,
then, her film was more her film than theirs; Gaventa’s tapes, on the other
hand, were more theirs than his. The film is readily available on DVD ; the
surviving tapes are, to all intents and purposes, unavailable, deteriorating as
almost none have been transferred from the original reels. Kopple was in
Harlan County with a camera because without it she had no reason to be
there. Gaventa was there as an activist; he just happened to have a camera
because he had been lent it at the Highlander Center . . . by George Stoney.
This is without prejudice to the social value of docmedia projects, not all of
which have change-making ambitions. It is certainly not to criticize them in
any way for this lack. And Hollow, for instance, does comparatively well overall
in terms of Gaventa’s power cube although it does not align all the tiles. Yet, as
a journalist, McMillion is an instigator more than a facilitator. And, like her,
many of the others signing early works in the web-/i-doc mode are also
instigators before they are facilitators—more so, in fact.
18 Days in Egypt (2011, USA ) allowed uploading of “people [aka “citizen”]
generated” material coming from those directly involved in the Cairene
demonstrations of the “Arab Spring” of that year. The imagery and other
testimony was produced by filmed/filmers on cell-phones, by text and tweet,
on Facebook and by YouTube live streaming. The site, though, was instigated
by California-based Jigar Mehta, also a trained journalist, to correct what he
saw as the mass media’s systematic misreporting. Moreover, 18 Days involved a
professional documentary producer, Hugo Soskin, “to work on story structure.”11
18 Days in Egypt consisted entirely of user-generated material but beyond
establishing fellowships for some Egyptian university students, primarily as
researchers to gather material locally, filmed/filmers were not the editors, not
“Giving Voice”
11
http://beta.18daysinegypt.com [accessed July 27, 2014].
117
quite fully participant. They were like the correspondents of newspapers who
for centuries had furnished materials for editorial use with no control over how
that was exercised. In such circumstances, the filmed/filmer role becomes
indistinct from the spectator interactivity the digital allows whereby requests
for general uploading to a project are an element—if not its raison d’être—(see
p. 207).
The possibility of the filmed becoming the filmer colors the documentarist
role but the co-creation that does this is, of course, avoidable. Web-/i-docs can
still be as much the work of a traditional director as ever. It is, then, no surprise
that Fort McMoney and High Rise, arguably in many ways the most sustained
and extensive projects thus far, are the work of established documentarists:
David Dufresne and Katrina Cizek, both working for established institutions (in
their case, the NFB ). Nor is it surprising that other professional documentarists
have figured prominently as the creators of these web-/i-docs works.
A certain pattern emerges. The projects consist of material, many hours
possibly, rendered accessible through cursor manipulation, whether the filmed
were involved by being merely observed or as interviewees, or as co-originators
in some way. Typical is The Block. After eviction notices had been served on the
residents of the Block, a corner of Sydney that had been home to indigenous
people for decades, Poppy Stockell spent two years interviewing the residents.
The filmmaker invited users of the site “to take a virtual tour around the precinct
to truly explore the diversity of the Block and its community” (Anon [The Block],
2012). But this navigational activity says nothing to the level of the filmed
participation in the project. The Block was traditional in its tone—voice-over
commentary, archive, etc; its topic again a deprived “othered place” and its
purpose “to capture the heart and spirit of a place that cannot be summed up
by one story or one narrative, but many.”12 The folk who live there were not
transformed into filmed/filmers.
In Gaza/Sderot (2009),13 the interface is a bifurcated map of the two adjacent
communities on either side of the Palestine/Israel line. Footage was taken of
the interviewees person-by-person and day-by-day in late fall, 2008. A map, an
interactive grid of portraits, a timeline and thematic tags permit the spectator
to access the site by country, by person, by topic, and by date. And, as in a

DVD, there are multi-lingual subtitles. The site, as with Hollow and the other
12
http://www.sbs.com.au/theblock/#/welcome [accessed August 24, 2016].
13
Robby Elmaliah/Khalil al Muzayyen| France| 2009.
118
early noted web-/i-docs, is again interactively elegant—for the spectator. Yet,
for the filmed this remains somewhat irrelevant. The work is directed by Robby
Elmaliah and Khalil al Muzayyen, and in no developed way is it co-created.
On the contrary: Heba Safi, a Palestinian student, is the only person who is
seen herself filming. She was a member of her school’s journalism club and
in an interview she explains what she was doing. But her footage was not
incorporated.
Documentarists have not been alone in exploring these possibilities and
other projects have been by professional artists. Welcome to Pine Point (2011)
documents another coal-mining community, the “man-bites-dog” element
here being that it, a company town of some 2,000 inhabitants, was abandoned.
Not a stone of it remains although the mine was closed as recently at 1988.
Material from the displaced is central. Despite being claimed as an example of
Lev Manovitch’s “deep remixablity” and for all that Welcome to Pine Point is billed
as “interactive documentary,” it is essentially linear, an art project with the
interactive flexibilities of a slide show, uploaded using little more navigability
than a DVD.
More eloquently, and of greater immediate social significance, is Question
Bridge: Black Males. It was started in 1996 by Chris Johnson, an artist embedded
in San Diego’s African American community, videotaping some 10 respondents
asking and answering each other’s questions. The technique encourages
the sharing of experience, in this instance, the nature of black male identity
in the United States. By 2012, it had become a gallery art installation and it
is now a website.14 Instigated and curated, the role of the filmed blurs into
that of the uploading spectator, as it does in a number of projects dealt with
below.
This is but a preliminary sample of those sites which can be characterized
as having filmed/filmer aspects, but more complete surveys (eg Hudson &
Zimmermann, 2015) suggest that it is not wrong to claim that, in fact, very
few web-/i-doc projects are participatory in a fully co-creative sense. The
technological does not automatically bestow empowerment. The one is far
from being the sole determinant of the other. Far more important is the
instigator’s intention vis-à-vis the filmed. And the instinct of the instigator
seems as much to tend back towards directing as it inclines forward to
facilitating.
“Giving Voice”
14
http://questionbridge.com [accessed August 24, 2016].
119
2.2. Embedding
Like Hollow, The High Rise Project can lay claim to being an early canonical
navigational web-/i-doc, but its helmer, Kat Cizek, makes clear how little she
yields to the people whose lives she highlights: “I am not interested in UGC
(user-generated content), I want to maintain an authorial role” (Gaudenzi, 2014:
141). The echoes of the classic patriarchal documentarist are strong. More than
40 years ago, Frederick Wiseman was insisting that he “couldn’t make a film
which gave someone else the right to control the final print”—even, of course,
if they were in it (in Rosenthal, 1971: 71). Digital interactivity allows access to
Cizek’s work not possible with Wiseman’s linear films, but it does so only for the
spectator, not necessarily for those she films—beyond, of course, the usual
collaborations that mark the procedures of the sensitive filmmaker which she
certainly is.
It is a matter of mind-set:
Can access to information technology and the opportunity for self-

representation and subjectification in the digital public domain assist those
who have no rights in the physical public domain—literally, in the street? How
else? (Daniel, 2011: 26).
Media artist Sharon Daniel has been exploring the answer in a series of projects
aimed at collaboratively giving voice to the excluded. Thus Public Secrets (2007)
offers an interactive platform—audio and text—using testimony of women
incarcerated in the California State Prison System to reveal the [true] secrets of
the war on drugs, the criminal justice, and the prison industrial complex:15
The piece seeks to dispel popular misconceptions about the nature of prisons
and those incarcerated within them, offering compelling evidence of the
violence and abuse that such systems perpetuate by their very nature.16
Daniel’s activist cards are laid out squarely. This is a site of social engagement,
challenging any easy assumption that imprisonment provides a solution to
governement-defined social problems.
15
http://vectors.usc.edu/issues/4/publicsecrets/ [accessed June 7, 2016].
16
http://www.sharondaniel.net/bloodsugar/ [accessed June 6, 2016].
120
Likewise, her Blood Sugar is a web-based audio documentary that allows
visitors to navigate a multi-vocal narrative linking individual testimony, public
evidence, social theory, and biological research. Testimony by 20 injection
drug users, incarcerated in California prisons or undergoing treatment in HIV
education and prevention programs reveals “the social and political
construction of poverty and addiction through the eyes of those who live it.”17
Echoing George Stoney in the light of digital possibilities, Daniel writes that
I see myself as a context-provider stretching the concept of artistic creation

from making content to making context. My goal is to avoid representation—
not to speak for others, but to provide them with the means to speak for
themselves, to speak and be heard (Daniel, 2011: 25–6).
This is crucial. Directors reducing themselves to facilitators in this way are

rare—more so if video technology is deployed and digital’s capacity for cheap
image capture is eschewed in favor of the usual production values to maintain
professional standards. Concomitantly, the filmed/filmer figure remains even
rarer than the facilitator. To point this out is not in any way to criticize the
engagé director, but it is to note that digital’s extensive affordances are more
deployed for spectator navigability than for the empowerment of the filmed.
For the latter, for all that new media facilitates participation, it no more
automatically provides it than did the Portapak; nor does it any more prevent
it, of course. Whenever docmedia adopts professional production values,
however, facilitators have little place.
Broadcasters, and newspapers exploring web usages, have, not unnaturally,
been prominently involved in experimenting with these new cognate, and
potentially rival, platforms. The Block was a project of the Australian public
experimental SBS channel; Gaza/Sderot is a Franco-German ARTE production;
and, not for the first time in the history of documentary, the National Film
Board of Canada has been in the forefront of innovation. Such institutions have
sound liberal credentials, as does (in many eyes) The New York Times (one of the
NFB ’s partners on High Rise). It is, though, to suggest that such funding imports
“professional standards” with their concomitant costs. These projects boast
long credit lists and large budgets—reportedly, C$800,000, for Fort McMoney
for example. More than that: needing such funding raises the specter of games
“Giving Voice”
17
Op cit 16.
121
industry involvement which in turn makes the ludic potential of any project a
necessary—and almost certainly distorting and limiting—factor in the
mainstream commissioning process.18 Moreover web-/i-docs can not only be
as expensive to make as linear documentaries, they have greater immediate
upkeep costs if they are to remain live. By eschewing the advantages of
cheapness, their makers are therefore far from “independent” social/cultural
animators.
This is not to make a jejune point about improper influence by funders nor
to question the bona fides of the web-/i-docs creator, whether or not they
reduce their role to that of facilitator. If the support comes with clean hands,
then, it can be readily assumed, the inevitabilities of the piper improperly calling
the tune are contained. Hollow speaks to the continued significance of this
in the web-/i-doc context. The Kickstater money led to obtaining support from
the West Virginia Arts Council and a foundation grant from the Tribeca Film
Institute’s New Media Fund. That Fund, among others, also supports Question
Bridge. As much independence as can reasonably be expected is in place.
We need to be extremely clear here. We are not arguing that the “Fogo
Process” and Challenge for Change offer the only model for socially engaged
documentary filmmaking—or, indeed for documentary in general. Seeking
the redistribution of power is not—and obviously cannot be—documentary’s
only purpose. As Kate Nash points out, “[t]he model of socially engaged film
making—with its clear goals and decision makers—is important but only one
of the ways in which media might relate to social power.”19 There are those for
whom the achievement of community identity and consciousness-raising
through media are an end in themselves, ranking with the concerns of
traditional prescriptive radical politics. This being so, what is here questioned is
only the rhetoric which too glibly calls up empowerment and change. The
limited position taken here is, quite simply, that if social change is documentary’s
or docmedia’s announced or implied ambition, then the tiles on the power
cube needs be aligned and hyperbolic claims that it is actually being effected
when it is not must be abandoned.
The problem is that embedded facilitators, “with clear goals” and targeted
“decision makers” on the one hand, and engagé web-i-doc directors from
18
A documentary on drones easily needs to become a game of zapping “terrorists” if it is to be
funded.
19
Kate Nash, personal communication, February 12, 2016.
122
whom consciousness-raising is ambition enough on the other are not clearly
distinguished. At conferences where docmedia is discussed and research
centers where it is studied, facilitators and docmedia makers—whether
corporate or more independent—mingle promiscuously. An engagé rhetoric
suffuses the discourse of all.
Engagé directors have been the main driver of committed documentary
from the interwar radical filmmakers on. And they still are. The danger with
such good work, however, is that, as Žižek suggests, without a great deal of
due care and sophistication, rhetorically it can be said to encourage “frenetic
humanitarian, politically correct, etc., activity. . . . changing something . . . so
that . . . . things will remain the same” (Žižek, 2002: 545). And thereby the distinct
other potentials of the empowered filmed/filmer working with facilitators is
blunted. As Josh, a thoughtful teenage collaborator of Elaine McMillion’s, puts
it in Hollow, “you can tell the world about all of our problems but that’s not
going to solve any of them.”
“Giving Voice”
123
124
. . . on THE FILMER
Technology, by better enabling participants to take up the camera, threatens

the director’s role, but the twenty-first century has seen a new legitimation of
overt displays of filmer subjectivity expanding the documentist’s voice. This
leaves all the old ethical problems in place but it also neuters the traditional
claim on objective, empirical truth. As subjectivity is an enemy to the patriarchal
concept of scientific objectivity (and therefore in this sense also to
documentary’s claim on the real as it has its roots in science), arguably this is of
deeper significance than are digital affordances:
The idea of a neutral science—of a theory which is not related to a

social/political position—is not in itself a neutral idea. . . .
The idea that knowledge does not have a foundation in the social
position of its producers is . . . the product of a very precise social
position: the position of dominance.
(Delphy, 1984: 156)
125
126
6 “To Make Space for the
Un-thought”
SUBJECTIVITIES: In considerations of GENDER (1), the expression of subjectivity

is the essence of the individual self, a crucial matter for the excluded and
marginalized. For the documentary in the twenty-first century, most vividly for
women, the legitimation of subjectivity opens the door to previously supressed
modes of expression, eg: Narcissism (1.1). This is no longer a distracting matter of
self-regard but, rather, the key to Auto/Biography (1.2). Moreover, in the context
of scienticism, subjectivity also occasions an EMANCIPATION (2) from the
objectivism of traditional documentary. It removes the Exclusions (2.1) that deny
documentary status to other marginalized muffled voices also unwilling to speak
in tones of patriarchal objectivity. Subjectivity directly challenges the hegemonic
objective tradition and a liberation from the tyranny of “Facts” (2.2) is underway.
1. GENDER
1.1. Narcissism
“Je suis heureuse/ I am happy to drop the ears of wheat and pick up my camera,”
Agnès Varda tells us at the outset of her 2002 film Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The
Gleaners and I.
She has taken her camera to the Musée des beaux-arts in Arras to film Jules
Breton’s 1877 painting La glaneuse, a resolute peasant woman holding a
wheatsheaf high on her left shoulder. Varda films herself standing by this oil in
the same pose with a sheaf on the other shoulder.
She releases the sheaf and brings the miniature video camera she’s been
holding behind her back up to her eye. A humorous moment, but as Katherine
Ince points out, one “replete with signification” (Ince, 2013: 606).
Varda identifies herself in multiple ways as “admirer and companion,” as
well as “viewing body-subject and simultaneously viewed body-object” (Ince,
2013: 610). She announces in voice-over: “The other glaneuse, her of [this]
documentary’s title—c’est moi/it’s me.” An unlikely parallel is being drawn
127
Still 11 “Je suis heureuse . . .”
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners and I| Agnès Varda| France| 2002
between the act of gleaning—which is “to gather or pick up ears of corn . . . left
by the reapers” (OED )—and the act of documenting.
Thus Varda inserts herself into the dialog, liberating herself from the onerous
patriarchal task of commanding, influencing or even just informing the
audience. Instead, she recasts herself as one who follows, gleaning insights
from the ways of the world as they strike her, at the same time reflecting on her
own preoccupations and understandings. This sharing of observation becomes
Varda’s way to transform the Vertovian injunction (“show us life”) into a “feminist
existential-phenomenological approach” (Ince, 2013: 602) that registers and
performs her own subjectivity.
When Varda brings the “little camera” she is holding behind her back to the
fore, she echoes Vertov’s exposure of the cinematic apparatus at the outset of
Man with a Movie Camera. For her, the digital camera is “fantastique, numerique,”
permitting “les effets narcissique, même hyper-réalistique.” Of these affordances,
the most pertinent is the facilitation of the narcissistic, a necessary element of
subjectivity—a “highly politically charged” term ( Tyler, 2007: 354). Traditionally

the concept is rooted in Freud’s notion of primary narcissism, the birth of the
conscious self, internalized in a process of self-management but carrying with
it negative connotations of self-obsession and self-regard ( Tyler, 2007: 344–5,
358). Yet the moment Varda lifts her camera is also the moment she shows
us life in the feminine/feminist. In her film practice, “narcissistic” sheds its
128
pathologized connotation, particularly in relation to women, rendered, rather, a
means to insert herself as an inquiring subject into the fabric of her own inquiry.
Imogen Tyler insists that as narcissism can be considered “the pathology of
our time,” it is important to acknowledge its contentious cultural and political
history. Within contemporary theoretical accounts of “cultural narcissism” and
“media narcissism,” especially in North America, it is deployed to mount a
“caustic critique of feminist politics” ( Tyler, 2007: 343.) In general, it becomes a
way to disparage a range of non-normative people and behaviors, especially as
an anti-feminist tool, subsuming and replaying the traditional tropes of female
supposed instabilities and self-indulgence. Instead, Varda snubs narcissism as
patriarchal, classist, and avowedly white instead embracing subjectivity as a
positive ( Tyler, 2007: 354). Old boundaries are thus redrawn, even dismantled.
We have previously noted Audre Lorde’s warning that the master’s tools
would never dismantle his house and that twenty or so years later, Trinh T.
Minh-ha sets out an alternative view: “Any tool of the oppressor can be turned
against the oppressor” ( Trinh T. Minh-ha 2005: 22). But how true is either
position in this context? After all contra Lorde, does a politics of subjectivity not
clear a space for more permanent outcomes, particularly in relation to thinking
about women filmmakers and their films?
For the camera, the jujitsu involved becomes a matter of developing new
modes of expression, a new cinematic language, arising out of altered sensibility.
Seeing the director as gleaner rather than preacher, makes her a scriptrix narrans
who produces even linear texts more open and writerly than are any of those
closed, writerly outputs of homo narrans. A case can certainly be made, for
women filmmakers if not more generally, that the politics of subjectivity is
clearing a space for more permanent outcomes than Lorde envisaged and
language generally—not just its cinematic analogon—is the key.
Nicole Brossard has devoted her artistic and intellectual career to the
question of subjectivity and agency for women, driven by “the desire and the
“To Make Space for the Un-thought”
necessity to re-invent language” and, in so doing, relocate women as essential

subjects within a western, patriarchal landscape:
My poetics is essentially to make space for the un-thought. As a woman I

am left with a language that has either erased or marginalized women as
subjects. Therefore, in my poetics I perform what is necessary to make space
for women’s objectivity and plurally to make space for a positive image of
women. This task engages me to question language—symbolic and
imaginary, from all angles and dimensions (Brossard, 2005: 35).
129
In her brilliantly inventive experimental novel Hier/Yesterday at the Clarendon
Hotel, Brossard constructs a woman-centered universe that, in essence,
reshapes language, lifting it from its male-centered roots (not an easy thing to
do with a gendered language), reformuating it in the feminine. Seeking a truer
rendering of female experience from language and form, Yesterday worries
meaning (syntax and grammar), jazzes the arrangement of the page, conflates
literary genres and reconstitutes narrative plot (Bailey Nurse, 2005). Brossard
does this by interrogating and refiguring European history and traditions of
narrative and voice from a female point of view.
One example: Brossard’s woman-centered universe revolves around
the lives of four female protagonists. One of these is “Axelle,” a geneticist
engaged in unearthing her own geneology, haunted by her mother’s
mysterious and sinister disappearance, remembering: “My mother left me
the words justice, freedom, transgression. And work” (Brossard, 2005: 191). In
one passage, Axelle sits at her desk, dreaming of her origins, writing a report
with one hand, stroking her clitoris with the other, effectively merging
corporality, intellect, and desire. Feminist philosopher, Susanne Lettow calls
for the same thing in rethinking the politics of subjectivity. Yoking it to its
antecedent emancipation, she calls for “alternative approaches that would
highlight potentials for transgression and change.” If subjectivity joins related
concepts (freedom, autonomy, justice) in political philosophy and political
language, it is subjectivity’s constitutive openness that renders it newly
productive (Lettow, 2015: 505–7). Or, as Alex Juhasz puts it: “The female
videomaker’s reflection, camcorder in hand, comes into focus. She is all
women filmmakers. She is Mp:me not WE . . . . Different real. New truths.”
(Juhasz, 2012: 253).
When approaching film language in the radical spirit of Nicole Brossard, the
spirit of the subject, the scriptrix narrans, is unleashed. This figure, embodied by
the feminist filmmaker intent on placing women at the center of the moving
image, responds to a dual imperative—“that of remembering and thereby
preserving work in danger of erasure’ ” and, at the same time, “developing
analytical tools and research agendas for work that challenges the classical
paradigm” (Columpar & Mayer, 2009: 1–2)

What is the more important, (and independent of the technology), is a
willingness to open the text (see ch. 2). Indeed, this does not even need the
abandonment of mainstream documentary “chrono-logics.” It can even be—
overtly so in Les glaneurs—a journey: a classic narrative text type. Varda
repeatedly films her trek to find gleaners through the windows of her moving
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camera-car. But almost none of the destinations she reaches are necessarily
causally related to the previous encounter. Instead, as the perceptive
“Wikipedian” reviewing the film noted, the film is: “a bricolage of garage-sale
items, trinkets, and colorful memorabilia” (Anon [Wikipedia], n/d). But for all
that “bricolage” is entirely apposite, the film has considerably more depth than
this dismissive list suggests.
As Claude Lévi-Strauss originally explained:
The bricoleur is adept at performing a large number of diverse tasks [making

do] with “whatever is at hand,” that is to say with a set of tools and materials
which is always finite and is also heterogeneous because what it contains
bears no relation to the current project, or indeed to any particular project, but
is the contingent result of all the occasions there have been to renew or enrich
the stock or to maintain it with the remains of previous constructions or
destructions. (Lévi-Strauss, 1996 [1962]: 17).
The “making do” of the bricoleur, who Lévi-Straus calls the “engineer,” involves
a culling of that which has been overlooked or left behind and perhaps
intended for other uses. Varda departs from this “engineer” figure bound by the
project in hand and only able to proceed according to “the availability of raw
materials and tools conceived and procured for the purpose of the project”
(Lévi-Strauss, 1996 [1962], 17). For Lévi-Straus, bricolage takes this linear
trajectory, sequentially fixed by a “just-in-time” utilization of materials; for Varda,
by contrast, it is a work of unbounded creation—because bricolage is for her,
precisely, not engineering (Spivak, 1997 [1976]: xix, xx).
Varda achieves her bricolage by drawing from her many hours of footage
(much including herself ) that self-reflexively acknowledges “her own role as a
‘gleaner of images’: la glaneuse” (Grant & Sloniowski, 2014: 495). In Virginia
Bonner’s understanding, Varda’s methodology underscores that documentary
filmmaking itself is always a form of gleaning. But what makes her unique is her
persistent manipulation of address: “By modifying the modes of address,
identification, and narration particular to the documentary genre, Varda hails
both her viewers and the people she films—including herself—as active
participants” (Bonner, 2009: 120). Thus, although the director is not removed
(as would be the case with full participation), she offers an opening of the text
to all those involved: “I asked people to reveal themselves, to give a lot of
themselves; so I thought that the film should also reveal a little about the
filmmakers, that I should use a little bit of myself in it” (in Havis, 2001).
131
And, in so doing, the implicitly patriarchal bias of the “engineer’ ” restricting
and commanding closed linearity is removed. Varda often implicates viewers
and those she is interviewing in this signature approach, combining first and
second person voice. Combining this mixed-address voice-over with her visual
compositions (herself, others) the film encourages an intersubjective dialog
with the film subjects and ultimately with the viewers.
Declaring that she wanted to explore the problems of consumption—
waste, the “gleaning” of food discarded by the more affluent—Varda situates
the topic of Les glaneurs et la glaneuse in mainstream documentary’s
conventional compass. It is as relevant to social concerns as, say, An Inconvenient
Truth or last night’s environmental news story. Indeed, she even covers an oil
spill. Her film presents an array of Griersonian social victims and those who
oppress them.
Les glaneurs et la glaneuse tells us, in detail, of the legal situation in France as
regards agricultural gleaning and unofficial urban recycling. But despite specifics
this is done almost en passant. For example, in three minutes, she covers a
scandal where homeless youngsters were prosecuted for raiding a supermarket’s
trash, interviewing the juge d’instance who tried the case, filmed in her robe
before her courthouse; the supermarket manager in the location of the crime;
the criminalized kids in the town square. Her conclusion: “They all played their
roles, applying their own logic.” Varda asks the magistrate: “should squatting be
legalized?” The magistrate replies: “I could work on that if it wasn’t for this robe.”
“But your robe is lovely,” interjects Varda, playful, ironic. She declines the role of
the “sociologue,” the “ethnographe,” the “serious thinker” inserting herself into her
film instead as an inquiring subject, refusing to play the reporter’s role:
I thought I should be free, even in a documentary which has a very serious

subject. It made me feel very good that I could investigate a certain way of
doing documentaries in which I’m present—I’m myself—knowing I’m doing a
documentary and speaking with the people, telling them I have a bed, that I
can eat every day, but I would like to speak to you (in Heti, 2009).
Such subjective candor is potentially an affront to documentary norms. In

effect, Varda’s approach crosses a boundary.
Trinh T. Minh-ha indicates the significance of this:
We keep encountering these classifications—fiction, documentary, and

experimental—everywhere in the film world. . . . In making these distinctions,
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the tendency has often been to reiterate a preconceived hierarchy, and
hence to harden a fundamentally explorative activity into a category of work
( Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2005: 28).
Trinh describes her films as “boundary events.”1 “One can view [boundary event
films] as different ways of working with freedom in experiencing the self and
the world” ( Trinh T. Minh-ha, 2005: 28). Agnès Varda could say as much. She too
“is engaged in breaking the boundary between those onscreen and their
viewers” (Bonner, 2009: 122).
For Virginia Bonner, Varda’s methodology underscores that documentary
filmmaking itself is always therefore a form of gleaning. She gleans “acts,
gestures and information” (Bonner, 2009: 119) at the same time revealing the
diverse motives (anticipated and otherwise) of her gleaners: poverty and
adversity played out against resourcefulness, tradition, art, and activism.
Beckoning her audience as participants in an on-going conversation about
social attitudes towards poverty, waste, and class, “Varda is engaged in breaking
the boundary between those onscreen and their viewers” (Bonner, 2009: 122).
And her gleaners emerge, not as abject victims, but inventive subjects. Varda’s
practice dovetails with Brossard’s in its radicality and subversion. Her act of
“filmer en femme,” a phrase Varda coins, produces works that are both “feminist
and political in their conception and message” (Bénézet, 2014: 6).
To understand Varda’s practice in the patriarchal mode as being apparently
born out of Freudian narcissism, utterly misses her purpose. Rosemary
Betterton warns that a traditional formulation of that concept has a dangerous
ambivalence for women—suggesting their “innate frivolity and self-
indulgence’ ” (Betterton, 1985: 8). Some feminists, Luce Irigaray for instance
(Irigaray, 1977), argue for a positive articulation operating outside patriarchal
confines. In Varda’s case, this perspective shift is better understood as “an
opening up of critical space” (Betterton, 1985: 10). Varda’s practice becomes,
rather, the self-reflexive modus operandi of the skilled auteur(e), an experimental

art maker, technological innovator, and ethical filmmaker.
For Delphine Bénézet, Varda articulates a mode of (often) activist cinema
that subverts classical theory through a unique “cinécriture” (Bénézet, 2014: 7),
1
And this is why the boxes in the diagrams above—Figures 1, 5 and 11 (pp. 4, 23, 56)—are so
flimsy, supported only by the ideological force of their cultural position: they can be seen by any
bricoleuse as the work of a Lévi-Straussian engineer spuriously implying a totalizing description of
the world.
133
especially marked by a preoccupation with the corporeal and a love of art.
Together with “a visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment” (Ince,
2013: 602) her documentaries offer—“a voice of resistance [in] her commitment
to resist norms of representation and diktats of production” (Bénézet, 2014: 6).
Katherine Ince, drawing on ideas from Laura Marks and Merleau-Ponty, puts
this down to a kind of “haptic visuality” where “the eyes themselves function as
organs of touch” (Ince, 2013: 604):
Varda’s female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform
feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and
relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which
Varda’s own subjectivity is registered within her film-texts” (Ince, 2013: 602).
Merleau-Ponty’s insights about how the encoding of history in our bodies

influences our perception leads Ince to note how Varda’s extreme close-ups of
skin and hair encourage “a haptic mode of looking” occurring “in an eroticized
relationship with sexually differentiated alterity” (Ince, 2013: 605). Whether it be
close-up footage lingering, tracing the skin of her husband Jacques Demy
dying of AIDS in Les plages d’Agnès (the even more overtly subjective
documentary she made eight years after Les glaneurs) or Varda’s own weathered
hands and chestnut hair with whitening roots, such footage in both films,
override any negative charges of narcissism. As with Brossard’s younger woman
Axelle, again corporality, intellect, and desire are mixed. Varda’s complaints,
though, are not rooted in faded youth and beauty but, rather, reflect a sobering
deliberation that, “the end is near,” soliciting viewer’s “emotions and sensations”
(Bénézet, 2014: 143). She offers a tribute to memory, a witness to the passage
of time, and an homage to decades of manual and artistic creation made by an
embodied filmed subject.
Varda articulates “a model of cinema that subverts classical theory” (Bénézet,
2014: 7). Her women are never confined to a single reductive image. In view is
nothing less than a dismantling of documentary as a patriarchal construct. Even
without the changed circumstance of digital’s potential, Agnès Varda is a model
scriptrix narrans pointing documentary to new modes of address.
1.2. Auto/Biography
Varda’s commitment to experimental and collaborative cinécriture is matched
by her insistence on a subjectivity that privileges both the feminine and the
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feminist. More even than in Les glanuers et la glaneuse, her overt interventionism
and her own voice was heard in a yet clearer personal register in Les plages
d’Agnès: “to love Jacques Demy is to love cinema”; “I am playing the role of an
old woman.”
Amy Lawrence’s examination of how classical Hollywood films construe
women’s speech suggests how radical this voice is, of itself. In the mainstream,
women’s voices are problematic, an affront to male authority. In Hollywood
history attempts to speak provoke increasingly severe repression. (Lawrence,
1991).
A tension has long existed between women’s bodies and women’s voices in
culture, in politics, and in media. Women’s bodies have been widely displayed
as objects of desire or as allegories of various vices and virtues, but their
voices, words, and soundmaking have often been muted or marginalized at
best, and censored or silenced at worst (Lacey & Hilmes, 2015, 1).
Clearly Varda is arguing that “female subjectivity is always lived, that is

embodied and actively animated, even when it remains a viewed object” (Ince,
2013: 611). Varda builds on this adopting a “humorous but entirely knowing
device of walking backwards” (Ince, 2013: 612) into her seven-plus decades of
memories, mixing autobiographical narration, installation art and filmic and
photographic montage.
The reception of Les plages d’Agnès was warm but confused, as if subjectivity
was all very well when tethered to any overt social agenda (eg waste in Les
glaneurs) but was unintelligible, even confusing as documentary. On the
internet, that bastion of received and—indeed—laggard opinion, the film was
classed as “MUST SEE ,” judged “charming” and “brilliant” but as “less a
documentary” than an un-pigeonhole-able “exploration of art, love and life”. . . .
or it was “so far beyond what could be considered, ‘Documentary,’ that the film
exists in entirely new cinematic terrain” (Anon [IMDB ], n/d).

But even better informed judgments also seemed to have difficulty in
recognizing Les plages as a legitimate documentary. Rather, the film was seen
as “a cinematic self-fiction” (Boyle, 2012); or “an essay-cum-collage” (Bradshaw,
2009). For the trade (as it were), Screen Daily significantly dismissed it by simply
implying that, with documentary, “personal” and “professional” were somehow
oppositional. And, as Les plages was a “film that puts the personal ahead of the
professional,” not much needed to be said about it beyond: “Some pruning
would have helped” (Fainaru, 2008).
135
The whole point of the project is comprehensively missed. Such
interpretations indicate the limited extent to which direct cinema dogme, as a
basis of determining documentary value, has been replaced in common
opinion in the 20 years since it was first challenged (see p. 90). Varda is engaged
in a “discourse about identity and representation” which, as Julie Rak notes,
is marked by “a shift from considerations of autobiography and biography as
genres with definable properties” to a melded form of “auto/biography as a
discourse about identity and representation” (Rak, 2005:17). Narratives in the
auto/biographical, including the visual, are discursive in nature, simultaneously
questioning both identity and representation.2 In the context of documentary
film, this confronts underlying ideological assumptions, rendering the question
of “truth-making” the purview of the filmer and/or the filmed she is interrogating.
Susanna Egan and Gabriele Helms suggest that the use of “the personal
narrative as a lens onto history and the contemporary world” has become
prevalent (Egan & Helms, 2002: 15). This turn has been the focus of significant
“feminist and materialist studies of auto/biography”3 as it has the potential of
re-inscribing women othered within androcentric language to be newly-
constructed as subjects. Auto/biography becomes “a way to work through the
impasse between political agency and poststructuralist approaches to
subjectivity and language . . . [T]he practice of auto/biography is something
that shapes how people see themselves as they help to shape it” (Rak, 2005:
23, 42). Alisa Lebow, noting a need to refine the classic concept of autobiography,
finds it in what she terms a “first person film.” These are not
primarily, and certainly not always explicitly, autobiographical. Subjective

as it may always be, the exploration of the filmmaker’s own biography is a
much less centrally important pursuit in these films than one might expect
(Lebow, 2012:2).
Agnès Varda, then, is far from alone.

In Angry Inuk (2016), the Inuit filmmaker, Alethea Arnaquq-Baril, displays a
promise similar to Varda’s, her personal sensibility transforming what, like Les
2
See also Smith, 1996, Gilmore, 1994; Bergland, 1994; Marcus, 1994, Stanley, 2000.
3
Emerging scholarship generally has broadened the parameters of these studies, for instance,
Steedman (1986); Liz Stanley on feminist epistemology that include the self-reflexive positions of
the researcher are increasingly an important part of cultural studies methodology” (Stanley, 1994:
19). Coslett et al 2000; Polkey, 1999; Lebow, 2012.
136
glaneurs, could be a straightforward activist intervention into a deeper
expression of cultural anguish and social need. The film is about unintended
consequences, in this case the disastrous impact of European seal protection;
and it is a reasoned counter-argument to have the ban on seal hunting
overturned. Snow stained with the blood of cute seal puppies has been a
sound source of revenue for the animal charities. But their blanket (ill-placed)
protection of the animals has had a disastrous effect on the Inuit. Unlike the
Europeans, they have lived in balance with the seal, culling for food and for
skins. Crude European intervention has destroyed that symbiosis, imperiling
the Inuit’s very existence in the north.
For Arnaquq-Baril, filming her people’s plight is complicated by the fact that
hers is a culture which does not express anger explosively. She goes round the
norms of western activist case-making with a bricolage, at whose center she is,
which mounts a damning prosecutory case, made all the more effective by
being quietly yet compelling mounted. And the key is, as with Varda, that she
is herself, both filmed and filmer—with observational footage, first person and
advocacy filming—exhorting the European Union to lift the ban and wildlife
charities to find a less damaging source of fund raising. Alethea Arnaquq-Baril
is using film as part of a campaign in which she is herself a significant figure,
along with Aaju Peters, “the titular ‘angry Inuk’ ” lawyer, meeting with EU
officials, using social media—and her work therefore is a fine example of the
targeted documentary made by an embedded instigator/filmmaker.4 But, her
personal voice makes Angry Inuk far more than that. “Activist cinema at its best”
(Cole, 2016) underestimates its power.
Australian and Indigenous, Tracey Moffatt is another working in the same
vein, often exploring the scars of wounds that never heal. Critically regarded for
her formal and stylistic experimentation in film, photography, and video,
Moffatt draws on cinematic tradition, photography, and popular culture as well
as her own childhood memories and fantasies, for the substance of her work:
Moffatt imbues her narratives with historical and political dimension by relying
on a variety of anti-illusionistic strategies, including the generation of a highly
stylized mise-en-scène, a refusal of the conventions of continuity editing in
favour of intellectual montage and the staging of provocative juxtapositions
between soundtrack and image track (Columpar & Mayer, 2009: 150).
4
http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/north/angry-inuk-hot-docs-award-1.3574182 [accessed June
16, 2016].
137
Nice Coloured Girls (1987), “sharpened by pain and humour,” is both feminist
revenge fantasy and anti-colonialist rebuke.
The film recounts the story of three young women on the town seducing a
predatory “Captain” (their grandmothers’ term for white men) intercut with a
dense overlay of imagery, voice, and text: the recurring image of an opaque
glass sheet shattering to reveal a water color, presumably hanging in an art
gallery, of a British ship nestled in the Sydney harbor; a voice-over of actual
diary entries penned in 1788 by William Bradley, a British naval officer recording
his impressions; a set of subtitles denying the voice-over, telling the story from
the young women’s perspective. While the successful seduction story is
“fictional,” it operates at the level of fabula, a recognized “pedagogical” feature
of Indigenous poetics. The narrative, constructed of these various elements of
witness, reflect a documentary “truth.”
Patricia Mellencamp reads Moffatt as undercutting and remaking colonial
history through “an intellectual, vertical montage.” For her, Moffatt’s films exist
“in the intersections between sound and imagery, history and experience, art
and life . . . the past [haunting] the present like a primal scene” (Mellencamp,
1994: 135, 133). Moffat engages “the rhetorical confusions of racism through
the sado-masochistic dynamic of the colonised subject” (Fink, 2014).
Pratiba Parmar’s documentary work is notable for its feminist, lesbian,
queer, activist formation: Khush (1991) on the erotic world of South Asian
queers; Double the Trouble Twice the Fun (1992) on disability and queer desire;
The Righteous Babes (1998) on popular music, feminism, and the role of the
female recording artist, as well as a biographical study—Alice Walker: Beauty in
Truth (2011).5 Questions of cultural hybridity, fragmentation, post-colonial
experiences of displacement and marginality inform this oeuvre. Parmar’s
career has revolved around exposing and analysing “the racist colonization of
Black female subjectivity and Black women’s images, stories, and spectatorship”
(Foster, 1997: 2). Tracy Prince believes the work is unique, “grounded in
postcolonial theory and an activist’s sense of their political reality” (Prince, 1995:
294). Refusing to situate herself as an artist working “from the margin,” Parmar
sees her stance as a filmmaker resisting marginalization. For her the question is:
“Are we victims of fragmentation or, precisely because of our cultural hybridity

and post-colonial experiences of displacement and marginality, are we a
synthesis placed very much in the centre?” (Parmar, 1992: 156).
5
Khush| UK | 1991; Double the Trouble Twice the Fun| UK | 1992; The Righteous Babes| UK | 1998; Alice
Walker: Beauty in Truth |USA /UK | 2011.
138
Questions of subjectivity and agency—in particular the vulnerability and
resilience of the human body—are likewise present in the works of Mona
Hatoum: “I want the work in the first instance to have a strong formal presence,
and through the physical experience to activate a psychological and emotional
response” (Hatoum, 2016).
I chose materials in a very intuitive way and, basically, if those materials are
seductive to me, then I want to use them. If they resonate with me, then, of
course, they’re actually going to have the same impact on people. There is
something very tactile—always (Hatoum, 2016).
Such is the case with Measures of Distance (1988) a video constructed from
images of Hatoum’s mother in the shower of the family home in Beirut.
Still 12 “something very tactile—always”

Measures of Distance| Mona Hatoum| UK /Lebanon| 1988
Born to Palestinian parents in Beirut, Hatoum became exiled again visiting

London when war broke out in Lebanon in 1975. Her experience of cultural
displacement, both as a woman and an Arab have marked much of her work.
Measures of Distance is a richly layered composition. Letters written by

Hatoum’s mother to her daughter in London appear as Arabic text
139
superimposed over the mother’s body. In voice-over, Hatoum reads them
aloud in English, privileging the strength of intimacy shared by mother and
daughter at the same time speaking of exile, displacement, disorientation
underscoring their sense of loss, their separation caused by war. The
decorative Arabic script floats over the images of Hatoum’s mother’s body
like a veil or barbed wire, preventing total visual access to the image. It both
conceals and reveals the woman inhabiting that body, explicating her as an
active thinking and feeling being, an image emphasised by the frank
conversation about her sexuality with her daughter (Manchester, 2000).
The video is a “map to explore the human body,” the images proposing their
own “ways of seeing” in the fashion of John Berger (Jones, 2003: 471).
Hatoum explains: “In this work I was also trying to go against the fixed
identity that is usually implied in the stereotype of Arab woman as passive,
mother as non-sexual being . . . the work is constructed visually in such a way
that every frame speaks of literal closeness and implied distance” (Hatoum
et al, 1997: 140). In the case of Measures of Distance, Hatoum employs the
screen as “a means of projecting specifically embodied subjects—and so of
engaging the body and mind of the viewer and provoking a potentially
politically charged intersubjective encounter” (Jones, 2003: 472).
The key, perhaps, to filmer en femme is a necessary “Fleeing from
Documentary” (ie the patriarchal norm) as Michelle Citron called it (Citron:
1999). It is well illustrated by the subjective alternative voices of these
filmmakers. Their work makes good the feminist contention that “the personal
is political.” The two-decade output of Studio D, the NFB ’s women’s unit which
was established specifically for “placing women’s issues at the centre of national
interests” was sustained by the challenge of making this contention good on
the screen ( Vanstone, 2007). Personal discourse suffuses this cinema as does a
willingness to ignore patriarchal aesthetics. Its subjectivity speaks to aspects of
women’s experience which more conventional films, even when suffused by
feminist sensibility, may not.
Michelle Citron’s own Daughter Rite (1980),6 is arguably clearly prototypical
of this filmer en femme. With its found home movies of her own childhood and
transgressive fictional scenes, it overtly attacks hegemonic objective practices
at the height of direct cinema’s dominance. It is a stance reflected by other
6
Daughter Rite| USA | 1980
140
filmmakers, for example, Ngozi Onwurah. In Coffee Coloured Children (1988)
and The Body Beautiful (1990).7 She too is in “flight” from objectivist documentary,
also deploying home movie footage coupled with her own particularly striking
image-making ability. As a Nigerian-English woman, her films challenge
“conceptions of ‘black’ British filmmaking, cultural identities and racial politics”
(Ciecko, 1999: 68). These inventive and daring understandings of the limitations
of the master’s tools, and how to repurpose them, spread.
In the new century, Michelle Citron is again on the move, “Slipping the
Borders/ Shifting the Fragments,“ giving up on linear film altogether.
My artwork slips across the mediums of film, writing, performance, and

new media with two consistent underlying ideas: the examination of
borders and the tension between fragmentation and narrative coherence.
Borders are where contradictions flourish. Fragments are the building blocks
of all narrative. We assemble fragments into a whole to construct a memory,
to recall a dream, to create a film, or to piece together a story of our life
(Citron, 2007: 66).
Although central to her media work, ideas of fragmentation—“unexpected

juxtapositions allowing for the expression of complexity and contradiction”
(Citron, 2007: 67)—and narrative wholeness, were “unformed.” The writing of
her experimental memoir in 1999 (Home Movies and Other Necessary Fictions)
had already “exploded” her ideas about narrative: “I embraced the digital as a
way to create stories that lie in fragments until constructed in the mind of the
play/viewer/reader” (Citron 2007: 68). Playing with fragmentation and narrative
unleashed a host of new work: Jewish Looks (2001) blends and contrasts the
personal with the historical, the psychological with the political through family
photographs; Cocktails and Appetizers (2001) probes the pleasures of voyeurism,
the performance of gender and falling in love; Mixed Greens (2004) takes shape
as a do-it-yourself movie about identity, belonging, and the things we desire,

while Leftovers (2008) contemplates the aging lesbian, exploring how we use
objects to construct our identity and what it means to grow old at the margins
of society (Citron, 2007: 69–71).
7
Coffee Coloured Children| Ngozi Onwurah/Simon Onwurah| UK | 1988); The Body Beautiful |Ngozi
Onwurah| UK |1990.
141
Queer Feast, a compilation of intersecting interactive digital narratives,
mixes documentary and fiction. In a continuing exploration of female
subjectivity, this navigable website duplicates the fragmentations of
overheard snatches of cocktail party conversation. Journeying further into the
complexities of identity, Citron mixes production platforms—including
Polaroids, video with an old DV camera, fake home movies shot with 16 mm
Bolex, super 8 film from her and other lesbians’ lives, photographs, and
documentary archive footage. Julia Lesage reads this as meaning that Citron’s
“aesthetic and political goal in making Queer Feast . . . is to use her own family
history and social context to trace the kinds of complex intersections of identity
and social history that might characterize many queer lives, a phenomenology
of identity, as it were” (Lesage 2013: 272). Citron’s digital work as much as Varda’s
subversion of the older linear technology, constitutes an articulation of “brazen
femme” (Brushwood Rose and Camilieri, 2002).
“The ability to deploy new experimental, emotional, and even tactile
aspects of argument and expression can open up fresh avenues of inquiry and
research” (McPherson, 2009:121). But Julia Lesage reminds us that all this work
can remain on the web to languish. She argues that “feminist film criticism has
favored certain kinds of women’s media and theoretical approaches in order
to promote new frames of knowledge, new ways of theorizing gender in film”
(Lesage, 2013: 267). This has produced “a kind of feminist documentary canon”
in opposition. The dynamics of distribution has not favored the range of work
being produced. While on one hand media viewing has a global reach,
“competing players in the entertainment industry” are built-in gatekeepers
with “an implicit, politically inflected point of view” that mitigate against the
indie woman filmmaker. The consequences are, in her view, paradoxical: a
“plethora of media” but a “far narrower range” (Lesage: 2013: 269). Tapping into
the wealth of “current and future feminist media” means dealing with—and
using—the gatekeepers, just as it always has: “After that, our own writing makes
us curators of the work we hope others will see” (Lesage, 2013: 272). Varda’s
appearance in the Sight and Sound top 10 documentary poll is, perhaps, the
exception that proves this rule.
Julia Lesage’s warning is well taken. Likewise, the significance of the first
person, “auto/biographical turn” admitting subjectivity to the documentary on
an equal footing to documentaries’ established objectivism is not to be denied.
It allows marginalized subjectivities—not just women’s—a voice that steers
clear of the pitfalls of exclusionary, patriarchal “grand narratives” (Egan & Helms,
2002: 15). And this is no small matter.
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2. EMANCIPATION
2.1. Exclusions
What changes is that, generally, legitimating subjectivity in documentary
prevents the marginalization of any voices simply because they are not
“objective”—certain avant-garde filmmakers, for example. “Up until the past
decade or two, and despite the influence of the 1920s documentary innovators,
the expressive or aesthetic function had been consistently undervalued within
the non-fiction domain” (Renov, 2013: 347); but Michael Renov has persuasively
argued that, for example, the traditions of the avant-garde, ought, and now
can, finally be recuperated into the documentary.
The original reception of documentary as an experimental film type has
been long forgotten and much work under this heading has been received as
explorations of other realities, rather than, meaningfully, documentary stories
about the world. Beyond verisimilitude—merely, supposedly, the “copying” of
reality—avant-garde cinema has progressed in various directions, some
formalist, some psychological; but even when their images, as Renov put it,
“play at the edges of abstraction” (Renov, 2008) many remain observational
(“lyrical” in P. Adams Sitney’s terminology) (Adams Sitney, 2002: 155). These can
be claimed as documenting “the visible world” and are therefore licitly “the
stuff of documentary” (Renov, 2007: 348, 349).
Of course, many experiments do lie outside any possible documentary
canon—eg: Peter Kubelka, Bill Viola; but equally many do not and effectively
“show us life” in ways that cannot easily be denied documentary status. Stan
Brakhage saw his own oeuvre, for all its reception as being canonically
experimental,8 as truth-telling texts as much as any in the documentary
mainstream. He himself said: “I think of my films as documentaries. I never
fantasize. I have never invented something just for the sake of making an
interesting image” (Brakhage, 1983: 203). And this continues with the
development of “video-art” in the 1970s and beyond. Like Brakhage, on

occasion, Nam Juin Paik could be no fantasist but rather another creator at the
very edge of abstraction.9
As with the filmmaking scriptrix narrans, it is the primacy of the avant-
gardist’s subjectivity which conditions this expansion of documentary’s
8
Eg The Wonder Ring| Stan Brakhage| USA | 1955.
9
Eg: Lake Placid ’80| USA | 1980.
143
compass. And, in so doing, it seeps across the personal/political boundary,
most vividly, say, in Marlon Riggs’ Tongues Untied (1989).
Still 13 “poetry, performance, confession, and history”

Tongues Untied| Marlon Riggs| USA | 1989
Tongues Untied can be read as a crucial film for charting the 1990s accelerating
move towards subjectivity. Overtly giving voice to the excluded community of
African-American gay men, the film wove “poetry, performance, confession,
and history in a complex pattern for a personal editorial statement.” It was
“thoroughly innovative” (Kleinhans, 1991: 108).
The potency of the challenge Rigg’s subjectivity presented to the assumed
objectivism of the mainstream documentary can be measured, of course, in
the hostility of its public reception. PBS had initially refused to transmit it and
then, when some years later the network backed off and agreed to a screening,
18 affiliates still demurred. No less a figure than the televangelist preacher,
sometime Ronald Regan PR and Republican presidential hopeful, Pat

Buchanan, used a clip from it in a tv campaign election ad to prove George
Bush senior was misusing public money to fund “pornographic art” (Petty,
2014: 424). The homophobic outrage was exacerbated by Rigg’s explicit denial
of the othering objectification which the observational mainstream cannot
avoid. This allowed Tongues Untied to be:
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not merely a report on gay males in the African-American community,
but a major intellectual intervention which is helping create the terms in
which black gay men are collectively thinking and imagining their identity.
While originally intended for a primary audience of black gay men, in release
the tape has been shown successfully to diverse audiences. It thus becomes
an important point of political discourse within the black community in
general, in the gay community, and in the straight white culture. (Kleinhans,
1991: 108).
This is the way the barriers to expression by excluded voice—which are so

much part of patriarchal objectivism—can be lowered by subjectivity.
In other marginalized cinemas, the South American until very recently, for
example: “The voice of the ‘I’ as the bridge between personal and historical
time is most meaningfully displayed” (Kleinhans, 1991) It is perhaps no wonder
that the cultures that created magical realism in fiction can produce “an
imaginary documentary”—as Edgardo Cozarinsky describes his Apuntes para
una biografía imaginaria/Notes from an Imaginary Biography, for example. For
these filmmakers: “What is opposed to fiction is not what is real, it’s not the
truth, which is always that of masters or colonizers.” Instead Cozarinsky creates:
a formal and visual tension between subjective and objective, the factual and
the recreated—in short, between “what has been lived and what has been
filmed” . . . speech and subjectivity express memory as an imaginary. . . . They
are the tools in which body, voice and the archive of images create a politics of
meaning (Amado & Mourão, 2013, 234).
This dynamic is clearly expressed in the aesthetic trajectory of the Chilean

documentarist Patricio Guzmán. For 35 years, in a distinguished series of films,
he has repeatedly returned to the same subject matter: the violent 1973
overthrow of democracy in his country by the dictator General Augusto

Pinochet. However, his strategies for documenting this have evolved. La Batalla
de Chile/Battle for Chile (1975–1979), the first of these, echoes La hora de los
hornos (Hour of the Furnaces| Fernando Solanas & Octavio Getino|Argentina|
1969). It follows La Hora in the meticulousness of its account, its fundamental
newsreel/archive aesthetic, and its length: 260 minutes (p.212).
Thirty-five years later, by contrast, Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light
(2010) contemplates the atrocities of the dictatorship through a subjective
prism. Guzmán’s philosophic and aesthetic complexities do not deign to
145
“challenge” the regime’s killers. He eschews the aesthetic austerities of the
newsreel. Instead he presents a personal meditation on the Atacama Desert
where astronomers scan the heavens looking for the light of long gone
galaxies; archeologists struggle with indecipherable artifacts of lost civilizations;
survivors remember the abandoned miners’ camp that became one of
Pinochet’s concentration camps only yesterday, as it were; and, today, a handful
of Las madres des desaparecidos are still searching the sands for the remains of
their family murdered by the fascists. The public record has become a private
reflection.
This, then, is what is truly fantastique for documentary in the twenty-first
century. An alternative to the long dominance of objectivity (which has been
especially central to anglophone factual films) presents itself. The technology—
which, for all its wonders—can be deployed to impede actually showing us life
by presenting virtualities; but, conversely, the emerging sense of the legitimacy
of the subjective enhances that capacity. A discernible subjective documentary
“species” belatedly recognizes this an alternative that stretches back to Vertov
and embraces all the personal and poetic expressions of the kino-eye since. It
is, indeed, fantastic, that, for example, Sight and Sound’s experts have reached a
point where they rank Les glaneurs et la glaneuse, a film in full-flight from
documentary’s hegemonic scientistic objectivity, eighth in the “greatest
documentaries ever” list.
By 1990 any chronicler of documentary history [could] note the growing

prominence of work by women and men of diverse cultural backgrounds in
which the representation of the historical world is inextricably bound up with
self-inscription (Renov, 2004: 174)
2.2. “Facts”
The importation of subjectivity is of a moment for the development of
documentary as great as the coming of the digital. Whereas there was,
traditionally, only one documentary species—the objective—the legitimation
of subjectivity is a second (see p. 23, figure 5). It is more than a matter of the

excluded we have here discussed finding a documentary voice. Rather it is that
subjectivity marks, in effect, an expanded basis for documentary expression—
not merely some sort of falling off from the standards of objectivity which
documentary supposedly demands. Subjectivity—as privileged individual
perspective—necessarily confronts “the idea of a neutral science” (in a way, it
146
can be noted, that documedia—a third species now emerging (p. 56,
figure 11)—does not necessarily do).
As Christine Delphy argues, objectivity can be seen as emanating from the
patriarchal “position of dominance” (Delphy, 1984: 156). Subjectivity, by insisting
on the validity of “the social position of its producers,” rejects this subaltern role.
In consequence, in both these contexts—the individualistic and the
scientific—“subjectivity, when joined to freedom, autonomy and justice, is
rendered [newly] productive” (Lettow, 2015; 507), but it is so at the cost of
objectivity’s scientistic hegemony. Given the threat it poses, it is little wonder
that in the frame of science, subjectivity has been long held to be a contaminant.
Documentary is implicated in the scientific because its claim on the real has
hitherto been over-invested in objectivity. It should not be forgotten that,
historically, the documentary has attempted:
an elaboration of a whole aesthetic of objectivity and the development of

comprehensive technologies of truth capable of promoting what is right and
what is wrong in the world, and by extension what is “honest” and what is
“manipulative” in documentary ( Trinh T. Minh-Ha, 1994: 94).
“Honesty” was demonstrated by calling up that part of the scientific project

which speaks to the testability of evidence. The assumption is that the
product—the record of the filmic event—is one which any observer would
have duplicated, had they been the filmmaker. Matthew Winston proposes an
analogy with mathematics where objectivity functions like a constant. Faced
with an event, all objective journalistic accounts—fair, balanced, professional,
factual—“should produce functionally uniform output” ( Winston, M, 2014: 180).
Ditto documentary. Of course, the filmmaker’s presence is acknowledged and
“subjectivity has never been banished from the documentary ranks” (Renov,
2004: xviii). But, up till the recent past, subjective blatantly expanding to
embrace “digression, reverie, and the revelation of public history through the
private and associational,” has been deemed to go too far (Renov, 2004: 110).
The project of science remains bound, as it has for the last half-millennium
in the global north, to objective observation of the “Book of Nature”; and the
photographic apparatus, however scientistically, linked the documentary to
this endeavor. This is the basis of the ideologically potent supposition that
documentary footage, if not contaminated by idiosyncratic selfhood, is an
objective truth. It is recorded by filmmakers “looking only at the facts, setting
aside personal preference or interest” ( Williams, 1976: 312). In Raymond
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William’s view, this is why it has been widely assumed that “a sense of something
shameful, or at least weak attaches to subjective” ( Williams, 1976: 312, bold in
original).
Given non-fiction’s historic links to the scientific project, to observational

methods and the protocols of journalistic reportage, it is not surprising that,
within the community of documentary practitioners and critics, subjectivity
has frequently been constructed as a kind of contamination, to be expected
but minimized (Renov, 2004: 176).
“All types of creative non-fiction [ergo including documentary] can thus be

read as . . . violating the purity of non-fiction as a category, as soon as they
allow subjectivity to form a valid part of their ostensibly non-fictional discourses”
( Winston, M, 2014: 20).
There is clear evidence, for example in the on-going propensity of the press
to worry at documentary “scandals,” to show the persistence of audience
assumptions as to documentary’s necessary “truth-telling” by analogy with
science. The hegemonic power of, especially, direct cinema to define the
documentary in such terms is by no means exhausted. The inexactitude of the
analogy with science, after all, reaches back to the false supposed equivalency
of the camera and the thermometer, etc. Nevertheless, filming is inherently
unscientific as it is not systematic; does not produce replicable results; and
certainly cannot be used to predict future outcomes. In short, it is not science—
and it never has been.
Acknowledging this signals a sea change. The turn is noticed from the late
1980s on, when direct cinema’s hegemony was weakening and older
documentary forms and tropes were being rediscovered or new ones explored.
Bill Nichols saw this as marking a “shift of epistemological proportions” creating
“new knowledges” (Nichols, 1994:1). The “new” can be glossed, exactly, as the
main consequence of the legitimation of the subjective and it has had—is
having—a profound effect: “Only recently has the subjective/objective
hierarchy (with the latter as the favored term) began to be displaced, even
reversed” (Renov, 2004:174). “There remains an ontological assumption that

there is, in fact, an external reality,” but it is now “one that is now openly being
subjectively interpreted by the [filmmaker] supposedly for the [viewer’s]
understanding and/or empathy” ( Winston, M, 2014: 20). The view that
individual perspective renders the act of documenting suspect in terms of
objectvity’s supposed neutrality is residually persistent but it is increasingly
148
passé. In the psychological context outlined above, it is, after all, a positive:
“subjectivity is no longer construed as something shameful” (Renov, 2004: 174).
As faith can survive the abandonment of belief in the inerrancy of an holy text,
the documentary idea can survive psychological subjectivity—even as it
accepts it cannot be resisted scientistically.
And so, Les glaneurs et la glaneuse comes eighth amongst the greatest
documentaries ever. And Chris Marker’s San Soleil (1983) is ranked third in the
same poll. Marker, Varda’s confrère—he who appears in Les plages in the
aggressively anti-engineering figure of an animated cat—has, with her, also
lived the struggle for subjectivity. Sans Soleil”s bricolage of images gleaned of
decades of travel through dozens of countries is offered with a personalized
commentary where what “he,” the filmer, thinks about what he has filmed, is
vouchsafed by a female voice in exquisitely well-crafted sentences. “For Marker,
truth is always a matter of an individual’s point of view: history does not exist
apart from through our personal experience and interpretation of it” (Bergan,
2012). And history—the world beyond Marker alone—suffuses his cinema.
From the outset of his career in the late 1940s, he was “always ready to
defend lost and difficult causes” (Cacérès, 1982: 27) His first noted documentary
was made with Alain Renais about African art in 1953.10 It was banned. French
censors, in the face of the collapsing of the French Empire, could not
countenance its anti-colonialism. As Marker started, so he went on: collaborative
work, reportage, and a complete commitment to the Left; but in his own voice,
as reclusive and self-sufficient as the cartoon/toy cat which represents him. By
the time he died in 2012, he made documentaries in Peking, Cuba, and Siberia,
about Vietnam, Israel—journalism’s “hot-spots”—but they are far from the
norms of objective “coverage.” Film after film is “unplayed” as Vertov would put
it: “— without the help of a story . . . without the help of theater . . .” Nevertheless,
he speaks, literally in his writerly, poetic commentaries and figuratively—more
readerly—in the visually ambiguous bricolage of his narratives, in an entirely
personnel register.
The gleanings of Varda, his friend the (deceptive) “little old lady,” are of a
piece. Les glaneurs is not merely a reflection on the absurdities of over-
consumption and waste in late capitalist societies—an inconvenient truth.11
10
Les statues meurent aussi/Statues also Die| Alan Resnais| France| 1953.
11
Similarly, Man with a Movie Camera melds its self-examination of cinematic practice with a critique
of Lenin’s New Economic Policy, an issue as pressing for the USSR in 1929 as is waste for the west in
2000. Of course, Vertov dangerously laid himself open to a charge of left infantilism. The worse Varda
has to suffer is the meaningless slur of unprofessionalism from Hollywood Screen Daily (p. 135).
149
Refracted through her unique individual sensibility, the subject is made to
speak, without pretense or bombast, to the fundamentals of the human
condition. Gleaning is more than just a metaphor for documentary filming; just
as her memoirs in Les plages are far from mere rambling cinematic jottings that
“some pruning would have helped.” Her twenty-first century oeuvre can be
rightly considered a model of “radical modesty” (Bonner, 2009); because she
indicates, sotto voce, something of a revolution for documentary expression.
For all her modesty, Agnès Varda, the model subjective documentarist both as
an individual voice and as a foe to objectivity, reveals the subtle and effective
ways the master’s cinematic tool can, after all, be turned against him. His
“position of dominance” no longer holds—and that cannot be ignored.
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7 “Nous sommes dans le
bain”/“We are Implicated”
CARE: The basis of ethical filmmaking is that no HARM (1) shall be done by the
filmmaker to the filmed; but allowing for subjectivity and concomitantly the greater
Involvement (1.1) of the filmed as co- creators alters this: even as the older ethical
considerations as to the Consequences (1.2) of taking part in a documentary still
persist. Ethical filmmaking essentially turns on RIGHTS (2) but the need for a pure
ethic can be set aside by the right to know. The Protocols (2.1) surrounding “do no
harm” (the harm principle) cannot then be applied wholesale because of this
demand for free expression. There is, in fact, a Conflict (2.2) of rights and
responsibilities that pitches the harm principle against free expression.
1. HARM
1.1. Involvement
Regina Nicholson, 19, lies dying of an untreatable bone cancer in her Californian
hospital bed. At her bedside sits filmmaker Henry Corra, nearly 40 years her
senior, who has been collaborating with her since she was 17 in filming what
both (and we) know are her last days. She had approached Corra at a screening,
explaining her obsession with film and her desire to be a filmmaker—and her
terminal illness. A project to document this was soon agreed.
Farewell to Hollywood (2013) can been seen as a twenty-first century version
of an Ars moriendi, those little books1 on the art of dying—the making of a
“good death”—which first appeared in Europe in the fifteenth century
( Thomas, n/d). The film, suffused by the young woman’s stoicism, intelligence,
wit, and candor is of a piece. It too is a guide to making a good death; but, as a
quasi-Ars moriendi, it teeters on the edge of contemporary western confusions
about the moral boundaries of image-making.
1
They were one of western printing’s early staples, little books of whole page-size wooden blocks,
xylographica, engraved with short texts arranged around the images of death.
151
As in Stories We Tell, appearances in Farewell to Hollywood are presentational.
For all that the life and death events being filmed are obviously of a moment
greater than the filming, those around—parents, health-care professionals,
social workers, religious figures—are clearly as aware of the camera as are
Nicholson and Corra. Rather, though, the concern here is another issue: not the
authenticity of the filmeds’ presentation of self but the duty of care owed them
by filmmakers.
The documentary filmmaker faces two sets of ethical concerns which can
be subsumed in legal terms as a duty to the audience and a duty to those
filmed. The two are rather different but, nevertheless, difficult to disentangle.
Applying Levinasian thinking, the duty of care to the filmed arises from the
“proximity” of “l’un-pour-l’autre”/“the-one-for-the-other” but the care for
the spectator is for “la troisième personage”/“the third party” who is beyond the
other (Levinas, 1981:141,166; 1998:174,195–6; Ofaz, 2015).2 For Emmanuel
Levinas, the degree to which the duties to the third are of a piece to those
afforded to the other is a measure of ethical probity. The filmmaker speaks to
the spectator via the screen as much as he has previously done directly to the
filmed and the moral obligation is therefore equivalent. But as a matter of
pragmatics, the control of the filmmaker over the other is immediately far
greater than is his control over his audience. For all the equivalency of speech,
the filmer necessarily invades the privacy of the other but leaves the autonomy
of the third far more intact. In practice, proximity involves the more immediate
and direct an ethical obligation to the filmed. “No harm,” as J.S. Mill insisted as a
general principle, shall come to those involved in the production at—literally—
the filmer’s proximate hand (Mill, 1998 [1859]: 48).
Filmmakers, just like all members of society, have always been subject to
the constraints of the Millian “harm principle.” None should cause another, in
his phrase, any “perceptible hurt,” that is: readily discernable damage (Mill, 1998
[1859]: 48). Yet, today, we are increasingly concerned with hurt which is un-
perceptible—self-attested, such as offense. This can be chilling of free speech,
especially since it seems—from, say, the Rushdie fatwa upheaval of 1989—
bien pensant opinion in defense of free speech is no longer automatic. And this
in the context where the digital dissolves the wall between the filmed and the
filmed; but all documentary’s long standing ethical challenges remain.
Farewell to Hollywood is a film about film; it celebrates Hollywood, a
commonplace and, more or less, morally unproblematic topic; but it also deals
2
We are grateful to Ohad Ofuz for his guidance on this point.
152
with (explicitly) death and (implicitly) sex, far more challenging subjects to
investigate ethically. And, moreover, Corra is a performing-filmmaker whose
subjectivity is as central to the film as is Regina Nicholson’s, an acting-subject.
Corra sees them both as being of a piece: creative artists signing the work as
co-directors. Farewell to Hollywood has hybridic on-screen filmmakers exploring,
explicitly, the still tabooed topic of natural death and, implicitly, the issue of
sexuality. It presents an agenda of contemporary documentary’s ethical
complexities.
Corra points out that the focus of Farewell to Hollywood is not Reggie’s
physical decline and difficulties. Tactfully, little of this was filmed. But conversely
scenes with connotations of her quite licet sexuality—she was, after all, above
the age of consent—are in the film. Nevertheless, its reception made much of
this as being somehow improper, to Corra’s not entirely ungrounded surprise.
What is being documented, apart from Nicholson’s battle with cancer and the
cultural importance of Hollywood to people’s lives, is her late teenage years.
Her close relationship with Corra is documented as contributing to the stresses
of the situation with her family over her care. Eventually, her relationship with
her parents breaks down although they never withdraw their consent to the
film.
Nicholson’s parents come to resent Corra’s presence in their dying
daughter’s life. As their relationship with her worsens—as it might under the
circumstances—Corra, in effect, slowly takes over from them. He becomes
deeply embedded, implicated in the situation he is documenting. Against the
moment when she will lose the ability to assent to treatments, Corra assumes
the role of caregiver which normally would be theirs.
“Nous sommes dans le bain”
Still 14 “Will you allow me to be your advanced care director?”

Farewell To Hollywood| Henry Corra/Regina Nicholson| USA | 2013
153
At the climax of this process, he is heard to ask, performatively in the Austinian
sense, “Will you allow me to be your advanced care director?” And, upon her
assent in shot, he slips a ring on her outstretched middle finger. The scene
clearly parodies the interlocutionary utterance of the wedding ceremony as
well as the (actually pagan) ring-giving which is now a Christian tradition as old
as the Ars moriendi. The signification of the utterance and the action in the shot
is unmistakable and it echoes repeated moments in the film which reflect
Nicholson’s deep relationship with Corra.
After film-school, Corra served his apprenticeship with the Maysles but has
never lost a beaux arts sensibility that marks his work. Umbrellas (1994) is a study
of a massive Christo art project3 which he had co-directed with Al Maysles and
Grahame Weinbren. It was shot under strict direct cinema non-interventionist
dogme. When editing the footage, Corra became “sick of pretending that I am
not there—that feels so dishonest. We spent so much time in the editing room
masking our presence.”4 (The direct cinema dogme demanded, as it always
does, such misrepresentation.) In contrast, his own practice evolved into what
he terms “living cinema” documentaries. This is not, as he points out, merely to
appear in a “hosted” mainstream “authored” non-fiction programming manner.
Rather, “Henry Corra emotionally embeds himself in his subject’s story without
knowing the outcome” (Anon [Uniondocs], 2013).
Farewell to Hollywood was originally tagged as “A Love Story” and Corra is
unrepentant about this. He does not deny that a certain flirtatiousness is on
display: “Of course, Reggie and I were inappropriate in the way we talked to
each other. Of course, we crossed boundaries. Of course we were pushing
boundaries together because that is what art is supposed to do . . .”5 The danger
of masking one’s presence—itself unethical as far as Corra is concerned—
demanded candor.
But more than that: he had become a crucial figure in Reggie’s life. Making
the film was one of the only sources of pleasure she had. Corra, therefore,
followed Regge’s lead and looked to her for what gave her joy, happiness,
fulfilment and laughter . . . I knew it was a dodgy situation but . . . Reggie
3
In 1991, Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and his partner Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon installed
3,100 giant metal umbrellas in two open valleys in Japan and Southern California. Three people
died in accidents with the sculptures, (Anon [New York Times] (a), 1991; Anon [New York Times](b),
1991).
4
Interview (BW & GV ) with Henry Corra, New York City, November 7, 2014.
5
Interview (BW & GV ) with Henry Corra New York City, November 7, 2014.
154
would be the one who would . . . say: “no, we gotta make the movie . . . we
gotta do this. This is the right thing to do.” It made her immensely happy
and the process filled her with joy . . . it was the only thing in her life that
gave her joy. . . . Everything else in this poor girl’s life was shit . . .
Doing what Reggie thought would help the film was in his mind therapeutic
for her. She was like Allakariallak, “Nanook,” who told Flaherty, in the same way
as she told Corra, “the aggie [film] comes first.” And she, his co-director, was,
after all, tragically and indeed horrifically dying before his eyes.
The alternative is impartial, unemotional observation, the norm of
objectivity; but that is also not without its own ethical quandaries. Implicitly, it
denies or downgrades the moral duty of care to the other. As Joseph Addison,
the editor of The Spectator, put it in the first issue in 1711: “I live in the world
rather as a Spectator of mankind than as one of the species” (Addison, Joseph
(1711): 1). Such alienation can be simply callous; and nobody can accuse Corra
of being that, perceived impropriety notwithstanding.
Nick Broomfield, arguably documentary’s leading performer-filmmaker,
finds himself equally inappropriately implicated the moment he becomes
serious—really embedded in the lives of those he films. His on-screen persona,
a descant on his real personality, is diluted and his presence reduced in the two
films he made about a sex-worker and serial killer, Aileen Wuornos: Aileen
Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1992) and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial
Killer (2003).6 Broomfield has made several films about the sex industry but
those, like the early documentaries in which he is apparently seeking interviews
with public figures he could easily have spoken with (eg Tracking Down
Maggie),7 are essentially “entertaining and self-indulgent” (Bruzzi, 2013: 54).
Filming himself being bound by giggling dominatrices while fully dressed and
still carrying his tape-recorder in Fetishes8 (for an HBO program) is simply silly.
The Wuornos pictures are far from that.
He (and his co-director Joan Churchill) became so close to Wuornos making
the first film that Churchill captured, secretly shooting when Aileen thought
6
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer| UK | 1992; Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer| USA |
2003.
7
Nick Broomfield| UK | 1994. Broomfield fails on camera to obtain an interview with Maggie
Thatcher although she is actually on a book tour. However, as Bruzzi notes (Bruzzi, 2013: 54), his
sober and engaged side has reasserted itself in more recent work. His sixth film about the sex
industry details the plight of Chinese immigrant women to the UK being forced into prostitution
and is a compelling, somber investigation: Sex: My British Job| Nick Broomfield| UK | 2013.
8
Fetishes| Nick Broomfield| UK | 1996.
155
the camera was not running, an admission which Broomfield felt proved her
insanity and therefore protected her from the Florida death-chamber. The
second film is a follow-up ten years after her death sentence, made as the last
attempts to stay her execution by reason of insanity were failing. In consequence
of it, he becomes a material witness to her state of mind. The evidence of the
Churchill footage was not enough and he no longer could be allowed to stand
by the work and nothing more. Now Broomfield is subpoenaed, easily seen as
an improper infringement of his right of free expression, analogous to seizing
a reporter’s notebook.
These are examples of the horns of the ethical dilemmas skewering a
performing-filmmaker, but such quandaries are not limited to subjective
documentaries. It now becomes ever more unavoidably the case, which even
the most “objective” of documentarists must acknowledge, that (as Edgar
Morin put it, getting into a taxi at the end of Chronqiue d’été): “nous sommes
dans le bain,” we [filmmakers] are in the bath—in the water—implicated.
1.2. Consequences
And, with outcomes both good and ill, implicated they are. There are
consequences to the act of documenting but, obviously, it is the possibility of
harm being caused to those filmed by publicly exposing them with negative
outcomes which should most ethically concern filmmakers.
Some contemporary documentary forms are particularly prone to have
deleterious effects and have been noted as so doing. Legal opinion is
that, for example: “there will always be the risk of harm” in the formatted
documentary approach developed for reality television (Matheson & Calow,
2003:6). Producers of such programming have been successfully sued for
misrepresentation, harassment, and injury (Hill & Ahmed 2003:19; Nosowicz,
2003: 21). And some harms they might have caused are beyond remedy:
suicide in apparent consequence of appearance has occurred. Exhibiting
the ethical sensibilities of a deceased skunk, a producer following one such
death said: “Nothing changes. I’m not even going to make any edits because
it’s real” ( Timms, 2005: 19) (see p. 204 for the specific problems of filming
suicide). Whether such upshots commonly occur or not is irrelevant. They can
range from perceptible life-changes to suffering imperceptible stress. Ethically,
they are troubling every time, however great or little and however little
reported. And reality tv is not alone in having the power to cause them.
Although so commonplace as to be seldom noted, appearing in any
156
documentary can have unintended negative consequences—and this has
always been so.
After Flaherty’s The Man of Aran (1934), the “Man of Aran” himself, Coleman
“Tiger” King, and the lad who played his “son” MI ckeleen Dillen, “found they
couldn’t live on Áran as former film stars” (Stoney, 1978: 2). “Tiger” King went to
London and worked his whole life for the Metropolitan Water Board. Mickeleen
just disappeared. The received history is that the family in Tanya Ballantyne’s
direct cinema exposé of poverty in Montreal, The Things I Cannot Change, were
believed to have been forced, like “Tiger” and Mickeleen, to move because of
hostility—in this instance that of their neighbors at having their community
exposed (see p. 113). The Renault worker, Angelo, in Chronique d’un été (1960)
was filmed on the assembly line in the factory; and then he was filmed
explaining how this had got him the sack. (Morin and Rouch found him
another job.) The harm done Angelo was not the result of exposure in the film,
a consequence of audience reaction. It was that of his bosses objecting to his
being filmed.
In less free, authoritarian, or lawless conditions, being filmed can be
physically endangering. Adi, the optometrist at the center of Joshua
Oppenheimer’s U anduh Film Senyap (The Look Of Silence) Di Sini (2015)9 not
only relives the trauma of his family’s persecution by murderous semi-official
Indonesian “anti-communist” “gangstas” in the 1960s—an experience which
could be claimed, at least theoretically, as therapeutic. But, as the killers were
still alive, free, and still capable of threatening, Adi then had to be moved to
another island for protection against them; which was done off-screen and
uncommented on in the film. (And done with Oppenheimer’s help, of course).10
We pay little heed to the ethical implications of such incidents.
Whether revealed or not, there might well be outcomes—benefits and
harms—and the filmmaker bears responsibility for them. But it would be
wrong—and chilling of free expression—to assume these are more usually
negative than not. Such unreported upshots can as easily be positive as
negative and either way can impact on a filmmaker’s ethics. For example, Kim
Longinotto’s Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go (2007),11 is about a residential school for

deeply disturbed children. Filming even un-distressed children is always
potentially ethically fraught but it was justified on this occasion because
9
Denmark/Indonesia/Finland/Norway/UK /Israel/France/USA /Germany/Netherlands| 2015.
10
Q&A [via Skype] @ Visible Evidence XXI International Documentary Film Conference, Jamia Millia
Islamia University, New Delhi. December 14, 2014.
11
UK | 2007.
157
Longinotto was in the school for impeccable reasons: invited in by its governors
and carer/teachers she became part of an eventually successful campaign
against the school’s threatened closure by its funding authorities.12
Benefits can occur even at the game show end of reality tv—for all that they
are “possibly the nadir of human achievement” (Logan, 2007: 39).13 There is,
after all, prize-money for the winner and some players have been further
rewarded by being transformed into media “stars,” however briefly careers such
as theirs flare. This is true of less ludic docusoaps as well. Notably, in Britain,
Jeremy Spake seized the spotlight in Airport (1996)14 a series on everyday life at
Heathrow. Russian-speaking and entertainingly charismatic, he was then
working for Aeroflot. The show made him a T V presenter and writer, and high
profile media work persisted for four years. But a decade later, internet forum
chat about him was guessing that now: “he’s opening supermarkets to a
meager crowd of onlookers murmuring ‘Who is he?’ ” (Dale, 2011). All the same,
this can scarcely be judged a harm.
Well before this, in the 1930s, Harry Watts’ central character Bill Blewitt and,
in the 1940s, one of Humphrey Jennings’ firemen, Fred Griffiths (“Johnny
Daniels”), became film actors—Blewitt briefly during the Second World War
but Griffiths worked as a minor player into the 1970s. And between the GPO
and reality tv, one of the latter’s major predecessors—multi-part documentary
series on everyday life—also occasionally had such non-harmful transformative
effects. For example: although her experience with filmmakers was far from a
happy one, Nolene Donaher, a classic Watt’s “extravert,” was cast as the central
character in Sylvania Waters (1992),15 a series set in a Sydney suburb. She briefly
became a celebrity, made a record, wrote a book and was flown to the
Edinburgh Television Festival to discuss her experiences before an audience of
British broadcasting professionals (Donaher, 1993) (p. 169).
Determining benefit or harm is confounded because impact itself is
seldom so obviously to be seen. The positive cases above are exceptional in
this regard as a film’s effect, good or bad, is normally too much subject to
12
The school is still open, although the usual caveats apply as to how much a role the film played
in this. Roger Graef, the film’s producer and a major direct cinema documentary filmmaker in his
own right was a patron of the school at the time. They were also ethically confident about the
consent difficulties of working with children.
13
Jon Dovey has argued that formatted programming can, nevertheless, be of value not as
documentaries per se but as analogies of computer simulations of human behavior (Dovey, 2005:
240). However, the computer’s virtual humans cannot be harmed; reality tv’s actual people can be.
14
Various| UK | 1996, May 2–June 6.
15
Sylvania Waters| Brian Hill/Kate Woods| UK /Australia| 1992, March 7–June 28.
158
contamination by other factors and influences to be easily discerned. (This is
why, more generally, uncontroversial evidence of the general social effects of
media on the audience is also so difficult to find: p. 201.) Many factors can be
involved.
Rouch cast, for his ethnofiction Moi, un noir,16 the Nigerian Oumarou Ganda
and, for Petit à Petit,17 Safi Faye. Both became significant filmmakers themselves.
Ganda was one of Africa’s first auteurs and Faye is the first sub-Saharan woman
director of note. Ganda, though, was at odds with Rouch over that first film
and, for Faye, the line from appearing for Rouch to her own career was not
much directly influenced by him (Haffner, 1996: 97–8; ten Brink, 2007b: 155–7).
The connection between their acting debuts and their subsequent careers is
by no means clear; but equally clearly, appearing for Rouch was the start, as it
was for Marceline Loridan. After her appearance in Chronique d’un été, she
herself became a filmmaker in partnership with the veteran Dutch documentary
pioneer, Joris Ivens. The connection was made because, when watching a
rough-cut of the film, he had asked Rouch for her telephone number (ten
Brink, 2007a: 148). The two eventually married.
Causality is always likely problematic. The breakdown of Reggie Nicholson’s
relationship with her parents cannot be solely attributed to the filmmaking.
Equally evidenced on screen was her potential revolt, a likelihood, even if
Henry Corra had not been involved. Angelo, when explaining his sacking on
camera, gives the impression that the filming at the factory was the last straw
for the Renault management. He did not last long at the Billancourt film studio
where he had been found a job because of his attempts to unionize the
workforce. It is possible to assume he might not have endured at Renault for
long either, filming or not (Morin, 1985: 21; Yakir, 1978: 9). Ditto the suicides
apparently provoked by reality tv appearances: it would seem reasonable to
suggest, without exonerating the tactless insensitivity of some producers, that
the filming is unlikely to be the only—or even the primary—cause of any such
tragedy.
As with much else, the question whether filmmakers must inevitably leave
a mark goes back to Robert Flaherty. To shoot Man of Aran, Flaherty, his family,
and crew (including an editor as the film was processed and a rough-cut
assembled on the island) took 20 months. The production brought an injection
of money onto Áran at the height of the Great Depression when the subsidence
16
Moi, un noir| Jean Rouch| France| 1958.
17
Petit à Petit |Jean Rouch| France/Niger| 1970.
159
economy was virtually cashless. Lives were totally changed for those directly
involved, as noted above, but the rest of the community were also affected.
Businesses were started with money earned working on the production and
family fortunes (albeit modest) made. New horizons were opened for people.
The effects of the production company’s sojourn persist. The filmmaker is
indeed implicated.
2. RIGHTS
2.1. Protocols
And, being implicated, they bear an ethical responsibility to those they film. It
might often be a gray matter as to how this shall be discharged, but it has a
black-and-white basis, ie: no harm shall come to the filmed at their hand.
For the climax of Man of Aran, Flaherty paid three men to put to sea in a
curragh in conditions they would never have gone out in normally.
Still 15 “a boatload of wild Irishmen”

Man of Aran| Robert Flaherty| UK /Ireland| 1934
However, Frances, his widow, exonerated him:
I think when you see those three men riding in a curragh, you will certainly ask,
“Did we put them out there in such danger just for the film?” The answer is:
160
they wanted to go for they had taken the film over. It was their film. . . . It was a
film to show the world what manner of men they were.18
The experienced “wild” (Flaherty’s term) Áran fishermen certainly consented,

although aware of the dangers. Nevertheless, Frances Flaherty’s self-serving
explanation of the circumstances does not disguise the fact that the £5, more
than a poor islander could expect to see in a year, given them off-camera,
constituted potential de facto undue influence. After all “Tiger” King, the “man
of Aran,” refused it.
Fees appear when it turns out there is absolutely no alternative if the
director’s wishes are not to be thwarted. The filmed are pressured because the
filmmakers are pressured—to make the film. Not that that is what is commonly
understood to be the case. Rather we hear of “giving voice,” a “public right to
know” and, as with the boatmen, the agreement of the filmed—consent. But
giving voice and the public right to know are something of shibboleths; they
can be little more than rhetorical justifications for the filmmaker. And, when
fully considered, obtaining consent is by no means ethically the end of the
matter. Unless true collaborative work is involved, there will be a director and,
if there is a director, there were will be influence; admittedly not necessarily
“undue”; but, equally, sometimes “undue” enough to come close—morally, if
not legally—to harassment.
For 15 screen minutes of Shoah,19 Claude Lanzmann forces Auschwitz
survivor barber Abraham Bomba to relive, in painful detail, shearing women’s
hair before they went to the gas chamber. When Bomba finally falls silent in
visible despair, tears running down his cheeks, Lanzmann is remorseless: “You
have to do it. I know it’s very hard. I know, and I apologize.” Bomba begs: “Don’t
make me go on, please.” Lanzmann ignores this: “Please. We must go on.” This is
not giving the interviewee a voice; it is the interviewee refusing to speak. It is
not the talking cure in action seeking therapeutic articulation for the sake of
Bomba’s mental health; and anyway Lanzmann, a philosopher by education, is
no trained psychologist. Nor is this justified on grounds of a public right to
know. These things are abundantly known already—hearing them again will
not convince deniers. Rather, it is Lanzmann asserting undue influence over a
clearly vulnerable interviewee to the point of re-traumatizing him. His blatant
misrepresentation is that it is not “we”—Abe Bomba or us the viewers—who
18
Television interview: Flaherty & Film | NET | n/d| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pM7k60
egxHo.
19
Shoah| Claude Lanzmann| UK /France| 1985.
161
must go on. It is only, solely him, Lanzmann: “I must go on.” Go on for, as
Allakariallak might have put it, the sake of the aggie.
For all the need “never to forget” etc, a more awful recorded example of
undue influence is hard to find. Flaherty’s reckless bribing of the Áran islanders
to surfeit his obsessive need for a climax to The Man of Aran comes close; but
he did not film himself doing this. Lanzmann was exceptional in that he is
callous enough to put evidence of his behavior on the screen. However, even
in the less fraught—unfilmed—circumstances of everyday filmmaking similar
conversations are held. Here is Craig Gilbert putting the same argument, in
effect, that Lanzmann put to Bomba, to Pat Loud, the mother in his pioneering
series An American Family (1972). Mrs Loud’s marriage collapsed during filming
but Gilbert needed the drama of her throwing her husband out of the family
home on camera, a thing never before seen in a documentary. She recalled
that: “[t]he producer [Gilbert] said how important it was, and how WNET [the
producing station] would protect me if I did that scene.” She saw this in
retrospect as “coercion,” exacerbated because, when she agreed: “I was probably
drunk” (Galanes, 2013).
Sober or not, Pat Loud was a wealthy sophisticate—money here was no
factor—but she was still ignorant about the implications for her and her family
of becoming involved. Her consent, even when sober, was not (and perhaps
could not be at that time) fully informed. The series was to be made in the then
new direct cinema mode. Indeed, the project was among the earliest films to
utilize the increased flexibility of the lightweight 16mm synch equipment to
penetrate the intimacy of family life to a degree previously impossible.20 The
Louds’ prior experience did not equip them to realize what might ensue,
despite a developed understanding of what documentaries were like. Pat
Loud recalled that: “nobody had ever heard of anything like this. It had never
been done before. . . . Documentaries weren’t like this. They were Margaret
Mead and Africa.” All Gilbert told them was: “We’re going to do four families,
and you’re going to be the West Coast family” (Galanes, 2013).
In the event the Louds provided Gilbert with all the sensational material
he needed—eg the divorce and a son coming out as gay, another first—and
the other families were forgotten. Direct cinema’s propensity for intrusion
and its then hold over anglophone documentary is what made it seem
20
A Married Couple| Alan King| Canada| 1969 for which King stuck film-lights on the walls of the
home of Antoinette and Billy Edward’s and proceeded to film in them in intimate—indeed
naked—detail. This is, conventionally, the founding documentary of this trope. It is the model for
Sylvania Waters.
162
reasonable to take a view at that time that documentary needed to be
reminded of the Nuremberg Protocols ( Winston, B., 1988), a safe suggestion
given that the strength of liberal commitment to the right of free speech was
unquestioned.
The Nuremburg Protocols had been established following the trials of the
Nazi concentration camp doctors who had performed horrendous experiments
on their prisoners in the name of medical research. What was glaringly absent
in the camps now needs to always be present in a lab or hospital: voluntary
consent by a person capable of giving it in the absence of any form of duress,
fraud, deceit, or underlying coercion or constraint. The consenting party
should be sufficiently aware of and understand what is involved in the
procedure, its nature, duration, and purpose, and what inconveniences and
hazards and long-term effects might be reasonably anticipated (Reynolds,
1982: 143).
The Protocols’ basic conditions, enshrined in law, against physical duress or
coercion, do of course totally apply to filmmaking. And so too does the need
for the filmed to have the capacity to consent. Ethically, getting Pat Loud’s
agreement when drunk simply negates it.
Such cases define an ethical boundary. Most, though, are not a matter of
legal “duress” involving perceptible threats. Behavior like that has little to do
with documentary film. Rather, what is common is everyday persuasion only
becomes “undue influence” when it overcomes the better judgment of the
filmed or distorts the grounds on which their choice is made. It can take many
forms—from exhortations through flattery to deception and it is not necessarily
a matter of money. In journalism, for all that it has become routinized, paying
for information smacks of corruption. Documentarists have taken a similar
view: it is both unnecessary and unethical to pay the filmed. But, as with all
facets of documentary ethics, it is not a black-and-white matter. It can
sometimes be justified and, indeed, some might argue often ought to be.
Hope of earnings need not necessarily be a sign of duress.
Nothing better illustrates the political bona fides of Kartemquin, a
progressivist Chicago production company, than the fact it shares filming

profits, should there be any, with the filmed. In Hoop Dreams (Steve James|
USA | 1994), the classic account of young basketball players dreaming of a
professional sports career, everybody who spoke on camera received a share
from the film’s earnings, determined by the length of their appearance. In The
Interrupters (Steve James| USA | 2013), a film highlighting the work of an
established community group dedicated to intervening in street gang
163
violence, the charity benefited financially from the profit sharing, as did the
four major participants.21 Kartemquin’s purpose is to deepen socially valuable
work, not exploit those doing it. Miraculously, it has survived now for 50 years
(p. 197). Hence, on occasion, payment can be justified whether consent is fully
informed or not; and, more generally, the prohibition against fraud and
misrepresentation can be trumped by it.
The prohibition against any form of subterfuge or entrapment is also not so
clearly a matter of black and white either. In Shoah, Claude Lanzmann was in
flagrant breach when he secretly filmed elderly surviving unrepentant Nazi
concentration camp guards without their consent or knowledge. However,
morally, because of their unpunished criminality, he owed them no duty of
care and needs no defense of his practice. In all situations involving the morally
compromised, “sufficient” information for them to make the considered
judgment that the Protocols require is not needed. They can be filmed with no
obligation to alert them to the possible consequences of their naivety.
The Act of Killing, Oppenheimer’s companion film to The Look of Silence, also
documents the same situation: an ignored aspect of the Cold War: the murky
period (1965–7) when the father of post Second World War Indonesian
independence from the Dutch, the dictator Sukarno, was replaced in a coup
by Suharto, a general more sympathetic to the west—and to the Indonesian
ulema, the influential scholars of Muslim law. Suharto then set about extirpating
the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI ) with the effects on the victims
documented in The Look of Silence. The Act of Killing deals with the same
historical event but from the viewpoint of the perpetrators. Suharto had
proceeded not by establishing concentration camps but, as the opening title
of the film explains:
The army used paramilitaries and gangsters to carry out the killings. These
men have been in power—and have persecuted their opponents—ever since.
When we met the killers they proudly told us stories about what they did.
Oppenheimer, anyway licitly exercising his right of free speech, correctly saw
no reason to suggest discretion to them, despite how his failure to do so

goes against the Protocols. The killers were far from fully informed as to the
potential consequences of their candor and quite rightly so. But they were
delighted to be filmed, basking in the attention Oppenheimer gave them. A
21
Gordon Quinn (Kartemquin), personal communication, February 15, 2016.
164
new quagmire appears in such extraordinary circumstances: the possibility of
complicity—not of course in the legal sense of aiding and abetting, but a
moral complicity arising from the filmed/filmer relationship as it appears on
the screen.
The central unrepentant murderer Anwar Congo—now an elegantly
preserved elderly man—gives an on-screen lesson of his preferred method for
dispatching “communists”: garroting. In the re-enactment of this, we follow
him and a friend onto the flat roof of a nondescript building where he, with the
friend as a mute cooperative victim, demonstrate these acts of killing:
At first we beat them to death [says Congo] . . . but there was too much blood . . .
it smelled awful. To avoid the blood I used this system. Can I show you? [“Go
ahead” says a voice from behind the camera.] See this pole. I’d tie the wire to the
pole. . . . Sit there. . . . Face that way . . . [the wire is placed round the neck of the
friend.] We have to re-enact this properly. . . . This is how to do it [motions pulling
on the wire]—without too much blood.
Still 16 “this is how to do it”

The Act of Killing| Joshua Oppenheimer| Denmark/Norway/UK | 2012
We have seen such shameless torturers and killers reconstructing their

crimes, unrepentantly recalling and re-enacting them on camera, before.
They first appeared in Rithy Pahn’s films documenting the albeit far-less-
forgotten killing fields of the Khmer Rouge’s murderous regime in Cambodia,
1975–9 eg; S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine (2003).22 But Oppenheimer’s
22
S-21: The Khmer Rouge Killing Machine| Rithy Phan| Cambodia/France| 2003.
165
novel contribution to this emerging perpetrator trope was to facilitate not only
the re-enactment of the murders but also to actualize, at what would seem to
be no little expense, the murderers’ fantasies of celebrity and movie stardom.
He has impeccable documentary film theory justification for doing this,
endorsed by the main British government’s source for funding research in the
humanities.
The Act of Killing is a Danish/Norwegian/British production and the British
element took the form of public social science research money awarded to the
Centre for Production and Research in Documentary Film (CPRD ) at
Westminster University. At the time Oppenheimer was a senior research fellow
working with Joram ten Brink, a distinguished Rouchian visual anthropologist,
director of the CPRD, who was to take a credit as his producer.
The three years [Genocide and Genre] project supported by an AHRC [UK
Arts & Humanities Council] £400,000 award develops innovative filmmaking
methods to explore people’s memory, narratives and performance of acts
of genocidal violence. . . . Drawing on the cinematic fantasies of perpetrators,
the project creates a unique opportunity to explore both the routines of
violence and the rhetoric and imagination of the killing machine.
Perpetrators dramatize their roles in the killings, suggesting genres
and directing scenes. The project documents these efforts . . . (Anon
[Westminster University] n/d).
Oppenheimer was seeking better to understand the killers’ mentalité and

deemed that the fantasy element was integral to this. As an ethnographic
filmmaker, his authority for believing this could legitimately be done is Jean
Rouch.
For Rouch:
the distinctive truths to be reached through cinema . . . were brought to light

by the presence of the camera in the real world. . . . subjects before the camera
were provoked by the performance of the filmmaker behind the lens to put
on a performance of their own that, in ideal circumstances, could provide

access to the world of their imagination, the world of their dreams (Henley,
2009: 149).
As Paul Henley suggests, in Rouch’s view, Vertovian expectations of the

kino-eye’s potential are moved from “catching life unawares” to asking
166
(necessarily very aware) people to relive events by re-enacting them. This,
then, will show far more of their mentalité than, for example, any formal
interview could. Nevertheless, it is a moral stretch to see the enacted fantasies
in The Act of Killing as being of a piece with the film’s re-enacted murders; or,
say, the re-enactments in S21:The Khmer Rouge Death Machine, never-mind
Marceline Loridan’s walk into Les Halles in Chronique d’un été. The “repeated
demonstrations of the art of garroting” in The Act of Killing give it a training film
feel (Fraser, 2014). But while it is one thing for the killers to reveal their continued
pleasure and pride in what they did, it is a somewhat different matter ethically
to allow them to go further and enact their dreams of stardom.
Enabling Congo and an obese cross-dressing crony, Herman Koto, to
surround themselves by showgirls for a cod-Arthur Freed MGM musical
sequence smacks of a serious absence of moral understanding. To claim that
this “challenges unrepentant death squad leader Anwar Congo and his friends
to dramatize their role in the Indonesian genocide” (Anon [Britdoc] (c) n/d) is to
redefine “challenge” as an absurdity, especially given no clear punishment for
the killers’ crimes is anywhere in view—even as an ambition, a possibility. The
killers are unchallenged, for example, by any threat of appearance before the
UN International Court in Den Hague despite that it has no statute of limitations
(Anon [ICC ], 2002: Article 27). It is barely mentioned in the films. Although
Oppenheimer owed the killers no duty of care and their fully informed consent
as envisaged by the Protocols was not required, his apparent insouciance
seems more to comfort the comfortable—these murderers—rather than, in
any real sense, afflict them. An ambiguous shot of Congo retching at the film’s
end rings false.
The Act of Killing represents the enriched repertoire of possibilities
documentary now has to hand. But its moral difficulties speak to how this
enhanced environment further complicates the ethics of the act of
documenting. Documentary filmmakers are still usually beyond reproach.
Speaking truth to power, giving the voiceless voice, showing us life, etc—for all
that these are often shibboleths, equally they can still have substance. Despite
the demands of funders, audience misreadings, and filmmaker errors of

judgment, moral ambitions can exist. Although caught between the Scylla
rocks of the Protocols and the Charybdis whirlpool of free speech, filmmakers
have a mast to which they can lash themselves navigating this otherwise
impassible straight. But it has to be one of their own making, hewn from
tact, sensitivity, and personal moral code. That is the real issue: the
controversy about Farewell to Hollywood was, basically, less about the ethics
167
of the filmed/filmer relationship than it is about tact. And this is often the
case—a question of moral judgment rather than a transgressive ethical failure.
2.2. Conflict
The Protocols have resulted in the everyday business of explaining procedures,
with a greater or lesser degree of commitment and effectiveness, to medical
patients and to the human subjects of experiments. Sociological inquiry also
seeks consent following “sufficient” explanation. But, with documentary, the
explanatory information can be extremely perfunctory, whether the persons
being persuaded to be part of a film are upright citizens (The Look of Silence) or
morally compromised (The Act of Killing). In everyday usage, so diluted is the
requirement that consent need not even be signed off on paper as long as it is
recorded in some way. The filmmaker says to a person: “we just took your picture
and it’s going to be for a movie, it’s going to be shown on television and maybe
in theaters. . . . Do you have any objections?” If they do not, could they say so into
the microphone? And such an exchange—as Fred Wiseman explained this his
practice to an interviewer—is all that is required at law (Pryluck, 1976: 25).
In effect, consent to being involved in a movie is more a protection for the
filmmaker being sued than it is for the filmed being harmed. Written release
forms are the norm but they no more guarantee “sufficient” understanding at
the level the Protocols require, than do the laconic assents on Wiseman’s tape.
“Informed” consent in the Protocols sense is something of a “myth” as far as
documentary filmmaking is concerned (Anderson & Benson, 1991: 7).
The filmmaker “offers” to make a film all profits from which, almost without
exception, will be theirs in perpetuity. The other party, in consideration of this
offer, “accepts” being filmed and never asking for anything, whatever the
collateral outcomes might be for them:
I have participated as indicated on the motion picture (“XXXXXX ”).

I agree that my participation in the Picture may be edited in [sic] your sole
discretion. . . . I expressly release you, your agents, employees, licensees and
assigns from and against any and all claims which I have or may have for
invasion of privacy, defamation or any other cause of action arising out of
production, distribution, broadcast or exhibition of the Picture.
Talent Signature
Counter Signature
Date
168
This is an example of an “assumption of risk”—the common law principle that
no willing person can be injured if they agree to the risk: volenti non fit inuria—
if one consents, no injury can be done them. But, filmmaking aside, this is not
straightforward. An ill-determined legal concept of “the magnitude of harm”
involved comes into play, as in the matter of willing participation in
sadomasochistic practices.23 There is a “relationship between the content of
consent and validity” ( Tadros, 2011: 26) and it is less settled than the language
of a release form suggests. For example, actions for defamation with the usual
measures of discernable damage might be mountable, whatever has been
signed: rights cannot be so easily given away.
With consent in the shape of the release form, filmers seek to be released
from their own liabilities ( Tadros, 2011: 28). This indicates the industry’s mind-
set, bolstered by strenuous claims of the right of free expression and the
application of another legal principle—pacta sunt servanda: agreements are to
be honored. The filmed—unless drunk, etc—are consenting persons with
capacity to strike a bargain. They reach an agreement with the filmmaker for an
exchange of obligations not necessarily requiring cash and however unbalanced
it might appear. But, on signing a release, they too thereby acquire responsibilities
as any change of their mind could, in truth, damage the filmmaker who is, at a
minimum, incurring costs. Consenting to be filmed, however unbalanced the
terms of that are, cannot protect the filmed from their own failure to anticipate
lesser undamaging, but still—to them—upsetting consequences of exposure.
Nor should they be, given the necessity of free speech.
Having noted the positive outcomes for Nolene Donaher, consider the
negatives. Paul Watson, who had made the British copy of An American Family
(The Family, 197424), produced Sylvania Waters. Mrs Donaher was savvy enough
to know she would be famous (for a moment or two). However, she was no
acting-subject. It was not “her” film and she was not well enough informed to
protect herself from being represented in ways she did not want. She lacked,
for example, sufficient understanding to recognize the possibilities of “false-
light.” And so she was upset when Watson and his directors cross-cut her at the
hairdressers with her daughter-in-law giving birth. In fact, she was, dutifully, at
the hospital, not feeding what the films presented as her monstrous ego. She
thought this a poor reward for her enthusiastic collaboration.
23
R v Brown [1994] 1 AC 212.
24
The Family| Paul Watson| UK | 1974, April 3–June 26. In the UK (where an addiction to spurious
“firstism” is something of a cultural blind-spot) The Family is often cited as the first series of its kind
anywhere.
169
But given the need to defend speech, the level of self-awareness she can be
presumed to have (and, indeed, generally displayed) as well as the contract
she signed, what duty of care did the filmmakers really owe her? Mrs Donaher,
like those who lend themselves to exploitation on mainstream “poverty porn”
documentaries, seemed oblivious of bourgeois notions of personal dignity. It
was she, for example, who suggested Sylvania Waters would be enlivened if
she hired a male stripper for a hen party she was throwing. Nobody was going
to gainsay her. The filmmakers could not, realistically, be seriously expected to
reject her plan, eg: “Bad Idea, Nolene.”
A fully compliant Nuremberg release might say: “In consideration of my
total understanding, I agree that, subject to my final approval, my participation
in the picture can be edited, etc, etc . . . but I do so without prejudice to any and
all claims which I may have arising out of my participation.” Documentaries on
a practical level could scarce expect funding if the implications of Protocols’
“informed consent” came to mean the filmed could frustrate production on a
whim. What stories about the world could be documented under such
constraints? Where would the right to know be then?
Moreover, the filmer has, literally, right on his side: “I couldn’t make a film
which gave someone else the right to control the final print,” as Fred Wiseman
put it (to Rosenthal, 1971:71). Wiseman’s stance, as he began his career nearly
half a century ago, smacks of a certain arrogance—of the artist’s claim to be
free of a duty of care to the rest of humanity—but it was acceptable, indeed
unexceptional. The right to “speak truth to power” in the name of “comforting
the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable”25 was widely seen as inviolate, a
true mark of a free society. The manipulations of ethical niceties can be morally
flawed and, indeed, offend the Protocols; but, even if the filmer’s practices are
less than ethically pure, in the name of free speech, as long as the harm
principle is not perceptibly abused, the right will legitimate the act of
documenting. It is a necessary assertion of independence. It marks resistance
to interference (censorship) by funders, producers, or outside authorities.
Again, where would the right without this?
25
These adages to justify the importance of the press in the Anglo tradition come respectively
from a Quaker pamphlet entitled “Speaking truth to power” (1937) and a newspaper column
(1902), in the cod-Irish voice of a recent immigrant to America, where its meaning was actually by
no means as positive as common repetition suggests: “Th’ newspaper does ivrything f’r us. It runs
th’ polis foorce an’ th’ banks, commands th’ milishy, controls th’ ligislachure, baptizes th’ young,
marries th’ foolish, comforts th’ afflicted, afflicts th’ comfortable, buries th’ dead an’ roasts thim
aftherwards” (Dunne, 2014 [1902]: 140).
170
In a democratic society stories about the world are crucial—so much so
that telling them is indeed a right; one not to be readily abridged by the
Protocols or any constraint beyond a strict application of the harm principle.
Nevertheless, ethically, filmmaking should still strive more to reflect the spirit
of the Protocols than that of the release form. And too often, it simply and
gratuitously does not; and the usual defenses and justifications—giving voice
and the right to know in the name of social betterment—ring hollow, in
marked contrast to the solidity of the claim of free expression. The right is too
important to be traduced by such shibboleths.
171
172
. . . on THE
SPECTATOR
The spectator is the third “personage” in the act of documenting, assessing

authenticity, and deconstructing meaning, expecting information. Their
interactivity with the film conditions it; they influence the documentary as
much as it does them. However savvy or not, spectators have agency. They can
resist, reinterpret, or misunderstand the hegemonic message of a film. But
meeting their assumed information needs is the filmmaker’s only duty of care
to them. The spectator can only expect being told that:
you have to make up your own mind about what you think about
the people you’re seeing . . . as you watch the film, you have to
make up your own mind about what is going on.
(Wiseman in Halberstadt, 1976: 301)
173
174
8 “You Have to Make up Your
Own Mind”
PERCEPTION: The audience has justifiable EXPEC TATIONS (1) of the

documentary filmmaker that they be given information but they are not thereby
absolved from themselves determining its Truth (1.1). However, failing to inform
them of what they need to know can be a sin of Omission (1.2). ASSUMPTIONS
(2) about the spectators can impel filmmakers into supposing there is need for an
often ethically suspect sensationalist Wow! (2.1) factor to gain and hold their
attention; but even if this is true, any supposed audience jadedness can be assuaged
by the deployment of the morally less vexed technique of Ostranenie/
Defamiliarization (2.2).
1. EXPECTATIONS
1.1. Truth
The nature of the duty of care due to the spectator, a Levinasian “third,” by the
filmmaker is distinct from that she owes to the filmed. In contrast to the filmed’s
personal exposure, spectators only encounter the documentary privacy intact.
Potential harm (unless the reception of the film is illicit as it can be under
authoritarian regimes, p. 212), is minimal—certainly so by comparison. And in
most conditions of reception, there is no such duress. Spectators are
autonomous and, given the filmmaker’s right of expression, it is no more an
ethically necessary part of the documentary project for the filmmaker to tell
the audience the truth (whatever that might be) than it is for them never to
dupe the filmed.
On December 17, 1903 the Wright Brothers flew the world’s first
heavier-than-air airplane, but there were others (as is usually the case with
“inventions”) engaged with the same technology. Richard Pearce, a New
Zealander, was rumored to have flown earlier but the evidence for this
was inconclusive until 1995, when Peter Jackson and Costa Botes unearthed
some very old film.
175
Still 17 “the man on the left has a newspaper in his pocket”
Forgotten Silver| Peter Jackson/Costa Botes| New Zealand| 1996
The footage was taken by another forgotten New Zealand inventor, Colin
McKenzie. He had produced an efficient sound film camera in 1908 and a
viable color film process in 1911 but nobody remembered this. With interviews
from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein and veteran critic Leonard Matlin
among other experts confirming McKenzie’s significance, Jackson and Botes
were determined, with their documentary on McKenzie, Forgotten Silver (1996),
that he should not remain forgotten. For one thing, he had filmed Pearce’s
flying machine thereby producing, in Jackson’s opinion given in voice-over, “a
fragment of celluloid that will forever rewrite aviation history.” This was so
because one of the frames he and Botes enlarged allowed a date on a
newspaper sticking out of somebody’s pocket to be clearly read: March 31,
1903—nine months before the Wright Brothers.
However, Jackson was wrong about the fragment’s significance, as he
himself well knew. The footage of the Pearce flight and all the rest of McKenzie’s
oeuvre seen in Forgotten Silver were no more genuine than much of the 8mm
material in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell. The breathtaking authenticity of the
film of Pearce’s flight was Jackson’s work. Forgotten Silver was a hoax, a
“mockumentary,” meticulously executed with serious enough purpose to
highlight the crudity of the truth-telling demand.1 Nothing less than a
corrective to a perceived self-deprecating tendency in the New Zealand
national character—“national insecurities” is Jane Roscoe’s and Craig Hight’s
1
Richard Pearce was an actual person (like Weinstein, Matlin, Jackson, Botes and others in the film)
and he certainly flew in 1904. The actor who portrays “Colin MacKenzie,” was the then little known
Thomas Robins. Jackson was to cast him as “Déagol” in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King|
Aotearoa-New Zealand/USA | 2003.
176
term—was intended (Roscoe & Hight: 2001: 149). Costa Botes told The New
Zealand Listener the film was meant as a lesson in media literacy: “If Forgotten
Silver causes people never to take anything from the media at face value, so
much the better” (in Roscoe & Hight, 2001: 146). In other words, that the
audience always be told the truth is no unbreakable ethical requirement.
Spectators taking the documentary unthinkingly as evidence on its face
became an ever more pressing problem with the coming of direct cinema.
Some filmmakers, Kit Carson and Jim McBride for example, thought the strident
truth claims being made on its behalf were “blubber” and set about proving
this with a proto-“mockumentary”2 in the direct cinema style, David Holzman’s
Diary (1968). Walking out of an early public screening in New York, Donn
Pennbaker complained to Carson that his film had “killed cinéma vérité” (as
direct cinema was then commonly called in the US ). Carson said that Penny
was wrong: “Truth movies are just beginning” (Carson, 1970: xiii). They were.
Forgotten Silver and David Holzman’s Diary deployed mockumentary’s
fictional lies in the service of a truth about media integrity and, after the
moment of initial reception, relied on revealed mendacity to convey their
actual hegemonic meaning. They do no more harm (and no less) than any
other documentary might do to the audience. Concealed mendacities are
different but, as far as the audience is concerned, even they too seldom offend
the harm principle, either perceptibly or imperceptibly.
Even in cases of outright mendacity, rather than misrepresentation, at stake
is not so much the protection of the audience as the ideologically crucial
maintenance of the media’s authority as a truthful source. The Connection
(1998),3 for instance, was a completely fabricated “documentary,” showing a
mule bringing cocaine into Britain via a new drug route from Columbia. Its
classic “shock” journalistic approach had none of David Holtzman’s Diary or
Forgotten Silver’s underlying purpose. It was, supposedly, truth—news. The
British television company that made it was fined £2 million by the UK
“You Have to Make up Your Own Mind”
broadcasting authority for “distorting reality,” misleading the audience in

contravention of Section 3.7 (1) of the UK Broadcasting Act, 1990;4 as if reality,
in non-fictional programming, was not constantly and endlessly being
2
In George Stoney’s film Man of Aran, How the Myth Was Made, Flaherty’s editor John Monck
(credited on the original as “John Goldman”) suggests that even in the early 1930s, with the term
documentary barely established, some thought of Flaherty’s work as “mockumentary.”
3
The Connection| Marc de Beaufort| UK | 1996, t/x: October 15.
4
C.42
177
distorted on television to one degree or another. The point is that the
manipulations in these examples do not fundamentally mislead or distort.
They do not offend the harm principle. The audience is actually unharmed.
Given that free expression affords much latitude for the filmmaker in the
matter of presenting truth, mendacity, or misrepresentation—whether overt
or covert, whether intended or accidental—it is the spectator’s responsibility
to be savvy. This modifies the duty of care they can expect. They may be infans,
unable to speak, but nevertheless, at least in the conditions of a bourgeois
democracy, they are autonomous individuals. Wiseman might not want those
he filmed interfering with his work, but he is more than happy to allow the
strangers who view it complete control of what they understand: “You have to
make up your own mind” (Halberstadt, 1976: 301).
Of course, his is a somewhat self-serving denial of hegemonic practice. It is
not true that, as he went on: “You are not being spoon-fed or told what to think
about this or that.” You are; but you can resist. Autonomous spectators can
“decode” media messages against the grain of their hegemonic meanings
(Hall, 1973). Reception theory, following Stuart Hall, is, exactly, primarily
concerned with the range such negotiations might take. Reception theory
aside, though, rather than demanding truth—or anything else—from the
filmmaker, an absolutely essential concomitant of free speech is the spectator’s
need to remember “caveat emptor.”
1.2. Omission
All communications must inevitably omit information—the whole truth,
whatever it might be, is never available. But, the audience, indexing a text as
documentary, can (mockumentaries excepted) expect a sufficiency of
information from a filmmaker. With this, Peircean percepts can be applied and
the veracity of what it is being presented determined. It is not formally
unethical by most measures, but there comes a point—perhaps not of itself
problematic—where the documentarist’s basic task of “showing us life,” is
distorted by a lack of information and the audience is thereby prevented from
coming to judgment. Omission then constitutes a de facto, although still

perhaps ethically acceptable, dereliction of duty to the audience. A “sin” of
omission is in play.
The most notable omission in The Act of Killing, for example, is the voice of
the victim. To remedy this Oppenheimer produced a companion piece, The
Look of Silence, with its one disgustingly brutal murder meticulously, and
178
horrifically, investigated by the victim’s surviving brother, Adi.5 But for all that
The Look of Silence gives “voice” to the victims, this does not inform the audience
to any level of comprehension that goes beyond empathy; just as the
perpetrators’ voices in The Act of Killing allow the audience little more than the
opportunity to be disgusted. Glaringly, the films obscure the roots of the
situation they recall.
Oppenheimer, of course, cannot be criticized for not making films other
than the ones he made; but, it is legitimate to ask how, in this project, without
fully providing context, mentalités alone can be truly illuminated. The AHRC
bid that secured the Genre and Genocide project’s initial funding did not
promise, nor did it deliver, anything but a most basic context. Rather: “the
project will provide insight into . . . violence we would hope to be unimaginable”
(Anon [Westminster University] n/d). The extent to which a general release
created the ideal circumstances for insight can be queried. Simply, the events
documented were so awful and the footage obtained documenting them so
extraordinary that the films and the filming intrude too much for the underlying
motivations and responses of the Indonesians to be easily unpacked. Omitting
the background was, arguably, a disabling design flaw; a failure that speaks to
documentary’s oldest limitation. David Schrire complained of Grierson, as the
director of Drifters (1929), that he had “dealt” with the world but had “run away
from its social [aka: its political] meaning” (Schrire, in Rotha, 1973: 30). Ditto,
Oppenheimer. The mentalités remain opaque because the events are denied
their social meaning. A viewer is unable to glean, from what is shown on the
screen, even the most basic contextual facts of the Indonesian situation in the
1960s.
That Oppenheimer was not tempted to address this lacuna was, in one
sense, understandable. The historical record is extremely complex and the
events leading to the massacres remain obscured. The destruction of the PKI
(Indonesian Communist Party) in the turmoil of General Suharto’s seizure of
power in 1965–6 was an event the causes and context of which cannot be said
5
This was promised: “In response to perpetrators’ performances, we will develop creative
filmmaking forums for survivors to act out memories of genocide that would otherwise remain
repressed” (Anon [Westminster University] n/d). However, The Look of Silence is far more
conventional than The Act of Killing. The investigating brother, Adi, is not given a forum “to act out
memories” anything like as creative as that afforded the killers. He gets an opportunity to relive his
family’s horrors imperceptibly running the dangers of being re-traumatized. And (although no
part of the film) actually endures the very perceptible upheaval of having to move after its release
(p. 157).
179
to do more than barely figure in these films. Those first words of The Act of
Killing’s opening title encapsulate the problem.
In 1965, the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military. Anybody

opposed to the military dictatorship could be accused of being a communist:
union members, landless farmers, intellectuals and the ethnic Chinese. In less
than a year, and with the direct aid of western governments, over one million
“communists” were murdered.
It is incontrovertible that any dissident “could be accused of being a

communist” and “over one million ‘communists’ were murdered.” The point is
that many of the victims were communists, supporters of the People’s Republic
of China and members of the largest communist party in Asia outside it; and
by no means were they all Chinese. The scare quotes around “communist”
need to be unpacked and the community tensions which led to the ethnic
cleansing of the Chinese under the umbrella of the purge of the PKI explained
if any sort of context to the killer’s re-enactments is to be given.
In the opinion of experts such as Robert Cribb:6
The film’s depiction of the terrible months from October 1965 to March 1966 is
deeply misleading. . . . The killings are presented as the work of civilian criminal
psychopaths, not as a campaign of extermination, authorized and encouraged
. . . within the Indonesian army and supported by broader social forces frightened
by the possibility that the Indonesian communist party might come to power. At
a time when a growing body of detailed research on the killings has made clear
that the army played a pivotal role in the massacres, The Act of Killing puts back
on the agenda the Orientalist notion that Indonesians slaughtered each other
with casual self-indulgence because they did not value human life (Cribb, n/d).
The audience’s right to hear is also abridged by a further omission: “In 1965,
the Indonesian government was overthrown by the military with the direct aid
of western governments” states the opening title. Again true, but the nature of
the “direct aid” is nowhere overtly unpacked. However:
No single American action in the period after 1945 . . . was as bloodthirsty as its
role in Indonesia. . . . Suharto’s seizure of power in 1965–6 . . . caused the violent
6
Professor of Asian history and politics at the Australian National University, Canberra.
180
deaths of up to a million people. For three decades, the Australian, US and
British governments worked tirelessly to minimize the crimes of Suharto’s
gestapo, known as Kopassus, who were trained by the Australian SAS and the
British army (Pilger, 2008).
It is the freelance gangsters of the Pemuda Pancasila auxiliaries of the Kopassus

who are Oppenheimer’s stars. Needless to say, key figures such as Colonel
Sarwo Edhie Wibowo who led Kopassus at the time, are not referenced. Such
detail is even more hidden in The Look of Silence.
John Pilger is a journalist and filmmaker whose reports from South East Asia
can claim to be of somewhat greater significance for a fuller western
understanding of the region than Oppenheimer’s. In 1979, working with the
late David Munro, his coverage of the aftermath of the Khmer Rouge atrocity
(Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia)7 occasioned a rare direct response: a
claimed $50 million was raised for the survivors as the film was screened
around the world (Pilger, 2005: 121). Even more relevantly, a later Indonesian
atrocity was investigated exactly to determine western involvement. For Death
of a Nation: The Timor Conspiracy8 Pilger and Monroe were smuggled into the
country, East Timor, in 1994. It had been a Dutch colony until 1975 when they
withdrew and the Indonesians took control instead causing Timorese resistance
to begin.
Still 18 “Of course, some things never change—like the propaganda of naked aggression”
Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy| David Munro| UK | 1994
7
Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia| David Munroe| UK | 1979, t/x October 30.
8
David Munro| UK | 1994.
181
In addition to eye-witness testimony, Pilger and Munro name names, western
as well as local by interviewing the Australian Foreign Affairs Minister; the
Indonesian ambassador to the UN ; the President of Portugal; the head, British
Defence Sales; a former British Minister of Defence; a former Australian
ambassador to Indonesia; a former Australian consul in East Timor, the Timorese
Foreign Minister, then in exile; and, secretly in East Timor, a commander of the
Timorese resistance, and other witnesses.
On the occasion of Suharto’s death in 2008, Pilger wrote:
To understand the significance of Suharto, who died on Sunday, is to look beneath

the surface of the current world order: the so-called global economy and the
ruthless cynicism of those who run it. Suharto was our model mass murderer . . .
Oppenheimer, of course, knows this history very well (Oppenheimer, 2012b:

287–91). He is no partially-informed “visiting fireman” journalist but has worked
as an anthropologist in Indonesia for a decade; he has the language. Yet his
response to the charge of debilitating omissions makes no claim on this
expertise. On the contrary, he has said9 that the fact that details of the west’s
involvement with Suharto remain classified is a reason for his silence about
them. Admission of what would be crippling failure in a western journalist is of
no concern to him because he makes no claim to be a journalist:
The Look of Silence [he writes] is not a work of journalism. It is a work of cinema
exploring (and making palpable for viewers) survivors’ experience living
side-by-side with the still powerful perpetrators (Oppenheimer, 2014b).
Despite the lack of overt references, Oppenheimer’s politics are not so

obscured in the films as to be recognizable as anything but impeccably liberal.
The entire project’s unearthing of this history, in so far as it goes, is laudable
from any standpoint but that of the Indonesian authorities. Yet to claim
omissions are justified as “a work of the cinema” is demeaning. It is no glibly
dismissible matter to say the “reaching for the Hitler” card is being played
when it is suggested that the “work of cinema” line can be seen as echoing
the unthinking complicity of Riefenstahl’s defenders (“great-films-pity-about-

the-fascism”). Oppenheimer does not belong in that party and does himself
ill-service by calling it up.
9
Q&A (via Skype) @ Visible Evidence XXI International Documentary Film Conference, Jamia Millia
Islamia University, New Delhi. December 14, 2014.
182
Despite the moot claim10 of not being a journalist, he argues, as a further
line of defense, contrariwise that:
The Look of Silence uncovers some pretty damning and hitherto unknown
things about US involvement as it affected survivors in North Sumatra:
1 An American corporation (Goodyear) operating in the area where Ramli

[the brother whose death is being investigated] was murdered used slaves
to harvest rubber. The slaves were then dispatched to be killed. This is
what German corporations did at Auschwitz. . . .
2 The high-ranking, wealthy, and powerful commander of the death squads
that murdered Ramli exclaims that America incited him to kill the
“communists.”?
3 We see clearly how US corporate media celebrated mass murder as good
news. (“Bali is now more beautiful without the communists.”)
And regarding The Act of Killing the film does not delve into the historical
involvement of the US in the genocide because, like The Look of Silence, it is
not a historical documentary, not a film about the massacres per se, but rather
a film about today — a film about the contemporary legacy of these crimes.
Nevertheless, The Act of Killing exposes in considerable detail the workings of a
present-day economy of corruption and terror which has much in common
with the economies of other former US client states across the global south.
The relationship between thugs, corporations, corrupt politicians, and the
stealing of elections is something explored in great detail—even though Act
of Killing is also not a work of journalistic exposé (Oppenheimer, 2014b).
The argument here is difficult to follow. Between explorations “in great

detail” and “a work of journalistic exposé” lies a distinction without a difference.
“Explorations” (in this context) and exposés are, after all, both investigatory:
both gather evidence, record the confessions of the accused, and hear the
testimony of the victims. In short, they are—and properly so—prosecutory.
Oppenheimer might well have explored in great detail “the relationship
between thugs, corporations, corrupt politicians, and the stealing of elections”
but to claim the audience can do so on the basis of what they see on the
10
The work is easily categorized as “Reporting and Journalism,” as on Vimeo, https://vimeo.
com/79346822 [accessed, February 11, 2016].
183
screen, where little or none of this is overtly referenced, is to more than stretch
the point. Names are not named but, at best, only hinted at. The political and
economic players, as in the Pilger—or indeed any other Cold War documentary
film—are entirely absent. There are no experts. The only western voice to be
heard is Oppenheimer’s (impressively in Bahasia, although one might expect
such linguistic competence from a modern anthropologist).
As for the fascists, the “high-ranking, wealthy, and powerful commander” he
films is no more than a canker on the Indonesian body politic, the indulged
Congo and Koto blisters. To claim a film is not an “historical documentary”
when the first words setting it up are “In 1965” and its central concern is
memory is also curious. And, moreover, for a film that is “not about the
massacres per se,” a lot of screen time is devoted to detailed accounts and
demonstrations of the logistics of just how to conduct one.
There is no reason to suppose anybody after watching The Act of Killing and
The Act of Silence has any idea who Suharto was and why he was the west’s
“model mass murderer.” But Oppenheimer has another very good, reason why
he choice the path he did: it is our fault—not his. He has claimed that, without
the frisson of filmic transgression, the audience would be too jaded to pay a
film about a stale old news story in a distant “Third World” country any attention.
And he does so with some justice.
2. ASSUMPTIONS
2.1. Wow!
An ad for The Act of Killing proclaimed it:
“A Masterpiece . . . Steve Boon, rogerebert.com;” “A Masterpiece . . . Amy

Goodman, Democracy Now;” “A Masterpiece . . . Nicholas Schager, The Village
Voice;” “A Masterpiece . . . Janet Pierson, Producer/SXSW;” “A Masterpiece. . . .
Michael Zelenko, The Fader;” “A Masterpiece . . . Jessica Kiang, Play List.”
It occasioned unprecedented international debate: 100 festival performances

in 57 countries; some 29 awards and prizes,11 1000-plus community screenings
in 118 cities; and cinema releases as well as pre-sold television transmissions in
11
A figure of 70 is also given.
184
21 countries; 1,321,665 watched the on-line trailer. There were 352,418 unique
visits to the film’s official site and 6,653 views of its email list; 8,235 people
“liked” The Act of Killing on Facebook and its Facebook “page”“signed up” 10,372
members. On Twitter, 3,935 “followed” @TheActofKilling (Anon [The Act of Killing]:
n/d). The Act of Killing even occasioned a whole edition of a leading cinema
studies journal devoted to it (published at unprecedented speed for the
academy) (Rich, 2013). But an Oscar eluded it.
Nick Fraser, who buys documentaries for the BBC and is a key figure in the
mainstream global documentary industry, told readers of The (London)
Observer that The Act of Killing felt to him as if:
film-makers had gone to rural Argentina in the 1950s, rounding up a bunch of

ageing Nazis and getting them to make a film entitled ‘We Love Killing
Jews’. . . . Instead of an investigation, or indeed a genuine recreation, we’ve
ended somewhere else—in a high minded snuff movie (Fraser, 2014).
The paper’s subs headlined the column: “Don’t give an Oscar to this snuff
movie.” However, the same elements that repelled some viewers totally
seduced others. All, after all, were making up their own minds, as Wiseman
wanted. And Oppenheimer suggests, with much justification, that his films’
extraordinary reception was exactly because it did not meet the norms of
historical-political documentaries on such topics.
He made the case12 that had he offered a Pilgeresque mainstream
documentary—interviews with survivors, major players and experts, maps,
archive, etc—little or no notice would have been taken of the film—and the
atrocity it documents would have remained buried. Although a tad unfair to
Pilger,13 Oppenheimer’s point well-taken: the mere recitation of the list of
talking heads presented in a sober mainstream style suggests tedium and
most such films do indeed pass without much notice being taken of them.
Their effect on general understanding, much less consequent action, is seldom

great enough to register.
Oppenheimer argued that it is the audience’s jaded palate which requires
the corrective jolt of transgressive techniques—unashamed confessions,
unrepentant re-enactments, fantasies to make a mark on audiences’
12
Eg at the Yamagata International Documentary Film Festival, October 13, 2013.
13
The East Timor film, although a classic political investigation, can claim to have played some role
in keeping the Timorese rebellion alive. Under the auspices of the UN , East Timor became
independent of Indonesia in 2002.
185
consciousness. Any perceived indulgence of, or complicity with, the killers in
The Act of Killing, he suggests can be therefore rebutted. Without the
transgressive nature of the footage the world would still be none the wiser
about the Indonesian ethnic cleaning.
This is not an unreasonable claim. Documentaries do remain “a discourse of
sobriety” (Nichols, 1991: 3) and a steady stream of films continue to “show us
life” with what is thought appropriate seriousness and “balance.” However,
equally and most popularly, we also have the contrary nightly evidence of
much of mainstream documentary a popular “man-bites-dog” freak show
which does no such thing. Those commissioning this endless sorry parade
would seem, most logically, to do so to appease what they must think to be a
pretty jaded audience. Platform rivalry then ensures a race to the bottom.
Documentaries as a discourse of sobriety are therefore still being produced
but under difficult and ever more constraining conditions.
The most constraining of these would seem to be a further assumption
that, if not jaded (or because jaded), the mass audience consists of dullards.
Not even programs designed for a richer and better educated demographic,
which resist cheap outrage in favor of more somber approaches, are trusted to
stand alone. They need to be “authored” by on-screen talent, handholding
“presenters.” Once there was the haut- en-bas condescension of Sir Kenneth
Clarke pontificating on western art (aka “Civilization”) in what might be
considered a pioneering example of the form, Civilization: A Personal View
(which most assuredly it was not).14 Now it is a more egalitarian—usually
academic figure—who is much like a remedial class school-teacher, yet who
too often implicitly also remains just as condescending.
In its defense, the industry can point to the undoubted fact that its output—
sober or not—commands the attention of millions. Yet it is surely not
unreasonable to suggest that it believes a certain prurience—and a mess of
other prejudices and predilections—infects the audience—as much for
documentaries (as these are classed in the mainstream) as for any other
programming. After all, the archive of rare pre-1989 commercial theatrical
documentary hits includes Mondo Cane/A Dog’s World, 1962.15 It was made on
the supposition that a mélange of transgressive scenes from around the world,
of sex, cruelty and violence, would do boffo box office business; and it did.
14
Civilization: A Personal View| Michael Gill| UK | 1969, t/x February 23—May 18. Clarke was ennobled
as Lord Clarke for the effort (and, of course, for being director of the National Gallery, London).
15
Mondo Carne |Paolo Cavara/Franco Prosperi/Gualtiero Jacopetti| Italy| 1962.
186
Despite its disrespectability at the time it won a prize from Accademia del
Cinema Italiano. Six more Mondo Carne titles followed over the next two
decades, and a further assortment of emulators were encouraged.
Although it affords no ethical ground for filmmaking, mainstream
documentarists appear often ready to proceed on the (anglophone) popular
press suppositions that “sex sells” and “if it bleeds it leads.” Mass media in the
global north cannot afford to be immune from sensationalism, certainly not in
the name of ethics, under such perceived market pressures. And there is
another shibboleth to justify this: “the public interest.”
“Interest” in English, however, can mean a desire for information; or, in
connection with money for instance, that which is paid in return for its use (ie
by a bank to a depositor). This last has a material value which the former does
not. Applied to information, the second meaning of interest suggests that it is
necessary to the receiver (for whatever purpose); and they benefit from having
it. This can include, without embracing prurience, recreation and entertainment.
The first meaning on the other hand indicates that interest is not valuable in
this way, being mere curiosity (and very often certainly embracing prurience).
But, in the hands of the media seeking to exculpate moral blemishes on their
activities, the two meanings are confounded: “There is a public interest in
freedom of expression itself” (Anon [Press Complaints Commission], 2011). The
public interest thereby becomes anything that interests the public; and what
interests the public, of course, is sex, violence, and cheap outrage, at least as far
as this is evidenced by sales, viewing figures, and all the other indicators of
public engagement.
The high-minded rhetoric of a public right to know transforms the provision
of titillation and sadistic material into a public service. “Wow!” rules.
2.2. Ostranenie/Defamiliarization
Yet, for all that it might be engaging for the viewer, wow! is distracting. Cheap
outrage and tactlessness work as attractors, but, for “sober work,” at a price: the
film can become the object of attention, not its substance. The Act of Killing
perfectly illustrates how spectators make up their minds but they do so more
about the filmmaking than about, in this instance, the Cold War, anti-
communism, and foreign interventionism. Audience focus shifts from what is
being documented to the way this is done.
Oppenheimer can blame our need to be jolted into attention, but jolts can
swamp a film’s message. Ergo, a dilemma: sensationalism compels attention
187
but impedes comprehension. Some might have thought The Act of Killing “a
breakthrough;” but it was as “the cinematic equivalent of hitting the alarm
while simultaneously being the alarm” (Korn, 2014, italics in original). Others,
believed that its
real merits—the curiosity when it comes to uncovering the Indonesian cult of

anticommunism capable of masking atrocity, and the good and shocking
scenes with characters from the Indonesian elite, still whitewashing the
past—are obscured by tasteless devices (Fraser, 2014).
However, attention-seeking techniques need not be sensational and

distracting.
Victor Shklovsky thought defamiliarization—о с Т р а н е н И е/ostranenie—
was central to the purpose of art, exactly to overcome jaded responses;
After we see an object several times, we begin to recognize it. The object is in
front of us and we know about it, but we do not see it. . . . The technique of art
is to make objects “unfamiliar” (Shklovsky, 1917).
Extend this to over-familiar images—for instance, to such disturbing referents

as are seen in the camp liberation footage. If familiarity drains them of all power
to move us, then forcing (in Shklovsky’s term) “de-automatized perception”
through ostranenie becomes a crucial purpose for the communicator. It is as
relevant for the documentarist as for the artist. But care and tact are still
required with its deployment if the dilemma of distracting sensationalism is to
be avoided.
Rithy Pahn, faced with the impossibility of documenting the destruction of
his own family by the Khmer Rouge in the 1970s, did not attempt to understand
his personal trauma by indulging the fantasies of the murderers. Instead he
documented the horror of the victim through the use of inanimate clay
figurines, mobilized in exact symbolic correspondence to the powerlessness
of the people they represent (The Missing Picture | 2013).
The victims are defamiliarized and we are forced to consider the horror and
hopelessness of their situation undistracted by sensationalism.
Were the people—the amateurs—whose films Péter Forgács uses in the
creation of his own work still alive and able to react to his manipulations of
their footage, he could be considered, in the terms now forced on us by digital
affordances, as much “amender” as director (see p. 60). As it is, they are dead:
188
Still 19 “Pol Pot says: ‘Those we cannot re-educate we
fight as enemies’ ”
The Missing Picture| Rithy Pahn| Cambodia/France| 2013
amateur-movie hobbyists documenting their familial circumstances, including

the horrors of war, in the Europe of the 1930s and 1940s. He remains the
director. Following in the non-digital filmic footsteps of Esfir Shub and her
compilation documentary, his is a one-way interaction with the amateurs’
materials. But his interventions are the very model of how, by rendering this
prosaic home-movie footage strange and unfamiliar, our perceptions of it are
de-automatized. “The films contain almost no footage shot by Forgács but
consist of meticulously edited, indeed re-orchestrated, archival material that
may be temporally manipulated and even tinted . . .” (Renov, 2011: 90).
And so when Forgács comes to the Shoah, through ostranenie, he forces us
to see again. He too eschews the liberation footage of the Allied army
cameramen. For example, in Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle (1997),16 we see only
filming by a civilian amateur; innocuous footage transformed into inescapably
horrific witness:
the rescued images are imbued with uncanny historical resonances through a
stunning display of decoupage: the footage is displayed at varying speeds

with frequent freeze-framings that arrest gestures and glances, suspending
the inexorability of time . . ., the superimposition of graphics or voice-overs
explicitly quoting laws, public decrees, and political speech of the period
provides a progressive time-line and precise historical matrix. We (the
audience) know perilously more than the images’ makers. We cringe with
dread knowledge as we watch a Dutch Jewish family, the Peereboms, embark
16
The Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle| Péter Forgács| Hungary| 1997.
189
on a Parisian holiday the day before Hitler marches into Poland . . . And we are
stricken by the sight of the family, our filmmaker (Max Peerebom, his wife and
their two small children) siting around the table, sewing and packing, making
last minute preparations the night before their deportation to Auschwitz. As we
watch, a female voice recites a list of personal articles to be allowed each
deportee: a mug, a spoon, a work suit, a pair of work boots, two shirts . . .
(Renov, 2011: 90, italics in the original).
Summoned up by this footage so treated, unavoidably and distressingly, is the

after-image of that otherwise drained familiar photographic evidence of the
camps in final collapse at war’s end. Forgács trusts the audience to understand
this. His technique in no way obfuscates the event documented; it remains, as
it must morally, more important than the film. And the after-image, in our
memory as spectators, regains its potency.
The world has been filmed, and filmed again and again, for the last 120
years and, as a result, whether or not blasé, dim or both, the audience can
reasonably be supposed to have seen it all before. For the filmmaker in such
circumstances, ostranenie then becomes crucial but, as Pahn and Forgács
show, it need not become distracting; it need not be tasteless or tactless. The
implication of Wiseman’s instruction to the audience—that people have to
make up their own mind—taken at its face value means they should be trusted
so to do by the filmmakers—even in the most commercialized of circumstances.
Double-guessing the audience’s tolerance levels for receiving information and
tending to assume it is lower rather than higher blunts the documentarist’s
only duty of care to the viewer: “show us life.”
190
9 “When the Lights go up”
RECEPTION: Assessing the OUTCOMES of spectatorship (1) is vexed. For those

more traditional documentaries, by no means all, that seek to be socially engaged,
meaningful Impact (1.1) can be variously defined from the provocation of direct
audience action to consciousness-raising Engagement (1.2) without such overt
outcomes. Demonstrating effects of either kind is a matter for, but largely beyond,
Research (1.3). This long-standing failure of social science is compounded because
the CONDITIONS of reception are changed in the digital era (2). The spectators’
Autonomy (2.1) is potentially expanded to embrace a co-creator role for the first
time, with consequences as yet little understood. But, contrariwise, in many parts of
the world political realities persist in potentially putting spectators at Hazard (2.2) in
time-honored repressive conditions of reception.
1. OUTCOMES
1.1. Impact
Determining media impact—including the effects of documentary—on
spectators has always been vexed. Despite the best—but still inconclusive—
efforts of sociologists and others, received understanding of media influence
remains more un-interrogated than evidenced. This is especially significant for
documentary because to have or promise impact in some way or another is
increasingly a major mainstream production funding requirement. Despite all
that, though, clear evidence of outcomes is still hard to come by. This is why
Blackfish, Gabriela Cowperthwaite’s 2013 investigation into the cruelties of
marine parks, is exceptional.
The film stars a murderous bull orca, Tilikum, who, over two decades, sired
20 offspring and drowned two handlers and an intruder. The latest attack in
2010 moved Cowperthwaite to investigate the conditions in which orca
are kept, specifically those penned in marine parks run by SeaWorld
Entertainment.
191
Still 20 “Never capture what you can’t control”
Blackfish| Gabriela Cowperthwaite| USA | 2013
The result—Blackfish—occasioned a not unusual uproar and evoked the usual

rebuttals from the company. But SeaWorld Entertainment suffered a precipitous
one-day 47 percent fall in its share price when it revealed to the market the
truth about its shrunken attendance figures for the year after the film’s release
(Hall, 2014). Legislation to control marine parks was passed federally and
introduced in New York and California in consequence of the documentary.
SeaWorld is not recovering. Its chief executive, Jim Atchkinson, finally resigned
in January 2015 and it has now given up orca performances and its breeding
program. Cowperthwaite, on the other hand, deservedly won the 2014 Puma
Doc Impact Award.
The Impact Award is a project of the Britdoc Foundation, initially sponsored
by the sports-wear company, to celebrate “the documentary films that have
made the greatest impact on society or the environment” (Anon [Britdoc] (e)
n/d); that is to say, in the context of this chapter, on the traditional audience
primarily watching linear documentaries.
“The Award is the first prize to celebrate the power of film as a driver of
change; the first which compels filmmakers to capture and articulate evidence
of impact” (Anon [Britdoc] (g) n/d). This entirely laudable objective, however,
presents a number of difficulties. Filmmakers can certainly be “compelled”
because their ability to raise funds is potentially indeed itself impacted, should
their careers fail to show some response or other to their work. Some, though,
might think that the language of “compulsion,” in however good a cause, is
chilling of free expression, and therefore rather concerning.
192
That aside, it can be noted that evidence is easier to demand than to furnish:
witness daily proceedings in any courtroom. Extrapolating from box-office,
ratings, and “hits” of various kinds to consciousness-raising might not be that
difficult to do as it is, in essence, a question of PR and rhetoric. The bottom line
is that presenting more meaningful triangulated evidence of impact as
verifiable change in the world, however that is defined, is a more fraught
business. The effect being evidenced (assuming one can agree what that
should look like) is virtually impossible to detect—even on a balance of
probabilities (never mind beyond reasonable doubt). For example, many
actions—boycotts, demonstrations, say, or any other social interventions—can
be occasioned by a documentary but the extent of a film’s distinct influence on
such occasions cannot be determined with any degree of certainty given the
general noise of the social sphere. Establishing that it is causation rather than
correlation, producing the apparent connection, is always confounding.
Blackfish is really exceptional in this regard as it emerged from
Cowperthwaite’s initially entirely personal concern at the conditions she
witnessed attending a show; and it achieved its effects alone. There had been
little urgent public debate about marine park environments. Similarly, how the
British police dealt with rape cases was not of much public concern either
when “A Complaint of Rape,” an episode in a 1980s British television series
Police1 was screened. The film consists, almost entirely, of two police detectives
aggressively interrogating a woman who had come to their station to make a
“complaint of rape,” as common law has it. It attracted much comment
essentially because the complainant was filmed throughout from behind, her
face hidden: ostranenie. Following transmission, the officers were removed
from such duties and the force established a female unit to examine rape
cases, a change copied across the country. Causation? Result? Not quite.
Unlike Blackfish, other factors were involved. Serendipitously, transmission
had immediately followed three headlined rape cases where judges had
ordered convicted perpetrators to send the victim a box of chocolates and the
like as punishment. Even Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was moved to
comment negatively and it was then, as director Roger Graef has explained,
“When the Lights go up”
that “the police quietly changed the way they handled rape.”2 Consequences
1
Police| Roger Graef| UK | 1982, t/x January 4–March 15. Direction of the episode is now credited to
cinematographer Charles Stewart as Graef removed himself from the interview room where most
of the film was shot to minimize intrusion.
2
Radio interview, Front Row| 2014| t/x July 13.
193
of this kind—be they causal (Blackfish) or correlative (“A Complaint of Rape”)—
are rare. Correlative contamination (as it were) is, normally, more likely than
direct cause. And effects on public opinion without apparent impact beyond
the self-attestation of altered states of mind are even more likely to be
correlative rather than causative.
A documentary’s outcomes can be various in this way. Impact is used to
describe “how the world is different as a result of our work” (Pedler & Abbott,
2013: 1); but both discernible reactions, as with Blackfish, and more amorphous
consequences of conscious raising are covered by the same term. Both kinds
of consequences are said to “articulate evidence of impact.” The old audience
measures—box office, ratings—also figure, numbers being of themselves
their own “impact” indicators. Yet, in the context of a rhetoric of change, these
crude pointers cannot be taken as a reasonable indicator of change-making
“power.” For one thing, they need contextualizing.
Documentary, despite its rising prominence, remains a minority taste. Even
if the proliferating film festivals are taken into account, the audience is
comparatively small. Typically, a film will be screened two or three times for, at
best, only a few thousand. Ditto community screenings: the audiences are
miniscule compared with the cinema’s. As for ratings, when tv screenings are
obtained—which is by no means a given—viewership is modest in mass
audience terms. Britdoc notes major exposures as: “sold in 7 television
territories” (aka: countries); “1,700,000+ television viewers in 9 territories;”
“2,900,000+ television viewers worldwide:” But compare an Attenborough
nature series that is screened in 130 territories and measures its cumulative
global audiences in the 150m range. DVD /downloads sales can be toted up,
too, but again these can be counted in, at best, thousands, not millions.
Turning on the television, buying a ticket, or a DVD, or even, these days,
clicking icons, “twittering,” “following,” “liking,” or downloading—are still the
primary ways audience response can be gaged; but none of these reactions,
either individual or cumulative, can be said to demonstrate a discernible
change in the world—in ways that, say, Blackfish can.
As commonly understood, impact actually runs along two axes: a shorter Y
reflecting outcomes in the form of noticeable actions. This can be manifested,

for instance, by instigating changes in public social, and private institutional
(eg company), policy; or by the crucial work of amplifying political campaigns
and the like. But there is also a longer X-axis where, screening over, spectators
leave with, externally imperceptible but claimable, increased understanding,
or altered opinions. And that is that. The termination points of the axes—what
194
else was in play both before (collateral knowledge) and after the film was seen
(causations)—make it hard to diagram. The world, however, is altered in
markedly different ways by actions or by consciousness-raising without
actions, yet these two are confused. Hence, here, “impact” will be used to
describe visible outcomes, while “engagement” characterizes externally un-
discernible consciousness-raising.
Of course, engagement itself is above reproach; but over-claiming social
effectiveness—an unavoidably political purpose—is too often in those terms,
at best, naïf and, at worst, enervating. The rhetoric that does this is consequently
damaging because instead of change-making actions, consciousness-raising
alone is deemed to be enough. Documentaries need have no change-making
ambition, but if they do, it must be allowed that some evidence of consequent
actions by the audience reasonably constitutes a measure of impact. Confusing
this sort of outcome with engagement can mean that consciousness-raising
alone is held to be the equivalent of causing consequent social action. The
“rhetorical persuasiveness and political efficacy” (as Nichols put it) of
documentary (Nichols, 2001: 214) is thus blunted. In effect, spectators are
made into “philosophers” who, after viewing, can “have only interpreted the
world, in various ways.” But, as Marx famously went on to say: “the point is to
change it” (Marx, 1976 [1845]: 5).
The confusion between impact and engagement is perfectly illustrated by
the Britdoc Puma awards. These, focusing on conventional linear documentaries,
began in 2011 with The End of the Line3 as that year’s winner. It was tagged as “a
film that would make you change the way you think about seafood.” As with
Blackfish, the initial impact, at least in the UK , involved more than changed
thinking: a number of key UK food industry players announced that they
would use only sustainable fish. This outcome directly followed some private
screenings for targeted change-makers—a major health food chain’s CEO, for
example—as part of the film’s initial release strategy. The same response from
celebrity chefs was also publicized. Targeting change-makers like this echoes
the Fogo films, with parallel direct impact: the eschewing of unsustainable fish,
in the one instance; the establishment of a co-op, among other things, in the
other.
The End of the Line is another classic journalistic investigation but, unlike
Blackfish where the problem of marine parks had been no more than hinted at
3
End of the Line| Robert Murray| UK | 2009.
195
in public debate, it was not an instigatory work. Rather, it was like the Fogo
films in that it, too, tapped into pre-existing campaigning organizations: a
Marine Sustainable Council, for example, had been active for a decade when
End of the Line filming began. What it achieved, as with Blackfish, deserved the
award. It is not that it solved the problem of global over-fishing—demanding
that of it would be Trump-like in its inanity.4 Rather, it made a marked
contribution to achieving that solution; not in terms of affecting public opinion
in ways hard to establish but in specific concrete responsive actions.
The Britdoc Foundation has noted nearly 90 projects around the world
using documentary in a similar way as a key campaigning tool to translate
public concern into ameliorative deeds, however local and limited. For
example, distinguished among the constant coverage of illegal migration
across the US /Mexico border is Marc Silver’s 2013 feature documentary Who is
Dayani Crystal. The film investigates the identity of an anonymous body found
dead in the Arizona desert as a way of humanizing a tragedy whose familiarity
on the news has numbed response. However, Who is Dayani Crystal was
conceived as being more than an engagé movie—it combined filmmaking
and community development expertise; the production team even included a
co-credited “Social Impact Director,” Lina Srivastava.
Who is Dayani Crystal followed a virtual “power-cube” playbook: from the
deep involvement of stakeholders in both the US and Latin America, through
targeted screenings for US officials and foreign embassies in Washington (in
addition to normal distribution and public exhibition), to establishing a web
presence and supporting activity in the film’s afterlife: “We needed to fully
understand the context and landscape of migration before committing to any
solutions” (Raftree et al, n/d: 8). Finally, after its release the filmmakers maintain
a continuing personal involvement in the immigration campaigning
organizations with whom they had worked.
More locally, Who is Dayani Crystal moved a stone or two, Yukong style. The
dead man had been traced to Honduras and the specific “stones” were, as the
committee of his home village, wanted:
4
Seeking concrete outcomes—discernible change—should not be misunderstand as a basis for
dismissing documentary wholesale when it fails to produce these results (Nichols, 2001: 14).
To suggest documentaries should solve social problems, even when that is their announced
intention is jejune. The criticism of a failure to effect change only applies to filmmakers deploying
the unethical shibboleth of the “giving voice” to social victims whose situation is unalleviated by the
exposure while their own reputations are thereby enhanced.
196
Access to water and improvements to the primary/secondary school, both
of which would create conditions that would allow community members
to stay home and not migrate, if that’s what they chose . . . (Raftree et al, n/d:
15, 9)
The water access system is complete, and renovation to the school has
begun. The results speak to the concept of an implicit “right NOT to migrate”
(as the team put it) because of the conditions forcing people to leave their
homes.
Other nominated Puma films have included documentaries with similar
concrete discernible outcomes. The Interrupters, for example, is a classic
instance of using film to amplify the work of an existing community group—in
this case, CeaseFire, a Chicagoan community project dedicated to intervening
in street gang violence. It had been active since 1995 but the film, its Puma
citation stated, “reframed urban violence and built capacity for the field” of
such campaigns, ensuring that “ ‘violence interrupting’ is an accepted strategy
for tackling endemic problems.” CeaseFire claims a 41–73 percent reduction in
street violence in some 50 cities round the world where its method—train ex-
gang members to intervene in street disputes—is being applied. The site is
replete with endorsements from change influencers (police chiefs, priests,
municipal authorities, criminal justice lawyers, and judges) in whose power lies
the introduction of the technique; and the film itself directly raised money for
the project not least through its rare profit-sharing arrangement (see p. 163)
(Anon [Cure Violence], n/d.)
Such concrete outcomes are not, cannot be, and are not suggested here as
being the only basis for judging documentary impact. But for any who, like the
Who is Dayani Crystal team, put “working on society impact with documentary
film” before simply just making documentary films in the hope of no more than
raising consciousness, lessons can be drawn:
● facilitate rather instigate, find partners and ensure stakeholder

engagement
● plan for impact and how to measure it

●
raise money for this as well as for filming
● target issue influencers, community organizers, and grassroots
communities
● make “exit” plans, likely now to include open access to digital content
197
● educate distributors to understand the importance of what
happens . . .
when, as George Stoney always put it, “the lights go up” (after Raftree et al, n/d:
26; Helfland, 2012).
And with George Stoney, we are returned to Fogo.
1.2 Engagement
Impact and engagement are intertwined—the former cannot happen without
the latter. Bully,5 for example, has been massively successful in demonstrating
engagement in the traditional way, taking over $3.5m in box-office receipts
and putting the topic of bullying “firmly on the map in the US [making] it
acceptable to talk about the issue” (in the words of its Puma citation). The topic,
though, was scarcely taboo. Be that as it may, apart from its box-office
performance, Bully has been screened over 7,500 times at community meetings
and this exposure has engendered a proliferation of community groups
dedicated directly to addressing the problem (Anon [Bully], n/d) It does have
Y- as well as X-axis outcomes, but this is not always so evidently the case.
In 2013, the Puma prize went to Act of Killing. Joshua Oppenheimer has
stated, in a lengthy feature article in the The (London) Guardian that:
The film has had exactly the impact the survivors hoped for. It has been
screened thousands of times in Indonesia, and is available for free online. This
has helped catalyse a transformation in how Indonesia understands its past.
In October 2012, Indonesia’s most important news publication, Tempo
Magazine, published a special double edition dedicated to The Act of Killing,
including 75 pages of boastful perpetrators’ testimony from across
Indonesia. . . . This special edition broke a 47-year silence about the genocide in
the mainstream media. Indonesia’s National Commission on Human Rights
issued its statement about the film: “. . . . No film, or any other work of art for
that matter, has done this more effectively than The Act of Killing. [It] is essential
viewing for us all” (Oppenheimer, 2014a).
A prior body of oppositional films exists which deals with the 1965/6 massacres,
as discussed by Ariel Heryano in Killer Images, a volume Oppenheimer co-edited
5
Bully| Lee Hirsch| USA | 2011.
198
(Heryano, 2012: 224–41). And in other media, F. X. Harsono, an Indonesian of
Chinese descent who is the country’s most distinguished modern artist, had
made the periodic state sponsored violence against his community a theme from
before 2000 (Sanchez-Kozyreva, 2015). Yet there is no reason to doubt that The Act
of Killing has affected the public sphere in the way claimed, breaking a wall of
mainstream media silence which this other work had not penetrated.
Although refused cinema exhibition in Indonesia, it was nevertheless
initially seen at 1,000+ community venues. Mette Bjerregaard, who screened
the film there, has reported that: “Through a network of underground
distributors and social media, The Act of Killing has now been viewed by millions
of Indonesians” (Bjerregaard, 2014).6 Millions, though, is hard to compute from
the 1,000 community screenings otherwise claimed. Nor is it the case that the
film’s online presence renders attempts to censor it futile (which Bjerregaard
also claimed) as such traffic can be readily impeded. Indonesia, which has a
history of censorship, has moved so to do (Kelion, 2016; Deibert et al, 2011:
312–13). But, on balance the dangers of over-claiming do not, of themselves,
make it impossible, or even unlikely, that the film (as its Puma citation noted)
has effected: “a transformation . . . a shift in discourse in Indonesia and its
understanding of its own difficult past.”
But leaving aside the question of X-axis engagement within Indonesia,
internationally not all that many of us agreed with the Indonesian National
Commission on Human Rights and saw viewing The Act of Killing as essential.
Of course, it was widely seen. It was screened at 100 film festivals in 57 countries
and this was exceptional, although not exactly unparalleled.7 A more pertinent
measure of its reach might be the feature documentary box office. But there it
made no killing commensurate with the coverage it received—under $500,000
in the US , 20 percent of Blackfish’s take, a 250th of Fahrenheit 9/11’s.8
More to the point, beyond that, what of impact in the stricter Y-axis sense
being here proposed?
For a long time, the Indonesian government ignored The Act of Killing, hoping
it would go away. When the film was nominated for an Academy award, the
6
Although not so identified in the article, Bjerregaard worked with the film’s Danish funder.
7
Noted titles can expect screenings at “70 festivals in 35 countries,”“44 festivals in 15 countries,”“30
festivals in 13 countries.”
8
http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=actofkilling.htm;http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/
?id=blackfish.htm [accessed February 12, 2016]). The Look of Silence took $109,000 in the US http://www.
boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=lookofsilence.htm [accessed February, 12, 2013].
199
Indonesian president’s spokesman acknowledged that the 1965 genocide was
a crime against humanity, and that Indonesia needs reconciliation—but in its
own time. While this was not an embrace of the film, it was incredible, because
it represents an about-face for the government: until then, it had maintained
that the killings were heroic and glorious (Oppenheimer, 2014a).
It is indeed incredible that an admission of guilt has been heard from the
Indonesian authorities. Yet, beyond this promise for action to be taken by the
government “in its own time”, impact—say, any moves towards obtaining
justice for the victims and punishment of the killers and those authorities who
aided and abetted them—has not been evidenced. The International Court at
The Hague is ignored.
There have been, though, some international outcomes, aside from public
exhibition; a screening, at the Library of Congress for senators, members of
Congress, and their staff, for instance. One “senator told US News and World
Report: ‘The United States government should be totally transparent on what
it did and what it knew at the time, and they should be disclosing what
happened here”’ (Oppenheimer, 2014a). The Britdoc impact report, however,
leaves political consequences of any kind aside to state that the prize was
earned because: “the film’s international reach in festivals, special events and
with cultural and political press around the globe prior to broadcast has been
exceptional”—X-axis exceptional engagement (albeit not reflected in the box
office); not any Y-axis achievements (Anon [Britdoc] 2013).
But compare that with the outcomes of one of the films that The Act of
Killing beat to the Puma award, Kirby Dick’s The Invisible War (USA , 2012).
This is:
a ground-breaking investigative documentary about the epidemic of rape

within the US military which has now been taken on by the military as a
training tool, has exerted pressure on top level decision makers and
introduced new codes of conduct for investigating Military Sexual Assault into
legislation (Anon [Britdoc] (d) n/d).
On the engagement axis, as measured by box office The Invisible War was far
from exceptional, initially booking only $72,000 at the box office. But, within
two days of being shown it, the then US Secretary of Defense, Leon Panetta,
“publicly credited the film for influencing his decision to revise military policy
on sexual assault,” ie: impact.
200
There have been five senate hearings and 35 legislative reforms have been
passed. These include measures to bar criminal felons with assault histories
from enlisting, a whistle-blower protection act, and more . . . to connect
directly with victims of abuse, the filmmakers organized a recovery program
. . .” (Anon [Media Impact Funders], 2016).
These immediate outcomes—“training tool,” new protocols for investigating

the abuse, whistle-blower protection, therapy—must, surely, be reasonably
considered as more potent than the catalyzing of opinion the Puma citation
announced The Act of Killing to have achieved.
It is not that The Invisible War has stopped rape in the US armed forces: of
course, it has not. Nor is that the Oppenheimer films have not drawn the
world’s attention to a forgotten episode of Indonesian history: of course, they
have. It is the ideological implications of, apparently, appraising engagement
(opinion formation on the X-axis) as, at least on this occasion, a more prize-
worthy measure of “impact” than discernible outcomes on the Y-axis.
1.3. Research
To demand evidence of engagement without exhibiting a whiff of
comprehension as to the vexations involved in obtaining it is, however,
unreasonable. The demand speaks not to “known unknowns”; the “known”
necessity of uncovering these “unknown” effects. Rather, it reveals a reversed
“unknown/known” situation because the known difficulties of evidencing
effects—as reflected in the library of social science research on the matter—
are, apparently, unknown to those demanding “evidence.” Instead, a rhetoric
of “the art of impact and the impact of art” carries the day (Anon [Britdoc]
(d) n/d). There is a veritable nesience to this:
emerging research in fields such as neuroscience and data science [allows]

impact to look beyond marketing and box office metrics for indications of
how, why and when media messages trigger individual and social change
(Anon [Harmony Institute], n/d).
Simply, such investigations provide no such indications, at least with any

safety; and the history of established positivist research tradition to “look
beyond” counting explains why.
Electrodes have been attached to people’s skulls for decades; the audience
has been endlessly questioned and counted. And the result has been that,
201
after 75 years of such constant effort by not only social psychologists and
statisticians but also sociologists, “[d]espite the volume of research, the debate
about media effects remains unresolved” (Livingstone, 1996). And now,
20 years on, it still has not been. It is nothing more than technicist romanticism
to think that the coming of social media changes this: “The measurement of
conversation in online social networks presents a meaningful, quantifiable
approach to measuring impact” (Anon [Harmony Institute] 2012: 7). Really? To
ignore the sociological debate about effects, and the limitations of all counting,
means that the reasons for its failure to find safe evidence will be duplicated.
That flawed effort is just being relived.
Sociologists were seduced by everything from moral panics about the
movies (Charters, 1933) to Hitler’s use of radio (Goebbels, 1938 [1933]) and the
myth of the “panic” caused by Orson Welles’ radio dramatization of H.G. Well’s
science fiction novel The War of the Worlds in 1938 (Cantril et al, 1982 [1940];
Dunham, 1997: 33–4 1982; Pooley & Socolow, 2013 a, b, c Winston, B, 2015c:
226–30).
A “Hypodermic Needle Hypothesis” explained all this but as, in the event,
the effect could not actually be demonstrated with safety. This refined by the
“Two Step Flow” concept which argued that the media supposedly influenced
“opinion-formers” who then supposedly influenced their peers (Katz &
Lazarsfeld, 1955). When that proved inconclusive, the “Null Effects
Hypothesis”/“Re-enforcement Theory” was suggested, in effect, claiming that,
as effects could not be readily determined, they, more or less, did not exist
(Klapper, 1960). A decade later, “Uses and Gratifications” then emphasized
audience autonomy rather than message power (Katz et al, 1973/4). But the
“Cultivation Hypothesis,” a decade after that, virtually did the reverse, seeing
“heavy” users—spectators with lower educational attainment and economic
standing—as being less able to resist media messages (Gerbner et al, 1998).
In all, essential problems remained—extrapolation, respondent
idiosyncrasy—and, above all—the impossibility of separating out any specific
message from the general noise of the social sphere. Confusing causation with
correlation becomes a given.
The psychologists had an answer to this: the lab. But, unfortunately, work
done there over many decades has been no more successful at producing
compelling evidence of effect than has media sociology. Even if an effect
can be demonstrated it cannot readily be extrapolated into the real world. In
the muddles of the social sphere, causation and correlation remain as hopelessly
intertwined and as confused in the lab as they do outside it. So, for example,
202
take violence. As Guy Cumberbatch has observed, research blaming screen
violence for violence in society is the functional equivalent of blaming the
rustling of leaves on the trees for the wind (Cumberbatch & Howitt, 1989). And
this is generally true. “Impact” can be a filmmaker’s laudable ambition; or it can
be a trap laid for her by funders. Either way media research is actually little use.
Little of this scholarship seems much to condition contemporary rhetoric
around documentary impact and powers of engagement or on how to
demonstrate one or the other. Public understanding of media power still
seems to reflect back to the Hypodermic Needle than to more nuanced
understanding. It is, though, to fall into the trap of the Null Effects Hypothesis
to deny media impact altogether. After all and most obviously, a huge
advertising industry implicitly and explicitly claims media effects.
However, hypothesis formation apparently being so seductive in this
context, it could be that—let us call it—an Irrelevance Hypothesis explains
this. That is to say, when assessing advertising, the more effective the behavior
change noted, the less significant it is. To use media to alter which brand
of instant coffee is bought does not mean the media can be used, say, to
combat unhealthy behavior. Actually, it is a given of reception studies on
health communication media campaigns that only moderate effects on
understanding are likely, much less actual modification of conduct (Noar, 2006;
Leavy et al, 2011; Foerster & Hudes,1994). And where change does occur, other
factors, apart from media, impinge, eg: media campaigns for seat-belt use in
cars have been successful but laws—with penalties—compelling buckling-up
are also in play.
And other exceptions to the Irrelevancy Hypothesis are equally less clear
cut: for instance, the media’s supposed change-making power in elections.
Rupert Murdoch’s British tabloid The Sun’s splash the day following the 1992
UK General Election—“IT ’S THE SUN WOT WON IT ”—actually does not (like
much of the content of that newspaper) withstand serious investigation (eg
Heath et al, 1999). The factors affecting the vote were, of course, manifold. As
with The War of the Worlds, the Sun’s claim of direct impact is mythic.
One can also imagine a Susceptibility Hypothesis. Most people absorb,
without consequent action, media messages that attempt to change

significant behavior (ie behavior beyond simply buying a new brand of coffee).
Otherwise, responding to profounder exhortations by imitating or conforming
to them when no action is demanded (as it is with “vote!”) is a measure of
susceptibility. For the susceptible to alter their personality in salient ways in
direct response to media might be considered a species of sociopathy. To
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imitate transgressive actions seen on a screen is psychopathic. The media are
correlative to socio- or psycho-pathy, not their cause.9
Not everybody involved in the current fashion for demanding evidence of
impact ignores the sociological traditions. Media sociologists caught up in this
new wave of research are of course aware of its failings and, therefore, the need
to put some blue water between previous social science and their present
endeavors:
[T]he field of media effects can be characterized as having a strong micro

orientation, in that the unit of analysis is typically the individual media user,
and the focus is on the relatively narrow question of whether exposure to a
particular media message impacted that user’s attitudes, beliefs, cognitions,
or behaviors. When we talk about media impact, on the other hand, the
orientation can be characterized as a bit more macro, in that the concerns
extend beyond whether individual media users had their attitudes,
beliefs, cognitions, or behaviors affected, to also include broader systemic
changes at the levels of organizations and institutions (Napoli, 2014,
emphasis added).
“A bit more macro”?

Differentiating “effects” from “impact” in these terms does not bear scrutiny.
The same set of consequences are being sought. Reports on the effectiveness
of film at an organizational/institutional level—as inconclusive as any other
research on the media—occupy many shelves in the library of mass
communication effects (eg from Ketcham & Heath, 1964 on). Anyway, what
are “organisations and institutions” if not aggregations of individuals? Given
that narrow changes are not defined, what “broader systemic changes” are
being uncovered by counting Twitter conversations and the like? Or, come to
that, by reductionist lab experimentation, either?
In fact, whether for media new or old, whether measured by established or
innovative methods, safe evidence of consciousness-raising, opinion formation,
effect—call it what you will—remains elusive. Behavior modification—
impact—rarer yet.
9
Suicide is possibly the exception that proves the rule as there is evidence of copycatting following
media reports (eg: Etzersdorfer & Sonneck, 1998).
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2. CONDITIONS
2.1. Autonomy
In 2015, Fort McMoney won an award—not a Puma (which is for films not web-
/i-docs) but a Webby (“honouring the best of the internet”).10 Some 250,000
“players” (aka “hits,” “users,” “visits,” “traffic”) had engaged with it (Dufresne, 2014)
but how many had “voted” is a less accessible figure. It seems that, for example,
the “turnout” for the nationalization question was at some 10 percent of this, 2:1
in favor. The web-/i-doc brings nothing new to the difficulties of providing
information to the audience: Fort McMoney does not even manage to avoid the
perennial charge against linear documentary of bias. It is claimed, for example,
that few activists, First Nation or Metis citizens appear (McDermott, 2013).
Nevertheless, potentially, it does allow for a degree of greater autonomy for
the spectator. It is moot as to whether clicking on the filmed interviewees and
being offered a few options of questions to “ask” them (by further clicking)
meaningfully does this. And the extent to which Dufresne’s technique of direct
invocation, in the form of emailed questions to which the player (“citizen”?) is
invited to “vote” in faux referenda, reflects enhanced understanding is also
arguable.
Fort McMoney’s sophisticated format was not matched by its analysis. “Should
oil be nationalized?” one referendum inquired, a question so vaguely put—Oil
in the ground? Oil companies? Gas stations?—as to be all but meaningless
( Wood, 2014).
Asylum Exit Australia11 is a more compelling example of the potentials. It

postulates an unfortunately far-from-unlikely divisive Australian government
presiding over serious social unrest, the question of immigration looming
large. Eschewing the artificialities of Fort McMoney’s democratic trappings as
well as the expense of film production, a viewer moves the cursor over a series
of stills to engage in conversation with the people in the photographs. Many
are the officials who can determine the user’s future. They ask, in print,
questions and clicking on answers advances progress.
10
http://webbyawards.com/winners/2015/mobile-sites-apps/tablets/games-tablet-all-other-devices/
fort-mcmoney/
11
Dan Fill/Frank Vergeggen/Chris Sullivan| Australia| 2011,
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One is placed in the position of the refugee, a classic Griersonian social
victim, for whom interrogation is a given of their situation (Anon [SBS ], 2011).
“It’s not just a game,” said one of Kate Nash’s interviewees for a research project
she conducted assessing Asylum Exit Australia’s effectiveness:
it’s actually for to get me thinking about what people are going through, so as
I’m going “this really sucks, I don’t have that many choices.” I’m also going, yeah,
it must suck to have to make that choice (Nash, 2015: 9).
The site was designed in connection with a major SBS documentary series
on immigration, Go Back to Where You Came From (2011–15).12 In the name of
ostranenie, these linear documentaries deployed reality tv show techniques to
shock the audience into new levels of awareness: Australians undertook a
terrifying voyage in a leaky boat back across the Indian Ocean, lived with
refugees, went to the war-torn countries whence they came. Both the linear
reality tv films and Asylum Exit Australia are far from ludic.
The case for the ostranenie of the website enhancing engagement and
awareness is well made but its broader significance for citizenship and civic-
orientation, much less its power to change social realities (should that be in
view), is not so clear. Certainly nothing has emerged thus far from the growing
range of web-/i-docs to suggest anything beyond this possible enhanced
engagement. As an Asylum Exit Australia user put it:
You can sympathise with people that you see on tv and think that it’s a
problem that needs to be fixed. . . . So I guess now I’ve felt a bit of that tension
“what am I going to do in this situation?” and it’s the emotional tension, I’ve
got to do something, but I’m at a loss of what to do (Nash, 2015: 9).
Impact is as elusive as ever.

It could well be that the most effective context for engagement with such
web-/i-docs is in fact to be found in formal educational modes—structured
engagement. For example, Off-Shore (Brenda Longfellow, Glen Richards, 2012)
is an intriguing and elegantly designed (by Helios) project that lands the viewer
on a virtual oil rig to begin an exploration of the ecology and politics of
undersea petroleum production. Like these other web-/i-docs, it too presents
12
Ivan O’Mahoney| Australia| 2011, series 1, t/x June 21–June 23; 2012, series 2, t/x August 28–30;
2015 series 3, t/x July 31 – August 2.
206
content in ways to exploit the potential of open texts better to engage
spectators than a fact-heavy linear documentary might. Its overt Y-axis
interventionist purpose is to influence environmental decision making and
curtail big oil. But it obviously also has potential for more formal educational
X-axis engagement and teachers’ packs indicating classroom uses are on offer.
It could be, as web/i-docs develop, that this sort of enhanced educational
value emerges as their most salient advantage over the linear.
These sites are examples of the navigational, where original materials are
presented, cursors clicked, and narrative progress is made. The possibilities of
adaption and co-creation, interactions which aggregate or alter the original
material, can plausibly be claimed, potentially, to go much further. They might
turn out to be as much transformative for the spectator as they could be for
the filmed. Thanks to the digital feedback-loop, a possible filmed/filmer/
spectator hybrid emerges to co-create “stories about the world,” producing
open texts, turning the documentary into a process (see Fig 12, p. 58).
This is not to say that such hybridity will sweep all before it; or, if it did,
that social change would necessarily be a consequence. The exploitation of
the possibilities for the spectator of this new hybridity have been thus
far limited—as, in effect, so too have the parallel co-creation opportunities
for the filmed (p. 65). The objectives in view have been far from directly
ameliorative.
For example, Planet Takeout (2012) is a completest project on America’s
more than 10,000 Chinese takeout restaurants, places which are “lenses into
our local neighborhoods.” Visitors to the site are invited to: “Add photos,
videos, and sounds. Add a new Takeout. Tell your story. Be in touch.” It began in
Boston funded by WGBH and instigated by local journalist Val Wang. Other
completest projects have the same aggregating ambition. Jessie Shapins, an
urban media artist and theorist, created Mapping Main Street (2010) inviting
the public to upload material they have filmed or otherwise gathered
about the more than 10,466 “Main Streets” in America. Supported by the US
Corporation for Public Broadcasting and National Public Radio, among others,
a “remapping of America” is envisioned and the site has been growing by
one street every other day.

Quipu can be considered a model of a more socially charged respondent-
led endeavor. It is a sound-only project aggregating testimony of some 300,000
First Nation Peruvians, more than 90 percent women, forcibly sterilized in the
1990s. It uses, in essence, only the appropriately accessible technology of the
telephone to secure, safely, this witness testimony. Quipo’s uploaded recordings,
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unadorned by further interventions, work “to shine a light on the sterilisations,
creating a collective memory archive of this case.”13
Basically, these witnesses being transformed into creators of a documentary
text need not be classic social victims. In contrast to her interactive
documentaries, Sharon Daniel’s Name Your Price, was a participatory-media
installation at San Jose’s O1SJ Global Festival of Art on the Edge in 2010:
Festival-goers were invited to make micro-documentaries—individual

video-portraits—relating the history of the clothes they were wearing and
reflecting on the social cost of their consumer decisions (Daniel, n/d).
Making one’s mark in this way—uploading (as it were) within the space created
by the facilitator’s greater or less overt seriousness of purpose—opens up an
expanded sphere of interaction for the art exhibit visitor.
The same affordance can work in other contexts: the web can be used as a
sophisticated tool to gather user-generated social statistics—a more structured
approach to the happenstances of “citizen journalism.” The (London) Guardian
is creating content by seeking readers to furnish details of American police
killings. The Counting project asks, in the fashion initially adopted by
seventeenth-century newspaper editors: “Send us your tips, images, video and
more—and we’ll use it in our reporting.”14 But note the “our.” Were criticism
not to wilt in the face of the project’s impeccable journalistic intentions, cynics
might say this is cheaper than sending out reporters.
The projects seeking intervention for spectators at these, the highest
adaptive or co-creative, levels tend—perhaps necessarily—towards the
formalist concerns of the avant-garde. But whatever the interventions, there
is no reason to suppose that claims of Y-axis change wrought by responding
spectators would be any greater than those achieved by the filmed in co-
creator or amender mode. Nevertheless, at whatever level of interactivity,
even just the navigational, the obvious enhancement of engagement
through digital interactions raises the possibility of an enriched civic culture
engendering more fully autonomous spectators.
13
https://interactive.quipu-project.com/#/en/quipu/intro Instigated by a collective and working
closely with a cohort of Peruvian women’s organizations Quipu was successful in obtaining
support, in part through the help of British academics from the Royal Geographic Society in
London.
14
http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police-killings The Counting.
208
This meshes, in this century, with what some see generally as “an increasing
emphasis on self-determination as the foundation of citizenship.” A new “DIY
citizen” emerges (Hartley, 1999: 178); and the adapting or amending web-/i-
doc spectator matches her profile:
Traditionally we have thought of documentary’s civic role in terms of the

provision of information—whether Grierson’s promotional civic education
films, investigative journalism or alternative, sometimes radical
representations. But with interactive documentary these traditional functions
are augmented by attempts to build community, garner user contributions or
foster various forms of civically oriented participation. (Nash, 2014 (c))
This is all potentially possible but achieving such outcomes is as much a

question of struggle as ever. “In the end,” as Nicholas Garnham points out,
“politics is not concerned with discourse that is at best the means to the end”
(Garnham, 2003: 196).
Nevertheless, changing the closed nature of messages received by
spectators means that the conditions of reception are, obviously, significantly
altered in favour of more autonomous reception. And with what consequences
necessarily remains an open question.
2.2. Hazards
It is a question that only has pertinence in the bourgeois liberal democracies
where a measure of spectator autonomy, however limited we might think it, is
already a given. Elsewhere the bare right to speak and to hear needs to be
established first.
The fall-back assumption in the debate about the autonomy of the spectator
is, in effect, that she is a westerner whose viewing circumstances are those
found in the global north (Fiske, 2011 [1987]: 72). Matters of the raising of
consciousness or the provocation of action are entirely for the individual; but,
from the global perspective, this focus might seem to be a luxury. Extrapolating
from the conditions of laissez-faire control such as exist in northern polities is,
obviously, eurocentric. Where these comparative freedoms do not exist—as is
the case in the huge swathes of the world—the whole documentary agenda
changes. It does so for the filmed and the filmer, of course, but also for the
spectator. Concerns about the state of the documentary in the digital era, as in
the past, are transformed if soldiers or secret police are at the door.
209
This is not a matter of repressive censorship per se. All nations, even if they
eschew direct prior constraint and strict dirigiste state intervention, still exercise
a measure of control over, at a minimum, exhibition. Beyond this, anywhere
the right to speak is abridged, so too is the right to hear. Not only does the
expression of any oppositional opinion become extremely fraught, but its
reception does also. It might be personally endangering to be involved
with the making of oppositional work, but it can be little safer to be caught
watching it.
For Fernado Solanas and Octavio Getino, working under the junta which
seized power in the Argentine from the left-wing nationalist Juan Perón in
1966, the struggle was for what they termed a “Third Cinema”: not Hollywood,
nor the product of auterism, but independent, politically militant, and
aesthetically experimental works (Solanas & Getino, 1997 [1969]). Even in
conditions of less overt suppression than the Argentina of their day, the
agenda of such a third cinema can mean not inconsiderable personal danger
effect—in China, say.
In the relative and inconsistent relaxation that began in the early 1990s,
in reaction to the previous repression after the Tiananmen Square protests
of 1989, the BBC ’s David Attenborough (for example) had become, for
China Central T V, the exemplary documentarist—unsurprisingly. More
unexpectedly, Fred Wiseman himself visited China in 1997 invited by Wu
Wenguang, a key figure in the development of Chinese independent
documentary. And more surprising yet—perhaps in acknowledgment that
his films were not quite the radical texts they appear to be—Wiseman also
meet with Li Tieying, a senior cultural figure in the CPR Central Committee
(Lu Xinyu, 2003: 19).
This visit confirmed Wiseman’s style of direct cinema as the dominant
model for emerging semi-licit “independent” productions, although its dogme
was not strictly obeyed and, on occasions, subjectivities in cinéma verité style
were also in play. However, all formal echoes of western documentary practice
are altered. What might be considered unethical or dubious filmmaking
behavior acquires, it can be argued, a justification because of the changed
conditions of production and reception. To take one example: Beijing De Feng

Hen Da /Is Beijing’s Wind Strong? (Ju Anqi| China| 1999).
Chronique d’un été’s initial attempt to understand the “strange tribe that
lives in Paris” took the form of asking people in the street, “are you happy,”
illustrating Rouch’s belief that interviews actually reveal very little. Is Beijing’s
Wind Strong? used the same process—street interviews asking an innocuous
210
question “is the wind in Beijing strong?” “The most blatant element of [Beijing’s
Wind is] the filmmaker’s repeated challenge to the involuntary interviewees
privacy” (Braester, 2010: 206)—including bursting in on a man in a public toilet.
But the ethical issue of intrusion, never mind concern about the limitation of
interviewing are being balanced because of the overall conditions of
filmmaking. Beijing’s Wind is a transgressive film highlighting the political
nature of the very act of public utterance. The situation transmutes the ethics
in play so that what is dubious in the west, in circumstances such as these can
nevertheless be justified.
Still 21 “Do you think Beijing’s wind is strong?”

Beijing De Feng Hen Da/Is Beijing’s Wind Strong?| Ju Anqi| China| 1999
“Rather than being taken for cheap pranks, [the interviews] should be
understood as comments on how official propaganda can only elicit canned
responses” (Braester, 2010: 207). What is at stake in such conditions is,
unambiguously, the public right to know—to speak and to hear (and to
understand)—and this can, ethically, be said to trump, for example in this case,
the privacy right of the filmed.
Thus far there has been little clear danger for those who have appeared on
screen in various independent documentaries, even among the criminals (or
criminalized) members of China’s hidden underclass, or with people involved
in protests of one kind or another. Participation could be considered then a
fully informed political act whose dangers are as willingly undertaken by the
filmed as they are by the filmmaker. All run risks for no other return than to
211
create a record. Exhibition, however limited, is secondary. In the west, on the
festival circuit, the unexpectedness of such subjects actually existing in China
at all is a source of their fascination. Western ethical considerations might well
call these victim films into question at film festivals; but in China they are
justified in the cause of witness. Great personal risks are being run to gain the
attention of a few eyes, if any eyes at all. Conditions of reception transform the
position of the audience, should there be one, as much as they do that of the
filmer and the filmed.
La hora de los hornos: Notas y testimonios sobre el neocolonialismo, la violencia
y la liberación/Hour of the Furnaces: Notes and Testimonies on Neocolonialism,
Violence and Liberation, the classic agitational documentary made by Solanas
and Getino in the time of the junta, was essentially a newsreel compilation. But
for them, its political significance was as much grounded in its viewing as in its
making (Solanas & Getino, 1997 [1969]). Its most experimental filmic element,
for example, was the deployment of an exhortationary intertitle suggesting
that the audience stop the projector to discuss what they have seen. Robert
Stam described this as an example of “tendentiously aleatory procedures”
(Stam, 1990: 254); but nevertheless La hora prefigures the aleatory affordances
of the digital. “The film is the pretext for dialogue, for search and in encounter
of wills” as Getino put it from exile in 1979 (Mestman, 2009: 124).15
What made the “act” of watching La Hora revolutionary, however, was
as much, or more, to do with what went on “when the lights go up”: the
peripheral circumstances of the viewing, the overall conditions of reception.
Spectatorship becomes revolutionary more because of the lurking hostile
attention of the authorities than a consequence of any individual’s internal
response to the film.
La Hora was screened in semi-secret at a network of alternative venues in
defiance of a law of 1966 censoring all expression that “harmed the interests of
the fundamental institutions of the state” (King, 2015: 93). The film certainly
does that. Despite the interdiction, a small audience of 25,000 was claimed for
eight months in 1970 alone (Mestman, 2011: 30).16 On a number of occasions
there were confrontations with the military (Brenez, 2014). It could well be that
the junta, exhibiting the usual stupidity of such authorities, transformed La

Hora’s audiences into the very dissidents they sought to eradicate as much as
15
Something of a paradox, given that Solanas and Getino themselves otherwise reflect, in their
rhetoric, unreformed Latin machismo.
16
As many as 100,000 spectators in total has been suggested (Stites Mor, 2012: 110).
212
Solinas and Getino managed to enthuse them. But, again, even in less vexed
situations—China, say, where exhibition is regularly frustrated by officials but
thus far audiences are dispersed rather than more dangerously harassed—the
ethical responsibility to the spectator is transformed.
Still 22 “I think you filmed very well”

Chi Bao De Cun Zi | The Satiated Village | Zou Xueping| China| 2011
“I think you filmed very well,” Uncle Ah, an elderly villager, tells the young
filmmaker, Zou Xueping, on camera in her 2011 documentary Chi Bao De Cun
Zi/The Satiated Village. Her two-part study of her birthplace, the village of
Zoujia, in Shandong province (Ji E De Cun Zi/The Starving Village, 2010 and its
follow-up, The Satiated Village) record memories of what the Chinese authorities
call “the difficult three year period,” otherwise known as the Great Famine,
between 1958 and 1962 in which anything up to 55 million people died
(Dikötter, 2011). The films were part of “The Memory Project,” an initiative of Wu
Wenguang, Wiseman’s Chinese host two decades before.
Your technique is very good [Uncle Ah goes on]. You are doing a service to the
old villagers. That’s great. You put a lot of heart into it. That’s really good, really
artistic, very good. You have done a great thing for the old villagers. I
appreciate that very much.
As is often the case initially, the audience reached by these films is

an essentially elite and privileged western film-festival one, occasionally
augmented by a western television screening (attracting a viewership
dominated by the same social demographic). The Starving Village, for instance,
was first seen in Finland, at the Tampere Film Festival in 2011. As Zou Xueping
213
toured her film through the western festival circuit in 2010 gathering well-
deserved accolades, she became aware that exhibition raised issues of moral
responsibility not only for herself and for those she had filmed but also for
those to whom she showed the film. Screening circumstances alter meaning
and impact on ethics for all parties concerned. Harmless consciousness-raising
in Finland might involve something more immediately life-changing in China.
In another echo of the climax of Chronique d’un été where Rouch and Morin
screened a rough-cut of their movie for the people they had filmed, she does
the same for her elderly informants in the village. She arranged a screening for
a dozen of them and filmed the conversation after “the lights go up.” In contrast
to the discussion in the Musée de l’homme where Chronique’s participants were
primarily concerned with tact and the authenticity of each other’s on-screen
“performances” (p. 88), Zou, in The Satiated Village, invites her subjects to
consider the matter of reception of their testimony politically. And this she re-
enforces by getting a second audience of 16 village children to watch and have
the same discussion.
The old villagers themselves have not been thus far bothered by the
attentions of the authorities for taking part in the film or for watching the result.
Like Uncle, they can be proud to have the history of their indomitability
preserved. But it is the need for such preservation that alters the ethics of their
participation for themselves and for the duty of care Zou owes them and all who
see her film in China. It speaks to their autonomy rather than any exploitation.
Zou: What else do you feel after watching the film? Do you have other opinions?
The Villagers: no . . . no . . .
Grandpa Hong Yi: You filmed this because you are educated and even had the
heart to call all of us to watch the film together. What you have done
cannot be found in other villages.
Uncle Ah: What you have done is very good.
Hong Yi: It is filmed very well. This is a very good remembrance.
But the conditions of reception, which Zou goes further to probe with them
on camera, indicate the extent to which the ethical implications of spectatorship

are also changed in such circumstances:
Zou: This film has been screened in Beijing and Shenzhen. Some people like it
and many people have asked questions. If this film were screened abroad
would you have any objections?
214
The Villagers: No objections. . . . What’s there to object to. . . . It’s all fact. . . .
Everything in it is fact. Everything that happened is real. . . . Yeah. Everything
people talk about is real. Screening this in China is OK .
Zou: What about screening it abroad?
Some Villagers: Sure, Yes.
Other Villagers: That’s not very good.
Some Villagers: It doesn’t affect us old people. . . . There’s nothing to be afraid
of. . . .
Other Villagers: It makes China look bad. . . . It makes China look bad . . . I feel it
won’t look good for China.
Grandma Jin (to Hong Yi): How does it make China look bad?
Other Villagers: Don’t screen it abroad. . . . Yeah. . . . Yes. Because it talks about
suffering.
A Villager: It’s alright to screen this in China but you can’t screen this
abroad.
Other Villagers: Yes—it’s not good for China’s image. . . . Not good . . . I think so
too. . . . Don’t screen this abroad. That’s betraying our country. . . . Yes,
betraying.
What would in the west occasion nothing more than scandal or provoke
nostalgia becomes a matter of potential sedition in societies where memory is
itself dangerous a matter of potential sedition. In Chinese conditions of
reception that a film does no more than record evidence of “everything that
happened” can easily become a “betrayal.”17 Grandpa Hong Yi was not alone in
reaching the conclusion that the film is not good for China, especially that: “It
would be betraying Chairman Mao” to screen it abroad. There is, in fact, much
“to be afraid of.”
17
The Chinese authorities have long been extremely sensitive to the possibilities of “betrayal.” In
1972, in the midst of another Maoist social upheaval, the “Cultural Revolution,” Michelangelo
Antonioni penetrated the then largely closed Chinese society to film Chung Kuo/China). Never-
mind that he spent two months filming at the invitation, it is rumored, of the highest level of the
Chinese government. Never-mind that he was carefully minded, shooting in specially selected
places in Beijing, Nanjing, Suzhou, Shanghai, and Henan with all the insights and understanding
of a well-intentioned and, it should be said, particularly observant tourist. The resultant rather
old-fashioned three-plus hours of cut material were nevertheless immediately banned in
China. One of his minders, subsequently filmed the same year as The Starving Village, recalled,
insouciantly, that: “it struck me that [Antonioni] was filming a lot of bad things, things that reflected
our backwardness. It seemed totally unfair ” Jia Zhangke| ( Hai Shang Chuan Qi/I Wish I Knew| China|
2010).
215
Those making and appearing in such a film, or for those Chinese who watch
it, are thus not in the same circumstances, say, as the makers and participants
in, and western viewers of, the BBC ’s popular long running series Yesterday’s
Witness (1969–81).18 This too recalled historical events through the testimony
of the citizens who witnessed and were involved in them. Although it did not
lack contemporary socio-political pertinence, the series was, in essence, a
popular exercise as much in nostalgia as it was a politically motivated “history-
from-below” project.19 In China, as in many places, memory can be no mere
matter of nostalgia in this way.
The very act of memory itself is, after all, a work of social construction,
arising from interpersonal reactions, thereby creating social value (Halbwachs,
2002). It is a given of modern theory that it is essentially controlled by power
(Foucault, 1979 [1975]: 25–6; Connerton, 2000: 1, 11, 12; Derrida, 1999: 75). In
this context, historically speaking, independent documentary plays a role of
alternative memory, or counter-memory. It can be argued that, without the
efforts of the Chinese independent documentarists, many historical details
would be forgotten; but they are not merely preserving hidden facts. The act
of documenting memory is itself a serious and significant political act.
The testamentary, in one form or another, necessarily figures large in
Chinese independent documentary. It is their point. If few Chinese are able to
see the films at the time, this was, and is, of little import. “It doesn’t matter if
there is no audience today. I have no market,” a documentary director explained
to us, because: “it’s memory, memory. We Chinese directors are the luckiest in
the world because we have this purpose,” that is: privileging their right, and the
right of those they film, to speak and to hear however ethically (and politically)
fraught this might be. The potential for harm (from the authorities) is far greater
but taking the risk of incurring their wrath is a political act that demands it be
respected on its own terms. And speaks to the essence of the documentary
enterprise.
It is nearly a century since Vertov conceived of the “kino-eye” to see beneath
the surfaces of the world. Such insightful penetration is all the justification the
act of documenting requires and its value persists into the documedia age.
Indeed, with the legitimation of subjectivity in documentary expression as well
18
Yesterday’s Witness| Stephen Peat| UK | 1969–81.
19
Yesterday’s Witness, however, was conceived of and directed by Stephen Peet, a producer who
saw it as a radical corrective to official histories of the period.
216
digital’s affordances, it becomes possible now to see how we might cross
documentary’s last frontier making good on the “kino-eye’s” promise to
illustrate mentalités as well as external realities. It will then realize the Chilean
filmmaker Patricio Guzmán eloquent claim that: “Documentary in itself is a
great archive of humanity . . . very precious and extraordinarily important.”20
That is, of itself, the only consequence it need have: “show us life.”
20
Interviewed in Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary| Pepita Ferrari| Canada| 2008.
217
MINUTES: The Act of
Documenting
In this book, we have suggested some salient points for discussion of the
twenty-first century documentary realizing that:
capturing documentary’s future is an unfinished work.

However, it is up to all of us to create it. Now. It’s up to you.
( Wintonick, 2013: 382)
In that spirit the following points can be drawn from the above for further
consideration.
Considerations
1. DIGITAL POTENTIALS
All three legs of the traditional documentary—scientistic objectivity, eurocentric
production norms, and patriarchal tone—are affected by the digital.
Documentary is expanding to embrace new forms of docmedia, eg: web-/i- docs,
recasting the roles of the filmed, the filmer, and the spectator.
Narrative is not a synonym for fiction and non-fiction is not a synonym for
documentary.
Chapter 1
● Photographic Image integrity—photography as “silent witness”—is
undercut by the digital but this is not fatal as triangulating testimony
remains foundational to the documentary, irrespective of the medium.
●
Liberated from the demands for realist photographic imagery, the digital
documentary encourages a multiplicity of new forms of documentary.
218
Chapter 2
● Digital’s easing of the barriers to entry for documentary production is the
key to enabling the emergence of a hybridic filmed/filmer as well as an
expansion of production in the global south.
● This emancipation, though, is hindered by the persistence of the
europeanized, patriarchal concept of professionalism, and the lack of
alternative globalized film languages.
●
The full potential of the digital to democratize production across the globe
is, thus far, only partially realized.
●
Paradoxically, although the web removes barriers to exhibition, it can also
be an electronic haystack into which documentary needles can easily
disappear.
Chapter 3
● Spectators can now also be navigators or hybridic spectator/filmer
amenders or co-creators when interacting with a web-/i-doc; and they
can do so at the level of the frame, shot, scene/sequence, or film.
●
Navigating, emending or co-creating hybridic spectator/filmers breaks the
“chrono-logic” of the traditional linear patriarchal documentary,
transforming a “readerly” homo narrans into a more open, non-patriarchal
“writerly” scriptrix narrans.
● Traditional texts are closed and digitally enabled navigational texts are still
semi-closed. Such interactivity as they allow does not alter the original as
do amending or co-creating interactivity which produce semi-open and
fully open texts.
● Navigational interactivity cannot sustain the claims made for its
significance; and the term “interactivity” should be reserved for the deeper
MINUTES: The Act of Documenting
amending and co-creating levels.
2. ACTUAL EFFECTS . . .
The possibilities of the digital and the persistence of older issues and factors,
combined or separately, condition the position of the filmed, the filmer, and the
spectator.
219
. . . on THE FILMED
Chapter 4
● Performativity is not a synonym for performance.
● To be seen to be “acting” vitiates the authenticity of appearing before the
documentary camera. (As the confusions of terms “acting,” “performance,”
“staging,” and “being” obfuscate discussion of this crucial element of
authenticity.)
● On the continuum from (inauthentic) acting to (authentic) being, the
filmed can be presentational (aware of the camera) or representational
(unaware—supposedly).
● There is a bias against the inarticulate.
Chapter 5
● Recasting the patriarchal director as a facilitator working with the filmed
advances documentary’s power to effect change.
● Documentary—and web-/i-doc—as a change-making agent requires
embedded filmers aiding and amplifying, more than instigating, existing
activist groups, using appropriate technology to reach targeted
influencers.
● Because of the legitimation of subjectivity, a performing filmer/filmed role
is also possible.
. . . on THE FILMER
Chapter 6
● Previously marginalized excluded voices now speak as filmers, eg
women.
●
Documentary’s legitimation of subjectivity is deployed through a
positively figured narcissism, the hegemonic giving way to more open
texts produced by a process of bricolage.
● The scriptrix replaces homo narrans, communicating in new documentary
languages, reconfiguring the old.
220
● The move establishes/emancipates others marginalized in the global
north and those in the global south as documentary speakers.
● The scientistic “fact” no longer dominates the documentary.
Chapter 7
● “Do no harm”—the “harm principle”—applies to documentary filmmakers
as a basic ethical requirement although to confuse the difference between
perceptible harm and self-attested interior psychology hurts potentially
chills free expression.
● Informed consent can be a myth and anyway . . .
●
“Participation” is without substance if editorial control is not shared.
● Consent should not be a consequence of undue influence and, although
any agreements the filmed make should be honored, in terms of
morality (more clearly than of the law) they cannot consent to their
own injury.
●
But the right of free expression makes this no black & white
matter. It can trump the harm principle if the filmed are morally
or legally culpable. Informed consent need not be “sufficient” in
such cases.
● “Giving voice” and “the right to know” are shibboleths more used to
protect the filmer from charges of exploitation, etc than to give rights to or
ameliorate the situation of the filmed.
. . . on THE SPECTATOR
Chapter 8
MINUTES: The Act of Documenting
● The “harm principle” also conditions the filmer’s duty of care to the
spectator but this should again be limited, because of the right of free
expression, to causing no discernable harm.
●
The duty of care cannot extend to truth telling without a chilling effect on
free expression, therefore: let the spectator beware.
●
Assessing the effect of media messages is vexed because of the general
noise of the social sphere.
221
● A Susceptibility Hypothesis suggests acting on transgressive media
messages transgressively demonstrates the susceptibility of the subject
rather than the power of the message; . . .
● and an Irrelevance Hypothesis suggests any behavior modification noted
in spectators means the behavior change in question is, likely, irrelevant.
Chapter 9
● Impact which involves discernable outcomes in the social sphere needs to
be distinguished from (to pick a term) “engagement” which is reflected in
externally undiscernible changes in individual mindsets.
● Impact is rare and the determination of engagement fraught.
● The spectator deserves not to be treated as a blasé dullard.
● Defamiliarization, ostranenie, rather than crude sensationalism, can compel
audience attention.
● Citizenship is not bestowed by watching a screen although docmedia are
potentially powerful tools to aid the creation of a better world.
● Repressive conditions of reception subvert the spectator’s autonomy,
recasting all the issues discussed in this book.
Toronto
Lincoln
June 1016
222
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256
Index
Page numbers in bold refer to figures.
4K high-definition 41 A Norwegian Crime in Congo 45

5 Broken Cameras 47 Anstey, Edgar 94
18 Days in Egypt 117–18 Antonioni, Michelangelo 215n
1940s House, The 92, 92–3 appearing, distrust 85, 85–9
Apperley, Thomas 78
Abbott, Christine 194 Apple i-Phone 36–7
accessibility, kit 35–6 Apuntes para una biografía imaginaria/
“A Complaint of Rape”, Police 193–4 Notes from an Imaginary
Act of Killing, The 5, 164–8, 165, 178–81, Biography 145
183, 184–6, 187–8, 198–200, 201 Arab Spring 117–18
actors 26, 89, 90 archival film 111
actual effects 9, 82 Aristotle 72
actuality 30 Arnaquq-Baril, Alethea 136–7
Adams Sitney, P. 143 Arnulf Rainer 66
adaptive interactivity 61 Ars moriendi 151, 154
adaptors 65–6 art 22, 22
Addison, Joseph 155 artistic achievement 2, 6–7
Adib, Kasim 45 assumption of risk 169
Afghan War Diary 46 Asylum Exit Australia 205–6
Agassiz, Louis 13 Athabasca oil sands 54
A Haunting 6 Attenborough, David 210
Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer 155–6 attention 44
Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial attention-seeking techniques
Killer 155–6 ostranenie/defamiliarization 187–90
Airport 158 Wow! 184–7
Alice Walker: Beauty in Truth 138 audience 31
alienation 155 assumptions about 175, 184–90, 189
al Muzayyen, Khalil 119, 121 autonomy 202
Alternative Media Center (AMC ), New capital’s greed for 38
York University 115 cinema 5–6
Althusser, Louis 21, 44 consciousness-raising 107–8
A Married Couple 162n distrust 85, 88–9
An American Family 162–3 and documentary value 30, 31
Anand, Shaina 45, 45–6 duty to 152
Angry Inuk 136–7 expectations 43, 175, 175–84, 176,
animated features 26, 34 181
An Inconvenient Truth 47, 132 figures 5–6
257
focus 187 Berger, John 29
harm 157 Betterton, Rosemary 133
inferences 28–33, 29, 31 Big Brother 27, 88
interactivity 3, 58–9 Big Stories, Small Towns 6n
as non-speakers 42 Binder, Lawrence 47
perception 9, 82 Bjerregaard, Mette 199
right to hear 180 Blackfish (Cowperthwaite) 191–3, 192,
savvy 13 194, 195–6, 199
television 2, 6 Blade Runner 63
tolerance levels 190 Block, The 118, 121
trust 20–1, 33 B Sugar 121
see also spectators Body Beautiful, The 141
Austin, John 96–7, 99 Bomba, Abraham 161–2
authenticity 19n, 20, 87–9, 98, 214 Bonner, Virginia 131, 133
assertions 14 Borges, Jorge Luis 78
of behavior 101–2 Botes, Costa 175–7, 176
flicker of 94–6 boundary events 133
image 13 Box Office Mojo 5n
photographs 18–19 Braester, Yomi 211
and pre-film deals 25n Brakhe, Stan 143
representational 89, 89 Breathless/A bout de soufflé 67
authority, repressive proclivities of 38 bricolage 131, 137, 149
auto/biography 127, 134–42, 139 Bridge, The 24n, 96
autonomy, spectator 205–9 Britdoc Foundation, the 45, 192, 194,
196n, 200
baggage 105 Britdocs 105
balance 186 broadband, unregulated 47
Ballentyne, Tanya 113, 157 Broadcasting Act, 1990 (UK ) 177
Barthes, Roland 18, 70, 71, 76 Broomfield, Nick 155–6
Battle of the Somme 73 Brossard, Nicole 75, 129–30
BBC Bruzzi, Stella 20, 93, 99, 100
Community Programme Unit 40n Buchanan, Pat 144
Film Operations Managers 41n budget 6
natural history unit 28 Bully 198
Beaufort, Marc de 177 Burnat, Emad 47
behaving 85, 96–102 Burns, Ken 1–2
behavior, authenticity of 101–2 Burroughs, William 66
behavior modification 204 Bush, Vannevar 78n
Beijing De Feng Hen Da/Is Beijing’s Wind Butler, Judith 97, 98
Strong? 210–12, 211
being 89, 89 cable television 60, 115
presentational 93–6 camera cannot lie, the 17, 17–18, 22
Bénézet, Delphine 133–4, 134 camera obscura portablis 49
Index
Bergan, Ronald 149 Cameron, Ardis 103
258
Capturing the Freidmans 86 Citron, Michelle 52, 140–2
care, duty of 9, 82, 96, 151–71 civic role 209
assumption of risk 169 Civilization: A Personal View 186
conflict of rights 151, 168–71 Civil Rights Act, 1964 108
ethical responsibility 160 Cixous, Hélène 75
and fees 161 Cizek, Katrina 6n, 81, 118, 120
and harm 151, 151–6 Clarke, Sir Kenneth 186
liabilities 169 clicktivism 64
protocols 151, 160, 160–8, 165 closed narratives 77
to the spectator 175 closure 111
undue influence 161–2 Cocktails and Appetizers 141
Carroll, Noel 13–14, 21n co-creation 82, 103, 114–16, 208
Carson, Kit 177 coercion 162–3, 163
casting 99–103, 100 Coffee Coloured Children 141
Cathy Come Home 27 cognitive dissonance 21, 22
Cavanagh, Elijah 6n collaboration 105, 112
Cavara, Paolo 186–7 collateral experience 31–2, 34, 195
CD -ROM 57 commissioning 122
cell-phone film festivals 36, 38, 41–2 complicity 164–8, 165, 186
cell-phones 35–7, 38, 39, 41, 46 condescension 186
censorship 40–1, 42–3, 199, 210 Condit, Celeste 69
Centre for Production and Research in conditional documentaries 27, 34
Documentary Film (CPRD ) 166 conditions, of reception 191
CGI 16–17 conferences 3
Challenge for Change/Société nouvelle Congo, Anwar 165, 165, 167
project 113–16, 122 Connection, The 177
Chanan, Michael 87 consciousness-raising 107–8, 123,
change, social 103, 105 197–8, 204, 209
Chatman, Seymour 71, 71–2, 72 consent 164, 168
Cheese Mites 42 consent forms 112
Cherubini, Matthieu 46 consequences 151, 156–60
Chi Bao De Cun Zi/The Satiated Village conservatism 7
213, 213–15 control, editorial 103
children, harm 157–8 engagement 103–10, 104, 106, 109
China 210–12, 211, 213, 213–16 filmed/filmer hybrid 115
Chronique d’un été 27, 87–8, 91, 100, Coover, Robert 7, 78
100–1, 157, 159, 167, 214 co-productions 45–6
chrono-logics 72, 73–4 Corner, John 30, 88, 94
Churchill, Joan 155–6 Cornett, Bessie Lou 106, 106–8
Ciecko, Anne 141 Corra, Henry 151–5, 153, 159, 167–8
cinécriture 133 cost, as a control 41
cinema 2, 4, 4–6 Counting, The 208
cinéma vérité 87–8, 94–5 Cowperthwaite, Gabriela 191–3, 192,
Index
citizenship 209 194, 195–6, 199
259
Cozarinsky, Edgardo 145 Discovery Channel 13, 14, 15, 28
Cribb, Robert 180 distribution 39, 41, 44
Cultivation Hypothesis 202 distrust, audience 85, 88–9
cultural narcissism 129 Djo Tunda Wa Munga 45
Cumberbatch, Guy 202–3 docmedia 2–3, 9, 55–7, 60
Curtis, Edward 19n documentary 11, 30, 71
Cut Ups, The 66 documentary film 1–2, 4, 4–5
cybernetics 60 documentary studies 3, 71
documentary tradition, the 8, 8–11
Dancers of New York 36, 42 documentary value 30, 31, 135–6
Daniel, Sharon 6n, 120–1, 208 documusicals 27, 34
Daughter Rite 52, 140–1 Donaher, Nolene 158, 169–70
David Holzman’s Diary 177 Double the Trouble Twice the Fun 138
Davidi, Guy 47 doubt 31, 32, 33
Death of a Nation: the Timor Conspiracy Dovey, Jon 27n, 43–4, 158n
181, 181–2 drama-documentary 27
death, treatment of 151–5, 153, 156 Dreuze, Mark 61–2, 63
deep remixablity 119 Drifters 179
defamiliarization 175, 187–90, 189 Dual Survival 6
de Lauretis, Teresa 79 Dufrense, David 55, 118
Delphy, Christine 147 DVD /Blu-ray sales 2
democratization 37
Demy, Jacques 134 earnings 5–6
dereliction of duty 178 East Timor 181, 181–2, 185n
Derrida, Jacques 58, 69 Eco, Umberto 28, 69, 74, 76
Dick, Kirby 200–1 editing 28, 67, 74
Digital Cultures Research Centre editorial control, surrendering 112
(DCRC ), University of the West of effects, research 201–4
England 57–8 Egan, Susanna 136
digital imaging effects 18–19 Egypt 117–18
digital manipulation 16–17, 18, 19, 29, Ellis, John 3, 88
33–4 Elmaliah, Robby 119, 121
digital media 2–3, 7 Elton, Arthur 94
digital potentials 9, 11, 28, 43–4, 50, emancipation 127, 143–6, 144
60, 75 embedding 103, 117, 119, 121–3, 153
digital texts, interference 65 embodied knowledge 32
digitization, kit 35, 35–49 empowerment 3, 103, 110, 110–16,
Dillen, MI ckeleen 157 119, 122
direct cinema 33, 51n, 93, 99, 113, endings 111
162–3, 177 End of the Line, The 195–6
direction 25 engagement 103, 103–10, 104, 106,
directors, role 116 109, 122, 191, 195, 198–201, 203
Disappearance of Tuvalu 46 engagé rhetoric 123
Index
disciplining technologies 62–3 equipment 3, 7, 48–52
260
ethical filmmaking see care, duty of filmed/filmer hybrid 7, 112–13, 115–16,
ethical responsibility 160 118, 121
ethnofictions 100 filmer, the 82
eurocentricism 8, 9, 36, 40, 44, 48–52 filmer en femme 140–1
Eurovision Song Contest 62 film exposé 74
evidence film festivals 2, 194
manipulation 16–17, 18, 18–21 film language 48–9, 52, 129–30
photographic 15–16, 16, 17, 17–18 filmmakers
exclusion 127, 143–6, 144 duties 152
expectations 14 embedded 103, 117, 119, 121–3
audience 175–84, 176, 181 as facilitators 103, 116–20
and omission 175, 178–84, 181 responsibility 157–8
truth 175, 175–8, 176 women 129–34
exploitation 170 Fires Were Started 26n, 95
eye–brain system 66, 67 Fisher, Walter 70
Flaherty, Robert B., 19n, 25, 25, 73, 74,
Facebook 35, 104, 185 74–5, 93, 159–60, 160, 160–1,
facilitators 103, 115, 116–20 162, 177n
facts 31–2, 127, 146–50 Fogo Island 113–16
Fahrenheit 9/11 2, 5, 6, 199 Fogo Process, the 114–16, 122, 196
Faith 42 Folman, Ari 26, 34
falsification 31–2 Forgács, Péter 111, 188–90
Family, The (Watson) 169 Forgotten Silver 175–7, 176
Farewell to Hollywood 151–5, 153, formatted documentary 27
167–8 Forster, E.M. 72
Faye, Safi 159 Fort/ McMoney 54, 55–6, 56, 62, 64, 73,
feedback 54 77, 118, 121, 205
adaptive interactivity 61 fragmentation 141
dysfunctional interactivity 62 frames 64–5, 66
functional interactivity 61–2 Fraser, Nick 185
interpassivity 59–64, 61 freedom, digital 44
loops 68, 207 free expression 41, 151, 156, 171,
navigational interactivity 62 178, 187
recipient 60–1, 61 free society 40–1
fees 161 free speech, right to 164, 170
Feltham Sings 27n, 34, 91–2 Freud, Sigmund 128
female subjectivity 127–42 Froemke, Susan 28n
feminist film criticism 142 functional interactivity 61–2, 67
feminist literary criticism 75–6 funding 46–7, 111, 112, 121–2, 166
Fentiman, Mike 40n
Ferrari, Pepita 217 games 70, 77, 122
fiction 9 Ganda, Oumarou 159
fictionality 26n Garnett, Tony 27n
Index
Fifth Gear 6 Garnham, Nicholas 209
261
Garrick, David 99 Hall, Stuart 32, 178
Gaudenzi, Sandra 61, 62, 65, 67, 68, Hansell, Tom 107
69, 71 harassment 156
Gauthier, Guy 30 Harlan County Tapes, The 106,
Gaventa, John 106, 108–10, 109, 113, 108–9
116–17 Harlan County, USA 106–8
Gaza/Sderot 6n, 118–19, 121 harm 151, 156–60
gender 127 audience reaction 157
auto/biography 134–42, 139 causality 159
narcissism 127–34, 128 children 157–8
Genette, Gérard 71 and free expression 151
Genocide and Genre project 166, 179 involvement 151–6, 153
Getino, Octavio 49, 52, 210, 212–13 magnitude of 169
Gilbert, Craig 162–3 responsibility 157–8
Gimme Shelter 28n spectators 175
globalization Hatoum, Mona 139, 139–40
kit 35, 43–52, 45, 48, 53 hazard 191, 209–17, 211, 213
rebalancing 44, 48, 48, 48–52, 52 Hazlitt, William 90, 91
resistance 35, 48–52 Helms, Gabriele 136
global north, role 44–6 Henley, Paul 93, 166–7
global south 36, 38, 43, 52 Heryano, Ariel 198–9
global warming 14 Highrise 7, 57, 62, 73, 118, 120
Glover, Douglas 13 Hight, Craig 176–7
Go Back to Where You Came From 206 Hill, Annette 18–19, 20, 88–9
Godard, Jean-Luc 67 Hill, Brian 26n, 27n, 34, 94, 158n
Goebbels, Joseph 202 Hirsch, Lee 198
Goffman, Erving 97–8 Hogarth, David 75
Goldsmith, Oliver 99 Hold Me Tight, Let Me Go 157–8
good intentions 107 Hollow 103–5, 104, 110–11, 116, 117,
Google 38 122
Gore, Al 47, 132 Homo Narrans 54, 76
Graef, Roger 158n, 193 stories 70–5
Graham, Alex 92, 92–3 texts 69–70
Granada Television 55 honesty 6
Grant, Barry 131 Hoop Dreams 163
Grey Gardens 28n Horner, Christopher 46
Grierson, John 14, 19, 21, 30, 60, 99, 105, Housing Problems 94
112, 115–16, 179 Hudson, Dale 35, 45–6, 47–8, 60
Gross, Larry 95, 99 Huffington Post, The 116
Guardian 198, 208 Huizinga, Johan 77
Gulf to Gulf 47 Hurley, Frank 73
Gunning, Tom 78 hypertext 78
Guynn, William 71 Hypodermic Needle model 202,
Index
Guzmán, Patricio 145–6 203
262
icons 32n interpassivity
identity 116 feedback 54, 59–64, 61
I-doc 58, 60 intervention 64–8, 65
I’m a Celebrity—Get Me Out of Here 6 navigation 54, 54–9, 56, 58
image 13–34 Interrupters, The 163, 196
authenticity 13, 13–18, 16, 17, 18–19 intervention
deconstruction 31 during filming 25–7
evidence 17–18 post-production 28
indexing 13–17, 20 re-enactment 25–6
integrity 21, 34, 87 re-imagined film 26
judgment 21–8, 22, 23, 24, 25 repetition 25
manipulation 16–17, 18, 18–21 unavoidable 27–8
navigation 63 and witness 23–4, 24
scientism of 9 interventionism 3
trust 13, 18–28, 22, 23, 24, 25 interviewees, validity of memories 87
truth 13 interviews 94, 100, 100–1, 107–8
impact 4, 7–8, 191, 191–8, 192, 200, In the Land of the Headhunters 19n
201–4, 206 intrusion 113, 162–3, 211
Ince, Katherine 127, 128, 134 Invisible War, The 200–1
independent documentary 44–5 involvement 151–6
indexing 13–17, 20 i-Phone Film Festival 38, 42
India 38 Irigaray, Lucy 133
Inflation 66 Irrelevancy Hypothesis 203
influence 8 Ivens, John 103
information Ivens, Joris 92, 95, 159
need for 40
sufficiency of 178 Jackson, Peter 175–7, 176
injury 156 Jacopetti, Gualtiero 186–7
insurance coverage 112 Jaffe, Pat 51
intellectual property protection 112 Jaguar 100
interactive documentary 119 James, Steve 163–4, 196
interactivity 7, 112, 120 Jarecki, Andrew 86
adaptive 61, 65–7 Jarrett, Kylie 62–3
audience 3, 58–9 Jennings, Humphrey 26n, 95
definition 58–9 Jewish Looks 141
dysfunctional 62 Ji E De Cun Zi/The Starving Village
feedback 59–60 213–14
functional 62, 67 Johnny Cash Project, The 66
navigational 62 Johnson, Chris 119
strategies 64–8, 65 Johnson, Nick 115
web-/i-doc 77 Jones, Amelia 140
International Festival of Cell Phone journalistic exposé 183, 195–6
Cinema 38 journalistic monopoly, loss of 3
Index
internet, the 3 Ju Anqi 210–12, 211
263
judgment, image 21–8, 22, 23, 24, 25 Lawrence, Amy 135
jump-cuts 67 Lazarus Taxon 13
Jury, William 73 Leacock, Richard 25, 28, 51, 95, 113
juxtapositioning 68 Learning to Fly 42
Lebow, Alisa 136
Kartemquin 163–4 Leftovers (Citron) 141
Keay, Douglas 55 legacy media 2
Khmer Rouge Killing Machine, The Le Gallic, Gilliane 46
165, 167 lens-culture 49–50
Khush 138 Lesage, Julie 142
Killer Images 198–9 Les glaneurs et la glaneuse/The Gleaners
Kinder, Marsha 59 and I 127–9, 128, 146, 149,
King, Alan 162n 149–50
King, Coleman 157, 161 Les Plages d’Agnès 7n, 130–4, 134–6
kino-eye, the 217 Lettow, Susanne 147
kit Levinas, Emmanuel 152
accessibility 35–6 Lévi-Strauss, Claude 131
contradiction 35, 35–43 liabilities 169
cost 35, 37, 38 Life After the Fall 45
digitization 35, 35–49 life-writing 6–7
eurocentricism 9, 48–52 Lin Costa, Amanda 111
globalization 35, 43–52, 45, 48, 53 linear documentary 67, 68
intrusiveness 95 lisible text 75–6
standards 35, 40–3 Li Tieying 210
Klein, Adam 16–17 Livingstone, Sonia 202
Kleinhans, Chuck 144, 145 Loach, Ken 27
Knutson, Susan 78 Logan, Brian 158
Konzack 77 Longfellow, Brenda 6n
Kopple, Barbara 106–8, 117 Longinotto, Kim 157–8
Koto, Herman 167 Look of Silence, The 157, 179, 181, 182–4,
Kubelka, Paul 143 199
Kubelka, Peter 66 Lorde, Audre 48–9, 49–50, 129
Kuleshov, Lev 68 Loridan, Marceline 91, 100, 100–1, 159
Kutchi Vahan Pani Wala/Gulf to Gulf 45, Lotz, Sussana 6n, 118–19
45–6 Low, Colin 113–14, 115
Lucaites, John 69
La Batalla de Chile/Battle for Chile 145
Labov, William 35 MaCay, Windsor 26n
La hora de los hornas/Hour of the McBride, Jim 177
Furnaces 145, 212–13 McDowell County, West Virginia 103–5,
Lake Placid, 1980 (Paik) 66 104
La marche de l’empereur/March of the McKenzie, Colin 176
Penguins 5 McMillion, Elaine 103–5, 104, 110–11,
Index
Lanzmann, Claude 161–2, 164 112, 116, 117, 122
264
McPherson, Tara 142 Mellencamp, Patricia 138
Maelstrom: A Family Chronicle 189–90 memory 87, 216
manipulation 16–17, 18, 18–21, 29, 33–4 mendacity 177–8
Man of Aran, The 157, 159–60, 160, mentalités 2, 179
160–1, 162 Mestman, Mariano 212
Man of Aran, How the Myth Was Made Metz, Christian 3, 5, 72, 74
177n Milk, Chris 66
Manovich, Lev 43, 70, 119 Mill, J.S. 152
Man with a Movie Camera, The 5, 67–8, Mills, Brett 27
128, 150n Misère au Borinage 92
Man with a Movie Camera: The Global misrepresentation 27, 86, 156, 161–2,
Remake, The 68 164, 177–8
Mapping Main Street 207 Missing Picture, The 189
marginalization 138, 143–6 MIT “Open Documentary Lab” 57
Marker, Chris 149 Mixed Greens 141
marketing 14 Moana 19n
Marks, Laura 134 mockumentaries 26, 176–7
Martinù’s Muse 42 Moffatt, Tracey 137–8
Marx, Karl 195 Moi, un noir 100, 159
mash-ups 68 Monbiot, George 15
mass hallucination 32 Mondo Cane/A Dog’s World 186–7
mass market 38 monopolies 39
mass media, control of 43 montage 68, 138
Matrix, The 36 Montgomery, Alabama 108
Maysles, Al 28, 28n, 154 Moore, Michael 2, 5, 6, 199
Measures of Distance 139, 139–40 morality 96
media effects research 201–4 moral understanding 167
media environment 44 Morin, Edgar 27, 87–8, 89, 91, 100,
media jujitsu 50–1 100–1, 156, 157, 159, 167, 214
media narcissism 129 Morning on Footpath 38
Meet Marlon Brandon 28n Morris, Errol 30, 90, 91
Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives mosaics 74
27, 34 Mossotti, Josh 16–17
airing 13 Munro, David 181, 181–2
end-title authentication 14, 15 Murray, Robert 195–6
indexing 13–17 musical documentaries 27, 34
initial voice-over 14
marketing 14 Name Your Price 208
refutation of legitimacy 15 Nam Juin Paik 143
viewing figures 15 Nanook of the North 19n, 25, 25, 73,
Megalodon: The New Evidence 15–16, 74, 93
16, 16 narcissism 127, 127–34, 128
Mehta, Jigar 117 narrative
Index
melding 56 centrality of 70–3
265
closed 77 Nostalgia de la luz/Nostalgia for the Light
definition 71 145–6
interactive 68 “Null Effects Hypothesis”/
linearity 54, 79 “Re-enforcement Theory” 202,
non-linearity 3 203
personal 136 Nuremberg Protocols, the 163, 170, 171
sequentiality 73–4
temporality 71–2 objectivity 2, 8, 22–3, 125, 146, 147,
text paths 77–9 148–9, 155
narrative analysis 70–1 observational documentary 51
narrative clauses 72–3 O’Connor, Hugh 103, 104
narrative films 65 Off-Shore 6n
narrative voice 69, 70 omission 175, 178–84, 181
narrativizing 75 Onwurah, Ngozi 141
Nash, Kate 158n, 206 Op-Docs 57
National Film Board of Canada 55, openness 112
113–16, 118, 121, 205 opinion formation 202, 204
women’s unit 140 Oppenheimer, Joshua 5, 157, 164–8,
National Socialist Party of Germany 165, 178–81, 182–4, 184–6,
47 187–8, 198–200, 201
Native Americans 54, 113–16 Original i-Phone Film Festival 36, 41, 42
native instigators 111 ostranenie/defamiliarization 175,
nature, laws of 32 187–90, 189, 193
navigational interactivity 62 outcomes 107
Nehru, Jawaharlal 25n behavior modification 204
Nelson, Ted 78n concrete 197
neuroscience 201 consciousness raising 197–8, 204
The New York Times 21, 56, 121 discernible change 196n
New York University, Alternative Media engagement 191, 195, 198–201,
Center (AMC ) 115 201–4, 205–7
Nice Coloured Girls 138 impact 191, 191–8, 192, 200, 201–4,
Nichols, Bill 9, 32, 70, 28n, 148, 186, 195, 206
196n opinion formation 204
Nicholson, Regina 151–5, 153, 159, research 201–4
167–8 spectatorship 191–204
non-intervention 93, 154
non-linearity 3, 24 Paget, Derek 90
non-narrative 74 Pahn, Rithy 165, 188, 189, 190
non-narratives 70–5 Paik, Nam June 66
non-professional enactment 94 Palmer, Daniel 62
non-professional re-enacting 91–2 Papols, Ansis 42
non-speakers 42–3 Parks, Rosa 108
North-South-East-West 1.0 47 Parmar, Pratiba 138
Index
nostalgia 216 participant footage, integration of 47
266
participation 9, 112, 115 status 18
patriarchy 8–9, 60, 75, 79, 129, 132, 133 and trust 18
Pearce, Richard 175 virtual 20
Peat, Stephen 216 photography 17, 49
Pedler, Mike 194 the camera cannot lie 17, 17–18, 22
Peirce, Charles 18, 31 evidentiary status 28–9
Pennebaker, D. A 55, 177 photoshop 19
perceiving-recording observer, the 23 Pilger, John 181, 181–2, 184, 185n
perception, audience 9, 82 Planet Takeout 207
percipient witness, the 23, 26–7 Plantinga, Carl 18, 19–20, 20–1, 29
Percival, Dan 27n, 34, 91 platform rivalry 186
performance documentary 98n play 77
performance paradox, the 89–90 plot 72–3
performative documentary mode 98n Police, “A Question of Rape” 193–4
performativity 85, 96–9 Polley, Mark 85, 85–7
performing 9, 82, 85–102 Polley, Sarah 85, 85–7, 90–1, 101–2, 176
appearing 85 Pope, Tristram 36, 42
authenticity 87–9 pornography 39
behaving 85, 96–102 Pornography: The Musical 27n
distrust 85, 85, 85–9 post-production 28
non-professional re-enacting 91–2 poverty porn 170
paradox 90 Powell, Anthony 86
presentational acting 85, 89, 89–93, Power and Powerlessness in Appalachia
92 108–10, 109
presentational being 93–6 power, change-making 194
professional reenacting 90–1 power cube, the 109, 109–10, 196
representational 89 Precious Spaces Community History
representational being 85 Project 37–8
representational re-enactment 92, pre-film deals 25n
92–3 presence, masking 154
validity of 87–8 presentational acting 85, 89, 89–93, 92
perpetrator trope 164–8, 165 presentational being 93–6
personal/political boundary 144 presentational enactment 94–5
Peters, Aaju 137 presentational flexibility 55–8
Petit à Petit 159 presentational re-enactment 94
photographic evidence 14, 15–16, 16, previous knowledge 31
17, 17–18 Prince, Gerald 76n
photographs Prince, Tracy 138
authenticity 18–19 prior witness 25
digital manipulation 16–17, 18 privacy, invasion of 152, 211
documentary value 19 probabilities, balance of 33, 33–4, 34
integrity 20 producers 46
message 18 production, globalization of 43–52, 45,
Index
Peirce on 32n 48, 53
267
production cost 38, 43 representational being 85
production independence 47 representational performance 89
professionalism 43 representational re-enactment 92, 92–3
professional reenacting 90–1 reputational damage 15
professional standards, as censorship 43 Richter, Hans 66
profit sharing 163–4 Riggs, Marlon 144
Prosperi, Franco 186–7 Righteous Babes, The 138
provocateurs 87 rights 151
public interest 187 conflict of 151, 168–71
Public Secrets 6n, 120 ethical boundary 163
Puma Doc Impact Award 192, 195, 198 and fees 161
purpose 105 moral understanding 167
protocols 151, 160, 160–8, 165
quality 40 role-playing 97
Queer Feast 142 Roosevelts: An Intimate History, The 1–2
quest grammar 78 Roscoe, Jane 95, 176–7
Question Bridge: Black Males 119, 122 Rose, Mandy 43–4
Quipu 207–8 Rouch, Jean 27, 47, 87–8, 91, 93n, 94n,
100, 100–1, 157, 159, 166–7, 214
radicalism 39–40 rules, breaking 51
Rak, Julie 136 rushes 65
Ranjan, Rajeev 38 Russian formalism 71
ratings 194 Ryan, Marie-Laure 63, 70, 76
reality 30
reality T V 88, 156, 158 Safi, Heba 119
received understanding 19n Salesman 28n
reception 9, 82, 191 San Soleil 149
reception bottleneck 44 Savings of Bill Blewitt, The 26n
reconstruction 26, 87 savvy 28–34
re-contextualizing 28 balance of probabilities 33, 33–4, 34
recorded witness, the 23 inferences 28–33, 29, 31
recording observer, the 21 savvy spectators 13, 14, 15, 17, 21n, 32
re-enactment 25–6, 167 scenes 64
non-professional 91–2 scholarship 3
presentational 94 Schrire, David 179
professional 90–1 scientific project, the 146–8
representational 92, 92–3 scientism, of image 9
referential integrity 18–19, 20, 34, 86–7 Scott, Ridley 63
re-imagined film 26 Screen Daily 135
release forms 168–9, 170 Scribe Video Project 37–8
Renais, Alain 149 scriptible 76
Renov, Michael 22–3, 143, 147, 148–9, Scriptrix Narrans 54, 75–9, 129, 130, 134
189 Searle, John 97, 98, 99
Index
repetition 25 Second World War 92, 92–3
268
sensationalism 175, 184–7, 187–8 reception 82
sequences 64 role 63
sequentiality 64–8, 73–4 see also audience
seriousness 186 spectatorship
Shaw, Simon 92, 92–3 ethical implications of 214–15
Sherman’s March 42 outcomes 191–204
Shklovsky, Victor 188 revolutionary 212
Shoah 161–2, 164, 189 Spivak, Gayatri 50
Shohat, Ella 50–1 Sprague, Gene 96, 102
shooting 66–7 Srivastava, Lina 196
shots 64, 66–7, 68 Stam, Robert 50–1, 212
Shub, Esfir 111, 112n, 189 standard assumptions 110
Sight and Sound 5, 142, 146 standards 35, 40–3
silent witness 17 Stanislavski, Constantin 90
Silver, Marc 196–7 Stanley, Liz 136n
simulation 27 state intervention 210
single-person operation recording Steele, Eric 96
synch 25n stereotyping 105, 140
Sinking of the Lusitania, The 26n Sternberg, Meir 73–4
Sky of Dubai 46 Stockell, Poppy 118, 121
Sloniowski, Jeannette 131 Stoney, George 40n, 113, 114–16, 117,
Smallpox 2002: Silent Weapon 27, 34, 91 177n, 198
smart-phones 3, 36 Storck, Henri 92
Smith, Anthony 21 stories 70–5
Soar, Matt 70 centrality of narrative 70–3
social activism 38 deconstruction 54
social change 8 organization 73–4
social engagement 4, 37–8, 122 patriarchy 9
social media 185 and plot 72–3
social necessity 40 structure 69
social value 27n, 117 text paths 77–9
Solanas, Fernando 49, 52, 210, 212–13 Stories We Tell 85, 85–7, 90–1,
Sola Pool, Ithiel de 60 101–2, 176
Songbird 27n subjectivity 2, 6–7, 9, 22–3, 82, 125,
Soskin, Hugo 117 127, 144
South 73 and agency 139–40
Spake, Jeremy 158 and care 153
Spalter, Ann 46 and exclusion 143–6, 144
special effects 19 and facts 146–50
spectators 173 female 127–42, 128, 139
autonomy 178, 191, 205–9 legitimation of 146–7, 216–17
duty of care due to 175 subjects
harm 175 freedom of choice 46
Index
hazard 191, 209–17, 211, 213 range of 6–7
269
Sukumaran, Ashok 45, 45–6 truth 9, 30, 148
surveillance 96 expectations of 175, 175–8, 176
surveillance cameras 24 probability assessment 13
Susceptibility Hypothesis 203–4 speaking 167, 170
Svilova, Yelizaveta 67–8 truth claims 94
Sylvania Waters 158n, 169–70 truthfulness 88, 101–2
truth-telling texts 143
Tadros, Victor 169 Twain, Mark 2n
taxonomy 4, 4–5 Twitter 185
technology 125 Two Step Flow concept 202
television 1–2, 6, 194 Tyler, Imogen 129
ten Brink, Joram 101
testimony 23, 26–7 Umbrellas 154
texts 69–70 undue influence 47, 161–2
deconstruction 63 United Kingdom, television audience 2
feminist analysis 75–6 United States of America 46, 49
gendered difference 75–7 University of the West of England,
lisible 75–6 Digital Cultures Research Centre
paths 54, 77–9 (DCRC ) 57–8
scriptible 76 Urban, Charles 42
writerly 76 Uricchio, William 39
textual hegemony, challenging 54 user-generated content 110, 117–18,
Thin Blue Line, The 90, 91 120
Things I Cannot Change, The 113, 157
Third Cinema 210 Vals im Bashir/Waltz with Bashir 26, 34
Thomas, Dylan 70 van Dyke, Wiliard 51
Thompson, Graham 47 van Es, Kees 42
Thoreau, Henry 44 Varda, Agnès 7n, 127–9, 128, 130–4,
“Timmins, Ontario”, World in Action 55, 134–6, 137, 142, 146, 149, 149–50
64, 73 Variety 60
Timms, Dominic 156 Vaughan, Dai 74, 112
Tisch School of the Arts, NYU 71n Vepakomma|, Mythravarun 42
Titicut Follies 99 verisimilitude 143
Toby and the Tall Corn 51 Vertov, Dzivga 5, 67–8, 128, 150n, 216
Tongues Untied 144, 144–5 victim films 210–12
Tracking Down Maggie 155 video games 3
transgressive techniques 184–7 viewing figures 15, 194
Tribeca Film Institute, New Media Fund Viola, Bill 143
122 virtual photographs 20
Trinh T. Min-ha 50, 58, 129, 132–3, 147 Visible Evidence conferences 3
Triumph of the Will 47 voice 3, 9–10
True Voice of Rape, The 26n
trust 13, 18, 20–1, 29, 29–33, 31, 33, Wang, Val 207
Index
34 war combat footage 51
270
War in the Back Yard 42 women
Warner Smith, Jason 42 filmmakers 129–34
War of the Worlds, The 202 as non-speakers 42–3
Watson, Paul 27, 169–70 and quest grammar 78
Watt, Harry 26n, 95 repression 135
Waugh, Tom 83, 89, 90, 94n voice 135
web distribution 39, 41 Wood, Chris 205
web-/i-docs 54, 60, 63, 64, 68, 70 world documentary 44
activity 46 World in Action, “Timmins, Ontario” 55,
analysis. 71 64, 73
empowerment 110 world, the, co-creation 57–8, 58
interactivity 7, 77 World Wide Web 7
potential 75, 104–5 Wow! 175, 184–7
subjects 6–7 writability 112
websites 104–5 writerly texts 76
Weinbren, Grahame 154 Wuornos, Aileen 155–6
Welcome to Pine Point 119 Wu Wenguang 210
Welles, Orson 202
white male, hegemony 9–10 Year Zero: The Silent Death of Cambodia
Who is Dayani Crystal 196–7 181
Wiener, Norbert 60 Yesterday’s Witness 216
Wife-Swap 27n You Are On Indian Land 114
Williams, Raymond 147 YouTube 38
Winston, Matthew 147, 148
Wintonick, Peter 2–3, 11, 37, 38, 60, 108 Zimmermann, Patricia 35, 45–6, 47–8,
Wiseman, Fred 33, 99, 120, 168, 170, 173, 60
178, 190, 210, 213 Žižek, Slavoj 59, 62, 64, 123
witnesses and witnessing 23–5, 24, Zou Xueping 213, 213–15
26–7 Zwerin, Charlotte 28n, 51n
Index
271
272
273
274

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What is the book about?

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What are some of the main topics discussed in the book?

The Act of

Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone

1385 Broadway 50 Bedford Square

First published 2017

© Brian Winston, Gail Vanstone and Wang Chi, 2017

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

ISBN: HB: 978-1-5013-0916-8

Cover image: ‘Stories We Tell’, 2012 © NFB / THE KOBAL COLLECTION

Typeset by RefineCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

For now, and forever, I am banishing the word documentary from

Part 1 Digital Potentials 11

1 “A Walk in the Woods” 13

2 “A Breath of Fresh Air for the Documentary” 35

4 “To Thine Own Self be True” 85

5 “Giving Voice” 103

. . . on THE FILMER 125

6 “To Make Space for the Un-thought” 127

7 “Nous somme dans le bain”/“We are Implicated” 151

. . . on THE SPECTATOR 173

8 “You Have to Make up Your Own Mind” 175

MINUTES: The Act of Documenting 218

The much-hailed triumph of documentary films

The power of [documentary] film to change the world has become

How can these claims be substantiated—as a matter of aesthetics, originality,

Figure 1 THE CLASS CINEMA 4

In terms of a formal taxonomy (and in the full understanding that the

“documentary” has so grown in de facto cultural salience it is now at a point

2. “THE SHAKIEST OF FOUNDATIONS”

3. THE ACT OF DOCUMENTING

Figure 2 THE DOCUMENTARY TRADITION

mainstream tradition, it thereby also affords great opportunities for other

The definition of documentary has always been prone to technological

new silicon-based technology is transforming documentary

IMAGE: The concept of the documentary is grounded in an assumption about the

particular indexing of a film mobilizes expectations and activities on the part

Still 1 “People are pretty creative with their photo software.”

“A Walk in the Woods”

Figure 3 “The Camera Cannot Lie”—EVIDENCE

What [asked Roland Barthes] is the content of the photographic message?

The authenticity of documentary is not thrown into doubt because a

However—simply—it is not to exaggerate and it is so rendered doubtful.

it. The observer becomes a creator, an artist like any other.

Photography’s putative special capacities—the basis of its claim on the real—

of expression—the only one available to the documentary. That there

being more broadly acknowledged (Renov, 2004). The documentarist is an

Only the witness of the surveillance camera is produced without

immediate interventions.8 Otherwise witness and intervention co-exist. It

Still 2 such intervention does not necessarily destroy documentary

“A Walk in the Woods”

Figure 7 “Trust the Source”—TRUTH

● a referent in the real world

Only the spectator—the audience—can finally determine documentary value.

“Actuality,” as Robert Fairthorne (the only scientific figure in Grierson’s circle of