University of Texas Press Society for Cinema & Media Studies

University of Texas Press

Society for Cinema & Media Studies

When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception

Author(s): Dirk Eitzen

Source: Cinema Journal, Vol. 35, No. 1 (Autumn, 1995), pp. 81-102

Published by: University of Texas Press on behalf of the Society for Cinema & Media Studies

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WhenIs a Documentary?:

as a Modeof Reception

Documentary

by Dirk Eitzen

Documentaries-orwhatevertheirdirectorscareto call them-are just not my favoritekindof moviewatching.The factis I don'ttrustthe littlebastards.I don'ttrust

the motivesof thosewho thinkthey are superiorto fictionfilms.I don'ttrusttheir

claimto havecorneredthe marketon the truth.I don'ttrusttheirinordinately

high,

and entirelyundeserved,statusof bourgeoisrespectability.'

-Marcel Ophuls

career

as

a

maker

of

serious

documentaries

belies

his claim to

Ophuls's ongoing

mistrust the form. Nonetheless, Ophuls's declaration gets to the heart of what

defines documentaries ("or whatever their directors care to call them"). All

documentaries-whether they are deemed, in the end, to be reliable or notrevolve aroundquestions of trust. A documentaryis any motion picture that is susceptible to the question "Might it be lying?"

It has been nearly seven decades since John Grierson first applied the term

"documentary"to movies. Still, the definition of the term remains a vexed and

controversialissue, not just among film theorists but also among people who make

and watch documentaries. Definitions of genres like the western and film noir are

in the last analysisfairlyacademic-of more concern to film scholarsthan to nonprofessional viewers. In contrast, as is apparent from the storms of controversy

that rage around "fact-based"fiction films like JFK (1991) and MalcolmX (1992),

the distinctionbetween "fact"and "fiction"is a vital and importantone to popular

movie audiences. It is also probablyindispensable in making sense of many kinds

of everyday discourse, from dinner-table conversation to TV commercials. It is

certainlycrucial in the reception of discourses that are commonly regarded to be

forms of nonfiction, including documentary.

The question I wish to address in this article is, What difference does it

make? How does it matter to the recipients of a discourse, in practical terms,

whether the discourse is considered to be fiction or nonfiction? Although I will

focus chiefly on documentary here-that is, on movies that are supposed to be

nonfiction2-this question pertains to other forms of nonfiction as well, such as

history and journalism.

Documentary has been variouslydefined through the years as "a dramatized

presentationof man's relationto his institutionallife," as "filmwith a message,"as

"the communication,not of imagined things, but of real things only,"and as films

DirkEitzenis anAssistantProfessorof filmandmediastudiesat Franklin& MarshallCollege andanaward-winning

documentary

producer.He haspreviouslypublishedin TheVelvet LightTrap,PostScript,andIris, amongothers.

Copyright ? 1995 by the Universityof TexasPress, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819

CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995 81

which give up control of the events being filmed.3 The most famous definition,

and still one of the most serviceable,is John Grierson's,"the creative treatmentof

actuality."4None of these definitions is completely satisfactory.The first excludes

characterstudies and city symphonies,the second includes allegoricalfiction films

like Spike Lee's School Daze (1988), the third begs the difficult question of what

part of a complex documentarylike Fred Wiseman'sHigh School (1968) is "real"

and what part "imagined,"and so on.

The toughest problem for common-sense definitions of documentary,like

Grierson's"the creative treatment of actuality,"is determining just what constitutes "actuality."Every representation of reality is no more than a fiction in the

sense that it is an artificialconstruct, a highly contrived and selective view of the

world, produced for some purpose and therefore unavoidablyreflecting a given

subjectivityor point of view. Even our "brute"perceptions of the world are inescapablytainted by our beliefs, assumptions,goals, and desires. So, even if there is

a concrete, material reality upon which our existence depends (something very

few actuallydoubt) we can only apprehendit through mental representationsthat

at best resemble realityand that are in large part sociallycreated. Some film theorists have responded to this dilemma by claiming that documentaryis actuallyno

more than a kind of fiction that is constituted to cover over or "disavow"its own

fictionality.5

This definition of documentary,though correctly controvertinga kind of naive realism, fails to account for the practical,everydaydifferences between fiction

and nonfiction-differences that we experience as real and that can have real consequences for how we get along in the world, even though they may be in a sense

imaginary.One could use the same line of reasoning to show, for example, that

visual perception is no more than a kind of fiction that just seems particularlyreal.

In theory, my perception of a baseball flying at my head may be no more than an

imaginaryconstruct-a fiction, if you will. Nevertheless, if it does not cause me to

duck, I am liable to get quite a lump. Documentaryhas some of the same practical

implications.

A neat definition of documentaryon the basis of something like textual features or authorialintentions has proved very tricky.I suggest that, in fact, it is impossible. It is impossible because the boundaries of documentary are fuzzy and

variablein viewers' experience and in everydaydiscourse. It is possible to define

"duck-billedplatypus"by saying that the term refers to a finite and distinct empirical category. That is not so with documentary. If you asked most people

whether the reenactment of a kidnappingon the TV tabloid A CurrentAffair is a

documentary or not, the answer would not be a neat yes or no but something

along the lines of "Well . .."And whether or not a semifictionalfilm like Michelle

Citron'sDaughter Rite (1978) is a documentarydepends upon how you look at it.

It would be quite feasible to set up rigorousanalyticaldistinctionsby fiat, as genre

theorists are wont to do, but to the extent that those would draw rigid boundaries

on one side or the other of A CurrentAffair and Daughter Rite, as they would be

bound to do, they would fail to describe the category "documentary"in the way

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CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995

we ordinarilyconceive and experience it. That is what counts if we wish to understand and explain actual, ordinarydiscourses (like how a reenactment in A Current Affair actuallyworks on viewers in a particularsituation).

The best way to define documentary,therefore, may be to say simply that it

is whatever people commonly mean by the term. That is what Andrew Tudor

wrote of genres twenty years ago. "Genre,"he wrote, "is what we collectively believe it to be."6What saves this argument from circularity,as Tudorpointed out, is

that how people use genre terms and what they mean by them is pretty strictly

delimited by culture. Daughter Rite might or might not be called a documentary,

depending upon how one makes sense of it. On the other hand, it would appear

practicallyabsurd in ordinarycircumstances to call Rocky (1976) a documentary.

Conventions change, of course. In its time, On the Waterfront(1954) was called a

documentary.Today,it takes a real stretch to think of it as one.

This definition begs the real question, of course. Saying that documentaries

are whatever people commonly take them to be tells us nothing at all about what,

specifically,people commonly do take them to be. That is the crucial question.

Representing Reality. In his recent book, Representing Reality, Bill Nichols

weighs in with a new definition of documentary.The adequacy of a definition, he

claims, has less to do with how well it corresponds to common usage, as Tudor

suggests, than with how well it "locates and addresses important [theoretical]

questions."' The theoretical questions that Nichols wishes to locate and address

have to do primarilywith how power circulatesin documentarydiscourses. That is

certainly an important question. Still, it is but one aspect of how documentaries

function as discourse. Moreover,Nichols appearsto recognize that one cannot adequately address the question of how power circulatesin a discourse without first

understanding how the discourse is perceived and interpreted by its recipients.

Accordingly,he begins by offering his view of how documentariesare conventionally understood.

Conventions circulate and they are negotiated and nailed down, Nichols says,

in three discursive arenas or sites: a community of practitionerswith its institutional supports, a corpus of texts, and a constituency of viewers. Since these three

things are inextricablybound together, the distinction between them is purely

analytical,but it seems a useful one. For documentarydiscourses, the community

of practitionersconsists of people who make or engage in the circulationof documentaryfilms. Its institutionalsupports include funders like the National Endowment for the Arts, distributorslike PBS, professional associations, documentary

film festivals, and so on. The corpus of texts includes everythingthat is commonly

considered to be a documentary.Although Nichols does not say this, it seems logical that some texts, like Daughter Rite and episodes of A Current Affair, might

belong to this corpus only marginallyor provisionally.The constituencyof viewers

includes, in its broadest sense, everyone who occasionallywatches documentaries.

The defining characteristicof this constituency,however,is certain kindsof knowledge about what constitutes a documentaryand about how to make sense of one

Cinema Journal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995

83

in conventionallyaccepted ways. The constituency of viewers, it might be added,

has its own institutionalsupports, like newspapercriticism, the educationalestablishment, and, once again, distributorslike PBS which determine how a film is

labeled and the context in which it is seen.8

The key factor that defines the community of practitioners, Nichols maintains, is "a common, self-chosen mandate to represent the historicalworld rather

than imaginaryones." The corpus of texts is defined by an "informinglogic" that

involves "a representation, case, or argument about the historical world." The

constituency of viewers is defined by two common assumptions:first, that "the

images we see (and many of the sounds we hear) had their origin in the historical

world"and, second, that documentariesdo not merely portraythe historicalworld

but make some sort of "argument"about it.9 The definitive factor in every case is

"the historicalworld."Whether you are looking at why documentaries are made,

how they are put together, or how they are interpreted, what conventionallydefines them, Nichols suggests, is their relationshipto "the historicalworld." Specifically,he claims, they make "arguments"about it.

Notice the similaritybetween this definition of documentaryand Grierson's,

"the creative treatment of actuality."For "the creative treatmentof," Nichols substitutes "an argument about"; for "actuality,"he substitutes "historicalreality."

Like Grierson'sdefinition, Nichols's might seem to beg the difficult question of

just what constitutes "actuality"or "historicalreality."Actually,Nichols goes on to

discuss this at some length.

The historicalworld, Nichols suggests, is not just something that we imagine,

even though we can have no perception of it that is not mediated by our imagination of it. The historicalworld is something that lies outside and beneath all our

representationsof it. It is a "brutereality"in which "objectscollide, actions occur,

[and] forces take their toll."10Documentaryis therefore not the representationof

an imaginary reality; it is an imaginative representation of an actual historical

reality. This aligns Nichols's definition of documentary more closely with the

common-sense definition of Griersonthan with those that suggest that documentaryis no more than a kind of fiction that denies its fictional status. Of course, our

perceptions of and ideas about historical (i.e., actual) reality can only be communicated to others in conventional ways. It is in working out these conventional

practices that Nichols's three arenas of discourse-the community of practitioners, the corpus of texts, and the constituency of viewers-come into play.

One can neatly sum up Nichols's definition of documentaryas the use of conventional means to refer to, represent,or makeclaims about historical reality. This

seems a good starting point. There remains one problem, however. There are

manyfiction films that refer to, represent, or make claims about historicalreality.

Spike Lee's School Daze, for example, portraystensions in the student body of a

fictional all-blackcollege-tensions that include strong differences of opinion on

the issue of whether the college should divest its holdings in companies that do

business in South Africa.In 1987, when the film was made, this issue was certainly

a historicalrealityon many college campuses. At the end of School Daze, the main

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CinemaJournal 35, No. 1, Fall 1995

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