After the1990s, a new wave of documentary theory took a clear concerted and interdisciplinary interest in historicizing and contextualizing the genre within
contemporary epistemologies that would necessarily call its objectivity into question and thus would in effect reclaim the analyses of filmmakers back at least to Grierson.
Importantly, we are finally seeing theoretical literature where scholars are “talking back” to older theories – a clear indication that a new more comprehensive approach to
theorizing the documentary as part of film studies has arrived.
The contemporary documentary film theorists who emerged during this time, most notably Brian Winston, Michael Renov, and Bill Nichols, all began publishing scholarship on the subject in the 1980s, but their optic did not emerge full-blown until the
1990s.141 This group is as much concerned with a theoretical style deconstructing the
form as they are with performance theory and the social/political uses of the genre, as best evidenced by the work of Stella Bruzzi, among others.
Renov, Nichols, and Winston are all contributors to Michael Renov’s seminal collection of documentary film scholarship Theorizing Documentary (1993), a landmark anthology which begins with the editor's comment that academic interest has only
recently reemerged in the area of documentary film.142 Michael Renov is most concerned
with bringing documentary theory into the center of film scholarship, and thus he argues against the genre's truth value. Instead, he argues that concepts from narrative film theory must be used to understand the discursive effects of documentary representations on the audience, thus recovering some of documentary's claims to aesthetic meanings.
Renov is one of the very first scholars who can reframe the intent of documentary as rhetorical. He claims to be equally concerned with resituating documentary beyond the “observational,” and to “more fully articulate a sense of documentaries discursive field and function, aesthetic as well as expository.”143 He does so by arguing four
tendencies of documentary, its attempts 1. To record, reveal, or preserve 2. To persuade or promote 3. To analyze or interrogate 4. To express.
141 Jane M Gaines, “Introduction: The Real Returns,” in Collecting Visible Evidence, eds. Jane M Gaines
and Michael Renov (Minnesota: University of Minnesota, 1999), ix.
142 Michael Renov, Theorizing Documentary (New York: Routledge, 1993). 143 Ibid., 13.
Unfortunately, his analysis was quickly discarded by most scholars in favor of Bill Nichols’ “modes of documentary,” discussed below.144 Nonetheless, several decades
later, Renov published another approach to the genre in The Subject of Documentary (2004), which focused on more recent autobiographical modes of documentary film and how they construct identity.145
What is critical for the present project is that Renov's work overall has broadened the definition of documentary used in film theory, especially since he include new technologies (YouTube and inexpensive cameras, among others), which enable different forms of what he would call performance than do traditional forms of documentary film- making, such as auto-biographical filmmaking or “documentary essays.” His work thus goes far in establishing as a cluster of related genres at the core of what all too often has been considered a limited historically limited set of documentary filmmaking styles. Yet as I will argue in the final section of this chapter, he still focuses on the production side of documentarianism rather than on the kind of common rhetorical space that early theorists identified as the ground for education through documentary.
Also from the same intellectual generation, Bill Nichols is particularly known for his essay, “The Voice of the Documentary,” later expanded into the book, Representing
Reality (1998), which presents a widely cited typology of “Documentary Modes” that has
become the standard theoretical discussion of how documentary works.146 In that
discussion, Nichols breaks down four modes of documentary film that lie at the base of historically attested documentary genres, offering a taxonomy based on the reflexivity of
144 Ibid., 21.
145 Michael Renov, The Subject of Documentary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004). 146 Nichols, Representing Reality (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
the filmmakers and how visible that reflexivity is to the audience in the structure of documentary film.
According to Nichols, the first mode, expository documentary (including, for example, Grierson and Flaherty, among others), “addresses the viewer directly, with titles or voices that advance an argument about the historical world,” as stylistically seen in the film's preference for a “voice of god” narration.147 The second mode, the observational
mode (including Pennebaker and Wiseman), refers its ideology to cinéma vérité and direct cinema techniques that frame subjects through purportedly “unobtrusive” filmmaking practices, which positioned the camera documentarian as “observational.” Interactive documentary (e.g., de Antonio and Connie Field), the third mode, engages documentary subjects directly through interviews and “interventionist tactics, allowing the filmmaker to participate more actively in present events.”148 In this mode, archival
footage and interviews replace re-enactments and “voice of god” commentary. The style here places an emphasis on visual evidence through testimony and archive materials. Finally, the fourth mode, reflexive documentary (known from the work of Jill Godmillow and Raul Ruiz, among others) “arose from the desire to make the conventions of
representation themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality which the other three modes normally conveyed unproblematicly.”149 This mode purportedly
shows the filmmakers problematizing the text itself through meta-commentary, as it reveals its own “strategy, structure, conventions, expectations, and effects.”150
147 Ibid., 34. 148 Ibid. 149 Ibid., 45. 150 Ibid., 57.
Most significant for the present argument is that Nichols' taxonomy rests on his claim that the various modes position the filmmakers differently for the audience in terms of how visible their role is as authors of their subject(s) -- a start on defining genre as a rhetorically structured engagement. Nichols' model also claims the existence of sub- genres of documentary, as he theorizes the ethos of and the conventions of representation inherent in each documentary mode -- thus tying documentary ideologies to cinematic aesthetic conventions and other forms of performativity. Nichols' model remains the most revisited and celebrated of models for understanding documentary filmmaking that we have today. Interestingly, it is not generally known, in the general scholarly preference for Nichols, that Rotha had early formed a preliminary categorization of documentary types (which he calls “documentary traditions,” that have yet to picked up by scholars in relationship to Nichols' taxonomy.151
Other voices emerging after the turn of the millennium do promise to update Nichols, albeit in ways other than I will in the following section. Let me note each briefly.
Brian Winston’s writings were featured in both Rosenthal and Renov’s
anthologies, but their number and significance picked up substantially in the late 1990s and 2000s with his publications, Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentaries, and Claiming the
Real.152 His work is now primarily concerned with the form of documentary in relation
to cinéma vérité and its truth claims, and with the ethical considerations between
filmmaker and subject. The former is a discussion of the documentary ethos -- its appeal
151 Paul Rotha, “Documentary Film,” 75-101.
152 Brian Winston, Lies, Damn Lies, and Documentaries (London: British Film Institute, 2000); Brian
to truth -- with regard to controversies at the time to docudramas, whereas the latter focuses on the history of documentary and to the relevant ethical discussions therein.
Another important, and less referenced, theorist from this era is Dai Vaughan, who began working as a film editor in 1963, but who was also a prolific writer
throughout his film career, offering work that was not often recognized in the academy until the publication of For Documentary in 1999.153 For Documentary is an essay
collection discussing major threads of documentary film theory – its historical forms, aesthetics, technology, and truth claims. Vaughan’s work is primarily focused on documentaries on television, but offers valuable insight into key debates of the time. Most importantly, Dai Vaughn conceptualizes the aesthetics of documentary as imperative to its instrumentality.
With the proliferation of “queer theory” in the 1990s, feminist documentary film theorists have continued to problematize gender construction and the performativity of the subject, as best exemplified by the work of Susan Scheibler, among others.154
Although not an explicitly feminist text, Stella Bruzzi’s much acclaimed New
Documentary: A Critical Introduction relies heavily on ideas of performativity (à la
Judith Butler) in her analysis of documentary films.155 In that text, she argues that
documentary films are anything but objective representations, but must rather be seen as products of “the intrusion of the filmmakers into the situation being filmed; that they are performative because they acknowledge the construction and artificiality of even the non- fiction film and propose, as the underpinning truth, the truth that emerges though the
153 Dai Vaughn, For Documentary (Berkley: University of California Press, 1999). 154 Ibid., 108-135.
encounter between filmmakers, subjects and spectators.”156 Her feminist impulses are
echoed by the work of other feminist theoreticians of documentary film, including particularly Paula Rabinowitz, who is well known for her work in the field, particularly her book, They Must Be Represented: The Politics of Documentary, a representative text for the era which offers a gendered history of documentary film, broken down by the periods where social activism led to the emergence of new filmic representations of marginalized (previously private) communities (by race, class, gender, sexuality, etc).157
She thus points to political documentaries as rhetorical in nature, arguing that their work creates change in the political and cultural spheres, yet again with the filmmakers in control of that politics.
None of these theorists, however, have ever managed to recapture the particular setting of theory that reach back to Grierson, combining issues of documentary
production with a nuanced discussion of audience, and positing that the education that can take place by means of the documentary actually happens because the films are rhetorically tailored to that audience, rather than to the particular cause, and that the films necessarily respond to the needs of that audience in the moment of their conception -- and, as the case of Burns' War documentary, as summarized above, even able to intervene in that conception in an age of accelerated media networks.
The current generation of theorists recover the importance of the identity politics involved in that case --- the depth of the problem of how Latino veterans were not represented or labeled -- but not necessary to understand the second round of protests about how those materials were eventually included in the documentary as a claim to
156 Ibid., 8.
agency and co-creation, not just as a phenomenon of reception. To accommodate such analyses will require, as I will argue in the next section, to draw on a different range of sources to recover a new sense of documentary as producing not just truth and
representation, but also a particular kind of interactive public space or “town hall,” which fosters public speech acts in the kinds of clusters of documentary films and public(s) that emerged from the contestation around The War’s final edit.