Strain relief mechanisms:0D,1D and 2D defects

What kind of research practice is documentary? Documentaries can of course draw on the quantitive methodologies of statistical analysis that are associated with what is known in the social sciences as the positivist paradigm. In the opening pre-credits sequence to Super Size Me (Morgan Spurlock 2004), a voice-over narrator (Spurlock) provides us with among the following statistics: that 100 million Americans are overweight or obese (some 60 per cent of the adult population); that the fattest state in America is Mississippi where one in four people are obese; that obesity is second only to smoking as a causal factor in preventable deaths (over 400,000 a year); that one in four Americans visits a fast food restaurant everyday; that McDonald’s operates

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over 30,000 restaurants in over 100 countries across six continents; that it feeds 46 million people per day and that it controls 43 per cent of the fast food market in America.

As Graham Murdock reminds us, counting and measuring – the key tools of analysis for positivism – can tell us a lot about trends or the true scale of events. The sort of knee-jerk dismissal of such methods by positivism’s antagonist within the social sciences, the interpretive paradigm, is unhelpful (Murdock 1997). The positivist paradigm is concerned to uncover statistical regularities in observable phenomena. It is strongly marked by its origins in the nineteenth-century natural sciences, hence its investment in the observation of empirical phenomena, its belief that reality (whether natural or social) is made up of universal laws, that ‘proper’ science is value-neutral and that the object of study is not or should not be influenced or changed by the studying subject (Hammersley 1995: 2). One can immediately see that philosophically at least, positivism has influenced certain traditions of documentary filmmaking, especially the appeal to the ‘objectivity’ of the subject-researcher (in the sense of value-neutrality) and the belief in the absolute objectivity (in the sense of being dichotomously independent from and uninfluenced by the researcher) of the phenomena that is being studied (Wayne 2003: 225–30). In relation to film, positivism grounds itself in the iconic nature of the visual sign (the image resembles that which it represents) and the indexical relationship implied (at least before digital technology) that the reality captured by the image must once have been there, present before the camera (itself often conceived as an objective, mechanical recording instrument).

Documentary sits at the intersection of contradictory philosophical streams and manifests this in its theory and practice. While positivist attitudes are common, the dualistic split between subject and object typical of positivism is challenged by the fact that documentary filmmaking involves engagement with value-laden contexts and people, begging the question of the documentary filmmaker’s own evaluative re-sponses to these people and the political and ethical conditions of intervention into these contexts. Thus, on the one hand, the Griersonian tradition of British documen-tary in the 1930s and 1940s stressed that documendocumen-tary involved the ‘creative treatment’ of actuality footage (Grierson 1946: 78–89), which suggests a strong subjective engagement with material taken to have some sort of relationship to the real world. But at the same time, its vision of the world was one of controlled, well-ordered industrial and social processes and the conflict-free operations of Empire, illuminated by an authoritative middle-class ‘objective’ voice-of-god narra-tion that smacks of positivism’s confidence that society is a well-oiled system of universal laws. The direct cinema practitioners of the 1960s similarly stood at the confluence of contradictory philosophical streams: they were the ‘direct descendants of the natural science paradigm’ as Banks notes, due to their investment in value neutrality and belief that their presence did not change what they were recording, but at the same time this very separation and distance produced a mode of filmmaking

‘sympathetic, even empathetic, with the rhythm of life as it was lived, and to be as reactive as possible to actual events in people’s lives – the camera following, rather DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 83

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than dictating action’ (Banks 1998: 18). Thus life became a little messier and more untidy than within the Griersonian paradigm.

Where the positivist paradigm involves controlled laboratory conditions and/or quantitive analysis of standardized regularities (‘facts’), the interpretive paradigm by contrast places emphasis on qualitative analysis. Its focus is on the variability of meanings, which are understood to be context-dependent rather than universal and standardized. It is clear then that while some documentaries may be philosophically influenced by elements of the positivist tradition and while they may draw on knowledge generated by its characteristic quantitive analysis, the contribution of documentary film itself towards knowledge production, tends to be overwhelmingly qualitative. The documentary provides an audio-visual record of particular people, particular places and particular events. The statistic-heavy introduction in Super Size Me concludes with the narrator now appearing before the camera for the first time as if to say that while all those statistics have given some sense of the scale of the problem, it will only really become meaningful by grounding it in a particular case study. The film’s original contribution to knowledge production is anchored in the chronicle of what happens to Spurlock’s body and health when he goes on a McDonald’s-only diet for one month. It is clear though that this experiment, which is monitored by three health experts, is designed to vividly illustrate the more general issue of the deleterious consequences of eating too much fast food. Thus the particularity of the stories which documentaries tell do not preclude investing those particularities with a broader social or historical meaning.

As a mode of qualitative research, we can identify a number of research tools or methods available to documentary: the interview (widely used, although in different ways, across both the positivist and qualitative/interpretive paradigms of social research), narration (equivalent to the researcher’s own sequencing and analysis of their results in written texts), archival footage (again used by sociologists and historians) and dramatic reconstruction (perhaps more unique to documentary). All these methods can be mobilized in very different ways. Literary and historical allusions and free association characterize the narration of Patrick Keiller’s Robinson in Space (1997), for example, and is very different from the sort of linear cause–effect account that predominates in many documentaries. The method of narration in Robinson in Space is mobilized using a surrealist methodology, designed to discover unexpected connections and reveal concealed realities. A more linear narration in which the image track has the role of illustrating (rather than provoking) what the narration is saying, uses what Bill Nichols calls an expository methodology (2001:

105–9). This distinction between methods and methodologies is widespread within the social sciences. A methodology refers to the more or less coherent principles and values that organize the use of the research methods: different methodologies stress different approaches to knowledge generation.

Examples of methodologies within the interpretive paradigm are symbolic interactionism, phenomenology, hermeneutics, psychoanalysis and ethnography (Sarantakos 1998: 33). Despite their differences, all these methodologies share an emphasis on the way human subjects creatively imbue their activities and interac-tions with culturally constructed meanings. Audio-visual methodologies may be 84 MIKE WAYNE

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rather less clearly defined than in the social sciences, more numerous, more prone to intertextual co-mingling with each other and there may be more of a case in some instances to think of a documentary having elements of its own methodology (what we would call authorship in film studies more generally). But let us just consider the case of the interview method in a little more detail.

While the positivist paradigm will use interviews organized around a standard-ized questionnaire that predetermines the range of responses the interviewee can give, the qualitative paradigm pays attention to the particularity of the subject, their audio (and visual) contribution being distinctive to their particular experiences/

background as a participant, expert or observer. ‘Qualitative interviewing’, suggest Rubin and Rubin, ‘is a way of finding out what others feel and think about their worlds’ (1995: 1). It turns everyday conversational skills into ‘a tool of research, an intentional way of learning about people’s feelings, thoughts and experiences’ (1995:

2). Qualitative interviewing can be focused either on the cultural milieu of the interviewee(s), exploring in ethnographic manner, their norms, values, understand-ings and the taken-for-granted rules of behaviour of a group or society, or they can be more topical based (Rubin and Rubin 1995: 28), focused on an event or process which the interviewee has some direct and immediate experience of or else in the case of

‘expert’ testimony, some professional knowledge of. Qualitative research focuses on the variability and complexity of context-sensitive meanings generated by social practices. Of course, in practice, interviewee responses that give details on particular events may also give us insights into the cultural milieu of a particular group of people operating within given institutional, social or historical contexts.

Errol Morris’ Fog of War (2003) is unusual in that while most documentaries use the comparative method to juxtapose the discourse of different interviewees, this film has a single interviewee only: Robert McNamara, former Secretary of Defense (read War) under both President John F. Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson during the US occupation of Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s. The comparative method is often used to explore contrasting views on points of fact and values and Morris explored this brilliantly in his earlier documentary, The Thin Blue Line (1988) which both acknowledges the subjectivity of testimony while also working towards an adequate account of what really happened in a murder case. The film helped overturn a wrongful conviction, a good example of a documentary making an original contribution to knowledge. The very title, Fog of War places the question of subjectivity, judgement, knowledge and self-knowledge to the fore. Indeed, in terms of our two paradigms, Fog of War charts the shift in McNamara’s thinking from a positivist to an interpretive paradigm.

McNamara was a Harvard professor with a background in data analysis, who begins his experience of war during the Second World War as the epitome of a morally disengaged, positivist calculating machine, whose analysis of bombing raids over Japan (sorties, tons of bombs dropped, targets hit, etc., illustrated with a rapid montage of reports, graphs, percentage figures, and so forth), helped influence General Curtis Le May to firebomb Tokyo and other cities to destruction. The intertwinning of murderous scientific rationality and modern technological destruc-tive power is wonderfully illustrated by a special effects shot that shows not bombs, DOCUMENTARY AS CRITICAL AND CREATIVE RESEARCH 85

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but numbers, dropping out of a plane’s bomb bay doors to the targets below. The limitations of McNamara’s reflections are illustrated when he discusses the ‘propor-tionality’ of the American atom bomb attacks on two Japanese cities. Here he is evasive and refuses to condemn senior military and political figures behind the decision. The film itself underscores this visually with a series of jump cuts and black screen punctuations suggesting his torturous rationalizations.

Morris is well known for using his own specially designed interview technology:

the Interrotron. This places an image of himself under the camera lens (like an auto-cue machine) and interviewees address themselves directly to the camera and therefore the watching viewer. This produces an unusually intense relationship between viewer and interviewee. While it might seem to offer McNamara a com-manding platform on which to provide a self-legitimating account of his role in the Vietnam War, it also subjects his account to microscopic scrutiny, where we find various hints and clues (often in little details and throwaway remarks) that suggest that here is a profoundly narcissistic man with extremely limited powers of self-introspection and amazing detachment from all the death and destruction he was involved in propagating.

Later in the film, in the context of the Vietnam War, which saw increasing opposition within the US, McNamara’s discourse shifts away from the positivist certainties which characterized his number-crunching days during the Second World War, and now he begins to stress the role of subjective perspective in inter-nation conflict. It is less clear, however, to what extent the film itself shares some of the more humanist, subjective and cautious reflectiveness of the later McNamara. As with his discourse, so within the film itself, there is little indication of the powerful economic interests of American capitalism that lay behind a war McNamara now sees as some sort of unfortunate misunderstanding between nations. The morally dubious nature of McNamara ought not to be reduced to the level of the individual, but rather should be seen as symptomatic of the broader structures of power in which he operated. As we shall see later, structures of power can be concealed as much within the interpretive paradigm as the positivist paradigm.

While Fog of War interviews its single protagonist in an anonymous studio setting, Mondovino (Jonathan Nossiter, Argentina, France, Italy, US, 2004) makes great use of the environments in which subjects are interviewed (as well as the comparative method to bring out contrasting viewpoints and values) to tell us something about them, to locate their subjectivities (and therefore their perspectives and values) in a social context. The film charts the global battle in the wine business between small-scale producers who use artisanal working practices and for whom winemaking is an art and above all what Marx called a use-value, and large-scale producers who operate globally using mass production methods and for whom the commercial value of wine (or what Marx called exchange-value) ultimately trumps its use-value. For example, in the early part of the film the small-scale wine growers are usually interviewed outside on hillsides (close to nature and production) while the wine consultant and the mass producers he advises are shot mostly in interiors (cars, houses and inside sheds where machinery is used to oxygenate wine). Later in California, the filmmakers interview one large-scale wine producer next to his swimming pool. He is talking about how he 86 MIKE WAYNE

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and his wife designed their garden and brought their trees, shrubs and bushes from Italy. This, we are told is a statement, a ‘showcase for our wines, our lifestyles, our commitments to charity’. On the word ‘charity’, there is a wonderful cutaway to an automatic machine swimming around the pool, evidently cleaning it. This cut hints at a level of luxury and commodity fetishism that works to counterpoint the philanthropic image being projected by the interviewee and his wife.

In another interview with a CEO of a large French company that markets a Californian wine, the main subject occupies the centre-right of the image but is out of focus even while he is talking. In the background, silent but in focus, a worker in company overalls is up a ladder attending to some problem or the other. This nicely illustrates the hierarchical working practices that characterize the large commercial concern in contrast to the small-scale family-run business. This image of the worker in the margins, in the shadows or in the background is also repeated in the California location sequences. Interviewing another merchant of globalization, the film cuts to a series of pictures on his office wall: former US President and emblem of de-regulated capitalism Ronald Reagan is seen holding a glass of wine, then later the camera zooms in on an example of facile visual exploitation with a picture of three black kids in shorts playing and laughing in the sand around a bottle of red wine in some generic

‘underdeveloped’ context, lending their connoted ‘natural’ happiness and authentic-ity (as constructed by the West) to the carefully calculated commodauthentic-ity (Barthes 1993).

In such ways Mondovino picks out visual elements of the subject’s social environment to comment on or add a revealing dimension to their verbal discourse.