What a Documentary Is, After All

2012

Like photography, documentaries are a representational medium: They record and occasionally reconstruct the everyday reality viewers typically cannot experience themselves. Because photography is an indexical sign signifying truth, audiences understand the documentary, a moving photograph, to signify truth also. However, they are able to make the distinction between the “everyday reality” presented by documentaries and the fictive “reality” of cinematic films.

Studies in Documentary Film, 2012

This paper reflects upon theoretical, practical and ethical issues facing the production of interactive documentary cinema projects that are based on in-depth, disciplinary, intellectual and/or artistic research questions, such of those concerning anthropological observation and visual studies. The paper considers ways in which perceptions of how documentary images function in digital environments impact documentary practice and production. The interdisciplinary paper draws upon writings in poetry, philosophy, visual studies, cinema studies and art with special attention given to the writings of

Hungarian Studies

The method and the formal-technical language of documentary fi lmmaking have expanded so much that the traditional divide between documentary and fi ction cannot be reasonably held. Animation has also claimed its place among the possible devices of a documentary fi lm. Consequently, a documentary no longer wears its 'truthfulness' on its sleeve. The cues of documentary that were used historically, like archival footage or talking heads, are eclipsed by cognitively engaging interactive camera work provoking viewer's identifi cation. The dilemma that a would-be documentary fi lmmaker is necessarily confronted with is between perceptual realism and representational realism. An image cannot show the 'original': it can only declare it in a meta-communication about the image. In the history of fi lm the self-referential 'dead-end' of the 'ontological' image is expressed by a camera fi lming the 'eye' of another camera. The self-referentiality of documentary fi lmmaking also entails that documenting is necessarily gappy: it always leaves certain things unsaid or hidden. The story it tells has its own important lacunae. It is the Unsaid of a documentary, and not so much the representation's truthfulness and that constitutes the ethical source for the viewer.

2021

Consistency in the documentary genre is elusive. Each definition given is both defiable and defining of the documentary’s genre. Multiple attempts and analyses have been made over the years in an ever-changing endeavor to make a meaning fit the wide scope of what we understand as the documentary. Rather than having one conclusive answer, we have many. So what links these definitions together where language and rules have not? It is not only elements of reality, truth, space, time, and empathy inspiring the documentary and thus defining it. I cannot hope to make a meaning capturing every rule and aspect evident in the genre, but I hope to open up a new line of thought and exploration that offers alternative language and perceptions in defining the documentary. As I have explored documentaries and the theories surrounding them, I have found the focus of the documentary more often falls on introspective analyses of spectatorship. With the spectator an important character in the comprehension of the documentary, an analysis of the documentary through a spectator-specific lens is warranted. Over the course of this paper, I will explore the documentary film through its reception by the spectator. In using the spectator, I create a double image, a reflection in the filmic image that generates language for those elements unarticulated by previous definitions, like its ability to call an audience to action.

Global Journal of Humanities, 2009

Ideologically, the film type called documentary, aspires to be a truthful cinema or cinema vēritē as the French calls it. It is widely acclaimed as a type of film based on the real world, a real people, dealing with real situations and depicting them as they are, or "telling about historical events in a supposedly truthful or objective manner". Interestingly, critics have expressed some scepticism about the truthfulness of some documentary films and the veracity of their contents. This doubt stems partly from the development of digital technology that makes it possible for documentarists to digitally embellish their work so as to maximize effect or empathy. The doubts also spring from the fact that as a veritable apparatus for propaganda, documentaries have been made to reflect the political, ideological and socio-cultural whims of their sponsors; with the ultimate aim of achieving the specific and often 'subversive' purpose for which they were produced.

ARS (São Paulo)

Recently, documentary practices, including those working with moving images, have known an unprecedented boom in the art field, which provoked criticism but also led to fruitful discussions between the two fields of artistic documentary practices and the more traditional documentary cinema. This article aims to contribute to this discussion by analyzing some pivotal arguments of the ongoing debate, mainly the question of documentary practices and their relation to reality, art and politics. For a better understanding of the current situation, the analysis of key moments in the history of documentary discourse is the basis for the discussion of contemporary documentary practices between cinema and art, considering seminal examples combining moving images with questions of performativity.

Foundations of Science, 2016

In this article we consider the growing interest in recent years in the use of documentary strategies in the wold of contemporary art, film and performing arts and explore some of the central epistemological assumptions underpinning the persistent idea that the documentary should be equated with 'non-fiction'. Following Stella Bruzzi we argue that if documentary theory maintains objectivity as the primary measure of value, it will inevitably and continuously arrive at the conclusion that the documentary genre is fundamentally flawed. Instead, we propose to move beyond the 'realist epistemology' of documentary theory and focus on the 'documentary real', i.e. the specific performativity of the reality constructed in and by the documentary genre. In the last paragraphs, we introduce the various articles that address the ''documentary real'' in this special issue.

Giovacchini, Saverio and Robert Sklar, eds. Global Neorealism. The Transitional History of a Film Style. University of Mississippi Press,, 2012

Much of the attraction of and debates and controversies around the documentary genre derives from it being a hybrid form, straddling both conflicting paradigms within the traditional social sciences on the one hand and the aesthetic dimensions of art and entertainment on the other. Mixed in with these cross-currents, the question of the political or ideological nature of documentary as research, its ‘critical’ or ‘uncritical’ nature vis-à-vis dominant institutions, power relations, commonsense frameworks of explanation, interpretation and embedded cultural assumptions, are never far away. This essay is about this trinity of terms as they pertain to the documentary: critical, creative, research. It asks what it means to discuss documentary as a mode of research, i.e. to what extent this audio-visual based genre overlaps with issues around knowledge production associated with the social sciences; what it means to discuss some documentary films as critical practices, i.e. to define what ‘critical’ might mean for the media generally in the present contemporary context of unleashed global capitalism and how it might best be related to documentary; and this essay asks what it means to discuss documentary as a ‘creative’ practice, i.e. one in which aesthetics plays a key role in its production and consumption. Finally this essay explores the relationships between the critical, creative/aesthetic and research aspects of documentary.

Cinéma & Cie Film and Media Studies Journal, 2025

Based on the theoretical studies that have been published to date regarding the Making- of Documentary — concerning intertextuality, film studies, critical theory, mass communication theory and audiovisual didactics — we explore its specificities as a meta- cinematographic practice that manifests itself when a film accounts for the process of creating another film. The article is divided into three sections: Towards a Definition of the Making-of Documentary, Meta-cinematographic Formats and Functions and Specificities of the Making-of Documentary. In the first, its contemporary definition is proposed; In the following, we establish the distinction between the Making-of Documentary and its predecessors or other contemporary practices; Lastly, we approach its discursive intentions — as a promotional object of the film which it alludes to and of its filmmakers as “authors” — and its current uses, which promote an expansion of cinephilia and self- learning in the viewers.