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    107 views11 pages

    Carl Plantinga - Defining Documentary PDF

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Projected Worlds CARL PLANTINGA. Film scholars sometimes despair of adequately characterizing the documentary as a genre, We seem to know what a documentary is, but nonetheless have difficulty defining it or even determining how it is distinguished from the fictional film, Many filin theorists would go so far as to deny validity to the very distinction between fiction and non-fiction. ‘This argument emerges from various theoretical positions, perhaps the strongest in film theory those of Jean-Louis Comolli and Christian Metz, and in literary theory, Derrida in ‘one camp, and Wittgenstein in another, As a result ofthese definitional difficulties, and of the question of whether fiction and documentary can be distinguished at all, much of our theorizing about the documentary is shackled by uncertainties and misperceptions. In this essay I offer a way to think about the documentary which I hope will clear up some of the uncertainties and correct the misperceptions. After describing and arguing with some previous attempts by documnentarists and scholars to define the documentary as a genre, I will offer a characterization of my own, making use of a theory of textual production developed by contemporary philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorif. What I offer is not a definition of the documentary in the traditional sense, but an observation about the ‘way we think about documentaries and about how they differ from fiction. My account of the documentary, I argue, is one which inproves our understanding of the genre not only by offering a characterization, but also by clearing away some misleading assumptions about documentary which must be abandoned. Perhaps the most quoted nutshell definition of the documentary is found in John Grierson’s phrase “the creative treatment of actuality.” In requiring creativity of the documentary, Grierson hoped to distinguish it from the tedious information film and to recognize the need for dramatization in representing social issues. Thus, for Grierson not all non-fiction films are documentaries; they must satisfy requirements of dramatization and “creativity” first. That the treatment in a documentary must be of actuality, rather than the staged facsimile, is one of Grierson’s first principles: “We believe that the original (or native) actor, and the original (or native) scene, are better guides to the screen in- terpretation of the modern world.” In distinguishing the documentary from the mere non- fiction film, Grierson’s characterization of the documentary often scems prescriptive rather than descriptive. In this essay I will be concerned more with the basic distinction between fiction and non-fiction than with distinguishing “documentary” from the “infor- mation film.” As conceptual tools, Grierson’s formulations about documentary are inade- ‘quate. His famous phrase, “the creative treatment of actuality,” remains overly general in that it would apply to much that we would not call documentary. In a sense, the fiction film as well treats reality creatively, for ate not actors, sets, and decor also real? On what basis can we distinguish between what is “real” and what is not? And what of the neo- realist films, for example, making use of authentic locations, or films such as Haskell Werler's Medium Cool, in which actors moved about during actual historical events (the demonstrations at the 1968 Democratic National Convention)? We think we know what “4 | | | | Grierson has in mind, but his account is too vague and too superficial to enable us to productively distinguish documentary from fiction. Other characterizations of the documentary share problems similar to those of Grier son's. William Stott, for example, defines the “essence” of documentary as “the communi cation, not of Imagined things, but of real things only.”* One is compelled to ask what it ‘means to communicate “real things” as opposed to “imagined things.” And what sorts of things are being communicated? Are they facts, bits of reality, signs, signifieds, referents, states of affairs, propositions, or what? Again, Stott’s characterization, like Grierson's, is not well enough developed to facilitate a fruitful analysis of the documentary. Raymond Spottiswoode, in A Grammar of the Film, correctly notes that on the quos- tion of definition writers on the documentary have been “

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