New Review of Film and Television Studies

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The dogmatic documentary: the missing mode

Yingchi Chu

To cite this article: Yingchi Chu (2015) The dogmatic documentary: the missing mode, New
Review of Film and Television Studies, 13:4, 403-421, DOI: 10.1080/17400309.2015.1073484

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2015.1073484

Published online: 25 Aug 2015.

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 New Review of Film and Television Studies, 2015
Vol. 13, No. 4, 403–421, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17400309.2015.1073484

The dogmatic documentary: the missing mode

Yingchi Chu*

Communication and Media Studies, School of Arts, Murdoch University,

Perth 6015, Australia
This paper addresses a widely accepted typology of the genre of documentary
cinema, proposed by Bill Nichols in the 1980s. Although a number of
improvements have been suggested in the literature since then, in principle
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his historically derived and structurally argued types, distributed as they are
on a spectrum from expository to performative modes of presentation, are
still useful and readily acknowledged to this day. However, this paper argues
that the typology contains a major lacuna in that its most authoritatively
controlled type, the expository mode, is not well suited to cover a much more
radically supervised kind of documentary, the dogmatic documentary which,
I contend, is characterized by a specific formula of production and mode of
presentation. I develop my argument with a focus on the documentary film
production during the period of Mao Zedong’s China, a focus that has the
advantage of dealing with a clearly identifiable historical epoch and political
system. Beyond my observations about China, the argument is intended as
a contribution to genre studies in general and, specifically, the genre of
cinematic documentary. By way of conclusion, the paper makes a number
of concessions, as for example with reference to other modifications of
the typology associated with Nichols, the generalizability of the dogmatic
documentary to other dictatorial regimes, and the special character and
exclusion from the typology of the parodic variety of the mock-documentary,
or mockumentary, as a meta-fictional type of cinema.
Keywords: genre; typology; documentary; dogmatic documentary; dog-
matic mode; dogmatic formula; Chinese documentaries; mockumentary

Introduction
In spite of the difficulties we face in trying to define the concept genre it remains a
requisite critical tool across a broad spectrum of artistic endeavours, disciplines
and creative industries. And although the traditional theorization of genre is firmly
anchored in the study of the fine arts and literature, generic classification has
become an indispensible industrial, commercial and aesthetic component of the
production and consumption of film. To narrow down the relevance of genre to
cinema, in documentary film generic considerations affect not only subject matter
and manner of presentation, but also the specifics of ‘film stock’, the ‘optical
capacities of cameras and editing suites, the apparatus of sound recording, the

*Email: y.chu@murdoch.edu.au

q 2015 Taylor & Francis

 4204 Y. Chu
set-up of a studio, the cost of production, and the possible screening outlets’ (Frow
2006, 73). Frow draws our attention to three fundamental dimensions of genre: its
formal organization, including the ‘repertoire of ways of shaping the material
medium in which it works’ as well as the immaterial manner in which a genre
employs the ‘categories of time, space, and enunciative position’. Accordingly,
documentary cinema of an ‘expository’ kind differs sharply from documentaries
in the ‘self-reflexive’ mode of presentation. The rhetorical structure of genre
affects the way documentaries address their audience, directly by way of a voice
over, authorial narrative situation, or indirectly by a deliberate reduction of
authorial interference. The diverse enunciative modalities of documentary genres
have immediate effects on the truth claims made and the kind of meaning
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negotiation that is stipulated by the film maker. A third key dimension of genre is
thematic content comprising topoi, iconography, typical events, character types
and the work’s emerging overall ‘world’. For documentary film, this dimension
is particularly important in terms of the degree of ‘plausibility’ it achieves for the
viewing public (Frow 2006, 74ff.).
At the same time, we have to be wary not to impose a false sense of stability on
the concept of genre that would destroy the very flexibility that is crucial for its
comprehension and use. They do not exist as empirical data; they are no more that
purely intentional ordering principles. Nor do genres remain stable as typological
principles; rather, they partake of a ‘constant category-splitting’ as well as
‘category-creating dialectic that constitutes the history of types and terminology’.
In this, genres follow both an expansive principle of ‘the creation of a new cycle’
and ‘a principle of contraction’, the ‘consolidation of a genre’, a process Rick
Altman covers under the heading of ‘genrification’ (Altman 2004, 65). But it
precisely because genres undergo constant change and so cannot have any fixed
boundaries, that they are so useful to advertising, consumption habits and
analysis. Well before we are in a position to proceed to an analysis, films typically
have already been identified for us by ‘title, publicity, press coverage, word of
mouth, and subject matter’ (Bordwell and Thompson 2008, 338). With such
provisos in mind, an important step in the investigation of the critical usefulness
of genre is its sub-classification into types. With respect to documentary cinema,
a genre famously called a ‘creative treatment of actuality’ by John Grierson
(Hill and Gibson 1998, 427; Hardy 1979), even a summary of some of the major
contributors to the genre indicates the rich engagement with the topic in the
literature to this day (Aitken 1990; Barnouw 1983; Barsam 1992; Beattie 2004;
Bruzzi 2000; Carroll 1996; Corner 2002; 2000; 1986; Ellis 1989; Guyun
1990; Hardy 1979; Krivaczek 1997; Piotrowska 2014; Plantinga 1997; Renov
2004, 1993; Rosenthal 1990, 1988; Rothman 1997; Saunders 2010; Spence and
Navarro 2011; Winston 2008; 2000, 1995). Amongst the many contributors to the
field one scholar, however, stands out not only for what he has had to say about
documentary film as a genre, but also for having proposed the most influential
historical ordering principles for this film form, Bill Nichols (Saunders 2010, 12).
What makes his proposal attractive is that Nichols transcends the merely
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 405
3
taxonomic approach to film anchoring it historically and by providing detailed
justifications for the distinctions he draws, distinctions that he has revised and
refined over the years. So, it should not come as a surprise that his typology of
documentary presentational modes has widely discussed, adopted and modified
by film theorists and critics as a useful tool for analysis (Nichols 1991, 32 –75,
1985, 1977; cf. Hill and Gibson 1998, 429 –433; Lee-Wright 2010; Beattie 2004,
20– 25; Nelmes 2012, 213– 225; Buckland 2012, 131 –150; Müller 2013,
186– 192; Plantinga 1997, 101ff.; Renov 2004, 174; Robinson 2013; Saunders
2010, 26– 31). This is not to suggest that there are no alternative ways of
classifying documentary film. Instead of looking at its mode of presentation in
their historical trajectory, as does Nichols, it would equally make sense to design a
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typology by subject matter, such as ethnography, war, history, youth and science
(cf. Renov 1993; Crawford and Turton 1992). At the same time new technologies,
especially digital innovations (CD-ROMs, DVDs and the Internet) and their
documentary as well as quasi-documentary uses, as for instance in video clips,
suggest the need for broadening our frame of analysis. That the focus on
presentational film style is given a privileged position as ordering system here is
no more than the result of a widely shared teaching focus on the specifically filmic
way that documentary representations work.
What unites documentary representation in contrast with fiction film is that, in
Bill Nichols’s phrase, they constitute a ‘discourse of sobriety’ (Piotrowska 2014,
18). What distinguishes documentaries from one another is at the heart of the
typology presented by Nichols, to be discussed in detail below. If Branigan has
characterized documentary film by the spectator’s assumption of a ‘close (causal)
connection between the logic of events depicted and the logic of depicting’
(Branigan 1992, 202), then Nichols’s typology testifies to the many different ways
in which this connection varies across different modes of presentation. Suffice it
in this Introduction to do no more than list his six types in the order in which he
proposed them and to suggest the motivation that guided him in drawing his
distinctions amongst poetic (1920s); expository (1920s); observational (1960s);
participatory (1960s); reflexive (1980s) and performative modes (1980s). The
principles informing this generic order however are not primarily formal.
The distinctions Nichols identified are in the first instance a consequence of
a historical rather than formal perspective (Wolfe 2014, 146). This had the
advantage of allowing the abstraction of both an evolutionary trajectory and its
structural diversity. Given the choices of historical exemplification made by
Nichols, however, it is only to be expected that not all formal options have been
covered in his typology. It should also go without elaborating that his generic
divisions are to be taken to be flexible rather than rigid. As one of his book titles,
Blurred Boundaries, suggests, he is clearly aware of the dangers of taxonomic
stringency. When we employ narratives to represent reality, he argues, the firm
divisions we draw between fact and fiction no longer hold. It is in this sense that
Renov, for instance, acknowledges Nichols’s disdain for ‘the magical template of
verisimilitude’ (Renov 1993, 118). From a formal perspective, then, his typology
 406 Y. Chu
can be viewed as an order of a diminishing belief in documentary realism. After
all, Nichols is anything but naı̈ve when it comes to the claim of any ‘true’
representation of actuality. ‘To what degree’, he asks in one of his early works,
‘will our recognition of a pro-filmic reality, external but depicted by the film,
be counterbalanced by our knowledge that this reality remains a construct,
an approximation and re-presentation?’ After all, we do not ‘gain truly direct,
unimpeded access’ (Nichols 1981, 237). Even the most ‘expository’ or
‘observational’ construction of reality, then, will always have to concede its
inexorable relation to ‘cinematic indexicality’ (Renov 1993, 211n6). Renov
pinpoints the position that Nichols holds in this respect when he writes that ‘all
discursive forms – documentary included – are, if not fictional, at least fictive,
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this by their tropic character (their recourse to tropes or rhetorical figures)’ (Renov
1993, 7). For Nichols, documentary film making is above all a ‘rhetorical practice’
(Nichols 2001a, 592). This is so, writes Nichols in one of his earlier papers,
because documentary cannot but operate ‘in the crease between life as lived and
life as narrativised’ (Nichols 1986, 114).
That given, if we translate the historical order of his documentary types into
one based on purely formal tenets, we can image a somewhat different spectrum,
one of cinematic documentaries assembled on the principle of a polarity between
the most controlled and the most open forms. This would not only produce
a different ordering of his types of documentary films from expository to
performative modes, but also show that the typology as designed by Nichols is
incomplete from both a historical and formal perspective. What is missing from his
list is a kind of documentary that extends film design and production significantly
beyond the generic boundaries of expository film making, a type I have called the
dogmatic documentary. This documentary form was introduced under the heading
of the ‘dogmatic formula’ in Chinese Documentaries: From Dogma to Polyphony
(Chu 2007, 53– 92). Without such a type of documentary film making, the book
argued, we are at a loss as how to cope with an entire cinematic sub-genre in its
own right. Since then, the ‘dogmatic documentary’ has been referred to in a
number of recent writings, as in Documentary, World History and National Power
in the PRC (Müller 2013) and Independent Chinese Documentary: From the
Studio to the Street (Robinson 2013), without however offering a comprehensive
summary of the concept. It is the aim of this paper to present arguments in favour of
expanding Nichols’s list of documentary sub-genres by inserting the dogmatic
documentary in his typology and, in doing so, contribute to the generic
theorization of documentary film.

Bill Nichols’s typology and its reception

If we list the typology of documentary film introduced by Nichols (1991,
99– 138) according to the formal principles of diminishing realist representation,
relaxation of authorial control and increase in interpretive freedom on the part
of the film viewer, we arrive at the following catalogue of modes of presentation
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 407
5
(1) expository, (2) observational, (3) participatory, (4) performative, (5) reflexive
and (6) poetic documentaries. Now the typology looks like starting with a strong
emphasis on firm audience guidance and an adherence to the documentary ideal
of as close as possible a representation of pro-filmic reality towards a gradual
loosening of both constraints. After the first two modes, certain concessions
are beginning to enter the representation, such as the admission of unavoidable
perspectives in the observational style, the inclusion of personae other than the
director into the overall presentation in the participatory documentary, a stress of
subjective ingredients in the performative film style, a further loosening of realist
constraints by a self-reflexive attitude colouring the presentation in the reflexive
mode and, lastly, an invitation to the audience to engage their creative
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imagination emotionally and aesthetically in a poetic re-assessment of pro-filmic

actuality. This reverses the original order in which the poetic mode was placed
first as a style in which the re-assemblage of the world by poetic means was seen
to undermine the specificity of pro-filmic actuality. This rearrangement further
places the performative style after the participatory mode on the grounds
that ‘performance’ tends to grow naturally out of an accent on participation and,
once extended to include intellectual performance, can be said to lead to a higher
degree of self-reflection in the director’s craft (cf. Margulies 2002, 157). Ending
the typology with the poetic mode of presentation may be seen as a bit of a tour de
force, but can be justified, I think, by its further and inevitable loosening of realist
constraints. While this was to grant a freer rein to the process of re-conceiving the
actual world in terms of increasingly subjective image chains, we must not forget
that subjectivity in Nichols, as Renov points out, is not entirely divorced from
the social (Renov 2004, 97). To that extent at least, the poetic mode cannot be
regarded as merely subjectivist and so can be justified as a documentary type.
Given this reworked sequence, how then would the addition of another sub-
genre such as the dogmatic documentary mode extend the typology? Before a
detailed answer to this question can make sense, we need to address some of the
specifics of Nichols’s rationale underlying his distinctions. The emphasis in the
expository mode is on the retreat of the directorial show of hands by a quasi-
authorial, disembodied and omniscient voice-over as well as intertitles. In this
style of presentation, the image chain of the documentary fulfils, as it were,
the schema of language guidance, leaving the film viewer little leeway for
interpretation or questioning. The documentary presents itself as providing
authorially descriptive and seemingly value-free information, aiming at
producing the impression of objectivity in the receiver of the film message.
Nichols compares the official tone of the expository mode to that of ‘news anchors
and reporters’ (cf. also Nichols 1983). He also places the accent in the expository
mode on direct viewer address, a firm perspective resulting from titles and voices,
the advancement of an argument or the recounting of history. Either ‘the speaker
is heard but never seen’ (voice-of-God commentary) or ‘the speaker is heard and
also seen’ (voice-of-authority commentary), whereby the commentary is ‘of a
higher order than the accompanying images’. At the heart of the expository mode,
 4608 Y. Chu
for Nichols, is the creation of the impression of ‘objectivity and omniscience’
(Nichols 2001b, 105ff.).
Although the expository mode was born and thrived in the 1930s, it continues
to survive in a variety of TV programs as journalistic reportage and as documentary
on ‘the small screen’ (Krivaczek 1997; Kilborn 1994). In spite of its foregrounding
of the objective representation of actuality, from its very beginning the expository
mode could never quite escape the charge that what appears to be captured in film
is as much the result of the director’s interpretive juxtaposition of selected images
as it is an accurate reflection of pro-filmic reality (Nelmes 2012, 218). Having said
this, there is nevertheless a marked shift from the expository mode to that of the
observational documentary, where the ‘impression of unmediated observation’
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began to be facilitated by developments in camera technology. The camera no turns

into a ‘fly on the wall’ permitting an ‘unobtrusive and all-seeing eye on the world’
(Beattie 2004, 21f.; cf. Young 1975). In this mode of presentation the expository
weight on objectivity has shifted to an assumption that it is not so much the director
and reliable post-production principles that guarantee observational neutrality as it
is the camera that simply cannot lie. This objectivist conviction was nourished for
instance by André Bazin’s idea of the ‘essential objectivity’ of the camera as the
‘photographic eye’, an assumption that, as Guyun contends, produced ‘the myth of
pure cinema’ (Guyun 1990, 31, 33; Petrić 1987). Yet, rather than having been
primarily a philosophical debate, direct cinema has above all been a specific
cinematic technology. With respect to the question of verisimilitude, according to
Nichols, a major shortcoming of the observational documentary is that it restricts
‘the film maker to the present moment’ and so demands a ‘disciplined detachment’
from the filmed events (Nichols 1991, 33), whereas on the part of the film viewer
portable cameras and location sound recording gear bolstered the cinematic
illusion of ‘truthful’ representation. This is not to say, that the observational mode
is intentionally involved in audience deception. Rather, the criticism levelled
against observational documentaries was that no matter how technologically
advanced the cinematic apparatus, capturing on film how things actually are must
remain a naı̈ve presumption.
That much is conceded in the participatory or interactive documentary,
where the director is no longer concealed but enters the mise-en-scène as
interviewer and participant, either on or off camera, in the flow of information
between film crew, portrayed persons and film viewer. Now the interaction
between film maker and subject is at the centre of cinematic representation.
As Nichols (1991, 33) writes, this mode resulted from the ‘desire to make the
film maker’s perspective more evident’. This is a far cry from the deliberate
disembodiment of the director of the expository documentary. A drawback of the
participatory mode, however, is the danger of ‘excessive faith in witnesses’, a
surfeit of directorial intervention, and a naı̈ve use of archival footage in the
re-creation of history (Nichols 1991, 138). In the performative documentary,
Nichols places the accent on the ‘expressive dimension of film’. As a result,
‘reference to the world is marginalized’ resulting in an indirect representation of
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 409
7
the film referent. Yet, in presenting its filmed world in a ‘subjective, expressive,
stylized evocative and visceral manner’ the performative documentary can
achieve a high degree of vividness (Buckland 2003, 145; Renov 1999). The
boundaries between which the performative documentary can be located appear
to be the questioning of the pro-filmic reality by maximizing the evocation of
mood and atmosphere without a total loss of objectivity on the one hand and, on
the other, an ‘excessive use of style’ and the abandonment of the film’s referential
basis (Nichols 1994, 95). If we proceed to the next documentary sub-genre
in Nichols’s typology we encounter a mode that makes the very problems
of representation part of its subject matter. This is the reflexive documentary
(cf. Allen 1977). Here, the ‘constitutive practices’ of documentary cinema are
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laid bare as a modification of what is being represented. The accent on

commentary in the expository mode is replaced here by ‘metacommentary’
(Beattie 2004, 23). As a result, the film viewers are put in a position of a double
perspective: they can interpret both the presented world and the means with
which the filmic version of the world has come into being. Nichols warns that if
excessively employed, the reflexive mode can self-destruct by losing sight of the
representation of ‘actual issues’, that is, the film’s referential ground (Nichols
1991, 94f.). Lastly, the poetic documentary, which Nichols placed at the very
dawn of documentary film making, viewed from a formal perspective appears as
a cinematic limiting case of documentary representation. As the term suggests, in
the poetic mode the film maker’s play with images takes centre stage in order to
allow the film viewers maximum freedom to engage their creative interpretation,
without however losing touch entirely with the actual source of representation.
As such, the poetic mode could be said to look across the dividing line that
separates documentary film making from the fiction film. Commenting on the
poetic documentaries of the 1920s, Nichols deplores their ‘lack of specificity’,
fragmentation and too high a degree of abstraction (Nichols 1991, 138).
Nevertheless, the poetic documentary mode remains an option even today,
especially in light of the lessons learnt from the unrealistic objectivist ambitions
of the expository and observational modes of presentation.
Looking at the formal spectrum of Nichols’s typology as whole, then, we
cannot fail to notice a consistent trajectory in documentary film making stretching
from a high degree of authorial control over the presented materials and the
interpretational options of the film viewer in expository and observational
documentaries towards a gradual loosening of directorial authority and a striking
increase in the interpretive freedom enjoyed by the cinema audience in the
consumption process (Nichols 1987, 2008, 72 – 89). And yet, while the typology
looks comprehensive on the self-reflexive and poetic side, I argue that an
important sub-genre of documentary film making is missing at the expository end
of the spectrum, one in which the maximization of authorial control and
minimizing of interpretive freedom far exceeds those of the expository mode of
presentation. I contend that even the most rigorous type of documentary within the
sub-genre of the expository type fails to capture an important political brand of
 4810 Y. Chu
documentary, the dogmatic documentary (Chu 2007). My purpose in reviewing
this kind of documentary here is to argue that in order to find room for this
cinematic variety in Nichols’s typology we need to amend it by expanding it
beyond its current formal limit set by the expository mode of presentation. If this
argument goes through, then the dogmatic documentary would mark a new
polarity in the continuum stretching from maximum presentational control to a
high degree of relaxation of documentary strictures. In order to shore up this claim,
the next section will address the emergence, style and function of the dogmatic
mode, exemplified by documentary cinema in China during the Mao period.
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The dogmatic documentary

In 1953, 4 years after the defeat of the Goumindang (the Nationalists) at the hands
of the Communist Liberation Army, the new government established the Central
News Documentary Film Studio (Zhongyan xinwen jilu dianying zhipian chang)
in Beijing. Two further documentary film studios followed, one to foster science
and general education, and the other focusing on agriculture. Since then until the
early 1990s, the government funded and controlled the documentary film
production industry in its entirety from scripting, filming and editing to
distribution and exhibition. To guarantee political cohesion in the production and
consumption of documentary cinema, Mao adopted Lenin’s motto that
documentary representation had to be viewed as ‘the visualization of political
theories’ (Gao 2003, 131; Fang 2003, 205; Shan 2005, 142 –145). In tune with
China’s ‘closed door’ policy, Chinese documentary film makers took the opposite
route to their Western colleagues. Instead of increasingly questioning the
relationship between actuality and perception, between social reality and
cinematic truth, along a track reflected in the kind of typology proposed by
Nichols, the presentational styles of Chinese documentaries soon collapsed into a
single monolithic pattern, identifiable as the ‘dogmatic formula’ (Chu 2007, 53ff.).
To be sure, after 17 years of political struggle China was not in a position to
produce or enjoy any sophisticated cinematic experimentation. As the then
Premier Zhou Enlai put it, ‘plots must be clear; patterns must not be as fast as in
foreign films . . . we can’t catch up if it is too fast’ (Qian and Gao 1981, 148).
Films were to forge a dialogue with the masses that were meant to identify with
heroes drawn from factory workers, peasants and the military and embrace
political messages. While questions of ‘truth’, ‘reality’ and ‘authenticity were
aired in the production process, the answers did not emerge so much from film
specifics such as genre, cinematography, sound, editing or mode of presentation
as from the established ideological baselines. At the First Conference on News
Documentary Filmmaking (December 1953 to January 1954) the purpose of
documentary cinema was declared to be to ‘educate the masses about Socialism’.
This is why documentaries had to ‘show the things as they exist and events as
they happen’ (Gao 2003, 136). The Conference concluded with a consensus on
three principles: Lenin’s visual illustration of political ideologies; actuality and
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 9
411
truthfulness and the need to script and plan documentaries before shooting. This
was to be achieved by foregrounding the theme of national achievements and
the enthusiastic participation of workers, peasants and soldiers in the socialist
reconstruction of the country. A number of distinct periods of documentary film
production can be discerned during those early years of Mao’s rule. When the
government launched the ‘One Hundred Flowers’ campaign of 1956 in order to
stimulate artistic diversity, some film makers felt emboldened to question Lenin’s
dogma of ‘visual ideology’ as ill suited to cover all the needs of documentation in
the new Chinese society. Images instead of words should be the predominant
ingredients of documentary cinema in order to avoid boring the nation with
‘political lectures’ (Gao 2003, 162). A year later, sensing that his relaxation of
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ideological rules had gone too far, Mao launched his ‘Anti-Rightist Movement’,
resulting in arrests, imprisonment and executions of some outspoken critics, as
well as producing considerable stagnation in documentary film output.
It was partly the aim of the ‘Great Leap Forward’, initiated by Mao in 1958 as
a concerted attempt to stimulate the economy, to also revive film production.
Every Province, except Tibet, was encouraged to establish its own film studio,
which lead to a sharp increase in documentary film making around the nation. Yet
instead of being harnessed to document the largest famine in Chinese history and
the death of millions as a result of economic mismanagement, film makers were
complicit in concealing and misrepresenting the nationwide tragedy before their
eyes. A reform proposed by the Film Bureau in 1964 failed to remedy this
situation and with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, documentary
film production relapsed to its lowest ideological denominator. The reins
remained firmly in the hands of the News Documentary Film Studio, which was
directly accountable to the Propaganda Department, while the Party supervised
the political content of film, with the Ministry of Culture being responsible for the
management of film culture and the Central Film Bureau looking after film
subjects and scripts, production and distribution. All this did not augur well for
the artistic side of documentary cinema in China, even if its consumption had
risen from about 47 million viewers in 1949 to a total audience of some 300
million by 1958. More than ten thousand mobile exhibition teams in rural areas
attracted the viewing masses, not however for making the film industry profitable
or in order to lift the level of aesthetic education, but rather for political effect.
‘Viewing was compulsory, while audiences were organized in their work units
to ensure a full house’ (Chu 2007, 66). As was to be expected, much the same
control was exerted over film criticism during the Mao period (Li 2002,
223– 224). Only when Deng Xiaoping’s agenda of the Four Modernisations took
hold in the 1980s did the documentary film scene begin to undergo an
increasingly radical transformation of its dogmatic style towards the presentation
of a cinematic polyphony of voices. Against this summary background we can
now address the characteristic features of the dogmatic documentary.
As to content and style, documentary film during the Mao period was closely
linked to reporting of news. It is no accident that the name of the Central News
 412
10 Y. Chu
Documentary Studio was xinwen jilu (news documentary film), deliberately
conflating the two activities. Accordingly, the ticai guihua (film subject plans),
issued regularly by the Film Bureau of the Propaganda Department of the Ministry
of Culture, were carefully designed not only to keep news and documentary
production neatly aligned, but also to ensure that both spoke to the masses in a
single voice. As a result, Mao’s mono-vocal documentaries addressed its various
subject matters very much in the same vein. These included significant national
events; industrial, agricultural and military construction projects; the military;
minorities; foreign affairs; culture and sport. The most important documentary
during the early years of the PRC is a cinematic celebration of the founding of
Communist China, The Birth of the New China (Xin Zhongguo de dansheng) of
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1950, a panegyric presentation of Mao and the first Political Consultative

Conference attended by party representatives, leaders from the minorities, as well
as overseas Chinese. The film sweeps across the whole nation depicting joyous
crowds from Inner Mongolia to Guangzhou, from Fujian to Xinjiang. Likewise,
The Will of Six Hundred Million People (Liu yi renmin de yizhi, 1954) portrays its
theme of the First National People’s Congress in a monological fashion of unity
and universal support for the Communist leadership. The topic of the socialist
nation building is realized in a raft of documentaries focusing on the Party’s
responsible handling of reconstruction and the voluntary and cheering support by
the workers, peasants and soldiers. In this vein, The Road to Victory (Shengli zhi lu,
1950) depicts the repairs of the railways for the Liberation army in their struggle
against the Guomindang (Nationalists), while We Must Control the Huai River
(Yiding yao ba Huaihe zhi hao, 1952) shows the effective leadership of the
Communist Party in organizing the people during the building of fortifications on
both sides of the Huai River in a heroic effort of preventing future large-scale
catastrophes. Other topics, such as nation building, land reform, agriculture,
industrialization, the military, minorities, foreign affairs, the arts and sport
received similar monological, heroic and celebratory treatment. A brief sketch of
cinematic features of some documentaries during this period will flesh out what is
meant by the term ‘dogmatic documentary’.
For example, The Birth of the New China in 1950 depicts two significant
events in the establishment of the PRC. One is the first Political Consultative
Conference where the representatives agree on the national anthem, the flag,
a few laws and the appointment of key government officials. The second event
is the celebration of the new China on 1 October 1949, with Mao’s famous
proclamation on the building of Tiananmen: ‘China has arisen!’ The sound track
is heavily dominated by non-diegetic music throughout, showcasing songs such
as ‘The East is Red’. There is a dominant male voice-over narration, the only
diegetic voice being reserved for Chairman Mao. Here, the production process
is acknowledged in the credits with the identification of the production studio,
some 40 cameramen, two composers and a scriptwriter. However, in subsequent
films the credits are gradually trimmed down, a practice that is to reach its climax
during the Cultural Revolution. The first image sequence presents the conference,
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 413
11
speeches by Mao, national representatives, including Uighurs and Mongols, the
applauding delegates and agreed upon documents. The second section starts with
the caption ‘The Nation’s people are celebrating’, followed by episodes identified
by the voice over as ‘From the city to the countryside, from children to seniors,
who wouldn’t be excited? Who wouldn’t celebrate?’ There is a series of images
of people reading the 1 October newspaper, in the countryside, and on trains, with
shots of the new flag being raised. In the Mongolian grasslands people are
dancing, a smiling girl is holding a lamb. The narrator tells us that she wants to
raise the lamb until it is big and fat, so she can give it to Chairman Mao. Milk is
delivered to a tank featuring the slogan ‘Milk for Chairman Mao’. In Harbin,
Changchun, Shenyang, Hunan and other cities, citizens and soldiers are shown
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marching and singing with slogans, balloons, dragon dancing and waving the
flag. The narration tells us that the ‘people are singing cheerfully, following Mao
from victory to victory’. The voice of God narration and Mao’s diegetic
monologue tell identical stories, proclaiming the New China, leaving no room for
alternative views, let alone criticism. Throughout, the images of Mao are shot
from a low angle, underlining his uncontested leadership position.
Another example of Mao’s Cinema of Workers Peasants and Soldiers’ (gong
nong bing dianying) in the dogmatic mode is Big Technological Reform (Danao
jishu gexin, 1960) depicting as it does the Northern China Wireless Factory and
its technological innovations. There is no diegetic presentation of the voices of
workers. Both the continuous narration and military background music are extra-
diegetic throughout. The documentary opens with images of workers entering the
factory, followed by shots of workshops. The voice over tells us that in spite of
their efforts, the workers are unable to satisfy market demand. This is reinforced
by images of newspaper headlines of the Party calling for increased
industrialization. Viewers then learn that after much experimentation workers
have been able to further speed up the production process. No further explanation
on how the result has been achieved. There are shots of young workers talking
and working together in groups in a fastidiously clean working environment. This
display of an idealized world of advanced industrial production is concluded by
the narration informing the viewer that all the products have passed the strictest
quality assurance standards. What strikes us now so forcefully is that the stark
discrepancy between this form of idealization and the actual misery of social
reality of China in the wake of the failures of The Great Leap forward of 1958
is rendered even more tragic by the blatant lies spread by the dogmatic
documentaries of the time. A similarly distorted form of ‘documentation’ via a
false idealization is the hallmark of The Iron Man: Wang Jinxi (Tieren Wang
Jinxi, 1966). Wang Jinxi is an oil driller in Daqin, Northeast China and a model
worker admired for his bravery. He was celebrated during the 1960s as a hero
representing industry at large. The documentary starts with images of Wang
meeting the hero of agriculture of the time, Chen Yongguai at the People’s Hall in
Beijing. Throughout the film, we never hear Wang or anyone else speak. The
entire soundtrack is restricted to extra-diegetic narration and non-diegetic music.
 414
12 Y. Chu
The diegesis of the documentary consists of images of Wang working in the field,
his coat, his hut and his drilling equipment. According to the narration Wang has
survived temperatures below minus 40 degrees Celsius and used his bare hands to
fix technical glitches of running machinery. Wang is shown meeting Premier
Zhou on 5 March 1966 in the People’s Hall. The narration informs us Wang’s
work ethos in Wang’s words: ‘Only Mao thoughts can fix China’s problems’.
To underline the modesty of this model worker, the voice over quotes Wang
saying that his achievements are the result of the Party’s education and that he
always carries a notebook to record his own shortcomings. Another film typical
of the period of the Cultural Revolution is Revolutionary Youth Only Listen to
Chairman Mao (Gemin xiaojiang zui ting Maozhuxi de hua, 1967). This is
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perhaps the most extreme example of the dogmatic presentational mode. The
documentary was produced by the Shanghai Eastern Red Film Studio. There are
no credits, with the sound track restricted to non-diegetic, revolutionary music,
male narration and the occasional red guards shouting ‘Long Live Chairman
Mao’. The image sequence focuses on the Sixth Girl School in Shanghai, the Red
Guards reading Mao’s work in the classroom, girls doing military exercises in the
school grounds and the shouting of slogans. This is followed by captions with
Mao quotations and images of Red Guards copying the quotations in large
characters and attaching the posters to a wall. They sing and dance, shouting
‘Long Live Chairman Mao’ and denouncing the ‘bad guys – the capitalists
hiding inside the Party’. The film collapses the narration and the Red Guards into
one voice by announcing that it is only Chairman Mao who supports ‘us’ in
carrying on the revolution. In this unifying manner, the voice over declares
‘Chairman Mao, we follow you forever, you are the red sun in our hearts’. The
film ends by zooming in on the captions ‘Long Live the Glorious and Boundless
Thoughts of Mao’ and ‘Long live, long, long live Chairman Mao’.
However, not all documentaries of the period slavishly implemented the
dogmatic formula. For a short period there was the promise of a more artistic
wave of documentary production, one of the most notable examples of which is
Jiangnan in Spring (Xinghua chunyü jiangnan, 1956). In the wake of Mao’s
slogan ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ the film markedly transgressed the
strictures of the dogmatic mode. Given its violation of the dogmatic formula,
the film met with severe government disapproval and, after a brief period of
screening, was denounced as spreading bourgeois ideas and withdrawn from
public display. Yet in its contrasting style, the film only underlines the official
horizon of expectations characteristic of the dogmatic documentary mode. What
then is the transgression of the official style of Jiangnan in Spring that so enraged
the political authorities? Instead of showing the collective activities of a
productive peasantry under the banner of Mao’s new China the viewer is treated
to a lyrical vista of a beautiful countryside. Under the supervision of China’s one
of the most celebrated film theorists Zhong Dianfei and directed by Gao
Zhongming, with enchanting cinematography by Han Haoren, and original music
by Li Baoshu, the film has been praised for its framing, the use of light and colour
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 415
13
and individualistic style in the presentation of spring in the south of the Yangzi
river. The documentary displays images of green fields and silkworm farms.
We see flowers, ducks and geese on lakes, bridges, tea plants, idyllic villages and
young women picking tea leaves in the hills, lines of fishing boats and fishermen
with their tame fishing-birds bringing back their catch. Political messages are
replaced by lyrical, poetic narration, presented by a gentle female voice,
substituting artistic expression for political control. No wonder that Zong Dianfei
was publicly denounced in 1957 as an unreconstructed rightist.
The presentational modes of these documentaries were determined by four
different production models (1) full or semi-scripted films, (2) short news
documentaries, (3) compilation films and (4) the rare poetic documentary. The
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pre-scripted news reel type of presentational mode is characterized by short topic

sentences and tight summaries, illustrated by image chains pruned to a
journalistic minimum. Such documentaries were often screened in advance of
feature films, before they were phased out in the 1980s when televised news took
over their function of information and political instruction. The bulk of short
news documentaries, scripted and driven by narrative, used footage shot after the
film plan had been approved. Their proposals and scripts were developed to an
advanced stage in order to avoid waste of materials and to ensure that official
guidelines had been followed. It followed that the documentaries so produced
were strictly controlled by political dogma, were reportage like, with a minimum
of location sound and non-diegetic music added during the editing process.
Compilation documentaries were made up of pre-existing raw footage subjected
to studio editing. This type of film peaked twice during, once in the early 1960s
when China experienced serious economic difficulties as a consequence of the
Great Leap Forward and the ensuing conflict with the Soviet Union; the second
time, in the wake of the Cultural Revolution when critics started to ask why
things had gone astray. The exception to the strict application of the dogmatic
formula film was a small group of documentaries that were permitted to employ a
poetic, artistic mode of presentation inviting the film viewer to rejoice in China’s
magnificent landscape and art. Though limited both in quantity and quality as a
film type, the lyrical documentary indicated the vulnerability of the dogmatic
mode as soon as its controlled prominence was challenged by a loosening of the
economic and political reins after Mao’s death.
If documentary film can be called the cinema of actuality, its Maoist variety of
‘Cinema of Workers Peasants and Soldiers’ is a serious deviation from that ideal.
For when actuality is not what the Party wanted the workers, peasants and soldiers to
see, it had to fake the images of social reality. When it did so by the intensity
of persuasion and in the extremity of its utopia, the documentary, instead of
transmitting information, was doomed to lose its grip on actuality. At its most
extreme, the dogmatic mode of presentation destroys the very idea of
documentation, rendering the documentary a limiting case of the genre. In this
sense, Chinese documentary film production during the Mao’s reign can be identified
by the studios’ obedient observance of what I have called the ‘dogmatic formula’.
 416
14 Y. Chu
The dogmatic formula
No film during this period, then, not even the rare lyrical documentary, was able to
escape the control exerted by the strictures that together make up the formulaic
structure of the dogmatic mode of presentation. What is important too is that the
formula does not just cover the pre-production, film text and its post-production
but the entire cinematic process, including distribution, exhibition and
consumption (cf. Chu 2007, 86f.). The most prominent ingredients of this process
comprise:

. A film policy informed by the convictions of Lenin, Mao, Jiang Qing and
other communist politicians.
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. A film theory narrowly informed by communist ideology.

. Subordination of traditional Chinese aesthetics to communist film theory.
. A tightly circumscribed subject plan reflecting official policy and film
theory.
. A quota system for production in tune with national economic planning.
. Film studios fully controlled by government.
. Production process vulnerable to changes in film policy.
. Strict control over and regular political screening of all cinema personnel.
. Enforced anonymity of directors, cinematographers and crews.
. Political selection of spectrum of appropriate kinds of social reality.
. Selection of footage reflecting the prescribed political message.
. Tightly controlled narration in the service of official ideology.
. Predominance of voice-of-God narration.
. Political selection of extra-diegetic music.
. Absence of cinematographic innovation.
. Unacknowledged fictionalization (staging, re-enactments).
. Fictional means of characterization (romantic idealization, heroic
stereotypes).
. State controlled distribution and exhibition.
. Compulsory screenings (mandatory viewing).
. Screening prohibitions.

Given the specifics of this formula, it should be obvious that the presentational
mode of the dogmatic documentary significantly deviates from the ‘expository’
mode as characterized by Nichols. Nor was it a merely transient type of cinema.
As a sub-genre of documentary film making it held sway in China for roughly a
quarter of a century. It was only in 1980s and especially after 1992, in the wake of
Deng Xiaoping’s inspection tour of the South of China that the uniformity of the
documentary film production began to dissolve in the emerging media pluralism.
Here, the second phase of the compilation documentaries played a significant role.
They were typically about prominent members of the Party, such as Zhou Enlai
(1979), Zhou Zongli (1979), Liu Shaoqi (1980) and many others who had made
a major contribution to the revolution. The foremost political purpose of such
 New Review of Film and Television Studies 417
15
documentaries appears to have been an expression of a widely felt need to
rehabilitate formerly celebrated but later disgraced and persecuted political
figures. What all these films have in common is their uniform celebratory tone and
an emphasis on the collective role played in the success of the revolution by many
dedicated leaders, a not so subtle critique of the previous salutation of Mao
Zedong’s singular leadership. In terms of the argument of this paper, what makes
this type of compilation documentary especially noteworthy is that it marks the
transition from the dogmatic to the expository mode of documentary cinema. Once
this transition gained momentum, it was not long before Chinese documentaries
film making began to advance to an observational type of documentary and from
there to experimental productions announcing the arrival amongst independent
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and semi-independent film makers of the emergence of a ‘polyphony of voices’ as

part of the larger picture of an evolving critical discourse and a first glimmer of a
fledgling ‘public media sphere’ (Chu 2007; Robinson 2013). Returning to Bill
Nichols and his influential theorization of the documentary film genre, I conclude
the main body of this paper by suggesting that we should amend his formally
rearranged typology by placing before his expository kind the dogmatic mode of
presentation as a radically doctrinaire style of film making.

Conclusion
As was to be expected, the addition of the dogmatic mode to the documentary
typology is by no means an exhaustive improvement of the schema proposed by
Nichols. Beattie, for one, added the ‘observation– entertainment’ type of
documentary in order to cover such recent innovations as ‘reality television, the
ducosoap, and reality game shows’, which would justify its place in the typology
as a sub-genre in its own right. Observation here includes a sense of ‘intimacy’
and ‘snoopy sociability’. However, Beattie is not viewing such new
developments as merely generic innovations, but adds his disquieting suspicion
that the new observation – entertainment ‘verges on a form of surveillance, replete
with camera angles reminiscent of closed-circuit surveillance camera footage,
that pries into otherwise proscribed spaces’ (Beattie 2004, 25). A second
qualification of the proposal presented in this paper is the merely exemplary
function of my focus on Chinese documentary cinema under Mao Zedong. The
dogmatic documentary is certainly not the prerogative of Chinese communism.
We can find examples in many dictatorial regimes, as for instance during Stalin’s
rule of the Soviet Union or in National Socialist Germany. After the Weimar
period, most of the brilliant film makers had fled Germany, others were
imprisoned and some who did not fully comply with fascist principles, as for
instance the middling Herbert Selpin, were murdered. Cinema during the Hitler
period ‘left little room for independent movement, seeking to occupy and control
all territory, both physical and psychic, in an effort to eradicate alterity’ (Nowell-
Smith 1996, 375), well exemplified by such trivial productions as Hitler Youth
Quex (1933), S.A. Man Brandt (1933), Bismarck (1940) or Campaign in Poland
 418
16 Y. Chu
(1940) and the pernicious The Wandering Jew (1941). The film production in
Nazi Germany, controlled by the Minister of Propaganda and Public
Enlightenment, Joseph Goebbels, had laid down prescriptions for film makers
that, in terms of authorial control, were akin to those of the Chinese examples.
It is however intriguing to note that their most famous examples, Leni
Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) and Olympia (1938), though ‘forceful
and eloquent propaganda pieces’, are not easily slotted into the dogmatic formula
(Parkinson 1995, 137; cf. Elsaesser 1989, 267; Reading 2001, 267f.; Bergfelder,
Carter, and Göktürk 2002, 161; Beattie 2004, 26). As the ‘definitive’ Oxford
History of World Cinema has it, ‘like many Anglo-American documentaries
of the period, Triumph of the Will endows the state with a powerful expertise
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seemingly beyond politics’, to be accepted without question (Nowell-Smith

1996, 326; cf. Zimmermann 2000). Thomas Doherty, in spite of his critical
analysis of the film, finds it nevertheless ‘awe-inspiring’ (Doherty 2013, 296).
An exception is the perspective offered by Siegfried Kracauer who describes
Triumph of the Will as a ‘complete transformation of reality’ into the ‘artificial
structure of the Party Convention’, itself a ‘staged reality’, suggestive of holding
the viewer captive by a carefully crafted cinematic formula (1974, 300f.).
In conclusion, a brief remark on a new and complex cinematic phenomenon,
the mock-documentary, also known as mockumentary, whose style of presentation
is perhaps farthest distanced from the dogmatic and expository modes (Roscoe and
Hight 2001). The mock-documentary can be recognized by the manner in which it
plays with the conventions of documentary cinema in order to dupe its gullible
audience. In doing so, it perverts the realist goal of the representation of some
‘truth’ into its opposite by cinematic deception, making a ‘mockery’ of the idea
that ‘documentaries present themselves as trustworthy’ (Bordwell and Thompson
2008, 339). However, because of its intent of perversion, combined with its expert
exploitation of the entire register of the techniques of realist cinematic persuasion,
the mockumentary is perhaps better viewed as parodic alternative to and critique
of documentary film than as one of its types. As such, the mock-documentary
could be regarded as meta-documentary.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

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