Nochols, Bill. (1991). Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press.
I. The Domain of Documentary (pp. 3-31)"What films have to say about the enduring human condition or about the pressing issues of the day can never be separated from how they say it, how this saying moves and affects us, how we engage with a work, not with a theory of it" (p. xiii).
"
We prepare ourselves not to comprehend a story but to grasp an argument. we do so in relation to sounds and images that retain a distinct bond to the world we all share" (p. 5).
"Our access to historical reality may only be by means of representation and these representations may sometimes seems to be more eager to
chase their own tails than able to guarantee the authenticity of what they refer to" (p. 7)
"Dziga Vertov advocated in his writings and his films an active process of social construction, including the construction of the viewer's historical-materialist consciousness, and Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay,
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, foresaw the degree to which the image wold be placed in the series of the dominant ideology as spectacle and distraction but would also retain the explosive potential to reassemble time and space into whatever order one desired" (pp. 10-11).
---> Look into Vertov's notion of social construction!
Nochols defines the documentary from the point of view of the filmmaker, the text and the viewer. In explaining its institutional practice, Nichols sheds light on the limitation of reflexivity as follows: "Documentary may talk about anything in the historical world except itself (until we consider reflexive documentaries where this very presupposition becomes the object of scrutiny).
It is hard to be reflexive if you have something urgent to say about a pressing issue, and for most documentarists the urgency of the said takes far higher precedence than the self-consciousness of the saying. This defines one of the classic traits of documentary at the same time that it helps explain why the 'discursive formation' (in Foucault's terms) remains somewhat underdeveloped and unexamined" (p. 17).
About a constituency of viewers, he says, "The documentary viewer employs 'procedures of
rhetorical engagement' rather than the 'procedures of fictive engagement' that guide the viewing of classic narrative film" (p. 26).
II. Documentary Modes of Representation (pp. 32-75)Nichols's topology of documentary mode provides a very useful tool to analyze many different types of documentaries.
1) Emerging as a counterpart of entertainment quality of the fiction film,
expository documentary takes a voice-of-God commentary style. As often seen in evening news, the authoring presence of the filmmaker is represented through the VOG commentary or an on-camera voice of authority.
2) Agaist the moralizing quality of expository documentary,
observational documentary (or direct cinema, non-fiction film, fly-on-the-wall style) --i.e. Fredrick Wiseman--tend to portray exhaustive depictions of everyday life with syn sound and relatively long shots, thus allowing viewers to have a vivid sense of comprehensive documentation. "Observational cinema affords the viewer an opportunityto look in on and overhear something of the lived experience of others, to gain some sense of the sidtinct thythms of everyday life, to see the colors, shapes, and spatial relationships among people and their possessions, to hear the intonation, inflection, and accents that give a spoken language its 'gain' and the distinguish one native speaker from another" (p.42). By emphasizing the absence of the filmmaker or an authoring agency, observational documentary "conveys the sense of unmediated and unfettered access to the world" (p.43).
3)
Interactive documentary, based on interview and interventionist tactics, makes the presence of the filmmaker more evident through interaction with individuals in present events. Nichols explains this mode predominated by verbal exchange, "The mode introduces a sense of partialness, of
situated presence and
local knowledge that derives from the actual encounter of filmmaker and other" (p. 44). As in Rouch's Chronicle of a Summer, Nichols states, the interactive mode show many social actors but only through direct encounter with the filmmkaer. According to Nichols, a participatory dynamic in this mode take beyond the interview style employed in an expository text.
4) Arising from more self-awareness and dubious questioning of representation itself,
reflexive documentary explores conventional documentary styles as well as structure, strategy, expectations and effects. In particular, by drawing attention to the film making process or its device itself, it poses to the viewers problems concerning film representation itself.
Nichols analyzes
The Thin Blue Line directed by Errol Morris in depth. "Reflexive documentaries will employ such [representation of realism, unproblematic access to the world by means of acting style, narrative structure, and cinematic techniques such as point-of-view shots] techniques only to interrupt and expose them. The Thin Blue Line, for example, relies heavily on the conventions of the interview with its affinities for the conventional, but also draws attention to the tensions that arise when statements contradict one another...Morris dramatizes the quest for evidence, and underlines the uncertainty of what evidence there is" (pp. 57-58).
With an emphasis given to the encounter between filmmaker and viewer, the reflexive documentary, Nichols argues, prompts the viewer to a heightened consciousness of his or her relation to the text and of the text's problematic relationship to its representation itself. Here he brings the term,
ostranenie, coined by the Russian formalists who made unfamiliar familiar and familiar unfamiliar through unexpected juxtapositions.
Based on epistemological doubt, Nichols maintains that "
deformative intervention of the cinematic apparatus in the process of representation" (p. 61) thus taken-for-granted viewing conditions are subject to scrutiny such that "
a thickened, denser sense of the textuality of the viewing experience is in operation" (p. 62).
In reviewing the reflexive mode in a historical context, Nichols affirms that this mode gained some ground in the 70s and 80s on the assumption that political urgency/radical transformation requires formal innovation and changes in the signifier. In parallel with this movement, Nichols mines into feminist documentary as another stream of reflexive mode of representation. Julia Lesage, in particular, recontextualizes domestic individual experience in a shared political domain and writes, "[These films] show experiences and to elaborate a strategy for making inroads in the public sphere" (cited p.64). Thereby Nichols redefines reflexivity: "Reflexivity, then, need not be purely formal; it can also be pointedly political" (p. 64). He recognizes feminism as a vital alternative discourse that documentary lacks: "The tools that documentary discourse lacked, feminism provided. It instigated a radical reconceptualization of subjectivity and politics that achieved through the programmatics of consciousness-raising an effect comparatble to that of reflexivity."
Thus, Nichols summarizes the bipolarity of reflexive strategies as formal reflexive and political reflexive. Thus he insinuates even expository documentaries may be seen as reflexive if they heighten viewers' consciousness. Now a question arise around films that open up formal awareness without political sense in viewer consciousness. He answers to this questions as follows: "We must attend to formal reflexivity since the content of the form, in Hayden White's phrase, is indeed decisive, but we must also attend to political reflexivity since the form of the content is equally critical.
