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Noch Project Avalon, noch het monitoraat, noch Historia of eender ander individu of instelling zijn verantwoordelijk voor de inhoud van dit document. Maak er gebruik van op eigen risico. [Geschiedenis voor een breed publiek] [2011-2012] Professor: Prof. Tom Verschaffel Handboek: DE GROOT, J., Consuming History. Historians and Heritage in Contemporary Popular Culture, 2009. Gemaakt door: Andrea Bardyn (geupload, niet zelf gemaakt) Opmerkingen: PDF van de eerste editie van het boek Introduction to Documentary door Bill Nichols.Introduction to DocumentaryBill Nichols Introduction to Documentary Indiana University Press | Bloomington & IndianapolisFor the men and women who make the ?lmsContents Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi 1. Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? 1 2. How Do Documentaries Differ from Other Types of Film? 20 3. What Gives Documentary Films a Voice of Their Own? 42 4. What Are Documentaries About? 61 5. How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started? 82 6. What Types of Documentary Are There? 99 7. How Have Documentaries Addressed Social and Political Issues? 139 8. How Can We Write Effectively about Documentary? 168 Notes on Source Material 179 Filmography 191 List of Distributors 201 Index 219Acknowledgments My greatest debt of gratitude goes to the students who have studied documentary ?lm with me over the years. Their curiosity and questions have provided the motivation for this book. I am also greatly indebted to those who have gathered at the Visible Evidence conferences since their inception in 1993 to exchange ideas and pursue debates about documentary ?lm. These conferences, initiated by Jane Gaines and Michael Renov, have proven invaluable to the promotion of a lively dialogue about documentary ?lm in the broadest possible terms. The Getty Research Institute provided generous support that facilitated the completion of this book during the 1999?2000 academic year, for which I am most grateful. Without the assistance of the ?lmmakers who so generously provided still images of their work, this book would be greatly impoverished. I thank them for their willingness to provide superb illustrations, often on short notice. John Mrozik researched the ?lmography; Michael Wilson initiated and Victoria Gamburg updated and completed the research for the list of distributors. Their assistance was timely and indispensable. Joan Catapano helped launch this project at the press, and Michael Lundell saw it to completion. Carol Kennedy did a thorough and felicitous job of copy editing the manuscript. Matt Williamson did the layout and design for the book and designed the cover. I am grateful to them all for helping to produce a work that exceeds my expectations. No acknowledgment is ever complete without giving thanks to those who make such work possible in the most fundamental sense of all, and from whom the time to do it is inevitably stolen?my wife, Catherine M.Soussloff, and my stepdaughter, Eugenia Clarke.Their contribution is far greater than they will ever know. ixIntroduction Organized as a series of questions about documentary ?lm and video, Introduction to Documentary offers an overview of this fascinating form of ?lmmaking. The questions involve issues of ethics, de?nition, content, form, types, and politics. Because documentaries address the world in which we live rather than a world imagined by the ?lmmaker, they differ from the various genres of ?ction (science ?ction, horror, adventure, melodrama, and so on) in signi?cant ways.They are made with different assumptions about purpose, they involve a different quality of relationship between ?lmmaker and subject, and they prompt different sorts of expectations from audiences. These differences, as we shall see, guarantee no absolute separation between ?ction and documentary. Some documentaries make strong use of practices or conventions, such as scripting, staging, reenactment, rehearsal, and performance, for example, that we often associate with ?ction. Some ?ction makes strong use of practices or conventions, such as location shooting, the use of non-actors, hand-held cameras, improvisation, and found footage (footage not shot by the ?lmmaker) that we often associate with non-?ction or documentary. Since notions about what is ?tting to documentary and what is not change over time, some ?lms spark debate about the boundaries of ?ction and non-?ction. At one point Eric von Stroheim?s Greed (1925) and Sergei Eisenstein?s Strike (1925) were praised for the high degree of realism or verisimilitude they brought to their stories.At another point Roberto Rossellini?s Rome, Open City (1945) and John Cassavetes?s Shadows (1960) seemed to bring lived reality to the screen in ways not previously experienced. Reality TV shows like Cops, Real TV, and World?s Most Amazing Videos have heightened the degree to which television can exploit a sense of documentary authenticity and melodramatic spectacle simultaneously. And ?lms such as Forrest Gump, The Truman Show, EDTV, and The Blair Witch Project build their stories around the underlying premise of documentary: we experience a distinct form of fascination for the opportunity to witness the lives of others when they seem to belong to the same historical world that we do. xiIn The Blair Witch Project (Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick, 1999) this fascination not only relies on combining documentary conventions with the gritty realism of camcorder technology to impart historical credibility to a ?ctional situation, it also makes full use of promotional and publicity channels that surround the ?lm proper and help prepare us for it.These included a Web site with background information about the Blair witch, expert testimony, and references to ?actual? people and events, all designed to market the ?lm not as ?ction, and not even simply as a documentary, but as the raw footage of three ?lmmakers who tragically disappeared. If nothing else, The Blair Witch Project should remind us that our own idea of whether a ?lm is or is not a documentary is highly susceptible to suggestion. (Susan Stewart?s July 10?16, 1999, TV Guide review of a SciFi Channel program, ?Curse of the Blair Witch,? treats it as a bad but authentic attempt to document the story of an actual witch rather than as a promotional tie-in to this clever ?ction story.) Film, video, and now digitally based images can bear witness to what took place in front of the camera with extraordinary ?delity. Painting and drawing seem a pale imitation of reality compared to the sharp, highly de?ned, precise representations available on ?lm, video, or computer monitors.Yet this ?delity serves the needs of ?ction ?lmmaking as much as it facilitates the work of medical imaging through the use of x-rays, MRIs, or CAT scans. The ?delity of the image may be as crucial to a close-up of Tom Cruise or Catherine Deneuve as it is to an x-ray of a lung, but the uses of that ?delity are vastly different. We believe what we see and what is represented about what we see at our own risk. As digital media make all too apparent, ?delity lies in the mind of the beholder as much as it lies in the relationship between a camera and what comes before it. (With digitally produced images there may be no camera and nothing that ever comes before it, even if the resulting image bears an extraordinary ?delity to familiar people, places, and things.) Whether what we see is exactly what we would have seen had we been present alongside the camera cannot be guaranteed. Certain technologies and styles encourage us to believe in a tight, if not perfect, correspondence between image and reality, but the effects of lenses, focus, contrast, depth of ?eld, color, high-resolution media (?lm with very ?ne grain, video displays with very many pixels) seem to guarantee the authenticity of what we see. They can all be used, however, to give the impression of authenticity to what has actually been fabricated or constructed. And once images are selected and arranged into patterns or sequences, into scenes or entire ?lms, the interpretation and meaning of what we see xii | Introductionwill hinge on many more factors than whether the image is a faithful representation of what, if anything, appeared before the camera. The documentary tradition relies heavily on being able to convey to us the impression of authenticity. It is a powerful impression. It began with the raw cinematic image and the appearance of movement:no matter how poor the image and how different from the thing photographed, the appearance of movement remained indistinguishable from actual movement. (Each frame of a ?lm is a still image; apparent motion relies on the effect produced when they are projected in rapid succession.) When we believe that what we see bears witness to the way the world is, it can form the basis for our orientation to or action within the world.This is obviously true in science, where medical imaging plays a vital diagnosIntroduction | xiii Palace of Delights (Jon Else and Steve Longstreth, 1982). Photo by Nancy Roger, courtesy of Jon Else. A documentary ?lm crew on location. Most of the components of a feature ?lm are replicated on a documentary production, though usually on a smaller scale. The ?crew? can be as small as a single camera-sound operator/director. For many documentaries the ability to respond to events that do not unfold entirely as the director intends, to, that is, ?real life,? plays a central role in the organization of the crew and in its working methods. In this case, Jon Else does the ?lming, with a 16mm camera, and Steve Longstreth records the sound with a Nagra tape recorder designed to keep the sound synchronized to the image. They are shooting a scene about the ?Momentum Machine? at the San Francisco Exploratorium.tic role in almost all branches of medicine. Propaganda, like advertising, also relies on our belief in a bond between what we see and the way the world is, or how we might act within it. So do many documentaries when they set out to persuade us to adopt a given perspective or point of view about the world. Filmmakers are often drawn to documentary modes of representation when they want to engage us in questions or issues that pertain directly to the historical world we all share. Some will stress the originality or distinctiveness of their own way of seeing the world:we will see the world we share as ?ltered through a particular perception of it. Some will stress the authenticity or ?delity of their representation of the world: we will see the world we share with a clarity or transparency that downplays the style or perceptions of the ?lmmaker. In either case, those who adopt the documentary as their vehicle of expression turn our attention to the world we already occupy.They do so with the same resourcefulness and inventiveness that ?ction ?lmmakers use to draw our attention to worlds we would have otherwise never known. Documentary ?lm and video, therefore, displays the same complexity and challenge, the same fascination and excitement as any of the genres of ?ction ?lm.Through the course of this book we will explore how the issues involved in representing reality have tested the resourcefulness and inventiveness of documentary ?lmmakers. It may be useful to mention as a caveat that this is not a documentary ?lm history. Such a work would bear an obligation to identify the major ?lmmakers, movements, periods, and schools that have gone into constructing the documentary tradition as we know it today. Several books do this already: Erik Barnouw?s highly readable and engaging account of documentary, Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, Richard Meran Barsam?s useful overview, NonFiction Film: A Critical History, and Jack C. Ellis?s carefully organized account, The Documentary Idea: A Critical History of English-Language Documentary Film and Video. Although each book has its strengths and weaknesses, in the aggregate they provide a helpful introduction to the historical development of documentary ?lm. Introduction to Documentary complements these efforts. The historical emphasis of these other books leaves some of the conceptual questions and issues about documentary less carefully developed. What modes of documentary ?lmmaking exist, for example, is a question that is partly historical (different modes tend to come to prominence at different points in time) but more basically conceptual (the idea of modes, or distinct types, of documentary itself needs to be thought through and developed before it can be applied historically). How should a documentary represent actual xiv | Introductionpeople rather than trained actors is another question that is answered implicitly by the record of documentary ?lmmaking, but it, too, needs to be isolated and scrutinized if we are to come to grips with the ethics of documentary ?lm practice, an issue most histories of the genre neglect. Introduction to Documentary will provide hints and traces of documentary ?lm history since the issues and practices examined here arise in history and cannot be discussed entirely free from it.The book does not, however, attempt to provide comprehensive and balanced coverage of the various key ?lmmakers, movements, and national characteristics of the documentary genre over the course of its history. The works chosen for discussion here are indicative of speci?c questions or exemplify important approaches to certain issues. Although illustrative, they do not amount to a history of the genre. Identifying some ?lms rather than others immediately suggests the idea of a canon, a list of ?lms that constitute the best of the tradition. I have tried to avoid constructing a canon.Such an approach carries implications about how history works (great artists, great works lead the way). My own view is that certain artists, while extremely in?uential, are but one part of a larger stew of ideas, values, issues, technologies, institutional frameworks, sponsorship, and shared forms of expression that all contribute to the history of documentary or any other medium. This book, therefore, runs the risk of constructing a canon through its selective use of examples, but it also tries to indicate that the works chosen, while often extraordinary accomplishments artistically and socially, have little standing as uncontested monuments or icons.It is how they solve problems and exemplify solutions, how they are suggestive of trends, practices, styles, and issues rather than any absolute sense of value intrinsic to them that takes priority here. Many of the works referred to in Introduction to Documentary are already part of a canon in that they are works frequently cited in other works and frequently included in courses.It seems more useful to develop the conceptual tools proposed here by referring to familiar works rather than by relying heavily on less accessible ones.This book may therefore reinforce the sense of a canon, but wherever possible I have chosen at least two ?lms to use as examples for a given point.In this way I hope to give a fuller sense of how different ?lms ?nd at least slightly different solutions to common problems and to suggest that no one ?lm deserves the status of best or greatest, certainly not in any timeless, ahistorical sense. One ?nal point: as an introduction to documentary ?lm and video, this book leaves many similar, sometimes parallel developments to the side.The various forms of realism in ?ction ?lms would be one example. Docudrama, Introduction | xvwhich has a complex and even more fascinating history in Britain than in the United States, is another.These alternative ways of addressing and representing the historical world, from photography and photojournalism to radio reports and oral histories, are treated as peripheral to the central focus here. These forms are peripheral only in the sense that they lie somewhat to the side of this study, not that they hold less interest, deserve less attention, or bear less signi?cance. A study revolving around photojournalism or photomontage might treat documentary ?lm and video as peripheral in the same sense as I mean here. There is a speci?city to documentary ?lm and video that revolves around the phenomenon of moving sounds and images recorded in media that allow for a remarkably high degree of ?delity between a representation and what it refers to. Digital forms of representation add to the number of media that ful?ll this criteria. Some will see an expansion of documentary into media such as CD-ROMs or interactive Web sites devoted to historical issues and organized according to conventions of documentary representation. I see something closer to cross-pollination than a literal expansion or direct continuation as related media trade conventions and borrow techniques from one another.Web sites, like photography before them, will someday deserve a history and theory of their own. For now we can treat all these related media as very signi?cant but nonetheless peripheral to our central concern. Digitally based media remind us even more forcefully than ?lm or video how much our belief in the authenticity of the image is a matter of trust to begin with. Digital recording and editing techniques can begin with an image generated without any referent whatsoever in the historical world.Even when there is such a referent, an actual person or event, they can modify sounds and images so that the modi?cation is of exactly the same order and same status as what would be called the ?original? version of the sound or image in other media. Copy and original are just strings of 1s and 0s in different locations. In fact, with digital technology the whole idea of an original begins to fade. Whether this idea is necessary to the belief we tender the documentary image, though, is open to question. This book assumes that the bond between photographic, video, or digital images and what they represent can be extraordinarily powerful even if it can also be entirely fabricated.The questions pursued in this introduction are not intended to allow us to decide whether or to what degree fabrication has taken place so that we can determine what the referent is ?really? like or what ?really happened.?They are designed more to ask how it is that we are willing to trust in the representations made by moving images, when such trust may be more, or less, xvi | Introductionwarranted, and to examine what the consequences of our trust or belief might be for our relation to the historical world in which we live. Introduction to Documentary pursues the following questions:?Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking?? in Chapter 1. This chapter explores some of the ethical issues surrounding documentary and suggests how they may differ from the types of ethical issues that may arise with ?ction.In Chapter 2, we ask, ?How Do Documentaries Differ from Other Types of Film?? and examine various, complementary ways in which this question can be answered. This chapter gives our ?rst taste of a historical dimension to documentary but stresses qualities and conditions that recur in different moments. Chapter 3 asks, ?What Gives Documentary Films a Voice of Their Own?? This question introduces concepts from the art of rhetoric to show how documentary remains indebted to the rhetorical tradition and how the documentary ?lmmaker often resembles the orator of old in his or her efforts to address issues or problems that call for social consensus or solution.Chapter 4 wants to know ?What Are Documentaries About?? It looks at some of the characteristics of those issues that tend to provide the content or subject-matter for documentary, especially the degree to which the issues taken up by documentary evade scienti?c or purely logical solution.They depend on assumptions and values, which, since they vary, then call on representations such as documentaries to persuade us of the worthiness of one approach over others. Chapter 5 asks, ?How Did Documentary Filmmaking Get Started?? in order to question some of the prevailing assumptions about documentary being synonymous either with early cinema of the sort Louis Lumière promoted, such as Workers Leaving the Factory (1895), or with non?ction ?lm generally. The chapter identi?es four different contributing practices that combined into a documentary ?lm practice by the late 1920s. Chapter 6 proposes to answer the question ?What Types of Documentary Film Are There?? by identifying six different modes, or types, of documentary. Each mode has its exemplary ?lmmakers, its paradigmatic ?lms, and its own forms of institutional support and audience expectation. All six are available at any given moment to provide the structural organization to a ?lm even if the ?lm freely mixes them together. Chapter 7 raises the question ?How Have Documentaries Addressed Social and Political Issues?? Like Chapters 4 and 5, this chapter also has a historical dimension as it looks at how the central issue of community ?nds representation in documentary and how this issue has close ties to questions of the nation state, feminism, identity politics, and multiculturalism or hybrid identities. Finally, Chapter 8 addresses the question ?How Can We Write EffecIntroduction | xviitively about Documentary?? Answering this question involves walking through some of the basic steps of constructing an essay, using a hypothetical writing assignment and two possible responses to it. By providing two model essays that take very different views of a classic documentary ?lm, Robert Flaherty?s Nanook of the North (1922), the chapter tries to indicate how the student?s own perspective or thesis becomes a central part of a written response to a given ?lm. Behind Introduction to Documentary lies the assumption that awareness of the central concepts in documentary ?lm practice, along with a sense of the history of documentary ?lmmaking, provides extremely valuable tools to the ?lmmaker as well as the critic. A strong link between production and study has been characteristic of much documentary ?lmmaking in the past. My hope is that it will remain a vital link in the future and that the concepts discussed here will help preserve that vitality. xviii | IntroductionIntroduction to DocumentaryChapter 1 Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? TWO TYPES OF FILM Every ?lm is a documentary. Even the most whimsical of ?ctions gives evidence of the culture that produced it and reproduces the likenesses of the people who perform within it. In fact, we could say that there are two kinds of ?lm: (1) documentaries of wish-ful?llment and (2) documentaries of social representation.Each type tells a story, but the stories, or narratives, are of different sorts. Documentaries of wish-ful?llment are what we would normally call ?ctions.These ?lms give tangible expression to our wishes and dreams, our nightmares and dreads.They make the stuff of the imagination concrete? visible and audible.They give a sense of what we wish, or fear, reality itself might be or become. Such ?lms convey truths if we decide they do. They are ?lms whose truths, insights, and perspectives we may adopt as our own or reject. They offer worlds for us to explore and contemplate, or we may simply revel in the pleasure of moving from the world around us to these other worlds of in?nite possibility. Documentaries of social representation are what we typically call non- ?ction. These ?lms give tangible representation to aspects of the world we already inhabit and share. They make the stuff of social reality visible and 1audible in a distinctive way, according to the acts of selection and arrangement carried out by a ?lmmaker.They give a sense of what we understand reality itself to have been, of what it is now, or of what it may become.These ?lms also convey truths if we decide they do. We must assess their claims and assertions, their perspectives and arguments in relation to the world as we know it and decide whether they are worthy of our belief. Documentaries of social representation offer us new views of our common world to explore and understand. As stories, ?lms of both type call on us to interpret them, and as ?true stories,? ?lms call on us to believe them. Interpretation is a matter of grasping how the form or organization of the ?lm conveys meanings and values. Belief is a question of our response to these meanings and values.We can believe in the truths of ?ctions as well as those of non-?ctions: Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) may teach us about the nature of obsession just as much as The Plow That Broke the Plains (Pare Lorentz, 1936) may teach us about soil conservation. Belief receives a premium in documentaries since these ?lms often are intended to have an impact on the historical world itself and to do so must persuade or convince us that one point of view or approach is preferable to others. Fiction may be content to suspend disbelief (to accept its world as plausible), but non-?ction often wants to instill belief (to accept its world as actual).This is what aligns documentary with the rhetorical tradition, in which eloquence serves a social as well as aesthetic purpose.We take not only pleasure from documentary but direction as well. This is the appeal and power of documentary. (We?ll call documentaries of wish-ful?llment ??ctions? from now on and simply use ?documentary? as shorthand for non-?ction ?lms of social representation.) Documentaries lend us the ability to see timely issues in need of attention, literally.We see (cinematic) views of the world.These views put before us social issues and current events, recurring problems and possible solutions.The bond between documentary and the historical world is deep and profound. Documentary adds a new dimension to popular memory and social history. This introduction to the ways in which documentary engages with the world as we know it takes up the series of questions indicated by the chapter titles.These questions are the commonsense sort of questions we might ask ourselves if we want to understand documentary ?lm. Each question takes us a bit further into the domain of documentary; each question helps us understand how a documentary tradition arose and evolved and what it has to offer us today. Documentary engages with the world by representing it, and it does so in three ways. First, documentaries offer us a likeness or depiction of the world that bears a recognizable familiarity.Through the capacity of ?lm, and 2 | INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARYaudio tape, to record situations and events with considerable ?delity, we see in documentaries people, places, and things that we might also see for ourselves, outside the cinema.This quality alone often provides a basis for belief: we see what was there before the camera; it must be true. This remarkable power of the photographic image cannot be underestimated, even though it is subject to quali?cation because (1) an image cannot tell everything we want to know about what happened and (2) images can be altered both during and after the fact by both conventional and digital means. In documentaries we ?nd stories or arguments, evocations or descriptions that let us see the world anew. The ability of the photographic image to reproduce the likeness of what is set before it compels us to believe that it is reality itself re-presented before us, while the story or argument presents a distinct way of regarding this reality. We may be familiar with the problems of corporate downsizing, global assembly lines, and plant shutdowns, but Michael Moore?s Roger and Me (1989) gives us a view of these issues in a fresh and distinctive way.We may know about cosmetic surgery and the debates surrounding efforts to regain lost youth by these means, but Michael Rubbo?s Daisy:The Story of a Facelift (1982) adds his own personal perspective to our knowledge. Second, documentaries also stand for or represent the interests of others. Representative democracy, in contrast to participatory democracy, relies on elected individuals representing the interests of their constituency. (In a participatory democracy each individual participates actively in political decision-making rather than relying on a representative).Documentary ?lmmakers often take on the role of public representatives. They speak for the interests of others, both for the individuals whom they represent in the ?lm and for the institution or agency that supports their ?lmmaking activity. The Selling of the Pentagon (1971), a CBS news production on the ways in which the American military markets itself and ensures itself a substantial slice of the federal tax dollar, presents itself as a representative of the American people, investigating the use and abuse of political power in Washington. It also represents the interests of CBS news in marketing itself as an institution independent from government pressure and committed to a well-established tradition of investigative journalism. Similarly, Nanook of the North (1922), Robert Flaherty?s great story of an Inuit family?s struggle for survival in the Arctic, represents Inuit culture in ways that the Inuit were not yet prepared to do for themselves and represents the interests of Revillon Freres, Flaherty?s sponsor, at least to the extent of depicting fur hunting as a practice that bene?ts the Inuit as well as consumers. It also, somewhat less overtly, represents Robert Flaherty?s conception of Inuit culture. The emphasis on a nuclear family assembled Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? | 3for the sake of the ?lm and on Nanook?s own skills as a hunter, despite the fact that most Eskimos living in the 1920s no longer relied on the traditional techniques depicted, for example, belong to the cinema of wish-ful?llment: they are a ?ction about the kind of peoples and cultures someone like Flaherty wished to ?nd in the world. Third, documentaries may represent the world in the same way a lawyer may represent a client?s interests: they put the case for a particular view or interpretation of evidence before us. In this sense documentaries do not simply stand for others, representing them in ways they could not do themselves, but rather they more actively make a case or argument; they assert what the nature of a matter is to win consent or in?uence opinion. The Selling of the Pentagon represents the case that the U.S. military aggressively fuels the perception of its own indispensability and its enormous need for continued, preferably increased funding. Nanook of the North represents the struggle for survival in a harsh, unforgiving climate as the test of a man?s 4 | INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARY Daisy: The Story of a Facelift (Michael Rubbo, National Film Board of Canada, 1982) Michael Rubbo does not spare us the clinical details. His own voice-over commentary tries to grasp the complexity of the issues while his images detail the realities of the process.mettle and a family?s resilience.Through the valor and courage of this family unit, with its familiar gender roles and untroubled relationships, we gain a sense of the dignity of an entire people. Daisy: The Story of a Facelift represents the case for the social construction of an individual?s image in novel and disturbing ways that combine the effects of social conditioning, medical procedures, and documentary ?lmmaking practices. REPRESENTING OTHERS Documentaries, then, offer aural and visual likenesses or representations of some part of the historical world. They stand for or represent the views of individuals, groups, and institutions. They also make representations, mount arguments, or formulate persuasive strategies of their own, setting out to persuade us to accept their views as appropriate.The degree to which one or more of these aspects of representation come into play will vary from ?lm to ?lm, but the idea of representation itself is central to documentary. The concept of representation is what compels us to ask the question, ?Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking?.? This question could also be phrased as ?What Do We Do with People When We Make a Documentary?.? For ?ction ?lms the answer is simple: we ask them to do what we want. ?People? are treated as actors. Their social role in the ?lmmaking process is de?ned by the traditional role of the actor.Individuals enter into contractual relations to perform for the ?lm;the director has the right, and obligation, to obtain a suitable performance.The actor is valued for the quality of performance delivered, not for ?delity to his or her own everyday behavior and personality. Both the actor and the ?lmmaker retain certain rights, receive certain compensation, and undertake to ful?ll certain expectations. (Using non-actors begins to complicate the issue. Stories that rely on non-actors, such as many of the Italian neo-realist ?lms or some of the New Iranian cinema, often occupy part of the fuzzy territory between ?ction and non-?ction, stories of wish-ful?llment and stories of social representation.) For non-?ction, or documentary, the answer is not quite so simple. ?People? are treated as social actors: they continue to conduct their lives more or less as they would have done without the presence of a camera. They remain cultural players rather than theatrical performers. Their value to the ?lmmaker consists not in what a contractual relationship can promise but in what their own lives embody. Their value resides not in the ways in which they disguise or transform their everyday behavior and personality but in the ways in which their everyday behavior and personality serves the needs of the ?lmmaker.(One parallel between documentary characters and Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? | 5traditional actors is that ?lmmakers often favor those individuals whose unschooled behavior before a camera allows them to convey a sense of complexity and depth similar to what we value in a trained actor?s performance.) The director?s right to a performance is a ?right? that, if exercised, threatens the sense of authenticity that surrounds the social actor.The degree to which people?s behavior and personality change during the making of a ?lm can introduce an element of ?ction into the documentary process (the root meaning of ?ction is to make or fabricate). Self-consciousness and modi?- cations in behavior can become a form of misrepresentation, or distortion, in one sense, but they also document the ways in which the act of ?lmmaking alters the reality it sets out to represent. The famous twelve-hour documentary series on the Loud family televised on PBS, An American Family (Craig Gilbert, 1972), for example, raised considerable debate about whether the Louds?behavior and their own family relationships were altered by the act of ?lmmaking or were simply ?captured? on ?lm. (The parents divorced, their son declared himself gay;these acts ?gured heavily in the overall drama of the series.) And if these events came about because of the watchful eye of the camera and the presence of the ?lmmakers, were these changes encouraged, even if inadvertently, because they added to the dramatic intensity of the series? What to do with people? Put differently, the question becomes, ?What responsibility do ?lmmakers have for the effect of their acts on the lives of those ?lmed?? Most of us think of the invitation to act in a ?lm as a desirable, even enviable, opportunity. But what if the invitation is not to act in a ?lm but to be in a ?lm, to be yourself in a ?lm? What will others think of you; how will they judge you? What aspects of your life may stand revealed that you had not anticipated? What pressures, subtly implied or bluntly asserted, come into play to modify your conduct, and with what consequences? These questions have various answers, according to the situation, but they are of a different order from those posed by most ?ctions. They place a different burden of responsibility on ?lmmakers who set out to represent others rather than to portray characters of their own invention. These issues add a level of ethical consideration to documentary that is much less prominent in ?ction ?lmmaking. Consider Luis Buñuel?s Land without Bread (1932). In it, Buñuel represents the lives of the citizens of the Hurdanos, a remote, impoverished region of Spain, and he does so with an outrageously judgmental, if not ethnocentric, voice-over commentary.?Here is another type of idiot,?the narrator tells us at one moment as a Hurdanos man raises his head into the frame. At another moment we see a tiny mountain stream as the narrator informs us, ?During the summer there is no water other than this, and the inhabitants 6 | INTRODUCTION TO DOCUMENTARYuse it despite the disgusting ?lth it carries.? Taken at face value, this abusive representation of people takes our breath away. How profoundly disrespectful; how contemptuous! How little regard for the hardships and dif?culties of those who confront an inhospitable environment and whom the ?lmmaker does not choose to nominate for the myth of noble savage as Robert Flaherty did with Nanook. On the surface of it, Land without Bread seems to be an example of the most callous form of reporting, worse even than the hounding of celebrities by paparazzi or the gross misrepresentations of others in ?mondo??lms such as Mondo Cane (Gualtiero Jacopetti and Franco E.Prosperi, 1965).But Luis Buñuel?s ?lm gradually suggests a level of self-awareness and calculated effect that might prompt us to wonder if Buñuel is not quite the insensitive cad we initially thought.In one scene, for example, we are told the Hurdanos eat goat meat only when a goat accidentally dies. What we see, though, is Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking? | 7 In and Out of Africa (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Taylor, 1992). Photos courtesy of Lucien Taylor. This ?lm adopts a radically different attitude from Land without Bread. A high degree of collaboration occurred between ?lmmakers and subject. Their interaction gives the viewer a sense of ?inside? or ?behind-the-scenes? knowledge rather than the impression of parody, or possibly disrespect. Middleman and merchant Gabai Barré assures the ?lmmakers that this piece of ?wood,? as he calls it, is a good sculpture. The leap in value that an object takes when it goes from ?wood? to ?art? is the source of Barré?s livelihood and of his client?s sense of aesthetic pleasure.a goat that falls off a steep mountainside as a puff of gun smoke appears in the corner of the frame. The ?lm suddenly cuts to an overhead view of the dead goat tumbling down the mountainside.If this was an accident, why was a gun ?red? And how did Buñuel jump from one position, at some distance from the point where the goat falls, to another, right above the falling goat, while the goat is still in the midst of tumbling down the mountain side? Buñuel?s representation of the incident seems to contain a wink: he seems to be hinting to us that this is not a factual representation of Hurdanos life as he found it or an unthinkingly offensive judgment of it but a criticism or exposé of the forms of representation common to the depiction of traditional peoples. Perhaps the ?lm?s comments and judgments are a caricature of the kind of comments found both in typical travelogues of the time and among many potential v