Bill Nichols[1]
defines the documentary tradition as the convergence of four elements in
conjunction with compliance to the expectation of documentary viewers that a
documentary film tell a story about something that actually happened to real
people, within their same diegetic world). The elements that came together to
evolve a tradition of cinematic documents into documentaries were: indexical documentation (or fidelity to
reality), poetic experimentation, narrative storytelling, and rhetorical
oratory.
It’s evident, as illustrated in his text that the narrative
storytelling was first introduced to non-fiction film with little concern about
indexicality by filmmakers like Robert Flaherty, but that the ability and
willingness of audiences to engage with the narrative in his films made it
clear that a narrative structure could be a powerful tool in structuring
non-fiction as well as fiction films. In
his prescient cinematic niche, Flaherty straddled the indefinable chasm between
fiction and documentary, as perhaps was only possible before documentary
conventions became more codified, and audience expectations more rigid.
The move toward including elements beyond indexicality,
along with the development of a reliable fiscal base for documentary production
(pioneered by John Grierson), created an environment where the documentary
tradition could thrive, and multiple practitioners could explore means and
modes of imbuing films with the distinct voice of their makers.
Each of the 6 modes of documentary filmmaking discussed in
Nichols’ chapter describe a way for the filmmaker to use or define their voice,
imbuing the indexical documentation that is inherent in film or video with the
other three elements that render the indexical subjective and constructed:
poetic experimentation, narrative storytelling, and rhetorical oratory.
Nichols’ modes include, first, the Poetic, wherein the
formal elements of filmmaking are used to a heightened sensory effect, which
was possibly the dominant mode in Flaherty’s Louisiana Story – where the plot
was extremely loose and fluid, (and was apparently scraped together by
Flaherty’s exasperated editor during the two years of filming[2])
but the individual shots and juxtapositions were richly laden with meaning and
detail. The Louisiana Story (1948)is
far more poem than story. (And possibly
more story than documentary, as the ties to indexicality are few). But the poetic mode seems to nearly always
surface when filmmakers have chosen documentary subjects they already have an
affinity for. It figures strongly in
affinity-for-sub-culture documentaries like The
Endless Summer(s)(1966,1994,2000) or Dog
Town and Z Boys(2001), or even in Ballerina
(2006) each of which portrays a performance culture with a nostalgic attention
to the nuance of successful technique, primarily through framing, editing, use
of slow-motion, and music.
The fourth mode (I’ll come back to #3) is Participatory mode, where the interaction between filmmakers and their subjects becomes an active part of meaning making in the film. Regret to Inform (1998) is a film where the premise of the film is the filmmakers experience interacting with subjects in Vietnam, where her first husband had been killed years earlier during the war. The film is entirely dependent on the presence and present interactions of the filmmaker for its existence.
The fifth mode is reflexive, calling attention to the conventions of film production. A fun example of this is Animals are Beautiful People (1975) which abuses montage editing and voiceover narration to a hilariously self-aware effect. But its also used more subtly as early as Vertov’s Man with a Movie Camera (1929).
The sixth mode is performative, which emphasizes the subjectivity
of the filmmaker’s involvement with a subject.
My memory of Born into Brothels
(2004) feels somewhat compatible with this mode (while it also possesses clear use of expository and participatory modes) – wherein the filmmaker was regularly
addressing her emotional response to the information, footage, experiences and
relationships she was encountering, as well as intentionally evoking performances (photographs) from her subjects, and where the purpose of sharing her own subjective emotion was to invoke social change. Her relationship with her
featured subjects became an allegory for an entire social problem.
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