Keith beattie documentary screens ~ non fiction film and television

Documentary Screens
Non-Fiction Film and Television

Keith Beattie


Documentary Screens


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Documentary
Screens
Non-Fiction Film
and Television

Keith Beattie


© Keith Beattie 2004
All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this
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Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication
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The author has asserted his right to be identified

as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2004 by
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For my mother, and to the memory of my father,
Reginald Joseph Beattie (1922–1998)


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Contents
viii

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1

1

‘Believe Me, I’m of the World’: Documentary
Representation

10

2

Men with Movie Cameras: Flaherty and Grierson

26

3

Constructing and Contesting Otherness:
Ethnographic Film

44

4

Decolonizing the Image: Aboriginal Documentary

Productions

63

The Truth of the Matter: Cinéma Vérité and
Direct Cinema

83

5
6

The Camera I: Autobiographical Documentary

105

7

Finding and Keeping: Compilation Documentary

125

8

The Fact/Fiction Divide: Drama-Documentary and
Documentary Drama

146

9

The Evening Report: Television Documentary
Journalism

161

Up Close and Personal: Popular Factual
Entertainment

182

10
11

The Burning Question: The Future of Documentary

204

Conclusion

217

Appendix: Screenings and Additional Resources

219

Notes

237

Bibliography

250

Index

269

vii


Acknowledgements
This book began as a series of questions raised in the course
‘Documentary Film and History’, coordinated by Professor Roger
Bell at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. Multiple thanks
are due to Roger for involving me in the course during its inception and to the students in the course whose insights and enthusiasm provided a stimulus for the writing of this book. For their
generous and long-standing support of my endeavours in the areas
of film and media I’d like to thank Dr Geoff Mayer, Head, Cinema
Studies Department, La Trobe University, Melbourne; Dr Richard
Pascal, School of Humanities, at the Australian National
University, Canberra; and Associate Professor Roy Shuker, Head,
Media Studies Programme, Victoria University of Wellington,
New Zealand.
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Melbourne,
allowed me to screen many of the works examined here. I would
like to thank Fiona Villella of ACMI for her assistance. Aysen
Mustafa of the Australian Film Institute also helped locate film
titles. My thanks to Dennis O’Rourke for agreeing to speak with me.
At Palgrave Press I am particularly grateful to Catherine Gray
for her patience and support. Also at Palgrave, Sheree Keep,

Beverley Tarquini and Kate Wallis provided timely and efficient
assistance. Comments by Palgrave’s two anonymous reviewers of
the manuscript were productive and welcome.
Louise and Michael Thake were, as ever, supportive and encouraging in the best possible way. Dr Julie Ann Smith offered an inestimable degree of support and extremely helpful comments on the
manuscript. The English language cannot do justice to such a contribution, and so: Grazie, molte grazie, brava dottoressa … adesso è
ora di passare ad altro.
Any errors in this book remain, of course, my own.

viii


Introduction
A 72-year-old director takes up a digital video camera and travels
the highways and back roads of France to shoot a series of startling
real life vignettes which turn an unlikely topic, scavenging, into a
story of loneliness, loss, ageing, and human fortitude at the beginning of the twenty-first century (Agnès Varda’s Les Glâneurs et la
Glâneuse, 2002). Subjects appearing in their homes and other locations testify in verse and song to the part alcohol plays in their lives
(in the British Broadcasting Corporation’s [BBC] Drinking for
England, 1998). A self-described explorer and adventurer with little
experience of filmmaking journeys to the far north of Québec and
directs a group of Inuit people in a reconstruction of their past way
of life (Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, 1922, the first ‘documentary’ film). Documentary productions encompass remarkable
representations of surprising realities. How do documentaries
achieve their ends? What types of documentary are there? What
factors are implicated in their production? Such questions – which
constantly return us to the representations themselves – animate
this study.
Documentary Screens critically examines formal features, evidentiary capacities, patterns of argumentation, and histories of
selected central documentary films and television programmes.
This study situates these features, and the documentaries themselves, within varying contexts which inform and impact on the

documentary texts in multiple direct and indirect ways. The contexts identified and examined here are, first, subgeneric formations and, second, broader and more significant material settings.
By gathering together selected works into nominated subgenres I
am not suggesting that documentaries have necessarily fallen into
discrete categories. Constructed as a genre within the field of nonfictional representation, documentary has, since its inception,
been composed of multiple, frequently linked representational
strands. In a related way, the various subgenres of documentary
referred to here are not textual codifications, but general categories composed of works sharing orientations and conventions
1


2

D OCUMENTARY S CREENS

recognized by both the producer and the viewer (Neale, 1980: 11).
The existence of these categories is manifest in everyday references to documentary such as those found in television programming guides, which routinely classify non-fictional work as historical
documentaries, science documentaries, autobiographical work,
works ‘based on a true story’ and so on. Similarly, academic studies
commonly construct or allude to subgenres of documentary,
among them, direct cinema, ethnographic film or compilation
film. The particular subgenres confronted in this study are by no
means exhaustive of the possible range of documentary categories,
though they do include works prominent within the documentary
tradition.
The subgenres returned to and reassessed here are: ethnographic film, direct cinema and cinéma vérité, autobiographical
documentary, drama-documentary and documentary drama,
indigenous documentary productions, compilation films and television documentary journalism. This book also examines recent
so-called popular factual entertainment, a category which, in its
multiple forms and revisions of documentary representation, overflows and refuses subgeneric positioning. The reassessment of documentary subgenres undertaken here is timely – perhaps even
overdue. It is virtually impossible to pick up any of the growing

number of books on documentary without reading of the ‘blurring’ of documentary forms and generic hybridity. Focused almost
exclusively on contemporary works, such analyses usefully outline
emergent processes of overlap and intersection between various
forms of documentary representation. However, recognition of
what is being blurred, an identification of the formal boundaries
that are being crossed, is assisted by an understanding of pre-existing
forms and subgenres of documentary film and television. We need
to know where we have come from to know where we are going.
This study assists such an endeavour.
Just as documentary is predicated on a series of refusals (it is not
fiction; it is not the item-based presentation of the evening news1)
so, too, this book is not concerned with practical aspects of
documentary production, or detailed study of viewing patterns or
audience reception of documentary on film or television (though
viewing habits are implicated here in the theory of documentary
and in the ‘readings’ or interpretations of documentary television
programmes and films). This book is a critical examination of
forms and histories of documentary selected from cinema, television


I NTRODUCTION

3

and new media contexts. Different formal characteristics are
suggested by the various media, and attention is paid to the features
of work within each medium, from the Griersonian documentary
film, through camcorder television, to convergent forms of new
media. In addition to an emphasis on various media, the analysis
includes works exhibited and broadcast internationally – specifically,

the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia – and recognizes the differing productive bases and broadcast ecologies which
influence work from various countries. An understanding of
national specificities allows comparisons to be drawn between productions from different countries without falling into either a
national parochialism that refuses to acknowledge international
trends or a media transnational essentialism that denies national
differences.
This attention to national productive practices and international comparisons is informed by reference to the specific material contexts which affect works of each subgenre, be they, for
example, the disciplinary concerns of a field of study (ethnography’s focus on the Other, the context of Chapter 3), the historical
and political determinants referred to as colonialism (the context
of Chapter 4), or the economics of production (the context of
Chapters 2, 10 and 11). In this way the analysis undertaken in
Documentary Screens situates selected documentary films and television programmes and subgenres in relation to the larger disciplinary, ideological, historical and economic forces which impact on
documentary form and content. This method constitutes the basis
of what is called here a ‘documentary studies’ approach, one that
can be distinguished from existing theoretical and practical orientations to documentary.2 The media theorist John Corner has
usefully outlined three different frameworks for academic interest
in documentary, each of which is paraphrased here as a way of
positioning the approach undertaken in this study.
The oldest strand of interest in documentary analysis is that
conducted within vocational and practical film schools worldwide.
Here the emphasis is on learning the practical techniques and
skills required to make effective films and programmes. While the
focus on the acquisition of practical productive skills has tended to
marginalize theories of documentary, Corner (2001b: 124) has
noted that ‘a great deal of clear and focused thinking about the
nature, form and function of documentary work has developed
from such teaching. The wish to make good documentaries has


4

D OCUMENTARY S CREENS

been a great motivator of analysis and criticism’ (Corner cites
Rabinger, 1998, in this regard, to which can be added Kriwaczek,
1997).
A second strand of interest in documentary developed from
within film studies and its close connection with literary and textual analysis. ‘In film studies, the chief if not exclusive concern is
with questions of aesthetics and textual form. A highly developed
and often dense analytic agenda surrounding the organisation of
the image, narrative structure, mise-en-scène and the symbolic and
imaginary conditions of spectatorship provides the focus of study’,
observes Corner (2001b: 124). The approach derives some of its
analytical and interpretive method from the study of fictional texts,
and some of it from the demands of documentary practice. Corner
notes the contributions by Nichols (1976 and 1991) and Renov
(1993c) to this approach. ‘Film studies has tended to regard documentary film as constituting a special case of “realism” … one in
which complex questions of ontology and epistemology (the status
of the film image and its use as a means of knowledge) are linked
to particular political and social intentions’ (Corner, 2001b: 124).
An interdisciplinary media studies, with its links to cultural studies, constitutes a third strand of study. This approach emphasizes
documentary texts as media products which can be considered in
relation to other such products, among them television news and
soap operas. Whereas the film studies approach has tended to
ignore documentary on television (within its focus on independently produced documentary cinema), media studies has moved
toward greater attention to the televisual forms of documentary
expression. Separate aspects of media studies examine the institutional features of television, the professionalization of its practices,
and its demand to engage an audience. The research of Kilborn
and Izod (1997) and Corner (1996) extends the media studies
orientation to non-fictional texts (Corner, 2001b: 124–5).

The approach undertaken in Documentary Screens is separate
from, though informed by, the three strands of study outlined
here. Questions of form prominent within film studies approaches
to fictional texts are rephrased in relation to the non-fictional texts
examined in this book. Following the perspectives of media studies, this study includes on forms of documentary representation on
television, with reference to institutional features such as public
and commercial broadcast environments, and aspects of television
scheduling. These approaches are extended within attention to


I NTRODUCTION

5

the contextual factors which impact on documentary form and
content. The connections between form, content and context
which are implicated in documentary studies are outlined in the
following descriptions of each chapter.
Chapter 2, ‘Men With Movie Cameras’, examines the work of
the founders of English language documentary, Robert Flaherty
and John Grierson. Specifically, the chapter draws upon Grierson’s
important essay ‘First Principles of Documentary’ as the basis of an
examination of the formal features of Flaherty’s Nanook of the North
(1922) and Grierson’s Drifters (1929), films which in differing ways
marry informational content to narrative as the basis of a work
referred to as documentary. The differing formal approaches
adopted by the filmmakers are contextualized through reference
to the filmmakers’ divergent approaches to production finances:
Flaherty’s alignment of documentary with commercial distribution
and exhibition, and Grierson’s focus on sponsored documentary

as a tool of citizenship. Grierson’s reliance on both corporate and
government sponsorship is emphasized within the chapter as a
prime factor in the development of documentary film. This
chapter presents historical background to the development of documentary as a genre which, since the days of Flaherty and
Grierson, has come to contain a number of subgeneric categories.
Chapter 3 confronts one of the earliest identifiable subgenres,
that of ethnographic film. Often excluded from analyses of documentary film, ethnographic film is a key focus for questions of
cross-cultural representation. The chapter examines the formal
regime of ethnographic representation within an account of the
rise and expansion of ethnographic film. The plotting of the historical dimension begins with ‘salvage ethnography’, a practice
exemplified by Flaherty’s Nanook of the North, a film which seeks to
save or rescue a culture believed to be ‘disappearing’. The socalled reflexive turn in ethnographic filmmaking is analysed
through reference to the film The Ax Fight (1974), and Dennis
O’Rourke’s film ‘Cannibal Tours’ (1987) serves as the basis of an
analysis of self-reflexive modes of ethnographic film. The most
recent phase of ethnographic depiction, the rise of a ‘new ethnography’, and its impact on ethnographic filmmaking, is also examined. The broad context for this analysis is the notion of Otherness
as it operates in ethnography and ethnographic film. Throughout
most of its history, ethnographic film has, like ethnography itself,
functioned as a representational practice in which the culture of


6

D OCUMENTARY S CREENS

the non-Westernized ‘Other’ has been treated as scientific datum
subject to the gaze of Western ethnographic science. Within this
recognition, the chapter explores ways in which ethnographic film
constructs or contests categories of ‘us’ and ‘them’, self and Other.
Opposing what are frequently the objectifying practices of

ethnographic film, indigenous peoples worldwide have used sound
and image technologies in various forms of self-documentation.
Chapter 4 focuses on the use by indigenous Australians of media
technologies to produce, disseminate and consume their own
images as a practice capable of revising documentary representation as part of a wider process of contesting the effects of colonialism, the context for this chapter. The revision of colonial
representation, a process referred to here as ‘decolonizing the
image’, is examined through reference to selected works produced
by indigenous Australian documentary producers.
Chapter 5 studies the developments in documentary filmmaking referred to as cinéma vérité and direct cinema, and the theoretical positions adopted by these practitioners in relation to the
representation of truth. In terms of direct cinema and cinéma
vérité, truth refers to the camera’s capacity to depict or reveal
authentic moments of human experience. Such a conception of
truth revolves around the question of behaviour modification –
the degree to which behaviour is altered by the presence of the
camera. Questions of behaviour modified by the presence of
the camera fed demands from within television journalism and the
social sciences in the late 1950s for portable camera technologies
that could be used to capture truth. These demands, and the new
camera technology – the contexts for the development of direct
cinema and cinéma vérité – are examined in relation to the claims,
methods and forms of Chronicle of a Summer (Chronique d’un été ), a
foundational work of cinéma vérité filmed in Paris in 1960 by
Jean Rouch and Edgar Morin and released the following year, and
Don’t Look Back, a prominent example of direct cinema made by
D.A. Pennebaker in 1966.
Behaviour modification and performance are also central
concerns within autobiographical film practices in which the
filmmaker/author adopts a persona and performs an identity, as
in the case of Ross McElwee’s comedic display in his film Sherman’s
March (1985). Within the informing context of the construction of

personal identity, Chapter 6 examines self-authored film and video
through reference to selected autobiographical works produced


I NTRODUCTION

7

over the past 20 years. The works studied include Sherman’s March,
a film in which McElwee’s performance complicates conceptions
of autobiography as a simple reflection of an authoring self, and
Rea Tajiri’s History and Memory (1991), an innovative record of the
experience and memory of internment suffered by her Japanese
American family during the Second World War. The chapter also
considers the visual grammar of camcorder-based autobiographical work, particularly works from the video diary form, including
Robert Gibson’s Video Fool for Love (1995), a feature-length diary of
romances lost and found that significantly extends the visual
language of camcorder autobiography.
Chapter 7, ‘Finding and Keeping’, considers features of compilation or so-called found footage film, those films edited from preexisting footage. Compilation films are produced within a context
that raises fundamental issues to do with the availability of, and
access to, footage. The context informs compilation filmmaking in
direct ways, notably in determining which topics will be addressed
and how they are treated. Within this context, this chapter studies
formal features of selected compilation films as they are deployed
in the construction of historical arguments. The selected works
analysed in this chapter are Emile de Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig
(1969), a work which mixes archival footage and interviews to
build a politicized rhetorical history of the Vietnam War, and The
Atomic Café (1982), a ‘pure’ compilation film which eschews interviews within an exclusive reliance on the recoding of source
footage to construct a history of Cold War tensions and nuclear

proliferation. The chapter also discusses recent avant-garde compilation works produced through the practices of ‘image piracy’.
In their open confrontation with copyright laws and their challenge to the commercialization of image archives such works foreground the contextual factors of availability and accessibility of
source footage.
‘The Fact/Fiction Divide’, Chapter 8, addresses the intersection
of documentary and dramatic elements in works produced for
television. This intersection, in works of documentary drama and
drama-documentary, has at times been the subject of critical, even
political, controversy. Unease has been felt in certain viewing quarters over a form that joins elements of fact and fiction or drama
and documentary within works that may contain contentious or
politically sensitive content. In a number of cases controversy has
impacted on broadcast practices and policies leading to regulatory


8

D OCUMENTARY S CREENS

provisions and, in one notable case, to the ultimate restrictive
practice: banning of such work. Within the contexts of controversy
and broadcast regulatory policies, this chapter examines Peter
Watkins’ The War Game, a devastating documentary drama depiction of nuclear war, produced in 1965 for the BBC, though banned
for 20 years. The War Game raises issues concerning the effectiveness of a form capable of representing events, such as a ‘ground
zero’ view of nuclear holocaust, which would otherwise be beyond
the capacity of a camera to document.
The capacity of dramatized documentary/documentary-drama
to narrate events when there is ‘no other way to tell it’3 has been
deployed in journalistic investigations of particular incidents (Why
Lockerbie?, Granada, 1990, a report of events surrounding the
bombing of a Pan Am passenger jet over Lockerbie, Scotland, is an
example here). Investigative journalism and television reportage

of contemporary events combine in other ways in the long-form
news documentary, the subject of Chapter 9. The chapter focuses
on the television news documentaries produced by renowned journalist John Pilger, in particular his report Cambodia: The Betrayal
(1990), one of a series of investigative reports undertaken by Pilger
into the devastating legacies of the Khmer Rouge regime. The contexts for Pilger’s work, and the long-form documentary news
report generally, are the practices of journalistic investigation and
impartiality in broadcasting.
Chapter 10 traces phases in the development of ‘popular factual
entertainment’ through reference to the central factor impacting
on this history, namely, production economics, specifically, the
cost of production and revenue returns from advertisers. Within
this context, the chapter addresses formal features of works which
draw on and transcend, or hybridize, forms and modes of a number of subgenres and televisual formats. Particular attention is paid
in the chapter to the characteristics of crime-based ‘reality television (TV)’ (specifically, the influential US example Cops, 1989),
so-called docusoaps (with reference to Music Television’s (MTV)
The Real World, 1992, and other examples) and the newer forms
referred to as ‘gamedocs’, principal among them the worldwide
television phenomenon Big Brother.
The final chapter, ‘The Burning Question’, steps out of the
subgeneric classificatory frame of earlier chapters and looks to the
future of documentary. This chapter previews current and emerging
media technologies and speculates on the forms of documentary


I NTRODUCTION

9

that will appear within the near future in film and cinema, television
and new media. The determining contexts here are media technologies and their convergence, and the economic factors which

have an impact on the production of new documentary work.
As this outline of chapters suggests, Documentary Screens traverses
a wide range of documentary works and subgenres, and in doing
so, it explores a number of formal strategies and historical changes
to the depictive patterns adopted in documentary representation.
Chapter 1 provides a basis for the analysis and constitutes a tool kit
of formal features that can be applied to the nuts and bolts of documentary forms studied in the subsequent chapters. Descriptions
and explanations of the ‘mechanics’ of documentary may be
somewhat ‘dry’ and, at times, intricate. The insights to be derived
from the tool kit are, however, useful for interpreting documentary representation as it operates in the various subgeneric forms
of documentary.
This book is intended to be read ‘interactively’ with the films
and programmes it examines. To this end, a final section provides
details of where copies of the central films or programmes studied
in each chapter can be purchased or hired in the United States,
the United Kingdom and Australia. The final section also includes
lists of further resources available to support the analysis of each
topic. This book, as its title suggests, tunes in to cinema, television
and computer screens and focuses on the documentary representations found there. It is hoped that reading this book, and watching the screens, will contribute to a deeper understanding and
appreciation of what are often fascinating, sometimes challenging,
always interesting documentary representations of the world.


CHAPTER 1

‘Believe Me, I’m of the
World’: Documentary
Representation
Documentary concerns itself with representing the observable
world, and to this end works with what Grierson called the raw

material of actuality. The documentarian draws on past and
present actuality – the world of social and historical experience –
to construct an account of lives and events. Embedded within the
account of physical reality is a claim or assertion at the centre of all
non-fictional representation, namely, that a documentary depiction of the socio-historical world is factual and truthful.
Of course, saying that a documentary representation makes a
truth claim is not the same as saying that it presents truth.
Distinctions of this kind inform the growing and increasingly
sophisticated positions offered within documentary theory, pointing to the complex relationship of representation, reality and
truth. The generalized truth claim of documentary representation
may encompass a number of individual truth claims.1 Furthermore,
not all truth claims are beyond dispute; indeed certain claims
made in a documentary may be the subject of what is at times
intense debate and critique (Corner, 1996: 3). Operating within
such parameters, the so-called truth claim is based on a particular
orientation or stance toward subject matter which is summarizable
in the position, ‘Believe me, I’m of the world’ (Renov, 1993a: 30).
In these terms documentary can be defined, generally, as a work
or text which implicitly claims to truthfully represent the world,
whether it is to accurately represent events or issues or to assert
that the subjects of the work are ‘real people’.
10


D OCUMENTARY R EPRESENTATION

11

This chapter begins with an analysis of one aspect of the truth
claim, that which rests on a ‘contract’ or a bond of trust between

producer and viewer. The other component of the truth claim –
the documentary interpretation of reality – is examined through
reference to the styles, conventions, rhetorical and narrative strategies, modes and genres of documentary representation.

‘Believe me’: the documentary contract
Truth claims reflect a tacit contractual agreement or bond of trust
between documentary producers (whether an individual filmmaker or broadcasting institution) and an audience that the representation is based on the actual socio-historical world, not a
fictional world imaginatively conceived. Documentary producers
and filmmakers adhere to this long-standing mandate through
detailed research of a topic and the verification of the identity of
witnesses relied on in a documentary report. In certain contexts,
this commitment is reinforced through guidelines and codes
issued to producers by broadcasting or commissioning authorities,
and in some instances contraventions of such guidelines can result
in punitive censures. The Connection (1996), a programme produced by Carlton Television for Britain’s commercial Channel 3, is
a case in point. Carlton was fined £2 million for fabricating scenes
using professional actors and for failing to label the scenes as
reconstructions, as demanded by the Independent Television
Commission code of practice (see Chapter 9).
The Connection raises various ethical issues, not the least the
betrayal of good faith inherent in the documentary contract (see
Winston, 2000). In most cases the ‘contract’ between producer
and audience is undertaken informally by producers concerned
with maintaining evidentiary standards (Tunstall, 1993: 32), and
reinforced in handbooks and manuals written to provide instruction in the production of film and television documentaries.
Exemplifying such routinized directives, one handbook states that,
‘It is the implicit duty of every documentary maker to stand by the
accuracy of the film’s claim to truth’ (Kriwaczek, 1997: 42). This
commitment is extended in what have been called ‘situational
cues’ or ‘indexes’ (Carroll, 1983 and 1987; Eitzen, 1995; Plantinga,

1996 and 1997). Such cues include advertisements for a film or
programme, distribution releases, reviews, notes in a television


12

D OCUMENTARY S CREENS

programme guide, explicit labels or written descriptions in the
title sequences of a film or television programme which alert
potential viewers to a work’s non-fictional content. In specific
situations these cues include statements such as ‘the untold story’
or ‘a television history’ which underline a producer’s commitment
to veracity and providing a full and accurate account of a subject.
In turn, the ‘constituency of viewers’ (Nichols, 1991) comes to a
documentary with a set of expectations regarding the work’s
authenticity and veracity. This is not to suggest that viewers fail to
question information contained in a documentary. Studies of
reception point to the fact that viewers interpret or decode the
documentary text in complex and sophisticated ways and frequently balance and validate the information and interpretations
provided in a documentary against their own experiences and
other sources of information (see, e.g. Corner and Richardson,
1986). Such a process of negotiation is, however, undertaken in
relation to a text which is generally expected to have been
produced in good faith with standards of evidentiality.
The pervasiveness and strength of viewer expectations have
been demonstrated in the case of a work which purposively subverts the documentary contract. Forgotten Silver (TVNZ: 1997), a
‘mockumentary’ produced by Costa Botes and Peter Jackson
(director of the Lord of the Rings trilogy) for New Zealand television, highlights the issues raised here. Unlike most mock documentaries, in which the viewer is alerted in advance through
situational cues to the fact that the work is a fabrication, the

Jackson and Botes programme was intentionally screened without
such warnings. The programme recounts the story of Colin
McKenzie, a figure responsible for various ground-breaking inventions, including, most notably, the invention of powered flight and
cinema. The programme’s outlandish assertions are rendered
plausible through interviews with a series of known experts and
through a reliance on carefully staged footage which supports the
experts’ testimony. Viewer response to the faked documentary was
mixed. According to letters to newspaper editors, many viewers
accepted the programme as a truthful account of historical events.
When the hoax was publicly exposed many viewers were, again
according to a flurry of letters to editors, incensed by what they
took to be the bad faith of the broadcaster and the producers in
breaking the documentary contract (Roscoe and Hight, 2001). As
the hoax demonstrated, viewers expect a documentary to engage


D OCUMENTARY R EPRESENTATION

13

the world in ways which present real people and events, not
invented ones. The process which supports this expectation involves
not only situational or extratextual cues but also cues within the
documentary text itself (Nichols, 1991: 18–23). A film or television
programme deemed to be documentary is structured by intratextual conventions which mediate viewers’ reception and interpretation of the work as an accurate and verifiable depiction of the
world.

‘Of the world’: interpreting reality
The status of a representation as a legitimate depiction of the
socio-historical world is informed by certain properties commonly

understood to be inherent in the photographic image. The photochemical process of photography and traditions of photographic
practice function to rally viewers’ belief in the photographic image
as an authentic and accurate representation of the object before
the camera.2 This position is reflected in the popular summation
of the photograph’s truth claim: ‘the camera cannot lie’. The
philosopher Charles Peirce argued that the photograph is made
under circumstances in which it is ‘physically forced to correspond
point by point to nature’ (quoted in Nichols, 1991: 149). Peirce
termed this connection between image and object an indexical
bond. The bond between representation and referent, that is,
between the image and the real world, produces an impression of
authenticity which documentary draws on as a warrant or guarantee of the accuracy and authority of its representation.3
The notion of an indexical bond – a point-by-point, unmediated
relationship between image and object – suggests a definition of
representation as an act of recording. However, documentary representation exceeds a recording function; a documentary representation is an interpretation of physical reality, not a mere reflection of
pre-existent reality. The interpretation and manipulation of reality
occurs at all stages of the documentary process. The presence of a
documentary camera and sound and light equipment is likely to
affect the world being filmed in multiple direct and indirect ways
such as a simple rearrangement of furniture to accommodate a
film crew in a cramped space, to alterations of behaviour in which
subjects ‘act’ naturally for the camera. The raw footage shot on
location is filmed according to certain codes and conventions, and
the footage is further manipulated in the editing process. The final


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edited film or programme is also ‘reworked’ in descriptions of the
text used to promote the film or programme. The multiple transformations point to the various ‘realities’ which documentary
encompasses: putative reality (the world as it is understood to exist
without the intrusion of the camera), the world in front of the camera (so-called profilmic reality), and the reality screened in the film
or programme (Corner, 1996: 21).4 Traversing these levels, the documentary manipulation and interpretation of reality is expressed
through representational styles and conventions and forms of argument and narrative which together work to produce a realistic and
authoritative representation of the socio-historical world.

Documentary realism and its conventions
Style refers to patterns of use, conventions or techniques in which
particular meanings and effects are produced. Style in documentary is rarely used for its own sake as technical virtuosity or ornamentation; dominantly, it is deployed to develop a work’s perspective
and to convey information (Plantinga, 1997: 147). Stylistic features
are not universal; individual filmmakers will bring their own style
of filmmaking to a work, and different documentary forms
are marked by different styles. These variations typically function,
however, within a realistic impulse which functions to produce
the effect of the filmmaker ‘having been there’ and, by extension,
of us – the viewers – ‘being there’ (Nichols, 1991: 181). Realism
operates in both fiction and documentary, with differing effects.
Fictional realism, particularly the classic realism of Hollywood film,
functions to make an invented world seem real. A ‘realistic’ fictional
film or programme thus seeks to render its characters, actions and
settings believable and plausible. This stance differs from the operation of realism in documentary, where it functions to render
persuasive the arguments and claims made in a film or programme
about the socio-historical world. As Corner (2001a: 126–7) points
out, such claims and arguments about the world operate in
documentary in two, linked, ways: first, at the indexical level of
the image – ‘this is the ship that brought survivors back, this is the
captain of the ship’ – and, second, at the level of exposition, that is,
through spoken propositions and directives provided in voice-over

commentary or the on-camera testimony of witnesses: ‘these are
the known facts relating to the shipwreck, this is the judgment it is
most sensible to make as to what happened’.


D OCUMENTARY R EPRESENTATION

15

Corner informs the distinction between realism in fiction and
documentary realism by noting that the former essentially provides a kind of ‘imaginative relationship’ between the viewer and
the events on the screen. ‘What this means is that the narrative of
the realistic fiction is designed to engage imaginatively (and selectively) with viewers’ perceptions of the real world and what can
happen in it. There is often a pleasing play-off here between fantasy and reality.’ Documentary, in contrast, provides an inferential
relationship between the represented events and the viewer. ‘In
the documentary, we are offered bits of evidence and argument
and have to construct truths from them, truths of fact and perhaps
truths of judgment. However, we should remember that imagination plays a part here too’ (2001a: 127). Within its capacity to continually engage viewers’ perceptions of reality, styles of realism
have changed over the decades. The realism of one era can look
hackneyed or appear unconvincing in another era. The realism of
The Bill (ITV, 1984–present) or Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981–87),
for example, is a different variety of realism to that of earlier programmes such as Dixon of Dock Green (BBC, 1955–76) or Kojak
(CBS, 1973–78) (Kilborn and Izod, 1997: 34). If the basis of a realistic work is a perceived ‘truth to life’ (O’Sullivan et al., in Kilborn
and Izod, 1997: 44), then changes in style constitute and reflect
varying perceptions of truth. Different viewers will, however,
depending on their varying expectations and experiences, carry
and form different understandings of the same object (Branigan,
1992: 203). In this way, realism, ‘both as a practice and a critical
concept – is the subject of never-ending contestation’ (O’Sullivan
et al., quoted in Kilborn and Izod, 1997: 44).

Within this pattern of contestation and change, Kilborn and
Izod have usefully set out various aspects of realism (1997:43–52),
and Corner identifies two principal stylistic approaches. In both of
the forms outlined by Corner, any effect of reality is not solely
achieved through the style itself; rather, the styles operate within
the broader context of the documentary truth claim to produce a
‘reality effect’ (Corner, 2001a: 127). The first form that Corner
identifies, what he calls observational realism, produces the effect
that what we are seeing is a record of reality as it unfolds. The
style strongly suggests that the events we are witnessing are beyond
the intervention or control of a film crew (Corner, 2001a: 127).
The impression is that the events we see on screen ‘would have
happened, as they happened, even if the filmmaker had not been present’


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(Roscoe and Hight, 2001: 21. Italics in original). The emphasis
here is on seeing, watching and observing and the camera style is
unadorned (‘raw’), an effect that contributes to the idea that the
events are captured as they occurred and not filtered through an
authoring consciousness. This type of realism is a central component of the observational mode (discussed below).
The second kind of realism can be called expositional realism, a
style closely aligned with commentary and the expository mode (see
below). Expositional realism exceeds mere observation, and
involves the organization of sound and image in support of an argument or rhetorical position. The style operates through a close fit
between word and image, between what is seen and what is heard,
and presents evidence in such a way that one outcome from the

array of evidence appears inevitable and ineluctable. Within the
style, scenes may function metonymically, serving as a typical
account of more general circumstances. The combination of word
and image functions here to ‘ “win the viewer” for the particular case
that the documentary is making’ (Corner, 2001a: 127).
The effects of both observational and expository realism are
enhanced by the conventions which are routinely deployed in documentary. Conventions include profilmic practices, those relating to
events which occur before the camera, and filmic techniques, stylistic
features adopted within the text itself, though not all of the possible
range of conventions and techniques need be apparent in a work for
it to be understood as realistic. Profilmic conventions evoke immediacy and direct access to the real and include location shooting (as
opposed to filming in a studio) and interviews at-the-scene with witnesses to ‘real-life’ events. Filmic conventions vary widely from form
to form and include, for example, the eschewing of a presenter
and voice-over commentary in the observational documentary, and
the expositional techniques of long-form television news documentary, which typically utilize an on-screen presenter and voice-over
narration. Other filmic conventions include the hand-held or
shoulder-mounted shaky camera shot, a practice that has been replicated to the point of cliché as a sign of documentary authenticity.
Documentary filmmaking manuals and critical assessments of documentary practice identify (and in certain cases, prescribe) various
filmic conventions. For example, one manual advises the documentary filmmaker to avoid using artificial lighting and light reflectors in
outdoor scenes and instead to rely on natural light which has a ‘realistic feeling to it that is desirable in documentary’. The same manual