Five Modes of Documentary
Representation
Reflexive and Performative Modes of
Documentary Films
Table of Contents
1) Reflexive Mode of Documentary
Representation
2) Dziga Vertov and Man with a Movie
Camera
3) Performative Mode of Documentary
Representation
4) Chris Maker’s Sans soleil
Reflexive Mode
Reflexive documentary arose from a desire to
make the conventions of representations
themselves more apparent and to challenge the
impression of reality which the other three
modes normally conveyed unproblematically.
Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p. 33
Reflexive Mode
• To problematize the ways in which
documentaries reveal the truth
• Reflexive documentaries are about
documentaries, documentary representation
and documentary film making.
• Meta-documentary - a documentary about
documentary
Dziga Vertov
• Dziga Vertov (18961954) psychoneurologist, film editor,
director and theorist
• Formation of the group
of film makers called
‘Kinok’ (or ‘Kino-oki’)
= camera eye
Dziga Vertov
• Vertov and ‘Kino-oki’
abandons fiction film for
documentary.
• The camera can capture lifeas-it-is which is missed by
human eye.
• The film drama is the Opium
of the people… down with
Bourgeois fairy-tale
scenarios… long live life as it
is!
Dziga Vertov
• Belief in the primacy of movie camera over
human eye
- To be able to see at long distances, to film in
slow or fast motion, etc
- Through editing, scenes from different times
and places could be cut together, the same scene
viewed from several different angles,
impressions of speed and energy enhanced by
fast cutting
• Kinok (Kino-oki) presents a
reality which only a movies
can presents.
• The reality different from
the reality the audience
knows.
• Thus, Vertov’s film poses a
question: is the reality
captured in his
documentary a reality.
• His reality does not agree
with our idea of it - lack of
truth effects.
Dziga Vertov
Dziga Vertov
Our eyes see very little and very badly – so
people dreamed up the microscope to let them see
invisible phenomena; they invented the
telescope… now they have perfected the
cinecamera to penetrate more deeply into the
visible world, to explore and record visual
phenomena so that what is happening now, which
will have to be taken account of in the future, is
not forgotten.—Provisional Instructions to KinoEye Groups, Dziga Vertov, 1926
Dziga Vertov
• Man with a Movie
Camera (1929) presents urban lives in
Soviet cities. From
dusk to dawn Soviet
citizens are shown at
work and at play.
• Also, it is about film
making
Dziga Vertov
• Showing the viewer how a
film is made by way of:
- Double exposure
- Quick motion
- Slow motion
- Stop motion
- Tracking shot
- Extreme high and low
angles
- Unusual camera
movement
Dziga Vertov
Errol Morris
• The Thin Blue Line (1988) - a documentary about
Randall Adams who was convicted and sentenced
to a life imprisonment for the murder of a police
officer.
• The film relies on the conventions of interactive
documentary - interviews and confessions.
Errol Morris
• Tension arises when statements contradict each
other and this draws our attention to the legitimacy
of testimonies and confessions recorded in the
documentary.
• Randall Adams swears he did not kill the
policeman but competing statements are presented.
• Despite the quest for evidence, the film underlies
the uncertainty of what evidence there is.
Legacy
• Self-reflexivity - the
reflexive documentary
shows how it is created.
→ Film’s reflection on
itself
• Jean-Luc Godard and
other nouvelle vague
filmmakers
Self-reflexive Cinema
• François Truffaut’s La
Nuit Americaine (Day for
Night, 1973)
• Definitive film on film
making
• Film within a film: La
Nuit Americaine is
constructed around the
production of Je vous
presente, Pamela.
•
NA excerpt
Performative Mode
[Performative documentaries] stress
subjective aspects of a classically objective
discourse - possible limitations: loss of
referential emphasis may relegate such
films to the avant-garde; ‘excessive’ use of
style. Bill Nichols, Blurred Boundaries, p.
95
Performative Mode
• The priority - to evoke the MOOD or
ATMOSPHERE.
• Aims - to present reality in a subjective,
expressive, stylized, evocative and visceral
manner.
Performative Mode
• Harry Watt and Basil
Wright, Night Mail
(1936) about the mail
carried from London to
Edinburgh in an
express train
• Poems written by W.H.
Auden and Music by
Benjamin Britten
Performative Mode
• Alain Resnais’s
Nuit et Brouillard
(Night and Fog,
1955)
• One of the first
documentary on the
horror of the
Holocaust.
Performative Mode
• Contrast between the huge stillness of the
abandoned camps and horrific wartime footage.
• Text by Jean Cayrol and spoken by Michel
Bouquet
Performative Mode
• Chris Maker, Sans
soleil (1983)
• Meditations on
travel, memory (or
forgetting), and
time in words and
images.
Performative Mode
• An essay, a collage
mixing images with
literarycomments and
philosophical
reflection, and
creating an
atmosphere of dream.