John Corner, The Art of Record : A Critical Introduction to Documentary, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1996.
ISBN 0-7190-4687-4
212 pp

Derek Paget, No Other Way to Tell it: Dramadoc/docudrama on Television, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1998.
ISBN 0 7190 4533 9
213 pp

William Rothman, Documentary Film Classics, New York, Cambrige University Press, 1997.
ISBN 521456819
218 pp

Uploaded 1 July 1999 | Modified 14 July 1999

For many writers in the British tradition of documentary criticism John Grierson serves in some way as an originary figure. A frequent rhetorical trope involves reference to the work of Grierson, as in the two books by Corner and Paget reviewed here which are part of the developing critique of Grierson’s influence most evident in the influential and important recent work of Brian Winston. Not so for William Rothman, coming as he does from another tradition altogether. In his case the originary figure seems to be the film philosopher Stanley Cavell who has clearly served, both personally and philosophically, as mentor to Rothman. Both the philosophical concerns and methodology of Documentary Film Classics are in accord with those of Cavell.

As in other works, Rothman repudiates European “theory” in favour of “criticism that is rooted in experience and expressed in ordinary language” (xiv). This empirical, realist, approach derives from analytical philosophy with a particularly American “commonsense” fervour derived from Thoreau and Emerson. Rothman’s aim is to produce writing which “continually turns in on itself, turns to us ourselves, aspires to make us mindful of who we have been, who we are, who we are capable of becoming” (xiv) and of the importance of conviction, passion and the “value of conversation”. In his own terms Rothman succeeds admirably in these aims, although at the cost of universalising both the subjects of the films under discussion and the spectators of those films. In repudiating “theory” Rothman appropriates the right for himself to speak for all members of the audience when he assumes a single, obvious interpretation: “Viewing Nanook at this moment we feel that we are glimpsing a primordial scene, humanity shorn of its thin veneer of civilization, and we are at once repelled and fascinated by this vision” (16). Frankly I’d prefer it if Rothman stuck to telling us how he responded to the film, rather than assuming he knows how I responded to it; but in criticising the universalising, liberal humanism of his work, I immediately fall into the trap of announcing my adherence to what Rothman elsewhere sees as fashionable “skepticism”.

The apparently bland title Documentary Film Classics announces the central focus is upon documentaries as films: discrete, privileged, timeless and ahistorical objects removed from any context of production, exhibition or reception – “classics”. This is in contrast to both Paget and Corner whose work focuses on the variety of contexts within which documentaries are produced. While there is a recognition in chapter five of the role of television in the genesis and form of American cinéma vérité, Rothman argues that in a few short years television rejected cinéma vérité which was reborn as film yet left a permanent influence on television (121, original emphasis).

The banality of the title suggests a degree of randomness about the choice of films for attention – there are six in all: Nanook of the North,  Land without Bread, Night and Fog, Chronicle of a Summer,  A Happy Mother’s Day, and Don’t Look Back (with a postscript on Monterey Pop) – however there is a more unified argument in the book than the title suggests. Consistent with the aesthetic framework which informs the argument Rothman’s exegesis constantly strives to achieve unity, both internally – every aspect of the film is treated as supporting every other to achieve the unity and coherence assumed to be essential to works of art – and across all the works under discussion. This leads to an attempt to seek out the auteurist vision at work in the films (although I felt there was some conceptual confusion over the locus of this vision: in places it is the director, in others the narrator. To his credit Rothman does not always assume they are one and the same). Consistent with assuming that he knows how every spectator (or at least an ideal spectator) will read the work, the exegete also assumes that he knows the intentions of each work – the role of exegesis is to find all the inherent meanings in the text and produce ways of comprehending them in relation to all others.

In places even the camera is given subjectivity and agency. An important element of his argument is the degree to which “the camera” played “an integral role in the murderous operation of the [death] camps” (58), and by implication in documentary itself. This concern with the role of the camera, and with the relationship between the documentarist and the subjects is a theme which unifies Rothman’s argument, and which produces some insightful discussion of his selected films.

Throughout the book his methodology is to focus on particular scenes from individual films which are analysed in detail. The best of these analyses are insightful, but I was less convinced by the attempts to generalise from these analyses. There are some exceptions, in the discussion of cinéma vérité a useful discussion of revelation as the dominant mode, as opposed to assertion, makes the point that the denial of the importance of that which cannot be revealed, but only asserted, was instrumental in the retreat from the public in much documentary output. On the whole I found the book more convincing in the detailed discussion in which Rothman tells me something about individual documentaries, and much less so in the overall argument.

If William Rothman decontextualises his individual “classics”, John Corner pays very careful attention to the contexts in which documentaries are produced, exhibited and received, arguing that “the current situation” is a period of reconstruction for documentary in response to institutional constraints, reduced budgets and increasing demands for watchability (180). These pressures are a particular danger to projects with lengthy research and production phases. On the other hand Corner sees hope in the vigorous reimagining of both visual and verbal language in some documentaries. (Interestingly in Australia many people are arguing that the reverse is the case). The difference in approach between the two writers can be attributed to a difference in their academic backgrounds. While Rothman is primarily a philosopher seeking to raise questions about individual texts, and to extrapolate from these to questions about the nature of “human experience”, Corner does his research and writing within the academic framework of media studies, and has a concern to place individual works within wider institutional structures. The work, while calling itself an “introduction to documentary” (a title which undersells the argument of the book), develops a clear discussion of some of the paradoxes of which arise from documentary’s place (where Grierson put it) at the intersection of art and record, an issue dealt with in both Paget and Rothman also.

While there is some chronology implicit in the choice of films by Rothman it is not a history of documentary, and the most recent of his films is safely in the past. This is certainly not the case for Corner. Nor is he afraid of “theory”. What informs his book is a coherent sense of a theory of documentary — but not in the sense of abstruse theory caricatured by Rothman, indeed Corner himself is also critical of such theory arguing, quite correctly in my opinion, that

the use of the word ‘theory’ . . . is currently prone to abuse . . the development of theoretical work has often increasingly divorced itself from attention to specific practices and artefacts, setting up as a relatively autonomous discursive activity ‘above’ the level both of practice and practical criticism (9).

The great strength of Corner’s book is the comprehensive manner in which he places rigorous analysis into a critical / historical perspective, including debates about the institutional role of documentary. His work is informed by sound historical research and a clear sense of the social purposes of documentary.

For John Corner documentary has been subject to two major shifts – the shift to television and the related shift to an emphasis on reportage and away from the cinematic essay. One of the central claims made is that on television documentary is seen as a major extension of journalism — a significant shift in social and aesthetic expectations from the Griersonian tradition. The book is clearly organised into chapters which examine the duality of documentary as artifice and evidence through an analysis of films which can be located at nodal points in these shifts.

The first chapter deals with debates within documentary theory, making the point that early theory was a theory “for” documentary, while more recent theory seems to be “against” documentary, most especially against realism. At this stage Corner establishes a sense of the range of criticisms of documentary before going on to look at some of the suggested means for its reconstruction. From here subsequent chapters examine drama documentary and vérité; Coalface and Housing Problems; Look in on London; Cathy Come Home; Living on the Edge; The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter; When the Dog Bites; Roger and Me; and Handsworth Songs. The final chapter briefly deals with “documentary futures” by which Corner means television futures, albeit recognising that television itself is subject to a great deal of change.

The discussion of the individual films is tied together by a number of features. The first is that all the films selected for discussion deal with work: a trajectory from industrial to post industrial society is evident, producing a particularly contemporary relevance. Secondly the discussion in each chapter deals with attempts to balance aesthetic with reportorial and expositional qualities of documentaries, a debate evident even in the 1930s as the discussion of Coalface demonstrates. One of Corner’s concerns is the need for documentary to balance a degree of formal and discursive innovation and referentiality with a need, given the institutional context, to avoid “avantgardism”, to avoid the dangers of seeking to subvert or marginalise too much its “referential axis” (142). Thirdly a central methodology of the work is the intensive investigation of documentary vocabulary and syntax as these are deployed in the various films, particularly as “consequences of the shift from documentary within cinema to documentary within television, from documentary films to documentary programmes” (73, original emphasis).

Like John Corner, Derek Paget deals with documentary on television, the focus of No Other Way to Tell it being about a quintessentially televisual genre: dramadoc/docudrama (as Grierson would say: “a clumsy description, but let it stand”). This is not the first work to deal with the form. Goodwin and Kerr’s groundbreaking monograph, Paget’s own True Stories?, Corner’s The Art of Record, and Kilborn and Izod, have all dealt with the subject, but it is the first full length book devoted to the British and American traditions of practice in the form. In fact the rather clumsy term “dramadoc/docudrama” arises from the examination of both British and American variants, which Paget sees as converging. In its treatment of the topic No Other Way to Tell it participates in debates on documentary theory to which John Corner alludes. For Paget “the dramadoc and the docu-drama are micro-features of this macro-debate” (4).

In this debate two strands of thought are evident: that documentary is a particular form which makes truth claims about anterior reality; or that documentary is a “project”, an ideal to aspire to. Like Corner, Paget sees a contradiction at the heart of the Griersonian documentary: “artfulness” versus “actuality”. Corner argues that a “‘core’ of reliable referentiality” is essential to the “foundational enterprise” of documentary (14, original emphasis), while Michael Renov argues, semiotically, that “at the level of the sign, it is the differing historical status of the referent that distinguishes documentary from its fictional counterpart” (quoted on page 128/9). Strategically, it is important for Paget’s argument to take seriously Basil Wright’s view that “documentary is not this or that type of film, but simply a method of approach to public information” (124). Rejecting epistemological and ontological purity and privileging purpose over “representational shortcoming” has become an important ethical ploy for the dramadoc/docudrama, which is forced to claim the purpose, or the ideal, of documentary, rather than its specific syntaxes and modes of audience address. Paget argues that ethically the fit between documentary and British dramadoc/docudrama “is almost seamless” (129), and that dramadoc/docudrama is an “inherently indexical form” which “points more insistently toward its origins in the real world than other kind [sic] of drama” (136).

So, theoretically and institutionally the dramadoc/docudrama is important as it lies at the intersection of two apparently contradictory, even antagonistic modes, at the boundaries of fact and fiction. In this context Paget’s main claim is that dramadoc/docudrama is not a mongrel or bastard, but a form in its own right which needs to be addressed in its own terms.

Taking the form seriously involves a detailed analysis of the institutional settings within which dramadoc/docudrama is produced and consumed, as Paget does most comprehensively. His methodologies include interviews with a number of players in the field, participant observation, analysis of documents and a range of critical responses to, and public debates around, particular programs as well as some analysis of the texts themselves. Paget draws throughout on his own background in theatre and theatre education – most evident in the discussion of acting and performance codes and script writing – placing the discussion within a framework of traditions of practice among production companies and broadcasters, tempering theoretical exposition with empirical research.

The logical structure of No Other Way to Tell itbegins with chapters on preparation and production and the law and regulation. These two chapters assert that the level of research is a key marker of the difference between drama and dramadoc/docudrama: the rigour expected of a purely factual programme is the base from which the programme must be made” (55). Following chapters cover taxonomic and definitional matters; principle academic debates; an historical survey of the British and American traditions of usage in dramadoc/docudrama; and finally some of the pleasures of the form.

The inherent claim of the title is that “within television’s historic popular mission to inform and entertain”(3) the dramadoc/docudrama can throw light into dark places to which no camera is able to gain access:

The ultimate aspiration of the category of programme that forms the subject of this book is to make a difference in the historical and political world beyond the television screen by going to places that are originally denied to the camera (10)

Like many people interested in documentary I have tended to look down on dramadoc/docudrama (especially in its American incarnation), and Paget’s book has forced me to reconsider some of my attitudes to the form (especially in the discussion of gender and “puritan pleasures” in chapter 8). It succeeds admirably in placing debates around the form into a comprehensive theoretical perspective rooted in an examination of the conditions of ‘actually existing’ practice” of broadcast television. Like  The Art of Recordand Documentary Film Classics, No Other Way to Tell it, is aimed at the intelligent reader rather than a narrow academic audience, and would prove a useful text in many courses on documentary at the tertiary level.

For John Corner “it is certain that around [documentary’s] future are assembled some of the most important issues of audio-visual form and public culture” (190) a claim with which it is hard to find fault. All three of the books reviewed here contribute in valuable ways to the delineation and analysis of some of these issues.

Peter Hughes

References:
Andrew Goodwin and Paul Kerr, ed. Drama-documentary, BFI Dossier 19, London, BFI, 1984.
John Grierson, ‘First principles of documentary’, in Forsyth Hardy (ed.), Grierson on Documentary, New York, Praeger, 1971, pp. 145-155.
Richard Kilborn and John Izod, An Introduction to Television Documentary: Confronting Reality, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1997.
Derek Paget, True Stories? Documentary Drama on Radio, Screen and Stage, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1990.
William Rothman, ‘Cavell’s philosophy and what film studies calls ‘theory’: must the field of film studies speak in one voice?’, (n/d), http://www.hanover.edu/philos/film/vol_02/rothman.htm, 6 April 1999.
Brian Winston, Claiming the Real, London, BFI, 1995.