Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds),
Documenting the Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video.
Detroit:Wayne State University Press, 1998.
ISBN 0-8143-2639-0
656pp
US$27.50

(Review copy supplied by Wayne State University Press)

Uploaded 1 November 2000

In recent years public interest in the documentary screen has been rejuvenated by the success of feature documentaries such as When We Were Kings, Hoop Dreams, and Crumb, as well as by the popularity of new television forms such as reality TV and the docu-soap. Such texts have brought a new audience to documentary as well as presenting a forum through which we have once again returned publicly to the issues of “reality” and “truth”. Likewise, academic interest in documentary has increased seeming to move the study of non-fiction from the margins into a more prominent place within the academy. Interestingly, this is also a time in which the documentary is perceived as being in “crisis”, and when scholars are asking whether the term ‘documentary’ has in fact out-lived its usefulness.

Documentary has always been a slippery concept; attempts to define and unravel its special relationship to the real seem to have raised more questions than provided answers. Part of the reason that it is so hard to pin down is that documentary is particularly good at adapting and responding to the wider social, political and economic context. It is continually changing and reinventing itself; documentary’s ability to adapt to the demands of television (both public service and commercial) is testimony to this.

Documenting the Documentary revisits this terrain. The editors state in their introduction that the volume is an attempt to understand the textual strategies that shape individual documentaries in order to engage critically with the notion of documentary as different from fiction. It represents our continued fascination with true stories. The twenty-seven essays present close textual readings of a wide range of texts (albeit rather predictable ones) and are best described as taking a film studies approach.

William Rothman starts off the collection with a well-written piece on Nanook of the North. He notes that while many regard this film as a key text in the development of documentary, it was film produced at a time before documentary and fiction were seen distinct entities. Instead of arguing about the truthfulness of the film, he pays attention to the strategies through which certain truths about Nanook and his community are constructed. It places the film in its historical context, revealing the film to be a site in which various debates about the role of the filmmaker and the relationship with the subjects of the film were rehearsed and played out. The chapter allows us to reconsider some of the assumptions we might make about the film (its colonialism, Nanook as victim, and so on) and to appreciate a more complex reading of its place in documentary’s history.

The development of cinema verite brought to the screen new forms of documentary. One of the most important and successful was the rockumentary. Jeanne Hall presents an analysis of Don’t Look Back (1967), Pennebaker and Leacock’s chronicle of Bob Dylan’s tour of Britain in 1965. In this sharp piece she argues that Don’t Look Back has a clear agenda, one that systematically critiques the media. This is a reading that goes against what is now the received wisdom about the film which suggests it is a film about the contradiction between the on-stage and off-stage Dylan. She also shows how the film can be read as a reflexive commentary on the process of documentary truth telling. Pennebaker is quoted as asking a critic “Would you care if I told you it was fake?”. Here, the question is left for us to consider.

Debates about documentary fakery are nothing new – but because technological advances have made it so easy to fake material in a convincing way, such concerns seem to be foregounded in recent times. There is however, an important difference between a filmmaker who fakes material with a view to deceiving the audience (say for example, material faked by Michael Born in Germany) and the mock-documentary which parodies documentary in order to comment on the form itself. Carl Plantinga’s chapter, one of the best in the book, analyses This is Spinal Tap (1984), a parody of the rockumentary. Plantinga shows how the film works to present a critique of both documentary and of specific versions of masculinity to central to rock. It is a both engaging and humorous piece that broadens the debate to the margins of documentary proper.

Other chapters complicate further the discussions of reality and truth through their analysis of race, sexuality and gender. Sheila Petty discusses the homophobic outcry that accompanied the American public television broadcast of Marlon Riggs’s Tongues Untied (1991), a film about black gay men. The film both celebrates and interrogates the notion of a black gay identity, especially important in the context of the AIDS epidemic. Here, documentary is shown to be a site in which the margins and the invisible can be made visible and given voice. Likewise, Julia Lesage’s discussion of Finding Christie works in a similar way, highlighting issues of subjectivity and identity in women’s autobiographical documentary. What is clear from both of these chapters, is the political function of documentary, to challenge and provoke, while not necessarily attempting to make great claims for a single truth. In both cases, the filmmakers reject such traditional notions of objectivity for a subjective account that reveals far more.
While several of the essays have been previously published, for example Linda Williams article on The Thin Blue Line (1988) as well as Matthew Bernstein’s piece on Roger and Me 1989), the collection makes a useful teaching and research resource.

The book is an interesting collection, and in its attention to close readings and details, it presents an alternative to many of the other documentary anthologies presently available. However, there are a number of points to raise. While the films chosen for analysis are all important and interesting, perhaps it presents a rather unimaginative version of the documentary canon? I would certainly be wary of using it as a core text in a documentary course (especially in Australia) without supplementing both the suggested films and readings. Given the importance of television to documentary’s history and future, it may have been worthwhile adding a chapter or two on some of the more significant made-for-television texts. The discussion of documentary within the film studies framework has tended to dismiss television, even though outside of the US, it is television that has provided a place for the development of the documentary form.

Likewise, given more recent debates which have acknowledged the importance of understanding both the production and reception of documentary, perhaps some attention to these issues would have strengthened the overall analysis. To be fair the book does not claim such comprehensibility, but, through its rather strict adherence to traditional film studies textual analysis, perhaps it fails to engage with the bigger issues confronting documentary filmmaker s and scholars alike.

However, taken on its own terms, this is a good book. The chapters are mostly well written and of a high quality. I have used several chapters in undergraduate classes to which students have responded well, and our engagement with these essays can only further the critical debate.

Jane Roscoe