Documentary Film

Home > Other > Documentary Film > Page 1
Documentary Film Page 1

by Patricia Aufderheide




  Oxford University Press, Inc., publishes works that further

  Oxford University’s objective of excellence

  in research, scholarship, and education.

  Oxford New York

  Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi

  Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi

  New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in

  Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece

  Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore

  South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Copyright © 2007 by Patricia Aufderheide

  Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.

  198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016

  www.oup.com

  Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,

  electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,

  without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Aufderheide, Patricia.

  Documentary film: a very short introduction

  / Patricia Aufderheide.

  p. cm.—(Very short introductions)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-19-518270-5 (pbk.)

  1. Documentary films—History and criticism.

  I. Title.

  PN1995.9.D6A94 2007

  070.1′8—dc22

  2007018114

  1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2

  Printed in the United States of America

  on acid-free paper

  Very Short Introductions available now:

  ADVERTISING • Winston Fletcher AFRICAN HISTORY • John Parker and Richard Rathbone AGNOSTICISM • Robin Le Poidevin AMERICAN POLITICAL PARTIES AND ELECTIONS • L. Sandy Maisel THE AMERICAN PRESIDENCY • Charles O. Jones ANARCHISM • Colin Ward

  ANCIENT EGYPT • Ian Shaw

  ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY • Julia Annas ANCIENT WARFARE • Harry Sidebottom ANGLICANISM • Mark Chapman

  THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE • John Blair ANIMAL RIGHTS • David DeGrazia ANTISEMITISM • Steven Beller

  THE APOCRYPHAL GOSPELS • Paul Foster ARCHAEOLOGY • Paul Bahn

  ARCHITECTURE • Andrew Ballantyne ARISTOCRACY • William Doyle

  ARISTOTLE • Jonathan Barnes

  ART HISTORY • Dana Arnold

  ART THEORY • Cynthia Freeland ATHEISM • Julian Baggini

  AUGUSTINE • Henry Chadwick

  AUTISM • Uta Frith

  BARTHES • Jonathan Culler

  BESTSELLERS • John Sutherland THE BIBLE • John Riches

  BIBLICAL ARCHEOLOGY • Eric H. Cline BIOGRAPHY • Hermione Lee

  THE BOOK OF MORMON • Terryl Givens THE BRAIN • Michael O’Shea

  BRITISH POLITICS • Anthony Wright BUDDHA • Michael Carrithers

  BUDDHISM • Damien Keown

  BUDDHIST ETHICS • Damien Keown CAPITALISM • James Fulcher

  CATHOLICISM • Gerald O’Collins THE CELTS • Barry Cunliffe

  CHAOS • Leonard Smith

  CHOICE THEORY • Michael Allingham CHRISTIAN ART • Beth Williamson CHRISTIAN ETHICS • D. Stephen Long CHRISTIANITY • Linda Woodhead CITIZENSHIP • Richard Bellamy CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY • Helen Morales CLASSICS • Mary Beard and John Henderson CLAUSEWITZ • Michael Howard

  THE COLD WAR • Robert McMahon COMMUNISM • Leslie Holmes

  CONSCIOUSNESS • Susan Blackmore CONTEMPORARY ART • Julian Stallabrass CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY • Simon Critchley COSMOLOGY • Peter Coles

  THE CRUSADES • Christopher Tyerman CRYPTOGRAPHY • Fred Piper and Sean Murphy DADA AND SURREALISM • David Hopkins DARWIN • Jonathan Howard

  THE DEAD SEA SCROLLS • Timothy Lim DEMOCRACY • Bernard Crick

  DESCARTES • Tom Sorell

  DESERTS • Nick Middleton

  DESIGN • John Heskett

  DINOSAURS • David Norman

  DIPLOMACY • Joseph M. Siracusa DOCUMENTARY FILM • Patricia Aufderheide DREAMING • J. Allan Hobson

  DRUGS • Leslie Iversen

  DRUIDS • Barry Cunliffe

  THE EARTH • Martin Redfern

  ECONOMICS • Partha Dasgupta

  EGYPTIAN MYTH • Geraldine Pinch EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Paul Langford THE ELEMENTS • Philip Ball

  EMOTION • Dylan Evans

  EMPIRE • Stephen Howe

  ENGELS • Terrell Carver

  ENGLISH LITERATURE • Jonathan Bate EPIDEMIOLOGY • Roldolfo Saracci ETHICS • Simon Blackburn

  THE EUROPEAN UNION • John Pinder and Simon Usherwood EVOLUTION • Brian and Deborah Charlesworth EXISTENTIALISM • Thomas Flynn FASCISM • Kevin Passmore

  FASHION • Rebecca Arnold

  FEMINISM • Margaret Walters

  FILM MUSIC • Kathryn Kalinak

  THE FIRST WORLD WAR • Michael Howard FORENSIC PSYCHOLOGY • David Canter FORENSIC SCIENCE • Jim Fraser FOSSILS • Keith Thomson

  FOUCAULT • Gary Gutting

  FREE SPEECH • Nigel Warburton FREE WILL • Thomas Pink

  FRENCH LITERATURE • John D. Lyons THE FRENCH REVOLUTION • William Doyle FREUD • Anthony Storr

  FUNDAMENTALISM • Malise Ruthven GALAXIES • John Gribbin

  GALILEO • Stillman Drake

  GAME THEORY • Ken Binmore

  GANDHI • Bhikhu Parekh

  GEOGRAPHY • John Matthews and David Herbert GEOPOLITICS • Klaus Dodds

  GERMAN LITERATURE • Nicholas Boyle GERMAN PHILOSOPHY • Andrew Bowie GLOBAL CATASTROPHES • Bill McGuire GLOBAL WARMING • Mark Maslin

  GLOBALIZATION • Manfred Steger THE GREAT DEPRESSION AND THE NEW DEAL • Eric Rauchway HABERMAS • James Gordon Finlayson HEGEL • Peter Singer

  HEIDEGGER • Michael Inwood

  HIEROGLYPHS • Penelope Wilson HINDUISM • Kim Knott

  HISTORY • John H. Arnold

  THE HISTORY OF ASTRONOMY • Michael Hoskin THE HISTORY OF LIFE • Michael Benton THE HISTORY OF MEDICINE • William Bynum THE HISTORY OF TIME • Leofranc Holford-Strevens HIV/AIDS • Alan Whiteside

  HOBBES • Richard Tuck

  HUMAN EVOLUTION • Bernard Wood HUMAN RIGHTS • Andrew Clapham HUME • A. J. Ayer

  IDEOLOGY • Michael Freeden

  INDIAN PHILOSOPHY • Sue Hamilton INFORMATION • Luciano Floridi INNOVATION • Mark Dodgson and David Gann INTELLIGENCE • Ian J. Deary

  INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION • Khalid Koser INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS • Paul Wilkinson ISLAM • Malise Ruthven

  ISLAMIC HISTORY • Adam Silverstein JOURNALISM • Ian Hargreaves

  JUDAISM • Norman Solomon

  JUNG • Anthony Stevens

  KABBALAH • Joseph Dan

  KAFKA • Ritchie Robertson

  KANT • Roger Scruton

  KEYNES • Robert Skidelsky

  KIERKEGAARD • Patrick Gardiner THE KORAN • Michael Cook

  LANDSCAPES AND CEOMORPHOLOGY • Andrew Goudie and Heather Viles LAW • Raymond Wacks

  THE LAWS OF THERMODYNAMICS • Peter Atkins LEADERSHIP • Keth Grint LINCOLN • Allen C. Guelzo

  LINGUISTICS • Peter Matthews

  LITERARY THEORY • Jonathan Culler LOCKE • John Dunn

  LOGIC • Graham Priest

  MACHIAVELLI • Quentin Skinner MARTIN LUTHER • Scott H. Hendrix THE MARQUIS DE SADE • John Phillips MARX • Peter Singer

  MATHEMATICS • Timothy Gowers

  THE MEANING OF LIFE • Terry Eagleton MEDICAL ETHICS • Tony Hope

  MEDIEVAL BRITAIN • John Gillingham and Ralph A
. Griffiths MEMORY • Jonathan K. Foster

  MICHAEL FARADAY • Frank A. J. L. James MODERN ART • David Cottington MODERN CHINA • Rana Mitter

  MODERN IRELAND • Senia Paseta MODERN JAPAN • Christopher Goto-Jones MODERNISM • Christopher Butler MOLECULES • Philip Ball

  MORMONISM • Richard Lyman Bushman MUSIC • Nicholas Cook

  MYTH • Robert A. Segal

  NATIONALISM • Steven Grosby

  NELSON MANDELA • Elleke Boehmer NEOLIBERALISM • Manfred Steger and Ravi Roy THE NEW TESTAMENT • Luke Timothy Johnson THE NEW TESTAMENT AS LITERATURE • Kyle Keefer NEWTON • Robert Iliffe

  NIETZSCHE • Michael Tanner

  NINETEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Christopher Harvie and H. C. G. Matthew THE NORMAN CONQUEST • George Garnett NORTHERN IRELAND • Marc Mulholland NOTHING • Frank Close

  NUCLEAR WEAPONS • Joseph M. Siracusa THE OLD TESTAMENT • Michael D. Coogan PARTICLE PHYSICS • Frank Close PAUL • E. P. Sanders

  PENTECOSTALISM • William K. Kay PHILOSOPHY • Edward Craig

  PHILOSOPHY OF LAW • Raymond Wacks PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE • Samir Okasha PHOTOGRAPHY • Steve Edwards

  PLANETS • David A. Rothery

  PLATO • Julia Annas

  POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY • David Miller POLITICS • Kenneth Minogue

  POSTCOLONIALISM • Robert Young POSTMODERNISM • Christopher Butler POSTSTRUCTURALISM • Catherine Belsey PREHISTORY • Chris Gosden

  PRESOCRATIC PHILOSOPHY • Catherine Osborne PRIVACY • Raymond Wacks

  PROGRESSIVISM • Walter Nugent PSYCHIATRY • Tom Burns

  PSYCHOLOGY • Gillian Butler and Freda McManus PURITANISM • Francis J. Bremer THE QUAKERS • Pink Dandelion

  QUANTUM THEORY • John Polkinghorne RACISM • Ali Rattansi

  THE REAGAN REVOLUTION • Gil Troy THE REFORMATION • Peter Marshall RELATIVITY • Russell Stannard RELIGION IN AMERICA • Timothy Beal THE RENAISSANCE • Jerry Brotton RENAISSANCE ART • Geraldine A. Johnson ROMAN BRITAIN • Peter Salway

  THE ROMAN EMPIRE • Christopher Kelly ROMANTICISM • Michael Ferber

  ROUSSEAU • Robert Wokler

  RUSSELL • A. C. Grayling

  RUSSIAN LITERATURE • Catriona Kelly THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION • S. A. Smith SCHIZOPHRENIA • Chris Frith and Eve Johnstone SCHOPENHAUER • Christopher Janaway SCIENCE AND RELIGION • Thomas Dixon SCOTLAND • Rab Houston

  SEXUALITY • Véronique Mottier SHAKESPEARE • Germaine Greer

  SIKHISM • Eleanor Nesbitt

  SOCIAL AND CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY • John Monaghan and Peter Just SOCIALISM • Michael Newman

  SOCIOLOGY • Steve Bruce

  SOCRATES • C. C. W. Taylor

  THE SOVIET UNION • Stephen Lovell THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR • Helen Graham SPANISH LITERATURE • Jo Labanyi SPINOZA • Roger Scruton

  STATISTICS • David J. Hand

  STUART BRITAIN • John Morrill SUPERCONDUCTIVITY • Stephen Blundell TERRORISM • Charles Townshend THEOLOGY • David F. Ford

  THOMAS AQUINAS • Fergus Kerr

  TOCQUEVILLE • Harvey C. Mansfield TRAGEDY • Adrian Poole

  THE TUDORS • John Guy

  TWENTIETH-CENTURY BRITAIN • Kenneth O. Morgan THE UNITED NATIONS • Jussi M. Hanhimäki THE U.S. CONCRESS • Donald A. Ritchie UTOPIANISM • Lyman Tower Sargent THE VIKINGS • Julian Richards WITCHCRAFT • Malcolm Gaskill

  WITTGENSTEIN • A. C. Grayling WORLD MUSIC • Philip Bohlman

  THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION • Amrita Narlikar WRITING AND SCRIPT • Andrew Robinson AVAILABLE SOON: LATE ANTIQUITY • Gillian Clark MUHAMMAD • Jonathan A. Brown

  GENIUS • Andrew Robinson

  NUMBERS • Peter M. Higgins

  ORGANIZATIONS • Mary Jo Hatch VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS

  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in more than 25 languages worldwide.

  The series began in 1995, and now represents a wide variety of topics in history, philosophy, religion, science, and the humanities. The VSI Library now contains over 200 volumes-a Very Short Introduction to everything from ancient Egypt and Indian philosophy to conceptual art and cosmology-and will continue to grow to a library of around 300 titles.

  VERY SHORT INTRODUCTIONS AVAILABLE NOW

  For more information visit our web site

  www.oup.co.uk/general/vsi/

  Patricia Aufderheide

  Documentary Film

  A Very Short Introduction

  Documentary Film: A Very Short Introduction

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  1 Defining the documentary

  Naming

  Form

  Founders

  Cinema verité

  2 Subgenres

  Public affairs

  Government propaganda

  Advocacy

  Historical

  Ethnographic

  Nature

  3 Conclusion

  A note on history and scholarship

  One Hundred Great Documentaries

  Further Reading and Viewing

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  1 Toxic effects of vinyl production explored in Blue Vinyl.

  © Chris Pilaro

  2 Moth wings and scraps of twigs and flowers in Mothlight.

  Estate of Stan Brakhage and www.fredcamper.com

  3 Traditional Inuit customs in Nanook of the North.

  Library of Congress

  4 British mailtrain in Night Mail.

  Museum of Modern Art Film Stills Archive

  5 Camera lens in Man with a Movie Camera.

  © Photofest

  6 Seller of Bibles in Salesman.

  © Photofest

  7 African American basketball player in Hoop Dreams.

  © Kartemquin Films 1994

  8 Crowd scene from Triumph of the Will.

  © Photofest

  9 Transatlantic phone call in The New Americans.

  © Kartemquin Films 2004

  10 Armored tanks as shown in The Battle of Chile.

  First Run/Icarus Films

  11 Bodyguards of Salvador Allende, in Chile, Obstinate memory.

  First Run/Icarus Films

  12 Amazonian Indians in The Smell of the Pequi Fruit.

  Video in the Villages

  13 Al Gore presents An Inconvenient Truth.

  © 2006 by Paramount Classics, a division of Paramount Pictures

  Introduction

  This introduction to documentary film is directed to people who like watching documentaries and want to know more about the form; to people who hope to make documentaries and want to know the field and its expectations; and to students and teachers who hope to learn more and tell others what they have learned.

  Documentary Film is organized to present an overview of central issues and then to discuss different subgenres. I particularly wanted to use categories that could address concerns about objectivity, advocacy, and bias that have always swirled around documentary but with renewed vigor since the breakthrough popularity of Fahrenheit 9/11. One could easily select or add other categories, such as music, sports, labor, diary, and food; I selected the ones used in this book because they are common categories in the documentary marketplace, and because they raise important issues about truth and representing reality.

  This thematic organization allows you to enter the subject matter easily through the kind of film that first attracted you to it, and it allows me to make connections between historical eras and to demonstrate the ongoing nature of core controversies in documentary. Those who prefer a more straightforward chronology may note that each of the subgenre chapters is organized chronologically (with the exception of the propaganda chapter, which focuses largely on World War II). So after reading the first four chapters, which establish the core issues and early documentary history, one can read the first se
ctions of the various subgenre chapters and then return to the next section of each of the chapters.

  Since the material is drawn not only from scholarship but from my four-decade experience as a film critic, it reflects my interests and limitations. Most of the scholarship I refer to is written in English, and I have a bias toward long-form documentary and the work of independent filmmakers.

  I was originally attracted to documentary by the promise that has drawn so many makers to the form—one that the noted editor and critic Dai Vaughan, in an essay concerned with the threat to documentary by digital manipulation, described as the “gut feeling that if people were allowed to see freely they would see truly, perceiving their world as open to scrutiny and evaluation, as being malleable in the way film is malleable.” I have found the work of filmmakers such as Les Blank, Henry Hampton, Pirjo Honkasalo, Barbara Kopple, Kim Longinotto, Marcel Ophuls, Gordon Quinn, and Agnès Varda to be inspiring.

  I am grateful to Elda Rotor of the Oxford University Press for approaching me with the idea of writing this book, and to Cybele Tom for shouldering the editing upon her departure, and to my copy editor, Mary Sutherland. Many colleagues in communication, literature, film, and film studies programs generously provided insights that I attempt to share here. I greatly appreciate the support of American University’s library staff, especially Chris Lewis. I am indebted to Ron Sutton, my mentor at American University; to Dean Larry Kirkman at the American University School of Communication, who also did me the inestimable honor of introducing me to Erik Barnouw; and to New York University’s Barbara Abrash, who opened many doors to insight and opportunity. Projects with the Council on Foundations (especially with Evelyn Gibson) and the Ford Foundation (especially with Orlando Bagwell) deepened my knowledge of the field. I am grateful as well to Gordon Quinn, Nina Seavey, Stephan Schwartzman, George Stoney, and anonymous reviewers for comments in production.

  Chapter 1

  Defining the Documentary

  Naming

  Documentary film begins in the last years of the nineteenth century with the first films ever projected, and it has many faces. It can be a trip to exotic lands and lifestyles, as was Nanook of the North (1922). It can be a visual poem, such as Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929)—a story about a rainy day, set to a piece of classical music, in which the storm echoes the structure of the music. It can be an artful piece of propaganda. Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who ardently proclaimed that fiction cinema was poisonous and dying and that documentary was the future, made Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as propaganda both for a political regime and for a film style.

 

‹ Prev