It heralds a welcome new approach. Bruzzi's achievement is to have understood the genre as an activity based on performance rather than observation.
This is a fresh perspective which illuminates the fundamental shifts that will continue to take place in the genre as it enters its second century.
John Ellis, Professor of Media Arts, Royal Holloway, University of London New Documentary provides a contemporary look at documentary and fresh and challenging ways of theorising the non-fiction film. As engaging as the original, this second edition features thorough updates to the existing chapters, as well as a brand new chapter on contemporary cinema release documentaries.
Additional interviews with influential practitioners, such as director Michael Apted and producer Stephen Lambert. More Details Original Title. Other Editions Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about New Documentary , please sign up. Lists with This Book. This book is not yet featured on Listopia. Add this book to your favorite list ».
Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. All Languages. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of New Documentary. Betsy rated it liked it Feb 14, Rachel rated it it was amazing Apr 04, Steven rated it really liked it Jul 27, Katrina Sark rated it liked it Sep 25, Daniel Green rated it really liked it Jan 02, Charlotte rated it really liked it Jan 06, Diana rated it really liked it Mar 29, The current vogue is for reconstruction to be used often alongside more traditional documentary methods, such as archive and interviews, and despite Janice Hadlow then Channel 4 Commissioning Editor for History, currently Head of BBC Four warning on Happy Birthday BBC2 that filmmakers venture into reconstruction at their peril, documentaries have become obsessed with it.
A significant reason for the rise in clearly signposted reconstruction was the inevitable fallout from the admitted restaging of scenes for docusoaps such as Driving School. Recent use of reconstruction is idiosyncratic and has established certain generic oddities and tendencies.
Reconstruction is therefore purely illustrative of words and archive used elsewhere in a documentary; it is padding. Reconstruction here comprises the invention of characters that could have existed but of whom there is no record. Reconstruction can perform a liberating function, particularly to a historical subject for which no archive is readily available; however, there have been too many examples recently of gratuitous reconstruction.
Bar a handful of close-ups, these reconstructions added very little to the story. This arguably confusing convention of placing reconstruction often of the halfhearted, semi-audible variety alongside authentic archive rarely offers new insights or creates a dialectical counterpoint to the more traditional archive and interview material; more commonly it is little more than a florid way of reiterating the same ideas in fancy dress.
Put alongside each other in much the same way as Oliver Stone had done in JFK, the archive sequences become energetic, dramatic renditions of the British salvage operation. It seemed inconceivable at the time of The Nazis that Rees would resort or stoop? In a traditional manner that earlier series juxtaposed only authentic archive and interviews, while the latter inserted several dramatised reconstructions of, for example, the Nazis discussing the building and running of their most notorious death camp.
In another complication, while the words of interviewees were, if they did not speak English, simultaneously translated, the German spoken in the reconstructions remained audible and the scenes subtitled. What are the conventions here? In a sense, reconstruction has come full circle as now it is used interchangeably with archive in many instances — much as it was in the s in the USSR.
What is missing, however, is the political intent behind the reconstructions. Now they are used to heighten and render more accessible the latent drama of the documentary situation. This chapter has taken issue with the central tenet of much theoretical writing on documentary, namely that a successful documentary is contingent upon representing the truth at its core as objectively as possible.
The realisation, however, that the authentic document might be deficient or lacking should not precipitate a representational crisis as it too often does. As the compilation films discussed for the remainder of this chapter exemplify, documentaries are predicated upon a negotiation between the polarities of objectivity and subjectivity, offering a dialectical analysis of events and images that accepts that no non-fictional record can contain the whole truth whilst also accepting that to re-use or recontextualise such material is not to irrevocably suppress or distort the innate value and meaning it possesses.
In the next chapter voice-over narration is examined as arguably the most blatant example of intervention on the part of the documentary filmmaker. Voice-over, in both documentaries and fiction films, is an extra-diegetic soundtrack that has been added to a film. On the whole such a voice-over gives insights and information not immediately available from within the diegesis, but whereas in a fiction film the voice-off is traditionally that of a character in the narrative, in a documentary the voice-over is more usually that of a disembodied and omniscient narrator.
The negative portrayal of voice-over is largely the result of the development of a theoretical orthodoxy that condemns it for being inevitably and inherently didactic.
The endpoint of this discussion will be the various ways in which the classic voice-over has been modified and its rules transgressed through the insertion of ironic detachment between image and sound, the reflexive treatment of the narration tradition and the subversion of the archetypal solid male narrator in a documentary such as Sunless.
The diversity of the form strongly suggests that an overarching definition of voice-over documentaries is distortive in itself. Beyond explanation. The non-fiction films of the silent era or as Nichols no doubt perceives it: the era of documentary chaos are too numerous to list here, but the work of Dziga Vertov, for one, was neither didactic and voice-over led nor undertheorised.
The coherent history of documentary film is thus deemed to have begun around the time of the Second World War. In the episode recounting the Battle of Britain, for example, this pivotal confrontation is re-enacted using a handful of bomber planes, newsreel footage and reconstructions. The omniscient narrator offers the dominant — if not the only — perspective on the footage on the screen.
The expository mode emphasises the impression of objectivity, and of well-established judgement. This mode supports the impulse towards generalisation handsomely since the voice-over commentary can readily extrapolate from the particular instance offered on the image track. Finally, the viewer will typically expect the expository text to take shape around the solution to a problem or puzzle: presenting the news of the day, exploring the working of the atom or the universe, addressing the consequences of nuclear waste or acid rain, tracing the history of an event or the biography of a person.
Nichols 34—8 As identified in this passage, the primary features of narration-led documentaries are: that, by blending omniscience and intimacy, they address the spectator directly; they set out an argument thus implying forethought, knowledge, the ability to assimilate ; they possess a dominant and constant perspective on the events they represent to which all elements within the film conform; they offer a solution and thereby a closure to the stories they tell.
Any attempt at rigid classification seems bound to dismiss or find fault with voice-over documentaries more readily than with any other mode.
Not only does Nichols arbitrarily decide that voice-over is the dominant feature of otherwise vastly divergent films, but he creates a definition of expository documentary that fits only a portion of the films that might reasonably be assumed to conform to that category. This gross oversimplification covers a multitude of differences, from the most common use of commentary as an economic device able to efficiently relay information that might otherwise not be available or might take too long to tell in images, to its deployment as an ironic and polemical tool.
The immediate point of spectator-identification is thereby with the victims of the Nazi extermination programme, and what the film subsequently seeks is an explanation for this final journey. The former is an example of the most common deployment of voice-over as a means of making sense of a montage of images that otherwise would not be explicable; the latter is a frequently adopted measure for telling such a monumental story.
The voice-over in The World at War makes sense of, and creates links between, the images it is covering. The selection of Himmler is not arbitrary but expedient and to a degree reductive, as what happens through this episode of The World at War is that all the historical events represented in terms of narrative unity refer back, however tangentially, to this one individual.
The World at War as a series does not follow a strictly chronological structure, although each episode is set out in a linear fashion. A residual effect of this is to stop the audience from probing deeper into less straightforward issues such as Nazi ideology and the practicalities of the mass exterminations.
The programme likewise shies away from taking issue with its subjects as it maintains its supposedly objective stance. Eden, for example, is not made to confront the inadequacy of being more concerned with the reception in the House of Commons to his statement regarding the treatment of the European Jews than with the issue of why, despite this information, the Allies did so little to intervene.
Fierstein, a well-known gay writer and actor, has an immensely distinctive voice gravel mixed with treacle that immediately makes the film into a statement about gay politics. The question of bias, however, is astutely handled by the film; although its narration is still highly selective and is unashamedly biased towards Milk, Epstein is careful to ensure that Harvey Milk is not simply a significant gay figure but more of a democratic Pied Piper with a more universal charisma.
At times it does this in a flagrantly manipulative manner; this is not a clinical analysis of a series of events but an emotional eulogy, and as such it wants to bring its audience round, to make us feel as well as think the same way it does.
To achieve this, Epstein deploys a variety of narrative devices, one of which is to construct a conflict around which the rest of the action revolves between Milk and White. Several strands running through the film can be traced back to this symbolic duel and the collisions that result from it.
White opposition that heighten, explicate and crystallise the debates enacted therein such as gays and lesbians vs. After the Feinstein news flash, the film cuts to a protracted sequence of interviews with the same friends and colleagues that have proffered choric opinions of Milk throughout, each talking about their immediate responses to hearing the news that morning and what they did afterwards.
Having reached this moment of extreme pathos and Billy Kraus reporting how he was assured that the march had not reached him yet, there is then a cut to footage of the actual march: a wide street filled, as far as the eye can see, with people holding candles this is not unlike the similarly delayed revelation of quite how many people are in attendance at the funeral in Imitation of Life.
This false ending culminates in the respective funerals of Milk and Moscone, the former taking precedence over the latter. In many ways, Harvey Milk is a consummate melodrama and this build up to a moment of crisis,triumph or extreme emotion is a formal technique repeated several times. It may come as a shock to some viewers that the funeral march is not the end of the film.
After a fade to black the final section commences, dedicated to the trial and sentencing of Dan White and the street violence that greeted the verdict. There is something anticlimactic, un-Aristotelian about this transition, abruptly reminding those watching that this is more documentary than melodrama.
This has the effect of imposing an emotional continuum on the film that compels the audience to react to the last section through the feelings engendered by what has preceded it. The World at War and The Times of Harvey Milk offer two examples of traditional voice-over as an explanatory and persuasive tool.
They use expository narration, however, in different ways; whereas The World at War maintains a semblance of instructional objectivity, the degree of bias in Harvey Milk is evident throughout. The tonal differences between the two make definitions of the expository mode difficult. The extent to which material has been assimilated, concentrated and selected in traditional expository documentaries makes theorists uneasy, as does the domination of commentary and of a single perspective.
The World at War has, out of necessity, been selective in its use of material. The questionable belief behind the theorisation of the narrationled documentary is that the voice-over automatically becomes the dominant and therefore subjectifying force behind every film in which it is substantially used, that its didacticism stems from its inevitable pre-eminence in the hierarchy of documentary devices.
Instead, it should be acknowledged that a strong voiceover rarely renders the truth contained within the image invisible, that in effect these narration-led documentaries are films — even the least radical amongst them — that suggest that documentaries, far from being able to represent the truth in an unadulterated way, can only do so through interpretation, which in the case of narration is of the most overt and blatant kind.
The truth, therefore, does not only become apparent when the overt intervention of the filmmaker is minimised. This is why another common ellipsis in Narration: the film and its voice 57 documentary theory — that form and ideology are corollaries — is likewise questionable. Narration is assumed to be undemocratic and inherently distortive. The traditional explanation lies in the disembodiment of the classic documentary narrator.
In this system the concern is to reduce, insofar as possible, not the informative capacity of commentary but its assertive character and, if one likes, its authoritative character — that arbitration and arbitrariness of the voice-off which, to the extent that it cannot be localised, can be criticised by nothing and no one.
That this dubious power is so often invested in a white, male, middle- 58 Narration: the film and its voice class and anonymous voice necessarily cements the voice-over form as repressive and anti-radical. As there is an alternative practical tradition, so there is an alternative if stunted critical tradition which prioritises the potential rather than the deficiencies of the expository mode.
The traditional voice-over form emphasises the unity, and imaginary cohesion of its various elements; so the dominance of the narration covertly serves to emphasise the incontrovertibility of the images by refusing to dispute and doubt what they depict. Narration could thereby be viewed as a mechanism deployed to mask the realisation that this mode of representation, and indeed its inherent belief in a consistent and unproblematic truth, are perpetually on the verge of collapse, that commentary, far from being a sign of omniscience and control, is the hysterical barrier erected against the spectre of ambivalence and uncertainty.
Indeed, many of the unconventional voice-overs signal their doubt that such a neat collusion between voice and image can ever be sustained, that even narration is not invariably allied to determinism, but has the potential to be a destabilising component of a dialectical structure that intentionally brings cracks and inconsistencies to the surface.
In certain documentary films — when voice-over becomes a truly subversive tool, and one not bound by the conservatism of the expository form — the narration becomes a component capable of engendering such a dialectical distance, one that both draws the audience into sympathising for the image and sets them critically back from it.
Yes, the film was commissioned by the French Ministry of the Army, but they were not entirely satisfied with the result, and their discontent no doubt resulted from detecting the thinly veiled tensions between thesis and antithesis. As Franju cuts between the petrified monument and the still living soldier, it remains unclear whether the soldier is looking at Napoleon, or indeed whether he can see or understand the objects his eyes happen to have alighted upon; as a result of this uncertainty, the issue of difference and tension between myth and the present is left for the spectator to ponder.
The point of synthesis is the moment of viewing. In both these examples what is signalled is the discrepancy between the brutality of war and the safety of its remembering, the one necessarily impinging on the other, so the mummification of experience witnessed in the army museum itself becomes an act of violence.
As the war orphans march crocodile fashion out of the gates and a flock of birds swings through the air a reprise of an earlier sequence the film appears to have made little definite progress.
Some of the censorship problems Huston encountered were indirectly related to these tonal shifts. US Army records reveal several memos calling for the removal of footage showing identifiable dead American soldiers being hauled onto a truck, overlaid with excerpts from interviews they recorded whilst still alive. Huston, having interwoven with clarity and precision image, commentary, irony and passion, dispenses with such rationality when it comes to the conclusion of San Pietro, a sequence that is almost abstract in its dependency on raw emotion and an absence of intellectual and historical interpretation.
This scene, in which the inhabitants of San Pietro re-emerge from their hiding places in the mountains, stands apart from the rest of the film by its lack of narration except of the most minimal, functional kind. A body is spied in the rubble; a man, beside himself with grief, is comforted by friends; 62 Narration: the film and its voice a piece of choral music is laid over the images; the man hugs the dead, dustcovered body of what is probably his wife; he turns to look at the camera with an expression of pleading and anger; after which there is a sharp edit as if the camera cannot bear this burden and has to look away to two mothers sitting together, both simultaneously breastfeeding and crying.
Huston, by the end, conveys rather than explains the battle for San Pietro and what it meant to witness it. It is apposite, therefore, that the film brings us back from such an acute moment of despair through images rather than narration. Again this entails looking out to camera, but this time it is the laughing, inquisitive, trusting and self-conscious children whose gazes we meet. The loss of voice at the end of San Pietro is, paradoxically, as eloquent as the previous scenes packed with loquacious commentary.
With the bodies Voice-over is no longer a controlling mechanism. As Silverman p. The unease with which Huston adopts the traditional expository form also creates an openness that allows for a far more active, interventionist spectatorship.
The last of these options is the most recognisably confrontational, as it challenges, from several angles, the conceptualisation of the documentary voice-over as a repressive ideological, patriarchal tool. There is a parallel to be drawn here with the use of voice-over in documentaries.
The traditional expository mode of direct address relies on proximity between text and image: the words explicate the visuals, telling the spectator how he or she should interpret them; the potential for secondary, connotative meaning is limited. As French feminist Annie Leclerc observes: Man has always decided what can be talked about, and what cannot How can female thought of any substance come into being if we are constrained to think along lines laid down by man As yet, I am only really able to think one thing: that female thought can exist, must exist so as to put an end at last, not to male thought itself, but to its ridiculous — or tragic — soliloquy.
Differences are emerging between the two categories in terms of actual quality of voice. This differs greatly from earlier notable uses of female narration in documentaries such as Are We Winning, Mommy? The first thing one notices about this voice-over — bar the fact that it is a woman who is speaking it — is that the narrator is making no attempt to disguise the fact that she is reading; there is a formality to the intonation and modulation as well as to the writing the rather old-fashioned rendering of the date, for example that is immediately at odds with the chaotic, hand-held images.
The contrapuntal use of the female voice continues as its distanciation from the visual text serves to mimic and convey the alienation of Douglas Hurd from the residents of Handsworth. The political statements being made via the voice-over of Handsworth Songs are intensified by the use of a female narrator to voice them.
It is intriguing that filmmakers such as Molly Dineen, Jane Treays or Lucy Blakstad, who all interject their own voices into their films, have very similar voices and styles of delivery: wispy, middle-class and rather self-consciously unauthoritative.
The female voice-over offers another instance of drawing attention to the frailty of the documentary endeavour to represent reality in the most seamless way possible. It is not the voice of universality but of specificity, and signals the impossibility and the lack that the single male voice-over frequently masks. The traditional voice-over can be construed as one of the symbolic substitutes for this loss of control and omniscience. The boundaries between these various personae are far from rigid and thus the central relationship between image and words, traditionally so logical, becomes, in Sunless, fluid and mutable.
I would like to suggest that the film Sunless is a cautionary tale. The cameraman is aware that in remembering images he has filmed, he may be too late in recognising their significance and emotional value. By means of comparison, one could cite the very different use Marker makes of voice-over and letters in The Last Bolshevik. What characterises the female voice-over is the inconsistency of its reported relationship with Krasna.
There is one particularly multi-layered series of sequences which exemplifies the confusions and contortions, beginning with the revisiting of the locations for Vertigo. Thus Sunless, the visual and aural material its audience is engaged in watching, is cast into the realm of the imaginary, coming to comprise little more than a tendentious collection of memories and travel footage held loosely together by a voice-over whose origins and authenticity remain obscured to the end. This obscurity spills over into how the film approaches the issues of representation and recollection, the main underlying questions raised by the image and the voice-over.
Throughout Sunless there is a running analysis of the interconnection between film and memory, two things which the normative documentary model might prise apart but which here are perceived as equivalents. Sunless works against such a simplistic dichotomy, proposing as analogous the acts of remembering and filming in a sequence where the erosion of the divisions between image, voice-over and letters are particularly pronounced: I remember that month of January in Tokyo — or rather I remember the images I filmed in that month of January in Tokyo.
They have substituted themselves for my memory — they are my memory. How has mankind managed to remember? I know — the Bible. The new bible will be an eternal magnetic tape of a time that will have to reread itself constantly just to know it existed. Unlike the classic expository documentary, this rumination does not suggest a finite or definite correspondence between image and narration; whilst the voiceover discusses means of remembering, of how memories are constructed, the images show people praying at temples in Japan for the beginning of the Year of the Dog.
In the place of an analysis of these images is an analysis of the event—film relationship that necessarily preoccupies much theorisation of documentary: does memory exist independently of being filmed, or is memory constructed through being recorded? The act of remembering thus becomes synonymous with the act of recording, and although the means by which this is achieved may have changed hence the cursory reference to the Bible , the equivocal outcome remains consistent.
Whilst this search for coherence is understandable, it seems more appropriate with a film such as Sunless to take it on its own terms, to accept that there are three sources for the narration, and that the relationship between them remains oblique.
In The Pillow Book Sei Shonagon, as the narrator of Sunless states, notes down things that, in her everyday life, attract, displease and fascinate her, in no particular order and with no particular end in sight. To pass a place where babies are playing.
Condition: Brand New. In Stock. Items related to New Documentary. New Documentary. Bruzzi, Stella. Publisher: Routledge , This specific ISBN edition is currently not available. View all copies of this ISBN edition:. Synopsis About this title Praise for New Documentary : 'It's refreshing to find a book that cuts through the tired old debates that have surrounded documentary film and television. Review : 'It's refreshing to find a book that cuts through the tired old debates that have surrounded documentary film and television heralds a welcome new approach.
Buy New Learn more about this copy. Other Popular Editions of the Same Title. Search for all books with this author and title. Customers who bought this item also bought. Stock Image. New Documentary Stella Bruzzi. Published by Routledge
0コメント