Archive: Book Reviews, May 2003
New Documentary: A Critical Introduction
By Stella Bruzzi
London and New York: Routledge, 2000. ISBN 0-415-18296-4. 7 illustrations, 199pp. £12.99 (pbk)
A Review by Heather Nunn, Middlesex University, UK
Stella Bruzzi's New Documentary: A Critical Introduction addresses contemporary non-fiction output in the 1980s and 1990s whilst also challenging some of the prevailing axioms of documentary critique and appraisal. Her analysis draws on theories of performance, performativity, authorship, gender, spectatorship and self-reflexivity. The accessible application of these terms to a broad range of contemporary productions recommends this as a provocative text that reclaims the adulterated 'truth' of documentary representation. Rather than being 'a critical introduction' New Documentary appeals to the student already schooled in generic and technological history through texts such as Kilborn and Izod's An Introduction to Television Documentary: confronting reality (1997) and Brian Winston's Claiming the Real: the documentary film revisited (1995).
New Documentary is divided into three parts: 'Ground rules', 'The legacy of direct cinema' and 'Performance'. Throughout, Bruzzi positions herself against the developmental model of documentary theorisation exemplified by Bill Nichols in which documentary falls into the five modes of expository, observational, interactive, reflexive and performative. She is concerned with the 'rigidity' of such 'theoretical orthodoxy', and attempts to rescue the maligned tools of voice-over and narration and highlight politically subversive uses of these techniques. Many documentary critics are well versed in the inevitable filmic manipulation of the real event. Nonetheless, Bruzzi contends, that even the most innovative of contemporary documentaries are still critically measured against a fetishised 'pure' capture of the real. One result being that the popular (such as docu-soaps) and the performative (such as the work of Broomfield, Dineen and Morris) remain under theorised. Her advocating of the contemporary documentary as a dialectical form is refreshing. Rather than hide 'truth' behind inverted commas she celebrates documentary truth as the knowing tension between fact and re-presentation; a praxis where complex political meanings arise from the compromise between a subject, recorder and spectator. Here, she attempts to reclaim the 'relaxed' engagement with the 'creative' treatment of 'actuality' exemplified by the early practitioners such as Grierson, the Soviets and Paul Rotha who embraced the contradictory reconstitution of reality.
Part I 'Ground rules' takes on idealised aspects of the documentary -- raw footage and the voice-over -- the well-worn target of docu-theorists and illustrates their potential for dialectical practice. Personal memory and public history are the conflicting terms that frame Bruzzi's analysis of authoritative and subversive documentaries. She critiques the canonisation of emotionally charged amateur footage of historical events such as the Zapruder home video of Kennedy's assassination and their use as 'raw' evidence. She contrasts this footage with de Antonio's Rush to Judgement (1966) which presents contradictory testimony from civilian witnesses to acknowledge the potential ambiguity of audiovisual evidence. This undermines documentary closure and reveals "a series of truths…not a single underpinning truth" (20). Historical documentary series such as World At War or The People's Century draw on expert testimony, interviewee or voice-over guide to guide response to archival or newsreel material. In contrast, Bruzzi foregrounds Antonio's compilation work from Point of Order (1963) to Mr Hoover and I (1989) for its continuation of Soviet montage tradition wherein the editorial juxtaposition of archive material invites audience participation and gives Nixon, Patton and McCarthy enough rope by which to hang themselves. Here, as in other sections of New Documentary, the different forms and modes of address of television and film should have been signaled. For example, the use of to-camera testimony of ordinary witnesses traced from historical footage in series such as The People's Century deserved further exploration on the back of recent work by cultural historians on the politics of popular memory.
In Part II, the legacy of direct cinema is tracked to the new observational work of British television docu-soaps. Bruzzi discusses the now commonplace discrepancy between ideal and execution in direct cinema. Performance is a key term here extended to the hybrid TV docu-soap -- Lakesiders, Hotel, Driving School and The Cruise -- which observe their 'ordinary' subjects over extended periods but break the governing documentary 'discourse of sobriety' through melodramatic emphasis on institutional and personal crises. The self-conscious affiliation between filmmaker and star personas that develop in docu-soaps such as The Cruise acknowledges the artificiality of the filming set-up but problematically replaces a search for 'truth' with the intimacy of 'honesty'.
Performance is also central to Bruzzi's examination of the 'journey' film. Lanzmann's Shoah and Keiller's London are structured around either a shared theme or shared location, both charting the encounter or act of journeying rather than the push towards a fixed destination highlighted by Brian Winston as the 'chrono-logic' of Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera or Jennings' Listen to Britain. Bruzzi highlights the shared aggression and repression in these two very different texts. In contrast to Lanzmann's inconclusive roving camera, Keiller's series of static composed tripod shots of London define the city as the object of the voyeur, "familiar images" made strange "by the obsessively static, photographic gaze" (120). Lanzmann's masochistic quest for details of the Final Solution involves the sadistic coercion of survivors to speak the past: an enforced performance that challenges the assumption that performance necessitates fictionalisation. Nonetheless the Holocaust remains the repressed real behind these enforced memories. London pictures almost every mode of London transport, yet the physical journey of travel and motion remains the 'sensual and pleasurable' repressed of the collage of city images.
In Part III 'Performance', Bruzzi charts the trajectory of political documentaries of US presidents Nixon, Kennedy and Clinton. The direct cinema film Primary (1960) illustrates Kennedy's ease with the observational camera and his carefully displayed affinity with the media becomes the mark of his mythic political authenticity. In contrast the prolific television footage of Nixon, and his attempted construction of a media persona, become documentary material for the seeking out of the manipulative political performance, a process which increasingly preoccupies documentary treatment of the presidency. Bruzzi argues that the distinction between real and performed political persona is rendered redundant with Clinton and his publicly aired sexual and financial crises which illustrate the widespread public recognition of the political masquerade as a normative state of affairs.
Finally in the work of recent filmmakers such as Nick Broomfield, Molly Dineen, Michael Moore and the innovative TV series Signs of the Times, Bruzzi distinguishes the performative documentary: most obvious in Broomfield's chaotic on-screen persona or Dineen's off-frame voice signifying archetypal intimate feminine concern. The dialectic between on-screen and off-screen persona foregrounds her central tenet: that filmic intervention, whilst necessarily a disruption of the real, does not invalidate the documentary.