Lecture notes charting the origins and aims of documentary (mainly UK focus), with emphasis on ideological claims and critique of the various formats Video playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLRCHqijqFjGtbN0T8TSizGvuDA0NmEPk9

1. Documenting Facts?
Documentary, „truth‟, hidden agendas
#MAC201
robert.jewitt@sunderland.ac.uk
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2. Overview
 Documentary
 History
 Formats
 Critique
 Ideology
 Hidden agendas/global media
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3. Documentary
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4. „Truth‟?
 The power of documentary to reveal a ‘truth’ grants it
special status
 To „document‟ a subject implies keeping a factual
record for future reference
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5. John Grierson (1930s-1940s)
Education
+
Propaganda
=
Social reform?
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6. Expositional documentary
 See Bill Nichols (1991/2004)
 Tended to depict institutions, communities
and traditions
 Public mode of address:
 Highly formal
 Serious
 Educational
 Aimed at informing citizens in a mass
democracy.
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7. Observational documentary
 1950s onwards
 cinema vérité („cinema truth‟ or „direct
cinema‟)
 observe and record the reality of
everyday life as it happened without the
usual organisational planning and
structured direction
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8. Fred Wiseman
High School
(1968, USA)
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9. Planet Earth (BBC, 2006)
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10. Planet Earth
Episode 6 – „Ice Worlds‟
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11. Faking it?
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12. real / reality / realism
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13. Genre hybrids – „fly on the wall‟
 Paul Watson‟s The Family (1974/2008)
 Roger Graef‟s Police (1982)
 Filming events exactly as they happened
 Agreeing in advance the specific subjects
to be filmed
 Showing the edited version to the
participants, but only to ensure any factual
errors may be corrected
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14. Critique
 „To be sure, some documentarists claim to be
objective – a term that seems to renounce an
interpretive role. The claim may be
strategic, but it is surely meaningless.
 The documentarists, like any communicator in
any medium makes endless choices. He (sic)
selects
topics, people, vistas, angles, lens, juxtaposition
s, sounds, words.
 Each selection is an expression of his point of
view, whether he is aware of it or not, whether
he acknowledges it or not.‟
 Erik Barnouw (1993: 287)
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15. Ideological construction
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16. BBC2 (2004), Adam Curtis
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17. Contemporary developments
 Genre hybridity
 Deregulation of broadcasting
 Competition for attention
 Driving School (BBC, 1997)
 11 million viewers
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18. Participatory mode
 Welcomes direct engagement
between filmmaker and subject(s)
 Filmmaker:
 becomes part of the events being
recorded
 is acknowledged (even celebrated) for
their impact on events
 Michael Moore
 Nick Broomfield
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19. Reflexive mode
 Acknowledges the constructed nature of
documentary
 Artifice is exposed
 Not „truth‟ but a reconstruction of „a‟ truth,
not „the‟ truth
 Frequently features the film-maker making
the documentary
 De-mystifying its processes
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20. Reflexive mode
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21. Performative mode
 Emphasizes the subjective nature of the
filmmaker
 Polemical, evocative and aiming for affect
 Morgan Spurlock
 Louis Theroux
 Nick Broomfield
 Michael Moore
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22. Authored documentaries
 Fronted by an investigative anchor
who is frequently positioned at the
centre of an unfolding narrative
 The process of film-making is selfconsciously foregrounded.
 Deeply personal
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23. 23

24. Louis and the Nazis (2003)
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25. Crisis in public communication
 - influence of state:
 corrupted by press officers,
 public relations experts,
 spin doctors,
 good day to „bury‟ bad news:
 9/11 and Labour‟s Jo Moore and Martin Sixsmith
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/1823120.stm
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26. Crisis in public communication
 - impact of market forces:
 need to be entertaining,
 need to make complex issues understandable to broad
audience,
 adopt preformed positions
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27. Crisis in public communication
 - impact of the personal:
 emotional issues,
 fear of personal repercussions,
 paranoia,
 xenophobia
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28. Crisis in public communication
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29. Global media
 We live in the global age. We live in a world that has
become radically interconnected, interdependent and
communicated in the flows of information and culture –
including, importantly, news journalism.
 Simon Cottle, 2009: 1
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30. Global media
 “we have a consciousness of the world, as a whole. That
is a bounded, holistic and finite place.” (emphasis
added)
 Cottle, 2009: 1
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31. Ideology
 In exercising their symbolic and communicative
power, the media today can variously exert pressure and
influence on processes of public understanding and
political response or, equally, serve to dissimulate and
distance the nature of the threats that confront us and
dampen down pressures for change. In such
ways, global crises become variously constituted within
the news media as much as communicated by them
 Cottle, 2009: 2
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32. Immigration
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33. „Unpeople‟
 „The great moral citadels in London and Washington
offer merely silent approval of the violence and tragedy.
No appeals are heard in the United Nations from them…
The distant voices from there should be heard, urgently‟
 (Pilger, 2009)
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34. Channel 4 (2011)
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35. Ideology
 In recent years a substantial amount of research has
been carried out by various organisations in order to
discover what the British public thinks about immigration
and asylum. Most of this research has discovered that
public opinion tends to be significantly hostile towards
asylum seekers. For example, a MORI poll conducted in
2001 found that 44% of people agreed that Britain should
not take any more asylum seekers. The same poll also
estimated that 74% of people believed that refugees
came to the country because they thought Britain was a
„soft touch‟ (http://www.icar.org.uk/?lid=5054).
 Saeed, 2007: 182
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36. Summary
 Long history of documentary production – origins in
educating with the aims being to bring about social
change.
 Special power of documentary to report the „truth‟ – to
expose hidden agendas and ideological malfeasance.
 However, this attempt to speak to the truth is also
ideological – the film-maker selects what should be
seen, structures it, etc.
 Various genre transformations to draw attention to the
constructed nature of the format
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37. Sources
 Erik Barnouw (1993), Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction
Film, Oxford University Press
 Stella Bruzzi (2000), New Documentary: a critical introduction, London:
Routledge
 Simon Cottle (2009) Global Crisis Reporting: Journalism in the Global
Age
 Bill Nichols (2004) Introduction to Documentary - 2nd
Edition, Bloomington, Indiana University Press.
 Amir Saeed (2007) 'Media, Racism and Islamophobia: The
Representation of Islam and Muslims in the Media', Sociology Compass
(1) (2007) (available at http://www.blackwellsynergy.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1751-9020.2007.00039.x)
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