Kill the Documentary as We Know It

Abstract

SOMEWHAT IRONICALLY, but in all seriousness as well, I here hurl out a Dogma for future documentary filmmaking-one that questions usefulness of classical realist documentary form as an instrument of publicly shared knowledge. The Dogma is result of my interrogation of classical assumptions of documentary filmmaking-that system of cinematic representation that is said to produce sober, unauthored texts, texts through which world supposedly tells itself, without any ideological intervention from its authors. I want to propose, in its place, strategies for rethinking nonfiction cinema as poetry, as speculative fiction, as critique-strategies for media forms that would utilize, self-consciously, photographic images from archive of the I am not at all ready to abandon making films with these images, but am fearful of ideology they usually hide. Perhaps my Dogma-a slashing away at very underpinnings of myth of real and a critique of current state of documentary-can be a useful tool for resisting what we are witnessing today: that form's swift slide into pornography. I don't believe in dogmas. I don't trust them. This one was first written for myself, in anger, as a kind of black joke, after I read Danish filmmakers' Dogme for fiction filmmaking. That Dogme seemed particularly ridiculous to me because it borrowed some ancient and exhausted conceits from-of all things-the documentary film. These were conceits that, since Lumiere and up to present, have given documentary film its pedigree of real, its guarantee of truth-telling and authenticity. Though many documentary filmmakers hide behind this pedigree, most know from practice (especially in editing room) that it is a guarantor of nothing real and a disingenuous declaration of honesty. The Dogme Danes say that in their films camera must be handheld. There can be no tripods; no inauthentic props; no nondiegetic music; no fancy lighting; etc. The Danish filmmakers seem to be suggesting that if Dogme films abide by these monastic principles and shun glamorous and seductive tools of Hollywood production, they will be more authentic in some way, more powerful and thus more significant. Though it has been taken as a serious political and aesthetic manifesto by many, my guess is that this Dogme was actually conjured up as a publicity stunt (maybe also as a private joke by filmmakers) to draw press attention to this group of films and to rationalize their non-Hollywood, low-budget production values. The Dogme films need no rationalization. The techniques they employ are perfectly pragmatic-reasonable strategies for avoiding burden of two hours of lighting per shot, and a refreshing method for fracturing classic film space with shots grabbed from set in a provocative and spontaneous manner. These techniques allow those filmmakers to concentrate on performances, and these are remarkably good in Dogme films. Cassavetes did all of these things in his film Shadows in 1959, and got great performances as well. He didn't bother to rationalize them at all. A friend of mine thinks Danish Dogme is actually intended as a black parody of cinema verite mode of documentary filmmaking and its truth claims. This makes some sense to me, though I think parody fails because nothing seems able to dislodge nonfiction film's exclusive possession of real. And it's this desperate clutching onto real that keeps documentary filmmakers reproducing, ad infinitum, a corrupt form of public knowledge. I bought into documentary filmmaking in 19605, when developments seemed to promise that independent documentary films could become truly useful, maybe even elegant, intellectual instruments, instruments that could produce significant experience, perhaps as important as experience of reading a book-let's say a book by Faulkner, Thomas Mann, Primo Levi, or today, J. …