The Objective Phenomenon

Derek Ustruck

McGowan-Hartmann

FTCA 4545

Derek Ustruck

FTCA -Film Theory and Criticism

John McGowan-Hartmann

04/07/11

The Objective Phenomenon

Jack Ellis and Betsy McLane assert that there are but three modes of film as an art:

documentary, narrative, and avant-garde.(14) There is a profusion of work by a number of thinkers

and critics regarding all three of these modes and all three are saddled, to an certain extent, with the

notion of meaning. What is the author trying to convey? While the difficulties of interpretation are

certainly difficult in narrative, and often nearly impossible in avant-garde films- where the artist

frequently obfuscates the meanings of his film behind layers of allegory and where they are sometimes

entirely nonsensical- the documentary film is burdened by a unique criterion of representing reality or

at the minimum making assertions of reality.

When dealing with assertions of fact, the situation becomes far more complicated. The narrative

film, even in its most didactic mode typified by films like Spielberg’s Schindler's List (1993) and

Kimberly Pierce’s Boys Don't Cry (1999), could only claim that this represents the filmmakers

sentiments on the subject. Lacking the direct treatment of reality, it is only possible to present deductive

conclusions synthesized by the filmmaker. The audience does not expect the treatment to be factual and

informative, the audience is present for the aesthetic value, or the reception of emotion broadcast from

the screen space.

The notion that documentary films are ones that are direct representations of reality and, by

virtue of this, are objective treatments of reality becomes exceedingly specious after a simple perusal of

the Netflix documentary section. The genre of documentary is populated by nearly 5,000 films with

luminaries such as Davis Guggenheim's An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Banksy's Exit Through the Gift

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Shop (2010) and Henry Joost and Ariel Shulman's Catfish (2010). None of these films are objective

treatments of reality. In fact, Catfish is completely contrived. There are, of course, what one might

describe as more conventional documentaries such as Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington's

Restrepo (2010), Flaherty's Nanook of the North (1922), and Man of Iran (1934). All of these films fall

into the broad class of documentary filmmaking, but the viewer would be remiss in approaching all of

these films in the same manner. This typifies the problem of the documentary genre: is there a

possibility of objective representation, and if there is, how can the audience determine when it is safe to

trust the filmmaker? An examination of the history of the documentary mode will help to understand

the synthetic construction of the genre. The inspection of use-instances (historical referents) will also

help to examine what is considered documentary film and of what its sub-classes are composed.

A Brief History of the Documentary Mode

While Flaherty's Nanook of the North was released in 1922, it was the release of his subsequent

film Moana in 1926 that led John Grierson in his review of the film in The New York Sun to apply the

term “documentary” as an adjective when speaking of film. He used the term with no explanation in his

review saying only: “Of course, Moana being a visual accounts of events on the daily life of a

Polynesian youth and his family, has documentary value.” (Ellis and MacLane, 3) It was not until later

that he qualified his usage with a definition saying documentary is “the creative treatment of reality”

(ibid, 4)

Grierson's definition gave a class to film which already was already separate in nature from

films of the emerging narrative style such as The Great Train Robbery filmed in 1903 by Edwin Porter.

There are certainly films of the early cinematic period which pre-date Flaherty's films and those by

such early documentarians as Margaret Mead and Malinowski follow much in the same vein as

Flaherty's in that they are ethnographic in nature. Ellis and MacLane ponder whether the Lumiere

brothers early films such as The Arrival of a Train at the Station (1895) and Workers Leaving the

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Factory (1895) qualify as early examples of the documentary class. These films certainly manifest

some of the traditional qualities of the genre, but are probably better looked at as a product of

filmmakers naïve to the capabilities of the film medium. Film theorist Rotha, in an early examination of

the genre in his seminal work Documentary Film classifies films of the documentary class into four

categories: the naturalist, the newsreel, the propagandist, and the continental realist traditions.

The naturalist sub-class is represented by the aforementioned and seminal works by Flaherty

and in the rest of the socio-anthropologically styled films. The Naturalists traveled and incorporated

themselves into the culture they intended to represent. This class has grown to include documentaries

of biological nature, such as those made by the esteemed oceanographer Jacques Cousteau. The

Naturalists certainly embody many of the qualities that are traditionally associated with the

documentary class in general.

They make attempts to accurately represent what it is to “be” their subject. The Naturalist details the

quotidian affairs and cultural structures of the subject, and as such the inclusion of the “nature

documentary” in the class seems to be a natural extension. Films such as Stevie (2003) carry on the

modern naturalist tradition, as filmmaker Steve James details, with as little approbation as possible, the

legal struggles and life of accused child molester Stevie Fielding. James used his history as a Fielding's

Advocate Big Brother to gain unprecedented access to the mind of someone who's mind is criminally

unwell. (Rotha, 79)

The Continental Realist tradition is the most ill-defined, but Rotha qualifies them as non-fiction

films that stem from the French tradition of “l'art pour l'art”. Unlike avant-garde films that were made

contemporaneously these pastiche films relied on documentary style footage to provide an aesthetic

basis around which they framed their montage films. Rotha describes the evolution of these films into a

more structured cinema verité style documentaries. Jean Aurenche and Pierre Charboner produced

Pirates du Rhône (1933) which investigates the methods and culture of the river poachers on the Rhône

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River and its surrounding areas, Rotha cites this film as the highest achievement of the Continental

Realist tradition. At this stage of the evolution, however, there doesn't seem to be sufficient difference

between the Naturalist and Continental Realist tradition to warrant separate categories. Rotha's

separates these categories based on the different evolutionary paths the sub-classes took, bu this seems

to be immaterial to the taxonomy. Ultimately the only difference between the films is location- the

Naturalist explores foreign cultures while the Continental Realist examines the domestic. McLane and

Ellis describe the class more accurately as the Anthropological Documentarians, including also in the

group films of the travelogue style such as those made by Martin and Osa Johnson's Baboona (1935)

and Borneo (1937). McLane and Ellis also include the films of Frank Buck, who filmed the animals of

the African continent in their natural environments, citing Wild Cargo (1934) and Fang and Claw

(1935) with their droll narratives as seminal works of the nature documentary type. (McLane and Ellis,

25)

Stylistically the films of Frank Buck aren't wholly dissimilar from the long running Warren

Miller travelogue films that detail winter sports and their locations. Interestingly, Warren Miller's

filmmaking career began as he narrated at home his films that he made detailing his skiing and surfing

exploits. The scope of the Naturalist- from Warren Miller's films to Steve Jame's Stevie to Kurt

Kuene's Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father ( 2008)- is the most grand of all the sub-

classes of documentary and includes those films of which one typically thinks when the term

“documentary film” is used.

Rotha's inclusion of the news-reel as a type of documentary seems a bit suspect. It is certain that

early news was disseminated through the cinema houses of the day, and while news-reel footage

certainly shares many aspects of the Naturalist tradition. As a class, news-reel footage lacks the

examination of the zeitgeist in an earnest manner that the documentarian should demand, and at the

very least news-reel footage lacks the depth of information presented by most documentarians and their

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films. There seems to be an absence of intimacy, the newsman doesn't love his subject in the manner

that the documentarian does. The disallowance of news-reel type films into the class of documentary is

prompted firstly by the fact that it falls within the journalistic arts, whose primary concern is

presentation of facts, and secondly that it lacks the notion of 'assertion'. Assertion is the quality sine

non qua of documentary filmmaking as Grierson saw it, saying,” I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use

it as a propagandist.” (McLane and Ellis, 71) The notion of “assertion' is a problematic one. Even

Grierson concedes that the necessity of assertion disqualifies Flaherty's pioneering films from inclusion

into the documentary genre. The definition of “documentary” is a larger problem, and includes notions

of assertion and intentionality, but will be discussed later.

Rotha's Propagandist sub-class certainly does not suffer from the Grierson's defined deficiency

as manifest in the news-reel sub-class. The propagandist is the most overtly assertive of the

documentarians. Both the Germans and the Soviet Russians were early to the gate in terms of utilizing

the nascent medium for the promulgation of official doctrine and party dogma. Lenin himself opined:

“Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important to us.” (Ibid, 27) Vertov's Kino-Pravda (1923-1925)

series of films were some of the first pieces of cinema dedicated entirely to the propagandist's agenda.

Vertov initially eschewed the use of contrived, recreated, or manipulated subjects, writing: “All people

must continue to act and function in front of the camera just as they do in everyday life.” (ibid, 33)

Vertov's later films are more in the vein of some of the continental avant-garde films, although there he

may have found his greatest success, as The Man with a Movie Camera (1929) is, in all respects, his

most salient work.

The British wasted no time getting involved in their own unique brand of propaganda. The

establishment of the Empire Marketing Board in 1928 with the mandate to “promote all the major

researches across the world which affect the production or preservation or transport of the British

Empire's food supplies” immediately put the British into the business of propaganda and self-

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promotion. (Rotha, 96) John Grierson was a notable contributor to the film units of the Empire

Marketing board. Perhaps it was during his tenure here that he began to understand the power of

cinema to affect public opinion, and this may have led him to strip Flaherty of the status:

'documentarian'.

One would be remiss to omit the work of Leni Riefenstahl. Her corpus includes two

archetypical pieces of propagandist film Triumph of the Will (1936) and Olympiad (1938). These films

were made under the auspices of Josef Goebbels who traveled to Italy to study the films of Ruttman,

and returned to Nazi Germany with a keen understanding of montage-style filmmaking as it applied to

propaganda films.

Rotha wrote of the documentary films during the early years of its development, and by

extension, his categorizations and taxonomic structuring of the embryonic art seem a bit anachronistic.

However, in conjunction with the analysis of the genre by McLane and Ellis, his ideas help to elucidate

the development of the genre conventions that the modern documentary viewer has come to expect.

The intervening years have seen a profusion of films made in the documentary tradition, but an

exploration of the next eighty years of documentary film would not be germane to this discussion.

Rotha's traditions of documentary filmmaking are the armature upon which the modern documentary is

built.

The Problem of Definition

The steps by which the mind attains several truths.–The senses at first let

in particular ideas, and furnish the yet empty cabinet: and the mind by

degrees growing familiar with some of them, they re lodged in the

memory, and names got to them, and by degrees learns the use of

general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with ideas

and language, the materials about which to exercise the discursive

faculty.(pp 13)

Johne Locke

An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

The problem of defining a particular “thing” is a philosophical problem that has been explored

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since the days of Aristotle. Locke, with his tabula rasa postulate, believed that there exists no

knowledge in one's brain upon entrance into this world. The process by which Locke believed that

knowledge was integrated into the conscience was experiential in nature, and the referents for this

process are 'qualities'. Qualities that are 'primary' in nature are the ones that cannot be self-

contradictory, and without which the 'thing' would indelibly changed. The rock is gleaming white

under the lamp, but upon extinguishing the light it becomes black. The color of the rock is not a

primary quality. However, if one were to grind the rock into a fine dust it would cease to be a rock.

Size , therefore, is a primary quality of a rock. Defining what qualifies as a 'documentary' according to

this approach, is extraordinarily difficult. What are the innate properties, that without which the film

would cease to exist in the class of 'documentary'?

It was Grierson, who first applied the adjective “documentary” to the Flaherty's Moana, but

later disqualified Flaherty's films from inclusion in the genre when he further qualified his statement by

asserting that the “First Principals” of documentary filmmaking require that the film be “dramatic and

not instructional” and that the documentary “must have social purpose.” (Plantinga, 27.) Immediately

the problems of definition become evident. Using Grierson's 'first principals' as analogues to Locke's

'primary qualities' seems to leave an overly restrictive genre qualification. Grierson's notion of

documentary includes only propaganda films. Only films that were made to affect public sentiment

could qualify, and while there are notable examples of this form, the aforementioned Inconvenient

Truth for instance, there certainly exist more films that do not aim to influence the zeitgeist. Director

Ron Fricke's Baraka (1992) in this structure would qualify- the montage sequence of the movie leads

the viewer on a tour of the destruction of the pure environment and its resulting effects on the human

populace. This stands contrapuntally to Grierson's belief that films in the tradition of Baraka and its

antecedents Berlin “are the most dangerous of all film models to follow.” (Grierson, 152) There is

clearly a deficiency in Grierson's concept of documentary film in general. Superficially, one might

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assume that the definition is unnecessarily restrictive, but there is a deeper logical fallacy at work:

Grierson's definition does not incorporate what a documentary 'is', only what it 'should be'. To say it

differently, Grierson has described qualities that in Locke's conception are not primary qualities or in

the Platonic sense– not a quality of the form: documentary. Despite his credit for coining the phrase, his

neologism- in both the psychiatric and lexicological sense- falls a bit short of what is commonly

considered to be documentary film.

The semantic approach to defining documentary implicitly incorporate the common conception

of a term's meaning. The semantic approach approximates an average of use-instances. Essentially,

meaning is derived from use. Words themselves have no innate meaning, they are vessels of symbol

transfer. The semantic approach pays its dues to Locke's ideas on the process by which ideas are

formed in the head. What are the traditional qualities that are associated with documentary films, or

what qualities do films have that are qualified as 'documentary films'? The qualities that would satisfy

the semantic need are far more open-ended than Grierson's definition. They are: 1) The film must be

non-fiction and 2) the film must rely primarily on capturing physical events and representing or

reproducing them on screen.

There is the exclusion of several questionable sub-genres from the documentary mode with this

approach. This docu-dramas, recreations, and the like, but also includes films that are not class

members in either voluntary or categorical manners. Michael Moore shirks reality in what Lopate

describe as “its cavalier manipulations of documentary verisimilitude”. (Lopate, 262) Michael Moore

may believe that his films are documentaries, but he has no desire to be included in the genre.

Additionally one may make an argument that his films are not entirely non-fiction. Michael Moore

describes his films as “an entertaining movie like Sophie's Choice, any Chaplin film that dealt with

social commentary.” (Currie, 285) While Michael Moore does not feel the need to qualify his films as

documentary pieces, they certainly perform admirably as documentary films when the field is sifted

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using Grierson's model– Michael Moore's films are expressly designed to affect public opinion. His

films and the sensationalist films in the same group, such as Robert Kenner's Food, inc. (2008) or

Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbot's Corporation (2003) all exhibit this characeteristic. However, there is

a sentiment of disingenuous representation that leads Michael Moore to qualify his films as outliers of

the genre. He seems to concede that there is an expectation of objectivity in the documentary, and

having no interest in delivering on that expectation, the viewer should treat his films as they would a

frivolous melodrama.

The vagaries of the semantic model led philosophers such as Currie to examine the

documentary form from an ontological approach. What is the 'thing' that is known as 'documentary'?

What separates things which in all physical appearances are identical? To Currie, the ontological

criteria for documentary lay in the difference between 'reproduction' and 'representation'. The

representative art form utilizes the artist as an intermediary between event and audience- if the event is

not purely conceptual. A reproductive art has the quality, regardless of intent, of replicating what is

seen from the camera eye. Bazin describes the phenomenon with regards to photography saying: “For

the first time, between the originating object and its reproduction there intervenes only the

instrumentality of a nonliving agent.” (Bazin, 7)

Currie expands the notion of reproduction with respect to documentary films and avoids neatly

the problem of class inclusion of films such as docu-dramas. Curie frames his ontological distinction

around the concepts of 'traces' and 'testimonies'. A 'testimony' is the recounting, the representation , the

output of an intermediary between subject and substrate. A 'trace' is a physical manifestation; the

effects of the photographic plane interacting with reality. The documentary, according to Currie,

represents those events that have primary causality. It is a direct representation of the events. Currie, in

obeisance to his ontological framework, concedes that if one wanted to view the frames of Casablanca

as a documentary, one might as long as they recognized that the documentary is one of the ways that

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Bogart and Bergman behaved during the particular time during which they were being filmed. Currie

concedes that while there are definite possibilities to mislead the audience in the documentary film

space, there exist no intrinsically misleading aspect of this representative art form. (Currie, 288)

Noel Carroll, too, attempts to make an ontological assertion regarding what constitutes

documentary or art, in terms of the type of language employed. The language of illocution is that which

is action by virtue of being spoken– imperatives and declarations. In the context of illocutionary

language it is critical to determine the intent of the author. The rules of conversant semiotics are

certainly germane, but the intention of the message is part and parcel to comprehension. Carroll stands

diametrically opposed to the position held by Barthes and explicated in his essay “The Death of the

Author”. Barthes and his fellow anti-intentionalist Beardsley share the conviction that once language

enters the aesthetic realm, the authorial intent of meaning is irrelevant int the context of maximum

pleasure in the aesthetic experience, while Carroll is want to find any real difference in the language.

Carroll says:

I am not reverting to the notion that we pursue art in order to commune

with remarkable personalities. Instead I am making the more modest

claim that art is obviously in part a matter of communication and that we

bring to it our ordinary disposition to understand what another human

being is saying to us.

“Interpretation and Intention” 176

There is no difference between artistic language and acts of illocution. The hedonistic interpretive

advocated by the anti-intentionalism approach seeks to maximize viewing pleasure by interpreting the

art in the most most pleasurable manner to the audience.

Barthes' structures are problematic in the sense that the sole qualification for what qualifies as a

piece of aesthetic art is whether or not some audience finds it pleasing. In an admittedly reductio ad

absurdum counterpoint to Barthes' claims, his interpretive structure seems to place pornography at the

zenith of the artistic spectrum. Judging art solely by the entertainment of the audience is a rather

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myopic view of the value and importance of art as a tool to expand understanding and discourse. If

there is a venue for the employment of anti-intentionalism, its milieu would be solely in works of pure

abstraction where the meaning of the art work has been hopelessly obfuscated by the artist, if there is

even an allegorical underpinning to the work.

Carroll responds to the anti-intentionalism movement, contending that intention is critical to

interpretation, and that the attempts by the anti-intentionalist to separate artistic language from the

language of illocution is a fruitless endeavor. Carroll proffers the example of Ed Wood's infamous film

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1959) in an effort to discredit further the schools of Barthes and Beardsley.

Carroll contends that if there were no room for authorial intention in critical analysis of art, then Plan 9

from Outer Space would be an exemplar of the modernist avant-garde movement that eschews the use

of Hollywood conventions and is a film that is transgressive in nature. The idea of considering a film

such as Plan 9 from Outerspace in the same category as subversive is ludicrous at any level of

interpretation. Carroll asserts that “given what we know about Ed Wood, it seems implausible to

attribute to him the intention of attempting to subvert Hollywood codes of filmmaking for the kinds of

purposes endorsed by the avant-gardists.” (Carroll, 176) In a similar vein, it would be remiss of the

viewer to treat Greydon's notoriously bad blaxploitation film Black Shampoo (1976) in the same

manner as Scott Sanders' spoof of the genre Black Dynamite (2009).

Carroll's integration of intent makes the waters of documentary interpretation treacherous.

Grierson's approach, which certainly integrates well with Carroll's model, necessitates that the author

intends to make an assertion. Now the onus is on the viewer to discern that intention, and while the

medium of film and documentary filmmaking is not intrinsically misleading, there is room for bias.

Carroll denigrates the suspicion with which empirical deconstructionists like White approach non-

fiction narratives. Carroll sees no fault in the principle of selectivity: “…historians may produce

distortive representations of the past because of biased procedures, but this only goes to show that the

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selective attention of a given narrative may be distorting, and not that selectivity, in and of itself, is

distorting.” (Carroll, 146)

While it is clear that, as Carroll indicates, an entirely comprehensive representation of nearly

anything is impossible, he strangely indicates that “there are procedures for ascertaining whether the

processes of selection of a given historian employs are questionable.” (ibid) Unfortunately, Carroll does

not elucidate exactly what these processes are. He continues to apply the principles of scientific

research to the heuristic of intent, saying selectivity is not inherently problematic, because “if it were,

then scientific findings, which are also selective, would also, by parity of reasoning, be fictional.” (ibid)

This seems a rather specious claim, because as Carroll would know there is quite a categorical

or ontological difference between scientific research and non-fiction narrative. Furthermore, the notion

of selectivity in scientific findings is contradictory to the process of the scientific method. Indeed, there

has been many a scientific discovery that has stemmed from a lack of selectivity. As a contemporary

example, the Fermi-Lab just published results of its latest particle collisions. The data that is most

interesting to particle physicists is not that which falls into the area which would be selected to support

the current quantum model, but that data which are statistical outliers.

Carroll's model synthesized into one statement seems to say: A filmmaker engages in the act of

documentary filmmaking when they intend to do so, and if there is structural or systematic bias present

in the film, then the viewer, using some technique, will be able to ferret out the disingenuous. Carroll

continues to expand on this notion of intention in his essay “Documentary and the Film pf Presumptive

Assertion”. In his essay Carroll asserts that the filmmaker and the audience have a mutual

understanding of the communication process in which they partake, or the viewer is savvy to the fact

that the filmmaker is attempting to make a documentary. Secondly, the filmmaker, by engaging in the

practice of making a documentary film, intends for the audience to engage the film assertively. The

notion of assertive engagement relies on the viewer to bring relevant critical analysis to the aesthetic

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experience.

Carroll continues to explore his intentional theory of artistic interpretation in his book

Philosophy of Motion Pictures. While at once declaring that the intent of the author to produce a

documentary and knowledge of that genre intent is critical to interpretation of the artwork itself, Carroll

concedes that there is a virtual infinitude of genres and sub-genres and that it is quite possible that films

occupy multiple categories, or what Carroll describes as the 'pluralistic category' approach. In a bit of a

concession to those who are not fully subscribed to the idea of authorial intent, Carroll also notes that

historical and cultural context may provide further grounds for categorization of films into appropriate

genres. This is a somewhat de-constructionist approach and seems contradictory to his root premise–

that it is exclusively the authorial intent which qualifies a film or art in general as a member of a

particular class. Carroll consolidates his views into a single maxim stating: “Structural, intentional, and

contextual considerations then, provide us with reasons, often strong reasons, for categorizing motion

pictures a certain way.” (Carroll, Philosophy, 212)

It seems that this system encumbers the viewer with the enormous burden of knowing and

recognizing the genre conventions with which to judge a film, in addition to historical and intentional

integrations. I suspect that most viewers would prefer the hedonistic or Epicurean approach to

interpretation– the interpretive model that places the preponderance of weight on the pleasure of the

viewer.

Currie approaches the same problem of defining the term documentary, for we must know of

what we speak to speak of it. Currie analyzes some of the logical problems in the definition of

documentary itself. To do so, he atomizes the construct of the documentary film to say: a given piece of

footage is a portion of a documentary if it is a representation of the physical world that services the

narrative of the purported documentary. Currie immediately finds fault in his original construction and

makes efforts to close the Casablanca issue, or the fact that often times there are real traces of objects

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in fictional narratives. He returns with the second construction in his dialectic, saying essentially that

the filmic trace portions of the documentary can only be included if they service the point of producing

an assertive documentary. This is a rather circular definition, akin to describing a 'nation' as being

comprised of people who assert that they are members of the nation. The reductionist is immediately

alarmed when the a concept is defined internally by itself. This generally indicates that the analyst has

failed to atomize the concept correctly, or that the atomized parts are the sort of secondary qualities

described by Locke. Ultimately, Currie's dialectic provides the analytic diagram that describes, in his

esteem, the nature of documentary. Currie's analytic diagram of the concept 'documentary' is expressed

as:

D2{A,B}, iff (i.) A is part of B, (ii.) A is a filmic trace of P and as such

contributes to the (asserted) narrative of B (iii.) the filmic parts of B

consist primarily of parts like A in this respect

Translated from the logic construction the phrase reads: being a part of a documentary whole is

only possible if the documentary part is indeed part of the documentary, represents the subject P

directly, and contributes to the narrative of the documentary, which consists primarily of documentary

parts. It is no wonder that Currie inserts the proviso that the structure of his definition is a bit of a

hermeneutic circle, and after deliberating the merits of his definition Currie seems to retreat to

intentionalism too, stating : “To decide whether shots/films are documentary in this stronger sense we

have to look, not merely at their status as traces, but at the intentionally produced narratives and their

constituent assertions, which those shots/films support.” (Currie, 293)

Plantinga approaches the problem of genre and documentary in a manner somewhat similar to

Carroll's idea of intent, but Plantinga senses that there is a problem with the idea that objectivity is a

phenomenon intrinsically related to the mode of production. Plantinga conceives of a principal called

the “Assertive Indexical Theory”. It's basic premise is explicated as such: “Nonfictions assert a belief

that given objects, entities, states of affairs, events, or situations actually occur(ed) or exist(ed) in the

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actual world as portrayed.” (Plantinga, 18)

Plantinga's conceptualization avoids the quagmire of content and its source, seeing the core

quality of non-fiction being an assertion of reality. The process of interpretation and analysis by the

viewer requires the use of indexical tools to determine the validity of the filmmakers assertion.

Plantinga describes the concept of indexing as one that is social in nature, one that stands aside from

the filmmaker's intent. “Indexing is a social phenomenon and to a degree is independent of the

individual uses of film.” (Plantinga, 20)

This formulation still requires that the viewer be aware of both the genre in which the

filmmaker is attempting to operate, and utilize this knowledge to examine the objective credibility of

the assertion. Plantinga does not see the problem of objectivity manifest in the analysis of the film. To

him, credibility and objectivity are interrelated. A credible witness has presented their sentiments on the

state of reality and the viewer must examine the statement based on this framework. This seems to

imply that the purest form of the documentary are those that are the most assertive– propaganda films.

The documentary is a class of positive assertion, much as in the Grierson tradition, and the films of

Michael Moore the exemplar of the class. Meanwhile, non-fiction films of the montage tradition are

excluded from recognition as valuable contributions to the documentary art.

The attempts at definition by aesthetic philosophers are riddled with problems. The

intentionalism of Carroll and the presumptive assertion of Plantinga both fail to describe the class

outside of the viewer's expectations and the filmmaker's intent. Neither of the two address the problem

that occurs when the audience has been cut from the communicative loop. What happens when the

viewer misconstrues what the authorial intent is? What happens when the audience encounters a

filmmaker who operates in bad faith? There has certainly been a profusion of films that ostensibly are

non-fiction, and are marketed as non-fiction films, but are entirely fictional. The recent film of Joost

and Schumann, Catfish (2010), provides a poignant example. Here, verbatim, is the Universal Studios

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press release for the film, which is filed under the documentary section of both IMDB and Netflix:

In late 2007, filmmakers Ariel Schulman and Henry Joost sensed a story

unfolding as they began to film the life of Ariel's brother, Nev. They had

no idea that their project would lead to the most exhilarating and

unsettling months of their lives. A reality thriller that is a shocking

product of our times, Catfish is a riveting story of love, deception and

grace within a labyrinth of online intrigue.

Conspicuously absent from the film's abstract is any mention that the film, despite its

purportedly non-fiction status is completely contrived. The events and many of the characters are

fabrications. How is the audience to receive the film? If the marketing of the film is successful, they

will accept as a representation of real events. While the authors of Catfish certainly make an assertion

about the state of the world, they do so from behind the veil of insincerity. Joost and Schumann are

certainly not the first to attempt such a ploy. Films such as The Blair Witch Project, Myrick and

Sanchez's 1999 supernatural thriller, which was released to a flurry of publicity attempting to cement

its position as non-fiction film, to the ridiculous Robe Reiner film Spinal Tap (1984) also operate in the

land of intentional bad-faith. The author has disguised their intent to force the audience to accept the

film as a member of a genre to which it does not belong. The trick is, in essence, categorical irony, the

author forces the audience to make a category mistake in classifying the nature of the film, and thusly

the genre expectations are exploited for the filmmaker's gain.

Currie's analytical definition is certainly problematic as well. His reliance on the concept of

'traces' disallows entire categories from consideration as non-fiction or documentary film. His

construction demands primacy of events- in that recording the events themselves is necessary and

recounting them is suspect. Is it intellectually dishonest to say that statistical information, by nature

non-physical and therefore impossible to visually trace, is not germane to the documentary genre?

There are a number of non-fiction topics which can be addressed in the documentary genre, that have

no physical manifestation. Are the topics of philosophy, or quantum mechanics, or other ethereal

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concerns out-of-bounds? If so, to where are we to remand these films, and how should we interpret

them in any of these critical philosophies?

Synthesis

Given that the failures exist to accurately describe what the genre of documentary actually is,

the problem of critical interpretation comes to a stand-still. Currie hints at the notion of a strong and

weak class of documentary, which is a notion that may be applicable to the particular problem. Implicit

in the structure is the idea that there are forms such as the news-report, historical recreations, and docu-

drama that certainly fall within the realms of non-fiction film, but are not classically considered to be

members of the documentary class. In accord with Currie, we shall lump these into the sub-genre of

'weak documentary' and return to the description of what are in the class of 'strong documentary'.

What are the qualities, of the primary type that bifurcates the class into the 'weak' and 'strong'

varieties? Let us propose a synthetic construction that describes the class of 'strong documentary' as

such: 1) the film must be non-fiction in nature, 2) the film must represent as directly as possible the

subject, 3) the film must not use contrived events or characters, 4) the film must appeal to a sense of

epistephilia (the love of knowledge) and not to scopophilia (the delight of voyeurism), 5) the film must

be of either narrative or propositional structure.

The synthesis avoids the intentional fallacies regarding authorial intent, while integrating the

once anathemic non-fiction materials that many of the documentary definitions disallowed out of

convenience. The distinction between films of the scopophilic and epistephilic nature, a construct of

Nichols, is imperative as it integrates the ideas of assertion and eliminates the problems of non-fiction

found footage films, montage films, and other purely visual, yet non-fiction, films– the Casablanca

problem. (Nichols, 178)

Given that the genre of documentary is sufficiently defined, the problem of non-fiction

objectivity begins to become an issue. Michael Schudson describes Naïve Empiricism as the category

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error in which facts are not viewed “as human statements of the world but aspects of the world itself

given in the nature of things rather than a product of social construction.” (Schudson, 64)

Without becoming mired in a lengthy discussion about synthetic and analytic knowledge,

Schudson is issuing a warning that any time information passes through an intermediary, there is an

indelible mark made on the information by the intermediary. It follows that those who are interested in

knowledge or truth be cognizant of this process. There is no unadulterated transmitted knowledge. It is

for this reason that Wittgenstein was consistently dismayed with the translations of his work, and a

problem that analytical philosophers have spent the greater part of the last century ironing out. This

phenomenon is clearly an important factor to viewing and interpreting the non-fiction film, and also a

critical determinant in the issue of film objectivity.

The Problem of Representation

Filmmakers rarely represent the subject of their films directly. While Flaherty made every effort

to incorporate himself into the culture of the people of Aran, he is still representing the culture from an

outsiders viewpoint, and biased by the cultural baggage with which he arrived. In Prylucks “Ultimately

We Are All Outsiders” he relays the tale of Arthur Barron, who confesses that often filmmakers must

misrepresent themselves for access to the subject: “I must say that I wasn't totally honest in persuading

the school board to let me do the film. There was, as in many films, a certain amount of conning and

manipulation.” (Pryluck, 257)

Often, the interpersonal ethics of the filmmaker are at odds with the implied ethics of the

documentarian. There is a conflict between the ethics of privacy and an implied kinship with the

subject that supposes they will be represented in a manner that is, if not favorable, at the very least

impartial. This conflict of interest between the complete and objective documentarian and the human

that has social empathy makes the production of objective documentary films incredibly difficult.

The production process, itself, is fraught with subjectivity. The visual aspects, from lens length

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to the location of the subject geographically, affect the viewer's perception of the subject in an indelible

manner. The credibility of the subject can be affected by how the filmmaker decides to integrate the b-

roll material. Often, the filmmaker is representing a subject that exists in a disparate socio-economic

and cultural landscape, and is compelled by economics to do so in a manner that is appealing to the

viewer. As a result, the filmmaker resorts frequently to the most salacious or incendiary material, in the

effort to make the film a more dramatic exercise in documentary.

Kuehl sees more problems in the pursuit of truth than the aesthetic manipulations employed.

The genre itself is fraught with structural failures. Firstly, the documentary only represents one person's

viewpoint, and, as the principal of naïve empiricism dictates, this is dangerous territory. The

documentary only represents its subjects superficially, in the sense that the only direct representation of

the subject is done without the benefit of context or history. There is a limit to the type and nature of

the historical data that may be included, and there are vast areas of human experience that are closed to

the representational capabilities of the genre. Kuehl charges the viewer, handicapped by lack of

information, to evaluate and establish a truth value in relation to the assertion of the filmmaker. This is

perhaps a good approach, as it mirrors the process by which we are conversant with one another and

integrate information about which we have no first hand empirical knowledge. There are structural

problems with the idea of objective communication in terms of the genre and medium itself, but there

also exist well-defined problems with information exchange in the linguistic sense, to which

documentary film is beholden. In this context, is it possible for a documentarian who strives for

objectivity to achieve their goal?

The Principals of Semiotics

Semiotics is the branch of philosophy that deals with the methods by which we transmit

information symbolically through interpersonal communication. The discipline recognizes three

separate vessels though which this transmission occurs: syntactics, pragmatics, and semantics. The

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problem of faithful transmission of symbolic information becomes apparent in even a brief exploration

of the core principals of the field.

Syntactics deal with the phenomenon of conjunctions and disjunction– the relationship of word

order to meaning. The arrangement of words in a sentence when the meaning is not clarified by either

pragmatics or semantics is fodder for irony and ambiguity, and results in a failure of symbolic

transference. Without the contextual framework from which to analyze the utterance, the multiplicity

of meaning and nuance hamstrings the recipients ability to understand the intended message. The

Kuleshov tests provide somewhat of a visual analogue. The viewer is forced to integrate contextual

information of dubious credibility to decipher the message. A picture of a child has no explicit

meaning, until it is projected in sequence with a crying mother.

Carroll in effect asserts that pragmatics alone are capable of informing the audience of the tools

that will be necessary to decipher the artist's message. Pragmatics are concerned with the physical

context in which the message is received, and the ability to decipher the broadcaster's intent. The

nature of language and syntactic constructs are such that there is ample opportunity to encounter

ambiguity in even the simplest of declarations. The assertion “I made my bed.” can be deciphered as

meaning “I constructed a thing which is called a bed.” or “I have neatly arranged my sheets in a

manner that is commonly known as made.” or “In a version of idiomatic speech, I am responsible for

my actions.” Without the benefit of authorial intent any of the these decodings are possible correct.

The idea of semantics is particularly germane with application to documentary film, as

frequently there is an issue of cross-cultural translation. Semantics focus on the referent symbols, or

the ultimate meaning of speech. In the instance of the documentary that details a foreign culture, the

direct translation, or transliteration, performs in an astoundingly ineffective manner. The subtle

meanings of idiomatic speech or metaphors are difficult to communicate effectively, unless there is a

lengthy exposure to the language and culture of the transmitter. Edward Said spent much of

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Orientalism investigating the phenomenon. In a more contemporary example, the Chinese Olympics

payed particular attention to the language of the translated signs, to avoid embarrassment.The website

www.engrish.com details in a somewhat comical manner, the problems associated with cross-cultural

information transference.

Faced with the task of decoding an incoming message, the receiver avails themselves, innately,

of the semiotic toolset in an attempt to decipher the intent of the author. This becomes increasingly

difficult as the receiver becomes separated from the broadcaster by either space or time. The vagaries

of word meaning come into play as time alters the use, and ultimately it is not the denoted meaning

that is most frequently used to determine meaning. There are two examples that spring to mind

immediately with regards to this phenomenon: 'boner' and 'prodigal'.

There is a little know Dr. Seuss book assembled from serial works and published in 1941 titled

The Pocket Book of Boner. I refer to this book not to devolve into puerile humor, but to highlight the

fact that while there may still be a dictionary entry that defines a 'boner' as a 'gaff' or 'blunder', common

usage finds that the word hold far different meaning. There is little doubt that if the book were to be

published today, it would appear with a slightly reworded title. The case of 'prodigal' is another where

the common use of the term is different from its original denotation. In this case, the parable of “The

Prodigal Son” is likely to blame. Webster's defines 'prodigal' as “wastefully extravagant”, but common

use of the word finds it used as a synonym for 'contrite'. One should be wary of its use in modern

parlance, as there is a real risk that the intended meaning will be misapprehended.

The audience has the benefits of the orders of semiotics to function as a decoder ring. The

audience populates the decoder keys, not with a dictionary, but with the experience of use-instances.

The audience likely has encountered similar symbols in their past in a similar context, and apply that

inductively to determining the intent of the current communicator. This as implied earlier, is where the

savvy filmmaker finds opportunity for irony– the intentional misleading of the audience's expectation

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of symbol meaning.

The particular problem of cross-cultural transmission is one of great consternation for linguists.

Ryle drives at the notion that dividing language into atomic units is a frivolous task. 'Language', he

says, is that which obligated to behave within the rules of syntax and grammar, while 'speech' is

liberated from the burden, and its success is solely determined by the speaker's ability to successfully

transmit their intended message. Ryle credits Husserl for the idea of Logical Syntax, which states that

there is no need for the formalization of speech into a first order language to ensure that there is

successful symbol transfer, and assertions can be made without formal structure. Ryle, through

Husserl, is arguing for natural syntax, or the idea that symbols are formed in processes that are

universal, though their results may vary, but there is an innate ability for humans to decode messages in

a sympathetic manner. Humans infrequently atomize the message they are receiving, instead they

examine the message as a whole to determine its value. There are problems with transmission, he

concedes, but the dangers are overstated because of the natural ability for humans to communicate, and

as a sympathetic process the burden of translation lies distributed equally between both parties. (Ryle,

59)

Fodor takes an opposing stance and claims that all language is framed in a formal logical

construct. The system is similar to the principal of the use-instance recollection. Fodor calls it the

'empirical characteristic'. There are characteristics of words that are built by the individual through

exposure or empirical valuations, and these valuations are the blocks from which we build meaning.

When he says: “It is supposed that there often exist empirical correlates of logically characteristic

features of words. I shall say that such correlates are empirically characteristic of the occurrences of

the words.” Fodor is describing the process by which humans apprehend word meaning. His assertion

is that words have no intrinsic meaning, and it is only their use which provides the meaning. This

approach eliminates the need to be overly concerned about the evolution of language, because the

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receiver, given they are aware of the pragmatic situation, is able to recognize the disparate environment

of the particular empirical characteristic, much in the same way that without knowing the content

explicitly of Dr. Seuss' Pocket Book of Boners, one is still able to determine implicitly what the content

probably is not. The Fodor method serves the intentional model well, as the receiver is charged with

the task of determining which empirical characteristic of the message upon which the transmitter is

relying. In terms of the documentary, it is the viewer who is responsible for determining the worth of

the speaker's intuitions of the language. (Fodor, 299)

The problems that mire meaning in speech, and by extension, any medium that transmits

symbols are real, but in practice how do they affect the principals pf objectivity in documentary films?

The crux of the issue is that there is never a possibility of stripping ambiguity from symbol

transference, there are simply too many intermediary steps. If there is no reasonable expectation to

decode and understand all of the information that is being delivered to us as the audience, how then are

we expected to validate the message for objectivity?

Austin approaches the idea with a novel concept called performative-constative speech or

speech that is action. He frames the concept of performative-constative as antithetical to constative

utterances, which are simply statements like “The sky is blue.” The problem that Austin finds with

constative utterances is that they have the quality of being either true or false, while performative-

constative speech does not. Austin provides several examples of the action speech: “I name this ship

Liberté” or “I apologize.” By merely uttering these phrases, the speaker has performed an action that is

unencumbered by notions of veracity. Whether or not an action has occurred is a rather simple task to

accomplish, but assertions of fact like “The king is fat.” provides a logical nightmare.

Unfortunately, documentary is necessarily the most assertive of the film arts. Every

documentary makes the assertion to the viewer: “These events happened.” Actions are fairly easy to

validate. Did or did not the event take place? There is no room for ambiguity. The documentary,

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though, makes a second assertion: “ Through the lens of my mind, this is the most logical manner in

determining the catalyst of the events, and deriving meaning from them.” The relationship of causality

is an assertion that proves incredibly difficult to establish. In addition, it is here that the problems of

language begin to become manifest. Symbol and referent are easily confused, and assignation of causal

relationships are often built on casual observances. The inherent subjectivity of aesthetics when

treating documentary film as constative utterances becomes an obstacle that is impossible to overcome.

It is here that many would hide behind post-structuralism– the yen to take the assertion and discard it,

looking for meaning in other empirically verifiable locations. “The author's grandmother died in the

slaughter of the Biafra, and thence the author's anti-colonial views” and other declaration of meaning

that derive in no manner from the intended message of the artist. This method may be germane in

determining the validity of the artist's viewpoint, but seems to dodge entirely the purpose of

communication and art. As Carroll intimates, art is, at least in part, the act of conversing with the artist.

Integrating the idea of performative-constative speech into the documentary provides a stable

and conversant method of interpreting the art form. The documentarian is still making an assertion in

the sense that both Carroll and Grierson demand, and our synthesized definition requires, but now

instead of the constative utterance: “This is the reason for that.” or “This phenomenon exists because

of that.” the filmmaker is making a performative-constative statement similar to: “I invite you to look

at the subject in this manner.” or “I offer this picture of my beliefs on this topic.” This structure

liberates the filmmaker from immediate attacks on veracity, and at once makes way for the

eccentricities of language and symbol transfer.

Furthermore, the viewer is invigorated and empowered by taking the documentary as the

performative-constative. No longer are they the victims of the pedagogy of the documentarian, the

viewer is invited to review the film on their own terms be it aesthetically, informatively, or simply for

the sake of exposure to novel thought or culture.

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Documentary as the Subjective Art

Given the obstacles to interpreting the documentary film as an objective art form, or even the

possibility of informal objective information transfer, what does this mean for the art form? As the

documentarian is not beholden to the rules of journalism. There is room for debate whether the

somewhat implied desire for objectivity is necessary or desired. Flaherty's films focused less on

capturing the reality of the subjects of his films than capturing the essence or zeitgeist of the

documentary’s subjects. Film critics have found fault with his manipulations of reality. For instance, he

removed the room of an igloo during the production of Nanook of the North so that he was able to

capture the domestic scene with the incredibly bulky and light-hungry cameras available to him at the

time. However, if it were not for this maneuver, even Flaherty's conception of the domestic culture of

the Inuit people would be absent from our examinations. While Flaherty's somewhat romantic

tendencies as an anthropological documentarian color his picture with bias, to a certain degree all

information is bastardized by every vessel that it inhabits.

Outside of direct empirical experience, any seeker of knowledge or truth is forced to integrate

the method by which the information arrived into their determination of credibility. The principals of

naïve empiricism admonish the audience for not recognizing that the human vessel is one of the poorer

transport mechanisms for factual information. The viewer of film of any variety, is at their leisure to

approach the film in the manner which is most satisfying to themselves. If they are interested in

making decisions regarding the validity of the filmmaker assertion, it behooves them to incorporate all

of the methods for determining not only what the filmmaker's assertion is, but also the level of

credibility that they accord the communicator.

The act of film viewership in this framework is genre agnostic, the same criteria for

determining the validity of the non-fiction filmmakers assertion are used for similar gain in the analysis

of fiction filmmakers as well. When Stephen Spielberg presented the atrocities of the Holocaust in

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Schindler's List (1993), the fictionalized evil of the Nazis is just a real, representatively, as the evil

presented by the picture provided by documentary films such as Arnold Schwartzman's Genocide

(1982), or even literary treatments such as those found in Art Speigelman's graphic novel Maus.

Documentary films have been done a disservice by the somewhat arbitrary demands for the

type of objectivity purportedly found in the journalistic arts. There is no strict corollary relating

objectivity and truth. It is completely possible to provide a larger picture of reality by refusing to be

beholden to the principles of objectivity. As insinuated by the anecdote of Arthur Barron, the

documentarian is forced to temper his/her desire for comprehensiveness with the need for the subject to

accept and trust the filmmaker. If the filmmaker is incapable of establishing a level of trust with the

subject, then the chances of realizing Vertov's idea of natural behavior are almost nil. Which actions

jeopardize the intent of the film the most? It would seem that the pursuit of objectivity implicitly leads

to a shallower depth of inspection. Michael Moore, you have been allowed back at the table, but watch

your behavior.

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Works Cited

Austin, J.L. “Intention and Convention in Speech Acts.” The Philosophy of Language ed.Searle, J.R.

Oxford UP, 1971 pp 13-22

Fodor, J. “On Knowing What We Would Say.” Philosophy and Linguistics. ed. C Lyas. Macmillan,

1971.

Bazin, Andre. “The Ontology of the Photographic Image” and Hugh Gray. Film Quarterly

Vol. 13, No. 4 (Summer, 1960), pp. 4-9

Beardsley,Monroe. “Intentions and Interpretations: A Fallacy Revived”

Carroll, Noel. “Documentary and the Film of Presumptive Assertion” Film Theory and Philosophy

Carroll,Noel. “From Reel to Real: Entangled in Non-fiction Film” Theorizing the Moving Image

Carroll ,Noel. “Photographic Traces and Documentary Film: Comments for Gregory Currie” The

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58, no 3 pp. 303-306

Carroll, Noel “The Intentional Fallacy”, Beyond Aesthetics: Philosophical Essay. Cambridge UP,

2001

Currie, Gregory. “Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs” Philosophy of

Film and Motion Pictures: An Anthology pp. 141

Ellis, Jack and Besty A. McLane. A New History of Documentary Film. Continuum, New York. 2005.

Grierson, John. Grierson on Documentary. ed. Forsyth Hardy. Faber, 1966.

James Kuehl, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research Vol. 31, No. 2, pp. 212-224

Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Oxford UP, 1975.

Lopate, Phillip. “In Search of the Centaur.” Beyond Document. Ed Charles Warren Wesleyn UP, 1996.

Nichols, Bill. “Representing Reality” Indiana U P 5-6

Plantinga, Carl. Rhetoric and Representaion in Non-fiction Film. Cambridge UP, 1997.

Pryluck, Calvin. “Ultimately We are All Outsiders.” New Challenges for Documentary. ed. Alan

Rosenthal. U of Cal, 1988.

Ransdell, Joseph. “Semiotic Objectivity” Semiotica Vol 26, No 3-4, pp 261-288

Rotha, Paul. Documentary Film. Faber and Faber, London. 1939.

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Ryle, Gilbert. “Use, Usage, and Meaning” Philosophy and Linguistics. ed. C Lyas. Macmillan,

1971.

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Filmography

The Arrival of a Train at the Station, dirs. Auguste Lumiére and Louis Lumiére, 1896.

Baboona, dirs. Martin Johnson and Truman Talley, 1935.

Baraka, dir. Ron Fricke, 1992.

Black Dynamite, dir. Scott Sanders, 2009.

Black Shampoo, dir. Greydon Clark, 1976.

The Blair Witch Project, dirs. Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez, 1999.

Borneo, dirs. Martin Johnson and Osa Johnson, 1937.

Boys Don't Cry, dir. Kimberly Peirce, 1999.

Casablanca, dir. Michael Curtiz, 1942.

Catfish, dirs. Henry Joost and Ariel Schuman, 2010.

The Corporation, dirs. Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott, 2003.

Dear Zachary: A Letter to a Son About His Father, Kurt Kuenne, 2008.

Exit Through the Gift Shop, dir. Banksy, 2010.

Food, inc., dir. Robert Kenner, 2008.

Fang and Claw, dir Frank Buck, 1935.

The Great Train Robber, dir. Edwin Porter, 1903.

An Inconvenient Truth, dir. Davis Guggeheim, 2006.

Kino-Pravda, Dziga Vertov, 1922.

Man of Iran, dir. Robert Flaherty, 1934.

The Man with a Movie Camera, Dziga Vertov, 1929.

Moana, dir. Robert Flaherty, 1926.

Nanook of the North, dir. Robert Flaherty, 1922.

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Olympiad, Leni Riefenstahl, 1938.

Pirates du Rhône, dir. Bernard Clavel, 1957.

Plan 9 from Outer Space, dir. Ed Wood, 1959.

Restrepo, dirs. Tim Hetherington and Sebastian Junger, 2010.

Schindler's List, dir. Stephen Speilberg, 1993.

Sophie's Choice, Alan Pakula, 1982.

Stevie, dir. Steve James, 2002.

Spinal Tap, dir. Rob Riener, 1984.

Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstahl, 1935.

Wild Cargo, dir. Armand Denis, 1934.

Workers Leaving the Factory, dirs. Auguste Lumiére and Louis Lumiére, 1895.

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