Claims to Truth in Documentary Pt 3.

The Real Speaks

Contrary to Frederick Wiseman, whose physical voice never becomes part of the elements captured in his films, Errol Morris constantly finds ways to reinscribe his voice, both physically and authorially, in his work. As a matter of fact, despite expressing admiration for Wiseman, Morris makes a point of emphasizing that his work is far from the Direct Cinema or cinéma vérité style usually aligned with Wiseman and other filmmakers of the latter’s ilk. In an interview, Morris observes that 

"[t]here’s a whole style to cinéma-vérité -- you take very light equipment, use available light, follow the action, remain as unobtrusive as possible. I do the exact opposite.... These people are performing for the camera. They’re perfectly aware of what’s going on." (Bloom 4)

Errol Morris

Morris, a former private detective, employs the documentary -- he prefers the term “nonfiction film” -- as a mode of investigation. Morris’ nonfiction films usually take on a subject -- the failure of justice and capital punishment, the pet cemetery industry, a former U.S. Secretary of Defense, the incident at Abu Ghraib -- and deconstruct it to its elements, searching for a truth by way of multiple accounts and perspectives as well as the use of multiple narrative modes. 

Stylistically, Morris’ work exhibits certain consistent traits: the films employ low-key lighting, similar to the type one would find in an American Noir film; reenactments share the same filmic space with interviews and testimonies; music, oftentimes by Phillip Glass, drives the rhythm of the “plot” the same way one would find in any suspense film. But more importantly, for the film’s interviews, Morris has devised a particular system which he’s called the Interrotron, which sets up two screens, one in front of the interviewer, the other in front of the interviewee, from which each party can engage with the other as if it were in a face-to-face interview. That way, Morris can have his subjects break down the forth wall, as they look towards the camera.

Morris and his Interrotron

This method has expanded, to the point where now Morris uses what he calls the Megatron, the same system whose difference lies in the use of (oftentimes) over four cameras which allow the filmmaker to recompose the image during the same interview. Thus, as one absorbs the trajectory of Morris’ work, one notices an increasing tendency towards a more ornate filmic construction which blurs the lines between the traditional documentary film and the Hollywood fiction film. With regards to this style, particularly as it pertains to reenactments, Morris has expressed in an interview his reasons for such a choice.

"Now, I’m very fond of pointing out to people, people talk about reenactments, “why do you use reenactments?” I like to point out that reality is reenacted inside of our skulls, routinely. That’s how we know about the world. We don’t -- We walk around in the world. The world isn’t walking around in us. We take in evidence with our senses. And we try to figure out on the basis of what we learn, what we read, what we see, what’s out there." (Meyer)

This tendency has elicited the scorn of various critics who believe that the use of these appendages in conjunction with the indexical material disqualifies Morris’ claim to Truth. 

Despite all of these embellishments, other critics like Brian Winston have lauded Morris’ films for approaching a brand of truth otherwise inaccessible; a type of truth achievable only with the use of what Winston calls the “dramadoc.” Winston, a historiographer of the documentary form, has noted how the attack on the use of the reenactment is a break with the form’s acceptance of such a method in the past. 

"What matters here is that the creation of a form, ‘dramadoc,’ which is all reconstruction, has helped cast the use of reconstruction in the old form, ‘documentary,’ into doubt. In so doing, it served to confirm the triumph of the journalistic ‘fly-on-the-wall’ Direct Cinema style as being the only legitimate documentary form. The result was that documentarists were now lambasted about the ‘reconstruction’ they had always used, directly denying one of documentary’s foundations." (Lies 25)

Initially, one would find the idea of using and, oftentimes, prioritizing these elements -- lighting, mise-en-scène, extra-diegetic music, a variety of multi-speed and multi-sensitive film stocks -- to go against the documentary’s claim to Truth. As Bill Nichols has noted, when viewing a documentary, audience members take what occurred in front of the camera (the profilmic event), and the “historical referent” as being “congruent with one another. The image is the referent projected onto a screen. In documentary we often begin by assuming that the intermediary stage -- that which occurred in front of the camera -- remains identical to the actual event that we could have ourselves witnessed in the historical world” (25). 

However, therein lies the presence of the signature in Morris’ films. Morris as the filmmaker makes no bones about the hyper-constructedness of his films. In a sense, he needs the films to emphasize the iconic, not the indexical, since all the events he chooses to “document” have already passed, much as they did for someone like Flaherty. It would seem that for Morris the filmmaker has to saturate all the senses, cause them to tire and become lax, and once he or she achieves this, peel away the layers of simulacra, the veneer of each situation, thus giving rise in the audience to what can be described as a hyperawareness or “wink” on the part of the director. Morris’ highly lauded The Thin Blue Line contains an example of this method. 

The Thin Blue Line (1988)

The Thin Blue Line weaves together the details surrounding the 1977 murder of Robert Wood, a Texas police officer, as well as the eventual conviction of Randall Adams as a result of incriminating testimony. Morris brings together about six different reenactments of the testimony provided by various witnesses to the crime, newspaper clippings, photographs, forensic documents, and has these share a filmic space with direct interviews with some of the actors, including Randall Adams himself. Consequently, as Elizabeth Cowie has written with regards to the use of the image in documentaries, “[the image] becomes narrated in the transformation of the document into the documentary as a presentation of the facts and the testimony of participants in the events and action shown” (31). Employing all this material, Morris builds a narrative space where diverging accounts converge, never seemingly prioritizing one over the others. However, as the film progresses, and without the need for Morris to speak up until the end, the audience can tease out which side the filmmaker aligns with. In the process, Morris subverts the witness accounts, including that of David Harris, the person who we ultimately find out allegedly committed the crime. 

Morris’ signature can be perceived in the sequence that includes the testimonies of Emily Miller, Robert Miller, and Michael Randell, the three key witnesses of the prosecution. Morris has shown in his work to have an interest in odd characters and these three personages fit the bill. During the trial Emily Miller came forward stating that she had seen Adams in the driver’s side of the vehicle and that she had witnessed the moment when Adams supposedly shot Officer Wood, going so far as to say that she saw his face clearly out the driver’s side window. Robert Miller, Emily Miller’s husband, who was driving the car as they passed the stopped vehicles, simply maintained his wife’s testimony. Michael Randell, who was also driving past the scene moments prior to the shots, also testified to seeing Adams’s face clearly. These three testimonies are believed to have been main reason for sending Adams to jail. However, during his interviews, Morris allows the witnesses to debase their own testimonies themselves. First, Emily Miller and Robert Miller are portrayed as a dysfunctional couple and in dire need of money, since Mrs. Miller had been laid off two weeks prior to the testimony in the Adams case for stealing at her job. 

Emily Miller in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

Morris edits in moments where Mrs. Miller expresses a desire throughout her life to be a detective, or the wife of one, so that she could be involved in deciphering crimes and finding the culprits, longing to beat the police in the resolution of a crime. After this information, Morris provides instances that would allow audiences to start questioning the veracity and integrity of the Millers as witnesses. For example, the husband, who is portrayed as just following his wife’s will, goes as far as to admit that his wife once called in the authorities after they had had an argument, accusing him of smuggling drugs from El Paso which allegedly turned out to be a false accusation. The film also shows the Millers doubting the entire sequence of events and the details attached to the case. Mr. Miller constantly states on camera that he didn’t see anything, “but she did” referring to his wife. Mr. Miller even adds that his recollection of the man that night didn’t accord with the man he eventually saw in court.  Mrs. Miller herself states at one point of her testimony on film that “it was hard to see in that car.” Morris intersperses these comments with images of text reading “too nosey” and “$21,000.” These flashes, which apparently come from the transcripts of the trial, punctuate details the same way that a crime scene photographer would capture at the scene of a crime. But instead of a knife or bullet holes, Morris’ choices feel as if he is commenting on the details themselves. According to other participants, and the Millers themselves, they got involved in a situation in which it is questionable if they actually had anything to offer in the first place. The sequence of events as Morris constructs it would indicate that the Millers could have as easily not been at the scene of the crime, but moreover, that their entire motive to provide information to the authorities was the $21,000 offered for any information having to do with the crime. 

Michael Randell in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

Michael Randell is presented using the same technique. Randell, a salesman, claims to have photographic memory, an ability that allowed him to recall the vivid details of that night. However, in an almost humorous sequence, Morris’s camera finds Randell doubting his own details. 

"I'm a salesman. And you develop something like total recall. I don't forget places, things, or streets, because it's a habit. Something I just picked up. I just stare intensely at people and try to figure them out. Being nosey, I just stare. 
I was leaving the Plush Pub one night, driving a 1977 Cadillac, heading west on Hampton. I noticed a officer had two individuals pulled over to the curb in a blue...some type of vehicle. It was...it was a blue...it was a blue...I think...it was a blue Ford. It was a blue something.
The driver, I think had long blonde hair and a mustache. And the other one didn't have no hairs on his face.

A person that's white going through that area at night - he's a sore thumb to stick out for the first reason. And if they don't look right, they're gonna stop you.

The officer, he walked up to the vehicle. He had walked up. His car was...let me see...I don't know if it was behind or in front, but I knew he had him pulled over, and he was up to the car. I think he was up to the car. Let me think. Yeah he was up to the car... and I was going by... he had to have been up to the car. I didn't see no bullet. I didn't see no gunfire. Because I went on." (Morris)

In the act of allowing the witness to speak uninterrupted, and in the way Morris picks and chooses the moments in which to present the reenactment or to present Randell’s confused looks, seemingly searching for the details in his memory bank, Morris is actually “speaking” himself, addressing the audience by presenting how faulty this witnesses’ recollections are; in other words, and here I agree with Elizabeth Cowie’s reading of Lacan with regards to Truth, Morris becomes “Truth’s witness.” As Lacan has pointed out “Truth draws its guarantee from somewhere other than the Reality it concerns: it draws it from Speech” (qtd in Cowie 27). Morris juxtaposes Randell’s account of seeing two men in the car against the Miller’s testimony of just seeing one man in the vehicle. Randell goes on to accuse the Miller’s of fabricating their testimony just to get the money. In the way it is all presented, Morris is in essence commenting on -- “witnessing” -- the inconsistency of the testimonies, a detail which according to Morris should have been enough to raise a red flag in the decision of convicting a man to death. But as Randell states in his final appearance in the film, 

"They already decided what to do with you in the hall. That's why they call it the Hall of Justice --- the scales are not balanced. The scales are in the hall, and they go up and down. They might go up for you in favor one way and they might go down against you. So if they DA wants you to hang 15 or 20 years, you hung."

David Harris in Morris' The Thin Blue Line

But perhaps the clearest instance of a signature in Morris’ film involves David Harris and his testimony. Throughout the film, Morris comes back every so often to both Harris’ and Adams’ contending versions of the truth. We see Harris grappling with his recollections, constantly looking off into the horizon; Adams never minces words, seemingly having the capacity to retrace all the details of his whereabouts and experiences of that night. We see Adams dressed in jail clothing, his last name clearly on display on the screen. Harris, however, is only show wearing a collared, orange “shirt.” Morris’ mise-en-scène during the Adams interview segments include the grilled partition that separates inmates from visitors. For Harris’ interventions, Morris opts for what looks like tiled columns in the background, omitting any markers that could inform the audience of the location. As the film progresses, Harris becomes more and more cynical and forgetful, his statements often punctuated by an “I guess” or an “I don’t know.” Eventually, at the hour twenty-five minute mark, during one of Harris’ last instances in the film, he’s recounting the events after he identified Adams on a police line. Right at the end of the sequence, Morris’ camera unexplainably lingers on Harris for an additional beat. It is at this time that Harris lifts up his hands to scratch his head that we see that throughout the entire film he has been in handcuffs. Suddenly, the orange shirt gains new meaning as do the tiled pillars behind him. At the time we find out Harris was on death row for the killing of a Texas man. Morris, by choosing the way he composed the shot, withholding details of location, and selecting when to edit, has manipulated the amount of information the audience has received from him. Moreover, Morris reveals the artifice of his own film; much in the same way that all the witnesses and records have manipulated the act of narrating for their own purposes, Morris exposes that he himself has been constructing a narrative, molding it to his film’s needs.   Thus, Morris’ use of evidence in his films aligns with Spence and Navarro’s idea that “when it appears in a documentary, evidence has already been interpreted by the documentarian and arranged in a particular way; its impact ... usually the result of this kind of arrangement” (40). 

The filmmaker’s voice has been prevalent all along. But now at the end of the film, Morris decides to also include his physical voice in the film. And the construction of this moment speaks volumes about his choice. According to Morris, he was granted only one day to access Harris for interview. During the second session, Morris’ camera jammed. Rather than stop, Morris decided to record the rest of the interview with audio tape only. During this encounter, Harris opens up to the point where he ultimately admits to having committed the crime himself, and that Adams was a scapegoat, a victim of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Aside from the importance of this testimony for the eventual exoneration of Adams, the cinematic dynamic of this moment does various things. To begin, Morris, albeit by accident, removes the indexical register of the interview; the audience is only presented with a tape recorder from various angles, but never do we see Morris or Adams in this all too important event. Second, Morris can now be heard asking his questions. Morris has brought himself physically into the film without the necessity of actually seeing him. Finally, this moment, which lacks a direct visual signifier, will come to resignify the entire film. Therefore, in a film as constructed as this one, where the visual detail has saturated and dictated our comprehension of the events, Morris eventually resorts to the act of removing the visual detail. 

Meditating on Truth in an interview, Morris has noted the faultiness of the image as way to approach Truth. 
"Someone comes up to you and they say “well I’m a postmodernist. I really don’t care about truth. Truth is subjective. Or there are all kinds of different versions of truth. Your truth; my truth; someone else’s truth.” and then you say to them, “Well, then it doesn’t matter to you who pulled the trigger. It doesn’t matter to you whether someone committed murder or not. Or someone in jail is innocent or not. It’s just a matter of personal opinion. Our intuitions, I believe our intuitions strongly are that it does matter. It matters a great deal what happened in the world. You know, our vision is incomplete in every respect. We try to find out about the world by collecting evidence, by thinking about things, by looking at things. Nothing that we ever create is complete. But you try to figure out what our relationship is to reality, to the real world, to what happened, to what transpired. Use every means at your disposal."
Thus, after the barrage of images, Morris seeks the employment of another one of the available means; speech becomes such a tool. At this point, Morris literally speaks his way into the film, by “stating” that this moment, this final testimony, stands in for a Truth greater than all that which we have been experiencing all along. As a result, “Truth... (becomes) not a quality or meaning that is immanent in reality; rather, it is an effect of human discourse” (Cowie 26). Morris can finally peel away all the ‘truth’ which turns into minutiae, simulacra, in the context of the only information needed in the decipherment of the case. In the process, this highly orchestrated film, I believe, becomes an anti-film. Thus, it’s the “Voice” which ultimately returns Randall Adams to liberty. It might have been an accident that brought about this moment, but the accident became a revelation for Morris. Although his work still exhibits the use of reenactments, low key lighting, driving music, and multiple film stock choices, films like Fog of War and Standard Operating Procedure have taken advantage of the incursion of the filmmaker’s voice into the final product, always integrating this same anti-film quality, this filmmaker’s signature, into his subsequent films. 

Bloom, Livia, Ed. Errol Morris: Interviews. UP of Mississippi: Jackson, 2009.

Cowie, Elizabeth. Recording Reality, Desiring The Real. U of Minnesota P: Minneapolis, 2011.

Meyer, Michael. “Recovering Reality: Errol Morris on Abu Ghraib.” Columbia Journalism Review. March 5, 2008. <http://www.cjr.org/video/recovering_reality.php>

Morris, Errol. The Thin Blue Line. 1988. MGM. DVD. 2005. 

Nichols, Bill. Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Indiana UP: Bloomington, 1991. 

Spence, Louise and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. Rutgers UP: New Brunswick, 2011. 

Winston, Brian. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. BFI: London, 2000.

Claims to Truth in Documentary Pt. 1

(This is the first entry of a four-part series. Thanks to Charlie Rivera for the initial approach, the invitation and the encouraging words. And thanks to Rojo Robles for reading my submission and his encouragement. Espero que lo disfruten. )

"Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular effects of power. Each society has its regime of truth, its "general politics" of truth—that is, the types of discourse it accepts and makes function as true; the mechanisms and instances that enable one to distinguish true and false statements; the means by which each is sanctioned; the techniques and procedures accorded value in the acquisition of truth; the status of those who are charged with saying what counts as true."

Michel Foucault, Truth and Power. 

From the moment the filmic apparatus made its debut on the world stage in 1895, cinema has mainly followed two very distinct tendencies meant to take advantage of the camera’s ability to capture “life.” In contrast to the first tendency, the fiction film, practiced by the likes of George Méliès, the documentary, originated by the Lumière Brothers among others, has offered the other alternative in the realm of moving celluloid. From this very beginning there has always existed a desire or, even, a necessity to capture reality. Yet, as critics like Erik Barnouw and Brian Winston have pointed out, once “captured,” the Real ceased to possess that aura that initially brought in the masses. The public wanted more than just the images of their lives filtered through a lens. 

In John Grierson’ s socially infused notion of the “creative treatment of actuality” and in Robert Flaherty’s meditative individualist auteurship, documentary would find a renewed sense of purpose, as it asserted in these two distinct modes its most influential sets of precepts. For Grierson and his acolytes, documentary offered not only the opportunity to capture the Real; this effort also provided enough room for the development of the filmmaker as an artist. According to Grierson, the documentary filmmaker inhabited a space in between the creative, fictional filmmaker and the journalist. In the documentary filmmaker these two notions came together in the interest of finding a “truth” that was (and for many is still) believed not accessible otherwise. Yet, despite Grierson’s definition of documentary, it was always understood among Grierson’s followers that the Real was the ultimate objective; creativity would take a back seat to reality when needed. For the Griersonian realist documentarists, their work placed its sights on providing information, in revealing truths regarding the way society and its institutions helped or neglected its less visible citizens, and in capturing moments that could reveal or expose these truths. 

Drifters, John Grierson (1929)

Flaherty, on the other hand, stepped in as the individualist auteur, intent on constructing a narrative out of the material reality offered. In Flaherty, the need to capture life for the greater good determined the method, even if this meant actually rehearsing or reenacting moments and cultural behaviors already confined to the dustbin of history, as is the case in his two most famous forays into the documentary: Nanook of the North (1922) and Man of Aran (1934). For Flaherty, it would seem, “truth” could simply be a tone, a mood, or an intention. “Truth,” according to Flaherty, hinged on the filmmaker’s idea of some form of reality, contained in the mind of the filmmaker and transferred onto the screen according to his or her interpretation. 

Nanook of the North, Robert Flaherty (1922)

Yet, despite their diverging methods and the underlying “poetics” dictating each oeuvre, both Grierson and Flaherty claimed the same thing; each believed that his work was successful in capturing the Truth. And it is this very claim that infused the documentary tradition with a belief in its status of proximity to the Real, all the way into the present. Consequently, beyond Grierson and Flaherty, documentary has grappled with this claim to Truth, both theoretically and actively in the very form it produces. During the upcoming months, I will explore these claims in a series of entries that will consider the idea of the documentary as defined according to three different practitioners of the form: Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, and Chris Marker. But before we explore these artists individually, first we must attempt a definition of the documentary and the notion of Truth and how these relate to each filmmaker. In subsequent weeks I will deal in detail with each filmmaker in an effort to determine what I believe each is telling the viewer he considers to be the Truth and how each goes about that exploration. 

Documentary’s claim to Truth, according to Louise Spence and Vinicius Navarro, finds its grounding in the apparent closeness of each documentary film to the phenomenal world. Spence and Navarro contend that, since documentaries are interested in capturing life without prioritizing certain techniques usually found in fiction filmmaking -- mise-en-scène, lighting, blocking, continuity editing, etc. -- the form provides the greatest access to the Truth when compared to other film forms. Therefore, in selecting representative filmmakers, I have decided to focus on three artists who approach the phenomenal in very distinct and contrasting ways, but who still claim to access and represent Truth in each of their respective works. Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, and Chris Marker each have their own style of documentary filmmaking, this despite all of them engaging in what can be deemed a mixture of Griersonian realism and Flahertian artistry in their separate approaches. In looking at these filmmakers, I am also interested in developing the notion of what I will call “the signature,” a mark, sometimes tangible, more often elusive, which signals the presence of a conscientious awareness intent on constructing a version of the truth. This signature may serve as a way to grapple with each filmmakers’ claim to Truth by revealing the grounding intentions. Thus, one may speak of a pedagogical signature, an authoritative signature, or even a playful, comedic signature.

Frederick Wiseman’s documentary purpose often lies in the examination of the State and its institutions. With his “fly-on-the-wall” style of filmmaking -- often aligned by critics and scholars with the Direct Cinema movement, despite the filmmaker’s aversion to the term -- Wiseman seeks truth in the day-to-day activities witnessed at institutional settings such as hospitals, penitentiaries, churches and schools. Avoiding voiceovers and boasting a similarly sparse camera style, Wiseman’s films claim Truth through their supposed non-interventionist mode. Wiseman believes the camera’s presence in his films eventually becomes elided, allowing the camera and its handler to become invisible, a claim that has been greatly contested, mainly by Postmodernist critics, as Michael Chanan has pointed out. Yet, given the amount of instances of institutional abuse and mishandling Wiseman’s films have captured, along with the various legal obstacles he has encountered throughout his career, one must ask whether he is not in fact accessing some level of veracity only achievable in his choice dynamic. 

Titicut Follies, Frederick Wiseman (1967)

Errol Morris also believes his films have access to Truth; moreover, he believes this access to be “unmediated.” Contrary to Wiseman, however, Morris, I will contend, reinscribes the authorial voice into the documentary space, employing the interview as his tool of choice, joining these with reenactments and archival footage, all of which lead to a highly ornate construction perhaps closer to the Griersonian tradition. For his interviews, Morris has devised the Interrotron (later renamed the Megatron), a camera system which allows the interviewer and the interviewee to look at each other during the interview, creating the illusion of unobstructed rapport between the parties. This illusion extends to the audience, who are invited to see themselves as the interviewers. Ultimately, the interviews as well as the reenactments and the archival footage converge in the same cinematic space, revealing the artifice of a constructed object. Still, in the act of acknowledging the aestheticized nature of his work, Morris problematizes the act of meaning making, revealing how it is always already an act of construction. Truth, in Morris, stems from our capacity and tendency for narrative; in this sense, narrative has the capability to capture the phenomenology of reality. An approach to Morris’ films should allow for an exploration as to whether these conditions of construction, in comparison with those employed by Wiseman, foreclose or further open the possibilities of accessing Truth. 

The Thin Blue Line, Errol Morris (1988)

Finally, Chris Marker offers simultaneously the greatest contrast from the two preceding filmmakers as well as the convergence of some stylistic elements found in both. Marker’s avant-garde, experimental ventures seem concerned with a different type of phenomenology. Whereas Wiseman invests his efforts in capturing the moment and Morris grapples with replicating the moment, one could make the case that Marker is interested in reinterpreting the moment. Memory, its permanence and impermanence, figure as Marker’s greatest focus. As such, one finds Marker raiding sites where memory is often believed to be contained: history in the collective realm; souvenirs and photography in the personal realm. Each of these sites converge and ultimately inform each other, first allowing for a meditation on the moment from each vantage point in space and time, then merging into what can only seem as Marker’s interpretation of a total moment where history and memory are irredeemably destabilized. Marker both reinscribes the Voice onto the documentary space like Morris but also seeks a vanishing or invisibility of the filmmaker as in Wiseman by attributing the Voice to other modalities such as the letter, the memoir, and the voice of an Other. Thus, Marker, it could be said, reshapes collective memory by including participants and audience members in the informal rereading of history, both personal and social. In Marker, separation and juxtaposition, not cohesion as one could argue is found in both Morris and Wiseman, offer the greatest possibility to accessing Truth. 

Sans Soleil, Chris Marker (1983)

Thus, what do the different modalities of documentary employed by these filmmakers say about the documentary’s claim to Truth? And what influence does the role of the filmmaker play in each of these modalities? Comparing the three filmmakers’ widely distinct methods of inquiry in creating their films should grant a clearer picture regarding the task of the documentary filmmaker and each methods’ access, or claim, to Truth. 

In his 1997 book, Doing Documentary Work, Robert Coles grapples towards a definition of “documentary.” 

        The word documentary certainly suggests an interest in what is actual, 

                        what exists, rather than what one brings personally, if not irrationally, to the 

                        table of present-day actuality. Documentary evidence substantiates what 

                        is otherwise an assertion or a hypothesis or a claim. A documentary film 

                        attempts to portray a particular kind of life realistically; a documentary 

                        report offers authentication of what is otherwise speculation. Through 

                        documents themselves, through informants, witnesses, participants, 

                        through the use of the camera and tape recorder, through letters or 

                        journals or diaries, through school records, hospital records, or newspaper 

                        records, a growing accuracy with respect to a situation, a place, a person 

                        or a group of people begins to be assembled. (quoted in Fricke, 546)

The context of Coles’ attempt mainly pertains to the recording of data and impressions during the treatment of his patients as a psychoanalyst. Still, the definition offers an entryway in the approach to documentary, since embedded in such a definition one finds hints at a history of the difficulties experienced by those who have engaged in the form, both creatively and critically, written or visual. Reading between the lines, one starts teasing out various elements that bring with them a torrent of unending questions: What can we consider to be “realistic?” How trustworthy are the documents employed in this search for authentication? How can something that needs assemblage not possess some element of the personal, and thus, be irredeemably informed by opinion? In looking at documentaries in the upcoming months, I am interested, not so much in answering these particular questions, but more in following the different roads which such questions suggest. The filmmakers discussed herein -- Frederick Wiseman, Errol Morris, Chris Marker -- I will contend, have themselves approached the documentary as a need to explore, not a need to answer. 

Chanan, Michael. The Politics of Documentary. BFI: London, 2007. 

Fricke, Tom and Keith Taylor, Eds. The Documentary Imagination: A Special Issue. Michigan Quarterly Review. Fall 2005. Vol 44. University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. 

Marker, Chris. Sans Soleil. 1983. Criterion Collection. DVD. 2007.

Morris, Errol. The Thin Blue Line. 1988. MGM. DVD. 2005. 

Spence, Louise and Vinicius Navarro. Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning. Rutgers UP: New Brunswick, 2011. 

Winston, Brian. Claiming the Real: The Griersonian Documentary and its Legitimations. BFI: London, 1995. 

---. Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries. BFI: London, 2000.

Wiseman, Frederick. Titicut Follies. 1967. Zipporah: Cambridge, 2007.