ABSTRACT
Filmmakers soon realised that problems inherent in the Griersonian mode – tangled problems of ideological and narrative dissonance within
the film text, in addition to the stultifying pitfalls of straightforward lecturing – could be overcome whilst not lessening a work’s educational or historical value (though a judgement of ‘value’, one must remember, is conditional on one’s opinion); nor, increasingly, has hammering
home a preferred reading appealed to anyone other than fervent cinematic rhetoricians with contentious agendas. Contra Grierson, it might be argued that history and epistemology in non-fiction never need be reliant upon easily understood facsimiles of real life, propaganda, the
slippery ideals of journalistic factuality, or the storytelling tropes of Hollywood. Reality, especially memory-as-reality, of course constitutes a maze of thorny issues rather than a concrete framework based on blackand-white condensations, shoehorned conclusions, or Manichean templates of Good against Bad: in every event, newsworthy or seemingly
trivial, lurks contradiction, emotion, subjectivity, compromise and complication – these are the sometimes inexplicable, hazy domains of poetic contemplation, and realms within which the burden falls on art to make a little sense of our deeply flawed world on the level of the
soul. In Chapter Four, we shall look at three very different films that not
only approach the reconstitution of reality from such a perspective, but also, in some respects, challenge non-fiction film’s supposed precepts:
all three documentaries attempt to move beyond schemes of exposition and rhetoric into the arena of subjective evaluation, evincing a discernible sense of authorial ambivalence about humanity’s overarching absurdity; moreover, they offer no solutions, preferring to find a
peculiar solace in the invocation of questions, ghosts and mortal preoccupations.
