ABSTRACT
Mainstream documentary theory and practice for decades have been concerned with self-consciousness. Theorists of documentary are well aware of the innate inability of the medium to present ‘truth’: ‘Documentaries are constructs, yet they seek to reveal the real without mediation. Watching a documentary involves holding these two contrary beliefs at once, a process of disavowal which is not terribly unusual inhuman behaviour, but is inherently unstable.’1 Within the form itself, critics argue is, an acknowledgement that truth is insubstantial.2 It is difficult to square these claims – that history on television is not complex enough and presents simple truths, or that it is innately self-reflexive and self-conscious and so obviously cannot claim the status of ‘truth’. Indeed, the very falseness of the relationship between camera and subject has
been instituted since the first full-length cinema documentary, Nanook of the North (1922). Director Robert Flaherty changed material and staged events, distorting his subject. The very insubstantiality of documentary seems to lie, like theatre, in the audience’s acceptance of the bias of the presenter and the ‘arrangement’ of information. As Richard Kilborn and John Izod recount, ‘The production of a documentary is not simply an act of chronicling; it is just as much an act of transformation.’3 They quote film-maker and theorist John Grierson’s (1946) mandate that documentary is ‘the creative treatment of actuality’.4 Grierson argued that documentary had educational value and was key to the improvement of society; it enabled active citizenship by giving the individual information. Before the 1960s, documentary tended to approach serious subjects in order to educate the audience. Yet since the 1960s the problems of representation associated with the documentary form have been uppermost in its discussion, debate and practice. This crisis of legitimacy has clear echoes with the shaking of authority felt by History as a subject, a movement from unquestioning inflexibility towards a more complex, dynamic sense of the issues involved in articulating a position; documentary practice in general seems a good analogue for history insofar as it tends towards factuality despite an awareness of its own incompleteness.
