ABSTRACT
‘I assume,’ wrote Erving Goffman, when trying to define his approach to the analysis of communication, ‘that when individuals attend to any current situation, they face the question: “What is it that's going on here?”’ (Goffman 1986: 8). Ask this question of documentary films, and immediately we find ourselves in difficulties. There are two distinct but profoundly interrelated ‘things going on’. There is the film that we watch as an audience; and there was once a series of interactions between filmer and the filmed. Different things go on in each situation; the people in them act and interpret the actions of others in different ways. However, the two things depend on each other for their existence. There is no film without filming; and filming normally presupposes the eventual existence of a film. So an experienced interviewee speaks with half an eye on the conversation they are having with their interviewer, but also half an eye on the eventual use of their words in a film that will be shown to other people at another time. However natural the speech may seem to us when watching it later, the situation is distinct from other forms of conversation and witnessed speaking.
