ABSTRACT
This chapter explores aspects of a critical realist approach that have practical applications to biographical documentary filmmaking as an ontological and methodological guide in the planning, production, and editing processes. Additionally, the semiotic facets of such an approach will illuminate the documentary modality along with the socio-cultural influence in which the biographical subject, President Juvénal Habyarimana of Rwanda, is embedded. The results of such an approach have universal application as an objective modality of messaging the ‘real’ as opposed to a culture-bound, political, or ideological point of view. Critical realism is an interdisciplinary social science methodology for gaining greater understanding of the mechanisms underlying events through its view of society as multi-layered with emergent properties and the use of abduction and methodological pluralism. This approach results in a circular historical perception that connects backward and forward in a continually recursive fashion to reveal events not as predestined points along a ‘linear’ continuum but as interrelated elements of a contextualized whole. The biographical subject is shown connected outside as well as inside his/her time and in relation to different levels of agency in the context of his/her culture. This has important implications for film modality and for semiotic analysis of documentary biography.
