ABSTRACT
This book aims to examine documentary as a series of efforts of communication. But, as John Peters points out, ‘communication is a risky adventure without guarantees. Any kind of effort to make linkage via signs is a gamble, on whatever scale it occurs. [ … ] Meaning is an incomplete project, open-ended and subject to radical revision by later events’ (Peters 2000: 267). This is particularly true of mediated communications. Documentary communication may often be adequate, but it is never perfect. It never lives up to the expectations of either filmers or filmed. The very technologies that enable documentary filming also frustrate its most idealistic aims of showing things as they are. As those machines have changed, so too have beliefs about what constitutes an adequate documentary communication. At the same time, close examination shows that any documentary is the result of a series of communicative attempts by all the parties involved. Depending on their skills and intentions, the filmed can be just as skilled as the filmers in negotiating this process. They reveal and conceal according to how they hope to be received. Recent developments in digital technology have changed the process significantly. In production and post-production, they have enabled commissioning and broadcasting organisations to become more closely involved in the details of the eventual production. Their branding becomes more marked as a result. For the eventual viewers, the everyday use of digital cameras has broadened the general level of appreciation of what it is to film and be filmed, and have rendered obsolete more mystical beliefs about the nature of photography and recording.
