ABSTRACT
Grierson is regarded as the first filmmaker to use the term 'documentary' about film in 1926 but he used the term to cover what he described as 'the creative treatment of actuality'. His contemporary documentary filmmakers, regarded themselves as artists, exempted from the obligation to consider the possible consequences of their art for those involved in it. Reflexivity in visual anthropology is linked to the responsibility of the filmmaker, whose work is evidently selective. In visual anthropology, discussions concerning the viewer have been rare in comparison with the focus on reception found in film, media and communication studies. As a film theorist, Bill Nichols works within an academic tradition dealing with aesthetic products. He is focused on analyses of film and relationship between the film and audience than on the fieldwork and research of which films are a result. The acting agents of film production have increasingly become the focus in ethnographic and documentary film; someone is controlling the narrative.
