Documentary and the Dimensions of Reference.

1. Documentary and the Dimensions of Reference. John Corner (Visiting Professor, ICS Leeds).

2. Intentions • A look at some questions concerning documentary representation and ‘referentiality’, taking us to the centre of issues around documentary’s continuingly problematic character, both in definition and in its relations to the world and to viewers. The idea of ‘grounding’ here (to be returned to).

3. The idea of ‘documentary reference’ • ‘Reference’ as a central factor at issue in arguments about documentary as a genre, about defining ‘documentary’. The form of the linkage between portrayal and the real world. Film and television as ‘documentary’ media, distinct in their referential character from writing, painting, photography and radio (as moving audio-visual recordings). Other key terms are related to ‘reference’, including knowledge, truth, reality, evidentiality • John Grierson’s affirmation of the directness of documentary reference in his founding statement of the 1930s (‘First Principles of Documentary’).. • ‘We believe that the cinema’s capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself, can be exploited in a new and vital art form’ . • ‘Documentary would photograph the living scene and the living story’ . • ‘We believe that the materials and the stories thus taken from the raw can be finer….than the acted article’. • But - increasing range of questionings, doubts and critiques about the ways in which documentaries make referential claims. The problem of ‘over-claiming’, perhaps in ways which distort and deceive.

4. Two Related Pairings • Physical and abstract. • The inevitable physicality of documentary reference (compare writing and speech). Recording of the physically specific (e.g. a street, a face, a ship leaving harbour, a village church at night) as a way into abstract exposition or argument (e.g about poverty, about the arms trade, about changing ideas of community). Both the sensuous (a basis for aesthetics) as well as the empirical (a basis for knowledge) are at work here. • Particular and general. • A relationship central to the expositional ambition of documentary. Using the particular to indicate the general. The important but potentially dangerous idea of ‘the typical’, the ‘case-study’ (one village indicates rural decline, one military incident indicates the war, one murder indicates problems of the contemporary family).

5. Two broad dimensions of documentary reference Direct (indexical – a function of the recording process). • Status of the image (in relation to denotative specificity or to the less specific - the indicative/categoric. (Take the example of a shot of a fishing boat leaving port). Conditions of its primary production here. • Status of the sound recording. Conditions of its primary production here too (who is speaking and when). Indirect (discursive – a function of image combination and language use) • The implications of causality and connectedness carried by the sequence of editing (offered as an exposition or a ‘story’). • Propositions (implicit and explicit) about the topic contained in the speech of participants and in the commentary. This is the principal mode of ‘truth claim’ in many documentaries.

6. Further elaborations • Note here: the special case of ‘dramatization’ as a kind of ‘replicated indexicality’, controversial because of this, often shifting and uncertain in relation to the status of its images and its speech. • Also: the special case of ‘self-reference’ (documentary reflexivity – talking about the construction of the documentary within the documentary - as a way of escaping naïve and suspect claims about reference).

7. Four examples of referential ‘profiles’(Closer analytic commentary will be offered in presentation). • The Arbor (Clio Barnard, UK. 2010). • Documentary about life of playwright Andrea Dunbar, which uses actors sound-synching to the recorded voices of her real family and acquaintances. • Waltz with Bashir (Ari Folman, Israel, 2008). • Animated documentary about Israeli involvement in a 1982 Lebanon massacre. Soundtrack scripted from the accounts of serving soldiers, friends of the director, spoken largely by the ‘real people’. • Basque Ball (Julio Medem, Spain, 2003) • Exploration of the Basque issue, using diverse interviewees often in ‘unrealistic’ settings that reference the Basque country. • Man on Wire (James Marsh, UK, 2008). • Strongly paced as a part-dramatization of a 1974 wire-walk between the twin towers of the New York Trade Centre, within which is woven interview testimony and archive footage, including stills.

8. New Directions for Documentary Reference? • Web-based documentary allows new kinds of referential assembly. The emergence of television entertainment series of ‘Reality Drama’ (e.g. The Only Way is Essex, Desperate Scousewives) further complicates the referential mix for cinema productions, the play-off of indexical and discursive components. • The continuing draw of the special ‘bond’ with the world established by documentary, a factor both in the way we are pleased by, and know from, work so designated (because we value that special ‘grounding’ of documentary). • Or- are we becoming less anxious about questions of reference; more prepared to entertain a wider range of indirect, inter-generic, looser connections with ‘the real’?