Film, like photography, differs from painting, writing, and other traditional arts. While painters can capture purely fictive, imaginary places or people in their chosen medium, and writers can write a purely inventive story or history, a photographer or filmmaker is limited in their ability to depict the imaginary. As Carroll (2000) writes, commonly film images are made by “…the use of photography to imprint the image of whatever stands before the camera.” (p. 303). This mechanical element eliminates the ability to document something that is purely imaginary. Thus, Carroll continues, photography has the potential to “…produce a document…whose causal provenance gives it a certain evidentiary authority.” Although filmmakers certainly make fictional films, the films they produce are still evidence of actual events that occurred – for example, the film Psycho captures images and events that actually existed, albeit images set up and shot deliberately, using actors, props, and a fictional story. Similarly, Currie (1999) makes the case that documentary films and photography are unable to be “intrinsically misleading” the way that a written history can be misleading (p. 288). The mechanical nature of filmmaking means that it captures reality in a way that is not required of a book, painting, or website.
The increasingly digital nature of film and photography has allowed for more manipulation of images in post-production and, in some cases, for the distortion of truth. However, photographs have been altered and manipulated for well over one hundred years – for example, a well-known photo of Lincoln was in reality a photo of Lincoln’s head affixed to the body of John Calhoun. More recently, a photo of John Kerry was doctored to suggest that he appeared onstage with Jane Fonda at an anti-war rally in 1971. Separate images were merged into a composite which appears to show both sharing the stage (Mikkelson, 2004):
In light of these historical distortions, and considering that, as Richard Morrison wrote in a 2004 article for the London Times, “…to mock up a photo of, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury groping Beyonce Knowles in a Bangkok brothel requires little more than a few twitches of a computer mouse, and of course a vivid imagination,” (Morrison, 2004, p. 12), it appears that while traditional documentary filmmaking can be considered to have the inability to be intrinsically misleading, this definition will need to be recast as more films are shot using digital technologies and include images that can easily be faked.
How do such manipulations fit into the ideals and standards of American documentary filmmakers? As early as the late 1920s, Grierson referred to documentaries as “the creative treatment of actuality.” (Currie, p. 285). This inevitably gives rise to the question of how much creativity can inform an account that is attempting, in some way, to document reality. Plantinga argues that a nonfiction, documentary film is one in which a “…filmmaker takes an assertive stance toward the world projected through the work,” and “…asserts that the state of affairs making up that projected world holds or occurs in the natural world.” (p. 107). Documentaries are not fiction but instead present ‘actuality’ in some form. Grierson’s definition implies that a documentary film can incorporate creative elements and thus better articulate a social position or stance that the filmmaker believes to be true or reflective of the truth. While proponents of cinema verite in the 1960s argued that such creative mediation was unnecessary and only served to distort, most documentaries engage in many practices that incorporate creativity, including the use of narration, editing, and the inclusion of stock footage to enhance the viewing experience. Writing in 1975, critic Thomas Waugh criticized cinema verite advocates as “naïve” in their declaration that cinema verite had what he referred to as a “new, privileged grasp of reality” (Waugh, quoted in Hall, p. 25). Polemics written by cinema verite filmmakers now appear dated in their arguments that their films finally captured reality in an objective way (Hall, p. 25.)
Perhaps a more salient definition of documentary comes from Plantinga when he writes that documentaries can be viewed as nonfiction films which have “…aesthetic, social, rhetorical, and/or political ambition” (p. 105). While this would seem to allow any number of creative distortions, including the sorts of manipulations such as the doctored photo of Kerry and Fonda, audience expectations of documentary films seem to mean that blatant misrepresentation and alteration of reality is less likely than subtle techniques that imitate the effective techniques of fiction films and allow for the story or stance of the filmmaker to be presented.
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