The answer is, of course, that it is very difficult to improve on
Grierson's own formula, the 'creative treatment of actuality', for all
its vagueness. Anything lese is restrictive and normative. The point is
that the pursuit of a definition here is philosophically mistaken, as
Wittgenstein taught long ago. (Or if you prefer, try adapting T.S.Kuhn's
concept of the paradigm.) That is to say that the documentary is
something like a dialect of cinema (to borrow a term used by Christian
Metz) which in Wittgensteinian terms is like an extended family linked
by family relations in the same way as games. There is no single
defining feature which is either necessary or sufficient to make a
documentary a documentary. (There are however a number of works which
stand as paradigms, and even establish movements and schools.) To let
the fly on the wall out of the bottle would perhaps allow us to turn the
whole approach around, and start looking at documentary as a set of
*social* discourses which interact with each other and with ideological
constructions of reality and truth-telling. A Bakhtinian idea of the
dialogical would be useful in producing such an account.
Michael Chanan
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Film-Philosophy Salon
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of NICKY HAMLYN
> Sent: 05 July 2001 09:36
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: Aguirre
>
>
> This definiton would exclude pretty well all documentaries
> except, perhaps, Fred Wiseman's work, some "fly on the wall"
> work and docu-soaps.
>
> > ----------
> > From: Matt Teichman[SMTP:[log in to unmask]]
> > Reply To: Film-Philosophy Salon
> > Sent: 05 July 2001 01:44
> > To: [log in to unmask]
> > Subject: Re: Aguirre
> >
> > This definition would exclude most documentaries made
> before the late
> > 50s, including the films produced by John Grierson, who
> invented the
> > term.
> >
> >
> >
> > >I've always understood 'documentary' to mean events/objects
> > >photographed or filmed actually undergoing the events that
> are being
> > >represented, rather than undergoing events as if they were
> actually
> > >happening. This does not include staging re-enactments, or
> anything
> > >similar. "Reconstructions" are, well, *difficult" for me
> to accept as
> > >documentary.
> >
>
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