Eitzen, Dirk. “When Is a Documentary?: Documentary as a Mode of Reception.” Cinema Journal. 35.1 (1995): 81-102.

All documentaries—whether they are deemed, in the end, to be reliable or not—revolve around questions of trust. A documentary is any motion picture that is susceptible to the question “Might it be lying?” 81

It has been nearly seven decades since John Grierson first applied the term “documentary” to movies. 81

In contrast, as is apparent from the storms of controversy that rage around “fact-based” fiction films like JFK (1991) and Malcolm X (1992), the distinction between “fact” and “fiction” is a vital and important one to popular movie audiences. 81

What difference does it make? How does it matter to the recipients of a discourse, in practical terms, whether the discourse is considered to be fiction or nonfiction? Although I will focus chiefly on documentary here—that is, on movies that are supposed to be nonfiction—this question pertains to other forms of nonfiction as well, such as history and journalism. 81

Documentary has been variously defined through the years as “a dramatized presentation of man’s relation to his institutional life,” as “film with a message,” as “the communication, not of imagined things, but of real things only,” and as films / which give up control of the events being filmed. 81-82

The most famous definition, and still one of the most serviceable, is John Grierson’s, “the creative treatment of actuality.” 82

Some film theorists have responded to this dilemma by claiming that documentary is actually no more than a kind of fiction that is constituted to cover over or “disavow” its own fictionality. 82

This definition of documentary [see directly above], though correctly controverting a kind of naïve realism, fails to account for the practical, everyday differences between fiction and nonfiction—differences that we experience as real and that can have real consequences for how we get along in the world, even though they may be in a sense imaginary. One could use the same line of reasoning to show, for example, that visual perception is no more than a kind of fiction that just seems particularly real. In theory, my perception of a baseball flying at my head may be no more than an imaginary construct—a fiction, if you will. Nevertheless, if it does not cause me to duck, I am liable to get quite a lump. Documentary has some of the same practical implications. 82

That is what Andrew Tudor wrote of genres twenty years ago. “Genre,” he wrote, “is what we collectively believe it to be.” What saves this argument from circularity, as Tudor pointed out, is that how people use genre terms and what they mean by them is pretty strictly delimited by culture. 83

In its time, On the Waterfront (1954) was called a documentary. Today, it takes a real stretch to think of it as one. 83

In his recent book, Representing Reality, Bill Nichols weighs in with a new definition of documentary. The adequacy of a definition, he claims, has less to do with how well it corresponds to common usage, as Tudor suggests, than with how well it “locates and addresses important [theoretical] questions.” The theoretical questions that Nichols wishes to locate and address have to do primarily with how power circulates in documentary discourses. 83

Conventions circulate and they are negotiated and nailed down, Nichols says, in three discursive arenas or sites: a community of practitioners with its institutional supports, a corpus of texts, and constituency of viewers. 83

For documentary discourses, the community of practitioners consists of people who make or engage in the circulation of documentary films. Its institutional supports include funders like the National Endowment for the Arts, distributors like PBS, professional associations, documentary film festivals, and so on. The corpus of texts includes everything that is commonly considered to be a documentary. Although Nichols does not say this, it seems logical that some texts, like Daughter Rite and episodes of A Current Affair, might belong to this corpus only marginally or provisionally. The constituency of viewers includes, in its broadest sense, everyone who occasionally watches documentaries. 83

The defining characteristic of this constituency, however, is certain kinds of knowledge about what constitutes a documentary and about how to make sense of one / in conventionally accepted ways. The constituency of viewers, it might be added, has its own institutional supports, like newspaper criticism, the educational establishment, and, once again, distributors like PBS which determine how a film is labeled and the context in which it is seen. 83-84

The key factor that defines the community of practitioners, Nichols maintains, is “a common, self-chosen mandate to represent the historical world rather than imaginary ones.” The corpus of texts is defined by an “informing logic” that involves “a representation, case, or argument about the historical world.” The constituency of viewers is defined by two common assumptions: first, that “the images we see (and many of the sounds we hear) had their origin in the historical world” and, second, that documentaries do not merely portray the historical world but make some sort of “argument” about it. The definitive factor in every case is “the historical world.” Whether you are looking at why documentaries are made, how they are put together, or how they are interpreted, what conventionally defines them, Nichols suggests, is their relationship to “the historical world.” Specifically, he claims, they make “arguments” about it. 84

[Still Nichols, including quotes] The historical world is something that lies outside and beneath all our representations of it. It is a “brute reality” in which “objects collide, actions occur, [and] forces take their toll.” Documentary is therefore not the representation of an imaginary reality; it is an imaginative representation of an actual historical reality. This aligns Nichols’s definition of documentary more closely with the common-sense definition of Grierson than with those that suggest that documentary is no more than a kind of fiction that denies its fictional status. Of course, our perceptions of an ideas about historical (i.e., actual) reality can only be communicated to others in conventional ways. It is in working out these conventional practices that Nichols’s three arenas of discourse—the community of practitioners, the corpus of texts, and the constituency of viewers—come into play. One can neatly sum up Nichols’s definition of documentary as the use of conventional means to refer to, represent, or make claims about historical reality. 84

There remains one problem, however. There are many fiction films that refer to, represent, or make claims about historical reality. Spike Lee’s School Daze, for example, portrays tensions in the student body of a fictional all-black college—tensions that include strong differences in opinion on the issue of whether the college should divest its holdings in companies that do business in South Africa. 84

Nichols tries to solve this problem by saying that fiction films that refer to or represent reality do so “metaphorically.” Neorealism, for example, “presents a world like the historical world and asks that we view it, and experience the viewing of, like the viewing, and experience, of history itself.” This explanation does nothing to illuminate the ending of School Daze, however, which points to historical reality without resembling it in the least and without explicitly comparing it to anything else. 85

Wolterstorff suggests that all representational works, including both documentaries and fiction films, “project a world.” This world is an imaginary one since, being the product of a work of art, it is the expression of someone’s imagination (even though it may be his or her imagination of reality). Like the world of everyday experience, it can consist of things, events, people, causes and effects, categories, general laws, and so forth. In a given projected world, any or all of these things can be lumped together under the term “a state of affairs.” 85

Wolterstorff claims that a world or state of affairs can be projected with various “stances.” A storyteller typically takes a “fictive” stance: “To take up the fictive stance toward some state of affairs is not to assert that the state of affairs is true, is not to ask whether it is true, is not to request that it be made true, is not to wish that it were true. It is simply to invite us to consider a state of affairs.” The purpose is simply to show or describe a world, to present it, not to make claims about it. In contrast, an “assertive” stance toward some state of affairs does make claims about it. It claims, specifically, that a certain state of affairs is or was so. 85

So, rather than saying that a documentary makes assertions, we need to say that a documentary is perceived to make assertions. Whether or not a text is perceived to make assertions is partly a matter of conventions (e.g., whether the text looks like a documentary is supposed to look) and partly a matter of the discursive context (e.g., how the distributor labels and describes the program). This is how Plantinga sidesteps the intentionalist implications of Wolterstorff’s theory. 86

When fiction makes assertions about reality, it proposes an analogy or similarity between a projected state of affairs and the real world. In contrast, a documentary asserts that a projected state of affairs is true in the real world. Fiction can make assertions of similarity, but documentaries make assertions of truth. Or, as Plantinga puts it, fictional films may assert or imply broad artistic truths. “Documentary films may also assert broad, artistic truths, but they in addition assert that the particular states of affairs represented actually occurred.” 86

The “Wake up! Wake up!” at the end of School Daze is as the same time a call to action in the historical world and an assertion that states of affairs portrayed earlier in the film are similar to states of affairs in the historical world. But it is not a truth claim. High School makes some of the same kind of claims, such as the implied claim that Northeast High is like a factory. But unlike School Daze, High School also makes specific truth claims: that the Penn Maid truck was not “planted” in the scene but really happened to be driving by; that the Otis Redding song actually played on the radio at some point during the filming, etc. 86

[on a letter-reading scene in Ken Burns’s The Civil War] This scene seems to depend for its effects on something besides “argument.” It seems to rely on melodrama, on sentiment, on the emotional resonance that Sullivan Ballou’s letter has for viewers. One might say that instead of stressing the syntagmatic connections between elements—the horizontal links: sequence, logic, cause and effect, and so forth—this scene emphasizes the paradigmatic dimension, piling meaning upon meaning to create a kind of emotional depth. In this scene, which many viewers held to be exemplary of what made the whole series interesting and special as a documentary, this rhetorical operation seems to be far more crucial and certainly quite different from what Nichols calls argument. 87

However one might wish to construe the term argument—as a series of explicit propositions, as an implicit stance, as the assertion of historicity, etc.—it appears that viewers do not, in general, interpret the love-letter scene as an argument. The typical reading is closer to that of melodramatic fiction. It seems to involve imaginary involvement or “identification” with the soldier anticipating his death or with the wife reading this letter from her late husband. It prompts thoughts about viewers’ own dear ones or, occasionally, reflections on the heroism of soldiers or the tragedy of war. Viewers who respond to this scene in such a fashion do not appear to look for or examine or even particularly care about the truth claims or arguments it may make. 88

On the other hand, viewers seem to assume that the scene is telling the truth, even though they do not pay attention to its particular truth claims. This assumption is precisely what makes it possible for viewers to ignore the truth claims. It is what makes it possible for them to focus on the melodrama in the scene rather than on its historical arguments. The assumption that the film is telling the truth also serves to validate their emotional responses to the scene. If the letter were presumed to be a fake, its emotional impact would no doubt be considerably diminished. In fact, a small controversy did arise when it was discovered that the letter quoted in the scene is actually just one of several differently worded “copies” of a letter for which no original could be found. 88

So, I hypothesize that the assumption that documentaries in general “tell the truth” (or are supposed to) precedes and lies beneath the interpretation of particular documentaries, even though people may make sense of a documentary in altogether different terms—as melodrama, for example. 88

It is therefore not quite accurate to suggest, as Nichols and Plantinga do, that documentaries are films that are perceived to make arguments or truth claims about historical reality, because they are not—at least not all of the time. It is more correct to say that documentaries are presumed to be truthful, even though considerations about the veracity of particular assertions may play little role in how viewers actually make sense of them. 88

A neater way to say this might be that a documentary is any film, video, or TV program that could, in principle, be perceived to lie. I suggest that this is more than a handy heuristic for the purposes of analysis; it actually conforms to the heuristic that people carry around in their heads. It does not produce a nice, neat, sharply defined set of texts but a fuzzy-edged, somewhat flexible one like the mental category “documentary” that we actually go by. Is the reenactment of a kidnapping on A Current Affair a documentary? That depends. It does not depend on whether it makes assertions or arguments. It does not depend upon whether or not it actually “tells the truth.” It depends on whether it is perceived in such a way that it makes sense to ask, “Might it be lying?” I propose that the applicability of this question, “Might it be lying?” is what distinguishes documentaries, and nonfiction in general, from fiction. 89

You may have lied about the stop sign, but you have not lied with it. A stop sign cannot lie because a stop sign does not claim to tell the truth. It just is. 89

Still, the painting itself can hardly be said to lie because a painting itself does not claim to tell the truth. Semiotician Sol Worth makes this point quite convincingly in a delightful essay called “Pictures Can’t Say Ain’t.” 89

Consider one of Worth’s examples. Imagine that I superimpose a photograph of a senator who claims not to know a certain gangster onto a photograph of that gangster dining with his cronies so that it looks as though the senator is toasting the gangster. What I have produced is a fake, not a lie. Granted, I can lie with the picture. If I send it around to the newspapers, implying that it is genuine, I am using the picture to lie. But the picture itself does not lie. It corresponds in all respects to what it would look like if the senator had, in fact, been there. 89

…a picture has no means of expressing what it does not depict. 90

What pictures depict is only what is, in the picture—even though that could very well be something imaginary, like the starship Enterprise zooming through the Milky Way, or something untrue, like an honest senator toasting a gangster. Pictures constitute a “reality” of their own. In the words of Wolterstorff, they “project a world.” 90

Recall the flap that TV Guide created some years ago by superimposing the dieting Oprah Winfrey’s head onto Ann-Margret’s body for its cover photo. 90

It is not self-evident that what applies to pictures applies to moving pictures. Movies are, after all, full of words. Because they are full of words, they tend to carry labels with them in a way that photographs ordinarily do not. A movie can say, “This is a filmed record of actual events” or, for that matter, “The characters in this movie have no resemblance to actual people, living or dead.” Such statements are analogous to the caption of a photograph, and there is no question that they can “lie” or at least be false. But outside of credit sequences, such explicit metatextual labels are rare in fiction films, completely absent in High School, and unusual even in very wordy documentaries like Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series (1942-1945). 91

In short, Worth’s arguments that pictures apply to everything in movies that does not have the character of an express metatextual caption or label. What a movie typically does when it represents a space, action, or event is no different from what a photograph does when it depicts an object or scene. It “projects a world.” 91

The point here, again, is not that movies cannot, in effect, lie. There is no question that they can. The point is that when viewers perceive movies to lie (or, for that matter, to “tell the truth”), that perception is with few exceptions a product of the metatextual label or interpretive framework that they apply to the text, not a product of the form of the text per se. Admittedly, the form of the text can prompt viewers to “frame” it in a particular way. (“Framing” is a term used by sociolinguists to describe the process of applying a metatextual label or interpretive framework to a discourse). For example, a jiggly camera, poor lighting, and bad sound suggests, “This is cinema verité.” Still, there is nothing about the form of such footage that demands that it be framed in a particular fashion. 91

A work of fiction might, on formal grounds, be virtually indistinguishable from The Civil War. Consider, for example, how Citizen Kane incorporates a take-off of The March of Time so studiously faithful that, outside of its fictional context, it might be mistaken for the genuine article. 92

So, it is not the representational or formal aspects of a movie that determine whether viewers “frame” it as a documentary but rather a combination of what viewers want and expect from a text and what they suppose or infer about it on the basis of situational cues and textual features. In other words, the question that distinguishes documentaries, “Might it be lying?” is one that is posed by viewers, not texts. In short, documentary must be seen, in the last analysis, not as a kind of text but as a kind of “reading.” 92

One movie demonstrates exceptionally well how true this is. It is a fake documentary entitled, appropriately enough, No Lies (Mitchell Block, 1973). No Lies is a fiction film inasmuch as it is scripted and meticulously rehearsed and all the characters in the film are played by actors. It is, however, on the surface virtually indistinguishable from a cinema verité documentary. The film portrays a filmmaker trying to record spontaneous events as they unfold and, as with all verité films, we see these events through the filmmaker’s camera. 92

So many things about this film label it a documentary—from the title, to comments made by the characters, to the rigorous adherence to documentary conventions—that viewers tend to overlook or ignore the contradictory end credits. When they are told that the film is, indeed, a fiction film—scripted, rehearsed, / and acted out—their reading of the film undergoes a remarkable transformation. The film produces dramatically different kinds of response when viewers see it as a fiction film than when they regard it as a documentary. And since it is self-same footage, it cannot be the form or style or “content” of the film that determines which of the two ways it is read. 92-93

Besides that anger, though, viewers now feel angry at having been duped. Worth calls this “media rage”; it is like the anger people felt at being taken in by the Oprah/Ann-Margret photograph. This anger is directed at the perpetrator of the hoax—in the case of No Lies, the person who orchestrated the film. 93

But there is another level at which the film remains a documentary. Even when viewers know that No Lies is a fiction, they retain a very strong sense that it makes untrue claims. It is not just a novel fiction film; it is a fake documentary. It lies about what it is. It assigns itself a false label. So even though the question “Might it be lying?” no longer applies to what is represented in the film, it still obviously applies with regard to the question “What kind of film is this?” On this plane, No Lies is still a documentary, even though it portrays an entirely fictional scenario. It is a fiction film about rape, but it is a documentary about documentaries. I suggest that this, in fact, corresponds to the way most viewers interpret the film. 94

The example of No Lies shows how the same film can be “framed” either as documentary or as fiction and how different the resulting readings will be. It also shows how the definition that I have proposed for documentaries—namely, any film that could, in principle, be said to lie—applies to an extraordinarily difficult instance: a well-faked documentary that first hides and then reveals its sleight of hand. Finally, I think it shows that the question we really ought to ask is not what but when is a documentary? 94

Documentaries are characterized by a particular interpretive “frame,” I have argued, in which it makes sense to ask, “Might the text / be lying?” The question remains, When or under what circumstances does this frame apply? How do people know when it is appropriate to frame a movie as a documentary? 94-95

For instance, despite all of the things that ordinarily mark School Daze as a fiction film, it is quite easy for anyone who is interested in, say, Larry Fishburne’s development as an actor to regard it as a “document.” 95

What I characterize here as situational cues, Noël Carroll has previously called “indexes.” “Producers, writers, directors, distributors, and exhibitors index their films as nonfiction . . . ,” he writes. “We don’t characteristically go to films about which we must guess whether they are fiction or nonfiction. They are generally indexed one way or the other.” Plantinga picks up and elaborates on this idea. He writes that because a film is indexed publicly, how it is indexed becomes a “property or element of the text within its socio-cultural milieu” and not merely the product of a spectator’s inferences. He argues, in effect, that even if documentary is a kind of “reading,” as I have proposed, it is so firmly attached to particular texts in any given interpretive community that there is nothing to be gained by defining it as a kind of reading. Moreover, Plantinga maintains, even though a spectator must decide how a film is indexed, because it is culture that indexes films, a spectator is capable of being mistaken. So, if you were to interpret High School as fiction film or School Daze as a documentary, your interpretation would be “wrong,” plain and simple. 95

Plantinga suggests that all one needs to do to adequately define documentary is determine which texts are indexed as documentary within a given sociocultural milieu, and then one has a de facto definition. On has specified the common usage of the term, just as good dictionary definitions are supposed to do. In fact, Plantinga claims, one has specified precisely what we collectively believe documentaries to be. 95

Although this might seem to be a sensible and straightforward way to pin down what we collectively believe documentaries to be, I would argue that it has / three fatal flaws. First, as I pointed out at the start of this essay, determining which texts are indexed as documentary in our culture and which are not is not merely tricky, it is impossible. Texts like Daughter Rite and No Lies, and even well-known and popular texts like JFK and episodes of A Current Affair, are not neatly indexed in one way or the other. They are ambiguously indexed or indexed in a way that allows them to be read as either documentary or fiction or intermittently as one then the other. 95-96

Second, Plantinga’s approach to definition ignores the extent to which people apply frames like “documentary” in variable ways, depending upon their changing aims and interests. People have considerable choice in how to interpret or “frame” any discourse. It is easy, as I have pointed out, to regard School Daze as a documentary of sorts if one asks questions of the text that invite such a stance. Conversely, it is quite possible to “read” The Civil War as though the whole text were make-believe, if one is so inclined. 96

If one’s primary concern is to determine which texts belong in the canon of documentary and which do not, then it may be necessary to discard idiosyncratic readings. If, on the other hand, one wishes to establish the particular ways in which people see documentaries as special and distinct, it is important not to discount unusual or ambivalent “readings.” This is especially so because, as No Lies amply demonstrates, the label documentary is not necessarily attached to texts in any fixed way. Nor is it attached to every element in a text. The ending of Schindler’s List (1993), for example, is clearly set apart as something different from the rest of the film—something special: “documentary.” So, if one wishes to analyze documentaries as an actual form of discourse rather than as an abstract category of text, the real problem is not how to categorize whole texts but how people make sense of those particular moments and elements of films that they frame as documentary—whenever that may be. 96

Some texts are almost invariably framed in a way that precludes asking true or false questions about them. In ordinary circumstances, it almost never makes sense to ask of a Georgia O’Keeffe painting of a skull on a rose whether it is true or false. Magritte’s painting of a pipe with the caption “Ceci n’est pas une pipe” whimsically makes this same point. The same thing also applies to the illustrations in story books and to romance novels. In addition, it almost invariably applies to fiction films—even fiction films with an obvious “message” or “moral” like School Daze. 97

The question “Might the film be lying?” does not really apply to such claims. Even if someone “knows” on the basis of personal experience that Northeast High is not at all like a factory, he or she would not ordinarily say that High School is lying by implying otherwise, just that it is wrong. On this level—the level that has to do with the imputed “point” or “moral” of the film—High School is read in the same way as the last scene of School Daze. That is evidently not what distinguishes it as a documentary. 97

But there is another level at which the question “Might it be lying?” clearly does apply to High School. Because of how the film is “indexed,” viewers generally / assume that the representations made in the film are really what they seem to be. 97-98

“Might it be lying” is by no means the only question we need to ask if we want to understand how documentaries work. I suggest, however, that it is the only question we need to ask to determine whether, or when, a film is working like a documentary. 98