Nichols, Bill. “Documentary Film and the Modernist Avant-Garde.” Critical Inquiry. 27.4 (2001): 580-610.

Note: many of these passages specifically concern documentary between the wars / development of form.

Rather than the story of an early birth and gradual maturation, I will suggest that documentary film only takes / form as an actual practice in the 1920s and early 1930s. 581-582

My primary thesis is that a wave of documentary activity takes shape at the point when cinema comes into the direct service of various, already active efforts to build national identity during the 1920s and 1930s. Documentary film affirms, or contests, the power of the state. 582

The modernist avant-garde of Man Ray, René Clair, Hans Richter, Louis Delluc, Jean Vigo, Alberto Cavalcanti, Luis Bunuel, Sergei Eisenstein, Dziga Vertov, and the Russian constructivists, among others, exceeded the terms of this binary opposition of affirmation and contestation centered on the bourgeois-democratic state. It proposed alternative subjects and subjectivities until the consolidation of socialist realism, the rise of fascism and Stalinism, the necessities of exile, and the exigencies of the Great Depression depleted its resources. From the vantage point of the avant-garde, the state and issues of citizenship were obscured by questions of perception and consciousness, aesthetics and ethics, behavior and the unconscious, actions and desire. These questions were more challenging imperatives than those that preoccupied the custodians of state power. 583

Both scientific evidence and carnival-like attractions exhibit noteworthy aspects of the world with indexical precision. Such images readily serve as documents, but not documentaries. 587

Unfettered from narrative structure or scientific analysis, a cinema of attractions is a form of excitation, exhibitionism, or spectacle. It engenders an effect comparable to the effect of reality TV shows such as Cops or Survivor, namely, “Isn’t this amazing!” We witness strange, violent, dangerous, or catastrophic events but receive only minimal analysis of them. A program on ABC in January 2000 entitled, “Out of Control People” provided a latter-day Mondo Cane-like catalogue of soccer rioting, college student rampages, prison uprisings, and other examples of its own title with small snippets of commentary from “experts” who make reference to mob behavior and group psychology. The intent of the program was clearly sensationalistic far more than it was educational. The sensationalism gained immeasurably from the use of “documentary” images of actual events. 587

Spectacle in early cinema, like visual evidence in science, relied on an impression of photographic realism the better to convince us of the authenticity of remarkable sights. One of the most vivid conjunctions of spectacle and photographic realism occurs in pornography. Markers of authenticity affirm than an actual sex act has occurred, even if this act occurred, like most fiction-based acts, solely for the purpose of being filmed. It is safe to conclude that the documentary potential of the photographic image does not lead directly to a documentary film practice. Neither spectacle and exhibition, nor science and documentation, guarantee the emergence of a documentary film form. Movements involve historical contingency, not genetic ancestry. Something more than the ability to generate visual documents, however useful this may be, is necessary. 589

Typically centered on a main character or hero in classic narrative fiction, such a structure proves detachable from individualized agents or heroes; social issues such as inadequate housing, floods, the isolation of remote regions, or the exploitation of an entire class can establish the story’s initiating disturbance. Resolution follows less from a hero’s actions than from the documentary’s own solution to social problems: slum clearance in Housing Problems (1935); the creation of the TVA in The River (1937); railroad construction in Turkish (1929); and a workers’ strike in Misère au Borinage (1934). The form of such films takes over the work customarily assigned to the heroic efforts of an individual protagonist. 591

The modernist avant-garde of the 1920s introduces a third contribution to the appearance of a documentary film form. 591

Documentaries from the period between the wars cobble images together with remarkable abandon, fully in accord with the pioneering spirit of the avant-garde. (Voice-over commentary, poetic or expository, lends them a purposefulness the avant-garde typically eschewed). 592

The “creative treatment of actuality” is authored, not recorded or registered. Creative treatment turns fact to fiction in the root sense of fingere, to shape or fashion. The concept of making, or authorship, moves us away from indexical documents of preexisting fact to the semiotics of constructed meaning and the address of the authorial I. 593

Modernist elements of fragmentation, defamiliarization (ostranenie, Verfremdungseffekt), collage, abstraction, relativity, anti-illusionism, and a general rejection of the transparency of realist representation all find their way into acts of documentary filmmaking. As Dziga Vertov wrote, “I am eye. I have created a man more perfect than Adam. . . . I take the most agile hands of one, the fastest and most graceful legs of another . . . and, by editing, I create an entirely new, perfect man.” Such techniques and aspirations speak less to a flight from the social world into aesthetic reverie than to a critique of “an ideology of realism” designed to “perpetuate a preconceived notion of some external reality to be imitated, and indeed, to foster a belief in the existence of some such commonsense everyday shared secular reality in the first place.” The 1920s avant-/garde set out to revise the terms and conditions by which to construct representations of a shared secular reality. 594

These sights followed even earlier efforts to document life in the street such as the extraordinary footage generated for Albert Kahn’s Archives de la Planete. One example is an extended long take of men entering and leaving a public urinal on a Paris street (Les Grands Boulevards, Paris, October 1913). The exchange of gazes between the camera and the urinal’s visitors attests to the surreal and complexly charged nature of this “archival” encounter. Such images lent historical potential to images of everyday life, even as these images altered our ordinary perception of the world. They only require yoking to the oratorical voice of the filmmaker to make them fit for documentary representation. The street, along with the car, the machine, and the city—with their position half way between the animate and the inanimate—provide a ready-made subject for the avant-garde as well the documentarian. 596

Discussed further below, documentary took identifiable shape when photographic realism, narrative structure, and modernist fragmentation served the goal of social persuasion. Oration added another element of / social consciousness to cinematic representation. 596 / 599

Documentary gains a definition and institutional base as it fulfills its potential to be what Lenin once called it, “the most important art.” 604

The orator not only reaches citizens but also contributes to the construction of the sense of identity necessary for citizenship in the first place. 605

Not until the 1970s does an opposition of a different kind displace the state from its central position in documentary rhetoric. Since then these have been the central issues and debates: (1) in the ethical, political, and ideological implications of the different modes of documentary production; (2) the quality and value of individual filmmaking oeuvres; (3) the usefulness of documentary film as a disciplinary (anthropological, sociological) or personal (autobiographical, poetic) form of knowledge and power; (4) the social efficacy of specific films and different modes; and (5) the challenges of historical representation and contemporary observation. Reacting against the small-scale, observational quality of documentaries in the 1960s that began to shift attention from the state to facets of everyday life and lived experience—be those of candidates (Primary, Drew Associates, 1960) or high school students (High School, Frederic / Wiseman, 1968)—work in the 1970s returned to the modernist techniques that observational cinema rejected. 607-608

. . . these films take up alternative subjectivities and identities involving issues of sex and gender, ethnicity and race, personal memory and public history. 608

[Quoting Maya Deren]: The ritualistic form treats the human being not as the source of the dramatic action, but as a somewhat depersonalized element in a dramatic whole. The intent of such depersonalization is not the destruction of the individual; on the contrary, it enlarges him beyond the personal dimension and frees him from the specializations and confines of the personality. He becomes part of a dynamic whole / which, like all such creative relationships, in turn, endows its parts with a measure of its larger meaning. 609-610