Manifesto

Rather than defining a narrow set of technical rules that allow for varied expression of values as per Dogme95, I set down a list of conditions integral to documentary work that allow for expression through various media and modes.

Taking as a broadly applicable definition that
Documentary work engages for a time with a particular aspect of life that peri-exists the image making process, and then leaves it, however changed, to continue its own course,

With the understanding that
This outside-being of a given focus of documentary work, even as it intersects with that work, is the anchor of any truth claim made on its behalf by the work,

It is possible to declare,
Documentary is a flexible meta-genre that enjoys the freedom to draw upon all media, modes (1) and strategies (2), but which has at its core the following principles:

1. Documentary entails responsibility

• To the ‘subject’ (hereafter referred to as topical participant, as distinct from image-making participant) and other participants, to the viewer, and to the image making team
• Documentary work affects that with which it is involved, often in surprising and unpredictable ways. Regardless of an image-maker’s intentions, direct transfer of intended meaning cannot be guaranteed. This is unavoidable, and while it is never a simple question of ‘positive’ or ‘negative’ impact, any painful activity must be weighed thoroughly in consideration of greater benefit because “not only what is emphasized, noticed, and how it is understood will be affected by the location of both speaker and hearer, but the truth-value or epistemic status will also be affected.”(3)

2. Documentary is privileged

• Western culture is deeply informed by its colonial history and capitalism: “some of us have been taught that by right of having the dominant gender, class, race, letters after our name, or some other criterion we are more likely to have the truth.”(4)
• Privilege must be recognized and used to do things differently, i.e. more justly, not simply to (unconsciously) reinforce imbalanced power relations, whether of gender, race, class, etc. A simple refusal or abandonment of privilege is an abdication of responsibility. Experiencing the “possibility to speak or not to speak”(5) is itself a privilege often taken for granted.
• The camera possesses a privileged invisibility that stems from colonial cultural logic and the rationalization thereof through scientific projects (early anthropological research that was used to justify the subjugation of one culture by another, such as eugenics and other forms of visually cataloging physical difference) and entertainment (exhibitions and museums). This is not all a camera is, but it is important to challenge and counter this tendency in representations within, and display of, documentary work.

3. Documentary is social

• Documentary is about relationships: the feeling of what is seen in documentary images reflects the emotional signature of the relationship between image-makers and topical participants.
• Documentary is a collaborative process: although participants have varying reasons to be involved and different functions to carry out, whether visionary (director), technical (crew) or topical (‘subject’), all involved make vital interdependent contributions.

4. Documentary requires critical awareness

• This is the intellectual component of documentary work, wherein it can create spaces for thoughtful contemplation where it would otherwise be unlikely (in crisis-driven situations, for example), which is the first step toward change, toward altering the pattern, however subtly or abruptly. Most important, meaning is unstable and intersubjective. The documentary image-maker has both the power and responsibility to move deftly within and between the complex structures of society to foster more thoughtful consideration of others’ lives by complicating assumptions and prejudices.

5. Documentary is about paying attention

• This is the emotional component of documentary work and requires first that image-makers know how to pay attention to their own emotions, with an understanding of their emotional history. Only to the extent that we understand and respond to our own emotions can we access and respond to those of others. Regardless of whether this reflexivity is explicit in a given work, it is an essential part of the documentary process.
• “Remembering is an ethical act, has ethical value in and of itself.”(6) Documentary work is a kind of remembering achieved through creating a record of what is noticed, especially beyond the initial appearance of things.

6. Documentary requires intuition

• This is the creative component of documentary work and takes place at all phases, though unpredictably. Active intuition produces moments of all-at-once perception, in which a coalescing of contingencies bursts into connective insight. Points of punctum can be encountered here.(7)

7. Documentary requires a reverence for life

• This is the spiritual aspect of documentary work, in which the image-maker’s degree of engagement is felt. If the image-maker does not care deeply about what is undertaken in their documentary work, the work itself (and everyone involved, from the ‘subject’ to the audience) will suffer from this indifference. When the image-maker is profoundly involved in their documentary work while simultaneously at a wide-open distance from it, the experience can be transcendent.
• In documentary as in life, Everything Counts! From the smallest gesture of kindness freely rendered to years-long projects that reveal wrong doing and call for change, it is this fully present participation in life through documentary work that has the power to shape the perceptions of others by bringing them closer to an experience they would not otherwise have had.

8. Documentary is political

• Regardless of the maker’s intentions and political views, and whether or not any given image is explicitly politicized, documentary work is situated in a larger context in which politics, however directly or indirectly experienced, is inescapable.
• Syllogism: If “the discursive context is a political arena”(8) and documentary work is, at least in part, a discursive process then documentary is also a political arena.

9. Documentary must continually seek to renew its forms

• Documentary forms were born with the inventions of various media and, therefore, of experiment. We must return to these beginnings for fresh insight, not to reinforce image-making conventions but to find something new in the old by transporting it to the present for reinterpretation and reapplication through new contexts and image-making technologies, precisely because an image can be “drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen.”(9)
• Harnessed with hegemony and driven to support a culturally embedded agenda to re-inscribe heteronormative values of consumerism, documentary modes are always at risk for appropriation to systematic ends of social control. We must strip away the TV-Hollywood chatter-clutter and rebuild the foundations of that art which draws upon all arts(10) and carries such dense potential to open the eyes of human spirit to greater depths and nuance of resonant-dissonant truth patterns.

10. Documentary is risk-taking

• Approaching a documentary endeavour should feel roughly equal parts fear and excitement, where fear is an indicator of how much can be learned (i.e. the unknown) and excitement a gauge of the level of involvement (i.e. rallying the known toward exploring and better understanding the unknown). Even the most meditative character study takes the emotional risk of diving into a person’s greater depths. In Regarding the Pain of Others, Susan Sontag encapsulates the need for risk in the statement, “Wherever people feel safe …they will be indifferent.”(11) Risk is necessary to documentary work because “…proximity without risk…”(12) is not intimate enough to engender critical reflection.
• Orbiting a documentary topic(al participant) is an act of ’studium’, an assembling of facts and experiences and a necessary part of documentary work. However, generating potential to reveal hidden or underlying, and most often conflicting or paradoxical, detail is an act of ‘punctum’(13) – a risky act by virtue of its capacity to disturb – where the former shows ‘we were there and this happened’ the latter shows ‘we were open to understanding something of what happened there and hope you are, too’ by having connected at a point of image-maker identification/projection/imposition that was unexpected but nonetheless already present.
• This is the crux of documentary work because where we, as image-makers, have engaged to such a degree, so do we generate potential for others to experience a similar connection (to a person, place, culture, event, point in history) through our work, which can produce the perceptual shift that is the first sprout of new growth.

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1 Nichols, Bill. “Chapter 6: What Types of Documentary Are There?” in Introduction to Documentary, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2001 p.99-138
2 Barnouw, Erik. Documentary: A History of the Non-fiction Film (2nd Edition), Oxford University Press: New York, 1993
3 Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others” in Cultural Critique, Winter. NC: Oxford University Press, 1991-2, pp 12,13
4 ibid. p. 24
5 ibid. p. 11
6 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2003 p. 115. (pp. 100, 101, 102, 105, 109)
7 Barthes, Roland and Richard Howard, Translator. Camera Lucida, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1982, pp. 26-59
8 Alcoff, Linda. “The Problem of Speaking for Others” in Cultural Critique, Winter. NC: Oxford University Press, 1991-2, p. 15
9 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2003 p. 105
10 This statement assumes a definition of art that goes beyond merely aesthetic considerations to encompass any creative engagement with an idea or circumstance rendered into the virtual space of a material form.
11 Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 2003 p. 100
12 ibid. p. 111
13 Barthes, Roland and Richard Howard, Translator. Camera Lucida, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York, 1982, pp. 26-59