Reflexive & Hybrid: Animation, Musical & Essayistic Documentary
I have added about 19 videos that are worth watching in the video section of this site.
Documentary must now be seen as a range of strategies in a variety of media, not essentialist notions of what the term may mean
Approach to Hybrids
Some commentators decry the ‘perversion’ of documentary which hybrids tend to entail, expressing alarm at the abandonment of well-established ethical & aesthetic standards of doco production. Here docos are seen to have fallen from their privileged socio-political position to become simply entertainment
Recognition of elitist assumptions that are bound up with critical commentary & acknowledgment of the significance of documentary hybrids precisely because of their popularity
Disagreement over the proper relationship between the ‘public’ & popular cultural forms & the manner in which documentary should engage with political practices.
•Reflexive Documentary
(Vertov, Morris, Minh-ha, Hill)
•Arose form desire to make the conventions of representation themselves more apparent & to challenge the impression of reality which other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically.
•It is the most self-aware mode - its reflexivity makes audience aware of how other modes claim to construct "truth" through documentary practice.
•It uses many of devices of other modes but sets them on edge so viewer attends to device as well as the effect.
•This involves the question of HOW we talk about the historical world. •The reflexive documentary asks the most self-conscious questions. They are very much self-conscious texts.
•This mode has strong problems with the notion of ‘realism’ in documentary.
•Filmmaker may appear, but as an authoring agent. See Man with a Movie Camera.
•Some films in this mode use actors rather than the original participants in scenes. (what difference there is between reflexive documentary and fiction films?
•“The emphasis here is on the encounter between filmmaker and viewer rather than filmmaker and subject.” [Nichols]
•The keyword here is IRONY.
•Editing works to heighten this awareness of the form and HOW we perceive reality through documentary film
•Acknowledgement of the medium to problematise it
•Discussion of the problems of making the documentary
•Making explicit the process of representation
•Making explicit institutional issues (such as who is funding it)
•Documentary itself is interrogated formally, politically, intellectually. While previous modes took for granted that something real exists and can, if only in part, be captured or represented through documentary, the reflexive mode questions these assumptions.
"A documentary aware of its own artifice is one that remains sensitive to the flow between fact and fiction. It does not work to conceal or exclude what is normalised as 'non-factual', for it understands the mutual dependence of realism and 'artificiality' in the process of filmmaking. It recognizes the necessity of composing (on) life in living it or making it." Trinh Minh-ha's
•hybrid helps to push the boundaries of what you think a documentary is. Popular forms that mix documentary and drama are important recent developments in popular factual television – they are not about "dumbing down"
•The hybrid forms developed by television’s factual program makers are not a threat to "documentary proper" but rather as an exploration of its borders with other modes of representation.
