(Chapter 6 and 7)[1]
Bill Nichols is an American film critic and theoretician, he is Professor Emeritus in the Cinema Department at San Francisco State University.
Documentary films are about “actual situations and events” (p.186).
We learned with Tim Ingold, how difficult it is to even distinguish an organism from a human made thing. Bill Nichols tries his hand not only at the task of distinguishing documentary from the rest, he even goes so far to distinguish different kinds of documentary, that he sorts into different baskets that he calls modes.
When Bill Nichols looks at documentary he almost exclusively looks at cinematic, linear film – “other media” (p. 244) like radio or photography play an minor role, if any. For Nichols “scientific films, surveillance footage, and informational or how-to-films” don’t count as documentary either, as they “exhibit a minimal sense of voice: they function as documents rather than as documentaries, conveying information in a straightforward, often didactic manner”. (p. 187)
“Documentaries tell stories about what happens in the real world” which Nichols understands as a “commonsense notion” that “refers to the storytelling power of documentaries.” (p. 29) This seems to suggest that one needs power to make understandable what happens in the real world, a power documentaries provide.
To better understand and use that power, Nichols defines seven distinct modes, whereby the 7th mode (the Interactive Mode) does not get as much attention as the ones before, but we will get there.
“There are no laws and few genuine rules when it comes to creative expression. What actually counts as a documentary remains fluid” (p. 186) and this is why documentary eludes unambiguous categories and would usually have to be assigned to different modes.
He defines models and modes that are useful to classify documentaries by asking two questions. The first question is: “What model does it adopt from other media?” and “What mode does it contribute to as cinema?”
Models do not necessarily originate but can be represented in cinematic form.
As these “pre-existing, non-fiction models”, he understands something like diary, biography, essay, but also manifestos, blogs, investigative reportage or ethnography.
Modes are distinctly cinematic and are the ones he presents in chapter 6 and 7 of the book. These then determine above all the “look and feel” of the documentary films and also their style.
A brief summary of the modes
The Poetic Mode: Often times modernist Avant-garde films for example “Un Chant d’amour” (A Song of Love, 1950), these films work a lot with rhythm and contrasts, juxtapositions are very important. Poetic Mode films show reality as very fragmented. “Nothing is quite real, but everything bears an uncanny resemblance to reality.” (p. 208)
The Expository Mode: These films have usually one clear perspective. Things are explained, viewers are directly addressed, very often through a voice-of-God commentary. There is a clear storyline and a clear argument, and everything is rather didactic. The voice organizes the B-roll, that then serves to suggest a certain objectivity.
The Reflexive Mode: These films try to represent, but above all they also represent how difficult it is to represent. The films by Trinh T. Minh-ha are mentioned as an example, for example ‘Surnam Viet given name Nam’ or in ‘Reassemblage’ where the apparent represented reality is always presented as a construct. This happens in part with alienation effects, as in Brecht’s epic theater, where the rules of representation are to be broken. Trinh T. Minh-ha’s described it as to “speak nearby” rather than “speak about” or “speak with”. (p. 219)
The Observational Mode: Nichols emphasises technical innovations as the 16-millimeter camera and the synchronous sound, to have been very important in the development of this mode. Frederick Wiseman’s films fall mainly into this category. It is a very close filming observation, seemingly without active intervention of the filmmakers. In this mode, he then also emphasises the “ethical issues” that come up. Questions about how consensus is negotiated, for example. What is considered voyeuristic and to what extent protagonists need to be protected from themselves. Interestingly Nichols also raises the question: “Does it place the viewer in a necessarily less comfortable position than in a fiction film?” (p.233), that suggest that also the viewer might be in need to be protected from being placed in a situation that one might conceive as voyeuristic.
The Participatory Mode: This is less of an “I speak about them to you”, but rather “I speak with them for you”, “as the filmmaker’s interactions give us a distinctive window onto a particular portion of our world”. (p. 243)
So, the filmmakers also participates in the events, they are visible and perceptible in the film. What happens in the film always has the impression of an exchange between those in front of the camera and those behind it, or with the camera itself. Films like ‘Chronicle of a Summer’ (1961), or Citizenfour (2014) would be examples. But this participation doesn’t just happen within the film; the recipients are also understood more as active participants. And in chapter 7 he also includes the interactive mode in here.
The Performative Mode: In this mode the emotional complexities of representation and the subjective qualities of experience are emphasised. Viewers are addressed emotionally instead of being presented a clear story or hard facts. Techniques like “Voice of God commentary” are rejected. Questions are also raised about what counts as knowledge at all. In some cases, films come out of the communities themselves. As an example, he mentioned Jennie Livingston’s ‘Paris Is Burning’ (1990) or Frantz Fanon’s ‘Black Skin, White Mask’ (1996). It is more about understanding and empathy than about the direct acquisition of knowledge.
The Interactive Mode? Nichols also addresses interactive documentaries and web-docs and partly assigns them to the participatory mode:
„The participatory mode has come to embrace the spectator as participant as well. Interactive websites and installations allow the viewer to chart a path through the spectrum of possibilities made possible by the filmmaker.” (p. 138)
The Interactive Mode appears in a table on page 156/157. But the description of this mode stays spartanic.
Films usually need to be placed in several modes at the same time. Nicholas points out that these modes represent a certain kind of linear history of documentary film, but certainly not a perfect one. He says that new modes are often the result, firstly, of technical innovations and, secondly, of filmmakers’ dissatisfaction with existing modes, but that it is not a chain of evolution.
Nichols is interested in the effects of documentary artifacts on the observer-audience. In my research, I would like to focus primarily on the effect on the makers and protagonists of the project, from which the artifact emerges. An effect that does not only arise through the finished piece as such, but already and perhaps even to a greater extent in the process of making. A peculiarity of interactive works is that the boundary between author and viewer becomes blurred. Author is always also viewer, viewer, usually at least co-author.
[1] Nichols, Bill. Introduction to Documentary, Third Edition. Indiana University Press, 2017.