Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary by Bill Nichols (review)

Speaking Truths With Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary is a compilation of eighteen articles, reviews, and letters written throughout Bill Nichols’s career focusing on the theoretical problems associated with documentary film. The selections included, revised for this publication, are appropriately categorized by section and flow seamlessly as a comprehensive book rather than an edited anthology. Nichols addresses issues ranging from content and form to ethics and politics, the latter of which is presented brilliantly in his final section of the book, which juxtaposes one of his earliest writings on the San Francisco and New York Newsreel organizations—originally published in the late 1960s as a masters thesis—with a more recent publication focusing on the institutional and ideological frameworks that documentary filmmakers often fall victim to in the digital age, indirectly imploring future filmmakers to adopt a more radicalized vision and documentary practice. But Nichols makes more compelling arguments in the first half of the book, providing a closer look at documentary form and its relation to the avant-garde, as well as an update on his seminal work from 1983, “The Voice of Documentary.”

Nichols treats the expository mode of documentation, most commonly associated with “voice of God” narration, as equivalent to classical Hollywood narrative. Much like the conventions that define classical Hollywood cinema (eye-level camera angles, continuity editing, etc.), exposition was the dominant mode of documentary films from the 1930s to the 1960s. Similarly, the role of the narrator was akin to that of the Hollywood star, as the primary communicative intermediary between the viewer and the filmmaker. For Nichols, this is what distinguishes documentaries from mere documents; for example, the early Lumiére films, which serve more as visual/historical evidence, much like an x-ray or an oral history, rather than the distinct rhetorical voice of a filmmaker (63). As Nichols concludes in this updated approach to his thesis,

New technologies make possible new ways of seeing and responding to the world around us but do not in and of themselves create new ways of speaking, of seeing, the world anew. They do not relieve us of the need to speak in our own voice about our own experience, perceptions, and perspectives and those of others (88).

In other words, the power of documentary, as opposed to documents, lies in their persuasive and rhetorical elements. This is clear not only in reflexive documentaries—for example, Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988)—but also observational works by filmmakers like Frederick Wiseman who nevertheless treat their subjects and subject matter in a manner that rhetorically communicates to the audience. In the digital age, access to the tools for documenting has significantly increased, creating “a golden age of creative expression,” but it should not be forgotten that the filmmaker and the subjects, not the tools, possess the power to persuade (82).

Nichols also examines the staged reenactment, which to my knowledge is the only detailed discussion of the topic to date. As a form that appears among the earliest actualities in the late nineteenth century, reenactments are formulaic anomalies in that they forfeit their “indexical bond to the original event” (35). According to Nichols, this creates a pleasurable, fantasmic effect for the viewer who is able to retrieve lost historical objects. In some ways this is similar to practice of found footage filmmaking in that historical events are recontextualized.

But reenactments rely on the viewer’s ability to recognize them as staged, not as authentic indexical historical representations. Therefore, the viewer is reflexively aware of the historical narrative being espoused by the filmmaker. The illusory nature of the historical event is in fact made more real in its status as a fabrication; that is, history is itself a narrative, and in the case of the documentarian, an artistic interpretation. Like all documentaries, reenactments partake in persuasive rhetoric, but it is clear that this form challenges the boundaries of fiction and non-fiction and even document and documentary...