Notes on Representation and the Nonfiction Film

When I witness an event, I am present to it and it to me. It presents itself to me. Those present are present to me. I am indeed in the present.

When I film an event, I am also present to it and it also presents itself to me.

When I view what I have filmed, I enter into a double relationship. The film is present to me while the event is re-presented. The re-presentation is not simply a reprise, for while the event is present to me, I am no longer present to it. I am, as Stanley Cavell says, screened from it. I am no longer in its present.

The re-presented event is missing several things. If I turn to the left or right, I encounter the limit of the frame and not the extension of the real space. If I move my head, I do not see around objects. However long a shot may be held, the continuity of time is eventually broken.

What is on the screen then is a portion, a sample of what one can witness and, being so, it exerts a claim to be representative, that is, to stand for a larger whole, even a totality.

Is this claim inevitable? We know of styles that affect nonchalance, as if to insinuate that the sample they offer is a random one. But these styles are not, as linguists say, the zero degree; they must be marked. It takes effort to stifle the presumption that when I am showing you something, I am doing so for a reason. I am not strolling idly with you past a window; I am uttering a statement.

As a witness to an event, I accept the partiality and contingency of my viewpoint. At a given moment, I might not be, and probably am not, ideally placed. I do not know what will unfold. I cannot know the best place from which to watch. I do not know if I have come too early or too late or if I am looking at the right thing. But I am free to stand where I choose and to look where I like. If someone says something out of my field of vision, I am free to turn to see the speaker.

In viewing film, I renounce the better part of this freedom. If the cinematographer and editor have not turned, as it were, to show the offscreen speaker, I cannot do so (even if I am the cinematographer and editor). In revenge for these losses, I burden the film with an additional demand: I demand that what it shows me be representative of a whole that I know to be unrepresentable.

II

Film is haunted by missing pieces: the before, the after, the left, the right, the top and bottom, the front and back—and more than this, the event itself, so vividly evoked, so poignantly absent. Indeed, film is in the business of manufacturing absences. Does it do anything else so powerfully?

What can compensate? Perhaps only an apprehension of the principle linking what the film preserves to what it consigns to oblivion. Is what I see and hear a sample of the whole? If so, it is not like a swatch of cloth that differs from the bolt only in extent. The fabric that film must sample is poor in patterns and repetitions, inconsistent, even chaotic. At the same time, the result laid before me is reproduced with an exactitude unique to, even definitive of, the medium. This paradox, which hovers over every moment of viewing, sharpens my appetite for the representative by dramatizing the impossibility of ascertaining what it might be.

Other media are not burdened with such a paradox, at least not at their centers. Music may involve reproduction or rendition but not representation as such. The thing to be rendered is a text, a universe already ordered and limited, and only in metaphoric terms does it make sense to ask what lies outside that text. Language, and the literatures spun from it, may refer to phenomena but do not reproduce...