Celluloid Circulation: The Dual Temporality of Nonfiction Film and Its Publics

This essay is a preliminary inquiry into celluloid circulation, which I define here as the reflexive relationship between nonfiction film and its publics. Through this inquiry, I argue that film’s simultaneous status as record of a past event and as present-tense performance of that event is a key feature of celluloid circulation.¹ Over the course of this essay, I explore the implications of this dual temporality to our understanding of nonfiction film as a mode of public address and connect these implications to rhetorical theories of circulation.

I chose the title “Celluloid Circulation” to invoke both the concept of circulation as discussed by Michael Warner in Publics and Counterpublics² and to acknowledge Bruce Gronbeck’s early recognition of nonfiction film as a genre of rhetorical discourse worthy of sustained theoretical attention.³ In the spirit of the title, I begin with an overview of Warner’s account of circulation as a process of public formation and his conception of publics as the outcomes of poetic world making. I then connect Warner’s theory of publics to scholarship in what Gronbeck called celluloid rhetoric to establish that our disciplinary understanding of the nonfiction film can benefit from a more thorough account of its circulation. Specifically, I suggest that by taking into account film’s simultaneous status as record and performance of an event we can add depth and nuance to our account of the nonfiction film as public address. To make my case, I briefly examine footage depicting the relocation of the Bikini islanders before an atomic test as it first appeared in a 1946 newsreel and as it appeared later in a 1982 documentary. Through this examination, I show that where the newsreel treated film’s simultaneous status as performance and record as an obstacle to be overcome, the documentary exploited it as an inventional resource. I conclude the paper by connecting this partial account of celluloid circulation to larger questions about textual fragmentation discussed in this forum.

Documentary Publics

As conceived by Warner, circulation refers to the interaction between individuals and the discourses that address them as a public. In his account, a public does not preexist the discourse that addresses it, nor does a discourse alone constitute a public. Rather, a “public is a social space created by the reflexive circulation of discourse.”⁴ By this, Warner means that a public emerges when individuals imagine themselves and others as members of the public addressed by a discourse at a particular time. The public created from circulation is therefore notional and material; it exists because its members attend to a text that circulates for a definite period time and within a particular space, and because they imagine it to circulate for a definite period and within a particular space.

Not only is the circulation of discourse a condition of possibility for publics in Warner’s sense of the term, but the character of the discourse will also influence the character of the public of its address. As Warner explains, there is “no speech or performance that does not try to specify in advance, in countless, highly condensed ways, the life-world of its circulation.”⁵ A discourse does not address any public, but rather describes a public that belongs to a particular world and is marked by a certain disposition to action within it. When a previously disaggregated group of individuals recognize themselves as members of the public described, they realize the world of understanding articulated in the discourse.⁶ Conceived in this way, public address does not make a case for a worldview so much as it creates a world that people imagine themselves already inhabiting as a public. These insights into circulation lead Warner to define a public as an outcome of “poetic world making.”⁷

The notion that a public is the outcome of poetic world making sits neatly with scholarship in rhetoric and communication concerned with nonfiction film as public address. Gronbeck’s essay on celluloid rhetoric represents an early foray into this territory, and since then, scholars have set...