Three Documentary Filmmakers: Erroll Morris, Ross McElwee, Jean Rouch (review)

William Rothman’s edited volume makes a useful contribution to what he describes as a “dearth of serious critical studies of documentary films and filmmakers” (1). Morris, McElwee, and Rouch are well-known, highly regarded filmmakers whose work is well recognized in the literature. This work considers each filmmaker individually. Although it’s not entirely obvious why this particular set of filmmakers was selected for inclusion in this survey, I agree with Rothman that in very different ways the films of Morris, McElwee, and Rouch meditate “on the impossibility of knowing with certainty where the imagination ends and the world begins . . . Their films, too, are both philosophical and deeply personal” (3).

About 50 percent of the book is devoted to Morris and McElwee, the remainder to Rouch. Although Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer has influenced generations of documentary filmmakers, for the most part his films are little known outside the worlds of ethnographic filmmaking and historians of the French New Wave. Given the difficulty of accessing Rouch’s films and the many studies available—including Rothman’s 2007 Jean Rouch: A Celebration of Life and Film—I find myself wishing for a more in-depth consideration of Morris and McElwee. The six pages on “Errol Morris’s Irony” and ten pages of “Reflections on Bright Leaves” (McElwee’s film) seem more like sketches than fully developed essays.

The role of the filmmaker as an author and participant is a common theme in many of these commentaries. The filmmakers profiled here have created unique personas for themselves. Morris, McElwee, and Rouch are (noncommercial) brands with clearly recognizable styles and points of view. In this spirit and in the interest of full disclosure, allow me to make my point of view explicit. I am a documentary filmmaker and teacher of documentary production and analysis. In class I sometimes tell a story about the encounter between John Adair, an ethnographic filmmaker, and a Navajo shepherd. When asked if he would participate in Adair’s and Sol Worth’s film, Sam Yazzie replied by asking, “Is it good for the sheep?” If not, why would he be interested? The question for me regarding documentary criticism is, “Is it good for documentary?” I am most interested in criticism and analysis that lead to better, more compelling work. I am particularly interested in criticism that is useful in the shared enterprise of creating and understanding documentary production.

I share an appreciation for theory coupled with cogent, accessible analysis (Bill Nichols’s work is especially insightful). I am less enthusiastic about what appears to me to be overly abstract formulations that revel in complexity, seemingly without offering sufficient rewards. Perhaps I am too unfamiliar with the literature or am merely a philistine, but passages such as Alan Cholodenko’s concerning “Jean Rouch’s Les maîtres fous” do little, I think, to advance the practice of documentary or appreciation of Rouch: “Carrying us beyond deconstruction’s hybrid form, Eaton’s ‘more real than the real’ designates for me what Baudrillard calls the hyperreal. The hyperreal is the ‘new reality’ that cinéma vérité creates, or better animates . . . . [H]ypertelia [is] the pushing of things to their extreme limits where ‘more x than x,’ they at once fulfill and annihilate themselves, becoming virtual” (159).

Where does this lead in terms of the film under consideration? “[T]he film leaves the viewer not with a sense of knowing its subject, as in classical ethnography, but rather of not knowing it, at best of knowing only that one does not and cannot know it” (161). To me this is solipsism, and I find myself wishing that like Errol Morris, I could live where “Baudrillard isn’t in the phone book” (7). (For a book-length treatment of Rouch that is focused on his process, style, and approach, see The Adventure of the Real: Jean Rouch and the Craft of Ethnographic Cinema by Paul Henley.)

On a more positive note, Carl...