Crafting Truth: Documentary Form and Meaning

1 Authenticity

11 1 Authenticity We begin with an assertion: All representation is transformation. And that transformation is always partial—in both senses of the word. Stories are never lifted from life intact (they are constantly sifting out the superfluous), and we can never know something separate from our way of thinking . It is important to emphasize this early in our discussion because, as the title of this book suggests, some theorists, filmmakers, and spectators associate documentaries with “truth.” Because of the camera’s ability to capture things as they happen, the photographic media are frequently considered to provide an authentic record of what was in front of the camera’s lens when the scene was recorded, the “profilmic reality .” Art critic John Berger, for example, in a 1968 essay, “Understanding a Photograph ,” describes the still photograph as an “automatic record” of things seen. “There is no transforming in photography. There is only decision, only focus” (181). And theorist Roland Barthes says in Camera Lucida that a photograph is “never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents)” (5). With the discovery that silver halides were sensitive to light and the invention of the photographic process in the early nineteenth century, the innovation was visualized as a tool of scientific investigation, a means to register the action of light on chemically prepared surfaces. It was claimed that the camera would join the thermometer, barometer, hygrometer, and the telescope as the latest scientific 12 chapter one instrument—a precision instrument for advancing knowledge (Winston, Claiming the Real II 133). By the 1870s still photography was already emerging as a tool for collecting scientific data about subjects in motion. Photographer Eadweard Muybridge constructed a special apparatus, a bank of twenty-four still cameras lined up horizontally twenty-one inches apart, in order to provide visual confirmation that a galloping horse at some point has all four hooves off the ground. Later, commissioned by the University of Pennsylvania, Muybridge recorded human locomotion in studies that were used for medical research. Étienne-Jules Marey, a French physiologist, devised the “chronophotographe,” a camera that could record successive images of a subject in motion on a single surface. Physician Félix-Louis Regnault and his colleague Charles Comte used a chronophotographe to document West African villagers in an 1895 ethnographic exposition on the Champs de Mars in Paris. This legacy, the idea of the scientific and pedagogical value of photographic images, was carried over to early cinema. One of the very first of the Lumière brothers’ films recorded still photographers arriving at a scientific convention. And before their famous 1895 public showing of films at the Grand Café in Paris, the Lumières showed their films at scientific gatherings. Certainly a documentary, which takes place over time, in which time can be manipulated, and which often includes a sound track, is not the same as a still photograph. Yet there is a residual sense of that ontological authority. Ethnographer and filmmaker Jean Rouch put it succinctly: “The camera eye is more perspicacious and more accurate than the human eye. The camera eye has an infallible memory” (quoted in Levin 135). We know what happened and how it happened because the camera was there to record it. The moving image recording media have the ability to preserve a time gone by. Like still photography, documentaries bear witness to a presence that is no longer there. Consider, for instance, a very simple film, a view of a Wolpi snake dance taken in a single shot by a camera operator for the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1901. Shot on location in Arizona, the images were taken by a static camera positioned on a parapet looking down on the dancers. Unlike a painting, which organizes the pictorial field into a staged tableau, this film has the look of contingency, as if the world were a field of potential scenes and the filmmaker came across this one and caught it for us, registering it and preserving it forever. The inclusion of an audience in the image suggests that the scene was not created for the camera , that the subject preexisted the arrival of the filmmaker. And the dance would have taken place even if the camera had not been there. It was observed, not reconstructed , and the camera placement is “the best view possible of the action” Authenticity 13 (Gunning 15). The camera was a witness to the occurrence—a...