The truth of a documentary image does not reside within it.
2018
Images have been regarded as accurately representing reality since the inception of photography, and documentary practice has established conventions that make it the “most suitable” account of truth (Ruby, 1975: 108; Chapman, 2009). The supposed link between reality and representation, however, has less to do with technological conventions, and rather relies on a distinct positivist philosophy and the subsequent acceptance of an objective reality and truth to be secured by the documentarian (Butchart, 2006). Both photographs and film rely on indexicality as a transcendental force in establishing and confirming narratives, especially regarding trauma, conflict and suffering. Yet there is an aporia in the visualisation of suffering and trauma, as the demand for representation in order to provoke an ethical or political response also requires a certain ambiguity in the avoidance of reductive representation strategies that complicate a truthful communication of the experience (Jazeel & Mookherjee, 2015; Guerin & Hallas, 2007). Moreover, Abu Hatoum (2017) reveals that response to images can differ depending not only on the image’s appearance, but the socio-historical context of the spectator. This approximation echoes postmodern and poststructuralist thought, which destabilised the truth of the image by revealing the socio-historical contingencies of modes of thought. In reassessing documentary as an institutional practice, the conventions that rendered it accurate and neutral are revealed to be part of a politically motivated aesthetic veneer and ideological regime of truth. Images of suffering remain important, however, and we cannot resign to an iconoclasm that denies any meaningful interpretation (Minh-Ha, 1990). Instead, we must shift the concern away from absolutes and the image’s epistemological claim to truth, and towards an ethics of representation that allows for redemptive and critical mobilization. This involves a reintroduction of both aesthetics and politics into the image to avoid reverting to the relinquished mimetic transparency (Guerin & Hallas, 2007).
The linguistic root of documentary reaches far beyond its arrival as a noun relating to conventional cinema practices in the twentieth century. The term goes back to the latin, ‘docere’, meaning to teach, and only more recently has it been utilised as an adjective to refer to evidence, thus implying an engagement with the factual. Images have been important tools in recounting this engagement, given Western ocularcentric meaning-making processes (Berger, 1972). Filmmakers were positioned as capable of discovering and representing the truth about other people and their political, social and economic realities, making documentary more of a social and political endeavor than an art form (Ruby, 1991). Documentary images fundamentally go beyond the descriptive, by presenting instrumental issue-driven and fact-based imagery that inform the audience of a certain truth in order to rhetorically motivate meaningful moral imperatives (Minh-Ha, 1990; Chapman, 2009; Plantinga, 1997).
The camera, in particular, was understood to facilitate this representation on account of an iconic and indexical relation between the resultant image and its referent. The inherent contingency in the image’s ontology is “never metaphoric” (Barthes, 1981: 76-78; Plantinga, 1997) and exactly the transparent evidential force that Barthes (ibid.: 87) argues gives value to photographic representation over other forms such as painting, drawing, or even text, which shift “from description to reflection” (ibid.: 28). The truth of the image is so strong that Barthes even trusted the image over memory, describing a photograph of himself he could not remember being taken: “[A]nd yet, because it was a photography I could not deny that I had been there” (ibid.: 85). This authority manifests due to the camera’s mechanical and unmediated inscription, which mapped onto the modernist ideal of epistemic positivism in order to provide empirical, rational and objective representations (Edwards, 2011). Visualisation of this kind was free from the limitations of the human eye, and thus regarded as “our most immediate experience” (Metraux in Poole, 2005: 169; Rouch in Spence & Navarro, 2010; MacDougall, 1998). Subsequently, the camera became “the latest of scientific instruments” for advancing knowledge and representing truth (Arago in Winston, 1993: 37; Spence & Navarro, 2010).
Although the camera was most often operated and directed by a documentarian, the relentless pursuit of truth limited stylistic intervention and emphasised mimesis. Facilitating the capturing of the truth has been the documentarians primary role and, in particular, respecting the ‘‘distinctive spatial and temporal configurations’’ of reality for the benefit of revealing a truth clearly (ibid.: MacDougall, 1998: 156). Direct Cinema came about in 1958 to define a series of conventions understood to best depict the truth in documentary, including wide angled shots that captured the event-in-context more so than close ups that were condemned for partiality, and long takes that reflected real time rather than filmic time (Minh-Ha, 1990). Still images similarly embraced these conventions, particularly emphasizing the importance of immediacy (Batchen, 1997).
Some documentarians came to believe that truth was more accurately represented through moments in which the camera was acknowledged that confirmed the authenticity of the referent within its context (Chapman, 2009; Bruzzi, 2006). This established the convention of Cinema Verite, which claimed that all documentary involved “the creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson, 1933: 8). Although it was often argued that this confused the representation of an authentic and objective truth (Winston, 1995), documentary was not collapsed into fiction, as creativity was decoupled from art’s relation to Romanticism (Bruzzi, 2006; Kerrigan & McIntyre, 2010). Resultantly, the documentarian remained limited by the truth they were endeavoring to represent (Minh-Ha, 1990). Documentary’s anti-aesthetic remained decisive, especially regarding images of trauma, conflict and suffering, as pandering to aesthetics romanticised the issue and prioritised appearance over political potency (Nichols, 1991). Documentary was established as antithetical to fictional cinema, mapping onto other naturalised dichotomies within the paradigm of Enlightenment thinking and scientific rationality that underpinned the power of the image, such as truth/beauty, objective/subjective and quantitative/qualitative.
Documentary realism is particularly important given that as Baer, reiterating Barthes (1981), argues, the power of documentary lies in its ability to capture “experiences that have remained unremembered yet cannot be forgotten” (Baer, 2002: 7-8). Often the brain can prevent traumatic experiences from being constituted in memory, as argued by Felman & Laub in relation to the Holocaust, wherein deceased victims could not give testimonies, whilst survivors were “convinced of their inhumanity”, and thereby refused of the “measure of awareness and of comprehension” (1992: 83-84). This type of testimonial postmemory is found in the image’s symbolic function, and extends beyond a purely descriptive or illustrative truth in order to allow the audience to make sense of what has occurred and contextualise the truth behind abstract political, economic, environmental and social struggle (Zelizer, 1998: 139; Berger, 1972). For example, Abu Hatoum (2017: 24) quotes an Israeli photographer who believed that photographs of the Israeli Separation Wall in Palestine “‘[simplify] everything to one clear image.’ It leaves no space for complication or conflicting connotations … the interpretive meaning of the Wall was so socially and politically embedded in its material form that the structure itself could only be interpreted in one way”. Nachtwey (2003: 471), who has photographed those suffering from AIDS, war, famine and poverty, advocated documentary as a tool for engaging a broader, collective memory: “The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated”. Redefining the spectator as an eyewitness was understood to cause an automatic comprehension of the represented, which is particularly important as events, such as the Holocaust, become more temporally distant and firsthand witnesses no longer exist. Moreover, the symbolic coherence allows the translation of truth into meaning through the relation between a universal moralism and a universal truth (Chouliaraki, 2006).
Jenin, Jenin (Bakri, 2002) attempts to situate and materialise the first-hand testimonies of survivors of the ‘Battle of Jenin’, in which Israeli Defence Forces bombed a Palestinian refugee camp. The film shows the remains of bombed buildings, but in one scene in particular the film introduces a mute man who, without words, relies on vision when gesturing towards the physical damage in Jenin. This scene not only illustrates the extent of the suffering, but also represents the symbolic power of the image to surmount the limitations of speech (Demos, 2009). It is through the image that the viewer receives a visceral and clear experience of what was otherwise a complicated political situation saturated with conflicting testimonies by Palestinians and Israeli institutions (ibid.). The film was banned by the Israeli Film Ratings Board, who claimed it presented libelous claims, and yet when Bakri took the ban to court the decision was overturned, arguing that the Board cannot have "a monopoly over truth" (BBC, 2004). Bakri explicitly claimed to want to portray “the Palestinian truth” which had been refuted by Israeli institutions (Demos, 2009). Whilst the claims made in the film are contentious, the spectator cannot deny the truth behind the image.
During the controversy surrounding the release of Jenin, Jenin there was little defense or response from those in the film, and Bakri spoke on behalf of their experience. This power imbalance reflects broader contentions about hierarchies inherent to image production given that, regardless of documentary style, there is always an omnipotent intervention by the documentarian. Observational cinema and Cinema Verite, in particular, place a reliance on the truth of the image, and an over emphasis on a fair representation. Although Bakri sought justice for the Palestinians in Jenin, Ranciere explains that there is a conflict in the logic of equality, which “rests on the presupposition that there is a proper knowledge and proper practice with respect to ‘distance’ and the means of suppressing it” (2007a: 7). This distance establishes an Other (those filmed) in dichotic relation to the Self (Bakri), and the separation of the two works to prevent the spectator from identification with the Other, and thus from forming a meaningful emphatic response to the trauma.
Similarly, even reflexive strategies that attempt to reveal the position of the documentarian in the process can become so introspective as to confound the image’s truth and convolute the spectator’s meaningful response as they focus on the image as a technology, rather than the referential truth (Renov, 2004). The ethical encounter between the documentarian and their subject has been stressed as a site for negotiating fair representation, and yet photographs, especially those taken during violence, are fleeting, and thus prevent any reciprocity or understanding. Berger has argued that “[T]he camera which isolates a moment of agony, isolates no more violently than the experience of that moment isolates itself. The word trigger, applied to rifle and camera, reflects a correspondence which does not stop at the purely mechanical” (1972: 2).
The ‘there-then becoming here-now’ constructs an atemporal object of truth (Poole, 2005: 172; Barthes, 1981). Wollen (1972: 131) has argued that Peirce’s index, and thus also documentary, encourages a “fidelity to nature … [that] stresses the passivity of the natural world rather than the agency of the human mind”. Documentary, through the rhetoric of science, asserts a “totalizing quest for knowledge” in which people and the event are reduced to knowable objects; “something” to be “experienced” in totality through the image alone (Renov, 2004: 148; Nash, 2011: 231; Poole, 2005; Minh-ha, 1990). Berger (in Wells, 2003: 2) explains that “an event, when it is isolated … is in another sense not very authentic because it has been seized from that ongoing experience which is the true authenticity”. Abu Hatoum (2017) demonstrates Berger’s (1982: 91) claim that “[D]iscontinuity always produces ambiguity” in regards to the Israeli Separation Wall in Palestine. She reveals how Palestinian photographers, unlike the Israeli, actually experience discomfort towards the “danger of [the Wall’s] depoliticized and naturalized visual representations” (2017: 21). Similarly, Eddie Adams, a photographer, in reference to his image from the Vietnam war that depicts two men, one shooting the other, confessed that “The general killed the Viet Cong; I killed the general with my camera. Still photographs are the most powerful weapons in the world. People believe them; but photographs do lie, even without manipulation. They are only half-truths” (1998). Adams claims that he killed the gunman by reductively defining him as a killer, without the complexity of the context of the war, in which the victim in the photo was responsible for executing numerous civilians under the Vietcong.
Ranciere (2007a) agreed that every image is subsumed within the spectacle to the extent that it contributes and elevates the pain of those pictured. This criticism can be applied to images of the liberation of Nazi concentration camps in 1945, wherein survivors and the dead were removed of their humanity, individuality and integrity to be presented as a statistic or symbol of the event at large. Images revealed the trauma only through physical bodies, failing to approach the emotional truth of the suffering. Similarly, the representation of the Palestinian’s in Jenin, Jenin is saturated with “victimization, trauma and shame”, such that its success relies on “traumatophilia” (Roth, 2011: 99 & xxii). Penley & Ross (in Spence & Navarro, 2010: 98) believe that a documentary image of this kind is more akin to “unacknowledged voyeurism than it is scientific fact-finding”. Sontag (2001: 21) further explains how “[P]hotographs shock insofar as they show something novel … Images anesthetize … At the time of the first photographs of the Nazi camps, there was nothing banal about these images. After thirty years, a saturation point may have been reached”. Documentary images that attempt to provoke an ethical or political concern must now do so by demonstrating only the most violent images, as spectators become accustomed to conventional iconography of war (Berger, 1972).
This ‘crisis of representation’ was part of a wider shift away from the modernist assumption of a unified truth. In fact, the ‘postmodern condition’ was understood as "incredulity towards metanarratives" (Lyotard in Henley, 1997: 80), and claimed to reveal the epistemologically unstable groundwork behind the “double illusion of the neutral observer and the observable phenomenon” (Banks & Morphy, 1999: 13). Any direct relation between the signifier and the real was disrupted, as both icons and indexes exist through communication: images “are not reality, they form part of the language of culture.” (Desnoes in Wells, 2003: 291; Plantinga, 1997). All representation is, therefore, translation, and a ‘pure image’ cannot exist (Crawford, 1992: 66; Spence & Navarro, 2010). The concomitant affirmation of cultural relativism revealed that truth, and the modernist ideals on which it was reified, were rendered abstractions that cannot be universally verified, but rather were inseparable from particular cultural contexts. Moreover, without truth there cannot be an overarching, ideal moral response.
Tagg (1993: 2) elaborates on this, revealing how the process of translation involves “specific and, in every sense, significant distortions” in order for it to fit into particular systems of representation that allow for the categorisation of concepts, people and events. Connecting the notions of science, objectivity and positivism to Western thought allowed the excavation of a link between specific contexts wherein images were used to profess a truth, and the reinforcement of state (ibid.; Lavie, 1990). Like the state, however, science, positivism, objectivity and the image were never neutral, but were imbued with ideology that reflected and reinforced political intentions (Nichols, 1997). Meaning and power are reciprocally dependent, creating an overarching regime of truth that infiltrated through society (ibid.). Documentary, regardless of technique, style or authorial intervention, is thus “a discourse of sobriety” that legitimised and established an authority for particular claims (Nichols, 1991: 3-4): documentaries “exert a power, not as the evocation of a pristine truth but as a politically mobilized rhetoric of Truth, a strategy of signification, a cultural intervention aimed at resealing social unity and structures of belief at a time of far-reaching crisis and conflict.” (Tagg, in Renov, 1993: 29).
Ranciere similarly asserted that the politics of aesthetics was determined by the ‘distribution of the sensible’: “a delimitation of … the visible and the invisible … that simultaneously determines the place and the stakes of politics as a form of experience” (2007a: 12-13). He explains how abstract concepts, such as modernism and objectivity, become reified in a way that prevents any real political change or, in the case of documentary, ethical motivation (ibid.; Jazeel & Mookherjee, 2015). Ranciere (2007a), uses Jacotot’s system of intellectual emancipation to reveal how dominant educational practices, including documentaries, rely on a hierarchical explication of information that serves to produce and sustain unequal access to truth. This “establishes at one and the same time something that is shared and [yet in its] exclusive parts” (ibid.: 7). Ranciere believed art and politics to be areas wherein a redistribution of the sensible could be provoked, as implicated by documentary’s aims, and yet by claiming to be both antiaesthetic and apolitical, the image fails to instigate any real change. The Israeli state’s attempt to ban Jenin, Jenin (2002) can be understood in this way, as it conflicted with political intentions to dilute the extent of their involvement in the bombings. Although the ban was overturned, Ranciere (2007a & 2014), by referencing Jaar’s ‘The eyes of Gutete Emerita’ and River’s ‘Erasing the Past II’ that subtly erases the image of a Holocaust survivor, implies that history should be approached with skepticism regarding what is memorialised and what is erased. Documentary mirrors the ’ethical regime of images’ in which ‘art’ cannot exist, as images claim mimesis so as to reinforce what they represent as true (ibid., 2007). Truth in opposition to beauty, or politics in opposition to aesthetics, is the product of a Western modernist distribution of the sensible. Pinney (1997: 191-192) summarises: “photography ... is concerned with the creation of worlds, rather than their duplication”. Moreover, it is important to note that Grierson, when coining the term ‘documentary’ intended it to be a tool for “the procurement of identification in order to produce citizens inculcate with a sense of responsibility appropriate to their role in the collective whole” (Tagg, 1993: 8 & 67).
Chouliaraki (2006: 263) demonstrates how images of suffering work alongside “a set of historically shaped and culturally specific practices of the public presentation of suffering … [so that] the footage plays a crucial role in identifying ‘good’ and ‘bad’ sides and, broadly, in legitimizing the causes and intended outcomes of the war”. She goes on to depict how ideological theories of the gaze and constructions of stereotypes map onto images of war, for example during the Iraq war troops from the UK were seen as omnibenevolent and omnipotent in contrast to the powerless, suffering Iraqis; creating a dichotic relationship between the Self and Other. Zelizer, too, claimed that the Holocaust images stood as ‘visual analogs’, so that we see them as a “backdrop or context against which to appropriate these more contemporaneous instances of barbarism.” (1998: 13). Stereotypes from images of the Holocaust provide recognition whilst also forcing the spectator to overlook the contextual truth of the image. Additionally, stereotypical hierarchies, an accessory to modernist ideology, can be found throughout documentary images of violence and suffering, for example developed/undeveloped, clothed/unclothed and civilized/primitive, amongst others (Edwards, 2011). Although footage appears to be neutral, it generates a ‘politics of pity’ that ensures the spectator takes sides by adhering to a collective ‘scopic regime’ (Chouliaraki, 2006).
Both Ranciere and Chouliaraki rely on the spectator’s adherence to the ideological codes in order to give the image meaning and reinforce its truth. The spectator is intended to read the “photographic message”, wherein symbolic connotations correspond to ideological preconceptions (Barthes, 2010: 16-17; Spence & Navarro, 2010). Claims to truth, therefore, rely only on recognition and acceptance with the representation (Barthes, 1981). Identification with the documentary echoes apparatus theory that purports the unification of spectators through the ideology of representation and film techniques. Whilst watching a film, the spectator is manipulated to identify with the perception of the camera or documentarian. Documentary images within this modernist convention, therefore, are ‘closed’ texts which carry specific instructions that delimit the spectator’s perception (Eco, 1979; Benjamin, 1969: 8). Ranciere (2007b: 2-3) problematizes the unified, passive spectator by claiming that looking is opposed to both knowing and acting. Freire (2006) similarly argued that dialogic engagement and active participation in the production of knowledge was crucial in understanding, and thus overcoming the distribution of the sensible and preventing the reinforcement of suffering or stereotypes.
Many representations of suffering and violence attempt to go beyond the ideological confines of the realist convention. In particular, opacity emerged as a “subsistence within an irreducible singularity” through an unknowability which prevents people, events and objects from being quantified and confined within a singular, reductive identification (Glissant in Demos, 2009: 123). Again, Abu Hatoum’s (2017) work reveals how Palestinian photographer, Yazan Khalili, captures the Palestinian landscapes without the Wall in order to contest the visual regime so centred on identifying Palestinians as a people withheld by occupation (ibid.). The enforced absence has “taken on the political role of exposing, as well as defying in absentia, the abuses of power and its diverse mechanisms of subjection via censorship” (Minh-Ha, 2016: 138). The truth of the Wall, although physically absent, is not symbolically absent from the images, and is always anticipated by the spectator. The juxtaposition between Khalili’s images and other Israeli and Palestinian images of the Wall initiate a critical awareness of the construction of the distribution of the sensible. Through unknowability and ambiguity, the image becomes an ‘open’ text which causes a higher level of semiotic interpretation (Eco, 1979), allowing the spectator to be free from a predetermined meaning and response.
Jarman’s Blue (1993) is another example in which the truth of the image escapes ideological and representational confines. The whole film is a singular, monochrome blue that was made photochemically in a lab rather than with a camera, thus challenging documentary convention that emphasises the role of the camera in liberating vision and forging a relationship between seeing and knowing (Guerin & Hallas, 2007). Jarmen never appears on screen, instead allowing the colour to provoke a visualisation of Jarmen’s AIDS related blindness. The viscerality of the blue light emanating from the screen illuminates the spectator’s own physicality, implicating them in an embodied admission of the truth of the suffering. Blue is a manifestation of Minh-Ha’s claim that “work that displays its own formal properties or its own constitution as work, is bound to upset one’s sense of identity” (1991: 45); it inverts the gaze by forcing the spectator to recognise humanity within Jarman as an AIDS sufferer. This works to negate any distance between the Self and the Other, or the spectacle and the spectator, ultimately forcing the spectator to renounce an assumed position of transcendence and develop a "relation" that is "an open totality evolving upon itself" (Glissant in Demos, 2009: 127). The renouncing of fundamental difference ensures “active participants in a collective performance” wherein empathy and a subsequent ethical response develop (Ranciere, 2007b: 2). This iconoclasm also responded to the “spectacle of AIDS” that pervaded media iconography of pathologized bodies marginalised within the rhetoric of correct citizenship (ibid.). The film represents a shift from the ethical regime to the aesthetic regime; recognising the autonomy of the documentarian beyond the hierarchical state’s control (ibid., 2004: 24-25). Of course, Jarman’s ability to represent his own suffering partly accounts for this success, unlike those in Jenin, Jenin and other images of violence, yet it offers a practical and ethical approach for future documentarians.
Trauma and suffering initiates a representational limit, that no longer demands realist representation for an ethical engagement. However, opacity through non-representation, as in Blue, remains confined within a dualistic opposition between visibility and invisibility, subsequently neglecting the liminal complexity and further repressing any positive representation through erasure (Minh-Ha, 2016; Demos, 2009). Shoah (Lanzmann, 1985) works within this paradox by mobilising the image in a way that evokes both opacity and representation. Lanzmann was aware that audiences were immune to images of the Holocaust, but also that there was difficulty in accurately representing violence and suffering through indexical or iconic representations (Chapman, 2009). Resultantly, the film breaks away from documentary convention, most notably by exceeding temporal limits by taking place over nine hours; defended as a decision to intrude the viewer more directly, and ensure a break from the everyday to experience the suffering. The film uses fragmented images of the Nazi camps taken in the present time, negating documentary attempts to capture pain immediately and in its totality. Moreover, interviews are reenacted or represented through metaphorical scenes in which, for example, a barber cuts a man’s hair in the present whilst recounting the pain of cutting the hair of suffering women and children in the gas chamber. The refusal to visualise the suffering directly prevents the imposition of meaning onto a passive spectator (Minh-Ha, 1990), and instead initiates a dialectic engagement in which truth emerges through an active engagement. Perhaps Shoah, as a documentary, more accurately represents the ‘representational regime of art’ (Ranciere, 2004), wherein the documentarian remains free from direct relation to political ideology, but the documentary is able to purport a mediated truth in order remain ethically inspirational.
Both Shoah and Blue defend the representation of suffering by shifting the emphasis from truth as existing between the image and the referent, to its manifestation between the image and the spectator. Although poststructuralism has revealed that the image is culturally coded with political intentions, this is over-deterministic and as Abu Hatoum (2017) shows, individual approaches to images can differ within cultural contexts. Truth is not found within the image, but is individually co-constructed through an active engagement and negotiation of meaning via intersecting ideologies and cultural beliefs. However, truth is also constantly renegotiated and resistance to normative conventions play an important role in the spectator’s interpretive work; “[I]nterpretation is already a means of transforming [the world], of reconfiguring it” (Ranciere, 2007b: 6). The spectator must develop an ‘ethics of seeing’ whereby they are ‘emancipated’ from passivity and objectivity. This requires a nuanced post-structuralist analysis that recognises that “every spectator is already an actor” (ibid.: 8), but also the importance of heterogeneous representation strategies in mobilising action.
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Filmography
Bakri, M. (2003). Jenin jenin
Jarman, D. (1993). Blue
Lanzmann, C. (1985) Shoah