Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Memory

Abstract

Documentary cinema is intimately tied to historical memory. Not only does it seek to reconstruct historical narrative, but it often functions as an historical document itself. Moreover, the connection between the rhetoric of documentary film and historical truth pushes the documentary into overtly political alignments which influence its audience. This essay describes and dissects the history and rhetoric of documentary cinema, tracing its various modes of address from the earliest moments of cinematic representation through its uses for ethnographers, artists, governments, and marginal political organizations in the present. The different uses of documentary result in a wide variety of formal strategies to persuade the audience of a film's truth. These strategies are based on a desire to enlist the audience in the process of historical reconstruction. The documentary film differentiates itself from narrative cinema by claiming its status as a truth-telling mode. However, as a filmic construction, it relies on cinematic semiosis to convince its audience of its validity and truth. By looking at the history of documentary address, this essay outlines the rhetoric of persuasion and evaluates its effectiveness. The documentary calls upon its audience to participate in historical remembering by presenting an intimate view of reality. Through cinematic devices such as montage, voice-over, intertitles, and long takes, documentary provokes its audience to new understandings about social, economic, political, and cultural differences and struggles. The films actively engage with their world; however, often viewers respond to the same devices motivating classic Hollywood narratives. Thus the genre reinforces dominant patterns of vision. Recent challenges to the emotional manipulations of documentary deconstruct its forms and conventions so that the films interrogate not only historical memory but their own investment in its recreation. Imaginative documentaries, such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, foreground their partial and contingent qualities, pushing viewers to question cinematic representation and its place in historical memory. Moreover, they ask audiences to think about their place in the films' meanings as well as their responsibility to the past and its interpretations.