ISSN: 1329-878X

Visible Evidence: New Factual Forms No 104 August 2002 Order form Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Jon Dovey: Confession and the unbearable lightness of factual
This paper examines the changes in contemporary documentary practices, in particular the shift to a ‘first-person media’. By looking at certain types of first-person and confessional speech forms in factual television, I hope to offer a case study in how we might continue to distinguish between different kinds of program and to determine their relationship to the public sphere. The rise of first-person media can be seen as a response to the need for a public space in which ‘life world politics’ and ‘emotional deomcracy’ are fundamental. The dispersal of intimate speech and confessional discourse is an expression of the changes that have occurred in our social and economic lives. This paper explores documentary and factul television’s role in this process.

Catherine Summerhayes: Translative performance in documentary film: Bob Connolly and Robin Anderson's Facing the Music
Facing the Music (2001) is a film that performs at many levels. While its primary narrative is about the effects of government funding cuts to universities, and specifically the effect on the University of Sydney’s Music Department, the film also weaves other more generic stories about people and how they interact with each other. Connolly’s and Anderson’s complex and confronting style of observational film-making is examined in the context of this film for the ways in which it ‘assumes’ that film can ‘translate’ the details of people’s everyday lives into a broad discussion of particular social issues and conflicts. As with all translations, however, some meanings inadvertently are lost and others added. Drawing on Walter Benjamin’s idea of ‘translatability’ and Brecht’s concept of gest, this paper describes how particular cultural meanings which are embedded within the documentary film, Facing the Music, can be accessed through the ways in which the audiovisual text ‘melodramatically’ presents people and profilmic events. Thomas Elsaesser’s definition of classic fictional melodrama, as a ‘closed’ world of ‘inner’ violence where ‘characters are acted upon’, becomes a guide to understanding the film’s secondary narratives about the operation of particular stereotypical, binary representations: men and women; artists and ‘the rest of the world’; academics (‘gown’) and other people (‘town’). Using Laura Mulvey’s further distinction of ‘matriarchal’ and ‘patriarchal’ melodramas, Facing the Music is described as a ‘matriarchal’ documentary melodrama. The film’s selective translation of how people live their lives in a particular social situation is thereby discussed as a further translation into the broader discourses of gender and power relations in a society.

Derek Paget: Acting a part: Performing docudrama
This essay considers approaches to acted performance in film and television docudrama, using as examples of recent practice a number of ‘high concept’ international coproductions such as Nuremberg and Conspiracy (both 2001). The focus of the essay is specifically upon the actor as a ‘visible marker of [documentary] inauthenticity’. It discusses the means by which an actor attempts to compensate for the manifest gap between the performed and the historical ‘real’ in preparation for docudrama performance. It also considers the nature of the transaction that takes place between actor and audience in docudrama, noting that the founding concept of this transaction is likely to be intertextual (grounded in an appreciation of the knowledge(s) brought to performance by actor and audience alike). Both parties bring to docudrama performance an awareness of the information, misinformation and disinformation that tend to cluster around significant historical events and personalities. This, it is argued, will in all probability affect both actors’ preparation and audience reception in strikingly similar ways. The actor’s trained ‘as if’ reflex is matched by a sophisticated audience’s ‘what if’ reflex, in a mutual seeking of understanding beyond the rational and factual. Brian Cox’s performance as Hermann Goering in Nuremberg is discussed in detail in relation to these claims. The intensification of documentary’s basic absent/present paradox that takes place in docudrama is finally considered in relation to reality TV and its participants (who should be thought of, it is argued, as ‘authentic performers of self’).

Bernadette Flynn: Factual Hybridity: Games, documentary and simulated spaces
Documentary theorist John Corner’s suggestion that we might be moving into a post-documentary period echoes concerns raised earlier by Brian Winston that the documentary is facing some type of crisis. This paper argues that this is only the case if one ignores a broader notion of media hybridity that takes into account directions offered by new technologies and aesthetic regimes. This paper proposes that, rather than signalling an unravelling of documentary’s purpose, emerging forms of factuality point towards more localised forms of communication that have been effaced in ‘discourse of sobriety’ with their distrust of the popular. Using examples from reality TV (Big Brother) and a simulation computer game (The Sims), I suggest that these multi-platform ‘gamedocs’ relate to older and often ignored histories of representing the real. These histories connect to the lineage of George Méliès’ actuality projects and the scientific and morality loops found in the mutoscope and entertainment diorama. Aspects of play and actuality remerge in the contemporary forms of Big Brother and The Sims which trade on documentary’s cultural cache as the site of the real whilst simultaneously adopting a self-conscious, sometimes critical relationship to the authentic seeming. In so doing, they construct a type of docobricolage in which narrative and representation become subservient to navigable geography, mastery of the game environment and the pleasures of gameplay itself.

Jason Middleton: Documentary comedy
While documentaries like Roger and Me and mock documentaries such as This is Spinal Tap differ in terms of the ontological status of their referents, they share many formal characteristics, particularly in their editing strategies. This essay examines the editing techniques in these two influential films of the 1980s in order to theorise exactly how film-makers combine conventions of documentary with those of comedy in an attempt to produce laughter in audiences. Having demonstrated the formal qualities of an editing technique prevalent in these films which I term ‘cutting on the absurd’, the essay then explores the broader implications of this comic style in more recent documentary film-making. With a particular focus on Chris Smith and Sarah Price’s American Movie (1999), it examines how the editing strategies in documentary films characterised as ‘offbeat character studies’ alternately position viewers to laugh at and laugh with the subjects, to occupy a position that can be at once derisory and empathetic.

Lisa Perrott: Rethinking the documentary audience: Reimagining The New Zealand Wars
Narratives of war and history are central to the development of nationhood. Within the distinctive context of New Zealand decolonisation, The New Zealand Wars documentary series offers a revised version of a formative moment in New Zealand history. This paper draws upon textual analysis and audience research to explore the potential of this series to function as a catalyst within the process of decolonisation. The television broadcast of this five-part series has arguably played a role in evoking a reimagining of the New Zealand ‘nation’, and in opening a space for public debate. This recently invigorated debate can be characterised by the negotiation of a number of discourses of ‘race’, ‘culture’ and ‘nationhood’. While examples of this public negotiation illustrate the social and intellectual activity involved in the process of making sense of a documentary text, a closer examination of audience response to this series reveals an especially emotional, even ‘mimetic’, dimension of engagement. The few available examples of documentary audience research have tended to focus on intellectual and social processes of negotiating meaning. Through a discussion of passionate responses to The New Zealand Wars series, this paper posits an argument for extending the traditional conceptualisation of documentary audience engagement beyond the intellectual, to include a visceral dimension. Rather than viewing these different types of activity as diametrically opposed, they are considered here to be interconnected elements within a dialogical and experiential encounter between the viewer and the documentary text.

General Articles

Jeff Lewis: Propagating terror: 9/11 and the mediation of war
Academic and public analysis of the media’s performance during the 9/11 and Afghanistan wars are critically influenced by the specific ideological perspective of the analyst. Those commentators who support the reprisal attacks against bin Laden, Al Qaeda and the Taliban tend to commend the media, identifying a substantial confluence between state interests, public opinion and media reporting. Alternatively, commentators such as Noam Chomsky who are highly critical of American foreign policy, especially in the Middle East, see the media as representing a pernicious conduit which allows state and military hegemonies to oppress and manipulate public opinion. The role of the media in reporting war and terrorism needs to be considered in terms of processes of cultural construction and representation. As we approach the anniversary of 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’, we need to understand that government foreign policy, public opinion and military action are all shaped through specific kinds of mediated discourse. Our role as media analysts is to expose these discourses in terms of those complex historical and cultural conditions which have served to generate a violence of this proportion.

Philip Kitley: Televisi Bangsa Baru: Television, reformasi and renewal in Indonesia
For nearly 30 years, television in Indonesia was dominated by the state broadcaster TVRI and five commercial channels with very close links to former President Soeharto. In the reform period since Soeharto’s resignation, there has been a new sense of public and publicness, an expansion of the public sphere and the break-up and re-imagination of the Indonesian audience. These developments have been led by media sector insiders. This paper argues that, despite the progressive work of new licensees and civil society media groups, it is media sector outsiders which are needed to lead television in Indonesia out from under the totalising, essentialist models of the past to establish televisi bangsa baru — television for a new nation.

Mark Gibson: The powers of the Pokémon: Histories of television, histories of the concept of power
Television studies has always been haunted by the concept of power, caught in a dilemma between Frankfurtian pessimism and a vulnerability to charges of a cheerful ‘banality’. The paper suggests a new perspective on this problem by introducing a distinction between theories of power (in the singular) and a more differentiated attention to plural powers. The latter approach can be traced as an emerging possibility in ‘post-Cold War’ formations in popular culture — the example discussed here being Pokémon. The paper further suggests that television studies might learn something from this development. The way is opened, specifically, for questions of power to be considered in a historical, rather than theoretical, mode. Such an approach offers an alternative to remaining caught in what have become increasingly repetitive debates about power.

Melissa Campbell: Little bogan lost: Examining media treatment of the Jaidyn Leskie murder case
In June 1997, 13-month-old Jaidyn Leskie disappeared from Moe, a rural Victorian town. His body was found in January 1998. Through a discussion of three presentations of ‘loss’, this paper contends those involved in the case were constructed by the media as ‘bogans’ — powerless outsiders — because they defied categorisation within narrow conceptions of ‘normal Australian society’. While Jaidyn himself was a ‘lost child’, his family and associates were likened to a ‘lost tribe’, whose alliances, feuds and kinship networks became exotic, exploitative entertainment. Lacking rhetorical tools to ‘explain’ such a distinctive culture, media coverage constructed bogans as victims of failed social policy: their culture ‘caused’ by economic downsizing, unemployment, drug use and single parenthood. Finally, when members of Jaidyn’s family accepted money for media interviews, they were painted as ‘losing their innocence’. This reveals insecurities underpinning the concept ‘bogan’: evidently, bogans were not supposed to engage in media manipulation themselves.