Concepts from academic documentary theory have been productively introduced into other fields of film, notably film history, drama and reality TV theory, where new work on concepts of representing reality are derived from the ideas of Nichols.
Three important books on issues and concepts of documentary have been published in recent years, all of them by pioneer in the field, Bill Nichols. Two of these books were written in a short period time; Ideology and the Image: Social Representation in the Cinema (1981) and The Voice of Documentary (1983), while Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary was published in 1991, a decade after the first of Nichol's books on the issue. Bill Nichol's, whose groundbreaking Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary first appeared in small parts as “The Voice of Documentary”, which was published in Films Quarterly 36, no.3 (Spring 1983), has pulled together all of his writings, from Questions of Magnitude, and The Documentary and Mass Media to Pornography, Ethnography, and the Discourses of Power, “originated as a term paper by Catherine Needham and Christian Hansen in [Nichols] Fall 1986 seminar on ethnographic film at Queen's University (Nichols, 1991:Xvii). This triple publication, then, provides an occasion for looking back as well as forward.
Concepts from academic documentary theory have been productively introduced into other fields of film, notably film history, drama and reality TV theory, where new work on concepts of representing reality is derived from the ideas of Nichols. And yet a number of questions concerning the cultural implications of early theorists work on the representing of reality in documentary remain unsolved. As Nichols sees it, “the invocation of, and promise to gratify, a desire to know”, is of that contemporary condition which scholars lead by Bruzzi, Carroll, Platinga, Izod, Kilburn and others see as an acceptance of “that a documentary can never be the real world” (Bruzzi, 2000:7). So, "representing reality", the title and focus of Nichols work is an implicated term. In one sense it refers to "the images of things", which invoke different conceptions of filming events: the image as the "real" twist of the visual representation made meaningful through "our hunger for Truth"; reality as an ordered story of the event, authorised by domestic documentary-making procedures. For Nichols, representing reality is a boundary that depends on ideology of images and the imaginary:
“Documentary realism also presents a pointedly historical dimension. It is a form of visual historiography. Its combination of representations of the world and representations about the world, of evidence and argument, give it the ambivalent status that the word “history” also enjoys: history is at once the living trajectory of social events as they occur and the written discourse that speaks about these events” (Nichols, 1991:177).
More particularly, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary is a wide-ranging history in the field of documentary as a concept or practice. It covers various periods and discusses documentary from various Modes of Representation. Much of the book is devoted to the detailed domain of documentary, where a number of precise distinctions between types of documentaries are made and where the diverse ways images and narratives have functioned is elaborated. Nichols is concerned to go beyond the parameters of an aesthetic history, analyzing the representing of the reality in documentary as a multidimensional phenomenon involving documentary form, documentary history, defining documentary, the image and ideology, a community of practitioners, an institutional practice, a corpus of texts, and constituency of viewers.
Reading Culture: Documentary As A Test
One of the most interesting and productive moves Nichols makes is to extend a discussion of a formal device to include historical and cultural accounts of the relationship between documentary not in institutional (discursive) nor textual terms but in relation to its viewers. In this regard representing of the reality can be seen as a kind of documentary test case for debates in contemporary cultural studies and critical theory. Nichols, however, specifically interrogates the factual status of realism and foregrounds the fictional status of objectivity. Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the Will, which praises fascism, and Grierson's Drifters, which compliments the fishermen are used in his analysis of realism in documentary film to build up the vision of how "the question of voice" can be related to the “authorial personality and textual persuasion, that differs from that of fiction” (p. 165). He notes that “similar stylistic techniques comes into play but the end result is a distinct mix of style and rhetoric, authorial personality and textual persuasion that differs from that of fiction” (p.165). Nichols argues that this is a case in modernist narrative in documentary where both "objective representations of the historical world" and "rhetorical overtness" are taken into consideration to communicate an argument about the world (p.166).
Nichols also discusses Grierson's representation of the documentary, which, he argues, foregrounds the importance of the filmmaker's devotion in establishing a particular relationship to the past: he relates Grierson's vision of a documentary film movement as managerial elite. This suggests that Nichols implies that Grierson is at the forefront of the documentary movement. For Nichols, Griersonian documentary assures the immensity of actions through rituals of involvement of the documentary participant. In addition, George Lukács's notion of "lack of convictions" is discussed in relation to Scott, Balzak and Tolstoy's experience of describing their characters. Nichols describes that the novelistic creation of characters differs from the documentary highlighting of characters, because the later is related to the involvement of the characters, which implicates the fact that characters are not only the choice of writers, but are part of the politics of representation. As Nichols clarifies, the politics of representation introduce questions of power and authority, showing that documentary is also the politics of representation.
