Note: This is a response to a post that is a response to a post about a blog comment argument Dan and I had last week. It’s in the comments for the post marked November 9, and is reproduced in Dan’s invective against scholarship that I link to below. I posted an additional comment to it before I saw Dan’s post, but I think I re-say all the stuff in it here, and better. If you don’t want to read it, and you’re not Dan, I won’t mind. It’s very long. I would have put most of this behind a “Read more”-style link if Blogdrive supported such a thing.
(You kids should just all go watch Shatner “sing” “Rocket Man”. Rock. It. Man. It is wholly the best thing on the internet and way less self-important than what follows.)

As a person who imagines himself as being creative, I take an offense to a group of non-artists (or failed, frustrated artists) standing back and wrestling interpretive clout and the right to define from me simply because they’ve spent their life “studying” the medium rather than actually building it. It’s really quite a new phenomenon in all accounting, and it’s not limited to just film. Essentially they help prove that the best works are those that defy classification i.e. cause the most arguments in classrooms.



Dear Dan,

You’ve taken an argument about the definition of “documentary” and turned into a wholesale dismissal of film scholarship and academia in general.

It made me sad when you wrote this, the same way it makes me sad every time I read that liberals are latte-drinking intellectuals. It’s the same sort of knee-jerk response. What do you have against academia? What is so execrable about espresso and steamed milk? An unexamined life is not worth living and an unexamined world is not worth living in. Interrogating culture is as important as creating it.

I was never arguing for a hard-and-fast definition of documentary. It’s a really broad umbrella term, not a genre. It is also value-neutral. It includes experimental documentary, poetic documentary, interview films, compilation films, etc. etc. But any definition will include films using footage the filmmaker shot as current events.

Just to clarify, the blurring of the line between documentary and truth is a lot older than Blair Witch and Survivor. Even the Lumiere’s actualities weren’t always all that actual. (There’s one of an Arab woman praying, which apparently isn’t an actual prayer, for instance.) The first films to be called documentary were Robert Flaherty’s, which arguably got even faker after Nanook. Back when they had them, newsreels were regularly staged.) A lot of what defines a documentary is indexical, which is to say, how it is presented to the public. I don’t know how you could make an animated film and still have be considered a documentary under any definition, but if you can, good on you.

Also, films that take found footage and use it to construct narratives that in no way relate to the actual context of the images have not only been done before, they’ve been canonized, especially in avant-garde circles. In first year we watched a film called A Movie that did this, with stock footage that obviously came from. It’s from 1958 and it’s in my Intro textbook. Lev Kuleshov did his experiments, which work on the same principles, much much earlier than this

What I was originally upset about was narrowing the definition of documentary to disclude certain points of view. Also, it undermines the value of Triumph now. It isn’t shown in classrooms to promote Hitler as the future of Germany but rather to interrogate the ways documentary footage can be used. That the film is beautiful makes it even more interesting to talk about in those terms.
This is why it’s on the syllabus of not one but two of my courses this semester.

As someone who considers themselves critical, I take offense to being told that I’m just a non-artist (or failed, frustrated artist) sitting around putting the creative people like you into boxes because I lack the talent to actually work in the medium.
(Why is an artist the only person qualified to talk about art? Especially film and literature, which are usually considered to be mass art, given their easy reproducibiliity and small cost to the spectator/reader. What the work does for the spectator/reader is as important as the work itself. “Standing back,” as you put it, is a big part of being a critic and it’s something that’s inherently very hard for an artist to do. Everyone can’t be right there up front. Not everyone wants to be. Films need people to watch them.)
What critics do, and it’s something filmmakers don’t (and I think probably shouldn’t) do is they study the experience of watching films, and the influence of films on the culture.
For one, criticism and theorisation of art by people not actually working within it is not new. It is ancient. Aristotle wrote Poetics, I don’t know exactly when, but you know, before Christ.
It is also important to note that modern criticism is descriptive, not prescriptive, as you seem to think it is. Critics, as a rule, love films that challenge convention. That’s why we watch them in classrooms. That’s why they write about them.
Criticism excites me the way art excites you. Talking about all the things a film is saying without really saying them matters, because you can’t understate how important film has become to culture in general in the last 100 years. It goes beyond catch phrases. It’s the way we see ourselves. (For instance, it is interesting how many presidents love High Noon.)

Just because I talk about the symptomatic meaning of the film doesn’t mean that I don’t respect the filmmaker (or his or her creative process). But when that filmmaker makes their film and releases it, it doesn’t really matter what they intended. It matters what people see in it. (Obviously, I think what filmmakers do is important and worthy. Otherwise I wouldn’t be studying it.)

Critics aren’t perfect. They get things wrong, they have crazy theories, they leave things out. But so do artists. In our society, where art and commerce and politics are so closely interwoven, we can’t make the artists untouchable deities. We can’t make art untouchable or unpolitical. We can’t hide from truths we don’t like about people and the power of film by saying “propaganda doesn’t count.” (Which was the initial thing we were actually arguing about, but you shifted the terms of the argument instead of actually responding to my points, which is why this is 1,000 words long.)

It seems kind of funny for exes to be playing out a theory-practice debate on the Internet.
I was also, I admit, kind of mad on a personal level because you misinterpreted what I was trying to say (possibly because I wasn’t explaining myself as well as I could be) and then used me to represent a group you call “critics,” about whom you then seem to have a lot of prejudice and not a lot of actual information, which makes them really easy to dismiss.
I’m less mad now, because it’s been a few days, and ultimately, I know you’re not going to look at this and say “Oh, you’re right.” And we’re still going to be friends, and we’re still going to argue and be stubborn.
I just had to say what I had to say.