2-16: ON DOCUMENTARY

WIP INTRO FOR RESEARCH PAPER

“No branch of art has ever more deliberately tried to combine research with interpretation, or laid so much emphasis on the intellectual background of art” said John Grierson of the documentary (1946:159). The Scottish filmmaker had coined the term in 1926 and spoke of the potential for a new art form to emerge from cinema; one that served as a tool for observing the world in a way that, in his view, could surpass the studio fictional works of the day in their interpretation of modern life.

“The creative treatment of actuality” (Grierson, 1933:5) was Grierson’s much quoted but rarely attributed definition of the documentary. Though referring to new developments in film—the context in which this definition is most actively applied—Grierson speaks ambiguously of the form of the documentary, initially noting only that it is the work of an artist offering some kind of record or social analysis.

This definition places the documentary in a place between fiction and non-fiction (a non-“creative treatment”), subject still to an artist’s aesthetic, social and political influences, yet using and giving form to the raw material of ‘actuality’.

The documentary film serves as the genre’s ubiquitous format and the foundation of much of its surrounding discourse; narratives, settings, characters derived first from reality and expressed in a curated arrangement of moving image and sound. But what of the other formats used to express Grierson’s notion?

At the core of this paper is an examination of artistic works that record or analyse the world: art as documentary, or alternative forms of documentary.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grierson, J. (1933) The Documentary Producer in Cinema Quarterly (1933, Vol. 2 No. 1) pp.7-9 Edinburgh: G.D. Robinson

Grierson, J. (1946) Postwar Patterns
in Hollywood Quarterly (January 1946, Vol. 1, No.2) pp.159-165 Berkeley: University of California Press

RESPONSES

As I have only worked on a small section of the three part research paper, I found it hard to respond to the feedback given; at present, it is hard to get a sense for what I want the paper to be as a whole, as opposed to the focused narrative found in what I have produced.

The most significant takeaway was a need for me to better establish my own position within regards to the subject matter, as opposed to relying solely on pre-existing theories.

Over the last week I have reworked the sections of my paper previously discussed (see 2-15) to better address my research question.

I. Definitions of Space
II. Definitions of Documentary

For the first two sections, it will be important to discuss not only existing perspectives on the nature of space and documentary, but also establish my own position developed through studio work. Existing theories about these areas will serve as a basis for unifying the works discussed in the subsequent sections of the paper, and serve as tools for establishing exactly is (and isn’t) a spatial intervention.

III. Survey of Alternative Forms of Documentary

A kind of literary review discussing relevant works in some detail. Discussed works will be selected so as to offer a methodology for engaging with the purely visual dossier section, in a sense an intervention in written form that teaches a way of reading. I will attempt in this section to show not only the range of genres in which what I am calling ‘artwork-documentaries’ can exist, but also the range of methods they use to fulfil said documentary function in regards to space.

This section will make up the majority of the research paper and show a critical engagement with the various works I have discussed in previous blog posts, amongst others.

IV. Dossier of Spatial Interventions as Documentary

I am aiming for this section to be purely visual. I was largely influenced by Batia Suter’s PARALLEL ENCYCLOPEDIA (2007), an exercise of collection and composition that creates an encyclopedia purely from images. Suter’s editing and arrangement of these images creates a strong unspoken narrative, through which a new kind of context for each image is created simply by its position in relation to other images.

I feel adopting this technique for my dossier may provide means through which to address the ambiguity of some aspects of assembling the range of works I seek to read as spatial interventions. I would hope that by seeing these images together, a question may be posed by the reader as to what in their own environment could constitute an intervention in space.