Reflexive Documentary

Reflexive documentary

Reflexive documentary arose from a desire to make the conventions of representations themselves more apparent and to challenge the impression of reality' which the other three modes normally conveyed unproblematically'.

Bill Nichols, Representing Reality, p.33

In the interactive mode of documentary, we saw that the film maker on screen participates in the events being filmed. In the case of Roger and Me, Michael Moore interviews the people of Flint and attempts to interview Roger Smith, chairman of General Motors.

In interactive documentary, therefore, the film maker does not attempt to conceal his presence, unlike the practice in expository and observational documentary.

In reflexive documentary, the film maker goes one step further than interactive documentary, attempting to expose to the spectator the conventions of documentary representation, with the effect of challenging the documentary's apparent ability to reveal the truth. Rather than focus on the events and people filmed, the reflexive documentary focuses on how they are filmed.

In the reflexive documentary, the properties of the film and the film making process become the main focus of attention.

The reflexive documentary does not pretend to simply present a slice of reality, since it also tries to demonstrate to the spectator how film images are constructed.

Whereas the interactive mode makes the film maker's presence known to the spectator, the reflexive documentary makes the whole process of film making known to the spectator.

Reflexive documentary challenges the documentary’s status as objective and illustrates the subjective choices involved in film making. But a lack of objectivity does not necessarily reduce the significance or impact of a documentary.

A documentary that acknowledges its limitations and its own perspective is more valuable than a film that pretends to be neutral and objective. Michael Moore makes no attempt to be neutral or objective and his personal involvement in the story - he was born in Flint - partly explains why he decided to make Roger and Me.

A reflexive documentary goes much further than the interactive documentary in making the spectator aware of all the stages involved in making a documentary. One of the most celebrated examples of a reflexive documentary is Dziga Vertov's Man with a Movie Camera (1928).

Vertov is generally regarded to be the father of radical documentary, a type of film making that challenges normative and common-sense views of reality. Like the British documentary film movement, Vertov's work was funded by the state.

But whereas the British documentaries of the 1930s reflected the opinions of centre progressive pressure groups (‘middle opinion') Vertov, an iconoclast of Soviet film making during the revolutionary period, attempted to change the audience's perception of everyday reality through radical techniques that attempt to raise each spectator's consciousness.

In terms of content, Man with a Movie Camera is a documentary because it shows unstaged events, scenes from everyday life that add up to represent the working day - from waking up, going to work and, finally, to leisure activities.

However, Vertov does not simply film these events, but transforms them by means of specific film techniques. He not only shows everyday life, but also shows how it has been filmed.

Throughout Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov shows the camera recording events, the editor re-arranging shots on the editing table, a film being projected and an audience in a cinema watching a film. In addition, he uses the specific qualities of film - montage, fast and slow motion, freeze frame, out of focus shots, double exposure and reverse motion - to remind us that what we see is a reconstructed reality mediated through film.

Vertov's working methods are therefore divided up into two principles:

what he calls the 'Film-Truth' principle, the process of capturing life-as-it-is, and the Film-Eye' principle, the procedure of constructing a film out of these shots by means of the specific qualities of film. In Man with a Movie Camera, each shot itself is a fragment of reality.

But Vertrov treats each shot as the raw material from which to make a film. Vertov calls the individual shots the bricks of film. The film makers then have a choice of building a modest house or a mansion from these bricks.

Vertov is only interested in building the filmic equivalent of a mansion. He offers us another perspective on reality, a perspective filtered through the specific qualities of film. Moreover, Vertov does not hide the fact that the view he gives the spectator is constructed, since he shows the spectator the process of construction.

 This is why Man with a Movie Camera is a reflexive documentary.