Bordwell and Thompson in Certain Respects the Postwar Art Film Marked a Resurgence

journal article

Wreckage upon Wreckage: History, Documentary and the Ruins of Retentivity

History and Theory

Vol. 32, No. 2 (May, 1993)

, pp. 119-137 (19 pages)

Published Past: Wiley

History and Theory
https://doi.org/10.2307/2505348

https://www. jstor .org/stable/2505348

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Abstruse

Documentary cinema is intimately tied to historical memory. Not only does it seek to reconstruct historical narrative, but it often functions as an historical document itself. Moreover, the connexion between the rhetoric of documentary film and historical truth pushes the documentary into overtly political alignments which influence its audience. This essay describes and dissects the history and rhetoric of documentary cinema, tracing its various modes of accost from the primeval moments of cinematic representation through its uses for ethnographers, artists, governments, and marginal political organizations in the present. The different uses of documentary result in a broad multifariousness of formal strategies to persuade the audience of a film's truth. These strategies are based on a desire to enlist the audition in the process of historical reconstruction. The documentary film differentiates itself from narrative cinema past claiming its status as a truth-telling mode. However, as a filmic construction, it relies on cinematic semiosis to convince its audience of its validity and truth. By looking at the history of documentary accost, this essay outlines the rhetoric of persuasion and evaluates its effectiveness. The documentary calls upon its audience to participate in historical remembering past presenting an intimate view of reality. Through cinematic devices such as montage, voice-over, intertitles, and long takes, documentary provokes its audience to new understandings about social, economic, political, and cultural differences and struggles. The films actively appoint with their world; even so, often viewers answer to the same devices motivating classic Hollywood narratives. Thus the genre reinforces ascendant patterns of vision. Recent challenges to the emotional manipulations of documentary deconstruct its forms and conventions then that the films interrogate non just historical retentivity but their own investment in its recreation. Imaginative documentaries, such as Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, foreground their partial and contingent qualities, pushing viewers to question cinematic representation and its place in historical memory. Moreover, they enquire audiences to call up virtually their place in the films' meanings as well as their responsibleness to the past and its interpretations.

Journal Data

History and Theory is the premier international journal in the field of theory and philosophy of history. Founded in 1960, History and Theory publishes manufactures, review essays, and summaries of books principally in these areas: disquisitional philosophy of history, cause, caption, interpretation, objectivity; speculative philosophy of history, comparative and global history; historiography, theoretical dimensions of historians' debates; history of historiography, theory and exercise of past historians and philosophers of history; historical methodology, examination of texts and other evidence, narrativism, stylistics; critical theory, Marxism, deconstruction, gender theory, psychoanalysis; time and civilisation, conceptions of humanity-in-time; related disciplines, interactions betwixt history and the natural and social sciences, the humanities, and psychology. JSTOR provides a digital archive of the impress version of History and Theory. The electronic version of History and Theory is available at http://www.interscience.wiley.com. Authorized users may be able to access the full text articles at this site.

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History and Theory © 1993 Wesleyan Academy

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Source: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2505348

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