Stories We Tell ends with Geoffrey Bowes confessing that he had, in fact, slept with Diane Polley “on one occasion” (Stories We Tell 01:43:38). The documentary is an expression of the love Sarah Polley has for her deceased mother and the resolution of dissonance she felt confronting her mother’s flaws. The credibility of Geoffrey Bowes’ claim, and the actuality of all the details in the movie, are irrelevant because it is an evocative document of a single person’s perspective, not an account of historic events that have any bearing on the lives of the general public. The function of Shoah is quite different. The director, Claude Lanzmann, does not get to decide what is important because the Holocaust is not his story to tell. The full length film was 9 hours and 26 minutes, and though I imagine it would be quite taxing to watch the entire movie, anything Lanzmann left on the cutting room floor would have been lost forever. The fundamental difference between a documentary that is informative, like Shoah, and one that is evocative, as is the case with Stories We Tell: one is an account for the public, and the other is a personal expression.

Bill Nichols chapter on documentary cinema from Engaging Cinema categorizes it into 6 modes based on form (expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflexive, and performative), but he only addresses the function as persuasive (Nichols 114 – 126). The first step in conscious viewing should be differentiating between a documentary that functions as a portrait of an experience from a perspective, which can have multiple truths, and a document of historic significance, which needs to be judged as true, false, or incomplete.

Evidence of the problem with a lack of distinction between informative and evocative is clear in the last two examples Nichols gives; Nanook of the North and Triumph of the Will. Nanook of the North was an evocative portrait masquerading as an informative documentary, and Triumph of the Will was evocative propaganda presented as historic documentation. Triumph of the Will did not contain any lies, but it was not informative and no more evidential than Stories We Tell. Similarly, the events portrayed in Nanook of the North were inaccurate because the filmmaker, Robert J. Flaherty, was trying to paint a romantic portrait of the life in the north. He saw the details of the actual events as inconsequential to the public, so he gave himself license to misrepresent the reality of Inuit life. This is contrasted with Claude Lanzmann’s approach to the witness’ accounts in Shoah. Several of the witnesses did not want to relive their ordeal, but details of the atrocities are too important to let the survivors be silent (Nichols 119 – 120).

Nichols tries to separate the sciences from the humanities as issues of objectivity vs. subjectivity (Nichols 129 – 130); I think this is a mistake. Subjective framing is unavoidable in all areas of study, even science. An inability to observe all the factors that contribute to a system, does not preclude the ability to judge the output. People are complicated, and immeasurable ambiguous conditions contribute to our decisions, but our actions are objective. The value of a life cannot be quantified, but the recounts are evidence of an objective event. While many past events cannot be observed and motivation is a complicated internal process, the effect on an overwhelming number of people can be uncovered as a psychological scar that could not exist without a specific cause. Accordingly, some historic events can be seen, judged, and quantified through the evidence of testimony.

Stories We Tell is a personal journal and Shoah functions as a testimony in a trial. Personal stories belong to the participants, and the events can be freely portrayed from the owners’ angle, but the evidence of history belongs to the public. There are people who deny that the Holocaust happened and those who deny their responsibility (Shoah 00:44:30). Human nature is on trial, and letting ignorance or egregiously deliberate misrepresentation slip back into our culture needs to be condemned. Preserving the awful details of the Holocaust as objective truth is critical so we do not deny our role, contributing to the cruelty through ignorance. As viewers and analysts we need to be conscious of the function of documentary cinema, and not group evocative portraits with informative historic testimony.

Nichols, Bill. Engaging Cinema: An Introduction to Film Studies. New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 2010. Web.

Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator.” Film Quarterly. 67.2 (2013): 59-61. Web.

Professor Nick Browne describes a fundamental problem with the analysis of cinematic narration through existing paradigms; the motivation behind the composition of a sequence based on the action and the gaze of the character does not consider the authority of the narrator. Instead, he proposes a reevaluation of the “center” through “reading” the film and assessing rational through an implied narrator placed by the spectator (126). His case is explored through a sequence 28 minutes into the movie Stagecoach which defies previous analytic structures, but is clarified when the text is interpreted through “implied position of the spectator” (125).

Traditional explanations for camera position and framing rationalize placement as “following the action” (126); the camera follows the gaze of a spectator who would be watching the events on a stage, and the content is edited to highlight the attention of the audience. An important characteristic noted in the traditional paradigm is in the authority of gaze, which is guided by the action. A second theory referenced is Oudart’s suture theory, which places the authority for the shot in an offscreen viewer dubbed the “absent one”; shot/countershot sequences are interpreted as depictions of the gaze of an off camera character within the scene. The suture system addresses the character, but neither theory addresses the “authority of narrative”. Browne proposes interpretation of imagery as motivated through a combination of the judgment of an “implied narrator” and the “imaginative action” caused by his placement (126).

(The camera is placed for the vantage of the antagonist, but the audience identifies with the protagonist.)

Attempting to analyze the opening and closing shots of the sequence through the traditional or suture systems yields a problem attaching the point of view to character or action. Browne argues that the failure arises because the shots function to present the complex psychological state of the group, rather than a single character. He supports his assertion with the fact that the opening and closing shots cannot be attached to anyone’s glance, and also sites supporting examples when the spectator is placed in one character’s location, but identifying with another (135). These exceptions make the interpretation of the figurative placement or “center” of the spectator complicated because the viewer can disagree with the opinions of the character represented through the geographic position and angle of the camera. This act of defiance with the physical perspective places the narrative authority in the possession of the spectator (132-133).

The switching of modes, alternating contrasting elements, is read as a as a coherent statement to the spectator, conveying a sense of meaning over time. Key to the process of reading is forgetting the elements that composed the dramatic impact, brought about by the placement of a new occluding significant event for the spectator to read, an effect Browne calls “fading” (135). A spectator reads emphasis implied through temporal variation in cycles of retrospection, fading, delay, and anticipation, an act that further involves the spectator (136).

Identification with a character on screen, without a sense of displacement as the shots change, relieves the spectator’s point of view from a “given spatial location” (134 and 137). The text the spectator inhabits is, as Browne puts it, “the product of the narrator’s disposition toward the tale” (136). Within the presentation of this structure the author transfers the appearance of authority onto the characters.  To the reader, the “center”, in the context of the specular text, is a function that is adopted as the one who makes the form intelligible, and for the spectator the center is the impression of being able to occupy the space of the narrative (137).

Relation to the image on screen is literal, but the relation to the space implied can be recognized through different terms. The audience is outside the action; actor’s and spectator’s glances cannot meet, the result is a “prohibition boundary” that separates the spectator from the action, but this boundary is the defining element of the narrative system, segregating the film as  “different from dream in being the product of another” (137 – 138). The result is a form which “conveys a point of view and define(s) the course of the reading” (139), “assist(ing) in the construction of attitudes”. The act of reading the scene becomes a performance that “recreates the point of view enacted in a scene” (140).

Works Cited:

Braudy, Leo, and Marshall Cohen. Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.