In Engaging Cinema, Bill Nichols uses the chapter, “Documentary Film,” to focus on identifiable elements of the genre. Nichols explains how the purpose of a documentary directly informs its technical and stylistic choices. He begins by highlighting some of the differences documentary films possess from that of narrative cinema, particularly in their respective goals. Nichols notes that documentaries, “typically seek to engage the viewer in relation to some aspect of the world in which we live,” as opposed to “an imaginary or fictional world” (Nichols 99). Of course, this also stresses the significance of point of view and just whose world we are introduced to. Nichols expands upon documentary’s tendencies to also include those which “make frequent use of poetic and narrative storytelling techniques as well as rhetorical ones” (Nichols 99). We see these modes employed by Sarah Polley in her personal narrative and poetic rendering of her documentary Stories We Tell (2012). I’m particularly interested in how Polley uses these modes to evoke an emotional response within her viewers as a form of persuasiveness. In my own viewing, I was greatly moved by the exposure of process and the collage-like building of memory or imaginings of the past.

One element that seems important to Nichols, is the relationship between perspective and persuasion associated with the genre of documentary. Nichols clarifies that “persuasiveness is not necessarily identical to persuasion: a documentary may move viewers or arouse feelings more than persuade them of the soundness of a specific argument” (Nichols 100). This is something we are made well aware of as elements of production and the inner workings of filmmaking (actors, crew, equipment, and process) are made visible throughout Stories We Tell. This impulse can appeal to the viewer’s emotions as we are exposed to, immersed in, or connect with the viewpoint of the world the documentary is guiding us through. Nichols cites two goals of documentary film when he writes, “engaging the viewer in a distinct perspective emotionally or persuading the viewer of a particular perspective intellectually go hand in hand in documentary, even though different films vary the balance between these two goals” (Nichols 100). In this way, Nichols also argues that these goals are privileged over “the narrative emphasis on telling an engaging story or the avant-garde stress on the form of the work itself” (Nichols 100).

Emotions are not the only mode a film can appeal to in efforts to incite change or effect. Nichols draws attention to documentary’s relationship to “reason or logic” as tools utilized by filmmakers (Nichols 100). However, logic alone may not move a viewer towards a drastic shift in opinion or perspective. Nichols explains its rather nuanced use: “for rhetorical purposes the appearance of logic may do the job as well as actual logic” (Nichols 101). This, I find particularly interesting in its connection to film as a medium, one that employs appearances by its innate connection to visuality. Nichols spends quite a bit of the chapter discussing how rhetoric influences documentary film’s purpose of persuasion and also identifies it as a means of dislodging documentary from a finite understanding of “truth.” He explains, “the anecdotes, impressions, or proofs may, in fact, be true, but most important for rhetorical discourse is that they convey the impression of truthfulness” (Nichols 102). This makes me wonder, how significant is an individual’s own criticality in watching documentary different from watching classic narrative cinema? Or is it different at all?

When discussing images used in Pare Lorentz’s 1936 film, The Plow That Broke the Plains, Nichols explains, “the images have a powerful impact” and that they “fulfill [their] persuasive purpose” whether they are “truly from the American Midwest in the early 1930’s” or not (Nichols 103). But is the viewer aware of this possible discrepancy while viewing the film–both the 1936 audience or the audience of today? Later, Nichols continues, “the purpose of the film is not to provide documents and evidence as such but to shape a documentary experience that uses such material to make a moving, affecting case from a particular perspective” (Nichols 103). Are there some documentaries where the “impression of truthfulness” feels more fitting or comfortable than others in that we accept a degree of manipulation for the greater effect of emotional and intellectual persuasion necessary? How might we catalog “truth” or “truthfulness” in Sarah Polley’s Stories We Tell in comparison to Kirsten Johnson’s Cameraperson (2016)?

Perhaps it is significant to look at the ways Nichols identifies “the six modes of documentary film” in order to ground a conversation around how each of these documentaries appeals to emotional and intellectual persuasiveness. The six modes Nichols spots are expository, poetic, observational, participatory, reflective, and performative. Nichols notes that multiple modes may be functioning within one documentary at a time, and it is less of an either/or than a means to locate “a set of conventions for representing reality” (Nichols 114). The fact that there are many modes only further confirms the subjectivity of perspective in regards to a depiction of reality or experience: “Although there may be only one historical world, and even if certain facts about it can be agreed upon as objectively true, the ways of seeing and representing that world, like the ways of interpreting it, vary considerably” (Nichols 114).

In relation to this week’s viewings, I’m particularly curious how the intersection of these modes helps to serve the emotional effect created in Sarah Polley’s film. Nichols considers different techniques used by documentary filmmakers to elicit various reactions from an audience such as voice-over and interviews, both of which we encounter in Stories We Tell. Early on in the film, we are made aware of the documentary itself with the inclusion of the boom, the lights, the process of setting up for interviews, and Sarah Polley’s voice and face as both filmmaker and subject. This choice seems to be in conversation with a few different modes. It is poetic, in its stressing of “form or pattern over an explicit argument, even though it may well have an implicit perspective on some aspect of the historical world” (Nichols 116). But it is also greatly participatory in that “the filmmaker interacts with subjects–probing, questioning, challenging, perhaps even provoking” (Nichols 119).

Because this documentary’s intentions appear to lie in its emotional connections, one way of eliciting such emotion from the viewer is by exposing the elements of process. The searching for “truth” (a word mentioned in the film—particularly of significance to Harry Gulkin in relation to art’s purpose and possibly his own) is being documented by the very act of making this film. Or as Nichols writes, “the film becomes a record of the interactions of subjects and filmmaker” (Nichols 116). Of course, this is also an aesthetic decision made as well. A sense of humor arises within this film from its level of awareness and self-referentiality. This seems to bring a closeness between the medium and the viewer, the participants and the viewer, and ultimately a degree of kinship felt with the filmmaker. This sense of connectivity and tenderness appears to be Polley’s goal (or one of her goals) in creating this film–allowing the viewer to feel with her alongside her discoveries of self and within the filmmaking process.

In her article “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form,” Amelie Hastie speaks to this transformation of expectations. She writes, “if we ‘‘cooperate’’ with this film, we enter into the possibility of seeing it first as one thing, then as another. And in that active transformation— first the film’s and then our own—we witness the complexity of memory, narrative, and belief layering and unraveling before us” (Hastie 59). Later she continues to examine Polley’s specific choices as a filmmaker that “reveal[s] the past not as ‘‘truth,’’ as some might prefer it, but as imagination and re-creation” (Hastie 60). If Polley, as her voice-over explains, really is uncertain about the ultimate outcome of this film or in some ways its purpose, a part of her must understand the significance of including herself as one of the “storytellers” in the film. Her uncertainty calls upon our empathy, evokes a human connection we might locate within ourselves. The interview style relies on the interpersonal relationships of family. This allows for moments of humor and moments of deep sadness. The drive to reconstruct a past, a person, an unanswerable or perhaps unknown question, sets the documentary out on a poetically ambivalent quest, one that allows for many diversions, anecdotes, reenactments (that surprised me–might this be the use of a reflexive mode?), and moving interviews. Hastie describes this outcome beautifully when she writes, “the very chronology of the film, in its interweaving between past and present, both real and imagined, suggests that this compassion was always possible; our working through of these past experiences lays it bare” (Hastie 61). This makes me wonder, in what ways do Sarah Polley’s choices as a documentary filmmaker draw attention to the process of thinking, creating, and editing this documentary shift the focus and conversation from her specific family story to that of a larger question around the act of storytelling?

Hastie, Amelie. “The Vulnerable Spectator: Vagaries of Memory, Verities of Form.” Film Quarterly, vol. 67, no. 2, 2013, pp. 59–61. University of California Press, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2014.67.2.59.

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

Stories We Tell. Dir. Sarah Polley. Mongrel Media, 2012. OSU Secured Media Library. Web. 1 November 2020.

In thinking of Peter Wollen’s “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est,” I’d like to consider Weekend’s early traffic scene [00:15:15], where Corinne and Roland set off to Corinne’s dying father in hopes of receiving an inheritance, as a means of examining counter-cinema’s relationship to narrative and foregrounding. The sequence lasts for over seven minutes, and although it is certainly engaging, its length is also felt. For me, there were multiple moments while viewing this sequence when I expected a change in location, an additional component of the narrative to be introduced, perhaps even hoped for a cut, but each time my expectations (most likely informed by classical narrative cinema norms) were subverted. This might suggest a connection to Wollen’s argument that the handling of narrative in Godard’s counter-cinema is in direct conversation with classical narrative cinema and therefore must be discussed “in relation to the rest of cinema” (Wollen 426). 

Bordwell cites Bazin as “the first major critic of the art cinema, not only because he praised a loose, accidental narrative structure that resembled life but also because he pinpointed privileged stylistic devices for representing a realistic continuum of space and time (deep-focus, deep space, the moving camera, and the long take)” (Bordwell 652). In addition to the long take, the use of the moving camera is arguably the primary mode of conveying “documentary realism” and “character subjectivity” within this scene (Bordwell 652). We enter through a sound bridge of honking cars, suggesting that traffic has been building up perhaps long before we’ve arrived, a gesture to realism where life has and will continue before and after the film. Roland and Corinne drive past the first cars stuck in traffic, ostensibly on the wrong side of the road. The camera moves in unison with their car, picking up pace through the stop-and-go traffic in a tracking shot, until their car drives out of frame [00:15:30]. 

We pass a red car with its door open, a rather subdued clue into the comic peculiarity that is to come. The camera catches up to Roland and Corinne, but at a pace that makes us, the audience, oddly (as in uncomfortably–another point made by Wollen as a characteristic of art cinema) aware of the camera. This trait of “foregrounding,” a self-referentiality (of course, there are greater moments of overt self-referentiality of the film’s presence, medium, and stylistic techniques later in the film) is one of Wollen’s categories in identifying Godard’s counter-cinema (Wollen 420). Two men play cards on the trunk of their car while a man tosses a ball with a child through the roof of his car. We get a sense that this is somehow terribly normal (within the film) through the banality of the landscape–a relatively unchanging beige field in the French countryside, and the slow and steady pace in which we participate in the gathering of images or “image building” (Wollen 421). In some ways, we are even made aware of the medium of film as a sequence of images by the length of the shot itself, and in the long, landscape quality of the camera movements like a strip of film.

[00:16:08] The camera outpaces the car to give the viewer more information than the film’s characters and reveals the first crashed car turned on its head, perhaps not unlike what Bordwell refers to as, “the game with the narrator” (654). Suddenly, children seem to hatch from behind the wrecked car. At this point, the continuous honking of the cars and their choral effect, become almost ‘normal’ or accepted in that they now make a degree of sense within the senselessness. Just as this happens, music is introduced, but the soft piano fades almost as quickly as it appears [00:16:13]. What might this signify? If the sound of honking horns has transformed into an element of the soundtrack, what new purpose does music serve throughout this scene? Another layer in the chaos? This begs the additional question: how does sound function as erasure, and therefore a foregrounding, throughout the film? What and who is muted or silenced by the interruption of another sound and why? To what effect?

Roland and Corinne catch up to the camera, pull over, and argue with a group of men standing outside of their cars, but as the camera continues to track, we realize it is not just another car, but a truck transporting animals. A literal zoo: lions, monkeys, and a llama (?). Then singing children are added into the mix, and the camera mimics a double-take back towards the animals, but soon enough this too is normalized by the continuation of the tracking shot, as it is then grouped into the everyday’s absurdities. The same red car reappears in the line of traffic perhaps suggesting the relevance of time, the subjectivity of the psychological experience of time, or restating the feeling that we are simply going nowhere.

As the camera continues to track alongside the traffic jam, we see someone fixing their car, a group of people sitting under a tree, and throughout, there is continual arguing. Although, we can’t make out the dialogue from the distance and over the honking, implying that the exact words hold little significance. If “art cinema is less concerned with action than reaction,” at times, might this include the lack thereof (Bordwell 651)? With each new driver or passenger, the camera passes, perhaps the expected reactions of an audience are repositioned, literally moving along by way of the tracking and pace. Our attention, as Bordwell suggests, is on the reaction of the characters to this bizarre or possibly entirely ordinary scenario, and whether their reactions are that of frustration (the insistent sound of honking), celebration (the children singing), anger (the recurring fighting), they are arguably more significant than the actual action of the scene. If we were to simplify the narrative at this moment, there is not much happening in the scene other than a line of cars waiting (for what, at this point, we do not know, other than the prospect of moving forward). 

By [00:17:39], music re-enters (for the length of the Shell oil truck–a new unit of measurement) with all of its unanswered questions, the back of a bus, then the title card reads: “13H40.” A reminder of time. Then, “WEEKEND” flashes, a reminder of the film itself, its title, what we are doing and experiencing as an audience. Then, at [00:17:48]: “14H10”–somehow in two seconds, thirty minutes have passed. The camera rushes toward the crowd standing in the traffic jam and towards the horse-drawn cart, perhaps suggesting the clashes of industry, technology, mechanization, and once again, time. Bordwell stresses, “art cinema defines itself explicitly against the classical narrative mode, and especially against the cause-effect linkages of events. These linkages become looser, more tenuous in art film” (Bordwell 650). The camera continues tracking, passing another wrecked car, and a new man and child playing catch from the roofs of their cars. If we are to think of art cinema’s rejection of the sequential cause and effect coherence, then are we to interpret each instance/car/animal/child/game as a collection that is being gathered? Wollen proposes, “Godard, like Eisenstein before him, is more concerned with ‘image building’ as a kind of pictography, in which images are liberated from their roles as elements of representation and given a semantic function within a genuine iconic code” (Wollen 421). And I would have to agree–although these images hold associations, the cinematic and stylistic choices intrinsic to art cinema allow them to free themselves from their representational confines. This provides the audience with an entirely different “film reading” than that of classical narrative cinema (Wollen 421). The backwards car, another upside-down car, the couple playing chess on the road–everything is absurd until nothing is, and a new expectation arises, an authorial expectation in which, “the text becomes a composite structure, like that of a medieval macaronic poem, using different codes and semantic systems” (Wollen 422). 

Roland and Corinne continue to inch their way past the line of traffic, aggravating most. Then the camera follows a different car that pulls out of the line of traffic and reveals the first bloody body splayed in the dried grass. The group of children walks past the corpse, like everyone and everything else. The entirety of the wreckage is displayed with the entrance of music and more severed victims of the crash that has held up all of the cars and the audience in this incredibly long sequence. The police whistles and gestures cars through, including that of Roland and Corinne. They drive through with more conventional normalcy than the entire sequence, but somehow this moment feels the most absurd of all. What is Godard asking us to question here? The car drives out of the frame and the countryside fades to black. 

What are some of the ways in which the audience is affected by unanswered questions and feelings of ambiguity within “a survey form of narrative” (Bordwell 651)? 

How might art cinema’s “multiple diegesis” and “plurality of worlds” be functioning within this scene and in relation to the greater film (Wollen 421, 422)?

References:

Weekend. Dir. Jean-Luc Godard. Athos Films, 1967.

Bordwell, David. “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 649-657.

Wollen, Peter. “Godard and Counter Cinema: Vent d’Est.” Film Theory and Criticism, edited by Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen, Oxford University Press, pp. 418-426.