|
|
This is a limited free preview of this book. Please buy full access.
on a theory of realism and should just describe the ‘surface values of a subject’. Instead, ‘to narrate’ is much more important than ‘to describe’. Thus, in his thought, documentary should be treated as ‘a method which more explosively reveals the reality of it’ (Cowie, 1997, p. 63). Hawes adopted Grierson’s perspective and shared the same definition of documentary. Bertrand (1999) summarised Hawes’s concept:
Nichols (1991) agreed with Grierson and Hawes’s concept of dramatisation in making documentary films. Documentaries are ‘fictions with plots, characters, situations, and events like any other’ (p. 107). Nichols stressed the importance of dealing with challenges and dilemmas such as the film introduction, the rising tensions, and conflicts in a dramatic way in the middle, and provision of resolution and closure at the end. ‘They do all this with reference to a “reality” that is a construct, the product of signifying systems, like the documentary film itself’. Rotha et al. (1968), on the other hand, believed that ‘no documentary can be completely truthful’, due to the changing nature of society and the limitations of camera action. Routt (1991) wrote,
Documenting reality is a matter of ‘an attitude of mind’ to Rotha et al.. To many others, documentaries are representations. They are the representations of social, cultural, and historical reality. P. Hughes (1993)