Migration Documentary Films in Post-War Australia By Liangwen Ku ...

argued that poststructuralist theorists regarded the documentary film as a representation constructed by the interplay of complex discourses. Films can represent the world only from a particular point of view. Thus, they ‘would deny a discourse of realism, and urge on documentary a discourse of representation’ (p. 104). Nichols proposed the same idea of treating documentary as a representational system. Nichols (2001) argued,

Furthermore, the dimensions of rhetoric, persuasion, and argument in the documentary representation are much more important than actuality, likeness, or reproduction, in Nichols’s thesis. He wrote, ‘Documentary also makes a representation, or a case, an argument, about the world explicitly or implicitly’ (2001, pp. 111–112). This world of representation was considered by many scholars as the socio-historical world we live in. ‘Documentary has had at its core a notion of the socio-historical world as its primary referent’ (Roscoe & Hight, 1997, p. 76). Beattie (2004) argued that documentary filmmakers draw on ‘past and present actuality—the world of social and historical experience—to construct an account of lives and events’ (p. 10). Nichols (1991) wrote, ‘Documentary remains distinct in its representation of the historical world, the world of power, dominance, and control, the arena of struggle, resistance, and contestation’ (p. 115). The documentary employment of creative shaping, dramatisation, fiction narrative, mind reflection (as in Rotha’s concept), rhetoric, and argument are all about representing the socio-historical world.