[Frameworks] Documentaries-diaries-essays or video/film installations that play with truth or cinema theory

[Bernard Roddy]

Hi Dave:

I was thinking about the way in which I tend to experience a personal work,
which could be closer to identifying with the maker or with someone who
wants to make such a work. And the sense of truth that would bear on such
work might better be compared to the significance of an explosion, the
blossoming of a field, or the rainbow at dawn: truth as a manifestation,
rather than as a mirror that gets it right, an image that is indiscernible
from the reality. I have long felt a scholar's hand in the insistence on
truth conceived as representation, and perhaps of equal significance to
this question would be the history of the lie. We are thus moving away from
a conception of language and the sign that is founded on representation, a
conception that has long been identified with the image of God as something
with a design for man and man as either living up to it or failing to do
so, truth as a plan that is fulfilled or subverted. That is a truth that
one can consider without cost, without anything at stake, a question for
the professional academic. It's all introductory documentary, however. The
books I am aware of include a couple that take up works the writers prefer
to think about for what is unsaid in them or otherwise unsayable.

Bernie

On Fri, Jun 7, 2019 at 5:35 PM Dave Tetzlaff <djtet53 at gmail.com> wrote:

> Fake docs like 'No Lies' and 'Daughter Rite' don’t really question the
> concept of truth in any profound way. They are also genre specific to
> Cinema Verite. If anything, the problem with Daubghter Rite is that the
> gimmick of the fakery subverts the theme more than it deepens it.
>
> So you can stage sequences with the same shooting and editing codes used
> in verite. So what?
>
> The famous short sequence on the bridge repeated three times in Letter
> from Siberia probably does more to "question the concept of 'truth in
> documentary’" than all the clever fakes and fauxs put together.
>
> Bernie mentioned Nichols’ ‘Intro to Documentary’ as touching on the topic,
> but I think his “Blurred Boundaries” is probably more relevant, though as
> usual the prose is hardly user-friendly.
>
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