Chapter Eight

Question 8: How Have Documentaries Addressed Social and Political Issues?

            Within this chapter Nichols discusses people as victims or agents, constructing national identity, contesting the nation-state, beyond nationalism: new forms of identity, redefining the politics of identity, and social issues and personal portraiture. For people as victims or agents, Nichols considers that to act unethically or misrepresent other involves politics and ideology too. He gives the example of journalist Brian Winston who argued that the 1930s documentary filmmakers in Great Britain took a romantic view of their working-class subjects. Ultimately, failing to see the worker as an active self-determining agent of change. Due to this the worker suffered from a “plight” that others, mostly government agencies, should do something about (Nichols 212). To this we take exception to the blanket condemnation of documentary and to the assumption that more radical documentaries alone will solve the pressing issues.

            Focusing on the construction of nationality and nationalism, which involves the construction of a sense of community. The word “‘community’ invokes feelings common purpose and mutual respect, of reciprocal relationships closer to family ties than contractual obligations” (215). To a community shared values and beliefs are vital, it often seems like an “organic” quality binding together by sharing a tradition, culture, or common goal. This even seems to be far removed from issues of ideology where competing beliefs struggle to achieve our minds and hearts. However, according to Nichols, the most insidious forms of ideology may be the ones that make a community seem natural and the sense of community always comes at the price of alternative values and beliefs considered unorthodox, rebellious, or illegal. “The politics of documentary film production address they ways in which this work helps give tangible expression to the values and beliefs that build, or contest, specific forms of social belonging, or community, at a given time and place,” says Nichols (216).  

            When challenging the Nation-State, many filmmakers proposed a sense of community based on actions, and changes, that governments seemed unprepared to accept, or make. Their documentaries opposed the policies of governments and industries. This eventually led to these filmmakers constituting the political avant-garde of documentary filmmaking. Nichols proceeds to give an example; in the U.S. this activity goes back to the efforts of the Workers’ Film and Photo Leagues of the 1920s and 1930s, which produced information about strikes and other issues from the perspective of the working class (223). These filmmakers adopted participatory mode, consistently identifying and collaborating with their worker-subjects, thus avoiding the risk of portraying them as powerless victims.  

            Going beyond the nationalism, new forms of identity began to arise. The formulation “we speak about us to you” took on a new emphasis that spread into a wide range of neglected corners of social life. Including the woman of many different cultures such as, African Americans, Asian Americans, and Native Americans, Latinos and Latinas, gays and lesbians. This is associated with the rise of a “politics of identity” which celebrated the pride and integrity of marginalized or ostracized groups, giving them a voice.

            Redefining the politics of identity has become the process of addressing the questions of alliances and affinities among various subcultures, groups, and movements. This represents another shift from the earlier construction of national identities to the recognition of partial or hybrid identities that seldom settle into a single and permanent category. As a result, an emphasis on hybridity and displacement exists in tension with the more sharply defined contours of an identity politics (238). Documentary filmmakers try to find a way to represent issues in ways that keep a sense of their magnitude in the lives of people who confront them.

            Two different emphases characterized the political voice of many of the films discussed in this chapter, social issues and personal portraiture.  These can be found at work in all six modes of documentary representation. Social issue documentaries take up public issues from a social perspective. Personal portrait films place their focus on the individual rather than the social issue. Some documentaries set out the try to explain aspects of the world to us. They analyze problems and propose solutions. Others invite us to understand aspects of the world more fully. They observe, describe, or poetically evoke situations and interactions.