Minh-ha then writes about the anthropologic documentary. Since the director made it an “action documentary” it has won many awards, and you can also text a seven digit number to donate ten dollars to a fund that will ” help make a difference and end the yearly dolphin hunt in Taiji, Japan,” whatever that may mean. Or is there even a schism between the two? Also, Minh-ha’s comment that spectator’s influence with monetary aspects seem somewhat true. It almost seemed that the excitement and the action of the film was what really drove it, not the material they were catching.
The trailer is about eighty percent about how capturing the images was difficult because they were forbidden and had to break into wherever they were shooting the images. She was explaining to me how captivating and devastating it was. This really struck a note with me because I had been talking to my sister about The Cove, which I have never seen, but watched the trailer. She argues that the viewer is a spectator where everyone is not responsible for what they see” (95). With these conventions of documentary Minh-ha argues that documentary film has an empashis on “capturing the reality ‘out there’ for us ‘in here'” (95).
In fact, after reading my notes on the film I wrote things like “confusing” and “distracting.” These are not things to give a viewer the information so easily and I think it avoids some of the conventions of documentary that she takes up as problematic. In Minh-ha’s film Surname Viet Given Name Nam she does use a documentary convention, interviewing, but she weaves it in between poetry, imagery and music. Minh-ha writes, “documentary reduced to a mere vehicle of facts may be used to advocate a cause, but it does not constitute one in itself hence, the perpetuation of the bipurtite system of division in the content- verses-form rationale” (99). Documentary film makers have been challenging this notion of objectivity. Since the documentary film is trying to inform us, notions of recording the truth have been infused in it. She explains some of the ways directors have tried to create this aesthetic is with real time, minimal editing, and filming independent of the tripod as ways of capturing that seems more “authentic” (94). Minh-ha then goes into detail of how documentary has had a specific aesthetic, what she calls the “aesthetic of objectivity” (93). Avoiding the process of reducing “film theory to specialization and of expertise, one that serves to constitute a discipline” (93). So with all of these competing and different directions to think about documentary film, Minh-ha is avoiding finalizing documentary’s meaning.
Minh-ha suggests that documentary film has been conceptualized the anti aesthetic (98), that it has been sometimes reduced to a mere vehicle of facts (94), but that it is never neutral (100). If it is invented then it is not documentary” (92). If the material is actual, then its documentary. The first sentence of her article is, “There is no such thing as documentary.” Okay, does this mean stop here? A little later Minh-ha offers Lindsay Anderson’s notion of documentary, “It isn’t a question of technique, it is a question of the material. With this in mind she provides different ways to think of what documentary is. But before she gives documentary a fleeting definition, Minh-ha attacks the idea of getting to a final meaning because rather she argues meaning is “on the run” (92). I have delved into many different definitions which provide different approaches to what documentary is. Some of the questions that she addressed include: What is documentary? What are the conventions of documentary? How does the film function as a cultural production? Is reflexivity enough?ĭocumentary film is not easy to explain what it is.
Her usage of humor and quotes provides a different kind of text that has movement to it. Minh-ha takes on some imperative question that I have had, not giving them a final answer, but providing me with something to think with. Minh-ha published in, Theorizing Documentary, provides a way to think about documentary differently. “The Totalizing Quest of Meaning,” written by Trinh T.