Nichols "the Voice" and Its Role in Representing the Real

English Seminar

Documentaries on Realism

Essay 1

Nicole Schumann

19472315

Documentaries are used in everyday life to educate a group of people or get a certain point across to its viewers. When examining the different ways in which documentaries are constructed, one can see that each documentary has particular qualities that it adopts in order to represent the real. There are multiple ways in which the real may be represented to its viewers, however, with reference to Bill Nichols publication on The Voice of Documentary (1983), this essay will address one of the most important qualities of documentary, the ‘voice’ of a documentary, and how it effects documentaries differently.

First it is important to understand what one means by the ‘real’. The real refers to what is accurate information portrayed in a documentary. Butchart expresses how a documentary and the images and visual representations it creates, plays the role of a mediator between the real and reality (Butchart 427). Once the concept of the real is understood, one could see how documentaries need to adopt various ‘voices’ they perceive as being the most reliable when it comes to representing the real.

Nichols defines the ‘voice’ of documentaries as, “[…] something narrower than style; that which conveys to us a sense of a texts social point of view, of how its speaking to us and how it is organising the materials it is presenting to us” (Nichlos18). It is essential that a documentary has a voice in order for the message to be conveyed to the viewer in a particular way. There are various voices that one can use when compiling a documentary: The Griersonian Traditional address, cinema vérité (observational film), direct address (interview orientated) and self reflexive voice.

The Griersonian tradition was one of the first understood forms of documentary. As an authoritative, God-like narrative, it was primarily used in educational films where more visuals were adopted on top of the ‘all-knowing’ voiceover. Cinema vérité, or observational film, was used to convey reality as it was, using original footage or trying to catch everyday events, untouched. This style attempts to give you the most authentic vision of the events the views are watching. the next style, direct address, involves the narrator speaking to those watching, predominantly in the form of interviews. With people stepping onto camera to tell their story there are pros and cons to this form of documentary. Finally, the self reflexive strategy of documentary uses a mix of the two above making it, as Nichols expresses, “patently clear […] that documentaries always were forms of re-representation[...]” (Nichlos 18).

Cinema vérité and direct address styles of documentary, as the most used forms, have their advantages and their disadvantages. First we will look at cinema vérité. With no medium of direct address this form of film give the viewer a raw view of a subject. This gives the viewer the ability to decide for themselves how they personally feel about the visuals being shown, where one might find an event alarming another might find empowering. Cinema vérité focuses on the personal perception of the viewer rather than the contents and uses ‘found’ stories rather than romanticised conventional films. With cinema vérité’s use of the camera it truly does aid the viewer in believing that what they are seeing is purely observational and authentic. However, in an attempt to deliver an authentic viewing, these films swop creativity in order to bring back, as much as possible, a historical event. As Nichols says, “the films produce the structure in which ‘facts’ themselves take on meaning precisely because they belong to a coherent series of differences” (Nichlos 21) this expresses how this style attempts to represent the real within a film, creating facts for the audience. (Nichols 20-21)