Researching into the ideas of Bill Nichols and his book Blurred Boundaries (1994), the documentary can have more metaphysical and symbolic methods of representing reality. Nichols Points out Roman Jacobson’s ‘six aspects of communication’, which include expression, referential, poetic, rhetoric, phatic and metacommunicative (1994, p.94).
Hollywood Fiction– This largely includes the ‘absence of reality, fantastical at times.
Expository Documentary– Stems from the 1930s, and directly addresses the real- ‘Overly Didactic.’
Observational Documentary– from the 1960s. Avoids direct commentary makes a record of things as they are happening. This can include a lack of context and historical facts.
Interactive Documentary– From the 1960s- 1970s. However, the person’s interview puts excessive faith in the witness and provides a ‘naive account of history’.
Reflexive Documentary-1980. Arises question to the documentary form. It can be considered too abstract and can lose insight into the factual issues at hand.
Performative Documentary– 1980s-1990s. ‘ Stresses the subjective of classically objective discourses’. The ‘loss of referential emphasis may relegate such films as avant-garde’ and can contain the overuse of style over fact.
Nichols states how the first four types of documentary modes emphasise the referent, while the performative documentary ‘inflects’ these modes into a different form of factual presentation (1994, p.95). Adding more metaphorical and inadvertently ambiguous meaning behind the real world’s presentation can help build a further sense of identity in the documentary, similar to the filmmaker Auter in style. Associating with my thesis topic at hand, the process of conveying personal experience through performative documentary methods could add a further level of emotional empathy in accentuating the symbolic representation of experience and provide interesting points when going into CGI documentary creation. Due to its artificial nature, the creation of assets and environments to accentuate personal recounts of events adds a deeper level of ‘performativity’, which could create additional points against the reliability of animated documentary, further blurring the line between fictional storytelling and factual account.
I feel these points and ideals could link to aspects such as Waltz with Bashir (Folman, 2008), which uses a lot of performative and non inherently overtly referential aspects in the way it represents hallucinatory and mentally constructed accounts of war, however, poses an intriguing statement that supports the real-life experience of the individuals involved. While previously covered in the critical report, the validity of personal experience through animation is something that can be explored further into its effectiveness of genre classification.
A Point Nichols brings forward is the point that performative documentary can embody an ‘existential situatedness’ that is relevant and a precondition of specific ‘class consciousness’ that arises watching more referentially created documentary. These are aspects to consider when viewing and partaking in the creation of the performative documentary as it may not be inherently accessible.
References
Nichols, B. (1994) Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.