Introduction: Representation and Documentary Emotion

Abstract

To speak about documentary is to immediately bring to mind the genre’s associations with science, education and social responsibility, or what Bill Nichols has called the ‘discourses of sobriety’ (Representing Reality 3–4). In focusing on documentary and the emotions, this book is not proposing that these strong associations be bypassed, but rather that the emotionality inherent to sobriety should be more fully examined. This is an investigation into how individuals are positioned by documentary representation as subjects that are entrenched in the emotions, whether it is pleasure, hope, pain, empathy or disgust. The individuals I am referring to are, in some instances, film-makers, and in others, those who are featured in the documentary. By ‘entrenched’ I mean not simply that the poetics of the film, such as music, rhetoric or narrative,¹ frame individuals in ways that elicit emotional responses from viewers, but that emotion confers cultural meanings onto others. Emotions are not only private matters; they also circulate in the public sphere where they are fashioned across histories of signification, different media forms and other technologies of social life. Thus, two critical considerations guide my analysis in this book. The first examines how emotion is produced in particular documentaries and how the audience is addressed by this emotion.