In-Reply-To: Your message of Wed, 03 Mar 93 10:04:17 -0500. <[log in to unmask]> Date: Wed, 03 Mar 93 17:00:39 EST This discussion of Subjectivity/Objectivity seems to have gotten far off track from its original focus on documentary film. As a result, somethings have gotten seriously muddled. For me, documentary refers to all non-fiction film. In non-fiction literature, there are a range of different modes of writing, some speaking from a personal voice (such as a personal essay), others from a collective voice (such as a manifesto or a catalog or a corporate press release), some from an explicitly subjective voice (such as an editorial), others from an explicitly "objective" voice (such as a newspaper report.) The same, surely, must be true for non-fiction film or documentary. The fact that a large percentage of documentaries in this country are made by the Network news division should not lead us to reduce documentary to journalism -- even by analogy. ROGER AND ME, for example, makes no pretense of objective journalism; it is a personal essay which comments on contemporary developments in the filmmaker's home town. HARVEST OF SHAME, to cite another example from the discussion, merged newsreporting with explicitly marked editorial. There is no way to read the closing moments of that film as objective journalism and Murrow made no pretense of objectivity. The case of HIGH SCHOOL is more complicated since Weisman's technique involves an explicit repression of the marks of narration, while never-the-less constructing an argument about the nature of institutional society. Much of the discussion, it seems to me, tries to impose journalistic categories on these documentaries without recoginizing that the analogy to essay writing is perhaps more apt and appropriate. People use the word, SHOULD, a lot here and I think that "SHOULD" in this case is the institutional voice of a particlar school of journalism that may not be appropriately applied to these films. Now, all of this fails to address what I see as a seperate question: whether objective documentary is in fact possible, viable, desirable, etc. I happen to fall into the camp that sees "objectivity" as practiced by American journalism to be larger a matter of rhetorical structure and self image rather than of practice. As a former journalist, I quickly learned the conventions for constructing news stories, conventions which went well beyond the inverted pyramid and the 4 Ws and included particular narrative formulas which definitely shaped the news that was presented and a sense of what stories would get editorial approval and which wouldn't. I am not convinced those conventions result in more "objective" accounts. I would rather see us encourage a critical interpretation of all nonfiction writing, which recognizes generic differences in rhetorical style and attempts to locate institutional perspectives and filters. I don't see this as a lowering of standards but an attempt to awaken critical intelligence. But, frankly, this whole line of argument doesn't interest me very much. As a journalism undergraduate almost two decades ago, these issues were already run into the ground in the responses to New Journalism (Tom Wolfe) or Gonzo journalism (Hunter S. Thompson), both of whom were ultimately essayists rather than journalists. --Henry Jenkins