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In different ways, elements of the 'biographical' have always figured as a key constituent within the documentary approach. They have often provided the basis in a particular life or lives upon which to develop a more general theme, commentary and argument. Here, both sides of the category of 'experience'-the objectivity of circumstance and event and the subjectivity of perception and response-have a role. Connie Fields' The Life and Times ofRosie the Riveter (USA, 1980) provides a quite influential instance of this basis at work in feminist historical critique. In Rosie, each of the women whose experiences and reflections will form part of the film's general exposition is initially established in terms of a brief autobiographical account. By this means, speakers are located in a personal history before beginning to offer testimony that will finally question how we should read the more official versions of the historical in circulation. They are no longer simply 'voices' recruited to expositional purpose, they are people, the specificity of whose lives irradiate the whole film, having both an evidential and a rhetorical strength.
Documentary is now, in many countries, primarily a televisual rather than cinematic genre. This strengthens its biographical tendency, since television may be seen as in many ways a biographical medium across a very wide range of its outputs. One of the defining features of its primary form of fiction-soap opera-is the detailed and sustained attention that it gives to the life-narratives of its characters. In many television documentaries, in what is in some ways a reverse movement to that of Rosie, the biographical is reached (one might say 'descended to') only after sections of exposition and commentary. Its job is to illustrate, substantiate and document what has earlier been put forward in more abstract terms. Once again, the usage is likely both to be evidential and rhetorical-proof being, in theory, different from illustration, but often difficult to separate from it in the terms of any given portrayal. Sometimes, the movement is both upwards to the abstract and then down again to the concrete experiential, a regular shifting between the terms of real living and the particular framework of issues, problems or questions which provides the main dynamic of documentary engagement.
In a particular version of this...