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New Documentary: A Critical Introduction * Silke Panse Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, London and New York: Routledge, 2000, ISBN: 0-415-18296-4
A study of performance in documentary has been long overdue and now in Stella Bruzzi's book it has received serious consideration. Her key argument is that performativity is innate to non-fiction film; according to Bruzzi, documentaries demonstrate J.L. Austin's concept of the 'performative', in that they 'perform the actions they name', so that 'a documentary is its own document'. She supports the criticism of direct cinema as 'complidt with a false integrity' and attributes to the conventional journey documentary the same imposition of coherence upon the incoherent that, she goes on to argue, constitutes much documentary theory.
In her chapter on archive footage, Bruzzi first argues against any singular meaning of film as record, proposing that even the least consciously shaped images, like the accidental amateur footage of Kennedy's assassination, have meaning imposed either by alteration, like the removal of frames of the Zapruder film, or by contexualisation in the case of Emile De Antonio's compilation films. Here Bruzzi sets her account apart from the privileging of a fictional master narrative, critiquing Linda Williams' readings of The Thin Blue Line (1988) and Shoah (1985) as being already 'rooted in memory and eyewitness testimony, films that intentionally lack or exclude images of the events under scrutiny'. Likewise she counters Paul Arthur's sweeping arguments against the myth of authenticity attached to archival footage by noting that, although Esfir Shub's and Emile De Antonio's compilation films reframe the images, their 'potential original meaning' is maintained.
What follows is a shrewd and amusing study of Richard Nixon's incoherent televisual performances. Nixon may have preferred the state-regulated medium of television to other media, but television proved to be more in control of Nixon than vice versa and even the classic narrative strategy Umberto Eco detected in these appearances could not prevent, as Bruzzi puts it, his face from betraying his words, as a hysterical Nixon desperately tried to bridge the gap between reality and fiction through overacting. She tellingly relates De Antonio's 'eclectic' collage of Nixon in Mulhouse: A White Comedy (1971) to the former president's own opportunist adaptations: 'a dummy that has learned a series...