What a documentary is, after all

Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism

Volumn 63, Issue 2, 2005, Pages 105-117

  Plantinga, Carl ^a  

^a CALVIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 67149084952     PISSN: 00218529     EISSN: 15406245     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.0021-8529.2005.00188.x     Document Type: Review

References (29)

1. Bill Nichols, Introduction to Documentary (Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 99-138
2. C. S. Peirce, "The Icon, Index, and Symbol" in Collected Papers, 8 vols., ed. Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss (Harvard University Press, 1931-1958), vol. II
3. See my Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film (Cambridge University Press, 1997), p. 59. The implications of the indexical bond between photograph and referent can easily be overestimated and misunderstood. See pp. 40-82 for an extended discussion of the nature and uses of moving-image photography in nonfiction films. It is also worth noting that the moving photograph can function simultaneously as an index, icon, and symbol
4. For an account of various attempts to define the documentary outside of philosophy, see Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Nonfiction Film, pp. 7-39
5. For a critique of postmodernist and poststructuralist theories of the documentary, see Noël Carroll, "Nonfiction Film and Postmodernist Skepticism" in Post-Theory: Reconstructing Film Studies, ed. David Bordwell and Noël Carroll (University of Wisconsin Press, 1996), pp. 283-306
6. see also my essay, "Moving Pictures and the Rhetoric of Nonfiction Film: Two Approaches" in Post-Theory, pp. 307-324
7. Gregory Currie, "Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57 (1999): 285-297
8. Further references to the Currie essay will be made parenthetically within the text. The two published responses to this essay and Currie's replies are very interesting. See Noël Carroll, "Photographic Traces and Documentary Films: Comments for Greg Currie," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000): 303-306
9. Gregory Currie, "Preserving the Traces: An Answer to Noël Carroll," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 58 (2000): 306-308
10. Jinhee Choi, "A Reply to Gregory Currie on Documentaries," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 317-319
11. Gregory Currie, "Response to Jinhee Choi," The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 59 (2001): 319-320
12. Here Currie makes reference to Kendall Walton's essay, "Transparent Pictures: On the Nature of Photographic Realism," Critical Inquiry 11 (1984): 246-277. Currie notes that Walton acknowledges a debt to the work of Paul Grice
13. Carl Plantinga, "Defining Documentary: Fiction, Non-Fiction, and Projected Worlds," Persistence of Vision 5 (1987): 44-54
14. and Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980)
15. Plantinga, "Defining Documentary," pp. 52-53
16. Carroll, "Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion: A Conceptual Analysis" in Film Theory and Philosophy, ed. Richard Allen and Murray Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), pp. 173-202
17. Carroll, "Fiction, Non-Fiction, and the Film of Presumptive Assertion," p. 186
18. For a critique of subjectivist definitions of the documentary, see my essay, "The Limits of Appropriation: Subjectivist Accounts of the Fiction/Nonfiction Film Distinction" in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind, ed. Ib Bondebjerg (University of Luton Press, 2000)
19. See Trevor Ponech, "What is Non-Fiction Cinema?" in Film Theory and Philosophy, pp. 203-220
20. see also Trevor Ponech, What is Non-Fiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication (Boulder: Westview Press, 1999)
21. Ponech, "What is Non-Fiction Cinema?" pp. 204-205
22. Ponech, What is Non-Fiction Cinema?: On the Very Idea of Motion Picture Communication, pp. 8-39
23. His significantly revised taxonomy can be found in Introduction to Documentary (Indiana University Press, 2001), pp. 99-138
24. Currie, "Visible Traces: Documentary and the Contents of Photographs," p. 296
25. For a discussion of the philosophical implications of cinema verité, see Carroll's "From Real to Reel," Philosophic Exchange 14 (1983): 5-46
26. Errol Morris and Peter Bates, "Truth Not Guaranteed: An Interview with Errol Morris," Cinéaste 14 (1989): 17
27. Many philosophers have given up attempts to find necessary and sufficient conditions in favor of characterizing paradigm cases of the concept in question, as I do here. See, for example, Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge University Press, 2003)
28. Ronald de Sousa, for another example, suggests that a greater understanding of the emotions will occur once we avoid the partiality of, but nonetheless learn from, each of the various theories of emotion. See Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion (MIT Press, 1987), p. 22
29. See Plantinga, Rhetoric and Representation in Non-fiction Film, pp. 171-190, for a discussion of what I call the "poetic voice" in documentary