ISSN: 1329-878X

Media International Australia

Documentary: Strangely Compelling
No. 82, November 1996

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Abstracts

Contents

Abstracts

Bill Nichols: What Really Happened: The Ax Fight Reconsidered.

Written in commemoration of the work of Timothy Asch, the essay begins with the author’s 1981 assessment of one of his most important films, The Ax Fight, and concludes with a reassessment fifteen years later. Whereas the first account of the film found it flawed for its use of narrative structure to import an ethnocentric conception of women in tacit form, the reassessment wonders if the use of narrative does not foster a more complex range of responses that retain something of the enigma of an event, rather than simply of women. Questions of ethnocentrism become supplemented by question of historiography, narrative, and visual representation that acknowledge the affective power and conceptual intricacy of Asch’s film.

Jay Ruby: Third Voice Films.

This paper is an exploration of auto-biographical/self-portrait film and its expansion among indigenous people through ‘assisted self-representation’. It suggests a way to broaden the range of individuals represented on film, lessen traditional forms of authority, increase the range of authorship, and provide documentarians an ethical and politically defensible position.

Barbara Rockburn: Cinéma Direct: History, Poetry and the Construction of Capture.

More than simply an aesthetic choice, cinéma direct was the cultural articulation of an emerging post-colonial articulation of an emerging post-colonial Québec. The filmic form functioned as an ideological statement of refusal of the patriarchal documentary tradition of the National Film Board of Canada. Through the deliberate inclusion/inscription of the voices of their subjects on their films, Québécois filmmakers sought to avoid the structural tendency of documentary forms to unconsciously colonise the objects of their gaze. The cinema direct tradition, as exemplified by Pour la Suite du Monde (Pierre Perrault, 1963) and chronique de la Vie Quotidienne (Jacques Leduc, 1977), is analysed as the appropriate and necessary cultural response of a colonised people to their marginalisation by the dominant ‘other’. By articulating their condition in their own language, Québécois filmmakers participating in the cinematic documentation of a proudly vocal Quiet Revolution.

Alyosha Goldstein: Total Communication: Cross-Examining the ‘Universality’ of Documentary and Digital Media.

Within the momentum of the information age and globalisation popular forms of documentary have acquired a particular currency. The types of agency imagined by the media and telecommunication industry are an important facet of these transnational processes. This essay examines the marketing of documentary and the discourse of interactivity in new media technologies in order to map the historical contingencies, cultural logic, and social dynamics which inform their notions of agency.

Lillian Leahy: Fidelity, Faith and Openness: Rescuing Observational Documentary.

Despite the theoretical critiques made of observational films in recent decades, the genre is currently gaining good audiences and strong institutional support from government film funding bodies in Australia. In an attempt to explain audience attraction to observational documentary films it is posited that viewers endow the observational style with presenting a greater fidelity to real states of affairs than other documentary modes. Secondly, the recognisable codes of observational film set up a filmmaker/audience contract; a viewer faith in seeing what the filmmaker believes is close to unmediated reality. Thirdly, because of the use of the extended take, loose structure and the refusal to fix meaning, observational films exhibit an openness and invite greater audience involvement in the construction of meaning.

Peter Hughes: Strangely Compelling: Documentary on Television.

The majority of critical and theoretical writing about documentary assumes that documentaries are films made for theatrical exhibition. In fact the majority of documentaries are screened in broadcast television where they reach a much bigger audience than in the cinema. The exhibition of documentaries on television requires an hitherto neglected attention to the audience and its role in the negotiation of meaning in the documentary. This active role of the audience, with the consequent inability to guarantee meanings, poses a challenge to the social project of the documentary. Broadcast television mobilises a range of strategies in the attempt both to produce audiences for documentaries and constrains the range of potential meaning s available in the text. One such strategy is the use of an on-screen host in some documentary time slots. Documentary on broadcast television needs to e seen against the background of a broad spectrum of factual programming including news, current affairs, ‘reality television’ and chat shows.

Paula Rabinowitz: Sentimental Contracts: dream and Documents of American Labour.

This essay traces the residual gendered codings of working-class identity present in Barbara Kopple’s academy award-winning documentary American Dream (1990). For decades, American radicals have sentimentalised a virile working class whose authenticity would overcome the corruption and pathos of bourgeois culture. Even in an age of labour’s retreat, this film challenges, yet ultimately reproduces melodramatic and sentimental narratives by overexaggerating men’s tears. Traditionally class struggle is dialectic, but current conditions have triangulates and fractured class alliances so that it becomes difficult to locate the heroes and villains. Kopple was denounced by many leftist critics for selling out the workers at Local P-9 in Austin, Minnesota, because her film tried to untangle the knotty difficulties unions face in contemporary transitional corporate America. Her film shares an uneasy history with less savoury attempts to plot labours’ place in history on its head to question these melodramatic narratives.

Faye Ginsburg and Toby Miller: Certifying Culture and Media: Anthropology Meets Cinema Studies.

This article discusses the establishment of the Program in Culture and Media at New York University, a joint program of the Department of Cinema Studies, Anthropology, and Film and Television. Initiated in 1986 as a Program in Ethnographic Film, the conceptualisation of the curriculum has changed considerably to a more expanded notion of the relationship between culture and media, in terms of both production, theory, and substantive areas. For example, we have developed study and programming areas around indigenous media, popular culture, and globalisation of media, in relation to the history of genre of ethnographic film. This broader framework provides the context for work in production, theory and ethnographic research into media.

Yao Souchou: The Internet: State Power and Techno-Triumphalism in Singapore.

The Singapore state’[s approach to the internet is marked by an uncertain feeling regarding its technological potentials and the perceived threat to the national/social order. A highly restrictive regulatory mechanism has been devised to make safe the undesirable influence of the internet on the local users. By placing internet postings under the Public Broadcasting Act, it places the – ethnically and technically – difficult tasks of censorship on the Internet Service Providers (ISPs) under government licence. The fact of ‘self-censorship’ by the ISPs and the average Singapore net users warns against the argument of the effective challenge to the state by a global media like the internet.

Philip Kitley: The New Indonesian Broadcast Law.

In June 1996 the Indonesia Department of Information presented the draft of Indonesia’s first ever Broadcast Law to the parliament (Dewan Perwakilan Rakyat) for discussion and ratification. Somewhat surprisingly for the government, the Bill has attracted widespread and trenchant criticism for parliamentary members and from many community representatives. The Bill is stalled in the parliament and may be returned to the Department for re-drafting, something very rare in Indonesian legislative process. This article examines the provisions of the new Bill and identifies the issues which have caused so much community concern.

Graham Turner: Post-Journalism: News and Current Affairs Programming From the Late ‘80s to the Present.

This paper discusses some major generic and discursive shifts in Australian television news and current affairs programming over the last decade. Developing a history of some aspects of these shifts, the paper argues that we are witnessing a decline in the construction of news and current affairs as a public service, and a parallel rise in the commodification of these programming genres within the battle for ratings.

Peter Putnis: The Production of Overseas News at Channel 7.

This article documents the selection priorities and production processes of overseas news at a major Australian commercial network: Channel 7 Sydney and Brisbane. It analyses the total overseas news vision input into the Channel 7 Sydney newsroom over a five-day period in terms of quantity, sources, country references and subjects. This analysis provides insights into Australia’s positioning in the global news system as it operated in early 1995. Channel 7’s total overseas news vision input is related to the station’s output of overseas news for the five-day-period.

John Hurst and Michael Provis: The Relationship Between Local Government and the News Media.

Throughout Australia local government has some 7700 elected representatives, an annual expenditure of $15 billion, employs more than 147 000 people and provides more than ninety different service functions. For the local news media, these local authorities are clearly the main source for much of the information that the public needs to know aout local services, and for local authorities the media is one of the more useful means by which to communicate with local residents. The interaction between local government and the news media is therefore an important one and is the focus of this study which is based on a nationwide survey of 135 local government authorities and 72 newspapers. The study examines the use of local authorities make of public relations and other officers to convey information and the level authorities with the coverage of their activities by the new media. It also looks at restrictions on the flow of information from local government to the news media and at ways of improving the local government/news media relationship.

Elizabeth van Acker: ‘Loonies’, ‘Villains’ and ‘Do-Gooders’ in the Gun Control Debate.

The Port Arthur shootings in April 1996 triggered enormous media attention about gun control. Various players in the debate received consistent coverage during the six-week period following the killings. This article presents an account of the media’s handling of complex issues and the kind of coverage given to the pro- and anti-gun groups. It raises questions about the responsibilities of the news media, and its role in covering highly charged political issues. Examining media treatment of the gun control debate suggests that old stereotypes such as ‘loonies’ and ‘villains’ are still employed to simplify complex issues.

BOOKS REVIEWED

Ang, Ian, Living Room Wars: Rethinking Media Audiences for a Postmodern World.

Atkins, William, Satellite Television and State Power in Southeast Asia: New Issues in Discourse and Control.

Lee, Jefferson, Reporting Cambodia in the Australian Media: “Heroic’ Journalism or Neo-Colonial Distortions?

Palmos, Frank, The Vietnam Press: The Unrealised Ambition.

Bell, Philip and van Leeuwen, Theo, The Media Interview: Confession, Contest, Conversation.

Bourne, Richard, News on a Knife Edge.

de Moragas Spa, Miquel, Rivenburgh, Nancy K and Larson, James F, Television in the Olympics.

Downing, John, Mohammadi, Ali and Sreberny-Mohammadi, Annabelle (eds), Questioning the Media: A Critical Introduction (2 nd Edition).

George, Peter, Behind the Lines; A personal account of an ABC Correspondent.

Green, Leila and Guinery, Rodger (eds), Framing Technology: Society, Choice and Change.

Harrison, Teresa M and Stephen, Timothy (eds), Computer Networking and Scholarly Communication in the Twenty-First Century.

Kellner, Douglas, Media Culture: Cultural Studies, Identity and Politics Between the Modern and the Postmodern.

Lipsitz, George, Dangerous Crossroads: Popular Music, Post modernism and the Poetics of Place.

Morely, David and Chen, Kuan-Hsing (eds), Stuart Hall: Critical Dialogues in Cultural Studies.

Morton, Robert (ed), Stand Up Comedians On Television (with introductory essay by Larry Gelbart).

Mpofu, Alm, Manhando, Susan and Tomaselli, Keyan (eds), Public Service Broadcasting: Policy Directions Toward 2000.

Osborne, Graeme, and Lewis, Glen, Communication traditions in 20 th-Century Australia.

Papandrea, Franco, Measuring Community Benefits of Australian TV Programs.

Poster, Mark, The Second Media Age.

Prior, Allan, Script to Screen: From Z Cars to The Charmer.

Robillard, Serge, Television in Europe: Regulatory Bodies.

Taylor, Mark C and Saarinen, Esa, Imagologies: Media Philosophy.

van Toorn, Penny and English, David (eds), Speaking Positions: Aboriginality, Gender and Ethnicity in Australian Cultural Studies.