Stella Bruzzi, New Documentary, Narration, Film and its Voice

Stella Bruzzi New Documentary, Narration, The film and its voice.

New Documentary by Stella Bruzzi works to redefine and critique more classic versions of Documentary theory and bring them into a new age, using new and old documentaries to prove wrong some of the theories of the past. Unfortunately I feel that it has itself fallen victim to time and many of the arguments it makes are either no longer relevant or are painfully obvious. Whilst many of the observations she makes about Bill Nichols’ modes of documentary in her introduction are astute he himself says that the modes and all of documentary is a “fuzzy” concept to define thus making his modes more like helpful guidelines, like genres in fiction, than set rules. The chapter of New Documentary I have focused on is Narration, The Film and its Voice. In this chapter Bruzzi champions the voice over as a valid tool for documentary film making rather than the “imposed destroyer of the ‘pure’ film image.”

Bruzzi believes is in “the 'problem' at the heart of the discussions of narration is the question of how one views the relationship between sound and image”. She cite many big names in early documentary that believe sound ruins image before again turning her sights on Nichols and his “expository mode”, she says “Most to blame for this negative perception of voice over documentaries has been Bill Nichols’ definition of the ‘expository mode” as didactic, the oldest and most primitive form of non fiction film”. She runs to the defence of the mode which she disagrees with by underpinning all of Nichols’ modes as ignoring many historic documentaries. However my fundamental issue with Bruzzi’s attack on Nichols is that he seems in his own book Introduction to Documentary to have no problem with either voice over or speech driven documentary, in fact he says “Speech fleshes out our sense of the world.” He also in discussion about the rhetoric language used by documentaries as well as when he talks about “evidentiary editing” he highlights the importance of a voice over or speech to tie together and sums up the importance of dialogue by saying “arguments call for a logic that words are better able to convey than are images". I therefore believe that Bruzzi's attack on Nichols is unwarranted, I do agree that the use of voice over in documentary is not a bad thing but I also believe that it has to be used in an interesting an well written way for it to have an impact.

I do agree on large with the examples of good documentary voice over that Bruzzi offers, her examples of voice over as ironic, emotional, political and even times when "words fail" excellently show that voice over can be a brilliant tool to enhance images. The other side to the argument Bruzzi fails to address is the cases in which voice over is used instead of or in lack of images, not to concrete or anchor their meanings and tie together an argument but to tell the audience what to think and what they are looking at.

I believe Bruzzi's general defensiveness gets in the way of her theoretical study however she does explain some good uses of voice over and well defines what voice over should do. Whilst she admits the basic use of voice over is to connect images that seem to have no link she recognises the importance of this role saying "The traditional voice-over form emphasizes the unity, and imaginary cohesion of it various elements; so the dominance of the narration covertly seeks to emphasise the incontrovertibility of the images by refusing to dispute and doubt what they depict." That is not all the voice over does and not all it encompasses, in fact she states that sometimes the voice over can do the opposite, ironically commenting on the visuals creating a juxtaposition that makes the piece more open and polysemous. Not only can it do the opposite but the actual "failing" of words within a documentary can be extremely powerful, she agrees that sometimes words aren't best but when there is a lack of words at a specific time, a silence or unwillingness to continue on the part of the commentator, it is more poignant than removing the voice over completely. "Voice over is no longer a controlling mechanism" this is also a point in which the direct mode seems to be broken and the audience identify with the voice and give it a kind of character, struggling with them through the experience of the film. There are many other specific unique and interesting uses of voice over which Bruzzi uses to create a stong argument for its use and I and I am sure many other film makers agree with those specific uses disregarding the "suspicion that a voice over has the capacity to violate the 'truth' revealed in the image" in these cases. However it cannot be forgotten that voice over as well as any individual element of a film has the "capacity" to ruin a film if done carelessly.