The Representation of Islam in the American Media: Two Documentary Films as Case Studies (Theoretical background)

Introduction

In the words of Bill Nichols, a documentary film is one of the “discourses of sobriety” that covers numerous topics related to culture, science, economics, politics, and history discourses that lay claim to tell the “truth.” Nonetheless, a documentary film like any other filmic material presents entertainment and knowledge, art and document. Most importantly, a documentary film stands on both sides of fact and fiction. The famously elusive definition of documentary film set by John Grierson is worth mentioning here: a documentary film is the “creative treatment of actuality,” Brian Winston wrote “Surely, no ‘actuality’ (that is, evidence and witness) can remain after all this brilliant interventionist ‘creative treatment’ (that is, artistic and dramatic structuring) has gone on. Grierson’s enterprise was too self-contradictory to sustain any claims on the real, and renders the term ‘documentary’ meaningless” (Qtd. in Breitrose 2002: 9-10). Hence, the very idea of documentary is impossible; objectivity is also impossible, and the ethical responsibility of documentary is undermined and questioned. The acts of framing and editing are acts of selection, and selectivity is necessarily biased. The act of editing alone has made documentary film indefensible. Any documentary film claiming to be factual is but a discourse and all discourses are equally privileged.

The Ethical Responsibilities of the Documentary Filmmaker 

The issue of documentary ethics is seriously discussed by a number of documentary film theorists such as Bill Nichols, Brian Winston, etc. One of the major problems of documentary ethics occurs when a documentarist tends to decontextualize, for instance, some aspects of their film by involving some archival footages that belong to different contexts. Some documentaries fall into this ethical problem such as Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West and Islam: What the West Needs to Know. In these two particular films, documentarists use archival footages that never relate to the stated contexts.

Bill Nichols argues that every film—including those of fiction—is but a documentary, since any film, be it a documentary or a fiction film, represents the particular aspect of culture which emanates from (Nichols 2001: 1). He differentiates between two types of documentary representations, those of the imaginary world and the historical world or what Nichols terms as “documentaries of wish-fulfillment and documentaries of social representation” (1). The imaginary or ‘wish-fulfillment’ documentaries, according to Nichols, are those which one can call “fiction” while documentaries of social representation are the “non-fiction” ones. However, both types of fiction or non-fiction documentaries have a story, and both “call on us to interpret them, and as “true stories,” films call on us to believe them.” (2). Thus, the documentary’s impact on viewers questions the documentary film’s ethics, and undermines film’s authentic claims of revealing reality.

In the first Chapter of Nichols’s Introduction to Documentary entitled “Why Are Ethical Issues Central to Documentary Filmmaking?” Nichols explains that some instances of the ethics of documentary filmmaking are called into question such as distortions or modifications of behavior of the social actors, and the reinforced stereotypes that some documentary films tend to highlight on “Other” cultures (6-9). Some filmmakers of some documentaries under study know nothing of Islam, and their knowledge of either the faith or its adherents is non-existent. Consequently, they tend to misrepresent, distort and exploit the issues raised in their films: “Filmmakers who set out to represent people whom they do not initially know but who typify or have special knowledge of a problem or issue of interest run the risk of exploiting them” (9).

The participant consent or, to use Nichols’s term, the “informed consent” is one of the ethical problems of documentary, since the nature of the consent is questioned. When documentary producers and directors do not provide subjects with a complete and clear idea of the nature of their film, subjects agree to be filmed. Yet, the resulted film undergoes ethical problems, due to naïveté and ignorance of the participants who do not recognizes the true nature of the film being involved in.
Only little account of documentary makers’ aims and intentions are disclosed to participants. The latter is not told the whole truth behind the film; consequently, a filmmaker gains consent and maintains cooperation with filming (Chapman 2009: 164). Brian Winston asserts that a written and signed consent form by participants “furnishes the documentarist with ethical armour” (Winston 2000: 149). Hence, the right of participants is not protected and sacrificed by documentary makers. Beside, the right of audience to know the “truth” of the represented event or people is exploited as well. Furthermore, lack of the informed consent and the audience’s right to know sacrifices the documentary objectivity and causes destabilizing neutrality of the documentary film in its visual representation of people or events. If the audience’s right to know is sacrificed and the text is not representative of what it claims, the documentary ethics is questioned, as the documentarian does not consider “public expectations about integrity, fairness, and good taste in documentary” (Butchart 2006: 428).

The subject is also exploited and victimized by the filmmaker’s unconcerned and indifferent argument. Nichols points out that participants are “placed in a mise-en-scene…they   become  a documentary  stereotype  in  the  filmmaker’s  argument” (Nash 2011: 1-13). Some documentary makers intentionally or unintentionally show their indifference towards their participants; the former “often [do] not feel obliged to protect subjects who they believed had themselves done harm” (Aufderheide 2009). Additionally, a documentary maker sometimes uses very intense investigative advances “by asking ‘provocative questions’ which  lead  eventually  to  make  the  subjects uncomfortable, embarrassed, and angry. Exceedingly, a subject, who could not bear this kind of questions, asked the filmmaker to turn the camera off” (Alshehri 2011).

Here, filmmakers sacrifice and manipulate two different rights, the participant’s right and the audience’s right to know the “truth” of a particular event or group of people. Because of the ‘provocative questions’ that lead to interviewees’ embarrassment and anger, “viewers may create an impression that some subjects are accused of being responsible for [a] crisis” (Alshehri 2011).  Thus, a documentary maker is obliged to avoid harming the participant, and introduce a fair represented image to the audience.

Many people still believe that “the camera never lies,” states Brian Winston, “It seems to me that many people still believe it. Most people believe pictures, particularly those accompanied by a well-respected voice on the television” (Winston 1989: 53). Lack of documentary maker’s ethical responsibility—through their intervention and manipulation of images—encourages them to distort reality by using certain techniques that can affect the context of images, and “manipulations…of lighting and objects and framing selectivities, there are the inevitable further selectivities of lenses, angles, shutter speed and aperture” (56). Some documentary images are seen superimposed and manipulated after the “Other” peoples and their faith. Thus, the absence of documentary filmmaker’s ethical duties and the influence of the documentarian subjective tendency do not lead to impartial representation of people, events or religions.

As mentioned above, Winston considers the claim that the eye of the camera does not lie, asserting that “the  limitations  of  the relationship  that  any  photographic  image  has  to  the  reality  it  reflects  are  beyond everyday  experience” (Winston 2005: 182). This relationship between the image and the reflected reality is further distorted by means of manipulation and modification.  The “sincere” construction of documentary is therefore clashing with viewers expectations. Whilst Winston questions the claim that the camera never lies, Jay Ruby in his article “The Ethics of Image Making,” agrees with camera’s authentic  imaging of reality arguing that “we  have  already witnessed  the  demise  of  ‘our  native  trust  that  since  the  camera  never  lies,  a photographer  has  no  option  but  to  tell   the  truth” (Nash 2011: 3-4).  Ruby’s point of view of the camera’s ability to record reality is at odds with other views of documentary film theorists. The sole aim of filmmakers is not just to produce a documentary as a vehicle for knowledge; however, the greater end is to create a spectacle for audiences.

The ethical duty of documentary filmmaker is undermined and questioned by the nature of the relationship between him/her and the participant; according to Kate Nash, this relationship between the two is understood in terms of an imbalance in power relations:“Power  is  most  often  understood  to  be  something  that  the  filmmaker possesses  by  virtue  of  their  access  to  media  institutions,  social  status,  control  of  the documentary  image  and  knowledge  (of  both  filmmaking  and  the  participant)” (Qtd. in Nash 4). Here, we understand that the documentary filmmaker practices power over his/her subjects, and exploits such advantage—actually through manipulation and “conning”—for creating a desired spectacle.

“At  the  level  of  the  text, Nichols (1991) encourages  us  to  read  the  absence  of  the  filmmaker  from  the documentary  frame  as  a  trace  of  their  power  over  the  participant” (Qtd. in Nash 5).  Imbalance of power between the two “remains  the  besetting  ethical  problem  of the  documentarist/participant  relationship  even  in  the  most  casual,  normal  and undeviant of circumstances” (Winston 147). Consequently, Winston suggests a “renegotiation  of  the  traditional  balance  of  power  between filmmaker and participant” (162).  The documentarist, Winston also suggests, “must give up their controlling  position  and  take  the  stance  of  advocate  or  enabler” (Qtd in Nash 5). However, Winston optimistic suggestions are inapplicable, since documentary makers seek to create a spectacle for viewers, i.e., an impressive and exciting view that could appeal to the latter, or an image that could arouse intense feeling and stress.

In her introductory essay, “The Spectacle of Actuality and the Desire for Reality,” Elizabeth Cowie argues that “the documentary film involves more disreputable features of cinema usually associated with the entertainment film, namely, the pleasures and fascination of film as spectacle. As a result, there is a desire for the real not as knowledge but as image—as spectacle” (Cowie 2011: 2). The documentary is therefore not distinguished from fiction films, since the documentarian does intentionally aim to create a spectacle that is able to entertain some viewers on the account of the exploited participants of documentary. Jean Baudrillard also contends, “There is a kind of primal pleasure...in images, a kind of brute fascination unencumbered by aesthetic, moral, social or political judgments. It is because of this that I suggest they are immoral, and that their fundamental power lies in this immorality” (Redhead 2008: 94). A documentarian sacrifices all ethical duties, manipulates film techniques and aesthetics, and controls participants to his/her own advantage—by artful or indirect means—for the sake of entertaining a particular group of audience. Thus, the relationship between the documentary maker and participants is problematic, as the former has all possible means of power that enable him/her to achieve his/her subjective ends.

Michael Foucault points out that  “power  is  understood  as  a  modality  of  action  in  which  actions  act  on  actions throughout  social  systems” (Qtd in Nash 7). Actions do not sometimes impose actions; rather, makes new paths for other actions possible. Members of any society exist in complex power relations that are central to the creation of subjects. Nash asks,  “How  then  are  we  to  understand  the  complex  power  relationships  at  play  in documentary  production?” The relation here is highly dominated by the documentary maker who keeps his/her voice prevailing in documentary, and manipulates, if not distorts, the participant’s voice.  Undermining, manipulating and distorting the voice of the documentary participant consequently problematizes the issue of the documentary ethics.

Power exerts itself through the discourse of documentary, or what Nichols calls, in his landmark book on documentary Representing Reality, the “discourse of sobriety.” He writes that the documentary discourses are “sobering because they regard their relation to the real as direct, immediate, transparent…Through them things are made to happen. They are the vehicles of domination and conscience, power and knowledge, desire and will” (Borda 2008: 57). Nonetheless, discourses of documentary cannot be seen as a “full-fledged” discourse of sobriety, since they contain images, “and images, as Plato taught us long ago, are deceiving. This situation is something of a paradox, because photographic images generally are apprehended as having a special relationship to reality that Nichols calls indexical” (Terrill 2008: 133). The indexical relationship between the documentary images and reality is recognized and perceived through signs which possess a physical hint to what they refer to. Though documentary photograph appears to capture reality and supports the impression of authenticity, Nichols argues that documentary cannot be entirely “sober,” because “documentary is a hybrid genre, providing both visual pleasure and logical argument...Documentary film, therefore, is not distinct from fictional film in any absolute sense but does display the evidentiary reasoning of the sober discourses” (133).  Jean Baudrillard draws attention tithe imminent danger of media images stating, “it is the reference principle of images which must be doubted...they always appear to refer to a real world, to real objects, and to reproduce something…None of this is true” (Baudrillard 2000: 444). Thus, a documentary’s ‘logical argument’ is contaminated by the image that distorts and appropriates reality for its own ends.

 Nichols draws our attention to think of aspects of fact and fiction in the documentary film. Like any fiction film, documentary adopts all possible styles and effects such as film techniques and aesthetics. Like fiction film, documentary cannot provide transparent and direct access to reality, “but because of its impression of authenticity, it directs the attention of its audience to reality in ways unavailable to fiction film” (Terrill 134). That is, the documentary rhetoric.
Nichols centers on the issue of rhetoric and asserts that documentary is “a simultaneously aesthetic and argumentative form of discourse, but he defines “rhetoric” as “the means by which the author attempts to convey his or her outlook persuasively to the viewer” and the “means by which effects are achieved” (134). In his article “Mimesis and Miscarriage in Unprecedented,” Robert E. Terrill draws attention to the simplicity of Nichols’s “instrumental understanding” and “narrowly rational” of documentary rhetoric that appears not to be adequate in analyzing the complex mode of documentary discourse, “and its shortcomings might be traced to Nichols’s reliance upon Aristotle” (134).The latter concentrates on the means of persuasion for achieving the desirable effects.                                                                                                                                
In his book Representing Reality, Nichols has pointed out in a section entitled, “A Fiction (Un)Like Any Other,” that there are fictional aspects inherent to the documentary project. According to Nichols, the focus on specific actions, circumstances and individuals clearly indicates fictional features of documentary; “Use of re-enactment, a firm narrative design to the commentary and the presence of an on-screen presenter who is shown to be ‘finding things out’ before the camera (thereby telling a story about telling the story) are some of the ways” (Corner 2006: 92) of documentary fiction. The documentary reference to reality lacks objectivity and “sobriety” because of the fictional features that intervene into the documentary discourse. In his book, Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture Nichols explains that “Reference to the real no longer has the ring of sobriety that separates it from fiction. Such reference now is a fiction” (Nichols 1994: 54).

Documentary films, those with plot, characters and events, are fictions; “they offer introductory lacks, challenges, or dilemmas; they build heightened tensions and dramatically rising conflicts, and terminate with resolution and closure” (Dornfeld 1998: 213). Nichols seeks to distinguish documentary from other films’ narrative modes by examining the fictional aspects of some documentary modes such as the performative and observational documentary modes of representations, and he “clearly sees ideas of ‘fiction’ as a useful way into the exploration of documentary, against the naïve, assertive usage of ‘fact’” (Corner 89). To illustrate, one needs to look at the ambivalence of a documentary film in the following way:
An image is a copy of reality. A reproduction, however, does have a dynamic touch with reality. In a film a person’s relationship with the world becomes magical. A documentary film is a creative interpretation of reality. Every documentary contains the seeds of fictional elements...A documentary film includes pieces of reality, but not the whole stream of reality (Antikainen 1996: 30).

The  “creative treatment  of  actuality” turns  fact  to  fiction in  the  root  sense  of finger; to shape  or fashion this “creative treatment” is not  recorded  or registered, but is authored (Nichols 2001: 592). That is, The  concept of authorship  moves from  indexical  reference  of  a preexisting  fact to  the  semiotics  of a certain represented meaning  and  the  address  of  the  authorial (593)  Thus, it is not just a simple recording of a certain reality; rather, it is the personality of the documentarian that “creates” a distinct between a certain reality and a constructed fiction.

This “dramatic turn” in documentary undermines its authentic claims and opens the way for “the temptations and contaminations of fiction and ‘mere’ entertainment” (Austin  2008:2). Some documentary makers seek to make a spectacle of an issue, event or a crisis, sacrificing their ethical duties and responsibilities for the sake of profitability or gaining fame.  Consequently, the documentary crafting as a tool for transmitting and documenting actual issues and events is questioned by some critics:
What makes a film “documentary” is the way we look at it; and the history of documentary has been the succession of strategies by which filmmakers have tried to make viewers look at films this way…To see a film as documentary is to see its meaning as pertinent to the events and objects which passed before the camera; to see it, in a word, as signifying what it appears to record (3).

 Lack of documentary pertinence to issues and events encourages the analogy between documentary and fiction. Nichols notes that there is “no absolute separation between fiction and documentary. Some documentaries make strong use of practices or conventions, such as scripting, staging, reenactment, rehearsal, and performance, for example that we often associate with fiction” (Nichols xi). Thus, form and content of the documentary film is questioned by a number of critics who tend to call it a “mockumentary” or a “rockumentary.”

Some documentary films are no longer documentaries, due to distortions that deeply touch their form and content. A documentary becomes “a mockumentary; that is, a self-satirizing documentary” (Nash & Ross 1988: 2). In his article, “Mockumentary: A Call to Play” Craig Hight defines mockumentary as one “consisting of those fictional texts which employ a sustained appropriation of documentary codes and conventions...mockumentary is little more than a ‘parasitic’ form” (Hight  2008: 204). One can contend that the “mockumentary discourse deliberately engages with documentary’s rhetorical address” (211) incorporating the fiction film’s elements and, consequently, aims at misleading audiences by a distorted “truth”.

Alexandra Juhasz and Jesse Lerner believe that “the term “mockumentary” more effectively works to signal skepticism toward documentary realism, rather than to reauthorize documentary’s ‘truth’” (Juhasz & Lerner 2006: 224). In a word, a documentary film deviates from its presupposed function as a vehicle of transforming and revealing reality, and is rendered a biased and subjective tool of reflecting ideological messages and largely negative images.
Hight explains that the digital media such as the DVD and the world wide web is a crucial factor to the emergence of mockumentary “to suggest the potential of mockumentary discourse to inspire new forms of cyber drama” (Hight 215-216). Hight also notes that many mockumentaries have online presence and promotional sites (216). Some documentary films under study such as Islam: What the West Needs to Know and Obsession: Radical Islam’s War Against the West are present online and have websites with their exact names.

Mockumentary texts are distinguished from other documentary texts by deliberately engaging to parodic and satiric agenda. Parody essentially involves “the process of recontextualizing a target or source text through the transformation of its textual (and contextual) elements, thus creating a new text” (207). Looking at the documentary Jihad in America, we find it a clear example of “mockumentaries,” since, we can trace how manipulated it is to have some issues recontexualized and detached from their real contexts. In this film, the filmmaker, from the one hand, exploits the Western audience’s ignorance of Arabic language by presenting two stills of an Arabic text with a two-line English translation. The meaning of the English translation is extremely different from the original Arabic text’s meaning; we can easily find out the huge difference by pausing the film at these stills and comparing both the Original Arabic text and the translated-into-English quote. On the other hand, the context of the Arabic text is Palestine; however, the film maker recontextualizes it into an imagined context, that is the United States. The Arabic text explains the sufferings of the Palestinian people caused by the Israeli occupation; the document also indicates some of the plans by which the Palestinian people may encounter the occupier with. Yet, the filmmaker decontextualizes Arabic text by impressing the American viewers into believing that there are terroristic actions planed to blow up American skyscrapers.  Thus, the mockumentary discourse oscillates between fact and fiction, and “has involved a variety of often conflicting strategies and intentions” (208). The example mentioned above shows how the filmmaker’s conflicted and biased constructions turn his film into a mockumentary per excellence.



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