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For Documentary: Twelve Essays
These essays, which span twenty-five years of writing and a lifetime of experience, offer fresh and challenging insights into documentary. Dai Vaughan, one of the most highly regarded documentary editors to have worked in Britain in recent decades, makes his starting point "Most of us would feel that the word 'documentary' had not justified its place in the dictionary if the films so called did not manifest some relationship with the world not shared by others." That elusive relationship is the subject of his eloquent reflections and analyses.
As critic, Vaughan contrasts the Olympic Games films of Riefenstahl (1936) and Ichikawa (1964); as participant, he tells how the introduction of portable 16mm equipment gave rise to cinéma vérité and observational visual anthropology. The twin perspective of analyst and practitioner results in a radical restatement of the documentary project, one in which documentary is seen as engaging the viewer's freedom in a way that fiction does not. A chapter near the end, "From Today, Cinema Is Dead," is uncompromising in its pessimistic view that digitalization threatens the privileged relationship we have always granted between a photograph and its object. Film theorists and filmmakers, indeed everyone who cares about how our society represents itself to itself, will find For Documentary engrossing as well as illuminating.
As critic, Vaughan contrasts the Olympic Games films of Riefenstahl (1936) and Ichikawa (1964); as participant, he tells how the introduction of portable 16mm equipment gave rise to cinéma vérité and observational visual anthropology. The twin perspective of analyst and practitioner results in a radical restatement of the documentary project, one in which documentary is seen as engaging the viewer's freedom in a way that fiction does not. A chapter near the end, "From Today, Cinema Is Dead," is uncompromising in its pessimistic view that digitalization threatens the privileged relationship we have always granted between a photograph and its object. Film theorists and filmmakers, indeed everyone who cares about how our society represents itself to itself, will find For Documentary engrossing as well as illuminating.
236 pages, Paperback
First published August 16, 1999
About the author
Dai Vaughan
18 booksDai Vaughan was known as an innovative documentary filmmaker and latterly as a novelist and poet.
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March 12, 2026
Hard to imagine a book more suited to my sensibilities. This kind of writing makes me wonder if the best theorists of art (or at least film) are indeed the practitioners (if so, bad news for me). Vaughan seems to default to a distinctly phenomenological approach—to reject any prima facie principles of Truth or Meaning or The Image and instead to pay delicate attention to the experience of watching a film, and the way that (and Vaughan returns to this over and over again) any image we see is not a one-way transfer of information or affect, but is instead the encounter of an image with a receptive apparatus that brings its own visual 'language' to bear on even the least mediated of footage (if there is indeed such a thing). Like Stanley Cavell writes about encounters with unfamiliar words in 'Must we mean what we say':
"We may also be forgetting how elaborate a process the learning is. We tend to take what a native speaker does when he looks up a noun in a dictionary as the characteristic process of learning language. (As, in what has become a less forgivable tendency, we take naming as the fundamental source of meaning.) But it is merely the end point in the process of learning the word. When we turned to the dictionary... we already knew everything about the word, as it were, but its combination: we knew what a noun is and how to name an object and how to look up a word... What seemed like finding the world in a dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary. We had the world with us all the time... but we felt the weight of it only when we felt a lack in it... the learning is a question of aligning language and the world."
Written language and cinematic language are not the same, but nevertheless we always bring our world to the image—for example, as Vaughan writes about in 'Notes on the Ascent of a Fictional Mountain", how it is almost impossible for a film to show prostration without it also connoting genuflection, even though in many societies the gesture can have other meanings: "every anthropological film, insofar as it relies for its comprehension upon the competencies of our own culture yet conceals this fact behind the referential nature of the photographic image, is as much about our own society as about that of its subjects. That which is an inflection of our own experience is inevitably also an in interpretation of it. Parallels do not have to be spelled out. They are spelled in." Part of me is inclined to say that this phenomenological, contingent approach (not that those two adjectives are synonymous) is inherent in the role of theorist/practitioner, but then again I don't think that's how Robert Bresson, for instance, approaches his theoretical writings, and indeed part of the power of Bresson's cinema is in the intuited strength of the convictions guiding his diligence and restraint (though here I am indulging in a phenomenological appreciation of an ontological approach, betraying either one or the other or perhaps both). In any case, this allows Vaughan to avoid many of the pitfalls of more rigid film theory, doomed to the status of either irrelevance or at best historical curio when certain baseline assumptions (about psychology, about vision, about celluloid) are disproven. Whether it is because he has such intimate knowledge of the technological developments of the medium, or because he is simply a lucid and limber thinker/prose stylist, Vaughan is able—more than most—to heed that Jamesonian exhortation to "always historicize!"
I'll leave off with a passage—saved mostly for myself—from the essay 'From Today, Cinema is dead', which could have been written yesterday:
"I am not concerned with the possibility that people may be misled by a doctored picture. What concerns me is that we shall wake up one day and find that the assumption of a privileged relation between a photograph and its object, an assumption which has held good for 150 years and on which ciné-actuality is founded, will have ceased to be operative. And when that happens, it will not be because some thesis has been refuted but because the accumulation of countervailing experiences—of the simulation of the photographic idiom, of the electronic recombination of photographic elements, of "photographic" processes where intervention between the registration and reproduction of the image is not only easy but inescapable—have rendered null that "trust" for which the idiom has simply been our warranty. And once we have lost it, we shall never get it back."
"We may also be forgetting how elaborate a process the learning is. We tend to take what a native speaker does when he looks up a noun in a dictionary as the characteristic process of learning language. (As, in what has become a less forgivable tendency, we take naming as the fundamental source of meaning.) But it is merely the end point in the process of learning the word. When we turned to the dictionary... we already knew everything about the word, as it were, but its combination: we knew what a noun is and how to name an object and how to look up a word... What seemed like finding the world in a dictionary was really a case of bringing the world to the dictionary. We had the world with us all the time... but we felt the weight of it only when we felt a lack in it... the learning is a question of aligning language and the world."
Written language and cinematic language are not the same, but nevertheless we always bring our world to the image—for example, as Vaughan writes about in 'Notes on the Ascent of a Fictional Mountain", how it is almost impossible for a film to show prostration without it also connoting genuflection, even though in many societies the gesture can have other meanings: "every anthropological film, insofar as it relies for its comprehension upon the competencies of our own culture yet conceals this fact behind the referential nature of the photographic image, is as much about our own society as about that of its subjects. That which is an inflection of our own experience is inevitably also an in interpretation of it. Parallels do not have to be spelled out. They are spelled in." Part of me is inclined to say that this phenomenological, contingent approach (not that those two adjectives are synonymous) is inherent in the role of theorist/practitioner, but then again I don't think that's how Robert Bresson, for instance, approaches his theoretical writings, and indeed part of the power of Bresson's cinema is in the intuited strength of the convictions guiding his diligence and restraint (though here I am indulging in a phenomenological appreciation of an ontological approach, betraying either one or the other or perhaps both). In any case, this allows Vaughan to avoid many of the pitfalls of more rigid film theory, doomed to the status of either irrelevance or at best historical curio when certain baseline assumptions (about psychology, about vision, about celluloid) are disproven. Whether it is because he has such intimate knowledge of the technological developments of the medium, or because he is simply a lucid and limber thinker/prose stylist, Vaughan is able—more than most—to heed that Jamesonian exhortation to "always historicize!"
I'll leave off with a passage—saved mostly for myself—from the essay 'From Today, Cinema is dead', which could have been written yesterday:
"I am not concerned with the possibility that people may be misled by a doctored picture. What concerns me is that we shall wake up one day and find that the assumption of a privileged relation between a photograph and its object, an assumption which has held good for 150 years and on which ciné-actuality is founded, will have ceased to be operative. And when that happens, it will not be because some thesis has been refuted but because the accumulation of countervailing experiences—of the simulation of the photographic idiom, of the electronic recombination of photographic elements, of "photographic" processes where intervention between the registration and reproduction of the image is not only easy but inescapable—have rendered null that "trust" for which the idiom has simply been our warranty. And once we have lost it, we shall never get it back."
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