In his article “The Voice of Documentary,” Bill Nichols writes:
Documentary displays a tension arising from the attempt to make statements about life that are quite general, while necessarily using sounds and images that bear the inescapable trace of their particular historical origin. These sounds and images come to function as signs; they bear meaning, though the meaning is not really inherent in them but rather conferred upon them by their function within the text as a whole. We may think we hear history or reality speaking to us through a film, but what we really hear is the voice of the text, even when the voice tries to efface itself (Nichols in Rosenthal, 1998, p. 52).
while reading this statement, I wanted to re-think about our intension or the direction of the doco.
even though it’s documentary, we must have a flow and the direction and the key question will be to find it out. Find the value out of the footages that we already have.
