Morgan Mays Documentary History and Theory Site

Reflexive Mode

According to Nichols, the reflexive mode of documentary, “asks us to see documentary for what it is: a construct or representation,” as opposed to learning about the world by seeing through documentary. He also says that “the process of negotiation  between filmmaker and viewer become the focus of attention for the reflexive mode.” All this is certainly true when you look at the film Surname Viet Given Name Nam. 

While on the surface, this movie appears to be about the effects of the Vietnam War on the people, specifically the women, of Vietnam, it actually is operating on many different levels to heighten the viewers awareness. This begs the question of what to do about the viewers for any filmmaker using this mode. A lot of reflexive mode documentaries address this issue by changing the usual means of representation. For example, in Surname Viet…, the viewer finds out that the women who are telling these personal and sometimes disturbing (in the sense that they are just sad/horrible things that are being told) stories are not actually sharing their personal accounts. The women chosen are actually Vietnamese women who lived in America, and were asked to read excerpts of personal accounts of women who actually suffered through that era in Vietnam. Another characteristic of this mode is how it challenges realism through its technique and conventions. Basically, this means that how the film is shot and edited and any stylistic choices that are implemented purposely go against the realist norm (the norm generally being continuity of editing, character development, and narrative structure all being shown linearly). In this movie, it almost seems as if the filmmaker is assaulting the viewer’s senses to get this point across. Words are shown that don’t always match what is being said. In the middle of someone speaking, a song with distinct sounds and lyrics beg for attention, even though someone is in the middle of a story. Visually, a lot of things take place at once, and the shot doesn’t always remain on the person who is speaking.

Performative Mode

In contrast to the reflexive mode, the performative mode sets out to question the importance of knowledge, who is sharing this knowledge, and whether or not personal experience fitting into our understanding of the world affects how knowledge is shared/gained. According to Nichols, this mode “sets out to demonstrate how embodied knowledge provides entry into an understanding of the more general processes at work in society.” A good example of a film that represents this mode is The Gleaners and I.

We come to gain knowledge through many different means: how we’re raised, personal experiences, our culture, our ethnicity/race, our religious beliefs/faith, etc. A general object, such as a car, could hold a certain meaning for us, but be completely different for the next person. The Gleaners and I, as well as other performative documentaries, “stress the emotional complexity of experience from the perspective of the filmmaker” (Nichols). The tone of these types of films plays out like someone is reading from a diary or a personal essay. In Gleaners, the filmmaker reflects on a time when the process of gleaning was something more commonplace and accepted in society; she also reflects on time, her on mortality, and the process of aging. She is nostalgic for youth and time lost, which I feel ties into her quest to discover what gleaning means for today’s society in France. Her quest to represent gleaning from  what it was to what it becomes is to help herself process the fact that she is aging. While she shows what gleaning was to what it has become, she is also representing how she has grown…she is still the same but with new points of view and new experiences that have changed her (which is the same for gleaning…the concept is the same, but its use has changed for the French people).