Gregory Currie’s The Documentary Film

Document Type : Academic research papers

Authors

1 Department of philosophy _ faculty of women_ ain shams university_ Cairo_ Egypt

2 Faculty of Women for Arts, Sciences and Education, Ain Shams University, Egypt

3 Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Arts, Damanhur University

Abstract

Abstract:
Gregory Currie introduces a sophisticated theory of the documentary film.' For Currie a documentary film is one comprised of a preponderance of photographic images that function in the context of the relevant film as traces of the objects and events that causally produced them. Gregory Currie defines documentary by recourse to the notion of visual trace: Objects in front of the camera leave traces in photographs, regardless of the photographer's beliefs about the objects or events. That is, the camera mechanically records what is in front of it. Currie argues that we need to look for the nature of documentary in that its narrative mostly consists of trace contents of photographic image. His definition of documentary can be seen as an attempt to exploit the indexicality or causal provenance of photographic images and filmic images. Currie does make many valuable observations in his paper. He does an excellent job of explaining why photographic documentation has the evidentiary power it does. He, in effect, illuminates the salience that the documentation capacity of film has had for previous film theorists, most strikingly Bazin. And he provides an immensely useful discussion of the trace.

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Buhūth
Volume 2, Issue 7 - Serial Number 7
Social Sciences & Humanities
July 2022
Pages 81-105

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