Читать книгу A Companion to Documentary Film History - Группа авторов - Страница 18

Traditionally less about entertainment than about education, instruction, and preservation, documentaries have rarely attracted substantial theatrical box office success. As a result, filmmakers and producers have had to argue that they have audience impact in a different way—by claiming that documentaries have lasting effects on viewers. But such claims, Brian Winston asserts, have little verifiability. The goal of sparking audiences to act in support of the film’s argument has been achieved on a limited basis and with limited, targeted communities. The more common effect of mainstream documentaries (for Winston, this is part of the Griersonian tradition) on a mainstream audience has been an empathetic response that seldom led to social action. But any assessment of audience impact, whether as empathy or action, has been made in the absence of an archive. As Winston notes, “Our historical understanding of viewers’ responses is trapped between the limitations of positivist social science and, essentially, anecdotage.” The essays in this section point to areas and methods that aim to redress these gaps. They urge us to reconsider established narratives of nonfiction film history: about the emerging dominance of fiction film entertainments inside and outside of the movie theater from 1907–1910 (Waller), and about the audiences and spaces of exhibition for films central to the Western European and American documentary canon in the late 1920s and early 1930s (Winston). They think through the implications of this historical (mis)understanding: on how the meaning of a film we thought we knew can be transformed both over time and across reception context (Mestman), and how those who dream of or project a certain type of audience engagement would be wise to think about how viewers have historically interacted with media technologies both old and new (Uricchio).