542
PARTISAN REVIEW
For our purposes and to contrast with Balzac's methods, I should like
to call thi s mode
invert ed documentary.
Ro bbe-Grill et's "story" does
not reinforce our sen se of external reality. Ra ther the screen images
express the power tha t beholds them : an imagina ti on , a mind brooding
over an obsession . One senses a comparable effect, I beli eve, in
Ci tizen
Kane.
Even when Kane himself is in the picture, the deep focus
photograph y serves to reveal a subj ective, no t an obj ecti ve, universe.
For a third tenta ti ve ca tego ry of documenta ry, literary exampl es
a re hard to come by. T hough close to autonomous, " Ja bberwocky" and
many children 's counting rhymes refer g lancingly and p layfull y to
assumed obj ecti ve and subj ecti ve worlds. Before he was propell ed all
the way out of litera ture by disgust, politics, and relig ion , Hugo Ball ,
the true founder of Zurich Dada in 1916, composed a seri es of sound
poems in thi s self-refl exive style:
gadj a beri bimba glandridi laul a lonni cadori
gadj ama gramma berida bimbala glandri glassassa
laulitalomini
gadj a beri bin blassa glassala laul a lonni cadorsll
sassala bim
gadj ama tuUm i simzall a binban gligla wowoli ma i
bin beri ban ...
T h ese nonwords approach a purely nonreferenti al o r abstract use of
sound , autonomou s entiti es or self-contained image tha t documen t
onl y the medium itself and nothing extern al to it, subj ect o r o bj ect.
This tendency I shall ca ll
au to-documentary.
Des pite the experimen ts
of Emil e Cohl and Len Lye, and more recentl y of Kubelka and
Frampto n , film has had a lmost as much diffi culty enterin g thi s
domain as literature has. We recoil before a work em p ty o f content, a
work tha t does not represent some part of the world we know. T here is
no proverb we have turned so thoroughl y into law as: na ture abhors a
vacuum. Art has not yet freed itself from thi s conditi on . We supp ly
mi ssing referents when they don 't seem to be there.
I am proposing a three-way di stin ction th a t app li es
to
bo th fil m
and fi cti on:
documentary
(po inted outwards, obj ecti ve),
inverted docu–
mentary
(pointed inwards, subj ective), and
au to-documentary
(po imed
a t the medium itself, self-refl exive, purely fo rma l). T he di stin ction
a llows me to make a sta tement tha t is no t so tri via l as it mi ght seem . All
film is documentary, in one or mo re of these ca tego ri es. I believe the
hi story o f film will bear me out. Furthermore, the three ca tegories are
a rranged in logica l sequence. Film has developed so rap idl y as to make
