Reflexive Techniques In Documentary Filmmaking

Nevertheless, documentary filmmaking, even in the new millennium, is always reticent to abandon objectivity completely. There is still something about the genre that makes filmmakers and viewers feel that by watching a documentary we are somehow getting closer to reality. This longstanding pretension may be the impetus behind Stella Bruzzi’s insightful observation that “documentary practice and theory have always had a problem with aesthetics.” Documentary filmmaking in the new millennium, however, clearly acknowledges that aesthetics are a key part of the documentary enterprise. Reflexive techniques allow filmmakers to more easily introduce a critical point of view and to deconstruct the narratives that shape individuals and modern societies. This seismic shift in documentary practice has caused Pablo Piedras, in his study of recent Argentine filmmaking, to signal a “profound transformation” that is occurring “in the epistemic status of documentary film.”

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that first-person documentaries—which are indeed diverse and incorporate the filmmaker’s subjective presence in different ways and to greater or lesser extents—are simply an exercise in narcissism or a modern-day iteration of bourgeois, auteurial cinema. Andrés Di Tella, one of the most recognized cultivators of the first-person documentary in Latin America, has admitted that such films, his own included, are probably not completely devoid of these defects. Yet, we would argue that in most first-person films there is something much more profound at play. The director,

At the same time, we are convinced that Latin American documentary today is a terrain whose complexity goes beyond questions of subjectivity, ethics, or the social