Welsprekende waarschijnlijkheden. Het misplaatste moralisme in het Nederlandse documentairedebat n.a.v. FORD TRANSIT (2002)

"Documentary in Dispute: A Reconsideration of Premises" In 2002 the VPRO, a critical Dutch cultural television channel sponsored the documentary Ford Transit made by the Dutch-Palestine director Hany Abu-Assad. The documentary, focusing on the white vans, originally Israeli, now used in Palestine areas as taxis, turned out to be partly based on a script, with (professional) actors in stead of social actors and with invented Israeli shooting. The fierce, but unclear debate that followed spoke in terms of truth or fake and was devoted to the question whether this film might be called a documentary or not. Academics and journalists on the one hand claimed that only social actors made a film a documentary. On the other hand directors confessed that they often artificially remade/ invented a situation for the benefit of the documentary. Be it the artificially produced smoke instead of morning mist on the meadow (Jos de Putter), be it the singer André Hazes who bought the birthday present for his wife twice (John Appel), be it that the director waited for the ‘right’ gesture of a social actor (Pirjo Honkasalo). Meanwhile, the VPRO has detached itself from Ford Transit. Up till now the documentary is sparsely shown, and if so with a reminder in advance that it is not a documentary. Perhaps ‘capturing the truth’ is – in terms of ‘recording the real’, ‘realism’, ‘non-fiction’, ‘social actor ’- not the right way to think about documentaries. Documentary as well as feature film have access to the same artificial cinematographic techniques and both are ‘manipulative’ and ‘fictitious’, although in different ways. Whereas feature film has been accepted as ‘dreamlike fiction’, the acceptance of documentary is based on the strong belief in the indexical bond between ‘reality’ and ‘film’, independent of the various aesthetic modalities. ‘Truth’ in documentaries, then, has to do with knowledge about the historical world we share, and the persuasive way in which the specific view is presented. Understanding ‘documentary truth’ in terms of ‘knowledge’, ‘rhetoric’ and ‘representation’ may be a more fruitful way in differentiate between documentaries that present a moral reassurance, confirming - in word and image - existing opinions, and documentaries that offer an ethical discourse, with discursive and visual arguments, ‘new facts’ and ‘fresh (re)interpretations’ that can be debated and criticized. Claims of ‘documentary truth’ in general invite to investigate the nature of the presented knowledge and the ethical boundaries of documentaries. What knowledge is offered by ‘(poetical) registrations of the harsh reality’ that won humanitarian awards, such as Checkpoint (Joris Ivens Award 2003) or The 3 Rooms of Melancholia (Amnesty International-DOEN Award 2004) in comparison with documentaries of Michael Moore (Oscar, Palme d’Or)? What is the role of intense emotion in (dis)approval documentaries by the (modern, Western) public? This given the fact that rage is often evoked by formal (‘rhetoric’, ‘lying’) features that are in fact applicable to all documentaries, and that approval is evoked by content (showing for instance severe circumstances in which an individual or groups of people live) with which people identify with compassion. In short, documentary as ‘Film for thought’ (IDFA 2004) urges for a clear frame of thinking.