Reflexive Mode

I feel that the manner in which the New Oxford American Dictionary defines the term ‘reflexive’ gives a good basis when approaching what a reflexive documentary strives to do. The dictionary defines reflexive as: “taking account of itself or of the effect of the personality or presence of the researcher on what is being investigated.” When this is relied to film a reflexive documentary takes into account the doc, film, or filmmaker and its relation to what is being made or investigated. 

With this reflexive nature of filmmaking, the filmmaker is more concerned with the encounter between filmmaker and audience than the encounter with the subject. It is through the encounter with the audience that the filmmaker tries to convey ideas and question assumptions about what filmmaking and documentary filmmaking is. In order to convey and bring attention to the processes of the film, a filmmaker will often try to jar the audience from the norms of a film. This is what Bertolt Brecht described as “alienation” or as the Russian formalists explain as ostranenie or “making strange.” Nichols elaborated on this term of alienation to be “ a conscious mode of detachment or distantiation [which] separates us from prevailing assumptions”. Examples of this alienation can be seen in the film The Man With the Movie Camera. In this film, Mikhail Kaufman continually brings to the audience’s awareness that a film is being made. He does this by showing the making of the film at the same time that the film is being made. He does this to make the audience question how they view a film and to demonstrate the constructed process which a film undergoes. From this demonstration Kaufman in more concerned with the audience encounter with the him, the filmmaker, through his film than he is concerned with what is being filmed. The purpose is not to make a pretty film but to make a film which makes an audience aware of the processes of filmmaking and which allows an audience to realize that what they see on screen is a constructed reality and not life reality. 

Overall, a reflexive documentary is concerned with the encounter between filmmaker/film and the audience and how this encounter can reveal new insights into what a film really is.