Towards an Ontology of Animated Documentary
—Sergei Eisenstein
What appears to be a preposterous claim—that films that deploy an array of non-realistic stylistic devices have the capacity to make such powerful truth claims about reality—can in fact be traced back through the theoretical progression of the digital revolution. The animated documentary serves as a vehicle for fostering a new relationship between the viewer and the cinematic text, one that tracks the shift from faith—faith in the photographic image’s indexical relationship with reality—to trust—trusting the filmic text to make truth claims that reflect reality in sophisticated ways.
The former’s assumptions about realism in cinema—perhaps the most basic theoretical understanding of film realism—are rooted in the view that photographic images, unlike paintings of drawings, are indexical signs. Photograph and referent are inextricably glued together by causality. Most famously, Andre Bazin based his ontology of film on what he regarded as the "objective" nature of photography, which bears the mechanical trace of its referents. "The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space which govern it,” Bazin writes. “No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discolored, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction” (8). Equally significant for documentary is Bazin’s belief in the camera’s power of analogy: that it can show us what we would have seen if we had been there ourselves. This mutually dependent relationship of causality and analogy has maintained dominance in the interpretation of cinematic images, particularly documentary ones, which can presumably make truth claims because of their indexicality. Bazin’s ontological realism rules out animation as a viable means of documentary representation due of the lack of a direct causal correspondence between animation and reality.
But the myth of objectivity has long been shattered. Archival footage plus talking heads does not always equal historical truth. Witnessing is a complex act, and the cults of vérité and direct cinema often overestimate the anchors of their own lasting, authoritative prowess. In the 1960s and 1970s, a turn towards Marxism and psychoanalysis primed the theoretical field for debates over the ideological underpinnings of previous film thought, and development of a more self-reflexive, self-critical set of assumptions. Influenced Freud and Lacan’s theories of the unconscious, Jean-Louis Baudry’s “Ideological Effects of the Basic Cinematic Apparatus” theorizes that projection and narration "conceal" from the spectator the ideologically-charged technology that underpins the production of the cinematic image. It was Baudry that explained why Bazin’s formulation of realism is “a style and thus a construct,” and how films require the construction of a transcendental subject in order to be perceived as realistic (Elsaesser and Hagener 76). His apparatus theory posits that the monocular lens of the camera and Cartesian philosophies of subjective rationality combine in the cinematic apparatus to reproduce the hegemonic visual regime of bourgeois-capitalism. Constrained as it is by historical specificity, Baudry’s theory of cinema exposes the “illusionism” present to some degree in all films claiming documentary truth. This inadvertently opened the door for alternative experimental strategies of representation; animation, precisely because it does not claim a direct ontological link to the past, is uniquely suited to subvert the specular regime.