- discourse and character in documentary film -


"Property is theft" says Proudhon, and "language is oppression" Foucault. The owners of means of media production produce their own discourse submitting the viewer to their own ideology.

Discourse is rhetorical dimension of the story, the way it is made to manipulate audience. Every story is manipulation and major motion pictures today are always test-marketed to see if they appeal to audiences, to see if they “work” with respect to the audience.

Michel Foucault focuses upon questions of how some discourses have shaped and created meaning systems that have gained the status and currency of 'truth', whilst other alternative discourses are marginalized and subjugated, yet potentially 'offer' sites where hegemonic practices can be contested, challenged and 'resisted'. As documentary filmmakers always think about themselves as seekers of truth, they use terms like "kino eye" (Vertov), "camera stylo" (Astruc), "kino fist" (Eisenstein), "cinema verite" (Rouch) etc, to explain their strategies, thus creating a truth-seeking film character, filmmaker/author with an extension, a tool, some kind of cyborg (man with a movie camera). 

However, in The Order of Discourse, Foucault argues that the 'will to truth' is the major system of exclusion that forges discourse and which 'tends to exert a sort of pressure and something like a power of constraint on other discourses". Thus, there are both discourses that constrain the production of knowledge, dissent and difference and some that enable 'new' knowledges and difference(s). 

            Cinema is true. A story is a lie. (Jean Epstein, Bonjour cinema)