Extra Credit #2

Panel: Documentary as Scholarship: Theory, Practice, Context {Documentary as Research} Speaker: Charles Musser (Yale) and a panelDate: 11/18/14

“The future depends on research.” This is the note that just received in my last seminar lecture. Research, whether it is in sciences or humanities or any field, is the vision (or at least the spark of vision) that the world needs in order to create innovation. Research done in order to garner ideas on how to prevent something from happening or research conducted in order to aid and abet a problem that has already been created are both equally important in solving problems in medicine, social ideas/constructs, as well as in environmentalism.

This panel is essentially centered around the idea of documentary as a form of research and how to establish the medium of documentary as a legitimate/widely accepted form of research. One of the panelists defined research to be “the process of asking questions within institutionally defined parameters, within historically conditioned settings, through established methods of inquiry, inside systems of order, etc.) In other words, what documentary lacks, in the views of the audiences and other researchers, is the order of other types of research (an example would be the scientific method.) The panelist also explained how research is “Janus” faced, appropriately named after the Roman god of beginnings and transitions who is depicted as having two faces as he looks to the past as well as the future. This means that that research is inherently two sided composed of one side that is dictated by legibility, convention and assessment and the other side which is dictated by innovation, the concept of new knowledge, and the not yet known. In research, there is both order and room to create, yet there is often presented a distinction between thinking and making. The intersection between research and the arts is so rarely explored because the problematic views that there is an innate difference between scholarship and craft. The form of documentary as research is a complicated phenomenon because people aren’t willing to accept the validity of the form and the knowledge required in order to make a documentary.

One of the panelists described a problem that the French philosopher Derrida once came across in one of his classes that can perfectly show this bias. A student of his wished to give in a visual production piece in response to an assignment instead of a traditional essay. He expressed that his “inclination was to accept this innovation” but that he didn’t because he “has the impression in reading or in watching their production that what I expected from a discourse…had suffered.” His argument was that words are not images and imaged are not words but even though imagistic research is a form of innovation, it fails because it’s not in the standards of discourse. Essentially, though Derrida welcomes the innovation, the “precision and rigor” which give scholarship its credibility are not present in a project like this.

To this point, I must respectfully disagree with Derrida and any researcher who say that they welcome innovation but their actions contradict this statement, as they decline innovation. A simple fact of life is that everything (humans, mindsets, the world, idea, etc.) must evolve as time progresses in order to become situated in the new times and, quite frankly, survive. One cannot expect to go their entire life without changing. Change is always a necessary factor in the betterment of things. We are always told to “think outside the box” and are always looking for innovation/vision and urged to think in an innovative fashion. However, if we reject the innovation that is proposed, how does one expect us to move towards improvement? The concept of research and scholarship is so grounded in order and rigor, that it is viewed as being boring, traditional, and uncreative. It doesn’t necessarily have to be viewed this way. Research is engaging, interesting, and important and if it wasn’t so grounded and accepted innovation such as documentaries as research, it would be seen more in this way.

Research should be about questions. Questions about the things we don’t know, questions about things we want to know more about, questions about things that exist and questions about things that might exist. It should be about trying to find answers to these various questions. It should be accepting of different methods used to find the answers and more open to innovation, especially in a world that demands innovation to solve the problems we are faced with and cannot reconcile with the information/technology we already have. And maybe this will be interest more people and inspire more people to conduct research.