Online Response 3 - The Reflexive & Participatory Modes

Two modes of documentary filmmaking that spotlight the filmmaker, camera, and audience are the reflexive and participatory modes. Though each make the filmmaker’s presence visible, the way in which they do so varies. The participatory mode focuses on the filmmaker’s engagement with subjects and the world around them, while the reflexive mode emphasizes the constructed nature of the medium itself. Surname Viet Given Name Nam and Sherman’s March illustrate the difference between the reflexive and participatory modes, respectively.

Trinh T. Minh-ha’s Surname Viet Given Name Nam personifies reflexivity by rejecting the classic understandings of how to conduct documentary filmmaking. One of the most up-front examples from the film comes from its use of panning and tilting across the faces of each of the women interviewed. Early in the film, subjects are interviewed in extreme closeups that roam slowly across their faces. Rather than being employed as a typical observational tool to capture natural interviews, the deliberate moves draw attention to the fact that the interviews are being staged and framed. Later, when Minh-ha reveals that these subjects are not actually Vietnamese women telling their own stories but instead American actresses performing the translated responses. Minh-ha is asking the viewer to examine not the women’s testimonies, but the process of filming and presenting them.

The use of this method during the interviews is clearly reflexive. The camera does not pretend to be invisible. It performs its presence, pulling the viewer’s attention toward the artificial nature of the medium. The subsequent reveal that these are reenactments strengthens that effect. Another example comes from the overlapping and often times incomprehensible audio of the interviews and traditional Vietnamese singing. Devices such as these alert the audience to the fact that they are watching a created perspective. Instead of striving for transparency, Minh-ha embraces transparency, telling the viewer to confront the subjectivity that shapes documentary “truth.” The reflexive mode here becomes a tool for political critique: the film’s subject is not only Vietnamese women’s history, but the impossibility of representing that history cleanly through Western documentary conventions.

In contrast, Ross McElwee’s Sherman’s March exemplifies the participatory mode by letting the filmmaker’s presence to directly shape events, conversations, and the film’s narrative direction. A clear and memorable example comes when McElwee finds himself alone in a hotel room with no idea what to film next. Rather than cutting away and hiding his lack of direction, he turns the camera toward himself. He films himself talking about the stagnation of his project and records his own boredom and loneliness. This moment does not expose the medium in the same way Minh-ha’s film does. Instead, it becomes part of the lived experience the documentary is capturing. It is about the narrative rather than the medium itself.

The participatory power of the moment comes from McElwee’s vulnerability and the spontaneity of the scene. His choices are no longer separate from the world he is documenting; they are the world he is documenting. The camera becomes a companion and a witness to his emotion, and a participant in his attempts to understand his life. This is furthered by people commenting that McElwee is unable to experience life without doing so through the lens of a camera.

This contrast between Minh-ha’s reflexive staging and McElwee’s participatory “vlogging” highlights the different questions each mode raises. Surname Viet focuses on the limits of representation, insisting that viewers not take documentary images for granted. Sherman’s March accepts the filmmaker’s influence on reality and builds its narrative from that influence. Both films make the camera visible, but each with a distinct purpose. Together, they show how documentary form can either challenge the structure of representation or embed the filmmaker fully within the unfolding world.