The Responsibility of the Gaze

Reflections on Ethics and Documentary Film Following Bill Nichols

Abstract

The article explores ethical issues in documentary cinema following the writings of Bill Nichols and other theorists of non-fiction. In his work on “axiographics,” Nichols examines the ways in which ethical values are embedded in the configuration of space, the constitution of the gaze, and the relationship between observer and observed. For Nichols, the difference between fiction and non-fiction is to be understood in terms of the difference between the erotic and the ethical. Whereas in narrative cinema the gaze is gendered and eroticized, in documentary film the object of desire is the historical world and the real social actors who inhabit it. Documentary works therefore invite an ethical interpretation. Moreover, whereas fiction films do not necessarily indicate the ethical positions of their directors, in documentary film an indexical bond exists between the image and the ethics which produced it. Formal characteristics such as camera position and the filmmaker’s presence in or absence from the shot reveal the particular ethical code governing the filmmaker’s behavior. Whereas Nichols uses the term “ethics” in a general sense, more recently other scholars such as Michael Renov view documentary film in light of Emmanuel Levinas’s ethical philosophy.