Teaching documentary production requires reflection on how documentary filmmakers have used the human voice throughout the history of the field. In my courses at Delta State University in Mississippi, I outline this history through readings of work by Bill Nichols, Stella Bruzzi, and Scott MacDonald.[1] I teach Fundamentals of Digital Video, Intermediate Digital Video, Advanced Digital Video, Fundamentals of Lighting, Cinema Studio I, and Documentary Filmmaking. My students consider narration, observational methods, and interview-based production, then study personal documentary and creative nonfiction approaches. They develop their own projects, mixing modalities as they choose.

In 2020 these methods were “stress tested” as we faced both pandemic restrictions and the challenge of revising our practice in light of the national dialogue on race, representation, and the teaching of history. I was tasked with leading our students in the production of a documentary about a 1969 Black student “sit-in” protest. On Monday, March 10, 1969, 52 students had walked into DSU’s Kethley Hall and occupied a hallway near the office of the college president. The students were arrested and bused away from campus to spend a night in a Mississippi state penitentiary. The protesting students were Black, local to the Mississippi Delta, and in their early twenties.

Five decades after the events of 1969, my students and I set up for our first video interview sessions with the protest participants and discovered a surprisingly strong connection to this past moment. Our two student cinematographers—Keenen Davis and Antonia Cannon—were also Black, twenty-something, and with deep roots in the city of Cleveland, Mississippi. They had never been taught the history of this protest.

Our crew filmed extensive formal studio interviews with the protesters, but in March a pandemic lockdown halted our production. We could not risk the health of our subjects—many in their seventies—to complete our planned observational visits to key locations in the story. This left us with completed interviews, but without balance from other modes of storytelling. Could a film truly represent the experiences of the protesters using only formal interviews? What happens when a production is locked into a “talking heads” approach? Is it possible to work successfully in a modality that, in our classroom discussions, was seen as limited?

My students and I considered these questions, reflecting on our established readings. In his 1983 essay “The Voice of Documentary,” Bill Nichols writes:

It is worth insisting that the strategies and styles deployed in documentary, like those of narrative film, change; they have a history. And they have changed for much the same reasons: the dominant modes of expository discourse change; the arena of ideological contestation shifts. The comfortably accepted realism of one generation seems like artifice to the next.[2]

Would our formal interviews seem artificial in today’s documentary environment?

The change Nichols cites has only accelerated. His writing has survived two generations of students now, but not without taking some bruises. Stella Bruzzi, for example, rejects Nichols’ “imposition on documentary history of a ‘family tree’” and dismisses Nichols’ references to an inevitable progression in the field.[3] In her 2000 essay “Narration: The Film and Its Voice,” Bruzzi challenges Nichols’ central concept: “The premise is that documentary has evolved along Darwinian lines, that documentary has gone from being primitive in both form and argument to being sophisticated and complex....”[4] Bruzzi’s critique is meant to resist a “theoretical orthodoxy” before it calcifies our understanding of documentary filmmaking.

Still, re-reading Nichols with today’s students can introduce valuable discussions. Consider his analysis of The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (Connie Field, 1980): “Using interviews, but no commentator, together with a weave of compilation footage as images of illustration, director Connie Field tells a story many of us may think we’ve heard, only to realize we’ve never heard the whole of it before.”[5]

Nichols recognizes the resonance of these interviews, yet describes them—from an imaginary neutral viewpoint—as somehow distinct from authoritative history: “We are encouraged to believe that these voices carry less the authority of historical judgment than that of personal testimony—they are, after all, the words of apparently ‘ordinary women’ remembering the past.”[6] Personal testimony is not enough for Nichols.

His interest is in documentary methods “evolving” to address what he imagines as a failure of courage from filmmakers. “Very few,” he claims, “seem prepared to admit through the very tissue and texture of their work that all film-making is a form of discourse fabricating its effects, impressions, and point of view.”[7] From this bold statement, my students considered a series of questions: Are filmmakers naive for foregrounding the specific statements of their interview subjects? Are the specific voices in a film less important than the conceptual “voice” of the film?

While Nichols recognizes value in interview evidence, he believes there is a problem to solve in presenting it.

Far too many contemporary film-makers appear to have lost their voice. Politically, they forfeit their own voice for that of others (usually characters recruited to the film and interviewed). Formally, they disavow the complexities of voice, and discourse, for the apparent simplicities of faithful observation or respectful representation, the treacherous simplicities of an unquestioned empiricism (the world and its truths exist; they need only be dusted off and reported).[8]

In our classroom talks about the film, I asked: Must a film create “complexities of voice” over “respectful representation,” and should we accept these as opposites? Our discussions favored “respectful representation” but there was a recognition that interviews are conducted to be edited, and are therefore constructed or filtered.

Nichols, however, imagined future documentarians would inevitably embrace his viewpoint.

The emergence of so many recent documentaries built around strings of interviews strikes me as a strategic response to the recognition that neither can events speak for themselves nor can a single voice speak with ultimate authority. Interviews diffuse authority. A gap remains between the voice of a social actor recruited to the film and the voice of the film.[9]

What, then, is the “true” voice of a film? My students and I wrestled with this question through every stage of our editing process. From first discussions to the first public screening, our production took sixteen months.

In August 2019, I had arrived at Delta State University as a new hire. I read the school’s annual list of activities, including a note that “Dr. Carrie Freshour and Professor Arlene Sanders, along with current DSU students, have begun an oral history project with the DSU students who organized and took part in the 1969 Black Student Organization sit-in protests.”[10] I met Professor Sanders and suggested the project merited a full documentary approach, with students involved in all aspects of production. This idea was well received and the students, staff, and faculty leading the oral history recording process quickly took key roles in the documentary. Professor Sanders interviewed some of the subjects, with others interviewed by students Tyler Wells and Sykina Butts. Sykina also appears in the film, explaining the significance of gathering this oral history and presenting the perspective of a contemporary DSU student. Throughout the interview process, five students served as sound recordists. Four others worked on “additional cinematography,” gathering the limited campus b-roll footage we acquired during lockdown. Throughout editing, we shared and discussed drafts online.

We planned an award-winning film, at least in our dreams. Reality is more complicated. In the 2021 article “Observing the Observers: How I Judged Documentaries and Learned to Teach None” we hear from Alexandra Juhasz about judging documentaries for the Peabody Awards. “This year’s 35 submitted films are significantly ‘better’ than those from previous contests,” Juhasz tells us. “Production values are higher, arguments clearer, foci significantly more relevant and important culturally.”[11] And yet, Juhasz sees a problem:

All the docs looked, sounded, and flowed the same. Nary a one had a narrator (omniscient or on-screen). Each was reported on by a caring but absent outsider or team. Regardless of the place or person, the conflict or question, all the films took up the same pacing marked by similar music. Not one took up an observational or verité style—letting the camera roll and allowing the subjects to be shot in long takes, allowing the audience to observe and make (some of the) meaning or interpretation. None is quiet or slow.[12]

Juhasz continues:

Anyone who has taken or taught a class in documentary must see where I am going. The 35 documentaries occupy only one of the six modes of documentary outlined by scholar Bill Nichols, which have become something of a trade standard. All 35 sit neatly in what he identifies as the “expository mode,” where “the voice” of the documentary uses words to inform the viewer what it knows and wants you to think about the subject at hand (and this lightly so, given that the score and editing contribute so strongly to the “voice” of all these documentaries).[13]

From “Drone shots to establish location” to “Character-driven stories moving from deprivation to conquest,” Juhasz lists an observed formula for these films and explains that their success—and sameness—comes at the expense of films that step outside this template.[14]

In-person classes closed March 10, 2020, transitioning online. On Zoom we discussed what we had recorded, and what we had not, assigning students to film a campus sign, the Administration building, the courthouse. Could we edit an emotionally impactful film? Did our teaching match the challenges in our own documentary practice? My students and I re-read Nichols’ claim that “in the evolution of documentary the contestation among forms has centered on the question of ‘voice.’”[15]

For balance, I presented Scott MacDonald’s “Alive and Well: Interviews with Jonathan Caouette and Ross McElwee” and highlighted McElwee’s plans to complete Photographic Memory (2011):

I did have a Plan B in case I never found any of the people I was looking for. Plan B would have entailed making a much more atmospheric and meditative movie—more on the order of something by Chris Marker—wall-to-wall narration with no sync-sound interactions with any human beings.... Another alternative was to hire French actors to play Maurice and Maud, which would then allow me to pontificate on the relationship of documentary to fiction, past to present, etcetera.... I’m very glad I was not forced to employ either of those approaches.[16]

McElwee’s brief panic made us realize: our footage contained the direct voices of the participants in a significant civil rights protest. Did Nichols imply we should put our own “voice” ahead of that? His take began to seem hollow to us, distrusting of the original experience. Did he want us to talk over the voices of the people who lived through these events? Did he presuppose the filmmakers as geniuses, the interview subjects as somehow less important or trustworthy? In Zoom meetings, my students and I discussed where the film might go, and how it might be received.

As we edited, documentary organizations were speaking about “decolonizing” documentary. I attended, virtually, the International Documentary Association’s “Getting Real ‘20” conference, and hoped I could bring what I was hearing there into our class discussions. With session titles like “Intersectionality in the Documentary Film Edit Room” and “At the Intersection of Documentary Storytelling and Community” it was clear the field was ready to transform.[17] Yet the specifics of our work made for a complex discussion: we realized we should look closely at these issues, but the general student sentiment was that this was “our” story, based on events that happened one hundred yards from our editing lab.

Our film featured four Black students who participated in the 1969 protest and one current Black student discovering this history. All of our video students had been invited to participate in our production and edit, but less than a majority are Black. We discussed if this had an impact on the “voice” of the film. We asked if the Mississippi accents the subjects demonstrated were also a “code” that a viewer perceived. Then, a shock came as the edit progressed.

It’s common to construct a documentary edit by placing the interviews and then cutting them down into a more flowing version using “cutaway” shots. This is what Juhasz referenced. In our case, however, our lack of material pushed us to stay on shots of the interview subjects, to let them speak uninterrupted. The surprise was that when we fought the impulse to cut, embracing the durational shots did not feel to us like a clumsy edit, but like making a bold choice to stay with the voice of the subject. Some passages did not work, but those that did felt very personal.

We began testing a minimal edit of the film consisting of interviews, b-roll shots and text. Once music was added and the edit tightened, we heard from viewers that we had hit an emotional chord. We had something powerful. One viewer admitted to tearing up at a key moment.

Our 27-minute film Voices from the Sit In has now screened at eight film festivals, winning best short documentary at one. Yet upon rewatching it, I still feel a film teacher’s impulse to suggest additional shots. Emotionally involved, I revel in the story, but I cannot fully escape the expectations I have received from documentary filmmaking culture. I find myself wondering: what will the next generation make of it? Surely change will continue. Perhaps our long takes will come back into fashion, for a while, and then a decade later again seem too slow.

That is fine. Let that generation hear these voices, directly, and argue about what they mean.


Ted Fisher is an Assistant Professor in the Art Department at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. He has an M.F.A. in Photography from Claremont Graduate University (2003) and an M.F.A. in Film Directing from the University of Edinburgh (2019).

    1. Bill Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” Film Quarterly 36, no. 3 (Spring 1983): 17–30, https://www.jstor.org/stable/3697347; Stella Bruzzi, “Narration: the film and its voice,” in New Documentary: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 2000), 40–65; Scott MacDonald, “Alive and Well: Interviews with Jonathan Caouette and Ross McElwee,” Film Quarterly 67, no. 1 (Fall 2013): 41–51, https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1525/fq.2013.67.1.41. ↑

    2. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 17. ↑

    3. Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 1. ↑

    4. Bruzzi, New Documentary: A Critical Introduction, 1. ↑

    5. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 22. ↑

    6. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 22. ↑

    7. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18. ↑

    8. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18. ↑

    9. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 23. ↑

    10. Office of the President, “Academic Affairs Accomplishments 2018-19,” Delta State University, February 27, 2022, https://www.deltastate.edu/PDFFiles/Office%20of%20the%20President/accomplishments/2018-2019/Academic-Affairs-Accomplishments_2018-19.pdf. ↑

    11. Alexandra Juhasz, “Observing the Observers: How I Judged Documentaries and Learned to Teach None,” Point of View Magazine, June 25th, 2021, http://povmagazine.com/articles/view/observing-the-observers. ↑

    12. Juhasz, “Observing the Observers.” ↑

    13. Juhasz, “Observing the Observers.” ↑

    14. Juhasz, “Observing the Observers.” ↑

    15. Nichols, “The Voice of Documentary,” 18. ↑

    16. MacDonald, “Alive and Well,” 48. ↑

    17. Getting Real ’20, International Documentary Association Digital Conference, September 29 – October 3, 2020, https://www.documentary.org/gettingreal20/schedule. ↑