Archival Material

Abstract

Abstract Chapter 8 investigates the use of archival documents in documentaries, interrogating how they are visually manipulated to deliver an artificial sense of authenticity and how they are used to quickly and superficially place an event in historical context. The markers of age (scratches, etc.) that many archival documents contain can be used by a documentary to make a particular section feel “authentic,” even though this is arguably artificial since there is no neutral way to present archival material. (Removing scratches is just as easily accomplished as adding them, and any telecine transfer will have to choose parameters for how the image should be represented.) It is not uncommon to accentuate an image’s seeming “archival” value, for instance, by including the sprocket holes on the side of the film frame even though this is actually a postproduction effect rather than a product of the transfer process. Newspaper articles have routinely had their context manipulated throughout the history of documentary in order to make them more easily digested by audience members; multiple examples from the series Tiger King: Murder, Mayhem, and Madness show that such manipulation is even more sophisticated today. Documentaries will often use the clichéd moments from a historical archive in order to quickly evoke an era and bring it into the narrative.