Internationally renowned film scholar Bill Nichols is undoubtedly a key referent for documentary studies. In his seminal work Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary (1991), he offers sapient reflections about the significance, ethics and aesthetics of the genre, which he further develops in Blurred Boundaries (Nichols 1994a), Introduction to Documentary (2001) and Speaking Truths with Film: Evidence, Ethics, Politics in Documentary (2016). In these works, Nichols refers to four main aspects which contribute to the articulation of a definition of documentary: a community of practitioners, an institutional framework, a corpus of texts and a constituency of viewers (1991, 12–31). Festivals represent a nodal point where these agents gather and negotiate the meaning of documentary, and therefore offer a critical aspect of film culture that must be taken into account for a better understanding of the genre. Nevertheless, these events have a timid presence in Nichols’ work, a reason why we consider that his further reflections on this topic can shed some light on the current developments in the study of the relationships between text and context in the formation of documentary cultures.

Nevertheless, a lesser-known aspect of Nichols’ contribution to Film Studies is his work on film festivals published in the 1990s. Two of his articles that appeared in 1994, “Discovering Form, Inferring Meaning” (1994b) and “Global Image Consumption in the Age of Late Capitalism” (1994c), have been recently rescued by Film Festival Studies scholars and have been widely referenced, or even reprinted (Iordanova 2013, 29–44, see Nichols 1994c). Nichols’ expertise and reflections are therefore of key importance to incipient scholarship that aims to investigate the intersections of film festivals and documentary film. In the following conversation, Nichols reveals his insights into the past, present and future for the study of documentary film festivals.

Aida Vallejo: How did you come to the topic of film festivals as academic objects of study in your pioneering articles written in the 1990s? Footnote 1

Bill Nichols: Well, a few years earlier I had written Representing Reality and then I was working on Blurred Boundaries. That was a period of time when I was working quite a bit with Visual Anthropology. I was very interested in ethnographic questions, and the film festival site just struck me as one that I was going to often, as well as visiting various countries to give talks, like China, which was a very vivid example in 1986. The late 1980s was a very transformative period, when an early wave of western film theorists visited China at a point when most Chinese filmmakers had not seen western films. And it got me thinking that we used the festival as the site to import knowledge, as if you are going to a library. I was taking it for granted, not thinking about what it is like to be in a festival. I was thinking: What can I get from the festival? Information, facts, new film titles, repertoire, meeting people …. And I think that the ethnographic context I was working in stimulated me to reflect that we need to think about the festival as a very peculiar kind of culture, like another country, like a regional or distinct subculture. And then I had a chance to go to the Toronto International Film Festival that year (1993), and the festival had chosen to show Iranian films, and I thought: Oh, this is the perfect test-case! But I think that, particularly in the article published in the East-West Journal (on the global context), I was trying to think about what the film festival does to constitute a particular kind of reception, a particular audience and a culture that is distinct to it and that hasn’t been looked at. Now, as you say, it’s becoming a “hot topic.”

And what is, in your opinion, the reason for this recent interest from academia? Why did film festivals become a “hot topic”?

Well, after I wrote those articles I don’t remember much further discussion. But more recently people were starting groups; informal connections developed, and books started to come up. You know, it was a little bit of a surprise! Because it was like: Oh! And what happened for 20 years? I thought that I myself might do some more with that idea. I remember Jeffrey Ruoff, who was pursuing some questions about the festival audience and festivals, and apart from him it didn’t seem to be creating much interest. Part of the reason may be that festivals themselves have become so plentiful. I’m thinking here in San Francisco right this week we have the San Francisco International Film Festival, one of the oldest in the United States. But, almost every week in San Francisco there is a film festival. It seems that there are festivals spawning everywhere, and I think that’s part of the stimulus, the festival phenomenon itself.

Given your expertise, I was wondering why you didn’t develop this interest in festivals also for those specializing in documentary?

That’s a good question. I think at that point I didn’t think of documentary film festivals as a separate category. I had been to some, but it didn’t seem like a prominent enough phenomenon to really draw my attention. And I think my interest had always been primarily on the films and contextualizing films, groups of films, looking at their formal qualities, and their relation to social issues, and the larger questions about the industry, about production, distribution, marketing. Festivals seemed like something that others might have more expertise on.

So, when I wrote those articles I felt very much like I was stepping into new water, and maybe others who were more familiar with that would get in their boats and paddle further than I could, but it didn’t happen quickly. It wasn’t right on the top of my agenda. Although it seems that it is now!

And how do you see the influence of film festivals in the creation of a film canon? To what extent do they influence the inclusion of specific documentaries in film history?

When you go back to the early 1990s when I wrote those pioneering books, the main book that I remember that most people referred to in discussions about documentary was Erik Barnow’s History of Documentary (1993). And that was based on his personal experience, on the films he had seen through archives, and on filmmakers. And I don’t think festivals played a very large role. Certainly he doesn’t talk about them, even though there were documentary festivals during that period. But I think he helped to set a tone, and it is not a criticism—looking for films that were either exemplary in their form or speaking to significant issues.

For me, in that period the festival was a kind of support structure, and a secondary one. I remember back in the 1970s going to the San Francisco Film Festival. My friends and I watched films from morning to night, but probably only a handful of documentaries. I remember Painters Painting by Emile de Antonio (1972), and in the press conference one of the artists in the film said “stop talking to these people—meaning the press in the room—they don’t understand what you are doing; you are wasting your time.” That was almost symbolic of the idea of discussing documentary at all. Because most film-goers were not interested in documentary. But there was a strong divide, and the idea was that documentaries are factual, they deal with the “truth,” with true issues in a real way, and they’re often boring. And in the late 1980s the appearance of Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989) was like: “Oh my god! There is a film that can play in theatres and make millions. We have to pay attention to this.” And The Thin Blue Line (Errol Morris, 1988) came out around the same time, and I think that the effect of both films was like a flag going up on a pole saying: “From now on, documentaries are not to be ignored. You have to learn to understand them, you have to ask about them, and you will need to know something about them.” And we are having the San Francisco International Film Festival going on right now, and not only are there quite a number of documentaries in it, but they are highlighted. That would never have happened 20 or 30 years ago. Now some documentaries get more attention than the features. The Act of Killing (Joshua Oppenheimer, Anonymous and Christine Cynn, 2012), like Night and Fog (Alain Resnais, 1956) for similar reasons—both are dealing with atrocious crimes—has generated that kind of buzz.

And do you think that nowadays festivals are still secondary to the creation of the canon?

Well, Sundance has always been used as an example. If you get a lot of exposure at Sundance, maybe you can get a distribution deal. And this is true for both fiction and documentary. I think that’s one of the roles festivals have played. If you can make a film that catches the attention in the festival circuit, whether it is the big circuit—Cannes, Berlin, Toronto and so on—or in a more secondary circuit, maybe New York and San Francisco … Sundance is somewhere in between …. That is a way to get to the marketplace. And in that sense, the festivals act as gatekeepers for what films get shown, and then there is the reception from audiences and critics as to which films are worth discussing and remembering. I think that does play a role in getting films before a larger public, and I think that’s the first step to qualifying for a canon. But I don’t think it canonizes as such. Because to me that takes time. It’s only over time that we can see changes in style, in direction.

And which in your opinion are the most relevant agents?

I think that the primary point of evolution is the filmmaker. First of all, you need to have someone like Joshua Oppenheimer making films that are pushing boundaries. Then, what happens is partly a question of festivals. The curators, the festival, the audience, the critics … all can then contribute to a dialogue about how this film has opened up possibilities, exposed us to feelings and emotions we hadn’t anticipated. But I don’t think festivals themselves create the new cutting-edge. Filmmakers are definitely first and more important for this evolution.

What, in your view, is the role of film festivals in articulating a documentary definition?

I think film festivals have an educational or training role. I don’t think it’s altogether conscious, but by choosing the films they choose (which are often either controversial in subject matter or distinctive in style), they are in a way educating the audience to the ranges, limits and possibilities for the form. And if you attend them, if you go to a festival devoted to documentary or you go to watch documentaries in a larger festival, you are learning to watch films that someone has already labelled as documentary. For example, if you watch a film like The Act of Killing there is a lot of fantasy, recreation, reconstructions, re-enactment … etc. You might ask: “What kind of documentary is this?” And I think that’s the core, that’s the question one might be invited to ask, by being presented with film in a context where boundaries are more fluid. The very idea of the festival is that we’re gathering to celebrate something unusual. Films that have been curated. It’s not just what’s on TV this week, or what the local cinema chain is showing.

It’s like, we’re going to step back; we’re going to cast a net around the world, and try to find films that we think are out of the ordinary. And as a viewer, when that’s presented in a documentary context, I think you’re constantly invited to ask: “How does this contribute to my understanding of what documentaries are? And how can I understand this as a documentary?” And in that way, I think the festivals have extended our sense. Look at what happened at the Oscars 2014: the film that won was 20 Feet from Stardom (Morgan Neville, 2013), and one of the films that lost was The Act of Killing. In that sense, I think that the Academy members hadn’t gone to enough festivals [laughs]. I think they voted for the documentary that was more conventional and traditional in form. The Academy is not a society for reflection, and 20 Steps from Stardom was a perfectly good choice, but I think the festival is where we get to step outside the boundaries that a conventional film honours.

In Representing Reality you associate the terms “epistephilia” (as the pleasure of knowledge) and “scopophilia” (as the aesthetic pleasure of looking) to documentary and fiction, respectively. Given the new trends in documentary, with first-person films, subjectivity and other ways of pushing the boundaries of the genre, are these changes in style challenging in some way this distinction? Can the spectator find much more scopophilic possibilities in documentary nowadays?

Yes. If I would rewrite this, I would go back and rethink this question like you are suggesting. When I was characterizing documentary in an earlier stage, it was something that was often boring. Not all of them, because a number of British documentaries, and certainly Flaherty and others, had quite stunning images, but for the most part they were sort of detached from character. They had a situation, an issue, but what was called the visual pleasure was usually subordinated, and in the service of some kind of knowledge transfer. Like we want you to understand the importance or significance of an issue, or a way to solve it. Now that has diminished significantly and the number of documentaries that address issues with the hope of solving them, I think it’s much less than it used to be proportionally. And the number of documentaries that explore the situation in order to have you understand it more fully regardless of what sort of decision you make is greater. And in that sense the visual quality matters more and carries more weight in a documentary context. It’s not that the scopophilic fiction has been copied; it’s a kind of visual pleasure in the service of a different kind of knowledge, an embodied knowledge, which is what I was discussing in the opening part of Blurred Boundaries back then.

Typical knowledge transfer is disembodied knowledge, where everybody understands the same truth. Embodied knowledge is more experiential, it’s what David McDougall’s films are about, it’s what Lucien Taylor’s recent films like Sweetgrass (Ilisa Barbash and Lucien Castaing-Taylor, 2009) and now Leviathan (Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Verena Paravel, 2012) are about. It’s more about how does it feel to be in a given situation. And then based on those feelings you may have value judgements and interpretations. And that can be conveyed often well visually, as well as with music, which is another quality that I think recent documentary is more attentive to. And I would go back again to The Thin Blue Line and certainly the film Koyaanisqatsi (1982) by Godfrey Reggio. Another example: Péter Forgács’ films. Michael Renov and I coedited a book of essays on his work (2011). As far as I know, he has never had a theatrical release, but his films are mainly known either from television in Europe or at the festivals. And they’ve been in numerous festivals (such as Warsaw and San Francisco), and the music in his films is exceptionally evocative, suggestive, and it really creates a tone and a mood and an atmosphere that is itself immersive. These documentary films have also taken to using the visuals and using music to convey an experiential or embodied sense of knowledge. Now words like “scopophilia” and “epistephilia” have become shifting registers. And festivals have been sensitive to that.

Tell us about some of your memories of festivals you’ve attended.

I think one of the things that is true and strikes me over time is that I can’t say I have been to an enormous number of documentary film festivals. But, I have been to documentary festivals in the Czech Republic, Netherlands, Korea, Japan, China, Brazil and the United States. So, some reasonable exposure. And one of the things that really strikes me in almost all cases is the size and enthusiasm of the audience. I remember going to Jihlava IDFF (Jihlava International Documentary Film Festival) in the Czech Republic, where I was on the jury. There was a large auditorium where many of the films (which were fairly obscure) were shown. A typical festival, you know, not much buzz, filmmakers you may not have heard of and so on. But this very large theatre was jammed full. And when we gave the awards at the end, the theatre was totally full. And the whole thing had a real aura of excitement and anticipation surrounding the awards and who was there. It was just like fiction festivals.

I also remember when I was at IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam) in 2010  and I was on a jury. I was the one on the team who had to come up and give the award, and it was in this beautiful theatre that seats probably over a thousand people, and it was the award show, so they played some clips. But it wasn’t a feature-documentary being shown, just the awards. But it was totally full. And I remember in Amsterdam that every day I thought I was becoming more ignorant, because I might see, on a good day, four or five documentaries, and the festival was showing 30 or 40. You just could not possibly see them all. But there was a sort of euphoria that you’re in documentary heaven, because there is such a rich amazing array of films, some of which you know are going to get in theatres, and others that you suspect may never be seen again. And the differences were not necessarily aesthetic, there were many reasons. The chance to see films and choose your own path through those films, to me, is one of the most remarkable things.

Another reflection I was having when thinking about our talk today is that in a couple of weeks I am going to the Mendocino Film Festival, a small event that takes place in a small coastal town to the north of San Francisco and shows a mixture of fiction and documentary. One of the things that strikes me is that as a phenomenon, the festival creates a virtual community. That’s part of the subculture of the festival. During its duration, a group of people attend and to some degree get to know each other. Because you hear someone ask questions, you strike up conversations waiting in line, which is more common in a festival, to wait in lines. You ask about what’s been seen, what you’ll see next and so on. And there is a group of people that come together with a common interest, who then have a chance to share some of their enthusiasm and interest with other strangers. And it happens in a very informal way. It’s something that one might study, as I did with the films that are on the screen. But the audience in the theatres also constitute a particular microcosm. And it’s an audience that might well have questions about work the filmmaker did 30 years ago. That’s part of what makes the festival audience distinct. It’s not just what new Superman film is out now that can distract me for a couple of hours. It’s how these films contribute to my understanding and knowledge and experience of film in general, given that I have an interest in it already. And in that sense, I think that at all the festivals I’ve been to, the distinction between the people behind the screen, the people making the films, the people putting them on the screen and the audience is narrower. Festivals are places where you can actually literally rub shoulders with Francis Ford Coppola or Kiarostami. Even if it’s just rubbing shoulders, I think there is a sense of “we are in this together,” which I think is quite nice!

And what was your experience as a jury member from the point of view of a scholar?

Oh, it is very enlightening . You see how people from different backgrounds value and appreciate different types of films, so it’s a learning experience. It’s a kind of group encounter. Certainly, one of those other sociological phenomena one can study is a jury. You know, how does a group of strangers who have a certain kind of knowledge, in this case film, come together and make judgements and come to decisions. And the stages and the process of familiarization, and sharing—usually tentatively for most people at first—values, testing the waters, finding common ground, learning what kind of arguments are persuasive or not … and in that sense, it’s a very enlightening and I would say also enjoyable process.

Whoever wins the prize is going to be the person who gets the attention, and the jury is thus forgotten. But behind the scenes you are doing something that will definitely have an impact. It is not something that will carry your name forward like making a film or writing a book. And that makes decision-making easier.

And do you think scholars have more or different resources to discuss than other professionals?

Not necessarily. On the whole, scholar-types are more comfortable about what they think or feel, better with words. And filmmakers on juries are sometimes not as comfortable putting in words what they feel. They just can’t quite find the words to capture what they feel, but if someone else tries for them, they might say, that is exactly it or not. So that is part of what makes it interesting. It’s finding a common ground, in terms of how to express your feelings about the film. An academic can be too “academic.” You know, they can be a little bit … [laughs] dry, and theoretical about what they think. And often what really makes a film compelling to an audience is not how it uses long-takes, it is how it makes you feel. Yes, that’s why I think a scholar on a jury needs to put the scholarship hat a little bit to the side. But still, the knowledge, the historical familiarity, the conceptual tools, these are all useful if they are really put in the service of how this film engages you as a viewer.

How do you see the future and possibilities of research and collaboration with film festivals? Which aspects of film festivals should be approached for a better understanding of documentary?

Well, I look forward to seeing what your book makes me think [laughs]. You know, having work come out on this or having a study group at the SCMS (Society for Cinema and Media Studies) will partly answer that question. Because it is to me determinant. Like you say, I think given the prominence of film festivals, and their proliferation, it just seems that invites a lot of reflection on what we call the standardization and differentiation of festivals. What do they have in common? How do they associate with the idea of a film festival? And then, how are they different? And maybe some of the things that you raised earlier, like canonization. How the films get selected. It’s pretty phenomenal, you know? One in a hundred getting chosen is not unusual. So, what happens with the other 99? What are the economics of that for festivals and filmmakers? How much time do you need to spend and usually pay for, to get someone to watch 100 films in order to pick one? And if you are submitting films, how many times can you pay registration fees, and shipping, even with video or DVDs, you are partly paying for the reviewer. But how many times can you afford to do that? And what are the logics and economics of all that?

As I mentioned before, I would also draw attention to the audience. This community is an interesting thing to look at further in terms of the audience at festivals, as well as the festivity of the festivals. How is it different from watching a movie in another context? Another issue would be the confluences and the similarities and differences between festivals and the internet, which we ought to pursue further too. Also, the changing and evolving place and significance of documentary within large festivals like New York, Venice, San Francisco, Berlin, Toronto …. That also is something that can merit further attention.

So I think there are a lot of questions that will continue to come up as we go forward, and I don’t think festivals are going to go away.