Document

The word document has its root in the Latin docere, the verb “to teach.” Its shifts in usage marked in the Oxford English Dictionary also mark changes in the attitudes in Western culture.

In twelfth and thirteenth century French, it had four nuances: lesson, proof, instance, or specimen. In Medieval Latin, it also held the meaning of a written instrument or charter. In English, from the fifteenth through the early nineteenth century, document carried both general and specific meanings of “teaching, instruction, warning.” From 1527-1879, document conveyed an overtone of proof: “Something written, inscribed, etc., which furnishes evidence or information upon any subject, as a manuscript, title-deed, tomb-stone, coin, picture, etc.” At the onset of the twentieth century, documentary took on different connotations. In turn of the century France, documentaire became the name of a genre of films associated with travel, whereas in England and America, documentary became more closely connected with the discourse of fact, both in film and in print.

However, there is another usage, perhaps implicit in the lost nuance of “warning” associated with document. A document can also be an index devoid of substantive content. A document might also merely point at an instance, a specimen, rather than be that specimen. However, to be an effective pointer, it must have an implicit point of view. It must originate somewhere in order to be directed at something. A document may be, effectively a promise that an instance or specimen exists. If a document is to be taken as proof, there are two alternatives: either it originates with a reliable witness who has inscribed it as truth (as a promise) or it may construct truth (as a performance) by its very existence. In the latter case, it is generally associated with institutional point of view rather than individual creation.

A document, as demonstrated by its myriad of uses in the OED, may be a written manuscript, a picture, or more pointedly, a tombstone, coin, or currency. Ultimately, I think my fundamental disagreement with the materialist analysis of documentary is the emphasis on these aspects alone. Modern criticism ignores the analysis of documents as indices, as warnings, preferring instead to assault their status as proof.

Perhaps the early French usage of documentaire as a genre of travel narrative should be resurrected. Documentary, in the specific case of photographs and/or non-fiction writing describing a something outside the witness, marks the boundary between a traveler visiting a foreign circumstance, and the thing itself. It can only reveal perspectives, not facts.