ABSTRACT
From the brief review of literature surrounding the disagreements regarding the Bomba/Lanzmann encounter, it is clear that there is a serious polarity of views on the matter, which simply cannot be easily reconciled. Some of the ethical concerns regarding the documentary process have been mentioned in Chapter 3. Recently, Bill Nichols, in the new edition of his classic Introduction to Documentary (2010), also states that the key issue is the responsibility of fi lmmakers for ‘the effect of their acts on the lives of those fi lmed’ (Nichols 2010: 48). There is a vague and intuitive sense of what is right and what isn’t, but it is only in the last few years that any documentary studies scholars, notably Michael Renov (2004) and Sarah Cooper (2006), have engaged with some philosophical notions of ethics. Cooper in her book Selfl ess Cinema? (2006) explores visual representations of asymmetrical relations between self and the Other in documentary, which, whilst close, can also afford a relative distance to the subject of the fi lm, and ‘did not reduce the latter to an entity that could be known fully’, as she put it a few years later (Cooper 2010: 58).
