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Chapter 1
Defining the Documentary
Naming
Documentary film begins in the last years of the nineteenth century with the first films ever projected, and it has many faces. It can be a trip to exotic lands and lifestyles, as was Nanook of the North (1922). It can be a visual poem, such as Joris Ivens’s Rain (1929)—a story about a rainy day, set to a piece of classical music, in which the storm echoes the structure of the music. It can be an artful piece of propaganda. Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who ardently proclaimed that fiction cinema was poisonous and dying and that documentary was the future, made Man with a Movie Camera (1929) as propaganda both for a political regime and for a film style.
What is a documentary? One easy and traditional answer is: not a movie. Or at least not a movie like Star Wars is a movie. Except when it is a theatrical movie, like Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), which broke all box-office records for a documentary. Another easy and common answer could be: a movie that isn’t fun, a serious movie, something that tries to teach you something—except when it’s something like Stacy Peralta’s Riding Giants (2004), which gives you a thrill ride on the history of surfing. Many documentaries are cannily designed with the express goal of entertainment. Indeed, most documentary filmmakers consider themselves storytellers, not journalists.
A simple answer might be: a movie about real life. And that is precisely the problem; documentaries are about real life; they are not real life. They are not even windows onto real life. They are portraits of real life, using real life as their raw material, constructed by artists and technicians who make myriad decisions about what story to tell to whom, and for what purpose.
You might then say: a movie that does its best to represent real life and that doesn’t manipulate it. And yet, there is no way to make a film without manipulating the information. Selection of topic, editing, mixing sound are all manipulations. Broadcast journalist Edward R. Murrow once said, ‘‘Anyone who believes that every individual film must represent a ‘ balanced’ picture knows nothing about either balance or pictures.’’
The problem of deciding how much to manipulate is as old as the form. Nanook of the North is considered one of the first great documentaries, but its subjects, the Inuit, assumed roles at filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s direction, much like actors in a fiction film. Flaherty asked them to do things they no longer did, such as hunt for walrus with a spear, and he showed them as ignorant about things they understood. In the film, ‘‘Nanook’’—not his real name—bites a gramophone record in cheerful puzzlement, but in fact the man was quite savvy about modern equipment and even helped Flaherty disassemble and reassemble his camera equipment regularly. At the same time, Flaherty built his story from his own experience of years living with the Inuit, who happily participated in his project and gave him plenty of ideas for the plot.
A documentary film tells a story about real life, with claims to truthfulness. How to do that honestly, in good faith, is a never- ending discussion, with many answers. Documentary is defined and redefined over the course of time, both by makers and by viewers. Viewers certainly shape the meaning of any documentary, by combining our own knowledge of and interest in the world with how the filmmaker shows it to us. Audience expectations are also
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commit the crime for which he is sentenced to die in Texas? The film shows the dubious quality of key witnesses’ testimony. When the case was reopened and the film entered as evidence, the film’s status suddenly became important, and Morris now had to assert that it was, indeed, a documentary.
Conversely, Michael Moore’s first feature, Roger and Me (1989), a savage indictment of General Motors for precipitating the decline of the steel town of Flint, Michigan, and a masterpiece of black humor, was originally called a documentary. But when journalist Harlan Jacobson showed that Moore had misrepresented the sequence of events, Moore distanced himself from the word ‘‘documentary.’’ He argued that this was not a documentary but a movie, an entertainment whose deviations from strict sequencing were incidental to the theme.
In the 1990s, documentaries began to be big business worldwide, and by 2004 the worldwide business in television documentary alone added up to $4.5 billion revenues annually. Reality TV and ‘‘docusoaps’’—real-life miniseries set in potentially high-drama situations such as driving schools, restaurants, hospitals, and airports—also burgeoned. Theatrical revenues multiplied at the beginning of the twenty-first century. DVD sales, video- on-demand, and rentals of documentaries became big business. Soon documentaries were being made for cell phones, and collaborative documentaries were being produced online. Marketers who had discreetly hidden the fact that their films were documentaries were now proudly calling such works ‘‘docs.’’
Why it matters
Naming matters. Names come with expectations; if that were not true, then marketers would not use them as marketing tools. The truthfulness, accuracy, and trustworthiness of documentaries are important to us all because we value them precisely and uniquely for these qualities. When documentarians deceive us, they are not just deceiving viewers but members of the public who might act
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upon knowledge gleaned from the film. Documentaries are part of the media that help us understand not only our world but our role in it, that shape us as public actors.
The importance of documentaries is thus linked to a notion of the public as a social phenomenon. The philosopher John Dewey argued persuasively that the public—the body so crucial to the health of a democratic society—is not just individuals added up. A public is a group of people who can act together for the public good and so can hold to account the entrenched power of business and government. It is an informal body that can come together in crisis if need be. There are as many publics as there are occasions and issues to call them forth. We can all be members of any particular public, if we have a way to communicate with each other about the shared problems we face. Communication, therefore, is the soul of the public.
As communications scholar James Carey noted, ‘‘Reality is a scarce resource.’’ Reality is not what is out there but what we know, understand, and share with each other of what is out there. Media affect the most expensive real estate of all, that which is inside your head. Documentary is an important reality-shaping communication, because of its claims to truth. Documentaries are always grounded in real life, and make a claim to tell us something worth knowing about it.
True, consumer entertainment is an important aspect of the business of filmmaking, even in documentary. Most documentary filmmakers sell their work, either to viewers or to intermediaries such as broadcasters and distributors. They are constrained by their business models. Even though documentary costs much less than fiction film to make, it is still much more expensive to produce than, say, a brochure or a pamphlet. Television and theatrical documentaries usually require investors or institutions such as broadcasters to back them. And as documentaries become ever more popular, more of them are being produced to delight
Defining the Documentary
not strive for balance in representing Wal-Mart’s point of view; it does strive for accuracy in representing the problem. The film was made for action; it was used to organize legislative pushback and social resistance to the company’s most exploitative practices. Wal-Mart aggressively countered the film with attack ads, and the filmmakers countercharged Wal-Mart with inaccuracy. Bloggers and even mainstream media picked up the discussion. Brave New Films positioned itself as a voice of the public, filling a perceived gap in the coverage that mainstream media provided on the problem. Viewers of the film, most of whom saw it through DVD-by-mail purchases and as a result of an e-mail campaign, viewed it not as entertainment but as an entertainingly-produced argument about an important public issue.
Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11, a sardonic, anti-Iraq war film, addressed the American public directly, as people whose government was acting in the public’s name. Right-wing commentators in commercial media attempted to discredit the film by charging that it was indeed propaganda. But Moore is not a minion of the powerful as propagandists are. He was putting forward, as he had every right to, his own view about a shared reality, frankly acknowledging his perspective. Further, he was encouraging viewers to look critically at their government’s words and actions. (Potentially weakening this encouragement, however, was his calculated performance of working-class rage, which can lead viewers to see themselves not as social actors but merely as disempowered victims of the powerful.)
Other recent documentaries for public knowledge and action use techniques designed to attract interest across lines of belief. Eugene Jarecki’s Why We Fight (2005) showcases an argument about the collusion between politicians, big business, and the military to spend the public’s money and lives for wars that do not need to be fought. Jarecki deliberately chose Republican subjects, who could transcend partisan politics and speak to the public interest. In Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Al Gore and Davis
Defining the Documentary
Guggenheim, in an easy-to-understand presentation, let scientific data speak to the urgency of the issue. The director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Jim Hansen, noted the public value of the work: ‘‘Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides. He will be attacked, but the public will have the information needed to distinguish our long-term well-being from short-term special interests.’’
Styles can be dramatically different, in order to accomplish the end of public engagement. Judith Helfand and Dan Gold’s Blue Vinyl (2002) employs the personal diary format to personalize a problem. The film follows Helfand as she takes a piece of her parents’ home’s vinyl siding and discovers the cancer-causing toxicity of vinyl at the beginning and end of its life cycle (it creates dioxin). Helfand becomes a representative of the public—people who need inexpensive siding and also suffer the health consequences of using it. Brazilian Jose´ Padilha’s Bus 174 (2002),
- Blue Vinyl used personal essay to explore social issues; Judith Helfand—a piece of her suburban home’s vinyl siding in hand— explores toxic effects of vinyl production. Directed by Daniel B. Gold and Judith Helfand, 2002.
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reality. Their makers manipulate and distort reality like all filmmakers, but they still make a claim for making a truthful representation of reality. Throughout the history of documentary film, makers, critics, and viewers have argued about what constitutes trustworthy storytelling about reality. This book introduces you to those arguments over time and in some of its popular subgenres.
Form What does a documentary look like? Most people carry inside their heads a rough notion of what a documentary is. For many of them, it is not a pretty picture. ‘‘A ‘‘regular documentary’’ often means a film that features sonorous, ‘‘voice-of-God’’ narration, an analytical argument rather than a story with characters, head shots of experts leavened with a few people-on-the-street interviews, stock images that illustrate the narrator’s point (often called ‘‘ b-roll’’ in broadcasting), perhaps a little educational animation, and dignified music. This combination of formal elements is not usually remembered fondly. ‘‘It was really interesting, not like a regular documentary,’’ is a common response to a pleasant theatrical experience.
In fact, documentarians have a large range of formal choices in registering for viewers the veracity and importance of what they show them. The formal elements many associate with ‘‘regular documentary’’ are part of a package of choices that became standard practice in the later twentieth century on broadcast television, but there are quite a few more to be had. This chapter provides you with several ways to consider the documentary as a set of decisions about how to represent reality with the tools available to the filmmaker. These tools include sound (ambient sound, soundtrack music, special sound effects, dialogue, narration); images (material shot on location, historical images captured in photographs, video, or objects); special effects in audio and video, including animation; and pacing (length of scenes,
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number of cuts, script or storytelling structure). Filmmakers choose the way they want to structure a story—which characters to develop for viewers, whose stories to focus on, how to resolve the storytelling.
Filmmakers have many choices to make about each of the elements. For instance, a single shot may be framed differently and carry a different meaning depending on the frame: a close-up of a father grieving may say something quite different from a wide shot of the same scene showing the entire room; a decision to let the ambient sound of the funeral dominate the soundtrack will mean something different than a swelling soundtrack.
Since there is nothing natural about the representation of reality in documentary, documentary filmmakers are acutely aware that all their choices shape the meaning they choose. All documentary conventions—that is, habits or cliche´s in the formal choices of expression—arise from the need to convince viewers of the authenticity of what they are being told. For instance, experts vouch for the truthfulness of analysis; dignified male narrators signify authority for many viewers; classical music connotes seriousness.
Challenges to conventions stake an alternative claim to authenticity. At a time when ambient sound could be collected only with difficulty, conventions of 35mm sound production included authoritatively delivered narration. They also included lighting and even staging, appropriate to the heavy, difficult-to-move equipment. Some documentaries used careful editing between the crafted compositions of each scene, to create the illusion of reality before the viewer’s eyes. When filmmakers began experimenting with lighter 16mm equipment after World War II, the conventions that arose differently persuaded viewers of the documentary’s truthfulness. Using very long ‘‘takes’’ or scenes made viewers feel that they were watching unvarnished reality; the jerkiness of handheld cameras was testimony to the you-are-there immediacy,
Defining the Documentary
One of the easiest ways to see conventions is through satire and parody. For example, the great Spanish surrealist artist Luis Bun˜uel’s Land without Bread (Las Hurdes: Tierra sin Pan, 1932) begins as a seemingly tedious, pompous excursion into an impoverished corner of Spain. Soon, however, it becomes clear that Bun˜uel, aided by the commentary written by the surrealist artist Pierre Unik, is using dry, pseudo-scientific conventions to incite bewilderment and outrage, both at the narrator and then at the horrific social conditions of the countryside. The British Broadcasting Company (BBC)’s 1957 The Spaghetti Story, a segment in its Panorama series, takes viewers to Switzerland to discuss the latest spaghetti harvest (growing on trees) as a joke that also functions as a media literacy lesson. The wry In Search of the Edge (1990), purportedly about why the earth is flat, employs a wide range of educational-documentary devices that people associate with ‘‘regular documentary’’—all with deliberate clumsiness—to demonstrate false logic in scientific arguments and manipulation in filmmaking. Here, experts are given such titles as ‘‘university professor’’ and are shown in front of bookcases signifying scholarship, although they speak nonsense; flashy graphics demonstrate physical impossibilities; the narrator’s tone is contemptuous of the notion that the earth is round; a family photo is shown in gradual close-up, Ken Burns–style, only to show the mentioned character with her head turned. The Australian film Babakiueria (1988), made by an aboriginal group, satirizes ethnographic film conventions, including the ascribing of mysterious or magical properties to exotic others in narration, the expert witness, the pretentious narrator, and the portrayal of scientific investigation as heroic exploration. In the film, aboriginal scientists investigate what they believe to be a white Australian cultural ritual site, which actually is a barbecue area.
Mockumentaries, or tongue-in-cheek fake documentaries, also offer the chance to see conventions at an angle. Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap! (1984), about an imaginary heavy metal band, famously parodied rockumentaries—performance films of rock
Defining the Documentary
bands—with their contrast of high-energy stage performance with goofy backstage antics and their populist success narratives. Like later mockumentaries such as Best in Show (2000) and A Mighty Wind (2003), the humor depended on the audience being able to identify the conventions.
Artistic experiment
Another way to see conventions is to analyze films by makers who see themselves primarily as artists—makers manipulating form rather than storytellers using the film medium—as they invent, reinvent, and challenge. Where the market pressures of attracting audiences have led many filmmakers to employ familiar conventions, artists working outside the film and video marketplaces have sought to go beyond them. They are frontline innovators and experimenters.
One highly celebrated example of such artistic countercurrents is the city symphony film. In the 1920s and 1930s, when theaters were showing nature adventures, war newsreels, and exotica, artists producing for galleries in interwar Europe imagined cinema (then a silent medium) as, among other things, a visual poem, one that could unite the experience of different senses. It was a time of exuberant experimentation and international communication. City symphonies participated in the modernist love of the urban, of machinery, and of progress. They absorbed elements from artistic movements such as surrealism and futurism, and they let people see what they usually could not or would not. Among the machines artists loved was the camera itself, which represented a superior ‘‘mechanical eye,’’ as Russian documentarian and theorist Dziga Vertov called it. An early example of the city symphony was Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler’s Manhatta (1921), and the form proliferated on the European continent in the later 1920s.
The city symphony was given its name by the German filmmaker Walther Ruttmann’s Berlin: Symphony of a Great City (1927). Ruttmann also commissioned a score for the film. The very term
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Angeles has been represented in the movies in Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). It sometimes wryly, sometimes bleakly shows the city in the commercial and public imagination.
Other self-described artists have searched for ways to use documentary film as a road to purity of vision and a celebration of the ecstasy of sensation itself. Because their films deliberately eschew conventions such as story line, narrator, and sometimes even discernable objects in the world, they provide another way of understanding what we have come to expect. Kenneth Anger, Jonas Mekas, Carolee Schneeman, Jordan Belson, and Michael Snow all made films that creatively interpreted real life, although they identified themselves as avant-garde artists and not documentarians. One of the best known American avant-garde artists who did think of himself as a documentarian—and a scientist—was Stan Brakhage.
Brakhage wanted viewers to return to an ‘‘innocent eye,’’ a purity of experience of vision. He wanted to help people see, not only what the eye takes in from the outside but also what the eye creates as a result of memory or bodily energy from the inside. ‘‘I really think my films are documentaries. All of them,’’ he said. ‘‘They are my attempts to get as accurate a representation of seeing as I possibly can.’’ Most of Brakhage’s work was silent and executed in the passionate belief that seeing was a full-body action. Surprisingly, his artistic intuitions and perceptions of how the eye works are supported by scientific research on optics.
Brakhage made hundreds of films; two of the most seen are Mothlight (1963) and The Garden of Earthly Delights (1981). In both short films, Brakhage encased found natural objects, put them between two pieces of celluloid and then printed the images created. Mothlight contained moth wings; Garden contained twigs, flowers, seeds, and weeds. The images produced then created an experience for viewers, which referred to the original but was entirely different.
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Art films have also experimented with sound. The German experimental filmmaker Hans Richter translated sound rhythms into visual experience in the 1920s and 1930s. The Indian filmmaker Mani Kaul, who grew up artistically in India’s subsidized ‘‘parallel cinema’’ (i.e., parallel to commercial cinema) in the 1970s, has worked repeatedly with Indian song traditions, including Dhrupad (1982), which mesmerizes with the sound and image of one classical music performance style designed to facilitate spiritual meditation. Such work highlights the way in which we often take sound for granted as a convenient emotional conductor.
In all these works, the conventions of ‘‘regular documentary’’ are largely absent. No narrator tells us what is going on; no experts provide authority; ordinary reality is deliberately distorted so that we will see it differently; soundtracks are used for other purposes than cueing story-linked emotions. Patterns of light and dark, the hypnotic sound of repetitive music, the sight of objects from the natural world projected at many times their size, and other devices
- In Mothlight, experimental documentarian Stan Brakhage pressed moth wings and scraps of twigs and flowers between celluloid strips. Directed by Stan Brakhage, 1963.
Defining the Documentary
is a powerful motive for national governments to provide these subsidies. Programming themes and styles often reflect a concern to express national identity, especially against the unceasing international flow of U.S. popular media.
By contrast, U.S. taxpayer support for documentary has historically been anemic, in a nation where cultural policy has always strongly supported commercial media. U.S. public broadcasting was given a rebirth in the liberal heyday of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, with committed public funds for the noncommercial, nongovernmental entity to help build capacity of the then- feeble public broadcast stations in most major cities. During the 1970s and 1980s, other cultural organizations, especially the taxpayer-funded National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Arts, also contributed to American documentary. Unconventional styles, themes, and politically sensitive topics often raised conservative ire in Congress.
Another way in which governments have been important to documentary filmmaking is through regulation that encourages certain kinds of production over others. For example, when the British government authorized the existence of private commercial television channels, it also required hefty public interest responsibilities, which translated into ambitious documentary projects funded in hopes of prestige, recognition, and license renewal. British Channel 4 was launched with funds siphoned from advertising revenues of a commercial channel and was given a mandate to feature the work of independent producers, including many documentarians. Chad Raphael has argued that American broadcast network fear of government regulation (networks had been caught rigging quiz shows) led to a period of lavish funding for investigative public affairs documentaries. (Indeed, the decline of government regulation of television in the 1980s resulted in a decline in public affairs documentaries.)
Defining the Documentary
Government regulators play a de facto role in standards-setting and enforcing of conventions. Broadcasters are usually under tight scrutiny by regulators who patrol use of airwaves, which the government typically leases to individual companies with conditions. In a documentary about drug smuggling, The Connection, Brian Winston recounted a scandal that erupted in Britain in 1998 over re-created or possibly even fictional footage. The British Independent Television Commission, a regulatory body, fined the television channel that aired the film and set in motion debates about government censorship.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) levied an indecency fine, widely criticized as arbitrary, on a public television station for airing a history program, The Blues (2003), because in it a jazz musician uttered a vulgar word. The judgment then made many broadcasters even more cautious in their programming.
The role of private-sector sponsors in the history of documentary has been large, and surely will continue to be. Key works of documentary founder Robert Flaherty were backed by corporate sponsors who hoped to associate their image with his romantic vision. Corporate underwriters and sponsors were also essential to early documentary on television. For instance, the American public affairs program featuring the great journalist Edward R. Murrow, See It Now (1951), was funded by Alcoa, which at the time was looking to burnish its reputation after an antitrust suit. Corporate underwriters have been crucial to public service television as well. Nonprofit organizations have also become significant clients for documentary film work on issues they consider important. Sponsors pay to have a film made because they want a particular story told or they want to improve their image. Either way, a filmmaker has limited autonomy but often it is enough to be able to do important work. Sometimes a filmmaker’s priorities accord well with an organization’s, as well. Advertisers are also sponsors, each of whom pays for a little time or space on a program that can
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