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 built on prior experience; viewers expect not to be tricked and lied to. We expect to be told things about the real world, things that are true.
We do not demand that these things be portrayed objectively, and they do not have to be the complete truth. The filmmaker may employ poetic license from time to time and refer to reality symbolically (an image of the Colosseum representing, say, a European vacation). But we do expect that a documentary will be a fair and honest representation of somebody’s experience of reality. This is the contract with the viewer that teacher Michael Rabiger meant in his classic text: “There are no rules in this young art form, only decisions about where to draw the line and how to remain consistent to the contract you will set up with your audience.”
Terms
The term “documentary” emerged awkwardly out of early practice. When entrepreneurs in the late nineteenth century first began to record moving pictures of real-life events, some called what they were making “documentaries.” The term did not stabilize for decades, however. Other people called their films “educationals,” “actualities,” “interest films,” or perhaps referred to their subject matter—“travel films,” for example. John Grierson, a Scot, decided to use this new form in the service of the British government and coined the term “documentary” by applying it to the work of the great American filmmaker Robert Flaherty’s Moana (1926), which chronicled daily life on a South Seas island. He defined documentary as the “artistic representation of actuality”—a definition that has proven durable probably because it is so very flexible.
Marketing pressures affect what is defined as a documentary. When the philosopher-filmmaker Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988) was released in theaters, public relations professionals downplayed the term “documentary” in the interest of ticket sales. The film is a sophisticated detective story—did Randall Adams 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 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 audiences without challenging assumptions. They attract and distract with the best-working tools, including sensationalism, sex, and violence. Theatrical wildlife films such as March of the Penguins (2005) are classic examples of consumer entertainment that use all of these techniques to charm and alarm viewers, even though the sensationalism, sex, and violence occur among animals.
Paid persuaders also exploit the reality claims of the genre, often as operatives of government and business. This may produce devastating social results, as did Nazi propaganda such as the viciously anti-Semitic The Eternal Jew (1937). Such work may also provoke important positive change. When the Roosevelt administration wanted to sell Americans on expensive new government programs, it commissioned some of the most remarkable visual poems made in the era, those by Pare Lorentz and a talented team. Works such as The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River (1938) helped to invest taxpayers in programs that promoted economic stability and growth.
In its short history, however, documentary has often been made by individuals on the edges of mainstream media, working with a public service media organization such as public broadcasting, with commercial broadcasters eager for awards, with nonprofit entities, or with private foundation or public education funds. On the margins of mainstream media, slightly off-kilter from status-quo understandings of reality, many documentarians have struggled to speak truthfully about—and to—power. They have often seen themselves as public actors, speaking not only to audiences but to other members of a public that needs to know in order to act.
Some recent examples demonstrate the range of such activity. Brave New Films’s Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price (2005) is an impassioned, didactic argument indicting the large retail superstore for such practices as inadequate medical plans for employees and the willful destruction of small businesses. It does 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 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 José Padilha’s Bus 174 (2002), in retelling a sensational news event in Rio de Janeiro—the hijacking of a bus, a several-hour standoff, and ultimate death of both hijacker and a bus rider, telecast live—brings viewers both into the life of the hijacker and the challenges of the police. By contrasting television footage that had glued viewers to their sets for an entire day along with investigations into the stories leading up to the event, the film reframes the “news” as an example of how endemic and terrible social problems are turned into spectacle. Three Rooms of Melancholia (2005), an epic meditation by Finnish filmmaker Pirjo Honkasalo, draws viewers into the Russian war against Chechnya by creating an emotional triptych. In “Longing,” her camera caresses the earnest faces of twelve-year-old cadets in St. Petersburg, training to fight Chechens; in the second part, “Breathing,” a local social worker visits the sad apartments of Grozny under siege, where daily-life problems become insuperable; the third, “Remembering,” takes place in an orphanage just over the border, where Chechnyan young people learn bitterness. Little is said; in contemplative close-up, the faces of puzzlement, pain, and endurance speak volumes. The viewer has become complicit with the camera in knowing.
1. 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.
Whether a filmmaker intends to address the public or not, documentaries may be used in unexpected ways. One of the most infamous propaganda films of all time, Triumph of the Will (1935), has had a long life in other, anti-Nazi propaganda and in historical films. Israeli Yo’av Shamir’s Checkpoint (2003), a scrupulously observed, non-narrated record of the behavior of Israeli troops at Palestinian checkpoints, was intended and was used as a provocation to public discussion of human rights violations. The Israeli Army embraced it as a training film.
Our shared understanding of what a documentary is—built up from our own viewing experience—shifts over time, with business and marketing pressures, technological and formal innovations, and with vigorous debate. The genre of documentary always has two crucial elements that are in tension: representation, and 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 experie
nce.
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, 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.
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