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 clichés 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, and it implied urgency; “ambush” interviews, catching subjects on the fly or by surprise, led viewers to believe that the subject must be hiding something. The choice against narration, which became fashionable in the later 1960s, allowed viewers to believe that they were being allowed to decide for themselves the meaning of what they saw (even though editing choices actually controlled what they saw).
Documentarians employ the same techniques as do fiction filmmakers. Cinematographers, sound technicians, digital designers, musicians, and editors may work in both modes. Documentary work may require lights, and directors may ask their subjects for retakes; documentaries usually require sophisticated editing; documentarians add sound effects and sound tracks.
A shared convention of most documentaries is the narrative structure. They are stories, they have beginnings, middles, and ends; they invest viewers in their characters, they take viewers on emotional journeys. They often refer to classic story structure. When Jon Else made a documentary about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the creator of the first atomic bomb—a scientist who anguished over his responsibilities—Else had his staff read Hamlet.
Conventions work well to command attention, facilitate storytelling, and share a maker’s perspective with audiences. They become the aesthetic norm—off-the-shelf choices for documentarians, shortcuts to register truthfulness. Conventions also, however, disguise the assumptions that makers bring to the project, and make the presentation of the particular facts and scenes seem both inevitable and complete.
Showcasing convention
How, then, to see formal choices as choices, to see conventions as conventions? You may turn to films whose makers put formal choice front and center as subject matter, and contrast their choices with more routine work.
One of the easiest ways to see conventions is through satire and parody. For example, the great Spanish surrealist artist Luis Buñuel’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 Buñuel, 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 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 “city symphony” unites the brash industrial enterprise of the modern city with the classical musical form that demonstrates the capacity to organize and coordinate many individual expressions into a whole. The film takes the viewer into Berlin on a train and then on a day-long tour of the many urban patterns emerging from the interaction of people and machines, culminating with fireworks. In the film, Ruttmann experimented with Vertov’s ideas about the power of documentary to be an “eye” on society in a way that transcended the power of human observation.
Many artists seized upon the city symphony notion as a way of experimenting with the medium. The Brazilian artist Alberto Cavalcanti was inspired by the project Ruttmann was developing and made Rien que les Heures (1926), a film about Paris, even before Ruttmann completed his. It features clever special effects in a whirlwind tour of Paris that includes both the highest and lowest classes of society. In the south of France, Vertov’s exiled younger brother, Boris Kaufman, and the French artist Jean Vigo, produced a slyly satirical little film, À Propos de Nice (1930), showing the beach town as a self-indulgent culture of gambling and sun-and self-worshiping. (Vertov wrote filmmaking instructions to his brothe
r.) In Belgium, Henri Storck made a closely observed film about his own beach town, in Images d’Ostende (1930), and the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens, who went on to work with Storck, made what became a classic of these films, Rain. Vertov, in touch with these developments, created his masterpiece, Man with a Movie Camera.
The city symphony form remains an unusual, poetic choice, an exception to the rule of documentary conventions. Godfrey Reggio’s 1982 Koyaanisqatsi uses lightshow-like techniques along with time-lapse photography (one of the techniques pioneered by city symphony films) to make a histrionic commentary on mankind’s devastating effect on the earth. The title refers to a Hopi word meaning “life out of balance.” American film scholar Thom Andersen used nearly a century of cinema to look at how Los 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.
2. In Mothlight, experimental documentarian Stan Brakhage pressed moth wings and scraps of twigs and flowers between celluloid strips. Directed by Stan Brakhage, 1963.
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 shock us out of our visual habits. These experiments have greatly expanded the repertoire of formal approaches for documentary filmmakers. At the same time, these experiments provide a sharp contrast to the most common conventions, those usually used in broadcast television.
Economic context
Conventions are also conditioned by business realities. On television, where viewers make a decision within one or two seconds about whether to watch, producers now strive to make every moment compelling and to signal brand identity not only through identifying logos but through style. They also search for ways to streamline production and reduce costs through style and form. A History Channel executive in the later 1990s memorably explained that channel’s then-formula—clips either of stock footage or of small staged scenes or objects interpolated with talking heads and stitched together with narration—to a group of striving producers: “We do it because it’s cheap and it works.”
Filmmakers have looked to three kinds of funders to pay for their documentaries: patrons or sponsors, both corporate and governmental; advertisers, typically on television and usually at one remove; and users or audiences. Each source of funding has powerfully affected the choices of filmmakers.
Government sponsors have been critically important to documentary filmmaking. In the British Commonwealth, institutions that promote the making and distribution of documentary film include the BBC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, and the Canadian National Film Board. Throughout continental Europe, governments provide subsidies to artists who work on documentaries. German, French, and Dutch documentary work has flourished with this kind of investment. In the developing world, ex-colonial powers sometimes provide stipends for cultural production; national governments may offer resources and often control access to screens. Cultural nationalism 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.)
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 critici
zed 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 attract viewers to their messages. Advertising favors lightweight, low-budget documentaries that do not challenge the status quo and sensationalist documentaries that can drive up ratings.
Documentary Film Page 3
