Direct sale is the fastest-growing model for documentary support. Theatrical audiences looking for novelty and awe find it in IMAX documentaries, whether on the miracle of flight or the astounding world of tropical insects. Subscribers to cable channels, such as HBO or Canada’s Doc Channel, receive a flow of documentary programming the same way they subscribe to magazines. Video on demand also offers documentaries direct to viewers, as do rental services such as Netflix and Blockbuster. Home users are purchasing, often online, DVDs of documentaries that may never have seen the inside of a theater, and they are also downloading films to their video iPods and cell phones; this drives documentarians to identify a “personal audience,” as producer Peter Broderick calls it, and to craft work around the interests of this niche or identify a constituency passionate about a particular cause or issue.
A breakthrough example of direct distribution was the Robert Greenwald-produced Outfoxed (2004), which lambastes Fox News for its right-wing bias. Launched during the 2004 election season in the United States, this film was offered to viewers via e-mails from the liberal website MoveOn.org. According to organizers, more than 100,000 viewers purchased the DVDs within the month, mostly for use in house parties where several viewers saw it at once. The film also received a limited, simultaneous theatrical run. The example was rapidly imitated and tweaked; soon conservatives were making their own incendiary films and circulating them to their constituencies.
Digital production in a download era bids fair to develop new market models. By 2006 video downloads occupied perhaps half the total traffic on the Internet. Within days, obscure homemade parodies have drawn worldwide audiences larger than many documentaries ever gained in a festival and theatrical run. At the same time, the business model that can support such work still remained to be seen.
Ethics and form
Ethical issues have been as critical as aesthetic ones in the formal choices of documentarians. American historical filmmaker Jon Else and theorist Bill Nichols among others have called for professional filmmakers themselves to articulate ethical standards.
One ongoing question is that of how much simulation of reality is acceptable. Outright fakery is easy to condemn, although it is common from the origins of film: Thomas Edison’s studio produced war footage from the Philippines in New Jersey, and the supposed record of the sinking of the Maine in the Havana harbor was actually filmed in a New York bathtub.
Other practices are less ethically clear. Reenactment was a staple of 35mm documentary film production. Given the cumbersome machinery, without lighting and staging, most filmmaking of this kind would have been impossible. Cinema verité purists in the 1960s, using new lighter-weight and more-flexible equipment, scorned such techniques, denigrating them as artificial.
Reenactment burgeoned again, though, in the 1990s. Sometimes, it was because of the low budgets offered by cable programmers that filmmakers struggled to produce compelling storytelling for television audiences used to high production values. Thus, on the History Channel, for example, it became common for a few feet in sandals to represent the march of thousands of Roman warriors, or for a few coins and a vase to represent the wealth of kings in another era. Other times, filmmakers used reenactment to evoke an uncaptured moment. In the Holocaust-memoir film Tak for Alt (1999), scenes of a mother making challah and lighting candles were staged to represent the memories of the survivor’s childhood. Such use is not confusing to viewers, since they usually can distinguish what is genuine experience from the symbolic representation of it.
Controversy has grown up around filmmaking in which the fake is interwoven with the real, without giving viewers the chance to distinguish. The civil rights history Mighty Times: Volume 2: The Children’s March (2004), by Robert Hudson and Bobby Houston, intermixed reenactments and archival material, and also used archival material from one place and time to signify another. When it won an Academy Award, the film generated controversy for its intermixing. David McNab’s The Secret Plot to Kill Hitler (2004) was part of a Discovery Channel experiment in “virtual history,” in which actors reenact a moment in history, and the heads of historical figures are borrowed from archival footage. The film admitted this at the outset, but some believed the approach of mixing actors with archival images crossed an ethical line and could potentially confuse people.
Films that throughout use actors and scripts, with creative license, to retell true events are usually called docudramas. Films such as Gandhi (1982) or television series such as Roots (1977) are docudramas. They look and feel like fiction films, and it is generally understood that they can take some license with details in order to dramatically represent a reality. However, neither viewers nor journalists think falsifying reality is appropriate. A 2006 ABC network docudrama, The Path to 9/11, cast actors in roles of real Clinton administration officials, including that of the secretary of state, and had them say and do things that they clearly had not. These falsifications showed the Clinton administration neglecting a terrorist threat. The network deleted some errors at the last minute and then tried to absolve itself by noting that the film was only a docudrama, but outraged viewers and commentators were not mollified by the disclaimer.
Some documentaries mix in fictional elements while still laying claim to being documentaries. This style is growing with the popularity of documentary entertainment. For example, Danish filmmaker Jeppe Rønde’s The Swenkas (2004) tells a fable about a father-and-son reunion, within documentation of real-life male fashion contests in South Africa. Although it was popular in film festivals in the global North, the film raises questions for its representation of a fictional plot as real life.
Some documentary filmmakers deliberately use fiction as a provocation. British left-wing filmmaker Peter Watkins has made many films using nonactors to reenact historical incidents that reveal structures of power and movements of resistance, from the Battle of Culloden to the Paris Commune. American radical filmmaker Emile de Antonio in his In the King of Prussia (1982) restaged a trial of anti-Vietnam War protesters, after reporters were banned from the courtroom. The film starred the actual defendants, including the priestly brothers Philip and Daniel Berrigan, with the Hollywood actor Martin Sheen as the judge. The reenactment not only retold the events but implicitly critiqued the banning of reporters during the trial. The French filmmaker Chris Marker, in his Sans Soleil (1982) mixed documentary images and sound with a fictional narration. The result was a provocative inquiry into the meaning of memory and a meditation on filmmaking. In Perfumed Nightmare (1977), Philippine filmmaker Kidlat Tahimik recycled documentary footage to tell a fictional story about a Third World innocent who traveled to the West—a tale that was also a critical documentary essay about the interpenetration of West and East. The recycling itself was a commentary on the Philippines’ syncretic and eclectic culture.
German artist Harun Farocki has created many complex and self-reflexive film essays where documentary footage is used and wrenching questions of public importance addressed. His essay on the complicity of industrial workers in the Vietnam war, Nicht löschbares Feuer (The Indistinguishable Fire, 1969)—the fire referred to napalm—was scripted and staged in a style that attempted Brechtian alienation. American filmmaker Jill Godmilow later remade the film shot-for-shot as What Farocki Taught (1998).
Are such hybrids still documentary? Like the mainstream of documentary, they claim to portray real life, telling the viewer something important about it. But to some, these experiments are outside the bounds of documentary, as are mockumentaries. Godmilow herself, within her film, asks the viewer what kind of movie What Farocki Taught is. She points out that almost all scenes were reenacted, such as most scenes in the film it mimics had been, and yet the film is an argument about real life. She suggests, partly tongue in cheek, that the viewer regard the film as “agit-prop,” recalling the Soviet-era term for “agitation-propaganda” films to incite social change. Her own questioning points to the fuzzy lines around the border of the genre.
/> Filmmakers’ formal choices all make persuasive claims to the viewer about the accuracy, good faith, and reasonableness of the filmmaker. The fact that filmmakers have a wide variety of choices in representing reality is a reminder that there is no transparent representation of reality. No one can solve these ethical dilemmas by eschewing choice in expression, and no formal choices are wrong in themselves. A good-faith relationship between maker and viewer is essential. Filmmakers can facilitate that by being clear to themselves why they are using the techniques that they do, and striving for formal choices that honor the reality they want to share.
Founders
Three figures who launched their careers in the 1920s have shaped expectation of audiences worldwide ever since: Robert Flaherty, John Grierson, and Dziga Vertov. Each one claimed simultaneously that they told the truth and that they were artists. These two assertions, as we have seen, create the most basic tension in documentary. When does artistry conflict with reality and when does it facilitate such representation? These filmmakers variously grappled with that question and set the stage for later arguments.
Grierson and Flaherty, with different aspirations, both anchored a tradition of realism in documentary. This expressive tradition creates the illusion of reality for the viewer. Thus, realism was not an attempt to authentically capture reality but an attempt to use art to mimic it so effectively that the viewer would be pulled in without thinking about it. Some of the techniques to create the illusion of reality include (1) elision editing (editing that goes unnoticed by the conscious mind, so that your eye is tricked into thinking it is merely moving with the action); (2) cinematography that creates the illusion that you are almost in the scene or “looking over the shoulder” of the action and gives you a psychological stake in the action; and (3) pacing that follows the viewer’s expectations for events in the natural world. Because of its evocative power, realism has become the international language of commercial cinema, in both documentary and fiction.
In contrast to realism are approaches that call attention to the artist’s and the technology’s role in creating the film. Some of these approaches have been grouped under the term formalism, meaning the highlighting of formal elements in the film itself. Examples of such elements include sharp or recognizable edits, unnatural colors, distortions in the lens, special effects such as animation, and slowing down or speeding up sound and image. In the early days of film, many filmmakers experimented with these techniques, and they have typified a strong strand of expression in documentary outside commercial strictures ever since. (Advertisers have also found them helpful, for memorable, high-impact effects.) Proponents of formalism charged realists with illusionism, with tricking viewers into believing that they are watching something real; instead, these makers argued, let viewers notice and even celebrate the artist’s role in creating the work.
Robert Flaherty
The American Robert Flaherty produced only a few films in a lifetime’s work, but some have become touchstones of documentary. His first film, Nanook of the North, was a popular success and inspired filmmakers all over the world, from the Russian Sergei Eisenstein to the British John Grierson to the French Jean Rouch.
Flaherty grew up in and on the border of Canada, living partly in mining camps with his father, a mine owner. After an aborted film (the negative burned up) made as documentation of his travels, he returned for a year to the indigenous Arctic people who had treated him well, with funds from a French fur trading company. Although several distributors turned down the resulting film, the film made a great deal of money both for itself and for Flaherty. Nanook was promoted in theaters with gimmicks such as dogsleds and cardboard displays of igloos, and it was touted as “a story of life and love in the actual Arctic.”
The film borrowed from popular screen entertainment of the time. It had “scenic” elements of the popular travelogue film, itself a legatee of travel slide shows. It told a dramatic story of survival against the elements, using a similar structure to that of the fiction feature by D. W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation (1915), which Flaherty had seen. It also had novelty: Flaherty introduced viewers to daily life in a culture that both he and his audiences thought of as primitive. The novelty of the film was that the “primitives” were not shown as freaks or exotic animals (as they had been only recently at the Chicago World Columbian Exhibition in 1893) but as people with families and communities. Urban audiences could look over the filmmaker’s shoulder to see into another way of life—indeed, they believed, even into the past. Flaherty’s representation of Inuit lifestyle was deliberately archaic.
Nanook’s warm humanism was a far more commercially successful approach than that of another “salvage ethnographer,” the photographer Edward S. Curtis, whom the Flahertys had visited before finishing Nanook. Curtis, already renowned for his photography of American Indians in archaic dress, had hoped to pay for years of living with Kwakiutl Indians with a film that would attract paying audiences. His In the Land of the Headhunters (1914)—later renamed, more accurately, In the Land of the War Canoes—combined footage of rites that he had asked the Kwakiutl to revive with a melodramatic plot that did not draw from Kwakiutl culture. It was a sad and clumsy box office and aesthetic failure, although of immense interest to later anthropologists for its re-created ritual scenes.
Flaherty clearly made some choices with the goal of engaging ticket-paying audiences. He renamed Allakariallak as Nanook and assembled for him a photogenic but fake nuclear family. He disguised the participation of various Inuit in the making of the film. He featured and even staged high-drama hunts rather than record the more-uneventful pace of daily life, particularly that of the women. Flaherty’s camerawork—the product of meticulous visual care and many retakes—and the editor’s clever pacing (slow enough to convince viewers they were watching real life, but dramatically shaped) produced high-quality entertainment from compelling raw material. The choice of a realist mode—creating, as it were, the illusion of seen and felt reality through editing, camera angle, and pacing—gave viewers a vivid impression of having virtually experienced something genuine.
Flaherty’s archaism in the film was a moral choice. “What I want to show,” he said, “is the former majesty and character of these people, while it is still possible—before the white man has destroyed not only their character, but the people as well.” Flaherty had a powerful romantic belief in the purity of native cultures, and he believed that his own culture was spiritually impoverished by comparison. “Nanook’s problem was how to live with nature,”
Flaherty’s widow recalled him saying. “Our problem is how to live with our machines. Nanook found the solution of the problem in his own spirit, as the Polynesians did in theirs. But we have made for ourselves an environment that is difficult for the spirit to come to terms with.”
This romantic conviction also meant that Flaherty believed Inuit culture was polluted by contact with the outside world; he did not believe that Inuit culture could survive the onslaught. For him, true native culture was pure, untouched by machine-made civilization, even though the very Inuit he depended on to fix his cameras were also selling to fur markets.
And that romanticism became a mark of Flaherty’s work. He made, among others, Moana (1926) in Samoa, Man of Aran (1934) on the desolate Aran Islands off Ireland, and Louisiana Story (1948), his last film, in the bayous of Louisiana. Each of these films erased the complexities of social relationships in favor of a narrative of man against nature. In the South Seas, Flaherty was flummoxed to discover that nature was forgiving to the islanders, so he created drama in the then-dying custom of painful tattooing. He ignored, among other things, the colonial presence in Samoa, the aggressive privatization of property that transformed Samoan communities, and the governmental insistence on Western legal marriage that contravened Samoans’ own marital traditions. In Man of Aran (1934), Flaherty got Aran Islanders to revive the hunting of basking sharks (they had to be taught), and excluded from the story two elements tha
t largely conditioned their lives: their fish trade with the mainland, and the fact that it was absentee landlords and not the harsh forces of nature that forced his subjects onto the poor land that they needed to enrich with seaweed.
3. Romantic realist Robert Flaherty asked Inuit to re-create traditional customs for Nanook of the North. Directed by Robert Flaherty, 1922.
One reason for Nanook’s appeal is Flaherty’s celebration of the “noble savage,” a popular notion with a long heritage in Western thought, going back to the early Enlightenment and expressed in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s writing. The noble savage notion expresses an optimism that natural man is inherently good. It had become particularly vivid in the European and Anglo-American imagination at the height of European colonialism in the Victorian era and with the American “manifest destiny” ideology. Even as rising powers asserted political domination over different cultures, their explorers pursued untouched exotic lands beyond their knowledge and celebrated the beauty of the simple life. As Leo Marx has noted, this romantic view of other cultures valued for their supposed simplicity and innocence only grew with rapid industrialization.
Another reason why people continue to love Flaherty’s films is that Flaherty’s immense affection for his subjects is palpable. Flaherty established a warm human bond with the people he lived and worked with for months at a time. Four decades after Flaherty made Man of Aran, filmmaker George Stoney—who had been inspired to take up filmmaking by watching Flaherty’s films—returned to the island where his grandfather had been the first physician to interview people who had worked on the film. His How the Myth Was Made (1978) examines Man of Aran as a myth artfully crafted out of reality. Still, people there recalled Flaherty with great affection. Generations of Inuit have also watched Nanook with pleasure, regarding it as a gift allowing them to know their traditions.
Documentary Film Page 4
