Documentary Film

by Patricia Aufderheide

  Conventions and criticisms

  The differences in style and tone between Selling and Hearts speak to the conventions of public affairs documentaries. Network documentaries were highly crafted, institutional products. They were professionally produced, using lighting, editing, and scripting techniques drawn from Hollywood filmmaking. The personalities, and sometimes even the names, of the producers who were responsible for them were absorbed into the broadcast network’s institutional identity, represented by the host.

  The producers developed a range of conventions to communicate authority, accessibility, balance, accuracy, and significance. They usually used an interviewer/host who could register both authority and accessibility. Ed Murrow was a model, with his rolled-up sleeves, cigarette, and somber tones, surrounded by TV equipment and the aura that his radio reputation cast. His demeanor communicated knowledge without elitism. The programs used plenty of b-roll and symbolic material, and as the tempo of TV picked up they began to use interview footage as story elements, clipping out remarks and inserting them into the story line. Sound was king; both narration and soundtrack led the viewer through the analysis.

  Thus, it was a shock to U.S. network executives when Life photographer Robert Drew and his team in 1959 proposed to ABC an entirely different way of making public affairs documentaries. Using more lightweight, mobile equipment, capturing events rather than interviews, they promised viewers a fly-on-the-wall individual experience rather than an institutional analysis. Programmers tried it, with grave doubts. Gradually, cinema verité influences appeared in network public affairs, without overthrowing the crafted-and-narrated approach. The BBC and Canadian Broadcasting Corporation also tried out observational public affairs documentaries, also without abandoning the analytically crafted model. New formats appeared. In 1964 the British commercial channel Granada TV daringly aired Seven Up, the beginning of a series in which children of different socioeconomic status in the same classroom were followed at seven-year intervals throughout their lives. The series contained elements both of observation and concern for grassroots experience of verité and the narration, interview, and problem-orientation of the established public affairs documentary.

  Network public affairs documentaries in the pre-cable era were highly influential, but they also opened wounds. In rural Appalachia, which was the focus of several network documentaries on poverty and inequality, many resented becoming “poverty” poster children and believed their cultural values had been slighted. At the same time a regional arts center, Appalshop, had been started with federal funds from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society initiative. Documentaries exploring the hill culture of the region became its priority. Stranger with a Camera (2000), made by one of the Appalshop founders, Elizabeth Barret, reveals the long-term ethical reverberations for locals and mediamakers; the film highlights a 1967 incident when a cantankerous landowner, angry at media outsiders, shot a liberal Canadian photo-journalist associated with television public affairs.

  The network television documentary has been examined more by journalists and journalism scholars than by cinema studies scholars. (This might be in part because the subgenre’s corporate identity complicates the director-focused, auteurist approach of many film scholars.) The Australian independent broadcast journalist John Pilger argued passionately that the much-vaunted impartiality of traditional TV documentary “is the expression of a middle-class consensus politics” that privileges power. Instead, he proposed, journalists should vigorously be watchdogs on power and defenders of the public interest. The conventions of public affairs broadcast journalism have been analyzed by communications scholars. Thomas Rosteck has shown how See It Now’s McCarthy coverage was cannily constructed to prejudice the Senator while seeming to be balanced and objective. Richard Campbell analyzed the format of the newsmagazines that provided a shrunken version of public affairs documentaries’ mission, noting that 60 Minutes episodes are structured like detective stories. The newsmagazines thus cannot tackle issues that fall outside the detective story model and cannot be resolved by “finding the villain.” Most social problems, from global warming to traffic jams, are in general not the fault of one bad guy.

  The public affairs documentary has lost its most munificent patrons, the old-style commercial network and national broadcasters; both face brutal competition that lowers budgets. The role of the authoritative broadcast journalist is also coming into question. Still, the style of the crafted, narrated, hosted documentary, positing an important concern to be investigated and understood and featuring a well-known, trustworthy host, remains a sturdy model. It continues to be a default choice in broadcast journalism worldwide, and it is also often imitated in work produced by and for nonprofit organizations striving for legitimacy and authority on any specific topic.

  Government Propaganda

  At the other end of the spectrum from the claims of public affairs documentary, which rests for authority on its journalistic expertise, is government propaganda—an important source of funding and training for documentarians worldwide and sometimes a powerful influence on public opinion.

  Propaganda documentaries are made to convince viewers of an organization’s point of view or cause. These films peddle the convictions not of the filmmaker but of the organization, although some makers fully support the cause. Although such work might be generated by anyone, including advertisers and activists, the term “propaganda” is more often connoted with governments. Documentaries have been valuable to governments precisely because of their claims to truthfulness and fidelity to real life. The height of importance for propaganda documentary was in the period before, during, and immediately after World War II, when film was the dominant audio-visual medium.

  Documentaries were used by governments to influence public opinion from the origins of film. As warfare moved to the model of “total war” in World War I, governments used media to motivate their own troops, mobilize their own civilians, and convince others of their might. The British documentary The Battle of the Somme (1916), which succeeded with British audiences in theaters largely because it showed actual battle footage, is a well-known example.

  After World War I, governments worldwide saw documentary as a new and potent tool. The Nazi party in Germany, rising to power in 1933, consolidated control over production, distribution, and exhibition of all films. Its political legitimacy was directly fed by propaganda. In Japan, the government in 1939 passed a law requiring filmmakers to hew to the government line and required theaters to show documentaries in every film program. The following year, the government forced a merger of leading news film companies to foster conformity of message in order to promote uniformity of behavior. The nascent Soviet government nationalized all media, in service of state agendas. The 1920s saw tremendous artistic ferment, as Dziga Vertov’s career showed, followed by collapse into grim Stalinist socialist realism.

  Propaganda agencies were created in Britain and the United States, but they had to negotiate with commercial producers, distributors, and exhibitors to get messages to their own citizens, except for members of the armed forces. Britain created a Ministry of Information, which was riddled with contradictory policies from the start. The U.S. Office of War Information was never fully supported by President Roosevelt, and each wing of the armed forces controlled its own propaganda production. American propaganda production also ran into opposition from Hollywood, where studios checked every attempt to create government products that might infringe upon business.

  In Britain, Grierson’s teams created some of critics’ most treasured and troubling documentaries. Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1934) is an excellent example. It not only romanticized precolonial life in one of Britain’s key tea-producing areas but also celebrated the impressive industrial process by which tea arrived at Britons’ kitchens. It thus glamorized tea drinking, as William Guynn has noted, making the act a participation in a nostalgic view of an exotic culture, while also celebrating the energy and power of Britain. />
  Roosevelt’s New Deal ameliorated economic crisis with shocking new government investment—and intrusion—into the lives of citizens, a change that called for persuasion. Different agencies employed documentarians, often drawing from the pool of radicalized artists who had been producing activist documentaries. The biggest of these was the Resettlement Administration, where writer and analyst Pare Lorentz became the producer of several celebrated documentaries.

  Lorentz strove to make works of art in the service of state objectives he profoundly believed in, as did Grierson in Britain and Vertov in the Soviet Union. His projects showed the influence of European and Soviet artists’ debates. They used sound as an independent element, not merely for background; they created associations through visual and auditory poetry; they echoed the look of city symphonies. Each of the Lorentz films negotiated between the often-radical analyses of filmmakers and official directives. William Alexander stated that Lorentz softened social analysis, particularly finger-pointing at greedy capitalists.

  The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), charged with encouraging public support for relief programs of the Resettlement Administration (later the Farm Security Administration), was a rueful look backward at the process by which people’s choices had destroyed the ecology of the central plains and resulted in mass migration. Hollywood businesses refused to share footage with Lorentz, and major distributors refused to carry the film in their theaters, but independent theaters turned it into a minor hit. The River (1937) poetically argued the need for government intervention in water management and conservation by looking at the destructive power of the Mississippi; Lorentz sometimes called it an “opera.” Paramount distributed it and actually made money, but studios remained hostile to government filmmaking.

  The films that Lorentz made or supervised became classics among film students for their bold artistic experiment. They retain fascination for historians because they capture a moment when governments worldwide were—for good or ill—suddenly taking on enormous social and physical engineering projects.

  Different goals, different styles

  A comparison of three government propaganda documentaries shows how propaganda differs according to the government mandate and the cultural context as well as the artist. Three filmmakers chose three different stylistic approaches to the challenge of shaping viewers’ ideology with reality.

  The German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935) was an excellent exemplification of the goal of Nazi film propaganda: to conflate Hitler with the nation, and to represent the party and later the state as a totalized, unified, and irresistible force. Documentaries were only one of a wide range of symbolic tools to achieve that aim. That symbolic power, which Riefenstahl employed so well, was intended to impress supporters and intimidate others, including foreign enemies.

  Made to document the 1934 rally of the Nazi party and funded by the German national studio UFA, Triumph of the Will is a spectacularly choreographed representation of an already spectacularly choreographed event. It visually deifies Hitler—the opening scene shows him arriving from the clouds. It represents the German people as a highly disciplined, worshipful mass, acting with one purpose: to serve Hitler as an equivalent of the nation. With its shots of euphoric faces idolizing Hitler, telescoped crowd scenes inspiring awe, swelling orgasmic music, and shots of individuals young and old all sharing the same actions and emotions, the film makes political union, as Frank Tomasulo noted, positively sexy. Although it chronicles a political rally, the film carefully steers clear of political debate. The film is about the emotional thrill of belonging, of being part of something grandly historic.

  As World War II began, the British had an entirely different challenge from that of the Germans. The “People’s War” would be won by a mobilized population, but the nation had almost lost the war in the first attack. Britons needed confidence in their own abilities to resist. British propaganda, after a rocky and preachy start and heavy censorship, developed a reputation for honesty and truth-telling—giving Britons the real facts, real battle scenes, real war news, and real people.

  Grierson’s teams made dozens of documentaries. Perhaps the film that best exemplifies the British propaganda approach of celebrating ordinary people’s ability to maintain their culture under pressure is Listen to Britain (1942) by Humphrey Jennings. An upper-class artist, he created several well-known wartime documentaries, all of them marked by a fascination with small but telling detail. He worked in Listen to Britain, as he did in others, with the brilliant editor Stewart McAllister.

  Listen to Britain is a visual poem, seen through glimpses of everyday moments in a Britain on constant guard for planes and bombs. The viewer seemingly overhears the continuing sounds of daily life—children dancing in a courtyard, a chorus of a traditional song by ambulance workers, an upper-class recital, an American GI teaching “Home on the Range” to his Allied colleagues—as the camera wanders through streets and peers into rooms. Briefcaseladen men pick their way through rubble-strewn, bombed streets on their way to work; women take on surveillance duties uncomplainingly.

  Some have argued that Jennings cynically played upon the myth that a class-riven Britain happily united around the war challenge, and others have said rather that he subtly pointed up the realities of class tensions in his contrasting images. However you read the work, Jennings produced a highly popular, short film that evoked a shared understanding among Britons that they would uncomplainingly do what it took to win, without giving up who they were. His approach was appropriate to the kind of message he wanted to deliver. His disarming method was to appear not to be propagandizing at all.

  The United States faced still different challenges. The federal government had no freestanding propaganda ministry or documentary production unit. The Americans entered the war belatedly, and many people in the United States resisted support for the Allies until the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. Moreover, young men who were mobilized for the armed forces often came from farms or small towns and had shallow educations; they had no idea why they were supposed to risk their lives.

  The hallmark work of U.S. war propaganda was the Why We Fight (1943) series, produced by noted Hollywood director (and Sicilian immigrant) Frank Capra for the Army’s Information and Education division. It addressed both isolationists and the ignorant. Commissioned by the U.S. Army, the eight-part series was designed to explain to American troops why the country was involved in this war. Capra drew on the film work of the U.S. Signal Corps, and he freely used his Hollywood connections. The key to his project, though, was the work of other nations’ propagandists—especially the work of Riefenstahl. He interwove images from Hollywood films (after overcoming studio resistance), animated maps from the Disney studios, U.S. Army footage, and enemy propaganda turned into a portrayal of danger. Riefenstahl’s ability to overwhelm the German viewer was, reinvented through American eyes, a sound to alarm.

  The Why We Fight series is a set of didactic, emotionally powerful arguments for U.S. involvement in the war. The style is jaunty, confident, even brash, drawing on the American popular culture of newspapers, radio, and film that was then the staple media diet of young Americans. Political arguments are simplified, sometimes into falsity. No mention of segregation, for instance, creeps into the rosy portrait of American democracy. Capra brought his trademark populist sentiment for “the American way of life” to the project. The contemporary political crisis was put in the context of American populist and democratic values meshed with the quality of small-town, neighborhood life. He had little control over the overt political messages, which were set by military officers.

  These three filmmakers used radically different styles—dazzling spectacle, deliberate understatement, forthright direct address. Their work reflects distinct cultural contexts as well as political missions. The filmmakers shared, however, a core strategy: to link the present crisis to what viewers could see as their enduring values and cultural heritage.

 
; Effectiveness

  Are propaganda documentaries effective? Nicholas Reeves, drawing on rich literature on media effects, has concluded that these films, like the propaganda efforts of governments generally, succeeded where they were able to reinforce beliefs—propaganda films have never been very effective at changing public opinion. Claims for the power of any one piece of propaganda to poison or control the minds of viewers seem universally to be overstated. At the same time, each documentary forms part of a larger picture of persuasion and agenda-setting, creating expectations and gradually redrawing mental maps of what is normal.

  Propaganda films also have lacked the appeal of commercial fiction films. During World War II, propaganda films were more often shown in nontheatrical screenings than in theaters. In Japan, where documentaries were mandated, wartime studies showed that the documentaries attracted relatively few women. In Germany Triumph of the Will, despite the Hitlerian state’s unsubtle promotion of it to theater owners, often ran for only one week in theaters because of small audiences. The film did not seem to improve public opinion soured by bad economic news and alarm over Nazi anti-Semitic extremism. The achievement of Triumph of the Will may have been at a deeper level not reflected in polls; it associated the newcomer Nazis with deep cultural and historical traditions.