Documentary Film

by Patricia Aufderheide

  Links were often international. In South Africa and worldwide, antiapartheid activists used End of the Dialogue (Phela-Ndaba, 1971) to rally international support. The film, which grimly exposed the harsh contrasts between wealthy white daily life and that of blacks in South Africa, was made by exiles in London. In India, the activist filmmaker Anand Patwardhan worked with demonstrators to document their struggle against government corruption. He smuggled out the footage and took a job in Canada; there, with resisters to India’s emergency government, he made Waves of Revolution (1975). Internationally shown (but banned in India), it was used by political organizations to rally opposition to the emergency.

  Throughout Latin America, filmmakers worked in groups inspired by the Cuban revolution’s resistance to U.S. hegemony, and thus evolved a notion of “third cinema,” a term that came to describe activist cinema around the world. Filmmakers in the developing world seized upon this idea, as did filmmakers in all parts of the globe who felt marginalized or saw themselves as representing the oppressed.

  “Third cinema” derived from the concept of “Third World,” which refers to nations and cultural movements that demanded autonomy from the superpower struggle of the Cold War. It promised a view of political change that was not tied to the now-discredited Soviet Communist Party. Intellectuals and artists worldwide saw culture as an arm of this movement. Latin American independent and dissident cinema—nuevo cine and in Brazil cinema novo—led the way and, as Michael Chanan stated, documentary was an important feature of it.

  Cuba, where the film industry was nationalized by 1960, was a center of production and support for independent filmmakers under attack in their own countries. (Joris Ivens worked with some of Cuba’s leading filmmakers in the 1960s.) Cuban photographer and filmmaker Santiago Alvarez started Cuba’s own version of Kino Eye newsreels and made many documentaries himself. The films show not only passionate outrage at injustice but also lyrical support for the revolution. One of Alvarez’s first documentary efforts was Now (1965), interesting for its reuse of found images. Here, Alvarez composed a denunciation of racism in the United States with a collage from photos in magazines and newspapers of racial conflict. The soundtrack features Lena Horne singing a freedom song.

  In Argentina, Fernando Birri established a socially engaged film school whose first film, Tire Die (Throw Me a Dime, 1960) showed how young children raised money to feed their families by begging for coins from passengers on passing trains. Largely uncommented, borrowing in part from the neorealist style Birri had studied in Italy, the film follows the youngsters in tracking shots as they run beside the train: it denounces by revealing. As Argentine politics polarized, filmmakers mentored or inspired by Birri participated in organized resistance or armed struggle, often were persecuted and many even “disappeared.”

  Among the most influential filmmakers of the movement were Argentine filmmaker Fernando Solanas and Argentine sociologist Octavio Getino, who together produced a brash and tremendously influential manifesto calling for a “third cinema.” (Hollywood and “art,” or auteur cinema, were the first two.) They asserted that cinema should not merely be a “hammer,” as Grierson had described it, but in itself be an act of “decolonization.” Their goal was to “dissolve aesthetics into the life of the society,” making intellectuals just as relevant to revolution as the masses. In theory, such films would be made by revolutionary teamwork and be shown in “liberated space.” Spectators would disappear, and collectively produced art would incite viewers to act. Such cinema would wage war against the most potent enemy—the one inside all of us, resisting the creation of a revolutionary “new man” such as the Cubans were making.

  Solanas and Getino tried out their theory in Hour of the Furnaces (La Hora de los hornos, 1968), within the Colectivo Cine Liberación. In three parts totaling more than four hours, the film alternately assaults, engages, explains, and meditates. It is an argument, delivered by an enraged professor shaking his students by the lapels. The first section deals with neocolonialism in Argentina; the second with the rise of the Argentine corporatist president—deeply beloved by the working class—Juan Perón, and with opposition to the coup that displaced him in 1955; the third considers roads to a revolutionary future. Devices are used to trouble and shock: intertitles with words that multiply, blank screens, and a full five-minute focus on the dead face of Che Guevara, to whom the film is dedicated.

  The film was shown clandestinely in Argentina and in other Latin American countries, and widely throughout the world at film festivals and in theaters. In the United States, The Hour of the Furnaces was popular with radical political groups; in Chicago, for instance, the Puerto Rican turf-gang-turned-Maoist-group Young Lords showed it. Solanas, Getino, and many others soon fled into exile.

  Other noteworthy films of “third cinema” were completed in exile, such as Chilean filmmaker Patricio Guzmán’s three-part epic The Battle of Chile (La Batalla de Chile, 1975–79). Guzmán was another of those Joris Ivens trained. He had filmed Ivens’s 1969 Valparaiso, Mi Amor, which poignantly contrasts the rich and poor aspects of the Chilean port city. (Chris Marker wrote the narration for this city symphony.)

  Battle is composed of precious verité footage rescued from a three-year film project chronicling the Salvador Allende presidency. The project dissolved when a military coup overthrew Allende; Guzmán smuggled out the footage and fled to Europe. The project now became one to mobilize resistance to the military government internationally. It was completed in France, with the help of leftist film clubs, and in Cuba’s nationalized film organization ICAIC, and it was circulated throughout the world, except in Chile. Battle indicts some parts of the Chilean military, the Chilean middle class, and the U.S. government for the overthrow of a legitimate, elected government. Crisply suspenseful editing and minimalist narration chart the path toward tragedy.

  Filmmakers’ interest in “third cinema,” cinema verité, and the political power of grassroots testimony converged in projects launched across the world. In Japan, a filmmaking group led by Shinsuke Ogawa documented the protests of peasants resisting the building of the Narita airport. One of the films, Peasants of the Second Fortress (1971), showed in rented municipal halls throughout Japan, in coordination with various leftist groups and had a broad international distribution. Shinsuke Ogawa ended up spending his life in such work; after years living with the Narita villagers, he moved to the small village of Magino and made several films documenting daily life there. In another Japanese film, residents of a small fishing village, poisoned by mercury caused by factory discharge, worked with filmmaker Noriaki Tsuchimoto to document their struggle for justice. Minamata (1971) raised international awareness of mercury poisoning and shamed the Japanese government into acknowledging the problem. Tsuchimoto continued to use film to raise international awareness and to work with Minamata villagers to keep up pressure to address their mercury-related problems. In Taiwan, the government of the 1970s frowned on acknowledging the oppression of native Taiwanese. A group of artists in the later 1970s produced a TV documentary series, Fragrant Jewel Island, celebrating the beauty of native culture. It led not only to a sequel series but to a shared vocabulary of social criticism.

  In repressive Soviet-dominated regimes, where freedom of speech was nonexistent and opposition organizations quashed, documentarians inserted criticism directly or indirectly into their works, thus sneaking past censors. The so-called “black” or dissident documentary flourished in Soviet Eastern Europe. Polish filmmakers such as Edward Skorzewski and Krzysztof Kieslowski made acutely observed documentaries designed to provide a disturbing mirror to their audiences.

  Advocacy films of the 1960s and 1970s, like those of other eras, combined idealism and pragmatism. They used all of the approaches that the early documentarians had pioneered. Realist and neorealist strategies in the Flaherty tradition, such as those employed in Tire Dié, exposed viewers to new realities. Griersonian social mandates pervaded the projects, but now in servic
e of overthrowing rather than preserving the state. Vertov’s exuberant formal challenges underlay experiments by Godard, and Cuban documentaries showed influence of Soviet filmmakers. Advocates fiercely debated their formal choices. They also seized upon innovations that could make their work more vivid. Cinema verité equipment and techniques were quickly incorporated. Pragmatism, however, ruled; for instance, if narration was needed in a cinema verité documentary to make the point, then narration was used.

  Legacies

  The example of “committed,” “third,” or radical filmmaking has traveled well and still resurfaces in times of crisis and opportunity. In South Korea in the 1970s, young people learned of radical trends at French and German cultural centers, and with the 1980 “Seoul Spring”—a political thaw—produced “people’s films” on workers’ and rural issues, building a base for independent film organizations. The Seoul Visual Collective’s vision was “to secure social rights for the masses.” In China after 1989, the “new documentary” movement featuring verité rather than bombast implicitly challenged dogma and served to encourage dissent. Wu Wenguang’s Bumming in Beijing (1991), about fringe artists in the big city, was a landmark film for urban activists. In early twenty-first century Argentina, after the national financial collapse, film collectives surfaced as agents of political mobilization, making films with political and labor groups.

  Many institutions have emerged from activist filmmaking. Distributors such as the Canadian DEC; the American distributors Women Make Movies (a feminist distributor), Third World Newsreel (focusing on socially critical work by people of color), California Newsreel (featuring African American, African, race, and labor issues), New Day (a collective fostering self-distribution); the French Iskra, and others are all legatees of 1960s committed filmmaking. Organizations begun to showcase grassroots and regional voices, such as the U.S. organizations DCTV and Appalshop, have endured and trained new generations of filmmakers. Cable access centers, a U.S. phenomenon of cable channels dedicated to airing films made by and for the local public, developed out of media activism of the era. American filmmaker George Stoney, who had learned much from his work in 1968–70 with the Canadian Challenge for Change program, was the leader of the movement.

  Many other filmmakers eventually took their idealism and filmmaking skills into more traditional arenas, particularly those in public and public service television and higher education. Many American documentarians began their careers in political activism and extended their reach to much broader audiences. For instance, Barbara Kopple, who studied in the late 1960s with the cinema verité pioneers Maysles brothers, made Harlan County, U.S.A. (1973) in coordination with striking Kentucky coal miners. The film was important to workers and labor unions, and it won an Academy Award that year. Kopple continued to work with social justice organizations and nonprofits, at the same time directing television dramas and producing commercial documentaries such as Wild Man Blues (1997)—a musical tour of film director and jazz musician Woody Allen.

  Organizations that took root in this period also developed to produce very different work. Three graduates of the University of Chicago, who were inspired by the work of John Dewey and the capacities of the newly mobile camera, founded the Chicago-based Kartemquin Films. Their first film, Home for Life (1966), was a cinema verité view of the indignities of nursing-home life. The film failed to change any health care policies. Looking for more action-oriented projects, and now a political collective, Kartemquin made The Chicago Maternity Center Story (1976) to protest the closing of the last public midwifery program in Chicago and as part of a campaign against corporatized health care. After the dissolution of the collective, Kartemquin continued to make films, now oriented at general audiences. Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994) became an international hit after winning an award at the Sundance Film Festival. A seven-hour epic television series, The New Americans (2002), co-executive-produced by Kartemquin cofounder Gordon Quinn and Steven James, tracked immigrants to the United States from their native countries. The same concern with giving voice to the subjects, inviting viewers respectfully into the experiences of those subjects, and provoking questions about the status quo that had driven Kartemquin’s original work continued in evidence.

  9. Kartemquin Films’ social-change goals were expressed differently at different times; above, Naima in Jerusalem talks to her fiancé in the United States, in The New Americans (2004). Produced by Kartemquin Films.

  When seen later, advocacy films become partisan testimony to history, such as The Spanish Earth and Hour of the Furnaces. Indeed, Battle of Chile has had a new life in Chile after the return of democracy; it now is being used to teach history to Chileans whose Pinochet-era books virtually erased the Allende years.

  In the twenty-first century, with ever more sophisticated production equipment, advocacy organizations are both commissioning and producing documentaries as a part of their strategic communications plans. Brave New Films’s Iraq for Sale (2006), about corporate greed in the Iraq war, and the conservative Citizens United’s Border War (2006), about immigration into the United States, are both designed as weapons in a war of ideas. When the U.S. Congress considered opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling, the Sierra Club and other environmentally concerned nonprofits produced Oil on Ice (2004). This film, narrated by Peter Coyote, examines the battle over oil development within the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and its impact on both the environment and indigenous communities. It was shown in theaters, on public TV, and in many grassroots settings; the DVD also featured a short film and organizing toolkit. Organizers credited it with mobilizing nationwide awareness and resistance, which, in the end, contributed to the defeat of legislation to initiate oil drilling.

  Whatever the perspective, advocacy organizations and nonprofits are beneficiaries of the implicit pledge of documentary to be telling an important story about real life in good faith. Advocacy films maintain that pledge not only through the credibility of their organizations but through the devices they use that signal their reliability. These include (but certainly do not exhaust) the use of authoritative narrators (such as the celebrity Peter Coyote), the realistic portrayal of daily life (The Spanish Earth), bold contrast (such as was used in Borinage), the use of cinema verité (Battle of Chile), statistics in service of argument (Hour of the Furnaces), and expert interviews (Iraq for Sale, Border Wars). If dueling documentaries become a standard feature of political warfare, however, they could erode the credibility that the form has accrued from its association with embattled causes and issues slighted by a sensationalistic and celebrity-happy mass media.

  Historical

  “History is not self-executing,” wrote historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. “You do not put a coin in the slot and have history come out.” All history is written for people in the present, searching out for them what historians call a “useable past”—a story that is used in the construction of our understanding of ourselves. History is also written on top of an earlier narrative—sometimes disagreeing, sometimes reinforcing, sometimes asserting a presence where previously there was only an absence.

  Documentarians who tell history with film encounter all the challenges facing their filmmaking peers. They face historians’ problems with getting data. Often they represent events for which there is no film, and as often they represent events using material never intended as a historical record. They turn to photographs, paintings, representative objects, images of key documents, reenactments, and, famously, on-camera experts to substitute for images. They record music that evokes an era, they find singers to sing songs of the time, they build in sound effects to enhance a viewer’s sense that what is shown is a genuine moment from the past. They struggle with the question of how much reenactment is appropriate and how it should be achieved.

  They also face problems of expertise. Documentary filmmakers typically reach many more people with their work than academic historians do, but filmmakers rarely have the training of
historians. Indeed, filmmakers often avoid consulting a range of experts. Too often for filmmakers’ liking, historians may be sticklers for precise historical sequences, discussion of multiple interpretations, and the need to insert minor characters or precise accuracies, all of which frustrate the clarity of filmed storytelling for broad audiences. Public service television often requires professional advisory boards, but commercial television productions rarely make such requirements.

  Finally, unlike print historians who can digress, comment, and footnote, documentarians work in a form where images and sounds create an imitation of reality that is itself an implicit assertion of truth. This makes it harder for them to introduce alternative interpretations of events or even the notion that we do in fact interpret events.

  Documentary filmmakers have often chosen to ignore the implications of their choices: they may accept an uncritical notion that they are merely reporting the facts of the past, or they may adopt uncritically a partisan view of the past. Their works, however, are often the first door through which people walk to understand the past.