Documentary Film

by Patricia Aufderheide

  His goal was to challenge unreflective approaches to both science and art in film. On the subject of anthropology, Rouch said he wanted to transform it from “the elder daughter of colonialism, a discipline reserved to people with power interrogating people without it. I want to replace it with a shared anthropology… an anthropological dialogue between people belonging to different cultures, which to me is the discipline of human sciences for the future.” About documentary, he said that for him

  there is almost no boundary between documentary film and films of fiction. The cinema, the art of the double, is already the transition from the real world to the imaginary world, and ethnography, the science of the thought systems of others, is a permanent crossing point from one conceptual universe to another; acrobatic gymnastics, where losing one’s footing is the least of the risks.

  Rouch made films about other people for three reasons. First, of course, he made them for himself, then for general audiences. Third, he made them because “film is the only method I have to show another just how I see him” and if it were participatory. It became a way of changing the anthropological relationship: “Thanks to feedback, the anthropologist is no longer an entomologist observing his subject as if it were an insect (putting it down) but rather as if it were a stimulant for mutual understanding (hence dignity).” Even today, people concerned with questions of power and meaning in ethnographic film turn back to Jean Rouch.

  Made with…

  Ethnographic filmmakers have built on Rouch’s courageous creativity in finding ways to bridge the power gap between subject and maker, and they also experimented on their own. David and Judith MacDougall, who studied anthropology and did graduate work in film, have produced distinctive and thoughtful work embodying and expostulating a theory of “participatory cinema,” a term they prefer to “cinema verité” although their work is classically observational. The MacDougalls’ films share an open respect for the cultural habits and choices of the subjects of the film, without asking viewers to like or sympathize with them. In The Wedding Camels: A Turkana Marriage (1976) the MacDougalls followed the process by which a wedding was negotiated among a group in Kenya whom they knew well. The film reveals a profoundly different notion of marriage from the contemporary Western one. At the same time, the MacDougalls’ choices also express their own convictions: their films on the Turkana are implicit endorsements of the right of pastoralists to live as pastoralists. David MacDougall states that he wants “to reclaim documentary as an arena of engagement with the world, one that actively confronts reality, and that in so doing is transformed into a mode of inquiry in its own right.”

  Participation by the subjects has also been part of an engaged, anticolonial practice, as Taking Pictures (1996), about a generation of ethnographic filmmakers in Australia and New Zealand, documents well. In the 1960s and 1970s, as Australians began to reconsider their relationship to the indigenous population and as New Guinea gained independence in 1975, anthropologists and filmmakers saw themselves as progressives working for and sometimes with native peoples to recover their dignity and self-image. These projects raised many of the questions filmmakers and anthropologists confronted in making them.

  Australian anthropologist Jerry Leach, filmmaker Gary Kildea, and a Trobriand Island (part of Papua New Guinea) political association jointly worked to make Trobriand Cricket (1979). The film follows the game of cricket the islanders adapted from their ex-colonial masters so thoroughly that it has become an elegant expression of their own culture. They used the game to make a transition from deadly warfare to game-based and symbolic warfare; far from victims in need of salvage ethnography they, like Rouch’s subjects, are creative cultural innovators. The film spoke to whites by whites and to Trobriand Islanders, about themselves. Filmmakers can also reverse the camera. Australian Dennis O’Rourke worked with Papuans to make the acerbic Cannibal Tours (1987), in which the exotic subjects were the tourists who came to visit Papua and who frequently baffled the natives with their bizarre customs.

  Made by…

  Concern with participation and sharing in ethnographic filmmaking, along with the rising demands of indigenous groups and new nations, led to the growth of indigenous production. It changed the field of visual anthropology as well; Faye Ginsburg and others began to argue that the field must concern itself with the anthropology of media. One large question within that topic has been the ability of the traditional subjects of ethnographic work to make their own media. Ginsburg, Eric Michaels, George Stoney, and Lorna Roth have all been as much champions of indigenous expression as analysts of it.

  Empowering indigenous creators became a movement in the 1970s, fueled by “Fourth World,” “First Nations,” or indigenous activism and thereby lowered costs of video. In Canada, the National Film Board’s Challenge for Change program, intended to strengthen community integration and ability of Canada’s underrepresented communities to represent themselves, worked with native activists. Films such as You Are on Indian Land (1969), a record of a protest by Mohawk Indians of a treaty violation, and Cree Hunters of the Mistassini (1974), a celebration of the huntergatherer culture of the northern Cree menaced by a hydroelectric project, were made and used as part of campaigns to reclaim land and land-use rights. Canadian native peoples learned from these interactions as they negotiated for communications systems for the region that in 1999 became autonomous.

  In Latin America, Brazilian Indians learned to use video to record traditional culture through the Video in the Villages project.

  12. Through the Video in the Villages project, Amazonian Indians made films like Cheiro de Pequi (The Smell of the Pequi Fruit) that put ethnographic filmmaking into the first-person. Directed by Takumã Kuikuro and Maricã Kuikuroã, with Vincent Carelli, 2006.

  They used it to revive traditional practices, to create a record of their negotiations with white people, and eventually to tell myths and stories of their own lives to others. Some of the work, aimed at outsiders, used a deliberately naïve perspective, such as the video letter format of From the Ikpeng Children to the World (2004). In other cases, Indians recounted myths or recorded ceremonies with goals such as preserving knowledge and enhancing awareness of their cultural wealth. In still others, such as Cheiro de Pequi (The Smell of the Pequi Fruit, 2006), the Indians (in this case the Kuikuro) connect the mythic past with present ceremony and daily life.

  In Australia, aboriginal groups produced work describing their struggles, such as Two Laws (1981), produced with help from a community group, about the need to recognize aboriginal laws and customs. Aboriginal artists such as Tracey Moffatt created work that not only documented experience but used experimental and fictional approaches to do so. Aboriginal youth have created, in Us Mob, both an ongoing video project and an online website and community. In Finland, Samí director Paul-Anders Simma, in Legacy of the Tundra (1995) showed outsiders the culture of reindeer herding under ecological strain.

  People in dominant cultures have often worried about the effect of media production on indigenous cultures. Indigenous filmmakers and activists have typically found this concern either baffling or insulting. Typically, the concern depends on a static conception of traditional culture, rather than seeing culture as the flexible social skin that takes on new shapes with new information, such as that seen in Trobriand Cricket. Indigenous activists argue that they are also inevitably bombarded with modern media and communications, and should be permitted access to expression as well as consumption. If, at the same time, indigenous people lack the ability to tell and transmit their own stories (since they have little control over much of the mass media that comes to them), mass media can become what Faye Ginsburg calls a “Faustian contract,” where they sell their cultural souls for access to media. As with all other social inequalities, the power imbalance is rarely solved with a technical fix.

  For whom and for what?

  Is ethnographic film for scientists, its subjects, or television audiences? Can there be overlaps or c
ommon goals? This is still a hotly debated question. So far anthropologists have not found funding or intellectual armature for a scientific method. Teachers regularly use work that was designed for a commercial or quasi-commercial television market. Indigenous people often have had clearly defined and practical reasons for their work: creating a record, warning authorities, exchanging cultural information with other cultural groups, educating whites. They rarely reach mass media and broad audiences in the global North, however.

  The challenges that documentaries on cultural issues and practices face in crossing cultural boundaries, both with subjects and users, are the challenges that Jean Rouch addressed with unfailing optimism, and that have always been at the heart of anthropology.

  Nature

  Animals were among the first subjects for filmmakers—cute pets, dead trophies, and exotic creatures. As documentary grew in commercial importance, so did the animal subjects, who cost less than actors. The nature documentary, also called environmental, conservationist, or wildlife, is now a major subgenre, an established part of the broadcast schedule and a dynamic category. Nature documentaries, which at first glance seem to be straightforward and ideologically neutral, expose our assumptions about our relationships with our environment.

  Educational entertainment

  Early nature films were driven by two seemingly opposing goals: science, and entertainment. Over time, the two impulses merged into the malleable claim of entertaining education.

  In the late nineteenth century, scientific experiments with photography—including a French physiologist’s invention to record birds in flight—pushed forward the creation of motion pictures. Scientists seized upon cinema as a way to document objectively their observations, but not only did they inevitably edit and design their films (something not always obvious to other scientists), mitigating the pure observational quality, but they also privileged the visual aspect of scientific observation. More general interest documentaries popularized scientific knowledge. An early British series of short documentaries, which ran from 1922 to 1933, called Secrets of Nature, presaged later nature series.

  At the same time, entertainers looked to film as the next step beyond slide shows of travelogues and hunting expeditions. One of the first documentaries, Hunting the White Bear (1903), triggered a wave of chase films. Some safarigoers brought along their personal filmmakers, simply to create trophy records. British photographer Cherry Kearton’s record of Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari, titled Roosevelt in Africa (1910), also featured trophies, but audiences preferred action. Predictably, filmmakers began faking or staging scenes and slaughtering animals to get their footage. (For a critical look at early travelogue films, watch the 1986 compilation film From the Pole to the Equator, which links safari films with other imperial adventures.)

  Following the success of Nanook of the North and Chang, Martin and Osa Johnson developed a highly successful commercial business producing nature film, including commercial tie-ins with adventure clothing. Wealthy backers funded a four-year trip to Africa, which resulted in Simba (1928). In it, the Johnsons portrayed themselves living a simple, pre-industrial life on “Lake Paradise.” They gave names to the animals shown in the film—including the noble lion—and turned Africans themselves into comical wildlife as well. Simba was a huge success in theaters and inspired many other, cheaper films.

  The thrill of seeing dangerous animals has never truly gone away. Steve Irwin’s The Crocodile Hunter television series, an international hit until his death in 2006, depended on his risk taking.

  In contrast to the violence-filled safari film was the film showing the exquisite balance of nature. Here, man was the dangerous intruder. The work of Swedish filmmaker Arne Sucksdorff, whose lyrical nature documentaries became worldwide hits, exemplified and distilled this style. His best-known feature documentary, The Great Adventure (1953), featured a young boy’s lyrical view of nature. Sucksdorff’s work inspired other bucolic films; perhaps the best known was Georges Rouquier’s Farrebique (1946), which chronicled the seasons on a French farm.

  Disney’s nature

  The Walt Disney studio synthesized themes of danger, noble savagery, and reverence in the pioneering True-Life Adventure series, launched with the 1948 Academy Award-winning short film Seal Island. The Disney films, which originally could not find a distributor and forced Disney to open its own Buena Vista studios, ended up on broadcast television. These films became enormously popular and profitable worldwide. In fact, the series may have saved Disney studios from failure after its expensive animation films bombed at the box office.

  In these films, dramatic narrative was driven by a tooth-and-claw Darwinism. The sight of death, however, was discreetly managed for general audiences, and death was always purposeful. For instance, Seal Island ignores the fact that seal bulls sometimes trample pups by accident. The drama of True-Life Adventures—the first was The Living Desert (1953)—was driven by techniques of fiction cinema. Broad and breathtaking wide-screen panoramas instill awe; expert pacing ensures suspense; music is portentous or tittering.

  Human beings are absent, but animals play human roles strangely like a postwar suburban American nuclear family—protective mothers, concerned fathers, rambunctious children.

  True-Life Adventures took place in a time and place comfortably removed from that of the viewer; any trace of human beings was carefully expunged. Photographers were told to choose sites where there was virtually no whiff of civilization. The Vanishing Prairie’s (1954) narration promised to take viewers to a place in “a time without record or remembrance, when nature alone held dominion over the prairie realm.”

  Blue chip and IMAX

  True-Life Adventures spurred the creation of long-running international series such as the British Nature films (1982). The so-called blue chip documentary became a staple of international documentary production for broadcast. Such documentaries feature large animals, an absence of humans or human influence, and a dramatic narrative driven by reproduction and predation (sex and violence). Blue Planet, the BBC/Discovery Channel series produced in 2001, provides an excellent example. This breathtaking series, full of technological wizardry and natural wonder, explores the oceans of the world without much of a hint that human action is changing conditions for the extraordinary animals it features.

  Large-format IMAX films depend on blue-chip assumptions in order to draw museum and event audiences to their large-screen spectacle. Insects (Bugs! in 3-D, 2003), large animals (Dolphins!, 2000), and a host of shark films all immerse viewers in stories of natural marvels with little human interference. The rising popularity of documentaries in theaters in the early twenty-first century was also buoyed by blue-chip nature drama. The French Jacques Perrin’s Winged Migration (2001) offers viewers astonishing closeups of birds taking off, in flight, and landing to conduct their seasonal migrations. Far from capturing nature, however, the production team actually raised the birds themselves so that the animals would not be afraid of the cumbersome machinery. Luc Jacquet’s highly popular international hit March of the Penguins (2005), also French, chronicles the seasonal struggle of penguins to reproduce under the conditions of the Antarctic. The film’s love story theme strategically ignores basic penguin realities such as the fact that they mate for only one season and skirts discussion of the global warming threatening the birds’ existence.

  Environmental

  At the same time True-Life Adventures was launched, the environmental movement was born in conservation and preservation efforts. The 1950s television series The Living Earth, backed by the Conservation Society, deeply penetrated the K-12 educational market. These documentaries stressed the role of human actions on the balance of nature. As environmental consciousness grew, these themes have become more and more common. Nonetheless, substantial artifice goes into even conservationist programming. Most such programs use realism to depict the relationships they show, employing strategic staging, elision editing, and scripting to tell their stories:
One animal may actually be made up of shots of several animals; animals’ behavior may be provoked, to get exciting footage; most shark films depend on teasing sharks for their action footage. Many nature films minimize or erase the role of the filmmakers; others turn the filmmakers into daring neosafari leaders, as the BBC’s Big Cat series does.

  Some independent filmmakers, however, have challenged viewers to consider their relationship to animals and the natural environment. Australian expatriate Mark Lewis has made a career of raised-eyebrow—and very funny—films about people and animals. Cane Toads (1988) looks at the consequences of introducing the cane toad into Australia with savage black humor. This venomous toad had no effect on the beetle it was imported to kill, but it has become a major pest. Lewis’s Rat (1998) and Natural History of the Chicken (2000) chronicle quirky, disgusting, and unusual relationships people have with their all-too-domestic animals. Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man (2005) looks at the grim end of Timothy Treadwell, a deranged documentarian who lived in bear country, mistook bears for his friends, and was eaten by one of them. Herzog contrasts Treadwell’s misguided sentimentalism with his own nihilism and belief in the inherent cruelty of nature; he matches Treadwell’s narcissism with his own and manages to make the bears look more dignified than any of the people in the film.

  One of the most successful theatrical documentaries of all time could be considered a nature film: Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Featuring former vice president Al Gore performing a vividly illustrated lecture on global warming, the film puts people in the center of a story about natural calamity. Using dramatic pictures of melting ice, simulations of rising water flooding Manhattan, animation of a drowning polar bear, and astonishing graphs and charts, Gore demonstrates the urgency of the problem. Interwoven are personal reminiscences—his father’s farm, the local river, his son’s nearly fatal accident, his sister’s death. He exposes his failure to convince politicians to act on global warming, saying that they need to hear from their constituents. The combination of scientific data, natural beauty, the jaw-dropping pictures of catastrophe, and personal transformation ready the viewers for the good news at the end: human action can save our planet.