The Documentary Films - Case Study Example

Truth and reality in ‘GOTTI’ Table of contents Table of contents 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 6 Relevance of truth in documentary films 8 Ideology behind Gotti - the documentary 11 Purpose of reality 13 Realism in Gotti - The man 15 Analysis 15 18 Conclusion 18 References 20 Executive Summary The main purpose of this paper is to see certain aspects the making of a documentary film. There are many instances when the documentary film turns up to be a so-called film with reality check. One of such movies is the Gotti] by Robert Harmon, produced for HBO in the year 1996. The film was about the career of a mafia don“Johnny Boy” Gotti. However the film has been made in such a way that in some cases it has violated the reality in the plot. These are the violations that are deliberate and the purposes behind these types of presentation are not even made clear. I want to find out certain facts related to the exploitation of truth, if there is any in the making of a documentary film. The film was no doubt a popular entertainer, but how relevant are the sources in making the film an ideological representative is to be explored. The amalgamation of truth and power as stated by Foucault are going to be the basis of the paper. As for Michel Foucault, there are three main points on discourse of truth’, a) ‘there is no such thing as truth’, b) ‘some versions of the truth have more authority than others. Authoritative versions of the truth tend to be associated with dominant institutions and c) ‘the act of talking about the world makes the world'. I tried to check all these points with Gotti-the film and found that it is point no.b) that suits it the most. According to this particular point, media can function as a means to communicate different principle1. These communicative principles are in form of artistic expressions, information and above all the way to give ‘message’. All of these principles are embodied in the documentary and in this case in Gotti. Table of contents 3 Executive Summary 4 Introduction 6 Relevance of truth in documentary films 8 Ideology behind Gotti - the documentary 11 Purpose of reality 13 Realism in Gotti - The man 15 Analysis 15 18 Conclusion 18 References 20 Introduction The documentary film Gotti, directed by Robert Harmon, for HBO in the year 1996 was about the Gambino Family boss, John “Johnny Boy” Gotti. It was about the rise and inevitable fall in a mafia family during which Gotti was nicknamed by the media as The Dapper Don and The Teflon Don. The film highlighted Gotti's association with three mobsters; Carlo Gambino, Aniello Dellacroce and Angelo Ruggiero. The documentary film also gives a partial account of documenting Gotti’s life. It clearly shows what sort of a character Gotti was and how he made his bones in the Gambino Family. My research report is going to find out the realities as manipulated by this film and the aspects that justify the presentation of the director. I will use theories to find out if any of theories is associable with Gotti. I am trying to find out the reasons behind representing Gotti in the documentary film as a neutral character. This is somewhat of a deliberate move from the producers of showing Gotti as a neutral character and letting the audience decide if they consider him as a friend or foe. However, some theories are already taking rounds, and those are the theories related to interpretation of truth, ideological impacts, and realistic valuations. These are some of the aspects that this paper will explore. The theorists like Foucault, Price and John Fiske are discussed here. Harmon makes the text polysemic. This attempt of Harmon had made the text potentially open to many interpretations from the audience on how they decode the context within the text. Though Gotti stays partially true to the book, The Rise and Fall of John Gotti (1988) by Jerry Capeci & Gene Mustain, still misses out some key parts and alters a few; some that you would never see in an organised crime family. My research report will also determine what parts of Gotti’s life were changed for the screen. The paper has been divided into seven sections. The section I is Introduction, section II is for the relevance of truth in documentary films. This section is trying to find out the authentic ways through which the making of documentary films can be ranked. This section is about the ways in which the documentary films choose their subjects and make the plot similar to the so-called reality of practical life. Section III is ideology behind Gotti - the documentary. It is a discussion related to the documentary film Gotti in association with the section II. The paper is a contemporary study of representing life through the visual media. The section IV is purpose of reality. It is an attempt to find out how important it is to assess certain notions as real or truth. I tried to interpret my topic with the theoretical approaches made by Foucault and some of the theorist of the same field. This section also tries to find out the purpose behind the making of truth with different philosophical levels. Section V is Realism in Gotti - the Man. This section is a reference to Gotti, the person and the important things related to his lifer. This is an extended section for section IV. Here the assessment of the real career of Gotti has been placed. This chapter also tries to find out whether Gotti was the same person that has been picturized by Robert Harmon, in the year 1996. The next is section VI, the analysis. This section is trying to find out the things from the real life of the man that inspired the reel life. It is also making a search through the documentary film to find how close it is or rather how far it is from Gotti the person in himself. It is a means to check how the director of the film could bring the relevance of the character’s life with the life of the person in general. The last section is section VII, the conclusion. This is basically the summing up of the paper. Here I have found some interesting things connecting the issues that I have discussed in the paper. Relevance of truth in documentary films The nature of documentary films is indeed a very complicated one. To define it within few norms is practically not possible. The definitions depend on exactly how strict the definer wants to be with a specified term. The definition, thus for a documentary film, is on the basis of the necessary and sufficient features that most of the films of the same category bears in them. It is also determined on the characteristic features of how this type of film differs from other types of film. The basic characteristics of all the documentary films are the depiction of reality, representation and presentation. It is the view point to see the truth that is accepted in general, represent it through visual aspects and thereby to present the idea that backed it up. It is all about the surveillance camera indicating the "recording reality" through the interpretive mind of the director. The basic belief is that the documentary films are the continuous mechanical recording of a raw tape. The representation of this raw tape lacks the touch of someone selecting and editing for the purpose of expressing or communicating something to the targeted audiences. In the making of a documentary film the intervention of human and the post-production process are the actual tools behind the act of distorting the continuation of the truth as it gets presented. As a rule of thumb, without camera work, cuts or editing, a film is not a film. The concept is thus in the fact of representing amidst all these factors. It is the neither a fiction film nor a documentary if it is nothing more than a "re-presentation" of what happens to the actual plot of life. The term seems to have been used first by John Grierson; the founder of the classic British documentary movement in the 1930's. He wrote about Robert Flaherty's film Moana (1926) that it had "documentary value." It was John Grierson who coined the phrase "creative treatment of actuality." There is a reality check in Grierson's principles of documentary. It was the trend of cinema's potential for observing life that could be exploited in a new art form. The mark for an "original" actor and "original" scene are better guides than their fiction counterparts to interpreting the modern world. This is the reason that in a documentary film the materials "thus taken from the raw" can be more real than the acted article. Grierson's views thus seem to stand equal to Vertov's contempt for dramatic fiction as "bourgeois excess". As John.Grierson, (1996) criicised the popular utility of the phrase "representation of reality"2 as a mistaken idea, the definition of documentary becomes more critical. According to him, the terms like "truth" and "reality" are confusing and lead to more confused definitions. One of the approaches can be the possession of a connotation of facing reality and seeing things as they are to the eyes in general. The popular use of the truth or realism grew with the development of the devices of photography. It is considered as the visual source that created a desire for people to produce things that look “objectively real”. Truth and accuracy are the main subjects that became the goals for many. According to Bill Nichols, documentary films however are those real aspects of creation where the "objective" way is to be creative or manipulative (1997)3. It is an attempt to make "a correspondence with actual facts" and "objective and neutral reproduction". The chief characteristic feature of documentary is to have the same weaknesses as philosophical positivism. Paul Rotha has interpreted the idea in a different way. It is sometimes about accepting the whole story to be pure fantasy, the characters fictitious and the behaviour of the actors may consist of incredible stunts. These are the elements that are put into to make the story more impressive and believable with the entertaining purposes. Still the film may be found to be in a state striving for "truth" (1973)4. The film may lack true emotions and perhaps even to illustrate some more general truths about human life. Etymologically, the word documentary has its root in the Latin word "docere" which meant to teach or instruct. The word ‘documentary can be a derivation of the modern word "a document"; meaning an important piece of paper presented in court. It is also used as we ask someone “to document" his identity or statements. The same idea, as and when it gets applicable to the film history; holds the mirror to authentication. Ideology behind Gotti - the documentary Robert Harmon, an American film director is best known for the 1986 horror classic. His success was further elevated by Gotti, starring Armand Assante5. With the success of Gotti, he is regarded as one of the trend setters in the making of documentary films. He became the man behind the creation of the ideology of differentiating the good within the bad. As an ideology is an organized collection of ideas6 (Pinker, Steven. 2002), this particular film too started getting same accumulations. Just as an ideology can be thought of as a comprehensive vision, as a way of looking at things as in common sense7 (Minogue, Kenneth, 1985); this particular piece of creation is also marked as a collection of several philosophical tendencies. It was put against the set of ideas proposed by the dominant class of a society. It was a stream against the popular believes about Gotti-the man in general. The main purpose of Robert Harmon behind the establishment of this ideology is to offer change in society through a normative thought process. He applied whole new systems of abstract thought to public making his own concept central point of demonstration. J. Fiske (1987)8 points out two types of realism that tend to recur. One of these types being the dramatic realism and the other the documentary realism. Both of these points can be related to the text Gotti. This is because this particular documentary has dramatic realism. It gets re-presented by showing people being killed, tense moments, suspense-laden scene where we do not know what the outcome is going to be. As documentary realism is a part of documentary film, this particular film too is documentary. The simple reason is that this film has been narrated and up to date in accordance to the time and phase when John Gotti gets sentenced and the film finishes. In John Storey’s ‘Discourse and Power’ (1993)9, he writes about Foucault’s genealogical analysis. He intervenes how this “is concerned with the relationship between power and knowledge and how this relationship operates within what he calls discursive formations…” Storey adds: “post-structuralists such as Foucault are more concerned with how language is used and how language-use is always articulated with other social and cultural practises.” It was in ‘Discipline and Punish’ that Foucault has been found to reject the notions of universal and timeless truth. Foucault here takes the ideological aspects from Friedrich Nietzsche; as knowledge works as a weapon of power. As demonstrated by Foucault, it is the process of "…how power operates through discourse and discourse are always rooted in power.” For Gotti, this is the perfect attitude as adopted by the director. The attitude is to re-present the inside story and thereby to enlighten the public with the notion that Gotti – the person is not an illusion but a neutral being like any other member of the society. It is the documentation of a different entity that was seems to be kept in dark and was covered by some wrong notions, and was rectified by the power of narration by the director. Purpose of reality The purpose of reality in crafting visual art is quite different from the notions collected in general. Realism in the visual arts and literature is the depiction of subjects as they appear in everyday life. It gets represented without embellishment or interpretation from the projector. It represents the craft revealing a truth. This is the place where the concept of truth gains the independence of being re-presented in several; different ways. According to Rodney Simard (1984), the realists render everyday characters, situations, dilemmas, and objects as real These are all structured through narration as the way they exist in a "true-to-life" picture. Under post-modernistic influence, most of the realists tend to discard theatrical drama, lofty subjects and classical forms of art in favour of commonplace themes10. The universal fact is that there can be no art that can declare itself as be truly realistic. Distortion in form and simplification of details are required for any kind of craft to be created. These are the basic things in structuring a work of art. The approaches made by surrealism, hyperrealism, magic realism in the field of visual art are remarkable and are more close in defining the purpose of reality in a piece of art. These types of realism have attained some kind of achievement of depicting realism in theatre. They are more into the elaboration of direct attention to the physical and philosophic problems of ordinary existence. The concept of documentary films thus is taking new turns in both socially and psychologically elaborative sequences. In documentary films people emerge as victims of forces larger than themselves, and gets represented as individuals in particular representative character in the film, confronting with a rapidly accelerating world (Rodney Simard, 1984). These films were constructed and directed without any fear to present the real life characters as ordinary, impotent, and unable to arrive at answers to their predicaments. This attitude has emerged as a type of art representing what we see with our human eyes, and what we feel comfortable for the majority. Modern documentaries are far more into the depiction of the facts as they are with minimal interpretation of the director or the author. The approach of these documentary film directors is quite common to the working of a clear picture with a positive advancement. In the ‘Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries’ (2003), it has been discovered that the modern documentaries have some overlap with television forms11. This is a unique development caused with the development of "reality television" that occasionally verges on the documentary. However in most cases they are found to be veering to the fictional or staged narrations. In today’s scenario, the making-of documentary is more into the ways of narrating stories related to the production of a movie or a computer game. That is to say, they are more into the advertising sector and are all made for promotional purposes. The space for classic documentary had made a shift towards the promotional market. Realism in Gotti - The man Apart from the documentary film of 1996, in real life Gotti attended some changes. After his marriage with Vicky, Gotti tried to make a shift towards a legitimate career as against his family profession12. The professions that he opted were of being a coat factory presser and a truck driver's assistant. However, in the year 1963, Gotti and Salvatore Ruggiero were arrested by police. The charge was related to a stolen car from a rental car agency. These types of incidences were predominant till 1996; Gotti became an associate for a crew headed by reputed captain Carmine Fatico13. Carmine Fatico worked for Aniello "Mr. Neil" Dellacroce, the Underboss of the Gambino crime family and the associative knot between the two. Gotti began with his career as a mafia and soon got counted as one of the dangerous being of his kind. Analysis The financial section can be a kind of reason behind this unwanted shift. It has been found that as compared to dramatic narrative films, documentaries typically have far lower budgets. These are also subject of attraction to film companies because even a limited theatrical release of any documentary film can be highly profitable. The best example had been set by Fahrenheit 9/11. It has set a new record for documentary profits by earning amounts over US$228 million in ticket sales and selling over 3 million DVDs14. The only way to attain commercial success in a documentary film is either to deal with a burning issue related to massive massacre or a film with some directorial interventions for psychological entertainment. The same causes and reasons got adopted as the Gotti ran down on floor. This was rated as a documentary film but had some directorial interventions to attain more popularity. The first major aspect that got altered for the doc-film was the introduction of Sammy who later becomes Gotti’s underboss. In the documentary film Sammy is shown near the start at Gambino Family boss, Carlo Gambino’s house and who opens the door when Gotti and Neil arrive to visit Carlo. However in real life, it was in 1973 that Sammy was a low-level mobster who would have never been that close to the boss. In a mandatory hierarchical maintenance; organised crime families have a chain of command. This practice leaves no space for Sammy to come up to the position as has been shown in the film. When Gotti’s son Frank Gotti killed by a car in 1980, the driver John Favara, disappeared. As opposed to this real life incident, in the documentary film Favara is shown beaten, shot and killed by Gravano as a favour to Gotti after Frank’s death. This adoption was made to create an emotional bond between Gotti and Gravano, and thereby to make the audience feel their friendship. The addition of factors related to the entertaining field has led some critics to question whether such films can truly be called documentaries. There are also some straight references made by the critics like Wood, Daniel B, (2006) to these works as "mondo films" or "docu-ganda"15. Though the directorial manipulation of documentary subjects are not appreciated much even in the post modern trend of narration, yet it has been noted since the work of Flaherty, and has attained widespread acceptance to the form. It is thus is a moderate shift of narration keeping the concept in mind and presenting it with the real characters of society. A documentary thus is equally into the trend of entertaining business and is making a shift from raw material to some kind of furnished and audience-friendly substances (Goldsmith, David A. 2003)16. This is a shift that has got the independence of manipulation to a little more extent than what in general happens to a documentary film. In general the documentary films are meant to show the real picture by the amalgamation of some facts. This notion has been made little broader by the means of approaching the subject with the effort of dealing with mental twists of the audiences. The director of Gotti, Robert Harmon could comprehend the mental agony of his audience as he develops the story his manipulations were not much away from reality and they insists the audience to accept the consequences that might have happened. In the documentary film, he also shows Neil talking in the famous Bergen Club with Gotti just after the death of Carlo Gambino. Neil tells Gotti that he got passed over for Carlo’s brother in-law Paul Castellano as the new boss of the Gambino Family. The frustration causes Gotti to lose control but Neil tells him that Castellano is the boss now and if not respected, he must be abided by. Though this is a fictitious addition as Neil was in jail for tax evasion at that time, yet the story seems to have made its audience gain entertainment, as it showed Gotti’s love for Neil. These are the distortions made to make the story more acceptable commercially. Conclusion As the idea put forwarded by Nichols; the documentary films are made up first by objective facts and secondly by subjective or personal sentiment put into it (1991)17. It is the craft that can make its spectators blind and deaf with its prevailing power structures and ideologies of this world. The application of the craft is with the motto of: "Let us stick to the facts and not be subjective and emotional" Truth and creativity are the two main end points in the making of a documentary film. The fact is kept on the one side whereas the story gets build on the other. It is the power of narration that makes the films just as alike as the truth. This however is not the way to accept the not that it is all right to disregard facts. The favouritism here is about the creation of a narration, where the "truth" gets presented, re-presented and understood in all possible ways. The documentary films, especially like those of Gotti are accepted to be made up of a lot of facts or statements. These are the facts and statements about facts that can be verified in a fiction film. The characters and incidents are all inspired from the day to day life and are thus carry narrow relevance to each other. The application of truth in this HBO documentary film is done absolutely from the point of view of earning commercial success. This film with its distortions and entertaining emotional impacts stands in the midst of a commercial and documentary film. To check the idea of depicting truth, through Foucault we get to develop its central claim. This is the claim stating the notion that all periods of history have possessed certain underlying conditions of truth that constituted what was acceptable18. This is what, in a way, justifies the directorial intervention of Gotti. Foucault further argues that these conditions of discourse have changed over time, in major and relatively sudden shifts, from one period's episteme to another19. Maybe, thus this creation too holds under the periphery of this particular shift and is interpreted, accepted and dedicated more towards the appeal of presenting Gotti as a neutral man. References 1. Fiske, J, 1987, Television culture. UK: Routledge. 2. Foucault: A Critical Reader, Edited by David Hoy, 1986, Oxford: Basil Blackwell 3. Grierson, John. 1996, 'First Principles of Documentary', in Kevin Macdonald & Mark Cousins (eds.) Imagining Reality: The Faber Book of Documentary. London: Faber and Faber 4. Leach, Jim, and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds.). Candid Eyes: Essays on Canadian Documentaries. Toronto; Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 2003 5. Minogue, Kenneth, 1985, Alien Powers: The Pure Theory of Ideology, Palgrave Macmillan 6. Nichols, Bill. 1991, Representing Reality: Issues and Concepts in Documentary. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press. 7. Nichols, Bill. 1997, 'Foreword', in Barry Keith Grant and Jeannette Sloniowski (eds.) Documenting The Documentary: Close Readings of Documentary Film and Video. Detroit: Wayne State University Press 8. Paul Kerr ‘F For Fake? Friction over faction’ in Andrew Goodwin & Garry Whannel (eds) Understanding Television 9. Pinker, Steven. 2002, "The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature." New York: Penguin Group, Inc. 10. Rotha, Paul, 1973, Documentary diary; An Informal History of the British Documentary Film, 1928-1939. New York: Hill and Wang 11. Simard, Rodney. 1984, Postmodern Drama: Contemporary Playwrights in America and Britain. New York: UP of America 12. Slate, "Paranoia for Fun and Profit: How Disney and Michael Moore cleaned up on Fahrenheit 9/11". May 3, 2005. 13. Storey, J (1993) Cultural theory and popular culture: a reader – Discourse and power, Michel Foucault Discipline and punish. Hemel Hempstead, GB: Harvester Wheatsheaf. 14. The Essential Foucault, eds. Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose (2003) 15. Wood, Daniel B.. "In 'docu-ganda' films, balance is not the objective", Christian Science Monitor, June 2, 2006 Electronic Sources – World Wide Web 1. [Anon] [online]. Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Gotti [Accessed 14.05. 08] 2. [Anon] [online]. Wikipedia. Available from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gotti [Accessed 14.05. 08] 3. JEREMY GERARDHBO, Sat. Aug. 17, 2007, 9 p.m. Gotti, Available from: http://www.variety.com/review/VE1117911006.html?categoryid=31&cs=1 [Accessed 14.05. 08] Bibliography 1. Carrette, Jeremy R. (ed.). Religion and culture: Michel Foucault. (Routledge, 1999). 2. Eagleton, Terry (1991) Ideology. An introduction, Verso 3. Saunders, Dave. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press, 2007 4. Walker, Janet, and Diane Waldeman (eds.). Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999 Read More

These are some of the aspects that this paper will explore. The theorists like Foucault, Price and John Fiske are discussed here. Harmon makes the text polysemic. This attempt of Harmon had made the text potentially open to many interpretations from the audience on how they decode the context within the text. Though Gotti stays partially true to the book, The Rise and Fall of John Gotti (1988) by Jerry Capeci & Gene Mustain, still misses out some key parts and alters a few; some that you would never see in an organised crime family.

My research report will also determine what parts of Gotti’s life were changed for the screen. The paper has been divided into seven sections. The section I is Introduction, section II is for the relevance of truth in documentary films. This section is trying to find out the authentic ways through which the making of documentary films can be ranked. This section is about the ways in which the documentary films choose their subjects and make the plot similar to the so-called reality of practical life.

Section III is ideology behind Gotti - the documentary. It is a discussion related to the documentary film Gotti in association with the section II. The paper is a contemporary study of representing life through the visual media. The section IV is purpose of reality. It is an attempt to find out how important it is to assess certain notions as real or truth. I tried to interpret my topic with the theoretical approaches made by Foucault and some of the theorist of the same field. This section also tries to find out the purpose behind the making of truth with different philosophical levels.

Section V is Realism in Gotti - the Man. This section is a reference to Gotti, the person and the important things related to his lifer. This is an extended section for section IV. Here the assessment of the real career of Gotti has been placed. This chapter also tries to find out whether Gotti was the same person that has been picturized by Robert Harmon, in the year 1996. The next is section VI, the analysis. This section is trying to find out the things from the real life of the man that inspired the reel life.

It is also making a search through the documentary film to find how close it is or rather how far it is from Gotti the person in himself. It is a means to check how the director of the film could bring the relevance of the character’s life with the life of the person in general. The last section is section VII, the conclusion. This is basically the summing up of the paper. Here I have found some interesting things connecting the issues that I have discussed in the paper. Relevance of truth in documentary films The nature of documentary films is indeed a very complicated one.

To define it within few norms is practically not possible. The definitions depend on exactly how strict the definer wants to be with a specified term. The definition, thus for a documentary film, is on the basis of the necessary and sufficient features that most of the films of the same category bears in them. It is also determined on the characteristic features of how this type of film differs from other types of film. The basic characteristics of all the documentary films are the depiction of reality, representation and presentation.

It is the view point to see the truth that is accepted in general, represent it through visual aspects and thereby to present the idea that backed it up. It is all about the surveillance camera indicating the "recording reality" through the interpretive mind of the director. The basic belief is that the documentary films are the continuous mechanical recording of a raw tape. The representation of this raw tape lacks the touch of someone selecting and editing for the purpose of expressing or communicating something to the targeted audiences.

In the making of a documentary film the intervention of human and the post-production process are the actual tools behind the act of distorting the continuation of the truth as it gets presented.

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