Forms of Documentary Films - Essay Example

Documentary should act on our hearts, not just our minds; it exists to change how we feel about something”: Michael Rabiger A Discussion 2008 Documentary films have for long been used to grow public opinion about issues. From the early days of cinema, since the time of Lumiere Brothers in 1890 when motion pictures was innovated, films were expected to reflect reality. The only surprise in the film then was the extent of duplication of real life (Nichols, n.d). Cinema then was essentially a means to document reality – single shots of natural scenes, news or daily events - although the term ‘documentary’ had not yet arrived. Lumiere Brothers’Arroseure Arrose (1895) and Georges Melieus’ A Trip to the Moon (1902) were essentially documentary films, meant to document reality. Various types of documentary films were made over the decade, ranging from travelogues, scenic, events, sport, corporate, etc. (Aitkin). Although fictionalized films or staged realities on screen, however, soon took over the medium of filmmaking, the value of documentary films for the purpose of propaganda was recognized during the First World War, when the War Office of England took cameramen along with the British Expeditionary Force into France. In the United States, too, documentary films became a major tool for propaganda once the country joined the war. However, these films were essentially official documents and did not have the mark of the makers. Documentary films as a distinct genre of film making emerged in the 1920s and the first major such film was Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North (1922) that documented the lives of the Eskimos in northern Canada. It inspired filmmakers in Britain, France, Germany and Soviet Russia even as the filmmaking scene in the United States remained dominated by Hollywood fictions. The possibilities of giving expression to political ideologies were recognized and a series of hybrid documentaries that recorded everyday and exceptional events as well as explicit political agenda were made. By the 1930s, documentary filmmaking had come of age and film makers began to make the most use of the genre for social and political purpose (Aitkin). It was perhaps John Grierson (1898 – 1972), who began the ‘documentary film movement’ in England the 1930s – first at the government organization, Empire Marketing Board and then from 1934 to the Post Office and finally to the GPO Film Unit till the Second World War when it became part of the Ministry of Information, changing its name to Crown Film Unit, who took documentary filmmaking as a political agenda (screen online). Grierson believed that the medium of films had a civic role, as a means to build public opinion. He was perhaps the first documentary filmmaker who used the medium to show his mind. It was Grierson’s belief that films could be used to build up consensus on various issues and problems related the Great Depression that was then raging the world. It was then that Grierson made his famous quotes: “The elect have their duty” and “I look upon cinema as a pulpit, and use it as a propagndist”. In 1929, Grierson, under the banner of GPO Film Unit, made Drifters, a modernist film about North Sea herring fishermen, Industrial Britain (1933, in association with Robert Flaherty) on the marvels of the Industrial Revolution and the pride of British workers, Night Mail (1936) on postal travel and loneliness of delivery workers (Aitken, 2001). The Griersonian form of documentary films aimed to play a part in social engineering through communication with the viewers. Although this genre later became a tool for official propaganda, Grierson’s main purpose was social activism through the medium of film-making. Thereafter, the genre of documentary films went into a downturn in the 1940s only to be revived through free cinema in the next decade. Lindsay Anderson, Karel Reisz and Tony Richardson discarded the genre of documentary films for a journalistic approach, using the medium for poetic expression (Screen Online). There were various different approaches of documentary film making since the end of World War II, for example, Alan Resnais’ Night and Fog (1957), depicted the horrors of Nazi concentration camp, Chris Maker’s travelogue, Letters from Siberia (1958) (Routledge). Cinema Verite (cinema truth in French) in France and Direct Cinema in North America of the 1950s and 1960s grew out of the sociological ideas of the time. These filmmakers shot in the real world as opposed to designed sets, trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible, using small cameras and natural lighting and avoiding voice-overs, screen titles and special effects (about.com). While better quality of film stock had now become available for television news documentary, equipment like zoom lens, portable camera, sound synchronizers and directional microphones made possible shooting in natural light. Lightweight 16 mm camera, on-location sound, crystal synchronization and radio microphones made it possible to shoot anywhere. Multi-tracking sound editing made documentaries even more sophisticated. Very often, these filmmakers used the same techniques that were used by the neo-realist feature filmmakers like Francois Truffaut, Jean luc Goddard and John Cassavetes who filmed with non-actors. Particularly in North America, Direct Cinema reflected the radical ideological mood of the 1960s. While filmmakers like Robert Drew, D A Pennebaker and Frederick Wiseman documented the presidential campaigns in the United States and the Woodstock revelers, Wiseman also shot ‘reality fictions’ (Saunders, 2007). Direct cinema and cinema verite were criticized for making the subjects more important than the issue or the process of filmmaking. The genres were often called “fly on the wall”, in their attempt to be unobtrusive. However, while Direct Cinema proponents aimed to document the reality as bystanders and did not aim at any epoch-changing education, cinema veritas had a definite agenda of provocateurs or catalysts to change (Barnouw). An example of Direct Cinema is Frederick Wiseman’s Titticut Follies, for which he and his crew became nearly part of a mental institution to record the life there. Wiseman took his role as an observer seriously yet he edited the recorded film heavily, so much so that he considered his films “reality fiction” and not merely as a depository of recorded reality. Direct Cinema like Wiseman’s did not have a political agenda. Robert Drew in fact said, “The film maker’s personality is in no way directly involved in directing the action.” Instead, they emphasized on the imperative to “reduce intervention and thereby improve observation” (quoted in Winston, 1993). However, such impersonal observation could never be possible since after all it was the filmmaker’s decision to decide on the direction of the camera, the shots to take or the extent of the editing. On the other hand, Jean Rouch’s Chronicle of a Summer (1961), in the genre of cinema verite aimed at ethnographic studies of human behavior and lives. In the process, the filmmaker became more participatory and affected the subjects and vice versa. It was a mediated record of filmmaker in which the subject was closely monitored. In Chronicle of a Summer, Rouch and his collaborator, the sociologist Edgar Morin, demonstrated a sense of participation with the subjects by themselves featuring in the films and not remaining merely dissociated observers. There was a sense of equality between the filmmaker and the subject that was not present in Direct Cinema. The film was shot in Paris after the Algerian War and immediately before the radical movements that rocked the city. The film was eminently distinctive in its choice of locales and techniques. It advanced unpredictably as Rouch recorded it without a written script and changed it constantly through his interactions with the subjects. At the same time, it followed a poetic structure and was not the impassionate recording of true events like Direct Cinema. As Bazin (1976), said, “Simultaneously a liberation and a fulfilment, it (photography) has freed western painting, once and for all, from its obsession with realism.” It was also an endeavor of his and Morin’s to capture reality as well as the camera to become subjective and objective at the same time. Rouche referred to the term cinema verite as a homage to Dziga Vertov’s “kino Pravda”, to combine the attributes of documentary and fiction. Yet, the term is more encompassing that simply the depiction of reality. It was more a fusion of the human eye and the cinema eye, a combination of the mind and heart to depict reality. Since the 1970s, the legacy of revealing the truth from the perspective of the actors has continued to grow. Over the years, the documentary film genre again emerged as an important tool of mainstream culture, in particularly through the television becoming a crucial opinion-maker. Significant documentary filmmakers like Michael Moore, with his Fahrenheit 9/11, Roger and Me and Bowling for Columbine have touched issues ranging from politics, youth violence to globalization. Along with other genres like reality TV, docu-soaps and mockumentary, these films have gone the full circle of documentary film making, with their emphasis on recording reality rather than the poetic dreamlike sequencing of the cinema verite. Television journalists have taken to the production of analytical documentary making with a great vigor particularly in the modern period of globalization and political uncertainties. Greater openness and freedom on content have provided journalists to test uncharted waters. One example of such bold initiative is the three-part 2 ½ hour documentary, The Power of Nightmares by Adam Curtis, aired on BBC1 on October 20, 2004 (Winston, 2005). The documentary was shown as a non-competitive entry in the Canne Film Festival the same year, earning much applause and debate. It questioned the post 9/11 fear of terrorism as a deliberately hyped up issue, asserting that the war on terrorism was fuelled by the politics in the United States and Britain, creating an unwarranted fear among the people. The bottom line of the documentary was that George W Bush, Tony Blair and the neo-conservatists in both countries deliberately fuelled this fear for their own political agenda. Portraying the neo-conservatists in the United States since 1945, including Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle and Donald Rumsfeld, the research found uncanny similarities with the present trend of projection of the fearful image of Osama bin Laden and his al-Queda, the name of which was coined only when the United States decided to move anti-Mafia regulations against the group in the 1990s, as the documentary said. The phantom of fear, which the documentary claimed the political bigwigs were projecting, had become a big issue for even the media in the United Kingdom, particularly since the Terror attack in New York in 2001. Though the documentary was aired in the United Kingdom prior to the London tube attack in 2005, it did make a big impact at the time. Researchers went back in history to understand the link between the current incidents and the past record of the US military establishments in fueling illusions. The interviewer asked Dr. Anne Cahn her views on the US’ story on USSR’s weapons of mass destruction way back in 1976. According to the transcript of the documentary, " Dr ANNE CAHN, Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 1977-80: They couldn't say that the Soviets had acoustic means of picking up American submarines, because they couldn't find it. So they said, well maybe they have a non-acoustic means of making our submarine fleet vulnerable. But there was no evidence that they had a non-acoustic system. They’re saying, 'we can’t find evidence that they’re doing it the way that everyone thinks they’re doing it, so they must be doing it a different way. We don’t know what that different way is, but they must be doing it.' "INTERVIEWER (off-camera): Even though there was no evidence. "CAHN: Even though there was no evidence. "INTERVIEWER: So they’re saying there, that the fact that the weapon doesn’t exist… "CAHN: Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. It just means that we haven’t found it." The voice-over then notes, " What Team B accused the CIA of missing was a hidden and sinister reality in the Soviet Union. Not only were there many secret weapons the CIA hadn’t found, but they were wrong about many of those they could observe, such as the Soviet air defenses. The CIA were convinced that these were in a state of collapse, reflecting the growing economic chaos in the Soviet Union. Team B said that this was actually a cunning deception by the Soviet régime. The air-defense system worked perfectly. But the only evidence they produced to prove this was the official Soviet training manual, which proudly asserted that their air-defense system was fully integrated and functioned flawlessly. The CIA accused Team B of moving into a fantasy world." Melvin Goodman, head of CIA’s Soviet Affairs during 1976-87, too, said, " Rumsfeld won that very intense, intense political battle that was waged in Washington in 1975 and 1976. Now, as part of that battle, Rumsfeld and others, people such as Paul Wolfowitz, wanted to get into the CIA. And their mission was to create a much more severe view of the Soviet Union, Soviet intentions, Soviet views about fighting and winning a nuclear war." Such bold statements, equating the War on Terror with the Cold War, could not perhaps be possible to be voiced on the BBC a decade back, when the television in the UK was more controlled and functioning like a duopoly. The opening up of television, the multi-channel framework and the entry of cable television has altered the ballgame entirely. Apart from the current affairs documentaries, another genre of documentaries that have gained in the popularity charts is the docusoaps – a type of Reality TV on the lines of the cinema verite. These multi-part documentaries, typically following celebrities in their everyday lives or ordinary people in extraordinary situations, have become immensely popular since the 1990s (Witson, 1999). The topics of such documentaries are typically the trivial, like Helen Fitzwilliam's and Paul Buller's 1996 seven-parter, Hollywood pets. Yet, these documentaries have attracted much controversy and criticism from within the industry. There are accused of staging events and faking images, often camouflaged as the reality. The 1997 docusoap aired on BBC1, Driving School, was first accused of having invented scenes. The character, Maureen, who failed the driving test a number of tests, apparently set her alarm clock at 4a.m but the shot was taken later. Hence, the documentary was accused of ‘faking’ the shot and camouflaging it as true. The media, which hounded the documentary, did not distinguish between reconstruction of the event and distortion of truth. It is accused of “abusing public trust” (Witson, 1999). Globalization and the market-driven economy have altered the global film and television medium. Not only are their more opportunity for the documentary in terms of form and content, allowing them a wide variety of choice of subjects, the shift in focus from ‘public service’ to viewer popularity has made the makers more independent and not bogged down by regulations. At the same time, the market orientation has induced television companies commission more docu-soaps, which are essentially documentaries, based on real-life characters, sensationalizing particular trends. These documentaries are a completely different genre from those on historical, current affairs or science, and hence have different norms that do not aim to change the social structure. For the documentary filmmakers to be reckoned with seriously and to bring about social change, they need to use both their hearts and minds. Works Cited Aitken, Ian. "The British Documentary Film Movement." In The British cinema book edited by Robert Murphy. 2nd ed. pp: 60-67. London : British Film Institute, 2001 Screen Online, Documentary, http://www.screenonline.org.uk/film/id/446186/index.html Barnow, Eric “Documentary: A history of the Non-fiction Film” New York: Oxford University Press, 1993 Winston, Brian “The Documentary Film as Scientific Inscription” in “Theorizing Documentary” edited by Michael Renov. New York: Routledge, 1993 Adams, John “ Jean Rouch Talks about his films to John Marshal and John Adams” American Anthropologist, Vol. 80, No. 4 Dec. 1978 Winston, Brian, Lies, Damn Lies and Documentaries, University of California Press, 2000 Witson, Brian, The primrose path: faking UK television documentary, “docuglitz” and docusoap, November 1999, retrieved on March 14, 2006 from http://www.latrobe.edu.au/screeningthepast/firstrelease/fr1199/bwfr8b.htm Read More

 

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