The Documentary - Essay Example

Documentary Introduction Documentary films, as they are known today, and as they have existed in history before, have been known for documenting some aspects of real life. Considered as non-fictional motion pictures the main purpose of documentary films is to either document a harsh aspect of real life, portray reality as it takes place or create a record of the same for current viewing and future preservation. Nichols et al (1997) have stated that documentaries sans boundaries and are considered as a form of art, a cinematic tradition, filmmaking practice of a non-commercial genre or mode of audience reception. The field is continually evolving and historically from being shot as part of non-standardised 'film stock' between 1889-1899, documentaries today are made as part of standardised operations using several media to get as close to the reality as documentary-makers can. This paper is an attempt to document documentary from its inception till date and analyse the same in its historical and technical context. In order to put this in the sequential order, the paper would look at pre-1900 and post-1900 era of documentary-making. This paper would also look into the esteemed place John Grierson holds in documentary and the matchless contribution he has made to documentary making (Aitken, 2005). Defining documentary Documentary is a documentaire-derivative; which is a word that was used by French for their films that they made on their travel experiences. In this regard John Grierson is considered as the Britain's documentary movement’s founder. He played key role in the development of Empire Marketing Board (EMB) film, while The Drifters was the first documentary film that he made. Grierson headed GPO Film Unit, was a subdivision of the UK General Post Office. EMB Film Unit's responsibility to produce films on GPO was vested as much in Grierson as it was in the GPO Film Unit. The Drifters, which has been acclaimed as Grierson's only personal film, has been critiqued as modernist, avant-garde, while employing techniques as rhythmic juxtaposition and montage-constructive images. It was based on Britain’s North Sea herring fishery and critical analysis of the film reveals that it was the best effort of its time that propelled its maker's documentary film movement. He would state it as "the creative treatment of actuality". Grierson's insight into documentary can be considered to have come from his background in psychology. he used his knowledge of human psyche and intricacies of relationship to create moving images of his time (Wyver, 1989). His main aim was to "inform people" through documentary. It is interesting to note what he has thought then in terms of mass production and distribution of this media for education of audiences is coming true now through the virtual mass communication explosion that the world is witnessing today. After his only personal film, Britain saw a spate of other documentaries that he made and which because the most famous ones of his. These included Industrial Britain (1931), Song of Ceylon (1934), Housing Problems (1935), Coal Face (1935), and Night Mail (1936). In Night Mail the famous poet E.H. Auden was commissioned to write a poem especially for it and so was music by Benjamin Britten. Grierson provided the narrative himself. The documentary was about London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS), produced by GPO Film and about mail train from London to Scotland. Documentaries made by Grierson during 1930s put Britain on the world map of films as these were widely seen and appreciated throughout the world. The 1930s movement heralded the movement of documentaries as part of the art form. Grierson held that cinema had an immense potential to observe life and exploited properly, it could result into a new art form. He was in favour of using original actors and original scenes which he believed infuse life in what is happening and how it is happening. Documentary's definition as coined by Grierson's finds a parallel with what Dziga Vertov has remarked about documentary, who said it presents "life as it is". Documentary, in that sense, is portrayal of life as "takes place". It is like filming it surreptitiously and catching it unawares. In the process the film captures facts in their original perspective. Documentaries present this aspect of life in whatever form they are made and whatever subjects or genres they touch. It could be biopics or observational works (Ward, 2008). What Grierson did was to bring documentary on the international pedestal in what is termed as modernist approach. In that sense he was a visionary. But if documentary is written about from the historical point of view, the history takes it back to 1977; a year in which horses in motion were developed through a sequential set of photographs by Eadweard Muybridge (Ellis and Betsy, 2003). Two years later he invented an device called zoöpraxiscope, which helped him animate his photographing images. His works are still preserved in Media Resource Centre of UC Berkley. This concept was put to use by Etienne Jules Marey by animating movement of people in chronophography experiments. However 28th December, 1895 was a day to remember when world's first public film was staged by Auguste and Louis Lumière in Paris' Boulevard des Capucines Grand Cafe's basement lounge (Soroli, 1977, pp 7-74). The Media Resource Centre still houses two of their works, one of which was The Movies Begin: The European Pioneers, and another The Lumière Brothers' First Films. In the same year ethnographic research footage was taken by using a camera by Felix-Louis Regnault, who filmed a Senegalese woman during an exposition called Paris Exposition Ethnographique de l’Afrique Occidentale (de Brigard, 1995, pp. 13–43). Two important works, often referred to their vintage character are Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indians, and In the Land of the War Canoes. It was 1914. ‌In 1919 Dziga Vertov arrived at the scene when he issued Kinoks-Revolution, a manifesto in which he talked about new style of cinema that reports real life. This was Veritov's documentary, and being from the then Soviet Union which was known for film making, he was critical of what was being produced there as part of the fictional media normally employed by theatre and literature. He often referred to Russian films as "drama" and "opium of masses" much akin to religion (Barnouw, 1993). . Nearly a hundred years ago he had envisioned that the future of film making was not in the fanciful masking of films as an art but one that was based on the "truthful" reporting. His inclination to portray truth in films led him to produce "Film Truth" or Kino Pravda (in Russian language), which were ‘documentarie-based’ on newspaper reportage and which gave the film making industry what later came to be known as cinéma vérité and propounded by Jean Rouch, whom Veritov inspired a lot. This is what is today known as "observational cinema". Veritov also influenced several European filmmakers, who started adapting the avant-garde style through editing techniques and tic filming to create impressionistic images. The works that resulted were "visual poems" and impressively poetic in nature. Documentaries as Rien que les heures made in 1926 by Alberto Cavalcanti and Berlin, die Symphonie der Grosstadt made in 1927 by Walther Ruttmann are known for their dexterity till date. This 1920s decade became synonymous with being as period of "city films" as most of the documentaries showcased cities than anything else. This decade also saw the making on first documentary of feature-length. It was a film by Robert Flaherty known as Nanook of The North. The main feature of this documentary was the use hero played by an indigenous person, use of subjective tone and third-person narration. Flaherty made this documentary in 1922 followed by others until Nanook Revisited in 1994. Those in-between included Moana in 1926, Tabu: A Story of the South Seas in 1931, Man of Aran in 1934, The Land in 1941, and Louisiana Story in 1948. In 1925 experimental narrative techniques and editing were combined with documentary by Sergei Eisenstein in Battleship Potemkin, which was on an uprising. It was a year later when Grierson, born in 1898 and ied in 1972, watched Moana; the ethnographic film by Flaherty and wrote a review in New York Times on 8th February 1926. It is in this review that he coined the word "documentary". Greirson belonged to Scotland and was studying mass communication in the United States. The experimental techniques as mentioned above were again used in 1928 by Vertov in his film Chelovek s kinoapparatom, which meant The Man With The Movie Camera. He shot a Moscow day from early dawn to late dusk in an effort which he put as "catching life unawares". He transformed reality of a day and enlightened it what he called "kino-glaz" or cinema eye. Verito continued with his experiments and produced some of best known documentaries which included Kino-Pravada in 1922, Kino-Eye (or Kino-glaz) in 1924, Shagai, Soviet (or Forward Soviet) in 1926, Entuziazm (or Enthusiasm) in 1931 and Tri pesni o Lenine (or Three Songs About lenin) in 1934. Grierson, in the meantime in 1928, after he joined EMB, was busy gathering around him most energetic and talented filmmakers of his time who included Sir Arthur Elton, Edgar Anstey, Stuart Legg, Humphrey Jennings, Basil Wright, Alberto Cavalcanti, and Harry Watt. Documentaries that got subsequently made included London Can Take It, Fires Were Started, and Diary for Timothy (1940, 1943, 1945 respectively – all by Humphrey Jennings); and The Song of Ceylon and Night Mail (1935, 1936 respectively - both directed by Basil Wright, but Night Mail produced by Grierson). By now the documentary wave had taken off and it was between 1930-37 that Worker's Film and Photo League was constituted in the United States (Klotman and Culter, 1999). It became to be known as Frontier Films in 1937 and before this, in 1934, it was named as Nykion. The idea behind the constitution of this league was to make documentaries that contained a socially progressive and political viewpoint. Well-know names as Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, Joris Ivens, and Willard Van Dyke joined as members. In 1935 there was emergence of New deal filmmakers in the United States, which made films for Resettlement Administration that aimed at providing aid to rural populations and farmers. These documentaries were made to get across messages of importance to this segment of population through public viewing. This was the dawn of technical specification and cinematic style in American documentary-making. Documentaries that were made under New Deal were Pare Lorenz's documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains (1934), Paul Strand's Native Land in 1942, Willard Van Dyke's The City in 1939, The River in 1939 by Willard Van Dyke again, and Joris Ivens' Power of the Land in 1940. It was, by now, established that documentary can be a powerful propaganda tool; something that led Adolph Hitler to commission Leni Riefenstahl, a German filmmaker, to film 1934's Nazi Party annual rally. This resulted in the making of a landmark documentary, Triumph of the Will, which has been hailed as a documentary that used astonishing techniques. Riefenstahl produced two more documentaries named Olympiad and The Wonderful Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl. Documentary began to be used for grabbing public imagination as was clear from March of Time newsreel series by Time-Life-Fortune, Inc's seniour executive Roy Edward Larsen. This series was provided with forceful narration by Westbrook Van Voorhis along with location footage that was high-quality, and dramatic re-enactments. In the meantime Grierson continues with his work on documentary and starts getting noticed more and more. In 1938 Canadian Government invites him to explore the possibility of forming a Canadian film organisation that could work at the national level. A year later Canadian Government appoints him Government Film Commissioner and he heads Canada's National Film Board. As many as 800 filmmakers gather around Garierson in this board. Between 1942 and 1945 the concept of documentary lures US Army Signal Corps, which enlists Frank Capra of Hollywood as major in the Corps. he is commissioned to oversee the making of Why We Fight, a propaganda series by the Corps aimed at justifying Government's wartime goals and policies on its troops that were hastily assembled. Capra, being one of Hollywood’s acclaimed filmmakers, ropes in other filmmakers of repute to execute the job. These include Robert Flaherty, James Hilton, Carl Foreman, John and Walter Huston, George Stevens, Lloyd Nolan, and William Wyle. Two well-known composers Dmitri Tiomkin and Alfred Newman are also inducted and Walt Disney teams are entrusted with animation work on different projects. The series results in the making of documentaries like Prelude to War, The Nazis Strike, Divide and Conquer, The Battle of Britain, The Battle of Russia, The Battle of China, War comes to America, The World at War, and Appointment in Tokyo. Redefining documentary The 1950s decade is seen as one that gave documentary film making new US and Europe-based filmmakers who used lightweight and newly developed hand-held equipment to take the documentary film making to a new level. This was the beginning of an ear in which synchronized sound began to be used. On account of the new technology that had started flooding the market the documentaries that began to be made contained spontaneity, authenticity and immediacy. This brought the audience and filmmakers closer to subject than before. Experiments started getting done with real people as characters in these documentaries in situations that were not rehearsed. These were documentaries that were practically devoid of any scripts and actors and this genre of documentaries became to be known differently in different countries. In Canada and England it was called Free Cinema, in France Cinema Verite and in the United States Direct Cinema (Saunders, 2007). These documentaries had little directional inputs and little voice-over narration as well. Even today for such documentaries props and sets are not used. Based on this concept CBS Television ran its magazine series called See it Now continuously for 7 years until 1957. Docudrama series starts on American television, but with a difference that real events are shot in dramatic recreations. In 1958 National Film Board of Canada starts a series on Cinema Verite itself. As part of a joint venture Time Inc and filmmaker Robert Drew develop 16mm synchronized sound and camera system under the banner of Drew Associates in 1959. Drew Associates create history in 1960 as they use this sync-sound motion picture camera in their production Primary and Letters from Vietnam. the former is get noticed because the camera moves with Wisconsin Democratic presidential primary of John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey. In America's Direct Cinema this is hailed as the foremost example of use of technology in documentary-making. In 1962 Jean Rouch, a proponent of Cinema Verite, infuses dramatic possibilities in documentary-making in Chronicles of a Summer, incorporating a combination of Flaherty's method and Vertov's theory. In 1961 documentary attempts to record U.S. migratory worker's plight in Harvest of Shame. Soon documentary seems to get proverbially out of hand of acclaimed filmmakers when on 22nd November, 1983 a clothing company owner, Abraham Zapruder, films his employees in downtown Dallas when they try to catch President John. F. Kennedy's motorcade. To shot the sequence an 8mm Bell and Howell movie camera (primarily meant for recording home shoots, is used by Zapruder. This is the short sequence which has been widely debated, critically analysed and tremendously written about since it is probably the only one that caught, by chance, moving images from Kennedy's assassination. Probably influenced by this power of this event as caught by a home movie camera, Sony finds an opportunity to make its first consumer video tape recorder. They launch 1/2-inch recorder in 1965. In 1967, a lawyer-turned-filmmaker, Frederick Wiseman turns the eye of documentary-making to critique governmental and social institutions. His first documentary, Titicut Follies, is made on Bridgewater Correctional Institution in Massachusetts on its inmates and the harsh treatment that is meted out to them. This was one of its kind documentaries given the extent of criticality it possessed against the government and as result of this it stood banned for more than two decades. Wiseman picked very sensitive issues for his documentaries and his most recent documentary was Domestic Violence made in 2001. Others included 1968's High School, 1969's Hospital, 1975's Welfare, 1976's Meat, and 1989's Near Death. Documentaries find new subjects during the twin decades of 1960's and 1970's on account of politically and socially charged atmosphere, which took place social, political and sexual activism got embedded in the people. New and emerging issues that that of lesbianism, colour, gays and marginalisation of communities started taking center stage and more and more views began to be recorded on film. The audiences started growing bigger and better and documentaries like Amerikkka, Off the Pigs, and Columbia revolt fuelled the documentary passion (Walker and Waldeman, 1999). The flooding of camcorders almost into any willing household shifts the narrative from third-person to first-person. From late 1970's onwards, it appears as if a new genre of documentary-making is emerging that has carved its place somewhere between general reportage as was seen previously, between the typical essay telling a tale that is well-told. Viewer himself becomes the story-teller. This genre is not polemical but is socially engrossing. The viewer and the story-teller start identifying with each other. Certain known and not-so-known people from film and non-film entities star experimenting with this genre and in the subsequent years many documentaries get noticed to the point of becoming reference works, like Healthy Baby Girl, Halving the Bones, Tongues Untied, Dialogues with Madwomen, Time Indefinite, When Billy Broke His Head, Complaints of a Dutiful Daughter, First Person Plural, Silverlake Life, and Great Girl. New technology and new formats Nearly a decade after it launched its first consumer video tape recorder, Sony launches its first videocassette recorder Beatamax. Victor Company of Japan, popularly known as JVC, launches VCR VHS format in 1976. Sony's Betacam is made available in the markets in 1982 and provides further impetus to the documentary-making as it is a single-unit broadcast-use equipment (Nornes, 2003). Several techniques are used to make documentaries; each technique is aim and idea-specific. Some documentaries are made to evince public interest, some simply informational and some opinion-based. However, conventions or techniques stay more or less the same. Documentaries are devoid of scripts, stories and props and artificial sets. A documentary is a story in motion. Even though attempts have been made to make silent documentaries but common convention is that voice-over must be used to relate to the footage being shown. Voice-over is normally in-film commentary or the same added as part of the post-production work. Another important technique is the interview. These are normally unrehearsed and are recorded while the events or incident is being filmed. It provides a sense of realism to the documentary because it offers the footage live credibility from a third party source (Tobias, 1997). When in a documentary there are multiple interviews being held, the information beamed is comprehensive. Sometimes documentaries use stock or archival footage; a process in which insertions from archives are inserted in a documentary wherever it befits. It may or may not need any extra filming. Where there is not enough footage to be shown or sufficient amounts of it available or accessible, artificial reconstruction technique is used to fill in the gaps. Reconstructions are based on factuality of events, information on which is provided by other credible sources. This technique too offers the viewer some level of realism. Non-availability of the footage gives documentary-makers an advantage to choose techniques as distortion, blurring, lighting effects, colour enhancement and camera level changes. Most of the documentaries introduce the thematic component of the subject being shown through a technique called exposition, which is inserted at the beginning. This is an important component since it provides the viewer a bird's eye view of what he must expect from the documentary. Exposition offers the documentary-maker a chance to show the dramatic segments of the work in the beginning, which are otherwise avoided. This is done only to catch viewer attention so that the documentary looks persuasive. One of the important aspects of documentary techniques is the use of montage sequence, which is an editing technique used such that the whole concept of documentary is condensed in space and time with the quantum of information that is made concise. Montage sequence technique was pioneered by the Russian filmmaker Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein (Bordwell, 2005). While in Russia creative editing was like being synonymous with montage sequence, in France it just referred to 'cutting'. It is in montage documentary-makers use special effects like dissolves, fades, double exposures, split screens, triple exposures, music and dance. American and British studios have mastered the art of montage (Reisz, 2010). New editing techniques: sound editing and cinematography The extent to which documentaries can have far-reaching capability different formats and through several media like television, direct-to-home telecast, internet and mobile-based formats has encouraged documentary-makers, just like their commercial filmmaking counterparts, to use state-of-the-art techniques on sound editing and cinematography. From merely being a 'mirror of reality' documentaries today prefer to add the additional component of attraction to them through various techniques. Sound and cinematography play and important part. Sound enables presentation to be enhanced and can be non-diegetic and diegetic. The first one comes from an external source, which is not part of the story space. When this technique is used the viewer is not able to locate it on any source being shown on the screen. It is not part of the action. It is part of the commentary; it is non-literal in nature. It could be coming from anything from narrator's commentary to additional sound effect; from music to an unknown source. Still it is there to create the right mood and atmosphere for the content in the documentary. One documentary can use multiple non-diegetic sounds. Diegetic sound, on the other hand, is one that both characters and viewers can locate within the moving frame. It is an actual sound emanating from somewhere there. It can come from a character's voice, objects clashing with each other within the space of the story, or a musical instrument being played therein, barking of the dog, honking of horns or mixed sounds from the scene being shot. Similarly cinematography techniques can be common across all documentary formats and include seven basic kinds, which are pan, tilt, dolly or track, zoom, crane, handheld, and aerial shots. Conclusion As can be seen documentary making is laced with interesting anecdotes and throughout the world film makers have taken interest in promoting this as a form of art. Grierson, post-1900, can be termed as one who was responsible in evincing interest of other filmmakers in documentary-making. Recently use of new technologies has added more impetus to documentary-making in terms of both creativity and quality. References Aitken, I, 2005. Aitken, Ian (ed.). Encyclopedia of the Documentary Film. New York: Routledge. Bordwell, D, 2005. The Cinema of Eisenstein. New York, NY: Routledge. Barnouw, E, 2005. Documentary: A History of the Non-Fiction Film, 2nd rev. ed. New York: Oxford University Press. de Brigard, E, 1995, "The History of Ethnographic Film," in Principles of Visual Anthropology, ed. Paul Hockings. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 13–43 Ellis, JC and Betsy AM, 2003, "A New History of Documentary Film." New York: Continuum International. Klotman, PR and Culter, JK.(eds.), 1999. Struggles for Representation – African American Documentary Film and Video Bloomington and Indianapolis, IN: Indiana University Press Nichols, B, 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. Nornes, M, 2003, Japanese Documentary Film: The Meiji Era through Hiroshima. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Reisz, K, 2010. The Technique of Film Editing. Burlington, MA: Focal Press. Sorlin, P. 1977, Sociologie du Cinéma, Paris: Aubier Montaigne, 1977, pp. 7–74. Saunders, D, 2007. Direct Cinema: Observational Documentary and the Politics of the Sixties. London: Wallflower Press. Tobias, M, 1997. The Search for Reality – the Art of Documentary Filmmaking. Studio City, CA: Michael Wiese Productions. Walker, J and Waldeman, D (eds.), 1999, Feminism and Documentary. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Wyver, J, 1989, The Moving Image: An International History of Film, Television & Radio. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd. Read More