24.4 A trainee’s family admires his rifle during a visit to boot camp (Basic Training, 1971). As in a fiction film, the participants seem oblivious to the presence of the filmmakers.
Wiseman carries on the Leacock tradition of fly-on-the-wall observation. The cameraman and the recordist (Wiseman) efface themselves (24.4). The filmmakers ask no questions and hope that the subjects never look into the lens. Wiseman creates classical continuity through eyeline matches, cutaways, and sound overlaps. We seem to be on the scene, invisible observers of social rituals of authority and humiliation. Yet Wiseman insisted that his documentaries were subjective creations, "reality fictions" expressing highly personal judgments. Many of his targets agreed.
Wiseman showed that the apparently neutral methods of Direct Cinema could create strong reactions through selection and emphasis. Yet some filmmakers believed that his films hid their "fictional" side. The films exemplified a transparency that documentarists would react against in the name of anti-illusionism and skepticism about the truth claims of Direct Cinema.
Age eighteen as a photojournalist, he quickly combined still photography with filmmaking. His first feature, Reporters (1981), conveys the routines of press photographers like himself. Like Wiseman, Depardon explored social roles and institutions; his hand-held camera follows neighborhood policemen in Faits divers (“News Items,” 1983) and studies psychiatric patients in Ur-gences (“Emergencies,” 1987). Also like Wiseman, Depardon avoids talking heads and scene-setting montages, preferring to plunge the viewer directly into a situation. But Depardon occasionally includes his own voice-over commentary, and Delits flagrants (“Misdemeanors,” 1994) experiments with more overt artifice: the camera is fixed to a tripod, framing police interrogations of suspects in dry profile compositions.
While Wiseman and Depardon adhered to the American tradition of Direct Cinema, effacing the presence of the filmmaker, other directors adopted the Rouch-Morin model of provocation (p. 487). Field Diary (1982), by the Israeli documentarist Amos Gitai, begins with a very long take as the filmmakers move through a town in the Gaza Strip and try to interview its Palestinian mayor. They continually confront Israeli soldiers, who cover the lens and demand identity papers from the sound recordist (Color Plate 24.1). Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) follows a Japanese veteran who insists that the emperor take the blame
24.5 The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On: the vengeful veteran assaults another ex-soldier when he refuses to acknowledge his role in wartime atrocities.
For war crimes. Tracking down witnesses, the veteran invades their homes (24.5).
Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah (1985), a nearly nine-hour study of the Nazis’ extermination of the Polish Jews, recalls Alain Resnais’s Night and Fog (p. 481) in studying bland contemporary landscapes that were the sites of unspeakable cruelty (24.6). Here, however, no stock footage takes us into the past; Lanzmann presents
24.6, left The extermination camp at Belzic, seen today (Shoah).
24.7, right Dr. Franz Grassier, former Nazi officer: “We at the Commission tried to maintain the ghetto for its labor force” (Shoah).
24.8 Harlan County USA: in a moment worthy of the Drew unit, the cameraman and sound recordist follow a sheriff reluctantly serving a warrant on a strikebreaker.
24.9 Archival footage used to create Soviet-style montage: a newsreel shot of soldiers moving in to break a strike in the 1930s. . .
24.10 . . . gives way to a shot of
Present-day police arriving to clear the roads, matched in frame position and direction of movement (Harlan County USA).
Only what he called “traces of traces,” interviews with witnesses, Jewish survivors, and former Nazis (24.7). In the provocateur tradition of Edgar Morin and Chris Marker, Lanzmann is present throughout, guiding, goading, and challenging his interviewees.
Veteran documentarist Don Pennebaker and his younger collaborator Chris Hegedus carried on the tradition of Primary (1960) by codirecting The War Room
(1993); this verite study of Bill Clinton’s 1992 campaign headquarters “starred” spin doctors George Stephano-poulos and James Carville. In 1999, Canadian documentarist Peter Wintonick explored the importance and pervasive effect of this approach to documentary in his film Cinema Verite: Defining the Movement.
Synthesizing Documentary Techniques
Shoah, Wiseman’s films, and most of the others mentioned above, are quite pure instances of Direct Cinema. Each is built principally out of the filmmaker-recordist’s immediate confrontation with a concrete situation. Usually no narrator or nondiegetic music guides the audience’s attention. The standard documentary format of the 1970s, however, was less stringent. It blended Direct Cinema interviews (often including an offscreen questioner), scenes shot on the fly (often without direct sound), and compilation footage, the whole glued together by commentary and music. Emile De Antonio’s In the Year of the Pig (1969) pioneered this synthetic format, which dominated well into the 2000’s.
A highly visible example is Barbara Kopple’s Harlan County USA (1976). Chronicling a thirteen-month strike of Kentucky coal miners, much of the film is in the Direct Cinema vein. The camera crew records the strikers’ changing tactics, with particular attention given to the wives who form a strong picket line and block the entry of scab workers. The film has as much drama as any crisis-structure film from the Drew unit—quarrels among the strikers, thugs firing at picketers, and a confrontation between the women and the strikebreakers (24.8).
Kopple frames the immediate drama, however, with background history concerning struggles in the mining industry. She draws upon archival footage and interviews with older citizens. And Kopple, a former member of Newsreel (p. 559), suggests broader points in the manner of De Antonio. There is no voice-over commentator, but superimposed titles supply basic information; regional folk music comments sympathetically on the action; and editing patterns make points in a manner that Leacock would find judgmental (24.9, 24.10). The
24.11 Advertising imagery tapping pornographic appeals (Not a Love Story).
Result has the immediacy of Direct Cinema but supplies historical context and leaves no doubt about the filmmaker’s sympathies.
The synthesis of Direct Cinema material, archival footage, titles, and music proved especially apt for examining controversial figures of the recent past, as in Lenny Bruce without Tears (1972), The Times of Harvey Milk (1984), What Happened to Kerouac? (1985), Let’s Get Lost (1988, Bruce Weber), and similar portrait documentaries. Other filmmakers began to use the synthetic format to record lengthy processes. The makers of So That You Can Live (UK, 1981) revisited a Welsh family over five years, and the film chronicles not only the maturing of the family members but also the growing sensitivity of the filmmakers. Michael Apted’s 28 Up (UK, 1985) interviews people at ages 7, 14, 21, and 28. Over the years of its making, the filmmakers increasingly stress the ways in which social class shaped their subjects’ lives.
The synthetic documentary format also dominated critical political cinema. By putting “talking heads” into context, filmmakers constructed oral histories of social movements in Union Maids (1976) and With Babies and Banners (1978). The Wobblies (1979) traces the history of a left-wing party, while Before Stonewall (1984) does the same for gay culture and activism in the United States. Other filmmakers used the synthetic format to report on contemporary political struggles: nuclear power accidents (We Are the Guinea Pigs, 1980), civil wars in Latin America (When the Mountains Tremble, 1983), and apartheid (We Are the Elephant, South Africa, 1987).
When mixing archival footage with interviews, filmmakers oriented toward social criticism and change followed Newsreel and De Antonio in using individual testimony to challenge accepted positions or images. In The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter (1980, Connie Field)—a study of women who worked in the defense industry during World War II—information films about plant safety are undercut by women’s accounts of accidents on the job. Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (1989, Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman) juxtaposes media coverage of AIDS with the personal stories of five people afflicted with the disease. The interviews in Bonnie Sherr Klein’s Not a Love Story (Canada, 1981), a study of pornography, move along a spectrum of opinions, ending with an attack upon erotic advertising (24.11). Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick explored the controversial ideas of linguist and political commentator Noam Chomsky in Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (Canada, 1992) by combining their interviews with Chomsky with clips from his lectures and appearances.
The synthetic format proved central to the work of Marcel Ophiils (son of Max Ophiils). His four-and-a-half-hour film about the Nazi Occupation, The Sorrow and the Pity (Switzerland, 1970), identified him with the investigative political documentary. Ophiils brought to light a history that many French preferred to hide behind heroic Resistance legends. Newsreels and interviews portray citizens acquiescing comfortably to their German masters and turning a blind eye to the holocaust.
Either in its pure form or in the synthetic version, Direct Cinema, along with its goal of recording social and political processes “ behind the scenes,” sustained political filmmaking throughout the 1970s and 1980s. At the same time, however, another trend was gathering force, and this called into question the idea that cinema could directly record any reality.
The Questioning of Documentary Actuality
Political modernism, as practiced by Jean-Luc Godard, Nagisa Oshima, Jean-Marie Straub, Daniele Huillet, and others, set many documentary filmmakers to thinking about their work. Throughout film history, and particularly since the advent of Direct Cinema, documentarists claimed to offer immediate access to reality. If the Brechtians’ critique of “transparent” and “illusionist” filmmaking (p. 562) was right, though, documentary could appear even more manipulative than the Hollywood fiction film. Perhaps documentary only seemed to capture reality.
The problem was not that of the filmmaker’s bias. Many documentarists had acknowledged their own sub-
24.12 A cold war film uses animation to cure a pessimistic citizen of “nuclear blindness” (The Atomic Cafe).
24.13 In Ruiz’s Of Great Events and Ordinary People, an unidentified looker reminds us of the convention of over-the-shoulder views.
24.14 Decentered framings and jerky editing accentuate the “invisible” conventions of the ethnographic film
(Reassemblage).
Jectivity, and directors like Georges Franju and Chris Marker had made it integral to their essayistic films (p. 481). What came to the fore now was the idea that perhaps the very forms and techniques of documentary were invisible conventions, no more inherently valid than the conventions of fictional narratives. Most documentaries presented themselves as descriptions or stories; yet these very forms carried a persuasive effect, asking the audience to accept a tacit social or political perspective. Most documentaries used voice-over commentary, but from whence came the voice’s authority? Documentaries showed archival footage or on-the-spot interviews, but what gave these images any power to penetrate reality, to present not only facts but truths?
The Meta-Documentary This line of thought was most explicitly posed by film theorists and critics (see “Notes and Queries” at the end of this chapter), but it was not merely academic. Documentaries became more reflexive, turning a critical eye on documentary tradition itself. A rudimentary instance is The Atomic Cafe (1982, Kevin Rafferty, Jayne Loader, and Pierce Rafferty). This compilation film reviews the history of the testing and deployment of nuclear weapons by the United States, from Hiroshima to the mid-1960s. In the De Antonio vein, commentary is reduced simply to subtitles identifying place, time, and occasionally sources of the footage. But much of the footage does not function as a transparent record of events. Since the shots come from educational and propaganda films, Atomic Cafe dwells on the ways in which these documentary genres spread oversimplified ideas of nuclear war (24.12). The film implies that the public’s acceptance of cold war policies was strengthened by the conventions of popular media.
The reflexive film might go further and scrutinize its own use of documentary conventions. Raul Ruiz’s
Of Great Events and Ordinary People (France, 1978) takes its title from John Grierson’s remark: “We wait for the cinema to give us an event, a great event which can show us ordinary people.” Yet, in this film, events and people are visible only through the distorting lenses of the media. “What I am calling the everyday,” remarks Ruiz the narrator, “is a parody of TV documentary.” Ruiz mocks news broadcasts, Marker’s Le Joli mai, and the talking-heads convention. Titles announce what we will see, promising “stock footage” and “shots which block the view” (24.13). The film’s ostensible subject—political attitudes in a Paris neighborhood before an election—is all but lost in tangents and rambling anecdotes. Of Great Events and Ordinary People delights in a digressive reflexivity that shows how much of reality the traditional documentary must ignore.
Chris Marker, an old hand at reflexivity and the essayistic form, contributed to the new meta-documentary with Sans soleil (aka Soleil noir, Sun Less, 1982), perhaps his most obscure and challenging film. A whimsical examination of the byways of Japanese city life is set against glimpses of other nations, while a woman’s voice reads extracts from a man’s letter about visiting a foreign country. In the vein of his Letter from Siberia, Marker’s Sans soleil questions current documentary cliches (“global culture,” “the rise of Asia”) while also interrogating assumptions of ethnographic cinema.
This interrogation paralleled work by others. Trinh T Minh-Ha’s Reassemblage (1982) films village life in Senegal in ways that refuse to transmit standard forms of anthropological knowledge (24.14). Laleen Jaya-manne’s Song of Ceylon (1985) presents tableaux of western leisure activities and courting rituals, accompanied by an anthropological description of a Sri Lankan exorcism (24.15). Invoking Basil Wright’s Song of Ceylon (1935), made for John Grierson’s GPO Film Unit
24.15 Song of Ceylon: as in Maya Deren’s Ritual in Transfigured Time (see 21.40), Jayamanne presents stylized images of social rituals. Unlike Deren, however, she criticizes ethnographic discourse by means of a dramatized soiind track.
(p. 312), Jayamanne questions how western documentary traditions represent nonwestern cultures.
Another strategy of meta-documentary was that of making a film about the impossibility of making the film originally intended. One of the earliest instances was Marcel Hanoun’s Octobre a Madrid (“October in Madrid,” France, 1964); more recent ones are Michael Rubbo's Waiting for Fidel (Canada, 1974) and Jill God-milow’s Far from Poland (United States, 1984). Another reflexive documentary centered on an aborted project is Hellmuth Costard’s A Little Godard to the Production Board for Young German Cinema (West Germany,
1978). The film begins with the director laboriously filling out an application for funding. Costard comments on the state of contemporary German cinema and the possibility of developing new equipment for super-8mm projects. The account of his (failed) application is intercut with a visit to Hamburg by Jean-Luc Godard, also failing to get backing for a film.
Such meta-documentaries of the 1970s and 1980s used reflexivity to explore the idea that any documentary carries a large freight of artifice—in its conventions, its appeal to ideology, and its reliance on the tricks of fictional filmmaking. Some documentarists began to doubt whether film could ever truthfully represent the world.
Demystifying the Documentary More commonly, as in The Atomic Cafe and A Little Godard, the film does not question the power of all documentary filmmaking; it seeks only to demystify certain forms or production processes. This moderate position has precedents in earlier documentary films, which used reflexivity in order to reveal a deeper truth that ordinary documentaries miss. In Man with a Movie Camera, for instance, Dziga Vertov shows people filming, editing, and watching the film we see; but this is in order to assert a new truth about reality, that of the harmonious integration of all labor into Soviet life (p. 136). Mario Ruspoli’s Regard sur la folie (p. 488) and Shirley Clarke’s Portrait of Jason make us aware of the act of filming, but principally to assure us of the actuality of the events portrayed.
One of the most celebrated 1980s examples of this moderate position is Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line
(1988). While revealing documentary artifice, Morris also tries to penetrate the truth of a murder case. As in the synthetic format of the 1970s, there is no voice-over commentary, and interviews with participants mingle with stock footage. Morris’s reflexivity poses the problem of documentary reenactment by including highly artificial restagings of the crime and the investigation, including the police interrogation of their suspect (Color Plate 24.2). At first, the reenactments may seem merely dramatic license, but when they change to accommodate new or contradictory testimony, the film suggests that the original event can be known only through distant, and biased, retellings. Morris increases skepticism about his restagings when a judge tells of his father’s seeing John Dillinger killed: the images consist of footage from an old gangster movie replaying the outlaw’s death.
Yet out of the layers of lies, cover-ups, uncertainties, and conjectures a plausible case emerges—plausible enough that the film helped free a falsely convicted man. The Thin Blue Line grants that personal bias, cultural predispositions, and cinematic conventions often mislead us; but it also declares that the documentarist can find a persuasive approximation to truth. This is a more tentative position than that adopted by Dziga Vertov, Robert Flaherty, or proponents of Direct Cinema, but it does secure a place for documentary as a legitimate means of discovering reality.
Documenting Upheavals and Injustice
Western documentarists and theorists had the luxury to muse on the truth of documentary in the 1970s and 1980s. Then political and social upheavals shook the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, Asia, and other regions. Filmmakers, especially in the Third World, took advantage of newfound access to filmmaking equipment, often in 16mm, 8mm, or video, to record those events. Suddenly the urgent truth value of the footage they captured seemed beyond debate. In 1986, when rioting toppled the regime of Ferdinand Marcos and ushered in a democratic government in the Philippines, Nick Deocampo filmed shorts like Revolutions Happen Like Refrains in a Song
(1987) in the streets on super-8mm film; all the other filmmakers he proudly declared, had merely used video.
Filmmakers in the disintegrating Soviet bloc seized upon documentary as a way of exposing decades of oppression and lies. For twelve years, Russian filmmaker Nikita Mikhalkov (better known for such fiction films as the 1994 Burnt by the Sun), began filming his 6-year-old daughter’S answers to such questions as “What do you want most?” Repeating the questions annually as she grew, he completed Anna: 6-18 in 1993, having captured a simple reflection of the country’s momentous changes.
In eastern Europe, the Polish Filmmakers Association sponsored Workers 80 (1980), a record of the Solidarity labor movement that let to a democratic government. In Hungary, a strong documentary movement emerged, exemplified in such films as Pretty Girls (1980), an expose of how the Miss Hungary pageant led women into prostitution. Most strikingly, under Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost (“openness”), Soviet filmmakers began to make stinging documentaries about history and contemporary life. Films about the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, about the grip of Stalinism on everyday life, and about scandals in the military and the bureaucracy poured forth. Marina Goldovskaya’s Solovki Regime (1988) shows how a monastery was used as a Stalinist prison camp. Juris Pokniek’s Is It Easy to Be Young? (1987), mixes rough Direct Cinema techniques with provocative, Rouch-like interviews in tracing teenagers from their attendance at a 1985 rock concert to their participation in the Soviet war in Afghanistan.
Similarly, the Chinese government’s massacre of pro-democracy student protesters in Tiananmen Square in Beijing in 1989 led to important documentaries. In 1991, Shi Jian and Chen Jue released an eight-part video series called Tiananmen Square, attempting to capture the life of the country at the time of the protest movement. In 1995, an American-made documentary, The Gate of Heavenly Peace (Carma Hinton and Richard Gordon), stirred controversy by questioning the motives and decisions of the Chinese student leaders as well as those of the government officials.
Film was used internationally to uncover injustices past and present. A Wall of Silence (1994, Margareta Heinrich and Eduard Erne) documented the search for mass graves of Jewish forced laborers during World War II. Video was used to document the plights of grindingly poor people living on garbage in Brazil (The Scavengers, 1992, Eduardo Coutinho) and child labor in the Philippines (Children Only Once, 1996, Ditsi Carolino and Sadhana Buxani). Filmmakers documented the horrendous situations of women in some Asian countries, as in Young-joo Byun’s trilogy (Murmuring, 1995; Habitual Sadness, 1997; and My Own Breathing, 1999) based on the recollections of “comfort women,” Korean women forced into sexual slavery to Japanese soldiers during World War II.
The right-wing government of Augusto Pinochet in Chile and its aftermath inspired numerous documentaries. Patricio Guzman had documented the move toward the coup d’etat that toppled the liberal government of Salvador Allende in The Battle of Chile (1973-1978). Returning from exile to Chile in the late 1990s, Guzman discovers that the younger generation have little idea of their own past and are shocked when he shows them The Battle of Chile; he documents his return in Chile, The Obstinate Memory (1997).
In such documentaries—and those made of the war in Bosnia, the rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico, and the occupation of Tibet by China—reflexivity was far from their filmmakers’ concerns.
The Theatrical Documentary in the Age of Television
From its beginnings, television had absorbed many of the kinds of documentaries that would have played in theaters in earlier decades. As cable channels multiplied in the United States and abroad, the demand for nonfiction films grew enormously. The National Geographic Channel, Arts & Entertainment, the History Channel, the Learning Channel, Court TV, and the Sundance Channel, along with the older PBS, provided a voracious outlet for nature and travel films, for historical series, for investigations of controversial criminal cases, and the like. Documentaries that achieved a theatrical release, however, had to offer something unusual.
One appeal was enhanced visual and audio quality. The IMAX system, filmed on large-format film with ten times the image area of an ordinary 35mm frame, was premiered at Expo ’70 in Osaka. In 1986, 3-D IMAX films were introduced, essentially using the old roadshow approach to exhibition. By 2001, there was a worldwide circuit of 183 specially equipped auditoriums for screening IMAX images and playing multiple audio tracks. Theaters were often housed in scientific institutions, such as the Science Museum of Virginia and the Tycho Brahe Planetarium in Copenhagen, although many also operated in commercial multiplexes.
The IMAX firm specialized in films with spectacular wildlife, scenery, and events, such as Mountain Gorilla (1991, Adrian Warren), Fires of Kuwait (1992, David Douglas), and T-REX: Back to the Cretaceous (1998, Brett Leonard). Although the films were costly to produce, their short length (usually around 40 minutes) permitted numerous showings per day; this and higher ticket prices meant a per-screen income much higher than in ordinary theaters. Despite the firm’s emphasis on the educational value of its films, they were also sold as viscerally exciting adventures. It is no wonder that IMAX started a small side business of designing simulator rides, including the Back to the Future attraction at Universal Studios in Los Angeles and Orlando.
There was still a place for the feature documentary at film festivals and in art theaters in the United States, but such films tended to fall into a limited number of genres. Not surprisingly, documentaries involving sex or violence unacceptable for television airing often found an audience. Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996) investigates the trial of teenagers accused of brutally murdering three children; while not attempting to assess the boys’ guilt, the film emphasizes the flimsiness of the evidence on which they were convicted. Sick: The Life and Death of Bob Flanagan, Supermasochist (1996, Kirby Dick) graphically depicts the self-mutilation of a performance artist during his act. Sex: The Annabel Chong Story (1999, Gough Lewis) reveals the self-destructive behavior of its sex-worker subject, and American Pimp (1999, Albert and Allen Hughes) interviews African American pimps and the prostitutes they manage.
Another genre of commercial nonfiction film that became more prominent in the 1990s was the portrait documentary. Such films usually went beyond the popular, straightforward Biography series on the Arts & Entertainment channel. Using a less stringent version of Direct Cinema, filmmakers could profile an eccentric individual whose activities provided the same sort of entertainment value as a fictional character. Terry Zwigoff blended interviews and candid footage in Crumb (1994), which deals with his friend, the underground comic artist Robert Crumb (24.16), as well as with his dysfunctional family. In Bennett Miller’s The Cruise (1998), a tour-bus guide's patter reflects his idiosyncratic enthusiasm for New York City. For American Movie (1999), Chris Smith spent two years following the struggles of an obsessive Wisconsin filmmaker to produce a horror film on a microbudget. Films such as these often blend humor and pathos to create the sort of ambiguity of tone appreciated by art-house audiences.
24.16 Crumb: visiting a comics shop, the antisocial artist refuses to sign an autograph for a long-time fan.
24.17 Hoop Dreams creates drama not only from the two boys’ aspirations but also from their families’ emotions.
24.18 In Frantz Fanon, Fanon’s sister-in-law dusts his portrait before recalling his life.
On a more serious note, films with such themes as the holocaust or African American Life have proven modest hits. One of the most acclaimed American documentaries of the decade, Hoop Dreams (1993, Peter Gilbert, Frederick Marx, and Steve James), follows the contrasting fortunes of two black Chicago teenagers dreaming of careers playing professional basketball (24.17). The portrait documentary could also be used to reveal the significance of overlooked historical personages. Isaac Julien’s Frantz Fanon: Black Skin, White Mask (1995) mixes archival footage and reenactments to chronicle its subject’s struggles against the Nazis and later against the French during the Algerian struggle for independence (24.18). Such films have a sense of dignity and importance that makes them the nonfiction equivalent of the event film in the world of Hollywood fiction.
World History
