A Journey Through Documentary Film

Copyright

‘THE HAMMER AND THE MIRROR’ An Essay on Documentary and Truth

In February 1926 an article appeared in the New York Sun, penned by an apparently anonymous critic referred to only as ‘The Moviegoer’. The item was a review of Moana, the newest film from director Robert Joseph Flaherty, concerning the lives of the native Polynesian people of Samoa. The Moviegoer was impressed by what he saw; in particular the rugged cinematography, which favoured real locations over artificial sets, and the emphasis on non-fiction detail over any manner of contrived plot. The film’s poster advertised Moana as a ‘true picture-romance of life and love in the South Seas’ and an ‘intimate drama of life’, but The Moviegoer decided to describe it as something else, in a concerted effort to get audiences to plonk down their hard-earned 30¢ to see this important film in the cinema. ‘Moana,’ he wrote, ‘being a visual account of events in the daily life of a Polynesian youth, has documentary value.’

It didn’t work. As it turned out Moana – the first film in cinema history to be recognised as a documentary upon its release – was a flop at the box office, despite Jesse L Lasky of Famous Players-Lasky Corporation (the company which would later be rechristened Paramount Pictures) writing Flaherty what effectively amounted to a blank cheque to travel anywhere in the world to shoot the film. Flaherty spent ‘20 months’ patient work’ filming Moana, and a further year editing it, but he had been unable to find what he was looking for. Despite hearing promising rumours that a giant octopus was terrorising the people of Samoa, who he imagined to be natives untouched by Western civilisation, he instead discovered an island population – frustratingly free of sea monsters – lorded over by a man that referred to himself as the King of Savai’i, who entertained the locals by singing opera. Needless to say, this wasn’t what Flaherty, nor audiences back home, had hoped for.

Flaherty’s relationship with documentary is a fascinating one (which I elaborate on further in my discussion of his famous 1922 film Nanook of the North on page 35). The Moviegoer, too, would go on to play a large role in the form’s early cinematic development. Under his real name of John Grierson, he returned home to the United Kingdom in the late 1920s and became one of the founding fathers of the British documentary movement, as both filmmaker and theorist. His description of documentary as the ‘creative treatment of actuality’ is still one of the form’s most enduring, and satisfactory, definitions.

So what is documentary? Grierson himself admitted that the term was ‘a clumsy description’. Ask a room full of film students what constitutes documentary and you may well get a dozen different answers, many dealing with the varying aesthetics of documentary filmmaking. One definition that is likely to reach a consensus agreement, however, is that documentaries deal with truth. Documentaries present reality, populated by real people, real places and real events. When we, the audience, watch a documentary we are watching a film that addresses the world in which we live, as opposed to a world imagined by the filmmaker. But while this description may meet with the Webster’s Unabridged dictionary description of documentary as a motion picture or television production ‘based on or re-creating an actual event, era, life story, etc, that purports to be factually accurate and contains no fictional elements: a documentary life of Gandhi’ this definition carries intrinsic problems.

THE TRAIN VERSUS THE ROCKET: DOCUMENTARY & THE REAL

At its most fundamental level, the notion of film-truth comes down to the misconception that the camera does not lie: perhaps an acceptable fallacy in 1895 when cinema-related technologies were still new, but one that is inexcusable in today’s postmodern climate. The apparent contradiction at the heart of documentary filmmaking is that it is intrinsically a subjective, overtly manipulated medium which nonetheless aims to, or is expected to, reveal some ultimate truth. This paradox can be reduced to a matter of semantics: the confusion of reality with truth on the part of documentary readers, or an impossible correlation being drawn between relative truth (conforming to language, cultural, ethical boundaries, and to the abilities of the filmmaker) and an absolute truth. When Grierson first applied the word ‘documentary’ to Moana, he was purloining a term used to describe still photography and applying it to cinema. Documentary photographers take images of real life but, much like their cinema counterparts, nowhere is there a tacit guarantee of truth. Who are they photographing? Which lens did they use? How did they elect to frame their image? Why were these decisions taken? All of these questions inform their work, both in conscious and subconscious execution and reading.

For the sake of pleasing simplicity, some critics have traditionally chosen to trace filmmaking’s dual tracts back to the apparently opposing ideologies of two of cinema’s early pioneering practitioners, Auguste and Louis Lumière, and Georges Méliès. The Lumière brothers are seen as epitomising documentary, or non-fiction, filmmaking; with their most recognised film being the 50-second single, unedited take of a steam locomotive arriving into a train station in the French coastal town of La Ciotat, in the film Train Pulling into a Station (1895). Méliès, on the other hand, stands in stark contrast, as cinema’s first magician, with his most associated image being that of a miniature rocket ship speeding towards a papier-mâché moon, in his groundbreaking science fiction A Trip to the Moon (1902). Divides are rarely that straightforward or neat – as proves the case here. The reality is that both the Lumière and Méliès camps, as well as many of their filmmaking contemporaries, utilised elements in their practice which fall under Grierson’s description of the ‘creative treatment of actuality’. The fact that it would take more than 30 years for a retroactive fiction/non-fiction divide to be written into cinematic classification speaks volumes of the two-way traffic that exists between the two ‘rival’ modes of filmmaking; a traffic that continues unabated more than a century later.

What, for example, makes United 93 (2006, Paul Greengrass), Titanic (1997, James Cameron), or any one of a number of Hollywood biopics – dramatised films that rely entirely on reconstruction, but are nonetheless based on events which historically took place – not widely considered documentaries by today’s definition? With their adherence to the tiniest authentic detail, Grierson, writing in 1926 as The Moviegoer, may well have also praised them for their ‘documentary realism’. Many of the early divisions between fiction and non-fiction filmmaking now seem comically arcane and irrelevant, such as the notion of soundstage sets (for fiction films) versus filming in real locations (for documentaries). Modern documentaries such as Errol Morris’s The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara (2003, see page 113) illustrate one obvious fallacy in this concept – being, as it is, comprised of an extended interview which takes place within the confines of a studio setting. Furthermore, reality television shows (which, as I discuss in ‘A Note on Film Selection’, page 31, I have chosen to ignore in this book) such as Big Brother take place almost entirely within the confines of an especially designed set, the artificiality of which is emphasised in a way rarely remarked upon in a fiction film. On the opposite end of the spectrum, fiction films are routinely filmed on location, often utilising faux-documentary aesthetics (such as the adoption of handheld cameras) to give added verisimilitude through cinematic shorthand. As an extreme example, note, for instance, Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump (1994), in which Tom Hank’s titular (invented) character is seamlessly digitally inserted into numerous pieces of historical newsreel footage, within the confines of a Hollywood fiction film.

But even with fiction and documentary filmmaking borrowing techniques, whether they be for stylistic or storytelling purposes, from one another, audiences apparently have no problem mentally separating them. It is what I refer to as the belief matrix: audience’s reading of the cinematic text based on their pre-determined expectations of where it should be critically situated. ‘The paradox of belief [in fiction films is that] we do not simply believe or not believe,’ says Slavoj Žižek in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006, see page 75). ‘We always believe in a kind of conditional mode: I know very well that it’s a fake, but nonetheless I let myself be emotionally affected.’ Fiction, Žižek argues in his magnum opus, The Parallax View (2006), exists not as a distinct, separate thread of cinema to fiction film; rather, it ‘emerges out of the inherent limitation of… documentary’. With documentary, that wilful suspension of disbelief Žižek describes in The Pervert’s Guide is simply not there. Although educated documentary viewers, aware of the infinite number of manipulations a documentary filmmaker may use, may critique a documentary’s objectivity, the widely accepted belief is that what is presented on screen is, by and large, real: a version of the truth less shaped than the one seen in a fiction film. A fiction film may strive for a represented reality in the same way that a photorealistic painting may do so, but we are aware that we are watching actors performing according to a script. Even the noticing of filmmaking gaffes – a boom mic straying accidentally into the frame, the changing levels of liquid in a glass when an editor switches between camera angles – does nothing to drag audiences out of this conditioned mode of belief. As Žižek points out (again, The Parallax View), ‘far from destroying the diegetic illusion [of fiction film], they, if anything, reinforce it in a kind of fetishist denial.’

Documentary, on the other hand, suggests a tacit truthfulness; whether it is demonstrated by the seemingly spontaneous images captured by a handheld camera in a cinéma vérité film (and if the execution of the filmmaking process is laid out so clearly on screen, how can we be misled?), or merely the suggestion of authoritative truth from an apparently omniscient, sonorously voiced narrator. It is in the state of fluidity which exists between subjectivity and objectivity that documentary filmmaking is truly defined. Audiences watch a fiction film to see a subjective story told subjectively. A documentary, on the other hand, is supposed – at least in popular myth – to be subjectively objective. We know that what we are watching in a documentary is the result of manipulation, but nonetheless we watch it expecting truth. This is why, regardless of agreeing or disagreeing with his overarching political views, some audiences find Michael Moore’s documentaries (which I discuss later in this essay, and elsewhere in this book) fundamentally dishonest by virtue of the manipulations involved in their construction.

Truth itself, however, is subject to the same ideological belief matrix as cinema, being equally shaped by the very same cultural and social economies. Take, for instance, Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s Oscar-winning documentary Murder on a Sunday Morning (2001, see page 179), which details a legal case in which a 15-year-old African-American boy was wrongfully accused of murder. The truth or reality revealed in the film is an answer to the question: is the suspect guilty or not in the eyes of the law? But this is not so much a truth of the Real as it is a truth of the Symbolic order. As Žižek discusses, ‘When a judge speaks, there is in a way more truth in his words (the words of the Institution of law) than in the direct reality of the person of judge – if one limits oneself to what one sees, one simply misses the point. (Psychoanalyst and philosopher) [Jacques] Lacan aims at this paradox with his "les non-dupes errent: those who do not allow themselves to be caught in the symbolic deception/fiction, who continue to believe their eyes, are the ones who err most. A cynic who believes only his eyes" misses the efficiency of the symbolic fiction, and how it structures our experience of reality.’

To go deeper down the rabbit hole, the entire quest for truth at the centre of documentary, based on the belief that reality itself is an obtainable commodity (like expensive cars, natural resources, etc), is symptomatic of our own cultural and social ideology: namely late capitalism. In his book Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (2009) Mark Fisher reiterates the frequently voiced opinion that ‘it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by capitalist realism: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it.’ In the same way that we cannot comprehend a world outside of an all-pervasive model of capitalism, so we cannot imagine documentary removed from the inconvenient notion that it needs to provide us with the truth on any given subject.

SMASH THE SUBWAY: DOCUMENTARY & SUBJECTIVITY

When Flaherty was making Moana the equipment he required to achieve his so-called ‘documentary’ images necessitated the use of 16-tons of filmmaking equipment (which led to the Samoans he was documenting nicknaming him ‘The Millionaire’). As is well known, lighter-weight cameras and direct sound recording equipment subsequently revolutionised documentary filmmaking in the 1950s and ’60s, allowing for a more on-the-hoof style of naturalistic documentary making. Today, filmmaking equipment has shrunk yet further – meaning that documentaries in which the subjects are completely unaware of the existence of the camera are more than possible from a technical perspective. In fact, according to commonly cited statistics, citizens in the UK may be caught on camera in excess of 300 times per day, with more surveillance cameras per head of population than any other country in the world. But few people would argue that such footage would constitute documentary. ‘CCTV footage is perhaps the only pure form of true documentary that exists,’ says