A Journey Through Documentary Film [1 ed.] 9781842435939, 9781842435908

Citation preview

kamera books

www.kamerabooks.com

KB Doc Journey.indd 1

24/03/2012 16:11

KB Doc Journey.indd 2

24/03/2012 16:11

Luke Dormehl

A JOURNEY THROUGH DOCUMENTARY FILM

kamera books

KB Doc Journey.indd 3

24/03/2012 16:11

This edition published in 2012 by Kamera Books, an imprint of Oldcastle Books, PO Box 394, Harpenden, Herts, AL5 1XJ www.kamerabooks.com

Copyright © Luke Dormehl 2012 Series Editor: Hannah Patterson The right of Luke Dormehl to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of the publishers. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-84243-590-8 978-1-84243-591-5 (kindle) 978-1-84243-592-2 (epub) 978-1-84243-593-9 (pdf)

Typeset by Elsa Mathern Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

KB Doc Journey.indd 4

24/03/2012 16:11

Dedicated to Tom Verran, who first suggested that these documentary things seem fairly interesting.

KB Doc Journey.indd 5

24/03/2012 16:11

KB Doc Journey.indd 6

24/03/2012 16:11

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks go out first and foremost to Hannah Patterson, whose unending enthusiasm for documentary and replying to late-night editorial queries was nothing short of inspirational. In addition I am indebted to a number of people who have helped me along the way: Tom Atkinson, my tireless producer on several tremendous documentaries (and many more in the future); Chris Bell; Philip Bird; James Brzezicki; Simon Callow; George Chignell of Passion Pictures; Jeff Feuerzeig; Simon Garfield; Alex Gibney; Dr Thomas Green; my agent Margaret Hanbury of the Hanbury Agency; Terry James; Graham Jones of Underleaf Studios; David Lassman; Andrew Lincoln; Richard Luck; Tim Matts; Nick Newport; Hans Petch; Tim Plester; Nick Setchfield; Michael Teh; Louis Theroux; Andre and Nathan Trantraal; and Colin Wyatt. Grazie also to my significant other, Clara, and members of my family.

KB Doc Journey.indd 7

24/03/2012 16:11

KB Doc Journey.indd 8

24/03/2012 16:11

CONTENTS

KB Doc Journey.indd 9

1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

The Hammer and the Mirror: An Essay on Documentary and Truth A Note on Film Selection Essayistic Documentaries Participatory Documentaries Poetic-Experimental Documentaries Fly-on-the-wall Documentaries



Index

11 31 35 91 141 159 185

24/03/2012 16:11

KB Doc Journey.indd 10

24/03/2012 16:11

‘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 11

KB Doc Journey.indd 11

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

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. 12

KB Doc Journey.indd 12

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

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 13

KB Doc Journey.indd 13

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

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 14

KB Doc Journey.indd 14

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

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 15

KB Doc Journey.indd 15

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

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 16

KB Doc Journey.indd 16

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

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 17

KB Doc Journey.indd 17

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

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 filmmaker Tim Plester, director of Way of the Morris (2011, see page 138). ‘And you have to pay people a salary to sit through that.’ Documentary requires an editorial decision with regard to content, and furthermore demands a context that extends beyond merely a superficial document of events. The 50,400 hours of video uploaded to YouTube each day, much of it user-generated content, demonstrates the huge demand that exists for real footage. However, the majority of that footage is composed – as is the case for the majority of Internet videos – of short, often sub-one minute clips, devoid of any greater context. This is another separation from documentary, which is looked at to answer questions which extend beyond simply what happened and into more subjective territory. ‘I go in the subway, I look at it and I note that the subway is dirty and that the people are bored – that’s not a film,’ said Jean Rouch, one of the founding fathers of the cinéma vérité movement, in an interview reproduced in Imagining Reality: the Faber Book of the Documentary (1998). ‘I go on the subway and I say to myself, “These people are bored, why? What’s happening, what are they doing here? Why do they accept it? Why don’t they smash the subway? Why do they sit here going over the same route every day?” At that moment you can make a film.’ It is in answering exactly how to reveal that truth that documentary falls most noticeably into its different categories. (NB I have written more about the different modes of documentary in 18

KB Doc Journey.indd 18

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

the individual chapter headings of this book.) Each mode contains its own modus operandi that opens it to both unique insights and manipulations. ‘There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real,’ wrote French philosopher and sociologist Edgar Morin. ‘The first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.’ These separate schools of truth extraction form the ideological divide between direct cinema and cinéma vérité. Direct cinema champions the idea of achieving truth through observation: the closest to the surveillance-camera model of documentary making hypothesised earlier. Of course this kind of documentary filmmaking still carries its innate manipulations. The sheer mathematics of documentary filmmaking, whereby hundreds of hours may be compressed into a 90-minute running time, means that at some point the film becomes shaped by the filmmaker. One is also largely unaware of the degree to which images, as much as they appear unaffected by the filmmaker, may be prompted by his or her actions. For instance, in the book Documentary in the Digital Age (2005), an interview is recounted with Nicolas Philibert, director of To Be and To Have (2002, see page 181) in which he discusses subtly ‘provoking’ events at the primary school at which he was filming to create a scene for the documentary. Philibert recalls that he had previously seen the younger children in the class struggling to use the photocopier, at which point they would ask for help from one of the older children. Wanting to see how they would react if this was not possible, Philibert devised a solution: ‘When I saw them [go into the photocopying room] I put the camera in the doorway,’ he explained, noting that the children continued trying to solve the problem rather than going for help. ‘It was a strategy,’ Philibert said. ‘I simply provoked a reality. Not invented or re-enacted. A reality.’ 19

KB Doc Journey.indd 19

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

A more critically troubling version of the above notion of ‘provoked... reality’ can be seen in Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will (1935, see page 160). The film, which chronicles the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany, represents a most perverse form of documentary: a film in which the scenes being documented are true (in that they actually occurred), but were designed and stage-managed specifically for the purposes of the making of the documentary. While Triumph documents real events, without the film these real events would not have taken place in the way that they did. Participatory cinema, on the other hand, readily accepts the role of author as part of the documentary-making process, and opts to heighten rather than ignore its effects. A director of vérité documentaries may often provoke a truth into being revealed in full view of the audience. ‘I think a filmmaker who thinks his role is simply to sit back and watch the action doesn’t tell the truth,’ said Bill Jersey, director of A Time for Burning (1966, see page 164), ‘because the truth doesn’t always bubble up to the surface, like an artesian well. The truth sometimes has to be grappled with, sometimes has to be pushed and shoved and pulled, and I think that’s my job.’ Nowhere is Edgar Morin’s ‘problem of truth’ laid barer than in the reflexivity of documentaries in which the filmmaker becomes an unavoidable presence on screen. No pretence is made that a film crew is not there, and the making of the documentary becomes the catalyst for events: whether it be the protagonists hopelessly playing up to the camera as in the Maysles brothers’ Grey Gardens (1975, see page 92), or the terrifying violence of World War II veteran Okuzaki Kenzo in Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987, see page 99). Structurally, many of these participatory documentaries become reflexive not just in their aesthetics, but also in their structure: emerging as ‘documentaries about the making of a documentary’. Films such as Nick Broomfield’s The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991, see page 106) epitomise 20

KB Doc Journey.indd 20

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

this mode of documentary filmmaking. In the documentary, the challenges and setbacks Broomfield experiences when trying to arrange an interview with the controversial Eugène Terre’Blanche become the film’s entire structural raison d’être, and the filmmaker himself becomes a sort of detective of the Real; butting heads with a constant series of narrative roadblocks which make it impossible for him to tell events in a linear, ‘realistic’ manner. Vérité documentaries reveal an axiom of modern documentary: that there is no singular universal truth about a subject, and that rather than searching for one we should examine the competing perspectives and ideologies which have constructed separate narratives from events. In the mode of participatory documentary, the onscreen presence of the filmmaker underlines that they are presenting not the objective truth, but their subjective truth. Had Broomfield taken a different tack, or a strongly pro-Boer line when making his film, he would have experienced a very different truth to the confrontational one he, in fact, did.

THE MIRROR SPEAKS, THE REFLECTION LIES: DOCUMENTARY & PROPAGANDA Michael Moore’s documentaries (of which three – 1989’s Roger & Me, page 105; 2004’s Fahrenheit 9/11, page 120; and 2009’s Capitalism: A Love Story, page 134 – are examined in this book) deserve their own essay, or even their own book, regarding documentary-truth and its associated ethics. Partly thanks to his position as the highest-grossing documentary filmmaker of all time, Moore’s polemical films have sparked more debate than any other documentary body of work. Those in favour of Moore’s methods as a filmmaker praise him for crafting populist documentary blockbusters which create engagement with issues such as the American healthcare system and the latent flaws in capitalist society, which would otherwise be unlikely to receive such mainstream exposure in a popular context. Critics accuse him 21

KB Doc Journey.indd 21

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

of manipulating facts, altering timelines, and utilising misleading filmmaking techniques to make his points. Although plenty of critics have since taken issue with this supposed methodology of misrepresentation in Moore’s documentaries, one of the first people to do so was film critic and lecturer Harlan Jacobson, who interviewed Moore in an article entitled ‘Michael & Me’ that appeared in the December 1989 edition of Film Comment magazine: ‘The movie is essentially what has happened to [Flint, Michigan] during the 1980s,’ Moore responded to Jacobson’s critique of his techniques. ‘What would you rather have me do? Should I have maybe begun the movie with a Roger Smith or GM announcement of 1979 or 1980 for the first round of layoffs that devastated the town, which then led to starting these projects; after which maybe things pick up a little bit in the mid ’80s, and then boom in ’86, there’s another announcement, and then tell that whole story? Then it’s a three-hour movie. It’s a movie, you know; you can’t do everything. I was true to what happened. Everything that happened in the movie happened... If you want to nitpick on some of those specific things, fine.’ Moore has influenced several generations of documentary filmmakers since he first emerged as a filmmaking presence in the late 1980s, and yet his films (Roger & Me is often considered the documentary which kick-started the documentary boom that subsists today) are more rooted in the tradition of wartime propaganda documentaries than they are consciously in the postmodernist approach to non-fiction filmmaking pursued by other contemporary filmmakers working in the medium. Like John Grierson, Moore is concerned with presenting a perceived social truth in his films, and this seemingly outweighs any fidelity to maintaining the lie that the camera always tells the truth. ‘The idea that a mirror held up to nature is not so important in a dynamic and fast-changing world as the hammer which shapes it,’ Grierson wrote. ‘It is as a hammer, not a mirror, that I have sought to use the medium that came to my somewhat restive hand.’ 22

KB Doc Journey.indd 22

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

This notion of social truth can also be seen in works as disparate as Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, see page 40), which deals with the hardships of life on the Great American Plains during the Dust Bowl period; Forugh Farrokhzad’s The House is Black (1963, see page 150), which investigates a leper colony outside the capital of Azerbaijan; and Marc Singer’s Dark Days (2000, see page 177), which examines the problems faced by New York’s homeless population. In each of these cases certain constructed liberties are taken by the filmmaker to present the ‘realities’ of a particular cause as they perceive them. That these films succeed as powerfully as they do (both as effective pieces of cinema and, to a greater or lesser degree, in changing social circumstances, legislature or perspectives) is not so much due to the quantity of new information presented in them as to the manner of their storytelling. Because documentary exists as a well-tuned collage of image, editing and sound, it does not so much coldly present facts as it does inform the audience how they should feel about certain facts; an emotive response triggered not by rational thought but by constructed feeling. Due to its framing, it is impossible to watch a documentary such as Steve James’s Hoop Dreams (1994, see page 171) and not feel sympathy for the plight of the working class African-American families depicted in it, as they struggle to achieve the best quality of life that they can against seemingly overwhelming odds. At the same time, the totality of James’s footage could have been used to create an entirely different film – made up of the worst elements he captured on camera during his several years of filming. It is ironic that many of the audiences that enjoy Hoop Dreams would find no central contradiction to appreciating the film on an emotional level, and yet also subscribing to mainstream news media’s portrayal of that same socio-racial strata of society, which is most often vilified. ‘In my day job as an actor, I quite understand that a director, for whatever reason, might not always use your favourite take of a scene in their final assembly,’ says Way of the Morris director 23

KB Doc Journey.indd 23

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

Tim Plester. ‘But with documentary you have real people up on the screen. And here you have their real lives that you’re asking them to divulge, without – certainly in our case – paying them for the privilege. It dawned on me early on in the lengthy editing process, that I had the power at my fingertips to make any one of my interviewees look like an idiot or a bigot should I wish. And that intrinsic ethical responsibility can sometimes be at real odds with your needs as a filmmaker and a decent human being.’ In actuality, time and again documentary – which has largely become the primary disseminary source of left-wing ideals in mainstream media – consciously positions itself as being opposed to the type of mercenary capitalist practices which would see downtrodden groups (the working-class African-American family in 1994’s Hoop Dreams; the coal miners and their wives in 1976’s Harlan County, USA, see page 166) in dehumanised terms of simple numbers. Of course, how is the subject of truth affected by the fact that this same model of starkly anti-capitalist behaviour is, itself, being presented by companies which operate in exactly this way? Is the fact that Michael Moore is a multi millionaire (‘I’m filthy rich. You know why I’m a multi-millionaire? ’Cause multimillions like what I do. That’s pretty good, isn’t it?’) due to his own anti-capitalist films simply ironic, a strike for the common man, or a more profound statement about the controlled liberal truth presented in documentary?

NARRATIVITY PLAYS: DOCUMENTARY & THE AUTHOR ‘One of the things I find most interesting about the new documentary is that they’re authored-films,’ Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005, see page 66) and Taxi to the Dark Side (2007), told me. ‘That means that in addition to capturing the voice of reality they’re also capturing the voice of the 24

KB Doc Journey.indd 24

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

author. And every new author is different, both temperamentally and in terms of their discipline with regards to aesthetics. Rather than saying what makes a good documentary filmmaker, I think a better question is what makes a good documentary? And the answer is when a filmmaker is about to be true to himself or herself as well as the subject.’ Towards the end of The Thin Blue Line (1988, see page 102), director Errol Morris elects to include a moment in which David Harris, the man whose accusation has placed Randall Adams on death row, scratches his head while answering one of Morris’s questions. It is only at this point that the viewer sees that Harris is wearing handcuffs, and that he is also imprisoned on account of an entirely separate murder charge. Since Harris’s testimony has formed a large part of the image that we, the viewer, have built up surrounding the events discussed in the documentary, the introduction of this new element may radically change audiences’ perception of what we have seen and heard thus far. Similarly, in Capturing the Friedmans (2003, see page 110), director Andrew Jarecki deliberately holds off on revealing selective pieces of information regarding guilt in order to construct a compelling narrative in which the real truth is left ambiguous. Narrativity, it is important to emphasise, is not solely the realm of fiction films. Its presence in documentary can be anything from the application of Hollywood’s familiar three-act structure to a documentary such as Seth Gordon’s King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007, see page 84) or Jeff Feuerzeig’s The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2005, see page 78), to the tension-ratcheting suspense created by the mail-drop sequence of Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s Night Mail (1936, see page 39), to the academicyear timeframe of Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have (2002). ‘I’m a storyteller,’ Gibney says. ‘If I may say, that’s one of my strengths as a documentary filmmaker. I’m not embarrassed by taking events and trying to shape them into a story that’s compelling for viewers.’ 25

KB Doc Journey.indd 25

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

The degree to which a filmmaker is free to emphasise or excise information he or she sees as important or meaningless has prompted strongly worded, often philosophical debate. Werner Herzog’s approach to documentary, which he describes as ‘ecstatic truth’, epitomises this notion, which I discuss further under the entry for his 2005 documentary Grizzly Man (see page 123). Dziga Vertov, whose practice encapsulates both avantgarde and cinéma vérité ideals in its reflexivity, believed that film was capable of showing what he referred to as ‘kinopravda’ (filmtruth). ‘The newsreel is organised from bits of life into a theme, and not the reverse,’ he wrote. ‘This also means that kinopravda doesn’t order life to proceed according to a writer’s scenario, but observes and records life as it is, and only then draws conclusions from these observations.’ Thus his highly stylised experimental film, The Man with a Movie Camera (1929, see page 144) is qualified as a documentary, and is as far removed, perhaps even more so, from the ideology of narrativised fiction filmmaking as any more ‘realistic’ documentary.

LIKE AN ARTESIAN WELL: DOCUMENTARY & MEMORY Documentary’s relation to and representation of the past suggests an entirely different set of challenges for the documentary filmmaker. Many essayistic documentaries do not broach this issue, preferring to utilise an authoritative, voice-of-god narrator, combined with especially selected interviews which do not contradict each other within the film’s agreed-upon internal version of past events. But for those documentaries which engage in this debate, it is a tantalising one. If the saying that the ‘winners write the history books’ holds true, then documentaries such as Kazuo Hara’s The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (1987) and Marcel Ophüls’ The Sorrow and the Pity (1969, see page 46) explore the opposite idea: the problematic nature of establishing 26

KB Doc Journey.indd 26

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

a factual truth when the events in question are a matter of national shame or even denial. When Ophüls set out to direct The Sorrow and the Pity he did it to set the record straight on the realities of France during its occupation by Germany, which had long since been whitewashed into an ‘official version’ promoted by President Charles de Gaulle and taught in schools. As such, the documentary becomes an exercise not just in narrativising the past, but also in liberating and reclaiming ‘the truth’ from the false history of socially constructed reality (the essayistic film’s version of agreed-upon history, writ large). ‘One of the jobs of documentary filmmaking is to prevent people from reinventing the past,’ Ophüls told the Los Angeles Reader in 1992. The inaccessibility of the past is a theme that has both challenged and fascinated a wide variety of documentary filmmakers. Three documentaries that grapple with this fundamental problem are Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line, Alain Resnais’ Night and Fog (1955, see page 148) and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir (2008, see page 130). All three films utilise stylisation far removed from vérité documentary convention to convey the fact that they are illustrating consciously subjective memory rather than strictly adhering to an agreed-upon reality. Similarly, the three films take different approaches to their theme. In the case of Morris’s film this is done through dramatised crime-scene re-enactments that borrow visually from images associated with film noir, which itself can be traced back to the German Expressionism. In the instance of Resnais’ Holocaust documentary, it is the contrast between the colour footage showing the dilapidated camps ten years after World War II ended, and the grainy black-and-white footage from the war years, which make the decade which separated the atrocities at Auschwitz and Majdanek and the release of Night of Fog feel like a lifetime. In Folman’s film, the gap between memory and reality is illustrated, literally, through the use of animation. Night and Fog, in particular, raises a seemingly contradictory idea about documentary’s status as ‘mirror with a memory’. 27

KB Doc Journey.indd 27

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

Its message is this: do not forget that the events described occurred, and yet, at the same time, the fact that what happened is so utterly horrendous that it is impossible for the human mind to accept it as truth. Al Reinert’s For All Mankind (1989, see page  169), meanwhile, is a joyful celebration of man’s moon landings, as far removed from Night and Fog in subject matter as is possible. And yet it, too, deals with memory and the audience’s failure to engage with the reality of its topic. In interviews about the documentary, Reinert admitted that the Apollo missions had been ‘treated as news to the point where it bores everyone to tears’. He was speaking about an ennui of image, in which the crushing weight of mass historical images transmitted by contemporary media ultimately lose their impact. Because of the familiarity audiences have with the widely circulated footage of the moon landings, the images themselves are stripped of all meaning. Reinert sought to create a documentary presenting space travel as one might actually experience it. In doing so, he was allowed access to the NASA archives, where Reinert and editor Susan Korda sifted through six million feet of film footage, and 80 hours of NASA interviews, to construct the finished film. The documentary succeeds in telling a narrative story from beginning to end in a straightforward manner: the experience of the astronauts on board. What the film does not make completely clear is that it is a collage of images taken from all six successful Apollo lunar landings, as well as images of a spacewalk from an earlier Gemini mission.

THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF TRUTH IN A FILM THAT IS LYING: DOCUMENTARY & THE FALSE In a sense, we enter into a strange discourse whereby the most truthful documentaries become not the films which are best representative of the Real (which is, as discussed, a facile impossibility) but rather those which are most open about their 28

KB Doc Journey.indd 28

24/03/2012 16:11

An Essay on Documentary and Truth

own inability (or lack of desire) to tell the truth. Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1975, see page 49) is a veritable potpourri of untrue elements. The film’s most famous lie is its final twist. Welles begins the picture by declaring that for the next 60 minutes – which the viewer presumes to be the film’s running time – everything that he presents will be entirely factual. Once that time has elapsed, entirely unbeknownst to the audience, the film continues with a fictitious final act, revealing a story about Pablo Picasso, nude paintings, and the selling of forgeries. Welles then interjects to remind viewers he promised only to tell the truth for one hour and that ‘for the last 17 minutes, I’ve been lying my head off’. This is not the extent of the F for Fake’s falsification. The documentary (even during the one hour in which it alleges to tell the truth) is filled with numerous other lies, most of them never revealed onscreen. For example, in one of the film’s early scenes – in which men are photographed, by means of a telephoto lens, watching as a beautiful woman (Welles’ girlfriend Oja Kodar) walks past – the woman used in a couple of the shots is not Oja herself, but rather her sister wearing the same dress. Similarly, during the Howard Hughes section of the documentary, one piece of archival footage features not Hughes, but rather actor Don Ameche. Welles, in the role of presenter/narrator, portrays not himself, but rather a ‘charlatan’ caricature of himself, who (judging on the evidence presented) appears to be a pathological liar. It is a criticism of the audience’s willingness to believe in the truth of film, that they take his word when he promises not to mislead them, even though he does several times in the documentary’s opening ‘magic trick’ sequence. Welles as narrator becomes the personification of the paradox that if the statement ‘there are no absolute truths’ is true, then that statement itself must be a lie. Novelist Robert Anton Wilson described F for Fake (1975) as ‘a documentary about the impossibility of making a documentary. It’s a documentary in which everybody is lying, including Welles himself. You never can figure out who’s the worst liar and how 29

KB Doc Journey.indd 29

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

much you can believe. Some of it is true. But you can never be sure which part. Other documentaries are terribly dishonest compared to that one, which admits it’s lying. A documentary that admits it’s lying is honest; a documentary that pretends to be honest is lying.’ And that’s the god’s honest truth of the matter. [I would like to thank Tim Matts, PhD in Critical Theory, who saw and commented on several drafts of this essay.]

30

KB Doc Journey.indd 30

24/03/2012 16:11

A NOTE ON FILM SELECTION For this book I have chosen to divide documentary into four separate modes: participatory, fly-on-the-wall, poeticexperimental, and essayistic. Each of these represents – as I detail in more depth in the essay ‘The Hammer and the Mirror’ on page 11, and at the start of the individual chapters – a different archetypal approach to the subject of documentary filmmaking. It is not always a perfect divide. Unlike a child’s toy which provides a series of differently shaped objects that fit neatly into a set of corresponding holes, modes of documentary exist more as ideological endgame models than as distinctly categorisable entities. Filmmakers, for a variety of reasons, often straddle categories with their work. The documentaries of Michael Moore, for example, could fit into either the participatory or essayistic modes. In such cases I have chosen to categorise films according to where I see them fitting best. As documentary filmmaking is often a series of compromises, see this only as a jumping-on point for debate. At the same time, attempting to compress more than a century of non-fiction cinema into a little over 60 case studies requires a degree of editorial pruning. Because I believe that not all non-fiction films are necessarily documentaries (and, in some instances, vice versa), I have excluded a number of stylistic sub-genres which, while perhaps related by blood or marriage to documentary, are not a part of the same nuclear family. Among 31

KB Doc Journey.indd 31

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

these are concert films, unless the content is weighted heavily away from simply being a record of musical performance. Martin Scorsese’s Bob Dylan documentary No Direction Home (2005, see page 71) makes it. His Rolling Stones tribute Shine a Light (2008) doesn’t. Docudramas, too, get short thrift, although films such as Touching the Void (2003, see page 61), which combine dramatic re-enactments with more traditional documentary elements, such as interviews, are included. Reality TV is out in the cold, and while I was far from heartbroken at not having to sit through both series of Celebrity Love Island (2005–6), I believe it is an area which greatly impacts on documentary, and deserves its own study. I have also, for the most part, left out mockumentaries: the spin-off genre in which fictitious events are presented in documentary format, which spawned works such as This Is Spınal Tap (1984, Rob Reiner) and The Blair Witch Project (1999, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sánchez). There are exceptions to the rule, and where this is the case I have tried to provide a sound explanation. I have attempted to include documentaries covering a broad range of styles, subjects and countries of origin, representing every decade of filmmaking from the 1920s to the present day. There are more new documentaries than old ones, however, reflecting the boom in non-fiction filmmaking which emerged with a new Golden Age in the 1980s and thankfully continues unabated today. It is my hope that you will find something to entertain you in this book; whether it is a reintroduction to an old friend, some additional background or food for thought about a particular favourite, or recommendations for future viewing from a fellow enthusiast. Enjoy! NB Credits for the documentaries included here are intended as a rough guide. You may notice that credits change from film 32

KB Doc Journey.indd 32

24/03/2012 16:11

A Note on Film Selection

to film, as I have attempted to highlight the roles that I believe most important when watching that particular film. I apologise if anyone involved with these documentaries feels unjustly left off the credits list, which has been compacted for reasons of space.

33

KB Doc Journey.indd 33

24/03/2012 16:11

KB Doc Journey.indd 34

24/03/2012 16:11

ESSAYISTIC DOCUMENTARIES These documentaries are expository in nature, a rhetorical discourse designed to provide information about a particular subject or historical event. As such, they are essayistic films: carefully constructed and narrativised in order to present a clear, flowing argument designed to convince the viewer. Although not always the case, this is often supported by the usage of an authoritative ‘voice of god’ narrator. Images – which can be provided by interviews, stills, archival materials, or even dramatised re-enactments – are tightly edited in a way that supports the argument put forward by the filmmaker.

Nanook of the North (1922) Directed by: Robert J Flaherty Produced by: Robert J Flaherty Written by: Frances H Flaherty (idea) and Robert J Flaherty Editing by: Robert J Flaherty and Charles Gelb Cinematography: Robert J Flaherty Running time: 79 minutes

Synopsis Early travelogue chronicling life in Inukjuak, in northern Quebec, Canada; an area all but untouched by industrial technology. The film focuses on an Inuit named Nanook and his family. 35

KB Doc Journey.indd 35

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

Comments Due to the non-fiction nature of many early film shorts, it is a matter of subjectivity what is considered the first documentary. If Nanook of the North is not the first documentary film, then it is certainly the first such commercially successful feature-length production. Its director, Robert J Flaherty, was also the first filmmaker to define himself in the terms we now associate with the documentarian: an independent filmmaker, who favoured real people and locations over the artificiality of actors and sets, and who dedicated himself to seeking out new images to present through his films. ‘First I was an explorer; then I was an artist,’ was Flaherty’s famous self-assessment. Before making Nanook Flaherty had worked as an explorer and prospector in Arctic Canada, and was thus familiar with the Inuit people. Prior to Nanook he had shot a less ambitious film in

Nanook of the North

36

KB Doc Journey.indd 36

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

the region, which was destroyed after he accidentally dropped a cigarette onto the highly flammable film negative. (This is detailed in intertitles at the start of the documentary, which remain traumatic reading for anyone who has ever set out to shoot a film.) Flaherty subsequently received $50,000 from a French fur company, Revillon Frères, which funded his 16-month expedition to make Nanook. The main academic discourse surrounding Nanook concerns its apparent lack of authenticity. In contrast to the lightweight cameras which would later characterise documentaries in the cinéma vérité and direct cinema modes, Flaherty’s heavy filmmaking equipment barred him from achieving this kind of off-the-cuff footage and instead necessitated him plotting out scenes in advance. Below is a recollection from Flaherty about the manner in which sequences were agreed upon, appertaining to the film’s hunting scenes: ‘Suppose we go,’ said I, ‘do you know that you and your men may have to give up making a kill, if it interferes with my film? You remember that it is the picture of you hunting the iviuk (walrus) that I want and not their meat?’ ‘Yes, yes, the aggie (motion picture) will come first,’ earnestly he assured me. ‘Not a man will stir, not a harpoon will be thrown until you give the sign. It is my word.’ We shook hands and agreed to start the next day. More controversial was Flaherty’s decision to cast the characters in his film – in particular handpicking a new screen wife for his leading man (whose real name was actually Allakariallak). ‘We select a group of the most attractive and appealing characters we can find, to represent a family, and through them tell our story,’ he said, in relation to his later documentary Man of Aran (1943). ‘It is always a long and difficult process, this type finding, for it is surprising how few faces stand the test of the camera.’ It is not a 37

KB Doc Journey.indd 37

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

world away from the creation of reality television: choose a goodlooking group of people, and then create a series of dramatic hurdles for them to leap, which, while provoking real reactions, is by its nature contrived. Most challenging of all is the fact that Nanook is set in the past (although this is not revealed onscreen), with Flaherty electing to present life as it was prior to the influence of Europeans (for example, encouraging Allakariallak to hunt with a spear rather than a gun, and detailing the building of an igloo). From an artistic perspective these flourishes not only made the film more exciting, but strengthened Flaherty’s own philosophical views as an artist that man is at his happiest and least corrupt when closest to nature and untouched by civilisation. These issues have led to some critics retroactively classifying Flaherty’s films as fictional documentaries. This appears unfair (and, since the term documentary seems to have been first used in conjunction with Flaherty’s Moana (1926), perhaps later documentaries produced in a different manner ought to be referred to as factual documentaries?). Ironically, it is precisely because of Flaherty’s acknowledgement that actualities can be shaped into a compelling narrative that he is well remembered today, and that his influence can be seen so strongly in the modern documentary.

Did you know? Nanook (Allakariallak) died shortly after the film was completed. While the commonly cited myth is that he died of starvation during a hunting trip, it is more likely that his death was the result of tuberculosis.

Other recommendations by the same director Moana (1926); Tabu: A Story of the South Seas (1931, as writer, producer and cinematographer, with direction by FW Murnau); Man of Aran (1934); and The Land (1942)

38

KB Doc Journey.indd 38

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

Night Mail (1936) Directed by: Harry Watt and Basil Wright Produced by: Harry Watt and Basil Wright Written by: WH Auden Narrated by: John Grierson Editing by: Basil Wright Cinematography: HE Fowle and Jonah Jones Music by: Benjamin Britten Running time: 25 minutes

Synopsis Documenting the journey of an overnight mail train travelling from London to Glasgow, on which the post is sorted, dropped and collected on the run.

Comments In today’s world of dreadful corporate promo videos it is difficult to imagine an organisation such as the General Post Office commissioning and making a film as artful as Night Mail. In fact, the documentary (whose working title was The Travelling Post Office) was one of many ambitious projects undertaken by the GPO’s dedicated documentary film unit, which, between 1934 and 1940, produced 35 short information films, before its success saw it turned into the Ministry of Information’s Crown Film Unit, where it was put to work producing a succession of British wartime propaganda films (see Listen to Britain, page 146). Night Mail was filmed in black and white on a budget of just £2,000. What makes it so remarkable is its ambitious vision, which raises the subject matter far above what one might expect from essentially a public-service film about a rather mundane activity. John Grierson, who founded the GPO film unit, was a believer in what he referred to as ‘drama on the doorstep’, and Night Mail succeeds admirably in this capacity: shaping documentary shooting locations (although several scenes were actually shot on 39

KB Doc Journey.indd 39

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

a soundstage), non-actors and sponsor’s message into a dramatic narrative. See, for example, the famous ‘two bridges and 45 beats’ sequence, in which the collection of a trackside mailbag is assembled in such a way as to ratchet up almost Hitchcockian levels of tension. The documentary’s best-known sequence is undoubtedly the culmination, in which WH Auden’s spoken verse (‘This is the Night Mail crossing the border/Bringing the cheque and the postal order./Letters for the rich, letters for the poor/The shop at the corner and the girl next door’), Benjamin Britten’s music, the sounds and rhythms of the train, and a montage of landscapes and racing train wheels combine to bravura effect.

Did you know? The sound recordist was unable to adequately record the sound of the train clattering over the tracks for the mailbag collection sequence. The soundtrack was recorded later on, with a model train and track being used instead.

While we’re on the subject... Documentary short subjects such as 1963’s Thirty Million Letters and 1986’s artlessly named Night Mail 2 have both paid homage and tried to replicate the enduring appeal of Night Mail.

The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) Directed by: Pare Lorentz Written by: Pare Lorentz Narrated by: Thomas Chalmers Editing by: Leo Zochling Cinematography by: Leo Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, Paul Strand and Paul Ivano Music by: Virgil Thomson Running time: 25 minutes (without epilogue) 40

KB Doc Journey.indd 40

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

Synopsis Examines the natural bounty of the Great Plains region of the United States and Canada, and how land abuses and extended drought led to the ravages of the Dust Bowl period between 1930 and 1936.

Comments Seventy years before An Inconvenient Truth (see page 79), Pare Lorentz’s environmentalist documentary, The Plow That Broke the Plains, helped raise awareness of another ecological catastrophe. The short documentary was commissioned by the Department of Agriculture as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal series of economic programs, in response to the Great Depression. It serves as a celebration of America as a land of plentiful resources, but also an indictment of the country’s misuse of the natural environment and a warning about what would happen if proper conservation was not practised in the future. The film’s title is both literal and metaphorical: the plow that broke the Plains really did break them. The Plow was the subject of much controversy at the time it was made. Opponents of the New Deal felt that the money being used to finance the documentary could be better spent elsewhere. Meanwhile, the Hollywood studio system had a contentious relationship with Lorentz, owing to a highly critical book he had co-authored with lawyer and writer Morris Ernst, entitled Censored: the Private Life of the Movies (1929). The studios were also concerned by the financial implications of the government creating commercial films which might run in competition with those produced by the industry. As a result, they barred Lorentz’s access to certain stock footage he required, which came under their ownership. Although Lorentz had previously worked as a film critic, The Plow represented his directorial debut. His cameramen accused him of not being sufficiently visually oriented, and three of the four 41

KB Doc Journey.indd 41

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

who worked on the documentary were fired prior to its completion. (Paul Strand, who was one of these three cameramen, went on to become one of America’s most revered stills photographers.) Lorentz ran considerably over budget; eventually spending more than three times the originally agreed-upon $6,000, and consequently having to pay many of the production costs himself. Not that one would know of these problems to look at the completed film. Aesthetically, The Plow is a groundbreaking triumph; seamlessly marrying iconic imagery, rhythmic editing, symphonic music and poetic free verse to breathtaking effect. In Richard Dyer MacCann’s The People’s Films: A Political History of US Government Motion Pictures (1973) Lorentz reviewed his own film with insight and honesty: ...with some outstanding photography and music, The Plow is an unusual motion picture which might have been a really great one had the story and construction been up to the rest of the workmanship. As it is, it tells the story of the Plains and it tells it with some emotional value – an emotion that springs out of the soil itself. Our heroine is the grass, our villain the sun and the wind, our players the actual farmers living in the Plains country. It is a melodrama of nature, the tragedy of turning grass into dust, a melodrama that only Carl Sandburg or Willa Cather perhaps could tell as it should be told.

The War Game (1965) Directed by: Peter Watkins Produced by: Peter Watkins Written by: Peter Watkins Editing by: Michael Bradsell Cinematography by: Peter Bartlett and Peter Suschitzky Running time: 48 minutes 42

KB Doc Journey.indd 42

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

The War Game

Synopsis Worst-case-scenario look at the possibility of nuclear war and its imagined aftermath in a typical English city.

Comments This film emphasises one of the most problematic aspects of documentary classification: can you document an event which hasn’t occurred? The War Game uses the established documentary tool of re-enactment, but, rather than enacting past events, dramatises possible future events in as realistic a manner as possible. It is based on factual evidence culled from writer/ director Peter Watkins’ own research into the likely aftermath of a nuclear attack on England. Despite its thankfully fictitious scenario, the film looks and feels like a documentary, using real locations and no professional actors, while employing documentary filmmaking techniques (interviews to camera, narration, handheld cameras) 43

KB Doc Journey.indd 43

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

reminiscent of the reportage-style of a news-magazine programme of the era. Furthermore, whenever the horrific details appear farfetched or unlikely, Watkins is clear to cite instances in Germany and Japan during World War II in which similar scenes occurred. In the vein of agitprop documentary filmmakers, Watkins examines governmental policies to be put in place in the event of a nuclear strike, and deems them utterly ineffective. Existing evacuation plans were practically useless, as were strategies for dealing with cities in the wake of an attack. Intercut with the documentary-style narrative are (real) interviews with members of the public, in which their knowledge of issues surrounding nuclear war is discussed. The War Game was commissioned by the BBC, and achieved tremendous notoriety when the organisation declined to broadcast it as agreed, leading to Watkins quitting the organisation in disgust. ‘The BBC panicked when they first saw the film, and sought government consultation re: showing it,’ he recalled. ‘They subsequently denied this, but the sad fact remains that the BBC violated their own Charter of Independence, and on September 24, 1965, secretly showed The War Game to senior members of the Home Office, the Ministry of Defence, the Post Office (in charge of telecommunications), a representative of the Military Chiefs of Staff, and Sir Burke Trend, Secretary to Harold Wilson’s Cabinet. Approximately six weeks later, the BBC announced that they were not going to broadcast the film on TV – and denied that their decision had anything to do with the secret screening to the government.’ The refusal to broadcast The War Game in 1965 (it was eventually screened two decades later) was part of a widespread reluctance on the part of British television to discuss the arms race, especially related to nuclear weapons – about which the majority of the general public had little or no information. Harold Wilson’s newly elected Labour government had already broken its election promise to unilaterally disarm Britain, and was in fact developing a full-scale nuclear weapons programme at the time 44

KB Doc Journey.indd 44

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

that the film was made. The War Game subsequently received the Academy Award for ‘Best Documentary’. ‘They should string up bedsheets between the trees and show The War Game in every public park,’ said Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert. ‘It should be shown on television, perhaps right after one of those half-witted war series in which none of the stars ever gets killed.’ It remains a skilful, terrifying documentary, which is as relevant today as it has ever been.

Powers of Ten (1968) Directed by: Charles and Ray Eames Narrated by: Philip Morrison Cinematography by: Alex Funke Music by: Elmer Bernstein Running time: 9 minutes

Synopsis Short documentary depicting the relative scale of the Universe, from galactic to microscopic, in factors of ten.

Comments This extraordinary documentary short, combining photography and animation to breathtaking effect, begins with the image of a man and woman relaxing on a picnic blanket next to Lake Shore Drive in Chicago. From there, accompanied by an expository narration from renowned astrophysicist Philip Morrison, the image zooms out at the rate of one power of ten per ten seconds. Taking in planets, stars and eventually galaxies, within a few short minutes the view shown is of the whole observable universe. From there the ‘camera’ drops back at a speed of one power of ten per two seconds, until it has reached its starting point. The image then zooms in closer, in negative powers of ten, until it reaches the level of quarks in one proton of a carbon atom. 45

KB Doc Journey.indd 45

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

Powers of Ten was created by husband-and-wife design team, Ray and Charles Eames, based on a 1957 book, Cosmic View, by Dutch reformist educator Kees Boeke. The documentary is often erroneously described as being made in 1977. In fact, it was re-released that year. It was distributed by the IBM computer company.

While we’re on the subject... Both Powers of Ten and the book it was based upon have inspired numerous imitators. Cosmic Zoom (also 1968, Eva Szasz) was produced by the National Film Board of Canada. While still impressive, its lack of expository voiceover and crude, handdrawn images makes it undoubtedly inferior to the Eames’ film. Cosmic Voyage (1996, Bayley Silleck), meanwhile, was a longer, IMAX-format update. Morgan Freeman narrated.

Did you know? The cinematic legacy of Powers of Ten can be seen in the opening credits of Fight Club (1999, David Fincher), where the camera zooms out from viewing the narrator’s brain on a microscopic level, and in Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001, see page 59), where the filmmaker is able to use satellite and closer aerial images of Santa Monica to engage in geographical location hopping to help piece his narrative together.

The Sorrow and the Pity (Le chagrin et la pitié) (1969) Directed by: Marcel Ophüls Produced by: André Harris and Alain de Sedouy Written by: Marcel Ophüls and André Harris Editing by: Claude Vajda Cinematography by: André Gazut and Jürgen Thieme Running time: 251 minutes 46

KB Doc Journey.indd 46

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

Synopsis Two-part documentary about the French Resistance during World War II and the collaboration between the Vichy government and Nazi Germany.

Comments Prior to making this four-hour-plus documentary, director Marcel Ophüls – son of celebrated filmmaker Max Ophüls – had chronicled the events leading up to the start of World War II, along with producers André Harris and Alain de Sedouy, in the television documentary, Munich, or Peace in Our Time (Munich, ou la paix pour cent ans, 1967). The film was a television success, although it was later withdrawn from circulation. The Sorrow and the Pity was a more controversial undertaking: an examination of Occupied France spanning the period from August 1939 to January 1947. The film challenged the patriotic

The Sorrow and the Pity

47

KB Doc Journey.indd 47

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

image of a nation of freedom fighters, as espoused by President Charles de Gaulle and taught as fact in French schools. Although The Sorrow and the Pity was well received upon its release, it was unofficially banned from being shown on French television, with executives refusing to view the film. (It eventually screened on French television in 1981.) The documentary is divided into two parts, entitled ‘The Collapse’ and ‘The Choice’. Both combine newsreel archive footage with interviews with those who experienced the Occupation firsthand – ranging from German soldiers, Resistance fighters and political leaders, to ordinary civilians. The template by which the film is constructed has been often replicated by other documentaries examining historical events with the use of personal testimony (see, for example, Nanking – page 82). ‘It was not hard to make a collaborator talk,’ said Ophüls in a 1972 interview with the Village Voice. ‘And of course it wasn’t hard to make a Resistance man talk... The most difficult thing is to make people talk who are aware of not having done anything.’ Much of the film’s power comes from its portrayal of humanity during extraordinary times. More than simply a film about the German invasion of France, with The Sorrow and the Pity Ophüls set out to examine the nature of human existence. The subjects that he selected for his 60 hours’ worth of interviews reacted to events in markedly different ways (some of which the director approved of, others of which he clearly did not), but all are given equal opportunity to rationalise their decisions and to reflect upon the consequences. The film thus holds a mirror up to the audience, and asks how we, faced with similarly challenging circumstances, would act. Since at the time that The Sorrow and the Pity was released, America was mired in its war in Vietnam, while France had recently undergone its own conflict relating to the subject of Algerian independence, the questions raised extended well beyond World War II. 48

KB Doc Journey.indd 48

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

The Sorrow and the Pity may be best known to filmgoers as a result of the numerous references made to it in Woody Allen’s Annie Hall (1977) – perhaps the greatest unofficial advertisement ever given to a documentary. In the film, Allen’s character, Alvy Singer, appears obsessed with the film, perhaps narcissistically seeing a parallel between his own life – neurotically collapsing under imagined burdens – and the documentary’s subjects. ‘I’m not in the mood to see a four-hour documentary on Nazis,’ is how Diane Keaton’s character summarises the film, although by the end of Annie Hall it is noted that she has been spotted taking her new boyfriend to see it. Allen’s Alvy Singer describes this as ‘a personal triumph’.

F for Fake (Vérités et mensonges) (1975) Directed by: Orson Welles Produced by: François Reichenbach, Dominique Antoine and Richard Drewitt Written by: Orson Welles and Oja Kodar Editing by: Marie-Sophie Dubus and Dominique Engerer Cinematography by: François Reichenbach Music by: Michel Legrand Running time: 85 minutes

Synopsis Orson Welles explores the subject of fakery and hoaxes, with case studies that include a renowned art forger, the author of a fraudulent Howard Hughes autobiography, and the work of the actor-director himself.

Comments ‘Watch out for the slightest hint of hanky panky,’ warns Orson Welles at the start of F for Fake, the last major film completed by one of twentieth-century cinema’s greatest talents. The initial 49

KB Doc Journey.indd 49

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

F for Fake

focus of this documentary (if that is what it indeed is; critic Stuart Byron opts to describe it as a ‘grace-note metafilm’) was Elmyr de Hory, a Hungarian-born art forger reputed to have sold more than a thousand forgeries to reputable art galleries all over the world. Elmyr, however, turned out to be just the beginning of the story. Having achieved a level of celebrity, Elmyr recounted his life story to a man by the name of Clifford Irving, who wrote his official biography, Fake! The Story of Elmyr de Hory, the Greatest Art Forger of Our Time. Irving then went on to execute his own fraudulent scheme: convincing a major publishing house to pay him $765,000 for a fake autobiography of the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, for which he was subsequently imprisoned. Such a sensational yarn would have been enough for most filmmakers, but then Welles was not most filmmakers. Taking this material as his raw footage (and incorporating vast swathes of François Reichenbach’s BBC documentary on Elmyr) Welles transformed it into an extended meditation on fakery, a topic which had fascinated him throughout his life. Much of Welles’ career was, in fact, built on fakery: whether it be launching his acting career by 50

KB Doc Journey.indd 50

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

turning up unannounced at Dublin’s Gate Theatre and introducing himself as an accomplished American actor on tour; or his more famous, celebrated hoax which saw hundreds of American citizens fleeing their homes in terror after Welles’ breakthrough radio drama The War of the Worlds (1938) presented HG Wells’ (no relation) famous science-fiction novel as a series of breathless, breaking-news updates. But in 1973 the director was accused of a less-appreciated form of fakery, when critic Pauline Kael wrote her damaging ‘Raising Kane’ essay, in which she downplayed Welles’ role in the creation of Citizen Kane (1941) and instead placed the credit with his co-screenwriter, Herman J Mankiewicz. Welles considered suing Kael for libel, although he instead responded through this documentary: a film which contains more than a few sideways swipes at pretentious critics and so-called ‘experts’. ‘It’s pretty, but is it art?’ chuckles Welles at one point in the film. ‘Well, how is it valued? The value depends on opinion; the opinion depends on the experts; a faker like Elmyr makes fools of the experts, so who is the expert? Who is the faker?’ Welles himself did not believe he had made a documentary with F for Fake, but rather an entirely ‘new kind of film’: drawing on documentary, fiction, and the first-person-singular essayistic format he had utilised in radio serials such as Hello Americans (1942-43). While it was met with confusion at the time, this approach would later be repackaged to popular effect by filmmakers such as Michael Moore, complete with the same rapid-fire edits used here, which were a world away from the lengthy, assured takes that characterised Welles’ early work in Citizen Kane and The Magnificent Ambersons (1942). Unlike the other projects which dragged on throughout Welles’ latter years, F for Fake was completed over a relatively short period of time: a nine-month period from 1972–73. In the wake of the Watergate scandal, it is a ‘don’t trust anything’ film as whimsical and witty as New Hollywood fiction films such as The Conversation (1974, Francis Ford Coppola) were moody and steeped in paranoia. 51

KB Doc Journey.indd 51

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

Imagine: John Lennon (1988) Directed by: Andrew Solt Produced by: Andrew Solt and David L Wolper Written by: Andrew Solt and Sam Egan Editing by: Howard Heard and Bert Lovitt Cinematography by: Néstor Almendros Music by: John Lennon Running time: 100 minutes

Synopsis Biographical portrait of the groundbreaking singer-songwriter John Lennon.

Comments The origins of Imagine: John Lennon can be traced to 1986, when Lennon’s widow, Yoko Ono, first approached documentarians Andrew Solt and David L Wolper about making the film. Its release was timed to coincide with – and thus attempt to thwart – the release of a muckraking unofficial biography of Lennon, The Lives of John Lennon by Albert Goldman. Ironically enough (or perhaps not!), Solt and Wolper were previously best known for the documentary This is Elvis (1981), which appeared at the same time as Elvis – another of Goldman’s slanderous music biographies. While the filmmakers agreed to take on the project, to their credit they also insisted on complete control over its content. As a result, while Imagine is ultimately favourable in its appraisal of Lennon (and Yoko), it is not a one-sided whitewash. While the film’s Beatles-era footage (much of which has been reproduced elsewhere) remains fantastic as a document of the twentieth century’s quintessential pop group, Imagine’s real coup lies in the previously unreleased home videos of Lennon (of which the filmmakers were given access to around 240 hours), 52

KB Doc Journey.indd 52

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

which helps make Imagine stand out among the plethora of other Beatles documentaries in existence. In one highlight, Lennon sits at a piano and rehearses ‘Imagine’ for a small group of friends, some time before he laid down the final track for his 1971 album. In another, he speaks with an evidently troubled drifter who has somehow snuck onto Lennon’s Tittenhurst estate, believing that Lennon’s songs were written as personal messages to him. Rather than turning him away, Lennon has a heartto-heart conversation with the youth, in which he explains that he writes songs for himself, his family and friends. Extraordinarily he then invites the man inside to give him something to eat. Knowing that the singer’s death in 1980 came at the hands of a deranged fan, this sequence – as well as one in which he laughs while reading predictions of his death in a tabloid newspaper – carries a disturbing poignancy that can’t have been lost on the filmmakers. Unlike many music biog-documentaries, Imagine is not a chronological account of Lennon’s life, but rather a careerspanning attempt to portray him during his two musical phases, both as a member of The Beatles and as a solo artist. Eschewing the more obvious routes for something altogether more personal (the narration, by Lennon himself, is stitched together from over 100 hours of interviews), this is one of the most introspective and revealing documentaries ever made about a public figure. And, of course, the soundtrack (featuring 36 songs from throughout Lennon’s career) is fantastic.

Did you know? To help assemble the finished documentary, all of the available footage and recordings were transferred to laser disc and logged into a comprehensive database. Using a computer the editor was thus able to quickly access any given piece of footage without having to shuffle through endless other material to reach it. This was an early version of non-linear editing. 53

KB Doc Journey.indd 53

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

While we’re on the subject... Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s Imagine Album (2000 Jonas Mekas and Andrew Solt) recycles some of the footage from Imagine: John Lennon, and adds more, for a documentary focusing on the recording of Lennon’s most popular album as a solo artist. Tupac: Resurrection (2003, Lauren Lazin) follows Imagine’s lead by using interview excerpts with its subject to form the film’s narration. While the musical genres may vary, Tupac is a documentary about another iconic, world-changing musician – in this case the rapper Tupac Shakur – who died as the result of a shooting long before he should have. Incidentally, the film’s director later went on to executive produce the documentary The US vs John Lennon.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse (1991) Directed by: Fax Bahr, George Hickenlooper and Eleanor Coppola (documentary footage) Produced by: Les Mayfield and George Zaloom Written by: Fax Bahr and George Hickenlooper Editing by: Michael Greer and Jay Miracle Cinematography by: Larry Carney, Shana Hagan, Igor Meglic and Steven Wacks Music by: Todd Boekelheide Running time: 96 minutes

Synopsis Documentary chronicling the troubled production of director Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Vietnam film, Apocalypse Now (1979).

Comments Hearts of Darkness (which takes its name from the Joseph Conrad novella upon which Apocalypse Now was based) opens with footage 54

KB Doc Journey.indd 54

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

taken at the 1979 Cannes Film Festival in which Francis Ford Coppola describes the making of Apocalypse by saying that: ‘We were in the jungle, there were too many of us, we had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.’ The quote perfectly sums up the troubled production of a film now revered as a masterpiece of twentieth-century cinema, but at the time seemingly destined to be an out-and-out disaster. The tales which sprang from the making of Apocalypse – including (but not limited to) script problems, horrendous cost overruns, one leading man being fired, his replacement suffering a heart attack, and Marlon Brando, hired to play the insane Colonel Kurtz, showing up horribly overweight and not having read the script or the story it was based on – have become the stuff of Hollywood legend. Few pictures better illustrate the excesses of the 1970s New Hollywood era of filmmaking, which many movie buffs still incidentally consider Hollywood’s last true Golden Age of fiction cinema. What makes Hearts of Darkness stand out among other ‘making of’ documentaries is its unprecedented level of access. Much of the on-set documentary footage was shot during the 238 (!) days of principal photography by the director’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, who travelled to the Philippines with her husband and their three children for the production. Many of the director’s comments to his wife were never intended for broadcast, and thus contain a level of intimate admittance rarely seen from a Hollywood director, much less one with the kind of confidence Coppola exuded at the height of his success. Add to that a comprehensive raft of modern interviews conducted by documentarians Bahr and Hickenlooper with the likes of George Lucas, Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall, John Milius and Francis Coppola himself, a wealth of archival footage (including material from Orson Welles’ aborted 1939 version of Heart of Darkness) and high-end production values, and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse may just be the best documentary about the realities of big-budget filmmaking ever made. 55

KB Doc Journey.indd 55

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

While we’re on the subject... Lost in La Mancha (2002, Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe) chronicles the ill-fated production of Terry Gilliam’s The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Sadly, the ending is not so happy as it was for Apocalypse Now. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (2003, Kenneth Bowser) adapts the salacious Peter Biskind book of the same name to provide a whistle-stop tour of 1970s Hollywood, when the director was star.

Did you know? Season 4 of the HBO series Entourage opens with a documentarystyle episode entitled ‘Welcome to the Jungle’ (2007), charting the ill-fated filming of another out-of-control, would-be Hollywood epic – which contains more than a passing nod towards Hearts of Darkness, a film that has become the benchmark by which other ‘making of’ documentaries are judged.

When We Were Kings (1996) Directed by: Leon Gast Produced by: Leon Gast and Taylor Hackford Editing by: Leon Gast, Taylor Hackford, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte and Keith Robinson Cinematography by: Maryse Alberti, Paul Goldsmith, Kevin Keating, Albert Maysles and Roderick Young Running time: 89 minutes

Synopsis Documentary about the famous ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ boxing title match which pitted champion George Foreman against underdog challenger Muhammad Ali.

Comments When We Were Kings followed two years after the superb Hoop Dreams (1994, see page 171), another documentary about 56

KB Doc Journey.indd 56

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

When We Were Kings

African-American spirit and identity as channelled through sporting excellence. Due to the elemental nature of boxing, it has always been the sport that best translates to the screen. The obvious narrative leading up to, and culminating with, a fight (a formula notably mastered in successful Hollywood movies such as the Rocky series) lends itself well to a thrilling film. With that said, the ‘Rumble in the Jungle’ (which took place in Zaire – now the Democratic Republic of the Congo – on 30 October 1974) was far more than simply an exciting prize fight. Notwithstanding the tremendous forces of personality that were Ali and Foreman themselves, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and notions of imperialism vs separatism (the film’s title offering a nod to the pre-colonial history of black Africa) are themes which course through the documentary. If these are only ever touched on so as to keep the film’s ferocious momentum going, they at least add a weight to When We Were Kings that broadens the documentary’s scope and appeal. Director Leon Gast was originally hired to document the threeday ‘black Woodstock’ – the ‘Zaire 74’ soul music festival designed to coincide with the Ali/Foreman fight, featuring such musical 57

KB Doc Journey.indd 57

24/03/2012 16:11

A Journey Through Documentary

luminaries as James Brown, BB King and Miriam Makeba. That footage, which punctuates When We Were Kings, was later edited into its own standalone documentary, Soul Power (2008, Jeff Levy-Hinte). While the music festival ran on schedule, the title fight was delayed for more than one month after Foreman was accidentally injured by a training partner during sparring. Instead of leaving, Gast stayed in Zaire, filming the preparations of both fighting camps, as well as the eventual fight itself. In doing so, the filmmaker captured a genuine piece of sporting history. The 23-year delay in the documentary’s completion was due to the footage and picture rights being the subject of a dispute involving the people who originally financed the filming. When We Were Kings is one example, however, of a situation in which this delay only helped the film’s success. Instead of being a document of recent events, the film benefitted from the fight in question – and Ali specifically – having ascended to legendary status in the interim decades. While neither Foreman nor Ali appear as presentday interview subjects in the film, the talking-heads roles are admirably filled by journalists there at the time, including Norman Mailer and George Plimpton. Spike Lee – who also appears in Hoop Dreams – offers additional reflections. Of the interviews, Mailer in particular shines with his expository analysis of the fight and the events surrounding it, having memorably covered Ali/ Foreman previously in his seminal non-fiction 1974 book The Fight.

While we’re on the subject... Tyson (2008, James Toback) examines the career of Mike Tyson, the most famous fighter of the next big era of heavyweight boxing. While ‘Iron Mike’ still holds the record for being the youngest heavyweight champion in history, his story is ultimately one of defeat and a personal and professional fall from grace, which makes this documentary a counterpoint to the triumph expressed in When We Were Kings. 58

KB Doc Journey.indd 58

24/03/2012 16:11

Essayistic Documentaries

Dogtown and Z-Boys

Dogtown and Z-Boys (2001) Directed by: Stacy Peralta Produced by: Agi Orsi Written by: Stacy Peralta and Craig Stecyk Narrated by: Sean Penn Editing by: Paul Crowder Cinematography by: Sebastian Jungwirth and Peter Pilafian Running time: 91 minutes

Synopsis Chronological account of the pioneering 1970s Zephyr skate­ boarding team.

Comments With feature documentaries hitting a critical mass of public acceptance at the turn of the century, suddenly there was a host of new, previously untapped demographics to be catered for. Chief among these were the white-guys-under-30 crowd who make up Hollywood’s idea of indie film patrons, decades younger 59

KB Doc Journey.indd 59

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

than traditional documentary audiences. Dogtown and Z-Boys is aimed squarely at this group: an MTV-style account of a group of outlaw youths from a rough section of Venice Beach, who helped revolutionise skateboarding in the 1970s with their unique style. Dogtown is lifted out of the usual sub-genre of extreme-sport docs by its high production values. While a period soundtrack (a budget-stretching array of artists ranging from Aerosmith, to the Jimi Hendrix Experience, to Pink Floyd) dutifully evokes a sense of time and place, it is because of the documentary’s arresting visuals that the film truly stands apart. Director Stacy Peralta was fortunate that there was a wealth of exhilarating archival footage available to him, not just following the Zephyr team’s ascent to stardom, but also from the days in which it was just a bunch of kids fooling around – documented meticulously by Glen E Friedman and Craig Stecyk for Skateboarder magazine. The archive footage is bolstered by present-day interviews with the people involved, filmed in grainy black-and-white Super 16 to emulate the look of those original magazine photo essays. Suiting the imperfect, rough-hewn aesthetic of skateboarding, editor Paul Crowder pulls out every trick in the book: from crashing rostrum shots, to speeded-up interviews in instances in which the subject goes off-point. ‘Every single documentary you see, there’s a wide shot, and then they do the slow push – they’re all the same,’ Peralta told Stumped magazine. ‘It doesn’t have to be that way. And with this, it lent itself, because of the music and the action, to a more kinetic feel.’ At one point, narrator Sean Penn pauses in mid sentence, clears his throat, and then continues speaking. Its inclusion is an inexplicably wonderful moment, and one which perfectly sums up the documentary’s break-all-therules modus operandi.

Did you know? Downplayed in the documentary itself – but certainly helping to explain the godlike status that the Zephyr crew is given in the 60

KB Doc Journey.indd 60

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

film – is the fact that director Stacy Peralta was himself one of the original team members. Furthermore, Vans Inc, who funded the documentary’s $400,000 budget, also paid Peralta to endorse their skateboarding shoes during his pre-filmmaking career.

Other recommendations by the same director Ignore the pointless Hollywood fiction-film adaptation, Lords of Dogtown (2005), and instead dive into Riding Giants (2004), a documentary which applies the Dogtown and Z-Boys treatment to the history of big-wave surfing.

While we’re on the subject... Murderball (2005, Henry Alex Rubin and Dana Adam Shapiro) is a documentary about wheelchair rugby, in particular focusing on the bitter rivalry between the Canadian and US teams leading up to the 2004 Paralympic Games. Like Dogtown and Z-Boys, Murderball benefits from its fast-paced MTV approach towards its subject, although just beneath the surface is one of the most challenging and modern looks at physical disability ever put on film.

Touching the Void (2003) Directed by: Kevin Macdonald Produced by: John Smithson Written by: Joe Simpson (book) Editing by: Justine Wright Cinematography by: Mike Eley and Keith Partridge Music by: Alex Heffes Running time: 106 minutes

Synopsis Documentary chronicling the successful – but near fatal – attempt by two English mountaineers to climb the 6,344 metre Siula Grande in the Peruvian Andes. 61

KB Doc Journey.indd 61

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Touching the Void

Comments The highest-grossing British documentary in UK box-office history, Touching the Void is an adaptation of Joe Simpson’s 1988 memoir of the same title. It recounts the 1985 attempt of Simpson, then aged 25, and Simon Yates, 21, to climb the perilous West Face of the Siula Grande mountain. Although both men made it to the top, on the descent something went seriously wrong: Joe badly broke his leg, necessitating Simon attempting to lower him the rest of the way back down on a length of 300 ft rope. Nature conspired further against both men, as Joe got stuck, hanging above a huge drop, with his partner – unable to move – on the other end of the rope. Not knowing whether his friend was alive or dead, Simon was thus faced with the agonising decision of whether or not to cut the rope and save his own life. He did, although Joe miraculously survived and managed to climb the rest of the way down on his one good leg. This would count as spoiling the documentary’s outcome, although as both men are interviewed for the film their eventual fate is never in doubt. It is therefore to the credit of director Kevin Macdonald that Touching the Void is as harrowing as it is. The 62

KB Doc Journey.indd 62

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

documentary combines these interviews, as well as one with a friend who travelled with them but stayed at base camp, with reconstructions using a combination of actors as well as Simpson and Yates themselves. As such, the film blurs the line between documentary and cinematic dramatisation. Act one of the documentary – the triumphant ascent of Siula Grande, which consumes less than 20 minutes of the film’s total running time – is characterised by majestic, sweeping images of the peak, captured by helicopter. While the images serve as testament to the awesomeness of the natural world, they also demonstrate man’s ability to rise above and triumph over nature. After the film’s false climax, the start of the second act is ominously signified through the mention that 80 per cent of mountaineering accidents happen on the climb back down. As the godlike triumph of the ascent is replaced by the grind and physicality of the hard climb down, so act two of Touching the Void is characterised by disorientating close-ups, as events spiral out of control for the two protagonists. Act three, following the cutting of the rope and focused almost exclusively on Simpson’s plight, is composed of stationary long shots, emphasising the seemingly impossible magnitude of his excruciating challenge, and dizzying handheld footage, reflecting Simpson’s frazzled mindset. This more cinematic approach to documentary extends to the interviews themselves. Borrowing from the playbook of Errol Morris (whose work Macdonald had previously examined in his 2000 documentary, A Brief History of Errol Morris), the subjects in Touching the Void look directly into the camera lens as they speak. As such, their recollections become more than simple talking heads conveying information, but performances in and of themselves, which serve to draw the viewer further into the film.

Did you know? Director Kevin Macdonald is the grandson of screenwriter, director and producer Emeric Pressburger, best known for his collaborations with Michael Powell. Among Pressburger’s 63

KB Doc Journey.indd 63

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

early film credits in England is one as the screenwriter of The Challenge (1938, Milton Rosmer, Luis Trenker and Vincent Korda), depicting the 1865 race between English and Italian teams of mountaineers to be the first to climb the Matterhorn.

While we’re on the subject... Stranded: I Have Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains (2008, Gonzalo Arijón) recounts the 13 October 1972 Andes flight disaster, in which a plane carrying 45 people crashed in the Andes mountains. A quarter of the passengers were killed, and the survivors were forced to consume their flesh in order to survive.

The Corporation (2003) Directed by: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott Produced by: Mark Achbar and Bart Simpson Written by: Joel Bakan, Mark Achbar and Harold Crooks Narrated by: Mikela J Mikael Editing by: Jennifer Abbott Cinematography by: Mark Achbar, Rolf Cutts, Jeff Koffman and Kirk Tougas Music by: Leonard J Paul Running time: 145 minutes

Synopsis Intelligent examination of the modern business corporation, particularly focusing on how its legal status as a class of person might classify its malevolent behaviour towards society and the rest of the world.

Comments The Corporation, an overlong but consistently fascinating look into the world of big business, begins with an alarming fact: that, according to a loophole in the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution (the clause guaranteeing equal rights to America’s 64

KB Doc Journey.indd 64

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

The Corporation

former slaves), the modern-day corporation is definable as a person in its own right; not the joint responsibility of its owners, but an entirely new legal entity, to be subject to the same civil and political rights as an individual. It’s a bizarre piece of legislation, but also one which provides co-directors Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott with a high-concept hook to hang their documentary thesis upon. After all, if a corporation is a person, then what kind of person would it be? According to the diagnostic criteria of the DSM-IV mental-disorder checklist – taking into consideration factors such as callous unconcern for feelings, conning others for personal profit, and an incapacity to experience guilt – the answer is a psychopath. Such hypotheses, of course, are patently ridiculous (although if it’s good enough for lawmakers, why not documentary filmmakers?), but it does provide an attractive framework for the film, even if lumping all big businesses together under one heading does ultimately amount to, for example, looking at Charles Manson as a representative portion of humanity, and concluding that all people are dangerously unstable as a result. The Corporation is not a narrative history of the corporate entity – examining how the likes of Exxon Mobil and Walmart rose to 65

KB Doc Journey.indd 65

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

become planet-straddling monsters of industry – but rather a wellresearched polemic, supported by a series of case studies and an impressive array of interviews with the likes of MIT intellectual Noam Chomsky, Nobel Prize-winning economist Milton Friedman, and a range of activists and CEOs. In its assembly the film borrows from the popular documentary-making tools of Michael Moore (also an interview subject) and Errol Morris, often plundering from popular cartoons and crumbly government infomercials to make its overarching points. The Corporation is split into three themed acts. The first act focuses on the pathological self-interest of the modern corporation. The second examines the numerous covert techniques used to get brand names into people’s homes. The final act discusses the links between corporations and government, from Nazi Germany to present day. Slightly extended versions of these instalments, under the subtitles ‘Pathology of Commerce’, ‘Planet Inc’ and ‘Reckoning’ were turned into three separate episodes for the film’s airing on the educational TVOntario station.

Other recommendations by the same director Before he made The Corporation, director Mark Achbar collaborated with filmmaker Peter Wintonick on Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992), an exploration of the political life and ideas of Noam Chomsky, particularly focusing on those concepts discussed in Chomsky’s 1988 book Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media.

Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room (2005) Directed by: Alex Gibney Produced by: Alex Gibney, Alison Ellwood, Jason Kliot and Susan Motamed Written by: Alex Gibney, Peter Elkind and Bethany McLean Narrated by: Peter Coyote 66

KB Doc Journey.indd 66

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

Editing by: Alison Ellwood Cinematography by: Maryse Alberti (director of photography) Music by: Matthew Hauser Running time: 109 minutes

Synopsis Examination of the 2001 collapse of the Enron Corporation, resulting in America’s largest corporate bankruptcy and criminal trials for several of its top executives.

Comments ‘People perceive [the collapse of Enron] as a story that’s about numbers; that it’s somehow about all these complicated transactions,’ says Fortune reporter Bethany McLean (who with Enron investor Peter Elkind co-authored the 2004 non-fiction book upon which this film is based) at the start of this documentary. ‘But in reality it’s a story about people.’ Partly. In addition to being a story of human greed and failure which unravels like a Greek tragedy, Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room also happens to be a horrifying true-crime film, concerning what may just be the biggest white-collar heist in history. The Enron Corporation’s questionable tactics included (although were not limited to) shutting down huge portions of the California power grid to artificially boost prices; starting up new business ventures and claiming hypothetical future profits as current earnings; and creating fake offshore companies – off the books, of course – and using them to shuttle business losses and debts back and forth. In the end it took Enron 16 years to go from $10 billion in assets to $65 billion, and a mere 24 days to go bankrupt. Self-deception and the abuse of power are two themes that have cycled through director Alex Gibney’s documentary work, and both are readily on display here. Aesthetically, Enron follows what is, by now, the style du jour of this mode of popular documentary filmmaking: a combination of talking-head interviews, newsreel 67

KB Doc Journey.indd 67

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

footage excerpts, and the occasional dramatised reconstruction – often satirically undercut by a score composed of popular hits, which run the gamut from Tom Waits and Marilyn Manson to Billie Holiday and Dusty Springfield. There are some beautiful aesthetic touches (the film’s director of photography, Maryse Alberti, was also responsible for the cinematography on Crumb – see page 173). Among these is the leitmotif of reflective surfaces seen in the documentary, which hint at the smoke and mirrors which existed behind Enron’s façade. Enron was a company built upon what Ronald Reagan referred to as the ‘magic of the marketplace’: an example of capitalism gone mad, in whose deregulated wonderland existence those in charge were able to invent wholly imagined profits based on such inanities as speculating on the weather. ‘Sometimes facts can’t be portrayed in any way other than a documentary without seeming forced or over the top,’ director Alex Gibney told me. ‘In Enron there’s a sequence in which we hear the audio tapes of the Enron electricity traders taking down the California [power] grid. Their attitude is so frat-house and callous that it’s hard to imagine believing it were it a fiction film. But within the context of a documentary you have no problem believing it.’ Ultimately Enron is more than an isolated case study. The film asks whether the corporation’s collapse was simply the work of a few bad men, or a dark microcosmic shadow of the American dream. In a world still suffering the effects of the 2008 economic crash (in which those responsible bear many of the hallmarks of Enron’s combination of aggressively macho culture and multimillion-dollar bonuses), one would suggest the latter.

Other recommendations by the same director Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) is Alex Gibney’s Oscar-winning documentary focusing on the murder of an Afghan taxi driver who was beaten to death by US soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base. 68

KB Doc Journey.indd 68

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

The Aristocrats (2005) Directed by: Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza Produced by: Paul Provenza and Peter Adam Golden Editing by: Emery Emery and Paul Provenza Music by: Gary Stockdale Running time: 89 minutes

Synopsis One hundred well-known comedians tell the same dirty joke, shedding light on the art of the stand-up comic.

Comments Not, as several comedians point out in the middle of their various foul-mouthed tirades, to be confused under any circumstances with the beloved 1970 Disney film The AristoCats, The Aristocrats is a hilarious documentary full of, as one tagline described it, ‘unspeakable obscenity’. Its central thesis is high-concept documentary storytelling at its simplest: what if you were to take one joke and then spend an entire film duration trying to dissect what makes it funny? Especially if said joke is not, in reality, very funny at all (NB: the punch line is the documentary’s title). But therein lies the deceptively simple brilliance of The Aristocrats. While it should be noted that the documentary is not going to appeal to everyone, the choice of joke is far more than an arbitrary excuse for the filmmakers and subjects to run through a checklist of taboo topics. ‘The Aristocrats’ gag (also known as ‘The Debonaires’ or ‘The Sophisticates’ in some tellings) is a sort of secret handshake between comedians, with a structure that allows for almost infinite jazz-like improvisations on a theme. As such, The Aristocrats rises above being simply an opportunity for directors Penn Jillette and Paul Provenza to show off who they know in the industry (which appears to be everyone), but instead becomes an exploration 69

KB Doc Journey.indd 69

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

of freedom of speech, the transcendent power of comedy, the history of stand-up, and the art of simply telling a really good joke. As a documentary, The Aristocrats is almost abrasively low-fi in execution. The overwhelming majority of the film is made up of talking heads, with one of the few visual ‘tricks’ being the directors’ choice to cover each interview from two angles and to switch haphazardly between them as they’re speaking. As stand-up comics themselves, Jillette and Provenza are well aware of a good comedian’s ability to command the screen and to keep the audience’s rapt attention. Laugh tracks, rostrum shots of convulsing audiences, or too much archival footage would have detracted, not added to, the overall effect of the film. Ironically, even where there is a brief animated digression from the round of hastily filmed DV monologues, it comes in the form of the jerky construction paper and stop-motion stylings of Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s South Park (in what is very likely the documentary’s high point).

While we’re on the subject... If a more typical behind-the-scenes look at the life of stand-up comics on the road is what you’re after, check out the tremendous Comedian (2002, Christian Charles), or watch American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas) for a polished documentary biopic of an all-time great.

Did you know? Anyone shocked and appalled by The Aristocrats’ multitude of references to incest, bestiality, scatology and other taboo subjects shouldn’t feel alone. Veteran talk-show host Joe Franklin, who features in the documentary, claims to have successfully sued for $50,000 after being offended by Sarah Silverman’s in-film ‘autobiographical’ telling of the joke, which ends with a deadpan allegation that Franklin once raped her.

70

KB Doc Journey.indd 70

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

No Direction Home (2005) Directed by: Martin Scorsese Produced by: Martin Scorsese, Susan Lacy, Jeff Rosen and Nigel Sinclair Editing by: David Tedeschi Cinematography by: Mustapha Barat (director of photography) Music by: Bob Dylan Running time: 208 minutes

Synopsis Documentary about Bob Dylan and his indelible impact on twentieth-century popular music and culture.

Comments As a director, Martin Scorsese has impeccable credentials for the task of bringing something new to a documentary about Bob Dylan (like a great many iconic musicians, a figure who has been well documented on screen). Although he is best known for his fiction-film output, Scorsese has a long history with documentary (see ‘Other recommendations by the same director’), in addition to being a filmmaker who has shown a continued aptitude for using popular music within his films. Given the similarities between Scorsese and Dylan (born within a year of each other, both in love with New York, both with a passion for vintage blues music, both used to traversing the mainstream-outsider line), it is surprising that the director had, with the exception of The Last Waltz (1978), his concert-doc tribute to Dylan-associated group The Band, never featured a Dylan track in one of his films previously – especially when so many of his contemporaries had. No Direction Home (the title of which comes from a lyric in Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’, from his 1965 Highway 61 Revisited album) was originally screened in two instalments on television as part of the American Masters series on PBS in the United States, 71

KB Doc Journey.indd 71

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

No Direction Home

and the Arena series for the BBC in the UK. It focuses primarily on Dylan’s career between his arrival in New York in January 1961 and his ‘retirement’ from touring, following a serious motorcycle accident, in July 1966. According to Scorsese’s thesis, at least, these are the years that established Dylan’s legend. Interestingly, while Scorsese chooses to tell Dylan’s story for the most part chronologically, he bookends it with footage from the singer’s controversial electric set at the Newport Folk Festival, in which he received a strongly polarised reaction from the crowd. As a narrative, No Direction Home falls somewhere between two of Scorsese’s favoured filmic structures from the latter half of his career. One is the humanising of an iconic figure through an examination of their formative years as seen in The Last Temptation of Christ (1988), Kundun (1997) and The Aviator (2004). The other is the rise, fall and possible redemption of a subject in films such as Raging Bull (1980) and Goodfellas (1990). In No Direction Home Scorsese is presented with a challenge, and not necessarily one that he wants to solve. The conundrum is 72

KB Doc Journey.indd 72

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

that, as a fan of Dylan, the director clearly realises that his subject’s power resides in the (often self-perpetuated) romanticised myths, more than it does the facts. Scorsese wants Dylan to represent more than just the man who was born Robert Zimmerman, but rather the embodiment of an entire age. On the other hand, he has been given an inordinate amount of time for his documentary – three-and-a-half hours – to create a clarifying portrait of Dylan the man. The results are, for the most part, satisfying. Scorsese manages to gather an impressive array of interviews (including a quasi-revealing one with Dylan himself, conducted by the singer’s archivist-manager) and all the archival footage one would expect from a high-end documentary profile. A worthy tribute to his subject.

Other recommendations by the same director Scorsese’s best known non-fiction films are his concert films The Last Waltz (1978) and Shine a Light (2008), which – as described in ‘A Note on Film Selection’ – I have elected not to include here. Instead, for a rare gem of a Scorsese documentary, seek out Italianamerican (1974): a cinéma vérité portrait of the director’s parents as they bicker, talk about growing up as first-generation Sicilian immigrants, and ruminate on the proper way to cook meatballs.

The Bridge (2006) Directed by: Eric Steel Produced by: Eric Steel Editing by: Sabine Krayenbühl Cinematography by: Peter McCandless Music by: Alex Heffes Running time: 94 minutes

Synopsis Documentary chronicling the number of suicidal jumpers from San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge during the year 2004. 73

KB Doc Journey.indd 73

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Comments This unique documentary was inspired by an article written by Tad Friend which appeared in the New Yorker in October 2003. Entitled ‘Jumpers’, and bearing a subheading proclaiming ‘The fatal grandeur of the Golden Gate Bridge’, the article examined how San Francisco’s most famous landmark has also become the world’s most popular suicide destination, with approximately 1,300 people known to have leapt from the bridge since its opening in 1937 – although no doubt others have gone unwitnessed. Having read the story, director Eric Steel applied for shooting permits at the Golden Gate Bridge and, along with a film crew, spent 12 months filming the site almost non-stop. ‘There were cameras running, every daylight minute, for an entire year,’ Steel says. ‘There were two sets of cameras, one on the north side and one on the south; each set had a camera set on a wide-angle lens, to capture the widest shot of the bridge.’ In so doing, the filmmaker captured on digital video 23 of the 24 known suicides which took place in 2004. The Bridge intercuts this footage, along with some breathtaking images of the Golden Gate Bridge, with interviews conducted with the friends and families of the deceased (as well as, in one instance, someone who made the jump and survived). The stories have much in common: alienation and mental illness are commonalities on the part of the jumpers, who, even before their suicides, had friends and family halfresigned to the likelihood of the victims’ eventual fate. Bookending The Bridge is the story of Gene Sprague, a long-haired 34-year-old who is shown prowling around the bridge at several points during the documentary, before eventually making his final, fateful backward leap at the film’s end. His friends are left wondering whether he had heard a message on his answering machine offering him a job managing a video-game store before he died. Suicide remains a taboo subject (note the continued controversy regarding images of people jumping from the World 74

KB Doc Journey.indd 74

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

Trade Center during the 9/11 attacks), and no doubt some will question the documentary’s voyeuristic motives in showing people’s final moments alive; often with the camera following the four-second plunge from deck to water right up until the moment of impact. But while The Bridge is certainly a discomfiting film (aided in no small part by a haunting score from Alex Heffes), it does not come across as exploitative, but rather as an artful and tragic documentary which may also be the most honest look at suicide, and the reasons behind it, yet presented on film.

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006) Directed by: Sophie Fiennes Produced by: Sophie Fiennes, Georg Misch, Martin Rosenbaum and Ralph Wieser Written by: Slavoj Žižek Editing by: Sophie Fiennes, Marek Kralovsky and Ethel Shepherd Cinematography by: Remko Schnorr Music by: Brian Eno Running time: 150 minutes

Synopsis Psychoanalytical examination of popular cinema by renowned Slovenian philosopher and critical theorist, Slavoj Žižek.

Comments Žižek, for those unfamiliar with him, is an incredibly prolific, gifted intellectual, who also – and despite his thick Slovenian accent – just happens to be the closest thing that contemporary cultural philosophy has yet produced to a megastar. The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema is an extended illustrated essay, during which Žižek walks and talks viewers through 40 different films (mostly Hollywood classics) to discuss the psychoanalytical themes that lurk beneath the surface. 75

KB Doc Journey.indd 75

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema

The three Marx Brothers are thus seen as representing the super-ego (Groucho), the ego (Chico), and the id (Harpo). That same three-tiered psychic apparatus is discussed with regards to Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (1960), whereby the levels of the Bates house upon which the film operates – top floor, ground floor and basement – become symbolic of that same Freudian structure. As one would expect from a documentary that deals in psychoanalysis, parental relationships take quite a beating: as the monstrous male figures in David Lynch’s Blue Velvet (1986) and Lost Highway (1997) become raging phallic personifications of the living father, which Žižek describes as ‘the ultimate object of anxiety’. Similarly, the unexplained violent ornithological attacks in Hitchcock’s The Birds (1963) are seen as manifestations of ‘raw incestuous energy’ on the part of the film’s domineering maternal figure (played by Jessica Tandy), as she attempts to foil her son (Rod Taylor) in his efforts to seduce Melanie Daniels (Tippi Hedren). More than just applying psychoanalytic concepts to cinema, however, Žižek takes things a step further by arguing that cinema itself, as the modern art form of note, is key in helping us 76

KB Doc Journey.indd 76

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

process the way in which our own reality is constructed – and may, on a certain level, be more Real than reality. The Pervert’s Guide’s attention-grabbing title hints at a tawdry eroticism that is not explicitly present in many of the films discussed, but refers more directly to the voyeuristic elements of filmgoing which allow us, the viewer, to fantasise within the safe confines of a darkened cinema or our own sitting rooms. Structurally, the documentary is split into three overlapping episodes. Part one examines the methods by which films arouse our desires and allow us to channel our own unconscious drives through the prismatic shield of the cinema screen. Part two explores themes of sex in the movies, and concludes that fantasy is a central element to our ability to properly function as sexual human beings. Part three discusses notions of appearance versus reality, centring both on the big reveal at the conclusion of The Wizard of Oz (1939) and the laid-bare constructiveness of Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003). Through the magic of cinema that he is so keen to explore – comprising recreated sets, original locations, and some deft editing – Žižek is able to lecture viewers from inside the very films he is discussing. Some of Žižek’s ideas will be familiar to anyone that has previously dipped into filmic psychoanalysis, but this is nonetheless a fascinating introduction to the world of cinematic critical thinking, and a surprisingly entertaining lecture from one of the world’s greatest contemporary pop philosophers. Though perhaps not a documentary to watch with one’s mother.

While we’re on the subject... A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies (1995, Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson) is, as its title would suggest, an examination of the films that affected the work of arguably cinema’s foremost fiction-film director. At nearly four hours of running time, it is considerably longer than even The Pervert’s Guide, but is a fascinating study of the often subversive, iconoclastic art of popular moviemaking. 77

KB Doc Journey.indd 77

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

The Devil and Daniel Johnston (2006) Directed by: Jeff Feuerzeig Produced by: Henry S Rosenthal Music by: Daniel Johnston Cinematography by: Fortunato Procopio Editing by: Tyler Hubby Running time: 110 minutes

Synopsis Portrait of the titular singer-songwriter-artist and his ongoing battles with manic depression.

Comments The perilously thin line between artistic genius and mental illness is at the heart of Jeff Feuerzeig’s acclaimed music documentary, The Devil and Daniel Johnston. Johnston, who is introduced on stage at the start of the film as ‘the greatest singer-songwriter alive today’ (a bold statement, particularly since so few people will have heard of him prior to watching the documentary), is the very definition of the kind of niche act that attracts a fierce cult status. Fans, most famously including the late Kurt Cobain, praise Johnston for his ability to create a tiny slice of apparent pop-music wizardry; songs with a childish, naïve simplicity to their lyrics, but nonetheless full of profound pain, love and broken dreams. Critics may require more convincing. After all, as the editor of the Austin Chronicle recalls of Johnston’s one-time ‘Folk Artist of the Year’ award, the result was a fair bit of unhappiness ‘in a town where a lot of people can play the guitar’. Has Johnston really got a gift, or is the admiration for his music nothing more than an ironic, hipster version of the Emperor’s New Clothes? Director Feuerzeig, a long-time fan of Johnston’s work, is definitely among the former in his line of thinking, subscribing wholeheartedly to the view of Johnston as a tortured genius. ‘In 1985, I was very much part of the American indie scene,’ Feuerzeig 78

KB Doc Journey.indd 78

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

told me. ‘I was writing for fanzines and doing a college radio show when Daniel’s tapes began making the rounds. All the songs were really honest, autobiographical songs about unrequited love and his bipolar disorder, which was really heartbreaking. I just became obsessed. I bought all his work and just started following his career.’ There is certainly enough in terms of story here to create a compelling narrative documentary. Anecdotes like the time Johnston commandeered the controls of, and subsequently crashed, a twoseater plane his father was piloting, have become the stuff of legend in certain circles. The documentary, completed with the full approval of Johnston, is also littered with oddball characters, like the former manager who continues selling Daniel’s tapes over the Internet, despite Johnston once attacking him with a length of pipe. The Devil and Daniel Johnston is noteworthy in one other way too. Focusing on a figure whose childhood coincided with the rise of home video, Johnston’s near-obsessive self-documentation hints at the ready mass of archival material which will await filmmakers chronicling their subjects in years to come, as they begin examining the lives of those who grew up with not just camcorders, but also Facebook, camera phones, YouTube etc.

An Inconvenient Truth (2006) Directed by: Davis Guggenheim Produced by: Lawrence Bender, Scott Z Burns and Laurie David Written by: Al Gore Editing by: Jay Cassidy and Dan Swietlik Cinematography by: Davis Guggenheim and Bob Richman Music by: Michael Brook Running time: 94 minutes

Synopsis Documentary version of former US vice president Al Gore’s illustrated Keynote presentation aimed at educating people about the dangers of global warming. 79

KB Doc Journey.indd 79

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

An Inconvenient Truth

Comments An Inconvenient Truth is without a doubt the highest-profile environmentalist documentary of all time. The third biggestgrossing documentary at the time of its release, the film won two Academy Awards (‘Best Documentary’ and ‘Best Original Song’), a clutch of other awards and accolades, spawned a bestselling companion book, and has been credited with helping raise awareness of global warming around the world. It represents a striking example of what Nanking (2007, see page 82) producer Ted Leonsis refers to as ‘filmanthropy’ – an initiative for the public good, focusing on social change for a greater quality of life, enacted through the medium of cinema. 80

KB Doc Journey.indd 80

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

Much of the initial attention paid to An Inconvenient Truth centred on former United States vice president and 2000 presidential candidate Al Gore’s presence in the film. Far from merely being employed as a recognisable narrator, the documentary is a filmed account of a presentation Gore – a longtime advocate for ecological issues – claims to have given upwards of one thousand times. With the exception of a self-deprecating joke at the start of the documentary, in which he introduces himself as the man who ‘used to be the next president of the United States’, little is made of Gore’s political career. Instead he is presented as that most contradictory of onscreen figures: the celebrity everyman, whose ability to convey his chosen message relies on his relatability to the viewer. As he explained in one of the many talk-show appearances he made to publicise the documentary: ‘As a lay person... I’ve always believed that if [scientists can explain a concept] to the point where I understand it, then I can communicate it to anybody.’ This image of Gore is aided by quieter, reflective sequences in the film – intercut with his ‘live’ slideshow presentation – during which he recounts, in a softer, more confiding voice than the one he uses for public speaking, anecdotes from his own life which are illustrative of the points he is discussing. Like Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, see page  40), Gore romanticises, and sometimes anthropomorphises, the image of unspoiled land. He frequently utilises images of animals, such as that of a polar bear swimming for miles amongst the melted icecaps, to emotive effect. This technique extended to the film’s marketing. An advertisement for An Inconvenient Truth which appeared in the New York Times depicted a line of Emperor penguins (which are not featured in the documentary) in the Antarctic, with a caption reading, ‘We’re all on thin ice.’ In doing so, the documentary drew a visual reference to the previous year’s documentary blockbuster March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’Empereur) (2005, Luc Jacquet). 81

KB Doc Journey.indd 81

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

As feature documentaries have seen a rise in their popularity, so too have the subjects under investigation in the most successful ones synced up with the topics being explored in mainstream Hollywood films. An Inconvenient Truth, for example, followed on the heels of The Day After Tomorrow (2004, Roland Emmerich), which applied the concept of global warming to the disaster-movie genre. Unlike that film, An Inconvenient Truth does not offer a simple happy ending, although it does conform to the problem/solution narrative structure that has been utilised for environmental documentaries going back to such films as Smoke Menace (1937, John Taylor). An Inconvenient Truth thus ends on a hopeful note, with practical advice on how individuals can play their part in reducing global warming.

Did you know? An Internet survey conducted across 47 countries in 2007 by The Nielsen Company and Oxford University, found that 66% of viewers who had seen An Inconvenient Truth said the documentary had ‘changed their mind’ about global warming, while 89% said watching the film had made them more aware of the problem. 75% of viewers claimed to have altered some of their habits as a result of seeing the documentary.

Nanking (2007) Directed by: Bill Guttentag and Dan Sturman Produced by: Ted Leonsis, Bill Guttentag, Michael Jacobs Written by: Bill Guttentag, Dan Sturman and Elizabeth Bentley Editing by: Hibah Sherif Frisina, Charlton McMillan and Michael Schweitzer Cinematography by: Buddy Squires Music by: Philip Marshall Running time: 88 minutes

Synopsis Historical documentary about the 1937 Nanking Massacre. 82

KB Doc Journey.indd 82

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

Comments During the 1937 Japanese occupation of China, the capital city of Nanking (now Nánjīng) was decimated by the Imperial Japanese Army as part of an invasion in which 200,000 civilians and prisoners of war were slaughtered in a matter of weeks, while more than 20,000 rapes were committed by troops. ‘We had nothing to do,’ says one now-elderly Japanese soldier who is interviewed in the documentary, ‘so we raped girls.’ The unimaginable savagery is comparable in scale and devastation to the 1994 mass murders in Rwanda, which, like Nanking, received very little coverage in the Western press. ‘I was struck by the fact that such an important chapter of twentieth-century history had been buried,’ revealed Nanking producer and financier Ted Leonsis in an interview for HBO. ‘Clearly, the Japanese genocide in China had been eclipsed by Hitler’s European atrocities, making the Rape of Nanking a sort of “forgotten holocaust”.’ ‘At the outset of the project, we knew that the history of Nanking remains a very sensitive topic for many in China and Japan, but we had no idea just how sensitive it is,’ said co-director Dan Sturman. ‘The Chinese and Japanese still don’t agree on what happened in Nanking, and this dispute continues to sour relations between the two countries, regularly making front-page news more than 70 years after the event. To this day, many Japanese believe that stories of atrocities in Nanking are exaggerations and lies.’ Taking its inspiration from Iris Chang’s 1997 non-fiction bestseller The Rape of Nanking, Nanking tells its story chronologically, compiled from over 700 hours of footage made up of archival footage and interviews with survivors and soldiers. ‘In order to track down survivors, we relied on our very talented co-producer, Violet Feng,’ said Sturman. ‘Sadly, many of the survivors [Violet] was searching for live in poverty, and very few of them have telephones, making old-fashioned detective work a necessity. In one instance, Violet learned about a survivor who is homeless and who apparently lives near a dumpster in a certain part of the city. 83

KB Doc Journey.indd 83

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Violet managed to find him, and his interview is one of the most powerful in the film.’ One controversial aspect of the documentary’s construction is the filmmakers’ decision to supplement the present-day interviews with survivors with actors – including Woody Harrelson, Jürgen Prochnow, Stephen Dorff and Mariel Hemingway – reading the firsthand accounts of Western witnesses present in Nanking at the time. The dramatic readings of the letters, diaries and other assorted documents is a technique wholly accepted in radio documentary, but one rarely seen in film documentary. In fact, the readings bring history to life in a manner which would be impossible to achieve through a standard voiceover narration. Nanking suggests that, in a media-saturated world in which violent images have lost much of their power to shock, it is ultimately eyewitness testimony – whether gleaned firsthand from interviews, or read aloud from sources – that carry the most emotive weight.

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007) Directed by: Seth Gordon Produced by: Ed Cunningham Editing by: Seth Gordon Cinematography by: Seth Gordon Running time: 79 minutes

Synopsis A school science teacher and a hot sauce mogul vie for the Guinness World Record high score for the arcade game, ‘Donkey Kong’.

Comments As with the best documentaries, King of Kong becomes more than the sum of its parts, turning teacher Steve Wiebe’s quest to master a 30-year-old arcade game into an underdog story about what it takes to make it in life or, in the words of Peter Travers in Rolling Stone magazine, ‘a metaphor for the decline of Western civilisation’. 84

KB Doc Journey.indd 84

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters

The latter may be taking things a little far, but King of Kong certainly manages to be one of the most entertainingly revealing documentaries of recent years, applying the feel-good, againstthe-odds formula of a sports film like Rocky (1976) to the oddball world of competitive video-gaming. Nowhere has Wallace Sayre’s quip (originally about academia) that the competition is ‘so intense because the stakes are so low’ been more applicable. Having discovered a tremendous subject, King of Kong’s real success is whittling down 300 hours of footage into a tightly edited 79 minutes. ‘Eventually we gave up trying to plan [what story we were telling],’ said director Seth Gordon in one interview. ‘[You] just keep showing up with the camera. Just stay with it and figure out what you’ve got once you’re in the editing room.’ The narrative that emerges is one with a clear-cut hero and villain, as Wiebe is presented as the everyman trying to do good by his family, while lank-haired arcade legend Billy Mitchell (‘probably the greatest arcade-video-game player of all time’) is portrayed as a controlling, manipulative schemer, desperately clinging on to past glories. Befitting a documentary in which a large percentage of its subjects are so clearly stuck in the 1980s, Seth Gordon makes 85

KB Doc Journey.indd 85

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

good use of appropriate period detail – whether it be source images, vintage video-game-inspired graphics, or even a training montage set to the power chords of Joe Esposito’s Karate Kid theme, ‘You’re the Best’. The tale is so compelling that it is little surprise that the rights were immediately snapped up by a Hollywood studio with plans to remake it as a comedy feature, no doubt with Vince Vaughn as Wiebe, and either Ben Stiller or Will Ferrell playing the Billy Mitchell role. If King of Kong takes several Michael Moore-esque liberties with its storytelling (for example, it is strongly implied that Mitchell holds the ‘Donkey Kong’ high score at the start of the film, which was in fact not the case), then it counters this by successfully presenting an entertaining, accessible and informative peek into a bizarre subculture, which manages to intrigue even those with no interest in vintage arcade games, while at the same time discovering a real, all-too-human story among the talk of ‘kill screens’, tampered circuit boards and illegal glitches.

Joy Division (2007) Directed by: Grant Gee Produced by: Tom Astor, Tom Atencio and Jacqui Edenbrow Editing by: Jerry Chater Cinematography by: Grant Gee Music by: Joy Division Running time: 93 minutes

Synopsis Documentary account of the British post-punk band Joy Division.

Comments Grant Gee’s music documentary was released during a resurgence of interest in Joy Division, whose status as one of the most influential groups in British popular music was at an all-time high thanks to a rediscovery of the band’s music by a new generation of fans. Joy Division was one of three celebrated 86

KB Doc Journey.indd 86

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

screen depictions of the group (although its title would suggest that at least the filmmakers consider it the definitive one) in the space of a few years, along with the fiction films 24 Hour Party People (2002) and Control (2007). The film takes a chronological look at the band’s brief history, from musicians Bernard Sumner and Peter Hook’s initiation into the world of Manchester’s punk scene in the mid-1970s, to singer Ian Curtis’s death by suicide at the age of 23 in 1980. The story is told through archival footage (much of it previously unseen bootleg recordings of live performances), and present-day interviews with the three surviving members of the group, as well as recordlabel owner/television presenter Tony Wilson, filmmaker Anton Corbijn, and Belgian journalist Annik Honoré, who was Curtis’s girlfriend at the time that he died. Notable in her absence is Ian’s wife Deborah Curtis, whose 1995 memoir Touching from a Distance served as the basis for Corbijn’s dramatised biopic of the late singer – released the same year as this documentary. While Deborah undoubtedly painted her husband as talented, she also revealed him as being volatile and emotionally controlling. Joy Division takes a less accusatory stance, preferring – largely through the adulatory words of the clearly still-smitten Honoré – to mythologise Ian as the fragile, troubled, working-class poet he is perhaps best remembered as. The documentary’s real strength is the way in which it takes the post-industrial essence of Joy Division’s music and transforms it into a unique visual look. This is, of course, the basis for successful music videos, and it should thus come as no surprise that director Grant Gee made a name for himself as a music-video director, creating videos for bands such as Radiohead, Blur and Coldplay. In one bravura sequence, possibly borrowing its inspiration from Jean-Luc Godard’s science-fiction-without-the-sets film Alphaville (1965), Gee captures the familiar otherworldliness that was at the root of Joy Division’s music, through a speeded-up nocturnal journey through the streets of Manchester. 87

KB Doc Journey.indd 87

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

While we’re on the subject... Something of a sideways link, but Of Time and the City (2008, Terence Davies) is an extraordinary documentary poem that, like Joy Division (which mournfully catalogues locations no longer in existence), is composed as a eulogy to a northern city – in this case Liverpool instead of Manchester – that is no longer as it once was.

Man on Wire (2008) Directed by: James Marsh Produced by: Simon Chinn Editing by: Jinx Godfrey Cinematography by: Igor Martinovic Music by: Michael Nyman and J Ralph Running time: 94 minutes

Synopsis The uplifting story of tightrope walker Philippe Petit’s illegal, 1974 high-wire walk between New York City’s World Trade Center twin towers.

Man on Wire

88

KB Doc Journey.indd 88

24/03/2012 16:12

Essayistic Documentaries

Comments James Marsh’s Academy Award-winning documentary tells the story of what was described by its tagline as ‘the artistic crime of the century’. On the evidence presented here, that judgement may well be correct. Philippe Petit, the French wire walker, unicyclist, magician and street performer, whose story Man on Wire documents (adapted from his 2002 memoir, To Reach the Clouds), was just 24 years old when he performed the feat of sneaking into the World Trade Center and spending 45 minutes walking, dancing, kneeling and lying on a wire he and his friends had illegally strung between the rooftops of the two towers, some 1,350 feet up in the air. Making use of present-day interviews with the stunt’s participants, extensive archival footage, and dramatic black-andwhite reconstructions, Man on Wire is partly a meditation on the transcendent, almost spiritual beauty of pure performance, and partly a taut, thriller-esque heist movie to rival Rififi (1955) or Ocean’s Eleven (2001). In a sense, it is an anti-heist film – Petit’s aim being, in the words of the director, ‘not to steal something, but to give something’. Petit himself proves an engaging subject, not just because his tale is so riveting, but because of the strength of his personality, which, even in his fifties, remains equal parts mischievous showman, idealist, and con artist. When he appeared onstage at the Oscars to collect the ‘Best Documentary’ award along with James Marsh and Simon Chinn he thanked the Academy for ‘believing in magic’ and became the only person in history to balance his statuette upside down on his chin to conclude his acceptance speech. The events of 9/11, which resulted in the destruction of the World Trade Center are, rightly, never addressed directly by the documentary. James Marsh commented that in his view it ‘would be unfair and wrong to infect [Petit’s] story with any mention, discussion or imagery of the towers being destroyed’. Nonetheless, 89

KB Doc Journey.indd 89

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary .

the awareness of their eventual fate adds a poignancy to the film, with the knowledge that the monolithic structures that once dwarfed Petit are no longer there, while he still is.

Did you know? Man on Wire’s producer, Simon Chinn, first encountered Philippe Petit in April 2005 on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs programme.

Other recommendations by the same director Wisconsin Death Trip (1999) is one of the more unusual docu­ mentaries you will see. Based on Michael Lesy’s 1973 book of the same name, it details the bizarre, shocking and occasionally hilarious series of disasters that befell one small town in Wisconsin during the last decade of the 19th century.

90

KB Doc Journey.indd 90

24/03/2012 16:12

PARTICIPATORY DOCUMENTARIES The documentary filmmaker as star. Participatory documentaries, which emerged with the advent of lightweight, handheld cameras and the cinéma vérité movement in the 1950s and ‘60s, revolve around the interactions of the documentary maker (and sometimes his or her crew) with the subject of their film. The director might take on the role of an intrepid reporter, attempting to uncover truth by provoking a reaction from the subject. Sometimes this will be done through the adoption of a faux-naïf persona or by using a more directly confrontational approach. The participatory documentary will often feature interviews extensively, although these will most likely be of a less formalised nature than those found in an essayistic documentary, and may be conducted as events are unfolding, rather than in retrospect. The presence of the filmmaker as an onscreen character allows for him or her to express more subjective emotive reactions to a subject than in other modes of documentary. These are sometimes stated directly to the viewer, thus eschewing the notion of an unbiased account. Many times the subject of the documentary will be of a personal nature to the filmmaker or, conversely, one in which the director appears as an obvious outsider. The investigative element of participatory documentaries can add a reflexive quality to the film whereby it becomes a documentary about the process of making a documentary. In Roger & Me (1989, see page 105) for example, director Michael Moore sets 91

KB Doc Journey.indd 91

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

out to secure an interview with elusive General Motors CEO Roger Smith. The difficulty of securing said interview, which in an essayistic documentary would be arranged entirely offscreen and taken for granted as such by the viewer, becomes the film’s raison d’être, and thus creates a self-contained narrative.

Grey Gardens (1975) Directed by: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer Produced by: Albert Maysles, David Maysles and Susan Froemke Editing by: Susan Froemke, Ellen Hovde and Muffie Meyer Cinematography by: Albert Maysles and David Maysles Running time: 100 minutes

Synopsis Documentary about the reclusive aunt and cousin of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, who live in a filthy, decaying mansion in East Hampton, New York.

Comments ‘It’s very difficult to keep the line between the past and the present,’ says Edith ‘Little Edie’ Bouvier Beale near to the start of Grey Gardens, in one of the documentary’s most revealing lines. ‘Little Edie’ and ‘Big Edie’ are two generations of Bouvier Beale women: relatives of former First Lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis. Both were onetime socialites, who at the time that the film was made lived an isolated, twilight existence together in one room of their decaying, flea-invested summer house. The story of the Beales’ squalid, poverty-stricken existence first came to light in 1971 when the National Enquirer and New York Magazine reported on a series of inspections by the Suffolk County Health Department, which had the two women facing eviction. The following year Jackie Onassis and her sister provided the 92

KB Doc Journey.indd 92

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

necessary funds to semi-repair the dilapidated mansion. Soon afterwards, the Maysles brothers were granted permission to make a documentary about the Beales, paying each of them $5,000 for the rights to film. Grey Gardens is an often surreal documentary thanks to its two protagonists. ‘Little Edie’ and ‘Big Edie’ (the former in her mid-50s and the latter approaching 80 at the time of shooting) live out an existence reminiscent of Great Expectations’ Miss Havisham or Norma Desmond from Sunset Boulevard (1950, Billy Wilder). They are ruined vestiges from a bygone age of American aristocracy, who rarely leave the house, and spend their days bickering with each other, looking over old photographs and feeding the multitude of cats that they have accumulated. The documentary combines fly-on-the-wall observation of the Beales’ daily life with a more direct participatory approach by the Maysles brothers, who interact with both women as they gradually reveal their history to the filmmakers. Grey Gardens perfectly illustrates both the strength and weakness of the new documentary school of cinéma vérité. Due to its unscripted nature and the new lightweight cameras which allowed for a greater amount of flexibility around shooting, the film

Grey Gardens

93

KB Doc Journey.indd 93

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

captures plenty of spontaneous – and memorable – moments. At the same time, its lack of narrative structure, particularly noticeable with regard to its overlong running time, means that the behaviour of the Beale women soon becomes repetitious; and this is not helped by the filmmakers’ seeming lack of interest in getting beneath the surface of, or contextualising, their subjects. Upon its release the documentary took on cult status among the ‘midnight movie’ crowd, particularly in the gay community, based around the outrageous behaviour of its protagonists. And yet Grey Gardens is often a discomfiting film to watch. ‘Little Edie’ and ‘Big Edie’ happily perform in front of the camera, seemingly without realising that their behaviour is likely to be regarded as dysfunctional and unhealthy by viewers. By documenting their actions without challenging them (and often, in fact, provoking a reaction), the filmmakers have undoubtedly discovered a memorable subject for Grey Gardens, but one which also raises moral and ethical questions about the presentation of mental illness on film.

Other recommendations by the same directors The Maysles brothers are important figures in film history. Salesman (1968), following door-to-door salesmen who sell expensive bibles to low-income Catholic families, and the classic Rolling Stones documentary Gimme Shelter (1970) offer further examples of their work at the time that Grey Gardens was made.

La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe (Warten auf eine unausweichliche Katastrophe) (1977) Directed by: Werner Herzog Editing by: Beate Mainka-Jellinghaus Cinematography by: Edward Lachman and Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein Running time: 30 minutes 94

KB Doc Journey.indd 94

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Synopsis When Werner Herzog hears that a volcano on the island of Guadeloupe is about to erupt he takes a small documentary film crew to investigate.

Comments The documentary which made Werner Herzog’s name as the preeminent risk-taking wildman of cinema. No other documentary filmmaker goes to such extreme lengths, sometimes even placing themselves in harm’s way, to capture their astonishing images. Nowhere is this more apparent than in La Soufrière when Herzog – hearing the news that the imminent eruption of La Grande Soufrière, an active volcano on the French island of Basse-Terre, in Guadeloupe, had caused the island to be evacuated – decided to journey there with cameramen Edward Lachman and Jörg Schmidt-Reitwein to record footage of a part of the Earth being cleansed of all traces of civilisation. ‘The experts... said the explosion of the mountain was guaranteed with almost 100 per cent certainty,’ Herzog recalled in the book Herzog on Herzog (2003). ‘It was calculated the volcano was going to blow with the force of several Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs, so if it had gone up and we were within a five-mile radius there would be absolutely nothing we could do.’ The looming threat of disaster and apocalypse that courses through La Soufrière, as potential catastrophe bubbles away beneath the volcano’s surface, is the perfect metaphor for the director’s view of the chaotic hostility of nature. Had the documentary come later in his career, one would almost be tempted to see the film – with its images of the filmmaker and his crew (intrepid or insane?) comically fleeing for their lives from the volcano’s toxic gases after venturing too close – as Herzog sending up his onscreen persona, as he would do in the later ‘mockumentary’ Incident at Loch Ness (2004, Zak Penn). 95

KB Doc Journey.indd 95

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

In addition to the images of the volcano, Herzog discovers poignant, dreamlike beauty in shot after shot of a nearby deserted town, now populated by just a few stray animals. In his narration he notes that the emptiness of the island makes him feel as though he and his crew have stumbled onto the set of a sciencefiction film. After a search, Herzog finds what he has been looking for: several men who have opted to remain on the island as they have nowhere else to go. All claim to have to come to terms with the inevitability of death, and their interviews suggest that the impending disaster has relieved them of a large burden. La Soufrière also utilises archival photographs to examine a similar event which occurred on the island of Martinique in 1902, when 30,000 people perished in the worst volcanic disaster of the 20th century. According to Herzog, the only survivor was a violent criminal, who was locked up underground in solitary confinement at the time of the eruption. The ultimate irony of La Soufrière is that the volcano does not explode, meaning that an ‘unavoidable catastrophe’ was somehow avoided. Despite the fact that the eruption would have almost certainly meant death for Herzog and his crew, the nearmiss is presented as a disappointment, a damp squib after all the anticipation, which somehow adds to the film’s bleakness.

Other recommendations by the same director Land of Silence and Darkness (1971); How Much Wood Would a Woodchuck Chuck (1977); Ballad of the Little Soldier (1984); Lessons of Darkness (1992); Little Dieter Needs to Fly (1997); The White Diamond (2004); Grizzly Man (2005, see page 123); and Encounters at the End of the World (2007)

96

KB Doc Journey.indd 96

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Life on Earth (TV series) (1979) Produced by: John Sparks and Richard Brock Written by: David Attenborough Presented by: David Attenborough Editing by: Ron Martin and Alec Brown Cinematography by: Various Music by: Edward Williams Running time: 13 x 55 minute episodes

Synopsis Globetrotting series of nature documentaries tracing the evolution of life on our planet.

Comments Sir David Attenborough began his BBC documentary career in 1954, with a series entitled Zoo Quest, which ran until 1963. That series’ premise – an expedition to a tropical country to capture a wild animal for London Zoo – now seems hilariously

Life on Earth

97

KB Doc Journey.indd 97

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

outdated and unethical. Nonetheless it proved highly successful (being the most popular British nature documentary of its time) and established Attenborough’s career as the country’s premier presenter of nature documentaries: a role with which he is still most associated today. Life on Earth was made by the BBC, in conjunction with Warner Bros and Reiner Moritz Productions, originally airing between January and April 1979. The format for the series followed on from two earlier 13-part documentary series, Kenneth Clark’s Civilisation (1969) and Jacob Bronowski’s The Ascent of Man (1973), which Attenborough had commissioned and developed during his stint as BBC2 controller. Despite these earlier templates, Life on Earth represented a unique achievement upon its original airing: the epic result of three years of research, and filming in more than 30 countries around the world. Each individually titled episode (‘The Infinite Variety’; ‘The First Forests’; ‘Lords of the Air’) focuses on a different aspect of the natural kingdom, ranging from sea-living invertebrates to giant land mammals. In the series’ most iconic moment (from the episode ‘Life in the Trees’), Attenborough encounters a group of mountain gorillas in Rwanda. Adopting a submissive pose and discarding his scripted comments he turns to the camera and whispers: ‘There is more meaning and mutual understanding in exchanging a glance with a gorilla than with any other animal I know.’ To capture many of the series’ images, a range of groundbreaking techniques – both low and high tech – were utilised. These included time-lapse photography, microphotography, and filming at a rate of 3,000 frames per second, allowing astounding slowmotion demonstrations of, for example, insects in flight, which had never been seen before. In somewhat more leisurely paced innovations, one unfortunate cameraman clocked hundreds of hours waiting for a single moment in which a frog which incubates its young in its mouth finally spat them out. An avant-garde score composed by Edward Williams, combining traditional orchestral 98

KB Doc Journey.indd 98

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

instruments with electronic sounds, perfectly complements Life on Earth’s innovative production values. Life on Earth was followed by successive, Attenboroughpresented, nature-documentary series, including The Living Planet (1984); Trials of Life (1990); Life in the Freezer (1993); The Private Life of Plants (1995); The Life of Birds (1998); The Blue Planet (2001); The Life of Mammals (2002); Life in the Undergrowth (2005); Life in Cold Blood (2008); and First Life (2010). Taken in their totality, the ‘Life’ series presents a near-comprehensive overview of evolutionary history.

While we’re on the subject... March of the Penguins (La Marche de l’Empereur) (2005, Luc Jacquet) chronicles the arduous annual journey of Emperor penguins in Antarctica, as they march single file to their traditional breeding ground. Walking with Dinosaurs (TV series) (1999, Tim Haines and Jasper James) utilises CGI and animatronics to recreate the life of dinosaurs in the Mesozoic Era in the style of a nature documentary.

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On (Yuki Yukite Shingun) (1987) Directed by: Kazuo Hara Produced by: Sachiko Kobayashi Editing by: Jun Nabeshima Cinematography by: Kazuo Hara Running time: 122 minutes

Synopsis Documentary filmed over a five-year period, following World War II veteran Okuzaki Kenzo as he uncovers war crimes and attempts 99

KB Doc Journey.indd 99

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

to track down the people responsible for the unexplained deaths of two soldiers in his former unit.

Comments Like The Sorrow and the Pity (1969, see page 46), which deals with the German occupation of France, The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On examines the subject of war guilt and memory with relation to World War II, a topic that is often ignored or hidden. Although The Emperor’s Naked Army is the accepted Anglicisation of the documentary’s title, a more accurate translation would be ‘God’s Army Marches On’: a better description of the relentlessness of Okuzaki Kenzo’s search and the divine inspiration he claims for his mission. As a young man, Kenzo was a survivor of the battlefields in New Guinea. At the end of the war, the Japanese garrison was crammed into a small area and almost completely cut off from food supplies, leading to starvation and, in some instances, cannibalism. When Kenzo is introduced at the beginning of the documentary he appears as an eccentric old man, boasting about once shooting BB pellets at the Royal Palace, and distributing crude, cut-and-paste pornographic images of Emperor Shōwa (Hirohito) who he declares ‘the most cowardly man in Japan’. This image is quickly dispatched, however, when Kenzo begins to track down his interview subjects; like him, men now in the twilight years of their lives, often feeble and surrounded by their family and grandchildren. Although Kenzo uses politeness to beg his way into the houses of those he wants to speak with, often apologising profusely for not calling ahead, he quickly drops this performance and accuses his host of a variety of heinous war crimes committed 40 years earlier. The testimonies he does extract are heartrendingly horrific. But while Kenzo appears to use many of the trademarks of an investigator like Michael Moore or Nick Broomfield (although, unlike those two, he is not the 100

KB Doc Journey.indd 100

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On

filmmaker), assuming the role of onscreen reporter, he also uses violence against his subjects, physically attacking those he holds responsible. In one powerful scene, the wife of a man Kenzo is assaulting questions why director Kazuo Hara continues to film without coming to the aid of her husband. The film thus raises questions about the ethical responsibility of the documentary filmmaker. While Hara’s modus operandi is to report an unburnished version of the truth, at what point does a documentarian become complicit in the actions that he is documenting? And to what extent is providing Okuzaki with a stage upon which to perform spurring on his behaviour? ‘I like to make dramatic movies,’ Hara has said. ‘I feel strongly about this, more than other directors. I love Hollywood action films, and I wanted Okuzaki to act like an action star. I want to make action documentary films.’ The director was faced with an even greater moral challenge when Kenzo told him that he planned to murder one of his former officers, and wanted Hara to record the homicide. ‘No movie has such a scene in it,’ Kenzo said. ‘Having you film such a scene 101

KB Doc Journey.indd 101

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

would be my greatest present to you.’ The filmmaker discussed the issue with his lawyer, producer and other directors. ‘This was a very delicate problem,’ Hara recalled in an interview with Kenneth Ruoff in Iris: A Journal of Theory on Image and Sound (1993). ‘I had to decide if I should film it or not. I still have not made up my mind. One reason that I didn’t film it is that I had become really sick of Okuzaki. I might have filmed it. Human beings have dark sides, and people want to see something frightening. People want to see the evil side of people. A little bit of me says I would like to see it. I went to speak to (director) Shōhei Imamura. His opinion was really different. He told me not to do it. But the real reason that I didn’t film it was that I was fed up with Okuzaki.’

The Thin Blue Line (1988) Directed by: Errol Morris Produced by: Mark Lipson Written by: Errol Morris Editing by: Paul Barnes Cinematography by: Robert Chappell and Stefan Czapsky (directors of photography) Music by: Philip Glass Running time: 103 minutes

Synopsis Investigation into the 1976 murder of a police officer in Dallas, Texas.

Comments Although there have been plenty of true-crime documentaries over the years, few have actually solved the crime they were investigating. But that’s exactly what happened with documentarian and former private investigator Errol Morris in 1988, when the case he set out to examine in The Thin Blue Line (advertised in cinemas 102

KB Doc Journey.indd 102

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

as ‘a new kind of murder mystery’ so as to escape the then-stigma of feature documentaries) helped free Randall Adams, a man who had been wrongly convicted of murdering police officer Robert W Wood during a routine traffic stop. The origins of The Thin Blue Line (the title refers to the trial prosecutor’s comment that the police are the ‘thin blue line’ that separates society from anarchy) can be traced back to 1985 when Morris first became interested in Dr James Grigson, a psychiatrist in Dallas who had been nicknamed ‘Dr Death’. Under Texas law, the death penalty can only be issued if a jury is convinced that the defendant is not only guilty, but also likely to commit further violent crimes in the future in the event that they are not put to death. In 15 years of testifying, Grigson had invariably reported that defendants he was consulted about were likely to kill again given the opportunity – even when he had not met the accused in question. Through Grigson, Morris was exposed to the story of Randall Adams, who claimed that he had been framed, and that another man, David Harris, had in fact committed the murder he was charged with. After reading through a transcript of the murder trial and meeting Harris, Morris abandoned the documentary he was in the process of shooting and instead decided to focus on telling Adams’s story. What follows is, quite literally, a procedural investigation laid out on film, culminating in Davis Harris admitting his guilt to Morris by essentially confessing to murder. In the original review of the documentary that appeared in the New York Times (under the legend ‘Anatomy of a Murder: A Real-Life Whodunit’), critic Janet Maslin noted that The Thin Blue Line is ‘both an investigation of [a] murder and a nightmarish meditation on the difference between truth and fiction, an alarming glimpse at the many distortions that have shaped Mr Adams’s destiny.’ This ‘meditation of the difference between truth and fiction’ is a recurrent theme in Morris’s work: examining how photographs and other images can misrepresent the truth. The Thin Blue Line has been ‘accused’ of beginning the trend of documentaries 103

KB Doc Journey.indd 103

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

heavy with re-enaction (the value of which was at first disputed and then embraced), but the re-enactions in this documentary are never purported to be illustrations of reality. Rather they are ironic illustrations, reflecting the subjective, misremembered and spun versions of the ‘reality’ expressed by the documentary’s eyewitnesses in their testimony. The film noir-inspired artificiality of the re-enactments form part of what Morris once claimed was a ‘war against cinéma vérité’, which he elaborated on in an interview with the Believer: ‘What I don’t like about vérité is this claim that somehow you’re guaranteed truthfulness by virtue of style. That’s my complaint. That somehow because a film has been made in a certain way – handheld camera, available light, fly on the wall – that somehow it becomes more truthful as a result. I respectfully disagree. My films are as much concerned with truth as anything in vérité. Maybe more so. I don’t believe that truth is handed over by stylistic choice. It’s a pursuit.’

Did you know? After Randall Adams was released from prison in 1989, he filed suit against Errol Morris over the rights to his life story. David Harris, meanwhile, was executed by lethal injection in 2004 for a subsequent murder unrelated to the one discussed in The Thin Blue Line. The use of dramatic reconstructions in the film, now considered a standard tool in the documentarian’s arsenal, caused The Thin Blue Line to be rejected by the Oscars for its ‘Best Documentary’ category in 1989 on the grounds that it was a ‘non-fiction’ film rather a documentary.

Other recommendations by the same director Gates of Heaven (1978); Vernon, Florida (1981); Fast, Cheap & Out of Control (1997); First Person (TV series, 2000); The Fog of War (2003, see page 113); Standard Operating Procedure (2008) 104

KB Doc Journey.indd 104

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Roger & Me (1989) Directed by: Michael Moore Produced by: Michael Moore Written by: Michael Moore Editing by: Jennifer Beman and Wendey Stanzler Cinematography by: Chris Beaver, John Prusak, Kevin Rafferty and Bruce Schermer Running time: 91 minutes

Synopsis In the wake of General Motors’ plant closure in Flint, Michigan, resulting in the loss of 30,000 jobs, filmmaker Michael Moore tries to track down an interview with elusive GM CEO Roger Smith.

Comments Filmed under the working title, ‘A Humorous Look at How General Motors Destroyed Flint, Michigan’ (in an effort to secure non-profit funding), Roger & Me is the first documentary made by campaigning filmmaker Michael Moore. Taking over two years to complete, the film sold to Warner Bros in 1989 for the sum of $3 million, and went on to become the most successful documentary in American history at the time of its original theatrical run. Roger & Me is a scathing satire about the effect that big business interest can have on the average American citizen, a line of enquiry that Moore has returned to multiple times during his career. Like Moore’s methods as a filmmaker, Roger & Me prompted strongly polarised reactions upon its release, and has continued to do so ever since. Naysayers point to the documentary’s various discrepancies, particularly its skewed timeline which knowingly shuffles events out of chronological order to heighten the film’s absurdist and darkly comedic tone (in reality, Ronald Reagan’s visit to Flint and the construction of the AutoWorld and Hyatt Hotel took place well in advance of the plant closures which open the film). 105

KB Doc Journey.indd 105

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Boosters, however, will argue that to criticise the film in this manner is to miss the point. In saying that ‘I wanted [Roger & Me] to play like Pee Wee’s Playhouse, not Hotel Terminus,’ Moore acknowledged that he was using the documentary form in the same way that a socially minded stand-up comic may use current affairs: picking and choosing details according to his argument in order to make a larger satirical point. At its heart Roger & Me remains a strongly worded polemic in which Moore’s agenda is never in doubt. If the subject matter provides the setup, then the film’s razor-sharp editing and Moore’s likeable ‘everyman’ persona are all too happy to swoop in and provide the punch line.

Did you know? Despite the contrary impression that the film gives, Michael Moore did, in fact, speak with Roger Smith at a General Motors company shareholders’ meeting in 1987. The footage, however, never made it into the film, and Moore claims that the encounter concerned a separate topic, unrelated to his line of enquiry.

Other recommendations by the same director Bowling for Columbine (2002); Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, see page 120); Sicko (2007); and Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, see page 134)

The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife (1991) Directed by: Nick Broomfield Produced by: Nick Broomfield and Rieta Oord Editing by: John Mister Cinematography by: Barry Ackroyd Running time: 85 minutes

Synopsis Documentary filmmaker Nick Broomfield travels to South Africa during the final days of the apartheid regime to interview 106

KB Doc Journey.indd 106

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Eugène Terre’Blanche, founder and leader of the far-right, whitesupremacist political organisation, the AWB.

Comments When Nick Broomfield set out to make this documentary for Channel 4 he never suspected that speaking with controversial neo-Nazi leader Eugène Terre’Blanche would prove so difficult. Broomfield’s film crew spent several weeks travelling around South Africa, trying in vain to get the interview they had been promised. In the event, it couldn’t have worked out any better, as Terre’Blanche’s elusiveness (a bullyish power-play to try and give him control over the making of the documentary) not only provides Broomfield with the structure for his film, echoing Michael Moore’s Roger & Me, but also offers an apt metaphor for the success of Terre’Blanche’s hopelessly outmoded brand of segregationalist racism in the dying days of apartheid. The structural similarity between The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife and Roger & Me (1989, see page 105) is not the only link between Nick Broomfield and Michael Moore. Broomfield was key in developing the ‘Les Nouvels Egotistes’ form of documentary filmmaking, whereby the documentarian appears onscreen as a character. Broomfield, often seen carrying his trademark boom mic, uses a confrontational interview style, tempered with a faux-naïf persona, which he utilises to draw humour or additional information from the subjects he is investigating. Documentaries such as The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife represented a fresh style of documentary filmmaking, one in which the filmmaker eschewed the pretence of total objectivity to instead openly take sides. ‘I wanted to make [a documentary] that would really puncture his balloon,’ was how Broomfield described his approach to Terre’Blanche in an interview with Jason Wood. Nowhere is this better evidenced than in the filmmaker’s eventual meeting with the AWB leader, in which Broomfield 107

KB Doc Journey.indd 107

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

and his crew deliberately arrive ten minutes late in a successful attempt to infuriate the egotistical Terre’Blanche. Although the entirety of the subsequent interview is made up of petty arguments and misunderstandings, it nonetheless reveals much about Terre’Blanche’s persona and the hollow bluster of his views. Unlike Broomfield’s His Big White Self (see ‘While we’re on the subject...’) The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife is not a serious piece of reportage into South Africa at a time of great political upheaval, but a darkly satirical piece of documentary-asfarce, accompanied by jaunty music which is at disarming odds with the frightening seriousness of the subject matter.

While we’re on the subject... His Big White Self (2006) is Nick Broomfield’s follow-up to The Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, catching up with many of the same characters 15 years after the original documentary aired. South Africa has changed, but Terre’Blanche is as terse as ever.

Other recommendations by the same director Soldier Girls (1981); Chicken Ranch (1983); Driving Me Crazy (1988); Aileen Wuornos: The Selling of a Serial Killer (1993); Tracking Down Maggie (1994); Heidi Fleiss: Hollywood Madam (1995); and Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003)

Stevie (2002) Directed by: Steve James Produced by: Steve James, Gordon Quinn and Adam Singer Editing by: William Haugse and Steve James Cinematography by: Peter Gilbert, Dana Kupper and Gordon Quinn Music by: Dirk Powell Running time: 140 minutes 108

KB Doc Journey.indd 108

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Synopsis In 1995, documentary filmmaker Steve James returned to rural Southern Illinois to reconnect with Stevie Fielding: a troubled young boy he had first met ten years earlier.

Comments As a filmmaker, Steve James has the rare gift for creating documentary portraiture of his subjects in a way that draws out affecting archetypes to almost novelistic ends, without ever descending into condescension. Having done this so successfully with Hoop Dreams (1994, see page 171), James next turned his attention to a subject seemingly as far removed from black innercity America as is possible. As a student at Southern Illinois University in the mid-1980s, James became a ‘Big Brother’ to Stephen ‘Stevie’ Fielding, a troubled 11-year-old child from near-rural Pomona. When James pursued filmmaking after graduation, he lost contact with ‘Stevie’, whose own life took him through a series of foster homes, state care and mental institutions. Stevie, as a documentary, begins when the director revisits the now-adult Fielding, and attempts to chart the course that his life has taken. Unlike the lithe, athletic and street-smart protagonists of Hoop Dreams, Fielding is an ungainly, dim-witted backwoods compendium of white-trash clichés. He has bad teeth, bad hair, a list of criminal offences but no job, and a beer can and bong at the ready to dull a seemingly bottomless well of combative resentment. There is very little about him to appeal to the viewer, but a disarming man-child naivety that invites sympathy. An infinitely more troubling (for all involved) development occurs when Fielding is arrested for molesting an 8-year-old girl. From the start of the documentary it is clear that Fielding is on a path of self-destruction. Despite support from a doting fiancée he is simply too damaged a human being to pull his life out of the tailspin it is in, either unable or unwilling to make the 109

KB Doc Journey.indd 109

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

life changes necessary. While not excusing his adult behaviour, Stevie deftly examines how its subject wound up as he did, revealing a dysfunctional family history, and a childhood full of neglect and abuse, that make the viewer question how things could have turned out differently. One tragic juxtaposition shows Fielding briefly reunite with his first (and happiest) foster family for a few hours – before we cut to a scene in which members of the Aryan Brotherhood advise him on how to survive in jail. James’s acknowledged guilt at dropping out of Fielding’s life (another abandonment in a life that has been full of them) is what spurred him to make the documentary in the first place. His in-film questioning about the ethics of doing so verbalises the fine line between creating a portrait of flawed humanity and a study in car-crash voyeurism.

While we’re on the subject... Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (2003, Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill) is the second of Nick Broomfield’s documentaries about notorious Florida serial killer, Aileen Wornous – following her from her criminal trial to execution on death row. Like Stevie, this documentary is a harrowing testimony to the effect that mental illness and childhood abuse can have on individuals.

Capturing the Friedmans (2003) Directed by: Andrew Jarecki Produced by: Andrew Jarecki and Marc Smerling Editing by: Richard Hankin Cinematography by: Adolfo Doring Music by: Andrea Morricone Running time: 107 minutes

Synopsis The life of the Friedman family, a seemingly typical, middle-class Jewish family in Great Neck, Long Island, is torn apart when 110

KB Doc Journey.indd 110

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Capturing the Friedmans

the father and his youngest son are arrested and charged with sexually abusing young boys, on Thanksgiving 1987.

Comments Capturing the Friedmans, the debut documentary of director Andrew Jarecki, is a film which attempts to grapple with three sprawling – but, in this case, tragically intertwined – topics: paedophilia, potential miscarriages of justice, and the selfdestruction of a seemingly ordinary middle-class family. Given the darkness and tragedy of the subject matter, it is ironic that the documentary started out as a film about children’s birthday party clowns in New York City. It was in this manner that Jarecki was introduced to David Friedman, whose anger towards his mother caused the filmmaker to begin digging into his history. The story that he found caused Jarecki to abandon his current topic, and instead to make this film. ‘We realised 111

KB Doc Journey.indd 111

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

our clown documentary was going horribly awry and the story was so fascinating and sad and engrossing and so we just kept listening to people, and met with a lot of people who knew something about the story,’ recalled Jarecki in an interview at the National Film Theatre, London. ‘Eventually [I told David]: “Look I’ve discovered this story and I’d like to make a film about it and I think you should help me do it. I think it’s a story that needs to be told.” He said, “I don’t know how I feel about that,” and he was very emotional about it. Then he said, “But I guess if you’re even going to consider refocusing the film I should tell you that, in addition to the 25 hours of 8mm home movies of the family during happy times that my father took, which he shared with me at the beginning, there’s another box with another 25 hours of home videos that I started shooting after the police showed up.”’ Supplementing this astonishing self-documenting footage are present-day interviews with the majority of people involved with the case. Far from being devices used to drive along a singular narrative, these interviews reveal a group of intelligent and, in many instances, highly qualified people who are unable to agree on almost anything. ‘Especially in the beginning, I really wanted someone, anyone, to believe,’ Jarecki told Film Freak Central. ‘But you realise that everyone you talk to has an agenda even if they don’t realise that they have an agenda. When I talked to Fran Galasso, the detective, who said that thing to me about how the one thing you have to worry about in this situation is that even charging someone with this kind of crime is enough to ruin their lives, I felt like, “Ah, here’s my person.” She’s bright, articulate, experienced, she’s obviously cautious, and, therefore, she’s going to be my narrator. I felt this immediate relief; I was drawn to her right away. And not more than five minutes later, she totally impeaches herself and it becomes clear that her recollection couldn’t be more incorrect.’ In one of the few negative reviews the documentary received, writer Kenneth Turan wrote in the Los Angeles Times that, 112

KB Doc Journey.indd 112

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

‘Jarecki’s pose of impartiality gets especially troublesome for audiences when it enables him to evade responsibility for dealing with the complexities of his material.’ I do not believe this to be the case. Like Errol Morris’s The Thin Blue Line (1988, see page 102), one of the central themes of Capturing the Friedmans is the subjectivity of truth, particularly in a legal context – although, unlike Morris’s film, a conclusive ending is never given.

While we’re on the subject... Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (1996, Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky) details the indictment and trials of the West Memphis 3, a trio of nonconformist teenagers accused of the murder and sexual mutilation of three young boys. As with Capturing the Friedmans, the sometimes questionable evidence, and the frenzied witch hunt carried out by a community baying for retributive blood, is nearly as terrifying as the crime being investigated.

Did you know? Although the documentary is constructed so as to be ambiguous about the Friedmans’ innocence or guilt, and director Andrew Jarecki stated – possibly for the purposes of a marketing strategy – that he had not concluded one way or the other, it has since emerged that he funded Jesse Friedman’s appeal.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara (2003) Directed by: Errol Morris Produced by: Errol Morris, Julie Ahlberg and Michael Williams Editing by: Doug Abel, Chyld King and Karen Schmeer Cinematography by: Robert Chappell and Peter Donahue Music by: Philip Glass Running time: 106 minutes 113

KB Doc Journey.indd 113

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Synopsis Observations about the nature of modern warfare from the controversial former US Secretary of Defence, Robert McNamara.

Comments ‘What makes [an act of war] immoral if you lose, but not immoral if you win?’ asks Robert McNamara at one point during Errol Morris’s Academy Award-winning documentary. There is something faintly reminiscent of the Frost/Nixon interviews about The Fog of War. Certainly, Morris – with his affinity for documenting subjects including pet cemeteries, the designers of electric chairs, and people who lop off their limbs for insurance money – and former Secretary of Defence Robert McNamara are about as far removed from each other as lightentertainment broadcast journalist David Frost and disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon ever were. McNamara originally agreed to be interviewed for a couple of hours as part of Morris’s (criminally underappreciated) First Person television series (2000). However, the interview soon ballooned to some 20 hours of questioning, covering McNamara’s life from his childhood in California, his work with the Office of Statistical Control during World War II, becoming the first non-Ford family president of the Ford Motor Company, to his 1961–68 tenure as Defence Secretary, during which time many held him accountable for the disastrous escalation of the Vietnam War. By way of a structure Morris has shaped McNamara’s answers into a series of larger philosophical ‘lessons’ about the nature of modern warfare, including ‘Empathise with your enemy’, ‘Rationality will not save us’ and ‘In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil’. This is augmented by a raft of archival footage (much of it unseen previously) and a score by regular collaborator Philip Glass. Even at McNamara’s advanced age (he was 85 at the time of filming), he never appears less than mentally alert and agile 114

KB Doc Journey.indd 114

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

in his answers, defending some decisions, admitting others as mistakes, but always explaining the reasoning behind his decisions. It is only in the film’s epilogue, when Morris asks why McNamara didn’t speak out against the Vietnam War after leaving the Lyndon Johnson administration, that one gets the sense that the documentary’s subject finds himself on the ropes. The Fog of War’s title comes from a term ascribed to the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz, who wrote: ‘The great uncertainty of all data in war is a peculiar difficulty, because all action must, to a certain extent, be planned in a mere twilight, which in addition not infrequently – like the effect of a fog or moonshine – gives to things exaggerated dimensions and unnatural appearance.’ What this means, suggests McNamara, is that ‘war is so complex it’s beyond the ability of the human mind to comprehend all the variables. Our judgement, our understanding, are not adequate. And we kill people unnecessarily.’ ‘I’ve always wondered where explanations end and excuses begin,’ Morris commented in an article published in the New York Observer. ‘I look at the McNamara story as the-fog-of-war-atemy-homework excuse. After all, if war is so complex, then no one is responsible.’ For the director, The Fog of War is essentially about a typically Morrisian theme: that of self-deception; of people seeing what they want to believe, so that they can justify it to themselves.

Did you know? The Fog of War utilises an interview setup Errol Morris refers to as the ‘Interrotron’. This system uses a teleprompter-like setup, mounted above the camera, which relays a video image of Morris, who is seated nearby. As such, the interview subject can look directly into the camera lens when responding to questions, rather than facing in another direction.This virtual face-to-face conversation creates a first-person effect for the viewer, which Morris believes increases the dramatic value of a subject’s responses. 115

KB Doc Journey.indd 115

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Overnight (2003) Directed by: Tony Montana and Mark Brian Smith Produced by: Tony Montana Edited by: Tony Montana, Jonathan Nixon and Mark Brian Smith Music by: Jack Livesey and Peter Nashel Running time: 82 minutes

Synopsis Documents the ‘rags-to-riches-to-rags’ story of first-time writerdirector Troy Duffy (Boondock Saints), an arrogant twentysomething wannabe filmmaker, who netted a dream movie deal with Miramax in 1997 – only to crash and burn in spectacular fashion.

Comments If the 1970s was the decade in which the Hollywood director became an auteur, then the 1990s was when the indie director became a superstar. Off the back of Quentin Tarantino’s rise to fame – the result of back-to-back successes with Reservoir Dogs (1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), but undoubtedly buoyed by his colourful, hyperactive, video-geek personality – Hollywood was on the lookout for its next breakout director-as-star. For a short time in 1997 Miramax thought that it had found what it was searching for in Troy Duffy: a blue-collar Bostonian bartender-turned-screenwriter, who, between shifts at work, had cobbled together the script for a Tarantino-violent vigilante thriller entitled Boondock Saints (1999). Duffy, who had never been to film school, nor made a film, had his script bought for $300,000 after an explosive bidding war, and was to be given the chance to direct, with a budget of $15 million and final-cut approval. In addition, his band would produce the film’s soundtrack, while the bar that he worked at would be bought by then-Miramax boss Harvey Weinstein for Duffy to run. In short, it was the lucky break of a lifetime – and the buzz caused 116

KB Doc Journey.indd 116

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

by the resulting story turned Duffy into an overnight celebrity and Boondock Saints into Hollywood’s hippest project. Of course, things quickly unravelled, largely thanks to Duffy’s immensely unlikeable combination of boorish behaviour and extreme arrogance: ironically enough, the same traits that had so worked in his favour early on. As Duffy is shown slating a veritable ‘who’s who’ of Hollywood players (agents, actors, producers), one is tempted to recall the analogy of the man standing blindfolded on a cliff edge, showing supreme confidence because he has no awareness of just how close he is to disaster. Overnight is a cinéma vérité documentary shot by two of Duffy’s friends, tracing his progress following the initial good fortune, over the span of four years. For Duffy, this act of chronicling his supposedly sure-fire success was just another status symbol designed to immortalise his questionable achievements. Instead, the filmmakers recorded him self-destructing in dramatic fashion, winding up penniless and working back as a bartender. This disparity between the documentary’s original brief and its final result is wryly commented on in the film’s tagline: ‘There’s more than one way to shoot yourself.’ For anyone interested in a documentary chronicling a fall-fromgrace of almost Greek tragedy proportions, this is a fascinating character study. For anyone intent on pursuing a career as a filmmaker, Overnight should be required viewing. Although the documentary – likely having learned from its subject’s mistakes – avoids criticising Hollywood for its role in events (as insufferable as he may be, was Duffy simply out-ogred?), the film is also an indictment of our society’s love of placing people upon a pedestal, and then tearing them back down again. No matter how much they may deserve it.

While we’re on the subject... American Movie: The Making of Northwestern (1999, Chris Smith) is a documentary about the reality of independent filmmaking for 117

KB Doc Journey.indd 117

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

a large number of people, documenting the plight of a haplessbut-passionate Wisconsin wannabe director, Mark Borchardt, as he struggles to achieve his low-budget horror opus, Northwestern.

Super Size Me (2004) Directed by: Morgan Spurlock Produced by: Morgan Spurlock Written by: Morgan Spurlock Editing by: Stela Georgieva and Julie ‘Bob’ Lombardi Cinematography by: Scott Ambrozy Running time: 100 minutes

Synopsis Inspired by news reports that two overweight girls had taken McDonald’s to court, alleging that they had become obese as a result of eating its food, documentary filmmaker Morgan Spurlock goes on a diet of nothing but McDonald’s food for one calendar month to investigate the impact that it has on his health.

Comments The critical and financial success of Michael Moore’s films have opened the doors for a certain breed of documentary to sit sideby-side with the latest Hollywood blockbusters in the commercial market, rather than being sidelined as art-house features with little in the way of public exposure. That trend continued with the release of Super Size Me, an alternately terrifying and hilarious examination of America’s (though, really, the Western world’s) obsession with fast food, which introduced filmgoers to the talents of documentarian Morgan Spurlock. Super Size Me is high-concept documentary filmmaking at its finest, staged as a quasi-experiment to investigate the effects that a high-junk diet will have on the average man. In a sense, the hypothesis is redundant: who could have predicted that eating 118

KB Doc Journey.indd 118

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Super Size Me

McDonald’s three times a day for 30 days, while not exercising, would be bad for you? But just how negative the effects are may surprise viewers, as they did Spurlock’s doctors in the film, who appear genuinely horrified at the results. Over the course of one month (Spurlock’s experiment ran from 1 February to 2 March 2003) he gained 24½ lbs (11.1 kg), a 13 per cent body-mass increase, and achieved a cholesterol level of 230. In addition, he suffered depression, headaches, a decreased libido, and frequent sugar/caffeine crashes. The sight of Spurlock’s emergent doughy physique, coupled with footage of him vomiting out of a car window, receiving a rectal examination, and a graphic sequence detailing a gastricbypass operation, sometimes veer Super Size Me into ‘shock doc’ territory, drawing a parallel between the documentary film and MTV’s popular Jackass stunt show. (In fact, the most shocking scene of all appears only as an extra on the DVD: a sequence comparing the decomposition rate of a McDonald’s meal over several months to that of a homemade hamburger and chips. The latter composts entirely, while the McDonald’s food remains perfectly preserved.) Spurlock’s experiment, however, really functions only as a narrative hook to the documentary, to 119

KB Doc Journey.indd 119

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

link together wider investigations into America’s obesity epidemic and the reasons behind it. As a filmmaker, Spurlock employs many of the stylistic devices Moore has honed during his career. He presents himself as the likeable ‘everyman’ (New York Magazine described Super Size Me as ‘the class clown’s science project’), whilst exhibiting broad satirical flourishes to make his point. While this kind of populist, do-it-yourself agitprop may not be to everyone’s taste, there is still no doubting that it is further evidence of the way in which documentary has emerged in recent years as one of the few mainstream outlets available for dissenting voices on everything from gun control, to the ‘War on Terror’, to, yes, the health risks posed by Maccy D’s.

Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004) Directed by: Michael Moore Produced by: Michael Moore, Jim Czarnecki and Kathleen Glynn Written by: Michael Moore Editing by: Kurt Engfehr, Todd Woody Richman and Chris Seward Cinematography by: Mike Desjarlais Music by: Jeff Gibbs Running time: 122 minutes

Synopsis Michael Moore’s examination of America in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, and the methods by which George Bush’s administration may have used the tragic event to push forward its agenda for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Comments Having won the ‘Best Documentary’ Academy Award for his previous film, Bowling for Columbine (2002), filmmaker Michael Moore next set his sights on a bigger target: influencing the 120

KB Doc Journey.indd 120

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Fahrenheit 9/11

outcome of the 2004 presidential election. While Moore never publically endorsed John Kerry in the manner he would later on with Barack Obama in Capitalism: A Love Story (2009, see page 134), he made it clear that he wanted to see Bush removed from the White House and felt that the reception of Fahrenheit 9/11 may help affect that aim. As a result, Fahrenheit 9/11 aims directly for the Bush jugular, questioning the legitimacy of his 2000 presidential victory, and portraying him as lazy, unintelligent, vain and a variety of other unappealing characteristics, while also revealing the dubious methods by which the Bush administration was able to profit from 9/11. The documentary’s title references author Ray Bradbury’s 1953 novel Fahrenheit 451, in which a dystopian view of the future United States is presented (compare the film’s tagline, ‘The temperature at which freedom burns’ with Fahrenheit 451’s ‘The temperature at which books burn’.) Bradbury expressed displeasure at the appropriation of his title, claiming that he had never been consulted by Moore. 121

KB Doc Journey.indd 121

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Moore’s sleight of hand as a filmmaker is on display from the first images we see in the film: a dreamlike sequence showing Al Gore accepting the Florida vote at the 2000 presidential elections. Devoid of context, the images seem real, as indeed they appeared at the time of their original live broadcast. But this proved not to be the case, just as the extended prologue is a false start in the documentary. This disparity between image and reality is one of the underlying themes of Fahrenheit 9/11, which employs many of the propaganda-filmmaking tools Moore has mastered. By constructing his documentary as an illustrated essay, Moore succeeds in making his conclusions clear, although he also opens himself up to criticism for misdirecting the audience. Moore’s films have always achieved a certain notoriety amongst a vocal minority of viewers, but what had previously amounted to a few dissenting voices became a veritable cottage industry following the release of Fahrenheit 9/11. Not only did criticisms appear in print and web media (the most comprehensive perhaps being David Kopel’s ‘Fifty-nine Deceits in Fahrenheit 9/11’ essay), but also in documentary, with such films as FahrenHYPE 9/11 (2004, Alan Peterson) and Celsius 41.11: The Temperature at Which the Brain Begins to Die (2004, Kevin Knoblock). Due to a variety of factors, none of these counter-documentaries achieved a wide release, but their existence as point-by-point commentaries/ dissections of Moore’s own documentary surely qualify Fahrenheit 9/11 for another historic precedent – even if it is not altogether a favourable one. Ultimately Fahrenheit 9/11 did not affect the 2004 presidential election results as Moore had hoped, although it went on to become the highest-grossing documentary ever made. It is certainly a film which merits viewing, and which represents Michael Moore on top of his game as a filmmaker. Just as those false images of Al Gore winning the elections prove, however, it’s a documentary in which the viewer must question everything they see and hear. 122

KB Doc Journey.indd 122

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Grizzly Man (2005) Directed by: Werner Herzog Produced by: Erik Nelson, Kevin Beggs, Billy Campbell, Phil Fairclough, Andrea Meditch, Tom Ortenberg and Jewel Palovak Written by: Werner Herzog Editing by: Joe Bini Cinematography by: Peter Zeitlinger Music by: Richard Thompson Running time: 100 minutes

Synopsis A portrait of the life and death of bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell who was killed and eaten, along with his girlfriend, in October 2003 while living among grizzlies in Alaska.

Comments Throughout his career Werner Herzog has shown a continuing fascination with extreme figures in far-flung places. His protagonists generally fall into two distinct camps: ‘over-reachers’ and ‘underdogs’. The question of which heading Treadwell comes under forms the backbone of Grizzly Man. The film may have been part-funded by the Discovery Channel’s theatrical documentary unit, but, make no mistake about it, this is no wildlife film in the anthropomorphised mode of March of the Penguins (also 2005), but, if anything, a dissection of it. Far from being a passive narrator, Treadwell’s centrality to the film (emphasised by the documentary’s title) turns Grizzly Man into a meditation on the line between man and nature, and at what point this is crossed. Grizzly Man is largely composed of some 85 hours of home video shot by Treadwell over the last five years of his life. Some of the footage is inadvertently hilarious, as when Treadwell claims that, ‘I am a kind warrior! I will not die at [the bears’] claws and paws! I will be a master!’ Some of it is astonishing: Treadwell 123

KB Doc Journey.indd 123

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Grizzly Man

wading into rivers to play with the grizzlies, without any apparent concern for his safety. Some of it is downright scary, raising severe concerns about Treadwell’s emotional stability. Grizzly Man offers no easy answers. Should we feel for Timothy Treadwell? Was he an informed activist whose death was a tragic accident, or a lunatic who tempted fate and eventually got what he deserved? In cutting down the footage to manageable length, Herzog was criticised by Charlie Russell, a naturalist famous for his study of bears, who corresponded with Treadwell during his life, for editing the film unfavourably to make Treadwell look bad. ‘Herzog is a skilful filmmaker so a large percentage of those who watch the movie Grizzly Man overlook Timothy’s amazing way with animals, even though, to me, this stands out very strongly,’ he claimed. ‘The fact that Timothy spent an incredible 35,000 hours, spanning 13 years, living with the bears in Katmai National Park, without any previous mishap, escapes people completely.’ But while Herzog never lets us doubt his own take on Treadwell (his own view of nature is one full of ‘hostility, chaos and murder’, whilst Treadwell’s is unabashedly sentimental), he also allows the found footage to play at great length in such a way that viewers can make up their own minds. 124

KB Doc Journey.indd 124

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

As one of the preeminent documentary filmmakers working today, Herzog’s relationship with the documentary form is a fascinating one. He is less concerned with aiming at objectivity or a slavishly factual truth than with seeking out an ‘inner, deeper’ reality, which the director refers to as the ‘ecstatic truth’. He elaborated on this in a speech delivered in Milan, Italy, following a screening of his documentary Lessons of Darkness (1992): ‘In the fine arts, in music, literature, and cinema, it is possible to reach a deeper stratum of truth – a poetic, ecstatic truth, which is mysterious and can only be grasped with effort; one attains it through vision, style, and craft.’

My Kid Could Paint That (2007) Directed by: Amir Bar-Lev Produced by: Amir Bar-Lev Written by: Amir Bar-Lev Editing by: Michael Levine and John W Walter Cinematography by: Matt Boyd, Nelson Hume and Bill Turnley Music by: Rondo Brothers Running time: 82 minutes

Synopsis Documentary following the surprising success of a four-year-old girl from Binghamton, New York, whose paintings have been compared to the works of Picasso, and sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Comments Like Orson Welles’ F for Fake (1973, see page 49) and Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010, see page 136), My Kid Could Paint That poses serious questions about the nature of art. After all, if a four-year-old girl can become the toast of the art world on the basis of her abstract paintings, does this make her prodigiously 125

KB Doc Journey.indd 125

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

My Kid Could Paint That

talented or other modern artists spectacularly untalented? Or is it simply that the post-ironic, uninhibited innocence of a child’s paintings appeal to the jaded temperaments of cynical collectors? My Kid Could Paint That also ponders the valuing of such artwork. What appears monetarily valueless when it’s blu-tacked to the wall of a youngster’s playroom becomes far easier to take seriously when it’s hanging in a top art gallery, with an asking price well into the thousands. But what does it say about the people who buy it? Aren’t they buying the work because they like it? Midway through director Amir Bar-Lev’s investigations into four-year-old Marla Olmstead, the documentary takes a sudden turn when, while filming with the Olmstead family, an episode of CBS News’ 60 Minutes II programme questions whether Marla did, in fact, create the paintings herself. The prime suspect would appear to be Marla’s father, an amateur artist, who was the driving force behind her sustained media push. While the twist creates an intriguing narrative development (turning the documentary into 126

KB Doc Journey.indd 126

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

a story about potential fraud) it also sheds the film of much of its intelligent discourse. Rather than being a film about the meaning of art and the machinations of the big money art market, it instead ends up focusing on a far more straightforward question: did Marla’s father paint the pictures for her? Is she a child prodigy or not? As with many documentaries which begin as purely fly-on-thewall observational films, at this point My Kid Could Paint That also becomes a film about the filmmaker, and the ethics of presenting the Olmstead family on film. Being one of the few media people the family come to trust, Bar-Lev is torn between his desire to tell the story he originally set out to tell, and also to face up to the possibility that he has been lied to. The finished documentary does not come down on one side or the other, although the degree of ambiguity (Marla’s parents were expecting the film to be a total exoneration) was enough to ruin Bar-Lev’s relationship with the Olmstead family.

While we’re on the subject... The Mystery of Picasso (Le mystère Picasso) (1956, HenriGeorges Clouzot) is a documentary showing Pablo Picasso creating several paintings for the camera. These are done directly onto transparent ‘canvases’ so that the artist could work on one side, while the filmmakers could shoot the reverse. The paintings were subsequently destroyed so that they exist only on film.

Bigger, Stronger, Faster* (2008) Directed by: Christopher Bell Produced by: Alexander Buono, Jim Czarnecki, Kurt Engfehr and Tamsin Rawady Written by: Christopher Bell, Alexander Buono and Tamsin Rawady Music by: Dave Porter Editing by: Brian Singbiel Cinematography by: Alexander Buono Running time: 105 minutes 127

KB Doc Journey.indd 127

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Synopsis Investigation into anabolic steroids and their metaphorical and literal centrality to the American Dream.

Comments Christopher Bell’s 2008 documentary could be called the other Super Size Me (see page 118). Subjects as disparate as basketball, videogames and spelling bees have all been used as a means by which to examine the American Dream in documentary, but anabolic steroids may be the most controversial and incisive metaphor yet. With characters such as Greg Valentino, a man with 28-inch arms who injects steroids directly into his biceps, Bigger, Stronger, Faster* could easily have gone down the freakshow route, prying into ‘shock doc’ territory by looking at child bodybuilders and other anomalies. But while there is certainly much to gawp at (a muscle-bound Belgian Blue Bull, hinting at the possibility of genetic modification in the future, is one of the documentary’s most disconcerting sights), Bell is more interested in examining the larger implications of America’s contradictory love/hate relationship with anabolics, whereby athletes are universally adored for pulling off seemingly superhuman feats, but demonised for using performance-enhancing drugs. Steroids thus inhabit a grey area between the puritanical element of society that believes that cheating is wrong, and the cutthroat, tread-on-people-to-reach-the-top capitalism that rewards people who do just that. Bigger, Stronger, Faster* is narrated by Bell with the same jocular, first-person style that has worked so effectively for Morgan Spurlock and Michael Moore (two of the film’s four producers were co-producers on Fahrenheit 9/11, see page 120, and Bowling for Columbine), but his approach is less stunt-based than Spurlock’s and more even-handed than Moore’s. 128

KB Doc Journey.indd 128

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

‘We talked to probably 50 people that said they could get us the money [to make the film],’ first-time filmmaker Bell recalled of how the documentary came into being. ‘Most of them wanted to be involved but didn’t have the money, or couldn’t find someone who did. We knew we had a strong treatment, which my producers and I had written together. Then we got a call from Jim Czarnecki who produced Michael Moore’s films. He had read the treatment through his agent. He said he had gotten a lot of documentary treatments sent to him since Fahrenheit 9/11, but this one really caught his attention. Getting a high-profile producer really helped us, as sort of an insurance plan. Through a network of friends and family we started to create a buzz, and with Jim on board people with money got interested. Eventually we met a serious investor who wrote us a cheque.’ While a jacked-up, power-chord pumping figure like pro wrestler Hulk Hogan and Rocky-era Sly Stallone provide the documentary’s colour, the film’s emotive resonance comes from Bell’s own story, particularly focusing on his two steroidusing brothers. Just as heartrending is the moment when Bell interviews a Houston, TX parent whose 17-year-old son committed suicide for reasons the parent believes relate to steroid abuse. Elsewhere Bell makes some shocking revelations: from the prescribed use of ‘performance enhancing’ amphetamines in the air force, to governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s flip-flopping view on anabolics, which somehow includes speaking out against steroids, while also sponsoring his own annual bodybuilding show, which conducts no form of drug testing whatsoever. By the time Bell wheels out then-president George W Bush (whose connection to seemingly infinite dubious rackets should earn him an honorary ‘special thanks’ credit on every documentary film from this point on) for the news that he was once owner of the Texas Ranger baseball team, a squad whose roster included known steroid user Jose Canseco, there is almost no doubting the film’s hypothesis about the societal pervasiveness of steroids. 129

KB Doc Journey.indd 129

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

To his credit, Bell never feels like he overextends himself by attempting to balance too many heavyweight issues at once. Must be those biceps.

Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir) (2008) Directed by: Ari Folman Produced by: Ari Folman, Serge Lalou, Gerhard Meixner, Yael Nahlieli and Roman Paul Written by: Ari Folman Editing by: Nili Feller Music by: Max Richter Running time: 86 minutes

Synopsis Animated documentary about the experiences of director Ari Folman, an Israeli Army veteran, as he tries to piece together his recollections relating to his experiences of the Lebanon War in Beirut.

Comments Is an animated documentary a contradiction in terms? Waltz with Bashir utilises animation not only to paint a dynamically cinematic version of the 1982 Lebanon War, but also to illustrate the hazy line between reality and fantasy in a manner which would be next to impossible to explore by means of a more traditional documentary. Waltz with Bashir follows dual narrative strands. One is a mostly chronological account of director Ari Folman’s youthful experience during the Lebanon War, while the other follows a present-day Folman as he interviews former colleagues to try and unlock his own memories of the past, which he appears to have lost. Waltz with Bashir suggests that this amnesia is not a condition unique to Folman, but rather symbolic of a larger-scale, wilful suppression of memory on the part of the Israelis for their 130

KB Doc Journey.indd 130

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Waltz with Bashir

role in the Sabra and Chatila massacres, during which Israeli forces allowed Christian Phalangist militia to enter Palestinian refugee camps to slaughter innocent civilians. Waltz with Bashir is not the first example of an animated documentary. In 1918 the genre was used to poignant effect in the 12-minute short The Sinking of the Lusitania (directed by Winsor McKay), in which 25,000 drawings detailed the 1915 sinking of RMS Lusitania after it was fired upon by a German U-boat. The choice of animation in that instance was made because no film footage existed of the event. In Waltz with Bashir, the use of animation is not due to a lack of footage, but is rather an artistic choice on the part of the director to convey the hallucinatory fantasy of Folman’s recollections. There are also several animated interview sequences, using the real audio of its subjects, a technique superbly executed elsewhere in both the Creature Comforts shorts (1989, Nick Park) and the Oscar-winning short animated documentary Ryan (2004, Chris Landreth). Waltz’s animation, supervised by Israeli animator Yoni Goodman, owes much to Japanese animation, as well as the comic work 131

KB Doc Journey.indd 131

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

of cartoonist Joe Sacco (best known for his 1996 graphic novel Palestine). Throughout the documentary there are several nods to the film’s animated style, and the implications of this. ‘You can draw, but no filming,’ says one character who meets Folman in the film. In another instance a study is cited in which it is claimed that false memories can be implanted into the brain if people are presented with a photograph, ostensibly from their childhood, in which their portrait has been inserted into a scene that they themselves were not a part of. It is a comment on the fact that photographs are not necessarily any more reliable than animation, which is at least honest in terms of its constructed nature. The film’s final jump cut from animation to news footage for the aftermath of the massacre was criticised by some for suggesting that Folman lost his nerve at the last moment, ultimately surrendering to the belief that animation was not a serious enough medium to convey the enormity of what happened. I disagree. In a film in which fact and fiction are so often blurred, the leap back to reality is a powerful moment and a reminder that this is an event which – despite the wishful thinking of some – actually happened.

Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country (Reporter i et lukket land) (2008) Directed by: Anders Østergaard Produced by: Lise Lense-Møller Editing by: Janus Billeskov Jansen and Thomas Papapetros Cinematography by: Simon Plum Music by: Conny Malmqvist Running time: 84 minutes

Synopsis Documentary following the 2007 uprisings against the military regime in Burma. 132

KB Doc Journey.indd 132

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Comments Although its focus is the brutal military government regime in Myanmar, the real subject of this documentary is the impossibility of reporting from a country in which freedom of the press and civic liberties are non-existent. Filmed at the time of the Buddhist monks’ rebellion in September 2007, Burma VJ (the VJ stands for ‘video journalist’) simultaneously tells the story of an underground network of around 30 news reporters – led by the film’s pseudonymous narrator ‘Joshua’ – who secretly document the harrowing state of their country for the Democratic Voice of Burma, a television station broadcasting via satellite from Oslo, Norway. ‘We did consider bringing a film crew of our own, but gave that up very soon, as we soon realised that would become a film about ourselves, about the difficulties we would have in talking to people [and] going places,’ said director Anders Østergaard. ‘Somehow we needed to get rid of that syndrome about not being able to work freely, and I felt that the VJs and their footage would be a shortcut to a more free film about the country.’ The VJs’ footage (self-shot, edited and smuggled out of the country) is filmed on small portable – thus easily hideable – handicams, as the risks posed by getting caught can entail arrest and long stretches of imprisonment. The low-res digital video is often shaky and blurred in its detail, but gives Burma VJ a sense of punchy immediacy rarely seen in news reportage. The images captured are deeply disturbing: the bloody corpse of a monk, floating face-down in a creek is particularly horrific. And yet, according to Aye Chang Naing, chief editor of the DVB, the VJs are willing to continue in order to keep informing the rest of the world – as well as those inside Burma – the truth about what is happening in their country. ‘I think [taking risks] to expose what’s really happening on the ground [is what every journalist does],’ Aye Chang Naing, chief editor of the Democratic Voice of Burma, told HBO in an interview to help promote the documentary. ‘What’s extraordinary about 133

KB Doc Journey.indd 133

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

the journalists that are working inside Burma with the Democratic Voice of Burma is that they know it’s a constant risk, every day. One journalist, after their footage was shown on CNN, said: “Now I’m happy to go to prison, even if I get arrested.” So they have an enormous desire that the information they send out spreads across the world, so that people know about Burma.’ This is documentary filmmaking at its most fearless and affecting. The fact that the riots were unsuccessful – that old-fashioned policestate violence and oppression can still overpower a guerrilla rebellion fuelled by new media – and that Burma remains a military-run dictatorship, makes the documentary an important one: a present call-to-action, rather than a reflection on events long past. But Burma VJ retains its sense of hopefulness that things can change, and the film remains a powerful testament to the revolutionary powers of documentary, digital technologies and the Internet.

Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) Directed by: Michael Moore Produced by: Michael Moore and Anne Moore Written by: Michael Moore Editing by: Jessica Brunetto, Alex Meiller, Tanya Meiller, Conor O’Neill, Pablo Proenza, T Woody Richman and John Walter Cinematography by: Daniel Marracino and Jayme Roy Music by: Jeff Gibbs Running time: 127 minutes

Synopsis An indictment of capitalism, focusing primarily on the recent financial crisis and America’s recovery stimulus.

Comments From the anthemic, crowd-pleasing strains of ‘Louie Louie’ (albeit a politically satirical version recorded by Iggy Pop for his 1993 American Caesar album), played over CCTV footage of a 134

KB Doc Journey.indd 134

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

bank raid at the start of Capitalism: A Love Story, there is little doubt that the viewer is watching a Michael Moore film. After 20 years in the public consciousness, Moore (the world’s most commercially successful documentary filmmaker) has his act as a rabble-rousing everyman down pat. In Capitalism he takes on the biggest subject of his career in what should be a synthesis of his previous work, but one which falls frustratingly short of the mark. As always, Moore and his researchers have dug up some interesting facts: among them that airline pilots, thanks to a series of pay cuts, now make less than the manager at a fast food restaurant, and that multiple large American corporations routinely take out ‘dead peasant’ life insurance policies on their employees, giving them a vested financial interest in the expiration of the people that work for them. It is in the contrasting of these cold, bottom-line-motivated details with the effect that they have on ordinary working people that the documentary finds much of its emotive power. Despite his mining of vintage information films for humour value (including a mock warning at the start of the film), Moore’s documentaries are unabashed propaganda films in the wartime tradition. Stirring music, rousing narration and masterfully executed montages are the most effective, and recognisable, tools in his filmmaking arsenal. In fact, Moore’s evocation of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal society at the conclusion of Capitalism draws a direct line between this film and the likes of Pare Lorentz’s government-produced The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936, see page 40). Where Capitalism slips is in its lack of focus and simplistic conclusions. Moore works best when he is able to find a smaller story, ideally centred on an individual, to act as a microcosm for his larger theme. Because of his trademark confrontational style he is a documentary maker who requires living, breathing targets upon which to focus his films in order for the designed dynamic to play out to its full extent. In Roger & Me (1989, see page 105) the target was General Motors’ CEO Roger 135

KB Doc Journey.indd 135

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Smith, who became the embodiment of Reagan-era greed. In Bowling for Columbine (2002) it was the Columbine High School shootings as an advertisement for stricter gun control. Even Moore’s wide-reaching Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, see page 120) had George Bush as its villain. As Moore’s career has progressed, so his scope has widened. In doing this, however, he has surrendered much of his ability to craft a tightly plotted documentary. As a result, Capitalism unsurprisingly works best when it sticks to addressing the events surrounding the 2008 global economic crash. Revelations which have emerged in the years since have provided so much Moore-esque material – alternately shocking and satirical – that, had the filmmaker focused solely on that topic without straying into too many other areas, the documentary would likely have been more effective than it ultimately winds up being.

Exit Through the Gift Shop (2010) Directed by: Banksy Produced by: Holly Cushing, James Gay-Rees and Jaimie D’Cruz Narrated by: Rhys Ifans Music by: Geoff Barrow Editing by: Tom Fulford and Chris King Running time: 87 minutes

Synopsis Thierry Guetta, an eccentric French immigrant in Los Angeles, reinvents himself as a street artist by the name of Mr Brainwash, and takes the art world by storm.

Comments ‘He tried to make a film about me, but I made a film about him,’ Banksy says of Thierry Guetta, the protagonist/antagonist at the centre of Exit Through the Gift Shop. ‘He was a lot more interesting than I am.’ 136

KB Doc Journey.indd 136

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Exit Through the Gift Shop

The innate problem with documentaries about artists is that, too often, they verge on hagiography, made by filmmakers with such obvious regard for their subjects that they lose any degree of objectivity. Exit Through the Gift Shop functions as both a celebration and deconstruction of street art (not limited to Banksy’s work), chronicling the history of one of the freshest and most exciting modern art movements, while simultaneously sending up the trappings of the contemporary art world. As such, it exists as an oxymoron: a documentary that validates the occasionally scorned work of street artists (described by Banksy in the film as a ‘legal grey area’) while also decrying the poseurs, pretentious art critics and commodification that have turned a once-underground scene into a hype-driven, million-dollar industry. And yet it works – partially because of the anarchic sense of fun that runs throughout the film (the highpoint, perhaps, being Banksy’s installation of a life-size Guantanamo Bay detainee replica at Disneyland) and partially because, under all the silliness, Exit Through the Gift Shop asks some very valid questions. The value of authenticity is one topic at the heart of the film, which is taken to greater levels by the (quite probable) accusation that 137

KB Doc Journey.indd 137

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

the documentary is an elaborate hoax: with Guetta himself a Borat-esque creation by Banksy, acting in the Sacha Baron Cohen vein, to explore and skewer his subject matter. The mere fact that the film was nominated for ‘Best Documentary’ at the Oscars (it ultimately lost out to Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job) is evidence of the degree to which the Academy has expanded its thoughts on what is considered documentary. Those involved with Exit Through the Gift Shop, however, continue to assert its realness. Unlike Orson Welles’ F For Fake (a natural companion piece to Exit, see page 49), Banksy is happy to let the ambiguity go on long after the final credits have run. In keeping with the story that the documentary footage was filmed by Guetta, he even refused to be listed as director (although it is described as ‘a Banksy film’). ‘I didn’t take the director’s credit because I thought that was a bit unfair,’ the artist has claimed. ‘The editors essentially built the whole thing, and I deferred to the producer on the scenes I feature in – otherwise I’d just have picked the shots where my silhouette looks good.’

While we’re on the subject... Style Wars (1983, Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver) examines the graffiti scene in New York City (albeit as part of a wider hip-hop context), just as a new wave of artists was challenging traditional views of tagging as being nothing but petty vandalism.

Way of the Morris (2011) Directed by: Rob Curry and Tim Plester Produced by: Rob Curry and Tim Plester Written by: Tim Plester Editing by: Jono Griffith Cinematography by: Richard Mitchell Music by: Adrian Corker Running time: 64 minutes 138

KB Doc Journey.indd 138

24/03/2012 16:12

Participatory Documentaries

Way of the Morris

Synopsis Actor Tim Plester explores his family’s history of Morris dancing, and uncovers a tragic story going back to the First World War.

Comments Way of the Morris appears on the surface to be another member of the subgenre of documentaries some have nicknamed ‘quirkumentaries’: films dealing with the oddball pursuits of its eccentric hobbyist subjects. Morris Dancing, that most curiously English of pastimes, appears ripe for such a skewering, especially when the documentary’s director is British character actor Tim Plester (a man well versed in wry, po-faced comedy), returning from big city London to his small village of Adderbury in North Oxfordshire to delve into the subject. This doesn’t prove to be the case, though. Way of the Morris, while certainly comedic in places (witness the twenty-first-century twist on Morris dancing, which has none other than Darth Vader dancing the part of the fool, lightsaber in hand), becomes a meditation on life, death, tradition and the importance of returning to one’s roots. 139

KB Doc Journey.indd 139

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

‘One of the benefits of the documentary taking two-and-a-half years to complete is that it gave the film room to evolve,’ Plester said. ‘I’d always been aware of the fact that the Morris dancing traditions of my village had been successfully revived during the heady days of the early 1970s, back when I was still a child. But I’d never realised that the reason for them having died out in the first place was so tragically connected to the unforgiveable horrors of the First World War. A generation of young Adderbury dancers went off to fight in the trenches, and only one of them ever returned. The Morris, I discovered, had very literally died out. And that changed things for me, more fundamentally, in fact, than I originally realised. The initial idea had been to simply follow the current team of Adderbury Village Morris Men, as they visited the final resting places of their fallen brethren in Northern France. By making that pilgrimage, it struck me that they were attempting to help repair a brutally severed link in the dancing heritage of their village. My village. A heritage I’d spent the greater part of my life running headlong away from. I realised, quickly and inescapably, that I was a part of this story, and that this story was a part of me: a part of both my birthright and my legacy. And so the film developed into something not only more personal, but something hopefully much more universal too: a film not just about knotted handkerchiefs and latten bells and bull’s pizzles upon the end of sticks, but a much bigger and richer story about what it means to be English, and male. And about what it means to seek a connection with one’s past. An ode to agrarian roots and a search for identity in our Enchanted Kingdom’s ongoing story; all underpinned, of course, by the recurrent motifs of circles and cycles and death and rebirth.’

140

KB Doc Journey.indd 140

24/03/2012 16:12

POETIC-EXPERIMENTAL DOCUMENTARIES The first poetic-experimental documentaries appeared in the 1920s as the crystallisation between fiction and non-fiction films was emerging; as a reaction against the imposed cinematic language (both in terms of content and aesthetics) which was fast becoming the accepted norm. Poetic-experimental documentaries are lyrical and impressionistic in their characterisation of the world, and place more emphasis on imagery and aesthetics than in the conveying of factual information. The passage of time is often less coherent or linear than in other modes of documentary, or fiction films, and this forms the basis for an alternative model of cinematic narrative.

Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (Berlin: Die Sinfonie der Großstadt) (1927) Directed by: Walter Ruttmann Produced by: Karl Freund Written by: Carl Mayer (concept), Karl Freund and Walter Ruttmann Editing by: Walter Ruttmann Cinematography by: Robert Baberske, Reimar Kuntze, László Schäffer and Karl Freund Music by: Edmund Meisel Running time: 65 minutes 141

KB Doc Journey.indd 141

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Synopsis Avant-garde symphonic documentary chronicling, through experimentation and abstract imagery, a single day in the city of Berlin.

Comments The documentary opens with a close-up of gently rippling water. The rhythmically parallel lines suggest the pistons of a steam train, and then dissolve to show the crossing bars at a railway junction. As a montage of rapidly edited images shows a train hurtling towards its destination, a sign reading ‘Berlin 15 kilometres’ establishes the location that is the heart of this film’s subject matter. Thus begins Berlin: Symphony of a Great City: a city symphony (see ‘While we’re on the subject...’) notable chiefly for its audacious experimentation and assured use of Sovietinspired montage techniques. ‘Since I began in the cinema, I had the idea of making something out of life, of creating a symphonic film out of the millions of energies that comprise the life of a big city,’ said director Walter Ruttmann. Ruttman had previously trained as an architect and found work as an impressionist painter. Both of these talents are demonstrated in this film, along with the filmmaker’s belief that film should structurally be situated as an extension of music (ironically, the modernist jazz-like score for Berlin by celebrated composer Edmund Meisel was considered lost for many years, before being rediscovered in the 2000s). There is no overt plot in Berlin. The central character in the film is the city itself. What minimal nod there is to narrative is in the film’s purported charting of one day (in reality, the film was shot over the course of a year), with five different acts representing predawn, morning, noon, afternoon and night. Ruttman creates a portrait showing almost every conceivable aspect of a bustling, then-modern metropolis. ‘I like to think of it as [an] historical document made of fragments, a touchstone for the multimedia 142

KB Doc Journey.indd 142

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

world we inhabit today,’ writes Paul D Miller, aka DJ Spooky, who composed a new soundtrack for Berlin for its screening at the Tate Modern, in the book Total Chaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop (2007). Berlin draws together a vast range of sometimes wildly different images to satirical and often alarming effect. In one such case, Ruttman cuts from businessmen arguing with each other over the telephone, to fighting dogs, and then to screaming monkeys. In another instance, a (staged) sequence showing a woman committing suicide jumps to footage of a beauty pageant. It is worth noting that it is only retroactively that Berlin has become most often identified with documentary form. While the capturing of real-life images (the film got around the inherent problems of early documentary filmmaking by using a hypersensitive film stock that allowed for shooting with minimal artificial light) is a definite documentary trait, and the superficial link with the travelogue film exists (especially for foreign audiences), the German term dokumentarfilm did not come into common usage until the second half of the twentieth century. Berlin was instead classed as an abstract art film (an Absolute film): a mode of non-fiction cinema strongly delineated from science films, ethnographical films, travel films, culture films, instructional films and newsreels.

While we’re on the subject... City symphony films, often highly experimental in nature, showing the day-in-the-life of a modern metropolis were something of a craze during the 1920s and early-30s in both Europe and the United States. Examples include such films as À propos de Nice (1930, Jean Vigo); A Bronx Morning (1931, Jay Leyda); Manhatta (1921, Paul Strand and Charles Sheeler); Regen (1929, Mannus Franken and Joris Ivens); and The Man With a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (1929, see page 144). 143

KB Doc Journey.indd 143

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

The Man with a Movie Camera (Chelovek s kinoapparatom) (1929) Directed by: Dziga Vertov Written by: Dziga Vertov Editing by: Dziga Vertov Cinematography by: Mikhail Kaufman and Gleb Troyanski Running time: 68 minutes

Synopsis A cameraman travels around a city, documenting urban life with dazzling inventiveness.

Comments As is stated at the beginning of The Man with a Movie Camera, the film is an experiment exploring – and helping to create – the notion of a universal cinematic language without the need for explanatory titles, story or acting. From the opening superimposed image of a tiny cameraman clambering atop an oversized camera, it is clear that this is not documentary as a lifelike presentation of reality, but rather documentary (or, to use the contemporary Soviet term, ‘unplayed’ cinema) as a stylised reaction against almost every formalised element of the entertainment ‘play-film’, which Vertov saw as totally alien to the wishes and needs of modern Soviet audiences. With The Man with a Movie Camera, Vertov is acquainting the viewer with the camera’s ability to manipulate images. It is a film about the exuberant joys of filmmaking, from the manner in which the cameraman happily hangs off the side of a train, travails high bridges, and even crawls underground to capture a particular shot, to the sheer range of dazzling camera tricks on display (including – but not limited to – split screens, superimposition, flicker effects, dissolves, fast and slow motion, and freeze frames). There is also a reflexive quality to proceedings – as the film is 144

KB Doc Journey.indd 144

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

The Man with a Movie Camera

shown not only being, itself, filmed, but also edited and screened before an audience in a packed cinema. As such, the film not only anticipates many of the visual techniques seen in experimental pictures such as Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio), but also helps create the template for later ‘documentaries about the making of a documentary’ (e.g. the cinéma vérité documentaries of Nick Broomfield) where the assembly of the film becomes the central narrative thrust of the work. Despite the high regard in which it is held today, The Man with a Movie Camera was not a success upon its release. One contemporary reviewer commented that ‘theorists [such as Vertov] mostly love their theories more than a father loves an only child’, while Sergei Eisenstein – busy creating films to glorify Communist rule – felt that Vertov’s documentary was little more than ‘unmotivated camera mischief’. The latter comment is especially harsh. While Vertov would later fall out of love with the political regime he had once promoted, The Man with a Movie Camera can certainly be contextualised as a politicised socialist text – with the cameraman’s status as a proletarian (note the 145

KB Doc Journey.indd 145

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

sequence in which he busily films on a train is intercut with a late-rising bourgeois woman waking up), the harmonious kinship between worker and machine, and overtly ideological statements such as the onscreen implosion of the Bolshoi Theatre, a symbol of high art in Russia (executed using a split-screen process), being especially potent images.

Did you know? The unnamed ‘Man with a Movie Camera’ in the film is the director’s brother, Mikhail Kaufman.

Listen to Britain (1942) Directed by: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister Produced by: Ian Dalrymple Editing by: Humphrey Jennings and Stewart McAllister Cinematography by: HE Fowle and Fred Gamage Running time: 20 minutes

Synopsis Depiction of different aspects of life in England at the time of World War II.

Comments Of all the directors to work for the renowned Crown Film Unit (previously the GPO Film Unit), Humphrey Jennings was arguably the greatest. His beautiful, poetic documentaries – of which those that he produced during the Second World War represent his peak as a filmmaker – not only set him apart from the majority of his peers but also challenged John Grierson’s emphasis on the social purpose of the documentary. (His co-director for Listen to Britain, Stewart McAllister, was a fine editor, who was given the sole directorial credit of his career due to the difficulty of separating direction from editing in a film which relies so heavily on montage.) 146

KB Doc Journey.indd 146

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

Listen to Britain resembles an unconventional travelogue through 1940s Britain. Instead of the pacy, narrative-driven, narratorled documentary one might expect from a film unit designed to produce morale-boosting wartime propaganda, Listen to Britain is experimental in form, taking seemingly disconnected scenes of daily life in the country – off-duty soldiers relaxing at the Blackpool dance hall, female munitions workers in a factory, children playing – and working them into a poetic montage of sound and image. The threat of war is not presented as the destruction of physical properties (where another wartime documentary may display newsreel footage of the effects of a bombing raid), but rather in the possible destruction of a culture or way of life. With that being said, this is not a wartime documentary built on fear, but rather a sensitively observed look at a country ‘getting on with it’ in as unhurried, though determined, a manner as possible. Although the scenes in Listen to Britain are staged, as with many documentaries of the time, Jennings was also a director who believed in extracting a filmic truth from what he was shooting. Watch, for example, for the sequence in which one of the young girls makes a mistake during a dance. Jennings was strongly advised by his cameraman to reshoot the scene, errorfree, but instead insisted on keeping it, believing that the moment added to, rather than detracted from, the documentary realism of the piece. This approach to filmmaking was later turned into a manifesto by Jennings devotee Lindsay Anderson, who stated that ‘Perfection is not an Aim’ and used it as the basis for the Free Cinema documentary movement of the mid-1950s. The initial reaction to Listen to Britain was not a positive one. Edgar Anstey, one of Britain’s then-leading documentary filmmakers, felt that the film would ‘not encourage anyone to do anything at all’. It was only later on – thanks largely to the efforts of Lindsay Anderson, who argued in Sight & Sound magazine that Jennings was ‘the only real poet the British cinema has yet produced’ – that the documentary began to find favour and became regarded as the classic it is remembered as today. 147

KB Doc Journey.indd 147

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Other recommendations by the same director Fires Were Started (1943) and A Diary for Timothy (1945) followed Listen to Britain as part of Humphrey Jennings’ great wartime trilogy.

Night and Fog (Nuit et Brouillard) (1955) Directed by: Alain Resnais Produced by: Anatole Dauman, Samy Halfon and Philippe Lifchitz Written by: Jean Cayrol Narrated by: Michel Bouquet Editing by: Alain Resnais Cinematography by: Ghislain Cloquet and Sacha Vierny Music by: Hanns Eisler Running time: 32 minutes

Synopsis Documentary essay exploring the horrors of the Nazi concentration camps.

Night and Fog

148

KB Doc Journey.indd 148

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

Comments Originally, filmmaker Alain Resnais turned down the opportunity to direct Night and Fog, feeling that only someone who had experienced the concentration camps firsthand should attempt to grapple with the subject matter. Eventually he agreed to make the film, provided that poet and novelist Jean Cayrol, who had been a prisoner at the Gusen concentration camp, collaborate with him on the project. The documentary’s title was adapted from a book Cayrol had written about his experiences, entitled Poèmes de la Nuit et Brouillard. Cayrol scripted the narration running throughout the piece, which is masterfully read by French actor Michel Bouquet. The music, meanwhile, was composed by Hanns Eisler, an Austrian-Jewish artist who had fled to the US before the outbreak of war. Although Cayrol was a survivor of the camps, Night and Fog is not so much an historic document as it is a subjective one. It is a film about the fragility of memory: the striking contrast between the colour footage of the dilapidated camps ten years after World War II ended, and the scratchy black-and-white footage from the war years, making the decade which separated the Holocaust and Night of Fog feel like a hundred years or more. For anyone who didn’t experience the camps, the realities are utterly impossible to comprehend. The numbers of those murdered are as unimaginable to us as the images showing rooms full of women’s hair, and skin turned into sheets of paper, are grotesquely bizarre. The narrator casts doubt throughout the film about the images’ ability to convey the sheer scope of the horror. ‘No description, no picture can reveal their true dimension,’ he says at one point. Night and Fog largely avoids labelling what happened in the concentration camps as solely a Jewish tragedy, making no mention of race or religion in the narration so as to present the Holocaust instead as a universal tragedy. In interviews, the director suggested that he did so to make a connection between 149

KB Doc Journey.indd 149

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

the Holocaust and the French treatment of Algerians during the then-current Algerian War, where torture and internment were already occurring. The film’s final message is a disturbing one: that this could happen again.

Did you know? François Truffaut once referred to Night and Fog as ‘the greatest film ever made’.

While we’re on the subject... Shoah (1985, Claude Lanzmann) is a nine-hour thirty-six minute documentary about the Holocaust, made over a period of 11 years, primarily consisting of visits to key Holocaust sites and interviews with those who experienced it. A masterpiece.

The House is Black (Khaneh siah ast) (1963) Directed by: Forugh Farrokhzad Produced by: Ebrahim Golestan Written by: Forugh Farrokhzad Editing by: Forugh Farrokhzad Cinematography by: Soleiman Minasian Running time: 22 minutes

Synopsis Poetic documentary about a leper colony outside Tabriz, the capital of Azerbaijan.

Comments The House is Black begins with a statement of intent, read over a black screen. ‘There is no shortage of ugliness in the world,’ says the narrator. ‘If man closed his eyes to it, there would be even more. But man is a problem solver. On this screen will appear an image of ugliness, a vision of pain no human being should ignore. 150

KB Doc Journey.indd 150

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

To wipe out this ugliness and to relieve the victims is the motive of this film and the hope of its makers.’ As a documentary, The House is Black presents some of the most shocking images of people suffering the debilitating effects of leprosy ever seen on screen. However, it is not an exploitative film, but rather one that is groundbreaking in its treatment of the disease, encouraging feelings of empathy and humanity on the part of the viewer as opposed to those of pity or revulsion. As such, it can be seen as a precursor to the de-stigmatising documentaries about AIDS orphans in Uganda made 30 years later. The film is the sole directorial credit of Forugh Farrokhzad, best remembered today primarily as the greatest Iranian poet of the twentieth century. Several years after making The House is Black, Farrokhzad was killed in a car accident at the age of 32. She had no formal training as a filmmaker, and learned much of her production knowledge during a visit to England. Later she travelled to Khuzestan, where she worked as a film actress, producer, assistant and editor. Farrokhzad’s other notable filmmaking credit was as an editor on A Fire (Yek atash) (1961, Ebrahim Golestan) – a documentary short about a 1958 oil-well fire near to Ahvaz, which continued burning for more than two months before an American fire-fighting crew was able to extinguish it. Like The House is Black, much of that documentary’s visual power relies on its poetic use of juxtaposed images. The House is Black was filmed over 12 days with a crew of just three people. In its construction it demonstrates considerable skill and assurance from Farrokhzad. Particularly noteworthy is the inventiveness of the cinematography, the use of tracking shots, whip-pans (often masking edits), montage and overlapping soundtracks. Another notable inclusion is the use of two narrators: one male and one female. The male voice (most likely the documentary’s producer, Ebrahim Golestan) is clinical: presenting facts about the curable nature of leprosy and the manners in which it can be treated to avoid being spread further. 151

KB Doc Journey.indd 151

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

The female voice is Farrokhzad reading her poetry, which is often spiritual in tone. As with much of Farrokhzad’s work there is a subversive undercurrent to the documentary. This is most poignantly evident during a sequence in which a group of individuals suffering from leprosy give thanks to god for all that they have been given in life. Although this appears to be unironic on the part of the speakers, there is no doubting it is also intended by Farrokhzad as a veiled criticism of Islam, and religion in general, for failing to show a more compassionate and active interest in these suffering and neglected people. The House is Black remains a powerful, intelligent and sensitive documentary. To the best of my knowledge it is the first Iranian documentary to be made by a woman, and it is often credited as helping to inspire the Iranian New Wave cinema.

Did you know? During filming, Forugh Farrokhzad became emotionally attached to Hossein Mansouri, the child of two lepers, who she subsequently adopted.

Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One (1971) Directed by: William Greaves Produced by: William Greaves, Manuel Melamed and Manny Meland Written by: William Greaves Editing by: William Greaves Cinematography by: Stevan Larner and Terrence McCartney Filgate Music by: Miles Davis Running time: 70 minutes

Synopsis Metatextual documentary ostensibly chronicling the audition process for the fictional film, Over the Cliff. 152

KB Doc Journey.indd 152

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

Comments Finding himself dissatisfied with the stiffness of Hollywood acting, director William Greaves’ intention with Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One was to find new ways of bringing out ‘reality’ on screen. Shooting was conducted in 1968 in NewYork’s Central Park, financed by a private patron. Greaves brought in a group of actors he had known from his work with the Actors Studio and then hired three separate film crews to document what happened. Greaves himself portrays the director of a fictional actor-documentary entitled Over the Cliff (albeit an apparently inept director with no idea of what it is that he’s trying to create), which appears to be a turgid romantic melodrama. The first film crew records the actors going through an audition process. Meanwhile, the second film crew were told to document the first crew, while the third was given instructions to document anything which fitted into the film’s overarching (but purposefully vague) theme – including actors, passers-by, etc. Because of Greaves’ apparent lack of control over the film he is making, things soon start to unravel, and Symbiopsychotaxiplasm becomes a multi-tiered documentary about a documentary about a documentary that is going horribly wrong. The free jazz soundtrack by Miles Davis reflects the endless variations on one scene – the break-up of a couple – performed by the film’s two actors, both of whom are denied any context or motivation with regard to what it is they are attempting to achieve. The trite, meaningless dialogue is heard over and over again as the actors experiment with different ways (including a musical version) of reading their lines. Seeing the production fall into disarray around them, the crew are forced into discussions about the definition of film direction and the nature of screen acting. Much of the talk centres on the importance of having people speak realistically on film, prefiguring a notable aspect of the ‘70s New Hollywood movement, which was largely built on just that: non-Hollywood actors talking in a realistic manner. 153

KB Doc Journey.indd 153

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Greaves adds another level when he discusses the idea of Symbiopsychotaxiplasm being symbolic of the larger social issues occurring at the time, with the on-set revolt being seen as a microcosm of the larger countercultural revolution. Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is also notable for its editing techniques, which include split screens displaying two or three perspectives at once. The final result is what Paul Arthur referred to in A Line of Sight: American Avant-Garde Cinema Since 1965 (2005) as an ‘adventure in reflexivity and demystification’. If all of this sounds thoroughly academic or of interest only to actors, it is worth noting that Symbiopsychotaxiplasm also happens to be frequently hilarious: an extended meta-prank about the insanity of filmmaking that is easily as entertaining as scripted fiction films which explore similar themes, such as Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005, Michael Winterbottom). Whether the viewer feels that the documentary poses some valid questions about the creation of art, or is simply a pitch-perfect skewering of artistic pretentiousness, Symbiopsychotaxiplasm is one of the most well-focused and revealing films ever made about the collaborative art of moviemaking.

While we’re on the subject... Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take 2½ (2003, William Greaves) picks up what narrative there is from the original film, and revisits it 35 years later. Actor Steve Buscemi and director Stephen Soderbergh, both admirers of the first Symbiopsychotaxiplasm, helped secure the funding.

Antonio Gaudí (1984) Directed by: Hiroshi Teshigahara Produced by: Noriko Nomura Editing by: Hiroshi Teshigahara and Eiko Yoshida Cinematography by: Junichi Segawa, Ryu Segawa and Yoshikazu Yanagida 154

KB Doc Journey.indd 154

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

Music by: Tôru Takemitsu, Shinji Hori and Kurodo Mori Running time: 72 minutes

Synopsis Documentary examining the work of celebrated Catalan architect, ceramist and sculptor Antonio Gaudí (1852–1926).

Comments If documentaries such as Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis (1927, see page 141) are classified as city symphonies, then Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Antonio Gaudí is an architectural symphony. There have been other documentaries dedicated to Gaudí, whose visionary work is perhaps more synonymous with Barcelona than any single person is with any other major city in the world. Notable among these films is the excellent ‘God’s Architect’ episode of the BBC’s Visions of Space series (2003), although none has captured Gaudí’s astonishing catalogue of work in quite so breathtaking a manner as this documentary. Hiroshi Teshigahara, one of Japan’s most celebrated avant-garde filmmakers (best known for his collaborations with novelist and screenwriter Kōbō Abe), first visited Spain in 1959. (16mm footage from that trip is featured on the Criterion release of this documentary.) Antonio Gaudí is the resultant, long-ruminated passion project of its filmmaker: an intergenerational, international love letter from one artist to another. In addition to taking viewers on a tour of the houses Gaudí designed, the film explores Park Güell, a planned garden complex with architectural elements (60 houses were envisaged but only four were built), as well as Gaudí’s unfinished masterwork: the giant, eight-towered Sagrada Família cathedral. With the exception of a few sparse pieces of information, Antonio Gaudí is entirely free of narration, allowing Gaudí’s work to speak for itself. The soundtrack is instead provided by renowned Japanese composer Tôru Takemitsu, working with two collaborators to create an Eastmeets-West score based upon Catalan folk music, electronically 155

KB Doc Journey.indd 155

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

altered and combined with other sound effects. The result is an otherworldly combination that – if perhaps slightly missing the humorous elements of Gaudí’s creations – is a mesmerising, worthy tribute to a unique artist nonetheless.

While we’re on the subject... My Architect: A Son’s Journey (2003, Nathaniel Kahn) is almost the polar opposite of Antonio Gaudí. Rather than focusing entirely on the work of a noted architect and excluding his personal life as a result, My Architect is the attempt by filmmaker Nathaniel Kahn to understand his troubled, world-famous father, architect Louis Kahn, who died suddenly when the director was just 11 years old.

Baraka (1992) Directed by: Ron Fricke Produced by: Mark Magidson Written by: Constantine Nicholas and Genevieve Nicholas Editing by: Ron Fricke, Mark Magidson, David E Aubrey and Alton Walpole Cinematography by: Ron Fricke (director of photography) Music by: Michael Stearns and various Running time: 96 minutes

Synopsis A non-fiction, non-narrative film about the world and its people, made up of expertly photographed scenes accompanied by a new-age world music score.

Comments Baraka’s title is taken from an ancient Sufi word, broadly translated as a blessing, or the breath or essence of life from which the evolutionary process unfolds. With the film’s extended, wordless takes, its environmental themes, its beautifully framed 156

KB Doc Journey.indd 156

24/03/2012 16:12

Poetic-Experimental Documentaries

Baraka

images, and its use of a variety of cinematic techniques, including time-lapse photography, Baraka can be viewed as a direct, albeit more spiritual, descendant of Koyaanisqatsi (1982, Godfrey Reggio) – upon which Baraka’s director Ron Fricke acted as a cinematographer and collaborator. Like that film, Baraka functions on two levels: both as a catalogue of stunning images, like a beautifully realised cinematic travelogue without words; and on a deeper level, as a visual poem about Earth’s evolution, man’s diversity and interconnectedness, and our impact (for better and for worse) on the planet. ‘I have always been very interested in documentary films from a very spiritual frame of reference,’ Fricke has said. ‘[Baraka’s] concept is humanity’s relation to the eternal, and I made it as a guided meditation without actors, words or a story. A series of images and music takes you [to] the inner essence of the concept... A lot of people found it uncomfortable because it wasn’t a structured story, [but] a lot of people found it very liberating and open, and they liked the experience. I would say there are more people who liked the film than didn’t because they sought out that kind of film. They knew what it was. If you are a hardcore dialogue-story person, you are not going to like it.’ 157

KB Doc Journey.indd 157

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Baraka was the $4,000,000 product of a five-person crew working for a period of 14 months in more than 150 locations, across 24 countries in six continents. It was photographed in the lush 70mm Todd-AO format, an extremely high-definition film format developed in the mid 1950s, that had last been used for the historical fiction film The Last Valley (1971, James Clavell). As producer Mark Magidson has phrased it, it is ‘the ultimate nonverbal film in the ultimate format’.

158

KB Doc Journey.indd 158

24/03/2012 16:12

FLY-ON-THE-WALL DOCUMENTARIES Referred to as such due to the apparent unobtrusiveness of the film crew’s presence in the making of the picture, this mode of documentary filmmaking is arguably the purest form of documentary: supposedly presenting an unfettered view of events as they actually occurred. Fly-on-the-wall documentaries are filmed on location. They are invariably made in the present tense, recording current events as opposed to examining those which have occurred in the past. They may be characterised aesthetically by the usage of handheld cameras and synchronous (direct) sound recording. Subjects will largely ignore the presence of the camera and film crew: either unaware, or pretending to be unaware, that their actions are being recorded. The key to separating fly-on-the-wall documentaries from participatory documentaries (see page 91) is the onscreen role of the filmmaker. In fly-on-the-wall documentaries, the director remains hidden from the viewer and does not appear onscreen as a significant character. The films may contain interviews with subjects, but the motivation of the director is not directly addressed, although it may in some instances be inferred. Similarly, the film may contain voiceover for explanatory purposes only, although this will likely be sparse, and exist only to support the images, and not the other way around. Voiceover should also be neutral in content, even where the documentary in question may be presented so as to side on a particular issue with one party. 159

KB Doc Journey.indd 159

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Triumph of the Will (Triumph des Willens) (1935) Directed by: Leni Riefenstahl Produced by: Leni Riefenstahl Written by: Leni Riefenstahl and Walter Ruttmann Editing by: Leni Riefenstahl Cinematography by: Sepp Allgeier (director of photography) Music by: Herbert Windt Running time: 114 minutes

Synopsis Propaganda film showing the 1934 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, Germany.

Comments How to comment on a documentary aggrandising arguably the most hated group in human history? Triumph of the Will (which received its title from Adolf Hitler, who also commissioned it) raises a series of troubling questions, one of which is whether a film can be both morally repugnant and beautiful at the same time? Triumph of the Will is historic for reasons of conception and execution. In conception, it represented the first time that cinema and politics had synced up so perfectly (Joseph Goebbels is quoted as saying, ‘We are convinced that films constitute one of the most modern and scientific means of influencing the masses’). In execution, it as a masterpiece of groundbreaking cinematography and editing. In keeping with Hitler’s belief that people were more effectively swayed by feeling and belief than by knowledge, arguments or logic, Triumph of the Will does not lay out specific political policies. Notable by its absence is any mention of the atrocities that the Nazi Party would become infamous for. Instead, the documentary focuses on establishing a ‘cult of personality’ around Hitler, who begins the film by descending, Christ-like, from the clouds – but is still shown as 160

KB Doc Journey.indd 160

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

Triumph of the Will

human enough to stop and accept some flowers offered to him by a young child. In making Triumph of the Will director Leni Riefenstahl was provided with undoubtedly the best working conditions ever set out for a documentary filmmaker. Along with total artistic control over the film (including final cut), she was given near-unlimited funds and a large crew consisting of a total of 172 persons: 36 cameramen and assistants, 9 aerial photographers, 17 newsreel men, 17 lighting technicians, etc. The unit worked nonstop for a week, using 30 cameras and producing hundreds of hours of film. In addition to this, the completed documentary was exhibited all over Germany, including mandatory screenings in schools and local halls. As would be the case throughout Riefenstahl’s career, there is no narration in Triumph of the Will, and nor does the filmmaker herself appear. However, the questions about whether she was a Nazi sympathiser, or simply a victim of society – a naive filmmaker for hire, who happened to do an excellent job with the assignment she was given – dogged her for the rest of her career. 161

KB Doc Journey.indd 161

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

While we’re on the subject... The World at War (1973–74) (TV series) is a 26-part BBC documentary series chronicling the events of World War II. At the time, it was the most expensive British television series ever produced. The Goebbels Experiment (Das Goebbels-Experiment) (2005, Lutz Hachmeister) examines the life of the infamous Nazi propaganda mastermind as he speaks directly to the audience through extracts of his diary read aloud. The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl (Die Macht der Bilder: Leni Riefenstahl) (1993, Ray Müller) is an officially sanctioned portrait of Riefenstahl, made to coincide with her 90th birthday. It examines the career of a talented female filmmaker whose career was nonetheless blighted by her association with the Nazi Party.

The Private Life of a Cat (1944) Directed by: Alexander Hammid and Maya Deren Running time: 22 minutes

Synopsis Short subject showing a male cat courting a female cat, who subsequently gives birth to a litter of five kittens.

Comments This charming silent documentary short was the work of husband-and-wife filmmaking team, Alexander Hammid (born Alexandr Hackenschmied) and Maya Deren (born Elenora Deren). Shot in the couple’s Morton Street apartment in Manhattan, The Private Life of a Cat begins by showing two cats, a male and a female. Offscreen, the female is impregnated by the male and soon begins to search the flat for a place in which to give birth. She then gives birth to a litter of five kittens, as the male cat 162

KB Doc Journey.indd 162

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

proudly looks on. The documentary goes on to follow the first few weeks of the kittens’ lives. The Private Life of a Cat is something of an anomaly in the work of its co-directors, whose collaborative work tended to be extremely experimental in form. While one could argue that the experiment here is to tell a complete narrative without the presence of humans as either visible screen presences or to provide narration (although the use of a cat’s perspective for POV shots may just be a cinematic first!), the film is most notable for both its imaginative cinematography and the brilliant capturing of cats’ natural behaviour. Incredibly, the sequence showing the female cat giving birth caused censors at the time to label the documentary as ‘obscene’ – greatly reducing its chances of exhibition. If anything, the image of the stable nuclear family presented in the film should have made it required viewing in the schools of the 1940s and ’50s. In fact, the most famous screening of The Private Life of a Cat came at New York’s Cinema 16 film society: a cinema club run by Amos Vogel with the aim of showcasing 16mm documentaries and experimental films, which, at its height, had a membership of around 7,000.

Did you know? Although Alexander Hammid’s career began with Czechoslovakian experimental films and anti-Nazi documentaries, he is best known as the editor on To Fly! (1976), the first IMAX-format film, which held the record for highest-grossing documentary in history, until it was overtaken by Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004, see page 120).

While we’re on the subject... The Love Life of an Octopus (Les amours de la pieuvre) (1967, Jean Painlevé and Geneviève Hamon) is a mesmerising documentary short detailing the mating and birth of octopi. Co-director Jean Painlevé (son of a former French prime minister) directed more 163

KB Doc Journey.indd 163

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

than 200 such science and nature films during his career, although his work is far too often overlooked by film audiences and critics. This short sets the precedent by which all wildlife documentaries should be judged.

A Time for Burning (1966) Directed by: Bill Jersey and Barbara Connell Produced by: Bill Jersey Editing by: Bill Jersey and Barbara Connell Cinematography by: Bill Jersey Music by: Barry Kornfeld Running time: 58 minutes

Synopsis Cinéma vérité documentary examining the attempts of the minister of Augustana Lutheran Church in Omaha, Nebraska, to convince his all-white congregation to reach out to ‘negro’ Lutherans on the city’s north side.

Comments A Time for Burning’s co-director Bill Jersey (credited onscreen as William C Jersey) was originally contacted by the Lutheran Film Associates group, an organisation designed to fund and distribute films about the Lutheran church, to create a documentary showing the church’s ‘response’ to the subject of civil rights and race relations in America. To examine this subject, Jersey chose to focus on Reverend William Youngdahl: a white preacher who had recently arrived in Omaha, Nebraska with the aim of bringing together his new all-white congregation with that of Omaha’s African-American populace. ‘I did not want to do a film in the South, because that made it very easy for Northerners to point their finger and feel less guilty or not guilty at all perhaps,’ Jersey has said. ‘I wanted to do an American story, and when I 164

KB Doc Journey.indd 164

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

heard that there was this minister in Omaha, Nebraska of the Augustana Lutheran Church, who had had an integrated church in Orange, New Jersey, and who had been active in civil rights, I thought: all-white congregation, Midwest, one would suspect reasonably conservative, have elected to call a quite liberal man to their pulpit. I suspect there could be a little tension there. And while we didn’t want to show failure, we wanted to show struggle, otherwise we didn’t have a film.’ To aid with the integration process, Reverend Youngdahl proposed the supposedly-modest step of starting an interracial social exchange, which would see couples from his church visit the city’s black Lutheran church, and vice versa. What, in fact, emerged was an infinitely more complex turn of events which went far beyond Youngdahl’s plan to make both sides realise that ‘we’re not so different after all’, and instead emphasised the deep wells of institutionalised racism which existed in an ‘ordinary’ 1960s American city. Perhaps for reasons of brevity (the documentary was originally designed for airing on television) A Time for Burning focuses its attention on three characters. The first of these is Reverend Youngdahl himself, who proves to have his heart in the right place, even if he grossly underestimates the challenge he has set. The second is fiery black nationalist, Ernie Chambers, who waxes eloquent on white oppression and criticises Youngdahl for his liberal condescension. The third is church elder Ray Christiansen, who at first stands for the conservative element in Omaha society, but later comes to realise the importance of breaking down racial barriers, and the role that the church may play in this. A Time for Burning ends without presenting any easy, simplistic answers. Given that the ultimate response from white America was the ushering in of Ronald Reagan as president, whose chief contribution to race relations was his expansion of the prison system – creating the crack-era ghetto environments seen in documentaries such as Hoop Dreams (1994, see 165

KB Doc Journey.indd 165

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

page 171), one would have to say that co-directors Jersey and Connell made the right choice. Even if it is not the one that the viewer wants to hear.

Did you know? Ernie Chambers, who is shown as a barber in A Time for Burning, completed law school following the documentary’s release. He was elected Senator to the Nebraska Legislature in 1970, and by 2005 had become the longest-serving Senator in the history of the state. A change in law regarding term limitations was passed in 2000, and Chambers was forced to step down in January 2009 – although it is widely agreed that he would easily have won re-election. ‘They had to change the [state] constitution to get rid of me,’ he has stated.

Harlan County, USA (1976) Directed by: Barbara Kopple Produced by: Barbara Kopple Editing by: Nancy Baker and Mary Lampson Cinematography by: Kevin Keating and Hart Perry Music by: Hazel Dickens and Merle Travis Running time: 103 minutes

Synopsis Documentary about the 1973 coal miners’ strike in Harlan County, Kentucky.

Comments Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning documentary sheds light on one of the more violent episodes in Harlan County, and United States labour, history: a bitter strike which lasted close to one year and left one miner dead. Harlan County, USA goes beyond the details normally presented in the media, and tells the 166

KB Doc Journey.indd 166

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

Harlan County, USA

human story behind the strikers. Most incredible are the miners’ courageous and indomitable wives, many of whom became heavily involved with the picketing action. In order to make the documentary, Kopple – an advocate of workers’ rights, who was just 30 years old when Harlan County, USA was released – spent 18 months with the families depicted in the film, documenting their lives as they campaigned for better working conditions and liveable wages. ‘I used to write letters for money from miners’ homes,’ the director explained in a 1977 interview with Jump Cut magazine. ‘I’d try to find places that would let me Xerox hundreds of grant proposals and I’d spend days collating them and writing them out and writing zillions of fundraising letters... I’d have to come home and try to figure out how to do a fundraising pitch and how to talk to these people, and it was very hard. People supported it, but I sometimes had to bleed to get anything. I just had to give so much and go so far out just to get anything to keep going.’ 167

KB Doc Journey.indd 167

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

One of the film’s most famous sequences occurs when Kopple and her cameraman (who are otherwise not mentioned or seen in the documentary) are attacked by hired goons working on behalf of the Duke Power Company – against whom the miners are striking – while filming at night. ‘It was a very scary scene,’ Kopple recalled. ‘I wasn’t scared when it was happening because I was so angry. They pushed me up against the rocks, and I just started swinging to keep them off of me. They took each one of us individually and did that to us. The cameraman, Hart Perry, was yelling, “The camera’s broken, the camera’s broken,” and that’s all they really wanted to do was to make sure that we weren’t functioning.’ Harlan County, USA has its faults: its narrative structure can be confusing, and the lack of a clarifying voiceover narration (a choice made to allow the people to speak for themselves) makes it difficult to follow some of the political complexities of the strike. The footage, however, is so shocking – especially when strong-arm tactics result in the strikers being fired upon by their employers – that the documentary makes its point with extraordinary power. Ultimately the film played a large part in the success of the Harlan County strike. ‘The cameras probably saved a bunch of shooting,’ says Jerry Johnson, one of the striking Eastover miners, in a ‘Making of’ documentary which appears as an extra on the film’s US DVD release. ‘I don’t think we’d have won it without the film crew. If the film crew hadn’t been sympathetic to our cause, we would’ve lost.’

Other recommendations by the same director American Dream (1990) recounts an unsuccessful strike on the part of unionised meatpacking workers in Austin, Minnesota, against the Hormel Foods Corporation, which slashed workers’ wages and benefits despite posting a net profit of $30 million. Barbara Kopple won her second ‘Best Documentary’ Academy Award for the film, making her the only female documentary maker in history to have done so. 168

KB Doc Journey.indd 168

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

For All Mankind (1989) Directed by: Al Reinert Produced by: Al Reinert and Betsy Broyles Breier Editing by: Susan Korda Music by: Brian Eno Running time: 80 minutes

Synopsis Documentary chronicling NASA’s Apollo missions, which resulted in man landing on the moon.

Comments The 7 December 1972 image of the Earth from space, as taken by the Apollo 17 crew as they left our orbit, is among the most widely reproduced photographs in history. While it is understandable that such an image would become iconic, it is this same familiarity which makes it difficult for documentary filmmakers to present the Apollo missions and subsequent moon landings in such a way as to instil close to the same level of excitement in viewers as was felt at the time that they occurred. Few know this problem better than director Al Reinert, for whom For All Mankind represented his debut as a documentary filmmaker. Previously a freelance writer, Reinert became aware of the existence of NASA’s untapped footage of the Apollo missions while researching an article for Texas Monthly magazine in 1979. ‘The event [had] always been covered and treated as news to the point where it bores everyone to tears,’ he told New York Magazine in 1990. ‘We just wanted to capture this incredible human experience.’ For All Mankind portrays the moon landings as never seen before, beautifully complemented by an ethereal score from Brian Eno. Reinert eschews details of NASA’s astronaut training programme and instead dives straight into the nitty-gritty of space exploration. 169

KB Doc Journey.indd 169

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Although the film includes footage from all six successful Apollo lunar landings, as well as images of a spacewalk from an earlier Gemini mission, the director made the bold decision to intercut the footage to present it as one single voyage for the sake of a cohesive narrative. (The Criterion Collection edition of the film contains a set of subtitles describing which mission is being shown on screen at the time.) What is incredible is that the images, often breathtaking in their beauty and framing, were not taken for their artistry, but as a scientific record for those back home to study. The vast majority of the footage on display – much of it never seen before the documentary’s release – was shot by the astronauts themselves on 16mm film, and then blown up to 35mm. This is complemented by a running commentary from the Apollo astronauts, the result being a first-person account which is as close as most viewers will ever get to the experience of space travel. The feeling that most pervades For All Mankind is one of fun and joyfulness. ‘Boy, is this a neat way to travel,’ says Gene Cernan of Apollo 17 as he skips across the moon’s surface like a child. ‘Isn’t it great? Dum-dee-dum-dum-dum.’ Watching the documentary, one becomes aware of the way in which images that began as science fiction wound up becoming science fact. From Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon (Le Voyage dans la lune, 1902) to the breathtaking spectacle of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), the cinema has long held a fascination with presenting man landing on the moon on film. For All Mankind is the documentary that finally does those fantasies justice. Incredibly, the film struggled to find a distributor upon its completion. Michael Eisner, then-CEO of the Walt Disney Company, was quoted as saying that it was a ‘great movie [that would] never make a nickel’. Finally, Reinert decided to distribute the documentary himself. ‘The guiding principle behind making this movie in the first place,’ he said, ‘was to make a movie people would want to watch in 500 years. If there had been a camera crew with Columbus, we’d still be watching that.’ 170

KB Doc Journey.indd 170

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

Did you know? For All Mankind’s director Al Reinert later collaborated on the screenplay for Apollo 13 (1995, Ron Howard), a film praised for the documentary realism of its presentation of space travel.

Hoop Dreams (1994) Directed by: Steve James Produced by: Steve James, Peter Gilbert and Frederick Marx Written by: Steve James and Frederick Marx Editing by: Steve James Cinematography by: Peter Gilbert, Frederick Marx and William Haugse Music by: Ben Sidran Running time: 170 minutes

Synopsis Two African-American high-school students from the Chicago housing projects pursue their dream of becoming professional basketball players.

Comments Being paid multi-million-pound sums to play sport is the dream of many young people, but nowhere is it more potent than in the poverty-stricken, crime-ridden milieu of inner-city urban neighbourhoods, where the slim chance of success not only represents the usual formula of fame and fortune, but also a way out of a potentially destructive environment. That is the thesis behind Steve James’s extraordinary documentary, which was later named by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert as his choice for best film of the 1990s. Hoop Dreams began as a 30-minute documentary short subject for the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS), but instead ballooned to 250 hours of raw footage. In the process it spans an almost five-year period in the lives of its two protagonists, 171

KB Doc Journey.indd 171

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

William Gates and Arthur Agee, following them from promising high-school freshmen to their eventual graduation. ‘I think at the time the film came out, America’s fascination with Michael Jordan, basketball and the sport’s “rags-to-riches” iconography were at a peak,’ Steve James claimed in an interview. ‘This was pure luck on our part, because we had started the film nearly eight years earlier. Basketball provided a great hook for audiences and press, but the real theme of the film – the basketball dream as metaphor for how hard it is for poor people to achieve the American Dream – is what gave the film its heart and moved so many people.’ James’s lightness of touch as both director and editor allows him to paint archetypal figures from his subjects (which include both boys’ extended families), without ever losing sight of them as believable individuals. Hoop Dreams does not draw straightforward conclusions, and nor does it paint simplistic antagonists. If a nebulous villain does emerge it is the American athletics system, which exploits the dreams of thousands of people like Gates and Agee, while burning through all but a select few. In one telling scene, filmmaker Spike Lee speaks to a group of potential collegiate athletes, breaking down in the starkest terms the realities of their situation. ‘The only reason you are here is because you can make their schools win and they can make a lot of money,’ he says. ‘This whole thing is about money.’ But the greed-driven collegiate athletics system is just symptom and microcosm of a larger society – where wealth and success are the rewards on offer, but good luck, money and opportunities are needed to get there. Ultimately, Hoop Dreams is about the ambitions, rationalisations, tragedies and sociology that have shaped working-class black America. At an impressive running time of three hours, it is one of a select handful of documentaries that can genuinely be classed as epic filmmaking in both its length and the breadth of its subject matter. It is also perhaps the closest documentary has yet come to producing the ‘Great American Novel’. 172

KB Doc Journey.indd 172

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

Crumb (1994) Directed by: Terry Zwigoff Produced by: Terry Zwigoff, Lynn O’Donnell and David Lynch Editing by: Victor Livingston Cinematography by: Maryse Alberti Music by: David Boeddinghaus Running time: 119 minutes

Synopsis A portrait of noted underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb, and his family.

Comments Crumb is the kind of sensitively observed portrait that, 30 years earlier, might have been a celebrated Gay Talese feature appearing in the pages of Esquire. The film’s director, Terry Zwigoff, stumbled into documentary filmmaking in the 1980s almost by accident,

Crumb

173

KB Doc Journey.indd 173

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

pitching a magazine article about blues musician Howard Armstrong, but finding that no one was interested. With only a rudimentary knowledge of photography he decided to instead tell the story as a documentary, and spent the next four years in the indie-film trenches trying to raise money for the project that became Louie Bluie (1985). Following that film’s critical success, Zwigoff turned his attention to underground comic-book artist Robert Crumb (best known for his characters Fritz the Cat and Mr Natural) and his family for his next subject, having first met Crumb in San Francisco during the 1970s. ‘The idea was to do a documentary on the three Crumb brothers,’ Terry Zwigoff told the AV Club in an interview. ‘It was never a documentary about Robert Crumb in my head. I had met Charles and Max and liked them both, and I collected artwork from all three brothers... So it started taking shape in my mind, and it seemed to me like a good idea for a film if Robert [Crumb] would do it. Not so much because I had access to Robert and he was willing to cooperate, but because I felt comfortable knowing that, as his friend, I’d been exposed to facts that other people wouldn’t have known.’ Although Robert Crumb initially refused to be part of a documentary, he later acquiesced and Zwigoff spent the next nine years shooting and assembling Crumb, during which time the filmmaker claims that he was ‘averaging an income of about $200 a month and living with back pain so intense that I spent three years with a loaded gun on the pillow next to my bed, trying to get up the nerve to kill myself’. Through interviews with Robert Crumb’s mother, two brothers, wife and ex-girlfriends, Crumb captures all of the weird sexual obsessions and social criticisms that one would associate with the cartoonist – although a second, interlinked story reveals a horrific upbringing that has deeply affected all three Crumb siblings (the oldest of whom, Charles, committed suicide one year after being 174

KB Doc Journey.indd 174

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

interviewed for the documentary), but also helped inspire that same groundbreaking work. As such, Crumb becomes more than simply a portrait of a compulsive artist, but an inquiry into the link between art, creativity and mental illness.

While we’re on the subject... Comic Book Confidential (1988, Ron Mann) may be almost a quarter century out of date in terms of new content, and certainly tries to fit too much into a 90-minute running time, but it is still the best documentary overview of comic-book history as a whole.

Did you know? Along with the equally snubbed Hoop Dreams (see page 171), Crumb’s failure to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature caused the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences to overhaul its documentary nomination process (at the time the Academy’s documentary membership was largely made up of distributors with a financial stake in the films eligible to win).

Beyond the Mat (1999) Directed by: Barry W Blaustein Produced by: Barry W Blaustein, Barry Bloom, Brian Grazer, Ron Howard and Michael Rosenberg Written by: Barry W Blaustein Editing by: Jeff Werner Cinematography by: Michael Grady Music by: Nathan Barr Running time: 102 minutes

Synopsis Documentary examining the offbeat world of American professional wrestling. 175

KB Doc Journey.indd 175

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

Comments ‘Can you imagine the level of a mind that watches wrestling?’ asks the supercilious Max von Sydow in Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986). Indeed, the stereotype of the wrestling fan as a toothless, trailer-park-dwelling yokel has been around almost as long as mullet-wearing men have been dressing in spandex and hitting each other across the back with folding steel chairs. Even Barry Diller, head of the USA Network which today still hosts WWE programming on a weekly basis, once scathingly described the pro wrestling viewers who tuned into his channel as an ‘audience of twelve-to-nineteen-year-old pimply-faced, meanspirited males [who] came, watched, and went on to whatever God-awful other pursuits.’ So in the late 1990s when professional wrestling was going through its last real boom period – buoyed by an inter-promotional war between the two big wrestling organisations of the day – the time seemed right for a pitch-perfect send-up of the whole grunt-and-grapple game. On the surface, first-time director and former Hollywood screenwriter Barry Blaustein appeared to have the perfect résumé for such a task. Starting out as writer for Saturday Night Live, Blaustein went on to script the successful Eddie Murphy comedies Coming to America (1988) and The Nutty Professor (1996). Beyond the Mat seemed destined to become wrestling’s answer to This Is Spınal Tap (1984). There was one hitch in the plan though: Blaustein was (and is) a pro wrestling fan. Far from a quickly dashed-off ‘mockumentary’, Beyond the Mat proves a fascinating, insightful and – oddly enough for a business like professional wrestling – real look at an oftentimes bizarre spectacle the director describes as ‘theatre at its most base’. ‘I spent about two years on the road, on and off, following different wrestlers and getting to know them,’ Blaustein has said. ‘Originally I was thinking I’d do something à la Hoop Dreams: 176

KB Doc Journey.indd 176

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

you know, find some of the younger guys and follow them, but the reality that I found was that the young guys just weren’t as interesting. The older guys have the more interesting stories in life and [the main characters that Beyond the Mat focuses on] represent different pieces of the spectrum. The movie quickly became, even approaching it from the beginning, more about the effect that this lifestyle is having on them and their families.’

Dark Days (2000) Directed by: Marc Singer Produced by: Marc Singer and Ben Freedman Editing by: Melissa Niedich Cinematography by: Marc Singer Music by: DJ Shadow Running time: 81 minutes

Synopsis Documentary about a group of homeless people living in the so-called Freedom Tunnel, an abandoned section of the New York City underground railway system.

Comments It took British-born Marc Singer five years to complete his debut documentary Dark Days: two of them spent living underground in the Amtrak tunnel beneath Riverside Park, which forms the setting for this documentary. Nicknamed ‘Freedom Tunnel’ ever since graffiti artist Chris ‘Freedom’ Pape used the tunnel walls as a canvas for his artwork, the location is just one of the many subterranean living spaces which have existed in New York since the mid-1850s. With no previous filmmaking experience whatsoever, Singer decided to document the existence of the underground community to raise awareness of the plight of some of New York’s homeless. 177

KB Doc Journey.indd 177

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

As appalling as the conditions in the Freedom Tunnel are shown to be – with rats scampering back and forth, no running water and huge mounds of rubbish piled up – Dark Days emphasises the community spirit that has formed among its inhabitants. As one person in the documentary explains, the Freedom Tunnel ‘stop[s] you from being helpless, not from being homeless’. By contrast, the above world is shown as a desolate place, devoid of human activity and community. The film’s first two acts introduce the existence of the Freedom Tunnel, chart the day-to-day activities of its inhabitants, show them living together underground as an extended family, and reflect on the circumstances that have brought them to this point. In the climactic third act, the tunnel is forcibly cleared by Amtrak authorities, and its inhabitants venture above ground where they are moved into government-sponsored housing. Thus the documentary ends on a positive note. Dark Days is entirely shot in grainy black and white, filmed on a 16mm Bolex loaned to Singer from a New York camera house. He managed to convince Kodak to donate leftover film stock on a ‘pay later’ basis, and was able to get his film negatives and prints processed by a lab under the same agreement. For a crew, Singer recruited the Freedom Tunnel’s homeless population. ‘Everybody had a job according to what they had done before, or were good at, or that I could adapt to film,’ the director told IndieWIRE. ‘Like Henry – before he was homeless, he laid track on the railroads. So I said to him, “Can you build me something that we can move down that track that people can push?” The next morning, I woke up and found him burning holes through wood because we didn’t have a drill and he’s got a shopping cart and he’s building the dolly that ran on the tracks.’ The documentary’s striking score, which was key in helping Dark Days receive distribution, was provided by DJ Shadow, a critically acclaimed music producer. Shadow, notorious for being very protective when it comes to licensing his work, was so taken 178

KB Doc Journey.indd 178

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

aback after seeing a rough cut of the film that he not only allowed Singer to use his existing titles (which the filmmaker had been using as a temp score), but also remixed several tracks, using audio samples recorded by Singer during filming.

Murder on a Sunday Morning (Un Coupable Ideal) (2001) Directed by: Jean-Xavier de Lestrade Produced by: Denis Poncet Editing by: Ragnar Van Leyden and Pascal Vernier Cinematography by: Isabelle Razavet Music by: Hélène Blazy Running time: 111 minutes

Synopsis Academy Award-winning documentary following a criminal case in which a 15-year-old boy was wrongfully accused of murder.

Comments In May 2000, two tourists from Georgia were accosted outside a Ramada Inn in Jacksonville, Florida. The wife was shot in the head in front of her husband, while the killer fled. Several hours later, on the hunt for a black suspect between the ages of 20 and 25, police picked up 15-year-old high-school student Brenton Butler as he walked to his local Blockbuster Video to submit a job application. Butler was presented to the victim’s husband, who immediately identified him as the shooter. After being brought in for questioning at a police station, Butler confessed to the murder in front of at least two detectives – although this was later revealed to have been the result of intimidation and physical abuse. Butler was subsequently assigned two attorneys from the public defender’s office, Patrick McGuinness and Ann Finnell, to represent him in his murder trial. Murder on a Sunday Morning documents his defence team as they build their case for his innocence. 179

KB Doc Journey.indd 179

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

The film follows in a long line of documentaries which use the narrative of legal cases in which the defendant is wrongfully accused of a crime to examine themes of criminality and justice. As a documentary filmmaker, director Jean-Xavier de Lestrade has a background in journalism and law, with a special interest in examining societal taboos: in this case racial profiling and racism within the American legal system. ‘In Murder on a Sunday Morning, I tried to show how a rather “ordinary” type of racism could lead policemen to arrest a young African-American just because he happened to be walking down the street 50 or so yards from a crime scene,’ he said in an interview with the BBC. The film is methodical in both its pacing and construction. To call such a powerful piece of documentary filmmaking workmanlike would be a disservice, but it is a film that is compelling because of the narrative which unfolds, as opposed to the method by which it is told. There is no use of reconstruction, nor even voiceover; the sparsest of necessary details (time passing, locations) are instead given in the form of simple white-on-black intertitles. The only real nod to entertaining documentary convention is also the film’s most distracting weakness: a stock music-sounding score by Hélène Blazy, which aims for Philip Glass modernism, but falls short. Brenton Butler is ultimately found not guilty by the jury, but Murder on a Sunday Morning succeeds in making its point about prejudice and brutality within the US justice system, as well as highlighting some gaping holes in the manner by which signed confessions are obtained from suspects.

Did you know? A title card at the end of the documentary reveals that the Butler family filed a civil lawsuit seeking $2.5 million in damages against the city of Jacksonville, the Sheriff’s Department and the individual officers involved with the case. On 29 April 2002, the family accepted a settlement of $775,000.

180

KB Doc Journey.indd 180

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

To Be and To Have (Être et avoir) (2002) Directed by: Nicolas Philibert Produced by: Gilles Sandoz Editing by: Nicolas Philibert Cinematography by: Laurent Didier, Katell Djian, Hugues Gemignani and Nicolas Philibert Music by: Philippe Hersant Running time: 104 minutes

Synopsis Follows a single school year in a primary school in rural France, in which a dedicated teacher looks after a small class containing children from ages four to twelve.

Comments There are few documentaries in this book more charming than Nicolas Philibert’s To Be and To Have. Unwinding at a leisurely pace to match the pace of life it is depicting, the film shows the efforts of an extraordinary primary-school teacher, George Lopez, on the verge of retirement, in the village of Saint-Étienne-sur-Usson, Puyde-Dôme, France, where the population is just over 200. Without engaging in any filmmaking gymnastics, the film demonstrates the effect that a great teacher can have on the lives of his students. The documentary is also one of the most genuine portraits of childhood ever captured on film – a far cry from the majority of American documentaries in which children are either depicted as overreaching prodigies (Spellbound, 2002, Jeffrey Blitz; My Kid Could Paint That, 2007, see page 125) or underachievers, allowed to fall through the cracks of the education system. To Be and To Have was shot over a period of ten weeks by director Nicolas Philibert, after a lengthy search for the right location. As Philibert told Maxine Baker in the book Documentary in the Digital Age (2005), he began by introducing himself to the 181

KB Doc Journey.indd 181

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary

To Be and To Have

children, showing them the camera and equipment to help gain their trust. ‘We are working here and so are you,’ he told them. Unfortunately, any analysis of the documentary will likely centre on an issue unrelated to a critical appreciation of the film. Following To Be and To Have’s startling international success, George Lopez attempted to sue the filmmakers for a share of the documentary’s profits, amounting to €250,000. In addition, he demanded to be credited as the film’s co-author and claimed ‘intellectual property rights’ for his teaching methods as shown onscreen. Although his case was twice defeated in court, it raises many questions about the nature of documentary filmmaking; not only the ethical practicalities of what is and isn’t shown on screen (according to the lawsuit, one child depicted in the film had been traumatised by its release), but also the extent to which a documentary’s subject is able to take credit for the final result. Claire Hocquet, who represented Philibert in court, claimed that ‘to pay someone who appears in a documentary would be to treat them as an actor, and that would be the death of documentary filmmaking’. This was expanded on by the filmmakers’ lawyer Roland Rappaport 182

KB Doc Journey.indd 182

24/03/2012 16:12

Fly-on-the-Wall Documentaries

who said that, ‘By paying the subjects of the film, you change the relationship entirely. The director then gets the right to tell them what to do, to advise them on what to say, to film things over and over again. You leave the sphere of documentary behind and it becomes reality television, or even drama.’ The notion of financial compensation for documentary subjects remains a grey area. Sometimes an amount will be given up front, normally if the film’s subject is of a level of celebrity. For example, the Maysles brothers paid the two subjects, close relatives of Jackie Kennedy Onassis, $5,000 each for appearing in Grey Gardens (1975, see page 92). Reality TV stars meanwhile (if they are to be counted as documentary subjects) can receive upwards of $30,000 per programme in certain cases (as do the ‘cast’ of Jersey Shore). Other times, the agreement between filmmaker and subject is looser. In Hoop Dreams director Steve James made good on a verbal promise and gave a portion of the film’s profits to the families of its two subjects. While it is not the case with To Be and To Have there are other cases, such as when the documentary is dealing with a criminal, in which it would be unethical to allow the subject to profit from the production. While I do not believe that remunerating the ‘stars’ of a documentary in the event that the film is successful is compromising to the work’s integrity, the precedent that would have been set had Lopez won his case could have been very damaging to documentary, particularly to those films with little to no funding.

183

KB Doc Journey.indd 183

24/03/2012 16:12

KB Doc Journey.indd 184

24/03/2012 16:12

INDEX A Abbott, Jennifer, 64–5 Achbar, Mark, 64–6 Ali, Muhammad, 56–7 Allen, Woody, 49, 176 American Dream, 128, 168, 172 American Movie: The Making of Northwestern, 117 American: The Bill Hicks Story, 70 An Inconvenient Truth, 41, 79–82 Anderson, Lindsay, 147 animation, 27, 45, 130–2 Annie Hall, 49 Antonio Gaudí, 154–6 Apocalypse Now, 54 Aristocrats, The, 69–70 Attenborough, David, 97

Bigger, Stronger, Faster, 127–8 Blair Witch Project, The, 32 Blaustein, Barry W, 175–6 Bowling for Columbine, 106, 120, 128, 136 Bridge, The, 73–5 Broomfield, Nick, 20, 100, 106–8, 110, 145 Burma, 132–4 Burma VJ: Reporting from a Closed Country, 132 Bush, George, 120, 129, 136 C capitalism, 17, 68, 128, 134 Capitalism: A Love Story, 21, 121, 134 Capturing the Friedmans, 25, 110–11, 113 Celebrity Love Island, 32 Censored: the Private Life of the Movies, 41 Challenge, The, 64 Chambers, Ernie, 165–6 Chomsky, Noam, 66 cinéma vérité, 16, 18–19, 26, 37, 73, 91, 93, 104, 117, 145 Citizen Kane, 51 Clouzot, Henri-Georges, 127

B Bahr, Fax, 54 Banksy, 125, 136–8 Baraka, 156–8 Bar-Lev, Amir, 125–7 Bell, Christopher, 127–8 Berlin: Symphony of a Metropolis, 141–3, 155 Beyond the Mat, 175–7 Big Brother, 14, 109 Big Edie, 92–4 185

KB Doc Journey.indd 185

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary Cobain, Kurt, 78 Comedian, 70 Comic Book Confidential, 175 Connell, Barbara, 164 Conrad, Joseph, 54 Conversation, The, 51 Coppola, Francis Ford, 51, 54–5 Corporation, The, 64–6 Cosmic Voyage, 46 Cosmic Zoom, 46 Crowder, Paul, 59, 60 Crown Film Unit, 39, 146 Crumb, 68, 173–5 Curry, Rob, 138 Curtis, Ian, 87

Exit Through the Gift Shop, 125, 136–8 F F for Fake, 29, 49, 51, 125 Fahrenheit 9/11, 21, 106, 120–2, 128–9, 136, 163 Farrokhzad, Forugh, 23, 150–2 Feuerzeig, Jeff, 25, 78 Fielding, Stevie, 109 Fiennes, Sophie, 75 Fight Club, 46 Fight, The, 58 filmanthropy, 80 Fincher, David, 46 Fisher, Mark, 17 Flaherty, Robert Joseph, 11–12, 17, 35–8 Fog of War, The, 14, 104, 113–15 Folman, Ari, 27, 130–2 For All Mankind, 28, 169–71 Foreman, George, 56 Forrest Gump, 15 Franklin, Joe, 70 Fricke, Ron, 156–7

D Dark Days, 23, 177–8 de Gaulle, Charles, 27, 48 de Hory, Elmyr, 50 de Lestrade, Jean Xavier, 16, 179–80 Devil and Daniel Johnston, The, 25, 78–9 docudramas, 32 documentary realism, 14, 147, 171 Dogtown and Z-Boys, 46, 59–61 Dogville, 77 dokumentarfilm, 143 Dylan, Bob, 32, 71–3

G Gast, Leon, 56–7 Gee, Grant, 86–7 Gibney, Alex, 24, 66–8 Gilliam, Terry, 56 Gimme Some Truth: The Making of John Lennon’s Imagine Album, 54 Goebbels Experiment, The, 162 Gordon, Seth, 25, 84–5 Gore, Al, 79, 81, 122 Greaves, William, 152–4 Grey Gardens, 20, 92–4, 183 Grierson, John, 12, 22, 39, 146 Grigson, Dr James, 103

E Eames, Charles and Ray, 45–6 Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, 56 Eisenstein, Sergei, 145 Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S McNamara, 14, 113 Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On, The, 20, 26, 99–100 Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 24, 66–8 186

KB Doc Journey.indd 186

24/03/2012 16:12

Index Grizzly Man, 26, 96, 123–4 Guggenheim, Davis, 79 Guttentag, Bill, 82

kinopravda, 26 Kopel, David, 122 Kopple, Barbara, 166, 168 Korda, Susan, 28, 169 Koyaanisqatsi, 145, 157

H Hammid, Alexander, 162–3 Hannah and Her Sisters, 176 Hara, Kazuo, 20, 26, 99, 101 Harlan County, USA, 24, 166–8 Hearts of Darkness A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, 54–6 Herzog on Herzog, 95 Herzog, Werner, 26, 94–5, 123–4 Hickenlooper, George, 54 His Big White Self, 108 Hitchcock, Alfred, 76 Hoop Dreams, 23–4, 56, 58, 109, 165, 171–2, 175–6, 183 House is Black, The, 23, 150–2

L La Soufrière: Waiting for an Unavoidable Catastrophe, 94–6 Last Waltz, The, 71, 73 Leader, His Driver and the Driver’s Wife, The, 20, 106–8 Lennon, John, 52–4 Lessons of Darkness, 96, 125 Levy-Hinte, Jeff, 58 Life on Earth, 97–9 Listen to Britain, 39, 146–8 Little Edie, 92–4 Lorentz, Pare, 23, 40–1, 81, 135 Lost in La Mancha, 56 Love Life of an Octopus, The, 163 Lucas, George, 55 Lumière, Auguste and Louis, 13–14 Lynch, David, 76, 173

I Imagine John Lennon, 52 IMAX, 46, 163 Irving, Clifford, 50 J Jacobson, Harlan, 22 James Marsh, 88 James, Steve, 23, 108–9, 171–2, 183 Jarecki, Andrew, 25, 110–13 Jennings, Humphrey, 146–8 Jersey, Bill, 20, 164 Jillette, Penn, 69 Joy Division, 86–8

M MacCann, Richard Dyer, 42 Macdonald, Kevin, 61–3 Magnificent Ambersons, The, 51 Mailer, Norman, 58 Man of Aran, 37–8 Man on Wire, 88–90 Man with a Movie Camera, The, 26, 144–6 Mankiewicz, Herman J, 51 March of the Penguins, 81, 99, 123 Maysles brothers, 20, 56, 92–4, 183 McAllister, Stewart, 146

K Kael, Pauline, 51 Kenzo, Okuzaki, 20, 99–100 King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, 25, 84 187

KB Doc Journey.indd 187

24/03/2012 16:12

A Journey Through Documentary McLean, Bethany, 67 Mekas, Jonas, 54 Méliès, Georges, 13–14, 170 Miller, Paul D, 143 Moana, 11, 13, 17, 38 Montana, Tony, 116 Moore, Michael, 16, 21, 24, 31, 51, 66, 86, 91, 100, 105–7, 118, 120, 122, 128–9, 134–5 Morin, Edgar, 19–20 Morris, Errol, 14, 25, 27, 63, 66, 102, 104, 113–15 Murder on a Sunday Morning, 16, 179–80 Murderball, 61 Murnau, FW, 38 My Kid Could Paint That, 125–7, 181 Mystery of Picasso, The, 127

participatory documentaries, 20–1, 91, 159 Peralta, Stacy, 59–61 Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, A, 77 Pervert’s Guide to Cinema, The, 15, 75, 77 Philibert, Nicolas, 19, 25, 181 Plester, Tim, 18, 24, 138–9 Plow That Broke the Plains, The, 23, 40–1, 81, 135 poetic-experimental documentaries, 141 Powers of Ten, 45–6 Pressburger, Emeric, 63 Private Life of a Cat, The, 162–3 Provenza, Paul, 69 Psycho, 76

N Nanking, 48, 80–4 Nanook of the North, 12, 35–6 Nazis, 20, 47, 66, 107, 148, 160–3 Night and Fog, 27–8, 148–50 Night Mail, 25, 39–40 No Direction Home, 32, 71–2

R reality, 13 Reichenbach, François, 49–50 Reinert, Al, 28, 167–9 Resnais, Alain, 27, 148–9 Riding Giants, 61 Riefenstahl, Leni, 20, 160–2 Roger & Me, 21–2, 91, 105–7, 135 Rouch, Jean, 18 Rumble in the Jungle, 56–7 Ruttmann, Walter, 141–2, 160

O objectivity, 15–16, 107, 125, 137 Of Time and the City, 88 Onassis, Jackie Kennedy, 92, 183 Ono, Yoko, 52 Ophüls, Marcel, 26–7, 46–8 Østergaard, Anders, 132–3 Overnight, 116–17

S Scorsese, Martin, 32, 71, 77 Shine a Light, 32, 73 Simpson, Joe, 61–2 Singer, Marc, 23, 177 Smith, Chris, 117 Smith, Mark Brian, 116 Smoke Menace, 82 Solt, Andrew, 52, 54

P Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills, 113 Parallax View, The, 15–16 188

KB Doc Journey.indd 188

24/03/2012 16:12

Index Tupac Resurrection, 54 Tyson, 58

Sorrow and the Pity, The, 26–7, 46–9, 100 Soul Power, 58 Spurlock, Morgan, 118, 128 Steel, Eric, 73–4 storytelling, 15, 23, 69, 86 Strand, Paul, 40, 42, 143 Stranded I Have Come from a Plane that Crashed on the Mountains, 64 Sturman, Dan, 82–3 subjectivity, 16, 36, 113 Super Size Me, 118–20, 128 Symbiopsychotaxiplasm: Take One, 152–4

U United 93, 14 V Vertov, Dziga, 26, 144–5 Vietnam, 48, 54, 57, 114–15 W Walking with Dinosaurs, 99 Waltz with Bashir, 27, 130–1 War Game, The, 42–5 War of the Worlds, The, 51 Watkins, Peter, 42–3 Watt, Harry, 25, 39 Way of the Morris, 18, 23, 138–9 Welles, Orson, 29, 49, 55, 125, 138 When We Were Kings, 56–8 Wilson, Robert Anton, 29 Wisconsin Death Trip, 90 Wizard of Oz, The, 77 Wolper, David L, 52 World at War, The, 162 World Trade Center, 75, 88–9 Wright, Basil, 25, 39

T Tarantino, Quentin, 116 Taxi to the Dark Side, 24, 68 Terre’Blanche, Eugène, 21, 107–8 Teshigahara, Hiroshi, 154–5 Thin Blue Line, The, 25, 27, 102–4, 113 Thirty Million Letters, 40 This is Elvis, 52 This Is Spınal Tap, 32, 176 Time for Burning, A, 20, 164–6 Titanic, 14 To Be and To Have, 19, 25, 181–3 To Fly!, 163 Touching the Void, 32, 61–3 Train Pulling into a Station, 13 Treadwell, Timothy, 123–4 Trip to the Moon, A, 14, 170 Triumph of the Will, 20, 160–1 truth, 13

Y Yates, Simon, 62 Z Žižek, Slavoj, 15–16, 75–7 Zwigoff, Terry, 173–4

189

KB Doc Journey.indd 189

24/03/2012 16:12

DOCUMENTARIES … and how to make them (2nd edition) Andy Glynne Documentaries are more popular now than ever before, increasingly prevalent both in cinemas and on TV. From the development of your initial idea, to screening your finished film for an audience, this book tells you all you need to know about the craft. It will enable you to make informed decisions, including which format to use, where to find crew and how to get your documentary distributed. An invaluable resource for new and more experienced film­makers alike, offering technical and creative solutions for the realisation of documentaries in all shapes and sizes. Chapters focus on: • Developing your concept • Funding • Writing pitches and treatments • Interview technique • Narrative • Writing commentary • Dealing with ethical issues

• Camera technique • Sound & Lighting • Post-production, editing and grading • Marketing and distribution • Film festivals • The history of documentary

With additional interviews with industry insiders and award-winning film­ makers, this new edition has up-to-the-moment technical information on the latest cameras and equipment and a fully updated resource guide with contact details of current commissioning editors. available Summer 2012 978-1-84243-365-2 £21.99

KB Doc Journey.indd 190

www.kamerabooks.com

24/03/2012 16:12

READING SCREENPLAYS how to analyse and evaluate film scripts Lucy Scher Script Readers are crucial to the film industry, often responsible for determining whether a script is even looked at by a producer or development executive, yet those accountable for reading can be on the first rung of the industry ladder and have had little or no training for the task. This user-friendly ‘how-to’ guide written by one of the UK’s leading script analysis specialists, lays bare the process of analysing film scripts. This is invaluable to anyone looking to work as a script reader, anyone who wants to work in development with writers, and for screen­ writers themselves who are seeking guidance on how the industry might respond to their work. An essential reference tool, the book includes information on: • How to write a brilliant script report • Storytelling and screen genres • Treatments and other short documents • Writing clear and detailed analysis of the craft of storytelling for film It also includes contributions from industry insiders, and a full Resource Section listing useful print and online publications, organisations and associations.

978-1-84243-510-6

KB Doc Journey.indd 191

£12.99

www.kamerabooks.com

24/03/2012 16:12

SHORT FILMS

writing the screenplay Patrick Nash Every award-winning short film begins life with a clever idea, a good story and a screenplay. Patrick Nash analyses the process of writing short film screenplays and gives advice on: • • • • • • • • •

Story and structure Ideas generation Plot and pace Screenplay format Eliciting emotion Dialogue and subtext Character design Protagonists and antagonists Character motivation & goals

• • • • • •

Conflict, obstacles and stakes Clichés and Stereotypes Beginnings, middles and ends Hooking the viewer Screenplay competitions Loglines, outlines and synopses • Rewriting and length • Practicalities and budgets

The book also includes a number of award-winning scripts and interviews, advice and contributions from their award-winning screenwriters and a discussion of the benefits to writers of writing short screenplays.

978-1-84243-501-4

KB Doc Journey.indd 192

£14.99

www.kamerabooks.com

24/03/2012 16:12